One of Ours
Book IV: The Voyage of the Anchises
Chapter 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,葉hough
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 stand the hulls of four wooden ships, in
the process of building. There is no town, there are no smoke-stacks要ery 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預nd 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,葉hey 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葉heir strong, inevitable lines葉old 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.