The Caine Mutiny Read Free

‘bilged’?”
    “Don’t you know how they work it? We get three weeks as apprentice seamen. Then the top two thirds of the class become midshipmen. The rest get bilged. Straight to the Army.”
    The fugitives exchanged an understanding look. Willie’s hand crept around to his back, to ascertain how hollow his hollow back really was. He began a series of frenzied efforts to touch his toes. At every bend he came nearer. He broke out in a sweat. Once he thought the tips of his fingers brushed his shoelaces, and he gurgled in triumph. With a swoop and a groan he brought his fingers squarely on his toes. Coming erect again, his spine vibrating, the room spinning, he found that Keefer, rolled over and awake, was staring at him with frightened little eyes. Keggs had backed into a corner. Willie attempted a lighthearted laugh, but he staggered at the same moment and had to clutch the desk to keep from falling over, so the effect of nonchalance was marred. “Nothing like a little setting-up exercise,” he said, with drunken savoir-faire.
    “Hell, no,” said Keefer. “Especially three o’clock in the afternoon. Ah never miss it myself.”
    Three rolled-up mattresses came catapulting through the open door, one after another. “Mattresses!” yelled a retreating voice in the hall. Blankets, pillows, and sheets flew in, propelled by another disembodied voice shouting, “Blankets, pillows, and sheets!”
    “Couldn’t imagine what they were less’n he told us,” growled Keefer, untangling himself from a sheet which had draped itself on him. He made up a bed in a few moments, flat and neat as if it had been steam-rollered. Willie summoned up boys’ camp experience; his cot soon looked presentable. Keggs wrestled with the bedclothes for ten minutes while the others stowed their books and clothes, then he asked Keefer hopefully: “How’s that, now?”
    “Fella,” said Keefer, shaking his head, “you an innocent man.” He approached the cot and made a few. passes of the hand over it. The bed straightened itself into military rigidity, as in an animated cartoon.
    “You’re a whiz,” said Keggs.
    “I heard what you said about me bilging,” said Keefer kindly. “Don’ worry. I be there on the great gittin’-up morning.”
    The rest of the day went by in bugles, assemblies, dismissals, reassemblies, announcements, marches, lectures, and aptitude tests. Every time the administration remembered a detail that had been omitted in the mimeographed sheets the bugle blared, and five hundred sailors swarmed out of Furnald Hall. A fair-haired, tall, baby-faced ensign named Acres would bark the new instruction, standing on the steps, jutting his chin and squinting fiercely. Then he would dismiss them, and the building would suck them in. The trouble with this systole and diastole for the men on the top floor (“tenth deck”) was that there wasn’t room for them all in the elevator. They had to scramble down nine flights of stairs (“ladders”), and later wait wearily for a ride up, or else climb. Willie was stumbling with fatigue when at last they were marched off to dinner. But food revived him wonderfully.
    Back in their room, with leisure to talk, the three exchanged identities. The gloomy Edwin Keggs was a high-school algebra teacher from Akron, Ohio. Roland Keefer was the son of a West Virginian politician. He had had a job in the state personnel bureau, but, as he cheerfully phrased it, he didn’t know personnel from Shinola, and had simply been learning the ropes around the capitol when the war came. Willie’s announcement that he was a night-club pianist sobered the other two, and the conversation lagged. Then he added that he was a Princeton graduate, and a chill silence blanketed the room.
    When the bugle sounded retreat and Willie climbed into bed, it occurred to him that he had not had a single thought of May Wynn or of his parents all day. It seemed weeks since he had kissed his mother that same morning on