“We’re picking up a cruiser escort,” he said suddenly. “Let’s go out and look her over.”
So they were on deck in the cold and wind again. And during the rest of that day, and upon the following days, almost every hour brought her into some sort of association with him on the decks, in the lounge, or in the writing rooms, during the morning; luncheon at the same table. Then the afternoon, as the morning, would be made up of hours when she would be sitting in the warm, bright saloon with her French war-study book before her and she would be carefully rehearsing “Masque respirateur—respirator; lunettes—goggles; nauge de gaz—gas fumes ...” when she would hear his quick, impulsive step or his clear, pleasant voice speaking to someone and Ruth would get combat animé and combat décousu hopelessly mixed. She would go out to walk the deck again with Hubert—who was apologetically up and about when the seas were smoother—or with Captain Lescault or Captain Forraker or with “1582” (as she called to herself the Sussex officer and once came near calling him that aloud), when she would come around the corner of a cabin and almost run into Agnes Ertyle and Gerry Hull going about the deck in the other direction; or she would pass them, seated close together and with Lady Agnes all bundled up in steamer rugs, and Ruth would see them suddenly stop talking when she and her escort came close, and they would look away at the sea as though they had been just looking at the water all the time.
He would sit down beside Ruth, too; and he would take her around and around the deck, tramping glowing, spray-splattered miles with him. They talked a lot; but now they never really said anything to each other. And it seemed to Ruth that each throb of those ceaseless engines, which thrust them ever nearer and nearer to France, made what she felt and believed more outrageous to him.
One afternoon, when the wireless happened to be tuned to catch the wavelength of messages sweeping over the seas from some powerful sending station in Germany, they picked up the enemy’s boasts for the day; and among them was the announcement that the famous American “ace,” sergeant pilot Paul Crosby, had been shot down and killed by a German flyer on the Lorraine front. It chanced that Gerry Hull and Agnes Ertyle were in the main saloon near where Ruth also was when some busybody, who had heard this news, brought it to Gerry Hull and asked him if he had known Paul Crosby.
Ruth knew that Gerry Hull and Paul Crosby had joined the French flying forces together; they had flown in the same escadrille for more than a year. She did not turn about, as others were doing, to watch Gerry Hull when he got this news; but she could not help hearing his simple and quiet reply, which brought tears to her eyes as no sob or protestation of grief could; and she could not help seeing him as he passed before her on his way out alone to the deck.
She dreamed that night about being torpedoed; in the dream, the boat was the Ribot; and upon the vessel there were—as almost always there are in dreams—a perfectly impossible company. Besides those who actually were on board, there were Sam Hilton and Lieutenant George Byrne and “Aunt Emilie” and Aunt Cynthia Gifford Grange and the woman in gray and a great many others—so many, indeed, that there were not boats enough on the Ribot to take off all the company as the ship sank. So Gerry Hull, after putting Lady Agnes in a boat and kissing her good-bye, himself stepped back to go down with the ship; and so, when all the boats were gone, he found Ruth beside him; for she had known that he would not try to save himself and she had hidden to stay with him. His arms were about her as the water rose to them and—she awoke.
Their U-boat really came; but with results disconcertingly different. January, 1918—if you can remember clearly back to days so strange and distant—was a month when America was sending across men by tens rather than by hundreds of thousands and convoying them very, very carefully; there were not so many destroyers as soon there were; the U-boats had not yet raided far out into the Atlantic—so fast and well-armed ships like the Ribot, which were not transports, were allowed to proceed a certain part of the way across unconvoyed, keeping merely to certain “lanes” on courses prescribed by wireless.
The Ribot, Ruth knew, was on one of these lanes and soon would be “picked up” by the destroyers and shepherded by them into a convoy for passage through the zone of greatest danger. In fact, Ruth and Milicent Wetherell, who also had awakened early upon this particular morning, were looking out of their port over a gray and misty sea to discover whether they might have been picked up during the night and now were in a convoy. But they saw no sign of any other vessel, though the mist, which was patchy and floating low, let them look a mile or more away. There was no smoke in sight—nothing but gray clouds and the frayed fog and the sea swelling oilily up and slipping down against the side of the ship.
Then, about a hundred yards away from the side and rather far forward, a spout of spray squirted suddenly straight up into the air. It showered over toward the ship and splashed down.
“That’s a shot,” Ruth said, “at us.”