From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [458]
Oh, those goddam bastardly Germans.
He got up quickly and then walked vaguely across to go out on the porch but the blackout curtains were drawn so instead he went into the kitchen, and sat down there.
In the bedroom, behind the carefully locked door that Georgette always locked now every night, Georgette was saying:
“Well, I dont care what you say! Sooner or later something is going to crack. I’m a nervous wreck. He just cant go on like this indefinitely, Alma.”
They both of them knew it, but they did not either one know what to do about it. Because they had both already done everything they could either one think of. And in the end it was Prewitt himself who precipitated the transmogrification.
He found the article in the afternoon paper, on the afternoon of the eighth day. He had been reading the papers regularly again, if you could call running your eyes over the black marks on the white paper “reading,” but this item when he saw it was not black marks but words. It was a small item on a back page that told how on the morning of December 7th the guards at the Schofield Barracks Post Stockade had flung open the gates and turned the prisoners out to go back to their outfits.
The Warden’s remark about his chances—if the Japs or somebody bombed this Rock and they turned all the prisoners loose to go fight—had stuck in his mind like a dart thrown into a whirling board, and now it pulled everything else into a vortex of juxtaposition around it. The Warden had strained to think up the least likely possibility he could think of—and that was just exactly what happened!
It all quite suddenly became very reasonable. He could feel his mind crawling up out of the frozen mud and standing forth to look on the sun. All he had to do was get back to the Company without getting picked up. After he had hunted out the uniform, he got Alma’s .38 Special out of the desk and checked the cartridges in the cylinder and put some extras from the box in his pocket.
The last paragraph of the article had gone on to say that, since they had opened the gates on the 7th, there had been fewer new prisoners committed than during any other eight day period in the Stockade’s history. That was fine; he was all for it; but he was not going to be one of them. Not when all he had to do was get back to the Company. The MPs were not going to pick him up now.
After he had tucked the gun in his belt, he looked around for anything else of his valuable enough to take with him, because if he never saw this place again it would be too soon. But outside of the civilian clothes they had bought for him, there wasnt anything; except the one finished copy of The Re-enlistment Blues which he folded carefully and stuck in his notebook of book titles and buttoned down carefully into his breast pocket. Then he sat down to wait for them to come home.
And so it was that, when they came home from work on the evening of the eighth day, he was waiting for them eagerly in the living room, holding the afternoon paper impatiently. His eyes, though not what you could strictly call sober, were reasonably clear; and he had shaved, and bathed,