The little Republic of Switzerland, always one of the most
interesting spots in the world, became during this war a most
amazing and anomalous country. Completely surrounded by four great
powers at war--and itself peopled by citizens each speaking the
tongue of one or another of its neighbors and each allied by blood
with one or with two or with three, or, perhaps, with all--the Swiss
Confederation suffered a complex of passions, sympathies, and
prejudices quite beyond possible parallel elsewhere. And, as
everyone knows, the Swiss Republic during the four years of the war,
successfully persisted in peace.
Peace! What a strange condition in which to live, Ruth wondered with
herself as she encountered the astonishments on every hand when she
had crossed the border. She had been in a country at war for not
quite three months--unless you nominated America from April, 1917,
to January, 1918, a nation at war. Ruth did not. As she thought of
her life before she took ship for France, the date of America’s
declaration of a state of war with the Imperial German government
was not fixed in the fiber of her feelings as were many other days
before the date of that declaration--the September 6 of the Marne,
the May 7 of the _Lusitania_, the glorious weeks of the defense of
Verdun. The war declaration of April 6, 1917, seemed now to Ruth but
a sort of official notification of the intentions of the American
people which since then had only continued to develop. That home
country which she had left in the last days of January was not
nearly so different from its peace-time self as war-time France had
proved distinct from war-time America.
Certainly Ruth’s life had run on almost unchanged by the American
declaration of war, save for the strengthening of her futile,
stifled passions. But that day in January, which had embarked her
for France, had ushered her into a realm which demanded dealings in
realities which swiftly had made all before seem illusory and
phantasmagorical.
The feeling of dreamland incredulity that she, Ruth Alden, could
actually be experiencing those gloriously exciting days upon the
_Ribot_ and following her arrival in France had been supplanted by
sensations which made it seem that these last weeks had been the
only real ones in her life. When she thought of her old self--of
that strange, shadowy, almost substanceless girl who used to work in
a Madison Street real estate office for Sam Hilton--it was her life
in Chicago which had become incredible. She did not, therefore,
forget her own home; on the contrary, her work which had been
largely the gathering together of scattered family groups and the
attempt to reestablish homes, had made her dwell with particular
poignancy upon memories of the little house in Onarga where her
mother and her sisters dwelt. Regularly Ruth had addressed a letter
to her mother and dropped it in a post-box; she had dared tell
nothing of herself or of her work or give any address by which
anyone could trace her. She simply endeavored to send to her mother
assurance that she was well and in France. Obviously she could not
receive reply from her mother; indeed, Ruth could have no knowledge
that any of her letters ever reached home. She experienced the
dreads which every loving person feels when no news can come; such
experience was only part of the common lot there in France; but it
helped to remove her life at home further into the past.
Switzerland, strangely and without warning, had undone much that
France and the battle zone had worked within Ruth; the inevitable
relaxing of the strain of work in a country at war had returned Ruth
to earlier emotions. What was she, Ruth Alden, doing here alone in
the Alps? She was standing, as one in a dream, upon the quay before
the splendid hotels of Lucerne and gazing over the blue, wonderful,
mountain-mirroring waters of the Lac des Quatre Cantons. Off to the
southwest, grand and rugged against the azure sky, rose the
snow-capped peaks of Pilatus; to the east, glistening and more
smiling under the spring sun, lay the Rigi. The beauty and wonder of
it was beyond anything which Ruth Alden could have known. Who was
she that she was there?
Then a boy came by with newspapers and she bought a German newspaper
and one printed in French at Bern. It was this one which informed
her, when she glanced down its columns, that Gerry Hull had been
shot down, and, strangely--and mercifully, perhaps--this knowledge
came not to the girl who, during the past months had been his
friend, his close comrade during days most recent; it seemed to
come, somehow, only to a girl who lay awake early in the morning in
a shabby room at an Ontario Street boarding house, a girl who
day-dreamed about impossible happenings such as knowing Gerry Hull,
but who soon must stir to go down to breakfast at the disorderly
table in the ill-lit room below and then catch a crowded car for Sam
Hilton’s office.
Such was the work of peace and Pilatus and the Rigi and the images
upon the lake. War--war which had become the only reality, the sole
basis of being--miraculously had vanished. She passed through
throngs speaking German and by other groups conversing in French;
these stood side by side, neither one prisoner to the other; they
had no apparent hostility or animosity. These people, in part at
least, were German and French; but there beyond the border--Ruth
gazed in the direction of Alsace--men of such sorts sprang at one
another with bayonets; and Gerry Hull had been shot down.
Ruth searched the German newspaper for further word of him; she
looked up a news-stand and bought several papers, both French and
German. In some she discovered the same brief announcement of the
fate of the American pilot; but no further information. But it was
certain that he was dead or a prisoner--wounded, probably, or at
least injured by the crash of his airplane in the “some sort of a
landing” which he had succeeded in making. It had been “some sort of
a landing” which he had made that time he was shot down when she had
gone to him and helped him free. Tales of German treatment of their
prisoners--tales which she could not doubt, having been told her by
men who themselves had suffered--recurred to her and brought her out
of this pleasant, peaceful Lethe from realities in which Lucerne,
for a few hours, had let her live. Tension returned; and, with the
tension, grief but not tears; instead, that determination imbued her
which she had witnessed often enough in others, when loss of their
own was made known to them. Gerry Hull, she thus knew, was her own;
and as she had seen men and women in France giving themselves for
the general cause, and for one particular, personal vengeance, too,
so Ruth thought of her errand into Germany no longer as solely to
gather information for the army but to find and free Gerry Hull, if
he was a prisoner; and if he was killed, then to take some special,
personal vengeance for him.
She had come to Lucerne--ostensibly--to rest and to recuperate; and
Mrs. Mayhew had given her letters to friends who were staying at one
of the large hotels. Ruth had registered at the same hotel and a
Mrs. Folwell, an American, had taken Ruth under her chaperonage.
Ruth’s name, upon the hotel register, of course stood as Cynthia
Gail; and as Miss Gail, she met other guests in the hotel, which was
one of those known as an “allied hotel” in the row of splendid
buildings upon the water front devoted to the great Swiss peace and
war _industrie des étrangers_. The majority of its guests, that is,
designated themselves as English or French, Italian or
American--whatever in fact they might be. The minority laid claim to
neutral status--Norwegian, Danish, Hollandish, Swedish, Spanish. But
everyone recognized that in this hotel, as in all the others, the
Germans and Austrians possessed representatives among the guests as
well as among the servants.
“It is the best procedure,” Mrs. Folwell said half seriously to Ruth
upon her arrival, “to lay out all your correspondence upon your
table when you leave the room so that it may be examined, in your
absence, with the least possible disturbance. They will see it
anyway.”
Ruth was quite willing. Indeed, she was desirous of advertising, as
quickly as possible, the presence of “Cynthia Gail.” She had taken
the trouble to learn a simple device, employing ordinary toilet
powder and pin perforations through sheets of paper, which would
disclose whether the pages of a letter had been disturbed.
Accordingly she prepared her letters, and, merely locking them in
her bureau drawer, she left them in her room. Returning some hours
later, and unlocking the drawer, she found all her letters
apparently undisturbed; but the powder and the perforation proved
competent to evidence that secret examination had been made.
Of course examination might have been at the hands of allied agents;
for Ruth did not imagine that the Germans and Austrians alone
concerned themselves with war-time visitors to Switzerland; but she
felt sure that the Germans had made their search also.
After breakfast the next morning Ruth met a man of twenty-eight or
thirty--tall, reddish-haired, and with small gray eyes by name
Christian Wessels, known as a Norwegian gentleman who had made
himself agreeable to the Americans at the hotel. He was an ardent
admirer of American policies and could repeat verbatim the statement
of American war aims given by President Wilson to Congress three
months before. He was a young man of culture, having graduated from
the Swedish University of Upsala and was now corresponding with the
University of Copenhagen. He proved to be a man of cosmopolitan
acquaintance who had visited London, New York, San Francisco. He
spoke English perfectly; and he nursed profound, personal antipathy
to Germany as his family fortunes had suffered enormously through
the torpedoing of Norwegian ships; moreover, he himself had been
traveling from England to Bergen when his ship was destroyed and he
had been exposed to winter weather in an open boat for five days
before being picked up. He was only now recuperating from the
effects of that exposure, meanwhile carrying on certain economic
studies to guide trade relations after the war.
His method of recuperation, Ruth observed, was to eat as heavily and
as often as occasions permitted; he was a sleek, sensuous young man,
ease-loving and, by his own account, a connoisseur of the arts. He
talked informatively about painting, as about politics. Ruth did not
like him; but when she encountered him as she was wandering about
alone gazing at the quaint houses in the interior of the old town,
she could not be too rude to him when he offered himself as a guide.
“You have seen the Kapellbrücke, Miss Gail?”
“Yes; of course,” Ruth said.
“And the historical paintings? You understand them?”
“Yes,” Ruth asserted again.
“To what do they refer?”
“I don’t know,” Ruth admitted, and accompanied him, in no wise
offended, back to the old bridge over the Reuss; then to the
Mühlenbrücke with its Dance of Death; next he took her away to the
Glacier Garden.
While they had been in the town with many people close by, his
manner to Ruth had not been unusually offensive; but when they were
away alone, he became more familiar and he took to uncovert
appraisal of her face and figure.
“You are younger than I had expected,” he commented to her, apropos
of nothing which had gone before but his too steady scrutiny of her
face and her figure.
“I did not know that you expected anything in regard to me,” Ruth
said. “Mrs. Folwell did not know I was coming until I arrived.”
“Ah! But your orders were given you--the thirtieth of last month,
were they not?”
Ruth stiffened. The thirtieth of last month was the day upon which
she had arrived in Paris from Compiègne, the day upon which she had
visited Charles Gail and, upon her return to the Rue des Saints
Pères, had met George Byrne. Only one order had been given her that
day; and that order had been given by the German who struck down
Byrne. No one else had known about that order but herself and the
German; she had told Gerry and he might have told it to the French
authorities. But she could not associate this sleek, sensuously
unpleasant person, going by the name of Wessels, with anyone whom
Gerry could have informed. She readily could connect him with the
German who had for her attempted to strike Byrne dead; and she had
been awaiting--impatiently awaiting--the German agent here at
Lucerne who must accost her.
“Yes; the thirtieth,” Ruth said.
“Then why did you not come sooner?”
“I applied at once for permission,” Ruth defended herself. “It was
delayed.”
“Ah! Then you had much difficulty?”
“Delay,” Ruth repeated. “That was all; though I may have been
investigated.”
“You used Hull again to help you, I suppose.”
“Yes, I used Hull,” Ruth said.
Her heart was palpitating feverishly and the compression in her
throat almost choked her while she fought for outward calm. She was
a German girl, she must remember; she had come from her great peril;
she had passed it; this was relief and refuge with one of her own
before whom, at last, she could freely speak; for--though she dared
not yet fully act upon the conviction--she no longer doubted at all
that this Wessels was the enemy agent who was to control her
henceforth. How much did he know about her, or about the girl she
was supposed to be? He knew that she had been ordered here on the
thirtieth of last month; he knew that she had at times “used” Gerry
Hull.
“We have him now, you know,” Wessels said, watching her with his
disagreeable, close scrutiny.
“He’s captured?” Ruth said. She had remembered that she must have no
real concern for the fate of an enemy pilot whom she had “used.”
“Dead or captured; anyway, we have him,” Wessels assured. He had
continued to speak to her in English, though no one was near them;
and if anyone did overhear, the German tongue certainly would arouse
no comment in Lucerne. “Mecklen seems to have only half-done your
other flame.”
In his conversation at the hotel he had affected the use of slang to
display his complete familiarity with English, Ruth had noticed; and
she caught his meaning instantly. Her other flame was George Byrne,
of course; Mecklen, who had “only half-done” him, must be the German
of the ruined house.
“Byrne did not die?” Ruth asked.
“Who’s Byrne?” Wessels returned. “The American infantry lieutenant?”
“Yes.”
“No; he did not die. Mecklen shut his mouth; but any day now it may
open. When you did not come, I thought it had.”
“His mouth opened?”
“Yes; we had better walk, perhaps. There are many more places of
great interest. I shall show them to you.”
He pointed Ruth ahead of him down a narrow way; and when she
proceeded obediently, he followed.
She welcomed the few moments offered for consideration. So George
Byrne had not died! That was a weight from her heart; and Wessels
had only fragmentary facts about her, however he had received them.
He knew that she had had another “flame,” an American infantry
lieutenant; but Wessels had not known his name.
“You were lucky to get here,” Wessels offered, coming up beside her
when the way widened. Their direction was farther out from the city
and they continued to be quite alone. “But it cooks your chance to
go back.”
“To France, you mean?”
“Where else?”
She had thought of the possibility of being dispatched from
Switzerland not into Germany, but back to France. If someone was to
meet her at Lucerne who could take complete report upon the matters
which she had been supposed to observe, the logical action would be
to return her to work again behind the allied lines. Her original
instructions, received in Chicago, had only implied--they had not
directly stated--that she was to go on into Germany; but she had
clung to the belief that she would go on. And now the failure of
Mecklen to fully do his work with Byrne had settled that doubt for
Ruth; for with Byrne alive and likely at any day to “open his
mouth,” obviously the Germans would not order her into the hands of
the French.
“We may use you in Russia or Greece; but not France for the present,
or even Italy,” Wessels said. “But first you can visit home, if you
like.”
He meant the Fatherland, home of the girl whom he believed Ruth to
be; and Ruth knew that she had come to the crisis. If the
fragmentary facts which had been forwarded to this man comprised any
account of the girl whom the Germans in Chicago had meant to locate
and whom they had failed to find when they entrusted their mission
to Ruth, she was stopped now. If not....
“I’d like to look in at the old home,” Ruth said.
“Where is it? What town?”
“My grandfather lived near Losheim.”
“Where is that?”
“It is a tiny town beyond Saarlouis; near the Hoch Wald.”
“Oh, yes; I know. What is your name?”
“Luise Brun,” Ruth said. There was a German girl of that name who
had lived in Onarga; Ruth had gone to high school with her and had
known her well. During the early days of the war, Luise had told
Ruth about her relatives in Germany--her grandfather, who had lived
near Losheim until he died the winter before, and her two cousins,
both of whom had been killed fighting. Ruth did not resemble Luise
Brun in any way; and she did not imagine that she could go to
Losheim and pass for Luise; but when questioned about herself, she
had far more detailed knowledge of Luise’s connections to borrow for
her own use than she had had of Cynthia Gail’s.
Wessels, however, appeared less interested in Ruth’s German
relatives than in herself. “You have been in America most of your
life?” he asked.
“When I was a baby I was brought to Losheim and again when I was a
little girl,” Ruth said. “My father and mother never forgot the
Fatherland.”
“Of course not,” Wessels accepted, impatient of this loyal
protestation and desirous to return to the more personal. “I was
saying you are much like an American girl. American girls, I must
admit, attract me.”
He began speaking to her suddenly in German; and Ruth replied in
German as best she could, conscious that her accent was far from
perfect.
It appeared to pass with him, however, as the sort of pronunciation
to be expected from a girl reared in America.
“How old are you now, Luise?” he questioned familiarly.
“Twenty-five.”
“Yet _eines mädchen_, I warrant.”
“I am not married, Herr Baron,” Ruth assured, employing the address
to one of title. Either he was a possessor of baronial rank and
pleased with the recognition of the fact, or the assignment of the
rank was gratifying and he did not correct her.
“And in America you have no sweetheart of your own--other than your
‘flames?’”
He spoke the slang word in English, referring to Byrne and to Gerry
Hull, with both of whom, as he believed, she had merely played.
“No one, Herr Baron,” Ruth denied, but colored warmly. He took this
flush for confession that she was hiding an attachment; and he
laughed.
“No matter, Luise; he is not here.”
He was indulgently more familiar with her--a _von_ something or
other, admitting pleasure with the daughter of a man of no rank who
had emigrated to America. Ruth brought up the business between them
to halt further acceleration of this familiarity.
“I am to make my report to you, Herr Baron?”
“Report? Ah, yes! No; of course not. Why should you make report here
now? It is simply trouble to record and transmit it. You are not
going back to France, I said, did I not?”
“Yes.”
“Then the report will be tomorrow.”
“Where, Herr Baron?”
“Where I take you to--headquarters.”
Ruth went weak and gasped in spite of herself. She had thought that
she was prepared to meet any fate; but now she knew that she had
built upon encountering her risks more gradually. To be taken to
“headquarters”--_das Hauptquartier_--tomorrow! And, though Gerry had
warned her, and she had said that she had recognized and accepted
every sort of danger, still she had not reckoned upon such a
companion as this man for her journey.
“Ha, Luise! What is the matter?”
“When do we start, Herr Baron?”
“The sooner the better; surely you are ready?”
“Surely; I was thinking--” she groped for excuse and could think of
nothing better than, “What way do we go?”
“By Basel and Freiburg.”
“What time, if you please, Herr Baron?”
“At eight o’clock the train is.”
“I would like to return now to the hotel, then.”
He complied and, conversing on ordinary topics in English, they
reentered the town.
She had no arrangements to make. Wessels was to see to all necessary
details. She could pack her traveling bags in a few minutes; and she
dared not write to anyone of the matters now upon her mind. She
desired to return to the hotel only to be alone; and, as soon as she
had parted from Wessels, she shut herself in her room.
Long ago--a period passed in incalculable terms of time--she had
determined, locked alone in a room, to undertake proceeding into
Germany. Her purpose from the first, and her promise to the soul of
Cynthia Gail--the vindication which she had whispered to strengthen
herself when she was writing to Cynthia’s parents, and George Byrne,
and when she was receiving their letters, trading upon Cynthia’s
mother’s friends--was that she was to go into Germany.
It must be at tremendous risk to herself; but she always had
recognized that; she had said to Gerry that she accepted certain
death--and worse than death--if first she might have her chance to
do something. Well, she might have her chance. At any rate, there
was nothing to be done but go ahead without futilely calculating who
Wessels actually was, what he truly believed about her, what he
meant to do. Here was her chance to enter Germany.
An hour later she descended to dinner with Mrs. Folwell, and noticed
Wessels dining at his usual table in another part of the room. Ruth
informed Mrs. Folwell after dinner that she was starting that
evening for Basel; it was then almost train time and, after having
her luggage brought down, she went alone to the train.
Wessels also was at the train, but he halted only a moment beside
her to give her an envelope with tickets and other necessary papers.
Ruth entered a compartment shared by two women--German women or
German-speaking Swiss, both of middle age, both suspicious of the
stranger and both uneasily absorbed with their own affairs. No one
else entered; the guard locked the door and the train proceeded
swiftly, and with much screeching of its whistle, through darkened
valleys, through pitch-black, roaring tunnels, out upon slopes, down
into valleys again.
Late at night the two women slept. Ruth tried to recline in a
corner; and repeatedly endeavored to relax in sleep; but each time,
just before the dissolution of slumber, she started up stiff and
strained. Dawn had not come when the women awoke and the train
pulled into Basel. It was still dark when, after the halt at the
city, all doors again were opened and everyone ordered to leave the
cars. This was the German border.
Ruth stepped out with the others and rendered up her luggage. She
was aligning herself with the women awaiting the ordeal of the
German examination, when Wessels appeared with a porter, who was
bearing Ruth’s bags. He passed without halting or speaking to her;
but a moment later a German official touched her arm and, pointing
her to go on, he escorted her past the doors before which the others
were in line for examination. He brought her to the train which was
standing on the German side and showed her to an empty compartment,
where her luggage lay in the racks. Ruth sat in the compartment
watching the people--men and women--as they issued from the depot of
examination; they went to different cars of the waiting train; but
when anyone attempted to enter the compartment where Ruth sat, a
guard forbade until Wessels reappeared, got in, and told the guard
to lock the door.
Immediately the train started.
“Welcome to the Fatherland, _Liebchen_!” said Wessels, drawing close
beside Ruth as the car gathered speed and rushed deeper into
Germany.