The Thin Red Line Read Online Free

did Bugger Stein mean, stopping him and asking him if he was nervous! What kind of shit was that? Did Bugger know he was out after a pistol? Was that it? Or was Bugger trying to make out that he, Doll, was yellow or something. That was what it looked like. Anger and outraged sensibilities rose up in Doll.
    Furious, Doll stopped in the oval water-tight doorway to the forward hold to look this next hunting-ground over. It was very small, compared to the area he had already covered. What Doll had hoped, when he started out, was that if he simply went wandering around with an open mind and open eyes, the proper moment, the right situation, would eventually present itself, and that he would be able with inspiration to recognize and seize it. That was not what had happened, and now he was desperately beginning to feel that time was running out on him.
    Actually, in his entire circuit of the whole stern, Doll had only come upon two loose pistols which were not being worn. That was not very many. Both pistols had presented him with a decision to make: Should he? Or shouldn’t he? All he had to do was pick it up belt and all and put it on and walk away. Both times Doll had decided against. Both times there had been quite a few men around, and Doll could not help but feel, quite very forcefully, that a still better opportunity would show up. None had however, and now he could not help but wonder, with quite equal force, if he had not perhaps erred on the side of caution because he had been afraid. This was a thought Doll could hardly bear.
    His own company might begin to move upstairs at any moment now. On the other hand, he was tormented by the thought of Mazzi and Tills and the rest, if they saw him come back now without a pistol.
    Gingerly, Doll wiped the sweat from his eyes again and stepped on through the doorway. He went on up the starboard side of the forward hold, working his way in and out amongst this crowd of strangers from another outfit, searching.
    Doll had learned something during the past six months of his life. Chiefly what he had learned was that everybody lived by a selected fiction. Nobody was really what he pretended to be. It was as if everybody made up a fiction story about himself, and then he just pretended to everybody that that was what he was. And everybody believed him, or at least accepted his fiction story. Doll did not know if everybody learned this about life when they reached a certain age, but he suspected that they did. They just didn’t tell it to anybody. And rightly so. Obviously, if they told anybody, then their own fiction story about themselves wouldn’t be true either. So everybody had to learn it for himself. And then, of course, pretend he hadn’t learned it.
    Doll’s own first experience of this phenomenon had come from, or at least begun with, a fist fight he had had six months ago with one of the biggest, toughest men in C-for-Charlie: Corporal Jenks. They had fought each other to a standstill, because neither would give up, until finally it was called a sort of draw-by-exhaustion. But it wasn’t this so much as it was the sudden realization that Corporal Jenks was just as nervous about having the fight as he was, and did not really want to fight any more than he did, which had suddenly opened Doll’s eyes. Once he’d seen it here, in Jenks, he began to see it everywhere, in everybody.
    When Doll was younger, he had believed everything everybody told him about themselves. And not only told him—because more often than not they didn’t tell you, they just showed you. Just sort of let you see it by their actions. They acted what they wanted you to think they were, just as if it was really what they really were. When Doll had used to see someone who was brave and a sort of hero, he, Doll, had really believed he was that. And of course this made him, Doll, feel cheap because he knew he himself could never be like that. Christ, no wonder he had taken a back seat all his life!
    It was