Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [128]
12 to 4-Steaming as before.
Willis Seward Keith
Ensign, USNR
He had signed many logs for port watches, but this was different. He put an extra flourish to his signature, and thrilled as though he were entering his name in a historic document.
In a state of quiet exaltation, he went down the ladders to the wardroom, and ripped merrily into a stack of decoded messages. He kept at it until the new steward’s mate, Rasselas, a sweet-faced, pudgy colored boy with huge brown eyes, touched his arm and begged permission to lay the table for dinner. Willie folded away his codes, poured a cup of coffee from the Silex, and lay on the wardroom couch with his legs up, sipping. The radio was purring a Haydn quartet; the boys in the radio shack had not yet noticed and strangled it. Rasselas spread a fresh white cloth, and clinked the silver into place. From the pantry, where Whittaker in his new khaki uniform of a chief steward lorded it over the mess boys, there floated an aroma of roast beef. Willie sighed with contentment, and snuggled in the corner of the gently rocking couch. He looked around at the wardroom, freshly sprayed with a light green paint, its brown leather fittings renewed, the brass polished, the chairs gleaming. After all, he said to himself, there were worse places in the world than the wardroom of the Caine.
The other officers came straggling in, shaved, dressed in clean clothes, good-humored, and hungry. All the old jokes were brought out. They seemed funny and gay to Willie: Harding’s procreative fertility, Keefer’s novel, the foulness of the ship’s fresh water (“Paynter’s Poison”), Maryk’s New Zealand girl of the seven warts, and, latest of all, Willie Keith’s stature as a Don Juan. The officers and sailors of the ship had caught glimpses of May Wynn during the overhaul, and her voluptuousness had become a matter of fable. Linked with the remembrance of the pretty nurses who had visited Willie in Pearl Harbor, the appearance of May had established for the ensign a reputation for mystic power over women.
It was a fine new topic for wardroom banter. Sex was the subject, therefore anybody could be a comedian. A properly timed grunt was a great witticism. Willie for his part was delighted. He protested, and denied, and pretended to be vexed, and kept on prolonging the joke long after the others were ready to drop it; and sat down to dinner in very high spirits indeed. He felt a warm bond with the other officers, made stronger by the presence of the two bashful newcomers, Jorgensen and Ducely. He realized now how green, how intrusive, he and Harding must have seemed five months ago to the vanished Gorton, Adams, and Carmody. He put a spoonful of pea soup to his lips, and at that instant the ship passed over a high swell and pitched violently. He noticed the practiced motion of his arm with which he neutralized the pitching and kept the spoon from spilling even a drop; and he uttered a low happy laugh, and drank it off.
After dinner he said to Ducely, as the fragile-looking ensign was about to leave the wardroom, “Let’s have a walk on the forecastle, shall we? Have to start talking about communications sometime.”
“Yes, sir,” said his new assistant meekly.
They stepped through the door of the forecastle into a cool purple twilight. The only brightness was a patch of fading gold in the west. “Well, Ducely.” Willie rested one leg on the starboard bitts, and leaned on the life lines with both hands, enjoying the flow of the salt wind. “Getting used to the Caine?”
“As much as I ever will, I guess. Horrible fate, isn’t it?”
Willie turned an annoyed glance at the ensign. “I suppose so. Every ship has good points and bad-”
“Oh, of course. I guess there isn’t much to do on one of these old rattletraps, which is something. And then I suppose we’ll spend most of our time in Navy yards getting patched up, which suits me, too. If it only