From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [366]
“You know what?” Warden said stifledly, “we’re just exactly alike. We’re absolute opposites; and yet we’re just alike.”
“We both imagine the other one’s trying to throw us over,” Karen said, “and neither one of us thinks the other appreciates us as much as we appreciate him.”
“We curse and storm at each other for doing the same identical things,” Warden said, “and we’re both of us so goddam jealous we cant hardly stand it.”
“We imagine all sorts of horrible things,” Karen said, “and we know the other one isnt near good enough for us.”
“I’ve never been so miserable in my life as I have since I met you,” Warden said.
“Neither have I,” Karen said.
“I wouldnt trade a minute of it,” Warden said.
“Neither would I,” Karen said.
“You’d think we were old enough to know better,” Warden said.
“We ought to,” Karen said.
“I still wouldnt change it,” Warden said.
“Loves like ours have always suffered,” Karen said brighteyedly ardently. “We both knew that when we went into it. Loves like ours have always been hated,” she said, looking at him with the half-parted mouth and warm-shining eyes of a Joan of Arc that made him suddenly want terribly to take her to bed. “Society does everything it can to prevent love like ours and what it cant prevent it destroys. Securely married American men dont like to think their wives have the right to leave them—not for love, which has never bought anything yet. And securely married American women who have been talked into believing it, know they’ve been duped, thats why they hate that kind of love worst of all because they have all had to sacrifice it for security and hate themselves for doing it so much they dont want anybody else to have a chance at it. Because if they ever once admit its true, then both their lives and their men’s have all been for nothing. Two or three years of foolish adolescent love in their youth—that they gave up and convinced themselves they had outgrown.
“Thats why its so important we dont lose ours; thats why we have to fight so hard to keep it; fight all of them, and fight ourselves too.”
“Yes,” Warden said.
“And theres only one way, Milt. The only way we can defeat them is to make our love conform to their conventions—outwardly. We can keep the core of it private and clean, but if we dont conform it outwardly they’ll end up by not only killing our love but us too.”
“Yes,” Warden said. “And the only way we can conform it is for me to accept the customary hogwash of success so we can give it the security. Its easy for you, whose job is to handle the core. But I’m the one who has to do the outside conforming. I have to make the living, that the security depends on. I’m the one who’ll have to agree with them and do things their way.
“All my life, from the time my goddam brother became a priest, I’ve fought their beef-eating middleclass assurance. I fought everything it stood for. I’ve made myself stand for everything they were against.
“Who do you think it was put Hitler up? The workers? No, it was the same middleclass. Who do you think gave the Communists Russia? The peasants? No, the Commissars. That same goddam middleclass. In every country everywhere that same middleclass holds every rein. Call it Fascism or call it Individual Initiative or call it Communism, and you still dont change it any. Each country calls it by a different name so they can fight all the other countries that look liable to get too powerful. I’ve stood up against all of that, I’ve stood up for me Milt Warden as a man, and I’ve made a place for myself in it, by myself, where I can be myself, without brownnosing any man, and I’ve made them like it.
“And now I’m supposed to go on and become an Officer, the symbol of every goddam thing I’ve always stood up against,