From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [392]
“It would. I dont mean that. I mean afterwards, after we were out. With two men it would be five hundred per cent harder. We’d have to head for the hills and go down that way in prison clothes, instead of back through the Post. And thats where they’d be looking for us. It would take a week to get down to town safely, we’d have to skirt every house and settlement, then go clear across Honolulu to my friends.”
“I’d like to go,” Prew said.
“I know how to travel,” Malloy said. “I’ve done all this before. I know how to go on shipboard like a rich man above suspicion. I know how to dress and act—like ordering dinners, the way to treat stewards and servants, and especially other passengers—a million little things it takes years to learn. You’d give it away the first day.”
“But I learn fast,” Prew said. “Listen, I know I’d be lots of trouble, at first. But I’d more than pay it back later on, in the things you plan to do.”
Malloy smiled. “You dont know what I’m planning to do.”
“I got a pretty good idea.”
“I dont even know myself, Prew.”
“Okay,” Prew said stiffly. “I wont force you. But I would’ve liked to of gone.”
“You dont belong with me,” Malloy said. “You belong in the Army. What do you want to go with me for?”
“I dont know. Because I want to help, I guess.”
“Help what?”
“I dont know. Just help.”
“Help change the world?”
“Maybe. Yeah, I guess thats it.”
“The little bit you and me might change the world,” Malloy smiled, “it wouldnt show up until a hundred years after we were dead. We’d never see it.”
“But it’d be there.”
“Maybe not,” Malloy said. “Thats why I say you dont belong with me. You got a romantic picture. It would mean years of living too close together, always on the jump. I’m not good at living close to people; I’m better when they’re always a little way off. And you’d soon get disillusioned with it. I’m doing what I’m doing for my own self only, not for what it might or might not produce. You know what I told you a while ago was wrong with me? You remember what I told you?”
Prew did not answer. It would have sounded stupid and inane to say he did not think there was anything wrong with Malloy.
“You dont know me at all,” Jack Malloy said. His voice had suddenly taken on the contorted abortive tone of a confessional. “You got a romantic picture of me too, just like all the rest. I’ve never loved anything enough in my life. Thats whats wrong.”
“What about the Wobblies? What about America?”
“The Wobblies are gone. Have been for a long time. But I dont think I even loved the Wobblies enough because if I had, I’d of been able to do something.
“And America isnt a thing. America is an idea. An idea that everybody has a different definition of. I can love ideas, as long as they’re my own, but ideas arent things. I’m the kind of a guy who dont like to get too close to any individual, to see his faults; if I do, it shuts off the love I feel; then I get angry and hate myself for it afterwards; and if I have to stay close to the guy, or the thing, I eventually get to hate him, or it, too. You see, the same things wrong with me thats wrong with everybody else. I preach against it with them, but its true of me, too. Even though I can prove logically that its not.”
“I dont believe that,” Prew said. “Thats not true. You’re just tearing yourself down.”
“Dont like to discover the feet of clay, do you?” Jack Malloy smiled painfully. “If you went with me, you’d discover it soon enough. Because its true. Believe me, its true. But you’re different. You love the Army. Really love it. Are a part of it, and belong in it. I’ve never loved anything enough to belong in it. The things I’ve loved have always been too phantasmal, too immaterial, too idealistic. I suffer from the same disease I try to diagnose, the same disease thats destroying the world.
“Thats the thing that has always dogged my steps haunting me,” he said abortively, for all the world like a good Irish Catholic confessing his customary Saturday night infidelity. “The thing thats always followed and tripped me up, the thing I’ve always been looking for,