The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [38]
"A Southerner will," Hearn said.
"Or a radical. It's a defense mechanism with them, bolsters their morale." Cummings showed his teeth. "For example, perhaps you have?"
"Perhaps."
Cummings stared at his fingernails. Was it disgust? Abruptly he laughed with sarcastic glee. "You know, Robert, you're a liberal."
"Balls."
He said this with a tense rapt compulsion as if he were impelled to see how far he could rock the boulder, especially when it had pinched his toes just a moment before. This was by far the greatest liberty he had ever taken with the General. And even more, the most irritating liberty. Profanity or vulgarity always seemed to scrape the General's spine.
The General's eyes closed as if he were contemplating the damage wreaked inside himself. When he opened them, he spoke in a low mild voice. "Attention." He stared at Hearn dourly for a moment, and then said, "Suppose you salute me." When Hearn had complied, the General smiled slightly, distastefully. "Pretty crude treatment, isn't it, Robert? All right, at ease."
The bastard! And yet with it, there was an angry reluctant admiration. The General treated him as an equal. . . almost always, and then at the proper moment jerked him again from the end of a string, established the fundamental relationship of general to lieutenant with an abrupt startling shock like the slap of a wet towel. And afterward always his voice like a treacherous unguent which smarted instead of salving the pain. "Wasn't very fair of me, was it, Robert?"
"No, sir."
"You've seen too many movies. If you're holding a gun and you shoot a defenseless man, then you're a poor creature, a dastardly person. That's a perfectly ridiculous idea, you realize. The fact that you're holding the gun and the other man is not is no accident. It's a product of everything you've achieved, it assumes that if you're. . . you're aware enough, you have the gun when you need it."
"I've heard that idea before." Hearn moved his foot slowly.
"Are we going into that attention business again?" The General chuckled. "Robert, there's a stubbornness in you which is disappointing to me. I had some hopes for you."
"I'm just a bounder."
"That's the thing. You are. You're a. . . all right, you're a reactionary just like me. It's the biggest fault I've found with you. You're afraid of that word. You've cast off everything of your heritage, and then you've cast off everything you've learned since then, and the process hasn't broken you. That's what impressed me first about you. Young man around town who hasn't been broken, who hasn't gone sick. Do you realize that's an achievement?"
"What do you know about young men around town. . . sir?"
The General lit a cigarette. "I know everything. That's such a fatuous statement that people immediately disbelieve you, but this time it happens to be true." His mouth moved into the good-guy grin. "The only trouble is, one thing remains with you. Somewhere you picked it up so hard that you can't shake the idea 'liberal' means good and 'reactionary' means evil. That's your frame of reference, two words. That's why you don't know a damn thing."
Hearn scuffled his feet. "Suppose I sit down?"
"Certainly." The General looked at him and then murmured in a completely toneless voice, "You're not annoyed, are you, Robert?"
"No, not any more." With a belated insight he understood suddenly that the General had been riding a great many emotions when he ordered him to stand up. It was so difficult ever to be certain what went on in the General's head. Through their whole conversation Hearn had been on the defensive, weighing his speech, talking with no freedom at all. And abruptly he realized that this had been true for the General also.
"You've got a great future as a reactionary," the General said. "The trouble is we've never had any thinkers on my side. I'm a phenomenon and I get lonely at times." There was always that indefinable tension between them, Hearn thought. Their speech was forced to the surface through a thick resistant medium like oil.
"You're a fool if you don't realize this is going to be the reactionary's century, perhaps their thousand-year reign. It's the one thing Hitler said which wasn't completely hysterical." Outside the partially opened flap of the tent, the bivouac sprawled out before them, rank and cluttered, the raw cleared earth glinting in the early afternoon sun. It was almost deserted now, the enlisted men out on labor details.