“I don’t expect to make any move at all—unless I receive my permission for Switzerland,” Ruth said.
“All right.” He turned away and looked for his cap in the corner where he had left it; then he came back and briefly said good night.
Out upon the street with the darkness enveloping him, misgivings tormented him again. The little, dim Rue des Saints Pères was quiet and almost deserted; all Paris seemed hushed. The spring warmth of the evening which, in another year, would have brought stir and gladness which would have thronged the avenues with folk upon idle, joyous errands tonight brought only oppression. Paris, Gerry knew, denied danger; yet Paris and, with Paris, all of France; and, with France, all Europe; and, with Europe, America and the rest of the world lay menaced that April night as they had not been since the September of the Marne.
For in the great bulge in the battle line which the enemy had thrust between Amiens and Paris, the Germans had established firmly their positions and there they rested, while to the north beyond Arras they were striking their second tremendous blow and had overrun Armentières and were rushing on toward Calais and the Channel.
Gerry strode on with consciousness of these events almost physically pressing upon him. In their presence, what was he with his prejudices and passions, what was that girl who had seared his lips when he pressed them against her fingers so that still for many moments afterwards his lips burned and tingled? If she was a German spy who had been deluding and playing with him, to permit her to proceed now might work further catastrophe incalculable; whereas were she what he believed—yes; he believed—she could do no good but must merely destroy herself if allowed to go on. Had he any choice but to take the only action which could prevent her?
Ruth had waited alone in the little parlor after he had gone, with her left hand clasped protectingly over the fingers which he had kissed; protectingly she kept that clasp while, standing at the window, she had watched his figure disappear in the darkness of the street of the Holy Fathers. Her fingers were hot like his lips; and while that heat still was strong, she brought her hand to her cheek and pressed it there.
That night nothing else occurred; nor upon the next day and night, nor during the following week did Ruth hear from Gerry as to what he had done about her; and she encountered nothing to indicate his decision until, calling again about her request for travel in Switzerland, suddenly she found permission granted, whereupon she took the first train for the east of France and the next morning passed the border into Switzerland. Accordingly it was in the shadow of Mount Pilatus that she read in a Bern newspaper that three days previously the American ace, Gerry Hull, had been shot down while flying over the German lines; but that his companions in the flight, who had returned, reported that, though falling in enemy territory, he seemed to have succeeded in making some sort of a landing; so it was possible that he was not killed but might be a prisoner in the hands of the Germans.
CHAPTER XVI
INTO GERMANY
The little Republic of Switzerland, always one of the most interesting spots in the world, became during this war a most amazing and anomalous country. Completely surrounded by four great powers at war—and itself peopled by citizens each speaking the tongue of one or another of its neighbors and each allied by blood with one or with two or with three, or, perhaps, with all—the Swiss Confederation suffered a complex of passions, sympathies, and prejudices quite beyond possible parallel elsewhere. And, as everyone knows, the Swiss Republic during the four years of the war, successfully persisted in peace.
Peace! What a strange condition in which to live, Ruth wondered with herself as she encountered the astonishments on every hand when she had crossed the border. She had been in a country at war for not quite three months—unless you nominated America from April, 1917, to January, 1918, a nation at war. Ruth did not. As she thought of her life before she took ship for France, the date of America’s declaration of a state of war with the Imperial German government was not fixed in the fiber of her feelings as were many other days before the date of that declaration—the September 6 of the Marne, the May 7 of the Lusitania, the glorious weeks of the defense of Verdun. The war declaration of April 6, 1917, seemed now to Ruth but a sort of official notification of the intentions of the American people which since then had only continued to develop. That home country which she had left in the last days of January was not nearly so different from its peace-time self as war-time France had proved distinct from war-time America.