Krause and Evelyn’s marriage

Krause and Evelyn’s marriage is presented through the lasting force of its failure: years after it ended, recollections of their brief happiness, unresolved quarrels, and the news of Evelyn with a San Diego lawyer still intrude on Krause’s thoughts during wartime duty. The relationship’s central conflict is not simply that his work took him away from her, but that he believed he had failed to make her understand why he could not leave that work to someone else.

Marriage and its brief happiness

The marriage lasted two years, but Krause remembered only a month as happy. Even that happiness was described as shamefaced, setting its tenderness against the embarrassment and strain that surrounded it. His recollections do not present a sustained period of domestic ease; instead, small differences began to spoil the limited contentment they had found.

Evelyn was amused to discover that her husband knelt to pray sincerely every morning and night. She was more irritated when he would not leave a dull duty aboard his ship to his executive officer in order to attend a party. These moments reveal a mismatch in how the couple met ordinary expectations: what Krause experienced as an obligation he could not delegate was, to Evelyn, a reason he was absent from shared life. His faith and professional discipline were not merely private traits in the marriage; they shaped the time and attention he could give her.

Duty, quarrels, and separation

Krause believed Evelyn had been justified in growing tired of him. He described himself as dull and regretted that they had quarrelled, while also recognizing that their disputes were difficult to avoid because Evelyn resented how much time he spent aboard ship. He did not cast her frustration as inexplicable. Rather, he thought the failure lay partly in his own inability to explain his feelings and compulsions: a cleverer man, he imagined, could have made them clear to her.

The phrase “Fitted and retained” carried a different weight for each of them. For Krause, those words were hideous and consequential; to Evelyn, he thought, they meant little. The contrast captures how professional judgment could dominate his inner life without becoming intelligible within the marriage. The evidence does not specify the formal circumstances of their separation, but it makes clear that the quarrels and the news of Evelyn with a handsome, black-haired young lawyer became bound together in Krause’s memory. Three years after the memories began to weigh on him, they remained bitter; the pain of that news felt worse to him than any physical suffering he had experienced.

The marriage’s afterlife in wartime

The relationship continued to shape Krause’s life after the marriage. He requested service on the Atlantic seaboard because he could not face the possibility of seeing Evelyn in San Diego or hearing fragments of gossip about her. The posting was therefore more than a professional circumstance: as he understood it, the lawyer’s presence helped send him away from the places where reminders of Evelyn might reach him. He could even recognize that, without the lawyer, he might have died with many of his friends at Pearl Harbour; that possibility offered no comfort. Survival did not erase the loss or make the choice feel fortunate.

During a dark Atlantic night, the memory returned as Krause stood on the bridge after warlike operations. His leg weariness had reasserted itself, and he sensed depression approaching despite having recently eaten. He recognized neither the pattern of mid-watch despondency nor its connection to the hours between midnight and four, but the narrative places his recollection within that low ebb of vitality. The recent tension of combat had briefly keyed him up; in the relative quiet afterward, he felt the emotional cost with unusual force. The sonar’s repeated pinging became, in his perception, a dirge for the happiness he had lost, joining the ship’s present soundscape to his private grief.

Memory, tenderness, and self-judgment

The marriage reappears not only through conflict but through precise domestic traces. When permission to smoke was announced aboard ship, men on deck lit cigarettes after a night in which a visible match or glowing cigarette could give them away. The drifting smoke recalled that Evelyn smoked, and that Krause did not. It also brought back the faint cigarette aroma and trace of her perfume that he remembered upon returning from duty to their little house in Coronado. This sensory recollection briefly restores the intimacy of home, but it does not resolve the separation; the memory remains inseparable from the absence that gives it force.

Later, after the first men had died under his command, Krause was too weary and harassed by other problems to feel what he thought he ought to feel about their deaths. He recognized his own apparent coldness and indifference, then felt a sudden stab of pain at the thought that the same qualities must have hurt Evelyn, whom he remembered as warm-hearted. His wartime self-judgment thus turns back toward the marriage: the emotional reserve that now troubled him as a commander also became, in his imagination, a source of injury at home. The text does not show a reconciliation or a final resolution between them. Instead, Evelyn remains present through regret, remembered habits, and Krause’s repeated effort to understand how his duty and his manner of living affected someone he had loved.