Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [212]
But Willie was still unprepared for the developments in San Francisco. He had never foreseen that the great Caine mutiny would be treated by the authorities as an irksome and not very pressing legal problem; that it would apparently mean little more to the legal office of Com Twelve than the pilfering of a truckload of lard. Days went by, while the ship rested in drydock, without any reaction to Captain White’s report. And when the investigation at last began, there were no admirals, no green table, no summons from the President. There was only a cross-examination by a little man in a little office.
Was it this distortion in scale, Willie wondered, that had turned his irrefutable facts into slippery, badly described anecdotes which discredited himself, not Queeg, more and more as he told them? Was it the hostility of the investigating officer? Stories which he had counted on to damn Queeg seemed to tell themselves as descriptions of his own disloyalty or ineptness. Even the water famine, one of Queeg’s grand crimes, sounded in his own ears like a prudent measure, and the crew’s water-bootlegging in the engine room a rebellious act abetted by incompetent officers. What he could not convey to the investigator was the terrible distress everybody had undergone. The captain regarded him fishily when he spoke of the heat and the stack gas, and finally said, “I’m sure you suffered unendurable hardships, Mr. Keith. Why didn’t you report the bootlegging to your commanding officer?” He knew he should have replied, “Because I considered him a coward and a lunatic-” but the answer that came out of his mouth was, “Well, er, nobody else did, so I didn’t see why I should.”
He remembered how he emerged from the interview with a terrible presentiment that he had hanged himself; a feeling which proved quite accurate. After the passing of five uneasy days he was summoned to the office of Captain Breakstone. The investigation report was placed in his hand. The cold blue-lined sheets felt horrible in his fingers before he began to read. He came to the words about himself with a sense of struggling in a nightmare; it was like reading a doctor’s report that he was dying:
Recommendation (3)
That Lieutenant (junior grade) Willis Seward Keith USNR be brought to trial by a general court-martial on the charge of making a mutiny.
Willie accepted the brutal prospect of a court-martial with his mind, but his heart was that of a frightened rabbit, looking about for succor with wide shining eyes. He knew that he was still Willie Keith, just the innocent, good-humored Willie whom everybody liked, Willie, who could delight people by sitting at a piano and playing If You Knew What the Gnu Knew. Impaled by a terrible accident on the spike of military justice, his virtue seemed to be leaking from him like air from a punctured tire; he felt himself flattening slowly to his old self of Princeton and the Club Tahiti. A thought which had not passed through his mind for years was murmuring up from his subconscious: “Mother will get me out of it.”
Supine in his tilted chair, his stomach straining against the tight safety belt each time the plane jounced, he spun a long morbid fantasy wherein his mother hired the country’s greatest lawyers to defend him, and the long-faced officers of the court-martial were confounded by the brilliant legal minds arrayed at