Gerry was speaking to her, but for some reason she could not understand what he was saying; she could hear his words, but they were separate sort of words without meaning. He and Mike were lifting her now and lowering her feet first into a pit—the seat pit of an airplane. Mike stepped down into the pit with her and supported her there. Gerry was gone from her now, but not far away. He was in the pilot’s pit, or just behind it, with the pilot in front of him. The motor was roaring again; the machine was moving; it was rising. She was flying!
Far—far below, when she looked back, she saw a strange sheen, which was the moonlight on the ground, with a twisting, brighter strip dividing it.
“That,” she tried to say to the man holding her in his lap, “that’s the Rhine?”
He tried very hard to hear her, and she supposed that the same thing must be the matter with him as was the trouble with her when Gerry spoke to her on the ground. Only slowly she realized that she could not even hear her own voice for the noise of the motor.
She looked back to the other pit and saw Gerry’s face; he waved at her and she waved back; then she sank upon the shoulder of the man holding her, and she lost consciousness.
Many times while that English bombing biplane—weighted now by three men and a girl instead of by two men and bombs—made the journey to the allied lines, Ruth stirred to semi-wakefulness. The swaying and the rising and the falling of the airplane as it rode the currents of the air made it seem to Ruth that she was upon a ship at sea—upon the Ribot. At other times the motion seemed merely the buoyancy following the sinking of sensations in a dream. Afterwards she remembered sitting up, wide-eyed and collected in mind, and gazing down upon the moonlit ground; but at the time these occasions gave no reaction.
She remembered that Gerry waved to her many times—every time she turned. Complete consciousness returned to her, however, only when she found herself no longer rising, and sinking, or swaying to right and left, with all sound overwhelmed by motor noises. She was upon a cot then; it was steady, and soft, and marvelously comfortable; and extremely kind people were caring for her—one of them an American girl.
Mrs. Mayhew was there, and George Byrne, and others, who identified her. Also, of course, there was Gerry. It was he who introduced to her two strange officers—one French and one American—and it was Gerry who said: “These are officers of our intelligence division, Ruth. Tell them what you can; then everyone will leave you alone to rest. Your work will be done.”
So she told them, summoning all her strength to repeat everything correctly and in detail; and when she had finished she answered their questions for more than an hour. The next day again they questioned her. The attack upon the Soissons-Reims front was not yet begun, they told her. Did they believe her? she asked.
It was not the business of the intelligence officers to express either belief or incredulity; their task was simply to ascertain what she knew, or believed that she knew; to check her recital over with discovered facts about her; to add her reports to the others, both confirming and conflicting; and to pass the report on.