Ruth of the U. S. A. (McClurg)/Chapter 12
THE French peasants, who had been fired upon and had gained the protection of the slope, gathered about them.
"Beyond, also, the road is open to fire," Gerry informed them in French; and he directed them to proceed in little groups and by the fields away from the road.
"Monsieur le Lieutenant is wounded," an old man observed solicitously.
"Barely at all," Gerry denied; but swayed as he said so.
"Your car must go by the road," Gerry said to Ruth. "You go with them in the fields; I will take it on for a bit."
He meant to relieve her for the run over the exposed stretch. He tried to step up to the driver's seat; but his leg would not bear his weight and he fell backward and would have gone to the ground had Ruth not caught him.
"That's simply a knee twist from being bent under my ship," he asserted. "That shrap hardly scratched me," he referred to the red spot on his side where her fingers were feeling.
"Help me lift Monsieur le Lieutenant," Ruth bid the old peasant. Gerry tried again to climb alone; but his leg had quite given away. As they lifted, he pulled himself into the seat and took the wheel.
"You need both feet for the pedals," Ruth reminded him, simply; and he moved over without further protest and let her drive. The car was a covered Ford truck and Gerry, gazing back, saw an old French woman, a child, and two men, who had been injured, lying upon the bedding over the floor. The car was coming to the section of road which the German gunner had registered and Gerry turned about and watched Ruth while she drove.
He had never seen her doing anything like this before; and the sight of her small, white hands, so steady and firm on the wheel, her little, slender, booted feet upon the pedals sent a thrill tingling through him. He was a little dizzy for a moment and he closed his eyes, clutching to the side of his seat. A shell smashed twenty yards before them; parts of it hit the car. The shock of it startled Gerry up; but the girl beside him was not hit nor frightened. Swiftly she swerved the car to dodge the hole in the road where the gravel was still slipping and settling; the next shell was behind and while they fled now, the shells all were behind and farther and farther back till they ceased.
Ruth halted her car and waited for her charges to gather on the road; all of them appeared; none of them had been hurt. The damage done by the German fire totaled a front wheel much bent and the radiator ruined.
"We'll have to run hot," Ruth said. "We can get on, if we go slowly."
Gerry attempted to get down to walk; but his twisted left knee would not bear him at all. His idea had been to return at once, somehow, to the battle, as soon as this girl who had come to him was in some sort of safety. He had planned wildly, to attempt to join the English fighting to the south of Mirevaux. He couldn't do that now; but, with strength enough in his leg to move a rudder bar, he could fly and fight again as soon as he could procure another "ship." The only way he could reach the rear and another airplane was to continue with these refugees and with this girl.
It was strange that when he had been fighting and had been far from her, he had felt more strongly about her than he did now—more about her as a girl, that was, in relation to him as a man. He was close beside her with her body swaying against his when the car careened in the pits and ruts of the road. He kept observing her—the play of color in her smooth skin in the flush of her excitement, the steady, blue eyes alert upon the road, her full, red little lips pressing tight together after speaking with him and drawing tiny lines of strain at the corners of her mouth. He noticed pretty things about her which he had not before the trimness of her ankles even under her heavy boots, the ease with which that slender, wellformed little body exerted its strength, the way her hair at her temples went into ringlets when effort and anxiety moistened her forehead. But he noticed these as though to remember them later; his thought seemed to store them and save them for feeling at another time; he was almost aware of going through an experience with her which could affect him, fully, only afterwards. In the same manner that subconsciously he had thought about her when all his conscious thought was absorbed in flying and fighting, now his eyes only observed her; his soul was blent in the battle.
He and she, and the rest, were going back—back, kilometer after kilometer and yet encountering no strong force of English or French in position to hold that land; and he knew that if that depth of front was being abandoned as far away to the right and as far away to the left as he could see, resistance must have broken down over a much greater front. Indeed, Gerry had himself observed from his airplane something of the length of the line where the allies were retreating; but he had not been able, when in the air, and passing in a few seconds over a kilometer, to feel the disaster as now he felt it in the swaying seat of the half-wrecked truck creeping along at the head of a column of refugees. This land which the Germans were again overrunning in a day was the strip which the English had freed the year before only through the long, murderous months of the "blood baths" of the Somme.
"Do you remember an English officer on the Ribot," Ruth was asking of him, "whom I called '1582?'"
"He's about here?" Gerry inquired.
"No; but several of his sort are—one particularly, a Lieutenant Haddon-Staples; I called him, to myself, '1583.'"
"What do you think of his sort now?" Gerry asked, confidently.
Ruth's eyes filled suddenly so that she had to raise a hand from the driving-wheel to dash away the wetness which blurred the road.
"They're the most wonderful sportsmen in the world!" Ruth said. "They don't care about odds against them; or at least they don't complain. Oh, that's not the word; complaint is about as far from their attitude as anything you can think of."
"I know," Gerry said.
"They don't even—criticize. They just accept the odds, whatever they are; and go in with all of themselves as though they had a chance to hold and win and come out alive! They know they haven't; but you'd never guess it from them; and there's none of that 'We who are about to die salute you' idea in them either. They're sportsmen and gentlemen!"
"I know how they make you feel," Gerry said, watching her keenly again; the road thereabouts was bad and she couldn't even glance around to him. "Rather, you know now how they made me feel, I think."
She made no reply; so he went on. "If they'd say things out to us; if they had criticized us and damned us and told us we were lying down behind them, it wouldn't be so rotten hard to see them. But they don't. They just go in as you say; they feel they've a fight on which is their fight and they're going to fight it whether anyone else thinks it worth while to fight it or not or whether they have any chance for winning."
Ruth winked swiftly again to clear her eyes; and Gerry, watching her, wondered what particular experience his general praise had called up. He did not ask; but she told him.
"'1583' was just that sort of man, Gerry," she said, using his name for the first time as simply as he had spoken hers when she had crouched behind the shield of his engine with him.
"He's killed?" Gerry asked.
"I don't know; but it's certain—yes, he's killed," she replied.
"You—cared for him, Cynthia?"
"He was about here—I mean about Mirevaux—as long as I've been. That was only two weeks—'a fortnight,' as he'd say in his funny, English way—but now it seems"
"I know," Gerry said.
"He was with his battalion which was lying in reserve. He and some of the others didn't have a lot to do evenings so they'd drop in pretty often at the cottage Mrs. Mayhew and I had where there was one of those little, portable organs with three octaves and we'd play their songs sometimes and ours—like Good King Wenceslaus and Clementine."
"Did you play?" Gerry interrupted.
"Sometimes; and sometimes he would; and we'd all sing,
In the cabin, in the cañon,
Excavating for a mine;
Dwelt a miner, forty-niner—
All the English liked that sort best with Wait for the Wagon, you know."
"Yes."
It was a minute or two before she continued; she was speaking of evenings none of them older than two weeks and one of them only the night before last; but they formed part of an experience irrevocable now and of an epoch past.
"They knew pretty well what was going to happen to them—that they would have to be thrown in some day, without a chance. But they talked about coming to America after the war—the mining camps of Nevada and California, the Grand Cañon, Niagara Falls, and Mammoth Cave appealed to them, particularly. I asked '1583' once—I knew him best," Ruth said; and when she repeated the nickname for him it was with the wistful fondness with which only such a name may be said, "if he didn't want to go back home to England and Suffolkshire after the war. He said, I'm eager to stay a bit with the pater and the mater, naturally.'" She was imitating his voice; and Gerry saw that it made her cry; but she went on "'But I can't stay there, you know.'
"I asked, why.
"'My friends,' he said. 'I've not one now. You fancy you're attached to a place; but you find, you know, you've cared for more than that.' Then he changed the subject the way the English always do when you come to something they feel. He was with me the evening this battle began; and he knew what was coming. I didn't see him again till this morning—early this morning," she repeated as though unable to believe the shortness of the time. "He rode over to warn us; and then, a little later when I was getting my first party of people out of Mirevaux, I passed him with some more men just like him going to the firing. He knew he was going to be killed for he'd told us the Germans had broken through; and we couldn't hold them. But he wasn't thinking about that when he saw me. He just watched me as I was working 'to get my people in order and, as he rode past, he called out, 'Good old America!' That to me—one girl getting peasants out of a village while he and his handful of soldiers were going—there!" Ruth gestured back toward the battle. "Oh, I wanted to be a million men for him for them! 'Good old America!' he said. I saw him, or men whom I think he was with, holding a hill a couple of miles east an hour later; they were one to ten or one to twenty; I don't know what the odds were against them; but they stayed on top of that hill. I tell you saw them—stay on top of that hill."
"I know," Gerry said. "I've seen them stay on top of a hill. I know how it is to want to be, for them, a million men!"
Ruth's hands on the steering-wheel went bloodless from pressure. "Our million is coming; thank God, it's coming! And I believe—I must believe that somehow it still is right and best that we couldn't come before." She gazed back over the land where the Germans were advancing; and where the English soldiers were "staying."
"How could this happen, this break-through?" she asked. "It wasn't just superior numbers; they've had that and, at other times, we've had superiority before; but no one ever advanced like this."
"They showed an entirely new attack," Gerry said. "New infantry formation; new arms—infantry cannon; then there was the mist. And our intelligence people must have fallen down, too, while theirs gave them everything they wanted. We didn't know at all what they were going to do, but they must have known everything about our strength, or lack of strength, here."
He saw her hands whiten again with their grasp of the wheel and the little lines deepen under her tight-drawn lips. She had stiffened as though he had accused her; and while he was wondering why, she glanced up at him.
"Then part of this—" her gaze had gone again to the fields being abandoned—"is my fault, Gerry."
That was all she said; but instantly he thought of her accusation of De Trevenac and what she had told him in the little parlor on the Rue des Saints Pères; and he was so certain that she was thinking of it also that he asked:
"You mean you didn't tell me all you knew about De Trevenac?"
"No; I told you everything I knew! Oh, I wouldn't have held back any of that. I mean, I haven't done all I might; you see, I never imagined anything like this could happen."
"What might you have done, Cynthia?" he asked. He had said to her that time in the parlor on the Rue des Saints Pères that she had come to do more than mere relief work; but he had not consistently thought of her as engaged in that more daring work against which he had warned her.
"I got so wrapt up in the work at Mirevaux," she said, avoiding direct answer. "I thought it was all right to let myself just do that for a while."
"Whereas?" he challenged.
She leaned forward and turned the ignition switch, stopping the motor which had been laboring and grinding grievously. "It must cool off," she said, leaping down upon the ground. She went about to the back of the truck and Gerry heard her speaking in French to the passengers behind him.
"Grand'mère Bergues," she said when she returned beside Gerry, "lost for a moment her twig of the tree. I had to find it for her."
"Her twig of what tree?" Gerry asked.
"I forgot you didn't know," and Ruth told him of Grand'mère Bergues' tree. "When I convinced her at last," Ruth added, "that the Boche had broken through and were coming again, she had a stroke; but even so she would not let us carry her until I had brought her a twig of the tree—a twig which was green, and budding, and had sap, though last year the Boche called that tree destroyed. That now must be her triumph."
Ruth restarted the motor and, when they proceeded, Gerry sat without inquiring again of what dangerous, indefinite business this girl was going to do. While he watched her driving, a queer, pulling sensation pulsed in his breast; it associated itself with a vision of a young Englishman, who now undoubtedly was dead, standing behind this girl while she played a little organ with three octaves and they all sang. This was not jealousy, exactly; it was simply recognition of a sort of fellowship which she could share which he would have liked to have discovered himself. It suggested 'not something more than he had had with Agnes Ertyle; but something quite different and which he liked. He tried to imagine Agnes playing, and singing Clementine, and Wait for the Wagon; and—he couldn't. He tried to imagine her crying because someone had called to her, "Good old England"; and he couldn't. Agnes cried over some things—children who were brought to her and badly wounded boys who died. But Agnes could have told him all that Cynthia had without any emotion at all. Agnes would have told it quite differently, of course.
They were coming in sight of a flying field. "Let me off here, please," Gerry asked when they were opposite it.
When Ruth stopped the car Gerry called for one of the old Frenchmen to give him a shoulder and he stepped down. "You don't need much leg muscle to fly," he assured Ruth when she observed him anxiously. "If I can't steal a ship over there, at least they'll take care of me." He hesitated, looking up at her, unable simply to thank her for what she had done.
"Where are you going?" he asked. During their drive they had discussed various destinations for their party; but could decide upon none. The final halting place must depend upon the military situation, and nothing was more unsettled than that. But Gerry was not referring now to the halting place of the whole party; he knew that during the last minutes she had formed determinations which would take her as soon as possible to her other tasks; and she accepted that in her answer.
"I'm going to Montdidier—unless it seems better to make for Amiens; then to Paris as soon as I can."
"I see." He gazed away and up in the air where machines with the tri-color circle of the allies were flying; and hastily he offered Ruth his hand. "Good-bye, Cynthia," he said.
"Good-bye, Gerry."
"Cynthia, when you're in Paris you'll stay there?"
"I don't know."
"If you do, where'll you be?"
"Milicent's kept our room in the pension on the Rue des Saints Pères. I'll be with her again, I think."
"All right! Look out for yourself!"
"You try to, too!"
She kept the car standing a few seconds longer watching him while, with his arm about the old man's shoulder, he hobbled toward the flying field. Several minutes later, when she was far down the road, she gazed back, and saw a combat biplane rise from the field with what seemed to be particular impatience, and she imagined that he was piloting that machine. She had passed now from the zone of the broken front, where all the effort was to throw men—any number and any sort of men—across the path of the victorious German advance to the region of retreat, where every sinew and every sense was strained in the attempt to get men, and guns, and supplies out of the area of envelopment by the enemy. And dreadful and appalling as it had been to witness men—too few men and unsupported—moving forward to immolate themselves in hopeless effort to stay that German advance, yet it had not been so terrible to Ruth as this sight and sound of retreat. For the sound—the beat of feet upon the road, the ceaseless tramp of retreating men, the rumble of guns and combat trains going back, then the beat, beat, beat of the retreat—continued into the darkness, when Ruth no longer could see the road from the little house where she rested. All through the night it continued till it seemed to Ruth, not something human, but a cataclysm of nature flowing before a more mighty catastrophe which no one and nothing could stop.
Whenever she awoke she heard it; and through the dreams which harassed the heavy periods of her stupor of exhaustion which served that night for sleep, that beat of the feet throbbed and throbbed.
Ruth reached Montdidier at noon of the next day. It was at Montdidier, accordingly, that she first learned the true magnitude of the disaster and first heard openly spoken what had been said only in part before; and that was that the fate of France and of the allied cause depended now upon the Americans. If they could not quickly arrive in great force and if, having arrived, they proved unable to fight on even terms with the Germans, all was lost. France would not yet give up, in any case; England would hold on; but, without America, they were beaten.
And during that day, and through the next, and the next, while Ruth was unable to leave Montdidier, the disaster grew until it was known that the British Fifth Army, as an organized force, had ceased to exist and the Germans, in this single great stroke, had advanced thirty-five miles and claimed the capture of thirteen hundred guns and ninety thousand men.
On Monday, as the Germans yet advanced and moved on Montdidier, Ruth was in a column of refugees again; she was obliged to abandon her determined task for the duty of the moment offered to her hands. She got to Compiègne and there was delayed. Roye, Noyon, Montdidier all now were taken; and the wounded from that southern flank of the salient which thrust west toward Amiens were coming back upon Compiègne; and no man yet could say that the disaster was halted.
But Foch had come to the command.
Ruth had tried to learn from men who had returned from the region where she had left Gerry Hull, what his fate might have been. She knew that he had been flying and fighting again, for she read in one of the bulletins which was being issued, that he had been cited in the orders of the day for Monday; but she learned nothing at all about him after that until the day after the announcement that all allied armies were to be under the supreme command of General Foch. It was Friday, eight days after that first Thursday morning of mist, and surprise, and catastrophe; and still the Germans fought their way forward; but for two days now the French had arrived, and were present in force from Noyon to Moreuil, and for two days the gap between the British and the French, which the German break-through had opened, had been closed.
Gerry upon that day was detailed with a squadron whose airdrome had been moved beyond Ribecourt; he had been flying daily, and had fought an engagement that morning, and after returning from his afternoon reconnaissance over Noyon he had been ordered to rest, as the situation was becoming sufficiently stabilized to end the long strain of his too constant flights. Accordingly, he left late in the afternoon for Compiègne to look for the field hospital where Agnes Ertyle would be at work. The original site of her tents had been far within the zone which the Germans had retaken; and Gerry had heard that she had done wonders during the moving of the wounded.
He found her on duty, as he knew she would be; she was a trifle thinner than before, perhaps; her cool, firm hand clasped his just a bit tensely; her calm, observant eyes were slightly brighter; but she was in complete control of herself, as she always was, quite unconfused—even when two nurses came at the same time for emergency directions—and quite efficient.
After a while she was able to give him a little time alone; and they sat in a tent and talked. Gerry had not seen her or heard from her since the beginning of the battle, and he found her almost overwhelmed with the completeness of the British defeat and the destruction of the Fifth Army. She herself knew and her father, who was dead, had been a close friend of the commanding officers who were held responsible for the disaster; and together with the shock of the defeat, went sympathy for them. They were being removed; and even the English commander-in-chief no longer had supreme command of his own men.
"It's the greatest thing the allies have yet done—one command," Gerry said. "We ought to have had it long ago; if we had, the Boche never would have done what they just have. When you had your own army and your own command, and the French had theirs, you each kept your own reserve; and, of course, Ludendorf knew it. Haig expected an attack upon his part of the front, so he had to keep his reserve to himself on his part of the line to be ready for it; the French looked for an attack on their sectors, so they kept their reserves to themselves; so wherever Ludendorf struck with all his reserves, he knew he'd meet only half of ours and that it would take five days—as it did—for the other half to come up. Now one commander-in-chief, like Foch, can stop all that."
"I can believe it was necessary and, therefore, best," Lady Agnes said. "Yet I can't stop being sorry—not merely for our general officers, but for our men, too. Poor chaps who come to me; they've fought so finely for England; and now the Boche are boasting they've whipped them and beaten England. They everyone of them are so eager to get well, and go back, and have at them again, and rather show the Boche that they've not—rather show them that England will have them! Now we'll not be under our own command; yet we'll be fighting just the same for England; the Boche shall find that England will have them!"
"You'll have them!" Gerry assured. "And far quicker than you could have before."
Lady Agnes observed him, a little puzzled. "You used 'we' when you spoke of us," she said gently.
Gerry flushed. "I was in your army then," he replied.
"You're fighting with us now—wonderfully, Gerry."
"Yes; but technically you see, Agnes, I'm with my own forces."
He said "my own" with a tone of distinction which surprised himself. His own forces, except for a few comrade pilots, and for those engineers who had grabbed rifles, and got into this battle, and except for those girls—those "awfully good" girls of Picardy—still were only in training in France or holding down quiet sectors in Lorraine. But Gerry had been in one of those sectors which had not been so noted for its tranquillity after "his own" forces had arrived.
However, he was not thinking of those forces just then; he was recalling an American girl who had come to him across open ground in the sunlight and under machine-gun fire. For a moment he visualized her as she stumbled and rolled forward, when he thought she was hit; then he saw her close beside him with the sun on her glorious hair and her eyes all anxious for him. Words of hers came to him when Lady Agnes was speaking again her regret that the English could not have kept their own command.
"Oh, I don't know how to say it!" that American girl's words repeated themselves to Gerry; she was in a yellow dress now, with bare arms and neck, and quite warm and flushed with her intentness to explain to him something he could not understand at all. "But at first France was fighting as France and for France against Germany; and England, for England, was doing the same. And America couldn't do that—I mean fight for America. She couldn't join with allies who were fighting for themselves, or even for each other. The side of the allies had to become more than that before we could go in; and it is and we're in!"
Gerry was understanding that better, now. This unification of the command, and the yielding of the British was their greatest earnest of that change which Cynthia Gail had felt before, and gloried in, and which Agnes Ertyle accepted but yet deplored.
More wounded came streaming back from the battle and Lady Agnes returned to duty immediately. "That Miss Gail, who was on the Ribot with us, was in Compiègne the other day," Agnes told him when he was saying good-bye. "She's doing marvels in sorting out refugees, I hear."
Gerry had been wondering often during the last days about what might have happened to Cynthia; and he had inquired of several people. But he had not thought that Lady Agnes might know.
"She was working at a relief headquarters on Rue Solférino, near the Place de l'Hôtel de Ville."
Gerry wandered into Compiègne, finding the Rue Solférino, which was the main street of the city, more crowded and congested than ever before. From the throng before the doors, Gerry quickly located the quarters near the Hôtel de Ville where Cynthia Gail had been working and, forcing a way in, he spied a yellow head bent over a little boy and he heard a gentle, sweet voice speaking, in newly learned French, interrogations about where the child last had seen his mother, whether he had aunt or uncle and so on. Gerry went farther in and made himself known; and when the girl looked up and saw him, an older American woman—Mrs. Mayhew—looked up, and she observed not only Gerry but the girl also.
"Hello," Ruth said. It was a poor word to encompass all she was feeling at that moment, which was, first, joy and relief that he was safe; next, that he had come there to seek her. But the word did, as it many, many times had done before; and he used the same to encompass what he felt. "Have you had anything to eat tonight?" he added after his greeting. He suspected not.
"I'll have supper later, thanks," Ruth said.
"You will not," Mrs. Mayhew put in. "You can come back after supper, if you must; but you go out now. Take her with you, Gerry."
Which was a command which Gerry obeyed. So they sat together at a little table in a café, much crowded, and very noisy, and where they supped in haste; for there was a great multitude to be served. But they were very light-hearted.
"You've heard the great news about our army?" Ruth asked.
"That we're going to be under the command of General Foch like the English?"
"Better than that," Ruth said. "General Pershing has offered all our forces to the French to use in any way they wish. He's offered to break up our brigades, or even our regiments and companies, and let the French and English brigade our regiments with them, or take our men as individuals into their ranks, or use us any way they want, which will help to win. They're not to think about us—our pride—at all. They're just to take us—in any way to help."
"No," said Gerry. "I hadn't heard that."
"It's just announced," Ruth told him. "I'd just heard. He did it under the instructions and with the approval of our government. I think—I think it's the finest, most unselfish offer a nation ever made! All we have in any way that's best for the cause!"
Gerry sat back while hot rills of prickling blood tingled to his temples. "I think so, too, Cynthia," he said. And again that evening words of hers, spoken long ago, seized him. "Oh, I don't know how or when it will appear; but I know that before long you will be prouder to be an American than you ever dreamed you could be!"
Part of that pride was coming to him, then, incredible as it would have seemed to him even a few days ago, when in the midst of disaster unparalleled and due to the tardiness of his country. For, though his country had not come in till so late, now it was offering itself in a spirit unknown in national relations before.
When they had finished their supper, he brought her back to her work and himself returned to his airdrome. The next day Ruth found a chance to journey to Paris.
For information—accurate, dependable word of German intentions and German preparations for the next attack—was the paramount essential now. This first assault at last was stopped; but only after tremendous catastrophe; and the Germans still possessed superiority in physical strength as great as before. And they owned, even more than before, confidence in themselves, while the allies' at least had been shaken. The Germans kept also, undoubtedly, the same powers of secrecy which had enabled them to launch their tremendous onslaught as a surprise to the allies, while they themselves accurately had reckoned the allied strength and dispositions.
Ruth did not hope, by herself, to change all that. The wild dreams of the girl who had taken up the bold enterprise offered her in Chicago, had become tempered by experience, which let her know the limits within which one person might work in this war; but the probability that she would be unable to do greatly only increased her will to do whatever she could.
Thus she returned to Paris to endeavor to encounter again the enemy agents who would send her through Switzerland into Germany. As she knew nothing of them, she must depend upon their seeking her; so she went at once to her old room in the pension upon the Rue des Saints Pères. Arriving late in the afternoon, she found Milicent home from work—a Milicent who put arms about her and cried over her in relief that she was safe. Then Milicent brought her a cablegram.
"This came while you were gone, dear. I opened it and tried to forward it to you."
Ruth went white and her heart halted with fear. Had something happened at home—to her mother or to her sisters?
"What is it?"
"Your brother's badly wounded. He's here in a hospital, Cynthia!"
"My brother!" Ruth cried. It had come to her as Cynthia Gail, of course. She had thought, when nearing the pension, that probably she would find an accumulation of mail to which, as Cynthia, she must reply. But she had been Cynthia so long now that she had almost ceased to fear an emergency. Her brother, of course, was Charles Gail, who had quarreled with his father and of whom nothing had been heard for four years.
Ruth took the message and learned that Charles had been with the Canadians since the start of the war; he had enlisted under an assumed name; but when wounded and brought to Paris, he had given his real name and asked that his parents be informed. The information had reached them; so his father had cabled Cynthia to try to see Charles before he died.
"I told Lieutenant Byrne about it," Milicent said to Ruth.
"Lieutenant Byrne?"
"Why, yes; wasn't that right? He called here for you last week; and several times since. He said he was engaged to you; why—isn't he?"
"Yes, he was. That's all right," Ruth said.
"So he's been about to see your brother."
"How is he? Charles, I mean, of course."
"He was still living yesterday."
"Lieutenant Byrne is still here?"
"As far as I know, he is."