The firing of the guns was keeping up all this time; the shock of shells bursting aboard the ship also continued. But the tug and thrust of the single engine had stopped; the vessel vibrated only at the firing of its own guns or at the detonation of a German shell.
Ruth took a towel which she found at her hand—she was in the wreck of someone’s cabin—and, after soaking it, she bound it about her head and crept back through the smoke to where the steel chute of the floor slanted sheer.
She dropped and fell upon a heap of sharp, shattered things which cut her ankles and stumbled her over on hands and knees upon débris, not flaming itself, but warm from a fire which burned lower. She lifted the towel from her eyes to try to see; but the smoke blinded her; she could not breathe; and she bound the towel again and crawled off the heap of smoldering things upon a linoleum. She heard a moan; but she could not find anyone in the smoke, though she called thickly several times. A current of air was sweeping over the floor and, following it, she came to a huge rent in the ship’s side where water washed in and out as the vessel rolled. The water had ceased to move from bow to stern; the vessel was merely drifting. A man floated, face downward, upon a wave which washed him almost to the ship’s side. Ruth reached out to seize him; she touched his shoulder—a blue-clad shoulder, the uniform of the French; but she could get no hold; the sea drew him slowly away.
“Gerry Hull! Gerry!” she called, as though that form in the French coat, with head under the water, could hear. The next wash brought it back toward the ship; but also drifted it farther to the stern. Now Ruth found among the rubbish washing at her feet a floating thing—a lifejacket. She thrust her arms in it and when the waves washed that blue-clad form nearer the next time, she leaped into the sea and swam toward it and got grasp of a sleeve and struggled back toward the ship.
The vessel’s side towered above her, mighty and menacing; it swung away from her, showing a long steep slant to the gray sky; it swung back and tilted over as though to crush her; wreckage slipped from off its topmost tier and splashed into the sea beside her. She could see the cloud of gun gases puff out and clear; then the flash of firing again. All the time she was thrashing with one arm to swim in the wash beside the vessel and drag the blue-clad form. That form was heavier now; and, as her clutch numbed, it slipped from her and sank. She spun about and tried to dive, groping with her hands below the surface; but the form was gone.
“Gerry Hull!” she cried out. “I had Gerry Hull—here!”
A coil of rope struck the water near her; men yelled to her to seize it; but she groped below the water until, exhausted from the cold, she looped the rope about her and they pulled her up.
“Lieutenant Gerry Hull was in the water there,” she cried to them who took her in their arms. “Lieutenant Gerry Hull is”—she shouted to the next man who took her when, looking up, she saw his face.
Silence—a marvelous stilling of the guns which had been resounding from fore and aft; a miraculous stopping of the frightful shock of the shells which had been bursting in the ship—enveloped Ruth. She did not know at first whether it was because some of her senses were gone; she could see Gerry Hull’s face, feel his arms holding her and the rhythm of his body as he stepped, carrying her; she could hear his voice and the voices of others close by; but all other sound and reverberation had ceased.
“I was separated from you,” Gerry Hull was explaining to her. “I was coming back to try and get you out.”