From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [361]
Feeling a great singing happiness at the prospect of being near him once more, she had laid out carefully, with an excess of both love and vengeance, the penalty she would inflict down to the smallest lash of the tongue, knowing in the love what would cut him deepest, and determined in the vengeance to cruelly make him drink every last bitter drop before allowing herself to be mollified, and when he climbed in the car with that brilliant-eyed wild look of precariously contained agony and did not even notice her, she knew immediately something was drastically wrong and forgot all about the vengeance, while the love began to fill up with a maternal anxiety for him and a wild unhinged murderous anger at whatever had hurt him, as she shifted the gears coolly and drove on around the Park calmly and out Beretania without saying a word.
They went through the slow-cooking business district and past the dry-baking Punchbowl in silence, Karen driving expertly and Warden smoking bitterly, and on past the Masonic Temple into the tree-leafy shade of the residence section across Punahou where Round Top and Tantalus, unseen but invisibly felt, dominated everything. They were almost out to the University Avenue before he flipped his cigaret away viciously and began to tell her the whole story. He told it clear across Kaimuki, Waialae, and Wailupe. By then they were almost out of town and across the causeway to Koko Head and instead of going on out into the country Karen turned off at Koko Head and drove down in under the grove of kiawe trees and out onto the bluff where the big gravelled parking lot for Hanauma Bay was.
There was a bunch of haole highschool kids, thin-limbed in swimsuits, out there on a picnic and running, yelling up and down the zigzag path down the bluff to the beach where somebody had once blasted out a hundred yards of coral reef to make a swimming place, the boys chasing the girls, and the girls being chased by the boys.
While they watched the kids (who suddenly seemed more alien to both of them than any foreigners could ever have been) he went through it one more time, this time with her asking the questions.
“So-o-o,” he wound it up shruggingly, “the son of a bitch took off and transferred.”
“Wasnt there anything you could do?”
“Sure. I could have talked him out of it again.”
“No you couldnt,” Karen said positively. “Not if you’re the kind of man I’ve always thought you were.”
Warden looked at her disgustedly. “You think not. I’ve done it plenty times before.”
“Then why didnt you do it this time then?” she said triumphantly.
“Why?” he hollered violently. “Because I just wanted to see if the son of a bitch would turn it down on his own, thats why. And of course he didnt.”
“Did you expect him to?”
“Hell no,” he lied. “Do you think I would?”
She did not answer. It had taken a little while for the enormity of it to penetrate in to her.
“Then that means our seeing each other afternoons will have to be postponed almost indefinitely,” she said finally.
Warden grinned at her stiffly, as if that was something he had failed to think of, and yet somehow was expecting.
“Thats about the size of it, yes.”
“And just when we thought we had it all worked out. Oh, Milt! And after you working so hard! Isnt there a thing we can do?”
“I dont know what. Unless you can get away sometimes at night.”
“You know I cant do that.”
“You’re going to do it when I’m an officer, aint you?”
“Yes, but thats different; that will be for good. Who would I get to stay with the boy? that I could trust?”
“Okay, maybe you got some suggestions.”
“If