In this moment no one spoke; there was no sound but the siren crying and the heavy feet of running men on the deck, and in the act of running Williams saw, from the corner of his eye, a glow of color; he turned his head briefly to see a ship burning on the horizon, with a great, majestic cloud of flame and smoke above it.
The contrast of the officers' wardroom with the activity on deck left him standing motionless for a moment in the room, as if he had wakened from a dream. Although the wardroom could scarcely be considered a luxury accommodation, it seemed so to Williams under the circumstances of life aboard the Ajax. He helped himself to a cup of coffee from the glass pot steaming on the electric hot plate. It was the best coffee on board, although the men did not envy the captain and the officers their special cook, Martinez, who sometimes stirred a cooking pot with the long ash of his cigar poised perilously over the brim.
Williams stood with his cup and listened for sounds from outside. He had no communication with anyone, nor any knowledge of what was taking place on the ship once he was inside this closed room with its covered portholes. As he stood there, a rustling sound caused him to look up with a start, and then he laughed, for curled in a corner of the pipes overhead was Stewart Brown's pet monkey.
Naval regulations stated that no man could have a pet on board without the express permission of the captain, but when Brown had climbed the gangway in Boston with the monkey on his shoulder, Captain Thompson, with his customary smile of indulgence, had insisted upon only one restriction—Brown could have the monkey on board if it had been properly inoculated. Brown had at once produced the inoculation paper, which had been given to him, along with the monkey, by a Merchant Marine sailor whose skipper had ordered him to get rid of the pet.
The monkey, which Brown promptly named Lover Boy, quickly became the object of affection of the entire crew. They wanted to hold Lover Boy and play with him, as they would do one day —although presumably the instinct behind this action did not occur to them —with their own children. They wanted to comfort him and pet him and feed him chocolate. Lover Boy, however, had no desire to be adopted by human primates, and consequently the free members of the crew spent a great part of each day in peering down ventilator shafts or into dark corners, searching for the glowing, pinpoint, frightened eyes. He was threatened with complete nervous collapse, as well as constipation from a surfeit of Hershey bars.
Brown had brought him to the sick bay one afternoon, languid in his arms, with bloodshot eyes and a coated tongue. Bullitt had wrinkled his forehead in solicitous thought. "I know I ought to recognize him," he said, apologetically. "I suppose he's a member of the black gang. It's so hard to tell them apart." He administered mineral oil with a little cascara, and advised rest and a light diet. "Do try to keep your friend in his bunk," he said to Brown, in a reassuring tone. "I'm sure he'll pull through, and I'll take him off the watch list the very moment I can remember his name."
Now, looking down at Williams, Loser Boy made a grimace and covered his bright, senseless eyes with his tiny, jewellike hands. The silence had become intense. Williams could tell, by the absence of vibration, and by a peculiar listless motion of the ship, that the engines had been cut off. This could mean only that a submarine had been sounded, or was suspected, below them. He carried his cup of coffee to the table and sat down. By habit, he kept his helmet on his head. The wardroom was directly below a five-inch gun mount, and he had learned from experience that when this particular gun was fired some of the light bulbs in the overhead would explode and shower him with broken glass. He selected an ancient copy of The National Geographic from the table.
He leafed through the magazine, sitting tautly, as if poised above a keg of gunpowder. His mind would not be diverted. And yet in practice drills this room had never failed to exercise its own soporific effect, for here had been established a military decorum, a timeless isolation, which nothing could ever touch. An elaborate tea and coffee service in silver sat on the railed sideboard. The members of the crew had bought this from their pay ("contributed" was the word they used, after being informed, somewhat to the astonishment of the civilian sailors, that sometimes the crew bought the silver tea and coffee service for a new ship). Mrs. Thompson, the captain's wife, had poured from it for the officers and their wives, after the ceremonies, on the day the ship was commissioned. (The members of the crew, who had bought the service, were permitted to bring their wives or guests for coffee from an electric urn in the quarters of the chief petty officers.) Martinez kept the silver service beautifully polished, possibly with his own cigar ash, for all Williams knew. Gray curtains of spun glass hung for privacy at the inner door of the wardroom, just as they did at the doors of the officers' cabins. Spun glass would not burn.
Doctor Claremont, who had once been invited aboard a British corvette for dinner, had explained to Williams, in one of his rare bursts of conversation, that the officers on board the Ajax actually lived in almost Spartan simplicity in contrast to the English officers on board the corvette. There was a wood-burning fireplace in the wardroom of the corvette, with a circular upholstered sofa in front of it, on which the officers sat and were served a Martini before dinner. Liquor being forbidden on American warships, quantities of canned grapefruit juice were consumed aboard the Ajax, but the same social order prevailed on both ships; the captain in his quarters, the officers in their rooms, the men below, neatly filed away in their bunks like bodies in a catacomb.
The ship trembled and began to move again, and a moment later the public-address system crackled into life, and the word was passed to secure from general quarters. Williams threw a fast salute in the direction of Lover Boy and went out to the deck.
Most of the crew stood at the rail. On the horizon the burning ship still stood soundlessly under its pillar of flame and smoke, but it was more distant now. They were leaving it. There seemed to be a cruiser and two destroyers standing by. Since very little information ever filtered down from the bridge, or since very little information might actually be known there, it was unlikely that the crew would ever know just what had happened.
Chief Bullitt had left his station in the sick bay and stood by the rail, watching the burning ship recede on the horizon. He was properly dressed now, and reasonably sober. Williams hoped to slip by him in the darkness, but Bullitt turned and saw him. "Ah, there you are," he said. "Come and have a front-row seat."
Williams stood beside him, reluctantly, but drawn by the terrible fascination of the scene. He did not speak, but even in the silence he could sense that fastidious detachment from the action taking place, that attitude, on Bullitt's part, of what might be called an academic interest in the war. "Think," Bullitt said with the tone of false heroics, "think of the millions who are being denied these pleasures."
All night the ship proceeded at a speed which was certainly in excess of thirty knots. The rattling, like that of a heavy truck traveling at reckless speed over an unpaved road, made sleep impossible. Williams was relieved to hear the sound of reveille in the morning, but the great speed produced a numbing vibration that made his teeth chatter when his feet touched the deck. He found it advisable to keep his jaws slightly apart to prevent the chipping of enamel.