From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [354]
“Neither would I,” Karen said.
“You’d think we were old enough to know better,” Warden said.
“We ought to,” Karen said.
“I still wouldnt change it,” Warden said.
“Loves like ours have always suffered,” Karen said brighteyedly ardently. “We both knew that when we went into it. Loves like ours have always been hated,” she said, looking at him with the half-parted mouth and warm-shining eyes of a Joan of Arc that made him suddenly want terribly to take her to bed. “Society does everything it can to prevent love like ours and what it cant prevent it destroys. Securely married American men dont like to think their wives have the right to leave them—not for love, which has never bought anything yet. And securely married American women who have been talked into believing it, know they’ve been duped, thats why they hate that kind of love worst of all because they have all had to sacrifice it for security and hate themselves for doing it so much they dont want anybody else to have a chance at it. Because if they ever once admit its true, then both their lives and their men’s have all been for nothing. Two or three years of foolish adolescent love in their youth—that they gave up and convinced themselves they had outgrown.
“Thats why its so important we dont lose ours; thats why we have to fight so hard to keep it; fight all of them, and fight ourselves too.”
“Yes,” Warden said.
“And theres only one way, Milt. The only way we can defeat them is to make our love conform to their conventions—outwardly. We can keep the core of it private and clean, but if we dont conform it outwardly they’ll end up by not only killing our love but us too.”
“Yes,” Warden said. “And the only way we can conform it is for me to accept the customary hogwash of success so we can give it the security. Its easy for you, whose job is to handle the core. But I’m the one who has to do the outside conforming. I have to make the living, that the security depends on. I’m the one who’ll have to agree with them and do things their way.
“All my life, from the time my goddam brother became a priest, I’ve fought their beef-eating middleclass assurance. I fought everything it stood for. I’ve made myself stand for everything they were against.
“Who do you think it was put Hitler up? The workers? No, it was the same middleclass. Who do you think gave the Communists Russia? The peasants? No, the Commissars. That same goddam middleclass. In every country everywhere that same middleclass holds every rein. Call it Fascism or call it Individual Initiative or call it Communism, and you still dont change it any. Each country calls it by a different name so they can fight all the other countries that look liable to get too powerful. I’ve stood up against all of that, I’ve stood up for me Milt Warden as a man, and I’ve made a place for myself in it, by myself, where I can be myself, without brownnosing any man, and I’ve made them like it.
“And now I’m supposed to go on and become an Officer, the symbol of every goddam thing I’ve always stood up against, and not feel anything about it. I’m supposed to do that for you.
“You’re the bait in the trap. They know how to work it, dont think they dont. What does dear mother do when sonny comes home from college all full of revolt and dissatisfaction with the way the world has always been run?
“They find him a sweet young thing thats around handy that he can get his gun off on and relieve himself and they finagle till they got him married to her, and then sonny quiets down to his duty and lets his revolt run off out through the head of his penis and accepts the status quo.”
“I’m not the bait,” Karen said. “I dont want to be the bait. I hate it as bad as you do. You must know that.”
“Do you think the pig tied in the trap for the tiger wants to be bait? And how much good does it do him?”
“Is that really the way you feel about it, Milt?”
“Thats the way I feel. All my life I’ve had to fight for one thing, the one thing nobody wants a man to be, to be honest. And now, to become an Officer— Did you ever see an honest Officer? that stayed an Officer?”
“Then you cant do it.”
Warden grinned at her combat