Free For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway Page B

his tongue in delicate anæsthesia. He looked at Pablo and grinned again.
    â€œHow’s business?” he asked.
    Pablo did not answer and Robert Jordan looked carefully at the other three men at the table. One had a large flat face, flat and brown as a Serrano ham with a nose flattened and broken, and the long thin Russian cigarette, projecting at an angle, made the face look even flatter. This man had short gray hair and a gray stubble of beard and wore the usual black smock buttoned at the neck. He looked down at the table when Robert Jordan looked at him but his eyes were steady and they did not blink. The other two were evidently brothers. They looked much alike and were both short, heavily built, dark haired, their hair growing low on their foreheads, dark-eyed and brown. One had a scar across his forehead above his left eye and as he looked at them, they looked back at him steadily. One looked to be about twenty-six or -eight, the other perhaps two years older.
    â€œWhat are you looking at?” one brother, the one with the scar, asked.
    â€œThee,” Robert Jordan said.
    â€œDo you see anything rare?”
    â€œNo,” said Robert Jordan. “Have a cigarette?”
    â€œWhy not?” the brother said. He had not taken any before. “These are like the other had. He of the train.”
    â€œWere you at the train?”
    â€œWe were all at the train,” the brother said quietly. “All except the old man.”
    â€œThat is what we should do now,” Pablo said. “Another train.”
    â€œWe can do that,” Robert Jordan said. “After the bridge.”
    He could see that the wife of Pablo had turned now from the fire and was listening. When he said the word “bridge” every one was quiet.
    â€œAfter the bridge,” he said again deliberately and took a sip of the absinthe. I might as well bring it on, he thought. It’s coming anyway.
    â€œI do not go for the bridge,” Pablo said, looking down at the table. “Neither me nor my people.”
    Robert Jordan said nothing. He looked at Anselmo and raised the cup. “Then we shall do it alone, old one,” he said and smiled.
    â€œWithout this coward,” Anselmo said.
    â€œWhat did you say?” Pablo spoke to the old man.
    â€œNothing for thee. I did not speak to thee,” Anselmo told him.
    Robert Jordan now looked past the table to where the wife of Pablo was standing by the fire. She had said nothing yet, nor given any sign. But now she said something he could not hear to the girl and the girl rose from the cooking fire, slipped along the wall, opened the blanket that hung over the mouth of the cave and went out. I think it is going to come now, Robert Jordan thought. I believe this is it. I did not want it to be this way but this seems to be the way it is.
    â€œThen we will do the bridge without thy aid,” Robert Jordan said to Pablo.
    â€œNo,” Pablo said, and Robert Jordan watched his face sweat. “Thou wilt blow no bridge here.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œThou wilt blow no bridge,” Pablo said heavily.
    â€œAnd thou?” Robert Jordan spoke to the wife of Pablo who was standing, still and huge, by the fire. She turned toward them and said, “I am for the bridge.” Her face was lit by the fire and it was flushed and it shone warm and dark and handsome now in the firelight as it was meant to be.
    â€œWhat do you say?” Pablo said to her and Robert Jordan saw the betrayed look on his face and the sweat on his forehead as he turned his head.
    â€œI am for the bridge and against thee,” the wife of Pablo said. “Nothing more.”
    â€œI am also for the bridge,” the man with the flat face and the broken nose said, crushing the end of the cigarette on the table.
    â€œTo me the bridge means nothing,” one of the brothers said. “I am for the mujer of Pablo.”
    â€œEqually,” said the other