At half past five in the morning, Williams was sent below with a small sedative for Kerensky. He wakened him from a deep sleep to give it to him. At this healthy period of his youth, Kerensky awoke instantly, his clear eyes expressionless as china. He listened impassively while Williams told him to take nothing to eat or drink, and to be ready, in clean clothes, in half an hour.
Back in the sick bay, Williams helped Doctor Claremont with the last-minute details. Kerensky was to sit upright in the aluminum chair, his head held in place and supported by an improvised bracket. When this was in place, Williams was sent below again for Kerensky. He came up sleepily, dressed in clean dungarees and a clean white skivvie shirt. Doctor Claremont, scrubbing at the sink, instructed Kerensky to sit in the metal chair. Williams then scrubbed, and he and Doctor Claremont got into their gowns, caps, masks and rubber gloves. Kerensky was swathed in a sterile sheet, the treatment table and the cabinet top were covered with their sterile cloths, and Williams then opened the sterile operating pack.
This whole procedure, so commonplace to the trained personnel of any hospital, struck Williams, with his hasty and inadequate training, as having an element of ritual drama about it. He was fascinated by the superb functioning of Doctor Claremont, the use of the word "functioning" coming to him as it might if he were watching the activity of a machine. Doctor Claremont had explained to him in advance that the tonsils were set in tissues rather like small onions, and that they must be peeled, in a sense, to be removed, but always with the utmost care, since if a minute blood vessel were cut before it was absolutely necessary, the field of operation would be obscured by the flow of blood.
After the local anesthetic had taken effect, the operation itself was accomplished in a matter of moments, the tonsils removed with scarcely any flow of blood, and the sutures placed with dispatch. During the entire operation Doctor Claremont had not addressed a single word to Kerensky.
Afterward, Williams led the still impassive Kerensky back to his bunk. He would watch out for him for a day or so, until Kerensky felt like being up and about, seeing to it that he had special dishes from the galley, ice cream, mashed potatoes or fortified milk drinks.
Doctor Claremont had gone when Williams returned to clean up the sick bay. He would wash and polish the instruments himself later; the linens he rolled in a bundle to take down to the laundry room. His back was turned to the door when Chief Bullitt came in, and he was startled and dismayed to detect the scent of alcohol. He had never known Bullitt to drink in the morning.
He turned to greet him, and Bullitt stood and surveyed the disorder with icy scorn. "Thousands of infants," he said dryly, "have been born successfully under less favorable circumstances."
Chapter 7
ONE WEEK later to the day. Seaman Pawling, who worked in the laundry room, injured his hand in the washing machine, and Chief Bullitt was given an opportunity, which was to have tragic consequences, to demonstrate his impatience with what he regarded as the excessive care taken in the removal of Kerensky's tonsils.
Seaman Pawling was, in a way, the Jonah of the Ajax. He was nineteen, with buoyant spirits, an untroubled face, and a love of practical jokes. In the beginning he had been very popular with his shipmates, but he was so emotionally immature that in the end he merely succeeded in irritating almost everyone.
He had come on board the Ajax, as had most of the deck crew, in a draft, that faceless group from which identities gradually emerged. Tommy Pawling was one of the first to emerge, because of his open, outgoing manner, his love of horseplay, and his healthy nature. It took some time for his shipmates to discover that what one saw of Pawling was all there was to Pawling. He was completely lacking in any sense of personal responsibility; he could not take part in any community activity, since he could not remember from one moment to the next what he was supposed to be doing.
When this happy specimen came aboard the Ajax, Chief Calder was delighted to take him into the engineering division, since Pawling was, as he himself said, "mechanically inclined." In the engine room Pawling was a joy to all, and ruined everything he touched. Although it would seem that the Ajax at sea was several fathoms above the nearest available sand, sand found its way into gears, parts meant to be oiled burned out, and parts meant to be wiped dry were hopelessly gummed with grease. Calder at first endured all this with patience. After all, everyone had to be trained. "Take it easy, now," he would say. "Pay attention. Look alive." When his patience was tried very gravely, he put Pawling on report, hoping to teach him a lesson. Pawling was confined to the ship for a week, a circumstance which dismayed him not at all, so happy was he with putting bolts into shipmates' mattress covers, waiting with a mug of ice water to pour on the head of a friend emerging from a hot shower, or tying wet clothes into knots on the lines where they had been hung out to dry.
Finally, however, it all came to an explosive head when Pawling destroyed a complicated part in an expensive piece of machinery, and Calder threw him out of the engine room in a monumental rage —a rage increased by the fact that Pawling was so amused by the expression on Chief Calder's face that he could do nothing but laugh.
McNulty then took Pawling on the deck crew, over Chief Kronsky's objections. Lieutenant Palazzo backed up McNulty; after all, Pawling had to do something. The first thing he did was to enrage Stud Clancy when, in attempting to lower the gig. Pawling let the running fall slip from his hand when he heard McNulty say, "Stand back handsomely!"
"You stupid jerk!" Clancy shouted, as the boat slipped and the lines fouled.
"But handsomely!" Pawling said, convulsed with laughter. "Handsomely! Yoo-hoo!"
The result was that the moment the boat was drawn back and secured, Clancy hit Pawling in the mouth and split his lip. McNulty pulled them apart, with Clancy shouting, "Don't you want to be a sailor: Do you want to be a civilian all your lifer" Clancy's eyes were hot with anger as McNulty drew him aside, and talked to him at the rail, his own eyes warm with regard. Clancy breathed heavily. "He fouled it up!" he kept saying. "We almost had it, just perfect, and he fouled it up!"
After that, Pawling went to the galley to assist Martinez, the officers' cook. His shining face and infectious laughter brightened the corner where he peeled potatoes, but when Martinez saw how slowly and wastefully he peeled them, how careless he was with any task assigned to him, the Puerto Rican was reduced to speechlessness after exhausting all the maledictions of his own tongue. These foreign words so amused Pawling that he began to imitate Martinez in a kind of gibberish and fell to the floor with laughter, but when Martinez picked up a handy meat cleaver and threw it at him Pawling ran to the deck, yelling for McNulty.
McNulty soothed Martinez by offering him a cigar, and he took Pawling by the arm, as if he were a small boy, and led him below. An idea had come to him, but he said nothing until they had reached the laundry, which was run by a seaman named Harris. "You, too, can release a man for active duty," McNulty said to Pawling with what was, for the boatswain, an unusual note of irony and humor.