Savage Coast (18 page)

The Englishman with the tall wife came over to Helen.

“If you get in,” he asked, smiling with his eyes in his blocked-out, austere face, “will you send a cable for me? To my wife's mother,” he said. He put his hand in his pocket for a pencil, took the postcard she offered and wrote a few words on it. His pencil moved slowly over the card, and jumped once at the end, as if his hand had been struck. A loud shot banged down, echoing, slapping among the hills. The Englishman turned with the rest. His forehead wrinkled as he stared against the bright sky.

Near the top of the hill, at the line of demarcation where the trees ended, a little man was running, lightly, with little darting motions, shuttling behind the last row of trees. He was short and dark, and wore a wide black sash around his waist. A shadow, shadow of cloud, moved over the hill, covered him for a minute, and then he was visible again, running, scampering between two lanes of trees. The hill stood clear, in maplike clarity, very impersonal.
Everything was quiet still. There was no way of telling who the man was.

A hundred people stood watching.

Then slowly, he could be seen moving out, holding his gun ready, looking down the slope, looking around with a reconnoitering look. He glanced once at the summit, and suddenly turned and hurried over the open shoulder of the hill. It was not until he was well over that the firing started again.

Nobody had spoken.

One of the Swiss cleared his throat. “They're hunting down Fascists,” he said hoarsely.

The Englishman, still holding the postcard, turned to Helen. His face had changed, his eyes were full of excitement. His controlled, assertive face flickered with the excitement. “I think he was a Fascist,” he said, with joy. “I think he was—and I hope to God he got away. I hope he's legging it over those hills for all he's worth this minute.” He was speaking rapidly, in a transport. He stopped for breath, and noticed her face. “Oh, no need to look like that,” affecting lightness, “I'm on the right side, I know the working class is on its way into its own. But the
bravery
, the sheer bravery of these men—cornered, broken up, fighting it out in these hills. And do you know they cut them down without a trial—they give common criminals a trial, but these fellows, they stop them in the roads and shoot them down without a word. That
brave
man, this morning, without a chance—that captain, do you know what he said? He said ‘You can do what you like with me,' and they shot him down and slit his throat and exposed him to the village with his four men, I saw them in the cellar. He may have been a vicious fool, that captain”—Helen saw Peter turn as the Englishman's voice rose— “but he was
brave
. And I hope they run like hell.”

“The Fascist captain? The son of a bitch,” said Peter, bitting the words.

The Englishman sneered through his nostrils. He was carried away. His face flickered. He stared at Peter.

“You'd get a trial if you committed a crime!”

From behind the hill where the man had disappeared, a sound spread, filling the sky, drowning out the quarrel for a moment. The crowd had already broken up, but people straggling across the lot stopped and looked back. For a moment they thought it was a new, protracted bombardment, the sound streaked along like a line of sonorous bombs. It was not until the plane appeared over the ridge that the fear changed and took shape. The high sweet sound of the engine ran through them. They might have been ready to be executed, strapped in the chair, the current might be shooting through them, the constraint of terror stabbed them so. Helen looked curiously up at the plane's clean progress over the even sky. Her mind seized on it like an abstract idea, in its successful motion. It approached; it was almost directly over them. And she thought, how calm I am, she could feel the trickle at the corner of her mouth. She licked her lips to cover the fear. When she moved her tongue, the fear did go; and it seemed to have left all of them in that instant. They all went on talking, the Englishman and Peter caught up in their quarrel, the teams discussing possibilities of a truck. They hardly looked up as the anonymous plane passed harmless overhead, marking the ground swiftly with its shadow, and turned away down the sky.

HELEN SWUNG AROUND
. Olive was sitting on the low stone wall, looking at her and at Peter quarreling. She was saying, “Come now, and look at the church.” Helen moved over to where she was.

“I can't stand just waiting here.” She pulled at her lower lip with her teeth. “What's Peter fighting about?” she asked.

“The Englishman's sporting instinct,” answered Helen. She grinned. “He thinks the captain should have had trial by jury.”

“These English and their ‘being sporting,'” said Olive, with her
hand flung out. “At home they're being sporting to Hitler, in the Mediterranean with Mussolini, and here they want to play games with the generals. Look at them run and line up with the Fascists. That's what I'm afraid of.” They walked on a bit. As they came to the railroad tracks, they saw that the train had been moved up the track about a hundred feet. The mayor must have let the town move it. There would be a better smell that night.

“It's a fine town,” said Helen.

Olive did not answer. She was watching four people, loaded with bags, who were coming down the street to the tracks. They were the professor, Peapack, and the Drews. They hallooed. “Gunnysacks!” called Drew across the street. “Very cheap! Admirably clean! Almost soft!” He took a breath. “So cheap! Six pesetas! And if a peseta equals sixpence—” he ran out of breath again. “To sleep on!” he yelled, as they crossed the tracks.

“Drew is lovely,” said Helen. “So cheap, so clean—he's almost sold me one.” She laughed.

“I suppose that really
was
a government plane,” said Olive softly. There was somebody calling them from behind. Olive turned. “Oh, God,” she said, “one of the bitches!”

“Wait for me,” called the one in the red blouse, running prominently up the street, her breasts shaking. “Are you going to see the church?—I've been wanting to see the church all day.”

“I didn't like to go alone,” she gasped, as she drew up to them.

They turned into the main street, where shadows were beginning to fill the doorways. The loud radio could be heard, turned on full blast in the café. A car, loaded with guns, initialed C.N.T., F.A.I., came down the street, its horn shouting, three times, pause, three times. The air was darkening.

The shell of the church stood, new yellow-brick walls darkened by smoke. A wooden beam, fallen just inside the portal, was not yet completely burned. A strand of smoke turned in the air, rising, issuing up, pointing at the inscription, cut in stone, “The house of
God is the gate of heaven.” Rags of red and gold cloth littered the steps. Within the arch of the portal was the arch of the stained-glass window over the shattered altar. The glass had been blown out by the explosion, and the blue sky was, through it, grotesque and untouched.

“I don't suppose there are many whole churches in Spain tonight,” said the bitch fatuously.

“See the rope!” Olive's hand was tight. Helen turned. There it lay, broken across the street, looking more like a guard against a fire area than like a boundary. Did they feed Fascists across a taut rope?

The sullen air touched them. The dusk became feverish and volcanic. A few houses down, some boys with guns were hammering against a door.

“Let's get going,” proposed the bitch.

They started down the main street. As they passed the door hurriedly, they could see the scars of the gun-butts that were ramming against it. It was a heavy brown door, carved. The building might be a parochial school, or the storehouse of an absentee landlord.

The bitch was looking the boys up and down. “They stare at you in such a funny way,” she observed, lasciviously.

Olive lost her temper, made a sound of dismissal, and walked faster. “Well,” said the bitch, “maybe you haven't found it to be true; but—”

Two boys stood over a large doll. One of them looked at it angrily. The street was quiet except for the hammering of the gun-butts on the door. The boy took the doll by the legs and threw it savagely on the sidewalk. Its head cracked open with a loud report. One of the legs tore loose. The other boy picked it up, laughed, and raised it over his head, whirling it. Behind them, the hammering was faster, and a sound of splintering.

They broke into a half-run, and stopped at the turning. Helen felt foolish. “Don't . . . let's,” she said, “if we go fast, that's enough.” They hurried down to the tracks. Two soldiers were at the crossing.
The uniforms were back, the attractive olive strapped with yellow. But the army! The soldier smiled as they approached. “
Guardia Civil
,” one called in reassurance. He was fair, and his teeth were lightning-white against his skin.

“Handsome,” muttered the bitch.

A shot was fired.

A young girl, walking along the ties, crossed herself.

Evening was closing down perilously fast, now.

It was only the second night. As if she had watched the passage of seasons, with the deepening, Helen thought, I know what is going to come now. I know a little of what is going to come.

The color deepened, melodiously, melodiously.

. . .
SHALL BE THE HUMAN RACE
.
*

A thin tan dog ran across the tracks.

There, the wagon marked
LLET
was pouring, while women stood with pails.

Helen began then to be very thirsty. “I want some of that milk,” she said.

“You have nothing to put it in,” said the bitch.

Do I need something? thought Helen.

“It's not pasteurized,” Olive observed.

“Wait, we'll have dinner.”

“Here comes Peter.”

Peter walked over, through the dim light, bringing the other bitch with him. It was growing dark.

“One minute,” said Olive, “I've asked the German to come along with us.” She stood and waved, isolated.

How thirsty I am! thought Helen.

He was walking across the lot, his brown head carried a little forward, his hips perfectly timed, perfectly at ease in a controlled walk. It was almost night.

“Who is he?” asked the bitch.

“He's a German,” said Olive. “I like him. Isn't he nice, Helen?”

“He walks well,” answered Helen. It was quite dark. They all started up the street again, walking three by three, the German going ahead with the two bitches.

OLIVE SAID TO
Peter, “The town's cracking. It's very jumpy now, like this,” teetering her hand from the wrist. “They're breaking into some places on the main street.”

“Hemingway doesn't know beans about Spain,” said Peter.

“Oh, Hemingway was all right,” answered Olive. “Who won, you or England?”

The German stopped, waiting to look at the three of them. He had deep brown eyes, or black. It was night now. He had a dark face, darker than his hair. As he passed under a light, it was plain. Sunburned dark. It had a carved rigor, the snub nose and wide peasant mouth, with keen lines on either side. Like carved wood, Helen thought, a Brueghel face, with active living, philosophic eyes.

“Rule, Britannia,” Peter was mocking. “Britannia keeps the rules.”

Olive and Peter went over the question of English sportsmanship, their mechanical answers echoing in the dark.

Helen felt that, at any other time, the quarrel would have been real, the issues plain. But that set of habits fell behind. Here there were only the weird scenes: the church, the man on the hill, the plane, following so swiftly and inconsequently that there was no way to stop and set them in place, no way for the speeding mind to arrange them.

Nightfall. That was real. Black and physical upon her, the only thing known.

Not that it was a matter of
real
scenes,
real
feelings, as it was with Olive, who felt most strongly and looked most moved during fear. It was all absorbed, immediately, too soon, in the way that the
danger from the unknown plane had been accepted by the time the plane had reached its position, able to let fall its bombs. The gun-cars could pass now: one had passed behind them as they criticized the fruit that morning, it had passed tooting, and they had not turned to face the guns. It was perhaps that there was no imaginable future. They had by common consent stopped saying, “
If
we reach . . .” and everyone said, “When we reach Barcelona,” but without conviction, without belief in their own imagining.

The street was dark and furiously real, Helen thought: the night was, all unidentified objects were real: the pregnant woman on the platform, the boy in the
camión
, nameless emotions, Peter's wish for a child, her own turning toward the lady, the anonymous German walking so powerfully before her. And the fear with which they were already familiar, the conventions which they had already adopted, so that they were unbearably aroused by mention of the captain's bravery. Criminal bravery, Peter was saying, and Helen thought how weak she was to let everyone talk on so, and to enjoy hearing them, to think always that if she had the poetic genius that produced the clue, she could find them, hear the real sound that could be spoken only at a moment like this, during such a night.

There were hidden causes.

The armies covered the world.

Let them win, let them only win, and we can bother about this later, she thought, helplessly.

All the moments flew, colored and clear. Now is my life, she thought. It comes to this night.

Only wait.

THEY WERE IN
back of the main street, on an easy incline. The bitches had stopped, uncertainly. Peter called out to them, “There's a little tunnel, to the left,” and hurried ahead. The black street grew tense and alert. When they entered the tunnel, there was a shiver behind them in the roadway and the women seized their children's
shoulders, snatching them into the houses. There was a tremor of heavy wheels approaching.