Herman Wouk - The Caine Mutiny

by The Caine Mutiny(Lit)

  "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 Jelly-belly, still in whites, perspiring and cross, came into the ward-room 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 min-utes. 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 mid-watch. 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? Frustra-tion, 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 under-mine 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.

  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.

  Actually, Maryk had begun a record of the captain's eccen-tricities and oppressions, labeled "Medical Log on Lieutenant Commander Queeg." He kept it locked in his desk safe. Aware that the captain possessed a record of the combination, Maryk quietly opened the lock late one night and reset the dials. He gave a sealed envelope containing the new combination to Willie Keith with instructions to open it only in case of his own death or disappearance.

  During the months that followed the log swelled to a vo-luminous record. By being sent to Funafuti the Caine had fallen into the clutches of the Southwest Pacific command, the Seventh Fleet, and it began a grinding, nerve-rasping tour of monotonous escort duty. These obsolete destroyer-mine-sweepers, bastards of the sea, attached to no permanent com-mand, tended to become temporary serfs of any naval potentate into whose domain they steamed. It happened that the com-mander of the Seventh Fleet needed escorts at that time for his shuttlings of amphibious forces around the humid blue void of the South Pacific. When the convoy from Funafuti arrived at Noumea the Caine was detached and sent up to Guadalcanal with a group of LCI's, scrubby landing craft that crawled at seven knots. After swinging to the anchor at Guadal-canal for a week it was sent back down again to Noumea, and westward to New Guinea, and back to Noumea, and up to Guadalcanal, and down to Noumea, and eastward to Funafuti for a brief glimpse of the beloved Pluto, and west-ward again to Guadalcanal, and south again to Noumea.

  Days dissolved into weeks and weeks into months. Time seemed not to be passing at all. Life was a wheel of watches, a procession of paper work, a fever dream of glaring sun, glaring stars, glaring blue water, hot nights, hot days, rain squalls; logs to write; monthly reports to submit, monthly state-ments to audit, repeating so often that it seemed the months were passing as swiftly as the days, And the days as slowly as the months, and all time was running melted and shapeless like the chocolate bars in the canteen and the butter in the butter dishes.

  During this captivity Captain Queeg became more irascible, secluded, and strange. When he emerged from his cabin he usually performed some minor outrage that was written down in Maryk's log. He incarcerated sailors and put officers under hack; he cut off water, he cut off coffee, and when the movie operator neglected to send him word that a performance was starting he cut off movies for the entire crew for six months. He made endless demands for written reports and investiga-tions. Once he kept all the officers sitting in session for forty-eight hours, trying to find out which mess boy had burned out a Silex (they never found out, and he announced a twenty--point cut in everybody's fitness rating). He developed a settled habit of summoning officers for conferences in the middle of the night. The equilibrium of declared hostility between him-self and the wardroom, established by his speech after the Stilwell court-martial, came to seem the normal way of life for the officers. They averaged four or five broken hours of sleep each night. A gray mist of fatigue settled over their minds. They were jumpy, easily moved to quarrel, and more scared and sickened, with every passing week, by the everlasting buzz of the wardroom phone and the message, "Captain wants to see you in his cabin." And all the time Maryk doggedly kept adding to his secret log.

  Early in June they were rescued from the treadmill delirium of Seventh Fleet duty. The operation order for the invasion of Saipan arrived aboard, and the Caine was assigned to the screen of the main body of attack transports. There was genuine joy among the officers and crew when the old ship set out on a high-speed run by itself through dangerous waters to join up with the attack force at Eniwetok. As between gun-fire and a prolongation of the tedium, they would probably have voted twenty to one for the gunfire. It was pleasanter to be shot at than to rot.

  On the first day of the invasion Maryk made one of the briefest and most important entries in his medical log: an in-cident involving Willie Keith.

  An hour before dawn of the invasion day, with the night fading to blue and Saipan beginning to show on the horizon, a humped black shape, Willie was surprised to find himself badly scared. It humiliated him to be afraid, approaching his second combat experience, when he had been so valorously carefree the first time. His innocence was gone. The flame and noise and ruin and falling figures of Kwajalein had pene-trated to his bones and viscera even while he had hummed Begin the Beguine.

  But when the sun came up, Willie momentarily forgot his fear in enchantment at the beauty of Saipan. Terraced and gardened, it was like Japanese scenes on lacquered screens and porcelain jars; a broad island of rolling green cultivated hills dotted with rustic homes, rising out of the gray waste of the sea. A flower-scented breeze blew from it across the water. Glancing down at the dirty forecastle, where the number-one gun crew stood in a blue phalanx of ragged dungarees, life jackets, and helmets, peering at the shore, Willie felt a tiny flash of sympathy for the Japanese. He sensed what it might be like to be short and yellow-skinned and devoted to a picture--book emperor, and to face extermination by hordes of big white men swarming from everywhere in flaming machines. Although the sea and air bombardment had enlivened the is-land's bucolic prettiness with patches of flame and mushrooms of dust and smoke, there was no such obliteration of the greenery here as there had been on Kwajalein. The rows of attack boats seemed to be crawling toward a recreation park instead of a murderous island fortress.

  The Caine was sent to an anti-submarine patrol sector as soon as the invasion got under way, and there it steamed endlessly in a figure-eight path several thousand yards long. Twelve other ships moved in unison with it, back and forth at ten knots, in a protective fanning curtain around the trans-ports anchored close to the beach. It seemed like a safe place, and Willie's spirits improved as the hours passed. His morale stiffened when he observed that Queeg was really shuttling from one side of the bridge to the other so as to remain sheltered from the beach. There was no mistaking it this time, because the ship kept reversing course every few minutes; and regular as clockwork, each time it presented a new side to Saipan, Queeg would come strolling around to the seaward wing. This gave Willie a dearly cherished chance to display his contempt for the captain by doing exactly the opposite. He sensed that the sailors were noticing Queeg's conduct; there was a lot of sly grinning and muttering. Willie ostentatiously moved to the ex-posed side with each turn of the ship. Queeg took no apparent notice.

  Things were so quiet in the patrol sector that the captain secured the crew from battle stations at noon, and went below to his cabin. Willie was relieved of the deck. He was des-perately tired, having been awake for more than thirty hours, but the captain's edict against daytime sleeping made retire-ment to his bunk too risky. He knew Queeg was heavily asleep in his cabin; but there was always the chance that a call of nature would bring the captain down to the wardroom. Willie went up to the flying bridge, nestled down on the hot iron deck, and slept in the blazing sun like a cat for four hours. He went back to the wheelhouse for the afternoon watch much refreshed.

  Shortly after he took over the binoculars from Keefer, a Navy Corsair came flying across the northern hills of the island toward the Caine. All at once it
burst into a rosette of flame, and arced into the water with a great splash halfway between the minesweeper and another patrol vessel, the new destroyer Stanfield. Willie telephoned the captain.

  "Kay, head over there at twenty knots," was the sleepy reply. Queeg arrived on the bridge wearing khaki shorts and bedroom slippers, yawning, as the Caine and the Stanfield were closing to within a thousand yards of each other at the place of the crash. There was no remnant of the plane on the water; only a rainbow-colored film of gasoline.

  "Bye-bye Corsair," said Queeg.

  "Went down like a stone," murmured Willie. He glanced at the paunchy little captain, and felt a stir of shame. What had happened to his sense of proportion, he wondered, that a comic-opera monster like Queeg could annoy or upset him? A man had just died before his eyes. The buzzing TBS trans-missions spoke of thousands more dying on the shore. He had not yet seen blood spilled on the Caine except in careless handling of tools. Thought Willie, "I'm in danger of becoming a self-pitying whiner after all, the scum of military life-"