"I'll wait," said Paynter, "until I see this Queeg."
"When you're at the bottom, there's no place to go but up," said Willie. "Can you imagine anyone worse than De Vriess?"
"Well, it's conceivable. I'll take this in to the skipper-"
"No, no, allow me that luxury."
Willie ran down the ladder to the wardroom and rapped at the captain's door.
"Come in-"
"Good news, Captain," cried Willie, as he opened the door. The captain snapped on his bed light and squinted at the mes-sage, leaning on an elbow, his face streaked with red marks from the creases of his pillow.
"Well, well," he said, with a small wry smile. "Call that good news, do you Keith?"
"I guess it is for you, sir, after six years. You'll probably get a new destroyer. Maybe shore duty."
"You're all for shore duty, eh, Keith? That's a thoroughly salty viewpoint. You've picked it up real quickly."
"Why, I sort of think you rate it, sir, that's all."
"Well, I hope the Bureau agrees with you. Thanks, Keith. Good night."
Willie left with a feeling that his sarcasm had somehow bounced off the captain's hide. But he didn't care. He could suffer through the next weeks on the Caine gladly now. De-liverance was on the way, in the person of Lieutenant Com-mander Philip F. Queeg.
9
First Day at Sea
After four days of repairs, the Caine was ordered to sea, for minesweeping exercises in waters near Oahu. "Well, well," said Captain De Vriess, when Willie brought him the decoded message, "minesweeping, eh? Looks like our friend Queeg will be relieving me just in time."
"Does that mean we're going to minesweep for real in-in the near future, sir?"
"Could be."
"Has the Caine ever done any sweeping, sir?"
"Sure, dummy mines by the hundreds. Never in any opera-tion, thank God." De Vriess climbed out of his bunk and reached for his trousers. "I'll like minesweeping, Keith, when they figure out one simple problem."
"What's that, sir?"
"Who sweeps ahead of the minesweepers- Well, tell Steve Maryk to come in here, will you? And tell Whittaker I'd like some coffee."
"Yes, sir."
"Not the black tar that's been cooking down since this morn-ing. Fresh."
"Yes, sir."
Roland Keefer came aboard that evening for dinner, bring-ing a batch of mail for Willie from the BOQ. As usual, Willie ripped open May's letter first. She had returned to college for the autumn session. It was a sacrifice, for during the summer Marty Rubin had obtained a midday radio booking for her, and she might have continued on it. The pay was a hundred dollars a week.
But I don't care, dear. The more I read and study, the less ambitious I become. Last year I was sure I wanted nothing in life but a top salary as a top singer. I despised the girls I met in Hunter at first because they couldn't earn a nickel. But I'm beginning to wonder whether it's sensible to give up all my days and nights for a salary. I love to sing, I guess I always will. As long as I have to earn money I'm glad I can do it at a fair rate in work I enjoy rather than as a typist in some stale office. But I know I'll never be a first-rate singer-haven't the voice, haven't the style, haven't the looks (no, I haven't, dear). What I want now, I think, is to trap some kindhearted sugar daddy who will help me have a couple of babies and otherwise let me read in peace.
Score one for you, my love. Dickens is terrif. Sat up all night reading Dombey and Son-for a book report, mind you, that isn't due till next week-and now have huge black bags under my eyes. Glad you can't see me.
What a lie that last sentence is. Are you ever coming home? When is this war going to end? I thought after Italy surrendered that I'd be seeing you any day. But it seems to be bogging down for another long stretch. The European news is usually good but I'm afraid I care mostly about the Pacific. And it may be unpatriotic, but I'm awfully glad you haven't caught the Caine yet.
I love you.
MAY
"Well," said Roland as they sat down to dinner, "looks like I'll be saying good-by to you all for a while. Staff's piling aboard the Yorktown tomorrow. Guess the admiral wants some sea pay."
Tom Keefer's face darkened. He threw down his knife and fork. "Wouldn't you know. A new flattop."
"That hurts, doesn't it, Tom?" said De Vriess, grinning.
"What's the matter, Tom?" said Maryk. "Don't you like minesweeping?" All the officers laughed at the standard joke about the communicator.
"Hell, I just want to see some war, as long as my sands are running out uselessly-"
"You came aboard too late," said Adams. "We saw plenty of war before-"
"You saw some errand-boy duty," said Keefer. "I'm in-terested in essences, not accidents. The nub of this Pacific war is the duel of flying machines. Everything else is as routine as the work of milkmen and filing clerks. All uncertainty and all decision rides with the carriers."
"I've got some friends on the Saratoga," said the captain. "Pretty routine life aboard her, too, Tom."
"War is ninety-nine per cent routine-routine that trained monkeys could perform," said Keefer. "But the one per cent of chance and creative action on which the history of the world is hanging right now you'll find on carriers. That's what I want to be part of. So my dear brother, who would like noth-ing better than to rest his duff in Hawaii for the rest of the war-"
"Tom, you are but so right," threw in Roland cheerfully. "-gets carted aboard a carrier on a silver charger, and I ride the Caine."
"Have some more liver, Tom," said Maryk. The first lieuten-ant, who resembled a prize fighter or drill sergeant with his bullet head, short wide nose, and close-clipped hair, had a surprisingly innocent, affectionate smile which changed his whole appearance.
"Why don't you send in another transfer request, Tom?" said the captain. "I'll approve it again."
"I've given up. This ship is an outcast, mantled by outcasts, and named for the great outcast of mankind. My destiny is the Caine. It's the purgatory for my sins."
"Any interesting sins, Tom? Tell us about `em," said Gorton, leering over a heavy forkful of liver.
"Sins that would make even the naked whores in your picture collection blush, Burt," said Keefer, raising a hoot of laughter at the exec.
The captain regarded Keefer admiringly. "That's the liter-ary mind for you. I never thought of Caine being a symbolic name-"
"The extra e threw you off, Captain. God always likes to veil his symbols a bit, being, among His other attributes, the perfect literary artist."
"Well, I'm glad I stayed aboard for dinner," said Maryk. "You haven't opened up for a long while, Tom. Been off your form."
"He just got tired of casting his pearls before swine," said the captain. "Let's have the ice cream, Whittaker."
Willie had noticed a curious mixture of respect and satire in the captain's attitude toward Tom Keefer. He was beginning to realize that the wardroom was a tangle of subtle, complex evaluations by the officers of each other, knotting centrally, as it were, in the person and attitudes of the captain. It seemed to him that De Vriess must have an insoluble difficulty in facing a subordinate so much more cultured and gifted than himself. Yet somehow De Vriess struck a note with Keefer that enabled him to use an amiable condescension, where he had no right to condescend.
Harding broke his accustomed silence to remark, "Friend of mine was sent to a destroyer called the Abel. Wonder what you'd say if you were aboard her, Mr. Keefer?"
"I'd probably say that I was sacrificing my first fruits aboard her, as God knows I am here, and had some hope they'd be acceptable," rejoined Keefer.
"What first fruits, Tom?" said Gorton.
"My young years, my early vigor, the time in which Sheridan produced The Rivals, and Dickens, Pickwick, and Meredith, Richard Feverel. What am I producing? A lot of decodes and registered pub inventories. My freshness is spending its waver-ing shower in the dust. At least if I were on a carrier-"
"You stole that line," said
Willie proudly, "from Francis Thompson."
"Christ," exploded the captain, "this ship is becoming a damned literary society. I'm glad I'm getting off."
"Well, it seems to me, Mr. Keefer," said Harding, "that you can twist any ship's name into a symbolical meaning. Caine, Abel-"
"The world is an endless treasury of symbols," said Keefer. "That's grade-school theology."
"I think Harding means that you're an endless treasury of plays on words," said Willie.
"Salvo for the junior ensign," cried Gorton, signaling with a fat forefinger for a third helping of ice cream.
"All intelligent conversation is playing on words," said Keefer. "The rest is definitions and instructions."
"What I mean," persisted Harding, "you can go on spinning those symbols forever, and one's as good as another-"
"Not quite," said Keefer, with a brief nod of appreciation at the point, "because the test of the validity of any symbol is the extent to which it's rooted in reality. What I said about the Abel was a specious verbalism to answer you. But you see I am aboard the Caine."
"Then we're all outcasts for our sins," said Willie.
"Hell, what sins? Keith looks as though butter wouldn't melt in his mouth," said Maryk. "Look at that sweet face."
"Who knows? Maybe he robbed his mother's purse once," said Keefer. "Sin is relative to character."
"Wonder what I ever did," said Gorton.
"It's hard to know what would be sin in a born degenerate," said Keefer. "You probably worship Satan in that private state-room."
"I," said the captain, rising, "am going to see that Hopalong Cassidy movie on the Johnson. Tom gives me mental indiges-tion."
The Caine left Pearl Harbor at dawn in a rain squall.
The light was still dim on the bridge when Maryk bawled into a greenish brass speaking tube, "Ready in all respects to get under way, Captain!" Willie, stationed on the bridge as Junior OOD, was utterly bewildered by the rapid reports and orders which went before this word. He stood out in the warm rain in his khakis, shielding his binoculars under his arm, deny-ing himself the protection of the pilothouse in the vague in-tention of demonstrating that he was a real seaman.
Captain de Vriess came up the ladder. He paced the bridge slowly, leaning over the bulwarks to look at the lines, es-timating the wind, peering astern at the channel, issuing brief orders in a dry pleasant tone. His bearing was very impressive, Willie admitted to himself, because it was natural, perhaps unconscious. It was not a matter of a stiff spine, squared shoulders, and a sucked-in stomach. Knowledge was in his eye, authority in his manner, decision in the sharp lines of his mouth.
"Well, hell," Willie thought, "if a destroyer captain can't get a ship away from alongside, what is he good for?" He had already adopted the Caine mode of shading the truth toward the glamorous side by regarding the ship as an honest-to--goodness destroyer.
His meditations were interrupted by a shocking blast on the ship's steam whistle. The stern of the destroyer next to the Caine swung away sluggishly, pulled by a small tug, leaving a narrow triangle of open water bubbling under the rain.
"Take in all lines to port," said the captain.
A goateed sailor named Grubnecker, who wore headphones, reported in a moment, "All lines taken in fore and aft, sir."
"Port back one third," said the captain.
The fat ship's yeoman at the engine telegraph, Jellybelly, repeated the order and rang it up. The engine-room pointer answered. The ship began to vibrate, and slowly to move back-ward. Willie had an intuitive flash that this was a historic moment, his first time under way aboard the Caine. But he pushed it from his mind. This ship was not going to be im-portant in his life-he was determined to see to that.
"Stand clear of the bulkhead, Mr. Keith," said De Vriess sharply, leaning over the side.
"Beg pardon, sir," said Willie, leaping aside. He mopped the streaming rain from his face.
"All engines stop," ordered De Vriess. He walked past Willie, remarking, "Don't you know enough to get in out of the rain? Go in the pilothouse."
"Thank you, sir." He took shelter gladly. A stiff wind was slanting the rain across the channel. Drops drummed on the windows of the wheelhouse.
"Fantail reports channel buoy a hundred yards dead astern," called Grubnecker.
"I see it," said the captain.
Maryk, in a dripping mackintosh, peered down the channel through binoculars. "Submarine coming down the channel, Captain. Making ten knots. Distance one thousand."
"Very well."
"Fantail reports battle wagon and two tin cans coming up--channel past the gate, sir," said the telephone talker. "Forty-second Street and Broadway out here today," said De Vriess.
Willie looked out at the choppy channel, thinking that the Caine was in difficulties already. The wind was moving her swiftly down on the channel buoy. There was little space to maneuver between the bobbing buoy and the ships in the docks. The battleship and the submarine were rapidly closing from both sides.
De Vriess, unperturbed, issued a swift series of engine and rudder orders, the purpose of which escaped Willie. But the effect was to swing the minesweeper around in the backing arc, heading down-channel, well clear of the buoy, falling in line behind the departing submarine. Meantime the battleship and its escorts passed down the port side with plenty of room. Willie observed that none of the sailors commented or seemed impressed, so he assumed that what had appeared knotty to him was a matter of course to an experienced seaman.
Maryk stepped into the pilothouse and swabbed his face with a towel hung on the captain's chair. "Damn! Puget Sound weather." He noticed Willie standing around, looking uncom-monly useless. "What the devil are you doing in here? You're supposed to stand lookout on the starboard side-"
"Captain told me to get in out of the rain."
"Hell, you probably were under his feet. Come on out. You won't melt."
"Gladly, sir." Willie followed him out into the weather, irritated at being in the wrong whatever he did.
"Learn anything," asked Maryk, peering down-channel, "from that backing maneuver?"
"Seemed pretty routine," said Willie.
Maryk dipped his binoculars and looked at Willie, showing all his teeth in a mystified grin. "You ever been on a bridge before, Keith?"
"No, sir."
Maryk nodded, and resumed his search of the channel through the glasses.
"Why," said Willie, wiping rain from his eyes, "was there anything remarkable about it?"
"Christ, no, no," said Maryk. "Any ensign could have handled the ship the way the old man did. I thought maybe you were impressed for no good reason." He grinned again and walked to the other side of the bridge.
The squall passed and the sun came out brilliantly as the Caine cleared the channel entrance. When Willie came off watch he went to the forescastle to enjoy the view of Diamond Head and Oahu's green hills. The ship knifed through calm blue water at twenty knots. He was agreeably surprised at the old minesweeper's brisk speed. There were traces of de-stroyer grandeur yet in the rusty ruin. The deck rolled steeply, and sparkling spray flew up from the bow wave, and Willie was proud of not being in the least seasick. For the first time since his arrival on the Caine he felt moderately happy.
But he made the mistake of going below for a cup of coffee. Keefer captured him and set him to work correcting publica-tions. This was the dreariest of all communication chores. Willie hated the red ink, the scissors and smelly paste, and the interminable niggling corrections: "Page 9 para. 0862 line 3: change All prescribed gunnery exercises to read All gunnery exercises prescribed by USNF 7A." He had visions of thou-sands of ensigns all over the globe straining their eyes and crooking their backs over these preposterous trifles.
The motion of the ship, heaving the green table up and down as he bent over it, began to trouble him. He noticed with annoyance that some of the corrections which Keefer had dumped on him in a heap were very old. Several of them he had himself entered in CincP
ac's books, months ago. At one point he threw down the pen with an exclamation of disgust. He had spent an hour minutely entering a set of ink corrections which were obsolete; further down in the pile there were new printed pages to replace them. "Damn," he said to Carmody, who was decoding messages beside him, "doesn't Keefer ever enter corrections? These things are piled up since the last war."
"Lieutenant Keefer's too busy with his novel," burst out Carmody bitterly, stroking his faint mustache.
"What novel?"
"He's writing some kind of novel. Half the time at night when I'm trying to sleep he's pacing around talking to himself. Then in the daytime he flakes out. Why, he can work these damn decoding gismos ten times faster than anybody in the wardroom. He spent six months on the beach studying them. He could clear up the whole traffic in a couple of hours a day. But we're always behind, and you, Rabbitt and I are clearing about ninety per cent of it. I think he's a foul ball."
Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny Page 13
