A blur of faces rose above deck-rails, faces
that, looking back, receded finally. The last flag and the last kerchief
became vapor. Against the pier-edge, frantically, even perilously forward,
her small flag thrust desperately beyond the rail, Mrs. Ross, who had
lost a saving sense of time and place, leaned after that ship receding in
majesty, long after it had curved from view.
The crowd, not a dry-eyed one, women in spite of themselves with lips
whitening, men grim with pride and an innermost bleeding, sagged suddenly,
thinning and trickling back into the great, impersonal maw of the city.
Apart from the rush of the exodus, a youth remained at the rail, gazing
out and quivering for the smell of war. Finally, he too, turned back
reluctantly.
Now only Mrs. Ross. An hour she stood there, a solitary figure at the rail,
holding to her large black hat, her skirts whipped to her body and snapping
forward in the breeze. The sun struck off points from the water, animating
it with a jewel-dance. It found out in a flash the diamond-and-sapphire top
to her gold-mesh hand-bag, hoppity-skippiting from facet to facet.
"My boy--my little boy!"
A pair of dock-hands, wiping their hands on cotton-waste, came after a
while to the door of the pier-house to observe and comment.
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