From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [204]
Nobody laughed.
“This is a party, gentlemen,” Jake joked insistently, “not a convention, you know. Eh? Dont you think we ought to perhaps possibly maybe ah . . .” Both of them were looking at him blankly, and gradually he ran down like a phonograph and tapered off into a nervous silence.
“I’m thirsty,” Jake said desperately, finally.
Sam Slater smiled at him, openly contemptuously, and Jake felt a spasm of nameless fear.
“Of course, Jake,” Sam Slater said soothingly. “Let us have another. Let us all have another.”
“But what I dont see,” Holmes said suddenly. “What do you suppose makes them all afraid like that? I’m not afraid, not of the truth.” And he meant it truly. He looked deep inside himself, there was no fear there.
Sam Slater shrugged. “Environmental training, I suppose. Psychologically, its a sort of subjective association of oneself with the external object. Some boys cant shoot birds because they put themselves into the place of the injured bird. Same thing.”
Holmes was irritated. “But thats stupid.”
“Gentlemen,” Jake Delbert said urgently. “Your drinks, gentlemen.”
“Thanks, Jake,” Sam Slater said soothingly. Somehow, Jake thought, Sam’s solace is always ominous. “Of course its stupid,” Sam said to Holmes. “Nobody claimed it wasnt stupid. Still, it happens to them.”
“Ha,” Jake Delbert said aloud, and to hell with them, what are they anyway? “Tell me, Dynamite,” Jake said. “How are you makin’ out with that new man, whats his name, Prewitt. Have you convinced him he should go out yet?”
“Who?” Holmes said. He looked up startled, jerked from the clarity of the abstract back into the turbid concrete, where the application always has to take place. “Oh,” he said. “Prewitt. No, not yet. But my boys are working on him.”
“Giving him The Treatment?” Sam Slater interjected.
“Yes,” Holmes said reluctantly.
“Thats a good example of my theory. How long do you think we could run an army without noncoms who fear our class so much they will tyrannize their own?”
“Not very long, I guess,” Holmes said.
“The secret,” Sam Slater said, “is to cause every caste to fear its superiors and be contemptuous of its inferiors. You are wise to have your noncoms do it instead of doing it yourself. That makes even the noncoms more aware of the gulf between EM and officers.”
“But has it done any good yet?” Jake insisted, swinging it back again to the concrete, away from that infernal theory of young Slater’s. “Your Smoker season is in June this year, instead of August. You haven’t as much time to pull him into line as you would have had last year, and he hasnt given in yet, has he?”
“I told you no,” Holmes said violently, finding he was suddenly just a Captain again. “But I’ve taken all that other into account. I know what I’m doing. Truly, Sir.”
“I ’m sure you do, m’ boy,” Jake said sympathetically. He was back on familiar ground now. He could risk a pointed glance at Slater. “But dont forget, son, that this man is apparently a bolshevik, a true fuckup. They’re diff’r’nt from the average run, you know. I firmly believe in leading men, myself, but with bolsheviks you have to drive them. Its the only way to handle them. And you cant ever let them best you or you lose prestige with the men and they ’ll all be tryin’ to take advantage of you.”
“That’s true,” Sam Slater interjected. “If you’ve made an open issue of the thing, you must follow it through. Not that the issue itself is important, but because of the overall effect it has on the men.”
“I haven’t made an open issue of it yet,” Holmes said, feeling badgered. “The men are doing it practically by themselves, without my help.” Immediately he realized he had trapped himself. “What I mean,” he said.
“Oh,” Jake grinned. He was not missing any tricks now. These young flibertygibets who were always sucking in with the rank; it was all very well to talk theory, but it was the application of it that counted. “But dont you think that’ll look to the men as if you’re tryin’ to evade the responsibility?”
“No,” Holmes said, seeing what he was