From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [360]
It did not take two days for Leva’s papers to go through. Capt Gilbert put them through that afternoon and they were back the next morning. Apparently old Jake Delbert was not only willing, but more than happy, to do a favor for the 3rd Battalion’s Lt Col Jim Davidson.
It made a fine cataclysm for such a fine summery morning, that was without the summery ecstasy of being alive. Capt Holmes flopped like a chicken without head and appealed to Warden. Warden, still a little hungover, grinned at him foolishly and remained as silent as a stone. While Leva was packing, Jim O’Hayer came in and made formal request to be returned to straight duty. Holmes relieved him without argument. After half an hour sweating over a roster he finally created Champ Wilson supply sergeant and sent the CQ out to the drillfield to corral him. Before noon The Champ was back in the orderly room and flatly quit, and if it meant his rating they could have it. Holmes relieved him without busting him either and put Ike Galovitch in his place. Ike was overjoyed at being chosen for such a responsible position. He would, he said, do his level best for the Captain Holmes; Captain Holmes thanked him gratefully; Ike disappeared into his new castle with proud tears standing in his eyes; Milt Warden watched in stony silence.
He knew he was watching the destruction of the Milt Warden legend. He watched it with the same painful sense of fitting rightness and sweet satisfaction as a boy who has spent weeks building a model airplane watches it crash in flames from the match he has applied to its wings with his own hand just before it took off. When the holocaust was over, he took off for town.
She was very lovely when she picked him up from the shaded bench on the King Street side of Aala Park and he felt no more sexual attraction for her than a man does for his wife on a hot day and it frightened him. He climbed in the car out of the shrill yammering of the Asiatic-crowded grass from across the shrill yammering Asiatic-flowing sidewalk and flopped back in the seat and lit another cigaret, impressed overwhelmingly with that sense of the end of something which he had had earlier but which had not hit him fully until now when he saw her. He did not even say hello.
Chapter 41
KAREN HOLMES HAD BEEN saving up for this moment for almost a full week. The evening of the same day Milt had called her she had learned, by carefully probing her husband about the new catastrophe of Bloom’s death in his Company, a thing she already had suspected but did not intend to ask about pointblank: that 1st/Sgt Warden had not, as yet been induced to put in his application for the Infantry Officer extension course. In discussing Bloom with her, her husband had been especially bitter on this point since Warden’s mere application, let alone his acceptance for a commission which was a foregone conclusion, would have been a feather in his cap that would more than have offset this new stroke of ill fortune. (A selling point presented to him by his wife some weeks before in connection with the trial of Prewitt, which he had since made his own.) Times certainly had changed, was his bitter comment, when an Officer had to beg an Enlisted Man to become an Officer, and then he refused. All of which philosophizing went impatiently in one of Karen’s ears and out the other, now that she had learned what she wanted; her suspicions were confirmed; she had been taken for a fool; she barely refrained from pouring out the whole story to her husband for his sympathy. She had expected as much since the day Milt had told her it was in the mail and this afternoon on the phone she had more than half-suspected to find he had trumped up the story of Bloom’s suicide as a further effort to get rid of her, now that his conquest was complete.