Elwood.”
Jim’s arm through hers drew her gently forward. His voice ran on, receding into the general background hum around us. Laura was tall and slender, erect of carriage, and her hand felt cool as she placed it in mine. I remember looking straight into gray-green eyes, wide-spaced in a soft golden tan. Everything in the room dropped away.
Jim was still talking, but it didn’t register. The smooth line of her throat vanished in the suggestion of gently rounded fullness. Her blonde slimness was set off by a soft green jersey dress which left her arms and throat bare and gave her an elusive air of feminine innocence.
“You’re going to have a hard time living up to the buildup Jim’s been giving you, Captain,” she said.
“Call me Rich,” I said.
“That’s right, Laura.” Jim grinned in high good spirits. “Don’t pay any attention to me because I’ll still have to call him ‘Captain’—it’s that good old Navy Tradition I’ve been pumped full of.”
“That suits me fine, Rich,” Laura said. Then, turning to Jim with mock concern, “Will you look this serious when you get to be a Captain, too?”
Jim hesitated. Laura’s eyes flicked to me with sudden apprehension. “I’m sorry, Rich. Did I say something wrong?”
“Of course not,” I told her. I made room for both of them at the bar.
“We almost had a little trouble today, but it came out all right,” Jim told her. “It was just one of those things that could have happened to any sub in this training racket. It was over so fast that nobody had any time to get really scared except the skipper.”
The light from the candles above the bar wavered in the depths of Laura’s eyes. As she waited I thought quickly for the right words to get it over to her without becoming too technical.
“One of the officer students was making his graduation approach,” I said, “and he got us right in front of the target at close range. So there was just enough time to pull the plug and go deep to clear before the other ship passed overhead. It didn’t actually hit us, but I guess it passed pretty close.” As I said the words I could again see the huge white numbers on the Semmes’ bow, the geometric furrows turned on either side of the steel stem of the destroyer as it rushed directly toward us, the rows of rivets I could practically have counted, the fact that had the two ships struck, even very slightly, we might have been dragged, or knocked, upward enough to permit the old destroyer’s heavy low-slung propellers to rip into our hull.
The strain of the scare must have communicated itself to my voice in spite of all I could do, for Laura’s face filled with sympathy. But she said nothing, for which I mentally thanked her. The nerves were jumping steadily in my right arm.
“I don’t blame you for feeling a little rugged about it, skipper,” said Jim, “but, after all, we got away with it so why worry. A lot of boats have had close shaves that we never heard about.”
Laura turned to him, “Jim, can’t we take Rich in with us to dinner? He needs cheering up.”
I thought Jim seemed just a trifle taken aback, but he grinned quickly at her. “Sure,” he said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
She had already turned back to me, slipped her arm impulsively through mine, hugged it to her. “You will, won’t you, Rich?”
Emotions submerged for four and a half years flooded to the surface. Had the events of the afternoon and then this meeting with Laura opened me up emotionally? Had they taken me back to those firmly forgotten days when I had decided that a career was more important than marriage? I had been very young and noble about it—too dumb to realize that I could have had both.
I could see now where I had been wrong. This was one of those decisions which need not have been made. Marriage or a career—you couldn’t launch them both at the same time. But other men had, and successfully, too. The day that Stocker Kane married Hurry and I was best man, I knew then I’d been a fool. But Sally had gone away with the wound I had dealt her. Later I heard she had married.
And now, here was Laura, and what was I going to do about it?
Laura, I soon learned, had come down from New Haven, where she had been working since the death of her father as combination secretary and assistant to the head of a small accounting firm. Professor Elwood, a widower of many years, had taught economics at Yale, and it was there that she had first met Jim. She wrinkled her nose impishly at him when they got on the subject—it was a straight nose, slightly aquiline, with delicately chiseled nostrils and barely the suggestion of an upturned tip.
I needed to know more about her, searched desperately for a suitable conversational gambit. “Laura,” I finally lamely asked her, “are you one of those whizzes at balancing books?”
She made a gesture of deprecation. “It’s surprising what a mess the average storekeeper will make of his accounting,” she answered, “and that’s what gives us our business. For a small fee we’ll come in and straighten things out for him. Otherwise, some of them never would know from one year to the next whether or not they’re making money.”
“You mean you’re one of those stony-hearted business women like in the movies?” I teased.
“I’m not, but my boss can be pretty hard-boiled,” she smiled, “especially when it comes to cheating, which we find now and then.”
“You don’t look tough enough for that kind of a job.”
She laughed outright. “You’d be surprised to see what an efficient little accountant Katherine Gibbs turned out. I majored in accounting and business administration—you don’t have to be a man to add two and two.” She grew a little more serious. “Of course, being a girl sometimes helps you to find out things, too.”
There was a trace of thoughtfulness in her voice and a hint of a wiry core to her character.
But she was changing the subject, asking me about life in the submarine service, and I found myself telling her all about it and about my most terrifying experience on board the Octopus—when the carrier Yorktown rammed us during a fleet problem. The Octopus’ welded hull shuddered violently under the impact of the Yorktown’s speeding bow, recoiled drunkenly into the depths. Tons of foaming sea water, backed up by rapidly increasing pressure as the boat careened downward, roared through the hold.
Laura listened with rapt attention, her face reacting to the different aspects of the crisis as I recounted them. The tips of her fingers rested on my arm as I told her about our struggle in the control room—the absolute blackness, the ship almost on her beam ends, sinking rapidly by the bow. Frantically working with the lights of battle lanterns and flashlights, we split our high-pressure air manifold so as to concentrate all the air remaining in our air bottles into the forward tanks. Thus we gained the precious air volume necessary to blow our forward tanks completely dry against the compressive force of the sea and start the ship back up to the surface before it was irrevocably too late.
“Is that why you’re so disturbed over this afternoon?” she breathed.
I was startled. I had to think this one over. “Why, yes. I guess subconsciously it is,” I responded slowly, feeling for the solid ground. It had not yet occurred to me to make the comparison, but Laura had hit it unerringly. This was undoubtedly the core of it, the background reason for my distraught nerves, the subconscious reason why our own near-disaster had hit so hard and had stayed with me. But now that it was out in the open, there was a sensation of a knot slipping at the base of my brain, the pressure in my temples that was almost a headache beginning to disappear. I could feel myself, for the first time, slowing down.
Dinner passed in a haze of delight. Not for years had I so enjoyed merely being with a girl. I had almost forgotten the completeness the right girl can bring in life. Laura’s eyes, now gay, now thoughtful, now sober, contained enough promise to drown in. I began to wonder whether I would have a chance to dance with her after dinner, when a bustle in the lounge