With these instructions, Bullitt disappeared, opening the door of the sick bay onto an increasingly turbulent outside world, where McNulty and the deck crew were busy stringing the life lines along the sloping deck. When he had gone, Williams locked the door and lay down on the deck on his back, spread-eagle. All the late hours, the excesses ashore had hit him at once. An aluminum dressing tray fell to the deck, where it rattled noisily back and forth with the pitching of the ship, but in spite of that he fell into a kind of sodden half sleep.
When he came to and stood up and opened the sick-bay door again, it was almost noon. The AJax had passed through the heart of the storm, and the open sea glistened ahead of them under a blinding sun. Williams went out to the deck, and, holding to the life line, made his way to the weather deck and looked over the side. From the bow ahead the waves broke cleanly and fell back, like the mane of a giant sea horse, like sculpture caught in motion, whiter at the crest than the white of paper, while the sea through which they moved was a deepening blue, like the blue at the heart of a sapphire. Salt spray streamed from the bridge and the weather deck, and foamed and bubbled swiftly away under his feet.
The fresh air made him feel that he might be able to eat his lunch, and he went back to the passageway, which passed midships from the starboard to the port side, to take his place in the chow line. The meals for the men were served from steam tables in the compartment at the foot of the port ladder. It was also a sleeping compartment, but during the day the bunks were pulled up and hooked against the bulkhead, so that the men could sit on benches at long tables with their trays. Today the men m line, grasping the life line as they waited, were unusually silent, and carefully turned their heads away as they passed the galley door, where the cooks braced themselves with widespread feet as they tended the cooking pots on the railed top of the stove. When Williams, in line, got to the bottom of the ladder, he knew that coming to chow had been a mistake. The pitching compartment below was a kind of comic inferno. Boys suddenly sick fought their way up the starboard ladder to the open air, and their abandoned trays slid across the tables and fell to the deck, awash with roast veal, gravy and mashed potatoes. In this others fell, and picked themselves up to fall again. Williams slipped and fought his way through this as well as he could and made his way up the ladder. He went back to the sick bay, passing on the way the second cook, Butler, an enormously fat young man, who was getting his revenge for the taunts he took by eating a large chunk of greasy pork in his bare hands, which he offered to the boys running to the rail to be sick.
Williams held the noon sick-call hour alone, dispensing soda-mint tablets and aspirin. Neither Doctor Claremont nor Chief Bullitt appeared, and after the hour had passed he closed the door and stood with his back braced against it, surveying with a lost feeling the small, closed space to which his world had shrunk. There were various places aboard ship where the men gathered when they were off duty. There were the midships boatswain's locker, and the locker on the forecastle, and the "blue room," where the gunnery crew gathered. The tables were always up for cards or letter writing in the after crew's quarters; off-duty black-gang boys met to talk and drink coffee in an engine or boiler room, and the deck crew sat on the fantail to beat their gums when they were off watch. But Williams would not be really welcome in any of these places without McNulty's tacit approval. There were a few solitaries on board who were permitted to survive in their own right —a difficult but respected role; Sullivan, the captain's yeoman, was one. Williams would have to try again to go it on his own.
The ship moved less violently now, more predictably, so that he could brace himself for its rise and fall. He took his Hospital Corps Manual down from the sea shelf, braced the chair against the bulkhead, and sat down with a determined effort to apply himself to his studies. Since Bullitt had spoken to him about going into action he was haunted by a feeling of apprehension about his limited knowledge. The pharmacist's mate of a destroyer on which McNulty had served had saved the life of his skipper, hit in the throat by a shrapnel fragment, by holding together the severed ends of a vein until the doctor had reached the bridge. Would he have the wit and ability to do that? A good pharmacist's mate, Williams had been told, always carried a fountain pen with him, because after extracting the point and the ink tube and cutting off the other end, the empty pen cartridge could be slipped into a man's trachea, in case of throat injury, and prevent him from choking to death. And if a man's leg or arm was blown away, just where were the pressure points to prevent fatal hemorrhage? He had been "taught those in Hospital Corps School, and he had gone back again and again to his textbook to memorize the procedure, but when Bullitt told him these things the explanation remained in his mind.
Williams had never seen action, as McNulty had once pointed out, but at least he felt he had enough hospital experience to recognize that a man like Bullitt was uncommon. In Navy hospitals, his record showed, he had invariably been assigned to the emergency room, because of his skill. His years of experience had made him practical and decisive. He would say, "You hold your hand here. Your fingers held this way. You hold it here with this much pressure, where you can feel the bone beneath the artery." He would demonstrate on Williams' body, and then he would say, "Now, do it to me." They would bandage each other's arms or legs for fracture, or tie a leg as for a traction splint.
Possibly it was true that Bullitt had contempt for men in general, but he was not indifferent to them, as Doctor Claremont was. Doctor Claremont was by nature and by training a surgeon. Williams imagined he must be excellent in an operating room, with a technician standing by the head of the patient to administer the anesthetic, with someone to check the blood pressure and someone else to hand him the instruments. He could see Doctor Claremont so busy with immediate concerns he would not have time or cause to look at the patient's face, half hidden, anyway, by the apparatus of anesthesia.
Doctor Claremont was a man who took his profession seriously. The weight of its noble history since Hippocrates rested on his thin shoulders. He was a doctor, Williams felt, who would walk, not run, to the nearest disaster, believing in the expediency of deliberation. But death, as Williams had learned, was no respecter of persons or their presumptions, no matter how professional these presumptions might be, and so he felt much safer with Bullitt, who was more at home with calamity in the open air. With so many things to remember— the element of shock, the pressure points, the safety margin of time involved in the application of a tourniquet before gangrene became a threat —with all these things to hold in mind it was always possible that Doctor Claremont might forget to include in his calculations the inexperience of Williams, a factor that Chief Bullitt would never forget.
And thinking these thoughts, Williams flung away his textbook. He stood up and opened the sick-bay door to the outer world. To a new world, glowing with sunlight in a sky of flawless blue. The ship moved easily through great, calm swells with a sound that was like the sound of singing. The life lines were down, the deck was dry. The members of the crew off watch stood talking in groups along the rail, in clean dungarees and spotless hats. And along the deck, toward the sick bay, came a curious figure. It was Bullitt, moving with his peculiar air of precision and elegance, wearing freshly starched and crisply pressed khaki, with his chief's hat at a jaunty angle on his head. He was carrying an aluminum pitcher, and he smiled when he saw Williams at the sick-bay door. He came inside, and Williams heard the metallic clink of ice in the pitcher, and smelled the pleasing aroma of cut lemon.