This was no way to think; but who censored his thinking? Nobody but himself. He would not think himself into any defeatism. The first thing was to win the war. If we did not win the war everything was lost. But he noticed, and listened to, and remembered everything. He was serving in a war and he gave absolute loyalty and as complete a performance as he could give while he was serving. But nobody owned his mind, nor his faculties for seeing and hearing, and if he were going to form judgments he would form them afterwards. And there would be plenty of material to draw them from. There was plenty already. There was a little too much sometimes.
Look at the Pilar woman, he thought. No matter what comes, if there is time, I must make her tell me the rest of that story. Look at her walking along with those two kids. You could not get three better-looking products of Spain than those. She is like a mountain and the boy and the girl are like young trees. The old trees are all cut down and the young trees are growing clean like that. In spite of what has happened to the two of them they look as fresh and clean and new and untouched as though they had never heard of misfortune. But according to Pilar, Maria has just gotten sound again. She must have been in an awful shape.
He remembered a Belgian boy in the Eleventh Brigade who had enlisted with five other boys from his village. It was a village Of about two hundred people and the boy had never been away froni the village before. When he first saw the boy, out at Hans’ Brigade Staff, the other five from the village had all been killed and the boy was in very bad shape and they were using him as an orderly to wait on table at the staff. He had a big, blond, ruddy Flemish face and huge awkward peasant hands and he moved, with the dishes, as powerfully and awkwardly as a draft horse. But he cried all the time. All during the meal he cried with no noise at all.
You looked up and there he was, crying. If you asked for the wine, he cried and if you passed your plate for stew, he cried; turning away his head. Then he would stop; but if you looked up at him, tears would start coming again. Between courses he cried in the kitchen. Every one was very gentle with him. But it did no good. He would have to find out what became of him and whether he ever cleared up and was fit for soldiering again.
Maria was sound enough now. She seemed so anyway. But he was no psychiatrist. Pilar was the psychiatrist. It probably had been good for them to have been together last night. Yes, unless it stopped. It certainly had been good for him. He felt fine today; sound and good and unworried and happy. The show looked bad enough but he was awfully lucky, too. He had been in others that announced themselves badly. Announced themselves; that was thinking in Spanish. Maria was lovely.
Look at her, he said to himself. Look at her.
He looked at her striding happily in the sun; her khaki shirt open at the neck. She walks like a colt moves, he thought. You do not run onto something like that. Such things don’t happen. Maybe it never did happen, he thought. Maybe you dreamed it or made it up and it never did happen. Maybe it is like the dreams you have when some one you have seen in the cinema comes to your bed at night and is so kind and lovely. He’d slept with them all that way When he was asleep in bed. He could remember Garbo still, and Harlow. Yes, Harlow many times. Maybe it was like those dreams.
But he could still remember the time Garbo came to his bed the flight before the attack at Pozoblanco and she was wearing a soft silky wool sweater when he put his arm around her and when she leaned forward her hair swept forward and over his face and she said why had he never told her that he loved her when she had loved him all this time?
She was not shy, nor cold, nor distant. She was just lovely to hold and kind and lovely and like the old days with Jack Gilbert and it was as true as though it happened and he loved her much more than Harlow though Garbo was only there once while Harlow—maybe this was like those dreams.
Maybe it isn’t too, he said to himself. Maybe I could reach over and touch that Maria now, he said to himself. Maybe you are afraid to he said to himself. Maybe you would find out that it never happened and it was not true and it was something you made up like those dreams about the people of the cinema or how all your old girls come back and sleep in that robe at night on all the bare floors, in the straw of the haybarns, the stables, the ‘corrales’ and the ‘cortijos’, the woods, the garages, the trucks and all the hills of Spain.
They all came to that robe when he was asleep and they were all much nicer than they ever had been in life. Maybe it was like that. Maybe you would be afraid to touch her to see if it was true. Maybe you would, and probably it is something that you made up or that you dreamed.
He took a step across the trail and put his hand on the girl’s arm. Under his fingers he felt the smoothness of her arm in the worn khaki. She looked at him and smiled.
“Hello, Maria,” he said.
“Hello, ‘Inglés’,” she answered and he saw her tawny brown face and the yellow-gray eyes and the full lips smiling and the cropped sun-burned hair and she lifted her face at him and smiled in his eyes. It was true all right.
Now they were in sight of El Sordo’s camp in the last of the pines, where there was a rounded gulch-head shaped like an upturned basin. All these limestone upper basins must be full of caves, he thought. There are two caves there ahead. The scrub pines growing in the rock hide them well. This is as good or a better place than Pablo’s.
“How was this shooting of thy family?” Pilar was saying to Joaquín.
“Nothing, woman,” Joaquín said. “They were of the left as many others in Valladolid. When the fascists purified the town they shot first the father. He had voted Socialist. Then they shot the mother. She had voted the same. It was the first time she had ever voted. After that they shot the husband of one of the sisters. He was a member of the syndicate of tramway drivers. Clearly he could not drive a tram without belonging to the syndicate. But he was without politics.
I knew him well. He was even a little hit shameless. I do not think he was even a good comrade. Then the husband of the other girl, the other sister, who was also in the trams, had gone to the hills as I had. They thought she knew where he was. But she did not. So they shot her because she would not tell them where he was.”
“What barbarians,” said Pilar. “Where is El Sordo? I do not see him.”
“He is here. He is probably inside,” answered Joaquín and stopping now, and resting the rifle butt on the ground, said, “Pilar, listen to me. And thou, Maria. Forgive me if I have molested you speaking of things of the family. I know that all have the same troubles and it is more valuable not to speak of them.”
“That you should speak,” Pilar said. “For what are we born if not to aid one another? And to listen and say nothing is a cold enough aid.”
“But it can molest the Maria. She has too many things of her own.”
“‘Qué va’,” Maria said. “Mine are such a big bucket that yours falling in will never fill it. I am sorry, Joaquín, and I hope thy sister is well.”
“So far she’s all right,” Joaquín said. “They have her in prison and it seems they do not mistreat her much.”
“Are there others in the family?” Robert Jordan asked.
“No,” the boy said. “Me. Nothing more. Except the brother-inlaw who went to the hills and I think he is dead.”
“Maybe he is all right,” Maria said. “Maybe he is with a band in other mountains.”
“For me he is dead,” Joaquín said. “He was never too good at getting about and he was conductor of a tram and that is not the best preparation for the hills. I doubt if he could last a year. He was Somewhat weak in the chest too.”
“But he may be all right,” Maria put her arm on his shoulder.
“Certainly, girl. Why not?” said Joaquín.
As the boy stood there, Maria reached up, put her arms around his neck and kissed him. Joaquín turned his head away because he was crying.
“That is as a brother,” Maria said to him. “I kiss thee as a brother.”
The boy shook his head, crying without making any noise.
“I am thy sister,” Maria said. “And I love thee and thou hast a family. We are
