it would really be there, really appear. But exactly on schedule it came up over the horizon. The long blue landfall appeared in the east, exactly as they had been told it would.
On the empty vastness of the slowly pulsing ocean the single steamer trailing its black plume was the only visible sign of life. The white ship with its big red crosses moved slowly along through the flat sea, which heaved and breathed beneath it like a separate existence. The ship plowed on. The sea continued to sparkle and show just the slightest froth of white now and then in the breeze and bright sun.
On the eastern horizon the long blue cloud, only slightly darker than the sky, appeared and disappeared like a mirage at first. Home. The word sped whispering through the ship like a prickle over the skin. The ship steamed slowly on and imperceptibly the blue cloud fixed itself above the waterline until it could be stared at without disappearing. Most of the cases on board had been serving overseas for at least a year. Home. The way they said it to each other, it was more a word of anxiety and deep unexorcised fear, of despair even, than of relief, love or anticipation. What would it be like, now? What would they themselves be like?
It was the same with everything. The bulletin boards and news-sheets had told them they were going home. But after so long a time away, they no longer trusted bulletins and communiqués. Bulletins and communiqués in general were more concerned with morale and with their beliefs than with realities. They all knew their beliefs were okay. God forbid anyone’s beliefs among them should be bad. But it was difficult to know if a bulletin or report had been created to affect morale, or to pass on specific information about the long blue cloud.
They could not see it from everywhere. It was visible only from the forward part of the upper decks. Of these, the only one not off-limits to them was the deck once called the Promenade Deck. Here as many of them as were able, wanted to, and could squeeze themselves into the available space, came to have a look at it.
They were a sorry-looking bunch. In the gray pajamas and maroon bathrobes, wearing the heelless duck slippers that would never stay on their feet, they pushed out through the doors onto the open forward deck and squeezed against the rail, or against those already squeezed against the rail. Shaky, skinny, stringy, yellow of eyeball and of skin, bandaged and suppurating or wearing plaster, they crippled their way up from below, some tottering, some helping each other along, a number limping along on leg casts. They were the lucky ones out of all the casualties. They had been judged sufficiently damaged to send all the way back home.
A few cried. Some laughed and clapped their hands, or slapped each other on the back. All gazed around them and at each other with anxiety. Anxiety at being so immensely lucky. A screened, secreted terror in their eyes suggested that they felt they had no right to be here.
Down below them, out on the more roomy space of what in normal times was the ship’s crew’s working deck, was crowded a mob of blueclad sailors, and whiteclad medical personnel. All of them were hired, paid, ranked, and organized, solely to service this steadily accumulating jetsam of a modern war. And the jetsam on their one small deck, indecent as a herd of turkeys, gobbled and craned and jostled and elbowed to get their look at the homeland they were all so vividly and happily aware none of them had yet died for.
Deep down in the ship in one of the cabins Marion Landers had tried to stay in his berth and found he couldn’t. Finally he rolled out and got laboriously to his feet in the small place. This was no easy operation since his right leg was in a cast to the knee. But it was impossible not to get caught up and carried along in the excited hubbub.
As a company clerk Landers was only a buck sergeant. He did not rate any airy stateroom with a porthole, like Winch and Strange. He had grown used to living mostly below decks in the half-gloom of bare electric bulbs. He felt under his pillow for his cheap sunglasses.
Involuntarily, he groaned a little. The pain was not due to his wound so much.