Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [176]
CHAPTER 27
The Search
Flat gray clouds closed in overhead. A strong wind from the west whipped the bridge clean of stack gas, and heeled the Caine over steeply each time it rolled to starboard. Lines of white spray began to appear on the blackish rough surface of the sea. Sailors staggered here and there, collecting keys, distributing tags, borrowing pens and pencils, and maintaining a murmur of rebellious cursing.
By seven o’clock Willie Keith had interviewed all the men in his department. On his bunk was a large cardboard carton which contained a tangle of some four hundred tagged keys. He hefted the box, wobbled through the wardroom with it, backed up the rolling ladder to the main deck, and inched along the rainy, slippery passageway to the captain’s cabin. He kicked at the door; it rang hollowly. “Open, please, sir. Both arms full.”
The door opened, automatically blacking out the interior of the cabin. Willie stepped over the coaming into the darkness. The door clanged behind him, and the lights flashed up brightly.
There were four people in the room: the captain, Ensign Voles, Jellybelly, and Chief Bellison. The captain’s bunk was a sea of keys-there seemed to be a hundred thousand of them, brass keys, steel keys, iron keys, of all shapes, tangled and knotted in each other and in the cords of the white tags. The deck was piled with cardboard cartons. Jellybelly and Bellison were clinking the keys into two separate heaps. Ensign Voles was passing the keys from the smaller heap one by one to the captain. Queeg, sitting at his desk, white-faced and red-eyed, but full of enthusiasm, plunged the keys one by one into the padlock, tried to turn them, and discarded them into a box between his feet. He glanced up at Willie, snapped, “Don’t stand there gawking, dump ’em and run along,” and resumed the regular smothered clank of key into lock, key into lock, key into lock. The air was fetid and smoky. Willie dumped his keys on the captain’s bed, hastened from the room, and went out on the forecastle.
Slant waving lines of rain were blowing across the bow. The wind whipped his trouser legs and water spattered his face. Willie wedged himself in the lee of the bridgehouse. The bow plunged into a trough, and cut a wave into two foaming black streams as it rose again. Spray blew past Willie and drenched the deck and the bridge, dripping down on him.
He loved these lonely moments on the forecastle, in all weathers. There was balm in the wide sea and the fresh wind for all the itchy afflictions of life on the Caine. In the late stormy twilight he could see the dim forms of the Montauk, the Kalamazoo, and the nearest destroyers of the screen, small tossing shapes of an intenser black on the gray-black of the ocean. Inside those shapes were light, and warmth, and noise, and all the thousand rituals of Navy life, and-for all he knew-crises as wild and unlikely as the strawberry affair on the Caine. Which of the watchers on the other bridges, seeing the narrow old minesweeper plunging through the steep waves, could guess that its crew was full of mutinous mutterings, and that its captain was immured in his room, testing innumerable keys in a padlock, his eyes gleaming?
The sea was the one thing in Willie’s life that remained larger than Queeg. The captain had swelled in his consciousness to an all-pervading presence, a giant of malice and evil; but when Willie filled his mind with the sight of the sea and the sky, he could, at least for a while, reduce Queeg to a sickly well-meaning man struggling