From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [29]
“Wheres your stuff?” he said.
“Still at A Compny. I dint want to pack my clean uniforms.”
Warden grinned his sly pixy grin. “Still the dude, hunh? Havent changed a bit. Takes more than clothes to make a soljer, Prewitt. A whole helluva lot more.”
He took a blank tab from one of Holmes’s desk drawers and printed Prewitt’s name on it. “Theres a machine-gun cart leaning up against the wall outside the supplyroom. Take that over for your stuff. Save you makin four five trips.”
“Okay,” Prew said, surprised at the beneficence and unable to keep it off his face.
Warden grinned at him, relishing the surprise. “I’d hate to see you muss them uniforms, kid. I hate to see any kind of energy wasted, even it its been wasted once already.
“We ought to be able to fix you up in a good squad,” he grinned. “Now how would you like to be in Chief Choate’s squad?”
“What’re you tryin to do?” Prew said, “kid me? I dont see you puttin me in Big Chief’s squad. I more likely see you puttin me in a squad that one of Holmes’s punchies runs.”
“You do?” Warden’s eyebrows hooked and quivered delicately. He hung the tab up on the chart under Cpl Choate’s name.
“There. You see? I’m probably the best friend you ever had, kid, and you dont even know it. Lets go to the supplyroom and draw your stuff.”
In the supplyroom rawboned bald and wryfaced Leva stopped his scribbling long enough to dole out sheets and mattress covers, shelter-half and blankets, pack and all the rest of it and get Prew’s initials on the Form.
“Hello, Prew,” he grinned.
“Hello, Niccolo,” Prew said. “You still in this outfit?”
“You come to stay a spell with us?” Leva said, “or is this just temporary?”
“He’ll probly,” Warden said, “stay quite a while.”
He led him upstairs to the row of bunks that Choate’s squad inhabited and pointed out the one for him to take.
“You got till one o’clock to get straightened out,” The Warden said. “You fall out for Fatigue at one P.M. Just like us common people.”
Prew set himself to stowing all his stuff. The big squadroom was very still with nobody in it. His heels clacked very loudly. The squadroom was too big for one man alone, and the banging of his wall locker was too loud, echoing deeply back and forth across the room.
Chapter 5
CAPT HOLMES, WHEN HE left the Orderly Room, was feeling good. He felt he had given a pretty good account of himself with the cook Willard, but particularly with the new man, Prewitt, the welter from the 27th. He had already heard the story about his quitting fighting and now, after the interview, he was confident Prewitt would come around and change his mind, before summer and the Company Smoker season.
Capt Holmes liked to climb the stairs to Hq Building. They did not look like concrete, they looked like old marble streaked gray and black. Age had polished down the once porous concrete and rounded the raw edges with rain and feet, and given it a smooth slick gloss. When the stairs were wet they always caught and perpetuated the rainbow, like a promise. There will always be an Army, they said to him.
Heavy concrete and mortared brick had been molded around a concept Capt Holmes believed and given it reality. His orderly faithfully saddlesoaped and polished his riding boots once a day, it was the same thing. As he raised first one foot then the other to the step above the soft pliant leather bent in long smooth wrinkles, with none of those crowsfeet that show poor care. Once a day, regular as the monthly pay voucher.
His sense of accomplishment was though, just now, dimmed by a slight uneasiness at the prospect of meeting Col Delbert. Not that he disliked the Old Man. But when a man had the rank on you and held your majority in the palm of his hand you naturally had to watch every word.
In the middle of the upper porch a dumpy private in fatigues was expertly swinging a mop over the glazed floor, never lifting it, each stroke sweeping from wall to wall. Capt Holmes paused