From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [11]
Prew had seen a lot of those things happen. If you hang around any profession long enough you will learn about the things the brethren never talk about to the public. But just seeing them had been like it is with getting wounded, this man’s handless arms have no relation to yourself, it happens to the other guy, but never you.
He felt a great deal like an amnesia case must feel, upon waking in some foreign land where he had never been and hears the language that he cannot understand, having only a vague, dream-haunted picture of how he ever got there. How came you here? he asks himself, among these strange outlandish people? but is afraid to listen to the answer himself gives him back.
My god! he wondered. Are you a misfit? What happened to you does not bother any of these others. Why should you be so different? But fighting had never been his calling, bugling was his calling. For what reason then was he here, posing as a fighter?
It would probably, after Dixie Wells, have been the same whether or not he had been haunted by his promise to his mother. But the old, ingenuous, Baptist-like promise was the clincher. Because the uninitiated boy had taken it, not like a Baptist, but literally.
One way, he thought, the whole thing of ring fighting was hurting somebody else, deliberately, and particularly when it was not necessary. Two men who have nothing against each other get in a ring and try to hurt each other, to provide vicarious fear for people with less guts than themselves. And to cover it up they called it sport and gambled on it. He had never looked at it that way before, and if there was any single thing he could not endure it was to be a dupe.
Since the boxing season was already over he could have waited until next December before he told them his decision. He could have kept his mouth shut and rested on his hard-earned laurels, until the time came round again to prove his right to them. But he was not honest enough to do a thing like that. He was not honest enough to dupe them, when he himself refused to be their dupe. He had not the makings of that honest man to whom success comes naturally.
At first when he told them why he was quitting they would not believe him. Then, later when they saw that it was true, they decided he had only been in the sport for what he could get out of it and did not love it like they did, and with righteous indignation had him busted. Then, still later, when he did not come around, they really did not understand it. They began to build him up then, they began to heckle him, they called him in and talked to him man to man, told him how good he was, explained what hope we have in you and are you going to let us down, enumerated what he owed the regiment, showed him how he ought to be ashamed. It was then they really began not to let him alone. And it was then he transferred.
He transferred to this other regiment because it had the best Bugle Corps in the Lower Post. He did not have any trouble. As soon as they heard him play they got him transferred quick. They had really, truly, wanted a good bugler there.
Chapter 3
AT EIGHT O’CLOCK that same morning, when Prewitt was still packing, First Sergeant Milton Anthony Warden came out from the Orderly Room of G Company. The Orderly Room opened onto a well-waxed corridor that ran from the porch inside the quad to the Dayroom that was on the outside street. Warden stopped in the corridor doorway and leaned against the jamb, smoking, his hands jammed deep in his pockets, watching the Company lining up for drill with rifles and web belts in the dustless early morning. He stood a moment in the sun rays slanting in on him from the east, and feeling the coolness that was already seeping away from what would be a hot day again. The spring rainy season would be breaking soon now, but until it did it would be hot and parched in February, just as it was hot and parched in December, and then when the rainy season broke it would be very damp, and chilly in the night, and the saddlesoap would be out and fighting desperately against the mould on all the leather. He had just finished the Sickbook and the Morning Report, and sent them out and now he was smoking a cigaret in laziness, watching the Company go out because he was glad he did not go out, before he went into the Supply Room to work hard again, this time at work that was not his.
He thr