From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [350]
American faces, he thought sleepily happily with that ecstasy of the martyr that had always been his goal and his destiny, American faces and American voices, weak with all the lustful-hungry greedy-lying American weaknesses, but strong now with the strength bred of necessity which is the only real strength ever, leathery lean hardbitten faces and voices in the old American tradition of the woodsmen and the ground-clearing farmers who also fought bitterly to stay alive. Here is your Army, America, he sleepily wanted to tell Them, here is your strength, that You have made strong by trying to break, and that You will have to depend on in the times that are coming, whether You like it or not, or want to or not, and no matter how much it may hurt Your pride. And here in Number Two was its cream, sifted and resifted and then sifted again, until all the dry rot had been winnowed out, all the soft spots squeezed out, all the rotting gangrene that all the social columnists were so afraid of excised out, so that only the firm hardy remainder of the most absolute of toughness, that would not only hold its own but would triumph, in a whole world of toughness, was all that was left now.
Thank your various Gods for your prisons, You America. Pray to Them hard, to not teach you how to get along without them,—until They have first taught you how to get along without your wars.
And he, Robert E Lee Prewitt, Harlan Kentucky, was one of them, one of these here, in the old hungry tradition, here where there was not one single fat-layered insurance salesman’s face in the new American tradition to be found.
You could not be one of them unless you shared it all with them, and for the first time in a long time he felt sleepily he was back with his own kind again, that he did not have to explain to, because each one of them had the same hard unbroachable sense of ridiculous personal honor that he had never been able to free himself from either.
And it had all been more than worth it, from the moment he had sat down at the mess table and taken that first single bite he had been too scared to taste, and he would start gladly right in on a second round again right now, if it was required to clinch it.
Poor Bloom, he thought sleepily, poor Bloom.
It was only later on, after the others had all finally gone off to sleep, that he was not sleepy any more and began to think of Alma Schmidt whom he had almost believed he had forgotten and, trying The Malloy’s black dot system again here in the bunk and failing miserably, lay for a long time wide awake, and thinking of her.
Everything you swear you will not do you always end by doing, he thought sleepy again now finally. I remember distinctly you swore once you would never lay in your bunk and jackoff, and so now you can add this one to the still growing list. At least this is one degradation Bloom didnt have to suffer.
Or maybe Bloom was in love with someone, too. Maybe that was why he killed himself.
The more he thought about it, sleepily again, the more he was quite positive that that was it, that Bloom had killed himself for love.
Chapter 40
MILTON ANTHONY WARDEN, on the other hand, having been out with Karen Holmes every afternoon since he had closed out Prewitt’s trial, did not speculate on why Bloom killed himself. It was enough for Warden, more than enough, that he had done it. It put the quietus on Milt Warden’s private life as effectively as if the Third Reich had invaded New York City, or the Japanese tried to attack Pearl Harbor in broad daylight, or the Martians captured California.
He had started seeing her in the afternoons after the Hickam problem. They had decided on that as being the best time for her to get away with the least amount of risk. They both felt the need of a plan that would give their deception dailyness and regularity and at the same time still be foolproof. This was, and under it they both had blossomed.