“‘To kill gives much thirst,’ the man with the wineskin said to me.
“‘Qué va,’ I said. ‘Hast thou killed?’
“‘We have killed four,’ he said, proudly. ‘Not counting the civiles. Is it true that thee killed one of the civiles, Pilar?’
“‘Not one,’ I said. ‘I shot into the smoke when the wall fell, as did the others. That is all.’
“‘Where got thee the pistol, Pilar?’
“‘From Pablo. Pablo gave it to me after he killed the civiles.’
“‘Killed he them with this pistol?’
“‘With no other,’ I said. ‘And then he armed me with it.’
“‘Can I see it, Pilar? Can I hold it?’
“‘Why not, man?’ I said, and I took it out from under the rope and handed it to him. But I was wondering why no one else had come out and just then who should come out but Don Guillermo Martin from whose store the flails, the herdsman’s clubs, and the wooden pitchforks had been taken. Don Guillermo was a fascist but otherwise there Was nothing against him.
“It is true he paid little to those who made the flails but he charged little for them too and if one did not wish to buy flails from Don Guillermo, it was possible to make them for nothing more than the cost of the wood and the leather. He had a rude way of speaking and he was undoubtedly a fascist and a member of their club and he sat at noon and at evening in the cane chairs of their club to read El Debate, to have his shoes shined, and to drink vermouth and seltzer and eat roasted almonds, dried shrimps, and anchovies. But one does not kill for that, and I am sure if it had not been for the insults of Don Ricardo Montalvo and the lamentable spectacle of Don Faustino, and the drinking consequent on the emotion of them and the others, some one would have shouted, ‘That Don Guillermo should go in peace. We have his flails. Let him go.’
“Because the people of this town are as kind as they can be cruel and they have a natural sense of justice and a desire to do that which is right. But cruelty had entered into the lines and also drunkenness or the beginning of drunkenness and the lines were not as they were when Don Benito had come out. I do not know how it is in other countries, and no one cares more for the pleasure of drinking than I do, but in Spain drunkenness, when produced by other elements than wine, is a thing of great ugliness and the people do things that they would not have done. Is it not so in your country, Inglés?”
“It is so,” Robert Jordan said. “When I was seven years old and going with my mother to attend a wedding in the state of Ohio at which I was to be the boy of a pair of boy and girl who carried flowers–”
“Did you do that?” asked Maria. “How nice!”
“In this town a Negro was hanged to a lamp post and later burned. It was an arc light. A light which lowered from the post to the pavement. And he was hoisted, first by the mechanism which was used to hoist the arc light but this broke–”
“A Negro,” Maria said. “How barbarous!”
“Were the people drunk?” asked Pilar. “Were they drunk thus to burn a Negro?”
“I do not know,” Robert Jordan said. “Because I saw it only looking out from under the blinds of a window in the house which stood on the corner where the arc light was. The street was full of people and when they lifted the Negro up for the second time–”
“If you had only seven years and were in a house, you could not tell if they were drunk or not,” Pilar said.
“As I said, when they lifted the Negro up for the second time, my mother pulled me away from the window, so I saw no more,” Robert Jordan said. “But since I have had experiences which demonstrate that drunkenness is the same in my country. It is ugly and brutal.”