Every book goes through several drafts before the author is happy to let it see the light of day. Usually it's only the last version that survives. But we've been lucky enough to root out some earlier, forgotten drafts in an obscure corner of the Ashmolean museum. We hope you enjoy this offering from Ernest Hemingway.
For Whom the Bell Tolls
manuscript discovered by David Eccles
The sun throbbed down warmly on Robert Jordan's back as he lay on his belly in the pine needles. The sun was good he thought. And so was the smell of the pines -- the glade was dappled with the shadow of their branches and the hot resin smell came and went with the light wind.
He focussed the foresight bead of his army carbine on the second uniform button of the young lieutenant standing 25 yards away by the fallen larch. The lieutenant was a young man, tall, with a clean-cut line to his jaw. He straddled the crossbar of his big, grey bicycle with an easy, almost arrogant grace, pushing the map back into its leather case. He looked up and it seemed to Robert Jordan that he looked straight at him. The moment stretched into eternity under the clear sky with only the gentle sound of the pine branches in the breeze. Jordan squeezed the trigger and the rifle rocked back against his shoulder.
The young officer lay face down, one leg still over the bicycle. Jordan had to move fast, heaving the body out from under the machine. Jordan slung his carbine over his back and looked admiringly at the bike. Here indeed was much bicycletta. A Zorbezitrone of the pre-1932 design, when the dropouts were still chiselled by hand from the solid mild steel. Even under the matt, field-grey fascisti livery, its frame told of the quiet dignity of honest and straightforward manufacture. He thought of the big Schwinn he'd had as a barelegged kid, rough riding in the dirt yard behind the cannery. It had been a good bike, red with 28 inch wheels -- and it had weighed a goddam ton. But it had the same rugged power and he remembered too the day red Hanrahan had run into a 50-gallon oil drum in a race round Di Maggio's and back, and how he'd pumped the old Schwinn back into the running and come home half a minute in front. And he still had the scars on his legs to show....
And there had been the time with Pablo the night before the El Sordo business. They had all been tense. Jordan had tried to explain, simply, dispassionately, how the bicycle could win the war for the Republic. That it was silent, that it could carry twenty times its own weight, that it didn't have to be fed or humoured, that troops could be mobilised more quickly. Pablo had listened, staring at him with insolence and disdain. Then with slow deliberation and infinite derision he had spat.
"The bicycletta, it is no mount for a man, only for children and women. I tell you Inglese, such a thing is fit only for a man with no cojones." He continued with a leer at the others, who sat silent around the fire, "maybe there is much good reason for the great love for your bicycletta!"
Jordan would have smashed the grin from Pablo's bristly face then, but Pilar had come between them with a flood of robust oaths.
"I ------- in the milk of the bicycletta and the maquina. You are both infants in all such matters that you expend your forces in the ------- of such useless mysteries, when tomorrow there are much works to do, much big works, much cutting of throats, much blowing of bridges, much destructions of the sons of whores of fascisti."
The two men had fallen silent, and Pablo had turned away with a shrug, filled his foul mouth with wine from the skin and spat again.
Jordan mounted his grey maquina. He had to get back to the other side of the bridge where the old man waited with true peasant's patience for his order to pull the wire and blow the bridge. He trod on the pedals and the bicycle responded with equal vigour. Even as they ran forward over the rough, dusty track, hoarse, excited cries came from the distance behind him, then the rolling crackle of heavy automatic fire. The dust of the road beside him erupted in a line of little spurts, like the drops of water trailed from the blade of an oar. Jordan gripped the bars more tightly and urged the maquina on with words which came hissing up from his pained lungs.
"Come on you great, grey, goddam son of a bitch, let's see what you can do."
Again the heavy machine gun spoke and he felt the wind of it by his temple. Now he had the bridge in sight, and still the bursts of fire followed him. Now he was on the bridge... now he was halfway across, and still they hadn't hit him. Truly this was much maquina he had between his thighs. And then he was on the further side, yelling to Anselmo that he was coming, that the viejo must prepare to pull and blow the bridge behind him.
Robert Jordan couldn't know that the old man, crouched behind the great, white boulder at the side of the track, could neither see him nor hear him. When the .303 bullet had caught him in the side of the breast he had been knocked backwards and sideways by the force of it.
"Roberto, Inglese," he had whispered, "truly I am sorry." And as he died, the wire had slipped from his gnarled, brown hand. Reverting to the pattern of its original coils, it had sprung and danced back along the road towards the bridge.
Jordan was blinded by the sweat that ran freely into his eyes as he sprinted for the boulder, the carbine thumping the small of his back. The first he know of the coils of wire in his path was the unnatural slewing of the back wheel as it wound into the spokes, dragging and skidding the machine as he struggled for balance. The side of the road leapt at him and he was falling. The wire went taught in a crisp arc, whipping leaves from the undergrowth. The world became black and red, and the huge wall of sound hit man and bike as they fell.
The centre of the bridge rose in a convulsion of twisted metal, and as the echoes of the explosion fell in dying waves on the sun-baked afternoon, they were replaced by a flapping pattern of sound like pigeons' wings as the sky rained splinters of steel.
Robert Jordan lay athwart the big, grey bicycle, something warm and wet flowing down his flank. With his one useful hand he squeezed the grip of the handlebars, then released it slowly.
"Much bicycletta," he murmured, "much bicycletta...."
© David Eccles
Cycling Plus, April 1993