Ruth was working in a canteen with the American army now--or,
rather, with one of the American armies. Her particular army
occupied the bending front about the St. Mihiel salient, east of
Verdun. Gerry--she heard of him frequently, but from him only when
the chances of the mails brought letters along the lines of the
shifting armies--Gerry was doing combat flying again with the
American forces operating farthest to the west. She was close behind
an active battle front again, as by secret night marches the
American First Army with its tanks and artillery concentrated on the
south side of the salient from Aprémont to Pont-à-Mousson.
Ruth went about glowing with the glory of the gathering of the
fighting men of her people. Many times when she looked up at the
approach of a tall, alert figure in pilot’s uniform, her heart
halted with hope that Gerry had come among the flyers to aid in this
operation; then she heard, with final definiteness, that he was
still kept at his combat work farther west. The gathering of the
army, however, brought Hubert Lennon.
Ruth had not seen him since March; and his manner of reappearance
was characteristic. On the evening of the eleventh of September, the
sense of the impending had reached the climax which forewarned of
immediate events; and the troops who were to go “over the top” at
some near hour, and also the support divisions which were to follow,
were being kept close to their commands. The canteen where Ruth was
working was deserted long before the usual time, and Ruth was busy
putting away dishes when someone entered and coughed,
apologetically, to attract her attention. She glanced up to see a
spare young man in the uniform of an ambulance driver and wearing
thick spectacles. His face was in the shadow, with only his glasses
glinting light until he took off his cap and said:
“Hello, Miss Alden.”
Ruth dropped the dish she was holding. “Hubert! I didn’t know how
much I’ve needed to see you!” And she thrust both her hands across
the counter and seized his hand and squeezed it.
He flushed ruddy under his brown weather-beatenness, and she held
tighter to the hand he was timidly attempting to draw away--still
her shy, self-effacing Hubert. By hailing her by her own name, he
had informed her at once that he knew all about her; and he had not
assumed to replace his former familiar “Cynthia” with “Ruth.”
“You--no one’s needed me,” he denied, more abashed by the warmness
of his welcome.
“You frightened me about you at first, Hubert,” she scolded him,
“when you went away and--except for a couple of postcards--you never
sent me a word. Then I heard of you through other people----”
“Gerry?”
“Yes; Gerry or Mrs. Mayhew; and I found you were always all right.”
He winced, and she reproached herself for not remembering how
terribly sensitive he was about not being in the combat forces. “I
certainly never expected you’d worry about me.”
“But you’ve been wounded!” she cried, observing now as he shifted a
little that he moved as do those who have been hurt in the hip.
“Hubert, what was it and when?”
“Air raid; that’s all. Might have got it in Paris--or London.”
“Look at me; where and when?”
“Well, then, field hospital near Fismes early in August. I’m quite
all right now.”
Ruth’s eyes suddenly suffused. She had heard about that field
hospital and how the German flyers had bombed it again and again,
strewing death pitilessly, and how the attendants upon the wounded
had worked, reckless of themselves, in an inferno. “Hubert, you were
there?”
“That was nothing to where you’ve been, I reckon.”
“I’ve never thanked you,” Ruth replied, remembering, “for not
telling on me that time you caught me on the train from Bordeaux.”
“How’d you know I caught you then?”
Ruth told him. He looked down. “I was pretty sure on the _Ribot_
that you weren’t Cynthia, Miss Alden,” he said, “but I was
absolutely sure I wasn’t doing anything risky--to the country--in
keeping still. By the way, I’ve a letter from Cynthia’s people for
you.”
He reached into a pocket and Ruth studied him, wonderingly. “How
long have you been here, Hubert?”
“Oh, three or four days.”
“How long have you known where I was?”
He hesitated. “Why, almost all the time--except during the retreat
in March, and then when you were in Switzerland and in Germany--I’ve
known fairly well where you were.”
“Why didn’t you come to me four days ago?”
“Didn’t have this till today.” He produced a letter postmarked
Decatur, Illinois, and in the familiar handwriting of Cynthia Gail’s
father. “You see, after Gerry brought you back and everything was
out, I thought the only right thing--to you, Miss Alden, as well as
to them--was to write Cynthia’s people. I knew you would, of course,
but I thought you wouldn’t say, about yourself, what you should. So
I did it. Here’s what they say.”
He handed the letter to her, and Ruth withdrew nearer a lamp to read
it. They were still quite alone in the corner of the canteen, and as
Ruth read the letter written by the father of the girl whose part
she had played, tears of gratitude and joy blinded her--gratitude
not alone to the noble-hearted man and woman in Decatur, but quite
as much to the friend who had written of her to them with such
understanding as to make possible this letter.
She came back to him with tears running down her cheeks and she
seized his hand again. “Oh, Hubert, thank you; thank you! I don’t
think anything ever made me so happy in all my life.”
“You know Byrne’s dead, do you?”
“No! Is he? He died from that----”
“Not from that, Miss Alden. He completely recovered. He was killed
cleanly leading his platoon in the fighting on the Vesle. He had
written Cynthia’s people about you forgiving you, you see.”
Hubert turned to the door and opened it and gazed out through the
dark about the hills and woods where that night the hundreds of
thousands of Americans of the First Army lay. “Funny about us being
back here, isn’t it?” he said, with the reflective philosophy which
he was likely to employ when dismissing one subject. “I’ve been
thinking about it a lot these last days, seeing our fellows
everywhere--so awful many of them. Everyone of ’em--or their
fathers--came from this side first of all because they didn’t like
the way things were going in Europe, and they wanted to get away
from it. But they couldn’t get away from it by just leaving it. They
had to come back after all to settle the trouble. That’s an
interesting idea, when you think of it, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” said Ruth. “Hubert----”
“How does Gerry feel about being an American now?”
“I’ve not talked with Gerry for more than three months.”
“Being an American,” Hubert mused, “being an American is some
privilege these days--even if you only drive an ambulance. To be
Gerry Hull now!” He gazed at Ruth, who looked away, but who could
not stop color suffusing her face under his challenge. He glanced
about the room and observed that they were quite alone.
“I’ve wondered a good bit recently, Miss Alden,” he said in a queer,
repressed matter-of-fact way, “whether you might prefer--or might
not prefer--to have me tell you that I love you. You must know it,
of course; and since it’s a fact, sometimes it seemed that we might
be better friends hereafter if I just told you that fact. You know
I’ve not any silly idea that you could care for me. No; don’t
please!” he stopped her, when she attempted to speak. “We’ll not
arrive anywhere except by sticking to facts; we’re friends; may we
ever be!”
“O, we will be, Hubert!”
“Then it is better that I’ve told you I love you.”
“But you mustn’t!”
“I can’t control that, Miss Alden.”
“Mayn’t I be Ruth even now?”
“Ruth, then; yes, I like that. Good night, Ruth.”
“You must go? But tomorrow you’ll----”
“Tomorrow no one knows where any one’ll be. But it’s been great to
see you again.”
“And you, Hubert! Good night; good luck, and--thank you again a
thousand times.”
He went; and on the morrow, as everyone knows, the American First
Army went “over the top,” and at night the St. Mihiel salient, which
had stuck like a Titanic thorn in the flank of France for four
years, was wiped out; the American guns in the next days engaged the
guns of the outer fortresses of Metz.
In the stream of casualties, which was the American cost of the
victory, Hubert was swept to the rear. Ruth read his name cited in
the orders of a certain day for extraordinary coolness and devotion
in caring for the wounded under fire. He himself was wounded again
severely, and Ruth tried to visit him at the hospital to which he
was sent; but she was able only to learn that he was convalescing
and had been transferred to the south of France.
She read, a little later, another familiar name--Sam Hilton. There
might be other Sam Hiltons in the army; on the other hand, she was
familiar enough with the swiftness with which the draft had cleared
out Class I in America, to be certain that the Sam Hilton for whom
she had worked in January must now be somewhere in the American
army, and the particular Sam Hilton who was mentioned was a corporal
in an Illinois regiment which had been most heavily engaged in the
desperate fighting in the forest of the Argonne. He was
awarded--Ruth read--the military medal for extraordinary bravery
under fire and for display of daring and initiative which enabled
him to keep together a small command after the officers were killed
and finally to outwit and capture a superior German force.
Somehow it sounded like Sam Hilton to Ruth. “He got in the army and
got interested; that’s all,” she said to herself as she reread the
details. “He wouldn’t let anyone bluff him; and--yes, that sounds
just like Sam Hilton after he got interested.”
This was late in the fall; the Argonne then was cleared; and by a
shift of the divisions who were pressing constantly after the
retreating Germans, Ruth found herself in the last week of October
attached to the American units fighting their way to Sedan.
Infantrymen of the Illinois regiment, which possessed the decorated
Sam Hilton, came into the canteen and Ruth asked about him. Everyone
seemed to know him. Yes, he came from Chicago, and had been in the
real estate business; he was in a battalion which recently had been
heavily engaged again, but now was in reserve and resting nearby.
Ruth visited, upon the next afternoon, the little, just recaptured
French village about which the battalion was billeted; and right on
the main street she met--medal and all--Sam Hilton. He was seated
before a cottage and was very popular with and intent upon the
villagers gathered about; so Ruth had a good look at him before he
observed her. In his trim uniform and new chevrons--he was sergeant
now--he never looked “classier” in his life.
He appeared to have appointed himself a committee of one to
investigate the experiences of the inhabitants of that village
during the four years of German occupation, and he had found an
interpreter--a French boy of thirteen or fourteen--who was putting
into rather precarious English the excited recitals of the peasants.
Ruth approached when one series of translation was coming to an end,
and Sergeant Sam Hilton looked up and recognized her. “Why, hello;
you here, too, Miss Alden?”
He had been long enough in France so that he was not really much
amazed to encounter anyone. “Come here and listen to what the Huns
been doing to these people, Miss Alden,” he invited her, after she
had replied to his greeting. “Say, do you know that’s the way they
been acting for four years? We’re a fine bunch, I should say,
letting that sort of stuff go on for three years and over before we
stepped in. What was the matter with our government, anyway--not
letting us know. I tell you----”
It took him many minutes to express properly his indignation at the
tardiness of the American declaration of war. Yet certain features
of the situation enormously perplexed him.
“What gets my goat,” he confessed, “is how we’re so blamed popular,
Miss Alden. We Americans are well liked--awful well liked, ain’t
we?”
“We certainly are,” Ruth agreed.
“We’re liked not just as well as the English, far as I can see, but
better. Yes, better. That certainly gets my goat; out of it three
years; in it, one; and not really in it all of one yet; and
we’re--_top hole_. That’s a British expression, Miss Alden; means
absolutely _it_.”
“Yes,” said Ruth; “I’ve heard it.”
“Well, we’re that; _top hole_. How does it happen? What’ve we done
that others ain’t that makes them feel so about Americans over
here?”
Ruth could not answer. She could only accept, at last, an invitation
to lunch with him the first time they met again in any city where
they had restaurants.
The perplexity which Sam Hilton felt was being shared by many and
many another American in those days which swiftly were sweeping
toward the end of the war; and not least among the perplexed was
Gerry Hull.
That strange morning had arrived upon which battle was to be entered
against the Germans, as usual, and to be continued until eleven
o’clock; after eleven was to be truce. Gerry was on patrol that
morning, flying a single-seater Spad in a formation which hovered
high in the morning sky to protect the photographic machines and the
fire-control airplanes which were going about their business as
usual over the German lines, taking pictures of the ground, and, by
wireless, guiding the fire of the American guns.
The American guns were going it, loud and fast, and the German guns
were replying; they might halt at eleven, but no love was being lost
upon this last day.
About the middle of the morning German combat planes appeared. Gerry
was among the first to sight them and dash forward. Seven or eight
American machines followed him; and for the swift seconds of the
first attack they kept somewhat to formation. Then all line was lost
in a diving, tumbling, looping, climbing, side-slipping maelstrom of
machines fighting three miles above the ground. Each pilot selected
a particular antagonist, and Gerry found himself circling out of the
mêlée while he maneuvered for position with a new triplane Fokker,
whose pilot appeared to have taken deep dislike for him.
The German was a good flyer--an old hand in a new machine, Gerry
thought. At any rate, Gerry could obtain neither the position
directly above him or just behind him--“on the tail.” They fired at
each other several times passing, but that was no way to hit
anything. Several times, of course, they got widely separated--once
for an interval long enough to give Gerry chance to aid another
American who was being pressed by two Germans, and to send one of
the Germans down out of control. Then Gerry’s particular enemy
appeared and they were at it again.
Gerry climbed better now and got above him; Gerry dived, and the
German, waiting just the right time, side-slipped and tumbled out
from underneath. Gerry checked his dive and got about behind him.
Gerry was coming upon him fast, behind, and just a trifle below--in
almost perfect firing position--when he saw the German look back and
hold up his hand. Gerry held his fire, and, coming up closer, he saw
the German jerk his hooded head and point groundward. Gerry gazed
down upon a stark and silent land.
The spots of shells were gone. Where they had erupted and flung up
great billows of sand, and where their smoke had puffed and floated,
the surface lay bland and yellow under the morning sun. Truce had
come--truce which the German pilot in the Fokker alongside
signalized by wave of his hand. Gerry raised his hands from his gun
lanyard, and, a little dazedly, waved back, and he let the German
steer away. Gerry swung his own ship about, and, flying low over an
anomalous land of man-specks walking all about in the open, he shut
off his motor and came down in his airdrome.
Silence--except for voices and motor noises--silence! And nothing
particular to do or to expect; nothing immediately threatening you;
death no longer probable. Truce!
Gerry joined the celebrants; but soon he retreated to the refuge of
his quarters, where he was alone. It was rather confounding suddenly
to find yourself with the right to expect to live. To live! What
amazing impatience this morning aroused. He had leave to depart in
two hours to spend a week wherever he pleased; and while the minutes
dallied and dragged, he reread the last letter he had received from
Ruth, which had arrived four days ago. She had mentioned that she
expected to be sent to Paris, so Gerry found place upon the Paris
train; and, upon arriving in the city, he took a taxi to the Rue des
Saints Pères.
The little French girl, who opened the door of the familiar
_pension_, said, yes, Mademoiselle Alden was in Paris and, also, at
that moment actually in her room. Gerry entered the parlor and sat
down; but he could not remain still while he waited. He arose and
went about staring vacantly at the pictures upon the walls, seeing
no one of them, but hearing every slightest sound in the house which
might mean that Mademoiselle Alden was coming downstairs. He heard
light footfalls upon the floor above, which, he decided, were hers
as she moved about, dressing; and he wondered what dress she was
putting on--the pretty yellow dress which she had worn at Mrs.
Corliss’ or the uniform she had worn upon the retreat from Mirevaux.
He liked her in both; he didn’t care which she wore, if she would
only come.
He heard her step on the stair; he started to the door, impulsively.
But the little French girl might be about; so he drew back to the
center of the room and stood there until Ruth appeared. Then his
arms went out to her and, regardless of who might hear, he rushed to
her, calling her name.
She was small and slender and round and with her face almost white
from some absurd uncertainty about him and with her eyes wide. She
wore neither the beautiful yellow gown nor the uniform but a simple
blue dress of the sort which girls wear in the morning when they go
out, or in the afternoon, but which they do not put on particularly
for an evening call. Gerry was not critical; he thought the dress
mightily became her; but it made her bewilderingly demure.
“What is it, Ruth? You’re not glad I came right to you?”
“Glad! Oh, Gerry, my soul’s been singing since I heard your voice
down here and I knew that you’d come and you’re safe; and the war’s
over!”
He had her in his arms, her slight, vibrant figure close to him, her
eyes turned up to his. Gently--gently as upon that time when she
disengaged his fingers from his clasp of her shoulders--she raised
her hands and put them upon his breast and thrust him back. The
touch of her hands and the tenderness of her strength sent rills of
delight racing through him, but he did not understand them.
“Ruth, I love you; can’t you love me?”
“Love you!” Her eyes closed for a moment as though she no longer
dared to look at him. Her resistance to him had relaxed; now she
thrust back from him again; but he did not permit it. He overpowered
her, drawing her against him. So she opened her eyes.
“The war’s over, Gerry.”
“Thank God, Ruth!... I couldn’t let myself even dream of this
before, dearest.”
“You mustn’t say that!”
“Why not?”
“We’ll all be going back soon, Gerry--those of us who’ve lived--back
to what we’ve been before. That’s why I kept you waiting so long. I
had to change to this.” She looked down at her dress and he released
her a little to glance down also, wonderingly.
“Why? What about it, dear?”
“It’s my own--the only thing of mine you’ve ever seen me in; I used
to wear this at the office where I worked. You know, I told you.”
“I wondered why I loved you more than ever before, Ruth. Oh, silly
sweetheart! You think you’re going back to an office!” He laughed,
delightedly.
“No; we must think the truth, Gerry. We’ve been moving in madness
through the war, my love!”
“Ah! You’ve said that!”
“I didn’t mean it! We mustn’t imagine that everything’s to be
changed for us just because we’ve met in war and----”
“And you’ve saved me, Ruth!”
“You saved me, too!”
“Oh, we shan’t argue that, dear. But about not being changed--well
I’m changed incurably and forever, my love. I mean that! You’ve done
most of the changing too. Did you think you’d made me an American
only for duration of the war?”
“But Gerry, we must think. You’ll go home and have all your
grandfather’s buildings and money and----”
“You’ll have all, too, and me besides, dear--if you want me? Do you
suppose that all these months I haven’t been thinking, too? Do you
suppose I’d want you for a wife only in war? I want you, Ruth--and
I’ll need you even more, I think, to help me in the peace to come.
But that’s not why I’m here. I want you--you--now and forever! Can I
have you?”
“You have me,” Ruth said. “And I--I have you!”