Della Matthews

Della Matthews enters Joe Williams’s life during a shore visit to Virginia Beach, and becomes the person who most directly challenges his drift between ships and temporary decisions. Their courtship develops through disagreements about work, responsibility, sex, and what it means to make something of a life. The prospect of marriage gives Joe’s choices a new direction, though the episodes here show a promise taking shape rather than a settled future.

Introduction and first impressions

Della is one of the young women Joe meets on a trip from Norfolk to Virginia Beach. The narration initially filters her through his attraction: he notices that she is very dark, and finds himself falling for her. At the beach, after swimming and toasting marshmallows with the group, she lets him kiss her good night. Joe immediately begins imagining that she could become his steady girl. His early interest is quick and possessive in its assumptions, while Della’s own intentions are not yet clear.

A later account of their time together establishes her as a stenographer at the First National Bank. She tells Joe that she would never marry a sailor, because a man who went to sea could not be trusted to stay home and the work seemed rough and unlikely to offer advancement. Her objection is practical as well as personal: the profession he accepts as a way of life conflicts with her idea of a marriage built around shared stability. Joe concedes that her judgment is reasonable, but treats youth as a reason not to worry much about the future.

Courtship and a clash of values

Della presses Joe on matters he would rather dismiss. When he says he hates his ill father and does not care what happens to him, she calls him terrible. She argues that everything matters, and tells him he is a decent young man from a decent family who ought to try to get ahead rather than remain a loafer. The disagreement exposes a sharp difference between them: Joe shrugs off responsibility and treats his own prospects as distant, while Della insists that choices have moral weight and that a person should work toward a worthwhile future.

Joe leaves her at her parents’ house without another word, and they do not see one another for four or five days. Yet he finds himself thinking about what she said. When he waits outside her workplace, Della first tries to pass him; his grin draws a smile from her, and they begin talking again. Although he is nearly broke, he buys her candy and tells her that the Tampa will soon sail for Pensacola and then across the sea. At the trolley stop, her distress at his departure prompts Joe to say, before he has thought it through, that he will not sail on the Tampa again and will find work in Norfolk.

Their reconciliation gathers force during a full-moon evening at the beach. Beside a small fire Joe has made to keep mosquitoes away, Della rests her head on his knees while he strokes her hair and kisses her. She says they should marry once he has steady work, believing that together they could amount to something. She explains that since graduating at the head of her high-school class she has felt obliged to work hard and make a success of herself, and looks down on the surrounding indifference she sees as no-account living. Joe compares her to his sister, Janey, whom he considers both pretty and successful. The comparison links Della’s ambition to a family ideal he admires, even as he has not yet shown the same commitment to building a stable life himself.

Work, money, and the sea

When Joe returns to Norfolk after another voyage, Della is glad to see him, although she has a date arranged. He teases her into cancelling it on the grounds that they are engaged. Over ice cream, she describes her new job with the Duponts, which pays ten dollars more a week. She also reports that people she knows are earning much more in the munitions factories: some make fifteen dollars a day and are buying cars. Her account makes the wartime labor market a concrete measure of the opportunities available around her, and Joe’s uncertain seafaring prospects one option among several.

Della is excited when Joe tells her that Captain Perry has said he was torpedoed, but the danger unsettles her. She urges him to take a shipyard job at Newport News rather than risk being torpedoed again. Joe resists leaving the sea just as he sees a chance to advance: he expects that a third mate on a freighter could earn $125 a month, with additional zone bonuses, and believes new shipbuilding will improve his prospects. Della admits she does not know whether she could bear having a husband away so much. Her concern is not simply whether he can earn well; it is whether the occupation he chooses can support the companionship she expects marriage to require. Still, she cancels the other date, returns home with him, and cooks supper while her parents are away.

Engagement and the promise of a new course

Captain Perry offers Joe a junior officer’s berth on the Higginbotham after repairs and tells him to attend shore school in Norfolk and prepare for the licensing examination. The offer makes Joe’s ambition more definite: instead of merely sailing, he can pursue an officer’s career and a route toward command. He is eager to tell Della, and takes her to see The Four Horsemen. During the film he holds her hand and presses close to her; afterward, overcome by desire, he demands that they marry immediately or he will leave her. Della cries and objects to the way he has spoken to her. His demand turns a relationship organized around her condition of steady work into a sudden test of whether she will yield on his terms.

Back at her parents’ house, Della allows him to kiss and embrace her in the pantry, but explains that she loves him and would let him do anything only because she knows he would not respect her if she did. She also wants to escape the close supervision of her home. In the morning, she plans to tell her parents that Joe has become a ship’s officer and that they must marry before he leaves; she wants him to obtain his uniform at once. Della’s consent is therefore bound both to her affection and to her wish for independence, while Joe’s new professional opportunity supplies the steadier future she had demanded. He leaves elated, although he had not planned to marry so soon, and decides not to write to Janey because he expects she would disapprove. In these episodes, Della is the force that repeatedly makes the future a question Joe must answer, but the evidence ends with the marriage planned, not with its completion.