The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [166]
"Suppose I don't care to arrange it?" Cummings was calm, almost cheerful. He leaned back in his chair, and tapped his foot slowly. "Frankly, I don't particularly care to have you around as my aide any longer. You aren't ready to appreciate this lesson yet. I think I'm going to send you to the salt mines. Suppose after lunch you report over to Dalleson's section, and work under him for a while."
"Yes, sir." Hearn's face had become expressionless again. He started toward the exit of the tent, and then paused. "General?"
"Yes?" Now that it was over, Cummings wished that Hearn would leave. The victory was losing its edge, and minor regrets, delicate little reservations, were cloying him.
"Short of bringing in every man in the outfit, all six thousand of them, and letting them pick up your cigarettes, how are you going to impress them?"
This was the thing that had sullied his pleasure. Cummings realized it now. There was still the other problem, the large one. "I'll manage that, Lieutenant. I think you'd better worry about your own concerns."
After Hearn had gone, Cummings looked at his hands. "When there are little surges of resistance, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward." And that hadn't worked with the line troops. Hearn he had been able to crush, any single man he could manage, but the sum of them was different still, resisted him still. He exhaled his breath, feeling a little weary. There was going to be a way, he would find it. There had been a time when Hearn had resisted him too.
And his elation, suppressed until now, stimulated him, eased to some extent the sores and frustrations of the past few weeks.
Hearn returned to his own tent, and missed lunch. For almost an hour he lay face down on his cot, burning with shame and self-disgust and an impossible impotent anger. He was suffering an excruciating humiliation which mocked him in its very intensity. He had known from the moment the General had sent for him that there would be trouble, and he had entered with the confidence that he wouldn't yield.
And yet he had been afraid of Cummings, indeed, afraid of him from the moment he had come into the tent. Everything in him had demanded that he refuse to pick up the cigarette and he had done it with a sick numbed suspension of his will.
"The only thing to do is to get by on style." He had said that once, lived by it in the absence of anything else, and it had been a working guide, almost satisfactory until now. The only thing that had been important was to let no one in any ultimate issue ever violate your integrity, and this had been an ultimate issue. Hearn felt as if an immense cyst of suppuration and purulence had burst inside him, and was infecting his blood stream now, washing through all the conduits of his body in a sudden violent flux of change. He would have to react or die, effectively, and for one of the few times in his life he was quite uncertain of his own ability. It was impossible; he would have to do something, and he had no idea what to do. The moment was intolerable, the midday heat fierce and airless inside the tent, but he lay motionless, his large chin jammed into the canvas of his cot, his eyes closed, as if he were contemplating all the processes, all the things he had learned and unlearned in his life, and which were free now, sloshing about inside him with the vehemence and the agony of anything that has been suppressed for too long.
"I never thought I would crawfish to him."
That was the shock, that was the thing so awful to realize.
The Time Machine:
ROBERT HEARN
THE ADDLED WOMB
A big man with a shock of black hair and a small sharp voice, a heavy immobile face. His brown eyes, imperturbable, stared out coldly above the short blunted and slightly hooked arc of his nose. His wide thin mouth was unexpressive, a top ledge to the solid mass of his chin. He liked very few people and most men sensed it uneasily after talking to him for a few minutes.
In the center is the city,