wandered to our ship resting sedately in the now-pumped-out dry dock. There was no one to be seen on her decks. She was bare, deserted.
Not even a gangway watch.
'Jim!' I ejaculated, as I took it in, 'didn't you leave a duty section aboard?'
'No, sir!' He looked me evenly in the eye. 'I pulled them all off, every one! Right now there's not a soul down there!'
'You know what the Navy regulations say about that?'
'You're God damned right I do! We were on the keel blocks and shored up. That part was done. This was an emergency, that carrier is the most important ship in the Navy, right now, and I don't give a hoot in hell what the regulations say, and you can forget the qualification, too!' The defiant look had come back. He put his hands on his hips, waiting.
'Jim,' I said honestly, 'you're absolutely right. I'd have done the same thing.' I didn't know whether I could have or not, but there was no question that the Navy could much better spare both me and the Walrus than it could the Enterprise.
Considering the stakes at issue, the personal risk to myself as Commanding Officer, or to Jim, since he had, in an unofficial way, temporarily relieved me, was as nothing compared to the larger importance of preserving our only effective aircraft carrier.
I grinned at him. 'But now that the fire's out, let's get a watch section down in the ship before somebody comes and starts asking a lot of embarrassing questions.'
Jim grinned back. 'Roger!' he said.
9
The system evolved by ComSubPac gave us two weeks of freedom in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. A 'relief crew,' complete with skipper, my old friend Eddie Holt, who came with orders detaching me temporarily so that not even legal responsibility for Walrus remained, took over the ship in its entirety. They would see to the completion of our outstanding work items, clean the ship thoroughly after the refit, stand all necessary watches, and turn Walrus back to us as good as new. In the meantime, for two weeks the whole gang of us, crew and officers alike, were billeted in luxury, and had nothing to do except lie on the sand or sample the other pleasures of Waikiki Beach.
Jim and I, as skipper and Exec, drew a corner suite with a sitting room between our two bedrooms. The place was nicely furnished, though it was apparent that some of the more delicate furnishings had been removed. Still tacked to the inside of the door was a card giving the prewar rates. Our suite, we immediately noticed, had gone for seventy-five dollars a day.
We had been assessed a payment, ostensibly for linen, of one dollar per day each. Our crew, billeted in another wing, got theirs for twenty-five cents a day.
A long, soaking hot bath felt wonderful, after our workout in the fire, and so did the stacks of personal mail which had arrived for everyone. I had several from my — mother telling of the doings Of the little town in which I had spent my boyhood and of the difficulties of the ration system. There was a note from Stocker Kane, hoping we would meet somewhere in the Pacific, written just before departing on his first patrol and Hurry, his wife, had also written.
Hurry Kane's letter was chatty and- friendly. She occupied herself with war work, had joined the 'Gray Ladies,' took a turn at serving out coffee and doughnuts at the San Francisco USO, rolled bandages three days a week, and in general kept as busy as she could. She made no mention of her loneliness for Stocker, but it was there between the lines, the very fact that she had written to me at all, for the first time after our years of closer-than- average acquaintance, showed that.
The thing which most excited my interest was a paragraph halfway through her letter. 'I saw quite a bit of Laura Bledsoe after you all left New London,' she wrote. 'Poor girt having Jim go off to war so soon after they were married was pretty rough on her. She stayed on in the Mohican Hotel for several days-just didn't seem to know what to do with herself. When she came over to the apartment to help me pack and follow Stocker, that was only the next week-I really felt sorry for her. You men will never be able to understand how it feels to be left behind.'
I debated whether to mention the passage in Hurry's letter to Jim. There was no reason why I shouldn't I thought, picking it up. I crossed the sitting room, pushed open the door to Jim's room, found him sitting half-naked on his bed, smoking a cigarette, with mail strewn all around him. He had received much more than I, and among the pile were many in identical blue envelopes. 'How's Laura?' I asked him.
'Fine. She's back at her, job in New Haven.' Jim stretched his arms, stubbed his cigarette, and flopped back into the pillow. Most of his mail, including several of the blue envelopes, was still unopened and, carelessly pitched on the bed, was now crumpled beneath him. 'What's that you've got there?' He wasn't interested, merely making conversation.
'I just heard from Stocker Kane,' I side-stepped with a half- truth. 'He might go to Australia, you know.'
'The lucky stiff! One of my buddies from sub school is down there on the staff. He says there are twice as many women as men around, and they're all starved for affection. He's doing his best to help them out, and it keeps him pretty busy.'
Jim stretched his arms to either side again, looked up at the ceiling. 'Let's us try to get sent down there, too, skipper.
He can't handle all of that stuff by himself.'
'There are probably twice as many women trying to stay out of your friend's reach as there are cooperating with his campaign to keep them from being affection-starved,' I growled. I stuffed the letter into a pants pocket.
The Royal Hawaiian was wonderful. Three free meals a day, hours of lying in the sun, surf-boarding, playing billiards, wandering around the streets of Waikiki, it was the ideal life, a wonderful rest. After twenty-four hours of it we were bored stiff.
I took to spending hours in the submarine base, watching the operations board, reading the dispatches as they came in, wandering around the Walrus, and watching the progress of the work on her, much to the annoyance of Eddie Holt, who as Relief Commanding Officer was serving his apprenticeship for his own command. I had wondered why it was that there were so many people always out to welcome every submarine in from patrol or from the States, and likewise to see them off.
After I had met my third I ceased to wonder.
Jim's reaction was nearly the same as mine, except that I did not see him much around the submarine base. He took to disappearing for long periods 'in town,' as he put it. And the rest of our crew went their own ways, each according to his own, instincts and desires. Hugh and Keith, lively young fellows, that they were, quickly found friends among the families still living in their homes in the Moano Valley, Waikiki proper, or elsewhere in the vicinity. And nearly every time I happened to be in town I would run into a Walrus sailor or sailors, sometimes in pairs, more frequently accompanied by a heavily tanned Hawaiian belle.
Despite the fact that he and I shared a suite, I practically never saw Jim at all during the last week of out 'recuperation period.' But the mystery was explained when the-submarine base threw one of its monthly dances on the BOQ terrace, and Jim showed up with a girl whom he introduced as Joan Lastrada.
She was dark, with masses of black hair, deeply tanned, and very slender. Her face was rather too thin, I thought, giving her full sensual lips an almost outsized appearance. The dance was one of those difficult affairs where there are at least ten men to every woman, and it was hard to get away from the determined stag line. I cut in on Jim once myself, nearly gasped aloud when Joan stepped into my arms from Jim's reluctantly released embrace.
It was not only her lips that were sensual I decided, after someone else had taken her away. She was sensual all over.
Jim gave her new partner less than half a dozen steps before he claimed her back, and then he led her into a corner as far removed from the stag line as possible. But keeping Joan undiscovered must have been about as hard to do as keeping a gold mine under wraps, and the determined stags, conspicuously Keith and Hugh, gave him no
