From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [481]
“All right,” Lt Ross said furiously.
“You know you cant run the mess without him, Lieutenant.”
“All right!” Lt Ross said furiously.
“I’m only being realistic, Lieutenant. If we had a man could run the mess, I’d be the first to want him busted. But we havent got a man that can do it.”
“All right!” Lt Ross said furiously.
“Its for the good of the Compny, Lieutenant.”
“I know, I know,” Lt Ross said furiously. “For the good of the Company!”
“Your responsibility is to the Compny as a whole.”
“Okay,” Lt Ross said furiously. “Okay, okay. I know what my responsibility is.”
“Yes, Sir,” Warden said.
With that settled, he informed him of his decision not to accept a commission.
“What!” Lt Ross cried furiously. “But, Jesus Christ!”
“My mind’s made up,” Warden said.
“I wish to hell I’d got my commission in the Coast Guard!” Lt Ross said furiously. “I’ll never understand the fucking Army.”
Chapter 54
HE SAW HER once more before she left. It was a very strange experience.
In the first place, it was a hard thing to arrange. It was not like before the war, when you could put on civvies and go anywhere you wanted simply because you wanted to go there. You could not go anywhere without an official reason now. And you had to have an officially documented explanation. Soldiers were not allowed in civilian clothes. Even to have them was a court-martial offense. And a soldier in uniform running around town in the daytime would be stopped immediately.
The ban on liquor by the Military Government was still in effect then, and the bars were closed down tight. The movies did not run at all. The big hotels had suddenly become very inquisitively careful about their registrations. All the tourists had either gone home, or else were sitting tight in their hotel rooms waiting for the Army to evacuate them. There were no new tourists. Even a car stopped along a road in the daytime was liable to investigation and inspection.
There was not anywhere they could meet. There was nowhere they could go. Even in the daytime.
And at night there was the curfew. At sundown Honolulu crawled quickly into its various holes and died until morning. After dark, nothing moved anywhere, except for the blue headlights of the patrols.
She was at Schofield. She would have to drive down. She could only drive in the daytime. She would have to drive back in the daytime, too. But it was an impossibility for him to get away from the CP in the daytime without being discovered. Even for an hour. And an hour was not long enough.
He could sneak away at night, after the switchboard relief went on. Stark had been sneaking off every night to see his wahine at the Wailupe Naval Radio Station, which was not far away. But Karen, she could not make the trip at night, not without being stopped. She could not even come down before dark and park and wait for him.
The only possible answer was a place, some place, where she could go in the afternoon and wait for him without being noticed, and then stay all night and drive back the next day. The hotels at Waikiki were out. Besides, he was ten or twelve miles from Waikiki out here on the highway, and there were no Motels or Tourist Courts on the highways of Hawaii.
He did not know any people out this way to whom she could go. All the people he knew lived either in Waikiki, or else in downtown Honolulu, which was further. Besides, he was not even sure she would be willing to go that far. To come down and stay all night. Even if he could find a place.
He sweated with it for over a week from the night that he had made the identification of Prewitt’s body. He told himself he meant to have that much, if he never had any of the rest of it.
And finally he went to Stark.
Stark’s wahine was a very beautiful Chinese-Hawaiian girl, the most beautiful