3

It was swaying round him. He fumbled at the hood which had hung unbuttoned for so long round his face, and a lucky tug dragged it off. He put his hands to the buttons of the sheepskin coat but he did not succeed in unfastening them. He wanted to sleep. He dropped to his knees by the bunk and put his hands before his face.

“Dear Jesus.”

It was the attitude and the words he had used when he was a child, when the beloved mother so shadowy in his memory had told him about the gentle Christ-child, to whom a little boy could take his troubles. The sunshine of his childhood was round him. The sun had always shone when he was little. He had been enfolded in love. When the sweet mother had faded from his life the dear father had loved him enough for two, the father whose desolate mouth could always smile for him. The dear father; the sun had shone when they went fishing together--the sun had brightened their happiness and their excitement as they took the train to Carquinez Straits to fish for bass and on the very few, the memorable occasions when they had taken the ferry across the bay and had places in a boat through the Golden Gate out on to the tossing ocean under the golden sun. He had learned his texts, he had read his Bible for that, because when he knew his texts they could go fishing, and only then; the father was sad when he did not know them.

Krause forgot the sunshine; his knees were uncomfortable on the steel deck and his face was buried in his hands on the bunk. In a second of returning consciousness he squirmed forward and upward on to the bunk, lying breast downward on it with his face turned to one side. He lay spreadeagled, the sprouting beard disfiguring his dirty face, his mouth a little open, as heavily asleep as if he were dead.

He had learned texts at home while he learned mathematics at high school. He had learned about duty and honour, too, the two inseparables. He had learned about charity, about being kind, to think well of everybody but impartially about himself even while the sun shone on him. The sunshine ceased when his father died, leaving him an orphan just graduating from high school when America was entering into a war. The Senator had nominated the much-loved pastor’s orphan son to Annapolis, a nomination strange for those days as it brought no political benefit, strengthened no political alliance, even though the nomination was old-fashioned enough in that no attempt was made to select the most academically suitable candidate.

Three hundred dollars; that was the estate his father left him when he died, when his books and furniture had been sold. It paid Krause’s fare to Annapolis; he could have managed without the balance, living on his pay as midshipman; the class of 1922 graduated in 1921 in the aftermath of war, and Krause graduated with it, half-way up the list, not specially noted for anything except for the above average skill in fencing which he unexpectedly discovered. He had learned something of discipline and subordination and self-control to supplement his childhood training. The Senator’s nomination had directed a considerable potential into a channel that Krause would never have selected for himself. It was one of those freaks of chance that may change the fate of nations. Without his Annapolis training Krause would have grown up into a very similar man, but perhaps without the unrelenting realism that stiffened his humanity. Severe and logical discipline, grained into him, produced an odd effect when reinforcing an undeviating Christian spirit that already knew little of compromise.

The United States Navy was his home and he knew no other for so many years. He had no family, not a relation in the world, and when the chances of service brought him back to the scenes of his childhood the changes that had taken place there cut him off from that past as if with a knife. Oakland was noisy and different, and the Berkeley hills were built over. Carquinez Straits with so many happy memories were now crossed by a vast and terrible bridge of steel jammed with squawking traffic, and soon the ferries on the Bay were replaced by other bridges over which the traffic hurtled with a pitiless single-mindedness so unlike what he remembered. The sun did not shine as warmly; the kindness and the kindliness seemed to have disappeared.

The transition was abrupt; it seemed as if he had never lived here. Some other little boy, about whom he had heard in much detail, had lived here, had trotted to the grocery store holding his mother’s hand, had sat enchanted at the circus, had walked to school round those corners which were now so different. It was not he; he had no past, no roots. What he knew as home was enclosed between four steel bulkheads; what he knew as family life went on in the wardroom and at captain’s mast. Promotion came, to lieutenant junior grade, to lieutenant, to lieutenant-commander, responsibility expanding with his experience. For seventeen years, from eighteen to thirty-five, he lived for nothing but his duty; that was why those hateful words “fitted and retained” hit him so hard, even though he knew that in the service of which he was a part there could only be one commander for every ten lieutenant-commanders.

But that came after he had met Evelyn, which made it all the harder. He had loved her as only a single-minded man can love a woman; the first love of a man of thirty-five, and she was in her early twenties and both brilliant and beautiful--he thought so, which was all that mattered--but for all her brilliance she had failed to appreciate the tragic implications of “fitted and retained.” He could not believe her to be unsympathetic, and still less could he believe her to be stupid, and so the deductions to be made regarding himself cut still more deeply. He had loved her so madly, so frantically. He had known an intoxication, an active happiness, quite unlike any other experience, and it had been so overwhelming that it had stilled completely the doubts he might have felt regarding his unworthiness of so much happiness and his uneasy feeling that no man should be so deficient in self-control. It had been a supreme moment. There was the house in Coronado; during those weeks roots began to sprout; Southern California with its sun-baked beaches and its barren hills began to be “home.”

And then “fitted and retained.” Evelyn’s inability to understand. The unworthy, hideous suspicion that the idol had feet of clay; the suspicion strengthened by Evelyn’s lack of sympathy towards his determination to do his duty--and that determination strengthened, contrariwise, by the service’s opinion of him expressed in “fitted and retained.” The quarrels had begun, the bitter, bitter quarrels, when everything combined to goad him into insane rages, and the rages were followed by black remorse that he could have ever said such things to Evelyn, that he could have said such things to any woman at all, and further that he could have lost his self-control to such a frightening extent, just as he had forgotten his self-control when he was in bed--uneasy thought.

Yet all this did little or nothing to lessen the pain when Evelyn told him about the black-haired lawyer. That was pain such that he did not know could ever be suffered by anyone. The dreadful pain when she told him; unrelieved unhappiness; not even pride could help him. The pain persisted as he went through the necessary formalities, rising to fresh peaks sometimes as he went on with them, when he was confronted afresh by the inability to retrace a single step--not to halt the legal proceedings, but to undo deeds that had been done, and to unsay words that had been said. Then there was the culminating peak of pain on the wedding day, and the wedding night.

There was still duty to be done and life to be lived; and it did not clash with duty to ask BuPers for assignment to the Atlantic seaboard, away from Southern California and the house in Coronado; to tear off the fragile roots that had begun to sprout; to face the rest of life with duty as his sole companion. Chance--the chance that elevated a paranoiac to supreme power in Germany and a military clique to power in Japan--dictated that when it was too late he should receive the coveted promotion to commander, if it can be called chance. Chance had made him an orphan; chance had brought about the Senator’s nomination. Chance had put him in command of the convoy escort. Chance had made him the man he was and had given that man the duty he had to carry out.

Now he was asleep. He could be called happy now, lying spreadeagled and face downward on his bunk, utterly unconscious.