“May the Lord watch between thee and me while we are absent the one from the other”

“May the Lord watch between thee and me while we are absent the one from the other” is a biblical farewell Robert Jordan recalls from his first journey away to school. Spoken by his religious father at a railway station, the prayer returns as Robert Jordan parts from Anselmo, turning a childhood memory into an unspoken form of leave-taking between comrades.

The Childhood Farewell

Robert Jordan remembers taking a train from Red Lodge to Billings on his way to school. He had been afraid to go and wanted to hide that fear. At the station, just before he climbed aboard, his father kissed him goodbye and spoke the prayer simply and sincerely. His father’s damp moustache and eyes made the farewell painfully intimate; Robert Jordan felt embarrassed by the religious sound of the words and the kiss, and suddenly older than his father, with pity for him that he could hardly bear.

After the train began moving, Robert Jordan stood on the rear platform and watched the station and water tower diminish. The rails, crossed by ties, seemed to narrow toward the tiny station as the train carried him away. A brakeman remarked that his father had taken the departure hard. The receding station gives the prayer a concrete setting: it is spoken at the threshold of separation, while the departing child watches the bond’s familiar place shrink into the distance.

The Prayer Recalled

The memory returns when Robert Jordan is saying goodbye to Anselmo. Anselmo announces that he is leaving and says they will meet again soon; Robert Jordan answers in kind, calling him an old man. Instead of replying with a conventional farewell or blessing, Robert Jordan remembers his father at the railway station and the wetness of that earlier parting. The prayer itself is not repeated in this later moment. Its absence is part of its force: the remembered farewell shapes what Robert Jordan cannot bring himself to say.

The childhood scene is therefore not merely background to the present departure. The earlier goodbye had embarrassed Robert Jordan because he saw his father’s emotion as exposed and almost burdensome; as he now faces separation from Anselmo, the memory leaves him unable to offer even a simple farewell. The text links these moments through remembered feeling rather than repeated words, allowing the old prayer to resonate without turning it into a spoken formula.

An Echo Between Partings

The prayer’s wording holds separation and continued care together: those departing will be absent from one another, yet remain under a shared blessing. Its return in Robert Jordan’s memory connects a son’s first journey away from home with a comrade’s departure. The relationship is not presented as identical—the first is between father and child, the second between companions—but the recollection places both goodbyes within the same emotional pattern of affection, distance, and difficulty speaking.

The contrast between the two scenes is decisive. At the station, the father speaks plainly, while the young Robert Jordan experiences the prayer as embarrassing and feels older than the man who says it. In the later farewell, Robert Jordan carries the memory inwardly and says nothing like it. The remembered words thus become an intimate measure of what parting costs him, even as his attention turns back to practical care: he whispers to Anselmo to wipe the oil from his gun’s bore so it will not shoot inaccurately. The prayer remains unspoken, but the concern for his companion gives the farewell its own form of tenderness.