Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [156]
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