THE deck floor just beyond her, where he had been, was gone; or rather—as she saw now through the smoke—it slanted steeply down like a chute into a chasm of indefinite depth from which the heavy, stifling smoke was pouring. A draft sucked the smoke out of the shattered side of the ship over the sea and gave Ruth cleaner air to breathe for seconds at a time. Gerry Hull must have been hurled into that chasm when that last detonation blew away the floor; or else he must have flung himself into the sea.
Ruth called his name, shouting first into the smoke column and then, creeping down to the shell hole in the side, she thrust her head out and gazed at the sea. Wreckage from the upper deck—wooden chairs, bits of canvas—swept backwards; she saw no one swimming. The splash of the waves dashed upon her, the ship was rushing onward, but not so swiftly as before, and with a distinct change in the thrust of the engines and with a strange sensation of strain on the ship. Only one engine was going, Ruth decided—the port engine; it was being forced faster and faster to do the work of both and the rudder was pulled against the swerve of the port screw to keep the vessel from swinging in a circle.
The guns on deck were firing steadily, it seemed; but the German submarine, which Ruth could see and which had begun to drop behind when the Ribot was racing with both engines, was drawing up abreast again with both its big rifles firing. But the Ribot's guns, if they had not yet hit that U-boat, at least had driven her away; for, though she came up abreast, the German kept farther off than before; and while Ruth watched, she heard a sudden, wild cheer from the deck; French shells had gone home somewhere on that U-boat or upon the other which Ruth could not see.
Smoke continued to sweep by Ruth, engulfing her for long moments, but the fire was far enough below not to immediately threaten her. So for the minute she was as safe as she could be anywhere upon that long flank of the ship at which the U-boats were firing. At any instant, a shell might obliterate her; but she could not influence that by any thought or action of her own. So she thought no more about it. She could possibly influence the fate of Gerry Hull. He had been flung down that chute of the deck floor, she thought; the shell might have killed him; it might only have wounded or stunned him. In that case, he must be lying helpless down there where the flames were. She took long breaths of sea air and crept back and called again into the smoke; she thought she heard a man's cry in response; Gerry Hull's voice. She returned to the hole in the side of the ship and let the waves drench her face and her hair; she caught up her skirt and soaked it in the splash of the sea.
The firing of the guns was keeping up all this time; the shock of shells bursting aboard the ship also continued. But the tug and thrust of the single engine had stopped; the vessel vibrated only at the firing of its own guns or at the detonation of a German shell.
Ruth took a towel which she found at her hand—she was in the wreck of someone's cabin—and, after soaking it, she bound it about her head and crept back through the smoke to where the steel chute of the floor slanted sheer.
She dropped and fell upon a heap of sharp, shattered things which cut her ankles and stumbled her over on hands and knees upon débris, not flaming itself, but warm from a fire which burned lower. She lifted the towel from her eyes to try to see; but the smoke blinded her; she could not breathe; and she bound the towel again and crawled off the heap of smoldering things upon a linoleum. She heard a moan; but she could not find anyone in the smoke, though she called thickly several times. A current of air was sweeping over the floor and, following it, she came to a huge rent in the ship's side where water washed in and out as the vessel rolled. The water had ceased to move from bow to stern; the vessel was merely drifting. A man floated, face downward, upon a wave which washed him almost to the ship's side. Ruth reached out to seize him; she touched his shoulder—a blue-clad shoulder, the uniform of the French; but she could get no hold; the sea drew him slowly away.
"Gerry Hull! Gerry!" she called, as though that form in the French coat, with head under the water, could hear. The next wash brought it back toward the ship; but also drifted it farther to the stern. Now Ruth found among the rubbish washing at her feet a floating thing—a lifejacket. She thrust her arms in it and when the waves washed that blue-clad form nearer the next time, she leaped into the sea and swam toward it and got grasp of a sleeve and struggled back toward the ship.
The vessel's side towered above her, mighty and menacing; it swung away from her, showing a long steep slant to the gray sky; it swung back and tilted over as though to crush her; wreckage slipped from off its topmost tier and splashed into the sea beside her. She could see the cloud of gun gases puff out and clear; then the flash of firing again. All the time she was thrashing with one arm to swim in the wash beside the vessel and drag the blue-clad form. That form was heavier now; and, as her clutch numbed, it slipped from her and sank. She spun about and tried to dive, groping with her hands below the surface; but the form was gone.
"Gerry Hull!" she cried out. "I had Gerry Hull—here!"
A coil of rope struck the water near her; men yelled to her to seize it; but she groped below the water until, exhausted from the cold, she looped the rope about her and they pulled her up.
"Lieutenant Gerry Hull was in the water there," she cried to them who took her in their arms. "Lieutenant Gerry Hull is"—she shouted to the next man who took her when, looking up, she saw his face.
Silence—a marvelous stifling of the guns which had been resounding from fore and aft; a miraculous stopping of the frightful shock of the shells which had been bursting in the ship—enveloped Ruth. She did not know at first whether it was because some of her senses were gone; she could see Gerry Hull's face, feel his arms holding her and the rhythm of his body as he stepped, carrying her; she could hear his voice and the voices of others close by; but all other sound and reverberation had ceased.
"I was separated from you," Gerry Hull was explaining to her. "I was coming back to try and get you out."
"I went down the way you fell," she replied to him. "Then I saw a man in the sea. I thought he was you. I tried to get him."
She was silent for a few moments while he carried her; the miracle of stillness continued; but it was a great effort for her to speak.
"I would have done it for anyone."
"I know you would," he said to her.
"You've seen Hubert?" she asked.
"He's not among the hurt," Gerry answered.
She was quite certain now that the stillness had continued so long that it could not be merely the interval between firing or between the arrival of German shells.
"What is it?" she asked him.
"What is what, Cynthia Gail?"
He called her whole name, as he knew it, as she had been calling his. "We're not fighting," she said. "We haven't surrendered or—are we sinking?"
"A destroyer's come in sight," he said. "It's fighting one of the Huns. Listen!" He halted for an instant to let her hear the distant sound of guns.
"I hear it," she said.
"We hit that U-boat, we think, so that it can't submerge and has to keep fighting on the surface. The other's submerged."
He brought her down a stairway into some large compartment, evidently below the water line; it seemed to have been a dining saloon for the steerage when the Ribot had been regularly in the passenger trade; or perhaps it had been crews' quarters. Now it was a hospital; cots had been laid out and those who had been injured by the shell fire had been brought there. They were a great many,, it seemed to Ruth—thirty or forty. She had never seen so many suffering people, so many bandages, so much blood before. The ship's surgeon was moving among them; women were there—quiet, calm, competent women. One had direction of the others and Ruth gazed at her for moments before she recognized Agnes Ertyle with her beautiful, sweet eyes become maturely stern and, at the same time, marvelously compassionate. If Ruth were a man, she must love that girl, she thought; love her now as never before. Ruth looked up to Gerry Hull to see his face when he spoke to Lady Agnes; he evidently witnessed no new marvel in her. He had seen her like this before, undoubtedly; that was why he loved her.
"I'm not hurt," Ruth said, ashamed of herself for having been brought to this place among so many who had been terribly wounded. "I've just been in the water; I'm wet, that's all." She moved to release herself from Gerry's hold.
"She went into the sea to save a man," Gerry told Agnes Ertyle.
"Let me go to the cabin," Ruth said, as she stood a little dizzily.
Lady Agnes grasped her hand. "If your cabin's been wrecked, go to mine—number twenty-six—and take any of my things," she invited. "Get dry and warm at once."
She motioned to someone who gave Ruth hot, strong tea to drink. Gerry turned with Ruth and led her up the stairs down which he had just carried her; he saw her to the door of her cabin, which had not been wrecked; he saw that a stewardess was there to aid her. Then he went.
The stewardess helped Ruth undress and rubbed her and put on warm and heavy things. Milicent Wetherell came to the cabin; she had escaped uninjured, and she aided also.
The rifles on the Ribot's deck rang out suddenly; they fired twice; again twice; and were still. Ruth had on warm, dry clothes now; and she ran out with Milicent Wetherell to the deck. While the Ribot had been under shell fire, passengers had been kept from the decks; but now that the sole danger was from torpedoes, the decks had become the safest place.
The gun crews had seen—Ruth was told—what they thought was a periscope and had fired. There was nothing in sight now near the Ribot but the wreckage which had fallen during the fight. Far off to the right, the U-boat which had continued to run on the surface, had withdrawn beyond the range of the Ribot's guns and was fleeing away to the south, fighting as it fled. The morning light had quite cleared the mist from the surface of the ocean and Ruth could see the low line of the German boat obscuring itself with gun-gases as its rifles fired. But its shells no longer burst aboard the passenger vessel or spurted up spray from the sea alongside. Far, far to the east and north appeared a speck—a gray, sea-colored speck, sheathing itself in the sparkling white of foam every second or so, casting the sheath of seaspray aside and rushing on gray and dun again—the bow of the destroyer coming up. She was coming up very fast—with a marvelous, leaping swiftness which sent the blood tingling through Ruth.
The destroyer seemed hurled through the water, so fast she came; it seemed impossible that engines, turning screws, could send a ship on as that vessel dashed; she seemed to advance hundreds of yards at a leap, hurling the spray high before her and screened by it for a flash; and when she thrust through the foam and cut clear away from it, she was larger and clearer and nearer. And, as she came, she fought. Her guns were going—one, two, three of them! Ruth could see the gossamer of their gases as they puffed forward and were swept backward; she could hear on the wind the resound of the quick firers. Steadily, rhythmically, relentlessly they rang, beating over the sea like great bells booming in vengeance for the Ribot's dead.
Ruth felt lifted up, glorified as by nothing she had ever known before. She turned to the man who had come up beside her; he was Gerry Hull and, as he looked over the sea at the destroyer, she saw the blood burning red, paling, and burning bright again in his face.
"What ship is that?" Ruth cried to him. "Do you know whether it's English or French or our own?"
"It's the Starke!" Gerry Hull replied. "The U. S. S. Starke, she reported herself to us! She made thirty-one knots the hour on her builder's trial two years ago; but she promised us to make the forty miles to us in an hour and ten minutes! And she's beating that, if I know speed. God," he appealed in reverent wonder, "look at her come!"
"The United States Ship Starke!" Ruth cried. "One of our own!"
A wild, wanton, incredible phrase ran through her; "the shame of being an American." And, as she recalled it, she saw that Gerry Hull recollected it too; and the hot color on his cheeks deepened and his eyes, when they met hers, looked quickly away.
"They're wonderful, those fellows," he admitted to her aloud. He spoke, then, not to her, but to the destroyer. "But why couldn't you come three years ago?"
A cry rose simultaneously from a lookout forward upon the Ribot and from another man in the top. A periscope had appeared; and the guns at once were going again at it. The radio, in the cabin amidships, was snapping a warning to the Starke. The Ribot's guns and the splash of their shells into the sea gave the direction to Ruth and to Gerry Hull; and they saw, for a flash, a spar moving just above the water and hurling a froth before it, trailing a wake behind. Indeed, it was probably only the froth and the wake which they made out at all certainly; but that was discernible; and it moved, not toward them, but aslant to them and pointed toward the course of the American destroyer as it came up.
They're trying to get the Starke!" Gerry Hull interpreted this to Ruth. "The Huns are leaving us for later; they know they've got to get the Starke or the Starke will get their other boat."
"The Starke saw them!" Ruth cried, as the guns on the destroyer, which had been firing at the fleeing U-boat to the south, tore up the sea where the Ribot's shells were splashing.
"The torpedo's started by this time," Gerry Hull said. "Two of 'em, probably, if the Huns had two left."
Others about Ruth on the deck of the Ribot realized that; and the commander of the Starke recognized it too. Ruth saw the leaping form of the destroyer veer suddenly and point straight at the spot in the sea where the U-boat had thrust up its periscope. This presented the narrow beam of the destroyer, instead of its length, for the torpedo's target; but still Ruth held breath as on the Starke came.
Gerry Hull had thrust his wrist from his sleeve and, as they stood waiting, he glanced down again and again to his watch. "Passing—past!" he muttered to himself while he counted the time. "The torpedoes have missed," he announced positively to Ruth at last.
The commander of the Starke evidently thought so too; for the length of his boat began to show again. His guns had ceased firing; and the Ribot's rifles also were silent. The destroyer, veering still farther to the right, was dashing now almost at right angles to its former course.
"They're going to cross the course of the Hun," Gerry Hull explained this also to Ruth, "and give'em an 'ashcan,' I suppose—a depth charge, you know," he added.
"I know," Ruth said. She had read, at least, of the tremendous bombs, filled with the new explosive "T. N. T.," which the U-boat hunters carried and which they dropped with fuse fixed to burst far below the surface. One of these bombs, in size and shape near enough to "ashcans" to win the nickname, was powerful enough—she knew—to wreck an undersea craft if the charge burst close by.
The Starke was still leaping on with its length showing to the Ribot when two hundred yards or more astern the destroyer, a great geyser of water leaped into the air fifty—a hundred feet; and while the column of water still seemed to mushroom up and up, a tremendous shock battered the Ribot.
Someone shouted out in French while another called in English, "Depth charge dropped from the destroyer!"
"There was one 'ashcan,'" Gerry Hull murmured. "Now for another!"
For the Starke, as soon as the charge had detonated, had put her helm about and was circling back with marvelous swiftness to cross again the spot in the sea where she had dropped the great bomb.
Men were below that spot of sea, Ruth knew—German men, fifty or eighty or a hundred of them, perhaps. They were young men, mostly, not unlike—in their physical appearance, at least—German-born boys whom she had known at home in Onarga or in Chicago. Some of that crew might, conceivably, even be cousins of those boys. They had mothers and sisters in homes at Hamburg or Dresden or Munich or perhaps in that delightful toy town of Nuremberg, which she knew and had loved from pictures and stories; or some of them came, perhaps, from the Black Forest—from those quaint, lovely homely woodland cottages which Howard Pyle and Grimm had taught her to love when she was a child. They were helpless down there below the sea at this moment, perhaps, with the seams of their boat opened by that tremendous shock which had battered even the Ribot so far away; water might be coming in upon them, suffocating them, drowning them there like rats in a trap. The vision flowed before Ruth's eyes for an instant with horror; then she saw them, not choking and fighting each other for escape which none could find, but crouching safe and smiling in their boat, stealing away swiftly and undamaged to wait chance to rise again to try another torpedo at the Starke or to surprise with gunfire, at the next dawn, another vessel like the Ribot and murder more people in their beds and fill the space below decks with the dead and the agonized dying.
"Get 'em!" Gerry Hull, close beside her, was praying. "Oh, get 'em now! Get 'em!"
No reaction to weakness had come to him; years ago, he had passed beyond that; and Ruth, at once, had recovered.
"Get 'em!" Aloud, without being conscious of it, she echoed his ejaculation; and astern of the Starke, as the few minutes before, another great geyser of seawater arose; another titanic blow, disseminating through the water, beat upon the Ribot. The Starke was turning about short, again; but when she rushed back over her wake, this time she dropped no other depth charge; she slowed a little instead, and circled while she examined carefully the surface of the sea. Then suddenly she straightened her course away to the south; she buried her bow in a wave; with the rush of her propellers, foam churned at her stern; she was at full speed after the U-boat which she first had engaged and which, during this interlude, had run quite out of sight to the south or had sunk or submerged. While she pursued, her radio was reporting to the Ribot; and the Ribot's rasped in return.
Oil in convincing quantities had come to the surface where the Starke had dropped its charge. Of course, the Germans often pumped oil out of their U-boats, when no damage had been done, for the purpose of deceiving the hunters and making them think they had destroyed a U-boat when they had not. But the officers of the Starke had been satisfied with their findings; they would follow up the other U-boat and then return. They understood that only two U-boats had appeared to the Ribot; if another came or if either of the two reappeared, the Starke would return instantly.
No third enemy came; and neither of the others reappeared. In fact, the Starke failed to find any further trace of the U-boat which, for a time, had fought upon the surface and then run away. Either the gunfire of the Ribot or of the Starke had so damaged it that it suddenly sank, leaving no survivors; or—as the men aboard the Ribot seemed to think was more likely—the crew succeeded in repairing the damage done so that it was able to submerge and escape. In this case, it might venture another attack, by torpedo, upon the drifting Ribot; so the Starke, after abandoning the search, put herself beside the Ribot. An American officer came aboard, bringing with him a surgeon to aid in care of the Ribot's wounded; he brought also mechanics to assist the engine crew of the Ribot in repairs and he supplied, from his own crew, men to take the places of the Ribot's crew who had been killed.
Ruth watched the young lieutenant—he was few years older than Gerry Hull or herself—as he went about his business with the officers of the Ribot. if any shame for recreancy of his country had ever stirred him, it had left no mark; he was confident and competent—not proud but quite sure of himself and of his service. She looked for Gerry Hull to see whether he observed this one of their people; she looked to see whether Captain Forraker and "1582" also saw him. And she found that "1582" was the first to make opportunity to meet the American officer and compliment him.
"You chaps might have been blowing up U-boats for a thousand years!"
The pounding and hammering in the engine rooms was resulting in thrust again from the port engine. The Ribot started under steam and ran through an area of water all iridescent with floating oil. Bits of wood and cloth scraps floated in the oil—bits which men scooped up to preserve for proof that the depth charges, which the Starke had dropped there, had burst and destroyed a German submarine.
Gerry Hull had gone below to look into the hospital again. Ruth had offered to aid there but, having no experience, she was not accepted. So Hubert Lennon found her on deck and went to the rail with her while they watched the recovery of these relics from the sea. It had been his first experience, as well as hers, with the frightful mercilessness of modern battle; he had been made sick—a little—by what he had seen. He could not conceal it; his sensitive, weak eyes were big; he was very pale; his hand was unsteady as he lit a cigarette.
"Queer—isn't it?—queer that they should want to do what they've done below and we have no feeling at all about them." He was gazing down at the oil, shimmering all colors of the rainbow as the waves flickered it against the light.
"You've none at all?" Ruth asked, looking up at him.
"I had none at the time we were after them; but I'm afraid," he confessed with that honesty which Ruth had learned to expect from him, "the idea of them gets to me now. Not that I wouldn't kill them all again! Oh, I'd kill! I've dreamt sometimes of being surrounded by 'em and having a machine gun and mowing Germans down—mowing 'em down till there wasn't one left. But it always seemed such an inadequate thing to do. It ought to be possible to do more—I don't mean torture them physically, of course; but to make them innocuous somehow and let them live and think about what they've done. There couldn't be anything more terrible than that."
"We've succeeded in doing that sometimes," Ruth said. "We've taken prisoners even from their U-boats; but they don't seem to be troubled much with remorse. It would be different for you and for men like you; but that's because you couldn't do what they've done."
"Sometimes I feel that I could to them. So I guess it's a good thing I'm going to be an ambulance driver. To fight them and keep fighting fair and clean yourself—well it must take more stuff than I've got."
Ruth did not know quite what to make of this confession. Constantly, since that first day when he called for her at the hotel in Chicago, he had been paying his peculiar sort of court to her—peculiar, particularly, in that he never obtruded himself when anyone else offered and he never failed to admit anything against himself.
"It was fine of you, Hubert," she said, "to come right for me when the fight began."
"I thought we were sinking; that's how much sense I had," he returned. "Gerry, now, knew just what to do."
"He didn't come for me first, Hubert."
"Maybe not; but you wished he had; I'm glad," he went on quickly before she could rejoin, "that this has taught Gerry a few things."
It was evident from his manner that he meant "things" in relation to her; and that puzzled her, for she could not feel any alteration in Gerry Hull's manner at all. To be sure, she had gone into the sea to try to rescue one whom she thought was he; Gerry Hull knew this. But that was not the sort of thing which could undo the opposition between them. Yet it was plain, upon succeeding days, that Hubert had discerned a fact; she had become again a person of real concern to Gerry Hull.
She dated the start of that rehabilitation of herself not with her adventure in the sea or with the moment when he carried her in his arms; but with that instant when they stood together watching the U. S. S. Starke come up. That rehabilitation proceeded fast the next days when, after the Ribot had repaired both engines, the Starke brought the ship into a convoy—a fleet of some thirty merchant vessels of all sorts and under a dozen flags, belligerent and neutral, guarded and directed by a flotilla of American destroyers, with the senior American officer in command of all the convoy.
British trawlers joined them soon, adding their protection; two of the destroyers sent up balloons which they towed; and now, by day, British and French dirigible balloons and British and French and, yes, American seaplane pilots appeared. And no submarine, in those waters supposed to be infested with U-boats, once showed a periscope. By day and night, the patrol and protection of those American destroyers proved perfect. So by that protection they came at last to France.
Gerry sought out Ruth upon the last morning when they would be on shipboard. It was a smiling, sunny day, warm for that time in the year. In addition to the ships of the sea and air which recently had accompanied them constantly, strange little business-like boats approached, airplanes from the land spied upon them; and as they drew near to the port, Ruth got amazing sight of the multifold activities of even this still distant threshold to war.
"You're going to Paris right away?" Gerry asked.
"As soon as I can get through."
"We'll get a train that'll probably bring us in at night. If you've not made arrangements ahead"
"I have, thanks; rather Hubert's offered to see to me; besides his aunt gave me letters to cousins of hers who've been living in Paris for years. They're Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Mayhew; they've an apartment on the Avenue Kléber. I'm to go there my first night anyway."
"That's good. I've heard of the Mayhews; they've done a lot all during the war. Then can I look you up at the Mayhews' when I'm in Paris? I hope for service right away, of course; but Paris is close for our leave always."
"Oh, I'll not stay at the Mayhews' or on Avenue Kléber! I'm to find a room with Milicent Wetherell."
"So you'll carry out your Latin Quarter plan! That's better! But you'll leave the address, anyway, at the Mayhews'?"
"Yes," Ruth promised.
She took the opportunity to ask him many practical, matter-of-fact items which she needed to know—particularly about the examinations to be made upon arrival in France.
"My passport's almost ruined, you see," she explained to him.
"Why? What's happened?"
Ruth colored. "I always carried it with me; so it got soaked in the sea the other day."
Color came to his face too; that had happened when she went into the water to get him, of course. She would not have reminded him of it but that she knew she well might need help no less influential than his to pass the gateway to France.
"Of course," he said. "How's it spoiled?"
"My picture on it, mostly."
"Oh; that'll be all right! You'll just have to have another picture taken in France and have them paste it on. I'll tell 'em about it and see you through, of course."
Accordingly Ruth went to her cabin and, after bolting the door against even Milicent Wetherell, she got out her passport which really had been wet by the sea but not soaked so badly that the picture was useless. Indeed, the picture was still plain enough so that a French intelligence officer might make out that it was not Ruth. So she soaked it again in water until that danger was past; then she dried it and took it with her to present at the port.
"I've told Agnes Ertyle all about your passport," Gerry Hull said to her when she came on deck again, "so she'll help you out if they put the women through first. They have to be awfully careful in France these days about spies, you see—especially now—spies from America."