Caine Mutiny, The - Herman Wouk [286]
Three weeks later, on the morning of the twenty-seventh of October, Willie sat in the cabin, muffled up in his bridge coat, reading Pascal’s Pensées, a book he had pulled out at random from one of the suitcases piled at his feet. His breath smoked. The air streaming through the open porthole was raw and dank. Outside were the shabby sheds of the supply depot, and beyond them the gray muddy flats of Bayonne knobbed with oil tanks. The Caine had been tied up for three days alongside a dock, stripped of its guns, empty of ammunition and fuel. All the paper work was done. It was the end of the trail. The decommissioning ceremony was half an hour off.
He fumbled inside his clothes, drew out a pen, and underlined in ink the words of the book, “Life is a dream, a little more coherent than most.” In the weeks since leaving Pearl Harbor he had felt more and more that he was living in a dream. It didn’t seem possible that he had himself conned a ship through the great locks and steamy green ditches of the Panama Canal; that he had sailed past the coast of Florida and picked out with binoculars the pink stucco home on the shore of Palm Beach where he had spent seven childhood winters; that he had brought a United States ship of war through the Narrows into the harbor of New York, threading among hooting ferryboats and liners, and had seen the spiky skyline and the Statue of Liberty from the bridge of his own ship, he, Captain Keith of the Caine.
His rise to command had seemed queer enough at Okinawa, but there, at least, his Navy identity had still possessed him. Coming to the East Coast, nearing his home, seeing the landmarks of his old life rising up real and unchanged, he had felt his military personality dissolving, drifting away, into the sea air like vapor, leaving a residue which was only Willie Keith. It was this transition that made the days and nights dreamlike. He was no longer a naval officer-but he was no longer Willie Keith, either. The old personality didn’t fit; it seemed as odd as an outdated fashion.
There was a rap at the door. “Come in!”
His exec stood at the threshold and saluted. “Ship’s company is at quarters, Captain.”
He laid aside the book and went out on the forecastle. He returned the crew’s mass salute and stood facing them, on the rusty empty circle where the number-one gun of the Caine had been fastened for thirty years. A stiff wind blew a swampy oily smell over the deck, and flapped the crew’s pea jackets. The sun shone feebly yellow through the gray smoke and mist over the harbor. He had prepared a long, sentimental speech. But he looked around at the faces and his heart became cold. He had nothing to say to these strange ensigns and jg’s. Where were Keefer, Maryk, Harding, Jorgensen, Rabbitt? Where was Ducely? Where was Queeg? The skimpy crew appeared as alien as the officers. All the men released on points were gone. He saw a few familiar faces: Budge, fat and stolid, had ridden all the way; so had Urban and Winston. Most of the others were sullen draftees, married men with children who had been dragged from their homes in the last months of the war.
Willie pulled the decommissioning order out of his pocket and read it aloud in a high, strained voice over the wind. He folded it away and looked around at the ragged thin ranks of the crew. A forlorn end, he thought. A truck rattled past on the dock, and a crane was snorting at a nearby pier. The cold wind stung his eyes. He felt he had to say something.
“Well, most of