The Caine Mutiny (6 page)

May stumbled during the last strains of the song. At the end there was a storm of hand-clapping. She hurried back to her seat without bowing. The three-piece dance orchestra struck up, and couples jammed the floor. “First time I ever blew up like that,” she muttered to Willie.

“It was wonderful, May.”

“I’m ready to fight now,” said the girl, draining her flat drink. “I don’t want to see you any more.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Don’t call me again at the candy store. I won’t come to the telephone.”

“Why? Why?”

“Let me put it another way-will you marry me?”

Willie pressed his lips together, and looked down at the glass in his hands. The trumpeter blew deafeningly into the microphone and dancers joggled their table. May said, “Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t expect you to. This is all my fault. You played it straight when you told me your pedigree over the pizzas. I was having a wonderful time until recently and I didn’t care. But somewhere along the line I made a terrible mistake. I forgot I was Tootsie Weaver-”

“Look, May-”

“Oh, sure, skinnier, younger, and somewhat more presentable-would you take either of us home to meet your mother?”

“May, we’re both kids-I’ll be out to sea in three months-”

“I know. You’re a darling, Willie. I hope you find a wonderful girl someday. I just don’t want another three months as Tootsie. I don’t want another evening of it. Not another minute, in fact.” Her eyes filled with tears, and she stood. “Never let it be said I earned you any demerits. Let’s go.”

They went out and climbed into a taxi, and fell into the most racking kisses they had ever exchanged. It was not pleasure, it was torment which neither could stop. The taxi drew up under the street lamp at the entrance to Furnald Hall. Willie’s wrist showed eleven twenty-five. “Keep going,” he said chokingly to the driver.

“Where to, mister?”

“I don’t care. Up and down Riverside Drive. Just so we get back here by midnight.”

“Right, mister.”

The driver started his motor and slid the glass panel closed between himself and his passengers. The taxi plunged downhill to the Drive. There were more kisses and broken futile words. May held Willie’s head comfortingly to her bosom, and stroked his hair. “Sometimes I think you like me,” she said.

“I don’t know why God makes human jellyfish like Willie Keith-”

“You know what Marty Rubin says?”

“Damn Marty Rubin.”

“You don’t know it, Willie, but he’s a friend of yours.” Willie sat up. “This whole mess started with him.”

“I asked him what I ought to do about you.”

“And be said throw me out.”

“No. He says he thinks you really love me.”

“Well, hooray for Marty.”

“He wondered whether I would become more acceptable to your mother if I enrolled in college.”

Willie was astounded. Moaning and protesting his undying love was one thing. But this was a serious matter.

“I could do it,” said May eagerly. “I could still get into the February class at Hunter. I had good marks in high school though you do consider me an ignoramus. I even have a Regents’ scholarship, if it’s still good. Marty says he can get me enough bookings in and around New- York to keep me going. I only work nights, anyway.”

Willie wanted to spar for time. His beautiful prize was drifting within reach again, but on sobering terms. May regarded him with lustrous, hopeful eyes. Her hard-boiled wariness was all gone.

“Could you stand going back to school?”

“I’m pretty tough,” she said.

Willie realized that she spoke truly. She was not a companion for good times any more, but a challenger to his mother for his life. It had all changed in a few minutes; he was dizzied. “I’ll tell you God’s truth, May. I don’t think it would make a particle of difference to my mother.”

“Would it to you?”

Willie looked into her eyes, and quailed, and turned away.

“Don’t trouble, darling,” she said with sudden dryness. “I predicted the answer to Marty. I said I don’t blame you. I don’t. Tell the little man to take you back to the Navy. It’s late.”

But when the taxi parked again at Furnald Hall and Willie had to get out and leave May behind forever, he couldn’t do it. At three minutes to twelve, he started a desperate harangue to recover lost ground. On the sidewalk outside, midshipmen were running, walking, and staggering toward the entrance. Several were kissing girls in nooks of the building. The tenor of Willie’s plea was that he and May ought to live for the hour, and gather rosebuds while they might, and drink for once dead they never would return, and youth was a stuff that would not endure, and so forth. It took him the whole three minutes to round out this message. The couples outside finished their business. The stream of midshipmen disappeared. But Willie, with demerits beginning to pile up, was compelled in courtesy to wait for May’s answer. He hoped it would be favorable and short.

“Listen, Willie darling,” said May, “for the last time, because we’re all finished. I’m a poor Bronx girl with a lot of problems. I don’t want to add a hopeless romance to them. I have a mother and father with a fruit store that doesn’t pay, one brother in the Army and another a plain bum that we never see except when he needs money to get out of trouble. All I want is a chance to make some money and live in peace. I was a fool to fall in love with you, and I don’t know why I did, because you’re a bigger fool than I am. Emotionally you’re about fifteen, and when your hair stands up in back you look like a rabbit, which is frequently. I guess I’m a sucker for comparative literature. Hereafter I’ll steer clear of any man with more than a public-school education and- For God’s sake,” she broke off irritably, “why do you keep looking at your watch?”

“I’m getting demerits,” said Willie.

“Get out-get out of my life. I’ll never see you again(“ stormed the girl. “You must be my punishment for not going to mass. Get out!”

“May, I love you,” said Willie, opening the door.

“Drop dead,” cried May. She pushed him out and slammed the door.

Willie raced into Furnald Hall. Awaiting him was a huge clock over the entrance which grinned four minutes past twelve. And under the clock, terrible in his gloating happiness, grinned Ensign Brain.

“Ah, Midshipman Keith, I believe.”

“Yes, sir,” panted Willie, erect and trembling.

“The check list showed you as absent over leave-the only one in Furnald, Midshipman Keith. I had hoped there was some mistake.” His wreathing smiles indicated that probably he had hoped harder there was no mistake. All his wrinkles were bent upward with pleasure.

“Sorry, sir. Circumstances-”

“Circumstances, Midshipman Keith? Circumstances? The only relevant circumstance that I am aware of, Midshipman Keith, is that you now have twenty demerits, the highest figure in Furnald, Midshipman Keith. What do you think of that circumstance, Midshipman Keith?”

“I’m sorry about it, sir.”

“You’re sorry about it. Thank you for informing me you’re sorry about it, Midshipman Keith. I was stupid enough to imagine that you were glad about it, Midshipman Keith. But probably you’re used to such stupidity in your superiors. You probably think we’re all stupid. You probably think all the rules of this school are stupid. Either you think that, or you think you’re too good to have to obey rules made for the common herd. Which is it, Midshipman Keith?”

To help the midshipman in making this interesting choice, he thrust his corrugated face within two inches of Willie’s nose. The midshipmen standing guard on the “quarterdeck” watched the dialogue out of the corners of their eyes, and wondered how Willie would get out of that particular alley. Willie stared at the sparse fuzz atop Ensign Brain’s head and had the sense to keep quiet.

“Fifty demerits mean expulsion, Midshipman Keith,” purred the drillmaster.

“I know, sir.”

“You’re well on the way, Midshipman Keith.”

“There won’t be any more, sir.”

Ensign Brain withdrew his face to a normal distance. “Wars are fought by the clock, Midshipman Keith. Attacks are made when ordered. Not four minutes late. A four-minute delay can cause ten thousand men to die. A whole fleet can be sunk in four minutes, Midshipman Keith.” Ensign Brain was following the usual pattern, shading his cat-and-mouse delights into lofty morality, though the morality was sound enough. “Dismissed, Midshipman Keith.”

“Thank you, sir.”

Willie saluted, and walked up nine flights of steps in despair. The elevator had stopped at midnight.

CHAPTER 5

Orders for Midshipman Keith

The next day, Sunday, was sunny and clear, and the midshipmen were thankful. A review was scheduled for the pleasure of the commandant of the Third Naval District, a display of the whole military might at Columbia. The other sections of the midshipmen school at Johnson Hall and John Jay Hall were going to merge with the men of Furnald in an array of twenty-five hundred novice naval officers. After breakfast the midshipmen shifted into their dress blues and lined up in front of the hall, with rifles, leggings, and gun belts. They were inspected one by one as minutely as if each midshipman were about to have lunch with the admiral, rather than pass by him in a blur of heads. Demerits flew for a spot on the collar, shoes that failed to reflect the image of the inspector, hair a fraction of an inch too long. A flick of Ensign Brain’s hand on the back of a midshipman’s neck was an announcement of five demerits, duly recorded by the yeoman who walked close behind him. Willie was flicked. In his eminence of twenty-five demerits he floated lonely as a cloud. The closest contender had seven.

A sixty-piece band of midshipmen blasted brassy marches with more lung power than harmony, colors waved bravely on staffs, and fixed bayonets glittered in the morning sun as the ranks of midshipmen marched onto South Field. Behind the wire fences around the field were hundreds of spectators-parents, sweethearts, passers-by, college students, and satiric small boys. The band used up its repertoire, and was beginning again on
Anchors Aweigh
, when all the cohorts of Johnson, John Jay, and Furnald reached their places. They made a stirring show, the immense ranks and files of white gold-trimmed hats, bristling rifles, squared shoulders in blue, and young stern faces. Individually they were scared youngsters trying to remain inconspicuous, but from their aggregate there rose a subtle promise of unexpected awkward power. A bugle call knifed across the air. “PRESENT ARMS!” blatted the loudspeakers. Twenty-five hundred rifles snapped into position. The admiral strolled onto the field, smoking, followed by a straggle of officers, walking carelessly to symbolize the privileges of rank, but straggling at distances from the admiral strictly regulated by the number of sleeve -stripes on each straggler. Ensign Brain brought up the rear, also smoking. He put out his cigarette at the instant that the admiral did.

The admiral, short, stout and gray-headed, addressed the ranks briefly and politely. Then the performance began. Stepping proudly and confidently to the music after a week of rehearsal, the battalions passed in review, marching, wheeling, countermarching. The spectators clapped and cheered. The small boys marched raggedly outside the fence in imitation of the midshipmen, yelling. And the commandant watched with a smile which infected the usually grim faces of the school staff. Newsreel cameras, mounted on trucks at the edges of the field, recorded the scene for history.

Willie went through his paces in a daze of whirling thoughts about May and demerits. He was not interested in the admiral but he was mightily interested in making no more mistakes. No back was straighter, no rifle at a more correct angle in the whole parade than Willie Keith’s. The martial music and the majestic passing to and fro of the ranks thrilled him, and he was proud to be in this powerful show. He swore to himself that he would yet become the most correct, most admired, most warlike midshipman at Furnald Hall.

The music paused. The marching continued to a flourish of drums signaling the last maneuvers of the parade. Then the band crashed once more into
Anchors Aweigh
. Willie’s squadron wheeled toward the fence, preparing to make a flank march off the field. Willie stepped around the wheeling turn, his eye on the line, staying faultlessly in position. Then he fixed his eyes to the front once more, and found himself looking straight at May Wynn. There she stood behind the fence not twenty feet away in her black fur-trimmed coat. She waved and smiled.

“I take it all back. You win!” she cried.

“By the
left
flank-march!” bawled Roland Keefer.

At the same instant a squadron from Johnson Hall passed them and the leader shouted, “By the
right
flank-march!”

Willie, his eyes on May, his mind paralyzed, obeyed the wrong order; turned sharply, and marched away from his battalion. In a moment he was cut off from them by an oncoming file from Johnson Hall. He halted after prancing into a vacant patch of grass and realizing that he was alone. A row of newsreel cameras close by, all seemingly trained on him, photographed every move.

He glanced around wildly, and, as the last of the Johnson Hall file went past him, he saw his battalion marching away from him, far down the field beyond a stretch of empty brown grass. With each grunt of the tubas, each beat of the drums, Willie was becoming more and more alone. To get back to his place meant a solitary hundred-yard dash in full view of the admiral. To stand alone on the field another second was impossible. Spectators were already beginning to shout jokes at him. Desperately Willie dived into a single file of John Jay Hall midshipmen marching past him to the exit in the opposite direction from Furnald.

“What the hell are you doing in here? Beat it,” hissed the man behind him. Willie had landed unluckily in a group of the tallest John Jay men. He formed a distinctly unmilitary gap in the line of heads. But now it was too late for anything but prayer. He marched on.

“Get out of this line, you little monkey, or I’ll kick you bowlegged!”

The file jammed up at the exit and became disorderly. Willie turned and said swiftly to the big glaring midshipman, “Look, brother, I’m sunk. I got cut off from my battalion. Do you want me to get bilged?”

The midshipman said no more. The file wound into John Jay Hall. As soon as they passed the entrance the midshipmen dispersed, laughing and shouting, to the staircases. Willie remained in the lobby, staring uneasily at faded Columbia athletic trophies in the glass cases. He allowed fifteen minutes to pass, wandering here and there, keeping out of sight of the officer and midshipmen guarding the quarterdeck. The excitement of the review dissipated. The lobby became quiet. He screwed up his courage, and walked briskly toward the one guarded door. All the other exits were locked and bolted.

“Halt! Sound off.”

Willie drew up at the summons of the officer of the day, a burly midshipman wearing a yellow armband. A few feet away an ensign sat at a desk marking examination papers.

“Midshipman Willis Seward Keith, Furnald, on official business.”

“State business.”

“Checking on a lost custody card of a rifle.”

The OOD picked up a clipboard with a mimeographed form sheet on it. “You’re not logged in, Keith.”

“I came in during the foul-up after the review. Sorry.”

“Show your business pass.”

This was the spring-of the trap. Willie cursed Navy thoroughness. He pulled out-his wallet and showed the OOD a picture of May Wynn waving and smiling on a merry-go-round horse. “Take it from here, friend,” he whispered. “If you want, I bilge.”

The OOD’s eyes widened in amazement. He looked sidelong at the ensign, then straightened and saluted. “Pass, Keith.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Willie saluted and emerged into the sunlight, through the one loophole that military wisdom can never quite button up-the sympathy of the downtrodden for each other.

There were three ways back to Furnald: across the field, which was too exposed; a sneak trip around through the streets, which were out of bounds; and the gravel path along the field in front of the library. Willie took the gravel path, and soon came upon a working party of Furnald midshipmen folding up the yellow chairs which had been placed for the admiral’s party on the library steps. He briefly considered mingling with them, but they wore khaki, and they gave him queer scared looks. He hurried by them. The path lay clear ahead to Furnald-

“Midshipman Keith, I believe?”

Willie spun around in unbelieving horror at the tones. Ensign Brain, concealed by a granite post at the library entrance, was seated on a yellow chair, smoking. He dropped the cigarette, ground it out daintily with his toe, and rose. “Any explanation, Midshipman Keith, for being outside your room and wandering around out of uniform during a study hour?”

All Willie’s resolve and invention caved in. “No, sir.”

“No, sir. An excellent answer, Midshipman Keith, making up in clarity for what it lacks in official acceptability.” Ensign Brain smiled like a hungry man at the sight of a chicken leg. “Midshipman Auerbach, you will take charge of the working party.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“You will come with me, Midshipman Keith.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Willie got back into Furnald Hall with no trouble, under the escort of Ensign Brain. He was marched to the desk of the duty officer, Ensign Acres. The midshipmen on the quarterdeck regarded him with pale dismay. Word of his pile of demerits had spread through the school. This new disaster horrified them. Willie Keith was all their nightmares come to life.

“Holy cow,” exclaimed Ensign Acres, standing, “not Keith again.”

“The same,” said Ensign Brain. “The same paragon of military virtue, Midshipman Keith. Out of uniform, absent without leave, and violating a study period. No explanation.”

“This is the end of him,” said Acres.

“No doubt. I’m sorry for him, but obviously I had to pick him up.”

“Of course.” Acres regarded Willie curiously, and with some pity. “Don’t you like the Navy, Keith?”

“I do, sir. I’ve had a bad run of luck, sir.”

Acres lifted his hat, scratched his head with the same hand, and looked doubtfully at Brain. “Maybe we ought to just kick his behind up nine flights of stairs.”

“You’re the duty officer,” said Brain virtuously. “A couple of dozen midshipmen know of this already. For all I know the exec saw the whole business through his window.”

Acres nodded, and squared his hat as Brain walked off. “Well, this does it, Keith. Come along.”

They paused outside the exec’s door. Acres said in a low voice, “Between you and me, Keith, what the hell happened?”

The uniforms of both young men seemed to fade away for the moment, in the friendliness of Acres’ tone. Willie had a sudden flooding sense that this was all just a dream in Looking-glass Land, that he still had his health, that the sun still shone, and that outside Furnald Hall, just a few feet away, on Broadway, his predicament would seem a joke. There was just this one difficulty: he was inside Furnald Hall. Enmeshed in comic-opera laws, he had comically broken a few, and was going to a comic-opera doom. But this dance of nonsense impinged very strongly on the real world. It meant that in time his living body, instead of being carted across the Pacific, clad in blue, would be carted across the Atlantic, clad in brown. This fact bothered him violently.

“What’s the difference?” he said. “It was nice knowing you, Acres.”

Ensign Acres let the familiarity pass. He understood it. “Merton has a heart. Tell him the truth. You have a chance,” he said as he knocked.

Commander Merton, a little round-headed man with bristling brown hair and a red face, sat at his desk facing the door. He was partly hidden by a bubbling Silex. “Yes, Acres?”

“Sir-Midshipman Keith again.”

Commander Merton peered sternly around the coffee at Willie. “Good God. What now?”

Acres recited the indictment. Merton nodded, dismissed him, locked the door, and flipped a key on his interoffice talkbox. “I don’t want any calls or other interruptions until further notice.”

“Aye aye, sir,” rattled the box.

The commander filled a cup. “Coffee, Keith?”

“No, thank you, sir.” Willie’s knees were unsteady.

“I think you’d better have some. Cream or sugar?”

“Neither, sir.”

“Sit down.”

“Thank you, sir.” Willie was more scared by the courtesy than he would have been by rage. There was an air about the coffee of a condemned man’s last meal.

Commander Merton sipped in silence for endless minutes. He was a reserve officer, in peacetime an insurance sales manager with a fondness for boating and for the weekly reserve drills. His wife had complained often of the time he wasted on the Navy, but the war had justified him. He had gone into active service at once and his family was proud now of his three stripes.

“Keith,” he said at last, “you put me into the peculiar position of wanting to apologize to you for the Navy’s laws. The sum of demerits for your three new offenses, together with the twenty-five you have, puts you out of school.”

“I know, sir.”

“Those demerits make sense. The values were carefully weighed. Any man who can’t stay within the bounds of those penalties shouldn’t be in the Navy.”

“I know, sir.”

“Unless,” said the commander, and sipped for a while, “unless extraordinary, once-in-a-million circumstances are involved. Keith, what’s been happening to you?”

There was nothing to lose. Willie poured out the tale of his troubles with May Wynn, including her appearance outside the fence. The exec listened unsmilingly. When the story was done, he pressed his fingertips together and mused.

“In effect, your claim is one of temporary derangement due to a girl.”