another by a plate of white painted, riveted steel, aft to port. Two brilliant light bulbs illuminated the small room from a steel overhead. There were two double berths, upper and lower, and a small sink; four lockers, two battered folding chairs, and a three-legged stool completed the furnishings of this bare steel chamber.
Bill glanced over at the other seaman who had been assigned to the same quarters. He was sleeping, his puckish young features calm in slumber. He couldnât be over eighteen years old, Bill reflected. Probably had been going to sea for years despite everything.
Bill pulled the job slip from his wallet and mulled over the writing: âWilliam Everhart, ordinary seaman, S.S. Westminster , deck crew mess boy.â Messboy! . . . William Everhart, A.B., M.A., assistant professor of English and American Literature at Columbia University . . . a mess boy! Surely, this would be a lesson in humility, he chuckled, even though he had never gone through life under the pretext that he was anything but humble, at least, a humble young pedant.
He lay back on the pillow and realized these were his first moments of solitary deliberation since making his rash
decision to get away from the thoughtless futility of his past life. It had been a good life, he ruminated, a life possessing at least a minimum of service and security. But he wasnât sorry he had made this decision; it would be a change, as heâd so often repeated to Wesley, a change regardless of everything. And the money was good in the merchant marine, the companies were not reluctant to reward the seamen for their labor and courage; money of that amount would certainly be welcomed at home, especially now with the old manâs need for medical care. It would be a relief to pay for his operation and perhaps soften his rancor against a household that had certainly done him little justice. In his absorption for his work and the insistent demands of a highly paced social life, Bill admitted to himself, as he had often done, he had not proved an attentive son; there were such distances between a father and his son, a whole generation of differences in temperament, tastes, views, habits: yet the old man, sitting in that old chair with his pipe, listening to an ancestral radio while the new one boomed its sleek, modern power from the living room, was he not fundamentally the very meaning and core of Bill Everhart, the creator of all that Bill Everhart had been given to work with? And what right, Bill now demanded angrily, had his sister and brother-in-law to neglect him so spiritually? What if he were a lamenting old man?
Slowly, now, Everhart began to realize why life had seemed so senseless, so fraught with fully lack of real purpose in New York, in the haste and oration of his teaching daysâhe had never paused to take hold of anything, let alone the lonely heart of an old father, not even the idealisms with which he had begun life as a seventeen-year-old spokesman for the working class movement on Columbus Circle Saturday afternoons. All these he had lost, by virtue of a sensitivity too fragile for everyday disillusionment . . . his fatherâs complaints, the jeers of the Red baiters and the living, breathing social apathy that supported their jeers in phlegmatic silence. A few shocks from the erratic fuse box of life, and Everhart had thrown up his hands and turned to a life of academic isolation. Yet, in the realms of this academic isolation, wasnât there sufficient indication that all things pass and turn to dust? What was that sonnet where Shakespeare spoke sonorously of time ârooting out the work of masonry?â1 Is a man to be timeless and patient, or is he to be a pawn of time? What did it avail a man to plant roots deep into a society by all means foolish and Protean?
Yet, Bill now admitted with reluctance, even Wesley Martin had set himself a purpose, and this purpose was the ideal of lifeâlife at seaâa
Bill glanced over at the other seaman who had been assigned to the same quarters. He was sleeping, his puckish young features calm in slumber. He couldnât be over eighteen years old, Bill reflected. Probably had been going to sea for years despite everything.
Bill pulled the job slip from his wallet and mulled over the writing: âWilliam Everhart, ordinary seaman, S.S. Westminster , deck crew mess boy.â Messboy! . . . William Everhart, A.B., M.A., assistant professor of English and American Literature at Columbia University . . . a mess boy! Surely, this would be a lesson in humility, he chuckled, even though he had never gone through life under the pretext that he was anything but humble, at least, a humble young pedant.
He lay back on the pillow and realized these were his first moments of solitary deliberation since making his rash
decision to get away from the thoughtless futility of his past life. It had been a good life, he ruminated, a life possessing at least a minimum of service and security. But he wasnât sorry he had made this decision; it would be a change, as heâd so often repeated to Wesley, a change regardless of everything. And the money was good in the merchant marine, the companies were not reluctant to reward the seamen for their labor and courage; money of that amount would certainly be welcomed at home, especially now with the old manâs need for medical care. It would be a relief to pay for his operation and perhaps soften his rancor against a household that had certainly done him little justice. In his absorption for his work and the insistent demands of a highly paced social life, Bill admitted to himself, as he had often done, he had not proved an attentive son; there were such distances between a father and his son, a whole generation of differences in temperament, tastes, views, habits: yet the old man, sitting in that old chair with his pipe, listening to an ancestral radio while the new one boomed its sleek, modern power from the living room, was he not fundamentally the very meaning and core of Bill Everhart, the creator of all that Bill Everhart had been given to work with? And what right, Bill now demanded angrily, had his sister and brother-in-law to neglect him so spiritually? What if he were a lamenting old man?
Slowly, now, Everhart began to realize why life had seemed so senseless, so fraught with fully lack of real purpose in New York, in the haste and oration of his teaching daysâhe had never paused to take hold of anything, let alone the lonely heart of an old father, not even the idealisms with which he had begun life as a seventeen-year-old spokesman for the working class movement on Columbus Circle Saturday afternoons. All these he had lost, by virtue of a sensitivity too fragile for everyday disillusionment . . . his fatherâs complaints, the jeers of the Red baiters and the living, breathing social apathy that supported their jeers in phlegmatic silence. A few shocks from the erratic fuse box of life, and Everhart had thrown up his hands and turned to a life of academic isolation. Yet, in the realms of this academic isolation, wasnât there sufficient indication that all things pass and turn to dust? What was that sonnet where Shakespeare spoke sonorously of time ârooting out the work of masonry?â1 Is a man to be timeless and patient, or is he to be a pawn of time? What did it avail a man to plant roots deep into a society by all means foolish and Protean?
Yet, Bill now admitted with reluctance, even Wesley Martin had set himself a purpose, and this purpose was the ideal of lifeâlife at seaâa
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