Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [211]
In the last turbulent months he had advanced in his thinking about her to the point of realizing that his conduct toward her, even in their correspondence, was abominable. He still yearned for her. If the word “love” meant anything, and if the descriptions in novels and poetry of the emotion were accurate, he supposed he loved her. But he had a deep-seated, unshakable intuition that he would never depart from his upbringing enough to marry her. It was a familiar old conflict in literature; and it was dreary and sad to find himself trapped in it in real life. But he understood now that the real victim of the situation was May, and he was determined to free her before the court-martial brought an unguessable new turn in his life. It no longer seemed possible to cut her off with a letter or with silence. He had to confront her, and take whatever pain and punishment she could inflict on him. It was a miserable errand on which he was embarked. He could hardly bear to think about it.
He tried to distract himself by talking to the bald fat literary agent beside him. His neighbor, however, was of the sleeping-pill school of air travel. For a while he cross-examined Willie to find out whether he had killed any Japs personally or earned any medals or been wounded; but he had already lost interest, and was pulling papers out of his portfolio, when the plane began to jolt and flutter in the air over the Rockies. Thereupon he produced a bottle of yellow capsules, swallowed three, and slumped unconscious. Willie wished he had brought along his Phenobarbital. In the end he drew the curtains, pushed back his chair, closed his eyes, and lost himself in sickly revolving thoughts of the Caine.
There were a few dreams of childhood which Willie could never forget, one in particular, in which he had seen God as an enormous jack-in-the-box popping up over the trees on the lawn of his home and leaning over to stare down at him. The scene in the anteroom of the Com Twelve legal office, in his memory, had the same quality of unreal and painful vividness. There, before his shut eyes, were the green close walls; the bookcase full of fat regular legal volumes bound in brown and red; the single fluorescent light overhead, throwing a bluish glare; the ashtray full of butts beside him on the desk, sending up a stale smell; the “board of investigation,” a surly, thin little captain, his voice dry and sneering, his face the face of a nasty post-office clerk refusing a badly wrapped package.
How different it had all been from Willie’s picturings, how unfair, how quickly over; above all, how small-scale and dreary! He had seen himself as an actor in a grand drama. In the privacy of his room, in his dark bunk, he had whispered to himself “the Caine mutiny, the Caine mutiny,” savoring the ring of the phrase, and imagining a long article in Time underneath that heading, greatly favorable to the heroic Maryk and Keith. He had even tried to envision Maryk’s face on the cover of the news magazine. He had anticipated confronting an array of admirals across a green-covered table, justifying his act with quiet poise, with irrefutable facts. The memory of one daydream made him writhe. He had seen himself, the true key figure of the mutiny, summoned to Washington by President Roosevelt for a private chat in his office, convincing the President that the Caine affair was exceptional, that it was no indication of low morale in the Navy. He had even planned, in answer to Roosevelt’s generous offer of restoration to any duty he chose, the simple reply, “Mr. President, I should like to return to my ship.”
This tangle of Technicolor folly had possessed his mind all during the Lingayen campaign and the return trip to Pearl Harbor. The suicide attack had happened so quickly, and caused so little damage (he had not even seen the Japanese plane before it struck) that it had merely served to enhance his picture of Maryk, and himself, and all the officers of the Caine, as cool-headed heroes.
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