Ruth of the U. S. A. (McClurg)/Chapter 15
RUTH had told that truth, perforce, to George Byrne with the result that he had condemned her; and, when meeting this condemnation, she had said that Gerry must know that she was loyal. But did she know that now?
Questions crowded upon her which, she knew, must come to him. She had betrayed De Trevenac; but it was a known principle of the German-spy organization that, at certain times and under certain circumstances, one agent would betray another. The Germans punished some of their spies in this way; in other cases, when a man was to be discarded who had ceased to be useful, another spy had been appointed to betray him for the advantage that the betrayal would bring to the informer.
Immediately after that betrayal, Ruth had gone to the precise districts concerning which the Germans had desired information preceding and during their attack and where results proved that spies must have been numerous and unsuspected. Gerry had commented upon this to Ruth during their retreat from Mirevaux; and when she replied, he had realized again that she was not in France doing "just relief work." He had asked what else she was doing; she had evaded answer. Would he believe her answer now or only that part of it which George Byrne had believed?
She arose and went to the door and saw that it was firmly closed.
"Do you remember, Gerry," she asked when she returned "that first time we talked together in Mrs. Corliss' conservatory, that I said I woke up that morning trying to imagine myself knowing you—without the slightest hope that I ever could?"
"I remember you said something like that, Cynthia."
"Did you ever wonder how that might be? I mean that I should have been invited to Mrs. Corliss' and that same morning not imagine that I could meet you?"
"I suppose I thought Mrs. Corliss hadn't called you till late," Gerry said.
"She never called me, myself, at all. A girl—a strange girl, whom I had never seen—a girl named Cynthia Gail had been asked. But she had died before that day; so I came in her place."
Gerry drew a little nearer intently. "Because your names were the same; you were related to her?"
"No; I wasn't related to her at all; and our names were entirely different."
"But you"
"Took her name, yes, I did."
"And her passport?" He was thinking now, Ruth knew, of her ruined passport and how he had advised her about having a new picture put on it and how it had been, not by her own credentials but by his requesting Agnes Ertyle to vouch for her, that she had been accepted in France.
"Yes; I took her passport and her identity—everything she had and was, Gerry. I became on noon of that day Cynthia Gail. That forenoon, I was Ruth Alden working for a real estate firm named Hilton Brothers in Chicago for twenty-five dollars a week. I wanted to tell you that—oh I wanted so much to tell you all about myself that afternoon when you asked how I happened to be at Mrs. Corliss' and could think and say such different things from the other people there."
"Why didn't you?"
She confused him, at first, as she had George Byrne; and she made Gerry suspicious, too, but with an impersonal challenge and distrust quite distinct from what Byrne's had been. The real Cynthia Gail, of course, had meant nothing to Gerry; he had known her only as Ruth had come to him. What he was concerned for was the cause for which and in which he had lived for four years—the cause which was protected and secured by passports and credentials and authentic identities and which was threatened by those who forged passports and appeared in the allied lines under names other than their own.
"I dared trust no one then—you almost last of all."
"With what?"
"The great plan which I dreamed I might carry out alone—a plan of going into Germany, Gerry, as a spy for America!"
"Ah! So that's the idea in Switzerland!"
"Yes. The chance came to me that morning within a few minutes after I spoke to you in the motor car on the street. You remember that?"
"Of course."
"I was almost crazy to get into the war; and I couldn't find any way; then . . ."
She told him, much as she had told Byrne, about the German who had played the beggar and who had stopped her; of the disclosures in her room; of her going to the hotel and finding Hubert waiting; and then, after she had gone to Mrs. Corliss' and met Gerry, how the German woman had ordered her to take the Ribot.
"The rest about me, I guess you know now, Gerry."
He made no answer as he had made no challenge except a question or two to bring out some point more clearly. For a while, as she made her confession, he had remained seated opposite her and gazing at her with increasing confusion and distress; then, unable to remain quiet, he had leaped to his feet.
"Go on," he had bid when she halted. "I'm listening." And she knew that he was not only listening but feeling too as he paced to and fro before her on the other side of the lamp staring down at the floor for long seconds, glancing at her, then staring away again.
"Hush!" he had warned her once when someone passed the door; she had waited and he had stood listening for the step to die away.
"All right now," he had told her.
That was all that he had said; but his tone had told of fear of anyone else hearing what she was confessing to him; and then there beat back upon him realization that the chief threat to her must be from himself.
"I knew you were up to something, Ruth," he murmured under his breath. "Ruth," he repeated her name, "Ruth Alden! That fits you better somehow; and what you've been doing fits you better, too. But—" he realized suddenly that this was acknowledging belief in her—belief beyond his right to have faith in this girl who once on the boat had tried to save his life and who, upon the battle field, had saved him and at frightful risk to herself. But he was not thinking chiefly of that; he was thinking of their intimacies from the first and particularly of that day when, after she had saved him from the wreck of his machine, they had driven away from the battle together.
"Only two things have happened to me since I went on board the Ribot which you don't know all about," she was adding, "and which had any connection with the secret I was keeping from you. One was my meeting with De Trevenac. He stopped me on the street, supposing I was a German agent. He gave me the orders which I told you he gave to someone else."
"I was supposing," Gerry replied, "that the entire truth about De Trevenac was something like that."
"You know the entire truth about him now," Ruth said. "What I told you before I specifically said was not the entire truth."
Gerry winced a little as he turned toward her. "Don't think I'm holding that against you—if you're Ruth Alden, as you say. Only if you're German"
"German!" Ruth refused the word with a gasp. "Gerry, you can't believe that."
"What was the other episode?" he asked quickly; and now she told him about George Byrne; of her attempt to continue to deceive him; of his mistaking her for his love; then his discovery of the truth and their talk in the ruined house; of Byrne's accusation and arrest of her; of the irruption of the German and his attack; his repetition of the order to her to go to Switzerland; and of her waiting since.
"I told him when he accused me and I could not make him believe, that you would know about me, Gerry!" she cried. "I thought everything would be all right if only I could get you! And oh—oh I've wanted you to come ever since!"
She did not mean to say that, he saw; it was not possible that this cry was planned and practiced for effect. It burst so unbidden, so unguarded from her breast; and seized upon him like her hand—her small, soft, strong little hand—closing upon his heart. It told to him a thousand times better than all the words she had just said, of her loneliness and fears and dreads fought out all by herself in her wild, solitary, desperate adventure. And Gerry, gazing down at her, did not ask himself again whether he believed. Instead he saw her once more as first he had seen her at Mrs. Corliss', and his heart compressed as never it had before as he thought of her, a little office girl making twenty-five dollars a week, coming to that big, rich house not knowing who or what she would meet there and standing up so singly and alone for her country and her faith; he saw her again as she was on the Ribot, surrounded by new terrors and with perils to her increasing day by day and playing her part so well; and now passions and sensations which he had fought and had tried to put off, overwhelmed him again. He felt her, wet and small with all her clothing clinging to her as he had taken her from a sailor's arms and she, looking up at him, had tried so bravely and defiantly to deny what her cries had just confessed to all the ship—that she was his; she had gone into the sea for him. He saw and heard and felt her hands upon him again as he lay helpless under the wreck of his airplane and she worked beside him, coolly and well, though machine-gun bullets were striking all about her; and she had freed him. The sensation of their ride together returned while he had been almost helpless in the seat of the truck watching her drive and listening while she talked to him of another man whom she had liked—the English officer, who had been killed, "1583."
As Gerry had envied that other man his comradeship with this girl, now jealousy rose for the man who, for the wanton moments of his tragic mistake, had possessed himself of her. She had not wished it; she had submitted to his arms, to his kisses only perforce. She had said, indeed, that she had not quite succeeded in submitting; and Gerry found himself rejoicing in that. But another man had held her; another had kissed her in full passion; and Gerry was dazed to find now how he felt at that.
He had known that she had been his almost from the first; but he had not known that he had wanted her his until he had had to think of her as having been someone else's.
He gazed down at her now, little, sweet, more beautiful than she had ever seemed to him before, and alone in danger; and his arms hungered to hold her; his face burned with blood running hot to press warm lips against hers. He wanted to feel with her all that any other man had felt; and she—she would not put him off. But instead, he had to judge her. So he stood away, his hands behind his back, one hand locked tight on the other wrist.
"Well," he said, "I'm here; what do you want me to do?"
"You'll do it for me, Gerry?"
"What?"
"Help me to Switzerland."
"Still as Cynthia Gail, of course."
"Yes."
"Then you turn into—whom?"
"The German girl whom they will take into Germany."
"I suppose so. But who is she? Where does she come from? What is her name?"
"I don't know."
"What?"
"She came from Chicago, I suppose."
"You suppose; and you don't know even her name and intend to try to be her!"
"It's possible, Gerry; oh it's possible, truly. You see I don't believe the Germans here in Paris, or those who'll meet me in Switzerland, know who I'm supposed to be."
"What do you think they'll know?"
"That the girl who's here going under the name of Cynthia Gail, and doing the work I'm doing, is really one of themselves and that she'll appear in Lucerne. Those are the essentials; and so far as I've been able to observe the German-spy system—and you see I've been a part of it for a while"
"Yes; I see."
"—it seems pretty well reduced to communicating just essentials. Of course I've prepared a German-American name and identity for myself. If they really know anything in Germany about the girl whom their Chicago people sent here, they'll have me; but if they don't, I'll get on. That's the part I've really been preparing myself for all these months, Gerry; just being Cynthia Gail here was—nothing."
He felt himself jerk and recoil at that. Had she been playing a part with him all this time as well as to others; had this being his been only a rôle which she had acted?
"I see," he said to her curtly.
"Oh, not nothing to me, Gerry, in the things I've had to do when I wrote Cynthia's mother and father and when I had to write George Byrne and when I've been seeing her brother. I meant that deceiving Hubert and his aunt and her friends here and the rest and you, Gerry, was—" she did not finish.
"Quite simple," he completed for her with relief. So the deception with him had not been hard because, in what would have been hard, she had not deceived him. "Where's Hubert?" Gerry questioned now.
"I don't know. I don't think he's in Paris, now."
"You haven't heard from him recently?"
"He sent me several postals when I was at Mirevaux; I've not heard from him since."
"Then he knows nothing whatever about this?"
"He doesn't know that George Byrne found me, Gerry; but he knows I'm not Cynthia Gail."
"Ah! So you told him some time ago, did you?" Jealousy of Hubert now leaped in him; Hubert had known of her what he could not know.
"I didn't tell him; or I didn't mean to, Gerry," Ruth explained. "He knew about me—that is, about Cynthia Gail, of course—and he asked me questions on the train coming here from Bordeaux which I had to answer and answered wrongly."
"Oh; he caught you, then; he told you so!"
"He caught me, Gerry; but he didn't tell me so," Ruth corrected. "I didn't know at all that I'd given him answers which he knew were false until I found out some family facts from Charles Gail here the other day. Hubert must have known I wasn't Cynthia, but"
"What?"
"I guess he trusted to me, myself, that I could not be against our cause."
She had not attempted to make a rebuke of that reply; but Gerry felt it.
"Hub hadn't been put in my position, Ruth," he defended himself. "He hadn't been made responsible for you—in France."
"I think that he felt himself wholly responsible for me, Gerry," Ruth replied, coloring warmly as she thought of the complete loyalty of her strange friend. "Only he felt willing to accept the responsibility."
"But he did not know what you were doing!" Gerry protested. "He did not know that you were accused as a spy!"
"No," Ruth said; then, "So I am accused, Gerry?"
"Byrne accused you, you said. Inquiries certainly have been made; that puts another problem up to a man."
"Yes," she said. But he knew, as he gazed down at her, that she was thinking that Hubert would have trusted her just the same.
Was she manipulating him now, Gerry wondered? Was it possible that this girl had been playing with and utilizing him in what had just passed? Had George Byrne come and had all happened which she had told him or was it conceivable that she had contrived the whole story, or distorted it for effect upon him to anticipate accusation against her from other quarters? Had Hubert really found out about her; or was that too invented for the sake of flicking him into blind espousal of her plans? Flashes of such sort fought with every natural reaction to remembrance of his own close comradeship with her. Impossible; impossible! his impulses iterated to him. But his four years in France had taught him that the impossible in relations, in understandings, in faiths and associations between man and man and man and woman had ceased to exist. In this realization, at least, his situation was truly distinct from Hubert's. He believed in her; at least, he wished to tear his hands apart from their clench together behind him; he longed to extend them to her; he burned at thought of lifting her again and feeling her weight in his arms; and when he looked at her lips, it fired flame to his; yet
"I don't flatter myself that I can control the report which is being compiled about you, Ruth Alden," he said. "What I have said, and may say, will only be a part of the data which will determine what's to be done with you. For you realize, now, that one thing or the other's to be done."
"I realize that, Gerry," she said.
"You know that in one case they must arrest you and try you—by court-martial."
"Yes."
"I may—I don't know! God help you and me, Ruth Alden, I don't know yet—I may have to give part of the evidence which will accuse you! But though I do—and after I've done it—you must know that I'll be fighting for you, believing in spite of facts which I may be bound to witness, that you somehow are all right. I'll be trying to save you. I suppose that sounds mad to you; but it's true."
"It doesn't sound mad to me."
"In the other case," he went on, "in case I can decide honestly with myself that you cannot possibly be doing anything one jot to threaten our cause, and in case Byrne has died or does not speak, then probably you will be passed on to Switzerland and you'll try to go into Germany."
Ruth waited without reply.
"Do you see what you're putting up to me? You're making me either accuse you to the French and cause you to be imprisoned and tried; or, if I believe and let them believe that you're American, I must know that I'm sending you on into Germany to face a German firing squad. For they'll shoot you down, as they did Edith Cavell, when they catch you; and they'll catch you! You haven't a chance and you know it! So give it up—give it up, I say! Go tomorrow and cancel your request; go home or stay here and work only as you have been doing."
"And when I'm taking my train of refugees out of the villages in the next zone where they strike, know again that I might have done some bit to prevent it and—I was afraid? What can you think of me? Do you think I could have done all that I've told you I have just for the sake of working here in Paris? Do you think I could see death come to so many and care how it comes to me?"
"It's not just death," Gerry said, quivering as he gazed down at her. "If I could be sure they'd just kill you, it might be easier to leave your affairs to you. Who owns the right to refuse another his way to die? But you're a girl. At first when they may think you one of themselves, you may be safe; but then they'll discover you. A man—or what passes in Germany for a man—probably will find you out. He"
Gerry could say no more; for a moment his resistance to himself broke and his hands seized her. "They shan't!" he denied to her fiercely. "They shan't!"
Gently she raised a hand and, as she had upon that occasion before, she loosened the grasp of his fingers.
"You're not to think about what could happen to me; you must think only of what I may do, Gerry," she said.
He released her, as he had before; but this time he caught the fingers which opposed his; he bent quickly and, carrying her hand to his lips, he kissed it.
He drew back from her then; and she closed her other hand over the fingers which he had kissed and, so holding, she stood gazing up at him under lashes wet with tears.
"I'm going now," he said abruptly. "What I'll have to do about you—I don't know. I suppose you realize that since you've applied for permission for Switzerland, and since I've been questioned about you, probably you are under special observation. So whatever you think I may be doing about you, you'd better not attempt to move for the present."
"I don't expect to make any move at all—unless I receive my permission for Switzerland," Ruth said.
"All right." He turned away and looked for his in the corner where he had left it; then he came back and briefly said good night.
Out upon the street with the darkness enveloping him, misgivings tormented him again. The little, dim Rue des Saints Pères was quiet and almost deserted; all Paris seemed hushed. The spring warmth of the evening which, in another year, would have brought stir and gladness which would have thronged the avenues with folk upon idle, joyous errands tonight brought only oppression. Paris, Gerry knew, denied danger; yet Paris and, with Paris, all of France; and, with France, all Europe; and, with Europe, America and the rest of the world lay menaced that April night as they had not been since the September of the Marne.
For in the great bulge in the battle line which the enemy had thrust between Amiens and Paris, the Germans had established firmly their positions and there they rested, while to the north beyond Arras they were striking their second tremendous blow and had overrun Armentières and were rushing on toward Calais and the Channel.
Gerry strode on with consciousness of these events almost physically pressing upon him. In their presence, what was he with his prejudices and passions, what was that girl who had seared his lips when he pressed them against her fingers so that still for many moments afterwards his lips burned and tingled? If she was a German spy who had been deluding and playing with him, to permit her to proceed now might work further catastrophe incalculable; whereas were she what he believed—yes; he believed—she could do no good but must merely destroy herself if allowed to go on. Had he any choice but to take the only action which could prevent her?
Ruth had waited alone in the little parlor after he had gone, with her left hand clasped protectingly over the fingers which he had kissed; protectingly she kept that clasp while, standing at the window, she had watched his figure disappear in the darkness of the street of the Holy Fathers. Her fingers were hot like his lips; and while that heat still was strong, she brought her hand to her cheek and pressed it there.
That night nothing else occurred; nor upon the next day and night, nor during the following week did Ruth hear from Gerry as to what he had done about her; and she encountered nothing to indicate his decision until, calling again about her request for travel in Switzerland, suddenly she found permission granted, whereupon she took the first train for the east of France and the next morning passed the border into Switzerland. Accordingly it was in the shadow of Mount Pilatus that she read in a Bern newspaper that three days previously the American ace, Gerry Hull, had been shot down while flying over the German lines; but that his companions in the flight, who had returned, reported that, though falling in enemy territory, he seemed to have succeeded in making some sort of a landing; so it was possible that he was not killed but might be a prisoner in the hands of the Germans.