---

I did not see Brett again until she came back from San Sebastian. One card came from her from there. It had a picture of the Concha, and said: “Darling. Very quiet and healthy. Love to all the chaps. Brett.”

Nor did I see Robert Cohn again.I heard Frances had left for England and I had a note from Cohn saying he was going out in the country for a couple of weeks, he did not know where, but that he wanted to hold me to the fishing-trip in Spain we had talked about last winter.I could reach him always, he wrote, through his bankers.

Brett was gone, I was not bothered by Cohn’s troubles, I rather enjoyed not having to play tennis, there was plenty of work to do, I went often to the races, dined with friends, and put in some extra time at the office getting things ahead so I could leave it in charge of my secretary when Bill Gorton and I should shove off to Spain the end of June. Bill Gorton arrived, put up a couple of days at the flat and went off to Vienna. He was very cheerful and said the States were wonderful. New York was wonderful. There had been a grand theatrical season and a whole crop of great young light heavyweights. Any one of them was a good prospect to grow up, put on weight and trim Dempsey. Bill was very happy. He had made a lot of money on his last book, and was going to make a lot more. We had a good time while he was in Paris, and then he went off to Vienna. He was coming back in three weeks and we would leave for Spain to get in some fishing and go to the fiesta at Pamplona. He wrote that Vienna was wonderful. Then a card from Budapest: “Jake, Budapest is wonderful.” Then I got a wire: “Back on Monday.”

Monday evening he turned up at the flat.I heard his taxi stop and went to the window and called to him; he waved and started up-stairs carrying his bags.I met him on the stairs, and took one of the bags.

“Well,” I said, “I hear you had a wonderful trip.”

“Wonderful,” he said.“Budapest is absolutely wonderful.”

“How about Vienna?”

“Not so good, Jake.Not so good.It seemed better than it was.”

“How do you mean?”I was getting glasses and a siphon.

“Tight, Jake.I was tight.”

“That’s strange.Better have a drink.”

Bill rubbed his forehead.“Remarkable thing,” he said.“Don’t know how it happened.Suddenly it happened.”

“Last long?”

“Four days, Jake.Lasted just four days.”

“Where did you go?”

“Don’t remember.Wrote you a post-card.Remember that perfectly.”

“Do anything else?”

“Not so sure.Possible.”

“Go on.Tell me about it.”

“Can’t remember. Tell you anything I could remember.”

“Go on.Take that drink and remember.”

“Might remember a little,” Bill said.“Remember something about a prize-fight.Enormous Vienna prize-fight.Had a nigger in it.Remember the nigger perfectly.”

“Go on.”

“Wonderful nigger.Looked like Tiger Flowers, only four times as big.All of a sudden everybody started to throw things.Not me.Nigger’d just knocked local boy down.Nigger put up his glove.Wanted to make a speech.Awful noble-looking nigger.Started to make a speech.Then local white boy hit him.Then he knocked white boy cold.Then everybody commenced to throw chairs.Nigger went home with us in our car.Couldn’t get his clothes.Wore my coat.Remember the whole thing now.Big sporting evening.”

“What happened?”

“Loaned the nigger some clothes and went around with him to try and get his money.Claimed nigger owed them money on account of wrecking hall.Wonder who translated?Was it me?”

“Probably it wasn’t you.”

“You’re right.Wasn’t me at all.Was another fellow.Think we called him the local Harvard man.Remember him now.Studying music.”

“How’d you come out?”

“Not so good, Jake.Injustice everywhere.Promoter claimed nigger promised let local boy stay.Claimed nigger violated contract.Can’t knock out Vienna boy in Vienna.‘My God, Mister Gorton,’ said nigger, ‘I didn’t do nothing in there for forty minutes but try and let him stay.That white boy musta ruptured himself swinging at me.I never did hit him.’”

“Did you get any money?”

“No money, Jake. All we could get was nigger’s clothes. Somebody took his watch, too. Splendid nigger. Big mistake to have come to Vienna. Not so good, Jake. Not so good.”

“What became of the nigger?”

“Went back to Cologne.Lives there.Married.Got a family.Going to write me a letter and send me the money I loaned him.Wonderful nigger.Hope I gave him the right address.”

“You probably did.”

“Well, anyway, let’s eat,” said Bill.“Unless you want me to tell you some more travel stories.”

“Go on.”

“Let’s eat.”

We went down-stairs and out onto the Boulevard St.Michel in the warm June evening.

“Where will we go?”

“Want to eat on the island?”

“Sure.”

We walked down the Boulevard.At the juncture of the Rue Denfert-Rochereau with the Boulevard is a statue of two men in flowing robes.

“I know who they are.”Bill eyed the monument.“Gentlemen who invented pharmacy.Don’t try and fool me on Paris.”

We went on.

“Here’s a taxidermist’s,” Bill said.“Want to buy anything?Nice stuffed dog?”

“Come on,” I said.“You’re pie-eyed.”

“Pretty nice stuffed dogs,” Bill said.“Certainly brighten up your flat.”

“Come on.”

“Just one stuffed dog.I can take ’em or leave ’em alone.But listen, Jake.Just one stuffed dog.”

“Come on.”

“Mean everything in the world to you after you bought it.Simple exchange of values.You give them money.They give you a stuffed dog.”

“We’ll get one on the way back.”

“All right.Have it your own way.Road to hell paved with unbought stuffed dogs.Not my fault.”

We went on.

“How’d you feel that way about dogs so sudden?”

“Always felt that way about dogs.Always been a great lover of stuffed animals.”

We stopped and had a drink.

“Certainly like to drink,” Bill said.“You ought to try it some times, Jake.”

“You’re about a hundred and forty-four ahead of me.”

“Ought not to daunt you.Never be daunted.Secret of my success.Never been daunted.Never been daunted in public.”

“Where were you drinking?”

“Stopped at the Crillon.George made me a couple of Jack Roses.George’s a great man.Know the secret of his success?Never been daunted.”

“You’ll be daunted after about three more pernods.”

“Not in public.If I begin to feel daunted I’ll go off by myself.I’m like a cat that way.”

“When did you see Harvey Stone?”

“At the Crillon.Harvey was just a little daunted.Hadn’t eaten for three days.Doesn’t eat any more.Just goes off like a cat.Pretty sad.”

“He’s all right.”

“Splendid.Wish he wouldn’t keep going off like a cat, though.Makes me nervous.”

“What’ll we do to-night?”

“Doesn’t make any difference.Only let’s not get daunted.Suppose they got any hard-boiled eggs here?If they had hard-boiled eggs here we wouldn’t have to go all the way down to the island to eat.”

“Nix,” I said.“We’re going to have a regular meal.”

“Just a suggestion,” said Bill. “Want to start now?”

“Come on.”

We started on again down the Boulevard.A horse-cab passed us.Bill looked at it.

“See that horse-cab?Going to have that horse-cab stuffed for you for Christmas.Going to give all my friends stuffed animals.I’m a nature-writer.”

A taxi passed, some one in it waved, then banged for the driver to stop.The taxi backed up to the curb.In it was Brett.

“Beautiful lady,” said Bill.“Going to kidnap us.”

“Hullo!”Brett said.“Hullo!”

“This is Bill Gorton.Lady Ashley.”

Brett smiled at Bill.“I say I’m just back.Haven’t bathed even.Michael comes in to-night.”

“Good.Come on and eat with us, and we’ll all go to meet him.”

“Must clean myself.”

“Oh, rot!Come on.”

“Must bathe.He doesn’t get in till nine.”

“Come and have a drink, then, before you bathe.”

“Might do that.Now you’re not talking rot.”

We got in the taxi.The driver looked around.

“Stop at the nearest bistro,” I said.

“We might as well go to the Closerie,” Brett said.“I can’t drink these rotten brandies.”

“Closerie des Lilas.”

Brett turned to Bill.

“Have you been in this pestilential city long?”

“Just got in to-day from Budapest.”

“How was Budapest?”

“Wonderful.Budapest was wonderful.”

“Ask him about Vienna.”

“Vienna,” said Bill, “is a strange city.”

“Very much like Paris,” Brett smiled at him, wrinkling the corners of her eyes.

“Exactly,” Bill said.“Very much like Paris at this moment.”

“You have a good start.”

Sitting out on the terraces of the Lilas Brett ordered a whiskey and soda, I took one, too, and Bill took another pernod.

“How are you, Jake?”

“Great,” I said.“I’ve had a good time.”

Brett looked at me.“I was a fool to go away,” she said.“One’s an ass to leave Paris.”

“Did you have a good time?”

“Oh, all right.Interesting.Not frightfully amusing.”

“See anybody?”

“No, hardly anybody.I never went out.”

“Didn’t you swim?”

“No.Didn’t do a thing.”

“Sounds like Vienna,” Bill said.

Brett wrinkled up the corners of her eyes at him.

“So that’s the way it was in Vienna.”

“It was like everything in Vienna.”

Brett smiled at him again.

“You’ve a nice friend, Jake.”

“He’s all right,” I said.“He’s a taxidermist.”

“That was in another country,” Bill said.“And besides all the animals were dead.”

“One more,” Brett said, “and I must run.Do send the waiter for a taxi.”

“There’s a line of them.Right out in front.”

“Good.”

We had the drink and put Brett into her taxi.

“Mind you’re at the Select around ten.Make him come.Michael will be there.”

“We’ll be there,” Bill said. The taxi started and Brett waved.

“Quite a girl,” Bill said.“She’s damned nice.Who’s Michael?”

“The man she’s going to marry.”

“Well, well,” Bill said.“That’s always just the stage I meet anybody.What’ll I send them?Think they’d like a couple of stuffed race-horses?”

“We better eat.”

“Is she really Lady something or other?”Bill asked in the taxi on our way down to the Ile Saint Louis.

“Oh, yes.In the stud-book and everything.”

“Well, well.”

We ate dinner at Madame Lecomte’s restaurant on the far side of the island.It was crowded with Americans and we had to stand up and wait for a place.Some one had put it in the American Women’s Club list as a quaint restaurant on the Paris quais as yet untouched by Americans, so we had to wait forty-five minutes for a table.Bill had eaten at the restaurant in 1918, and right after the armistice, and Madame Lecomte made a great fuss over seeing him.

“Doesn’t get us a table, though,” Bill said.“Grand woman, though.”

We had a good meal, a roast chicken, new green beans, mashed potatoes, a salad, and some apple-pie and cheese.

“You’ve got the world here all right,” Bill said to Madame Lecomte.She raised her hand.“Oh, my God!”

“You’ll be rich.”

“I hope so.”

After the coffee and a fine we got the bill, chalked up the same as ever on a slate, that was doubtless one of the “quaint” features, paid it, shook hands, and went out.

“You never come here any more, Monsieur Barnes,” Madame Lecomte said.

“Too many compatriots.”

“Come at lunch-time. It’s not crowded then.”

“Good.I’ll be down soon.”

We walked along under the trees that grew out over the river on the Quai d’Orléans side of the island.Across the river were the broken walls of old houses that were being torn down.

“They’re going to cut a street through.”

“They would,” Bill said.

We walked on and circled the island.The river was dark and a bateau mouche went by, all bright with lights, going fast and quiet up and out of sight under the bridge.Down the river was Notre Dame squatting against the night sky.We crossed to the left bank of the Seine by the wooden foot-bridge from the Quai de Bethune, and stopped on the bridge and looked down the river at Notre Dame.Standing on the bridge the island looked dark, the houses were high against the sky, and the trees were shadows.

“It’s pretty grand,” Bill said.“God, I love to get back.”

We leaned on the wooden rail of the bridge and looked up the river to the lights of the big bridges.Below the water was smooth and black.It made no sound against the piles of the bridge.A man and a girl passed us.They were walking with their arms around each other.

We crossed the bridge and walked up the Rue du Cardinal Lemoine.It was steep walking, and we went all the way up to the Place Contrescarpe.The arc-light shone through the leaves of the trees in the square, and underneath the trees was an S bus ready to start.Music came out of the door of the Negre Joyeux.Through the window of the Café Aux Amateurs I saw the long zinc bar.Outside on the terrace working people were drinking.In the open kitchen of the Amateurs a girl was cooking potato-chips in oil.There was an iron pot of stew.The girl ladled some onto a plate for an old man who stood holding a bottle of red wine in one hand.

“Want to have a drink?”

“No,” said Bill.“I don’t need it.”

We turned to the right off the Place Contrescarpe, walking along smooth narrow streets with high old houses on both sides.Some of the houses jutted out toward the street.Others were cut back.We came onto the Rue du Pot de Fer and followed it along until it brought us to the rigid north and south of the Rue Saint Jacques and then walked south, past Val de Grâce, set back behind the courtyard and the iron fence, to the Boulevard du Port Royal.

“What do you want to do?”I asked.“Go up to the café and see Brett and Mike?”

“Why not?”

We walked along Port Royal until it became Montparnasse, and then on past the Lilas, Lavigne’s, and all the little cafés, Damoy’s, crossed the street to the Rotonde, past its lights and tables to the Select.

Michael came toward us from the tables.He was tanned and healthy-looking.

“Hel-lo, Jake,” he said.“Hel-lo!Hel-lo!How are you, old lad?”

“You look very fit, Mike.”

“Oh, I am.I’m frightfully fit.I’ve done nothing but walk.Walk all day long.One drink a day with my mother at tea.”

Bill had gone into the bar.He was standing talking with Brett, who was sitting on a high stool, her legs crossed.She had no stockings on.

“It’s good to see you, Jake,” Michael said.“I’m a little tight you know.Amazing, isn’t it?Did you see my nose?”

There was a patch of dried blood on the bridge of his nose.

“An old lady’s bags did that,” Mike said.“I reached up to help her with them and they fell on me.”

Brett gestured at him from the bar with her cigarette-holder and wrinkled the corners of her eyes.

“An old lady,” said Mike. “Her bags fell on me. Let’s go in and see Brett. I say, she is a piece. You are a lovely lady, Brett. Where did you get that hat?”

“Chap bought it for me.Don’t you like it?”

“It’s a dreadful hat.Do get a good hat.”

“Oh, we’ve so much money now,” Brett said. “I say, haven’t you met Bill yet? You are a lovely host, Jake.”

She turned to Mike.“This is Bill Gorton.This drunkard is Mike Campbell.Mr. Campbell is an undischarged bankrupt.”

“Aren’t I, though?You know I met my ex-partner yesterday in London.Chap who did me in.”

“What did he say?”

“Bought me a drink. I thought I might as well take it. I say, Brett, you are a lovely piece. Don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

“Beautiful.With this nose?”

“It’s a lovely nose.Go on, point it at me.Isn’t she a lovely piece?”

“Couldn’t we have kept the man in Scotland?”

“I say, Brett, let’s turn in early.”

“Don’t be indecent, Michael.Remember there are ladies at this bar.”

“Isn’t she a lovely piece?Don’t you think so, Jake?”

“There’s a fight to-night,” Bill said.“Like to go?”

“Fight,” said Mike.“Who’s fighting?”

“Ledoux and somebody.”

“He’s very good, Ledoux,” Mike said.“I’d like to see it, rather”—he was making an effort to pull himself together—“but I can’t go.I had a date with this thing here.I say, Brett, do get a new hat.”

Brett pulled the felt hat down far over one eye and smiled out from under it.“You two run along to the fight.I’ll have to be taking Mr. Campbell home directly.”

“I’m not tight,” Mike said. “Perhaps just a little. I say, Brett, you are a lovely piece.”

“Go on to the fight,” Brett said.“Mr. Campbell’s getting difficult.What are these outbursts of affection, Michael?”

“I say, you are a lovely piece.”

We said good night.“I’m sorry I can’t go,” Mike said.Brett laughed.I looked back from the door.Mike had one hand on the bar and was leaning toward Brett, talking.Brett was looking at him quite coolly, but the corners of her eyes were smiling.

Outside on the pavement I said: “Do you want to go to the fight?”

“Sure,” said Bill.“If we don’t have to walk.”

“Mike was pretty excited about his girl friend,” I said in the taxi.

“Well,” said Bill. “You can’t blame him such a hell of a lot.”

The Ledoux-Kid Francis fight was the night of the 20th of June.It was a good fight.The morning after the fight I had a letter from Robert Cohn, written from Hendaye.He was having a very quiet time, he said, bathing, playing some golf and much bridge.Hendaye had a splendid beach, but he was anxious to start on the fishing-trip.When would I be down?If I would buy him a double-tapered line he would pay me when I came down.

That same morning I wrote Cohn from the office that Bill and I would leave Paris on the 25th unless I wired him otherwise, and would meet him at Bayonne, where we could get a bus over the mountains to Pamplona.The same evening about seven o’clock I stopped in at the Select to see Michael and Brett.They were not there, and I went over to the Dingo.They were inside sitting at the bar.

“Hello, darling.”Brett put out her hand.

“Hello, Jake,” Mike said.“I understand I was tight last night.”

“Weren’t you, though,” Brett said. “Disgraceful business.”

“Look,” said Mike, “when do you go down to Spain?Would you mind if we came down with you?”

“It would be grand.”

“You wouldn’t mind, really?I’ve been at Pamplona, you know.Brett’s mad to go.You’re sure we wouldn’t just be a bloody nuisance?”

“Don’t talk like a fool.”

“I’m a little tight, you know.I wouldn’t ask you like this if I weren’t.You’re sure you don’t mind?”

“Oh, shut up, Michael,” Brett said.“How can the man say he’d mind now?I’ll ask him later.”

“But you don’t mind, do you?”

“Don’t ask that again unless you want to make me sore.Bill and I go down on the morning of the 25th.”

“By the way, where is Bill?”Brett asked.

“He’s out at Chantilly dining with some people.”

“He’s a good chap.”

“Splendid chap,” said Mike.“He is, you know.”

“You don’t remember him,” Brett said.

“I do.Remember him perfectly.Look, Jake, we’ll come down the night of the 25th.Brett can’t get up in the morning.”

“Indeed not!”

“If our money comes and you’re sure you don’t mind.”

“It will come, all right.I’ll see to that.”

“Tell me what tackle to send for.”

“Get two or three rods with reels, and lines, and some flies.”

“I won’t fish,” Brett put in.

“Get two rods, then, and Bill won’t have to buy one.”

“Right,” said Mike.“I’ll send a wire to the keeper.”

“Won’t it be splendid,” Brett said. “Spain! We will have fun.”

“The 25th.When is that?”

“Saturday.”

“We will have to get ready.”

“I say,” said Mike, “I’m going to the barber’s.”

“I must bathe,” said Brett.“Walk up to the hotel with me, Jake.Be a good chap.”

“We have got the loveliest hotel,” Mike said. “I think it’s a brothel!”

“We left our bags here at the Dingo when we got in, and they asked us at this hotel if we wanted a room for the afternoon only.Seemed frightfully pleased we were going to stay all night.”

“I believe it’s a brothel,” Mike said. “And I should know.”

“Oh, shut it and go and get your hair cut.”

Mike went out.Brett and I sat on at the bar.

“Have another?”

“Might.”

“I needed that,” Brett said.

We walked up the Rue Delambre.

“I haven’t seen you since I’ve been back,” Brett said.

“No.”

“How are you, Jake?”

“Fine.”

Brett looked at me.“I say,” she said, “is Robert Cohn going on this trip?”

“Yes.Why?”

“Don’t you think it will be a bit rough on him?”

“Why should it?”

“Who did you think I went down to San Sebastian with?”

“Congratulations,” I said.

We walked along.

“What did you say that for?”

“I don’t know.What would you like me to say?”

We walked along and turned a corner.

“He behaved rather well, too.He gets a little dull.”

“Does he?”

“I rather thought it would be good for him.”

“You might take up social service.”

“Don’t be nasty.”

“I won’t.”

“Didn’t you really know?”

“No,” I said.“I guess I didn’t think about it.”

“Do you think it will be too rough on him?”

“That’s up to him,” I said.“Tell him you’re coming.He can always not come.”

“I’ll write him and give him a chance to pull out of it.”

I did not see Brett again until the night of the 24th of June.

“Did you hear from Cohn?”

“Rather.He’s keen about it.”

“My God!”

“I thought it was rather odd myself.”

“Says he can’t wait to see me.”

“Does he think you’re coming alone?”

“No.I told him we were all coming down together.Michael and all.”

“He’s wonderful.”

“Isn’t he?”

They expected their money the next day.We arranged to meet at Pamplona.They would go directly to San Sebastian and take the train from there.We would all meet at the Montoya in Pamplona.If they did not turn up on Monday at the latest we would go on ahead up to Burguete in the mountains, to start fishing.There was a bus to Burguete.I wrote out an itinerary so they could follow us.

Bill and I took the morning train from the Gare d’Orsay.It was a lovely day, not too hot, and the country was beautiful from the start.We went back into the diner and had breakfast.Leaving the dining-car I asked the conductor for tickets for the first service.

“Nothing until the fifth.”

“What’s this?”

There were never more than two servings of lunch on that train, and always plenty of places for both of them.

“They’re all reserved,” the dining-car conductor said.“There will be a fifth service at three-thirty.”

“This is serious,” I said to Bill.

“Give him ten francs.”

“Here,” I said.“We want to eat in the first service.”

The conductor put the ten francs in his pocket.

“Thank you,” he said.“I would advise you gentlemen to get some sandwiches.All the places for the first four services were reserved at the office of the company.”

“You’ll go a long way, brother,” Bill said to him in English.“I suppose if I’d given you five francs you would have advised us to jump off the train.”

“Comment?”

“Go to hell!”said Bill.“Get the sandwiches made and a bottle of wine.You tell him, Jake.”

“And send it up to the next car.”I described where we were.

In our compartment were a man and his wife and their young son.

“I suppose you’re Americans, aren’t you?”the man asked.“Having a good trip?”

“Wonderful,” said Bill.

“That’s what you want to do.Travel while you’re young.Mother and I always wanted to get over, but we had to wait a while.”

“You could have come over ten years ago, if you’d wanted to,” the wife said.“What you always said was: ‘See America first!’I will say we’ve seen a good deal, take it one way and another.”

“Say, there’s plenty of Americans on this train,” the husband said. “They’ve got seven cars of them from Dayton, Ohio. They’ve been on a pilgrimage to Rome, and now they’re going down to Biarritz and Lourdes.”

“So, that’s what they are.Pilgrims. Goddam Puritans,” Bill said.

“What part of the States you boys from?”

“Kansas City,” I said.“He’s from Chicago.”

“You both going to Biarritz?”

“No.We’re going fishing in Spain.”

“Well, I never cared for it, myself.There’s plenty that do out where I come from, though.We got some of the best fishing in the State of Montana.I’ve been out with the boys, but I never cared for it any.”

“Mighty little fishing you did on them trips,” his wife said.

He winked at us.

“You know how the ladies are.If there’s a jug goes along, or a case of beer, they think it’s hell and damnation.”

“That’s the way men are,” his wife said to us.She smoothed her comfortable lap.“I voted against prohibition to please him, and because I like a little beer in the house, and then he talks that way.It’s a wonder they ever find any one to marry them.”

“Say,” said Bill, “do you know that gang of Pilgrim Fathers have cornered the dining-car until half past three this afternoon?”

“How do you mean?They can’t do a thing like that.”

“You try and get seats.”

“Well, mother, it looks as though we better go back and get another breakfast.”

She stood up and straightened her dress.

“Will you boys keep an eye on our things?Come on, Hubert.”

They all three went up to the wagon restaurant. A little while after they were gone a steward went through announcing the first service, and pilgrims, with their priests, commenced filing down the corridor. Our friend and his family did not come back. A waiter passed in the corridor with our sandwiches and the bottle of Chablis, and we called him in.

“You’re going to work to-day,” I said.

He nodded his head.“They start now, at ten-thirty.”

“When do we eat?”

“Huh!When do I eat?”

He left two glasses for the bottle, and we paid him for the sandwiches and tipped him.

“I’ll get the plates,” he said, “or bring them with you.”

We ate the sandwiches and drank the Chablis and watched the country out of the window.The grain was just beginning to ripen and the fields were full of poppies.The pastureland was green, and there were fine trees, and sometimes big rivers and chateaux off in the trees.

At Tours we got off and bought another bottle of wine, and when we got back in the compartment the gentleman from Montana and his wife and his son, Hubert, were sitting comfortably.

“Is there good swimming in Biarritz?”asked Hubert.

“That boy’s just crazy till he can get in the water,” his mother said.“It’s pretty hard on youngsters travelling.”

“There’s good swimming,” I said.“But it’s dangerous when it’s rough.”

“Did you get a meal?”Bill asked.

“We sure did.We set right there when they started to come in, and they must have just thought we were in the party.One of the waiters said something to us in French, and then they just sent three of them back.”

“They thought we were snappers, all right,” the man said.“It certainly shows you the power of the Catholic Church.It’s a pity you boys ain’t Catholics.You could get a meal, then, all right.”

“I am,” I said.“That’s what makes me so sore.”

Finally at a quarter past four we had lunch. Bill had been rather difficult at the last. He buttonholed a priest who was coming back with one of the returning streams of pilgrims.

“When do us Protestants get a chance to eat, father?”

“I don’t know anything about it.Haven’t you got tickets?”

“It’s enough to make a man join the Klan,” Bill said.The priest looked back at him.

Inside the dining-car the waiters served the fifth successive table d’hôte meal.The waiter who served us was soaked through.His white jacket was purple under the arms.

“He must drink a lot of wine.”

“Or wear purple undershirts.”

“Let’s ask him.”

“No.He’s too tired.”

The train stopped for half an hour at Bordeaux and we went out through the station for a little walk.There was not time to get in to the town.Afterward we passed through the Landes and watched the sun set.There were wide fire-gaps cut through the pines, and you could look up them like avenues and see wooded hills way off.About seven-thirty we had dinner and watched the country through the open window in the diner.It was all sandy pine country full of heather.There were little clearings with houses in them, and once in a while we passed a sawmill.It got dark and we could feel the country hot and sandy and dark outside of the window, and about nine o’clock we got into Bayonne.The man and his wife and Hubert all shook hands with us.They were going on to LaNegresse to change for Biarritz.

“Well, I hope you have lots of luck,” he said.

“Be careful about those bull-fights.”

“Maybe we’ll see you at Biarritz,” Hubert said.

We got off with our bags and rod-cases and passed through the dark station and out to the lights and the line of cabs and hotel buses. There, standing with the hotel runners, was Robert Cohn. He did not see us at first. Then he started forward.

“Hello, Jake.Have a good trip?”

“Fine,” I said.“This is Bill Gorton.”

“How are you?”

“Come on,” said Robert.“I’ve got a cab.”He was a little near-sighted.I had never noticed it before.He was looking at Bill, trying to make him out.He was shy, too.

“We’ll go up to my hotel.It’s all right.It’s quite nice.”

We got into the cab, and the cabman put the bags up on the seat beside him and climbed up and cracked his whip, and we drove over the dark bridge and into the town.

“I’m awfully glad to meet you,” Robert said to Bill.“I’ve heard so much about you from Jake and I’ve read your books.Did you get my line, Jake?”

The cab stopped in front of the hotel and we all got out and went in. It was a nice hotel, and the people at the desk were very cheerful, and we each had a good small room.

In the morning it was bright, and they were sprinkling the streets of the town, and we all had breakfast in a café.Bayonne is a nice town.It is like a very clean Spanish town and it is on a big river.Already, so early in the morning, it was very hot on the bridge across the river.We walked out on the bridge and then took a walk through the town.

I was not at all sure Mike’s rods would come from Scotland in time, so we hunted a tackle store and finally bought a rod for Bill up-stairs over a drygoods store.The man who sold the tackle was out, and we had to wait for him to come back.Finally he came in, and we bought a pretty good rod cheap, and two landing-nets.

We went out into the street again and took a look at the cathedral. Cohn made some remark about it being a very good example of something or other, I forget what. It seemed like a nice cathedral, nice and dim, like Spanish churches. Then we went up past the old fort and out to the local Syndicat d’Initiative office, where the bus was supposed to start from. There they told us the bus service did not start until the 1st of July. We found out at the tourist office what we ought to pay for a motor-car to Pamplona and hired one at a big garage just around the corner from the Municipal Theatre for four hundred francs. The car was to pick us up at the hotel in forty minutes, and we stopped at the café on the square where we had eaten breakfast, and had a beer. It was hot, but the town had a cool, fresh, early-morning smell and it was pleasant sitting in the café. A breeze started to blow, and you could feel that the air came from the sea. There were pigeons out in the square, and the houses were a yellow, sun-baked color, and I did not want to leave the café. But we had to go to the hotel to get our bags packed and pay the bill. We paid for the beers, we matched and I think Cohn paid, and went up to the hotel. It was only sixteen francs apiece for Bill and me, with ten per cent added for the service, and we had the bags sent down and waited for Robert Cohn. While we were waiting I saw a cockroach on the parquet floor that must have been at least three inches long. I pointed him out to Bill and then put my shoe on him. We agreed he must have just come in from the garden. It was really an awfully clean hotel.

Cohn came down, finally, and we all went out to the car. It was a big, closed car, with a driver in a white duster with blue collar and cuffs, and we had him put the back of the car down. He piled in the bags and we started off up the street and out of the town. We passed some lovely gardens and had a good look back at the town, and then we were out in the country, green and rolling, and the road climbing all the time. We passed lots of Basques with oxen, or cattle, hauling carts along the road, and nice farmhouses, low roofs, and all white-plastered. In the Basque country the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean. Every village had a pelota court and on some of them kids were playing in the hot sun. There were signs on the walls of the churches saying it was forbidden to play pelota against them, and the houses in the villages had red tiled roofs, and then the road turned off and commenced to climb and we were going way up close along a hillside, with a valley below and hills stretched off back toward the sea. You couldn’t see the sea. It was too far away. You could see only hills and more hills, and you knew where the sea was.

We crossed the Spanish frontier.There was a little stream and a bridge, and Spanish carabineers, with patent-leather Bonaparte hats, and short guns on their backs, on one side, and on the other fat Frenchmen in kepis and mustaches.They only opened one bag and took the passports in and looked at them.There was a general store and inn on each side of the line.The chauffeur had to go in and fill out some papers about the car and we got out and went over to the stream to see if there were any trout.Bill tried to talk some Spanish to one of the carabineers, but it did not go very well.Robert Cohn asked, pointing with his finger, if there were any trout in the stream, and the carabineer said yes, but not many.

I asked him if he ever fished, and he said no, that he didn’t care for it.

Just then an old man with long, sunburned hair and beard, and clothes that looked as though they were made of gunny-sacking, came striding up to the bridge.He was carrying a long staff, and he had a kid slung on his back, tied by the four legs, the head hanging down.

The carabineer waved him back with his sword.The man turned without saying anything, and started back up the white road into Spain.

“What’s the matter with the old one?”I asked.

“He hasn’t got any passport.”

I offered the guard a cigarette.He took it and thanked me.

“What will he do?”I asked.

The guard spat in the dust.

“Oh, he’ll just wade across the stream.”

“Do you have much smuggling?”

“Oh,” he said, “they go through.”

The chauffeur came out, folding up the papers and putting them in the inside pocket of his coat.We all got in the car and it started up the white dusty road into Spain.For a while the country was much as it had been; then, climbing all the time, we crossed the top of a Col, the road winding back and forth on itself, and then it was really Spain.There were long brown mountains and a few pines and far-off forests of beech-trees on some of the mountainsides.The road went along the summit of the Col and then dropped down, and the driver had to honk, and slow up, and turn out to avoid running into two donkeys that were sleeping in the road.We came down out of the mountains and through an oak forest, and there were white cattle grazing in the forest.Down below there were grassy plains and clear streams, and then we crossed a stream and went through a gloomy little village, and started to climb again.We climbed up and up and crossed another high Col and turned along it, and the road ran down to the right, and we saw a whole new range of mountains off to the south, all brown and baked-looking and furrowed in strange shapes.

After a while we came out of the mountains, and there were trees along both sides of the road, and a stream and ripe fields of grain, and the road went on, very white and straight ahead, and then lifted to a little rise, and off on the left was a hill with an old castle, with buildings close around it and a field of grain going right up to the walls and shifting in the wind. I was up in front with the driver and I turned around. Robert Cohn was asleep, but Bill looked and nodded his head. Then we crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the line of trees, and away off you could see the plateau of Pamplona rising out of the plain, and the walls of the city, and the great brown cathedral, and the broken skyline of the other churches. In back of the plateau were the mountains, and every way you looked there were other mountains, and ahead the road stretched out white across the plain going toward Pamplona.

We came into the town on the other side of the plateau, the road slanting up steeply and dustily with shade-trees on both sides, and then levelling out through the new part of town they are building up outside the old walls.We passed the bull-ring, high and white and concrete-looking in the sun, and then came into the big square by a side street and stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya.

The driver helped us down with the bags.There was a crowd of kids watching the car, and the square was hot, and the trees were green, and the flags hung on their staffs, and it was good to get out of the sun and under the shade of the arcade that runs all the way around the square.Montoya was glad to see us, and shook hands and gave us good rooms looking out on the square, and then we washed and cleaned up and went down-stairs in the dining-room for lunch.The driver stayed for lunch, too, and afterward we paid him and he started back to Bayonne.

There are two dining-rooms in the Montoya. One is up-stairs on the second floor and looks out on the square. The other is down one floor below the level of the square and has a door that opens on the back street that the bulls pass along when they run through the streets early in the morning on their way to the ring. It is always cool in the down-stairs dining-room and we had a very good lunch. The first meal in Spain was always a shock with the hors d’œuvres, an egg course, two meat courses, vegetables, salad, and dessert and fruit. You have to drink plenty of wine to get it all down. Robert Cohn tried to say he did not want any of the second meat course, but we would not interpret for him, and so the waitress brought him something else as a replacement, a plate of cold meats, I think. Cohn had been rather nervous ever since we had met at Bayonne. He did not know whether we knew Brett had been with him at San Sebastian, and it made him rather awkward.

“Well,” I said, “Brett and Mike ought to get in to-night.”

“I’m not sure they’ll come,” Cohn said.

“Why not?”Bill said.“Of course they’ll come.”

“They’re always late,” I said.

“I rather think they’re not coming,” Robert Cohn said.

He said it with an air of superior knowledge that irritated both of us.

“I’ll bet you fifty pesetas they’re here to-night,” Bill said.He always bets when he is angered, and so he usually bets foolishly.

“I’ll take it,” Cohn said.“Good.You remember it, Jake.Fifty pesetas.”

“I’ll remember it myself,” Bill said.I saw he was angry and wanted to smooth him down.

“It’s a sure thing they’ll come,” I said.“But maybe not to-night.”

“Want to call it off?”Cohn asked.

“No.Why should I?Make it a hundred if you like.”

“All right.I’ll take that.”

“That’s enough,” I said.“Or you’ll have to make a book and give me some of it.”

“I’m satisfied,” Cohn said.He smiled.“You’ll probably win it back at bridge, anyway.”

“You haven’t got it yet,” Bill said.

We went out to walk around under the arcade to the Café Iruña for coffee.Cohn said he was going over and get a shave.

“Say,” Bill said to me, “have I got any chance on that bet?”

“You’ve got a rotten chance.They’ve never been on time anywhere.If their money doesn’t come it’s a cinch they won’t get in to-night.”

“I was sorry as soon as I opened my mouth. But I had to call him. He’s all right, I guess, but where does he get this inside stuff? Mike and Brett fixed it up with us about coming down here.”

I saw Cohn coming over across the square.

“Here he comes.”

“Well, let him not get superior and Jewish.”

“The barber shop’s closed,” Cohn said.“It’s not open till four.”

We had coffee at the Iruña, sitting in comfortable wicker chairs looking out from the cool of the arcade at the big square.After a while Bill went to write some letters and Cohn went over to the barber-shop.It was still closed, so he decided to go up to the hotel and get a bath, and I sat out in front of the café and then went for a walk in the town.It was very hot, but I kept on the shady side of the streets and went through the market and had a good time seeing the town again.I went to the Ayuntamiento and found the old gentleman who subscribes for the bull-fight tickets for me every year, and he had gotten the money I sent him from Paris and renewed my subscriptions, so that was all set.He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office.That has nothing to do with the story.Anyway, his office had a green baize door and a big wooden door, and when I went out I left him sitting among the archives that covered all the walls, and I shut both the doors, and as I went out of the building into the street the porter stopped me to brush off my coat.

“You must have been in a motor-car,” he said.

The back of the collar and the upper part of the shoulders were gray with dust.

“From Bayonne.”

“Well, well,” he said.“I knew you were in a motor-car from the way the dust was.”So I gave him two copper coins.

At the end of the street I saw the cathedral and walked up toward it. The first time I ever saw it I thought the façade was ugly but I liked it now. I went inside. It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big windows. I knelt and started to pray and prayed for everybody I thought of, Brett and Mike and Bill and Robert Cohn and myself, and all the bull-fighters, separately for the ones I liked, and lumping all the rest, then I prayed for myself again, and while I was praying for myself I found I was getting sleepy, so I prayed that the bull-fights would be good, and that it would be a fine fiesta, and that we would get some fishing. I wondered if there was anything else I might pray for, and I thought I would like to have some money, so I prayed that I would make a lot of money, and then I started to think how I would make it, and thinking of making money reminded me of the count, and I started wondering about where he was, and regretting I hadn’t seen him since that night in Montmartre, and about something funny Brett told me about him, and as all the time I was kneeling with my forehead on the wood in front of me, and was thinking of myself as praying, I was a little ashamed, and regretted that I was such a rotten Catholic, but realized there was nothing I could do about it, at least for a while, and maybe never, but that anyway it was a grand religion, and I only wished I felt religious and maybe I would the next time; and then I was out in the hot sun on the steps of the cathedral, and the forefingers and the thumb of my right hand were still damp, and I felt them dry in the sun. The sunlight was hot and hard, and I crossed over beside some buildings, and walked back along side-streets to the hotel.

At dinner that night we found that Robert Cohn had taken a bath, had had a shave and a haircut and a shampoo, and something put on his hair afterward to make it stay down. He was nervous, and I did not try to help him any. The train was due in at nine o’clock from San Sebastian, and, if Brett and Mike were coming, they would be on it. At twenty minutes to nine we were not half through dinner. Robert Cohn got up from the table and said he would go to the station. I said I would go with him, just to devil him. Bill said he would be damned if he would leave his dinner. I said we would be right back.

We walked to the station.I was enjoying Cohn’s nervousness.I hoped Brett would be on the train.At the station the train was late, and we sat on a baggage-truck and waited outside in the dark.I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn—nor as eager.I was enjoying it.It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy.Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.

After a while we heard the train-whistle way off below on the other side of the plateau, and then we saw the headlight coming up the hill.We went inside the station and stood with a crowd of people just back of the gates, and the train came in and stopped, and everybody started coming out through the gates.

They were not in the crowd.We waited till everybody had gone through and out of the station and gotten into buses, or taken cabs, or were walking with their friends or relatives through the dark into the town.

“I knew they wouldn’t come,” Robert said.We were going back to the hotel.

“I thought they might,” I said.

Bill was eating fruit when we came in and finishing a bottle of wine.

“Didn’t come, eh?”

“No.”

“Do you mind if I give you that hundred pesetas in the morning, Cohn?”Bill asked.“I haven’t changed any money here yet.”

“Oh, forget about it,” Robert Cohn said.“Let’s bet on something else.Can you bet on bull-fights?”

“You could,” Bill said, “but you don’t need to.”

“It would be like betting on the war,” I said.“You don’t need any economic interest.”

“I’m very curious to see them,” Robert said.

Montoya came up to our table.He had a telegram in his hand.“It’s for you.”He handed it to me.

It read: “Stopped night San Sebastian.”

“It’s from them,” I said.I put it in my pocket.Ordinarily I should have handed it over.

“They’ve stopped over in San Sebastian,” I said.“Send their regards to you.”

Why I felt that impulse to devil him I do not know.Of course I do know.I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him.The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any.I certainly did hate him.I do not think I ever really hated him until he had that little spell of superiority at lunch—that and when he went through all that barbering.So I put the telegram in my pocket.The telegram came to me, anyway.

“Well,” I said.“We ought to pull out on the noon bus for Burguete.They can follow us if they get in to-morrow night.”

There were only two trains up from San Sebastian, an early morning train and the one we had just met.

“That sounds like a good idea,” Cohn said.

“The sooner we get on the stream the better.”

“It’s all one to me when we start,” Bill said.“The sooner the better.”

We sat in the Iruña for a while and had coffee and then took a little walk out to the bull-ring and across the field and under the trees at the edge of the cliff and looked down at the river in the dark, and I turned in early.Bill and Cohn stayed out in the café quite late, I believe, because I was asleep when they came in.

In the morning I bought three tickets for the bus to Burguete. It was scheduled to leave at two o’clock. There was nothing earlier. I was sitting over at the Iruña reading the papers when I saw Robert Cohn coming across the square. He came up to the table and sat down in one of the wicker chairs.

“This is a comfortable café,” he said.“Did you have a good night, Jake?”

“I slept like a log.”

“I didn’t sleep very well.Bill and I were out late, too.”

“Where were you?”

“Here.And after it shut we went over to that other café.The old man there speaks German and English.”

“The Café Suizo.”

“That’s it.He seems like a nice old fellow.I think it’s a better café than this one.”

“It’s not so good in the daytime,” I said.“Too hot.By the way, I got the bus tickets.”

“I’m not going up to-day.You and Bill go on ahead.”

“I’ve got your ticket.”

“Give it to me.I’ll get the money back.”

“It’s five pesetas.”

Robert Cohn took out a silver five-peseta piece and gave it to me.

“I ought to stay,” he said.“You see I’m afraid there’s some sort of misunderstanding.”

“Why,” I said.“They may not come here for three or four days now if they start on parties at San Sebastian.”

“That’s just it,” said Robert.“I’m afraid they expected to meet me at San Sebastian, and that’s why they stopped over.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well, I wrote suggesting it to Brett.”

“Why in hell didn’t you stay there and meet them then?”I started to say, but I stopped.I thought that idea would come to him by itself, but I do not believe it ever did.

He was being confidential now and it was giving him pleasure to be able to talk with the understanding that I knew there was something between him and Brett.

“Well, Bill and I will go up right after lunch,” I said.

“I wish I could go.We’ve been looking forward to this fishing all winter.”He was being sentimental about it.“But I ought to stay.I really ought.As soon as they come I’ll bring them right up.”

“Let’s find Bill.”

“I want to go over to the barber-shop.”

“See you at lunch.”

I found Bill up in his room.He was shaving.

“Oh, yes, he told me all about it last night,” Bill said.“He’s a great little confider.He said he had a date with Brett at San Sebastian.”

“The lying bastard!”

“Oh, no,” said Bill.“Don’t get sore.Don’t get sore at this stage of the trip.How did you ever happen to know this fellow, anyway?”

“Don’t rub it in.”

Bill looked around, half-shaved, and then went on talking into the mirror while he lathered his face.

“Didn’t you send him with a letter to me in New York last winter?Thank God, I’m a travelling man.Haven’t you got some more Jewish friends you could bring along?”He rubbed his chin with his thumb, looked at it, and then started scraping again.

“You’ve got some fine ones yourself.”

“Oh, yes.I’ve got some darbs.But not alongside of this Robert Cohn.The funny thing is he’s nice, too.I like him.But he’s just so awful.”

“He can be damn nice.”

“I know it.That’s the terrible part.”

I laughed.

“Yes.Go on and laugh,” said Bill.“You weren’t out with him last night until two o’clock.”

“Was he very bad?”

“Awful. What’s all this about him and Brett, anyway? Did she ever have anything to do with him?”

He raised his chin up and pulled it from side to side.

“Sure.She went down to San Sebastian with him.”

“What a damn-fool thing to do.Why did she do that?”

“She wanted to get out of town and she can’t go anywhere alone.She said she thought it would be good for him.”

“What bloody-fool things people do.Why didn’t she go off with some of her own people?Or you?”—he slurred that over—“or me?Why not me?”He looked at his face carefully in the glass, put a big dab of lather on each cheek-bone.“It’s an honest face.It’s a face any woman would be safe with.”

“She’d never seen it.”

“She should have.All women should see it.It’s a face that ought to be thrown on every screen in the country.Every woman ought to be given a copy of this face as she leaves the altar.Mothers should tell their daughters about this face.My son”—he pointed the razor at me—“go west with this face and grow up with the country.”

He ducked down to the bowl, rinsed his face with cold water, put on some alcohol, and then looked at himself carefully in the glass, pulling down his long upper lip.

“My God!”he said, “isn’t it an awful face?”

He looked in the glass.

“And as for this Robert Cohn,” Bill said, “he makes me sick, and he can go to hell, and I’m damn glad he’s staying here so we won’t have him fishing with us.”

“You’re damn right.”

“We’re going trout-fishing.We’re going trout-fishing in the Irati River, and we’re going to get tight now at lunch on the wine of the country, and then take a swell bus ride.”

“Come on. Let’s go over to the Iruña and start,” I said.

It was baking hot in the square when we came out after lunch with our bags and the rod-case to go to Burguete.People were on top of the bus, and others were climbing up a ladder.Bill went up and Robert sat beside Bill to save a place for me, and I went back in the hotel to get a couple of bottles of wine to take with us.When I came out the bus was crowded.Men and women were sitting on all the baggage and boxes on top, and the women all had their fans going in the sun.It certainly was hot.Robert climbed down and I fitted into the place he had saved on the one wooden seat that ran across the top.

Robert Cohn stood in the shade of the arcade waiting for us start. A Basque with a big leather wine-bag in his lap lay across the top of the bus in front of our seat, leaning back against our legs. He offered the wine-skin to Bill and to me, and when I tipped it up to drink he imitated the sound of a klaxon motor-horn so well and so suddenly that I spilled some of the wine, and everybody laughed. He apologized and made me take another drink. He made the klaxon again a little later, and it fooled me the second time. He was very good at it. The Basques liked it. The man next to Bill was talking to him in Spanish and Bill was not getting it, so he offered the man one of the bottles of wine. The man waved it away. He said it was too hot and he had drunk too much at lunch. When Bill offered the bottle the second time he took a long drink, and then the bottle went all over that part of the bus. Every one took a drink very politely, and then they made us cork it up and put it away. They all wanted us to drink from their leather wine-bottles. They were peasants going up into the hills.

Finally, after a couple more false klaxons, the bus started, and Robert Cohn waved good-by to us, and all the Basques waved good-by to him.As soon as we started out on the road outside of town it was cool.It felt nice riding high up and close under the trees.The bus went quite fast and made a good breeze, and as we went out along the road with the dust powdering the trees and down the hill, we had a fine view, back through the trees, of the town rising up from the bluff above the river.The Basque lying against my knees pointed out the view with the neck of the wine-bottle, and winked at us.He nodded his head.

“Pretty nice, eh?”

“These Basques are swell people,” Bill said.

The Basque lying against my legs was tanned the color of saddle-leather.He wore a black smock like all the rest.There were wrinkles in his tanned neck.He turned around and offered his wine-bag to Bill.Bill handed him one of our bottles.The Basque wagged a forefinger at him and handed the bottle back, slapping in the cork with the palm of his hand.He shoved the wine-bag up.

“Arriba!Arriba!”he said.“Lift it up.”

Bill raised the wine-skin and let the stream of wine spurt out and into his mouth, his head tipped back. When he stopped drinking and tipped the leather bottle down a few drops ran down his chin.

“No!No!”several Basques said.“Not like that.”One snatched the bottle away from the owner, who was himself about to give a demonstration.He was a young fellow and he held the wine-bottle at full arms’ length and raised it high up, squeezing the leather bag with his hand so the stream of wine hissed into his mouth.He held the bag out there, the wine making a flat, hard trajectory into his mouth, and he kept on swallowing smoothly and regularly.

“Hey!”the owner of the bottle shouted.“Whose wine is that?”

The drinker waggled his little finger at him and smiled at us with his eyes.Then he bit the stream off sharp, made a quick lift with the wine-bag and lowered it down to the owner.He winked at us.The owner shook the wine-skin sadly.

We passed through a town and stopped in front of the posada, and the driver took on several packages. Then we started on again, and outside the town the road commenced to mount. We were going through farming country with rocky hills that sloped down into the fields. The grain-fields went up the hillsides. Now as we went higher there was a wind blowing the grain. The road was white and dusty, and the dust rose under the wheels and hung in the air behind us. The road climbed up into the hills and left the rich grain-fields below. Now there were only patches of grain on the bare hillsides and on each side of the water-courses. We turned sharply out to the side of the road to give room to pass to a long string of six mules, following one after the other, hauling a high-hooded wagon loaded with freight. The wagon and the mules were covered with dust. Close behind was another string of mules and another wagon. This was loaded with lumber, and the arriero driving the mules leaned back and put on the thick wooden brakes as we passed. Up here the country was quite barren and the hills were rocky and hard-baked clay furrowed by the rain.

We came around a curve into a town, and on both sides opened out a sudden green valley.A stream went through the centre of the town and fields of grapes touched the houses.

The bus stopped in front of a posada and many of the passengers got down, and a lot of the baggage was unstrapped from the roof from under the big tarpaulins and lifted down.Bill and I got down and went into the posada.There was a low, dark room with saddles and harness, and hay-forks made of white wood, and clusters of canvas rope-soled shoes and hams and slabs of bacon and white garlics and long sausages hanging from the roof.It was cool and dusky, and we stood in front of a long wooden counter with two women behind it serving drinks.Behind them were shelves stacked with supplies and goods.

We each had an aguardiente and paid forty centimes for the two drinks.I gave the woman fifty centimes to make a tip, and she gave me back the copper piece, thinking I had misunderstood the price.

Two of our Basques came in and insisted on buying a drink.So they bought a drink and then we bought a drink, and then they slapped us on the back and bought another drink.Then we bought, and then we all went out into the sunlight and the heat, and climbed back on top of the bus.There was plenty of room now for every one to sit on the seat, and the Basque who had been lying on the tin roof now sat between us.The woman who had been serving drinks came out wiping her hands on her apron and talked to somebody inside the bus.Then the driver came out swinging two flat leather mail-pouches and climbed up, and everybody waving we started off.

The road left the green valley at once, and we were up in the hills again. Bill and the wine-bottle Basque were having a conversation. A man leaned over from the other side of the seat and asked in English: “You’re Americans?”

“Sure.”

“I been there,” he said.“Forty years ago.”

He was an old man, as brown as the others, with the stubble of a white beard.

“How was it?”

“What you say?”

“How was America?”

“Oh, I was in California.It was fine.”

“Why did you leave?”

“What you say?”

“Why did you come back here?”

“Oh!I come back to get married.I was going to go back but my wife she don’t like to travel.Where you from?”

“Kansas City.”

“I been there,” he said.“I been in Chicago, St.Louis, Kansas City, Denver, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City.”

He named them carefully.

“How long were you over?”

“Fifteen years.Then I come back and got married.”

“Have a drink?”

“All right,” he said.“You can’t get this in America, eh?”

“There’s plenty if you can pay for it.”

“What you come over here for?”

“We’re going to the fiesta at Pamplona.”

“You like the bull-fights?”

“Sure.Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he said.“I guess I like them.”

Then after a little:

“Where you go now?”

“Up to Burguete to fish.”

“Well,” he said, “I hope you catch something.”

He shook hands and turned around to the back seat again.The other Basques had been impressed.He sat back comfortably and smiled at me when I turned around to look at the country.But the effort of talking American seemed to have tired him.He did not say anything after that.

The bus climbed steadily up the road.The country was barren and rocks stuck up through the clay.There was no grass beside the road.Looking back we could see the country spread out below.Far back the fields were squares of green and brown on the hillsides.Making the horizon were the brown mountains.They were strangely shaped.As we climbed higher the horizon kept changing.As the bus ground slowly up the road we could see other mountains coming up in the south.Then the road came over the crest, flattened out, and went into a forest.It was a forest of cork oaks, and the sun came through the trees in patches, and there were cattle grazing back in the trees.We went through the forest and the road came out and turned along a rise of land, and out ahead of us was a rolling green plain, with dark mountains beyond it.These were not like the brown, heat-baked mountains we had left behind.These were wooded and there were clouds coming down from them.The green plain stretched off.It was cut by fences and the white of the road showed through the trunks of a double line of trees that crossed the plain toward the north.As we came to the edge of the rise we saw the red roofs and white houses of Burguete ahead strung out on the plain, and away off on the shoulder of the first dark mountain was the gray metal-sheathed roof of the monastery of Roncesvalles.

“There’s Roncevaux,” I said.

“Where?”

“Way off there where the mountain starts.”

“It’s cold up here,” Bill said.

“It’s high,” I said.“It must be twelve hundred metres.”

“It’s awful cold,” Bill said.

The bus levelled down onto the straight line of road that ran to Burguete.We passed a crossroads and crossed a bridge over a stream.The houses of Burguete were along both sides of the road.There were no side-streets.We passed the church and the school-yard, and the bus stopped.We got down and the driver handed down our bags and the rod-case.A carabineer in his cocked hat and yellow leather cross-straps came up.

“What’s in there?”he pointed to the rod-case.

I opened it and showed him.He asked to see our fishing permits and I got them out.He looked at the date and then waved us on.

“Is that all right?”I asked.

“Yes.Of course.”

We went up the street, past the whitewashed stone houses, families sitting in their doorways watching us, to the inn.

The fat woman who ran the inn came out from the kitchen and shook hands with us.She took off her spectacles, wiped them, and put them on again.It was cold in the inn and the wind was starting to blow outside.The woman sent a girl up-stairs with us to show the room.There were two beds, a washstand, a clothes-chest, and a big, framed steel-engraving of Nuestra Señora de Roncesvalles.The wind was blowing against the shutters.The room was on the north side of the inn.We washed, put on sweaters, and came down-stairs into the dining-room.It had a stone floor, low ceiling, and was oak-panelled.The shutters were up and it was so cold you could see your breath.

“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 up-stairs 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.

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 down-stairs. No one was stirring down-stairs, 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 onto 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 down-stairs 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 down-stairs.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 a 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 the Anti-Saloon League.Sex explains it all.The Colonel’s Lady and Judy O’Grady are Lesbians under their skin.”

He stopped.

“Want to hear some more?”

“Shoot,” I said.

“I don’t know any more.Tell you some more at lunch.”

“Old Bill,” I said.

“You bum!”

We packed the lunch and two bottles of wine in the rucksack, and Bill put it on.I carried the rod-case and the landing-nets slung over my back.We started up the road and then went across a meadow and found a path that crossed the fields and went toward the woods on the slope of the first hill.We walked across the fields on the sandy path.The fields were rolling and grassy and the grass was short from the sheep grazing.The cattle were up in the hills.We heard their bells in the woods.

The path crossed a stream on a foot-log. The log was surfaced off, and there was a sapling bent across for a rail. In the flat pool beside the stream tadpoles spotted the sand. We went up a steep bank and across the rolling fields. Looking back we saw Burguete, white houses and red roofs, and the white road with a truck going along it and the dust rising.

Beyond the fields we crossed another faster-flowing stream.A sandy road led down to the ford and beyond into the woods.The path crossed the stream on another foot-log below the ford, and joined the road, and we went into the woods.

It was a beech wood and the trees were very old.Their roots bulked above the ground and the branches were twisted.We walked on the road between the thick trunks of the old beeches and the sunlight came through the leaves in light patches on the grass.The trees were big, and the foliage was thick but it was not gloomy.There was no undergrowth, only the smooth grass, very green and fresh, and the big gray trees well spaced as though it were a park.

“This is country,” Bill said.

The road went up a hill and we got into thick woods, and the road kept on climbing.Sometimes it dipped down but rose again steeply.All the time we heard the cattle in the woods.Finally, the road came out on the top of the hills.We were on the top of the height of land that was the highest part of the range of wooded hills we had seen from Burguete.There were wild strawberries growing on the sunny side of the ridge in a little clearing in the trees.

Ahead the road came out of the forest and went along the shoulder of the ridge of hills.The hills ahead were not wooded, and there were great fields of yellow gorse.Way off we saw the steep bluffs, dark with trees and jutting with gray stone, that marked the course of the Irati River.

“We have to follow this road along the ridge, cross these hills, go through the woods on the far hills, and come down to the Irati valley,” I pointed out to Bill.

“That’s a hell of a hike.”

“It’s too far to go and fish and come back the same day, comfortably.”

“Comfortably.That’s a nice word.We’ll have to go like hell to get there and back and have any fishing at all.”

It was a long walk and the country was very fine, but we were tired when we came down the steep road that led out of the wooded hills into the valley of the Rio de la Fabrica.

The road came out from the shadow of the woods into the hot sun.Ahead was a river-valley.Beyond the river was a steep hill.There was a field of buckwheat on the hill.We saw a white house under some trees on the hillside.It was very hot and we stopped under some trees beside a dam that crossed the river.

Bill put the pack against one of the trees and we jointed up the rods, put on the reels, tied on leaders, and got ready to fish.

“You’re sure this thing has trout in it?”Bill asked.

“It’s full of them.”

“I’m going to fish a fly.You got any McGintys?”

“There’s some in there.”

“You going to fish bait?”

“Yeah.I’m going to fish the dam here.”

“Well, I’ll take the fly-book, then.”He tied on a fly.“Where’d I better go?Up or down?”

“Down is the best.They’re plenty up above, too.”

Bill went down the bank.

“Take a worm can.”

“No, I don’t want one.If they won’t take a fly I’ll just flick it around.”

Bill was down below watching the stream.

“Say,” he called up against the noise of the dam.“How about putting the wine in that spring up the road?”

“All right,” I shouted. Bill waved his hand and started down the stream. I found the two wine-bottles in the pack, and carried them up the road to where the water of a spring flowed out of an iron pipe. There was a board over the spring and I lifted it and, knocking the corks firmly into the bottles, lowered them down into the water. It was so cold my hand and wrist felt numbed. I put back the slab of wood, and hoped nobody would find the wine.

I got my rod that was leaning against the tree, took the bait-can and landing-net, and walked out onto the dam.It was built to provide a head of water for driving logs.The gate was up, and I sat on one of the squared timbers and watched the smooth apron of water before the river tumbled into the falls.In the white water at the foot of the dam it was deep.As I baited up, a trout shot up out of the white water into the falls and was carried down.Before I could finish baiting, another trout jumped at the falls, making the same lovely arc and disappearing into the water that was thundering down.I put on a good-sized sinker and dropped into the white water close to the edge of the timbers of the dam.

I did not feel the first trout strike.When I started to pull up I felt that I had one and brought him, fighting and bending the rod almost double, out of the boiling water at the foot of the falls, and swung him up and onto the dam.He was a good trout, and I banged his head against the timber so that he quivered out straight, and then slipped him into my bag.

While I had him on, several trout had jumped at the falls. As soon as I baited up and dropped in again I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water. It was a hot day, so I slit them all and shucked out the insides, gills and all, and tossed them over across the river. I took the trout ashore, washed them in the cold, smoothly heavy water above the dam, and then picked some ferns and packed them all in the bag, three trout on a layer of ferns, then another layer of fems, then three more trout, and then covered them with ferns. They looked nice in the ferns, and now the bag was bulky, and I put it in the shade of the tree.

It was very hot on the dam, so I put my worm-can in the shade with the bag, and got a book out of the pack and settled down under the tree to read until Bill should come up for lunch.

It was a little past noon and there was not much shade, but I sat against the trunk of two of the trees that grew together, and read.The book was something by A.E.W.Mason, and I was reading a wonderful story about a man who had been frozen in the Alps and then fallen into a glacier and disappeared, and his bride was going to wait twenty-four years exactly for his body to come out on the moraine, while her true love waited too, and they were still waiting when Bill came up.

“Get any?”he asked.He had his rod and his bag and his net all in one hand, and he was sweating.I hadn’t heard him come up, because of the noise from the dam.

“Six.What did you get?”

Bill sat down, opened up his bag, laid a big trout on the grass.He took out three more, each one a little bigger than the last, and laid them side by side in the shade from the tree.His face was sweaty and happy.

“How are yours?”

“Smaller.”

“Let’s see them.”

“They’re packed.”

“How big are they really?”

“They’re all about the size of your smallest.”

“You’re not holding out on me?”

“I wish I were.”

“Get them all on worms?”

“Yes.”

“You lazy bum!”

Bill put the trout in the bag and started for the river, swinging the open bag.He was wet from the waist down and I knew he must have been wading the stream.

I walked up the road and got out the two bottles of wine.They were cold.Moisture beaded on the bottles as I walked back to the trees.I spread the lunch on a newspaper, and uncorked one of the bottles and leaned the other against a tree.Bill came up drying his hands, his bag plump with ferns.

“Let’s see that bottle,” he said.He pulled the cork, and tipped up the bottle and drank.“Whew!That makes my eyes ache.”

“Let’s try it.”

The wine was icy cold and tasted faintly rusty.

“That’s not such filthy wine,” Bill said.

“The cold helps it,” I said.

We unwrapped the little parcels of lunch.

“Chicken.”

“There’s hard-boiled eggs.”

“Find any salt?”

“First the egg,” said Bill.“Then the chicken.Even Bryan could see that.”

“He’s dead.I read it in the paper yesterday.”

“No.Not really?”

“Yes.Bryan’s dead.”

Bill laid down the egg he was peeling.

“Gentlemen,” he said, and unwrapped a drumstick from a piece of newspaper.“I reverse the order.For Bryan’s sake.As a tribute to the Great Commoner.First the chicken; then the egg.”

“Wonder what day God created the chicken?”

“Oh,” said Bill, sucking the drumstick, “how should we know?We should not question.Our stay on earth is not for long.Let us rejoice and believe and give thanks.”

“Eat an egg.”

Bill gestured with the drumstick in one hand and the bottle of wine in the other.

“Let us rejoice in our blessings.Let us utilize the fowls of the air.Let us utilize the product of the vine.Will you utilize a little, brother?”

“After you, brother.”

Bill took a long drink.

“Utilize a little, brother,” he handed me the bottle.“Let us not doubt, brother.Let us not pry into the holy mysteries of the hen-coop with simian fingers.Let us accept on faith and simply say—I want you to join with me in saying—What shall we say, brother?”He pointed the drumstick at me and went on.“Let me tell you.We will say, and I for one am proud to say—and I want you to say with me, on your knees, brother.Let no man be ashamed to kneel here in the great out-of-doors.Remember the woods were God’s first temples.Let us kneel and say: ‘Don’t eat that, Lady—that’s Mencken.’”

“Here,” I said.“Utilize a little of this.”

We uncorked the other bottle.

“What’s the matter?”I said.“Didn’t you like Bryan?”

“I loved Bryan,” said Bill.“We were like brothers.”

“Where did you know him?”

“He and Mencken and I all went to Holy Cross together.”

“And Frankie Fritsch.”

“It’s a lie.Frankie Fritsch went to Fordham.”

“Well,” I said, “I went to Loyola with Bishop Manning.”

“It’s a lie,” Bill said.“I went to Loyola with Bishop Manning myself.”

“You’re cock-eyed,” I said.

“On wine?”

“Why not?”

“It’s the humidity,” Bill said. “They ought to take this damn humidity away.”

“Have another shot.”

“Is this all we’ve got?”

“Only the two bottles.”

“Do you know what you are?”Bill looked at the bottle affectionately.

“No,” I said.

“You’re in the pay of the Anti-Saloon League.”

“I went to Notre Dame with Wayne B.Wheeler.”

“It’s a lie,” said Bill.“I went to Austin Business College with Wayne B.Wheeler.He was class president.”

“Well,” I said, “the saloon must go.”

“You’re right there, old classmate,” Bill said.“The saloon must go, and I will take it with me.”

“You’re cock-eyed.”

“On wine?”

“On wine.”

“Well, maybe I am.”

“Want to take a nap?”

“All right.”

We lay with our heads in the shade and looked up into the trees.

“You asleep?”

“No,” Bill said.“I was thinking.”

I shut my eyes.It felt good lying on the ground.

“Say,” Bill said, “what about this Brett business?”

“What about it?”

“Were you ever in love with her?”

“Sure.”

“For how long?”

“Off and on for a hell of a long time.”

“Oh, hell!”Bill said.“I’m sorry, fella.”

“It’s all right,” I said.“I don’t give a damn any more.”

“Really?”

“Really.Only I’d a hell of a lot rather not talk about it.”

“You aren’t sore I asked you?”

“Why the hell should I be?”

“I’m going to sleep,” Bill said.He put a newspaper over his face.

“Listen, Jake,” he said, “are you really a Catholic?”

“Technically.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know.”

“All right, I’ll go to sleep now,” he said.“Don’t keep me awake by talking so much.”

I went to sleep, too.When I woke up Bill was packing the rucksack.It was late in the afternoon and the shadow from the trees was long and went out over the dam.I was stiff from sleeping on the ground.

“What did you do?Wake up?”Bill asked.“Why didn’t you spend the night?”I stretched and rubbed my eyes.

“I had a lovely dream,” Bill said.“I don’t remember what it was about, but it was a lovely dream.”

“I don’t think I dreamt.”

“You ought to dream,” Bill said.“All our biggest business men have been dreamers.Look at Ford.Look at President Coolidge.Look at Rockefeller.Look at Jo Davidson.”

I disjointed my rod and Bill’s and packed them in the rod-case.I put the reels in the tackle-bag.Bill had packed the rucksack and we put one of the trout-bags in.I carried the other.

“Well,” said Bill, “have we got everything?”

“The worms.”

“Your worms. Put them in there.”

He had the pack on his back and I put the worm-cans in one of the outside flap pockets.

“You got everything now?”

I looked around on the grass at the foot of the elm-trees.

“Yes.”

We started up the road into the woods.It was a long walk home to Burguete, and it was dark when we came down across the fields to the road, and along the road between the houses of the town, their windows lighted, to the inn.

We stayed five days at Burguete and had good fishing. The nights were cold and the days were hot, and there was always a breeze even in the heat of the day. It was hot enough so that it felt good to wade in a cold stream, and the sun dried you when you came out and sat on the bank. We found a stream with a pool deep enough to swim in. In the evenings we played three-handed bridge with an Englishman named Harris, who had walked over from Saint Jean Pied de Port and was stopping at the inn for the fishing. He was very pleasant and went with us twice to the Irati River. There was no word from Robert Cohn nor from Brett and Mike.

One morning I went down to breakfast and the Englishman, Harris, was already at the table.He was reading the paper through spectacles.He looked up and smiled.

“Good morning,” he said.“Letter for you.I stopped at the post and they gave it me with mine.”

The letter was at my place at the table, leaning against a coffee-cup.Harris was reading the paper again.I opened the letter.It had been forwarded from Pamplona.It was dated San Sebastian, Sunday:

“What day of the week is it?”I asked Harris.

“Wednesday, I think.Yes, quite.Wednesday.Wonderful how one loses track of the days up here in the mountains.”

“Yes.We’ve been here nearly a week.”

“I hope you’re not thinking of leaving?”

“Yes.We’ll go in on the afternoon bus, I’m afraid.”

“What a rotten business.I had hoped we’d all have another go at the Irati together.”

“We have to go into Pamplona. We’re meeting people there.”

“What rotten luck for me.We’ve had a jolly time here at Burguete.”

“Come on in to Pamplona.We can play some bridge there, and there’s going to be a damned fine fiesta.”

“I’d like to.Awfully nice of you to ask me.I’d best stop on here, though.I’ve not much more time to fish.”

“You want those big ones in the Irati.”

“I say, I do, you know.They’re enormous trout there.”

“I’d like to try them once more.”

“Do.Stop over another day.Be a good chap.”

“We really have to get into town,” I said.

“What a pity.”

After breakfast Bill and I were sitting warming in the sun on a bench out in front of the inn and talking it over.I saw a girl coming up the road from the centre of the town.She stopped in front of us and took a telegram out of the leather wallet that hung against her skirt.

“Por ustedes?”

I looked at it.The address was: “Barnes, Burguete.”

“Yes. It’s for us.”

She brought out a book for me to sign, and I gave her a couple of coppers.The telegram was in Spanish: “Vengo Jueves Cohn.”

I handed it to Bill.

“What does the word Cohn mean?”he asked.

“What a lousy telegram!”I said.“He could send ten words for the same price.‘I come Thursday.’That gives you a lot of dope, doesn’t it?”

“It gives you all the dope that’s of interest to Cohn.”

“We’re going in, anyway,” I said.“There’s no use trying to move Brett and Mike out here and back before the fiesta.Should we answer it?”

“We might as well,” said Bill.“There’s no need for us to be snooty.”

We walked up to the post-office and asked for a telegraph blank.

“What will we say?”Bill asked.

“ ‘Arriving to-night.’That’s enough.”

We paid for the message and walked back to the inn.Harris was there and the three of us walked up to Roncesvalles.We went through the monastery.

“It’s a remarkable place,” Harris said, when we came out.“But you know I’m not much on those sort of places.”

“Me either,” Bill said.

“It’s a remarkable place, though,” Harris said.“I wouldn’t not have seen it.I’d been intending coming up each day.”

“It isn’t the same as fishing, though, is it?”Bill asked.He liked Harris.

“I say not.”

We were standing in front of the old chapel of the monastery.

“Isn’t that a pub across the way?”Harris asked.“Or do my eyes deceive me?”

“It has the look of a pub,” Bill said.

“It looks to me like a pub,” I said.

“I say,” said Harris, “let’s utilize it.”He had taken up utilizing from Bill.

We had a bottle of wine apiece.Harris would not let us pay.He talked Spanish quite well, and the innkeeper would not take our money.

“I say.You don’t know what it’s meant to me to have you chaps up here.”

“We’ve had a grand time, Harris.”

Harris was a little tight.

“I say.Really you don’t know how much it means.I’ve not had much fun since the war.”

“We’ll fish together again, some time.Don’t you forget it, Harris.”

“We must. We have had such a jolly good time.”

“How about another bottle around?”

“Jolly good idea,” said Harris.

“This is mine,” said Bill.“Or we don’t drink it.”

“I wish you’d let me pay for it. It does give me pleasure, you know.”

“This is going to give me pleasure,” Bill said.

The innkeeper brought in the fourth bottle.We had kept the same glasses.Harris lifted his glass.

“I say.You know this does utilize well.”

Bill slapped him on the back.

“Good old Harris.”

“I say.You know my name isn’t really Harris.It’s Wilson-Harris.All one name.With a hyphen, you know.”

“Good old Wilson-Harris,” Bill said.“We call you Harris because we’re so fond of you.”

“I say, Barnes.You don’t know what this all means to me.”

“Come on and utilize another glass,” I said.

“Barnes.Really, Barnes, you can’t know.That’s all.”

“Drink up, Harris.”

We walked back down the road from Roncesvalles with Harris between us.We had lunch at the inn and Harris went with us to the bus.He gave us his card, with his address in London and his club and his business address, and as we got on the bus he handed us each an envelope.I opened mine and there were a dozen flies in it.Harris had tied them himself.He tied all his own flies.

“I say, Harris—” I began.

“No, no!”he said.He was climbing down from the bus.“They’re not first-rate flies at all.I only thought if you fished them some time it might remind you of what a good time we had.”

The bus started.Harris stood in front of the post-office.He waved.As we started along the road he turned and walked back toward the inn.

“Say, wasn’t that Harris nice?”Bill said.

“I think he really did have a good time.”

“Harris?You bet he did.”

“I wish he’d come into Pamplona.”

“He wanted to fish.”

“Yes.You couldn’t tell how English would mix with each other, anyway.”

“I suppose not.”

We got into Pamplona late in the afternoon and the bus stopped in front of the Hotel Montoya.Out in the plaza they were stringing electric-light wires to light the plaza for the fiesta.A few kids came up when the bus stopped, and a customs officer for the town made all the people getting down from the bus open their bundles on the sidewalk.We went into the hotel and on the stairs I met Montoya.He shook hands with us, smiling in his embarrassed way.

“Your friends are here,” he said.

“Mr. Campbell?”

“Yes. Mr. Cohn and Mr. Campbell and Lady Ashley.”

He smiled as though there were something I would hear about.

“When did they get in?”

“Yesterday.I’ve saved you the rooms you had.”

“That’s fine.Did you give Mr. Campbell the room on the plaza?”

“Yes.All the rooms we looked at.”

“Where are our friends now?”

“I think they went to the pelota.”

“And how about the bulls?”

Montoya smiled.“To-night,” he said.“To-night at seven o’clock they bring in the Villar bulls, and to-morrow come the Miuras.Do you all go down?”

“Oh, yes.They’ve never seen a desencajonada.”

Montoya put his hand on my shoulder.

“I’ll see you there.”

He smiled again.He always smiled as though bull-fighting were a very special secret between the two of us; a rather shocking but really very deep secret that we knew about.He always smiled as though there were something lewd about the secret to outsiders, but that it was something that we understood.It would not do to expose it to people who would not understand.

“Your friend, is he aficionado, too?”Montoya smiled at Bill.

“Yes.He came all the way from New York to see the San Fermines.”

“Yes?”Montoya politely disbelieved.“But he’s not aficionado like you.”

He put his hand on my shoulder again embarrassedly.

“Yes,” I said.“He’s a real aficionado.”

“But he’s not aficionado like you are.”

Aficion means passion. An aficionado is one who is passionate about the bull-fights. All the good bull-fighters stayed at Montoya’s hotel; that is, those with aficion stayed there. The commercial bull-fighters stayed once, perhaps, and then did not come back. The good ones came each year. In Montoya’s room were their photographs. The photographs were dedicated to Juanito Montoya or to his sister. The photographs of bull-fighters Montoya had really believed in were framed. Photographs of bull-fighters who had been without aficion Montoya kept in a drawer of his desk. They often had the most flattering inscriptions. But they did not mean anything. One day Montoya took them all out and dropped them in the waste-basket. He did not want them around.

We often talked about bulls and bull-fighters.I had stopped at the Montoya for several years.We never talked for very long at a time.It was simply the pleasure of discovering what we each felt.Men would come in from distant towns and before they left Pamplona stop and talk for a few minutes with Montoya about bulls.These men were aficionados.Those who were aficionados could always get rooms even when the hotel was full.Montoya introduced me to some of them.They were always very polite at first, and it amused them very much that I should be an American.Somehow it was taken for granted that an American could not have aficion.He might simulate it or confuse it with excitement, but he could not really have it.When they saw that I had aficion, and there was no password, no set questions that could bring it out, rather it was a sort of oral spiritual examination with the questions always a little on the defensive and never apparent, there was this same embarrassed putting the hand on the shoulder, or a “Buen hombre.”But nearly always there was the actual touching.It seemed as though they wanted to touch you to make it certain.

Montoya could forgive anything of a bull-fighter who had aficion. He could forgive attacks of nerves, panic, bad unexplainable actions, all sorts of lapses. For one who had aficion he could forgive anything. At once he forgave me all my friends. Without his ever saying anything they were simply a little something shameful between us, like the spilling open of the horses in bull-fighting.

Bill had gone up-stairs as we came in, and I found him washing and changing in his room.

“Well,” he said, “talk a lot of Spanish?”

“He was telling me about the bulls coming in to-night.”

“Let’s find the gang and go down.”

“All right.They’ll probably be at the café.”

“Have you got tickets?”

“Yes.I got them for all the unloadings.”

“What’s it like?”He was pulling his cheek before the glass, looking to see if there were unshaved patches under the line of the jaw.

“It’s pretty good,” I said.“They let the bulls out of the cages one at a time, and they have steers in the corral to receive them and keep them from fighting, and the bulls tear in at the steers and the steers run around like old maids trying to quiet them down.”

“Do they ever gore the steers?”

“Sure.Sometimes they go right after them and kill them.”

“Can’t the steers do anything?”

“No.They’re trying to make friends.”

“What do they have them in for?”

“To quiet down the bulls and keep them from breaking horns against the stone walls, or goring each other.”

“Must be swell being a steer.”

We went down the stairs and out of the door and walked across the square toward the Café Iruña. There were two lonely looking ticket-houses standing in the square. Their windows, marked SOL, SOL Y SOMBRA, and SOMBRA, were shut.They would not open until the day before the fiesta.

Across the square the white wicker tables and chairs of the Iruña extended out beyond the Arcade to the edge of the street. I looked for Brett and Mike at the tables. There they were. Brett and Mike and Robert Cohn. Brett was wearing a Basque beret. So was Mike. Robert Cohn was bare-headed and wearing his spectacles. Brett saw us coming and waved. Her eyes crinkled up as we came up to the table.

“Hello, you chaps!”she called.

Brett was happy.Mike had a way of getting an intensity of feeling into shaking hands.Robert Cohn shook hands because we were back.

“Where the hell have you been?”I asked.

“I brought them up here,” Cohn said.

“What rot,” Brett said.“We’d have gotten here earlier if you hadn’t come.”

“You’d never have gotten here.”

“What rot!You chaps are brown.Look at Bill.”

“Did you get good fishing?”Mike asked.“We wanted to join you.”

“It wasn’t bad.We missed you.”

“I wanted to come,” Cohn said, “but I thought I ought to bring them.”

“You bring us.What rot.”

“Was it really good?”Mike asked.“Did you take many?”

“Some days we took a dozen apiece.There was an Englishman up there.”

“Named Harris,” Bill said.“Ever know him, Mike?He was in the war, too.”

“Fortunate fellow,” Mike said.“What times we had.How I wish those dear days were back.”

“Don’t be an ass.”

“Were you in the war, Mike?”Cohn asked.

“Was I not.”

“He was a very distinguished soldier,” Brett said. “Tell them about the time your horse bolted down Piccadilly.”

“I’ll not.I’ve told that four times.”

“You never told me,” Robert Cohn said.

“I’ll not tell that story.It reflects discredit on me.”

“Tell them about your medals.”

“I’ll not.That story reflects great discredit on me.”

“What story’s that?”

“Brett will tell you.She tells all the stories that reflect discredit on me.”

“Go on.Tell it, Brett.”

“Should I?”

“I’ll tell it myself.”

“What medals have you got, Mike?”

“I haven’t got any medals.”

“You must have some.”

“I suppose I’ve the usual medals. But I never sent in for them. One time there was this wopping big dinner and the Prince of Wales was to be there, and the cards said medals will be worn. So naturally I had no medals, and I stopped at my tailor’s and he was impressed by the invitation, and I thought that’s a good piece of business, and I said to him: ‘You’ve got to fix me up with some medals.’ He said: ‘What medals, sir?’ And I said: ‘Oh, any medals. Just give me a few medals.’ So he said: ‘What medals have you, sir?’ And I said: ‘How should I know?’ Did he think I spent all my time reading the bloody gazette? ‘Just give me a good lot. Pick them out yourself.’ So he got me some medals, you know, miniature medals, and handed me the box, and I put it in my pocket and forgot it. Well, I went to the dinner, and it was the night they’d shot Henry Wilson, so the Prince didn’t come and the King didn’t come, and no one wore any medals, and all these coves were busy taking off their medals, and I had mine in my pocket.”

He stopped for us to laugh.

“Is that all?”

“That’s all. Perhaps I didn’t tell it right.”

“You didn’t,” said Brett.“But no matter.”

We were all laughing.

“Ah, yes,” said Mike.“I know now.It was a damn dull dinner, and I couldn’t stick it, so I left.Later on in the evening I found the box in my pocket.What’s this?I said.Medals?Bloody military medals?So I cut them all off their backing—you know, they put them on a strip—and gave them all around.Gave one to each girl.Form of souvenir.They thought I was hell’s own shakes of a soldier.Give away medals in a night club.Dashing fellow.”

“Tell the rest,” Brett said.

“Don’t you think that was funny?”Mike asked.We were all laughing.“It was.I swear it was.Any rate, my tailor wrote me and wanted the medals back.Sent a man around.Kept on writing for months.Seems some chap had left them to be cleaned.Frightfully military cove.Set hell’s own store by them.”Mike paused.“Rotten luck for the tailor,” he said.

“You don’t mean it,” Bill said.“I should think it would have been grand for the tailor.”

“Frightfully good tailor.Never believe it to see me now,” Mike said.“I used to pay him a hundred pounds a year just to keep him quiet.So he wouldn’t send me any bills.Frightful blow to him when I went bankrupt.It was right after the medals.Gave his letters rather a bitter tone.”

“How did you go bankrupt?”Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said.“Gradually and then suddenly.”

“What brought it on?”

“Friends,” said Mike.“I had a lot of friends.False friends.Then I had creditors, too.Probably had more creditors than anybody in England.”

“Tell them about in the court,” Brett said.

“I don’t remember,” Mike said.“I was just a little tight.”

“Tight!” Brett exclaimed. “You were blind!”

“Extraordinary thing,” Mike said.“Met my former partner the other day.Offered to buy me a drink.”

“Tell them about your learned counsel,” Brett said.

“I will not,” Mike said.“My learned counsel was blind, too.I say this is a gloomy subject.Are we going down and see these bulls unloaded or not?”

“Let’s go down.”

We called the waiter, paid, and started to walk through the town.I started off walking with Brett, but Robert Cohn came up and joined her on the other side.The three of us walked along, past the Ayuntamiento with the banners hung from the balcony, down past the market and down past the steep street that led to the bridge across the Arga.There were many people walking to go and see the bulls, and carriages drove down the hill and across the bridge, the drivers, the horses, and the whips rising above the walking people in the street.Across the bridge we turned up a road to the corrals.We passed a wine-shop with a sign in the window: Good Wine 30 Centimes A Liter.

“That’s where we’ll go when funds get low,” Brett said.

The woman standing in the door of the wine-shop looked at us as we passed.She called to some one in the house and three girls came to the window and stared.They were staring at Brett.

At the gate of the corrals two men took tickets from the people that went in. We went in through the gate. There were trees inside and a low, stone house. At the far end was the stone wall of the corrals, with apertures in the stone that were like loopholes running all along the face of each corral. A ladder led up to the top of the wall, and people were climbing up the ladder and spreading down to stand on the walls that separated the two corrals. As we came up the ladder, walking across the grass under the trees, we passed the big, gray painted cages with the bulls in them. There was one bull in each travelling-box. They had come by train from a bull-breeding ranch in Castile, and had been unloaded off flat-cars at the station and brought up here to be let out of their cages into the corrals. Each cage was stencilled with the name and the brand of the bull-breeder.

We climbed up and found a place on the wall looking down into the corral.The stone walls were whitewashed, and there was straw on the ground and wooden feed-boxes and water-troughs set against the wall.

“Look up there,” I said.

Beyond the river rose the plateau of the town.All along the old walls and ramparts people were standing.The three lines of fortifications made three black lines of people.Above the walls there were heads in the windows of the houses.At the far end of the plateau boys had climbed into the trees.

“They must think something is going to happen,” Brett said.

“They want to see the bulls.”

Mike and Bill were on the other wall across the pit of the corral.They waved to us.People who had come late were standing behind us, pressing against us when other people crowded them.

“Why don’t they start?”Robert Cohn asked.

A single mule was hitched to one of the cages and dragged it up against the gate in the corral wall.The men shoved and lifted it with crowbars into position against the gate.Men were standing on the wall ready to pull up the gate of the corral and then the gate of the cage.At the other end of the corral a gate opened and two steers came in, swaying their heads and trotting, their lean flanks swinging.They stood together at the far end, their heads toward the gate where the bull would enter.

“They don’t look happy,” Brett said.

The men on top of the wall leaned back and pulled up the door of the corral.Then they pulled up the door of the cage.

I leaned way over the wall and tried to see into the cage. It was dark. Some one rapped on the cage with an iron bar. Inside something seemed to explode. The bull, striking into the wood from side to side with his horns, made a great noise. Then I saw a dark muzzle and the shadow of horns, and then, with a clattering on the wood in the hollow box, the bull charged and came out into the corral, skidding with his forefeet in the straw as he stopped, his head up, the great hump of muscle on his neck swollen tight, his body muscles quivering as he looked up at the crowd on the stone walls. The two steers backed away against the wall, their heads sunken, their eyes watching the bull.

The bull saw them and charged.A man shouted from behind one of the boxes and slapped his hat against the planks, and the bull, before he reached the steer, turned, gathered himself and charged where the man had been, trying to reach him behind the planks with a half-dozen quick, searching drives with the right horn.

“My God, isn’t he beautiful?”Brett said.We were looking right down on him.

“Look how he knows how to use his horns,” I said.“He’s got a left and a right just like a boxer.”

“Not really?”

“You watch.”

“It goes too fast.”

“Wait.There’ll be another one in a minute.”

They had backed up another cage into the entrance.In the far corner a man, from behind one of the plank shelters, attracted the bull, and while the bull was facing away the gate was pulled up and a second bull came out into the corral.

He charged straight for the steers and two men ran out from behind the planks and shouted, to turn him.He did not change his direction and the men shouted: “Hah!Hah!Toro!”and waved their arms; the two steers turned sideways to take the shock, and the bull drove into one of the steers.

“Don’t look,” I said to Brett.She was watching, fascinated.

“Fine,” I said. “If it doesn’t buck you.”

“I saw it,” she said.“I saw him shift from his left to his right horn.”

“Damn good!”

The steer was down now, his neck stretched out, his head twisted, he lay the way he had fallen.Suddenly the bull left off and made for the other steer which had been standing at the far end, his head swinging, watching it all.The steer ran awkwardly and the bull caught him, hooked him lightly in the flank, and then turned away and looked up at the crowd on the walls, his crest of muscle rising.The steer came up to him and made as though to nose at him and the bull hooked perfunctorily.The next time he nosed at the steer and then the two of them trotted over to the other bull.

When the next bull came out, all three, the two bulls and the steer, stood together, their heads side by side, their horns against the newcomer.In a few minutes the steer picked the new bull up, quieted him down, and made him one of the herd.When the last two bulls had been unloaded the herd were all together.

The steer who had been gored had gotten to his feet and stood against the stone wall.None of the bulls came near him, and he did not attempt to join the herd.

We climbed down from the wall with the crowd, and had a last look at the bulls through the loopholes in the wall of the corral.They were all quiet now, their heads down.We got a carriage outside and rode up to the café.Mike and Bill came in half an hour later.They had stopped on the way for several drinks.

We were sitting in the café.

“That’s an extraordinary business,” Brett said.

“Will those last ones fight as well as the first?”Robert Cohn asked.“They seemed to quiet down awfully fast.”

“They all know each other,” I said. “They’re only dangerous when they’re alone, or only two or three of them together.”

“What do you mean, dangerous?”Bill said.“They all looked dangerous to me.”

“They only want to kill when they’re alone.Of course, if you went in there you’d probably detach one of them from the herd, and he’d be dangerous.”

“That’s too complicated,” Bill said.“Don’t you ever detach me from the herd, Mike.”

“I say,” Mike said, “they were fine bulls, weren’t they? Did you see their horns?”

“Did I not,” said Brett.“I had no idea what they were like.”

“Did you see the one hit that steer?”Mike asked.“That was extraordinary.”

“It’s no life being a steer,” Robert Cohn said.

“Don’t you think so?”Mike said.“I would have thought you’d loved being a steer, Robert.”

“What do you mean, Mike?”

“They lead such a quiet life.They never say anything and they’re always hanging about so.”

We were embarrassed.Bill laughed.Robert Cohn was angry.Mike went on talking.

“I should think you’d love it.You’d never have to say a word.Come on, Robert.Do say something.Don’t just sit there.”

“I said something, Mike.Don’t you remember?About the steers.”

“Oh, say something more.Say something funny.Can’t you see we’re all having a good time here?”

“Come off it, Michael.You’re drunk,” Brett said.

“I’m not drunk. I’m quite serious. Is Robert Cohn going to follow Brett around like a steer all the time?”

“Shut up, Michael.Try and show a little breeding.”

“Breeding be damned. Who has any breeding, anyway, except the bulls? Aren’t the bulls lovely? Don’t you like them, Bill? Why don’t you say something, Robert? Don’t sit there looking like a bloody funeral. What if Brett did sleep with you? She’s slept with lots of better people than you.”

“Shut up,” Cohn said.He stood up.“Shut up, Mike.”

“Oh, don’t stand up and act as though you were going to hit me.That won’t make any difference to me.Tell me, Robert.Why do you follow Brett around like a poor bloody steer?Don’t you know you’re not wanted?I know when I’m not wanted.Why don’t you know when you’re not wanted?You came down to San Sebastian where you weren’t wanted, and followed Brett around like a bloody steer.Do you think that’s right?”

“Shut up.You’re drunk.”

“Perhaps I am drunk.Why aren’t you drunk?Why don’t you ever get drunk, Robert?You know you didn’t have a good time at San Sebastian because none of our friends would invite you on any of the parties.You can’t blame them hardly.Can you?I asked them to.They wouldn’t do it.You can’t blame them, now.Can you?Now, answer me.Can you blame them?”

“Go to hell, Mike.”

“I can’t blame them. Can you blame them? Why do you follow Brett around? Haven’t you any manners? How do you think it makes me feel?”

“You’re a splendid one to talk about manners,” Brett said.“You’ve such lovely manners.”

“Come on, Robert,” Bill said.

“What do you follow her around for?”

Bill stood up and took hold of Cohn.

“Don’t go,” Mike said.“Robert Cohn’s going to buy a drink.”

Bill went off with Cohn.Cohn’s face was sallow.Mike went on talking.I sat and listened for a while.Brett looked disgusted.

“I say, Michael, you might not be such a bloody ass,” she interrupted.“I’m not saying he’s not right, you know.”She turned to me.

The emotion left Mike’s voice. We were all friends together.

“I’m not so damn drunk as I sounded,” he said.

“I know you’re not,” Brett said.

“We’re none of us sober,” I said.

“I didn’t say anything I didn’t mean.”

“But you put it so badly,” Brett laughed.

“He was an ass, though. He came down to San Sebastian where he damn well wasn’t wanted. He hung around Brett and just looked at her. It made me damned well sick.”

“He did behave very badly,” Brett said.

“Mark you.Brett’s had affairs with men before.She tells me all about everything.She gave me this chap Cohn’s letters to read.I wouldn’t read them.”

“Damned noble of you.”

“No, listen, Jake.Brett’s gone off with men.But they weren’t ever Jews, and they didn’t come and hang about afterward.”

“Damned good chaps,” Brett said.“It’s all rot to talk about it.Michael and I understand each other.”

“She gave me Robert Cohn’s letters.I wouldn’t read them.”

“You wouldn’t read any letters, darling.You wouldn’t read mine.”

“I can’t read letters,” Mike said.“Funny, isn’t it?”

“You can’t read anything.”

“No.You’re wrong there.I read quite a bit.I read when I’m at home.”

“You’ll be writing next,” Brett said.“Come on, Michael.Do buck up.You’ve got to go through with this thing now.He’s here.Don’t spoil the fiesta.”

“Well, let him behave, then.”

“He’ll behave.I’ll tell him.”

“You tell him, Jake.Tell him either he must behave or get out.”

“Yes,” I said, “it would be nice for me to tell him.”

“Look, Brett. Tell Jake what Robert calls you. That is perfect, you know.”

“Oh, no.I can’t.”

“Go on.We’re all friends.Aren’t we all friends, Jake?”

“I can’t tell him.It’s too ridiculous.”

“I’ll tell him.”

“You won’t, Michael.Don’t be an ass.”

“He calls her Circe,” Mike said.“He claims she turns men into swine.Damn good.I wish I were one of these literary chaps.”

“He’d be good, you know,” Brett said.“He writes a good letter.”

“I know,” I said.“He wrote me from San Sebastian.”

“That was nothing,” Brett said.“He can write a damned amusing letter.”

“She made me write that.She was supposed to be ill.”

“I damned well was, too.”

“Come on,” I said, “we must go in and eat.”

“How should I meet Cohn?”Mike said.

“Just act as though nothing had happened.”

“It’s quite all right with me,” Mike said.“I’m not embarrassed.”

“If he says anything, just say you were tight.”

“Quite.And the funny thing is I think I was tight.”

“Come on,” Brett said.“Are these poisonous things paid for?I must bathe before dinner.”

We walked across the square.It was dark and all around the square were the lights from the cafés under the arcades.We walked across the gravel under the trees to the hotel.

They went up-stairs and I stopped to speak with Montoya.

“Well, how did you like the bulls?”he asked.

“Good.They were nice bulls.”

“They’re all right”—Montoya shook his head—“but they’re not too good.”

“What didn’t you like about them?”

“I don’t know.They just didn’t give me the feeling that they were so good.”

“I know what you mean.”

“They’re all right.”

“Yes.They’re all right.”

“How did your friends like them?”

“Fine.”

“Good,” Montoya said.

I went up-stairs.Bill was in his room standing on the balcony looking out at the square.I stood beside him.

“Where’s Cohn?”

“Up-stairs in his room.”

“How does he feel?”

“Like hell, naturally.Mike was awful.He’s terrible when he’s tight.”

“He wasn’t so tight.”

“The hell he wasn’t.I know what we had before we came to the café.”

“He sobered up afterward.”

“Good.He was terrible.I don’t like Cohn, God knows, and I think it was a silly trick for him to go down to San Sebastian, but nobody has any business to talk like Mike.”

“How’d you like the bulls?”

“Grand.It’s grand the way they bring them out.”

“To-morrow come the Miuras.”

“When does the fiesta start?”

“Day after to-morrow.”

“We’ve got to keep Mike from getting so tight.That kind of stuff is terrible.”

“We’d better get cleaned up for supper.”

“Yes.That will be a pleasant meal.”

“Won’t it?”

As a matter of fact, supper was a pleasant meal. Brett wore a black, sleeveless evening dress. She looked quite beautiful. Mike acted as though nothing had happened. I had to go up and bring Robert Cohn down. He was reserved and formal, and his face was still taut and sallow, but he cheered up finally. He could not stop looking at Brett. It seemed to make him happy. It must have been pleasant for him to see her looking so lovely, and know he had been away with her and that every one knew it. They could not take that away from him. Bill was very funny. So was Michael. They were good together.

It was like certain dinners I remember from the war. There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.