“Yes,” Pilar agreed.
“You would not expect him actually to perform those degrading acts?”
“No,” Pilar said. “Go to bed, will you?”
“But, Pilar–” Fernando went on.
“Shut up, will you?” Pilar said to him suddenly and viciously. “Do not make a fool of thyself and I will try not to make a fool of myself talking with people who cannot understand what one speaks of.”
“I confess I do not understand,” Fernando began.
“Don’t confess and don’t try to understand,” Pilar said. “Is it still snowing outside?”
Robert Jordan went to the mouth of the cave, lifted the blanket and looked out. It was clear and cold in the night outside and no snow was falling. He looked through the tree trunks where the whiteness lay and up through the trees to where the sky was now clear. The air came into his lungs sharp and cold as he breathed.
El Sordo will leave plenty of tracks if he has stolen horses tonight, he thought.
He dropped the blanket and came back into the smoky cave. “It is clear,” he said. “The storm is over.”
20
Now in the night he lay and waited for the girl to come to him. There was no wind now and the pines were still in the night. The trunks of the pines projected from the snow that covered all the ground, and he lay in the robe feeling the suppleness of the bed under him that he had made, his legs stretched long against the warmth of the robe, the air sharp and cold on his head and in his nostrils as he breathed. Under his head, as he lay on his side, was the bulge of the trousers and the coat that he had wrapped around his shoes to make a pillow and against his side was the cold metal of the big automatic pistol he had taken from the holster when he undressed and fastened by its lanyard to his right wrist. He pushed the pistol away and settled deeper into the robe as he watched, across the snow, the dark break in the rocks that was the entrance to the cave. The sky was clear and there was enough light reflected from the snow to see the trunks of the trees and the bulk of the rocks where the cave was.
Earlier in the evening he had taken the ax and gone outside of the cave and walked through the new snow to the edge of the clearing and cut down a small spruce tree. In the dark he had dragged it, butt first, to the lee of the rock wall. There close to the rock, he had held the tree upright, holding the trunk firm with one hand, and, holding the ax-haft close to the head had lopped off all the boughs until he had a pile of them. Then, leaving the pile of boughs, he had laid the bare pole of the trunk down in the snow and gone into the cave to get a slab of wood he had seen against the wall. With this slab he scraped the ground clear of the snow along the rock wall and then picked up his boughs and shaking them clean of snow laid them in rows, like overlapping plumes, until he had a bed. He put the pole across the foot of the bough bed to hold the branches in place and pegged it firm with two pointed pieces of wood he split from the edge of the slab.
Then he carried the slab and the ax back into the cave, ducking under the blanket as he came in, and leaned them both against the wall.
“What do you do outside?” Pilar had asked.
“I made a bed.”
“Don’t cut pieces from my new shelf for thy bed.”
“I am sorry.”
“It has no importance,” she said. “There are more slabs at the sawmill. What sort of bed hast thou made?”
“As in my country.”
“Then sleep well on it,” she had said and Robert Jordan had opened one of the packs and pulled the robe out and replaced those things wrapped in it back in the pack and carried the robe out, ducking under the blanket again, and spread it over the boughs so that the closed end of the robe was against the pole that was pegged cross-wise at the foot of the bed. The open head of the robe was protected by the rock wall of the cliff. Then he went back into the cave for his packs but Pilar said, “They can sleep with me as last night.”