On the tugs men were shouting through megaphones: “Is Jack Butler, of Company E, there? His mother welcomes him.” “Hello Bill!” The men on the ship shouted their answers in chorus.
“Is Dick Blackwell on board?” This time there was no answer. The men looked at each other, their faces suddenly red. Dick was not on board. He had made the supreme sacrifice and now lay on the field of glory somewhere in France.
His name had appeared on the casualty list, but someone had refused to believe it until the last.
Now they had passed the Battery and its cheering thousands and were being swung about to the pier in Hoboken. On the Jersey shore—new bands of music, new flags and banners, new thousands of waving, exultant human beings.
The band strikes up “Home, Sweet Home”; cheering, laughing and singing suddenly die down. A new look of wistfulness steals into the men’s eyes. No one trusts himself to look at his neighbor. There is a murmur of suppressed sobbing. The ecstacy of a common happiness is gone. Each is carried to his own little world of memory, of joy or sorrow. But the next minute the band is blaring out “How Dry I Am,” and everyone is laughing, cheering and beginning to sing uproariously. A few minutes later the ship touches the side of the pier. They are back again. It is noon.
Hamilton was watching the reception committee coming on board—first the general in charge of the port of debarkation, a magnificent but pathetic figure (he had made many fruitless efforts to be sent overseas, but had always been turned down because of age or some other unknown reason). Beside him walked the mayor of New York, all smiles. Then a group of officers—generals and colonels. Next, other city and state officials. Then a delegation of congressmen and prominent citizens and, suddenly, among them, Hamilton’s father—a tall, slender man in the fifties, with aristocratic iron-gray hair and blue eyes, arched brows, gray moustache and goatee. A little thinner and paler than he had appeared two years ago, Hamilton thought in that first whirl of oversweeping emotions.
He longed to cry out to his father, but instead he stood peering over the rail motionless. A hundred questions rushed into his mind—questions about his old life, about his father’s health, about his mother, about the home, about the servants, about persons he had known. Would he appear changed to his father? A flood of old emotions, associations long forgotten, vague anxieties, swept over him.
He felt strangely aloof, far away, a stranger among familiar things, one returned to a once familiar land that has somehow become foreign.
Suddenly he was a child again, with an absurd wish to cry—in spite of the cheers and songs and band music all about him. He had started to run away from Corinth on his white pony, became frightened and homesick and galloped back home to fling himself into his father’s arms.
The next moment Robert was elbowing his way to the companionway and down the stairs.