The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [151]
In a fury he came back to his tent, sat down at his desk, and found himself doodling with a pencil. He threw it down and stared with a febrile loathing at the map board by his cot. By now, it was a taunt to him.
But something was wrong with the tent. Something was changed since Clellan had fixed it this morning. He turned around, gazed about the room with a feeling of inordinate anxiety.
"God!" It came out as something between a grunt and a choked exclamation. A deep pang of pain and fear lanced through his chest. On the middle of his floor was the match and the cigarette butt, mashed into the duckboards in a tangled ugly excrement of black ash, soiled paper, and brown tobacco.
There was a note for him, too, on the desk, which he had not noticed:
Sir,
Waited for you but you didn't show up. I brought back the supplies you indicated.
Hearn.
Then it was Hearn who had soiled his floor. Of course. Cummings walked over to the match and cigarette butt, picked them up with intense distaste and dropped them in a wastebasket. There was a little black ash left, which he scattered with his foot. Despite himself he felt obliged to keep sniffing his fingers although he loathed the odor of a dead cigarette.
Deep in his bowels something had reacted and a twinge of diarrhea made him perspire. He reached over, picked up his field telephone, cranked it once, and murmured into the receiver, "Find Hearn and send him over to my tent." Then he rubbed vigorously at the flesh on the left side of his face, which seemed to have grown numb. "To do that." His rage was just beginning to function; a furious uncontrolled anger tightened his mouth, set his heart beating over-rapidly, and tingled in the tips of his fingers. Almost unbearable. He walked over to his refrigerator and poured himself a glass of water, which he drank with short distraught swallows. For an instant, deep beneath the currents of his rage, there was another feeling, an odd compound of disgust and fear perhaps, and something else, a curious troubled excitement, a momentary submission as if he had been a young girl undressing before the eyes of a roomful of strange men. But his rage choked this off, expanded inside him until it clotted all the conduits of his emotion, and left him trembling with an unendurable wrath. If he had been holding an animal in his hands at that instant he would have strangled it.
And with it was another sort of fear, overt and aware; what Hearn had done was equivalent to a soldier's laying hands on his person. To Cummings it was a symbol of the independence of his troops, their resistance to him. The fear, the respect his soldiers held for him now was a rational one, an admission of his power to punish them, and that was not enough. The other kind of fear was lacking, the unreasoning one in which his powers were immense and it was effectively a variety of sacrilege to thwart him. The cigarette butt on the floor was a threat, a denial of him, as fully as Lanning's defection, or a Japanese attack on his lines, and he had to meet it directly and ruthlessly. The longer you tarried with resistance the greater it became. It had to be destroyed.
"You want to see me, sir?" It was Hearn entering his tent.
Cummings turned around slowly, and looked at him. "Yes, sit down, I want to talk to you." His voice had been cold and even. With Hearn before him, his anger became incisive, controllable, an instrument of his actions. With great deliberation he lit a cigarette, his hands steady now, and exhaled it leisurely. "It's been a long time since we've had a little talk, Robert."
"Yes, sir, it has been."
Not since the night of the chess game. And they were both aware of it. Cummings surveyed Hearn with loathing. Hearn was an embodiment of the one mistake, the one indulgence he had ever permitted himself, and it had been intolerable to be with him since then. "My wife is a bitch, Robert." Cummings writhed at the memory, revolted with himself for that temporary weakness. At that time. . .
There was Hearn before him now, sprawled in the camp chair, his large body not nearly so relaxed as it seemed, his sullen mouth, his cold eyes staring back at him. For a while he had thought there was something in Hearn, a brilliance to match his own, an aptitude for power, the particular hunger that had meaning, but he had been wrong. Hearn was a vacuum with surface reactions, surface irritations. No doubt he had mashed the cigarette on an impulse.