"I must tell thee for it is a great thing."
"Nay."
"Rabbit-"
But she held him tight and turned her head away and he asked softly, "Is it pain, rabbit?"
"Nay," she said. "It is that I am thankful too to have been another time in la gloria."
Then afterwards they lay quiet, side by side, all length of ankle, thigh, hip and shoulder touching, Robert Jordan now with the watch where he could see it again and Maria said, "We have had much good fortune."
"Yes," he said, "we are people of much luck."
"There is not time to sleep?"
"No," he said, "it starts soon now."
"Then if we must rise let us go to get something to eat."
"All right."
"Thou. Thou art not worried about anything?"
"No."
"Truly?"
"No. Not now."
"But thou hast worried before?"
"For a while."
"Is it aught I can help?"
"Nay," he said. "You have helped enough."
"That? That was for me."
"That was for us both," he said. "No one is there alone. Come, rabbit, let us dress."
But his mind, that was his best companion, was thinking La Gloria. She said La Gloria. It has nothing to do with glory nor La Gloire that the French write and speak about. It is the thing that is in the Cante Hondo and in the Saetas. It is in Greco and in San Juan de la Cruz, of course, and in the others. I am no mystic, but to deny it is as ignorant as though you denied the telephone or that the earth revolves around the sun or that there are other planets than this.
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think, than in all the other time. I'd like to be an old man and to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew about so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
"You taught me a lot, guapa," he said in English.
"What did you say?"
"I have learned much from thee."
"Que va," she said, "it is thou who art educated."
Educated, he thought. I have the very smallest beginnings of an education. The very small beginnings. If I die on this day it is a waste because I know a few things now. I wonder if you only learn them now because you are oversensitized because of the shortness of the time? There is no such thing as a shortness of time, though. You should have sense enough to know that too. I have been all my life in these hills since I have been here. Anselmo is my oldest friend. I know him better than I know Charles, than I know Chub, than I know Guy, than I know Mike, and I know them well. Agustin, with his vile mouth, is my brother, and I never had a brother. Maria is my true love and my wife. I never had a true love. I never had a wife. She is also my sister, and I never had a sister, and my daughter, and I never will have a daughter. I hate to leave a thing that is so good. He finished tying his rope-soled shoes.
"I find life very interesting," he said to Maria. She was sitting beside him on the robe, her hands clasped around her ankles. Some one moved the blanket aside from the entrance to the cave and they both saw the light. It was night still and here was no promise of morning except that as he looked up through the pines he saw how low the stars had swung. The morning would be coming fast now in this month.
"Roberto," Maria said.
"Yes, guapa."
"In this of today we will be together, will we not?"
"After the start, yes."
"Not at the start?"
"No. Thou wilt be with the horses."
"I cannot be with thee?"
"No. I have work that only I can do and I would worry about thee."
"But you will come fast when it is done?"
"Very fast," he said and grinned in the dark. "Come, guapa, let us go and eat."
"And thy robe?"
"Roll it up, if it pleases thee."
"It pleases me," she said.
"I will help thee."
"Nay. Let me do it alone."
She knelt to spread and roll the robe, then changed her mind and stood up and shook it so it flapped. Then she knelt down again to straighten it and roll it. Robert Jordan picked up the two packs, holding them carefully so that nothing would spill from the slits in them, and walked over through the pines to the cave mouth where the smoky blanket hung. It was ten minutes to three by his watch when he pushed the blanket aside with his elbow and went into the cave.
38
They were in the cave and the men were standing before the fire Maria was fanning. Pilar had coffee ready in a pot. She had not gone back to bed at all since she had roused Robert Jordan and now she was sitting on a stool in the smoky cave sewing the rip in one of Jordan's packs. The other pack was already sewed. The firelight lit up her face.
"Take more of the stew," she said to Fernando. "What does it matter if thy belly should be full? There is no doctor to operate if you take a goring."
"Don't speak that way, woman," Agustin said. "Thou hast the tongue of the great whore."
He was leaning on the automatic rifle, its legs folded close against the fretted barrel, his pockets were full of grenades, a sack of pans hung from one shoulder, and a full bandolier of ammunition hung over the other shoulder. He was smoking a cigarette and he held a bowl of coffee in one hand and blew smoke onto its surface as he raised it to his lips.
"Thou art a walking hardware store," Pilar said to him. "Thou canst not walk a hundred yards with all that."
"Que va, woman," Agustin said. "It is all downhill."
"There is a climb to the post," Fernando said. "Before the downward slope commences."
"I will climb it like a goat," Agustin said.
"And thy brother?" he asked Eladio. "Thy famous brother has mucked off?"
Eladio was standing against the wall.
"Shut up," he said.
He was nervous and he knew they all knew it. He was always nervous and irritable before action. He moved from the wall to the table and began filling his pockets with grenades from one of the rawhide-covered panniers that leaned, open, against the table leg.
Robert Jordan squatted by the pannier beside him. He reached into the pannier and picked out four grenades. Three were the oval Mill bomb type, serrated, heavy iron with a spring level held down in position by a cotter pin with pulling rig attached.
"Where did these come from?" he asked Eladio.
"Those? Those are from the Republic. The old man brought them."
"How are they?"
"Valen mas que pesan," Eladio said. "They are worth a fortune apiece."
"I brought those," Anselmo said. "Sixty in one pack. Ninety pounds, Ingles."
"Have you used those?" Robert Jordan asked Pilar.
"Que va have we used them?" the woman said. "It was with those Pablo slew the post at Otero."
When she mentioned Pablo, Agustin started cursing. Robert Jordan saw the look on Pilar's face in the firelight.
"Leave it," she said to Agustin sharply. "It does no good to talk."
"Have they always exploded?" Robert Jordan held the graypainted grenade in his hand, trying the bend of the cotter pin with his thumbnail.
"Always," Eladio said. "There was not a dud in any of that lot we used."
"And how quickly?"
"In the distance one can throw it. Quickly. Quickly enough."
"And these?"
He held up a soup-tin-shaped bomb, with a tape wrapping around a wire loop.
"They are a garbage," Eladio told him. "They blow. Yes. But it is all flash and no fragments."