The deck floor just beyond her, where he had been, was gone; or
rather--as she saw now through the smoke--it slanted steeply down
like a chute into a chasm of indefinite depth from which the heavy,
stifling smoke was pouring. A draft sucked the smoke out of the
shattered side of the ship over the sea and gave Ruth cleaner air to
breathe for seconds at a time. Gerry Hull must have been hurled into
that chasm when that last detonation blew away the floor; or else he
must have flung himself into the sea.
Ruth called his name, shouting first into the smoke column and then,
creeping down to the shell hole in the side, she thrust her head out
and gazed at the sea. Wreckage from the upper deck--wooden chairs,
bits of canvas--swept backwards; she saw no one swimming. The splash
of the waves dashed upon her, the ship was rushing onward, but not
so swiftly as before, and with a distinct change in the thrust of
the engines and with a strange sensation of strain on the ship. Only
one engine was going, Ruth decided--the port engine; it was being
forced faster and faster to do the work of both and the rudder was
pulled against the swerve of the port screw to keep the vessel from
swinging in a circle.
The guns on deck were firing steadily, it seemed; but the German
submarine, which Ruth could see and which had begun to drop behind
when the _Ribot_ was racing with both engines, was drawing up
abreast again with both its big rifles firing. But the _Ribot’s_
guns, if they had not yet hit that U-boat, at least had driven her
away; for, though she came up abreast, the German kept farther off
than before; and while Ruth watched, she heard a sudden, wild cheer
from the deck; French shells had gone home somewhere on that U-boat
or upon the other which Ruth could not see.
Smoke continued to sweep by Ruth, engulfing her for long moments,
but the fire was far enough below not to immediately threaten her.
So for the minute she was as safe as she could be anywhere upon that
long flank of the ship at which the U-boats were firing. At any
instant, a shell might obliterate her; but she could not influence
that by any thought or action of her own. So she thought no more
about it. She could possibly influence the fate of Gerry Hull. He
had been flung down that chute of the deck floor, she thought; the
shell might have killed him; it might only have wounded or stunned
him. In that case, he must be lying helpless down there where the
flames were. She took long breaths of sea air and crept back and
called again into the smoke; she thought she heard a man’s cry in
response; Gerry Hull’s voice. She returned to the hole in the side
of the ship and let the waves drench her face and her hair; she
caught up her skirt and soaked it in the splash of the sea.
The firing of the guns was keeping up all this time; the shock of
shells bursting aboard the ship also continued. But the tug and
thrust of the single engine had stopped; the vessel vibrated only at
the firing of its own guns or at the detonation of a German shell.
Ruth took a towel which she found at her hand--she was in the wreck
of someone’s cabin--and, after soaking it, she bound it about her
head and crept back through the smoke to where the steel chute of
the floor slanted sheer.
She dropped and fell upon a heap of sharp, shattered things which
cut her ankles and stumbled her over on hands and knees upon débris,
not flaming itself, but warm from a fire which burned lower. She
lifted the towel from her eyes to try to see; but the smoke blinded
her; she could not breathe; and she bound the towel again and
crawled off the heap of smoldering things upon a linoleum. She heard
a moan; but she could not find anyone in the smoke, though she
called thickly several times. A current of air was sweeping over the
floor and, following it, she came to a huge rent in the ship’s side
where water washed in and out as the vessel rolled. The water had
ceased to move from bow to stern; the vessel was merely drifting. A
man floated, face downward, upon a wave which washed him almost to
the ship’s side. Ruth reached out to seize him; she touched his
shoulder--a blue-clad shoulder, the uniform of the French; but she
could get no hold; the sea drew him slowly away.
“Gerry Hull! Gerry!” she called, as though that form in the French
coat, with head under the water, could hear. The next wash brought
it back toward the ship; but also drifted it farther to the stern.
Now Ruth found among the rubbish washing at her feet a floating
thing--a lifejacket. She thrust her arms in it and when the waves
washed that blue-clad form nearer the next time, she leaped into the
sea and swam toward it and got grasp of a sleeve and struggled back
toward the ship.
The vessel’s side towered above her, mighty and menacing; it swung
away from her, showing a long steep slant to the gray sky; it swung
back and tilted over as though to crush her; wreckage slipped from
off its topmost tier and splashed into the sea beside her. She could
see the cloud of gun gases puff out and clear; then the flash of
firing again. All the time she was thrashing with one arm to swim in
the wash beside the vessel and drag the blue-clad form. That form
was heavier now; and, as her clutch numbed, it slipped from her and
sank. She spun about and tried to dive, groping with her hands below
the surface; but the form was gone.
“Gerry Hull!” she cried out. “I had Gerry Hull--here!”
A coil of rope struck the water near her; men yelled to her to seize
it; but she groped below the water until, exhausted from the cold,
she looped the rope about her and they pulled her up.
“Lieutenant Gerry Hull was in the water there,” she cried to them
who took her in their arms. “Lieutenant Gerry Hull is”--she shouted
to the next man who took her when, looking up, she saw his face.
Silence--a marvelous stilling of the guns which had been resounding
from fore and aft; a miraculous stopping of the frightful shock of
the shells which had been bursting in the ship--enveloped Ruth. She
did not know at first whether it was because some of her senses were
gone; she could see Gerry Hull’s face, feel his arms holding her and
the rhythm of his body as he stepped, carrying her; she could hear
his voice and the voices of others close by; but all other sound and
reverberation had ceased.
“I was separated from you,” Gerry Hull was explaining to her. “I was
coming back to try and get you out.”
“I went down the way you fell,” she replied to him. “Then I saw a
man in the sea. I thought he was you. I tried to get him.”
She was silent for a few moments while he carried her; the miracle
of stillness continued; but it was a great effort for her to speak.
“I would have done it for anyone.”
“I know you would,” he said to her.
“You’ve seen Hubert?” she asked.
“He’s not among the hurt,” Gerry answered.
She was quite certain now that the stillness had continued so long
that it could not be merely the interval between firing or between
the arrival of German shells.
“What is it?” she asked him.
“What is what, Cynthia Gail?”
He called her whole name, as he knew it, as she had been calling
his. “We’re not fighting,” she said. “We haven’t surrendered or--are
we sinking?”
“A destroyer’s come in sight,” he said. “It’s fighting one of the
Huns. Listen!” He halted for an instant to let her hear the distant
sound of guns.
“I hear it,” she said.
“We hit that U-boat, we think, so that it can’t submerge and has to
keep fighting on the surface. The other’s submerged.”
He brought her down a stairway into some large compartment,
evidently below the water line; it seemed to have been a dining
saloon for the steerage when the _Ribot_ had been regularly in the
passenger trade; or perhaps it had been crews’ quarters. Now it was
a hospital; cots had been laid out and those who had been injured by
the shell fire had been brought there. They were a great many, it
seemed to Ruth--thirty or forty. She had never seen so many
suffering people, so many bandages, so much blood before. The ship’s
surgeon was moving among them; women were there--quiet, calm,
competent women. One had direction of the others and Ruth gazed at
her for moments before she recognized Agnes Ertyle with her
beautiful, sweet eyes become maturely stern and, at the same time,
marvelously compassionate. If Ruth were a man, she must love that
girl, she thought; love her now as never before. Ruth looked up to
Gerry Hull to see his face when he spoke to Lady Agnes; he evidently
witnessed no new marvel in her. He had seen her like this before,
undoubtedly; that was why he loved her.
“I’m not hurt,” Ruth said, ashamed of herself for having been
brought to this place among so many who had been terribly wounded.
“I’ve just been in the water; I’m wet, that’s all.” She moved to
release herself from Gerry’s hold.
“She went into the sea to save a man,” Gerry told Agnes Ertyle.
“Let me go to the cabin,” Ruth said, as she stood a little dizzily.
Lady Agnes grasped her hand. “If your cabin’s been wrecked, go to
mine--number twenty-six--and take any of my things,” she invited.
“Get dry and warm at once.”
She motioned to someone who gave Ruth hot, strong tea to drink.
Gerry turned with Ruth and led her up the stairs down which he had
just carried her; he saw her to the door of her cabin, which had not
been wrecked; he saw that a stewardess was there to aid her. Then he
went.
The stewardess helped Ruth undress and rubbed her and put on warm
and heavy things. Milicent Wetherell came to the cabin; she had
escaped uninjured, and she aided also.
The rifles on the _Ribot’s_ deck rang out suddenly; they fired
twice; again twice; and were still. Ruth had on warm, dry clothes
now; and she ran out with Milicent Wetherell to the deck. While the
_Ribot_ had been under shell fire, passengers had been kept from the
decks; but now that the sole danger was from torpedoes, the decks
had become the safest place.
The gun crews had seen--Ruth was told--what they thought was a
periscope and had fired. There was nothing in sight now near the
_Ribot_ but the wreckage which had fallen during the fight. Far off
to the right, the U-boat which had continued to run on the surface,
had withdrawn beyond the range of the _Ribot’s_ guns and was fleeing
away to the south, fighting as it fled. The morning light had quite
cleared the mist from the surface of the ocean and Ruth could see
the low line of the German boat obscuring itself with gun-gases as
its rifles fired. But its shells no longer burst aboard the
passenger vessel or spurted up spray from the sea alongside. Far,
far to the east and north appeared a speck--a gray, sea-colored
speck, sheathing itself in the sparkling white of foam every second
or so, casting the sheath of seaspray aside and rushing on gray and
dun again--the bow of the destroyer coming up. She was coming up
very fast--with a marvelous, leaping swiftness which sent the blood
tingling through Ruth.
The destroyer seemed hurled through the water, so fast she came; it
seemed impossible that engines, turning screws, could send a ship on
as that vessel dashed; she seemed to advance hundreds of yards at a
leap, hurling the spray high before her and screened by it for a
flash; and when she thrust through the foam and cut clear away from
it, she was larger and clearer and nearer. And, as she came, she
fought. Her guns were going--one, two, three of them! Ruth could see
the gossamer of their gases as they puffed forward and were swept
backward; she could hear on the wind the resound of the quick
firers. Steadily, rhythmically, relentlessly they rang, beating over
the sea like great bells booming in vengeance for the _Ribot’s_
dead.
Ruth felt lifted up, glorified as by nothing she had ever known
before. She turned to the man who had come up beside her; he was
Gerry Hull and, as he looked over the sea at the destroyer, she saw
the blood burning red, paling, and burning bright again in his face.
“What ship is that?” Ruth cried to him. “Do you know whether it’s
English or French or our own?”
“It’s the _Starke_!” Gerry Hull replied. “The _U. S. S. Starke_, she
reported herself to us! She made thirty-one knots the hour on her
builder’s trial two years ago; but she promised us to make the forty
miles to us in an hour and ten minutes! And she’s beating that, if I
know speed. God,” he appealed in reverent wonder, “look at her
come!”
“The _United States Ship Starke_!” Ruth cried. “One of our own!”
A wild, wanton, incredible phrase ran through her; “the shame of
being an American.” And, as she recalled it, she saw that Gerry Hull
recollected it too; and the hot color on his cheeks deepened and his
eyes, when they met hers, looked quickly away.
“They’re wonderful, those fellows,” he admitted to her aloud. He
spoke, then, not to her, but to the destroyer. “But why couldn’t you
come three years ago?”
A cry rose simultaneously from a lookout forward upon the _Ribot_
and from another man in the top. A periscope had appeared; and the
guns at once were going again at it. The radio, in the cabin
amidships, was snapping a warning to the _Starke_. The _Ribot’s_
guns and the splash of their shells into the sea gave the direction
to Ruth and to Gerry Hull; and they saw, for a flash, a spar moving
just above the water and hurling a froth before it, trailing a wake
behind. Indeed, it was probably only the froth and the wake which
they made out at all certainly; but that was discernible; and it
moved, not toward them, but aslant to them and pointed toward the
course of the American destroyer as it came up.
“They’re trying to get the _Starke_!” Gerry Hull interpreted this to
Ruth. “The Huns are leaving us for later; they know they’ve got to
get the _Starke_ or the _Starke_ will get their other boat.”
“The _Starke_ saw them!” Ruth cried, as the guns on the destroyer,
which had been firing at the fleeing U-boat to the south, tore up
the sea where the _Ribot’s_ shells were splashing.
“The torpedo’s started by this time,” Gerry Hull said. “Two of ’em,
probably, if the Huns had two left.”
Others about Ruth on the deck of the _Ribot_ realized that; and the
commander of the _Starke_ recognized it too. Ruth saw the leaping
form of the destroyer veer suddenly and point straight at the spot
in the sea where the U-boat had thrust up its periscope. This
presented the narrow beam of the destroyer, instead of its length,
for the torpedo’s target; but still Ruth held breath as on the
_Starke_ came.
Gerry Hull had thrust his wrist from his sleeve and, as they stood
waiting, he glanced down again and again to his watch.
“Passing--past!” he muttered to himself while he counted the time.
“The torpedoes have missed,” he announced positively to Ruth at
last.
The commander of the _Starke_ evidently thought so too; for the
length of his boat began to show again. His guns had ceased firing;
and the _Ribot’s_ rifles also were silent. The destroyer, veering
still farther to the right, was dashing now almost at right angles
to its former course.
“They’re going to cross the course of the Hun,” Gerry Hull explained
this also to Ruth, “and give ’em an ‘ashcan,’ I suppose--a depth
charge, you know,” he added.
“I know,” Ruth said. She had read, at least, of the tremendous
bombs, filled with the new explosive “T. N. T.,” which the U-boat
hunters carried and which they dropped with fuse fixed to burst far
below the surface. One of these bombs, in size and shape near enough
to “ashcans” to win the nickname, was powerful enough--she knew--to
wreck an undersea craft if the charge burst close by.
The _Starke_ was still leaping on with its length showing to the
_Ribot_ when two hundred yards or more astern the destroyer, a great
geyser of water leaped into the air fifty--a hundred feet; and while
the column of water still seemed to mushroom up and up, a tremendous
shock battered the _Ribot_.
Someone shouted out in French while another called in English,
“Depth charge dropped from the destroyer!”
“There was one ‘ashcan,’” Gerry Hull murmured. “Now for another!”
For the _Starke_, as soon as the charge had detonated, had put her
helm about and was circling back with marvelous swiftness to cross
again the spot in the sea where she had dropped the great bomb.
Men were below that spot of sea, Ruth knew--German men, fifty or
eighty or a hundred of them, perhaps. They were young men, mostly,
not unlike--in their physical appearance, at least--German-born boys
whom she had known at home in Onarga or in Chicago. Some of that
crew might, conceivably, even be cousins of those boys. They had
mothers and sisters in homes at Hamburg or Dresden or Munich or
perhaps in that delightful toy town of Nuremberg, which she knew and
had loved from pictures and stories; or some of them came, perhaps,
from the Black Forest--from those quaint, lovely homely woodland
cottages which Howard Pyle and Grimm had taught her to love when she
was a child. They were helpless down there below the sea at this
moment, perhaps, with the seams of their boat opened by that
tremendous shock which had battered even the _Ribot_ so far away;
water might be coming in upon them, suffocating them, drowning them
there like rats in a trap. The vision flowed before Ruth’s eyes for
an instant with horror; then she saw them, not choking and fighting
each other for escape which none could find, but crouching safe and
smiling in their boat, stealing away swiftly and undamaged to wait
chance to rise again to try another torpedo at the _Starke_ or to
surprise with gunfire, at the next dawn, another vessel like the
_Ribot_ and murder more people in their beds and fill the space
below decks with the dead and the agonized dying.
“Get ’em!” Gerry Hull, close beside her, was praying. “Oh, get ’em
now! Get ’em!”
No reaction to weakness had come to him; years ago, he had passed
beyond that; and Ruth, at once, had recovered.
“Get ’em!” Aloud, without being conscious of it, she echoed his
ejaculation; and astern of the _Starke_, as the few minutes before,
another great geyser of seawater arose; another titanic blow,
disseminating through the water, beat upon the _Ribot_. The _Starke_
was turning about short, again; but when she rushed back over her
wake, this time she dropped no other depth charge; she slowed a
little instead, and circled while she examined carefully the surface
of the sea. Then suddenly she straightened her course away to the
south; she buried her bow in a wave; with the rush of her
propellers, foam churned at her stern; she was at full speed after
the U-boat which she first had engaged and which, during this
interlude, had run quite out of sight to the south or had sunk or
submerged. While she pursued, her radio was reporting to the
_Ribot_; and the _Ribot’s_ rasped in return.
Oil in convincing quantities had come to the surface where the
_Starke_ had dropped its charge. Of course, the Germans often pumped
oil out of their U-boats, when no damage had been done, for the
purpose of deceiving the hunters and making them think they had
destroyed a U-boat when they had not. But the officers of the
_Starke_ had been satisfied with their findings; they would follow
up the other U-boat and then return. They understood that only two
U-boats had appeared to the _Ribot_; if another came or if either of
the two reappeared, the _Starke_ would return instantly.
No third enemy came; and neither of the others reappeared. In fact,
the _Starke_ failed to find any further trace of the U-boat which,
for a time, had fought upon the surface and then run away. Either
the gunfire of the _Ribot_ or of the _Starke_ had so damaged it that
it suddenly sank, leaving no survivors; or--as the men aboard the
_Ribot_ seemed to think was more likely--the crew succeeded in
repairing the damage done so that it was able to submerge and
escape. In this case, it might venture another attack, by torpedo,
upon the drifting _Ribot_; so the _Starke_, after abandoning the
search, put herself beside the _Ribot_. An American officer came
aboard, bringing with him a surgeon to aid in care of the _Ribot’s_
wounded; he brought also mechanics to assist the engine crew of the
_Ribot_ in repairs and he supplied, from his own crew, men to take
the places of the _Ribot’s_ crew who had been killed.
Ruth watched the young lieutenant--he was few years older than Gerry
Hull or herself--as he went about his business with the officers of
the _Ribot_. If any shame for recreancy of his country had ever
stirred him, it had left no mark; he was confident and
competent--not proud but quite sure of himself and of his service.
She looked for Gerry Hull to see whether he observed this one of
their people; she looked to see whether Captain Forraker and “1582”
also saw him. And she found that “1582” was the first to make
opportunity to meet the American officer and compliment him.
“You chaps might have been blowing up U-boats for a thousand years!”
The pounding and hammering in the engine rooms was resulting in
thrust again from the port engine. The _Ribot_ started under steam
and ran through an area of water all iridescent with floating oil.
Bits of wood and cloth scraps floated in the oil--bits which men
scooped up to preserve for proof that the depth charges, which the
_Starke_ had dropped there, had burst and destroyed a German
submarine.
Gerry Hull had gone below to look into the hospital again. Ruth had
offered to aid there but, having no experience, she was not
accepted. So Hubert Lennon found her on deck and went to the rail
with her while they watched the recovery of these relics from the
sea. It had been his first experience, as well as hers, with the
frightful mercilessness of modern battle; he had been made sick--a
little--by what he had seen. He could not conceal it; his sensitive,
weak eyes were big; he was very pale; his hand was unsteady as he
lit a cigarette.
“Queer--isn’t it?--queer that they should want to do what they’ve
done below and we have no feeling at all about them.” He was gazing
down at the oil, shimmering all colors of the rainbow as the waves
flickered it against the light.
“You’ve none at all?” Ruth asked, looking up at him.
“I had none at the time we were after them; but I’m afraid,” he
confessed with that honesty which Ruth had learned to expect from
him, “the idea of them gets to me now. Not that I wouldn’t kill them
all again! Oh, I’d kill! I’ve dreamt sometimes of being surrounded
by ’em and having a machine gun and mowing Germans down--mowing ’em
down till there wasn’t one left. But it always seemed such an
inadequate thing to do. It ought to be possible to do more--I don’t
mean torture them physically, of course; but to make them innocuous
somehow and let them live and think about what they’ve done. There
couldn’t be anything more terrible than that.”
“We’ve succeeded in doing that sometimes,” Ruth said. “We’ve taken
prisoners even from their U-boats; but they don’t seem to be
troubled much with remorse. It would be different for you and for
men like you; but that’s because you couldn’t do what they’ve done.”
“Sometimes I feel that I could to them. So I guess it’s a good thing
I’m going to be an ambulance driver. To fight them and keep fighting
fair and clean yourself--well it must take more stuff than I’ve
got.”
Ruth did not know quite what to make of this confession. Constantly,
since that first day when he called for her at the hotel in Chicago,
he had been paying his peculiar sort of court to her--peculiar,
particularly, in that he never obtruded himself when anyone else
offered and he never failed to admit anything against himself.
“It was fine of you, Hubert,” she said, “to come right for me when
the fight began.”
“I thought we were sinking; that’s how much sense I had,” he
returned. “Gerry, now, knew just what to do.”
“He didn’t come for me first, Hubert.”
“Maybe not; but you wished he had; I’m glad,” he went on quickly
before she could rejoin, “that this has taught Gerry a few things.”
It was evident from his manner that he meant “things” in relation to
her; and that puzzled her, for she could not feel any alteration in
Gerry Hull’s manner at all. To be sure, she had gone into the sea to
try to rescue one whom she thought was he; Gerry Hull knew this. But
that was not the sort of thing which could undo the opposition
between them. Yet it was plain, upon succeeding days, that Hubert
had discerned a fact; she had become again a person of real concern
to Gerry Hull.
She dated the start of that rehabilitation of herself not with her
adventure in the sea or with the moment when he carried her in his
arms; but with that instant when they stood together watching the
_U. S. S. Starke_ come up. That rehabilitation proceeded fast the
next days when, after the _Ribot_ had repaired both engines, the
_Starke_ brought the ship into a convoy--a fleet of some thirty
merchant vessels of all sorts and under a dozen flags, belligerent
and neutral, guarded and directed by a flotilla of American
destroyers, with the senior American officer in command of all the
convoy.
British trawlers joined them soon, adding their protection; two of
the destroyers sent up balloons which they towed; and now, by day,
British and French dirigible balloons and British and French and,
yes, American seaplane pilots appeared. And no submarine, in those
waters supposed to be infested with U-boats, once showed a
periscope. By day and night, the patrol and protection of those
American destroyers proved perfect. So by that protection they came
at last to France.
Gerry sought out Ruth upon the last morning when they would be on
shipboard. It was a smiling, sunny day, warm for that time in the
year. In addition to the ships of the sea and air which recently had
accompanied them constantly, strange little business-like boats
approached, airplanes from the land spied upon them; and as they
drew near to the port, Ruth got amazing sight of the multifold
activities of even this still distant threshold to war.
“You’re going to Paris right away?” Gerry asked.
“As soon as I can get through.”
“We’ll get a train that’ll probably bring us in at night. If you’ve
not made arrangements ahead----”
“I have, thanks; rather Hubert’s offered to see to me; besides his
aunt gave me letters to cousins of hers who’ve been living in Paris
for years. They’re Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Mayhew; they’ve an apartment
on the Avenue Kléber. I’m to go there my first night anyway.”
“That’s good. I’ve heard of the Mayhews; they’ve done a lot all
during the war. Then can I look you up at the Mayhews’ when I’m in
Paris? I hope for service right away, of course; but Paris is close
for our leave always.”
“Oh, I’ll not stay at the Mayhews’ or on Avenue Kléber! I’m to find
a room with Milicent Wetherell.”
“So you’ll carry out your Latin Quarter plan! That’s better! But
you’ll leave the address, anyway, at the Mayhews’?”
“Yes,” Ruth promised.
She took the opportunity to ask him many practical, matter-of-fact
items which she needed to know--particularly about the examinations
to be made upon arrival in France.
“My passport’s almost ruined, you see,” she explained to him.
“Why? What’s happened?”
Ruth colored. “I always carried it with me; so it got soaked in the
sea the other day.”
Color came to his face too; that had happened when she went into the
water to get him, of course. She would not have reminded him of it
but that she knew she well might need help no less influential than
his to pass the gateway to France.
“Of course,” he said. “How’s it spoiled?”
“My picture on it, mostly.”
“Oh; that’ll be all right! You’ll just have to have another picture
taken in France and have them paste it on. I’ll tell ’em about it
and see you through, of course.”
Accordingly Ruth went to her cabin and, after bolting the door
against even Milicent Wetherell, she got out her passport which
really had been wet by the sea but not soaked so badly that the
picture was useless. Indeed, the picture was still plain enough so
that a French intelligence officer might make out that it was not
Ruth. So she soaked it again in water until that danger was past;
then she dried it and took it with her to present at the port.
“I’ve told Agnes Ertyle all about your passport,” Gerry Hull said to
her when she came on deck again, “so she’ll help you out if they put
the women through first. They have to be awfully careful in France
these days about spies, you see--especially now--spies from
America.”