The Steel Cocoon [Bentz Plagemann] (fb2) читать постранично

Bentz Plagemann THE STEEL COCOON

Producer's Note

About Internet Archive Daisy Books

This book was produced in DAISY format by the Internet Archive. The book pages were scanned and converted to DAISY format automatically. This process relies on optical character recognition, and is somewhat susceptible to errors. These errors may include weird characters, non-words, and incorrect guesses at structure. Page numbers and headers or footers may remain from the scanned page. The Internet Archive is working to improve the scanning process and resulting books, but in the meantime, we hope that this book will be useful to you.

P.S. Текст по возможности вычитан, но могут оставаться пропущенные (нераспознанные) ошибки. 

* * *

Text from Reader's digest condensed books : volume 4, 1958, autumn selections.

"The Steel Cocoon," copyright © 1957 by Bentz Plagemann, is published by The Viking Press. Inc . 625 Madison Ave. New York 22. V. V.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bentz Plagemann was born in Springfield, Ohio, in 1913. For about eight years before the outbreak of World War II he was a bookseller in Cleveland, Chicago and New York. From 1942 to 1945 Plagemann served in the Hospital Corps of the U. S. Navy, as a pharmacist's mate on a destroyer, and later on an LST where he was in charge of the ship's medical department, without a doctor, but with two assistants.

While his LST was fitting out for the second Normandy landings, Mr. Plagemann contracted polio. One week before his illness, after a formal inspection, his LST was chosen medical flagship of its group and later acquitted itself well in removing the wounded from France to England.

After receiving a medical discharge from the Navy, Mr. Plagemann turned to writing. His story of his own battle with polio, My Place to Stand, was well received in 1949. The hilarious This Is Goggle was a Condensed Book Club selection in the autumn of 1955.

Mr. Plagemann enjoys travel and plans to go to Italy or France with his wife to work on his next—it will be his sixth—book.

THE STEEL COCOON 

CHAPTER 1 

IT IS possible that the condition of war is agreeable to most men. Aside from the killing and the being killed, and the long periods of enforced idleness, almost everything about it is pleasant. It was a long time after World War II before Tyler Williams allowed himself to accept this reflection. But he discovered that when he could not sleep at night, or when he awoke in the darkness, he would take up his memories of the Navy with a secret pleasure.

It seemed to him that he could hold these memories in his hand, so to speak, as a child might hold an old-fashioned Easter egg of papier-mache, and that, if he narrowed his eyes in the darkness and looked into the small aperture in the end, he could see the complete world of his memory, all cut paper and gilt and brightness, waiting there, never changing, alive in another dimension of time.

Most especially did he possess in this private way his memories of the USS Ajax, the destroyer on which he had served in the North Atlantic and the North Sea. At such a moment the Ajax still existed, the green seas still streamed, salt-glistening, from the weather deck, as the bow climbed from a wave through into the sparkling sun. "Never go to the weather deck when the green seas run!" he would hear McNulty shout, and in the darkness his eyes would ache quickly from the remembered brilliance of those days.

Oddly enough, the memories he relived most vividly were those of the shakedown cruise in 1942, while they were being prepared and preparing themselves, to go into action. For the fulcrum of his memories was not the action of war itself, but a man, his old chief, Alexander Bullitt. The pleasure of his recollections was troubled by that presence. A man must live with himself, man who respects himself must feel that he has behaved with honor. Had he, Tyler Williams, done so? With his stubborn loyalty to Bullitt had he failed the others, and even helped to bring about the tragedy that followed? He needed to resolve that in his mind.

Often, on these nights, his sleeplessness would force him out of bed, and he would feel guilty, standing in the moonlit bedroom, as if his preoccupation with the past betrayed his present happiness. In the bed beside his, Maria would be beautiful in sleep, and vulnerable, so that his heart went out to her in a quick rush of tenderness. She had no part in this story of the past. He had not even known her then, and there were moments when he had thought never to find his own life again, much less this fulfillment of marriage. C^h, he was a man who had blessings to count. Thinking this, he would leave the room quietly and look in at Billy's room. And Billy would be sleeping as only a boy of nine can sleep, with his arms curled upward, and a blessed look on his face, the immortal purity of childhood.

But old ghosts are hard to lay, and sometimes, on these wakeful nights, Tyler Williams would find himself, trousers and sweater pulled over his pajamas, sneakers on his bare feet, pacing the walks of the college campus he loved. He had found his life there, in teaching, even before the war. He was a man born to teach, and he loved the classrooms by day, and now the campus at night, with the dark, arching elms, and the moon-gilded clock tower, and the chapel spire. The memory of the limited, narrow man he had been when he was young haunted him, but, more than that, the past haunted him —distilled, on troubled nights like this, into the memory of a single night, and he was on the deck of the Ajax again, kneeling beside Bullitt, bathing his broken face, and looking into the dark void behind his eyes. Time, and the war, had made him the man he was, but —oh, God! —not, he hoped, at the sacrifice of other men. And he would walk the campus in the moonlight, until the chimes in the clock tower intervened with present reality, to diminish the echoes of the past.

In the sick bay on the AJax, order existed, and every day was very much like any other day. It was one of the few quarters of the ship where a man might shut a door behind him. In the morning, after an early mug of coffee, Williams began the preparations for the day as Chief Bullitt had instructed him to do. On the treatment table, and on the narrow shelves that ran about the compartment, he arranged the equipment, the bottles, the trays of instruments in antiseptic solution, the sterile gauze and the bandages.

When everything was in order he would take his place on a high stool in the corner, where the sick-call book lay open on a small metal lectern. On the sea shelf above this lectern were his Hospital Corps Manual, his notebooks from Hospital Corps School, and copies of the Bible and Thoreau's IValden, the only personal books he had room for in his sea bag. His duty during the hours of sick call was to assist in treatment, and to enter each man's complaint, diagnosis and treatment in the sick-call book.

By eight a.m. Chief Bullitt would have appeared, lounging in the doorway in his impeccably clean, starched khaki, his chief's cap fixed to one side of his lean, saturnine head, probing his gold-filled teeth with a gold toothpick, in the same way his skeptical eyes probed for psychic faults in the ailing men who came to him. In those early days he did not acknowledge Williams, or even speak to him, aside from instructing him in the performance of his duties.

Williams had first met Chief Bullitt on the dock at Norfolk, where the chief sat on a packing case filled with bottles of blood plasma, smoking a cigarette. There was something about the chief which suggested the nervelessness of some large, articulated insect, a praving mantis, perhaps, in Navy khaki. Physically he was slender, browned, ageless. He held himself with an elegant, angular erectness, and his attitude showed that he knew himself to be superior. When Williams presented himself as his new assistant on the Ajax, Chief Bullitt acknowledged him with a look of insolent contempt, one knee crossed over the other, his cigarette held at a right angle to his thin, tanned hand. "And what are your qualifications for the Hospital Corps?" he asked. "A job in a Liggett's drugstore?"

"No," Williams said. "I was an English instructor."

"Mercy," Bullitt said. He shook his head as if he had been beset by flies. "I