For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway [181]
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,” Agustín 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.”
“Qué va, woman,” Agustín 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,” Agustín 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 más que pesan,” Eladio said. “They are worth a fortune apiece.”
“I brought those,” Anselmo said. “Sixty in one pack. Ninety pounds, Inglés.”
“Have you used those?” Robert Jordan asked Pilar.
“Qué va have we used them?” the woman said. “It was with those Pablo slew the post at Otero.”
When she mentioned Pablo, Agustín started cursing. Robert Jordan saw the look on Pilar’s face in the firelight.
“Leave it,” she said to Agustín 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.”
“But do they always blow?”
“Qué va, always,” Pilar said. “There is no always either with our munitions or theirs.”
“But you said the other always blew.”
“Not me,” Pilar told him. “You asked another, not me. I have seen no always in any of that stuff.”
“They all blew,” Eladio insisted. “Speak the truth, woman.”
“How do you know they all blew?” Pilar asked him. “It was Pablo who threw them. You killed no one at Otero.”
“That son of the great whore,” Agustín began.
“Leave it alone,” Pilar said sharply. Then she went on. “They are all much the same, Inglés. But the corrugated ones are more simple.”
I’d better use one of each on each set, Robert Jordan thought. But the serrated type will lash easier and more securely.
“Are you going to be throwing bombs, Inglés?” Agustín asked.
“Why not?” Robert Jordan said.
But crouched there, sorting out the grenades, what he was thinking was: it is impossible. How I could have deceived myself about it I do not know. We were