THERE is a thrill upon awaking on your first morning on board a ship at sea which all the German U-boats under the ocean can scarcely increase. You may imagine all you please what it may be; and it will amaze you with something more. Ruth Alden had imagined; and her first forenoon on shipboard was filled with surprises.
She had gone aboard from the New York quay at nine the evening before, as she had been warned to do; she had looked into her cabin—a small, square white compartment with two bunks, upper and lower, an unupholstered seat, a washbowl with a looking glass beside the porthole and with a sort of built-in bureau with four drawers, above which was posted conspicuously the rules to be observed in emergencies. These were printed in French and English and were illustrated by drawings of exactly how to adjust the life-preservers to be found under all berths. Someone, whose handbaggage bore the initials "M. W." and who evidently was to share the cabin with her, had been in before her and gone out. Ruth saw that the steward disposed her cabin baggage beside M. W.'s; she shut herself in a moment after the steward had gone, touching the pillow of her bunk, reading the rules again, trying the water-taps. She stood with shut eyes, breathing deliciously the strange, scrubbed, salty smells of a deep-water boat; she opened the door and went out to the deck with the darkness of the Hudson on one hand; upon the other, the myriad-lighted majesty of New York.
She was standing there at the rail gazing up at the marvelous city when Hubert Lennon found her. He merely wanted to make sure she was aboard. Gerry Hull and Captain Lescault—he was the French officer who had spoken at Mrs. Corliss'—and an English captain, Forraker, of the same party, were aboard now; Lady Agnes and the Englishwomen with whom she traveled also were aboard, Hubert said.
He was glad to find that Cynthia was all right; but he said that a nasty sea was running outside; the Ribot might go out at any time. Hubert thought Cynthia had better go to bed and get all the sleep she could.
Ruth went below, not with any idea of sleeping, but to avoid meeting Gerry Hull just yet. That she was aboard the Ribot under orders did not undo the fact that she was here for the conscious purpose of furthering her acquaintance with him. He must guess that, she thought—he from whom she had heard nothing at all since that afternoon at Mrs. Corliss'.
Ruth was ready for bed when someone put a key in the cabin door, but knocked before turning it, and a girl's pleasant voice inquired, "All right to come in?"
"All right," Ruth said, covering up in bed.
A dark-haired, dark-eyed girl of twenty-six or seven entered. "I'm Milicent Wetherell," she introduced herself. "I'm from St. Louis; I'm going to Paris for work in a vestiaire."
Ruth sat up and put out her hand; she liked this girl on sight. "I'm RuCynthia Gail of Decatur, Illinois," she caught herself swiftly. It was the first time in the eight days that she had been Cynthia that she had made even so much of a slip; but Milicent Wetherell did not notice it.
Milicent went to bed and turned out the light. The boat did not move; and after indefinite hours of lying still in the dark, Ruth dropped to sleep. When she awoke it was daylight; the ship was swaying, falling, rising; the tremor of engines shook it. They were at sea.
The waves were higher than any Ruth had encountered before, but they were slower and smoother too—not nearly so jumpy and choppy as the Lake Michigan surf in a strong wind. The big steamer rose and rolled to them far more steadily than the vessels upon which Ruth had voyaged on holidays on the lake. Milicent Wetherell, in the lower berth, lay miserably awake with no desire whatever to get up; but Ruth let the stewardess lead her to the bath; she dressed and found the way to the diningsaloon. She was supplied, along with a number designating her "abandon ship" place in starboard lifeboat No. 7, a numeral for a seat at a table.
At this hour of half after nine, there were perhaps fifty men at breakfast and just five other women or girls; four men were seated at the table to which Ruth was led—Captain Forraker one of them. He arose as she approached. Possibly he remembered her, Ruth thought, from an introduction at Mrs. Corliss'; much more probably Hubert Lennon—who undoubtedly had had her placed at this table—had reminded Captain Forraker about her. His three table-companions arose and Captain Forraker presented them to her; they were all English—two young officers and one older man, in rank a colonel, who had been about some ordnance inspection work in America. Ruth sat down; they sat down and resumed their talk; and Ruth got the first of her morning amazements. She was in a foreign land, already; she was not just on the way there, though still in sight of Long Island. She was now in Europe, with Europeans thinking and talking, not as guests of America, but as Europeans at home again.
Ruth had been brought up, as a good American, to believe her country the greatest in the world; and, implicitly, she believed it. She recognized that sons and daughters of other nations likewise were reared to believe their native land the best and their people the noblest; but she never had been able to quite believe that they really could think so. They must make an exception, down deep in their consciousness, for America, she was sure; however loyal they might be to their own institutions and to their own fellows, they must admire more highly the American ideals of freedom and democracy, and they must consider that the people who lived by and for those ideals were potentially, at least, the greatest.
It was a momentous experience, therefore, to hear her country discussed—not in an unfriendly way or even with prejudice, but by open-minded foreigners trying to inform one another of the facts about America as they had found them; America was a huge but quite untried quantity; its institutions and ideals seemed to them interesting, but on the whole not nearly so good as their own; certainly there was no suggestion of their endowing Americans with superior battle abilities, therefore. The nation—that nation founded more than a hundred and forty years ago which was to Ruth the basis of all being—was to them simply an experiment of which no one could yet tell the outcome.
They did not say that, of course; they said nothing at all to which she could take the slightest exception. They simply brought to her the brevity and unconclusiveness of a century of independent existence in the perspective of a thousand; their national thought started not with 1776 but with the Conquest or, even earlier, when the Roman legions abandoned Britain and King Arthur reigned.
When they spoke of their homes, as they did once, and Ruth found opportunity to inquire of one of them how long he had had his home in Sussex, he told her:
"The present house goes back to 1582."
It rather made her gasp. No wonder that a man of a family which had occupied the "present" house since before the Pilgrims sailed, looked upon America as an unproved venture.
"They're in it to the end now, I consider," this man commented later to his companion when they returned to the discussion of America and the war.
"Quite so, probably," the other said. "The South went to absolute exhaustion in their Civil War."
"Absolutely," the Sussex man agreed. "North probably would have too, if necessary."
They were estimating American will and endurance, not by pretty faiths and protestations, but by what Americans, in their short history, had actually shown.
"But this is foreign war, of course;" the colonel qualified the judgment dubiously.
The man whose "present" house went back to 1582 nodded thoughtfully.
Ruth received all this eagerly; it could not in the least shake her own confidence in her people; but it gave her better comprehension of the ideas which Gerry Hull had gained from his association with Europeans. And this morning, when she was certain to meet him, she wished—oh she wished to an incredible degree—to understand him more fully than before. She learned from a remark of Captain Forraker's that Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes had breakfasted early and had gone out on deck. Ruth had intended to go on deck after breakfast; but now she changed her mind. She went to the saloon; and hardly was she there, when Gerry Hull and Lady Agnes came in from the cold.
They were laughing together at something which had happened without. Ruth saw them before either of them noticed her; and her heart halted in the excitement of expectancy during the instant Gerry Hull's glance went about the saloon. He saw her; nodded to her and looked at once to Lady Agnes, who immediately advanced to Ruth, greeting her cordially and with perfect recollection of having talked with her at Mrs. Corliss'. Upon this French ship bound for Europe, the English girl was at home as the Englishmen at the breakfast table had been; she felt herself, in a sense, a hostess of Ruth.
"You've been about the ship yet, Miss Gail?" Gerry, Hull asked.
"Only a little last night," Ruth said.
"Come out on deck then," he invited her. "Done for just now, Agnes?" he asked.
"Just now," Agnes said. "But I know you're not. Go on!" she bid, smiling at him as his eyes came to hers.
Ruth saw it as she started away to her cabin for her coat. There had been some concern—not much, but some—in Agnes Ertyle's look that first time she discovered Gerry Hull and Ruth together; there was no suggestion of concern now.
"Hub's sick, poor chap," Gerry told Ruth when she came out and they set off side by side up the promenade deck against the cold, winter wind. "He wanted me to tell you that's why he couldn't look you up this morning."
Had Hub—her loyal, self-derogatory Hub—therefore arranged with his friend to give her this attention, Ruth wondered. Not that Gerry Hull offered himself perfunctorily; he was altogether too well bred for that. He held out his hand to her as the wind threatened to sweep her from her feet; she locked arms with him and together they struggled forward to the bow where a spray shield protected them and they turned to each other and rested.
"Pretty good out here, isn't it?" he asked, drawing deep breaths of the cold, salt air, his dark cheeks glowing.
"Glorious!" Ruth cried. "I never" she checked herself quickly, almost forgetting.
"Crossed in winter before?"
"No."
"Neither've I—in real winter weather; except when coming home this last time."
Ruth glanced up at him and caught his eyes pondering her. He had meant merely to be courteous to her when meeting her on shipboard; but too much had passed between them, in their brief, tempestuous first meeting. He was feeling that as well as she! The gage which she had thrown before him was not to be ignored. However certainly he may have thought that he would be merely polite to this girl who had—he deemed—insulted his comrades and himself, however determinedly he had planned to chat with her about wind and weather, he wanted to really talk with her now! And however firmly Ruth had decided to avoid any word which could possibly offend him, still she found herself replying:
"Then you think of Chicago as your home?"
"Of course; why not?"
She turned her back more squarely to the wind and gazed down the length of the deck, hesitating.
"I might as well own up, Miss Gail," he said to her suddenly. "I'm still mad."
"At me?"
"At you. For a while I was so mad that I didn't want to see you or think of you," he admitted with the frankness which had enabled him to ask her, directly, how she happened to be at Mrs. Corliss'. "But that didn't seem to do me any good. So I called up your hotel"
"You did? When?"
"After you were gone—about two days after. They had no address for you and Hub had none. I asked him."
Ruth trembled with joyous excitement.
"I wanted to tell you better what I meant," he went on. "And to find out more from you."
"About?"
"What we'd been arguing. I told you that day I'd never had a chance to talk over affairs with an American like you; and I hadn't later.
"You see," he explained after a moment of thought, "it seemed to me that the other people I met at home—or most of them, anyway—went into the war as a sort of social event. I don't mean that they made light of it; they didn't. They were heart and soul in the cause; and a good many of them did a lot of real work. But they didn't react to any—original ideas, as far as I could make out. They imported their opinions and sympathies. And the ones who were hottest to have America in the war weren't the people who'd been most of their lives in America; but the ones who'd been in England or France. I told you that day that what they said was just what I'd been hearing on the other side."
In spite of the canvas shield, it was very cold where they were standing. Gerry moved a bit as he talked; and Ruth stepped with him, letting him lead her to a door which he opened, to discover a little writing room or card room which happened to be deserted just then. He motioned to her to precede him; and when she sat down upon one of the upholstered chairs fixed before a table, he took the place opposite, tossing his cap away and loosening his coat. She unbuttoned her coat and pulled off her heavy gloves. She had made no reply, and he seemed to expect none, but to be satisfied with her waiting.
"I suppose you're thinking that's the way I got my opinions too," he said. "But it's not quite true. I wasn't trying to be English or French or foreign in any way. I was proud—not ashamed—to be American. Why, at school in England they used to have a regular game to get me started bragging about America and Chicago and our West. I liked the people over there; but I liked our people better. Grandfather—well, he seemed to me about the greatest sort of man possible; and his friends and father's friends who used to come to look me up at Harrow once in a while—some of 'em were pretty raw and uncouth, but I liked to show 'em off! I did. They'd all done something themselves; and most of 'em were still doing things—big things—and putting in eight or ten hours a day in their offices. They weren't gentlemen at all in the sense that my friends at Harrow knew English gentlemen; but I said they were the real thing. America—my country—was made up of men who really did things!
"Then the war came and showed us up! I tell you, Miss Gail, I couldn't believe it at first. It seemed to me that the news couldn't be getting across to America; or that lies only were reaching you. Then the American newspapers came to France and everyone could see that we knew and stayed out!"
"Last week," Ruth said, "and yesterday; and before I met you this morning, I knew how to tell you what I tried to that day at Mrs. Corliss'. I've thought more about that, I'm sure, than anything else recently; but now—" she gazed across the little table at him and shook her head—"it's no use. It's not anything one can argue, I guess. It's just faith and feeling—faith in our own people, Lieutenant Hull!"
She saw, as he watched her, that she was disappointing him and that he had been hoping that, somehow, she could resolve the doubts of his own people which possessed him; she saw—as she had observed at Mrs. Corliss'—that his eyes lingered upon her face, upon her hands, as though he liked her; but her stubbornness in upholding those people whom she would not even try to explain, offended him again. He glanced out the port above her.
"We're picking up a cruiser escort," he said suddenly. "Let's go out and look her over."
So they were on deck in the cold and wind again. And during the rest of that day, and upon the following days, almost every hour brought her into some sort of association with him on the decks, in the lounge, or in the writing rooms, during the morning; luncheon at the same table. Then the afternoon, as the morning, would be made up of hours when she would be sitting in the warm, bright saloon with her French war-study book before her and she would be carefully rehearsing "Masque respirateur—respirator; lunettes—goggles; nauge de gaz—gas fumes . . . ." when she would hear his quick, impulsive step or his clear, pleasant voice speaking to someone and Ruth would get combat animé and combat dé cousu hopelessly mixed. She would go out to walk the deck again with Hubert—who was apologetically up and about when the seas were smoother—or with Captain Lescault or Captain Forraker or with "1582" (as she called to herself the Sussex officer and once came near calling him that aloud), when she would come around the corner of a cabin and almost run into Agnes Ertyle and Gerry Hull going about the deck in the other direction; or she would pass them, seated close together and with Lady Agnes all bundled up in steamer rugs, and Ruth would see them suddenly stop talking when she and her escort came close, and they would look away at the sea as though they had been just looking at the water all the time.
He would sit down beside Ruth, too; and he would take her around and around the deck, tramping glowing, spray-splattered miles with him. They talked a lot; but now they never really said anything to each other. And it seemed to Ruth that each throb of those ceaseless engines, which thrust them ever nearer and nearer to France, made what she felt and believed more outrageous to him.
One afternoon, when the wireless happened to be tuned to catch the wavelength of messages sweeping over the seas from some powerful sending station in Germany, they picked up the enemy's boasts for the day; and among them was the announcement that the famous American "ace," sergeant pilot Paul Crosby, had been shot down and killed by a German flyer on the Lorraine front. It chanced that Gerry Hull and Agnes Ertyle were in the main saloon near where Ruth also was when some busybody, who had heard this news, brought it to Gerry Hull and asked him if he had known Paul Crosby.
Ruth knew that Gerry Hull and Paul Crosby had joined the French flying forces together; they had flown in the same escadrille for more than a year. She did not turn about, as others were doing, to watch Gerry Hull when he got this news; but she could not help hearing his simple and quiet reply, which brought tears to her eyes as no sob or protestation of grief could; and she could not help seeing him as he passed before her on his way out alone to the deck.
She dreamed that night about being torpedoed; in the dream, the boat was the Ribot; and upon the vessel there were—as almost always there are in dreams—a perfectly impossible company. Besides those who actually were on board, there were Sam Hilton and Lieutenant George Byrne and "Aunt Emilie" and Aunt Cynthia Gifford Grange and the woman in gray and a great many others—so many, indeed, that there were not boats enough on the Ribot to take off all the company as the ship sank. So Gerry Hull, after putting Lady Agnes in a boat and kissing her good-bye, himself stepped back to go down with the ship; and so, when all the boats were gone, he found Ruth beside him; for she had known that he would not try to save himself and she had hidden to stay with him. His arms were about her as the water rose to them and—she awoke.
Their U-boat really came; but with results disconcertingly different. January, 1918—if you can remember clearly back to days so strange and distant—was a month when America was sending across men by tens rather than by hundreds of thousands and convoying them very, very carefully; there were not so many destroyers as soon there were; the U-boats had not yet raided far out into the Atlantic—so fast and well-armed ships like the Ribot, which were not transports, were allowed to proceed a certain part of the way across unconvoyed, keeping merely, to certain "lanes" on courses prescribed by wireless.
The Ribot, Ruth knew, was on one of these lanes and soon would be "picked up" by the destroyers and shepherded by them into a convoy for passage through the zone of greatest danger. In fact, Ruth and Milicent Wetherell, who also had awakened early upon this particular morning, were looking out of their port over a gray and misty sea to discover whether they might have been picked up during the night and now were in a convoy. But they saw no sign of any other vessel, though the mist, which was patchy and floating low, let them look a mile or more away. There was no smoke in sight—nothing but gray clouds and the frayed fog and the sea swelling oilily up and slipping down against the side of the ship
Then, about a hundred yards away from the side and rather far forward, a spout of spray squirted suddenly straight up into the air. It showered over toward the ship and splashed down.
"That's a shot," Ruth said, "at us."
"Where's the U-boat?" Milicent asked her; and they both pressed closer to the port to look out. They had heard no sound of the gun, or they did not distinguish it from the noises of the ship. Ruth was shaking with excitement; she could feel Milicent shaking too. Another spout of spray, still forward but a good deal closer, spurted up; and this time they heard—or thought they heard—the sound of the gun which had fired that shell at them. The roar of their own guns—one forward and one aft—buffeted them violently.
"We're fighting!" Ruth cried.
"Can you see anything?" Milicent demanded.
"Not a thing. Let's get dressed!"
Gongs were beating throughout the ship; and the guns on deck were going, "Twumm! twumm! twumm!" Ruth could hear, in the intervals, the voices of stewards calling to passengers in the companionways between the cabins. A tremendous shock, stifling and deafening, hurled Ruth against the bunk; hurled Milicent upon her. They clung together, coughing and gasping for breath.
"Hit us!" Ruth said; she might have shouted; she might have whispered; she did not know which.
"That's just powder fumes; not gas," Milicent made herself understood.
"No; not nauge de gaz," Ruth agreed. They were hearing each other quite normally; and they laughed at each other—at the French lesson phrase, rather. They had learned the phrases together, drilled each other and taken the lessons so seriously; and the lessons seemed so silly now.
"They must have hurt someone," Ruth said. For the first time she consciously thought of Gerry Hull; probably subconsciously she had been thinking of him all the time. "He wasn't hit," she was saying to herself confidently now. "That shell struck us forward; his cabin's aft and on the other side; so he couldn't have been hurt—unless he'd come to this side to get Lady Agnes."
Another shell exploded in the ship-aft somewhere and lower. It didn't knock Ruth down or stifle her with fumes as the other had. Someone was beating at her door and she opened it—Milicent and she had got into their clothes. Ruth saw Hubert Lennon in the passage.
"You're safe!" he cried out to her with mighty relief. He had pulled trousers and coat over his pajamas; he had shoes, unlaced, upon his bare feet. He was without his glasses and his nearsighted eyes blinked big and blankly; he had on a life-jacket, of the sort under all berths; but he bore in his hands a complete life-suit with big boots into which one stepped and which had a bag top to go up about the neck.
"Put this on!" he thrust it at Ruth.
"We're not sinking," she replied. "Oh, thank you; thank you—but we aren't torpedoed—not yet. They're just firing and we're fighting—" indeed she was shouting to be heard after the noise of their guns—"we must have people hurt."
"We've a lot—a lot hurt," Hubert said.
Other shells were striking the ship; and Ruth went by him into a passage confused with smoke and stumbly from things strewn under her feet; a cabin door hung open and beyond the door, the side of the ship gaped suddenly to the sea. The sides of the gap were jagged and split and splintered wood; a ripped mattress, bedding, a man's coat and shirt, a woman's clothing lay strewn all about; the bedding smouldered and from under it a hand projected—a man's hand. It clasped and opened convulsively; Ruth stopped and grasped the hand; it caught hers very tight and, still holding and held by it, Ruth with her other hand cleared the bedding from off the man's face. She recognized him at once; he was an oldish, gentle but fearless little man—an American who had been a missionary in Turkey; he and his wife, who had worked with him, had been to America to raise money for Armenian relief and had been on their way back together to their perilous post.
"Mattie?" the little man was asking anxiously of Ruth as he looked up at her. "Mattie?"
Mattie, Ruth knew, must have been his wife, and she turned back the bedding beyond him.
"She's gone," Ruth told him, mercifully thrusting him back as he tried to turn about. "She's gone where you are going."
The little missionary's eyes closed. "The order for all moneys is in my pocket. Luke vi, 27," his lips murmured. "Luke vi, 27 and 35."
The hand which again was holding Ruth's and which had been so strong the instant before, was quiet now. "The sixth chapter of the gospel according to St. Luke and the twenty-seventh verse," the little man's voice murmured, "But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies."
Ruth covered his face decently with the sheet; and, rising, she grasped the jagged edges of the hole blown by the German shell in the side of the ship; and she stared out it. A mile and a half away; two miles or more perhaps—she could not tell—but at any rate just where the fringe of the mist stopped sight, she saw a long, low shape scudding over the swell of the sea; puffs of haze of a different quality hung over it, cleared and hung again. Ruth understood that these were the gases from guns firing—the guns which had sent that shell which had slain in their beds the little Armenian missionary and his wife, the guns which were sending the shells now bursting aboard the Ribot further below and more astern. Ruth gazed at the U-boat aghast with fury—fury and loathing beyond any feeling which she could have imagined. She had supposed she had known full loathing when she learned of the first deeds done in Termonde and Louvain; then she had thought, when the Germans sank the Lusitania, that it was utterly impossible for her to detest fellow-men more than those responsible. But now she knew that any passion previously stirred within her was only the weak and vacuous reaction to a tale which was told. She had viewed her first dead slain by a fellowman; and amazing, all overwhelming instincts—an urge to kill, kill in return, kill in punishment, kill in revenge—possessed her. She had not meant to kill before. She had thought of saving life—saving the Belgians from more barbarities, saving the lives of those at sea; she had thought of her task ahead, and of the risks she was to run, as saving the lives of American and British and French soldiers. For the first time she thought of herself as an instrument to kill—kill Germans, many, many Germans; all that she could.
Someone had come into the wreck of that cabin behind her now. A steward, probably; or perhaps Hubert Lennon, who had found her again. She did not turn but continued to stare at the U-boat, her hands clinging to the jagged hole made by its shell. A man's hand caught her shoulder and a voice spoke to her—Gerry Hull's voice.
"Come with me," he was saying to her. "You cannot stay here; come to a safer place."
"A safer place!" she repeated to him. "How can we help to kill them on that boat?" she cried to him.
He was undoing her fingers, by main strength, from their clutch at the jagged iron of the shell hole. He was very calm and quiet and strong; and he was controlling her as though she were a child.
"They're four thousand yards off," he said to her. "That one there and another on the other side. It's just begun to fire."
Some of the shells which had been striking, Ruth realized now, had burst on the other side of the Ribot.
"Yes," she said.
"We've signaled we're attacked," he told her. He had both her hands free; and he bound her arms to her body with his arms. "We've an answer, and destroyers are coming. But they can't get up before an hour or two; so we've a long fight on. You must come below."
He was half carrying her, ignominiously; and it came to Ruth that, before seeking her, he had gone to Agnes Ertyle; but she had not delayed him because she was used to being under fire, used to seeing those slain by fellowmen; used to knowing what she could and could not do.
"I'll go where—I should," Ruth promised, looking up at him; and he released her.
He pointed her toward a companionway where steps had led downward a few minutes before; but now they were broken and smoke at that moment was beginning to pour up. He turned and led her off to the right; but a shell struck before them there and hurled them back with the shock of its detonation. It skewed around a sheet of steel which had been a partition wall between two cabins; it blew down doors and strewed débris of all sorts down upon them. Another shell, striking aft, choked and closed escape in the other direction. Gerry Hull threw himself against the sheet of thin steel which the shell so swiftly and easily had spread over the passage; but all his strength could not budge it. He turned back to Ruth and looked her over.
"All right?" he asked her.
"You are too?"
He turned from her and gazed through the side of the ship. "They've got our range pretty well, I should say. They're still firing both their guns, and we don't seem to be hitting much."
He tried again to bend back the sheet of steel which penned them in the passage, but with effort as vain as before.
"I guess we stay here for a while," he said when he desisted. "If we don't get help and it looks like we're going to sink, we can always dive through there into the sea.
A shell smashed in below and a few rods forward and burst with terrific detonation.
"Huns seem to like this part of the ship," he said when the shock was past.
"That started something burning just below," Ruth said.
Throughout the ship again, between the concussion of the striking shells and the firing of the Ribot's guns, alarm gongs were going.
A woman screamed; men's shouts came in answer. The rush of the Ribot through the water, which had been swift and steady since the start of the fight, suddenly swerved and the ship veered off to the right.
"What's that?" Ruth said.
"We may be zigzagging to dodge torpedoes," Gerry Hull said. "Or it may be that our helm is shot away and we can't steer; or we may be changing course to charge a sub in close."
A detonation closer than any before quite stunned Ruth for seconds or minutes or longer—she did not know. Only when she came to herself slowly, she was alone behind the sheet of steel. Gerry Hull was gone.