Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [157]
“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.
CHAPTER 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 eccentricities 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 voluminous 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-minesweepers, bastards of the sea, attached to no permanent command, tended to become temporary serfs of any naval potentate into whose domain they steamed. It happened that the commander 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 Guadalcanal 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