From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [123]
“Sure,” Prew said. “I believe it myself. Thems my ideals, too. But I’m not talking about ideals. I’m talkin about life.
“Every man has certain rights,” he said; “in life I mean, not in ideals. And if he dont stand up for his own rights nobody else is going to stand up for them for him.
“Theres nothing in the Law, or in the ARs, that says I have to go out for fighting in this outfit, see? So its my right not to go out, if I dont want. I’m not just doing it to be bastardly, I got a good reason, and if I want to do some thing and I do do it, then I can still go along and live my life, as long as I dont harm nobody, without bein kicked around. Thats my right, as a man. To not be kicked around.”
“Persecuted,” Stark said.
“Thats it. Well, if I go in the kitchen then I’m giving up one of my rights, see? I’m admitting I’m wrong and dont have that right, and letting them think they’re right, and that they’ve forced me. Whether into fighting or not isnt the point. They still forced me. You see?”
“All right,” Stark said. “Yes, I see. But you let me say something now.
“Now in the first place,” he said, “you’re looking at it all bass-ackwards, you’re going on the idea of the world as people say it is, instead of as it really is. In this world, no man really has any rights at all. Except what rights he can grab holt of and hang on to. And usually the only way he can get them is by taking them away from somebody else.
“Now dont ask me why. All I know is its so. And if a man’s going to holt onto anything, or gain anything, he’s got to take account of that. He got to see how other people get and keep what they got, and then he got to learn to do it that way too.
“The best way, the one most people use the most, is politics. They get friendly with somebody who’s got influence they need and then they use that influence. Thats what I did. At Fort Kam I was as bad off as you are here. But I dint walk out on it until I knew where I was goin. It was bad, sam, bad. But I stayed there. I stayed there till I knew for damn sure I was tradin it in on something better, see? I found out old Holmes was up here and come up and used him to get out.”
“I dont blame you,” Prew said.
“Then compare that to you when you quit the Bugle Corps,” Stark said. “If you’d really been smart, sam, you’d stayed there till you found a sure thing to get out into. Instead of runnin off half cocked and blowin your top and transferrin out, like you did, and look where you are now.”
“I dint have any good angles,” Prew said. “I dint have any angles.”
“Thats what I say: You should of stayed till you did. And now, when I’m offering a good angle, one that will get you back onto safe ground, you’re turnin it down. It just aint smart, it aint even sensible, because thats the only way anybody can get along in this world.”
“I guess I just aint sensible,” Prew said. “But I hate to believe that thats the ony way a man can get along. Because if it is, then what a man is dont mean anything at all. A man himself is nothing.”
“Well in a way,” Stark said, “thats true. Because its who he knows and not the man himself that counts. But in another way its not true either, not true at all. Because listen: What a man is, sam, is always the same. And nothing in God’s world, no kind of philosophy, no Christian Morals, none of that stuff, can change it. What a man is just comes out in a different channel, thats all. Its like a river that finds the old channel dammed up and moves into a new channel where the current’s just as strong, only it moves in a different direction.”
“Only people lie about it,” Prew said. “Thats what confuses you. They say they come up the hard way, by good hard honest labor, but really they married the boss’s daughter and inherited it. And what you mean to say is: it takes just as much on the ball for a man to marry the boss’s daughter out from under the rest of the competition as it does to beat the competition out the hard way. Which is impossible anyway, any more.”
“Always was,” Stark corrected.
“Okay,