From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [421]
That was the way it went that week.
Somewhere, either out of her silence and politeness, or else out of his own imagination, he got the idea that she had been planning to marry him all along until this happened. He felt like a man who had got his ring back.
Once or twice they got into heavy arguments over nothing, absolutely nothing, like whether St Louis Heights was 483 feet elevation or 362 feet elevation. They would start with something like that, but before they were finished everything would be dragged in. Your ad; my ad; your ad; my ad. He held his own, in these; it was the silence that got him. And he took a lot of ad points with his old threat of just walking out. It still seemed to work just as good as ever.
Even, he thought, if he didnt have the guts to actually do it.
Chapter 50
MILT WARDEN DID NOT really get up early the morning of the big day. He just had not been to bed.
He had gone around to the Blue Chancre, after Karen had gone home at 9:30, on a vague hunch that Prewitt might be there. Karen had asked him about him again and they had discussed him a long time. Prewitt hadnt been there, but he ran into Old Pete and the Chief; Pete was helping the Chief to celebrate his last night in town before going back into his garrison headquarters at Choy’s. They had already made their bomb run on the whorehouses and dropped their load on Mrs Kipfer’s New Congress. After Charlie Chan closed up the Blue Chancre, the four of them had sat out in the back room and played stud poker for a penny a chip while drinking Charlie’s bar whiskey.
It was always a dull game; Charlie could not play poker for peanuts; but he always let them have the whiskey at regular wholesale prices and if they complained loud enough he would even go in on it and pay a full share, although he drank very little. So they were always willing to suffer his poker playing. They would always overplay a hand to him now and then to keep him from finding out how lousy he was.
When they had drunk as much as they could hold without passing out, it was so late the Schofield cabs had stopped running. They had hired a city cab to take them back because there was nowhere else to go at 6:30 on Sunday morning.
Besides, Stark always had hotcakes-and-eggs and fresh milk on Sundays. There is nothing as good for a hangover as a big meal of hotcakes-and-eggs and fresh milk just before going to bed.
They were too late to eat early chow in the kitchen, and the chow line was already moving slowly past the two griddles. Happily drunkenly undismayed, the three of them bucked the line amid the ripple of curses from the privates, and carried their plates in to eat at the First-Three-Graders’ table at the head of the room.
It was almost like a family party. All the platoon sergeants were there, and Stark was there in his sweated undershirt after getting the cooks started, and Malleaux the supply sergeant. Even Baldy Dhom was there, having been run out by his wife for getting drunk last night at the NCO Club. All of this in itself did not happen often, and today being Sunday, nobody was less than half tight and since there had been a big shindig dance at the Officers’ Club last night none of the officers had shown up, so that they did not have to be polite.
The conversation was mostly about Mrs Kipfer’s. That was where Pete and the Chief had wound up last night, and most of the others had gone there. Mrs Kipfer had just got in a shipment of four new beaves, to help take care of the influx of draftees that was raising Company strengths all over Schofield. One was a shy dark-haired little thing who was apparently appearing professionally for the first time, and who showed promise of someday stepping into Lorene’s shoes when Lorene went back home. Her name was Jeanette and she was variously recommended back and forth across the table.
At least one