There is a thrill upon awaking on your first morning on board a ship
at sea which all the German U-boats under the ocean can scarcely
increase. You may imagine all you please what it may be; and it will
amaze you with something more. Ruth Alden had imagined; and her
first forenoon on shipboard was filled with surprises.
She had gone aboard from the New York quay at nine the evening
before, as she had been warned to do; she had looked into her
cabin--a small, square white compartment with two bunks, upper and
lower, an unupholstered seat, a washbowl with a looking glass beside
the porthole and with a sort of built-in bureau with four drawers,
above which was posted conspicuously the rules to be observed in
emergencies. These were printed in French and English and were
illustrated by drawings of exactly how to adjust the life-preservers
to be found under all berths. Someone, whose handbaggage bore the
initials “M. W.” and who evidently was to share the cabin with her,
had been in before her and gone out. Ruth saw that the steward
disposed her cabin baggage beside M. W.’s; she shut herself in a
moment after the steward had gone, touching the pillow of her bunk,
reading the rules again, trying the water-taps. She stood with shut
eyes, breathing deliciously the strange, scrubbed, salty smells of a
deep-water boat; she opened the door and went out to the deck with
the darkness of the Hudson on one hand; upon the other, the
myriad-lighted majesty of New York.
She was standing there at the rail gazing up at the marvelous city
when Hubert Lennon found her. He merely wanted to make sure she was
aboard. Gerry Hull and Captain Lescault--he was the French officer
who had spoken at Mrs. Corliss’--and an English captain, Forraker,
of the same party, were aboard now; Lady Agnes and the Englishwomen
with whom she traveled also were aboard, Hubert said.
He was glad to find that Cynthia was all right; but he said that a
nasty sea was running outside; the _Ribot_ might go out at any time.
Hubert thought Cynthia had better go to bed and get all the sleep
she could.
Ruth went below, not with any idea of sleeping, but to avoid meeting
Gerry Hull just yet. That she was aboard the _Ribot_ under orders
did not undo the fact that she was here for the conscious purpose of
furthering her acquaintance with him. He must guess that, she
thought--he from whom she had heard nothing at all since that
afternoon at Mrs. Corliss’.
Ruth was ready for bed when someone put a key in the cabin door, but
knocked before turning it, and a girl’s pleasant voice inquired,
“All right to come in?”
“All right,” Ruth said, covering up in bed.
A dark-haired, dark-eyed girl of twenty-six or seven entered. “I’m
Milicent Wetherell,” she introduced herself. “I’m from St. Louis;
I’m going to Paris for work in a _vestiaire_.”
Ruth sat up and put out her hand; she liked this girl on sight. “I’m
Ru----Cynthia Gail of Decatur, Illinois,” she caught herself
swiftly. It was the first time in the eight days that she had been
Cynthia that she had made even so much of a slip; but Milicent
Wetherell did not notice it.
Milicent went to bed and turned out the light. The boat did not
move; and after indefinite hours of lying still in the dark, Ruth
dropped to sleep. When she awoke it was daylight; the ship was
swaying, falling, rising; the tremor of engines shook it. They were
at sea.
The waves were higher than any Ruth had encountered before, but they
were slower and smoother too--not nearly so jumpy and choppy as the
Lake Michigan surf in a strong wind. The big steamer rose and rolled
to them far more steadily than the vessels upon which Ruth had
voyaged on holidays on the lake. Milicent Wetherell, in the lower
berth, lay miserably awake with no desire whatever to get up; but
Ruth let the stewardess lead her to the bath; she dressed and found
the way to the dining-saloon. She was supplied, along with a number
designating her “abandon ship” place in starboard lifeboat No. 7, a
numeral for a seat at a table.
At this hour of half after nine, there were perhaps fifty men at
breakfast and just five other women or girls; four men were seated
at the table to which Ruth was led--Captain Forraker one of them. He
arose as she approached. Possibly he remembered her, Ruth thought,
from an introduction at Mrs. Corliss’; much more probably Hubert
Lennon--who undoubtedly had had her placed at this table--had
reminded Captain Forraker about her. His three table-companions
arose and Captain Forraker presented them to her; they were all
English--two young officers and one older man, in rank a colonel,
who had been about some ordnance inspection work in America. Ruth
sat down; they sat down and resumed their talk; and Ruth got the
first of her morning amazements. She was in a foreign land, already;
she was not just on the way there, though still in sight of Long
Island. She was now in Europe, with Europeans thinking and talking,
not as guests of America, but as Europeans at home again.
Ruth had been brought up, as a good American, to believe her country
the greatest in the world; and, implicitly, she believed it. She
recognized that sons and daughters of other nations likewise were
reared to believe their native land the best and their people the
noblest; but she never had been able to quite believe that they
really could think so. They must make an exception, down deep in
their consciousness, for America, she was sure; however loyal they
might be to their own institutions and to their own fellows, they
must admire more highly the American ideals of freedom and
democracy, and they must consider that the people who lived by and
for those ideals were potentially, at least, the greatest.
It was a momentous experience, therefore, to hear her country
discussed--not in an unfriendly way or even with prejudice, but by
open-minded foreigners trying to inform one another of the facts
about America as they had found them; America was a huge but quite
untried quantity; its institutions and ideals seemed to them
interesting, but on the whole not nearly so good as their own;
certainly there was no suggestion of their endowing Americans with
superior battle abilities, therefore. The nation--that nation
founded more than a hundred and forty years ago which was to Ruth
the basis of all being--was to them simply an experiment of which no
one could yet tell the outcome.
They did not say that, of course; they said nothing at all to which
she could take the slightest exception. They simply brought to her
the brevity and unconclusiveness of a century of independent
existence in the perspective of a thousand; their national thought
started not with 1776 but with the Conquest or, even earlier, when
the Roman legions abandoned Britain and King Arthur reigned.
When they spoke of their homes, as they did once, and Ruth found
opportunity to inquire of one of them how long he had had his home
in Sussex, he told her:
“The present house goes back to 1582.”
It rather made her gasp. No wonder that a man of a family which had
occupied the “present” house since before the Pilgrims sailed,
looked upon America as an unproved venture.
“They’re in it to the end now, I consider,” this man commented later
to his companion when they returned to the discussion of America and
the war.
“Quite so, probably,” the other said. “The South went to absolute
exhaustion in their Civil War.”
“Absolutely,” the Sussex man agreed. “North probably would have too,
if necessary.”
They were estimating American will and endurance, not by pretty
faiths and protestations, but by what Americans, in their short
history, had actually shown.
“But this is foreign war, of course;” the colonel qualified the
judgment dubiously.
The man whose “present” house went back to 1582 nodded thoughtfully.
Ruth received all this eagerly; it could not in the least shake her
own confidence in her people; but it gave her better comprehension
of the ideas which Gerry Hull had gained from his association with
Europeans. And this morning, when she was certain to meet him, she
wished--oh she wished to an incredible degree--to understand him
more fully than before. She learned from a remark of Captain
Forraker’s that Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes had breakfasted early and
had gone out on deck. Ruth had intended to go on deck after
breakfast; but now she changed her mind. She went to the saloon; and
hardly was she there, when Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes came in from
the cold.
They were laughing together at something which had happened without.
Ruth saw them before either of them noticed her; and her heart
halted in the excitement of expectancy during the instant Gerry
Hull’s glance went about the saloon. He saw her; nodded to her and
looked at once to Lady Agnes, who immediately advanced to Ruth,
greeting her cordially and with perfect recollection of having
talked with her at Mrs. Corliss’. Upon this French ship bound for
Europe, the English girl was at home as the Englishmen at the
breakfast table had been; she felt herself, in a sense, a hostess of
Ruth.
“You’ve been about the ship yet, Miss Gail?” Gerry Hull asked.
“Only a little last night,” Ruth said.
“Come out on deck then,” he invited her. “Done for just now, Agnes?”
he asked.
“Just now,” Agnes said. “But I know you’re not. Go on!” she bid,
smiling at him as his eyes came to hers.
Ruth saw it as she started away to her cabin for her coat. There had
been some concern--not much, but some--in Agnes Ertyle’s look that
first time she discovered Gerry Hull and Ruth together; there was no
suggestion of concern now.
“Hub’s sick, poor chap,” Gerry told Ruth when she came out and they
set off side by side up the promenade deck against the cold, winter
wind. “He wanted me to tell you that’s why he couldn’t look you up
this morning.”
Had Hub--her loyal, self-derogatory Hub--therefore arranged with his
friend to give her this attention, Ruth wondered. Not that Gerry
Hull offered himself perfunctorily; he was altogether too well bred
for that. He held out his hand to her as the wind threatened to
sweep her from her feet; she locked arms with him and together they
struggled forward to the bow where a spray shield protected them and
they turned to each other and rested.
“Pretty good out here, isn’t it?” he asked, drawing deep breaths of
the cold, salt air, his dark cheeks glowing.
“Glorious!” Ruth cried. “I never----” she checked herself quickly,
almost forgetting.
“Crossed in winter before?”
“No.”
“Neither’ve I--in real winter weather; except when coming home this
last time.”
Ruth glanced up at him and caught his eyes pondering her. He had
meant merely to be courteous to her when meeting her on shipboard;
but too much had passed between them, in their brief, tempestuous
first meeting. He was feeling that as well as she! The gage which
she had thrown before him was not to be ignored. However certainly
he may have thought that he would be merely polite to this girl who
had--he deemed--insulted his comrades and himself, however
determinedly he had planned to chat with her about wind and weather,
he wanted to really talk with her now! And however firmly Ruth had
decided to avoid any word which could possibly offend him, still she
found herself replying:
“Then you think of Chicago as your home?”
“Of course; why not?”
She turned her back more squarely to the wind and gazed down the
length of the deck, hesitating.
“I might as well own up, Miss Gail,” he said to her suddenly. “I’m
still mad.”
“At me?”
“At you. For a while I was so mad that I didn’t want to see you or
think of you,” he admitted with the frankness which had enabled him
to ask her, directly, how she happened to be at Mrs. Corliss’. “But
that didn’t seem to do me any good. So I called up your hotel----”
“You did? When?”
“After you were gone--about two days after. They had no address for
you and Hub had none. I asked him.”
Ruth trembled with joyous excitement.
“I wanted to tell you better what I meant,” he went on. “And to find
out more from you.”
“About?”
“What we’d been arguing. I told you that day I’d never had a chance
to talk over affairs with an American like you; and I hadn’t later.
“You see,” he explained after a moment of thought, “it seemed to me
that the other people I met at home--or most of them, anyway--went
into the war as a sort of social event. I don’t mean that they made
light of it; they didn’t. They were heart and soul in the cause; and
a good many of them did a lot of real work. But they didn’t react to
any--original ideas, as far as I could make out. They imported their
opinions and sympathies. And the ones who were hottest to have
America in the war weren’t the people who’d been most of their lives
in America; but the ones who’d been in England or France. I told you
that day that what they said was just what I’d been hearing on the
other side.”
In spite of the canvas shield, it was very cold where they were
standing. Gerry moved a bit as he talked; and Ruth stepped with him,
letting him lead her to a door which he opened, to discover a little
writing room or card room which happened to be deserted just then.
He motioned to her to precede him; and when she sat down upon one of
the upholstered chairs fixed before a table, he took the place
opposite, tossing his cap away and loosening his coat. She
unbuttoned her coat and pulled off her heavy gloves. She had made no
reply, and he seemed to expect none, but to be satisfied with her
waiting.
“I suppose you’re thinking that’s the way I got my opinions too,” he
said. “But it’s not quite true. I wasn’t trying to be English or
French or foreign in any way. I was proud--not ashamed--to be
American. Why, at school in England they used to have a regular game
to get me started bragging about America and Chicago and our West. I
liked the people over there; but I liked our people better.
Grandfather--well, he seemed to me about the greatest sort of man
possible; and his friends and father’s friends who used to come to
look me up at Harrow once in a while--some of ’em were pretty raw
and uncouth, but I liked to show ’em off! I did. They’d all done
something themselves; and most of ’em were still doing things--big
things--and putting in eight or ten hours a day in their offices.
They weren’t gentlemen at all in the sense that my friends at Harrow
knew English gentlemen; but I said they were the real thing.
America--my country--was made up of men who really did things!
“Then the war came and showed us up! I tell you, Miss Gail, I
couldn’t believe it at first. It seemed to me that the news couldn’t
be getting across to America; or that lies only were reaching you.
Then the American newspapers came to France and everyone could see
that we knew and stayed out!”
“Last week,” Ruth said, “and yesterday; and before I met you this
morning, I knew how to tell you what I tried to that day at Mrs.
Corliss’. I’ve thought more about that, I’m sure, than anything else
recently; but now--” she gazed across the little table at him and
shook her head--“it’s no use. It’s not anything one can argue, I
guess. It’s just faith and feeling--faith in our own people,
Lieutenant Hull!”
She saw, as he watched her, that she was disappointing him and that
he had been hoping that, somehow, she could resolve the doubts of
his own people which possessed him; she saw--as she had observed at
Mrs. Corliss’--that his eyes lingered upon her face, upon her hands,
as though he liked her; but her stubbornness in upholding those
people whom she would not even try to explain, offended him again.
He glanced out the port above her.
“We’re picking up a cruiser escort,” he said suddenly. “Let’s go out
and look her over.”
So they were on deck in the cold and wind again. And during the rest
of that day, and upon the following days, almost every hour brought
her into some sort of association with him on the decks, in the
lounge, or in the writing rooms, during the morning; luncheon at the
same table. Then the afternoon, as the morning, would be made up of
hours when she would be sitting in the warm, bright saloon with her
French war-study book before her and she would be carefully
rehearsing “_Masque respirateur_--respirator; _lunettes_--goggles;
_nauge de gaz_--gas fumes ...” when she would hear his quick,
impulsive step or his clear, pleasant voice speaking to someone and
Ruth would get _combat animé_ and _combat décousu_ hopelessly mixed.
She would go out to walk the deck again with Hubert--who was
apologetically up and about when the seas were smoother--or with
Captain Lescault or Captain Forraker or with “1582” (as she called
to herself the Sussex officer and once came near calling him that
aloud), when she would come around the corner of a cabin and almost
run into Agnes Ertyle and Gerry Hull going about the deck in the
other direction; or she would pass them, seated close together and
with Lady Agnes all bundled up in steamer rugs, and Ruth would see
them suddenly stop talking when she and her escort came close, and
they would look away at the sea as though they had been just looking
at the water all the time.
He would sit down beside Ruth, too; and he would take her around and
around the deck, tramping glowing, spray-splattered miles with him.
They talked a lot; but now they never really said anything to each
other. And it seemed to Ruth that each throb of those ceaseless
engines, which thrust them ever nearer and nearer to France, made
what she felt and believed more outrageous to him.
One afternoon, when the wireless happened to be tuned to catch the
wavelength of messages sweeping over the seas from some powerful
sending station in Germany, they picked up the enemy’s boasts for
the day; and among them was the announcement that the famous
American “ace,” sergeant pilot Paul Crosby, had been shot down and
killed by a German flyer on the Lorraine front. It chanced that
Gerry Hull and Agnes Ertyle were in the main saloon near where Ruth
also was when some busybody, who had heard this news, brought it to
Gerry Hull and asked him if he had known Paul Crosby.
Ruth knew that Gerry Hull and Paul Crosby had joined the French
flying forces together; they had flown in the same escadrille for
more than a year. She did not turn about, as others were doing, to
watch Gerry Hull when he got this news; but she could not help
hearing his simple and quiet reply, which brought tears to her eyes
as no sob or protestation of grief could; and she could not help
seeing him as he passed before her on his way out alone to the deck.
She dreamed that night about being torpedoed; in the dream, the boat
was the _Ribot_; and upon the vessel there were--as almost always
there are in dreams--a perfectly impossible company. Besides those
who actually were on board, there were Sam Hilton and Lieutenant
George Byrne and “Aunt Emilie” and Aunt Cynthia Gifford Grange and
the woman in gray and a great many others--so many, indeed, that
there were not boats enough on the _Ribot_ to take off all the
company as the ship sank. So Gerry Hull, after putting Lady Agnes in
a boat and kissing her good-bye, himself stepped back to go down
with the ship; and so, when all the boats were gone, he found Ruth
beside him; for she had known that he would not try to save himself
and she had hidden to stay with him. His arms were about her as the
water rose to them and--she awoke.
Their U-boat really came; but with results disconcertingly
different. January, 1918--if you can remember clearly back to days
so strange and distant--was a month when America was sending across
men by tens rather than by hundreds of thousands and convoying them
very, very carefully; there were not so many destroyers as soon
there were; the U-boats had not yet raided far out into the
Atlantic--so fast and well-armed ships like the _Ribot_, which were
not transports, were allowed to proceed a certain part of the way
across unconvoyed, keeping merely to certain “lanes” on courses
prescribed by wireless.
The _Ribot_, Ruth knew, was on one of these lanes and soon would be
“picked up” by the destroyers and shepherded by them into a convoy
for passage through the zone of greatest danger. In fact, Ruth and
Milicent Wetherell, who also had awakened early upon this particular
morning, were looking out of their port over a gray and misty sea to
discover whether they might have been picked up during the night and
now were in a convoy. But they saw no sign of any other vessel,
though the mist, which was patchy and floating low, let them look a
mile or more away. There was no smoke in sight--nothing but gray
clouds and the frayed fog and the sea swelling oilily up and
slipping down against the side of the ship.
Then, about a hundred yards away from the side and rather far
forward, a spout of spray squirted suddenly straight up into the
air. It showered over toward the ship and splashed down.
“That’s a shot,” Ruth said, “at us.”
“Where’s the U-boat?” Milicent asked her; and they both pressed
closer to the port to look out. They had heard no sound of the gun,
or they did not distinguish it from the noises of the ship. Ruth was
shaking with excitement; she could feel Milicent shaking too.
Another spout of spray, still forward but a good deal closer,
spurted up; and this time they heard--or thought they heard--the
sound of the gun which had fired that shell at them. The roar of
their own guns--one forward and one aft--buffeted them violently.
“We’re fighting!” Ruth cried.
“Can you see anything?” Milicent demanded.
“Not a thing. Let’s get dressed!”
Gongs were beating throughout the ship; and the guns on deck were
going, “_Twumm! twumm! twumm!_” Ruth could hear, in the intervals,
the voices of stewards calling to passengers in the companionways
between the cabins. A tremendous shock, stifling and deafening,
hurled Ruth against the bunk; hurled Milicent upon her. They clung
together, coughing and gasping for breath.
“Hit us!” Ruth said; she might have shouted; she might have
whispered; she did not know which.
“That’s just powder fumes; not gas,” Milicent made herself
understood.
“No; not _nauge de gaz_,” Ruth agreed. They were hearing each other
quite normally; and they laughed at each other--at the French lesson
phrase, rather. They had learned the phrases together, drilled each
other and taken the lessons so seriously; and the lessons seemed so
silly now.
“They must have hurt someone,” Ruth said. For the first time she
consciously thought of Gerry Hull; probably subconsciously she had
been thinking of him all the time. “He wasn’t hit,” she was saying
to herself confidently now. “That shell struck us forward; his
cabin’s aft and on the other side; so he couldn’t have been
hurt--unless he’d come to this side to get Lady Agnes.”
Another shell exploded in the ship--aft somewhere and lower. It
didn’t knock Ruth down or stifle her with fumes as the other had.
Someone was beating at her door and she opened it--Milicent and she
had got into their clothes. Ruth saw Hubert Lennon in the passage.
“You’re safe!” he cried out to her with mighty relief. He had pulled
trousers and coat over his pajamas; he had shoes, unlaced, upon his
bare feet. He was without his glasses and his nearsighted eyes
blinked big and blankly; he had on a life-jacket, of the sort under
all berths; but he bore in his hands a complete life-suit with big
boots into which one stepped and which had a bag top to go up about
the neck.
“Put this on!” he thrust it at Ruth.
“We’re not sinking,” she replied. “Oh, thank you; thank you--but we
aren’t torpedoed--not yet. They’re just firing and we’re fighting--”
indeed she was shouting to be heard after the noise of their
guns--“we must have people hurt.”
“We’ve a lot--a lot hurt,” Hubert said.
Other shells were striking the ship; and Ruth went by him into a
passage confused with smoke and stumbly from things strewn under her
feet; a cabin door hung open and beyond the door, the side of the
ship gaped suddenly to the sea. The sides of the gap were jagged and
split and splintered wood; a ripped mattress, bedding, a man’s coat
and shirt, a woman’s clothing lay strewn all about; the bedding
smouldered and from under it a hand projected--a man’s hand. It
clasped and opened convulsively; Ruth stopped and grasped the hand;
it caught hers very tight and, still holding and held by it, Ruth
with her other hand cleared the bedding from off the man’s face. She
recognized him at once; he was an oldish, gentle but fearless little
man--an American who had been a missionary in Turkey; he and his
wife, who had worked with him, had been to America to raise money
for Armenian relief and had been on their way back together to their
perilous post.
“Mattie?” the little man was asking anxiously of Ruth as he looked
up at her. “Mattie?”
Mattie, Ruth knew, must have been his wife; and she turned back the
bedding beyond him.
“She’s gone,” Ruth told him, mercifully thrusting him back as he
tried to turn about. “She’s gone where you are going.”
The little missionary’s eyes closed. “The order for all moneys is in
my pocket. Luke VI, 27,” his lips murmured. “Luke VI, 27 and 35.”
The hand which again was holding Ruth’s and which had been so strong
the instant before, was quiet now. “The sixth chapter of the gospel
according to St. Luke and the twenty-seventh verse,” the little
man’s voice murmured, “But I say unto you which hear, Love your
enemies.”
Ruth covered his face decently with the sheet; and, rising, she
grasped the jagged edges of the hole blown by the German shell in
the side of the ship; and she stared out it. A mile and a half away;
two miles or more perhaps--she could not tell--but at any rate just
where the fringe of the mist stopped sight, she saw a long, low
shape scudding over the swell of the sea; puffs of haze of a
different quality hung over it, cleared and hung again. Ruth
understood that these were the gases from guns firing--the guns
which had sent that shell which had slain in their beds the little
Armenian missionary and his wife, the guns which were sending the
shells now bursting aboard the _Ribot_ further below and more
astern. Ruth gazed at the U-boat aghast with fury--fury and loathing
beyond any feeling which she could have imagined. She had supposed
she had known full loathing when she learned of the first deeds done
in Termonde and Louvain; then she had thought, when the Germans sank
the _Lusitania_, that it was utterly impossible for her to detest
fellow-men more than those responsible. But now she knew that any
passion previously stirred within her was only the weak and vacuous
reaction to a tale which was told. She had viewed her first dead
slain by a fellow-man; and amazing, all overwhelming instincts--an
urge to kill, kill in return, kill in punishment, kill in
revenge--possessed her. She had not meant to kill before. She had
thought of saving life--saving the Belgians from more barbarities,
saving the lives of those at sea; she had thought of her task ahead,
and of the risks she was to run, as saving the lives of American and
British and French soldiers. For the first time she thought of
herself as an instrument to kill--kill Germans, many, many Germans;
all that she could.
Someone had come into the wreck of that cabin behind her now. A
steward, probably; or perhaps Hubert Lennon, who had found her
again. She did not turn but continued to stare at the U-boat, her
hands clinging to the jagged hole made by its shell. A man’s hand
caught her shoulder and a voice spoke to her--Gerry Hull’s voice.
“Come with me,” he was saying to her. “You cannot stay here; come to
a safer place.”
“A safer place!” she repeated to him. “How can we help to kill them
on that boat?” she cried to him.
He was undoing her fingers, by main strength, from their clutch at
the jagged iron of the shell hole. He was very calm and quiet and
strong; and he was controlling her as though she were a child.
“They’re four thousand yards off,” he said to her. “That one there
and another on the other side. It’s just begun to fire.”
Some of the shells which had been striking, Ruth realized now, had
burst on the other side of the _Ribot_.
“Yes,” she said.
“We’ve signaled we’re attacked,” he told her. He had both her hands
free; and he bound her arms to her body with his arms. “We’ve an
answer, and destroyers are coming. But they can’t get up before an
hour or two; so we’ve a long fight on. You must come below.”
He was half carrying her, ignominiously; and it came to Ruth that,
before seeking her, he had gone to Agnes Ertyle; but she had not
delayed him because she was used to being under fire, used to seeing
those slain by fellow-men; used to knowing what she could and could
not do.
“I’ll go where--I should,” Ruth promised, looking up at him; and he
released her.
He pointed her toward a companionway where steps had led downward a
few minutes before; but now they were broken and smoke at that
moment was beginning to pour up. He turned and led her off to the
right; but a shell struck before them there and hurled them back
with the shock of its detonation. It skewed around a sheet of steel
which had been a partition wall between two cabins; it blew down
doors and strewed débris of all sorts down upon them. Another shell,
striking aft, choked and closed escape in the other direction. Gerry
Hull threw himself against the sheet of thin steel which the shell
so swiftly and easily had spread over the passage; but all his
strength could not budge it. He turned back to Ruth and looked her
over.
“All right?” he asked her.
“You are too?”
He turned from her and gazed through the side of the ship. “They’ve
got our range pretty well, I should say. They’re still firing both
their guns, and we don’t seem to be hitting much.”
He tried again to bend back the sheet of steel which penned them in
the passage, but with effort as vain as before.
“I guess we stay here for a while,” he said when he desisted. “If we
don’t get help and it looks like we’re going to sink, we can always
dive through there into the sea.”
A shell smashed in below and a few rods forward and burst with
terrific detonation.
“Huns seem to like this part of the ship,” he said when the shock
was past.
“That started something burning just below,” Ruth said.
Throughout the ship again, between the concussion of the striking
shells and the firing of the _Ribot’s_ guns, alarm gongs were going.
A woman screamed; men’s shouts came in answer. The rush of the
_Ribot_ through the water, which had been swift and steady since the
start of the fight, suddenly swerved and the ship veered off to the
right.
“What’s that?” Ruth said.
“We may be zigzagging to dodge torpedoes,” Gerry Hull said. “Or it
may be that our helm is shot away and we can’t steer; or we may be
changing course to charge a sub in close.”
A detonation closer than any before quite stunned Ruth for seconds
or minutes or longer--she did not know. Only when she came to
herself slowly, she was alone behind the sheet of steel. Gerry Hull
was gone.