Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [130]
Official mail was heaped two feet high on his bunk. He had dumped the tumbled mass of envelopes stamped with crimson secrecy warnings out of three gray mail sacks which lay crumpled on the deck. The stuff had accumulated in Pearl Harbor for a month. It was all his now, to log, file, and be responsible for; his first batch of secret mail since inheriting Keefer’s job.
Willie threw a blanket over the rest of the mail and brought the operation order up to the captain. Queeg was in the cabin on the main deck which had formerly housed two officers. It had been altered at the Navy Yard under his careful direction so that it contained one bed, a wide desk, an armchair, a lounge seat, a large safe, and numerous speaking tubes and squawk boxes. The captain paused in his shaving to riffle through the sheets, dripping soap on them. “Kwajalein, hey?” he said casually. “Kay. Leave this stuff here. You’ll discuss this with nobody, of course, not even Maryk.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
When Willie began to log and file the mail he made unpleasant discoveries. Keefer had turned over to him a set of dog-eared ledgers and the keys to the filing cabinet, and had offhandedly added several handfuls of secret mail which lay on the deck of his closet under shoes and dirty laundry. He assured Willie that the correspondence was “meaningless garbage.”
“I’ve been figuring on logging it in when the next batch came. You may as well do it,” he said, yawning. He climbed back on his bunk and resumed reading Finnegan’s Wake.
Willie found the file cabinet in a hopeless jumble. Letters in it would have been easier to locate had they been stuffed in a gunnysack. The ledgers contained an idiotically complicated system for entering the arrival of mail, using four different notations for each letter. Willie calculated that it would take him five or six solid working days to log the mail. He went to the ship’s office and watched Jellybelly logging tremendous sackfuls of non-secret correspondence. The yeoman typed entries on green form sheets, and in less than an hour disposed of as much mail as Willie had in his room. “Where’d you get that system?” he asked the sailor.
Jellybelly turned a bored, bleary glance at him. “Didn’t get it nowhere, sir. Navy system.”
“How about these?” Willie thrust the ledgers at Jellybelly. “Ever see them?”
The yeoman shrank away from the books, as though they were leprous. “Sir, that’s your job, not mine-”
“I know, I know-”
“Mr. Keefer, he tried half a dozen times to get me to log in that secret stuff. It’s against regulations for an enlisted man to-”
“All I want to know is, are these ledgers official, or what?” The sailor wrinkled his nose. “Official? Christ, that system would give any yeoman third class a hemorrhage. Mr. Funk, he invented it back in ’40. He give it to Mr. Anderson, he give it to Mr. Ferguson, he give it to Mr. Keefer.”
“Why didn’t they use the Navy system? It seems so much simpler-”
“Sir,” said the yeoman dryly, “don’t ask me why officers do anything. You wouldn’t like my answer.”
In the next weeks Willie overhauled his entire department. He installed standard Navy systems of filing and logging. He burned some sixty obsolete registered publications, and he sorted the rest into order, so that he could find any book in an instant. In this process he caught himself wondering often about Keefer. It became obvious that the novelist had wasted a fearful amount of time in communications. Willie remembered searches for letters or publications that had consumed whole afternoons, searches punctuated with a fire of Keefer’s sour wit about the Navy’s foul-ups. He remembered the communicator bending over the ledgers for hours, cursing. Willie knew that above all things the novelist prized time in which to write and read. He knew, too, that Keefer had the cleverest mind on the Caine. How, then, could this man have failed to see that he was defeating himself