The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer [79]
Understand your class and work within its limits. Marxist lesson with a reverse twist.
It disturbed Hearn deeply. He had been born in the aristocracy of the wealthy midwestern family, and although he had broken with them, had assumed ideas and concepts repugnant to them, he had never really discarded the emotional luggage of his first eighteen years. The guilts he made himself feel, the injustices that angered him were never genuine. He kept the sore alive by continually rubbing it, and he knew it. He knew also at this moment that out of all the reasons why he had begun to quarrel with Conn in officers' mess, one of the vital ones had been that he was afraid of not really caring enough about what Conn was saying. It was true of too many of his reactions. And since his direct self-interest could only move him back toward the ideas of his father, there was no other direction for him to turn, unless there was some other emotional basis for continuing in his particular isolated position on the Left. For a long time he had thought there was one, for even a longer period he had sustained his politics because his friends and acquaintances in New York assumed them as a matter of course, but now in the isolation of the Army, under the searching critique of the General's mind, his fingers were being pulled from the chinning bar.
He walked back to the recreation tent and went inside. Rafferty had filled the lamps and lit them, and already the evening influx of officers had begun. Two card games had been started, and several of the officers were beginning to use the writing tables.
"Hey, Hearn, you want to come in on some poker?" It was Mantelli, one of Hearn's few friends in the headquarters.
"All right." Hearn pulled up a chair. Since the tent had been set up, Hearn had spent his evenings here in unstated defiance of the General. Actually he found it dull and uncomfortable, for it became tremendously hot inside and the air filled quickly with cigarette and cigar smoke, but this was a part of the continual sparring that went on between the General and himself. The General had wanted him to build the tent -- all right, he would use it. But, tonight, after his realization about Rafferty, the idea of seeing the General gave Hearn an intimation of dread. There had been very few people he ever feared, but he was beginning to think he was afraid of the General. The cards came around to him, and he shuffled them and dealt, playing mechanically without much interest. He could feel himself perspiring already, and he stripped his shirt and hung it on the back of his chair. It went this way every evening. By eleven o'clock virtually all the officers were in their undershirts, and the tent stank of sweat and smoke.
"Those cards are gonna be hot for me tonight." Mantelli grinned, his small mouth twisted around a cigar.
The babel of chatter was dense already, saturated in the smoke. Somewhere, far off in the jungle, some artillery fired once, the sound thudding in Hearn's head like a jaded angry nerve. Division's nightly smoker, he muttered to himself.
He had played only a few hands with moderate luck when there was an interruption. The General for the first time had come into the tent. "Attention!" somebody bawled.
"At ease, gentlemen," the General murmured. He stared about the tent, his nostrils wrinkling faintly at the odor. "Hearn," the General called.
"Sir?"
"I need you." He waved his hand slightly, his voice brisk and impersonal. While Hearn was still buttoning on his shirt, he left the tent.
"Go ahead, run to poppa," Mantelli grinned.
Hearn was angry. Normally, the fact that the General had come to him would have been pleasing, but the General's voice had humiliated him. For a moment he actually considered remaining in the tent. "I'll get back that money later," he said to Mantelli.
"Not tonight, huh?" one of the other officers at the table gibed.
"My master's voice," Hearn said.
He finished buttoning his shirt, kicked his chair back into place, and walked through the tent. In one corner a few officers were drinking up one of their ration bottles of whisky.