From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [343]
“Hell, he dint shoot hisself over you whippin him, if thats what you thinkin.”
“I didnt whip him.”
“All right. Over you fightin him then. A long time ago old Hal said Bloom would kill hisself someday, remember?”
“I just barely broke even with him. If anything, he whipped me.”
“Hal said he was ‘dropping down the ladder rung by rung.’ I guess ats a quotation from some poem. He was a pretty smart boy, old Hal,” Angelo said grudgingly. “The son of a bitch.”
“Not so smart,” Prew said, remembering the forty dollars he had finally spent on the seduction of Alma. “I’d hate to think I had anything to do with it.”
“Oh, balls,” Angelo said disgustedly.
“Well,” Prew said, “I would.”
They sat silent, looking at each other, neither one of them able to put their finger on just exactly what it was Bloom’s death made them feel.
“Its funny,” Angelo said, trying reluctantly. “How a guy dies and then he’s gone and isnt there any more. Even if you dont like him. All the things he’s done in his life, and been, all gone just like that.”
“Yeah,” Prew said. “But I cant see what the hell made him do it.”
That was when the last man, the big man with the odd dreaming eyes, came over and sat down on the bunk with them. Without seeming to try to, he drew to himself all the available attention and interest in the same way a magnet collects iron filings, and for this they both looked up at him gratefully.
“Every man has the right to kill himself,” the big man said gently, appropriating the subject as if there was no question to his right to it. “Its the only absolute inviolable right a man does have, the only act he can commit which nobody else has a sayso in, the one irrevocable deed he can execute without outside influence. The old Anglo-Saxon term of ‘freedom’ came from that: ‘free’ and ‘doom,’ with the idea that every man always had that last final resort that nobody could take away from him, if he wanted to avail himself of it.
“But like everything else,” the big man said gently, “it has its price, too: its price is its own absoluteness and irrevocableness and inviolableness. ‘Doom’ is the only thing thats ever ‘free,’ citizens,” the big man said, as if speaking out of some very sure personal source not open to them.
“I’d hate to believe that,” Prew said distastefully.
“I dont see why,” the big man said tranquilly. “If its the truth. And anyway, maybe you’re right: Maybe even that isnt free.”
“I didnt mean that,” Prew said.
“I know what you meant,” the big man said. He stopped and smiled at them. The subject he had appropriated seemed to have been pretty well covered.
“Except for one thing,” Angelo said worriedly. “Even for us guys, here, dont you think its wrong?”
“You’re a Catholic,” the big man grinned gently.
“Not a good one.”
“But still a Catholic.”
“Okay, so I’m a Catholic,” Angelo said belligerently. “Somebody else is a Methodist. So what does that prove?”
“Nothing. But I wasnt talking about the moral right. I was talking about the physical right, the fact, the opportunity. No laws or preachments or physical restraints can take away the concrete physical right, if a man wants to do it. But you, being a Catholic, or a follower of any other religion, immediately transposed the physical right into a moral right.”
“But is it right?” Angelo insisted. “Or is it wrong?”
“Its all how you look at it. Would you say the early Christian martyrs committed suicide?”
“No.”
“Of course not. You’re a Catholic. But they didnt have to go into the arena, did they?”
Angelo frowned. “No, they didnt have to. But they did have to. Besides, somebody else killed them.”
“But they knew what they were getting into. They were accepting death of their own free will, werent they?”
“Yes, but—”
“Isnt that suicide?”
“Well, in a way, yes,” Angelo frowned. “But they had a reason.”
“Sure. They had a reason. Either they were too proud to back down; or else they figured they’d