CHAPTERS 9-10

Chapter 9 Summary: Jake plans to go to Bayonne with Bill and wires to Cohn to meet them there. Mike asks Jake if he would “mind if we [Mike and Brett] came down with [Jake].” Jake says it “would be grand” if they met up in Pamplona for the bull fights. Brett asks Jake if “Robert Cohn [is] going on this trip.” Brett is worried that the group trip “will be a bit rough on him.” Jake asks Brett who she went to San Sebastien with and Brett reveals that she had a sexual retreat with Cohn because she “through it would be good for him.” Jake, cynical and jealous, retorts and tells Brett should “take up social service.” A few days later, Jake learns that Cohn is “keen about it.” Jake and Bill take a train the next morning, which departs from the Gare d’Orsay. While on the train, they see Catholics going on a pilgrimage to Rome. Upon seeing the group, Bill comments, “It’s enough to make a man join the Klan.” The two men also have a conversation with an American family. The husband claims, “It’s a pity [Jake and Bill aren’t] Catholics” because then they “could get a meal.” The audience then learns that Jake is in fact Catholic. Jake and Bill watch the countryside pass them as they ride the train until they arrive in Bayonne. There they meet Cohn and grab a cab to the “nice hotel, [where] the people at the desk were very cheerful, and [they] each had a good small room.”

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Chapter 10 Summary: The men wake in the morning and a driver takes them through the Basque country where “the land all looks very rich and green and the houses and villages look well-off and clean.” The group passes the Spanish frontier and cross a bridge, where they encounter Spanish carabineers who check the men’s papers. They also come across “an old man with long, sunburned hair and beard” who was carrying “a kid slung on his back.” After crossing the Spanish frontier, the group “crossed a wide plain, and there was a big river off on the right shining in the sun from between the lines of tree, 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.” Once in Pamplona, the men check-in at Hotel Montoya, run by a man of the same name. After settling into the hotel with a meal, Jake notices how “Cohn had been rather nervous since we [Jake and Bill] 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.”  Bill and Cohn make a bet whether Brett will arrive that evening with Mike. Jake and Bill then head over to the Café Iruña for some coffee, while Cohn goes out to get a shave. Jake heads over to the Ayuntamiento and buys tickets to the bull fights from the same man he has been dealing with for years. After buying the tickets, Jake walks over to the cathedral, and because he thought he was a “bad Catholic” back on the train, makes a prayer for himself, Cohn, Brett, Mike, and the bull fights. The men reconvene for dinner and Jake again notices that Cohn is nervous and Jake “did not try to help him…enjoying Cohn’s nervousness.” Jake receives a telegram at dinner from Brett saying her and Mike would be stopping in San Sebastien for the night. Jake tells Cohn the message out of spite. Cohn tells Jake and Mike that he will wait at the hotel for Brett and Mike to arrive. Jake goes over to Mike’s room and finds him shaving. Bill tells Jake that Cohn confined in him about the rendezvous between Cohn and Brett in San Sebastien. Bill thinks Cohn is nice, but yet still believes Cohn to be “so awful.” The chapter ends with Bill saying any woman would feel safe with him, and the men plan to go fishing in the Irati River the next day.