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_ 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 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. _
Read next: Book Four: The Voyage of the Anchises: Chapter 2
Read previous: Book Three: Sunrise on the Prairie: Chapter 13
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