• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 9045 0

but there was more here, more complexity, less of a congealed and overt personality to perceive comfortably. The General at first glance did not look unlike other general officers. He was a little over medium height, well fleshed, with a rather handsome sun-tanned face and graying hair, but there were differences. His expression when he smiled was very close to the ruddy, complacent and hard appearance of any number of American senators and businessmen, but the tough good-guy aura never quite remained. There was a certain vacancy in his face, like the vacancy of actors who play American congressmen. There was the appearance and yet it was not there. Hearn always felt as if the smiling face were numb.

And his eyes gave him away. They were large and gray, and baleful, like glass on fire. On Motome there had been an inspection before the troops boarded ship, and Hearn had walked through the ranks behind the General. The men trembled before Cummings, stammered out their replies in hoarse self-conscious voices. Three-quarters of it, of course, came from talking to a general, but Cummings had been so genial, had attempted so fully to put them at their ease, and it had not worked at all. Those great eyes with the pale-gray irises had seemed almost blank, two ovals of shocking white. Hearn remembered a newspaper article which had described the General as having the features of a genteel intelligent bulldog, and the article had added a little lushly, "in his manner are combined effectively the force, the tenacity, the staying power of that doughty animal with all the intellect and charm and poise of a college professor or a statesman." It was no more accurate than a newspaper story ever was, but it underlined a favorite theory about the General which Hearn had. For that reporter he had been The Professor, as he had been The General, The Statesman, The Philosopher, to any number of different men. Each of those poses had been a baffling mixture of the genuine and the sham, as if the General instinctively assumed the one which pleased him at the moment, but beyond that was driven on, was handed a personality garment by the unique urges that drove him.

Hearn leaned back in his chair. "All right, I suppose I was an ass. So what? There's a kind of pleasure in telling somebody like Conn where to shove it."

"It was a completely pointless thing to do. I suppose you considered it some kind of indignity to have to listen to him."

"All right, I did."

"You're being very young about it. The rights you have as a person depend completely upon my whim. Just stop and think about that. Without me you're just a second lieutenant, which I suppose is the operative definition of a man who has no soul of his own. You weren't telling him to shove it" -- the General's distasteful pronunciation of "shove it" italicized the phrase -- "I was, in effect, telling him, and I had no wish to do so at the time. Suppose you stand up now while you're talking to me. You might as well start at first principles. I'm damned if I'm going to have people walking by and seeing you sit here as if this division were a partnership between you and me."

Hearn stood up, conscious of a sullen boyish resentment in himself. "Very well," he said sarcastically.

The General grinned at him suddenly with some mockery. "I've heard the kind of filth Conn purveys for a good many more months than you have. It's boring, Robert, because it's pointless. I'm a little disappointed that you reacted on such a primal level." His voice flecked delicately against Hearn's mounting annoyance. "I've known men who've used filth until it became a high art. Statesmen, politicos, they did it for a purpose, and their flesh probably crawled. You can indulge your righteous rage but the things it comes out of are pretty cheap. The trick is to make yourself an instrument of your own policy. Whether you like it or not, that's the highest effectiveness man has achieved."

Perhaps. This was something Hearn was beginning to believe. But instead he muttered, "My range isn't as long as yours, General. I just don't