FEAR—so Ruth was finding out—is a most complicated and perplexing sensation. What she had learned about fear, upon those infrequent occasions when causes of alarm approached that queer, humdrum, almost forgotten girl who used to work for Sam Hilton, had made it appear a simple emotion to bring about a rational reaction. One fear differed from another chiefly in degrees of effect; you might be a little afraid of something—like having your skirt caught in an elevator door when the car started up too crowded; having a rough looking man suddenly accost you when you were hurrying back to Ontario Street late in a winter evening, caused more alarm; and there were other occurrences which had frightened still more. The amount of fear you felt—and the force of the corresponding reaction—seemed generally proportional to the danger threatening you; but now Ruth had been through an adventure—battle—which had menaced her life to a far greater degree than any previous experience; and she had not been afraid, in the old sense of fear. Emotions had tortured her—emotions far more violent and furious than ever she had suffered; but fear for her life had not been chief among them. Committed to battle, as she had been by the mere fact of her presence aboard the Ribot, the instant realization that nothing she could do could save her had amazingly freed her from fear.
Fear, then, was not made up just of a dread of death. Now that the Ribot was safely in from the Bay of Biscay, had passed the Phare de Cordouan and was running down the broad, flat estuary of the Gironde river to Bordeaux, securely situated sixty long miles inland, Ruth was in no danger of death at all. If at that city, whose roofs and chimneys were just coming into sight, the French examiners found out how she had obtained her passport, how she had duped and tricked people to aid her in arriving here, and if they arrested her, therefore, upon the charge of being a German spy, they would be making her life safe; her punishment probably would not go beyond imprisonment for the duration of the war; it would prevent her wild plan of going into Germany, where court-martials did not simply imprison spies. Yet Ruth was afraid this morning as she had never been before; far, far more afraid than when she had been in battle.
That meant, obviously, that she was far more afraid of failing to do that which she was determined upon than she was afraid of dying. Less than three weeks earlier, when Ruth Alden was drawing up quit-claims and deeds for Sam Hilton in Chicago, such a recognition of the fact in regard to oneself would have seemed—even if spoken only to self—ostentatious and theatrical; but now to make the fate of yourself nothing, the performing of your part in the great scheme everything, was the simple and accepted code of almost everyone about her.
Exactly when Ruth had begun to accept this code for herself, she did not know. Once or twice in her twenty-two years she had encountered emergencies when one person or two—or very, very few, at most—acted without regard to consequence to themselves; but always they did this for the saving of more serious catastrophe to a greater number of persons who were present; so that even upon those occasions the highest purpose was plain self-preservation. But now Ruth had become a member of a society not chiefly charged with preserving itself—whose spirit, indeed, was disregard of self. She had come from a society in which the discovery that a certain project was not "safe" and would lead one to certain destruction was enough to immediately end that project, into a hemisphere where the certainty of death made no difference and was simply not to be discussed.
It was not from fear of punishment, therefore, that Ruth's heart was fluttering as the Ribot drew up to the docks at Bordeaux; it was from terror at thought of no longer being permitted to be one of such a company as that upon this ship.
Men were directing the passengers to arrange themselves for presentation of their credentials to the French authorities; and Ruth found Lady Agnes taking her place beside her. The English girl was well known and, after merely formal inquiry and the signing of a few papers, she was passed on. She made a statement for Ruth of the reasons for Ruth's passport being in bad condition; and she mentioned what she knew about Ruth. The Frenchmen attended politely, but they did not, therefore, take chances. They examined her passport far more carefully than they had Agnes Ertyle's; but Ruth had so ruined the picture that identification by it was impossible. The sea water also had helped to blur the signature so that her "Cynthia Gail" which they made her sign, and which they compared with the name upon the passport, escaped open challenge. Then there were questions.
The man who asked them referred to cards in an index box which, evidently, had come across upon the Ribot; for his inquiries referred largely to questions which had been asked Ruth upon the other side. She, fortunately, had had sense enough to have written down for herself the answers which she had given at New York; she had rehearsed them again and again; so now she did not fail to give similar replies. Then there were other inquiries—sudden, startling ones, which gave her consternation; for they seemed based upon some knowledge of the real Cynthia Gail which Ruth did not have. But she had to answer; so she did so as steadily as possible and as intelligently as she could.
The examiner gazed more keenly at her now; he halted his examination to confer in whispers with an associate; he made careful notation upon a card. A clerk brought in a cablegram, which the examiner carefully read. Had the body of Cynthia Gail been identified in Chicago? Had her family found out the fraud which Ruth had been playing upon them; or had other discovery been made so that the French knew that she was an impostor?
The man looked up from the cablegram.
"You have been in France before?" he challenged.
Ruth had thought of being asked that question. She had told Gerry Hull at Mrs. Corliss' that she had been in France—or at least she had let him suppose so when he said that, of course, she had been in Paris. She did not know at all whether Cynthia Gail had or not; but that statement to Gerry Hull—which he might have repeated—committed her.
"Not since the war began," she answered.
"Previous to then?"
"Yes."
"Upon how many occasions?"
"Once," Ruth said.
"When was that?"
Ruth had figured out several occasions when Cynthia Gail might have come abroad—if she really ever had done so. "The summer of 1913."
"When did you land?"
"Late in June; I don't recall the exact date." She fixed June, as she supposed Cynthia Gail would have come during summer vacation.
"Where did you land?"
"Dieppe. I crossed from New York on the Adriatic of the White Star Line to Plymouth for England first; then I crossed to France by Newhaven-Dieppe." She had picked up a good deal on board the Ribot, you see.
"Visiting what places in France?"
"I spent most of my time in Paris; I was with my parents. We stayed at the Hotel Regina." Gerry Hull had said he supposed she had been at the Regina or the Continental.
The readiness of these answers seemed to somewhat reassure the examiner.
"You have friends in France?"
"Only acquaintances such as one makes traveling; no one whom I could now place. I've letters to Mr. and Mrs. Gregory Mayhew, of Avenue Kléber. I did not know them when I was in France before."
The examiner made notations on his card.
"Report at your first opportunity, if you please, to your consul general at Paris and obtain a passport in place of this!" He was writing upon her passport now and handing it back to her! Whatever reservation of judgment he had made in regard to her; whatever orders he might give to watch her pending verification of her facts, he was passing her on and permitting her to go with the others to take the afternoon train to Paris!
She saw to customs and let Hubert order the transfer of her luggage; then she was free upon the streets of her first foreign city. Not for long; because the train for Paris left soon. But Hubert hired a queer old cab, driven by a white-haired, Gallicly garrulous man, who quickly understood that they were less interested in the wide magnificence of the modern city than in the labyrinths of the old town with its white, huddled houses facing quaint, gayly painted shops about irregular squares, and looming at one another over the narrowest of mediaeval streets.
They halted the cab and walked down the delightful defiles. Ruth had to remember, in her raptures, that she was supposed to have been in France before; but there were moments when Hubert left her—he understood that she wanted to experience some of this alone—when the incredible wonder that she was abroad overwhelmed her. She had cabled, of course, to Cynthia Gail's parents in Decatur; but she wanted to cable her own mother to tell her where she was, and to buy the pretty, picturesque postal cards, and send them to her sisters; she wanted to write some of the wonder to all her friends; she would have included even a card to Sam Hilton. But all that was impossible.
Then the sight of French soldiers on the narrow streets and the many, many French women in mourning—mothers and widows—returned her to the grim, terrible business which had brought her here. She rejoined Hubert where he had been waiting for her at the end of a twisty, shadowy little street; he had bought a French newspaper; and when she came beside him, he glanced up at her gravely.
"They've sunk a transport with American troops, Cynthia," he said.
"Where? How many of our soldiers—?" she cried.
"The Tuscania to the north of Ireland; torpedoed when we were at sea. Two or three hundred of our men are missing; they don't know exactly how many yet."
The news had reached the others of the Ribot's passengers, who were taking the same train for Paris that afternoon. Ruth shared a compartment in the little European-gauged cars, with Milicent Wetherell and two French women; but the train was a "corridor train," as Ruth learned to say, and the occupants of the different compartments could visit one another much as they might in the larger American cars. There was news of recent air raids upon Paris—one raid had been most deadly and destructive; there was news of various sorts from the French and British fronts—a little news also from the short American sectors; for it was announced that the Americans had taken over a new portion of the line in Lorraine. But the report of the successful attack of the U-boats upon the Tuscania overshadowed all other news.
It was not alone the loss of the hundreds of American soldiers; it was the ugly threat that, where the U-boats at last had succeeded in sinking a transport out of a convoy, they might succeed again and, as the Germans had been boasting, they might—they just possibly might cut that bridge of ships really beginning this month to bring America over the seas. Ruth thrilled with discovery at how these people here in France had come to count upon the arrival of her people. She talked not only with the acquaintances from the Ribot, but Milicent and she practiced their French upon the polite and patient ladies from Bordeaux.
Ruth thus found that these French women were relieved that the Tuscania was not an American ship and had not been under convoy of American destroyers when it was lost.
"They have the most appalling faith in us!" Ruth reported this to Gerry when he stopped to speak with her during the afternoon. "They think we can do anything; that we cannot fail!"
"That's their way," he warned. "We're the new ally. The British must have done wonders to get off all but two hundred men from a crowded transport going down in a heavy sea."
"I don't mean that we could have done more," Ruth said, "or that we could have saved the Tuscania; I'm just glad people can believe so in us. But it puts upon us an awful responsibility to make good."
"It does," Gerry agreed, laconically, and went on.
The train pulled into Poitiers—Poitiers of the battle of the Black Prince in her Green's English History! It ran on to Tours! Now the names of even the little towns, as they neared Paris, were familiarly full of legend and romance.
Hubert Lennon "looked by" in the evening, as he often had during the day; and, as Milicent was visiting elsewhere just then, he sat down beside Ruth.
She observed at once that something was troubling him—not a matter which had affected him suddenly, but rather an uncertainty which seemed to have been progressing for some time. He remained beside her silent for several minutes while they looked out at the lights of the little French hamlets. Finally he asked her in quite an ordinary tone, so that the French women could not suspect any challenge:
"You remember motoring down this way to Blois and Tours, and then that run down the valley of the Loire?"
Ruth startled a little straighter and gazed out at the darkness without answering. If Gerry Hull had asked her such a question she would have bluffed the answer boldly; but Hubert had interrogated her for a purpose; and he knew something of what Cynthia Gail had done and had not done. Suddenly it dawned upon Ruth that that time, nine years earlier, when Hubert had last seen Cynthia Gail, was not in Chicago, as she had supposed, but here in France.
"Yes, I remember," she replied weakly and without looking about.
"Your father and mother were with you, and my father—he was alive then—and I; and who else was along?" he questioned, as though quite casually, but Ruth knew that this was a test.
"I—don't remember," she faltered. She doubted whether Cynthia Gail had been with him on any such trip; the whole question might merely be a catch; well, if he suspected her and wanted to catch her, certainly he had her. Her progress from the moment of her appearance as Cynthia Gail had been made possible—she recognized—because of his unsuspecting acceptance of her. That had won for her championship in more powerful quarters which, in turn, had gained her favor more influential still; yet the whole pyramid of that favor balanced on the point of Hubert's original acceptance.
So she sat in the dark awaiting what this strange friend of hers should determine to do.
The French women in the opposite seats conversed between themselves. The train was drawing into Paris, they said. The rapid rattle of railroad joints and cross-tracks confirmed this to Ruth, as well as the more frequent noise of engines passing; she could see, too, low shaded signal lights. But the environs of Paris had become more black than the villages of the south; this was from danger of repetition of the severe air raids of which Ruth had heard at Bordeaux.
The train stopped; not at a station, nor did guards open the doors. Everything was black without; the few lights, which Ruth had been viewing, either had not been necessary thereabouts, or else they had been extinguished; and, with the stifling of the train noise, a weird, wailing moan rose through the night air.
"A siren!" Hubert said to Ruth. The French women, too, had recognized the warning of a raid. A blast of a horn blew a loud staccato alerte; and the siren—it evidently was on some fast-driven car—diminished in the distance, wailing. Far off, but approaching closer, sounded deep, rolling reverberations; not like guns—Ruth knew guns now; nor yet like shells such as had burst on board the Ribot. They were aerial torpedoes, of tremendous violence, detonating in Paris buildings or upon the city streets. Guns were going now; and their shells were smashing high in the air.
Ruth could see the flash of their break against the gleaming stars of the clear, cold sky; she could see rockets and glaring flares. The sound of the guns and the smash of the shells in the sky redoubled; a mighty flash lit the ground a half mile or more away across the railroad yards; it threw in brilliant silhouette for a second, roofs, trees, chimneys against a crimson inferno of flame.
Hubert had the window open; and Ruth and the French women were kneeling side by side to look out and up. They could see little lights in the sky now; they could hear, between the smash of shells, the hum of airplane motors and the rattle of brief bursts of machine-gun fire.
Airplanes of defense were up there fighting the Germans—French piloted those machines. But there might be Americans fighting there, too. Ruth had read that once or twice American pilots had been among those honored with the defense of Paris. She did not know whether it was true; she had meant to ask Gerry Hull.
A few yards away in another compartment of another car—probably in the compartment where Lady Agnes sat—Ruth knew that he was kneeling before a window also gazing out; and she knew that the helpless impulse which stirred her with desire to be out there above to fly and fight was surging through him a thousand times intensified. She could feel even Hubert Lennon twist and sway at struggle with that impulse; how much more was Gerry Hull's lithe, powerful body—that strong, rhythmically moving form which had carried her—straining now to join his comrades there above and to strike.
A flare of flame, not sharp and jagged like the burst of shells, nor yet the streak of a rocket, nor like the glaring spot of a signal light, wavered across the stars. Something clouded it—smoke. It flung free from the smoke and dived, flaring bigger and brighter, trailing behind it a streamer of black which blanketed both rockets beyond and the stars; it dived on, burning.
Ruth's heart throbbed like a hammer in her throat. "Chute d'un aeroplane!" the French women cried.
"Fall of an airplane!"
It had been hit! The gasoline tank had ignited; it was going down in flames. Whether friend or foe, no one on the train could know. Cries reached Ruth from other compartments in the car. Everyone was seeing it as it dropped down now faster and faster, its head burning whiter; its streamer of smoke longer and broader before the stars. The line of roofs and chimneys off to the south, which had shown in glaring silhouette, sucked it from sight. It had crashed; and a shudder shocked through Ruth as she pictured the pilot. She wanted Gerry Hull beside her to know that he was safe; her hand groped in the dark, without her will. It encountered Hubert's and found his trembling and cold.
"They're going away, I think," he said to reassure her.
The detonations of the torpedoes dropped upon the city surely were less; the guns diminished their fire; the flashes in the sky were farther away; and the hum of the airplane motors and the bursts of machine-gun fire no longer were to be heard.
A bugle from somewhere blew a none-too-confident "All clear." The train moved on and drew after midnight into the darkened Gare du Quai-d'Orsay.
It composed for Ruth a far different entrance to Paris than any she had dreamed—the dark, almost deserted railroad station as a center of an expanse vague and doubtful under the starlit city haze. A man who repeated, "Mees Seenthya Gaiil" and "Meester Huber' Lennon," in patient, respectful intoning, stood at the gates from the train. He had a car, toward which he escorted Ruth and Milicent (who, Ruth insisted, must not try to find a place for herself that night) and Hubert.
Several of the Ribot's men came and said good-bye to Ruth and Milicent again and made last memoranda of how they could later be located. Gerry Hull appeared and, in her brief moment with him, Ruth marveled at the change in him. The air raid and the view of his comrades fighting again and, too, this nearness of his return to duty had banished all boyishness from him; a simple sternness suddenly had returned him to a maturity which made her wonder how she ever could have assumed to scold and correct him as once she had.
He saw that Ruth and Milicent passed the formalities at the gare. He ascertained that they had a vehicle; he brought to Ruth Lady Agnes' farewell and offer of assistance at any time. Then, saluting, he said good-bye and they drove off.
Their car was keeping along the Quai-d'Orsay at first with the Seine glinting below on the right. They passed a bridge.
"Pont de Solférino," Hubert said.
They turned across the next bridge—"Pont de la Concorde!"
That brought to Ruth's right the Garden of the Tuileries! They were in the Place de la Concorde; they turned into the Champs-Elysées! It was little more than a vague wideness of speeding shadows; but Ruth's blood was warm and racing. Hubert spoke to her, and when she replied she knew that if he had questioned before whether she had been previously in Paris he could not wonder now. But he spoke to her as if she had, calling names of the places quietly to Milicent rather than to her.
The car swerved into the Place de l'Etoile.
"The Arc-de-Triomphe!" Hubert cried. Ruth bent and saw its looming bulk; they were lipon the Avenue Kléber now and the car soon was halting.
A single light burned in the hallway of a building of apartments handsomer than any Ruth ever had seen; a door upon a second floor opened and an American man and woman welcomed "Cynthia Gail" as Ruth had never been welcomed anywhere in her life. These hospitable people—they were Aunt Emilie's cousins, the Mayhews—welcomed Hubert, too, of course, and Milicent.
Ruth lay that night in a beautiful bed of gold and blue—the most grateful, the most excited, the most humble and insignificant-feeling girl in all France. When she had started out upon this adventure in America she had seemed to herself to be seizing an opportunity ordained for her by fate and entrusted to her as the instrument for a great deed; now the fact that she was here, and had come with an idea that she could greatly do, seemed the most assuming conceit in the world.
The next morning when she went out upon the avenues in the uniform, which now she was to wear constantly, the pettiness of her part reimpressed itself with every square she passed as she witnessed the throngs of soldiers—of a dozen races, of innumerable nations—gathered for the war. She went with Hubert to the American consulate, where she applied for a new passport to replace the ruined one; then, proceeding alone to the office where Cynthia Gail was to report, she accepted gladly the simple, routine duties assigned her.
That same day she and Milicent found a room in a pension upon the Rue des Saints Pères, where Hubert and Mrs. Mayhew called upon her the next evening. But if Gerry Hull had inquired for her at the Mayhew's, his inquiry resulted in no visit to the Rue des Saints Pères. Lieutenant Gerry Hull was transferred—so Ruth read in a Matin of the next week—to the American forces and was flying now under his own flag. And with his return to duty it seemed that he must have lost concern for a girl satisfied to do half-clerical, half-charity relief work among refugees in Paris.
Of course Ruth did not think of herself as merely doing such work; she considered herself as waiting for further instructions from the Germans.
The orders which she had received from the spy in Chicago had directed her to take up this work of Cynthia Gail's; and only by following these orders could she hope to carry out her plan.
She found far more talk of German agents, and far more certainty of their activities, in Paris than she had heard about in Chicago. The difference was that while in Chicago the presence and the activities of German spies was extraordinary, here it was the everpresent and accepted thing—like the arrival of trains of wounded from the front and air raids upon clear nights. She learned that the Germans undertook no important enterprise without information from their agents in France; she learned that, as in America, these agents were constantly being taken. It was plain to her, therefore, that they could scarcely have any rigid organization or any routine method of reports or intercommunication. They must operate by creating or seizing sudden opportunities.
During the noon hour upon a day in the middle of February, Ruth left the relief rooms, where she had been working, to wander in the winter sunlight by Notre Dame, where bells were ringing for some special mass. She went in and stood in the nave, listening to the chants, when she observed a gentleman of about fifty, evidently a Parisian, go to a pew beyond her and kneel down. She noticed him because she had seen him at least twice before when she was coming out of her office, and he had observed her with keener glance than gentlemen of his apparent station were accustomed to bestow.
She went from the cathedral after a few minutes and wandered up the Rue St. Jacques toward the Sorbonne, when the same man suddenly appeared about a corner and—a rather gusty wind was blowing—his hat left his head and blew toward Ruth. She stooped quickly and picked it up.
He thanked her effusively in French and, observing that she was an American in uniform, he extended compliments upon the participation of America, which made it impossible for Ruth to go on at once. Suddenly, and without change in his tone, he inquired her name.
"Cynthia Gail," she gave it, without thinking anything in particular.
"From what city?" he inquired.
"Decatur, Illinois."
"You are to make effort at once to leave Paris to go to the district of Roisel. Never mind the Americans; there will be few there. Observe British dispositions; of their Fifth Army; their headquarters; what forces in reserve present; what movements indicating a lengthening of their front. Return here after two weeks; not later than three. It is the wonder of America, observe!" he proceeded in the same tone as a man went by, "that it saves not only my country, my civilization, but even, for me, my hat! I thank you again, Mademoiselle. Bon jour!" He bowed and was off.