CHAPTER XXII
"The War's Over"
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 re-read 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, sideslipping 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, sideslipped 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!"