The Caine Mutiny Read Online Free PDF Page B

the masterpieces of Dali, Chagall, and Tchelitchew, and burst out laughing. At the Metropolitan Museum they did better. She found an immediate deep pleasure in Renoir and El Greco. She made Willie take her there again. He was a good guide. “Ye gods,” she exclaimed once, as he sketched the career of Whistler for her, “do you really get all that stuff in four years of college?”
    “Not quite. Mother’s been taking me to museums since I was six. She’s a patron here.”
    “Oh.” The girl was a little disappointed.
    Willie soon obtained the telephone number of the Bronx candy store, and they continued seeing each other after May’s engagement at the club was finished. It was April. Their relationship advanced to include long walks in the blossoming new-green park, and dinners at expensive restaurants, and kisses in taxis, and sentimental presents like ivory cats and fuzzy black bears and a great many flowers. Willie wrote some bad sonnets, too, and May took them home, read them again and again, and shed warm tears over them. Nobody had ever written poetry to her before.
    Late in April Willie received a postcard from his draft board, inviting him for a physical examination. Upon the sounding of this tocsin he remembered the war, and forthwith went to a Navy officer-procurement station. He was accepted for the December class of the Reserve Midshipmen School. This put him beyond the clutches of the Army, and gave him a long reprieve from service.
    Mrs. Keith, however, took his enlistment as a tragedy. She was outraged at the fumblers in Washington who had permitted the war to drag on so long. She still believed that it would end before Willie put on a uniform but she had an occasional chill at heart to think that he might actually be taken away. Discreetly inquiring among influential friends, she found a peculiar stoniness everywhere to the idea of getting Willie some safe duty in the United States. So she determined to make his last free months beautiful. May Wynn was doing a pretty good job of that, but of course Mrs. Keith didn’t know it. She was unaware of the girl’s existence. She compelled Willie to quit his job, and carted him off, with the unresisting doctor, on a trip to Mexico. Willie, quite bored with sombreros, brilliant sunlight, and feathered serpents carved on decaying pyramids, spent all his money on surreptitious long-distance calls to the candy store. May invariably scolded him for his extravagance, but the radiant tones in which she did so were quite enough consolation for Willie. When they returned in July Mrs. Keith with undimmed force dragged him to a “last wonderful summer” in Rhode Island. He managed half a dozen trips to New York on thin excuses; and lived for these excursions. In the fall May was booked by Marty Rubin for a tour of clubs in Chicago and St. Louis. She came back in November, in time for three happy weeks with Willie. He performed prodigies of invention, enough for the creation of a book of short stories, to explain his absences from home to his mother.
    He and May had never talked about marriage. He sometimes wondered why she didn’t mention the subject, but he was very glad that she was content to leave their relationship in the realm of wild kisses. His idea was that the sweetness would last to be enjoyed during the four months of midshipmen school; then he would go to sea, and that would be the convenient and painless end. He was quite pleased with himself for having worked the romance out for maximum fun and minimum entanglement. It indicated to him that he was a mature man of pleasure. He prided himself on not having attempted to sleep with May. The correct policy, he had decided, was to enjoy the sparkle and stimulation of the girl’s company without becoming involved in a mess. It was a wise enough policy; but he deserved less credit for it than he gave himself, because it was based on a cool subconscious estimate that he probably wouldn’t succeed if he