Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  Towers of white water suddenly grew out of the sea on both sides of the Stanfield. For half a second Willie was puzzled, and thought they might be a queer tropical weather trick. Then the words burst from his throat: "Captain! The Stanfield's being straddled!"

  Queeg looked at the subsiding splashes and shouted into the pilothouse. "All engines ahead full! hard right rudder!"

  "There, Captain!" Willie pointed to an orange flash followed by a puff of black smoke, high on a cliff to the north. "That's the battery, sir!" He ran out on the wing, and shouted up to the flying bridge, "Gun watch!"

  Jorgensen poked his head over the bulwark. "Yes, Mr. Keith?"

  "Shore battery bears 045 relative, distance 4000, top of the cliff! There, see that flash? Train the main battery on it!"

  "Aye aye, sir!... All guns, shore battery, 045 relative, elevation 10, distance 4000!"

  The Stanfield was whirling in a tight circle through a rain of splashes, and, even as it turned, it blasted an earsplitting salvo from its five-inch guns. Willie saw the Caine's gun crews jump to their places. The line of three-inch guns swung par-allel, pointing more and more astern each second as the ship turned.

  "Rudder amidships! Steady as you go!" Willie heard Queeg say. The minesweeper was now headed directly away from the shore battery, leaping through the water at twenty knots. Wil-lie ran into the pilothouse.

  "Captain, main battery manned and on target!" Queeg seemed not to hear. He stood at an open window, with a squinting smile on his face. "Captain, request permission to come broadside and fire at the shore battery! We're on the target, sir!" The guns of the Stanfield roared two more salvos astern. Queeg paid no attention. He did not turn his head or his eyes. "Sir," said Willie desperately, "I request permission to open fire with number-four gun! A clear shot over the stern, sir!"

  Queeg said nothing. The officer of the deck ran out on the wing and saw the destroyer, a dwindling shape, fire its guns again. A thick ball of dust enveloped the place on the cliff where the battery had been. Flames darted out of the dust as the salvo struck. Again the Stanfield was straddled. It fired four rapid salvos. There were no answering shots; at least there seemed to be no more splashes rising near the de-stroyer. Already the Caine was too far away for Willie to be certain.

  He whispered the story to Maryk after dinner. The exec grunted, and made no comment. But late that night he wrote in his log:

  19 June. Saipan. I did not see this at first hand. It was reported to me by an OOD. He states that this vessel was investigating the scene of an air crash with a destroyer. The destroyer, 1000 yards on our beam, was taken under fire by a shore battery. Captain reversed course and left scene without firing a shot, though battery was well within our range and our guns were manned and ready.

  The Saipan campaign was not yet over when the Caine was detached from the attack force and ordered to escort a damaged battleship to Majuro. That was the end of the mine-sweeper's part in the Marianas battle. It missed the Turkey Shoot and the invasion of Guam; while these brilliant events were going forward the Caine sank back into escort duty. From Majuro it accompanied a carrier to Kwajalein, a dull, domesticated Kwajalein all knobby with Quonset huts. Blighted yellowish greenery was appearing again around the edges of the sandy air strips, and there was a continuous crawling on the beach of bulldozers and jeeps. Willie thought it curious that, with the coming of the Americans, the once-charming tropic islands had taken on the look of vacant lots in Los Angeles.

  The old minesweeper went on with the carrier to Eniwetok, and was sent back to Kwajalein with some LST's, and then to Eniwetok again with a tanker. The year rounded into August and the Caine still plied among the atolls of the Central Pacific, trapped once more in tedious shuttling, this time in the grip of Com Fifth Fleet.

  The ship's life remained a static vexatious weariness. There were no grand incidents for a while, and Maryk's log writing dwindled. Everything was known. All personalities had been explored, and even Queeg, it seemed, had at last run through his surprises. What happened today had happened yesterday, and would happen tomorrow: heat, zigzagging, little nervous spats, paper work, watches, mechanical breakdowns, and steady scratchy nagging by the captain.

  The taste of this wretched time was preserved for Willie in the score of Oklahoma! Jorgensen had picked up the album at Majuro. He played it day and night in the wardroom; and when he was not playing it the boys in the radio shack borrowed it and piped it through the loudspeakers. For the rest of his life, Willie would be unable to hear

  "Don't-throw

  Bo-kays at me,"

  without being overwhelmed by a flashing impression of heat, boredom, and near-to-screaming nervous fatigue.

  Willie had an extra burden to carry. Once the captain's favorite, he had suddenly become the wardroom goat. The turn seemed to come immediately after the Stanfield episode. Until then Keefer had been Queeg's main target; but thereafter everyone noticed a marked shift of the captain's hounding to Lieutenant Keith. One evening at dinner the novelist ceremo-niously presented to Willie a large cardboard head of a goat cut from a beer advertisement. The transfer of this Caine heirloom was accompanied with great laughter, in which Willie wryly joined. The summons, "Mr. Keith, report to the captain's cabin," boomed over the p.a. system a couple of times each day; and seldom did Willie lie down for a few hours of sleep be-tween watches, without being shaken awake by a mess boy and told, "Cap'n wants to talk to you, suh."

  Queeg's complaints in these interviews were about the slow-ness of decoding, or the routing of mail, or the correction of publications, or a smell of coffee coming from the radio shack, or an error of a signalman in copying a message-it did not much matter what. Willie began to develop a deep, dull hate for Queeg. It was nothing like the boyish pique he had felt against Captain de Vriess. It was like the hate of a husband for a sick wife, a mature, solid hate, caused by an unbreakable tie to a loathsome person, and existing not as a self-justification, but for the rotten gleam of pleasure it gave off in the continu-ing gloom.

  Out of this hate, Willie achieved an unbelievable thorough-ness and accuracy in his work. It was his one joy to frustrate the captain by anticipating his complaints and stopping his mouth. But there was a permanent hole in his defenses: Ducely. When the captain, droning nastily in triumph, faced Willie with a mistake or an omission in his department, it nearly always traced back to the assistant communicator. Willie had tried rage, contempt, invective, pleading, and even a bitter interview in the presence of Maryk. At first Ducely, blushing and boyish, had made promises to reform. But he had re-mained exactly as vague and slovenly as before. In the end he had retreated into petulant assertions that he was no good, and knew it, and never would be any good, and there was nothing for Willie to do but report him to Queeg for court--martial or dismissal. Willie took a belligerent pride in never blaming his assistant to the captain, by word or hint. It gave him perverse pleasure to know that Ducely had received an excellent fitness report.

  August dragged, and dragged, and expired into September, with the Caine en route from Kwajalein to Eniwetok in the company of ten green crawling LCI's.

  During the first two weeks of September an increasingly tense, restless expectation spread among the officers. It was now twelve months since Queeg had been ordered to the Caine, and they knew that few captains held their posts longer than a year. Willie took to going to the radio shack and scanning the Fox skeds as they came out of the radiomen's typewriters, seeking the prayed-for BuPers despatch. Queeg himself showed stirrings of the same eagerness. Several times Willie found him in the shack, glancing through the skeds.

  They say the watched pot never boils. It is equally true that the watched Fox sked never contains the captain's orders. The vigil simply increased the nervous irritation in the ship, spreading down from the officers to the men. Eccentricities, those fungi of loneliness and boredom, began to flourish rankly on the Caine. The men grew queerly shaped beards, and had their hair cut in the shapes of hearts, crosses, and
stars. Paynter caught a fiddler crab on the beach at Kwajalein, a thing the size of a pie, with one huge multicolored claw. He brought it aboard, and kept it in his room, walking it every evening on the forecastle at the end of a string like a dog. He called the hideous creature Heifetz. Paynter and Keefer had a falling--out when the crab escaped, walked in on the novelist while he sat naked at his desk, composing, and nipped one of his toes with the big claw. Keefer danced shrieking into the wardroom. He attempted to exterminate Heifetz with the ship's cutlass, and Paynter threw himself between the crab and the maddened nude Keefer. Bad blood existed between the two officers there-after.

  Ensign Ducely went queer, too, falling ragingly in love with a corset advertisement in the New Yorker. To Willie's eye the nameless maiden in the advertisement was like a thousand other clothing models he had seen in magazines-arched brows, big eyes, angular cheeks, pouting mouth, a fetching figure, and a haughty, revolted look, as though someone had just offered her a jellyfish to hold. But Ducely swore that this was the woman he had searched for all his life. He wrote off letters to the magazine and the clothing firm asking for her name and address, and he also wrote to friends in three New York advertising agencies, begging them to track her down. If his efficiency had been around twenty-five per cent of normal before, it now dropped to zero. He languished on his bunk, sighing over the corset ad, by day and by night.

  Willie took uneasy note of these peculiarities. They re-minded him of incidents in novels about men on long sea voyages, and there was a not quite pleasant amusement in seeing the classic symptoms popping out in his shipmates. And then he himself was stricken. One day the thought occurred to him, as he was drinking coffee on the bridge during a watch, that it would be rather elegant to have his own monogrammed coffee mug. In itself the notion was not odd, but his response to it was. In a few minutes, a monogrammed coffee mug came to seem to him the most wonderful imaginable possession on earth. He could not pay attention to the watch for thinking of the mug. He could see it floating in the air before his eyes. When he was relieved he rushed to the shipfitter's shack, borrowed a small file, and spent several hours gouging "WK" into a crockery cup with a jeweler's precision and delicacy while the dinner hour passed and night fell. He filled the ex-cavated letters with a rich blue paint, and laid the mug tenderly in his desk drawer to dry, cushioned with socks and underwear. When he was wakened at 4 A.M. to go on watch his first thought was of the mug. He took it out of the drawer and sat gloating over it like a girl over a love letter, so he was ten minutes late in relieving, and drew a snarl from the weary Keefer. The following afternoon he brought the cup up. to the bridge and casually handed it to the signalman Urban, asking him to fill it from the radar-shack Silex. The envious, admiring glances of the sailors filled Willie with pleasure.

  Next morning, coming on the bridge again with his wonder-ful cup, Willie was enraged to see Urban drinking out of a mug monogrammed "LU," just like his own. He took this as a personal insult. He soon saw that a rash of monogrammed mugs had broken out throughout the ship. The boatswain's mate Winston carried one etched with an insignia in fine Old English lettering, with heraldic flourishes. Willie's monogram was a kindergarten work compared to this, and to a dozen other sailors' cups. He angrily threw his mug into the sea that night.

  In this long nightmare time, Willie spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours daydreaming about May Wynn, staring at her pictures, or reading and re-reading her letters. She was his one link with what had once been his life. His civilian existence now seemed a perfumed glamorous unreality, like a Hollywood movie about high society. Reality was the rolling minesweeper, and the sea, and shabby khakis, and binoculars, and the captain's buzzer. He wrote wildly passionate letters to the girl, and with the greatest difficulty edited out any references to marriage. It made him uneasy and guilty to send off these letters, because as time passed he suspected more and more that he was not going to marry May. If he ever came back alive he wanted peace and luxury, not a strug-gling inept marriage with a coarse singer. So his reason in-formed him; but reason had little to do with the hours of romantic fantasy with which he doped himself to beguile the tedium and deaden the pain of Queeg's nagging. He knew his letters were queerly evasive and contradictory; but such as they were, he sent them off. In return, in the rare times when the minesweeper encountered a fleet post office, he would get batches of warm happy letters from May, which at once in-toxicated and worried him. She gave herself completely to him in these letters, and followed his silent treatment of the subject of marriage. In this strange love affair on paper Willie found himself becoming more and more attached to May and at the same time increasingly aware that he was being unjust to her. But the dreamworld was too precious an anodyne to be broken up; and so he persisted in his fervid pointless love letters.

  25

  A Medal for Roland Keefer

  On October 1, with Captain Queeg still in command, the old minesweeper steamed into Ulithi Atoll, an atoll like any other atoll, a ragged ring of islands, reefs, and green water, halfway between Guam and the newly captured Palaus. As the captain was maneuvering the nose of the ship into the center of the anchoring berth, Willie, yawning on the starboard wing, felt a tap on his shoulder. He turned. Keefer, pointing off to the right, said, "Willie dear, look yonder and tell me it's a hallu-cination."

  A thousand yards away an LST, painted with brown-and--green tropic camouflage, was anchored. Tied to the open ramp at the bow were three sixty-ton target sleds. Willie said sadly, "Oh, Christ, no."

  "What do you see?" said Keefer.

  "Targets. That's why we were sent down to this hole, no doubt." The despatch ordering the Caine to proceed from Eniwetok to Ulithi alone at high speed had been the subject of extended guessing in the wardroom.

  "I am going below to fall on my sword," said the novelist.

  The weary old Caine went back to work, hauling targets around the open sea near Ulithi for the fleet's gunnery practice. Day after day, dawn found the ship steaming out of the channel with the sled, and dusk was usually purple over the atoll be-fore it dropped anchor again. The effect of this on Captain Queeg was marked. In the first couple of days of target-towing he was more irascible and cantankerous than ever. The pilot-house echoed with his screeches and curses. Then he fell into a comatose condition. He turned over the conning of the ship entirely to Maryk, even to weighing anchor in the morning and steaming into the channel at night. Occasionally in fog or rain he would come to the bridge and take the conn. Otherwise he lay in his bunk, day and night, reading, or playing with a jigsaw puzzle, or staring.

  Personal to Lieutenants Keefer and Keith. Greetings, sweepers. How about coming over tonight? I have the duty. Roland.

  The Caine, returning to Ulithi in the sunset, received this blinker message from a carrier far up in the lagoon, one of a large number which had come in during the day and now were crowded at the north end of the anchorage, a mass of oblong shapes, black against the red sky. Willie, who had the deck, sent the boatswain's mate to fetch Keefer. The novelist came to the bridge when the Caine's anchor was splashing into the water. "What is that lucky clown doing on the Montauk?" Keefer said, peering through binoculars at the carriers. "Last I heard he was on the Belleau Wood."

  "When was that?" Willie said.

  "I don't know-five, six months ago. He never writes."

  "He just commutes from carrier to carrier, I guess."

  Keefer's face twisted in a wry grin. The evening breeze stirred his lank black hair. "I could almost believe," he said, "that BuPers is deliberately and systematically insulting me. I have put in about seventeen requests for transfer to a car-rier- Well. Think we can risk a reply without bothering Queeg? The answer is no, of course, don't bother saying it. Guess I'll have to pay a visit to Grendel's cave. Christ, it's been a year since we saw Rollo last in Pearl, isn't it?"

  "I guess so. Seems longer."

  "Rather. This cruise under Queeg seems to me to be lasting about as long as the Renaissance. W
ell. Here's hoping he's not in a blood-drinking mood."

  Queeg, lying on his bunk, yawning over a wrinkled old Es-quire, said, "Well now, Tom, let's see. Seems to me you have a registered publications inventory due on 1 October. Have you turned it in?"

  "No, sir. As you know we've been at sea every day and-"

  "We haven't been at sea at night. I daresay you've managed to write quite a bit of your novel lately. I've seen you at it almost every night-"

  "Sir, I promise to do the inventory tonight when I get back, even if it means staying up all night-"

  The captain shook his head. "I've got my methods, Tom, and they're the result of a hell of a lot of observation of human nature. What's more I'm a damn softhearted guy, strange as that may sound to you, and if I make one exception I'll start making more and my whole system will fly to pieces, and whatever you may think of the way I run this ship at least it's been run properly and I've made no mistakes yet. So I'm sorry and it's nothing personal but permission is denied until such time as you turn in that inventory."

  Keefer and Willie took inventory that night, to the accom-paniment of some picturesque cursing by the gunnery officer. It had been galling him for a year that Queeg had never per-mitted him to transfer custody of the secret publications. In Pearl Harbor, Queeg had compelled him to take the books back from Willie, saying it would only be for a week or two, until Willie mastered the manual; but thereafter the captain had balked at allowing the transfer, month after month.