Fear--so Ruth was finding out--is a most complicated and perplexing
sensation. What she had learned about fear, upon those infrequent
occasions when causes of alarm approached that queer, humdrum,
almost forgotten girl who used to work for Sam Hilton, had made it
appear a simple emotion to bring about a rational reaction. One fear
differed from another chiefly in degrees of effect; you might be a
little afraid of something--like having your skirt caught in an
elevator door when the car started up too crowded; having a rough
looking man suddenly accost you when you were hurrying back to
Ontario Street late in a winter evening, caused more alarm; and
there were other occurrences which had frightened still more. The
amount of fear you felt--and the force of the corresponding
reaction--seemed generally proportional to the danger threatening
you; but now Ruth had been through an adventure--battle--which had
menaced her life to a far greater degree than any previous
experience; and she had not been afraid, in the old sense of fear.
Emotions had tortured her--emotions far more violent and furious
than ever she had suffered; but fear for her life had not been chief
among them. Committed to battle, as she had been by the mere fact of
her presence aboard the _Ribot_, the instant realization that
nothing she could do could save her had amazingly freed her from
fear.
Fear, then, was not made up just of a dread of death. Now that the
_Ribot_ was safely in from the Bay of Biscay, had passed the Phare
de Cordouan and was running down the broad, flat estuary of the
Gironde river to Bordeaux, securely situated sixty long miles
inland, Ruth was in no danger of death at all. If at that city,
whose roofs and chimneys were just coming into sight, the French
examiners found out how she had obtained her passport, how she had
duped and tricked people to aid her in arriving here, and if they
arrested her, therefore, upon the charge of being a German spy, they
would be making her life safe; her punishment probably would not go
beyond imprisonment for the duration of the war; it would prevent
her wild plan of going into Germany, where court-martials did not
simply imprison spies. Yet Ruth was afraid this morning as she had
never been before; far, far more afraid than when she had been in
battle.
That meant, obviously, that she was far more afraid of failing to do
that which she was determined upon than she was afraid of dying.
Less than three weeks earlier, when Ruth Alden was drawing up
quit-claims and deeds for Sam Hilton in Chicago, such a recognition
of the fact in regard to oneself would have seemed--even if spoken
only to self--ostentatious and theatrical; but now to make the fate
of yourself nothing, the performing of your part in the great scheme
everything, was the simple and accepted code of almost everyone
about her.
Exactly when Ruth had begun to accept this code for herself, she did
not know. Once or twice in her twenty-two years she had encountered
emergencies when one person or two--or very, very few, at
most--acted without regard to consequence to themselves; but always
they did this for the saving of more serious catastrophe to a
greater number of persons who were present; so that even upon those
occasions the highest purpose was plain self-preservation. But now
Ruth had become a member of a society not chiefly charged with
preserving itself--whose spirit, indeed, was disregard of self. She
had come from a society in which the discovery that a certain
project was not “safe” and would lead one to certain destruction was
enough to immediately end that project, into a hemisphere where the
certainty of death made no difference and was simply not to be
discussed.
It was not from fear of punishment, therefore, that Ruth’s heart was
fluttering as the _Ribot_ drew up to the docks at Bordeaux; it was
from terror at thought of no longer being permitted to be one of
such a company as that upon this ship.
Men were directing the passengers to arrange themselves for
presentation of their credentials to the French authorities; and
Ruth found Lady Agnes taking her place beside her. The English girl
was well known and, after merely formal inquiry and the signing of a
few papers, she was passed on. She made a statement for Ruth of the
reasons for Ruth’s passport being in bad condition; and she
mentioned what she knew about Ruth. The Frenchmen attended politely,
but they did not, therefore, take chances. They examined her
passport far more carefully than they had Agnes Ertyle’s; but Ruth
had so ruined the picture that identification by it was impossible.
The sea water also had helped to blur the signature so that her
“Cynthia Gail” which they made her sign, and which they compared
with the name upon the passport, escaped open challenge. Then there
were questions.
The man who asked them referred to cards in an index box which,
evidently, had come across upon the _Ribot_; for his inquiries
referred largely to questions which had been asked Ruth upon the
other side. She, fortunately, had had sense enough to have written
down for herself the answers which she had given at New York; she
had rehearsed them again and again; so now she did not fail to give
similar replies. Then there were other inquiries--sudden, startling
ones, which gave her consternation; for they seemed based upon some
knowledge of the real Cynthia Gail which Ruth did not have. But she
had to answer; so she did so as steadily as possible and as
intelligently as she could.
The examiner gazed more keenly at her now; he halted his examination
to confer in whispers with an associate; he made careful notation
upon a card. A clerk brought in a cablegram, which the examiner
carefully read. Had the body of Cynthia Gail been identified in
Chicago? Had her family found out the fraud which Ruth had been
playing upon them; or had other discovery been made so that the
French knew that she was an impostor?
The man looked up from the cablegram.
“You have been in France before?” he challenged.
Ruth had thought of being asked that question. She had told Gerry
Hull at Mrs. Corliss’ that she had been in France--or at least she
had let him suppose so when he said that, of course, she had been in
Paris. She did not know at all whether Cynthia Gail had or not; but
that statement to Gerry Hull--which he might have
repeated--committed her.
“Not since the war began,” she answered.
“Previous to then?”
“Yes.”
“Upon how many occasions?”
“Once,” Ruth said.
“When was that?”
Ruth had figured out several occasions when Cynthia Gail might have
come abroad--if she really ever had done so. “The summer of 1913.”
“When did you land?”
“Late in June; I don’t recall the exact date.” She fixed June, as
she supposed Cynthia Gail would have come during summer vacation.
“Where did you land?”
“Dieppe. I crossed from New York on the _Adriatic_ of the White Star
Line to Plymouth for England first; then I crossed to France by
Newhaven-Dieppe.” She had picked up a good deal on board the
_Ribot_, you see.
“Visiting what places in France?”
“I spent most of my time in Paris; I was with my parents. We stayed
at the Hotel Regina.” Gerry Hull had said he supposed she had been
at the Regina or the Continental.
The readiness of these answers seemed to somewhat reassure the
examiner.
“You have friends in France?”
“Only acquaintances such as one makes traveling; no one whom I could
now place. I’ve letters to Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, of Avenue
Kléber. I did not know them when I was in France before.”
The examiner made notations on his card.
“Report at your first opportunity, if you please, to your consul
general at Paris and obtain a passport in place of this!” He was
writing upon her passport now and handing it back to her! Whatever
reservation of judgment he had made in regard to her; whatever
orders he might give to watch her pending verification of her facts,
he was passing her on and permitting her to go with the others to
take the afternoon train to Paris!
She saw to customs and let Hubert order the transfer of her luggage;
then she was free upon the streets of her first foreign city. Not
for long; because the train for Paris left soon. But Hubert hired a
queer old cab, driven by a white-haired, Gallicly garrulous man, who
quickly understood that they were less interested in the wide
magnificence of the modern city than in the labyrinths of the old
town with its white, huddled houses facing quaint, gayly painted
shops about irregular squares, and looming at one another over the
narrowest of mediaeval streets.
They halted the cab and walked down the delightful defiles. Ruth had
to remember, in her raptures, that she was supposed to have been in
France before; but there were moments when Hubert left her--he
understood that she wanted to experience some of this alone--when
the incredible wonder that she was abroad overwhelmed her. She had
cabled, of course, to Cynthia Gail’s parents in Decatur; but she
wanted to cable her own mother to tell her where she was, and to buy
the pretty, picturesque postal cards, and send them to her sisters;
she wanted to write some of the wonder to all her friends; she would
have included even a card to Sam Hilton. But all that was
impossible.
Then the sight of French soldiers on the narrow streets and the
many, many French women in mourning--mothers and widows--returned
her to the grim, terrible business which had brought her here. She
rejoined Hubert where he had been waiting for her at the end of a
twisty, shadowy little street; he had bought a French newspaper; and
when she came beside him, he glanced up at her gravely.
“They’ve sunk a transport with American troops, Cynthia,” he said.
“Where? How many of our soldiers--?” she cried.
“The _Tuscania_ to the north of Ireland; torpedoed when we were at
sea. Two or three hundred of our men are missing; they don’t know
exactly how many yet.”
The news had reached the others of the _Ribot’s_ passengers, who
were taking the same train for Paris that afternoon. Ruth shared a
compartment in the little European-gauged cars, with Milicent
Wetherell and two French women; but the train was a “corridor
train,” as Ruth learned to say, and the occupants of the different
compartments could visit one another much as they might in the
larger American cars. There was news of recent air raids upon
Paris--one raid had been most deadly and destructive; there was news
of various sorts from the French and British fronts--a little news
also from the short American sectors; for it was announced that the
Americans had taken over a new portion of the line in Lorraine. But
the report of the successful attack of the U-boats upon the
_Tuscania_ overshadowed all other news.
It was not alone the loss of the hundreds of American soldiers; it
was the ugly threat that, where the U-boats at last had succeeded in
sinking a transport out of a convoy, they might succeed again and,
as the Germans had been boasting, they might--they just possibly
might cut that bridge of ships really beginning this month to bring
America over the seas. Ruth thrilled with discovery at how these
people here in France had come to count upon the arrival of her
people. She talked not only with the acquaintances from the _Ribot_,
but Milicent and she practiced their French upon the polite and
patient ladies from Bordeaux.
Ruth thus found that these French women were relieved that the
_Tuscania_ was not an American ship and had not been under convoy of
American destroyers when it was lost.
“They have the most appalling faith in us!” Ruth reported this to
Gerry when he stopped to speak with her during the afternoon. “They
think we can do anything; that we cannot fail!”
“That’s their way,” he warned. “We’re the new ally. The British must
have done wonders to get off all but two hundred men from a crowded
transport going down in a heavy sea.”
“I don’t mean that we could have done more,” Ruth said, “or that we
could have saved the _Tuscania_; I’m just glad people can believe so
in us. But it puts upon us an awful responsibility to make good.”
“It does,” Gerry agreed, laconically, and went on.
The train pulled into Poitiers--Poitiers of the battle of the Black
Prince in her _Green’s English History_! It ran on to Tours! Now the
names of even the little towns, as they neared Paris, were
familiarly full of legend and romance.
Hubert Lennon “looked by” in the evening, as he often had during the
day; and, as Milicent was visiting elsewhere just then, he sat down
beside Ruth.
She observed at once that something was troubling him--not a matter
which had affected him suddenly, but rather an uncertainty which
seemed to have been progressing for some time. He remained beside
her silent for several minutes while they looked out at the lights
of the little French hamlets. Finally he asked her in quite an
ordinary tone, so that the French women could not suspect any
challenge:
“You remember motoring down this way to Blois and Tours, and then
that run down the valley of the Loire?”
Ruth startled a little straighter and gazed out at the darkness
without answering. If Gerry Hull had asked her such a question she
would have bluffed the answer boldly; but Hubert had interrogated
her for a purpose; and he knew something of what Cynthia Gail had
done and had not done. Suddenly it dawned upon Ruth that that time,
nine years earlier, when Hubert had last seen Cynthia Gail, was not
in Chicago, as she had supposed, but here in France.
“Yes, I remember,” she replied weakly and without looking about.
“Your father and mother were with you, and my father--he was alive
then--and I; and who else was along?” he questioned, as though quite
casually, but Ruth knew that this was a test.
“I--don’t remember,” she faltered. She doubted whether Cynthia Gail
had been with him on any such trip; the whole question might merely
be a catch; well, if he suspected her and wanted to catch her,
certainly he had her. Her progress from the moment of her appearance
as Cynthia Gail had been made possible--she recognized--because of
his unsuspecting acceptance of her. That had won for her
championship in more powerful quarters which, in turn, had gained
her favor more influential still; yet the whole pyramid of that
favor balanced on the point of Hubert’s original acceptance.
So she sat in the dark awaiting what this strange friend of hers
should determine to do.
The French women in the opposite seats conversed between themselves.
The train was drawing into Paris, they said. The rapid rattle of
railroad joints and crosstracks confirmed this to Ruth, as well as
the more frequent noise of engines passing; she could see, too, low
shaded signal lights. But the environs of Paris had become more
black than the villages of the south; this was from danger of
repetition of the severe air raids of which Ruth had heard at
Bordeaux.
The train stopped; not at a station, nor did guards open the doors.
Everything was black without; the few lights, which Ruth had been
viewing, either had not been necessary thereabouts, or else they had
been extinguished; and, with the stilling of the train noise, a
weird, wailing moan rose through the night air.
“A siren!” Hubert said to Ruth. The French women, too, had
recognized the warning of a raid. A blast of a horn blew a loud
staccato _alerte_; and the siren--it evidently was on some
fast-driven car--diminished in the distance, wailing. Far off, but
approaching closer, sounded deep, rolling reverberations; not like
guns--Ruth knew guns now; nor yet like shells such as had burst on
board the _Ribot_. They were aerial torpedoes, of tremendous
violence, detonating in Paris buildings or upon the city streets.
Guns were going now; and their shells were smashing high in the air.
Ruth could see the flash of their break against the gleaming stars
of the clear, cold sky; she could see rockets and glaring flares.
The sound of the guns and the smash of the shells in the sky
redoubled; a mighty flash lit the ground a half mile or more away
across the railroad yards; it threw in brilliant silhouette for a
second, roofs, trees, chimneys against a crimson inferno of flame.
Hubert had the window open; and Ruth and the French women were
kneeling side by side to look out and up. They could see little
lights in the sky now; they could hear, between the smash of shells,
the hum of airplane motors and the rattle of brief bursts of
machine-gun fire.
Airplanes of defense were up there fighting the Germans--French
piloted those machines. But there might be Americans fighting there,
too. Ruth had read that once or twice American pilots had been among
those honored with the defense of Paris. She did not know whether it
was true; she had meant to ask Gerry Hull.
A few yards away in another compartment of another car--probably in
the compartment where Lady Agnes sat--Ruth knew that he was kneeling
before a window also gazing out; and she knew that the helpless
impulse which stirred her with desire to be out there above to fly
and fight was surging through him a thousand times intensified. She
could feel even Hubert Lennon twist and sway at struggle with that
impulse; how much more was Gerry Hull’s lithe, powerful body--that
strong, rhythmically moving form which had carried her--straining
now to join his comrades there above and to strike.
A flare of flame, not sharp and jagged like the burst of shells, nor
yet the streak of a rocket, nor like the glaring spot of a signal
light, wavered across the stars. Something clouded it--smoke. It
flung free from the smoke and dived, flaring bigger and brighter,
trailing behind it a streamer of black which blanketed both rockets
beyond and the stars; it dived on, burning.
Ruth’s heart throbbed like a hammer in her throat. “_Chute d’un
aéroplane!_” the French women cried.
“Fall of an airplane!”
It had been hit! The gasoline tank had ignited; it was going down in
flames. Whether friend or foe, no one on the train could know. Cries
reached Ruth from other compartments in the car. Everyone was seeing
it as it dropped down now faster and faster, its head burning
whiter; its streamer of smoke longer and broader before the stars.
The line of roofs and chimneys off to the south, which had shown in
glaring silhouette, sucked it from sight. It had crashed; and a
shudder shocked through Ruth as she pictured the pilot. She wanted
Gerry Hull beside her to know that he was safe; her hand groped in
the dark, without her will. It encountered Hubert’s and found his
trembling and cold.
“They’re going away, I think,” he said to reassure her.
The detonations of the torpedoes dropped upon the city surely were
less; the guns diminished their fire; the flashes in the sky were
farther away; and the hum of the airplane motors and the bursts of
machine-gun fire no longer were to be heard.
A bugle from somewhere blew a none-too-confident “All clear.” The
train moved on and drew after midnight into the darkened Gare du
Quai-d’Orsay.
It composed for Ruth a far different entrance to Paris than any she
had dreamed--the dark, almost deserted railroad station as a center
of an expanse vague and doubtful under the starlit city haze. A man
who repeated, “Mees Seenthya Gaiil” and “Meester Huber’ Len_non_,”
in patient, respectful intoning, stood at the gates from the train.
He had a car, toward which he escorted Ruth and Milicent (who, Ruth
insisted, must not try to find a place for herself that night) and
Hubert.
Several of the _Ribot’s_ men came and said good-bye to Ruth and
Milicent again and made last memoranda of how they could later be
located. Gerry Hull appeared and, in her brief moment with him, Ruth
marveled at the change in him. The air raid and the view of his
comrades fighting again and, too, this nearness of his return to
duty had banished all boyishness from him; a simple sternness
suddenly had returned him to a maturity which made her wonder how
she ever could have assumed to scold and correct him as once she
had.
He saw that Ruth and Milicent passed the formalities at the _gare_.
He ascertained that they had a vehicle; he brought to Ruth Lady
Agnes’ farewell and offer of assistance at any time. Then, saluting,
he said good-bye and they drove off.
Their car was keeping along the Quai-d’Orsay at first with the Seine
glinting below on the right. They passed a bridge.
“Pont de Solférino,” Hubert said.
They turned across the next bridge--“Pont de la Concorde!”
That brought to Ruth’s right the Garden of the Tuileries! They were
in the Place de la Concorde; they turned into the Champs-Elysées! It
was little more than a vague wideness of speeding shadows; but
Ruth’s blood was warm and racing. Hubert spoke to her, and when she
replied she knew that if he had questioned before whether she had
been previously in Paris he could not wonder now. But he spoke to
her as if she had, calling names of the places quietly to Milicent
rather than to her.
The car swerved into the Place de l’Etoile.
“The Arc-de-Triomphe!” Hubert cried. Ruth bent and saw its looming
bulk; they were upon the Avenue Kléber now and the car soon was
halting.
A single light burned in the hallway of a building of apartments
handsomer than any Ruth ever had seen; a door upon a second floor
opened and an American man and woman welcomed “Cynthia Gail” as Ruth
had never been welcomed anywhere in her life. These hospitable
people--they were Aunt Emilie’s cousins, the Mayhews--welcomed
Hubert, too, of course, and Milicent.
Ruth lay that night in a beautiful bed of gold and blue--the most
grateful, the most excited, the most humble and
insignificant-feeling girl in all France. When she had started out
upon this adventure in America she had seemed to herself to be
seizing an opportunity ordained for her by fate and entrusted to her
as the instrument for a great deed; now the fact that she was here,
and had come with an idea that she could greatly do, seemed the most
assuming conceit in the world.
The next morning when she went out upon the avenues in the uniform,
which now she was to wear constantly, the pettiness of her part
reimpressed itself with every square she passed as she witnessed the
throngs of soldiers--of a dozen races, of innumerable
nations--gathered for the war. She went with Hubert to the American
consulate, where she applied for a new passport to replace the
ruined one; then, proceeding alone to the office where Cynthia Gail
was to report, she accepted gladly the simple, routine duties
assigned her.
That same day she and Milicent found a room in a _pension_ upon the
Rue des Saints Pères, where Hubert and Mrs. Mayhew called upon her
the next evening. But if Gerry Hull had inquired for her at the
Mayhew’s, his inquiry resulted in no visit to the Rue des Saints
Pères. Lieutenant Gerry Hull was transferred--so Ruth read in a
_Matin_ of the next week--to the American forces and was flying now
under his own flag. And with his return to duty it seemed that he
must have lost concern for a girl satisfied to do half-clerical,
half-charity relief work among refugees in Paris.
Of course Ruth did not think of herself as merely doing such work;
she considered herself as waiting for further instructions from the
Germans.
The orders which she had received from the spy in Chicago had
directed her to take up this work of Cynthia Gail’s; and only by
following these orders could she hope to carry out her plan.
She found far more talk of German agents, and far more certainty of
their activities, in Paris than she had heard about in Chicago. The
difference was that while in Chicago the presence and the activities
of German spies was extraordinary, here it was the everpresent and
accepted thing--like the arrival of trains of wounded from the front
and air raids upon clear nights. She learned that the Germans
undertook no important enterprise without information from their
agents in France; she learned that, as in America, these agents were
constantly being taken. It was plain to her, therefore, that they
could scarcely have any rigid organization or any routine method of
reports or intercommunication. They must operate by creating or
seizing sudden opportunities.
During the noon hour upon a day in the middle of February, Ruth left
the relief rooms, where she had been working, to wander in the
winter sunlight by Notre Dame, where bells were ringing for some
special mass. She went in and stood in the nave, listening to the
chants, when she observed a gentleman of about fifty, evidently a
Parisian, go to a pew beyond her and kneel down. She noticed him
because she had seen him at least twice before when she was coming
out of her office, and he had observed her with keener glance than
gentlemen of his apparent station were accustomed to bestow.
She went from the cathedral after a few minutes and wandered up the
Rue St. Jacques toward the Sorbonne, when the same man suddenly
appeared about a corner and--a rather gusty wind was blowing--his
hat left his head and blew toward Ruth. She stooped quickly and
picked it up.
He thanked her effusively in French and, observing that she was an
American in uniform, he extended compliments upon the participation
of America, which made it impossible for Ruth to go on at once.
Suddenly, and without change in his tone, he inquired her name.
“Cynthia Gail,” she gave it, without thinking anything in
particular.
“From what city?” he inquired.
“Decatur, Illinois.”
“You are to make effort at once to leave Paris to go to the district
of Roisel. Never mind the Americans; there will be few there.
Observe British dispositions; of their Fifth Army; their
headquarters; what forces in reserve present; what movements
indicating a lengthening of their front. Return here after two
weeks; not later than three. It is the wonder of America, observe!”
he proceeded in the same tone as a man went by, “that it saves not
only my country, my civilization, but even, for me, my hat! I thank
you again, Mademoiselle. _Bon jour!_” He bowed and was off.