“Well, did you see the bridge?” the gypsy asked. The others, who had not opened their mouths after the change of allegiance, were all leaning forward to listen now.
“Yes,” Robert Jordan said. “It is something easy to do. Would you like me to show you?”
“Yes, man. With much interest.”
Robert Jordan took out the notebook from his shirt pocket and showed them the sketches.
“Look how it seems,” the flat-faced man, who was named Primitivo, said. “It is the bridge itself.”
Robert Jordan with the point of the pencil explained how the bridge should be blown and the reason for the placing of the charges.
“What simplicity,” the scarred-faced brother, who was called Andrés, said. “And how do you explode them?”
Robert Jordan explained that too and, as he showed them, he felt the girl’s arm resting on his shoulder as she looked. The woman of Pablo was watching too. Only Pablo took no interest, sitting by himself with a cup of wine that he replenished by dipping into the big bowl Maria had filled from the wineskin that hung to the left of the entrance to the cave.
“Hast thou done much of this?” the girl asked Robert Jordan softly.
“Yes.”
“And can we see the doing of it?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“You will see it,” Pablo said from his end of the table. “I believe that you will see it.”
“Shut up,” the woman of Pablo said to him and suddenly remembering what she had seen in the hand in the afternoon she was wildly, unreasonably angry. “Shut up, coward. Shut up, bad luck bird. Shut up, murderer.”
“Good,” Pablo said. “I shut up. It is thou who commands now and you should continue to look at the pretty pictures. But remember that I am not stupid.”
The woman of Pablo could feel her rage changing to sorrow and to a feeling of the thwarting of all hope and promise. She knew this feeling from when she was a girl and she knew the things that caused it all through her life. It came now suddenly and she put it away from her and would not let it touch her, neither her nor the Republic, and she said, “Now we will eat. Serve the bowls from the pot, Maria.”
5
Robert Jordan pushed aside the saddle blanket that hung over the mouth of the cave and, stepping out, took a deep breath of the cold night air. The mist had cleared away and the stars were out. There was no wind, and, outside now of the warm air of the cave, heavy with smoke of both tobacco and charcoal, with the odor of cooked rice and meat, saffron, pimentos, and oil, the tarry, wine-spilled smell of the big skin hung beside the door, hung by the neck and the four legs extended, wine drawn from a plug fitted in one leg, wine that spilled a little onto the earth of the floor, settling the dust smell; out now from the odors of different herbs whose names he did not know that hung in bunches from the ceiling, with long ropes of garlic, away now from the copper-penny, red wine and garlic, horse sweat and man sweat dried in the clothing (acrid and gray the man sweat, sweet and sickly the dried brushed-off lather of horse sweat), of the men at the table, Robert Jordan breathed deeply of the clear night air of the mountains that smelled of the pines and of the dew on the grass in the meadow by the stream. Dew had fallen heavily since the wind had dropped, but, as he stood there, he thought there would be frost by morning.
As he stood breathing deep and then listening to the night, he heard first, firing far away, and then he heard an owl cry in the timber below, where the horse corral was slung. Then inside the cave he could hear the gypsy starting to sing and the soft chording of a guitar.
“I had an inheritance from my father,” the artificially hardened voice rose harshly and hung there. Then went on:
“It was the moon and the sun
“And though I roam all over the world