Any sort of _cliches_ both revolutionary and patriotic.
His mind employed them without criticism.
Of course they were true but it was too easy to be nimble about using them.
But since last night and this afternoon his mind was much clearer and cleaner on that business.
Bigotry is an odd thing.
To be bigoted you have to be absolutely sure that you are right and nothing makes that surety and righteousness like continence.
Continence is the foe of heresy.
How would that premise stand up if he examined it?
That was probably why the Communists were always cracking down on Bohemianism. When you were drunk or when you committed either fornication or adultery you recognized your own personal fallibility of that so mutable substitute for the apostles' creed, the party line.
Down with Bohemianism, the sin of Mayakovsky.
But Mayakovsky was a saint again.
That was because he was safely dead.
You'll be safely dead yourself, he told himself.
Now stop thinking that sort of thing.
Think about Maria.
Maria was very hard on his bigotry.
So far she had not affected his resolution but he would much prefer not to die.
He would abandon a hero's or a martyr's end gladly.
He did not want to make a Thermopylae, nor be Horatius at any bridge, nor be the Dutch boy With his finger in that dyke.
No.
He would like to spend some time With Maria.
That was the simplest expression of it.
He would like to spend a long, long time with her.
He did not believe there was ever going to be any such thing as a long time any more but if there ever was such a thing he would like to spend it with her.
We could go into the hotel and register as Doctor and Mrs. Livingstone I presume, he thought.
Why not marry her?
Sure, he thought.
I will marry her. Then we will be Mt and Mrs. Robert Jordan of Sun Valley, Idaho.
Or Corpus Christi, Texas, or Butte, Montana.
Spanish girls make wonderful wives.
I've never had one so I know.
And when I get my job back at the university she can be an instructor's wife and when undergraduates who take Spanish IV come in to smoke pipes in the evening and have those so valuable informal discussions about Quevedo, Lope de Vega, Galdos and the other always admirable dead, Maria can tell them about how some of the blue-shirted crusaders for the true faith sat on her head while others twisted her arms and pulled her skirts up and stuffed them in her mouth.
I wonder how they will like Maria in Missoula, Montana?
That is if I can get a job back in Missoula.
I suppose that I am ticketed as a Red there now for good and will be on the general blacklist.
Though you never know.
You never can tell.
They've no proof of what you do, and as a matter of fact they would never believe it if you told them, and my passport was valid for Spain before they issued the restrictions.
The time for getting back will not be until the fall of thirtyseven.
I left in the summer of thirty-six and though the leave is for a year you do not need to be back until the fall term opens in the following year.
There is a lot of time between now and the fall term.
There is a lot of time between now and day after tomorrow if you want to put it that way.
No.
I think there is no need to worry about the university.
Just you turn up there in the fall and it will be all right.
Just try and turn up there.
But it has been a strange life for a long time now.
Damned if it hasn't.
Spain was your work and your job, so being in Spain was natural and sound.
You had worked summers on engineering projects and in the forest service building roads and in the park and learned to handle powder, so the demolition was a sound and normal job too.