‘I’m very curious to see them,’ Robert said.
Montoya came up to our table. He had a telegram in his hand. ‘It’s for you.’ He handed it to me.
It read: ‘Stopped night San Sebastian.’
‘It’s from them,’ I said. I put it in my pocket. Ordinarily I should have handed it over.
‘They’ve stopped over in San Sebastian,’ I said. ‘Send their regards to you.’
Why I felt that impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. I do not think I ever really hated him until he had that little spell of superiority at lunch—that and when he went through all that barbering. So I put the telegram in my pocket. The telegram came to me, anyway.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘We ought to pull out on the noon bus for Burguete. They can follow us if they get in to-morrow night.’
There were only two trains up from San Sebastian, an early-morning train and the one we had just met.
‘That sounds like a good idea,’ Cohn said.
‘The sooner we get on the stream the better.’
‘It’s all one to me when we start,’ Bill said. ‘The sooner the better.’
We sat in the Iruña for a while and had coffee and then took a little walk out to the bull-ring and across the field and under the trees at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the river in the dark, and I turned in early. Bill and Cohn stayed out in the café quite late, I believe, because I was asleep when they came in.
In the morning I bought three tickets for the bus to Burguete. It was scheduled to leave at two o’clock. There was nothing earlier. I was sitting over at the Iruña reading the papers when I saw Robert Cohn coming across the square. He came up to the table and sat down in one of the wicker chairs.
‘This is a comfortable café,’ he said. ‘Did you have a good night, Jake?’
‘I slept like a log.’
‘I didn’t sleep very well. Bill and I were out late, too.’
‘Where were you?’
‘Here. And after it shut we went over to that other café. The old man there speaks German and English.’
‘The Café Suizo.’
‘That’s it. He seems like a nice old fellow. I think it’s a better café than this one.’
‘It’s not so good in the daytime,’ I said. ‘Too hot. By the way, I got the bus tickets.’
‘I’m not going up to-day. You and Bill go on ahead.’
‘I’ve got your ticket.’
‘Give it to me. I’ll get the money back.’
‘It’s five pesetas.’
Robert Cohn took out a silver five-peseta piece and gave it to me.
‘I ought to stay,’ he said. ‘You see I’m afraid there’s some sort of misunderstanding.’
‘Why?’ I said. ‘They may not come here for three or four days now if they start on parties at San Sebastian.’
‘That’s just it,’ said Robert. ‘I’m afraid they expected to meet me at San Sebastian, and that’s why they stopped over.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Well, I wrote suggesting it to Brett.’
‘Why in hell didn’t you stay there and meet them, then?’ I started to say, but I stopped. I thought that idea would come to him by itself, but I do not believe it ever did.
He was being confidential now and it was giving him pleasure to be able to talk with the understanding that I knew there was something between him and Brett.
‘Well, Bill and I will go up right after lunch,’ I said.
‘I wish I could go. We’ve been looking forward to this fishing all winter.’ He was being sentimental about it. ‘But I ought to stay. I really ought. As soon as they come I’ll bring them right up.’
‘Let’s find Bill.’
‘I want to go over to the barber-shop.’
‘See you at lunch.’
I found Bill up in his room. He was shaving.
‘Oh, yes, he told me all about it last night,’ Bill said. ‘He’s a great little confider. He said he had a date with Brett at San Sebastian.’
‘The lying bastard!’
‘Oh, no,’ said Bill. ‘Don’t get sore. Don’t get sore at this stage of the trip. How did you ever happen to know this fellow, anyway?’
‘Don’t rub it in.’
Bill looked around, half-shaved, and then went on talking into the mirror while he lathered his face.
‘Didn’t you send him with a letter to me in New York last winter? Thank God, I’m a travelling man. Haven’t you got some more Jewish friends you could bring along?’ He rubbed his chin with his thumb, looked at it, and then started scraping again.
‘You’ve got some fine ones yourself.’
‘Oh, yes. I’ve got some darbs. But not alongside of this Robert Cohn. The funny thing is he’s nice, too. I like him. But he’s just so awful.’
‘He can be damn nice.’
‘I know it. That’s the terrible part.’
I laughed.
‘Yes. Go on and laugh,’ said Bill. ‘You weren’t out with him last night until two o’clock.’
‘Was he very bad?’
‘Awful. What’s all this about him and Brett, anyway? Did she ever have anything to do with him?’
He raised his chin up and pulled it from side to side.
‘Sure. She went down to San Sebastian with him.’
‘What a damn-fool thing to do. Why did she do that?’
‘She wanted to get out of town and she can’t go anywhere alone. She said she thought it would be good for him.’
‘What bloody-fool things people do. Why didn’t she go off with some of her own people? Or you?’—he slurred that over—‘or me? Why not me?’ He looked at his face carefully in the glass, put a big dab of lather on each cheek-bone. ‘It’s an honest face. It’s a face any woman would be safe with.’
‘She’d never seen it.’
‘She should have. All women should see it. It’s a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country. Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar. Mothers should tell their daughters about this face. My son’—he pointed the razor at me—‘go west with this face and grow up with the country.’
He ducked down to the bowl, rinsed his face with cold water, put on some alcohol, and then looked at himself carefully in the glass, pulling down his long upper lip.
‘My God!’ he said, ‘isn’t it an awful face?’
He looked in the glass.
‘And as for this Robert Cohn,’ Bill said, ‘he makes me sick, and he can go to hell, and I’m damn glad he’s staying here so we won’t have him fishing with us.’
‘You’re damn right.’
‘We’re going trout-fishing. We’re going trout-fishing in the Irati River, and we’re going to get tight now at lunch on the wine of the country, and then take a swell bus ride.’
‘Come on. Let’s go over to the Iruña and start,’ I said.
CHAPTER XI
It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete. People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder. Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us. When I came out the bus was crowded. Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun. It certainly was hot. Robert climbed down and I fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top.
Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us to start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that I spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time.
He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of the bus. Everyone took a drink very politely, and then they made us cork it up and put it away. They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles. They were peasants going up into the hills.
Finally, after a couple more false klaxons, the bus started, and Robert Cohn waved good-bye to us, and all the Basques waved good-bye to him. As soon as we started out on the road outside of town it was cool. It felt nice riding high up and close under the trees. The bus went quite fast and made a good breeze, and as we went out along the road with the dust powdering the trees and down the hill, we had a fine view, back through the trees, of the town rising up from
