Voyage to Somewhere (10 page)

The quartermaster had been having trouble with his wife and was afraid that she would divorce him. I think he loved his wife and was very much worried. He told me once that he had had no business marrying above his station in life. All his wife's male relations were officers, he said, except her brother. who was a private in the army. In the last letter he had received from her she had said that she was considering leaving him.

The quartermaster and the chief boatswain's mate were the two whom the lack of mail hurt most. Then there were five or six newly married youngsters who were in the sort of continual emotional crisis that a barely consummated marriage brings and that only a steady stream of letters can soothe. The rest of us just wanted mail the way a man in a strange land wants to see a familiar face.

It was, therefore, quite an event when, after five months, the mail orderly came running down to the ship at Milne Bay and said that not only was there mail, but it would be necessary for a truck to bring it down to us. As commanding officer, I went myself to telephone Transportation, but I was told that no truck was available. Just as I was coming back to the ship to tell the crew that they would have to wait a little longer, the port director arrived in his jeep with some official messages. When I explained the situation to him, he agreed not only to let us use his jeep as a mail truck but to drive it himself. With the help of two seamen, we took the top down, and the director set off. Within an hour the jeep returned, so loaded down with sacks of mail that it looked like a hay wagon.

The whole crew turned out to hustle the mail aboard. I had expected to see a great deal of boisterousness and gaiety, and I was surprised to find that an almost worried silence prevailed. The men formed a line and passed the mail sacks aboard with the care, hurry, and perturbed lack of comment that they might have displayed if they were passing full buckets of water to a fire. It seemed to me that the wardroom was the best place to sort the mail, so I ordered it piled there. When all the sacks had been stacked around the wardroom table, there was barely room for Mr. Crane and me to sit down and do the sorting. The crew jammed the passageways outside and a few even pushed into the wardroom. They kept their caps on, but it was not, I felt, a moment to insist upon the refinements of military discipline. A machinist's mate appeared with a pair of pliers to tear off the wire-and-lead seal at the neck of every bag. Mr. Crane and I waited while he opened the first one. The wire was tough, and he had to twist it many times before it broke. Then he pulled open the mouth of the bag, lifted the bag over the table, and spilled out in front of us a cascade of brightly colored air-mail envelopes. I looked up and saw that the door to the wardroom was jammed with men's heads. There were the heads of people kneeling, people crouching, and people standing, so many heads at so many levels that no bodies could be seen. Everyone's eyes were searching the letters, on the table. No one put his hand out toward the letters, but there was in the eyes of the men a look one sees in the eyes of a well-trained dog looking at a forbidden piece of meat.

Mr. Crane and I quickly sorted the mail, one pile for the deck force, one for the black gang, and one for the smaller departments. Each pile was given to a chief petty officer, who, followed by his men, retired to the deck to conduct a routine mail call. After that, as each sack was sorted, we handed the petty officers further piles of mail. It seemed more reasonable not to make the men wait until we had been through all the bags and sorted everything, including the official mail. The result was that many small mail calls were held, and there was a good deal of confusion and suspense as the men opened their letters out of the sequence in which they had been written. If a man didn't get a letter in one mail call, he had only to wait five minutes for another.

At last all the mail sacks were empty and I went to my cabin to read my own letters. When, half an hour later, I went on deck, I found the crew dispersed all over the ship. Each man was sitting alone, with a pile of letters beside him. The desire for privacy was so great that men were sitting in out-of-the-way places. I saw men in a lifeboat and on the gun platform, and one man had retired with his letters to the crow's nest. For the better part of an hour there was no conversation. Looking at the intent faces of the readers, I realized that, to promote a mutiny, all I would have to do would be to call the men to cleaning stations at that moment.

At the end of an hour the tenseness had lessened, and the men began to forsake their isolated spots. Friends drifted together. It surprised me to see the politeness with which each man examined any photograph handed to him. Almost everyone had received a photograph of some member of his family. White was walking around the deck, stopping everyone who came along to show him a picture of his wife. “Very nice,” I heard Guns say to him. “She sure is pretty.”

There was also a great deal of reading aloud from letters. From what I could hear, most of the quotations were not very startling or witty, but they were all accorded a respectful attention. This atmosphere of brotherhood and peace lasted the rest of the day, and it was a long while before I heard the customary language of the deck.

I went back to the office to have a look at some of the official mail. While I was tearing open the envelopes, the chief boatswain's mate came in and told me that he was the father of “a daughter who's going to grow up to be the prettiest girl in Pennsylvania—and the hardest to get!”

I didn't hear from the quartermaster till next day. Then he came to my cabin to ask about legal aid. There had been no letter from his wife for him, but the divorce papers, with a short note from her lawyer requesting him to sign them, had come in his mail. “Well,” he said, “it's nice to be certain, anyway. Those five months not knowing what was happening were tough.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

A
LTHOUGH THE
mail relieved the basic tenseness of the ship, it had a deleterious effect on some of the men that did not appear until some days afterward. The quartermaster had not been the only one to get bad news. White had received news of his father's death. His mother had written that she thought she could run the family hardware store without much difficulty, and his wife, Betsy, had written that she was going to move in with his mother and help in the store. White told me all this one dark night just before he relieved the wheel. He spoke quietly, and it would have been somehow wrong to give him any blithe reassurances.

“I figure they'll make out all right,” he concluded. “My Betsy is pretty smart.”

I could tell that Mr. Warren had received some kind of bad news, because right after the mail came he started spending all his time in his stateroom. On the bridge he indulged in no conversation and even at meals he sat silently. His sharp young face which always had had an intent look appeared more strained than ever.

“What's wrong with Mr. Warren?” Mr. Crane asked me after dinner one night, when Mr. Warren had just excused himself.

“I don't know,” I said “I guess we better just stay away from him.”

Not for a week did I learn what was troubling Mr. Warren. Then one night while he had the watch we were sitting alone together on the starboard wing of the bridge. It was a beautiful night; the moon gilded the water and whitened the night sky. Six miles away to our left the coast of New Guinea showed like a low black cloud. Ahead of us the horizon was clear, and the ship moved over the smooth ocean almost without roll or pitch.

“Nice night, isn't it?” I said.

Mr. Warren leaned on the rail of the bridge and stared moodily ahead. For a moment I thought he wasn't going to answer me at all.

“Yeah,” he said at last, “it's all right.”

I ducked into the chart room and lit my pipe. Coming out on the bridge again with my hand over the bowl to conceal its glow, I sat on the stool in the corner and watched the smoke drift away in the moonlight.

“Captain,” Mr. Warren said at length, “do you have a wife?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I do.”

“How long have you been married?”

“About six years.”

There was another long silence during which my pipe went out. I held it until I was sure the spark had been extinguished, then I tapped it over the side. Mr. Warren stood with his back toward me.

“Tell me,” he said suddenly, “how does your wife act? When you're away, I mean.”

“What do you mean, how does she act?” I asked.

“Does she go out with other men?”

I took my pouch from my pocket and filled my pipe slowly enough to give me time to think. “I guess she goes out with old friends,” I said. “There's nothing wrong with that.”

“Does she go to dances and cocktail lounges and places like that?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I never asked her.”

There was another long silence. I wanted to go back to the chart room to relight my pipe, but there was something so urgent in Mr. Warren's voice that I stayed.

“My wife, Rachel,” he said at last, “she was going back East to live with her family I've never met her family, but I guess they're pretty nice. They live in Philadelphia. Anyway, she was going back there, but I got a letter from her saying she had decided to stay in San Francisco.”

“Well,” I said, “I don't see anything so wrong in that. She probably wants to be there when you come back.”

Mr. Warren ignored me. For a moment he was silent, then, still staring straight ahead over the bow, he spoke again.

“I got another letter. It was from a friend of mine, a guy I went to school with. He said that he had met Rachel in a cocktail lounge. She was sitting there alone. He said they had a few drinks together, then some guy came for her, and the two of them went out together. It was an Army lieutenant.”

“I don't see anything so bad about that,” I said. “There could be all kinds of logical explanations of that.”

Mr. Warren turned around. In the moonlight his face looked white. “Do you think I ought to ask her for some of them?” he asked. “Do you think I ought to enclose my friend's letter and ask her to explain it?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I wouldn't want to give you an answer to that.”

The clock on the bridge struck six bells. A seaman appeared in the door of the pilothouse. “Permission to relieve the wheel, sir, on course two nine three?” he asked.

“Permission granted,” said Mr. Warren.

A moment later another seaman appeared in the door. “The wheel is relieved, sir, on course two nine three,” he said.

“Very well,” answered Mr. Warren.

There was a long wait, and we were alone again. Mr. Warren shoved his cap nervously back on his head. “You see,” he said, “I don't want to play the part of the jealous husband. That's a hell of a thing.”

“Yes,” I said, “it is.”

“But I don't like the idea of my wife living alone in San Francisco and bumming around cocktail lounges,” Mr. Warren continued. “She's young. She doesn't know much about things.”

I realized that it was not necessary for me to make answers. Mr. Warren was talking more to himself than to me.

“She might get in trouble,” he said. “She wouldn't mean to, but she might get in trouble. I think I'll write her and tell her to go home.”

The bow lookout called that he thought he saw a ship two points on the starboard bow, three quarters of the way to the horizon. Mr Warren picked up the binoculars from their rack on the bulkhead and stared intently into the night.

“It's a Liberty, sir,” he said at last, and handed the glasses to me. I looked, and far away could see the silhouette of a blacked out ship.

“Looks as though she'll pass us clear enough,” I said.

“Sure,” said Mr. Warren. “She'll be plenty far away when she's abeam.”

I handed him back the glasses, and he replaced them in their rack.

“I wonder who that Army lieutenant was,” he said. “I know that there are no Army lieutenants in her family.”

“If you're going to worry about it,” I replied, “you better write and ask her. I've seen a lot of people worry about things like that and most of the time it's all through misunderstanding.”

Mr. Warren sounded relieved when he answered. “I think I will,” he said. “I think I'll enclose that damn letter and ask her about it.”

We were at sea on our way back to Hollandia when we heard the great news that the Army had gone into the Philippine Islands. Rumor had long had it that the invasion would start pretty soon, but no one had thought that it would be right away.

“Well be going up there ourselves,” I heard Guns say. “I wish we had something we could really shoot with.”

When we reached Hollandia we felt that we were already part of the invasion. The harbor had changed since last time we were there. Anchored almost gunwale to gunwale were over five hundred ships. Destroyers, Liberties, tankers, hospital ships, a carrier, and countless nondescript merchant vessels crowded every nook and corner of the bay so that one could almost walk from ship to ship across the harbor. Mr. Rudd and I stood on deck as we threaded out way into the docks.

“Quite a sight,” I said. “Looks like all the ships in the world are here.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Rudd. “I don't like to see it. Every time I make fun of the way the brass hats do things I'll think of these five hundred ships and I'll wonder.”

As soon as we were alongside the wharf I went up to the port director's office to find out whether we were going to Leyte in the convoy that was obviously making up.

“No,” he said. “We've got you slated for a milk run between here and Milne Bay. Can't tell how long you'll be on it.”

I received the news with mixed emotions. The voyage to Leyte and the possibility of combat it carried with it was nothing to look forward to; the SV-126 was a ship best kept out of action. Still, there was a sort of disappointment in going back to the familiar New Guinea coast, the steady routine of loading and unloading unimportant cargoes. When I returned to the ship and told the men, they were frankly disappointed. Only Boats and Mr. Rudd seemed glad.