From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [330]
From Fatso, a speech that long amounted to an oration. Must of impressed him, Prew thought happily as they propped him up against the wall and threw his clothes at him.
“You dont need to pull at stuff neither,” Fatso said. “You can stand up.”
He leaned against the wall grinning sillily while he put his clothes on, noticing for the first time that it was Pfc Hanson again with Fatso this time, Pfc Hanson alone, and realizing dimly that it must therefore have been Pfc Hanson who had gasped. I made Pfc Hanson gasp, he thought proudly. Hanson was grinning at him proudly, fully as proudly as Angelo Maggio grinned at him a few minutes later when they shoved him in through the door of Number Two Barrack. They both grinned at him as though he had at last fulfilled all the promise they had seen in him.
His stuff had already been moved into Number Two for him and the men in Number Two had gotten together and fixed it all up for him. Even his bunk was made up for him. They were proud men in Number Two. They were the toughest of the tough. They were the cream. They wore their barracks number like a medal of honor and guarded its bestowal as jealously as any Masonic Lodge or midwestern Country Club ever guarded theirs. They could not fight back and win, so they were very strict with their great pride in losing, and they were so meticulous that when they did take a man in it was an occasion and they went all the way. All Prew had to do tomorrow to be ready for inspection was to remake his bunk in the morning.
Angelo sat on the side of the bunk and proudly did all the honors. Blues Berry came over a while, and then the others came over too, one or two at a time, to listen to Prew tell the story. The last man to come over, after the others had settled back down and gone back to sitting around on the chairless floor smoking and talking, was the big man with the soft, penetrating, unabashed-dreamer’s eyes, who had been sitting three bunks away taking all of it in.
Prew lay on top his new bunk, deliciously wrapped in a blanket, and acknowledged all the introductions and compliments, deliciously savoring his great sense of accomplishment. There was a satisfaction that came from having borne pain that nothing else could ever quite equal, even though the pain was philosophically pointless and never affected anything but the nervous system. Physical pain made its own justification. That must be your Indian forebearers talking, he thought. Except, he thought, that Angelo Maggio from Atlantic Avenue Brooklyn sure dont have no Indian blood, thats for sure. But he felt he could understand Angelo much better now.
In between all the introductions and coming and goings Angelo told him about Bloom, complete with all the gory details. Angelo had the whole entire story. The Stockade grapevine had had it the evening of the day it happened, just six hours after Prew had gone in the Hole. Apparently the Stockade grapevine had everything the evening of the day it happened, although nobody could say exactly just how this was accomplished. The Stockade grapevine more often than not had things before the guards themselves had them; one of Blues Berry’s greatest delights was to pass on to the guards tidbits of Post gossip they had not had yet.
The reaction in the Stockade had been pretty much the same as it had in the Company. There were several other men from the Regiment in the Stockade besides Prew and Angelo, and all of them knew Bloom. The rest, if they did not know him personally, had all seen him fight last year in the Bowl. They went around with the same indignant look on their faces and the same outraged tone in their voices; if anything, this open slap in the face to everything that good soldiers stood for was even more of an affront to them than it was to G Company. Just because they were in the Stockade, their faces and voices implied, did not mean they had turned up their nose with contempt and sneered at all Bloom’s advantages; if th