Except for that lack of moral conviction, not even Millstor could have added any explanation of his puling vacillations. For most of one day he stood by the rail wondering what had happened in his life. In college he had been willing to fight anyone who threatened the inner citadels he had constructed. On Guadalcanal he had, as his commanding officer reported, “ignored the fact that there was danger.” But here aboard the Roviana, faced with the debacle of his own life, he was lost in a fog of inanition.
Where had it come from, this sickness of will? He recalled that in recent years Liz had been reading a good many books about marriage, what it was that made a man and woman—especially the woman—happy. She had said many times, “John, I’m worried. About us.” By that time he was disgusted with her clever gambit and had merely grunted, “What’s it now, Liz?”
She had rocked him back on his heels by saying, “I’m afraid it’s something dreadfully important, John. What I mean is, I’m afraid I’m not a good wife. Oh, socially I am, but what I mean is … Oh, dammit, sexually.”
Then it became clear. She had come upon an outspoken article by a University of Iowa professor who said that twentieth-century American marriages were different from all preceding ones in that the wife had finally won the right to demand emotional and physical gratifications equal to those previously enjoyed only by the husband. “I mean,” Liz had said, “do I satisfy you? I mean really down deep?” And by professing her own embarrassed inadequacy she had let him know that according to the standards of the professor’s article, he had never provided her with the gratifications she now learned had been her due.
From that day John Millstor had known no peace. It seemed to him that all aspects of American society—toothpaste ads, editorials, women’s magazines, community gossip—were dedicated to the job of reminding men that in the American woman they had a treasure never before equaled in the history of the world and that only through the most meticulous attention could any man hope to retain his prize. Once, as a young man, John had naïvely considered marriage a rather delightful and normal prelude to having three or four children, a family pew in the Episcopal Church, a recognized niche in society and a happy home. It had seemed as simple as that. Now he discovered how ingenuous he had been. “Marriage,” one of his wife’s clippings had read, “is a social and psychological jungle in which only the eternally vigilant can find their way.”
Liz agreed with this concept. “Really, John,” she had often said, “I think marriage is the most difficult of all social relationships. It’s something you’ve got to work at.” And working, John discovered, meant sacrificing every normal, relaxed instinct he had ever known. It meant making the right friends, bucking for more pay, being a pal to his children and not just a father. Above all it meant that he had to be understanding when his wife dallied in mild flirtations with other men. Somewhere Liz had read that if marriage were to succeed, husbands and wives should take separate vacations, so he was miserable at the Millstor island in Maine, while she was bedazzled by an Englishman in Bermuda.
He looked at the dark sea and hammered his hands against the railing. He thought of his wonderfully attractive wife—the Australian newspaper woman had asked, “What do these American girls have that we don’t have?”—and he concluded that the erosion of his marriage had not been Liz’s acknowledged objective. She was too fine a woman for that. No, it was either the swift change of modern life or some inadequacy on his part. He tried to reconstruct his errors. Had he been forceful enough? Hell, a man isn’t supposed to play the tyrant, not in the twentieth century. Had he tried to make Liz understand his side of marriage? He had talked with her, but he would never have been willing to browbeat her the way McNair terrorized his frowsy wife.
Then, from far back in his courtship days, he remembered a warning his mother had delivered: “John, you mustn’t marry Elizabeth. She’s the new type of woman, the efficient American wife. But you’re the old-fashioned type of man, and I don’t think you’ll be strong enough to battle things out with her.”
Had that been the poison? Had those chance words caused him to avoid any arguments with Liz lest he be guilty of having allowed his mother to becloud his marriage?
Again he hammered the railing and thought, “Damn it all! Liz isn’t fundamentally mean. There’s nothing wrong with her. She’s generous and honorable, and I love her!” He was about to rush in and discuss the impasse with her when a small voice came to his elbow and in the night shadows he saw Mrs. McNair. “Mr. Millstor,” she said haltingly, “you may think ill of me, but I’ve got to say it.”
“Got to say what?” John demanded.
“Please forgive me, but you ought to watch your wife.”
No one spoke. The soft phosphorescence of the tropical sea rose quietly from the prow of the Roviana and slithered off into darkness. Great blobs of protoplasm scintillated in the night, casting an eerie glow upon the flying fish that sailed across the night.
“Mr. Millstor,” the complaining voice begged, “I know the Cap’m. He’s a weak man. Please watch your wife.”
Finally Millstor spoke. “My wife? What do you mean?”
“Forgive me, but she’s an evil woman.”
The words shocked Millstor and automatically he drew back his hand as if to strike the Australian woman. In shame he dropped it and mumbled, “What do you mean?”
At last Mrs. McNair put her hand on John’s arm. “You won’t get angry? All right. Mrs. Millstor is in our cabin right now. Not completely dressed.”
“Oh, hell,” Millstor gasped. He bowed his head for a moment and tried vainly to reach some decent conclusion to his long hours of self-torment.
It was Mrs. McNair who broke the spell. “I know it’s difficult,” she said, looking up at him with eyes that suddenly seemed very large and important. “There have been times in my marriage,” she confessed, “when I’ve beat my brains trying to figure what ought to be done.”
“Look,” Millstor said dully. From the bridge Captain McNair and Liz looked down upon the conspirators.
“Cap’m says we’ll see Guadalcanal tomorrow,” Liz announced gaily.
McNair boomed with some satisfaction. “You’ll soon be on dry land, Nella.”
“Are you really leaving?” Millstor asked quietly.
“Yes. That’s why I spoke to you. Please don’t let some tragedy happen.”
“Look at them!” Millstor muttered as the couple above went forward. “They know we’ve been talking about them.”
“The Cap’m don’t let talk worry him,” the plain little woman said, retreating in accustomed humiliation to her cabin.
Her parting words had a strange effect upon Millstor. Big Alec McNair didn’t bother about talk. If somebody had been fooling with his wife, the brawling Australian would have knocked him in the head with a beer bottle. But John Millstor, the pasteurized American husband, had long ago surrendered such primitive reactions. Instead, he went to his cabin determined to talk this problem out with his wife.
She did not appear till several hours later, laughing a bit too obviously. She threw her hat on the bunk and said selfconsciously, “What do you think? I’ve been conning the ship!”
“On the bridge?”
“Yep! Course is 349 true.”
“Liz,” he began quietly, “aren’t you seeing too much of Captain McNair?”
“Why, John!” she laughed spontaneously. “He’s only been showing me how a ship operates.”
“Darling, let’s not lie to one another. On the Malekula trail I saw him kissing you.”
Liz turned an outraged scarlet. “That’s dreadfully unfair, John. He carried me across the stream and kissed me against my will.”
An argument like this was degrading and Millstor would gladly have dropped it, accepting defeat, but he had to continue. “No, Liz. It was you who kissed him. Darling, I saw you.”
She whipped her lithe body about and slapped him in the face. “Don’t call me darling,” she snapped. “If you saw your
wife kissing another man, why didn’t you do something about it instead of playing the peeping Tom?”
“Liz,” he pleaded, “I’m merely trying to prevent …”
Suddenly his wife became very cool. She stared at him and asked, “What are you trying to prevent, John?”
“I guess I’m trying to prevent you from making a fool of yourself.”
“That’s horrid, John. Truly, that’s horrid, coming from you.”
“It’s not coming from me,” he persisted doggedly. “Mrs. McNair asked me to do something. She saw you in her cabin.”
Liz threw her delicate hands over her face and muttered, “That cheap, frowsy woman! Peeping through keyholes.” She pushed her husband aside and went on deck.
Alone John tried to comprehend the inconclusiveness of the argument. He realized that Liz was right in demanding to know why he had not stepped onto the trail when McNair was kissing her. He searched the narrow Goal Poster looking for her, but he did not find her that night. Shortly before breakfast she appeared and dabbed her face with cold cream.
“Where have you been?” Millstor asked.
“Sleeping in a lifeboat,” she said. He wanted to believe her but noticed that her clothes were not rumpled.
“Liz,” he said earnestly, “if you’re involved with McNair …”
She wiped the cream off her face and studied her husband. He sensed that she was assessing him ruthlessly as the spineless creature he had become. “John,” she said with cool disgust, “we mustn’t fool each other any longer. I did kiss Alec. I did let him make love to me. And I liked it. Because Alec McNair is what you never were. A man.”
Millstor looked away. “But Liz …” he fumbled.
“It’s all washed up, John. Now please get out of the way.” With the confident precision of a general who has just handed down surrender terms, she pushed her way past him onto the deck. “By the way,” she called back, “over there’s Guadalcanal.”
Millstor sat dumbly on his bunk. His wife was gone. His world was crumbling. He leaned forward and held his chin, aware of the ridiculous figure he represented: the modern husband who has been refined to the point of moral impotency.
He could guess why Liz preferred ugly, tough Alec McNair. The Australian retained, arrogantly, every distinguishing male characteristic that John Millstor had been forced to give up. After a beer, McNair belched as college students had done at Harvard years ago. (John had surrendered this repulsive habit in 1938.) McNair picked his nose. (John hadn’t done so since 1939.) The Australian went unshaved. (There had been a real crisis about this in 1940.) And in bed McNair was a rough and ready bounder. (By late 1937 John had read all the books.)
Suddenly he clutched at his throat with both hands. He seemed to be choking, but quickly he realized what had happened. A cord from the curtains had dropped about his neck and for a moment he had imagined it to be a thin, beautiful creeper of the strangler fig.
Sick and dismayed, he went on deck to see Guadalcanal, the great brooding island, and as he stood by the rail he thought that in those jungles life had been simpler. The enemy was easy to identify. Your friends could be relied upon to the last round of ammunition. You could, if you had the patience, memorize where every shoal was, how far the enemy guns would carry, and precisely what you needed for victory. In the jungle there had been order and law. But in his own life John Millstor had been unable to discern the enemy. He could not even comprehend himself.
The Roviana pulled alongside a sagging structure John had once known well, and as the ship docked he felt that he was returning to a home he should never have left. This feeling increased when he saw a shriveled runt on the dock. It was Clarence Miller, and when he recognized Millstor he shouted in a nasal voice, “Hello, John. It’s been a long time.”
Eagerly, Millstor left the tangled problems of the Roviana and stepped onto the clean shores of Guadalcanal. Clarence Miller, as ugly as ever, took him to a jeep and they set off for a glass of beer.
It was a strange reunion. Three times during the war Millstor had rescued Miller from dark shores along The Slot, once in sight of Jap gunners. The two men had never mentioned the dangers, nor did they now, but on this hot day John earnestly wished that he might share with Miller the burden of his addled conscience. But that he must not do, for he recalled that Miller’s wife had deserted him for a German planter. So Millstor said, “It’s a bit different now.”
Miller agreed. “Guadalcanal’s a bit different now.”
Looking at the prosaic planter, Millstor felt self-conscious. It was preposterous that the Western world should once have depended upon men like Clarence Miller and himself, for in the ultimate sense of the word neither could really be termed a man. Each had been unable to hold a wife.
“Well,” Miller said, “got to be going. Have some coons to look after.”
“You getting enough labor?” John asked.
The gnome-like fellow laughed. “Nobody is. The black devils’ll fight for me, but damned if they’ll work for me.” He drained his beer and went along the sleepy roads where once he had been immortal.
The three days in Guadalcanal were blistering hot, and a kind of moral miasma settled over the Roviana. Sniffing into her handkerchief, Mrs. McNair moved ashore to stop with friends. Liz no longer even bothered to make believe she was sleeping in her own cabin. McNair avoided John on the grounds that if a man couldn’t look after his wife the less said about it the better. And John stayed ashore at the dwindling American base, where he went over old trails with a fifty-year-old sergeant who said, “I don’t give a good goddam if I never see the States again, because my old woman is on the bottle, but good.”
Once, driving past the docks, John saw his wife standing on the bridge and an autonomic gasp caught his throat. He knew then that she had not intended this, that she had not wanted him to become the kind of man he was. It was all a mistake and he told the driver to stop. In the great heat of midday he ran along the crumbling dock and cried, “Hey, Liz. Wait a minute!” But his cry had brought McNair to the bridge, and the lovers went back to the chart room. The old sergeant asked, “That your wife, Mister?”
“Yes,” John replied with no mask of shame.
“They’re all tramps,” the professional soldier said.
Finally the copra was loaded and the Roviana turned south for Lord Howe. The first day out of Guadalcanal was blistering hot and the musty copra began steaming in the sun. A sickly sweet odor settled upon the ship like an anaesthesia, dulling the senses. Along with the fetid smell came thousands of copra bugs, small pests that did not bite but which did crawl endlessly about the body, seeking deposits of salt. Sometimes John could feel a hundred of them touring his chest and the only alleviation was a cold shower. Once, when he was rubbing his shoulders with a towel, Liz entered the cabin. There was a momentary embarrassment while he covered himself as he might have done were she a stranger.
“I’m moving things topside,” she said, using an old Navy phrase that he had clung to after returning to civilian life. Methodically, for she had always been an excellent housekeeper, she packed her two bags.
“What’s happening, Liz?” he asked.
“Nothing important,” she said briskly. “We’ll get a divorce later on.”
“But, Liz!”
“John, please,” she begged. “No scenes.” It was part of the twentieth-century code duello that there must never be a scene. She clicked the bags shut and the steward came brazenly in to carry them aloft. When they were gone Liz said, “I’ll not embarrass you, dear. I’ll take my meals in my cabin.” She left, and so efficient had been her rearrangement of their former quarters that no sign remained that she had ever been there.
On the second day south of Guadalcanal a heavy swell set in from south-south-east, followed by a stiff gale. The Roviana pitched heavily and the increasing storm diverted John’s mind from the antiseptic modern tragedy in which he was playing so inglorious a role. He stood outside the cabin and watched th
undering waves crash over the deck cargo until it seemed as if the diesel drums and copra must be washed away.
The radioman said that Noumea reported a hurricane moving up from the Antarctic. It was east of New Zealand but threatened to invade the Coral Sea. At first it seemed as if the Roviana might avoid it, but during the night a tremendous wind roared through the absurd goal posts, and by morning the full force of the hurricane broke.
Surging green seas swept the decks and hammered down upon the hatches. Once each minute the propeller wrenched itself clear of the boiling wake and vibrated sickeningly in the free air until the ship lunged bow-down into the next trough. There was a constant thunder of wind which forced the rain into each crevice, and a safety rope had to be rigged to permit seamen to pass from one part of the ship to the next.
Only Mr. Morrison remained calm. “I’ve seen worse storms,” he muttered, but where he would not say. It was his opinion that the storm would last three days with no serious damage to the Roviana, but even so John heard him advise Captain McNair to jettison the deck cargo.
McNair studied his ship and said nothing. He kept his bow head-on into the mountainous waves. When the propeller screamed at the wind, he steadied himself for the following shock, and as for the deck cargo, let her ride! Nothing wrong yet.
John studied the man with a macabre fascination. McNair was sure of what he was doing, oblivious to what he had already done. The brawny man seemed to have been fashioned for storms.
But Millstor was too generous in his judgment, for he had not yet seen the huge man oppressed by decisions which were difficult to make. John was standing forward of the bridge when two drums of diesel oil finally broke loose. “Cap’m!” Mr. Morrison shouted above the storm, “We better get those two overboard before they scatter the rest!”
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