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just to his breast pocket, and she rubbed it against the heavy cloth. Claude stood looking down at her without
speaking a word. Suddenly his arms tightened and he almost crushed her.
"Mother!" he whispered as he kissed her. He ran downstairs and out of the house without looking back.
She struggled up from the chair where she had sunk and crept to the window; he was vaulting down the hill as
fast as he could go. He jumped into the car beside his father. Ralph was already at the wheel, and Claude had
scarcely touched the cushions when they were off. They ran down the creek and over the bridge, then up the
long hill on the other side. As they neared the crest of the hill, Claude stood up in the car and looked back at
the house, waving his cone-shaped hat. She leaned out and strained her sight, but her tears blurred everything.
The brown, upright figure seemed to float out of the car and across the fields, and before he was actually
gone, she lost him. She fell back against the windowsill, clutching her temples with both hands, and broke
into choking, passionate speech. "Old eyes," she cried, "why do you betray me? Why do you cheat me of my
last sight of my splendid son!"
Book Four: The Voyage of the Anchises
I
A long train of crowded cars, the passengers all of the same sex, almost of the same age, all dressed and hatted
alike, was slowly steaming through the green sea-meadows late on a summer afternoon. In the cars, incessant
stretching of cramped legs, shifting of shoulders, striking of matches, passing of cigarettes, groans of
boredom; occasionally concerted laughter about nothing. Suddenly the train stops short. Clipped heads and
tanned faces pop out at every window. The boys begin to moan and shout; what is the matter now?
The conductor goes through the cars, saying something about a freight wreck on ahead; he has orders to wait
here for half an hour. Nobody pays any attention to him. A murmur of astonishment rises from one side of the
train. The boys crowd over to the south windows. At last there is something to look at,--though what they see
is so strangely quiet that their own exclamations are not very loud.
Their train is lying beside an arm of the sea that reaches far into the green shore. At the edge of the still water
One of Ours 108
stand the hulls of four wooden ships, in the process of building. There is no town, there are no
smoke-stacks--very few workmen. Piles of lumber lie about on the grass. A gasoline engine under a temporary
shelter is operating a long crane that reaches down among the piles of boards and beams, lifts a load, silently
and deliberately swings it over to one of the skeleton vessels, and lowers it somewhere into the body of the
motionless thing. Along the sides of the clean hulls a few riveters are at work; they sit on suspended planks,
lowering and raising themselves with pulleys, like house painters. Only by listening very closely can one hear
the tap of their hammers. No orders are shouted, no thud of heavy machinery or scream of iron drills tears the
air. These strange boats seem to be building themselves.
Some of the men got out of the cars and ran along the tracks, asking each other how boats could be built off in
the grass like this. Lieutenant Claude Wheeler stretched his legs upon the opposite seat and sat still at his
window, looking down on this strange scene. Shipbuilding, he had supposed, meant noise and forges and
engines and hosts of men. This was like a dream. Nothing but green meadows, soft grey water, a floating haze
of mist a little rosy from the sinking sun, spectre-like seagulls, flying slowly, with the red glow tinging their
wings--and those four hulls lying in their braces, facing the sea, deliberating by the sea.
Claude knew nothing of ships or shipbuilding, but these craft did not seem to be nailed together,--they seemed
all of a piece, like sculpture. They reminded him of the houses not made with hands; they were like simple
and great thoughts, like purposes forming slowly here in the silence beside an unruffled arm of the Atlantic.
He knew nothing about ships, but he didn't have to; the shape of those hulls--their strong, inevitable lines--told
their story, WAS their story; told the whole adventure of man with the sea.
Wooden ships! When great passions and great aspirations stirred a country, shapes like these formed along its
shores to be the sheath of its valour. Nothing Claude had ever seen or heard or read or thought had made it all
so clear as these untried wooden bottoms. They were the very impulse, they were the potential act, they were
the "going over," the drawn arrow, the great unuttered cry, they were Fate, they were tomorrow!...
The locomotive screeched to her scattered passengers, like an old turkey-hen calling her brood. The soldier
boys came running back along the embankment and leaped aboard the train. The conductor shouted they
would be in Hoboken in time for supper.
II
It was midnight when the men had got their supper and began unrolling their blankets to sleep on the floor of
the long dock waiting-rooms,--which in other days had been thronged by people who came to welcome
home-coming friends, or to bid them God-speed to foreign shores. Claude and some of his men had tried to
look about them; but there was little to be seen. The bow of a boat, painted in distracting patterns of black and
white, rose at one end of the shed, but the water itself was not visible. Down in the cobble-paved street below
they watched for awhile the long line of drays and motor trucks that bumped all night into a vast cavern lit by
electricity, where crates and barrels and merchandise of all kinds were piled, marked American Expeditionary
Forces; cases of electrical machinery from some factory in Ohio, parts of automobiles, gun-carriages,
bath-tubs, hospital supplies, bales of cotton, cases of canned food, grey metal tanks full of chemical fluids.
Claude went back to the waiting room, lay down and fell asleep with the glare of an arc-light shining full in
his face.
He was called at four in the morning and told where to report to headquarters. Captain Maxey, stationed at a
desk on one of the landings, explained to his lieutenants that their company was to sail at eight o'clock on the
Anchises. It was an English boat, an old liner pulled off the Australian trade, that could carry only twenty-five
hundred men. The crew was English, but part of the stores,--the meat and fresh fruit and vegetables,--were
furnished by the United States Government. The Captain had been over the boat during the night, and didn't
like it very well. He had expected to be scheduled for one of the fine big Hamburg-American liners, with
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