The pounding and hammering in the engine rooms was resulting in thrust again from the port engine. The Ribot started under steam and ran through an area of water all iridescent with floating oil. Bits of wood and cloth scraps floated in the oil—bits which men scooped up to preserve for proof that the depth charges, which the Starke had dropped there, had burst and destroyed a German submarine.
Gerry Hull had gone below to look into the hospital again. Ruth had offered to aid there but, having no experience, she was not accepted. So Hubert Lennon found her on deck and went to the rail with her while they watched the recovery of these relics from the sea. It had been his first experience, as well as hers, with the frightful mercilessness of modern battle; he had been made sick—a little—by what he had seen. He could not conceal it; his sensitive, weak eyes were big; he was very pale; his hand was unsteady as he lit a cigarette.
“Queer—isn’t it?—queer that they should want to do what they’ve done below and we have no feeling at all about them.” He was gazing down at the oil, shimmering all colors of the rainbow as the waves flickered it against the light.
“You’ve none at all?” Ruth asked, looking up at him.
“I had none at the time we were after them; but I’m afraid,” he confessed with that honesty which Ruth had learned to expect from him, “the idea of them gets to me now. Not that I wouldn’t kill them all again! Oh, I’d kill! I’ve dreamt sometimes of being surrounded by ’em and having a machine gun and mowing Germans down—mowing ’em down till there wasn’t one left. But it always seemed such an inadequate thing to do. It ought to be possible to do more—I don’t mean torture them physically, of course; but to make them innocuous somehow and let them live and think about what they’ve done. There couldn’t be anything more terrible than that.”
“We’ve succeeded in doing that sometimes,” Ruth said. “We’ve taken prisoners even from their U-boats; but they don’t seem to be troubled much with remorse. It would be different for you and for men like you; but that’s because you couldn’t do what they’ve done.”
“Sometimes I feel that I could to them. So I guess it’s a good thing I’m going to be an ambulance driver. To fight them and keep fighting fair and clean yourself—well it must take more stuff than I’ve got.”
Ruth did not know quite what to make of this confession. Constantly, since that first day when he called for her at the hotel in Chicago, he had been paying his peculiar sort of court to her—peculiar, particularly, in that he never obtruded himself when anyone else offered and he never failed to admit anything against himself.
“It was fine of you, Hubert,” she said, “to come right for me when the fight began.”
“I thought we were sinking; that’s how much sense I had,” he returned. “Gerry, now, knew just what to do.”