The Pen

by JOHN HERSEY

THE transport docked at Balboa a few minutes after six. Half an hour later a boatswain passed the word over the public-address system that all first-class passengers could call for their landing permits at the troop commander’s office and disembark; they were requested to be back to the ship not later than midnight. The passengers — three businessmen, seven medical missionaries and nurses, six Chinese government officials, and eighteen men and women going out to China for UNRRA — hurried, like greedy tourists, to get their passes and go ashore. Soon afterward most of the officers and two thirds of the crew also left the ship on liberty. Nearly all of those who stayed on the ship worked in the fueling detail or stood watch.

Just after nine a seaman second class stepped from the ladder at hatch number six into the portside companionway of “troop officers’ country,” where the male passengers had their cabins. He was a young sailor — short, with fair hair and huge blue eyes. His skin was smooth and ruddy. He was dressed in dungarees and held a frayed white cap in his left hand.

He walked quickly forward to the troop commander’s office, which was at the forward end of the companionway. He put his head in and said to the man sitting at the middle one of the three desks, “Hi, Sarge. ”

The sergeant looked up from Tono-Bungay and said, “Hello, Sibly. What you know?”

The sailor said, “Not a thing, not a thing.”

“Take it easy,” the sergeant said, and went back to his reading.

The sailor doubled back and walked slowly down the passageway. He looked into each doorway as he passed. The cabins had no doors, simply curtains, most of which were drawn to one side. The rooms all seemed to be empty. As the sailor walked by the door of the next-to-last room, he glanced over his shoulder. There was no one in the companionway.

He ducked into the last room. Its light was on and the porthole was open. He snapped out the light, hurried to the porthole, lifted the heavy circle of glass and the black-out flap enough to unhook them, eased them down, and looped one of the four dogs into place. He went back and turned on the light.

The sailor looked around the room. There were nine bunks, in tiers of three. Only two were made up with sheets and striped blue coverlets. A small onelegged table was bolted to the center of the floor. Against the after bulkhead ten gear lockers stood, five on five. The sailor went to them deliberately and opened the upper locker on the right, nearest one of the made-up bunks. On the three shelves he saw shirts, underwear, pajamas, socks, and handkerchiefs. He ran his hand in on each shelf under the clothing. He opened the larger of the two drawers at the bottom left-hand corner of the locker. Inside he saw toilet articles and medicines. He picked up some of the things and felt them carefully, almost caressingly, and put them down again — a tube of brushless shaving cream; a small bottle of bismuth and paregoric; a plastic safety razor set; a bottle of yellow pills marked “One after meals”; a can of borated talcum.

He shut the drawer and opened the shallower one underneath. Papers lay in this one. A passport was on top of the pile. The sailor picked it up and opened it. On the second page he read the printed script and typed capitals, “I the undersigned, Secretary of State of the United States of America, hereby request all whom it may concern to permit safely and freely to pass, and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection to MATHER WILLARD CURTIS, a citizen of the United States.” The sailor turned the page over and saw a picture of a gaunt face, long and thin, with white hair and dark, peaked eyebrows. He turned over another page and read the validation: . for China, except Manchuria — U.N.R.R.A.”

He dropped the passport and shut the drawer and locker without a sound. He went to the door and listened a moment behind the curtain. Hearing nothing, he pushed back the curtain and put his head out and looked along the companionway. It was still empty.

Hurriedly now he stepped back into the room and lifted from the bottom bunk of the outboard tier a black composition suitcase with the initials M.W.C. on it. He put the suitcase on the table, over some pocket books and papers lying there, and opened it. His hands darted through the contents; they probed corners and ruffled the middle. The left hand came up soon, holding a gleaming Monel metal fountain pen.

The sailor lifted the pen and looked at it. He hastily dropped the cover of the suitcase down without bothering to snap the catches and with both hands hoisted the bag horizontally to the bunk and flopped it there. He started for the door. Then he hesitated and turned. He moved a chair up to the table and sat down. He pulled the cap off the pen and reached for a piece of paper with some mimeographing on it.

Carefully, with regard for the turn and flow of the letters, he wrote on the margin of the paper his name, Charles W. Sibly. The moment he had finished he stood up. His face became flushed. He leaned over and scratched out the name with the pen, back and forth, back and forth, until it was nearly all covered. He had started to tremble and he looked confused. He went over to the lockers, opened the one he had gone through, and dropped the pen into the upper drawer where the toilet articles were. He closed the drawer and locker with a fumbling hand, carelessly and noisily. He fell on his knees by the bunk to the right of the lockers and lowered his forehead onto his folded hands.

After a few moments he rose to his feet and walked quickly from the room.

2

SOMETIME before eleven o’clock, Dr. Curtis boarded the ship and went to his cabin. He was a huge man, and his face was even more drawn and tired-looking than the retouched passport picture made it seem. During the evening it had rained, but because he had heard that the local taxi drivers were notoriously unscrupulous, he had walked from the bus stop in Panama City to the Cathedral, whose bright altar he had wanted to see, and to his annoyance he had been soaked.

The doctor took off his gray coat and was tugging at his tie when he noticed that the porthole had been shut. He opened it. As he hung his shirt over the back of the chair, he distinctly remembered that he had pushed the chair over against the lockers to make it easier to shine his shoes before he went ashore. His roommate had disembarked before he had. Someone else must have been in the room.

The doctor looked at his suitcase and saw that it had been opened. In a moment he was bending over and going through the bag where it lay on the low bunk. He lifted out some of the clothing and a couple of books. Then he explored the case as the boy had done, only much more clumsily and feverishly. It did not take him long to realize that the pen, and only the pen, was missing.

In great agitation Dr. Curtis put on his shirt and almost ran to the troop commander’s office. No one was there; the light was out. The doctor hesitated in the corridor, considering whether he should go at once to find an officer. He decided finally to wait until morning. He undressed nervously and crawled into his bunk. He could not get to sleep at first, but lay clearing his throat and turning from side to side, and when he did doze, he groaned and stirred in his sleep. His roommate — the owner, before the war, of a hair-net business in Shantung — came in drunk after two o’clock and woke the doctor with his stumbling and happy cursing. The doctor did not get back to sleep. He arose and dressed shortly after five and went out on deck.

The doctor was the first passenger to breakfast. He told others at the long table, when they came in, that his baggage had been “looted” while he was ashore, and warned them that they had all better check their possessions. He gulped down some coffee and hurried to the troop commander’s office. The corporal on duty told him to report the theft to the ship’s executive officer. The doctor hurried forward and found the proper office, but a yeoman there said that he would not be able to see Mr. Algwen, the executive officer, until after the eight o’clock reports.

Dr. Curtis went back to his cabin to wait. He sat down at the table and tried to read. In a few minutes his restless eyes were caught by the blue splotch on the margin of the mimeographed sheet. He picked up the paper excitedly and held it up to the washbasin light. He could make out, at one end, the shape of a capital C, and at the other the downward loop of a g or a y. He was unable to wait any longer, and he strode, haggard but triumphant, with the paper in his hand, to the executive officer’s room. A few minutes later a young lieutenant commander came in whistling.

The doctor stood up and announced in a deep voice, “I am Dr. Mather Curtis, one of the firstclass passengers.”

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” the officer said. “What can I do for you?”

“Young man, I’m afraid you have a criminal on board.”

The officer sighed. “Somebody been in your compartment?”

“Someone has stolen my fountain pen. I had just purchased it. It was one of the new sort which you needn’t refill for two years or more. I’m going to need that pen. I am being sent into the interior of China to work, where ink must be scarce. I expect you to search every corner of this ship, if necessary, and find it.”

The young lieutenant commander burst out suddenly: “You passengers give us nothing but trouble. Why don’t they give us troops? Doctor, at your age you ought to know enough to latch onto your gear.”

The doctor put forward the mimeographed paper and said, “This may simplify your problem. The intruder was foolish enough to try out the pen before he left the room.”

Algwen looked at the blotch. He called over his yeoman and asked if he could make anything of it. The yeoman held the paper up to the porthole. “It’s my guess it’s Sibly,” he said.

“Not him again,” the exec said. He picked up his phone, dialed a number, and asked the man who answered to come up right away. In a short time an elderly lieutenant junior grade came in, a man in his fifties with the unmistakable, bitter look of a man long in the Navy and just recently up from the ranks.

“Pat,” Algwen said, “looks like Sibly’s been in troop officers’ quarters again. This gent had a pen snitched last night and whoever did it left this.” He handed the j.g. the paper. “ Will you look into it, please?”

The j.g. looked at the scribbled spot and said, “Sibly’s been getting along pretty good lately.” He turned to the doctor and said, “What’s your name, sir?”

“Curtis, Dr. Curtis.”

“O.K., Doctor, I’ll let you know if I find out anything.”

When the doctor had left, the j.g. got out Sibly’s service record and looked at the allotment signature and then at the blotch on the mimeographed sheet. He took the paper and the record and went below to sick bay and sought out the chief pharmacist’s mate, a man as old and wise and sour in the Navy as himself. Together they went through a pretense of examining the signature — looking at it through a magnifying glass, laying it on the X-ray reading lamp, even peering at it through the lowest power of a microscope — though it was obvious all along who had written his name on the paper.

“That’s not Sibly,” said the chief, realizing that the j.g. was distressed. “Hell, that’s no y. That’s a g right there on the end.”

“It is Sibly, Brewster — you know it’s Sibly. God damn that boy.”

Finally, over the microscope, in which he could see nothing but fragments of pen strokes, the chief said, “Yep, guess that’s Sibly all right.”

“I’ll have to have a talk with him,” the old j.g. said.

3

DR. CURTIS spent an uneasy day. While the ship moved through the ground swell and the rain off Panama, he sat on the superstructure deck telling people to look through their luggage. In midafternoon he jumped up when he heard an announcement over the public-address system. “Now hear this: Dr. Curtis, lay up to the wardroom. Dr. Curtis, lay up to the wardroom.”

The j.g. was waiting for him. He said, “Come over here, sir, and let’s sit down where this fan’ll blow on us. Cup of coffee?”

“No, thank you,” the doctor said, with a rising inflection of the “no” which made it clear that coffee was not one of his habits.

“Too bad to get all this rain,” the j.g. said. “They tell me this is the rainy season down along this part.”

“ What about my pen? ” the doctor asked abruptly.

The j.g. got up and went over to pour himself a cup of coffee. When he sat down again he said, “ Doctor, I want to give you some background on this Sibly. I got to tell you he’s had a little trouble in the past. Seems to an outsider like he’s got light fingers or something like that. He’s been in the officers’ rooms before, and he’s taken things out of those rooms.”

The doctor gave a kind of snort, as if the case were closed.

“But you got to understand about him. lie’s all right, he has possibilities. I look at it that he can’t help himself. His family was real poor in Dedham, Massachusetts, real poor from what I understand. And then they died while he was still young. He’s had it extremely difficult for a young boy.”

“But, my goodness, you’ve got a confirmed criminal on your ship.”

“He’s not what I would call a criminal, Doctor. In fact, he’s improving in his attitude and work.”

The j.g. sipped his coffee. “Sure you won’t have some?” he asked. The doctor shook his head.

“I’ve had a talk with Sibly,” the j.g. said. “The first thing I said was: ‘Now have you been in those troop officers’ quarters again?’ He told me right off, he said, ‘Yes, sir, I been there.’ You see, he’s honest and fair and square with me. So I asked him what he took this time and he swore to me he didn’t take a thing. I don’t know you very good, sir, but I do know him, and I’m inclined to believe him. I’m not going to press it any more on him.”

The doctor was astonished. “But he signed his name with the pen.”

“If he says he didn’t take it, then I’m going to believe him.”

The doctor said, “I demand the right to interrogate this sailor.”

“I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir. If I was to let you talk to Sibly without any better evidence, I’d be in trouble, I’d like as not wind up in Portsmouth Naval Prison, instead of him. I’m in the Navy, sir. I’ve got no legal right to let you question him.”

The doctor’s lips drew tight. He stood up. “I shall go to the captain,” he said.

“Go ahead, mister,” the j.g. said, shrugging his shoulders. He had been in the service a long, long time, through many humiliations. He got up and left the wardroom.

Shaking and red and more gaunt than ever, the doctor went out on deck and forward toward the bridge. At the top of the first ladder a Marine corporal stopped him.

Dr. Curtis said, “I want to see the captain.”

“He don’t like strangers waltzing around up here, not unless they been invited.”

“This concerns a member of his crew.”

“You better get an invitation. I’d just get my tail chewed if I was to let you come up here. I suggest you go see the exec.”

The doctor went to Mr. Algwen’s office again, but the executive officer said that the matter was in Lieutenant Taylor’s hands, and if Lieutenant Taylor had decided that Sibly was innocent, that was that. “These things happen on a ship,” he said.

The doctor went to his cabin and lay down to rest.

Late that afternoon Dr. Curtis got up and prepared to shave. He had been too distracted to shave in the morning. He took off his shirt, and as he wrapped a Navy towel around his waist, it occurred to him for the first time that he had forgotten to bring any towels along in his baggage for China. He went over to his locker, opened the door and the upper drawer, and reached in for his shaving things — and found his pen.

He hid the pen in a shoe at the bottom of his suitcase. He did not tell the other passengers he had found it. Twice, in the following days, he ostentatiously borrowed a pen. For the remainder of the trip, he avoided the executive officer and Lieutenant Taylor. But one afternoon on the superstructure deck he bumped into the Marine corporal who had stopped him at the bridge, and the Marine asked, “Did you get to see the old man?”

“Yes, thank you. Thank you very much,” the doctor said, and walked along clearing his throat.

Several days out from Panama, Sibly went to Lieutenant Taylor’s room and said, “Could I talk with you a minute, sir?”

The j.g. went out on deck with Sibly.

“Sir,” Sibly said, “it’s been bothering me, I didn’t tell you the whole thing about going into troop officers’ quarters the other night. I thought I ought to tell you. I did lay my hands on a fountain pen. I even wrote with it.”

“I know, son.” The j.g. took the mimeographed sheet out of his pocket and gave it to the sailor. Sibly crumpled the paper and dropped it overboard.

“I thought I ought to tell you,” Sibly went on, “I wanted very bad to take that pen out of there and keep it. I did want to walk out with it. It was funny, I wrote my name, see, then I got disgusted with myself. Soon as I saw my own name I was disgusted, so I put it back. I been worrying about it.”

“That’s all right, Sibly,” the j.g. said. “Just don’t think about it. Think about something else. Keep your mind on your work, or either read a book or something like that.”

“I don’t want the pen,” Sibly said. “I got no use for a pen.”

When Dr. Curtis disembarked at Shanghai, he took every precaution to keep his baggage about him, because he had heard that the Chinese were untrustworthy scoundrels. At the Palace Hotel he did not unpack his suitcase, but kept it locked and only went into it for things as he needed them. Before he washed up for lunch, he unlocked it, reached in, and pulled out a towel marked in large blue letters U.S.N. About an hour later, after lunch, preparing to write a letter home, he unlocked the bag again and groped to the bottom of the case and put fingers inside both shoes and felt in all the corners, but his new fountain pen was gone.