Ruth of the U. S. A.

by Edwin Balmer

Certainly Ruth’s life had run on almost unchanged by the American declaration of war, save for the strengthening of her futile, stifled passions. But that day in January, which had embarked her for France, had ushered her into a realm which demanded dealings in realities which swiftly had made all before seem illusory and phantasmagorical.

The feeling of dreamland incredulity that she, Ruth Alden, could actually be experiencing those gloriously exciting days upon the Ribot and following her arrival in France had been supplanted by sensations which made it seem that these last weeks had been the only real ones in her life. When she thought of her old self—of that strange, shadowy, almost substanceless girl who used to work in a Madison Street real estate office for Sam Hilton—it was her life in Chicago which had become incredible. She did not, therefore, forget her own home; on the contrary, her work which had been largely the gathering together of scattered family groups and the attempt to reestablish homes, had made her dwell with particular poignancy upon memories of the little house in Onarga where her mother and her sisters dwelt. Regularly Ruth had addressed a letter to her mother and dropped it in a post-box; she had dared tell nothing of herself or of her work or give any address by which anyone could trace her. She simply endeavored to send to her mother assurance that she was well and in France. Obviously she could not receive reply from her mother; indeed, Ruth could have no knowledge that any of her letters ever reached home. She experienced the dreads which every loving person feels when no news can come; such experience was only part of the common lot there in France; but it helped to remove her life at home further into the past.

Switzerland, strangely and without warning, had undone much that France and the battle zone had worked within Ruth; the inevitable relaxing of the strain of work in a country at war had returned Ruth to earlier emotions. What was she, Ruth Alden, doing here alone in the Alps? She was standing, as one in a dream, upon the quay before the splendid hotels of Lucerne and gazing over the blue, wonderful, mountain-mirroring waters of the Lac des Quatre Cantons. Off to the southwest, grand and rugged against the azure sky, rose the snow-capped peaks of Pilatus; to the east, glistening and more smiling under the spring sun, lay the Rigi. The beauty and wonder of it was beyond anything which Ruth Alden could have known. Who was she that she was there?

Then a boy came by with newspapers and she bought a German newspaper and one printed in French at Bern. It was this one which informed her, when she glanced down its columns, that Gerry Hull had been shot down, and, strangely—and mercifully, perhaps—this knowledge came not to the girl who, during the past months had been his friend, his close comrade during days most recent; it seemed to come, somehow, only to a girl who lay awake early in the morning in a shabby room at an Ontario Street boarding house, a girl who day-dreamed about impossible happenings such as knowing Gerry Hull, but who soon must stir to go down to breakfast at the disorderly table in the ill-lit room below and then catch a crowded car for Sam Hilton’s office.

Such was the work of peace and Pilatus and the Rigi and the images upon the lake. War—war which had become the only reality, the sole basis of being—miraculously had vanished. She passed through throngs speaking German and by other groups conversing in French; these stood side by side, neither one prisoner to the other; they had no apparent hostility or animosity. These people, in part at least, were German and French; but there beyond the border—Ruth gazed in the direction of Alsace—men of such sorts sprang at one another with bayonets; and Gerry Hull had been shot down.

Ruth searched the German newspaper for further word of him; she looked up a news-stand and bought several papers, both French and German. In some she discovered the same brief announcement of the fate of the American pilot; but no further information. But it was certain that he was dead or a prisoner—wounded, probably, or at least injured by the crash of his airplane in the “some sort of a landing” which he had succeeded in making. It had been “some sort of a landing” which he had made that time he was shot down when she had gone to him and helped him free. Tales of German treatment of their prisoners—tales which she could not doubt, having been told her by men who themselves had suffered—recurred to her and brought her out of this pleasant, peaceful Lethe from realities in which Lucerne, for a few hours, had let her live. Tension returned; and, with the tension, grief but not tears; instead, that determination imbued her which she had witnessed often enough in others, when loss of their own was made known to them. Gerry Hull, she thus knew, was her own; and as she had seen men and women in France giving themselves for the general cause, and for one particular, personal vengeance, too, so Ruth thought of her errand into Germany no longer as solely to gather information for the army but to find and free Gerry Hull, if he was a prisoner; and if he was killed, then to take some special, personal vengeance for him.

She had come to Lucerne—ostensibly—to rest and to recuperate; and Mrs. Mayhew had given her letters to friends who were staying at one of the large hotels. Ruth had registered at the same hotel and a Mrs. Folwell, an American, had taken Ruth under her chaperonage. Ruth’s name, upon the hotel register, of course stood as Cynthia Gail; and as Miss Gail, she met other guests in the hotel, which was one of those known as an “allied hotel” in the row of splendid buildings upon the water front devoted to the great Swiss peace and war industrie des étrangers. The majority of its guests, that is, designated themselves as English or French, Italian or American—whatever in fact they might be. The minority laid claim to neutral status—Norwegian, Danish, Hollandish, Swedish, Spanish. But everyone recognized that in this hotel, as in all the others, the Germans and Austrians possessed representatives among the guests as well as among the servants.

“It is the best procedure,” Mrs. Folwell said half seriously to Ruth upon her arrival, “to lay out all your correspondence upon your table when you leave the room so that it may be examined, in your absence, with the least possible disturbance. They will see it anyway.”

Ruth was quite willing. Indeed, she was desirous of advertising, as quickly as possible, the presence of “Cynthia Gail.” She had taken the trouble to learn a simple device, employing ordinary toilet powder and pin perforations through sheets of paper, which would disclose whether the pages of a letter had been disturbed. Accordingly she prepared her letters, and, merely locking them in her bureau drawer, she left them in her room. Returning some hours later, and unlocking the drawer, she found all her letters apparently undisturbed; but the powder and the perforation proved competent to evidence that secret examination had been made.

Of course examination might have been at the hands of allied agents; for Ruth did not imagine that the Germans and Austrians alone concerned themselves with war-time visitors to Switzerland; but she felt sure that the Germans had made their search also.