"No, sir," admitted the chaplain meekly, swallowing slowly with a visible effort. "Not right now. I'm very thirsty."
"Then get yourself a drink. Colonel Korn keeps some bourbon in his desk. You ought to try dropping around the officers' club with us some evening just to have yourself a little fun. Try getting lit once in a while. I hope you don't feel you're better than the rest of us just because you're a professional man."
"Oh, no, sir," the chaplain assured him with embarrassment. "As a matter of fact, I have been going to the officers' club the past few evenings."
"You're only a captain, you know," Colonel Cathcart continued, paying no attention to the chaplain's remark. "You may be a professional man, but you're still only a captain."
"Yes, sir. I know."
"That's fine, then. It's just as well you didn't laugh before. I wouldn't have given you the plum tomatoes anyway. Corporal Whitcomb tells me you took a plum tomato when you were in here this morning."
"This morning? But, sir! You gave it to me."
Colonel Cathcart cocked his head with suspicion. "I didn't say I didn't give it to you, did I? I merely said you took it. I don't see why you've got such a guilty conscience if you really didn't steal it. Did I give it to you?"
"Yes, sir. I swear you did."
"Then I'll just have to take your word for it. Although I can't imagine why I'd want to give you a plum tomato." Colonel Cathcart transferred a round glass paperweight competently from the right edge of his desk to the left edge and picked up a sharpened pencil. "Okay. Chaplain, I've got a lot of important work to do now if you're through. You let me know when Corporal Whitcomb has sent out about a dozen of those letters and we'll get in touch with the editors of The Saturday Evening Post." A sudden inspiration made his face brighten. "Say! I think I'll volunteer the group for Avignon again. That should speed things up!"
"For Avignon?" The chaplain's heart missed a beat, and all his flesh began to prickle and creep.
"That's right," the colonel explained exuberantly. "The sooner we get some casualties, the sooner we can make some progress on this. I'd like to get in the Christmas issue if we can. I imagine the circulation is higher then."
And to the chaplain's horror, the colonel lifted the phone to volunteer the group for Avignon and tried to kick him out of the officers' club again that very same night a moment before Yossarian rose up drunkenly, knocking over his chair, to start an avenging punch that made Nately call out his name and made Colonel Cathcart blanch and retreat prudently smack into General Dreedle, who shoved him off his bruised foot disgustedly and order him forward to kick the chaplain right back into the officers' club. It was all very upsetting to Colonel Cathcart, first the dreaded name Yossarian! tolling out again clearly like a warning of doom and then General Dreedle's bruised foot, and that was another fault Colonel Cathcart found in the chaplain, the fact that it was impossible to predict how General Dreedle would react each time he saw him. Colonel Cathcart would never forget the first evening General Dreedle took notice of the chaplain in the officers' club, lifting his ruddy, sweltering, intoxicated face to stare ponderously through the yellow pall of cigarette smoke at the chaplain lurking near the wall by himself.
"Well, I'll be damned," General Dreedle had exclaimed hoarsely, his shaggy gray menacing eyebrows beetling in recognition. "Is that a chaplain I see over there? That's really a fine thing when a man of God begins hanging around a place like this with a bunch of dirty drunks and gamblers."
Colonel Cathcart compressed his lips primly and started to rise. "I couldn't agree with you more, sir," he assented briskly in a tone of ostentatious disapproval. "I just don't know what's happening to the clergy these days."
"They're getting better, that's what's happening to them," General Dreedle growled emphatically.
Colonel Cathcart gulped awkwardly and made a nimble recovery. "Yes, sir. They are getting better. That's exactly what I had in mind, sir."
"This is just the place for a chaplain to be, mingling with the men while they're out drinking and gambling so he can get to understand them and win their confidence. How the hell else is he ever going to get them to believe in God?"
"That's exactly what I had in mind, sir, when I ordered him to come here," Colonel Cathcart said carefully, and threw his arm familiarly around the chaplain's shoulders as he walked him off into a corner to order him in a cold undertone to start reporting for duty at the officers' club every evening to mingle with the men while they were drinking and gambling so that he could get to understand them and win their confidence.
The chaplain agreed and did report for duty to the officers' club every night to mingle with men who wanted to avoid him, until the evening the vicious fist fight broke out at the ping-pong table and Chief White Halfoat whirled without provocation and punched Colonel Moodus squarely in the nose, knocking Colonel Moodus down on the seat of his pants and making General Dreedle roar with lusty, unexpected laughter until he spied the chaplain standing close by gawking at him grotesquely in tortured wonder. General Dreedle froze at the sight of him. He glowered at the chaplain with swollen fury for a moment, his good humor gone, and turned back toward the bar disgruntedly, rolling from side to side like a sailor on his short bandy legs. Colonel Cathcart cantered fearfully along behind, glancing anxiously about in vain for some sign of help from Colonel Korn.
"That's a fine thing," General Dreedle growled at the bar, gripping his empty shot glass in his burly hand. "That's really a fine thing, when a man of God begins hanging around a place like this with a bunch of dirty drunks and gamblers."
Colonel Cathcart sighed with relief. "Yes, sir," he exclaimed proudly. "It certainly is a fine thing."
"Then why the hell don't you do something about it?"
"Sir?" Colonel Cathcart inquired, blinking.
"Do you think it does you credit to have your chaplain hanging around here every night? He's in here every goddam time I come."
"You're right, sir, absolutely right," Colonel Cathcart responded. "It does me no credit at all. And I am going to do something about it, this very minute."
"Aren't you the one who ordered him to come here?"
"No, sir, that was Colonel Korn. I intend to punish him severely, too."
"If he wasn't a chaplain," General Dreedle muttered, "I'd have him taken outside and shot."
"He's not a chaplain, sir." Colonel Cathcart advised helpfully.
"Isn't he? Then why the hell does he wear that cross on his collar if he's not a chaplain?"
"He doesn't wear a cross on his collar, sir. He wears a silver leaf. He's a lieutenant colonel."
"You've got a chaplain who's a lieutenant colonel?" inquired General Dreedle with amazement.
"Oh, no, sir. My chaplain is only a captain."
"Then why the hell does he wear a silver leaf on his collar if he's only a captain?"
"He doesn't wear a silver leaf on his collar, sir. He wears a cross."
"Go away from me now, you son of a bitch," said General Dreedle. "Or I'll have you taken outside and shot!"
"Yes, sir."
Colonel Cathcart went away from General Dreedle with a gulp and kicked the chaplain out of the officers' club, and it was exactly the way it almost was two months later after the chaplain had tried to persuade Colonel Cathcart to rescind his order increasing the number of missions to sixty and had failed abysmally in that endeavor too, and the chaplain was ready now to capitulate to despair entirely but was restrained by the memory of his wife, whom he loved and missed so pathetically with such sensual and exalted ardor, and by the lifelong trust he had placed in the wisdom and justice of an immortal, omnipotent, omniscient, humane, universal, anthropomorphic, English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon, pro-American God, which had begun to waver. So many things were testing his faith. There was the Bible, of course, but the Bible was a book, and so were Bleak House, Treasure Island, Ethan Frome and The Last of the Mohicans. Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall? Had Almighty God, in all His infinite wisdom, really been afraid that men six thousand years ago would succeed in building a tower to heaven? Where the devil was heaven? Was it up? Down? There was no up or down in a finite but expanding universe in which even the vast, burning, dazzling, majestic sun was in a state of progressive decay that would eventually destroy the earth too. There were no miracles; prayers went unanswered, and misfortune tramped with equal brutality on the virtuous and the corrupt; and the chaplain, who had conscience and character, would have yielded to reason and relinquished his belief in the God of his fathers -- would truly have resigned both his calling and his commission and taken his chances as a private in the infantry or field artillery, or even, perhaps, as a corporal in the paratroopers -- had it not been for such successive mystic phenomena as the naked man in the tree at that poor sergeant's funeral weeks before and the cryptic, haunting, encouraging promise of the prophet Flume in the forest only that afternoon: "Tell them I'll be back when winter comes."
26 AARFY
In a way it was all Yossarian's fault, for if he had not moved the bomb line during the Big Siege of Bologna, Major --- de Coverley might still be around to save him, and if he had not stocked the enlisted men's apartment with girls who had no other place to live, Nately might never have fallen in love with his whore as she sat naked from the waist down in the room full of grumpy blackjack players who ignored her. Nately stared at her covertly from his over-stuffed yellow armchair, marveling at the bored, phlegmatic strength with which she accepted the mass rejection. She yawned, and he was deeply moved. He had never witnessed such heroic poise before.
The girl had climbed five steep flights of stairs to sell herself to the group of satiated enlisted men, who had girls living there all around them; none wanted her at any price, not even after she had stripped without real enthusiasm to tempt them with a tall body that was firm and full and truly voluptuous. She seemed more fatigued than disappointed. Now she sat resting in vacuous indolence, watching the card game with dull curiosity as she gathered her recalcitrant energies for the tedious chore of donning the rest of her clothing and going back to work. In a little while she stirred. A little while later she rose with an unconscious sigh and stepped lethargically into her tight cotton panties and dark skirt, then buckled on her shoes and left. Nately slipped out behind her; and when Yossarian and Aarfy entered the officers' apartment almost two hours later, there she was again, stepping into her panties and skirt, and it was almost like the chaplain's recurring sensation of having been through a situation before, except for Nately, who was moping inconsolably with his hands in his pockets.
"She wants to go now," he said in a faint, strange voice. "She doesn't want to stay."
"Why don't you just pay her some money to let you spend the rest of the day with her?" Yossarian advised.
"She gave me my money back," Nately admitted. "She's tired of me now and wants to go looking for someone else."
The girl paused when her shoes were on to glance in surly invitation at Yossarian and Aarfy. Her breasts were pointy and large in the thin white sleeveless sweater she wore that squeezed each contour and flowed outward smoothly with the tops of her enticing hips. Yossarian returned her gaze and was strongly attracted. He shook his head.
"Good riddance to bad rubbish," was Aarfy's unperturbed response.
"Don't say that about her!" Nately protested with passion that was both a plea and a rebuke. "I want her to stay with me."
"What's so special about her?" Aarfy sneered with mock surprise. "She's only a whore."
"And don't call her a whore!"
The girl shrugged impassively after a few more seconds and ambled toward the door. Nately bounded forward wretchedly to hold it open. He wandered back in a heartbroken daze, his sensitive face eloquent with grief.
"Don't worry about it," Yossarian counseled him as kindly as he could. "You'll probably be able to find her again. We know where all the whores hang out."
"Please don't call her that," Nately begged, looking as though he might cry.
"I'm sorry," murmured Yossarian.
Aarfy thundered jovially, "There are hundreds of whores just as good crawling all over the streets. That one wasn't even pretty." He chuckled mellifluously with resonant disdain and authority. "Why, you rushed forward to open that door as though you were in love with her."
"I think I am in love with her," Nately confessed in a shamed, far-off voice.
Aarfy wrinkled his chubby round rosy forehead in comic disbelief. "Ho, ho, ho, ho!" he laughed, patting the expansive forest-green sides of his officer's tunic prosperously. "That's rich. You in love with her? That's really rich." Aarfy had a date that same afternoon with a Red Cross girl from Smith whose father owned an important milk-of-magnesia plant. "Now, that's the kind of girl you ought to be associating with, and not with common sluts like that one. Why, she didn't even look clean."
"I don't care!" Nately shouted desperately. "And I wish you'd shut up, I don't even want to talk about it with you."
