“My picture on it, mostly.”
“Oh; that’ll be all right! You’ll just have to have another picture taken in France and have them paste it on. I’ll tell ’em about it and see you through, of course.”
Accordingly Ruth went to her cabin and, after bolting the door against even Milicent Wetherell, she got out her passport which really had been wet by the sea but not soaked so badly that the picture was useless. Indeed, the picture was still plain enough so that a French intelligence officer might make out that it was not Ruth. So she soaked it again in water until that danger was past; then she dried it and took it with her to present at the port.
“I’ve told Agnes Ertyle all about your passport,” Gerry Hull said to her when she came on deck again, “so she’ll help you out if they put the women through first. They have to be awfully careful in France these days about spies, you see—especially now—spies from America.”
CHAPTER VIII
FRANCE
Fear—so Ruth was finding out—is a most complicated and perplexing sensation. What she had learned about fear, upon those infrequent occasions when causes of alarm approached that queer, humdrum, almost forgotten girl who used to work for Sam Hilton, had made it appear a simple emotion to bring about a rational reaction. One fear differed from another chiefly in degrees of effect; you might be a little afraid of something—like having your skirt caught in an elevator door when the car started up too crowded; having a rough looking man suddenly accost you when you were hurrying back to Ontario Street late in a winter evening, caused more alarm; and there were other occurrences which had frightened still more. The amount of fear you felt—and the force of the corresponding reaction—seemed generally proportional to the danger threatening you; but now Ruth had been through an adventure—battle—which had menaced her life to a far greater degree than any previous experience; and she had not been afraid, in the old sense of fear. Emotions had tortured her—emotions far more violent and furious than ever she had suffered; but fear for her life had not been chief among them. Committed to battle, as she had been by the mere fact of her presence aboard the Ribot, the instant realization that nothing she could do could save her had amazingly freed her from fear.
Fear, then, was not made up just of a dread of death. Now that the Ribot was safely in from the Bay of Biscay, had passed the Phare de Cordouan and was running down the broad, flat estuary of the Gironde river to Bordeaux, securely situated sixty long miles inland, Ruth was in no danger of death at all. If at that city, whose roofs and chimneys were just coming into sight, the French examiners found out how she had obtained her passport, how she had duped and tricked people to aid her in arriving here, and if they arrested her, therefore, upon the charge of being a German spy, they would be making her life safe; her punishment probably would not go beyond imprisonment for the duration of the war; it would prevent her wild plan of going into Germany, where court-martials did not simply imprison spies. Yet Ruth was afraid this morning as she had never been before; far, far more afraid than when she had been in battle.
That meant, obviously, that she was far more afraid of failing to do that which she was determined upon than she was afraid of dying. Less than three weeks earlier, when Ruth Alden was drawing up quit-claims and deeds for Sam Hilton in Chicago, such a recognition of the fact in regard to oneself would have seemed—even if spoken only to self—ostentatious and theatrical; but now to make the fate of yourself nothing, the performing of your part in the great scheme everything, was the simple and accepted code of almost everyone about her.
Exactly when Ruth had begun to accept this code for herself, she did not know. Once or twice in her twenty-two years she had encountered emergencies when one person or two—or very, very few, at most—acted without regard to consequence to themselves; but always they did this for the saving of more serious catastrophe to a greater number of persons who were present; so that even upon those occasions the highest purpose was plain self-preservation. But now Ruth had become a member of a society not chiefly charged with preserving itself—whose spirit, indeed, was disregard of self. She had come from a society in which the discovery that a certain project was not “safe” and would lead one to certain destruction was enough to immediately end that project, into a hemisphere where the certainty of death made no difference and was simply not to be discussed.
It was not from fear of punishment, therefore, that Ruth’s heart was fluttering as the Ribot drew up to the docks at Bordeaux; it was from terror at thought of no longer being permitted to be one of such a company as that upon this ship.