“Yes, what did you mean, Regan? I wish you would say what you mean. We’ve been rewriting ‘Man Drowning’ until it’s coming out of my ears, and I still don’t know what you mean. Can’t you say what you mean? Just for once? Can’t you, for God’s sake, spit it out in clear intelligent English?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” David said. “I’ve been trying to, but—”
“Don’t be so sorry. I’m sorry enough for both of us. I’m sorry I ever read your letters and ever made the mistake of thinking you could possibly in a thousand years write even a single paragraph of interesting prose. Don’t go telling me you’re sorry, Regan.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but—”
“I said don’t tell me you’re sorry!”
David stared at Devereaux, wondering how this had suddenly got so serious. He’s drunk, yes, he thought, but still this had got so serious all at once. He glanced toward Sammener, who had washed his hands of the entire affair and was leisurely sipping his coffee on the quarterdeck.
“What made you think you were a writer, Regan?” Devereaux asked.
“I never thought that, sir. It was you who—”
“Don’t contradict me! What was it, Regan? A burning desire to get that magnificent event on paper?”
“No, sir, I—”
“Man Drowning, Man Drowning, Man Drowning, how many times has he drowned since we first started the story?”
“I don’t know, sir. There have been a lot of revis—”
“What makes you think anyone would be interested in reading about some fool who’s too stupid to avoid getting caught in an anchor line?”
David felt his right fist tightening on the barrel of the rifle.
“I... I don’t know, sir.”
“No one. That’s who would be interested. No one. A colorless little man goes out in a rowboat and—”
“Sir!”
“What is it?”
“Sir, I... I’d rather not discuss the story now, sir.”
“Ahh, he’s sensitive,” Devereaux said solicitously. “The sensitive artist. How literary. If you’re so literary and sensitive, Regan, why did you choose to write about such an insensitive clod? Why did you—?”
“Sir, that’s my father,” David said quietly. He could feel an uncontrollable anger boiling inside him. His fist was tight on the barrel of the rifle. He hoped he would not cry. His eyes blinked as he tried to stifle the anger.
“Oh, your father. Oh, forgive me, Regan.”
“That’s all right, sir.”
“Yes, your father. I didn’t realize your father was the idiot who—”
“Stop it, Mr. Devereaux!”
“—stepped into a rowboat and allowed his foot to—”
“Stop it!”
“—get caught in an anchor line. That takes brains. A damn fool is what that man was, a goddamn stupid...”
His first impulse was to raise the rifle and fire it.
He controlled the impulse somehow, bringing the rifle up, his right hand almost going to the trigger, and then he decided to swing the rifle, and he started to do that and simply threw the rifle away and smashed his right fist into Mr. Devereaux’s face. Devereaux reeled back against the gangway, and David went after him, his eyes brimming with tears, his heart pounding.
“That’s my father,” he said, and he struck Devereaux again as Sammener put down his coffee cup and came running down the gangway, his hand going for the .45 at his side.
“Regan!” he yelled. “Are you out of your mind? Regan, cut it out!” He seized David’s arms and pulled him away from Devereaux. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I’m sorry, sir,” David said, trembling now with the realization of what he had done.
“That’s a fool stunt, Regan,” Sammener said. “You... you better get below. Mercer, wake... wake the next man on the watch list. Come on, Regan, we’d just better...”
Devereaux straightened up from the gangway and wiped his hand across his nose. He looked at the blood on his fingers and then smiled his chipmunk grin and said, “Just a second, Jonah.”
“He lost his head, George,” Sammener said. “I’ll have him relieved and—”
“He lost his head indeed,” Devereaux answered. “I think we’d better wake the captain.”
On April seventh David Regan stood a captain’s mast, and it was recommended at that primary court that David’s case be presented before a Naval court-martial. On April sixteenth he stood before a board of officers on the Juneau and was found guilty of violation of Article 90 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which stated Any person subject to this code who strikes his superior officer or lifts up any weapon or offers any violence against him while he is in the execution of his office shall be punished, if the offense is committed in time of war, by death or such other punishment as a court-martial might direct.
The lawyer charged with David’s defense pointed out that George Devereaux had been returning to the ship from a liberty and was not actively engaged in “the execution of his office,” but the defense was reminded that an officer is in the execution of his office when engaged in any act or service required or authorized to be done by him by statute, regulation, the order of a superior, or military usage. In general, the court advised, any striking or use of violence against any superior officer by a person subject to military law, over whom it is the duty of that superior officer to maintain discipline at the time, would be striking or using violence against him in the execution of his office.
It was pointed out to the court that George Devereaux had provoked the attack upon himself, and that he was drunk at the time of the attack, but the prosecution maintained that Article 112 of the Code, the article relating to drunkenness on duty, did not relate to those periods when, no duty being required of them by orders or regulations, officers and men occupy the status of leisure known as “off duty” or “on liberty,” which status George Devereaux was occupying at the time of the attack.
They could have given David a dishonorable discharge in addition to whatever punishment they decided upon within the specified limits of the Code. Instead, and because of the mitigating circumstances — the attorney for the defense constantly harped on a duality that permitted Devereaux to be engaged in “the execution of his office” where it suited the prosecution’s case, but to be “off duty” or “on liberty” where it did not — David was sentenced to five years at hard labor without pay or allowances, but his punishment did not include a dishonorable discharge.
On May third he was put aboard a transport in irons, and shipped to the Naval Retraining Command at Camp Elliott in San Diego, where he began serving his term.
Aboard the Hanley, the captain called Devereaux into the wardroom and delivered a flowery speech, the true substance of which was contained in the four words “I told you so.”
The girls from Phi Sig had somewhere acquired an Army Air Corps parachute, painstakingly dyed it a shocking red, and hung it from the ceiling of the gymnasium in a billowing canopy of brilliance. The Omega Epsilon girls had hand-fashioned dozens and dozens of long-stemmed roses, threaded them on strings, and trailed them from the gym ceiling so that the room was bathed in a literal shower of flowers, the huge silk parachute serving as an umbrella to protect the dancers from the crepe-paper downpour as they circled the floor to the beat of the band at the front of the gym. The dance had been labeled, appropriately though perhaps unimaginatively, The Shower of Roses Ball. The beat of the band throbbed through the hall, pounded the dancers, fired the feet of Amanda Soames, who swirled about the gym in yellow taffeta, amazed that she was here going round and round in the arms of a stranger beneath the Army Air Corps parachute somewhere acquired by the girls from Phi Sig.