From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [498]
“I’ll get some,” Sandra said. “What did you show the old bitch? to make her loosen up like this?”
“Then you and I have much in common,” Warden said. “I got French ancestors myself.”
“Money,” Stark said. “Get the liquor.”
“Tell me, little thing,” Warden said. “Do you love me?”
“Yes, I love you,” Jeanette squealed happily. “I’d love anybody who’d get me out of there, on a day like today.”
“Well, I love you, too,” Warden said.
“Oh, honey,” Sandra said, setting two bottles on the table. “Do I love you. I’ve been hungry for the past hour and a half. Do I love you.”
“I love you, too,” Stark said.
“Me and my dollbaby are going down the hall,” Warden said, “and play some pattycake. You watch the steaks.”
Stark, sitting half on the chair beside Sandra with his arm around her, turned his head over his shoulder toward the door as Warden went out through it.
“You hurry back,” he said.
“Dont you burn those steaks,” Warden said.
Chapter 57
KAREN HOLMES, STANDING at the promenade deck railing of the ship and looking back, thought it was too beautiful a place to leave.
She had stood there while the confetti had been thrown and the Navy band had played Aloha Oe and the bunting streamers had come down with the gangplank and the yoohooing passengers had crowded the rail to wave good-by. And now, while they slid out past Fort Armstrong through the channel past Sand Island and on out through the reef and the restlessly excited passengers began to thin out and go below, she still stood there.
They said there was an old Hawaiian legend that if you threw your lei overboard as you passed Diamond Head it would tell you whether you would ever come back again. Don Blanding had squeezed a few poems and a great many tears out of it. Karen did not think she would ever be back but she decided to try the legend anyway, as they passed Diamond Head, and see.
She was wearing, altogether, a total of seven leis. The bottom one was a red and black paper lei the Regiment gave to all its short-timers and there were, progressively more expensive, a carnation lei from the Officers’ Club, another one from Major Thompson’s wife, one from Holmes’s old Battalion Commander’s wife, a ginger lei from Col Delbert’s wife, a pikaki lei from General Slater, and on top the pure white gardenia lei Holmes had bought her when he saw her off. The seven leis made a collar of flowers that came clear up above her ears, as she stood on at the rail.
Dana Junior, freed from the necessity of standing at the rail to wave good-by to his father, was already back toward the rear of the ship in the middle of the deck at the shuffle-board courts with two other lovable small boys screaming at each other that they were shuffleboards and pushing each other up and down the slick wood courts to prove it. He was out of harm’s way there, and she would let the stewards worry about the damage to their shuffleboard courts. That was one of the fine things about being on shipboard, and she might as well avail herself of it.
Behind them, seeming to wheel as the big ship swung out of the channel east down along the reef, the city clustered around Fort Street and Nuuanu Avenue with that antheap look all downtown cities have. Behind it climbing the shoulders of the mountains sat the profuse multi-colored houses of the suburbs, their windows every now and then catching the sunshine gaily. And above it all the solid unchanging mountains stood in their tropic greenness that seemed to drip down in patches and threaten to engulf the carefully man-constructed streets and houses. And between them, ship and shore, nothing but air. Air reaching clear down to the water and clear up into the sky, with that expansive far-vista look that you got nowhere else except on the sea or the tops of high mountains. There was no more true a picture of Honolulu anywhere, than from out here.
On shore straight in front of them she picked out Kewalo Basin the harbor for the fishing fleet. Next would come Moana Park, and then the Yacht Basin. Then pretty soon Fort De Russy, and then Waikiki.
“Its very