From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [405]
Warden did not say anything. There was not anything else left to say. He stopped grinning and stared at Ross, but that didnt do any good either. Apparently it was going to be just like with Sgt Wellman back in A Co, who put in for the OEC last January; every officer in the battalion helped him with his correspondence lessons. Wellman who didnt know a squad column from a skirmish line; now he was a hotshot 2nd Lt down in the 19th.
“Thats too bad about your whiskey, Sergeant,” Lt Ross said, looking at his watch. “Well, I guess I better be getting on up to the Club for lunch. I’ll see you later on this afternoon. If you have any questions about that exam paper, you just ask me. I’ll try to answer them for you.”
Warden sat up after he was gone and picked up the copy of the exam. No wonder they had such stupid shitheads for officers, if they give them such childish examinations as this. He knew the answers to these questions before he even finished reading them. If you have any questions, he minced, you just ask me. Shit. He stuffed the exam in his pocket and turned to watch Lt Ross through the window, crossing the quad in his bent-kneed back-bobbing shambling walk, his uniform hanging from him dismally. Picture of a soljer. The son of a bitch walks like a goddam ragman. Or a plow jockey. Looks like a ragman, too.
A gentleman, he sneered, a gentleman. Manners, no less. Politeness he’s got. His old man is probly a pork packer on Millionaire’s Row or something. He took the bottle off the desk and put it back in the filing cabinet. Them and their goddam examination papers.
But that night, while Pete was off visiting some sidekick in the 27th, he looked over the copy of the exam again in his room. And Monday morning, when he went over to Regiment to take it, he sat right down and wrote them off contemptuously. Then he tossed the paper contemptuously on the desk of the 2nd Lt who was acting as timer and walked out, with over half of the two hour time limit still to go, feeling the Lt staring after him incredulously.
It was when he got back to the Orderly Room that morning that Rosenberry handed him the Department Special Order decreeing that the annual fall maneuvers would start on the 20th, two days hence.
He carried Prewitt present on the Morning Report until the morning they left, before he finally picked him up as absent. He had been able to give him an extra week. If there was ever any investigation about Fatso Judson, that ought to cover him. Anyway, it was the best he could do.
The evening before they pulled out, on the strength of a hunch, he went down to the Blue Anchor Cafe on King Street two doors from Mrs Kipfer’s New Congress which had been the Company hangout ever since he got in the outfit, both because it was cheap and because it was two doors from Mrs Kipfer’s—The Blue Chancre, they called it in the Company. There was nobody there tonight; they were all home getting ready to move in the morning. He waited four hours, swilling straight shots with beer chasers, and talking to Rose the Chinese waitress.
Prewitt did not show. Rose said she could not remember that he had been there, not for long time now. But then, Rose wouldnt have told him if he had. She and Charlie Chan the bartender-proprietor knew fully as much about the personal affairs of G Company as its Company Administration ever did. At one time or another Rose had been shacked up with almost every noncom in the Company. Sort of a community wife.
Somehow, he had had a hunch Prewitt might show up down there. He might never come back to the Post, but he wouldnt be able to stay away from news of the Company for ever. So, logically, the Blue Chancre would be the place he would head for. It was only a hunch. He knew it was a wild last-gasp shot in the dark. In the morning they moved out for the beaches and he dropped him for rations and picked him up AWOL on the Morning Report.
Lt Ross, who was having a nervous time with his first maneuvers and did not know Prewitt from his name on the roster, was very angry about it at first. He wanted to court martial him. Warden had to explain to him that Prewitt was probably drunked up lying in somewhere with a wahine and would probably show up at the Hanauma Bay CP in a day or two, before he would accept Warden’s idea of Company Punishm