Voyage to Somewhere by Sloan Wilson

had to twist it many times before it broke. Then he pulled open the mouth of the bag, lifted the bag over the table, and spilled out in front of us a cascade of brightly colored air-mail envelopes. I looked up and saw that the door to the wardroom was jammed with men’s heads. There were the heads of people kneeling, people crouching, and people standing, so many heads at so many levels that no bodies could be seen. Everyone’s eyes were searching the letters, on the table. No one put his hand out toward the letters, but there was in the eyes of the men a look one sees in the eyes of a well-trained dog looking at a forbidden piece of meat.
    Mr. Crane and I quickly sorted the mail, one pile for the deck force, one for the black gang, and one for the smaller departments. Each pile was given to a chief petty officer, who, followed by his men, retired to the deck to conduct a routine mail call. After that, as each sack was sorted, we handed the petty officers further piles of mail. It seemed more reasonable not to make the men wait until we had been through all the bags and sorted everything, including the official mail. The result was that many small mail calls were held, and there was a good deal of confusion and suspense as the men opened their letters out of the sequence in which they had been written. If a man didn’t get a letter in one mail call, he had only to wait five minutes for another.
    At last all the mail sacks were empty and I went to my cabin to read my own letters. When, half an hour later, I went on deck, I found the crew dispersed all over the ship. Each man was sitting alone, with a pile of letters beside him. The desire for privacy was so great that men were sitting in out-of-the-way places. I saw men in a lifeboat and on the gun platform, and one man had retired with his letters to the crow’s nest. For the better part of an hour there was no conversation. Looking at the intent faces of the readers, I realized that, to promote a mutiny, all I would have to do would be to call the men to cleaning stations at that moment.
    At the end of an hour the tenseness had lessened, and the men began to forsake their isolated spots. Friends drifted together. It surprised me to see the politeness with which each man examined any photograph handed to him. Almost everyone had received a photograph of some member of his family. White was walking around the deck, stopping everyone who came along to show him a picture of his wife. “Very nice,” I heard Guns say to him. “She sure is pretty.”
    There was also a great deal of reading aloud from letters. From what I could hear, most of the quotations were not very startling or witty, but they were all accorded a respectful attention. This atmosphere of brotherhood and peace lasted the rest of the day, and it was a long while before I heard the customary language of the deck.
    I went back to the office to have a look at some of the official mail. While I was tearing open the envelopes, the chief boatswain’s mate came in and told me that he was the father of “a daughter who’s going to grow up to be the prettiest girl in Pennsylvania—and the hardest to get!”
    I didn’t hear from the quartermaster till next day. Then he came to my cabin to ask about legal aid. There had been no letter from his wife for him, but the divorce papers, with a short note from her lawyer requesting him to sign them, had come in his mail. “Well,” he said, “it’s nice to be certain, anyway. Those five months not knowing what was happening were tough.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN
    A LTHOUGH THE mail relieved the basic tenseness of the ship, it had a deleterious effect on some of the men that did not appear until some days afterward. The quartermaster had not been the only one to get bad news. White had received news of his father’s death. His mother had written that she thought she could run the family hardware store without much