From Here to Eternity_ The Restored Edit - Jones, James [58]
“Whats for chow?” Warden called.
“BS and C,” stated the wryfaced Leva laconically, and strolled on.
Roast beef hash and gravy! Again! Preem was getting worse and worse. It kept the Company Fund broke buying GI lemon extract for him.
Warden sat down at his desk and reached into a drawer and brought out the regulation .45 pistol he always kept there, hefting the heavy weighted balance in his hand. Just like the pistol his father had brought home from the War. Same weight, same shape, same heavy blueness. He and Frankie Lindsay up the street had swiped it from his father’s bureau, every now and then, and shot caps in it sticking them in the slot before the pinless hammer; they would drop pebbles down the muzzle too and shoot them out a foot or so, playing they were bullets.
The Company was trooping down the stairs for chow.
Warden leveled the pistol at the small doorless closet where the filing cabinets were and cocked it. The raising of the hammer made a dull metallic click that was an ominous expectant sound, and Milt Warden banged his other palm down flat on the desk.
“Ha! you son of a bitch,” he said out loud. “Thought I didnt see you.”
He stood up, staring at the inoffensive closet, eyes narrowed, brows arched and quivering.
“Re-enlist, will you? I’m Wolf Larsen, see? and nobody re-enlists. Not without answering to old Shark. . . . No you dont!”
He stepped around the desk and strode at the closet, chin thrust forward murderously, stopping in the doorway, pulling the trigger slowly, inexorably.
The hammer fell, inevitable as a clock stroke. The dull click was flatly disappointing after the expectancy of the cocking.
He tossed the heavy pistol on the closet table clatteringly. “Continued next week,” he said, looking down at it. In its simple lines and solid gunmetal color it was an entity, beautiful and complete within itself as a woman’s calf. But then, he thought, a woman’s calf is only a symbol of the rest of it; what man would be satisfied with a woman’s calf alone?
Angrily he picked it up and jerked the slide back, letting it slam forward viciously, carrying a cartridge from the clip into the chamber, pointing the now loaded, cocked pistol at his own head and putting his finger lightly on the trigger.
Just where is, he thought, the line that separates insanity? Any man who would pull this trigger now would be insane. Am I insane? because I put it loaded to my head? or because I touch the trigger?
He gazed raptly at the heavy death a moment, then he took it down. He released the magazine expertly and ejected the shell upon his desk. He slipped shell back into clip, clip back into piece, piece back into drawer; and leaned back in his chair listening to the sounds of eating in the messhall.
After a while he rose and took a fifth of whiskey from the second drawer of his file cabinet and had a long, adam’s-apple-bobbling drink. Then he went out onto the porch and into the kitchen where Leva was leaning against the castiron sink, eating from a plate in his hand.
Warden’s chance came sooner than he had expected. The next afternoon it cleared a little, the rain stopped a while at noon and drew back to re-form its ranks before the next assault. It was hanging low and heavy-bellied, ominously, as Holmes came around the quad, staying on the street this time, wearing civvies, a soft brown tweed suit, and carrying his topcoat, to tell him that he was going down to town with Col Delbert and that he would not be back today.
And suddenly Warden knew that he would have to do it. He didnt know why exactly, because this was more than just a woman, there were women enough downtown that he could have. This went much deeper.
Up until now, while he had thought about it, he had only played with the idea. Always before it had been a point with him to steer clear of Army women, they were cold, with no more warmth in them than in a brilliant diamond, and there was no pleasure in them. They did their fornication out of boredom rather than desire. And from what Leva had told him and from what he had seen himself, he suspected Karen Holmes was one of them.
Yet above all that he still knew tha