shan55yumei

@@@@@"You were depending on me to bring you out of it He smiled as he said this, and his voice had become artificial, slightly affectedThe General had many different types of speech; when he spoke to enlisted men he swore slightly, made his voice a little less preciseWith his officers he was always dignified and remote, his sentences always rigidly constructedHearn was the only man to whom he spoke directly, and whenever he did not, whenever the down-to-junior-officer-level affectation slipped in, it meant that he was very displeasedHearn had once known a man who stuttered whenever he was telling a lie; this on a more subtle level was as effective a clueThe General was obviously furious that he had had to come to Hearn's support in such a way that headquarters would talk about it for days "I guess I did, sir; I realized that afterward "Will you tell me why you behaved like such an ass, Robert?" Still the affectationIt was almost effeminateThe General had given Hearn when he first met him an immediate impression of very rarely saying what he thought, and Hearn had never had occasion to change his mindHe had known men who were casually like him, the same trace of effeminacy, the same probable capacity for extreme ruthlessness, but there was more here, more complexity, less of a congealed and overt personality to perceive comfortablyThe General at first glance did not look unlike other general officersHe was a little over medium height, well fleshed, with a rather handsome sun-tanned face and graying hair, but there were differencesHis expression when he smiled was very close to the ruddy, complacent and hard appearance of any number of American senators and businessmen, but the tough good-guy aura never quite remainedThere was a certain vacancy in his face, like the vacancy of actors who play American congressmenThere was the appearance and yet it was not thereHearn always felt as if the smiling face were numb And his eyes gave him awayThey were large and gray, and baleful, like glass on fireOn Motome there had been an inspection before the troops boarded ship, and Hearn had walked through the ranks behind the GeneralThe men trembled before Cummings, stammered out their replies in hoarse self-conscious voicesThree-quarters of it, of course, came from talking to a general, but Cummings had been so genial, had attempted so fully to put them at their ease, and it had not worked at allThose great eyes with the pale-gray irises had seemed almost blank, two ovals of shocking whiteHearn remembered a newspaper article which had described the General as having the features of a genteel intelligent bulldog, and the article had added a little lushly, "in his manner are combined effectively the force, the tenacity, the staying power of that doughty animal with all the intellect and charm and poise of a college professor or a statesma