“Will you not have sentries?” he asked. “The night is clear and the storm is over.”
“Fernando goes,” Pilar said.
Maria was in the back of the cave and Robert Jordan could not see her.
“Good night to every one,” he had said. “I am going to sleep.”
Of the others, who were laying out blankets and bedrolls on the floor in front of the cooking fire, pushing back the slab tables and the rawhide-covered stools to make sleeping space, Primitivo and Andrés looked up and said, “Buenas noches.”
Anselmo was already asleep in a corner, rolled in his blanket and his cape, not even his nose showing. Pablo was asleep in his chair.
“Do you want a sheep hide for thy bed?” Pilar asked Robert Jordan softly.
“Nay,” he said. “Thank thee. I do not need it.”
“Sleep well,” she said. “I will respond for thy material.”
Fernando had gone out with him and stood a moment where Robert Jordan had spread the sleeping robe.
“You have a curious idea to sleep in the open, Don Roberto,” he said standing there in the dark, muffled in his blanket cape, his carbine slung over his shoulder.
“I am accustomed to it. Good night.”
“Since you are accustomed to it.”
“When are you relieved?”
“At four.”
“There is much cold between now and then.”
“I am accustomed to it,” Fernando said.
“Since, then, you are accustomed to it–” Robert Jordan said politely.
“Yes,” Fernando agreed. “Now I must get up there. Good night, Don Roberto.”
“Good night, Fernando.”
Then he had made a pillow of the things he took off and gotten into the robe and then lain and waited, feeling the spring of the boughs under the flannelly, feathered lightness of the robe warmth, watching the mouth of the cave across the snow; feeling his heart beat as he waited.
The night was clear and his head felt as clear and cold as the air. He smelled the odor of the pine boughs under him, the piney smell of the crushed needles and the sharper odor of the resinous sap from the cut limbs. Pilar, he thought. Pilar and the smell of death. This is the smell I love. This and fresh-cut clover, the crushed sage as you ride after cattle, wood-smoke and the burning leaves of autumn. That must be the odor of nostalgia, the smell of the smoke from the piles of raked leaves burning in the streets in the fall in Missoula. Which would you rather smell? Sweet grass the Indians used in their baskets? Smoked leather? The odor of the ground in the spring after rain? The smell of the sea as you walk through the gorse on a headland in Galicia? Or the wind from the land as you come in toward Cuba in the dark? That was the odor of the cactus flowers, mimosa and the sea-grape shrubs. Or would you rather smell frying bacon in the morning when you are hungry? Or coffee in the morning? Or a Jonathan apple as you bit into it? Or a cider mill in the grinding, or bread fresh from the oven? You must be hungry, he thought, and he lay on his side and watched the entrance of the cave in the light that the stars reflected from the snow.
Some one came out from under the blanket and he could see whoever it was standing by the break in the rock that made the entrance. Then he heard a slithering sound in the snow and then whoever it was ducked down and went back in.
I suppose she won’t come until they are all asleep, he thought. It is a waste of time. The night is half gone. Oh, Maria. Come now quickly, Maria, for there is little time. He heard the soft sound of snow falling from a branch onto the snow on the ground. A little wind was rising. He felt it on his face. Suddenly he felt a panic that she might not come. The wind rising now reminded him how soon it would be morning. More snow fell from the branches as he heard the wind now moving the pine tops.
Come now, Maria. Please come here now quickly, he thought. Oh, come here now. Do not wait. There is no importance any more to your waiting until they are asleep.