‘My God!’ said Bill. ‘It can’t be this cold to-morrow. I’m not going to wade a stream in this weather.’
There was an upright piano in the far corner of the room beyond the wooden tables and Bill went over and started to play.
‘I got to keep warm,’ he said.
I went out to find the woman and ask her how much the room and board was. She put her hands under her apron and looked away from me.
‘Twelve pesetas.’
‘Why, we only paid that in Pamplona.’
She did not say anything, just took off her glasses and wiped them on her apron.
‘That’s too much.’ I said. ‘We didn’t pay more than that at a big hotel.’
‘We’ve put in a bathroom.’
‘Haven’t you got anything cheaper?’
‘Not in the summer. Now is the big season.’
We were the only people in the inn. Well, I thought, it’s only a few days.
‘Is the wine included?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘It’s all right.’
I went back to Bill. He blew his breath at me to show how cold it was, and went on playing. I sat at one of the tables and looked at the pictures on the wall. There was one panel of rabbits, dead, one of pheasants, also dead, and one panel of dead ducks. The panels were all dark and smoky-looking. There was a cupboard full of liqueur bottles. I looked at them all. Bill was still playing. ‘How about a hot rum punch?’ he said. ‘This isn’t going to keep me warm permanently.’
I went out and told the woman what a rum punch was and how to make it. In a few minutes a girl brought a stone pitcher, steaming, into the room. Bill came over from the piano and we drank the hot punch and listened to the wind.
‘There isn’t too much rum in that.’
I went over to the cupboard and brought the rum bottle and poured a half-tumblerful into the pitcher.
‘Direct action,’ said Bill. ‘It beats legislation.’
The girl came in and laid the table for supper.
‘It blows like hell up here,’ Bill said.
The girl brought in a big bowl of hot vegetable soup and the wine. We had fried trout afterward and some sort of a stew and a big bowl full of wild strawberries. We did not lose money on the wine, and the girl was shy but nice about bringing it. The old woman looked in once and counted the empty bottles.
After supper we went upstairs and smoked and read in bed to keep warm. Once in the night I woke and heard the wind blowing. It felt good to be warm and in bed.
CHAPTER XII
When I woke in the morning I went to the window and looked out. It had cleared and there were no clouds on the mountains. Outside under the window were some carts and an old diligence, the wood of the roof cracked and split by the weather. It must have been left from the days before the motor-buses. A goat hopped up on one of the carts and then to the roof of the diligence. He jerked his head at the other goats below and when I waved at him he bounded down.
Bill was still sleeping, so I dressed, put on my shoes outside in the hall, and went downstairs. No one was stirring downstairs, so I unbolted the door and went out. It was cool outside in the early morning and the sun had not yet dried the dew that had come when the wind died down. I hunted around in the shed behind the inn and found a sort of mattock, and went down toward the stream to try and dig some worms for bait.
The stream was clear and shallow but it did not look trouty. On the grassy bank where it was damp I drove the mattock into the earth and loosened a chunk of sod. There were worms underneath. They slid out of sight as I lifted the sod and I dug carefully and got a good many. Digging at the edge of the damp ground I filled two empty tobacco-tins with worms and sifted dirt on to them. The goats watched me dig.
When I went back into the inn the woman was down in the kitchen, and I asked her to get coffee for us, and that we wanted a lunch. Bill was awake and sitting on the edge of the bed.
‘I saw you out of the window,’ he said. ‘Didn’t want to interrupt you. What were you doing? Burying your money?’
‘You lazy bum!’
‘Been working for the common good? Splendid. I want you to do that every morning.’
‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Get up.’
‘What? Get up? I never get up.’
He climbed into bed and pulled the sheet up to his chin.
‘Try and argue me into getting up.’
I went on looking for the tackle and putting it all together in the tackle-bag.
‘Aren’t you interested?’ Bill asked.
‘I’m going down and eat.’
‘Eat? Why didn’t you say eat? I thought you just wanted me to get up for fun. Eat? Fine. Now you’re reasonable. You go out and dig some more worms and I’ll be right down.’
‘Oh, go to hell!’
‘Work for the good of all.’ Bill stepped into his underclothes. ‘Show irony and pity.’
I started out of the room with the tackle-bag, the nets, and the rod-case.
‘Hey! come back!’
I put my head in the door.
‘Aren’t you going to show a little irony and pity?’
I thumbed my nose.
‘That’s not irony.’
As I went downstairs I heard Bill singing, ‘Irony and Pity. When you’re feeling . . . Oh, Give them Irony and Give them Pity. Oh, give them Irony. When they’re feeling . . . Just a little irony. Just a little pity . . .’ He kept on singing until he came downstairs. The tune was: ‘The Bells Are Ringing for Me and My Gal.’ I was reading a week-old Spanish paper.
‘What’s all this irony and pity?’
‘What? Don’t you know about Irony and Pity?’
‘No. Who got it up?’
‘Everybody. They’re mad about it in New York. It’s just like the Fratellinis used to be.’
The girl came in with the coffee and buttered toast. Or, rather it was bread toasted and buttered.
‘Ask her if she’s got any jam,’ Bill said. ‘Be ironical with her.’
‘Have you got any jam?’
‘That’s not ironical. I wish I could talk Spanish.’
The coffee was good and we drank it out of big bowls. The girl brought in a glass dish of raspberry jam.
‘Thank you.’
‘Hey! that’s not the way,’ Bill said. ‘Say something ironical. Make some crack about Primo de Rivera.’
‘I could ask her what kind of jam they think they’ve gotten into in the Riff.’
‘Poor,’ said Bill. ‘Very poor. You can’t do it. That’s all. You don’t understand irony. You have no pity. Say something pitiful.’
‘Robert Cohn.’
‘Not so bad. That’s better. Now why is Cohn pitiful? Be ironic.’
He took a big gulp of coffee.
‘Aw, hell!’ I said. ‘It’s too early in the morning.’
‘There you go. And you claim you want to be a writer, too. You’re only a newspaper man. An expatriated newspaper man. You ought to be ironical the minute you get out of bed. You ought to wake up with your mouth full of pity.’
‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Who did you get this stuff from?’
‘Everybody. Don’t you read? Don’t you ever see anybody? You know what you are? You’re an expatriate. Why don’t you live in New York? Then you’d know these things. What do you want me to do? Come over here and tell you every year?’
‘Take some more coffee,’ I said.
‘Good. Coffee is good for you. It’s the caffeine in it. Caffeine, we are here. Caffeine puts a man on her horse and a woman in his grave. You know what’s the trouble with you? You’re an expatriate. One of the worst type. Haven’t you heard that? Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers.’
He drank the coffee.
‘You’re an expatriate. You’ve lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafés.’
‘It sounds like a swell life,’ I said. ‘When do I work?’
‘You don’t work. One group claims women support you. Another group claims you’re impotent.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I just had an accident.’
‘Never mention that,’ Bill said. ‘That’s the sort of thing that can’t be spoken of. That’s what you ought to work up into a mystery. Like Henry’s bicycle.’
He had been going splendidly, but he stopped. I was afraid he thought he had hurt me with that crack about being impotent. I wanted to start him again.
‘It wasn’t a bicycle,’ I said. ‘He was riding horseback.’
‘I heard it was a tricycle.’
‘Well,’ I said. ‘A plane is sort of like a tricycle. The joystick works the same way.’
‘But you don’t pedal it.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘I guess you don’t pedal it.’
‘Let’s lay off that,’ Bill said.
‘All right. I was just standing up for the tricycle.’
‘I think he’s a good writer, too,’ Bill said. ‘And you’re a hell of a good guy. Anybody ever tell you you were a good guy?’
‘I’m not a good guy.’
‘Listen. You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by
