For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway [40]
“I did not like it,” Fernando said quietly. “I did not like Valencia.”
“Yet they speak of the mule as stubborn,” the woman said. “Clean up, Maria, that we may go.”
As she said this they heard the first sound of the planes returning.
9
They stood in the mouth of the cave and watched them. The bombers were high now in fast, ugly arrow-heads beating the sky apart with the noise of their motors. They are shaped like sharks, Robert Jordan thought, the wide-finned, sharp-nosed sharks of the Gulf Stream. But these, wide-finned in silver, roaring, the light mist of their propellers in the sun, these do not move like sharks. They move like no thing there has ever been. They move like mechanized doom.
You ought to write, he told himself. Maybe you will again some time. He felt Maria holding to his arm. She was looking up and he said to her, “What do they look like to you, guapa?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Death, I think.”
“They look like planes to me,” the woman of Pablo said. “‘Where are the little ones?”
“They may be crossing at another part,” Robert Jordan said. “Those bombers are too fast to have to wait for them and have come back alone. We never follow them across the lines to fight. There aren’t enough planes to risk it.”
Just then three Heinkel fighters in V formation came low over the clearing coming toward them, just over the tree tops, like clattering, wing-tilting, pinch-nosed ugly toys, to enlarge suddenly, fearfully to their actual size; pouring past in a whining roar. They were so low that from the cave mouth all of them could see the pilots, helmeted, goggled, a scarf blowing back from behind the patrol leader’s head.
“Those can see the horses,” Pablo said.
“Those can see thy cigarette butts,” the woman said. “Let fall the blanket.”
No more planes came over. The others must have crossed farther up the range and when the droning was gone they went out of the cave into the open.
The sky was empty now and high and blue and clear.
“It seems as though they were a dream that you wake from,” Maria said to Robert Jordan. There was not even the last almost unheard hum that comes like a finger faintly touching and leaving and touching again after the sound is gone almost past hearing.
“They are no dream and you go in and clean up,” Pilar said to her. “What about it?” she turned to Robert Jordan. “Should we ride or walk?”
Pablo looked at her and grunted.
“As you will,” Robert Jordan said.
“Then let us walk,” she said. “I would like it for the liver.”
“Riding is good for the liver.”
“Yes, but hard on the buttocks. We will walk and thou—” She turned to Pablo. “Go down and count thy beasts and see they have not flown away with any.”
“Do you want a horse to ride?” Pablo asked Robert Jordan.
“No. Many thanks. What about the girl?”
“Better for her to walk,” Pilar said. “She’ll get stiff in too many places and serve for nothing.”
Robert Jordan felt his face reddening.
“Did you sleep well?” Pilar asked. Then said, “It is true that there is no sickness. There could have been. I know not why there wasn’t. There probably still is God after all, although we have abolished Him. Go on,” she said to Pablo. “This does not concern thee. This is of people younger than thee. Made of other material. Get on.” Then to Robert Jordan, “Agustín is looking after thy things. We go when he comes.”
It was a clear, bright day and warm now in the sun. Robert Jordan looked at the big, brown-faced woman with her kind, widely set eyes and her square, heavy face, lined and pleasantly ugly, the eyes merry, but the face sad until the lips moved. He looked at her and then at the man, heavy and stolid, moving off through the trees toward the corral. The woman, too, was looking after him.
“Did you make love?” the woman said.
“What did she say?”
“She would not tell me.”
“I neither.”
“Then you made love,” the woman said. “Be as careful with her as you can.”
“What if she has a baby?”
“That will do no harm,