Slant wav­ing lines of rain were blow­ing across the bow. The wind whipped his trouser legs and water spat­tered his face. Willie wedged him­self in the lee of the bridge­house. The bow plunged into a trough, and cut a wave into two foam­ing black streams as it rose again. Spray blew past Willie and drenched the deck and the bridge, drip­ping down on him.

He loved these lonely moments on the fore­cas­tle, in all weath­ers. There was balm in the wide sea and the fresh wind for all the itchy afflic­tions of life on the Caine. In the late stormy twi­light he could see the dim forms of the Moun­tauk, the Kala­ma­zoo, and the near­est destroy­ers of the screen, small toss­ing shapes of an intenser black on the gray-black of the ocean. Inside those shapres were light, and warmth, and noise, and all the thou­sand rit­u­als of Navy life, and–for all he knew–crises as wild and unlikely as the straw­berry affair on the Caine. Which of the watch­ers on the other bridges, see­ing the nar­row old minesweeper plung­ing through the steep waves, could guess that its crew was full of muti­nous mut­ter­ings, and that its cap­tain was immured in his room, test­ing innu­mer­able keys in a pad­lock, his eyes gleaming?

The sea was the one thing in Willie’s life that remained larger than Queeg. The cap­tain had swelled in his con­scious­ness to an all-pervading pres­ence, a giant of mal­ice and evil; but when Willie filled his mind with the sight of the sea and the sky, he could, at least for a while, reduce Queeg to a sickly well-meaning man strug­gling with a job beyond his pow­ers. The hot lit­tle fevers of the Caine, the dead­lines, the inves­ti­ga­tions, the queer ordi­nances, the dreaded tantrums, all these could dwin­dle and cool to comic pic­tures, con­trasted with the sea–momentarily. It was impos­si­ble for Willie to carry the vision back below decks. One rake on his nerves, a ward­room buzzer, a pen­ciled note, and he was sucked into the fever world again. But the relief, while it lasted, was deli­cious and strength­en­ing. Willie lin­gered on the gloomy splash­ing fore­cas­tle for half an hour, gulp­ing great breaths of the damp wind, and then went below.

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