The destroyers of the United States Navy stood by like spectators on the bleachers, and when the submarine had quite finished the supply of ships the obliging destroyers picked up the fragments in the open boats and brought them ashore. And the U-53 went on unchecked, after one of the most astounding spectacles in the history of the sea.
Charity Coe and other women waited on the docks till midnight arranging refuge for more than two hundred victims. It was a novel method for getting into Newport mansions. Even Kedzie took in an elderly couple. She tried to get a few young men, but they were all taken.
The next morning there was a panic in Wall Street and nearly two million shares were flung overboard, with a loss of five hundred million dollars in market values. Marine insurance-rates rose from a hundred to five hundred per cent. and it seemed that our ocean trade would be driven from the free seas. But everything had been done according to the approved etiquette for U-boats, and there was not even an official protest.
Once more the Germans announced that they had wrecked the British naval supremacy, as in the battle of Jutland, after which glorious victory the German fleet appeared no more in the North Sea.
Nor was there any check in the throngs of merchant-vessels shuttling the ocean for the Allies. And that disgusted the Germans. Their promises to Mr. Wilson irked them. They lusted again for their old policy of “ruthlessness”; “Schrecklichkeit” joined “Gott strafe” in familiar speech, and Germany added America to her “Hymn of Hate.” Strange, that among all the warring peoples the one nation that went to battle with the most fervent religious spirit, even putting “Gott mit uns” on the uniforms of its soldiers, that nation contributed to the slang of the day no nobler phrases than “Schrecklichkeit” and “strafe” and the equivalents of “scrap of paper” and “Hymn of Hate.”
All this meant little to Kedzie except that Jakie Vanderveer, who had been her devoted squire for some time, was caught and ruined in the market slump. Otherwise he might have ruined Kedzie, for he had been dazzling her more and more with his lavish courtship. When he lost his money he left Newport and Kedzie never knew how narrow an escape she had. She only knew that she did not make the money he promised to make for her. She said that war was terrible.
A pious soul would have credited Providence with the rescue. But Providence had other plans. One of the victims of the U-53 was a young English aviator, the Marquess of Strathdene. If the U-53 had not sunk the ship that carried him Kedzie would have had an exceedingly different future.
Strathdene had been a spendthrift, a libertine, and a loafer till the war shook England. He had been well shaken, too, and unsuspected emotions were aroused. He had learned to fly and insulted the law of gravity with the same impudence he had shown for the laws of morality.
In due time he was joined to an air squadron. He risked his life every moment he was aloft, but the danger became a negligible thing in the thrill of the liveliest form of big-game hunting thus far known to man. In mid-sky he stalked his prey and was stalked by it; he chased German Taubes or was chased by them into clouds and out of them, up hill and down dale in ether-land amid the showers from below of the raining aircraft guns. Strathdene knew how to dodge and duck, turn somersaults, volplane, spiral, coast downward on an invisible toboggan-slide, or climb into heaven on an airy stair.
The sky was full of such flocks; the gallant American gentlemen who made up the Escadrille Lafayette went clouding with him, and Mr. Robert Lorraine, the excellent actor, and Mr. Vernon Castle, the amiable revolutionist of the dance, and many and many another eagle heart. Strathdene scouted valuably during the first battle of the Somme, his companion working the gun or the camera or the bomb-dropping lever as the need might be.