by Herman Wouk
“Look, Mr. Keith,” the sailor said hoarsely, “maybe you mean well, but I don’t know, every time I have anything to do with you I wind up in worse trouble than before. Lay off me, will you? The captain told me to give you this. Here it is.”
Willie read a handwritten scrawl: I hereby state that the confession made by me on 13 February 1944 was made voluntarily, under no duress. I was glad to be given a chance to make a clean breast of it, and I have been given no inducement or promises of better treatment for confession. I will repeat these true facts under oath if necessary. It was signed by Stilwell in a schoolboyish hand; the bright blue ink and the broad pen nib identified the instrument as Captain Queeg’s fountain pen.
Willie said, “Stilwell, this isn’t the end. He got this under duress, too. If there’s anything you want me-”
“Please, Mr. Keith!” A sudden desperate glare came into the sailor’s eyes. “That’s it, see? That’s the way I want it, that’s the truth, that’s how it’s gonna be. There wasn’t no duress, see? Duress!” Stilwell flung Courts and Boards over the side. “I never heard of duress! Keep your goddamn nose out of my business!”
He ran off down the port passageway. Willie mechanically looked over the side. Courts and Boards lay under water, caught between the two hulls, amid floating splinters and garbage. The ships rolled slowly together; the book was squashed to a shapeless wad.
The beer was icy, golden, keenly gratifying and delicious, gurgling out of the triangular holes in the misted cans. Keefer, Maryk, Harding, and Willie lay under palm trees in sweet breezy shade and rapidly drank off a couple of cans each, to quench thirst. Then, more slowly, they began their social drinking. The spot they had chosen was a secluded curve of the recreation beach. They were alone with sand and palms. Far out on the green-blue lagoon the Pluto drifted slowly back and forth at the end of her anchor chain carrying the six nursing destroyers with her.
Willie had resolved to say nothing to the other officers about the Stilwell matter. It seemed unethical for the prosecutor and court members to gossip over the case on the day before the trial. But a few beers dissolved his resolution. He told them about the abortive not-guilty plea, and the documents Queeg had extorted from the sailor.
None of the others spoke for a while. Harding rose and began plunging holes in three more cans of beer. Keefer sat with his back to the bole of a palm, smoking a pipe. Maryk lay face down on the sand, his head on his arms. He had rolled into this position halfway through the story, and remained so.
The novelist accepted a beer can from Harding and drank deeply. “Steve,” he said in a quiet tone. Maryk turned his head sideways. “Steve, has the thought ever occurred to you,” said Keefer, gravely and calmly, “that Captain Queeg may be insane?”
The executive officer sat up with a grunt, and squatted cross-legged, red-brown and thick, white sand clinging to the folds of his skin. “Don’t bust up a good afternoon, Tom,” he said.
“I’m not making jokes, Steve.”
“There’s no point in that kind of talk,” said the exec, shaking his head impatiently like an animal.
“Look, Steve, I’m no psychiatrist, but I’ve read a lot. I can give you a diagnosis of Queeg. It’s the clearest picture I’ve ever seen of a psychopathic personality. He’s a paranoid, with an obsessive-compulsive syndrome. I’ll bet a clinical examination would back me up a hundred per cent. I’ll show you the description of the type in the books-”
“I’m not interested,” said the exec. “He’s no crazier than you are.”
“You’re in a big jam, Steve.”
“I’m in no jam.”
“I’ve seen this coming for a long time.” The novelist got up, tossed his beer can aside, and punched holes in another. Foam boiled over his hands. “See, Steve, about a week after Queeg came aboard I realized he was a psychopath. The shirttail obsession, the little rolling balls, the inability to look you in the eye, the talking in secondhand phrases and slogans, the ice-cream mania, the seclusion-why, the man’s a Freudian delight. He crawls with clues. But that doesn’t matter. Some of my best friends are psychopaths. It could be argued that I’m one. The thing is, Queeg is an extreme case, bordering on the twilight zone between eccentricity and real psychosis. And because he’s a coward, I think that being in a combat zone is beginning to drive him over the red line. I don’t know whether there’ll be a sudden crack, or-”
“Tom, it’s a known fact that you read a hell of a lot more than I do and talk better, and all that. The only thing is, common sense is worth more than all the talk and all the books in the world.” Maryk lit a cigarette in a swift scratch of flame and spurt of smoke. “You’re all wound up in big words, paranoid, psychopath, and all that. Captain Queeg is nothing but a strict guy who likes to have his own way, and there are a thousand skippers more or less like him. Okay, he rolls little balls. You sit in your room before reveille filling your desk drawers with a lot of scribbling. Everybody is a screwball in their own way. It doesn’t make them crazy.”
Keith and Harding looked from one speaker to the other with the intensity of children at a family quarrel.
“You’re whistling in the dark,” said Keefer. “Ever hear of a captain in his right mind trying to rig a court-martial as crudely as he’s doing it?”
“It happens every day. What the hell is a summary court-martial but a farce? Nobody on a ship ever knows any law. Hell, how about De Vriess with Bellison-and Crowe?”
“That was different. De Vriess fixed the court to let them off. He was going through the forms because the Auckland police were so sore about the riot. But rigging a trial to convict a man-moral considerations aside, he’s violating all his Navy principles. That’s what makes me think he’s going off his head. You know damn well that the enlisted man is God in this Navy. For two reasons, first, because he is the Navy, and second, because his relatives back home pay the Navy’s appropriations. Sure, hounding the officers is standard emotional ping-pong for skippers. But the enlisted man? The regulations bristle with his rights. Queeg’s juggling dynamite and giggling happily.”
“When it comes right down to it, Stilwell is guilty,” said Maryk.
“Of what? Christ, Steve! Wanting to see his wife, when poison-pen letters from home were accusing her of adultery?”
“Look, try the trial tomorrow,” said Maryk. “Give us a beer, Harding. Drop it, Tom, or I’m going to semaphore for the gig.”
The rest of the afternoon went by in increasingly sullen beer drinking.
The plan of the day read: 1400. Summary Court-Martial of Stilwell, John, GM 2/C, in the wardroom.
Shortly after lunch Queeg sent for Harding. Then he sent for Paynter. In another quarter hour, Paynter brought the same message for Keefer. The novelist rose. “Nothing like polling the jury for the verdict before the trial starts,” he said. “Eliminates all that unpleasant suspense.”
Willie was in the ship’s office, his mind whirling in a fog of legal rituals and phrases. The yeoman, obese as a pudding in shrunken dress whites, was helping him arrange the papers for the trial. When Chief Bellison, the master-at-arms, came to the door, smooth-shaven and immaculate, his shoes gleaming black, and announced, “Fourteen hundred, Lieutenant Keith. Ready in all respects for the court-martial,” Willie had a panicky moment. It seemed to him that he was utterly unprepared for his task. He blindly followed the yeoman and the chief into the wardroom, where the three officers were ranged around the green table, looking strangely dressed up in their black ties, and grave and embarrassed. Stilwell came shambling in, picking at his cap, a meaningless half-smile on his face. The trial began.
Willie sat with Courts and Boards open before him, carefully acting out the ritual step by step. Jellybelly prompted him, and he prompted the accused and the court. As Willie pushed the limping trial along he was reminded continuously of his high-school fraternity initiation, which had been enacted shamefacedly from a printed script by perplexed boys, half amused, half solemn, in a dim room around a steamin
g skull.
It was the simplest possible situation, a guilty plea with a typewritten confession in the record, and yet time wasted and wasted in entrances and exits, clearings of the court, wrangles over the meanings of words in Courts and Boards, and searchings through Navy Regulations and the court-martial manual. At the end of an hour and a half of this weariness, Keefer declared the trial finished, whereupon Stilwell roused himself from a horse-like apathy and announced that he wanted to make a statement. This occasioned further flurries of debate. At last he was allowed to proceed.
“The captain give me six months’ restriction for reading on watch, and that’s why I had to get that phony wire sent. I had to see my wife or my marriage would of busted up,” Stilwell said, in halting, self-conscious tones. “I didn’t think reading a comic book at the gangway was enough reason to ruin my life. But I’m guilty. Only I think the court ought to remember why I done it.”
Willie swiftly copied down as much of this as he could, and read it back to Stilwell. “Is that the substance of your statement?”
“That’s fine, Mr. Keith. Thanks.”
“All right,” Keefer said. “Clear the court.”
Willie led out the yeoman, the accused, and the orderly. He waited in the ship’s office for forty minutes, and then Bellison called him and the yeoman back to the wardroom.
“Court finds specification proved by plea,” Keefer said. “Sentence is loss of six liberties.”
Willie stared around at the three officers. Paynter sat like a mahogany idol; Harding was trying to look solemn, but a grin was bursting through; Keefer appeared half irritated and half amused. “Well, that’s it,” the gunnery officer said. “That’s our verdict. Record it.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Willie was appalled. This was a direct insult to Queeg. Stilwell was already confined for half a year; the punishment was meaningless. It amounted to an acquittal. He glanced at Jellybelly, whose face was as blank as a fish’s. “Got that, Porteous?”
“Yes, sir.”
The officers were finishing their evening meal when Jellybelly, still in whites, perspiring and cross, came into the wardroom for signature and authentication of the typed record. “Okay, Jellybelly,” said Keefer, the last to sign. “Bring it up to him.”
“Aye aye, sir,” said the yeoman, getting an extraordinary amount of church-bell timbre into the three words, and he left.
“We have time for one more cup of coffee, I think,” said Keefer.
“Before what?” said Maryk suspiciously.
“You’ll see,” said Willie. “Hold onto your hat.” Silence settled over the wardroom, made more palpable by the clinks of spoons in coffee cups.
The rasp of the telephone buzzer came almost immediately. Maryk leaned back in his chair and with a weary gesture yanked the phone out of its bracket. “Maryk speaking. ... Yes, sir. ... Aye aye, Captain. What time? ... Yes, sir. How about the officer at the gangway? ... Aye aye, sir.” He put the phone back, and said to the expectant officers with a sigh, “Meeting of all officers in the wardroom in five minutes. Somebody’s done something.”
Queeg came in head down, shoulders hunched, his face gray with rage. He announced that he was now convinced there was no loyalty whatever to him in the wardroom. Therefore all gentle treatment of officers was at an end. He laid down several new edicts. There would be five points off a fitness rating for any mistake in a log; another five points off for every hour that a report or statement was overdue; and an automatic unsatisfactory fitness rating if any officer was caught sleeping any time after eight o’clock in the morning or before eight at night.
“Sir,” said Keefer pleasantly, “how about officers who have come off the midwatch? They have no sleep at all before morning-”
“Mister Keefer, the midwatch is a duty like any other, and nobody deserves a letter of commendation for standing a midwatch. As I say, if you gentlemen had played ball with me I might have played ball with you, but you gentlemen have made your bed and now you’re going to get the book thrown at you. And as for the goddamn childish vindictive stupidity that was perpetrated this afternoon, and especially that so-called statement of Stilwell which was phrased specifically and lyingly to embarrass me I don’t know who’s responsible, but I have a pretty good idea-and, well, as I say, there’s a new policy here in this wardroom now, and it had better pay dividends!” The door crashed shut.
Keefer was sitting on his bed in his shorts, reading the poems of T. S. Eliot.
“Say, Tom!” It was the voice of Maryk from across the passageway. “How about coming in here for a second if you’re not busy?”
“Sure.”
Maryk, also in shorts, sat at his desk, fingering a pile of Navy letters. “Pull the curtain, Tom. ... Now, just for the hell of it, tell me this. Can you figure what it is the captain has against Stilwell?”
“Sure, Steve, I know, but you’ll just brush me off-”
“Let me hear.”
“Okay. He hates Stilwell for being handsome, healthy, young, competent, and naturally popular and attractive-all the things that Queeg is not. Ever read Billy Budd, by Melville? Read it. That’s the whole story. Stilwell is a symbol of all the captain’s frustrations, all the things he would like to smash because he can’t have them, like a child wanting to break another child’s toys. Infantilism is very strong in our captain. I’m leaving out a conjectural element which I also think is important, maybe even decisive-the sexual-” Maryk made a disgusted grimace. “-I know, we start wading in slime at this point. But repressed desire can turn to hate, and all of the captain’s maladies could fall into a pattern on the theory of an unconscious, violently repressed inversion which fits in beautifully with-”
“Okay, Tom. I’ve heard enough. Thanks.” The exec got up and hoisted himself onto his bunk. He sat at the edge, his thick bare legs dangling. “Now, would you really like to know why the captain has it in for Stilwell?”
“Sure,” said Keefer. “No doubt you have a much more profound theory, and I-”
“I don’t know any theories. I’m just a dumb comic-book reader who made a straight C-minus at college. But I know a fact or two that you don’t. The captain is out to get Stilwell because he blames him for the time we cut our own towline. He thinks Stilwell deliberately didn’t warn him, just to get him in trouble.”
Keefer was startled. “How do you know? We don’t even know that he realizes we did cut the towline-”
“He realizes. He told me in San Francisco what I just told you.”
“I’m damned!”
“And the captain feels that all his trouble with ComServPac, and for that matter with the Caine officers and crew, stems from that incident. He knows what an idiot that made him out to be. Don’t underrate the captain, Tom-”
The novelist shook his head in wonder. “You know, that’s the first backstage glimpse I’ve been allowed into that strange mind. Imagine, blaming Stilwell! When he himself-”
“How about all those theories of yours now, Tom? Frustration, Billy Buck, infantilism, inversion, and all that-?”
Keefer said, with an embarrassed grin, “You think you’ve caught me, don’t you? Not necessarily. What he told you may still be just a surface symptom of my diagnosis-”
“Okay, Tom. How about this? Will you come up with me tomorrow morning to the medical officer of the Pluto, and tell him what you think of the captain?”
Keefer took a long pause before answering. “Not me,” he said. “You can go. It’s your place, not mine.”
“I can’t explain all that psychological stuff. That’s your line.”
“Did you ever hear of a thing called conspiracy to undermine authority?” said the novelist.
“But if he’s crazy-”
“I never said he was crazy. I said he was teetering on the edge. That kind is almost impossible to nail. Once you accuse them, they shrink back into the most convincing goddamn normal attitudes you ever saw. They’re as cunning as acrobats at treading that thin line between being
a bastard and being a lunatic. It would take a state-side civilian clinic to see into Queeg. Here we’d just hang ourselves.”
“All right, Tom.” The executive officer jumped off his bunk, and faced the gangling novelist, looking up into his eyes. “That was a request to put up or shut up. You won’t put up. Then shut up this talk about the captain being crazy. It’s like running around in a powder magazine with a goddamn blowtorch. You understand? I swear to Christ I’ll report to the captain any further statements you make along that line. Friendship, on this point, no longer means anything to me. That’s the straight dope.”
Keefer listened with a grave, tense face; only there was a tinge of mockery in the wrinkling of his eyes. “Aye aye, Steve,” he said quietly, and went out through the drawn curtain.
Maryk crawled up on his bunk. Propping himself on an elbow, he drew from under his pillow a red-bound volume, with the black and gold label, Mental Disorders. Across the top of the pages was an oval blue rubber-stamp mark, Property of Medical Officer, U.S.S. Pluto. He flipped open the book to a place marked with a burned match.
CHAPTER 24
Maryk’s Secret Log
It became known among the officers, shortly after the ship left Funafuti in a convoy to Noumea, that Steve Maryk had taken to writing late at night. He would draw his curtain, and through the gaps when it swayed he could be seen in the desk lamp’s blob of light, knitting his forehead over a yellow pad, and chewing the end of a pen. When anyone entered he would hastily turn the pad upside down.
Of course, in the constricted life of the Caine wardroom, such a scrap of novelty was delicious. Maryk was quickly accused of composing a novel, which he denied with grins and blushes. But he would not say what his writing was, beyond grunting, “It’s work I’ve got to get done.” That was met with groans and jeers, naturally. Willie and Keefer, one evening at dinner, started speculating on the probable title and plot of Maryk’s novel. Keefer finally dubbed it All Quiet on the Yellowstain Front, and began improvising ridiculous chapter headings, characters, and incidents, in a wild farce principally involving the captain, the wart-girl of New Zealand, and Maryk. The other officers caught the idea and began throwing ribald suggestions. Their mood flared into hysterical hilarity. Queeg finally telephoned down to inquire peevishly what was causing all the shrieks of mirth in the wardroom, and that ended it for the evening. But new improvisations for the novel brightened the dinner conversation at intervals for months. The joke was kept alive by Maryk’s persistence both in the writing and the secrecy.