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diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/1590-8.txt b/1590-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..5357ee6 --- /dev/null +++ b/1590-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,9045 @@ +Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Amazing Interlude + +Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart + +Release Date: December 23, 2004 [EBook #1590] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + + + + +Produced by An anonymous PG volunteer and David Garcia + + + + + +[Illustration: Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin +battles.] + + + + +THE AMAZING INTERLUDE + +By Mary Roberts Rinehart + + +ILLUSTRATIONS BY +THE KINNEYS + +[Transcriber's Note: Troy and Margaret West] + + +1918 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + + +Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles. + +Henri explained the method. + +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. + +That Henri might be living, somewhere, that some day the Belgians might +go home again. + + + + + + +I + + +The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for +most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the +same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits +through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately +the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is +the background for the moving figures of the play. + +So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of +permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there +should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected +none. + +But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours: +lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity, +reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes +place. Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on--a new _mise +en scène_, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left +knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy--Sara Lee became a fairy, of a +sort--and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And +then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the +lady is back by the fire--but with a memory. + +This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory--and of something more. + + * * * * * + +The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing her part in the +setting of a city in Pennsylvania. An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It +is only fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither quality. She +was far from ugly, and very, very far from rich. She had started her +part with a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one they had +gone away into the wings and had not come back. At nineteen she was +alone knitting by the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop was +of painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for its moment, was the +forest of adventure. A strange forest, too--one that Sara Lee would +not have recognised as a forest. And a prince of course--but a prince +as strange and mysterious as the forest. + +The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented. If it was +resignation rather than content, no one but Sara Lee knew the difference. +Knitting, too; but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid, knitting an +afghan against an interesting event which involved a friend of hers. + +Sara Lee rather deplored the event--in her own mind, of course, for in +her small circle young unmarried women accepted the major events of life +without question, and certainly without conversation. She never, for +instance, allowed her Uncle James, with whom she lived, to see her +working at the afghan; and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be a +sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions. + +Sara Lee's days, up to the twentieth of December, 1914, had been much +alike. In the mornings she straightened up her room, which she had +copied from one in a woman's magazine, with the result that it gave +somehow the impression of a baby's bassinet, being largely dotted Swiss +and ribbon. Yet in a way it was a perfect setting for Sara Lee herself. +It was fresh and virginal, and very, very neat and white. A resigned +little room, like Sara Lee, resigned to being tucked away in a corner +and to having no particular outlook. Peaceful, too. + +Sometimes in the morning between straightening her room and going to the +market for Aunt Harriet, Sara Lee looked at a newspaper. So she knew +there was a war. She read the headings, and when the matter came up for +mention at the little afternoon bridge club, as it did now and then after +the prizes were distributed, she always said "Isn't it horrible!" and +changed the subject. + +On the night of the nineteenth of December Sara Lee had read her chapter +in the Bible--she read it through once each year--and had braided down +her hair, which was as smooth and shining and lovely as Sara Lee herself, +and had raised her window for the night when Aunt Harriet came in. Sara +Lee did not know, at first, that she had a visitor. She stood looking +out toward the east, until Aunt Harriet touched her on the arm. + +"What in the world!" said Aunt Harriet. "A body would suppose it was +August." + +"I was just thinking," said Sara Lee. + +"You'd better do your thinking in bed. Jump in and I'll put out your +light." + +So Sara Lee got into her white bed with the dotted Swiss valance, and +drew the covers to her chin, and looked a scant sixteen. Aunt Harriet, +who was an unsentimental woman, childless and diffident, found her +suddenly very appealing there in her smooth bed, and did an unexpected +thing. She kissed her. Then feeling extremely uncomfortable she put +out the light and went to the door. There she paused. + +"Thinking!" she said. "What about, Sara Lee?" + +Perhaps it was because the light was out that Sara Lee became articulate. +Perhaps it was because things that had been forming in her young mind for +weeks had at last crystallized into words. Perhaps it was because of a +picture she had happened on that day, of a boy lying wounded somewhere +on a battlefield and calling "Mother!" + +"About--over there," she said rather hesitatingly. "And about Anna." + +"Over there?" + +"The war," said Sara Lee. "I was just thinking about all those women +over there--like Anna, you know. They--they had babies, and got +everything ready for them. And then the babies grew up, and they're all +getting killed." + +"It's horrible," said Aunt Harriet. "Do you want another blanket? It's +cold to-night." + +Sara Lee did not wish another blanket. + +"I'm a little worried about your Uncle James," said Aunt Harriet, at the +door. "He's got indigestion. I think I'll make him a mustard plaster." + +She prepared to go out then, but Sara Lee spoke from her white bed. + +"Aunt Harriet," she said, "I don't think I'll ever get married." + +"I said that too, once," said Aunt Harriet complacently. "What's got +into your head now?" + +"I don't know," Sara Lee replied vaguely. "I just--What's the use?" + +Aunt Harriet was conscious of a hazy impression of indelicacy. Coming +from Sara Lee it was startling and revolutionary. In Aunt Harriet's +world young women did not question their duty, which was to marry, +preferably some one in the neighborhood, and bear children, who would be +wheeled about that same neighborhood in perambulators and who would +ultimately grow up and look after themselves. + +"The use?" she asked tartly. + +"Of having babies, and getting to care about them, and then--There will +always be wars, won't there?" + +"You turn over and go to sleep," counseled Aunt Harriet. "And stop +looking twenty years or more ahead." She hesitated. "You haven't +quarreled with Harvey, have you?" + +Sara Lee turned over obediently. + +"No. It's not that," she said. And the door closed. + +Perhaps, had she ever had time during the crowded months that followed, +Sara Lee would have dated certain things from that cold frosty night in +December when she began to question things. For after all that was what +it came to. She did not revolt. She questioned. + +She lay in her white bed and looked at things for the first time. The +sky had seemed low that night. Things were nearer. The horizon was +close. And beyond that peaceful horizon, to the east, something was +going on that could not be ignored. Men were dying. Killing and dying. +Men who had been waited for as Anna watched for her child. + +Downstairs she could hear Aunt Harriet moving about. The street was +quiet, until a crowd of young people--she knew them by their +voices--went by, laughing. + +"It's horrible," said Sara Lee to herself. There was a change in her, +but she was still inarticulate. Somewhere in her mind, but not +formulated, was the feeling that she was too comfortable. Her peace was +a cheap peace, bought at no price. Her last waking determination was to +finish the afghan quickly and to knit for the men at the war. + +Uncle James was ill the next morning. Sara Lee went for the doctor, but +Anna's hour had come and he was with her. Late in the afternoon he came, +however looking a bit gray round the mouth with fatigue, but triumphant. +He had on these occasions always a sense of victory; even, in a way, a +feeling of being part of a great purpose. He talked at such times of the +race, as one may who is doing his best by it. + +"Well," he said when Sara Lee opened the door, "it's a boy. Eight +pounds. Going to be red-headed, too." He chuckled. + +"A boy!" said Sara Lee. "I--don't you bring any girl babies any more?" + +The doctor put down his hat and glanced at her. + +"Wanted a girl, to be named for you?" + +"No. It's not that. It's only--" She checked herself. He wouldn't +understand. The race required girl babies. "I've put a blue bow on my +afghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs. + +Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as +Sara Lee's days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it, +ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul--for its bright +curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining brasses and growing +plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to +ache, too, for her friends--their small engrossing cares, their kindly +interest, their familiar faces. + +Time was to come, too, when she came back, not to the little house, it +is true, but to her friends, to Anna and the others. But they had not +grown and Sara Lee had. And that is the story. + +Uncle James died the next day. One moment he was there, an uneasy +figure, under the tulip quilt, and the next he had gone away entirely, +leaving a terrible quiet behind him. He had been the center of the +little house, a big and cheery and not over-orderly center. Followed +his going not only quiet, but a wretched tidiness. There was nothing +for Sara Lee to do but to think. + +And, in the way of mourning women, things that Uncle James had said +which had passed unheeded came back to her. One of them was when he +had proposed to adopt a Belgian child, and Aunt Harriet had offered +horrified protest. + +"All right," he had said. "Of course, if you feel that way about +it--! But I feel kind of mean, sometimes, sitting here doing nothing +when there's such a lot to be done." + +Then he had gone for a walk and had come back cheerful enough but rather +quiet. + +There was that other time, too, when the German Army was hurling itself, +wave after wave, across the Yser--only of course Sara Lee knew nothing +of the Yser then--and when it seemed as though the attenuated Allied +line must surely crack and give. He had said then that if he were only +twenty years younger he would go across and help. + +"And what about me?" Aunt Harriet had asked. "But I suppose I wouldn't +matter." + +"You could go to Jennie's, couldn't you?" + +There had followed one of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt +Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle +James' becoming twenty years younger and going away. + +And now Uncle James had taken on the wings of the morning and was indeed +gone away. And again it became a question of Jennie's. Aunt Harriet, +rather dazed at first, took to arguing it pro and con. + +"Of course she has room for me," she would say in her thin voice. +"There's that little room that was Edgar's. There's nobody in it now. +But there's only room for a single bed, Sara Lee." + +Sara Lee was knitting socks now, all a trifle tight as to heel. "I +know," she would say. "I'll get along. Don't you worry about me." + +Always these talks ended on a note of exasperation for Aunt Harriet. For +Sara Lee's statement that she could manage would draw forth a plaintive +burst from the older woman. + +"If only you'd marry Harvey," she would say. "I don't know what's come +over you. You used to like him well enough." + +"I still like him." + +"I've seen you jump when the telephone bell rang. Your Uncle James often +spoke about it. He noticed more than most people thought." She followed +Sara Lee's eyes down the street to where Anna was wheeling her baby +slowly up and down. Even from that distance Sara Lee could see the bit +of pink which was the bow on her afghan. "I believe you're afraid." + +"Afraid?" + +"Of having children," accused Aunt Harriet fretfully. + +Sara Lee colored. + +"Perhaps I am," she said; "but not the sort of thing you think. I just +don't see the use of it, that's all. Aunt Harriet, how long does it +take to become a hospital nurse?" + +"Mabel Andrews was three years. It spoiled her looks too. She used to +be a right pretty girl." + +"Three years," Sara Lee reflected. "By that time--" + +The house was very quiet and still those days. There was an interlude +of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet +alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things. +At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the +Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading +like wildfire. There were arguments and disagreements. A girl named +Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island +of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval. Mabel Andrews came once +to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross +dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging. Forerunner of the many +first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable +by one thing she said. + +"You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things," she stated +in her brisk voice. "One of our _internes_ is over there, and he says +we'll be in it before spring." + +After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm. + +"Are you going?" she asked. + +"Leaving day after to-morrow. Why?" + +"I--couldn't I be useful over there?" + +Mabel smiled rather grimly. "What can you do?" + +"I can cook." + +"Only men cooks, my dear. What else?" + +"I could clean up, couldn't I? There must be something. I'd do +anything I could. Don't they have people to wash dishes and--all that?" + +Mabel was on doubtful ground there. She knew of a woman who had been +permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and +buying her own tires and gasoline. + +"She carries supplies to small hospitals in out-of-the-way places," she +said. "But I don't suppose you can do that, Sara Lee, can you?" + +However, she gave Sara Lee a New York address, and Sara Lee wrote and +offered herself. She said nothing to Aunt Harriet, who had by that time +elected to take Edgar's room at Cousin Jennie's and was putting Uncle +James' clothes in tearful order to send to Belgium. After a time she +received a reply. + +"We have put your name on our list of volunteers," said the letter, +"but of course you understand that only trained workers are needed now. +France and England are full of untrained women who are eager to help." + +It was that night that Sara Lee became engaged to Harvey. + +Sara Lee's attitude toward Harvey was one that she never tried to analyze. +When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This +was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash +about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile, +and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust +forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,--gave him a sort of tense +eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph +Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact he was a bond +salesman. + +So during the daytime Sara Lee looked--at intervals--at the photograph, +and got that feel of drive and force. And in the evenings Harvey came, +and she lost it. For, outside of a frame, he became a rather sturdy +figure, of no romance, but of a comforting solidity. A kindly young man, +with a rather wide face and hands disfigured as to fingers by much early +baseball. He had heavy shoulders, the sort a girl might rely on to +carry many burdens. A younger and tidier Uncle James, indeed--the same +cheery manner, the same robust integrity, and the same small ambition. + +To earn enough to keep those dependent on him, and to do it fairly; +to tell the truth and wear clean linen and not run into debt; and to +marry Sara Lee and love and cherish her all his life--this was Harvey. +A plain and likable man, a lover and husband to be sure of. But-- + +He came that night to see Sara Lee. There was nothing unusual about +that. He came every night. But he came that night full of determination. +That was not unusual, either, but it had not carried him far. He had no +idea that his picture was romantic. He would have demanded it back had +he so much as suspected it. He wore his hair in a pompadour because +of the prosaic fact that he had a cow-lick. He was very humble about +himself, and Sara Lee was to him as wonderful as his picture was to her. + +Sara Lee was in the parlor, waiting for him. The one electric lamp was +lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of +reflected light. There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a +white fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The +Encyclopaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the +wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by +the fire. It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as +no doubt Harvey would picture for his own home. He had of course never +seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom. + +Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him. When he had taken off his +ulster and his overshoes--he had been raised by women--and came in, +she was standing by the fire. + +"Raining," he said. "It's getting colder. May be snow before morning." + +Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat. +She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her +quietest moments there was that about her--a sort of repressed +eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that +there were times when she had a "flighty" look. + +And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped +Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his +arms out. + +"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!" + +"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically. + +"I don't know," he muttered. "You--sometimes you look as though--" +Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good +to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek +against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear." + +A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has +stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel. He +was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures flashed through +her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One was of +Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby. +The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield +and crying "Mother!" + +Two sorts of maternity--one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, +but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other +vicarious, of all the world. + +"Don't you love me--that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers. + +"I don't know." + +"You don't know!" + +It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing +at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up, +saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust +forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair +that marked him all man, and virile man. + +She slipped her hand into his. + +"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the +complete surrender of a child. + +He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where +she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his +simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear, +and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion +he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he +read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers. + +To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's +devotion was something more, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara +Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit, +small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she +was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes, +she had never even dreamed. + +Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and +behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing, +unsuspected, the _mise en scène_. + + + + +II + + +About the middle of January Mabel Andrews wrote to Sara Lee from +France, where she was already installed in a hospital at Calais. + +The evening before the letter came Harvey had brought round the +engagement ring. He had made a little money in war stocks, and into +the ring he had put every dollar of his profits--and a great love, and +gentleness, and hopes which he did not formulate even to himself. + +It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger, +than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious +glances for months. + +"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously. + +Sara Lee looked at it on her finger. + +"It is lovely! It--it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his +shoulder. + +Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews, and +he had a tendency to restrict his war reading to the quarter column in +the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News." + +What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry? Which +is what Mabel wrote about. + +"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and +something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but +just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty +of it. But here--yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy. +He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or +coffee." + +It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a +long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust +out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no +_matériel_ of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army. France had +her own problems--her army, non-productive industrially, and the great +and constantly growing British forces quartered there, paying for what +they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of the starvation of +German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know and may never know is of +the struggle during those early days to feed the heroic Belgian Army in +their wet and almost untenable trenches. + +Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained +to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing? +Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew +that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny +living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as pointed +with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over there +Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and--put on her engagement ring. + +Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned adoringly +to her, Sara Lee formulated a question: + +"Don't you sometimes feel as though you'd like to go to France and fight?" + +"What for?" + +"Well, they need men, don't they?" + +"I guess they don't need me, honey. I'd be the dickens of a lot of use! +Never fired a gun in my life." + +"You could learn. It isn't hard." + +Harvey sat upright and stared at her. + +"Oh, if you want me to go--" he said, and waited. + +Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger. + +"Nobody wants anybody to go," she said not very elegantly. "I'd +just--I'd rather like to think you wanted to go." + +That was almost too subtle for Harvey. Something about him was rather +reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was determined not to +go to church. + +"It's not our fight," he said. "And as far as that goes, I'm not so +sure there isn't right on both sides. Or wrong. Most likely wrong. +I'd look fine going over there to help the Allies, and then making up my +mind it was the British who'd spilled the beans. Now let's talk about +something interesting--for instance, how much we love each other." + +It was always "we" with Harvey. In his simple creed if a girl accepted +a man and let him kiss her and wore his ring it was a reciprocal love +affair. It never occurred to him that sometimes as the evening dragged +toward a close Sara Lee was just a bit weary of his arms, and that she +sought, after he had gone, the haven of her little white room, and closed +the door, and had to look rather a long time at his photograph before +she was in a properly loving mood again. + +But that night after his prolonged leave-taking Sara Lee went upstairs +to her room and faced the situation. + +She was going to marry Harvey. She was committed to that. And she loved +him; not as he cared, perhaps, but he was a very definite part of her +life. Once or twice when he had been detained by business she had missed +him, had put in a lonely and most unhappy evening. + +Sara Lee had known comparatively few men. In that small and simple +circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two +inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the +usual give and take of more sophisticated circles. Boys and girls paired +off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was +comparatively little shifting. There were few free lances among the men, +and none among the girls. When she was seventeen Harvey had made it +known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing. And for +two years he had without intentional selfishness kept Sara Lee for +himself. + +That was how matters stood that January night when Sara Lee went +upstairs after Harvey had gone and read Mabel's letter, with Harvey's +photograph turned to the wall. Under her calm exterior a little flame +of rebellion was burning in her. Harvey's perpetual "we," his attitude +toward the war, and Mabel's letter, with what it opened before her, had +set the match to something in Sara Lee she did not recognize--a strain +of the adventurer, a throw-back to some wandering ancestor perhaps. But +more than anything it had set fire to the something maternal that is in +all good women. + +Yet, had Aunt Harriet not come in just then, the flame might have died. +And had it died a certain small page of the history of this war would +never have been written. + +Aunt Harriet came in hesitatingly. She wore a black wrapper, and her +face, with her hair drawn back for the night, looked tight and old. + +"Harvey gone?" she asked. + +"Yes." + +"I thought I'd better come in. There's something--I can tell you in +the morning if you're tired." + +"I'm not tired," said Sara Lee. + +Aunt Harriet sat down miserably on a chair. + +"I've had a letter from Jennie," she stated. "The girl's gone, and the +children have whooping cough. She'd like me to come right away." + +"To do the maid's work!" said Sara Lee indignantly. "You mustn't do it, +that's all! She can get somebody." + +But Aunt Harriet was firm. She was not a fair-weather friend, and since +Jennie was good enough to offer her a home she felt she ought to go at +once. + +"You'll have to get married right away," she finished. "Goodness knows +it's time enough! For two years Harvey has been barking like a watchdog +in front of the house and keeping every other young man away." + +Sara Lee smiled. + +"He's only been lying on the doormat, Aunt Harriet," she observed. "I +don't believe he knows how to bark." + +"Oh, he's mild enough. He may change after marriage. Some do. But," +she added hastily, "he'll be a good husband. He's that sort." + +Suddenly something that had been taking shape in Sara Lee's small head, +quite unknown to her, developed identity and speech. + +"But I'm not going to marry him just yet," she said. + +Aunt Harriet's eyes fell on the photograph with its face to the wall, +and she started. + +"You haven't quarreled with him, have you?" + +"No, of course not! I have something else I want to do first. That's +all. Aunt Harriet, I want to go to France." + +Aunt Harriet began to tremble, and Sara Lee went over and put her young +arms about her. + +"Don't look like that," she said. "It's only for a little while. I've +got to go. I just have to, that's all!" + +"Go how?" demanded Aunt Harriet. + +"I don't know. I'll find some way. I've had a letter from Mabel. +Things are awful over there." + +"And how will you help them?" Her face worked nervously. "Is it going +to help for you to be shot? Or carried off by the Germans?" The +atrocity stories were all that Aunt Harriet knew of the war, and all +she could think of now. "You'll come back with your hands cut off." + +Sara Lee straightened and looked out where between the white curtains +the spire of the Methodist Church marked the east. + +"I'm going," she said. And she stood there, already poised for flight. + +There was no sleep in the little house that night. Sara Lee could hear +the older woman moving about in her lonely bed, where the spring still +sagged from Uncle James' heavy form, and at last she went in and crept +in beside her. Toward morning Aunt Harriet slept, with the girl's arm +across her; and then Sara Lee went back to her room and tried to plan. + +She had a little money, and she had heard that living was cheap abroad. +She could get across then, and perhaps keep herself. But she must do +more than that, to justify her going. She must get money, and then +decide how the money was to be spent. If she could only talk it over +with Uncle James! Or, with Harvey. Harvey knew about business and money. + +But she dared not go to Harvey. She was terribly frightened when she +even thought of him. There was no hope of making him understand; and +no chance of reasoning with him, because, to be frank, she had no +reasons. She had only instinct--instinct and a great tenderness toward +suffering. No, obviously Harvey must not know until everything was +arranged. + +That morning the Methodist Church packed a barrel for the Belgians. +There was a real rite of placing in it Mrs. Augustus Gregory's old +sealskin coat, now a light brown and badly worn, but for years the only +one in the neighborhood. Various familiar articles appeared, to be +thrust into darkness, only to emerge in surroundings never dreamed of +in their better days--the little Howard boy's first trouser suit; the +clothing of a baby that had never lived; big Joe Hemmingway's dress suit, +the one he was married in and now too small for him. And here and there +things that could ill be spared, brought in and offered with resolute +cheerfulness. + +Sara Lee brought some of Uncle James' things, and was at once set to +work. The women there called Sara Lee capable, but it was to take other +surroundings to bring out her real efficiency. + +And it was when bending over a barrel, while round her went on that +pitying talk of women about a great calamity, that Sara Lee got her +great idea; and later on she made the only speech of her life. + +That evening Harvey went home in a quiet glow of happiness. He had had +a good day. And he had heard of a little house that would exactly suit +Sara Lee and him. He did not notice his sister's silence when he spoke +about it. He was absorbed, manlike, in his plans. + +"The Leete house," he said in answer to her perfunctory question. "Will +Leete has lost his mind and volunteered for the ambulance service in +France. Mrs. Leete is going to her mother's." + +"Maybe he feels it's his duty. He can drive a car, and they have no +children." + +"Duty nothing!" He seemed almost unduly irritated. "He's tired of the +commission business, that's all. Y'ought to have heard the fellows in +the office. Anyhow, they want to sub-let the house, and I'm going to +take Sara Lee there to-night." + +His sister looked at him, and there was in her face something of the +expression of the women that day as they packed the barrel. But she +said nothing until he was leaving the house that night. Then she put +a hand on his arm. She was a weary little woman, older than Harvey, +and tired with many children. She had been gathering up small overshoes +in the hall and he had stopped to help her. + +"You know, Harvey, Sara Lee's not--I always think she's different, +somehow." + +"Well, I guess yes! There's nobody like her." + +"You can't bully her, you know." + +Harvey stared at her with honestly perplexed eyes. + +"Bully!" he said. "What on earth makes you say that?" + +Then he laughed. + +"Don't you worry, Belle," he said. "I know I'm a fierce and domineering +person, but if there's any bullying I know who'll do it." + +"She's not like the other girls you know," she reiterated rather +helplessly. + +"Sure she's not! But she's enough like them to need a house to live in. +And if she isn't crazy about the Leete place I'll eat it." + +He banged out cheerfully, whistling as he went down the street. He +stopped whistling, however, at Sara Lee's door. The neighborhood +preserved certain traditions as to a house of mourning. It lowered +its voice in passing and made its calls of condolence in dark clothes +and a general air of gloom. Pianos near by were played only with the +windows closed, and even the milkman leaving his bottles walked on +tiptoe and presented his monthly bill solemnly. + +So Harvey stopped whistling, rang the bell apologetically, and--faced a +new and vivid Sara Lee, flushed and with shining eyes, but woefully +frightened. + +She told him almost at once. He had only reached the dining room of +the Leete house, which he was explaining had a white wainscoting when +she interrupted him. The ladies of the Methodist Church were going to +collect a certain amount each month to support a soup kitchen as near +the Front as possible. + +"Good work!" said Harvey heartily. "I suppose they do get hungry, poor +devils. Now about the dining room--" + +"Harvey dear," Sara Lee broke in, "I've not finished. I--I'm going +over to run it." + +"You are not!" + +"But I am! It's all arranged. It's my plan. They've all wanted to do +something besides giving clothes. They send barrels, and they never hear +from them again, and it's hard to keep interested. But with me there, +writing home and telling them, 'To-day we served soup to this man, and +that man, perhaps wounded.' And--and that sort of thing--don't you see +how interested every one will be? Mrs. Gregory has promised twenty-five +dollars a month, and--" + +"You're not going," said Harvey in a flat tone. "That's all. Don't +talk to me about it." + +Sara Lee flushed deeper and started again, but rather hopelessly. +There was no converting a man who would not argue or reason, who based +everything on flat refusal. + +"But somebody must go," she said with a tightening of her voice. +"Here's Mabel Andrews' letter. Read it and you will understand." + +"I don't want to read it." + +Nevertheless he took it and read it. He read slowly. He did nothing +quickly except assert his masculine domination. He had all the faults +of his virtues; he was as slow as he was sure, as unimaginative as he +was faithful. + +He read it and gave it back to her. + +"I don't think you mean it," he said. "I give you credit for too much +sense. Maybe some one is needed over there. I guess things are pretty +bad. But why should you make it your affair? There are about a million +women in this country that haven't got anything else to do. Let them go." + +"Some of them will. But they're afraid, mostly." + +"Afraid! My God, I should think they would be afraid! And you're asking +me to let you go into danger, to put off our wedding while you wander +about over there with a million men and no women and--" + +"You're wrong, Harvey dear," said Sara Lee in a low voice. "I am not +asking you at all. I am telling you that I am going." + + * * * * * + +Sara Lee's leaving made an enormous stir in her small community. Opinion +was divided. She was right according to some; she was mad according to +others. The women of the Methodist Church, finding a real field of +activity, stood behind her solidly. Guaranties of funds came in in a +steady flow, though the amounts were small; and, on the word going about +that she was to start a soup kitchen for the wounded, housewives sent +in directions for making their most cherished soups. + +Sara Lee, going to a land where the meat was mostly horse and where +vegetables were scarce and limited to potatoes, Brussels sprouts and +cabbage, found herself the possessor of recipes for making such sick-room +dainties as mushroom soup, cream of asparagus, clam broth with whipped +cream, and from Mrs. Gregory, the wealthy woman of the church--green +turtle and consomme. + +She was very busy and rather sad. She was helping Aunt Harriet to close +the house and getting her small wardrobe in order. And once a day she +went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a fierce and +kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes like this: _Le +livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenêtre_, and so on. By the end of ten +days she could say: "_La rose sent-elle bon?_" + +Considering that Harvey came every night and ran the gamut of the +emotions, from pleading and expostulation at eight o'clock to black +fury at ten, when he banged out of the house, Sara Lee was amazingly +calm. If she had moments of weakness, when the call from overseas was +less insistent than the call for peace and protection--if the nightly +drawn picture of the Leete house, with tile mantels and a white bathroom, +sometimes obtruded itself as against her approaching homelessness, Sara +Lee made no sign. + +She had her photograph taken for her passport, and when Harvey refused +one she sent it to him by mail, with the word "Please" in the corner. +Harvey groaned over it, and got it out at night and scolded it wildly; +and then slept with it under his pillows, when he slept at all. + +Not Sara Lee, and certainly not Harvey, knew what was calling her. And +even later, when waves of homesickness racked her with wild remorse, she +knew that she had had to go and that she could not return until she had +done the thing for which she had been sent, whatever that might be. + + + + +III + + +The first thing that struck Sara Lee was the way she was saying her +nightly prayers in all sorts of odd places. In trains and in hotels and, +after sufficient interval, in the steamer. She prayed under these novel +circumstances to be made a better girl, and to do a lot of good over +there, and to be forgiven for hurting Harvey. She did this every night, +and then got into her narrow bed and studied French nouns--because she +had decided that there was no time for verbs--and numbers, which put +her to sleep. + +"Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq," Sara Lee would begin, and go on, rocking +gently in her berth as the steamer rolled, "Vingt, vingt-et-un, +vingt-deux, trente, trente-et-un--" Her voice would die away. The +book on the floor and Harvey's picture on the tiny table, Sara Lee would +sleep. And as the ship trembled the light over her head would shine on +Harvey's ring, and it glistened like a tear. + +One thing surprised her as she gradually met some of her fellow +passengers. She was not alone on her errand. Others there were on +board, young and old women, and men, too, who had felt the call of mercy +and were going, as ignorant as she, to help. As ignorant, but not so +friendless. Most of them were accredited somewhere. They had definite +objectives. But what was more alarming--they talked in big figures. +Great organizations were behind them. She heard of the rehabilitation +of Belgium, and portable hospitals, and millions of dollars, and Red +Cross trains. + +Not once did Sara Lee hear of anything so humble as a soup kitchen. The +war was a vast thing, they would observe. It could only be touched by +great organizations. Individual effort was negligible. + +Once she took her courage in her hands. + +"But I should think," she said, "that even great organizations depend on +the--on individual efforts." + +The portable hospital woman turned to her patronizingly. + +"Certainly, my dear," she said. "But coördinated--coördinated." + +It is hard to say just when the lights went down on Sara Lee's quiet +stage and the interlude began. Not on the steamer, for after three days +of discouragement and good weather they struck a storm; and Sara Lee's +fine frenzy died for a time, of nausea. She did not appear again until +the boat entered the Mersey, a pale and shaken angel of mercy, not at +all sure of her wings, and most terribly homesick. + +That night Sara Lee made a friend, one that Harvey would have approved +of, an elderly Englishman named Travers. He was standing by the rail +in the rain looking out at the blinking signal lights on both sides of +the river. The ship for the first time had abandoned its policy of +darkness and the decks were bathed in light. + +Overhead the yardarm blinkers were signaling, and directly over Sara +Lee's head a great white searchlight swept the water ahead. The wind +was blowing a gale, and the red and green lights of the pilot boat swung +in great arcs that seemed to touch the waves on either side. + +Sara Lee stood beside Mr. Travers, for companionship only. He had +preserved a typically British aloofness during the voyage, and he had +never spoken to her. But there was something forlorn in Sara Lee that +night as she clutched her hat with both hands and stared out at the +shore lights. And if he had been silent during the voyage he had not +been deaf. So he knew why almost every woman on the ship was making +the voyage; but he knew nothing about Sara Lee. + +"Bad night," said Mr. Travers. + +"I was wondering what they are trying to do with that little boat." + +Mr. Travers concealed the surprise of a man who was making his +seventy-second voyage. + +"That's the pilot boat," he explained. "We are picking up a pilot." + +"But," marveled Sara Lee rather breathlessly, "have we come all the way +without any pilot?" + +He explained that to her, and showed her a few moments later how the +pilot came with incredible rapidity up the swaying rope ladder and over +the side. + +To be honest, he had been watching for the pilot boat, not to see what +to Sara Lee was the thrilling progress of the pilot up the ladder, but +to get the newspapers he would bring on with him. It is perhaps +explanatory of the way things went for Sara Lee from that time on that +he quite forgot his newspapers. + +The chairs were gone from the decks, preparatory to the morning landing, +so they walked about and Sara Lee at last told him her story--the +ladies of the Methodist Church, and the one hundred dollars a month she +was to have, outside of her traveling expenses, to found and keep going +a soup kitchen behind the lines. + +"A hundred dollars a month," he said. "That's twenty pounds. Humph! +Good God!" + +But this last was under his breath. + +Then she told him of Mabel Andrews' letter, and at last read it to him. +He listened attentively. "Of course," she said when she had put the +letter back into her bag, "I can't feed a lot, even with soup. But if I +only help a few, it's worth doing, isn't it?" + +"Very much worth doing," he said gravely. "I suppose you are not, by +any chance, going to write a weekly article for one of your newspapers +about what you are doing?" + +"I hadn't thought of it. Do you think I should?" + +Quite unexpectedly Mr. Travers patted her shoulder. + +"My dear child," he said, "now and then I find somebody who helps to +revive my faith in human nature. Thank you." + +Sara Lee did not understand. The touch on the shoulder had made her +think suddenly of Uncle James, and her chin quivered. + +"I'm just a little frightened," she said in a small voice. + +"Twenty pounds!" repeated Mr. Travers to himself. "Twenty pounds!" +And aloud: "Of course you speak French?" + +"Very little. I've had six lessons, and I can count--some." + +The sense of unreality which the twenty pounds had roused in Mr. Travers' +cautious British mind grew. No money, no French, no objective, just a +great human desire to be useful in her own small way--this was a new type +to him. What a sporting chance this frail bit of a girl was taking! And +he noticed now something that had escaped him before--a dauntlessness, +a courage of the spirit rather than of the body, that was in the very +poise of her head. + +"I'm not afraid about the language," she was saying. "I have a phrase +book. And a hungry man, maybe sick or wounded, can understand a bowl of +soup in any language, I should think. And I can cook!" + +It was a perplexed and thoughtful Mr. Travers who sipped his +Scotch-and-soda in the smoking room before retiring, he took the problem +to bed with him and woke up in the night saying: "Twenty pounds! +Good God!" + +In the morning they left the ship. He found Sara Lee among the K's, +waiting to have her passport examined, and asked her where she was +stopping in London. She had read somewhere of Claridge's--in a novel +probably. + +"I shouldn't advise Claridge's," he said, reflecting rather grimly on +the charges of that very exclusive hotel. "Suppose you let me make a +suggestion." + +So he wrote out the name of a fine old English house on Trafalgar +Square, where she could stay until she went to France. There would be +the matter of a passport to cross the Channel. It might take a day or +two. Perhaps he could help her. He would give himself the pleasure of +calling on her very soon. + +Sara Lee got on the train and rode up to London. She said to herself +over and over: "This is England. I am really in England." But it did +not remove the sense of unreality. Even the English grass, bright green +in midwinter, only added to the sense of unreality. + +She tried, sitting in the strange train with its small compartments, to +think of Harvey. She looked at her ring and tried to recall some of +the tender things he had said to her. But Harvey eluded her. She could +not hear his voice. And when she tried to see him it was Harvey of the +wide face and the angry eyes of the last days that she saw. + +Morley's comforted her. The man at the door had been there for forty +years, and was beyond surprise. He had her story in twenty-four hours, +and in forty-eight he was her slave. The elderly chambermaid mothered +her, and failed to report that Sara Lee was doing a small washing in +her room and had pasted handkerchiefs over the ancient walnut of her +wardrobe. + +"Going over, are you?" she said. "Dear me, what courage you've got, +miss! They tell me things is horrible over there." + +"That's why I'm going," replied Sara Lee, and insisted on helping to +make up the bed. + +"It's easier when two do it," she said casually. + +Mr. Travers put in a fretful twenty-four hours before he came to see her. +He lunched at Brooks', and astounded an elderly member of the House by +putting her problem to him. + +"A young girl!" exclaimed the M. P. "Why, deuce take it, it's no place +for a young girl." + +"An American," explained Mr. Travers uncomfortably. "She's perfectly +able to look after herself." + +"Probably a correspondent in disguise. They'll go to any lengths." + +"She's not a correspondent." + +"Let her stay in Boulogne. There's work there in the hospitals." + +"She's not a nurse. She's a--well, she's a cook. Or so she says." + +The M. P. stared at Mr. Travers, and Mr. Travers stared back defiantly. + +"What in the name of God is she going to cook?" + +"Soup," said Mr. Travers in a voice of suppressed irritation. "She's +got a little money, and she wants to establish a soup kitchen behind +the Belgian trenches on a line of communication. I suppose," he +continued angrily, "even you will admit that the Belgian Army needs all +the soup it can get." + +"I don't approve of women near the lines." + +"Neither do I. But I'm exceedingly glad that a few of them have the +courage to go there." + +"What's she going to make soup out of?" + +"I'm not a cooking expert. But I know her and I fancy she'll manage." + +It ended by the M. P. agreeing to use his influence with the War Office +to get Sara Lee to France. He was very unwilling. The spy question was +looming large those days. Even the Red Cross had unwittingly spread its +protection over more than one German agent. The lines were being +drawn in. + +"I may possibly get her to France. I don't know, of course," he said in +that ungracious tone in which an Englishman often grants a favor which +he will go to any amount of trouble to do. "After that it's up to her." + +Mr. Travers reflected rather grimly that after that it was apparently up +to him. + +Sara Lee sat in her room at Morley's Hotel and looked out at the life of +London--policemen with chin straps; schoolboys in high silk hats and +Eton suits, the hats generally in disreputable condition; clerks dressed +as men at home dressed for Easter Sunday church; and men in uniforms. +Only a fair sprinkling of these last, in those early days. On the first +afternoon there was a military funeral. A regiment of Scots, in kilts, +came swinging down from the church of St. Martin in the Fields, tall and +wonderful men, grave and very sad. Behind them, on a gun carriage, was +the body of their officer, with the British flag over the casket and his +sword and cap on the top. + +Sara Lee cried bitterly. It was not until they had gone that she +remembered that Harvey had always called the Scots men in women's +petticoats. She felt a thrill of shame for him, and no amount of +looking at his picture seemed to help. + +Mr. Travers called the second afternoon and was received by August at +the door as an old friend. + +"She's waiting in there," he said. "Very nice young lady, sir. Very +kind to everybody." + +Mr. Travers found her by a window looking out. There was a recruiting +meeting going on in Trafalgar Square, the speakers standing on the +monument. Now and then there was a cheer, and some young fellow +sheepishly offered himself. Sara Lee was having a mad desire to go +over and offer herself too. Because, she reflected, she had been in +London almost two days, and she was as far from France as ever. Not +knowing, of course, that three months was a fair time for the slow +methods then in vogue. + +There was a young man in the room, but Sara Lee had not noticed him. +He was a tall, very blond young man, in a dark-blue Belgian uniform with +a quaint cap which allowed a gilt tassel to drop over his forehead. He +sat on a sofa, curling up the ends of a very small mustache, his legs, +in cavalry boots, crossed and extending a surprising distance beyond +the sofa. + +The lights were up now, beyond the back drop, the stage darkened. A +new scene with a vengeance, a scene laid in strange surroundings, with +men, whole men and wounded men and spying men--and Sara Lee and this +young Belgian, whose name was Henri and whose other name, because of +what he suffered and what he did, we may not know. + + + + +IV + + +Henri sat on his sofa and watched Sara Lee. Also he shamelessly listened +to the conversation, not because he meant to be an eavesdropper but +because he liked Sara Lee's voice. He had expected a highly inflected +British voice, and instead here was something entirely different--that +is, Sara Lee's endeavor to reconcile the English "a" with her normal +western Pennsylvania pronunciation. She did it quite unintentionally, +but she had a good ear and it was difficult, for instance, to say +"rather" when Mr. Travers said "rawther." + +Henri had a good ear too. And the man he was waiting for did not come. +Also he had been to school in England and spoke English rather better +than most British. So he heard a conversation like this, the gaps being +what he lost: + +MR. TRAVERS: ---- to France, anyhow. After that ---- + +SARA LEE: Awfully sorry to be ---- But what shall I do if I do get over? +The chambermaid up-stairs ---- very difficult. + +MR. TRAVERS: The proper and sensible thing is ---- home. + +SARA LEE: To America? But I haven't done anything yet. + +Henri knew that she was an American. He also realized that she was on +the verge of tears. He glared at poor Mr. Travers, who was doing his +best, and lighted a French cigarette. + +"There must be some way," said Sara Lee. "If they need help--and I +have read you Mabel Andrews' letter--then I should think they'd be +glad to send me." + +"They would be, of course," he said. "But the fact is--there's been +some trouble about spies, and--" + +Henri's eyes narrowed. + +"Spies! And they think I'm a spy?" + +"My dear child," remonstrated Mr. Travers, slightly exasperated, +"they're not thinking about you at all. The War Office has never heard +of you. It's a general rule." + +Sara Lee was not placated. + +"Let them cable home and find out about me. I can give them references. +Why, all sorts of prominent people are sending me money. They must +trust me, or they wouldn't." + +There were no gaps for Henri now. Sara Lee did not care who heard her, +and even Mr. Travers had slightly raised his voice. Henri was divided +between a conviction that he ought to go away and a mad desire to join +in the conversation, greatly augmented when Sara Lee went to the window +and wiped her eyes. + +"If you only spoke French--" began Mr. Travers. + +Sara Lee looked over her shoulder. "But of course I do!" she said. +"And German and--and Yiddish, and all sorts of languages. Every spy +does." + +Henri smiled appreciatively. + +It might all have ended there very easily. Sara Lee might have fought +the War Office single-handed and won out, but it is extremely unlikely. +The chances at that moment were that she would spend endless days and +hours in anterooms, and tell her story and make her plea a hundred times. +And then--go back home to Harvey and the Leete house, and after a time, +like Mrs. Gregory, speak rather too often of "the time I went abroad." + +But Sara Lee was to go to France, and even further, to the fragment of +unconquered Belgium that remained. And never so long as she lived, would +she be able to forget those days or to speak of them easily. So she +stood by the window trying not to cry, and a little donkey drawing a +coster's cart moved out in front of the traffic and was caught by a motor +bus. There was only time for the picture--the tiny beast lying there +and her owner wringing his hands. Such of the traffic as could get by +swerved and went on. London must move, though a thousand willing little +beasts lay dying. + +And Sara moved too. One moment she was there by the window. And the +next she had given a stifled cry and ran out. + +"Bless my soul!" said Mr. Travers, and got up slowly. + +Henri was already up and at the window. What he saw was Sara Lee making +her way through the stream of vehicles, taking a dozen chances for her +life. Henri waited until he saw her crouched by the donkey, its head +on her knee. Then he, too, ran out. + +That is how Henri, of no other name that may be given, met Sara Lee +Kennedy, of Pennsylvania--under a London motor bus. And that, I think, +will be the picture he carries of her until he dies, her soft eyes full +of pity, utterly regardless of the dirt and the crowd and an +expostulating bobby, with that grotesque and agonized head on her knees. + +Henri crawled under the bus, though the policeman was extremely anxious +to keep him out. And he ran a practiced eye over the injured donkey. + +"It's dying," said Sara Lee with white lips. + +"It will die," replied Henri, "but how soon? They are very strong, +these little beasts." + +The conductor of the bus made a suggestion then, one that froze the +blood round Sara Lee's heart: "If you'll move away and let us run over +it proper it'll be out of its trouble, miss." + +Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to Henri. + +"Did you hear that?" she said. "They'd do it too!" + +The total result of a conference between four policemen, the costermonger, +and, by that time, Mr. Travers--was to draw the animal off the street +and into the square. Sara Lee stuck close by. So, naturally, did +Henri. And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she +was named, became increasingly evident, Henri behaved like a man and a +soldier. + +He got out his revolver and shot her in the brain. + +"A kindness," he explained, as Sara Lee would have caught his hand. +"The only way, mademoiselle." + +Mr. Travers had the usual British hatred of a crowd and publicity, +coupled with a deadly fear of getting into the papers, except through +an occasional letter to the _Times_. He vanished just before the shot, +and might have been seen moving rapidly through the square, turning +over in his mind the difficulty of trying to treat young American girls +like rational human beings. + +But Henri understood. He had had a French mother, and there is a leaven +of French blood in the American temperament, old Huguenot, some of it. +So Americans love beauty and obey their impulses and find life good to +do things rather than to be something or other more or less important. +And so Henri could quite understand how Sara Lee had forgotten herself +when Mr. Travers could not. And he understood, also, when Sara Lee, +having composed the little donkey's quiet figure, straightened up with +tears in her eyes. + +"It was very dear of you to come out," she said. "And--of course it was +the best thing." + +She held out her hand. The crowd had gone. Traffic was moving again, +racing to make up for five lost precious moments. The square was dark, +that first darkness of London, when air raids were threatened but had +not yet taken place. From the top of the Admiralty, near by, a +flashlight shot up into the air and began its nightly process of brushing +the sky. Henri took her hand and bent over it. + +"You are very brave, mademoiselle," he said, and touched her hand with +his lips. + +The amazing interlude had commenced. + + + + +V + + +Yet for a day or two nothing much was changed. Mr. Travers sent Sara +Lee a note that he was taking up her problem with the Foreign Office; +and he did indeed make an attempt. He also requested his wife to ask +Sara Lee to tea. + +Sara Lee was extremely nervous on the day she went. She wore a black +jacket suit with a white collar, and she carried Aunt Harriet's mink +furs, Aunt Harriet mourning thoroughly and completely in black astrachan. +She had the faculty of the young American girl of looking smart without +much expense, and she appeared absurdly young. + +She followed the neat maid up a wide staircase to a door with a screen +just inside, and heard her name announced for the first time in her life. +Sara Lee took a long breath and went inside, to a most discouraging half +hour. + +Mr. Travers was on the hearth rug. Mrs. Travers was in a chair, a portly +woman with a not unkindly face, but the brusque manner many Englishwomen +acquire after forty. She held Sara Lee's hand and gave her a complete +if smiling inspection. + +"And it is you who are moving heaven and earth to get to the Front! +You--child!" + +Sara Lee's heart fell, but she smiled also. + +"But I am older than I look," she said. "And I am very strong." + +Mrs. Travers looked helplessly at her husband, while she rang the bell +for tea. That was another thing Sara Lee had read about but never +seen--that ringing for tea. At home no one served afternoon tea; but +at a party, when refreshments were coming, the hostess slipped out to +the kitchen and gave a whispered order or two. + +"I shall be frank with you," said Mrs. Travers. "I think it quite +impossible. It is not getting you over. That might be done. And of +course there are women over there--young ones too. But the army +objects very seriously to their being in danger. And of course one +never knows--" Her voice trailed off vaguely. She implied, however, +that what one never knows was best unknown. + +"I have a niece over there," she said as the tea tray came in. "Her +mother was fool enough to let her go. Now they can't get her back." + +"Oh, dear!" said Sara Lee. "Can't they find her?" + +"She won't come. Little idiot! She's in Paris, however. I daresay +she is safe enough." + +Mrs. Travers made the tea thoughtfully. So far Mr. Travers had hardly +spoken, but he cheered in true British fashion at the sight of the tea. +Sara Lee, exceedingly curious as to the purpose of a very small stand +somewhat resembling a piano stool, which the maid had placed at her knee, +learned that it was to hold her muffin plate. + +"And now," said Mr. Travers, "suppose we come to the point. There +doesn't seem to be a chance to get you over, my child. Same answer +everywhere. Place is full of untrained women. Spies have been using +Red Cross passes. Result is that all the lines are drawn as tight as +possible." + +Sara Lee stared at him with wide eyes. + +"But I can't go back," she said. "I--well, I just can't. They're +raising the money for me, and all sorts of people are giving things. +A--a friend of mine is baking cakes and sending on the money. She +has three children, and--" + +She gulped. + +"I thought everybody wanted to get help to the Belgians," she said. + +A slightly grim smile showed itself on Mrs. Travers' face. + +"I'm afraid you don't understand. It is you we want to help. Neither +Mr. Travers nor I feel that a girl so young as you, and alone, has any +place near the firing line. And that, I fancy, is where you wish to go. +As to helping the Belgians, we have four in the house now. They do not +belong to the same social circles, so they prefer tea in their own rooms. +You are quite right about their needing help too. They cannot even make +up their own beds." + +"They are not all like that," broke in Mr. Travers hastily. + +"Of course not. But I merely think that Miss--er--Kennedy should know +both sides of the picture." + +Somewhat later Sara Lee was ushered downstairs by the neat maid, who +stood on the steps and blew a whistle for a taxi--Sara Lee had come in +a bus. She carried in her hand the address of a Belgian commission of +relief at the Savoy Hotel, and in her heart, for the first time, a doubt +of her errand. She gave the Savoy address mechanically and, huddled in +a corner, gave way to wild and fearful misgivings. + +Coming up she had sat on top of the bus and watched with wide curious, +eyes the strange traffic of London. The park had fascinated her--the +little groups of drilling men in khaki, the mellow tones of a bugle, and +here and there on the bridle paths well-groomed men and women on +horseback, as clean-cut as the horses they rode, and on the surface as +careless of what was happening across the Channel. But she saw nothing +now. She sat back and twisted Harvey's ring on her finger, and saw +herself going back, her work undone, her faith in herself shattered. +And Harvey's arms and the Leete house ready to receive her. + +However, a ray of hope opened for her at the Savoy--not much, a prospect. + +The Savoy was crowded. Men in uniform, a sprinkling of anxious-faced +wives and daughters, and more than a sprinkling of gaily dressed +and painted women, filled the lobby or made their way slowly up and +down the staircase. It was all so utterly different from what she had +expected--so bright, so full of life. These well-fed people they seemed +happy enough. Were they all wrong back home? Was the war the ghastly +thing they thought it? + +Long months afterward Sara Lee was to learn that the Savoy was not +London. She was to learn other things--that America knew more, through +a free press, of war conditions than did England. And she was to +learn what never ceased to surprise her--the sporting instinct of the +British which made their early slogan "Business as usual." Business +and pleasure--but only on the surface. Underneath was a dogged and +obstinate determination to make up as soon as possible for the +humiliation of the early days of the war. + +Those were the transition days in England. The people were slowly +awaking to the magnitude of the thing that was happening to them. Certain +elements of the press, long under political dominion, were preparing to +come out for a coalition ministry. The question of high-explosive +shells as against shrapnel was bitterly fought, some of the men at home +standing fast for shrapnel, as valuable against German artillery as a +garden hose. Men coming back from the Front were pleading for real help, +not men only, not Red Cross, not food and supplies, but for something +more competent than mere man power to hold back the deluge. + +But over it all was that surface cheerfulness, that best-foot-forward +attitude of London. And Sara Lee saw only that, and lost faith. She +had come far to help. But here was food in plenty and bands playing +and smiling men in uniform drinking tea and playing for a little. That, +too, Sara Lee was to understand later; but just then she did not. At +home there was more surface depression. The atrocities, the plight of +the Belgians, the honor list in the _Illustrated London News_--that was +the war to Sara Lee. And here! + +But later on, down in a crowded dark little room, things were different. +She was one of a long line, mostly women. They were unhappy and desolate +enough, God knows. They sat or stood with a sort of weary resignation. +Now and then a short heavy man with an upcurled mustache came out and +took in one or two. The door closed. And overhead the band played +monotonously. + +It was after seven when Sara Lee's turn came. The heavy-set man spoke +to her in French, but he failed to use a single one of the words she +had memorized. + +"Don't you speak any English?" she asked helplessly. + +"I do; but not much," he replied. Though his French had been rapid he +spoke English slowly. "How can we serve you, mademoiselle?" + +"I don't want any assistance. I--I want to help, if I can." + +"Here?" + +"In France. Or Belgium." + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"We have many offers of help. What we need, mademoiselle, is not +workers. We have, at our base hospital, already many English nurses." + +"I am not a nurse." + +"I am sorry. The whole world is sorry for Belgium, and many would work. +What we need"--he shrugged his shoulders again--"is food, clothing, +supplies for our brave little soldiers." + +Sara Lee looked extremely small and young. The Belgian sat down on a +chair and surveyed her carefully. + +"You English are doing a--a fine work for us," he observed. "We are +grateful. But of course the"--he hesitated--"the pulling up of an +entire people--it is colossal." + +"But I am not English," said Sara Lee. "And I have a little money. I +want to make soup for your wounded men at a railway station or--any +place. I can make good soup. And I shall have money each month to buy +what I need." + +Only then was Sara Lee admitted to the crowded little room. + +Long afterward, when the lights behind the back drop had gone down and +Sara Lee was back again in her familiar setting, one of the clearest +pictures she retained of that amazing interlude was of that crowded +little room in the Savoy, its single littered desk, its two typewriters +creating an incredible din, a large gentleman in a dark-blue military +cape seeming to fill the room. And in corners and off stage, so to +speak, perhaps a half dozen men, watching her curiously. + +The conversation was in French, and Sara Lee's acquaintance of the +passage acted as interpreter. It was only when Sara Lee found that a +considerable discussion was going on in which she had no part that she +looked round and saw her friend of two nights before and of the little +donkey. He was watching her intently, and when he caught her eye +he bowed. + +Now men, in Sara Lee's mind, had until now been divided into the ones at +home, one's own kind, the sort who married one's friends or oneself, the +kind who called their wives "mother" after the first baby came, and were +easily understood, plain men, decent and God-fearing and self-respecting; +and the men of that world outside America, who were foreigners. One +might like foreigners, but they were outsiders. + +So there was no self-consciousness in Sara Lee's bow and smile. Later +on Henri was to find that lack of self and sex consciousness one of the +maddening mysteries about Sara Lee. Perhaps he never quite understood +it. But always he respected it. + +More conversation, in an increasing staccato. Short contributions from +the men crowded into corners. Frenzied beating of the typewriting +machines, and overhead and far away the band. There was no air in the +room. Sara Lee was to find out a great deal later on about the contempt +of the Belgians for air. She loosened Aunt Harriet's neckpiece. + +So far Henri had not joined in the discussion. But now he came forward +and spoke. Also, having finished, he interpreted to Sara Lee. + +"They are most grateful," he explained. "It is a--a practical idea, +mademoiselle. If you were in Belgium"--he smiled rather mirthlessly--"if +you were already in the very small part of Belgium remaining to us, we +could place you very usefully. But--the British War Office is most +careful, just now. You understand--there are reasons." + +Sara Lee flushed indignantly. + +"They can watch me if they want to," she said. "What trouble can I make? +I've only just landed. You--you'd have to go a good ways to find any +one who knows less than I do about the war." + +"There is no doubt of that," he said, unconscious of offense. "But the +War Office--" He held out his hands. + +Sara Lee, who had already caught the British "a" and was rather overdoing +it, had a wild impulse to make the same gesture. It meant so much. + +More conversation. Evidently more difficulties--but with Henri now +holding the center of the stage and speaking rapidly. The heavy-set man +retired and read letters under an electric lamp. The band upstairs was +having dinner. And Henri argued and wrangled. He was quite passionate. +The man in the military cape listened and smiled. And at last he nodded. + +Henri turned to Sara Lee. + +"You Americans are all brave," he said. "You like--what is it you +say?--taking a chance, I think. Would you care to take such a chance?" + +"What sort of a chance?" + +"May I visit you this evening at your hotel?" + +Just for an instant Sara Lee hesitated. There was Harvey at home. He +would not like her receiving a call from any man. And Harvey did not +like foreigners. He always said they had no respect for women. It +struck her suddenly what Harvey would call Henri's bowing and his kissing +her hand, and his passionate gesticulations when he was excited. He +would call it all tomfool nonsense. + +And she recalled his final words, his arms so close about her that she +could hardly breathe, his voice husky with emotion. + +"Just let me hear of any of those foreigners bothering you," he said, +"and I'll go over and wipe out the whole damned nation." + +It had not sounded funny then. It was not funny now. + +"Please come," said Sara Lee in a small voice. + +The other gentlemen bowed profoundly. Sara Lee, rather at a loss, gave +them a friendly smile that included them all. And then she and Henri +were walking up the stairs and to the entrance, Henri's tall figure the +target for many women's eyes. He, however, saw no one but Sara Lee. + +Henri, too, called a taxicab. Every one in London seemed to ride in +taxis. And he bent over her hand, once she was in the car, but he did +not kiss it. + +"It is very kind of you, what you are doing," he said. "But, then, you +Americans are all kind. And wonderful." + +Back at Morley's Hotel Sara Lee had a short conversation with Harvey's +picture. + +"You are entirely wrong, dear," she said. She was brushing her hair at +the time, and it is rather a pity that it was a profile picture and that +Harvey's pictured eyes were looking off into space--that is, a piece +of white canvas on a frame, used by photographers to reflect the light +into the eyes. For Sara Lee with her hair down was even lovelier than +with it up. "You were wrong. They are different, but they are kind and +polite. And very, very respectful. And he is coming on business." + +She intended at first to make no change in her frock. After all, it was +not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the +right footing. + +But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and +slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her +way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt +and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts +still affect. And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress. She called in +the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over +her clothes. + +It was the maid, perhaps, then who brought into Sara Lee's life the +strange and mad infatuation for her that was gradually to become a +dominant issue in the next few months. For the maid chose a white dress, +a soft and young affair in which Sara Lee looked like the heart of a rose. + +"I always like to see a young lady in white, miss," said the maid. +"Especially when there's a healthy skin." + +So Sara Lee ate her dinner alone, such a dinner as a healthy skin and +body demanded. And she watched tall young Englishwomen with fine +shoulders go out with English officers in khaki, and listened to a babel +of high English voices, and--felt extremely alone and very subdued. + +Henri came rather late. It was one of the things she was to learn about +him later--that he was frequently late. It was only long afterward that +she realized that such time as he spent with her was gained only at the +cost of almost superhuman effort. But that was when she knew Henri's +story, and his work. She waited for him in the reception room, where a +man and a woman were having coffee and talking in a strange tongue. +Henri found her there, at something before nine, rather downcast and +worried, and debating about going up to bed. She looked up, to find him +bowing before her. + +"I thought you were not coming," she said. + +"I? Not come? But I had said that I would come, mademoiselle. I may +sit down?" + +Sara Lee moved over on the velvet sofa, and Henri lowered his long body +onto it. Lowered his voice, too, for the man and woman were staring at +him. + +"I'm afraid I didn't quite understand about this afternoon," began Sara +Lee. "You spoke about taking a chance. I am not afraid of danger, if +that is what you mean." + +"That, and a little more, mademoiselle," said Henri. "But now that I am +here I do not know." + +His eyes were keen. Sara Lee had suddenly a strange feeling that he +was watching the couple who talked over their coffee, and that, oddly +enough, the couple were watching him. Yet he was apparently giving his +undivided attention to her. + +"Have you walked any to-day?" he asked her unexpectedly. + +Sara Lee remembered the bus, and, with some bitterness, the two taxis. + +"I haven't had a chance to walk," she said. + +"But you should walk," he said. "I--will you walk with me? Just about +the square, for air?" And in a lower tone: "It is not necessary that +those two should know the plan, mademoiselle." + +"I'll get my coat and hat," Sara Lee said, and proceeded to do so in a +brisk and businesslike fashion. When she came down Henri was emerging +from the telephone booth. His face was impassive. And again when in +time Sara Lee was to know Henri's face better than she had ever known +Harvey's, she was to learn that the masklike look he sometimes wore +meant danger--for somebody. + +They went out without further speech into the clear cold night. Henri, +as if from custom, threw his head back and scanned the sky. Then they +went on and crossed into the square. + +"The plan," Henri began abruptly, "is this: You will be provided +to-morrow with a passport to Boulogne. You will, if you agree, take the +midnight train for Folkestone. At the railway station here you will +be searched. At Folkestone a board, sitting in an office on the quay, +will examine your passport." + +"Does any one in Boulogne speak English?" Sara Lee inquired nervously. +Somehow that babel of French at the Savoy had frightened her. Her +little phrase book seemed pitifully inadequate for the great things +in her mind. + +"That hardly matters," said Henri, smiling faintly. "Because I think +you shall not go to Boulogne." + +"Not go!" She stopped dead, under the monument, and looked up at him. + +"The place for you to go, to start from, is Calais," Henri explained. +He paused, to let pass two lovers, a man in khaki and a girl. "But +Calais is difficult. It is under martial law--a closed city. From +Boulogne to Calais would be perhaps impossible." + +Sara Lee was American and her methods were direct. + +"How can I get to Calais?" + +"Will you take the chance I spoke of?" + +"For goodness' sake," said Sara Lee in an exasperated tone, "how can I +tell you until I know what it is?" + +Henri told her. He even, standing under a street lamp, drew a small +sketch for her, to make it clear. Sara Lee stood close, watching him, +and some of the lines were not as steady as they might have been. And +in the midst of it he suddenly stopped. + +"Do you know what it means?" he demanded. + +"Yes, of course." + +"And you know what date this is?" + +"The eighteenth of February." + +But he saw, after all, that she did not entirely understand. + +"To-night, this eighteenth of February, the Germans commence a blockade +of this coast. No vessels, if they can prevent them, will leave the +harbors; or if they do, none shall reach the other side!" + +"Oh!" said Sara Lee blankly. + +"We are eager to do as you wish, mademoiselle. But"--he commenced +slowly to tear up the sketch--"it is too dangerous. You are too young. +If anything should go wrong and I had--No. We will find another way." + +He put the fragments of the sketch in his pocket. + +"How long is this blockade to last?" Sara Lee asked out of bitter +disappointment. + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"Who can say? A week! A year! Not at all!" + +"Then," said Sara Lee with calm deliberation, "you might as well get out +your pencil and draw another picture--because I'm going." + +Far enough away now, the little house at home and the peace that dwelt +therein; and Harvey; and the small white bedroom; and the daily round of +quiet duties. Sara Lee had set her face toward the east, and the land +of dying men. And as Henri looked down at her she had again that poised +and eager look, almost of flight, that had brought into Harvey's love +for her just a touch of fear. + + + + +VI + + +Sara Lee Kennedy was up at dawn the next morning. There was a very +serious matter to decide, for Henri's plan had included only such hand +luggage as she herself could carry. + +Sara Lee carefully laid out on the bed such articles as she could not +possibly do without, and was able to pack into her suitcase less than +a fourth of them. She had fortunately brought a soft wool sweater, +which required little room. Undergarments, several blouses, the sweater +and a pair of heavy shoes--that was her equipment, plus such small +toilet outfit as is necessary when a young woman uses no make-up and +regards cold cream only as a remedy for chapped hands. + +The maid found her in rather a dismal mood. + +"Going across, miss!" she said. "Fancy that!" + +"It's a secret," cautioned Sara Lee. "I am really not sure I am going. +I am only trying to go." + +The maid, who found Sara Lee and the picture of Harvey on her dressing +table both romantic and appealing, offered to pack. From the first +moment it was evident that she meant to include the white dress. Indeed +she packed it first. + +"You never know what's going to happen over there," she asserted. "They +do say that royalties are everywhere, going about like common people. +You'd better have a good frock with you." + +She had an air of subdued excitement, and after she had established the +fact that not only the white frock but slippers and hose also would go +in she went to the door and glanced up and down the passage. Then she +closed the door. + +"There was queer goings-on here last night, miss," she said cautiously. +"Spies!" + +"Oh, no!" cried Sara Lee. + +"Spies," she repeated. "A man and a woman, pretending to be Belgian +refugees. They took them away at daylight. I expect by now they've +been shot." + +Sara Lee ate very little breakfast that morning. All through England +it was confidently believed that spies were shot on discovery, a theory +that has been persistent--and false, save at the battle line--since +the beginning of the war. And Henri's plan assumed new proportions. +Suppose she made her attempt and failed? Suppose they took her for a +spy, and that tomorrow's sun found her facing a firing squad? Not, +indeed, that she had ever heard of a firing squad, as such. But she +had seen spies shot in the movies. They invariably stood in front of +a brick wall, with the hero in the center. + +So she absent-mindedly ate her kippered herring, which had been strongly +recommended by the waiter, and tried to think of what a spy would do, so +she might avoid any suspicious movements. It struck her, too, that war +seemed to have made the people on that side of the ocean extremely ready +with weapons. They would be quite likely to shoot first and ask +questions afterwards--which would be too late to be helpful. + +She remembered Henri, for instance, and the way, without a word, he had +shot the donkey. + +That day she wrote Harvey a letter. + + "_Dearest_:" it began; "I think I am to leave for France to-night. + Things seem to be moving nicely, and I am being helped by the Belgian + Relief Commission. It is composed of Belgians and is at the Savoy + Hotel." + + +Here she stopped and cried a little. What if she should never see +Harvey again--never have his sturdy arms about her? Harvey gained by +distance. She remembered only his unfailing kindness and strength and +his love for her. He seemed, here at the edge of the whirlpool, a sort +of eddy of peace and quiet. Even then she had no thought of going back +until her work was done, but she did an unusual thing for her, unused +to demonstration of any sort. She kissed his ring. + +Followed directions about sending the money from the church society, +a description of Morley's and Trafalgar Square, an account of tea at +the Travers', and of the little donkey--without mention, however, of +Henri. She felt that Harvey would not understand Henri. + +But at the end came the passage which poor Harvey read and re-read +when the letter came, and alternately ground his teeth over and kissed. + + "I do love you, Harvey dear. And I am coming back to you. I have felt + that I had to do what I am doing, but I am coming back. That's a + promise. Unless, of course, I should take sick, or something like + that, which isn't likely." + + +There was a long pause in the writing here, but Harvey could not know +that. + + "I shall wear your ring always; and always, Harvey, it will mean to + me that I belong to you. With dearest love. + + "SARA LEE" + + +Then she added a postscript, of course. + + "The War Office is not letting people cross to Calais just now. But + I am going to do it anyhow. It is perfectly simple. And when I get + over I shall write and tell you how. + + "S.L." + + +It was the next day that an indignant official in the censor's office +read that postscript, and rose in his wrath and sent a third +Undersomething-or-other to look up Sara Lee at Morley's. But by this +time she was embarked on the big adventure; and by the time a cable +reached Calais there was no trace of Sara Lee. + +During the afternoon she called up Mr. Travers at his office, and rather +gathered that he did not care to use the telephone during business hours. + +"I just wanted to tell you that you need not bother about me any more," +she said. "I am being sent over and I think everything is all right." + +He was greatly relieved. Mrs. Travers had not fully indorsed his +encomiums of the girl. She had felt that no really nice girl would +travel so far on so precarious an errand, particularly when she was +alone. And how could one tell, coming from America, how her sympathies +really lay? She might be of German parentage--the very worst sort, +because they spoke American. It was easy enough to change a name. + +Nevertheless, Mr. Travers felt a trifle low in his mind when he hung up +the receiver. He said twice to himself: "Twenty pounds!" And at last +he put four sovereigns in an envelope and sent them to her anonymously +by messenger. Sara Lee guessed whence they came, but she respected the +manner of the gift and did not thank him. It was almost the first gold +money she had ever seen. + +She was very carefully searched at the railway station that night and +found that her American Red Cross button, which had come with her dollar +subscription to the association, made the matron inspector rather +kindly inclined. Nevertheless, she took off Sara Lee's shoes, and ran +over the lining of her coat, and quite ruined the maid's packing of the +suitcase. + +"You are going to Boulogne?" asked the matron inspector. + +Sara Lee did not like to lie. + +"Wherever the boat takes me," she said with smile. + +The matron smiled too. + +"I shouldn't be nervous, miss," she said. "It's a chance, of course, +but they have not done much damage yet." + +It was after midnight then, and a cold fog made the station a gloomy +thing of blurred yellow lights and raw chill. A few people moved about, +mostly officers in uniform. Half a dozen men in civilian clothes +eyed her as she passed through the gates; Scotland Yard, but she did not +know. And once she thought she saw Henri, but he walked away into the +shadows and disappeared. The train, looking as absurdly small and light +as all English trains do, was waiting out in the shed. There were no +porters, and Sara Lee carried her own bag. + +She felt quite sure she had been mistaken about Henri, for of course +he would have come and carried it for her. + +The train was cold and quiet. When it finally moved out it was under +way before she knew that it was going. And then suddenly Sara Lee's +heart began to pound hard. + +It was a very cold and shivering Sara Lee who curled up, alone in her +compartment, and stared hard at Harvey's ring to keep her courage up. +But a curious thing had happened. Harvey gave her no moral support. +He brought her only disapproval. She found herself remembering none of +the loving things he had said to her, but only the bitter ones. + +Perhaps it was the best thing for her, after all. For a sort of dogged +determination to go through with it all, at any cost, braced her to her +final effort. + +So far it had all been busy enough, but not comfortable. She was cold, +and she had eaten almost nothing all day. As the hours went on and the +train slid through the darkness she realized that she was rather faint. +The steam pipes, only warm at the start, were entirely cold by one +o'clock, and by two Sara Lee was sitting on her feet, with a heavy coat +wrapped about her knees. + +The train moved quietly, as do all English trains, with no jars and +little sound. There were few lights outside, for the towns of Eastern +England were darkened, like London, against air attacks. So when she +looked at the window she saw only her own reflection, white and +wide-eyed, above Aunt Harriet's fur neckpiece. + +In the next compartment an officer was snoring, but she did not close +her eyes. Perhaps, for that last hour, some of the glow that had brought +her so far failed her. She was not able to think beyond Folkestone, save +occasionally, and that with a feeling that it should not be made so +difficult to do a kind and helpful thing. + +At a quarter before three the train eased down. In the same proportion +Sara Lee's pulse went up. A long period of crawling along, a stop or +two, but no resultant opening of the doors; and at last, in a cold rain +and a howling wind from the channel, the little seaport city. + +More officers than she had suspected, a few women, got out. The latter +Sara Lee's experience on the steamer enabled her to place; buyers mostly, +and Americans, on their way to Paris, blockade or no blockade, because +the American woman must be well and smartly gowned and hatted. A man +with a mourning band on his sleeve carried a wailing child. + +The officers lighted cigarettes. The civilians formed a line on the +jetty under the roof of the shed, and waited, passports in hand, before +a door that gleamed with yellow light. Faces looked pale and anxious. +The blockade was on, and Germany had said that no ships would cross +that night. + +As if defiantly the Boulogne boat, near at hand, was ablaze, on the shore +side at least, with lights. Stewards came and went. Beyond it lay the +harbor, dark and mysterious save where, from somewhere across, a +flashlight made a brave effort to pierce the fog. + +One of the buyers ahead of Sara Lee seemed exhilarated by the danger +ahead. + +"They'll never get us," she said. "Look at that fog!" + +"It's lifting, dearie," answered a weary voice behind her. "The wind is +carrying it away." + +When Sara Lee's turn came she was ready. A group of men in civilian +clothes, seated about a long table, looked her over carefully. Her +passports moved deliberately from hand to hand. A long business, and +the baby wailing harder than ever. But the office was at least warm. +Some of her failing courage came back as she moved, following her papers, +round the table. They were given back to her at last, and she went out. +She had passed the first ordeal. + +Suitcase in hand she wandered down the stone jetty. The Boulogne boat +she passed, and kept on. At the very end, dark and sinister, lay another +boat. It had no lights. The tide was in, and its deck lay almost flush +with the pier. Sara Lee walked on toward it until a voice spoke to her +out of the darkness and near at hand. + +"Your boat is back there, madam." + +"I know. Thank you. I am just walking about." + +The petty officer--he was a petty officer, though Sara Lee had never +heard the term--was inclined to be suspicious. Under excuse of lighting +his pipe he struck a match, and Sara Lee's young figure stood out in full +relief. His suspicions died away with the flare. + +"Bad night, miss," he offered. + +"Very," said Sara Lee, and turned back again. + +This time, bewildered and uneasy, she certainly saw Henri. But he +ignored her. He was alone, and smoking one of his interminable +cigarettes. He had not said he was crossing, and why had he not spoken +to her? He wandered past down the pier, and she lost him in the shadows. +When he came back he paused near her, and at last saluted and spoke. + +"_Pardon_," he said. "If you will stand back here you will find less +wind." + +"Thank you." + +He carried her suitcase back, and stooping over to place it at her feet +he said: "I shall send him on board with a message to the captain. When +I come back try again." + +He left her at once. The passengers for Boulogne were embarking now. +A silent lot, they disappeared into the warmth and brightness of the +little boat and were lost. No one paid any attention to Sara Lee +standing in the shadows. + +Soon Henri came back. He walked briskly and touched his cap as he +passed. He went aboard the Boulogne steamer, and without a backward +glance disappeared. + +Sara Lee watched him out of sight, in a very real panic. He had been +something real and tangible in that shadowy place--something familiar +in an unfamiliar world. But he was gone. She threw up her head. + +So once more Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and went down the pier. +Now she was unchallenged. What lurking figure might be on the dark deck +of the Calais boat she could not tell. That was the chance she was to +take. The gangway was still out, and as quietly as possible she went +aboard. The Boulogne boat had suddenly gone dark, and she heard the +churning of the screw. With the extinction of the lights on the other +boat came at last deeper night to her aid. A few steps, a stumble, a +gasp--and she was on board the forbidden ship. + +She turned forward, according to her instructions, where the overhead +deck made below an even deeper shadow. Henri had said that there were +cabins there, and that the chance was of finding an unlocked one. If +they were all locked she would be discovered at dawn, and arrested. And +Sara Lee was not a war correspondent. She was not accustomed to arrest. +Indeed she had a deep conviction that arrest in her case would mean death. +False, of course, but surely it shows her courage. + +As she stood there, breathless and listening, the Boulogne boat moved +out. She heard the wash against the jetty, felt the rolling of its +waves. But being on the landward side she could not see the faint +gleam of a cigarette that marked Henri's anxious figure at the rail. +So long as the black hulk of the Calais boat was visible, and long +after indeed, Henri stood there, outwardly calm but actually shaken by +many fears. She had looked so small and young; and who could know what +deviltry lurked abroad that night? + +He had not gone with her because it was necessary that he be in Boulogne +the next morning. And also, the very chance of getting her across lay +in her being alone and unobserved. + +So he stood by the rail and looked back and said a wordless little prayer +that if there was trouble it come to his boat and not to the other. +Which might very considerably have disturbed the buyers had they known +of it and believed in prayer. + +Sara Lee stood in the shadows and listened. There were voices overhead, +from the bridge. A door opened onto the deck and threw out a ray of +light. Some one came out and went on shore, walking with brisk ringing +steps. And then at last she put down her bag and tried door after door, +without result. + +The man who had gone ashore called another. The gangway was drawn in. +The engines began to vibrate under foot. Sara Lee, breathless and +terrified, stood close to a cabin door and remained immovable. At one +moment it seemed as if a seaman was coming forward to where she stood. +But he did not come. + +The Calais boat was waiting until the other steamer had got well out of +the harbor. The fog had lifted, and the searchlight was moving over +the surface. It played round the channel steamer without touching it. +But none of this was visible to Sara Lee. + +At last the lights of the quay began to recede. The little boat rocked +slightly in its own waves as it edged away. It moved slowly through +the shipping and out until, catching the swell of the channel, it shot +ahead at top speed. + +For an hour Sara Lee stood there. The channel wind caught her and tore +at her skirts until she was almost frozen. And finally, in sheer +desperation, she worked her way round to the other side. She saw no +one. Save for the beating heart of the engine below it might have been +a dead ship. + +On the other side she found an open door and stumbled into the tiny dark +deck cabin, as chilled and frightened a philanthropist as had ever +crossed that old and tricky and soured bit of seaway. And there, to be +frank, she forgot her fright in as bitter a tribute of seasickness as +even the channel has ever exacted. + +She had locked herself in, and she fell at last into an exhausted sleep. +When she wakened and peered out through the tiny window it was gray +winter dawn. The boat was quiet, and before her lay the quay of Calais +and the Gare Maritime. A gangway was out and a hurried survey showed +no one in sight. + +Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and opened the door. The fresh morning +air revived her, but nevertheless it was an extremely pale young woman +who, obeying Henri's instructions, went ashore that morning in the gray +dawn unseen, undisturbed and unquestioned. But from the moment she +appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare +Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not +breathe at all. She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and +her heart entirely unreliable. + +A woman clerk was asleep at a desk. Sara Lee roused her to half +wakefulness, no interest and extremely poor English. A drowsy porter +led her up a staircase and down an endless corridor. Then at last he +was gone, and Sara Lee turned the key in her door and burst into tears. + + + + +VII + + +Now up to this point Sara Lee's mind had come to rest at Calais. She +must get there; after that the other things would need to be worried +over. Henri had already in their short acquaintance installed himself +as the central figure of this strange and amazing interlude--not as a +good-looking young soldier surprisingly fertile in expedients, but as a +sort of agent of providence, by whom and through whom things were done. + +And Henri had said she was to go to the Gare Maritime at Calais and make +herself comfortable--if she got there. After that things would be +arranged. + +Sara Lee therefore took a hot bath, though hardly a satisfactory one, +for there was no soap and she had brought none. She learned later on +to carry soap with her everywhere. So she soaked the chill out of her +slim body and then dressed. The room was cold, but a great exultation +kept her warm. She had run the blockade, she had escaped the War +Office--which, by the way, was looking her up almost violently by +that time, via the censor. It had found the trunk she left at Morley's, +and cross-questioned the maid into hysteria--and here she was, +safe in France, the harbor of Calais before her, and here and there +strange-looking war craft taking on coal. Destroyers, she learned later. +Her ignorance was rather appalling at first. + +It was all unreal--the room with its cold steam pipes, the heavy window +hangings, the very words on the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. A +great vessel moved into the harbor. As it turned she saw its name +printed on its side in huge letters, and the flag, also painted, of a +neutral country--a hoped-for protection against German submarines. It +brought home to her, rather, the thing she had escaped. + +After a time she thought of food, but rather hopelessly. Her attempts +to get _savon_ from a stupid boy had produced nothing more useful than +a flow of unintelligible French and no soap whatever. She tried a +pantomime of washing her hands, but to the boy she had appeared to be +merely wringing them. And, as a great many females were wringing their +hands in France those days, he had gone away, rather sorry for her. + +When hunger drove her to the bell again he came back and found her with +her little phrase book in her hands, feverishly turning the pages. She +could find plenty of sentences such as "_Garçon, vous avez renversé du +vin sur ma robe_," but not an egg lifted its shining pate above the +pages. Not cereal. Not fruit. Not even the word breakfast. + +Long, long afterward Sara Lee found a quite delightful breakfast +hidden between two pages that were stuck together. But it was then far +too late. + +"_Donnez-moi_," began Sara Lee, and turned the pages rapidly, "this; do +you see?" She had found roast beef. + +The boy observed stolidly, in French, that it was not ready until noon. +She was able to make out, from his failing to depart, that there was no +roast beef. + +"Good gracious!" she said, ravenous and exasperated. "Go and get me +some bread and coffee, anyhow." She repeated it, slightly louder. + +That was the tableau that Henri found when, after a custom that may be +war or may be Continental, he had inquired the number of her room and +made his way there. + +There was a twinkle in his blue eyes as he bowed before her--and a vast +relief too. + +"So you are here!" he said in a tone of satisfaction. He had put in an +extremely bad night, even for him, by whom nights were seldom wasted in +a bed. While he was with her something of her poise had communicated +itself to him. He had felt the confidence, in men and affairs, that +American girls are given as a birthright. And her desire for service +he had understood as a year or two ago he could not have understood. +But he had stood by the rail staring north, and cursing himself for +having placed her in danger during the entire crossing. + +There was nothing about him that morning, however to show his bad +hours. He was debonnaire and smiling. + +"I am famishing," said Sara Lee. "And there are no eggs in this +book--none whatever." + +"Eggs! You wish eggs?" + +"I just want food. Almost anything will do. I asked for eggs because +they can come quickly." + +Henri turned to the boy and sent him off with a rapid order. Then: +"May I come in?" he said. + +Sara Lee cast an uneasy glance over the room. It was extremely tidy, +and unmistakably it was a bedroom. But though her color rose she asked +him in. After all, what did it matter? To have refused would have +looked priggish, she said to herself. And as a matter of fact one of +the early lessons she learned in France was learned that morning--that +though convention had had to go, like many other things in the war, men +who were gentlemen ignored its passing. + +Henri came in and stood by the center table. + +"Now, please tell me," he said. "I have been most uneasy. On the quay +last night you looked--frightened." + +"I was awfully frightened. Nothing happened. I even slept." + +"You were very brave." + +"I was very seasick." + +"I am sorry." + +Henri took a turn up and down the room. + +"But," said Sara Lee slowly, "I--I--can't be on your hands, you know. +You must have many things to do. If you are going to have to order my +meals and all that, I'm going to be a dreadful burden." + +"But you will learn very quickly." + +"I'm stupid about languages." + +Henri dismissed that with a gesture. She could not, he felt, be stupid +about anything. He went to the window and looked out. The destroyers +were still coaling, and a small cargo was being taken off the boat at +the quay. The rain was over, and in the early sunlight an officer in +blue tunic, red breeches and black cavalry boots was taking the air, his +head bent over his chest. Not a detail of the scene escaped him. + +"I have agreed to find the right place for you," he said thoughtfully. +"There is one, but I think--" He hesitated. "I do not wish to place +you again in danger." + +"You mean that it is near the Front?" + +"Very near, mademoiselle." + +"But I should be rather near, to be useful." + +"Perhaps, for your work. But what of you? These brutes--they shell +far and wide. One can never be sure." + +He paused and surveyed her whimsically. + +"Who allowed you to come, alone, like this?" he demanded. "Is there no +one who objected?" + +Sara Lee glanced down at her ring. + +"The man I am going to marry. He is very angry." + +Henri looked at her, and followed her eyes to Harvey's ring. He said +nothing, however, but he went over and gave the bell cord a violent jerk. + +"You must have food quickly," he said in a rather flat voice. "You are +looking tired and pale." + +A sense of unreality was growing on Sara Lee. That she should be alone +in France with a man she had never seen three days before; that she knew +nothing whatever about that man; that, for the present at least, she was +utterly and absolutely dependent on him, even for the food she ate--it +was all of a piece with the night's voyage and the little room at the +Savoy. And it was none of it real. + +When the breakfast tray came Henri was again at the window and silent. +And Sara Lee saw that it was laid for two. She was a little startled, +but the businesslike way in which the young officer drew up two chairs +and held one out for her made protest seem absurd. And the flat-faced +boy, who waited, looked unshocked and uninterested. + +It was not until she had had some coffee that Henri followed up his +line of thought. + +"So--the fiance did not approve? It is not difficult to understand. +There is always danger, for there are German aëroplanes even in remote +places. And you are very young. You still wish to establish yourself, +mademoiselle?" + +"Of course!" + +"Would it be a comfort to cable your safe arrival in France to the +fiancé?" When he saw her face he smiled. And if it was a rather heroic +smile it was none the less friendly. "I see. What shall I say? Or +will you write it?" + +So Sara Lee, vastly cheered by two cups of coffee, an egg, and a very +considerable portion of bread and butter, wrote her cable. It was to +be brief, for cables cost money. It said, "Safe. Well. Love." And +Henri, who seemed to have strange and ominous powers, sent it almost +immediately. Total cost, as reported to Sara Lee, two francs. He took +the money she offered him gravely. + +"We shall cable quite often," he said. "He will be anxious. And I +think he has a right to know." + +The "we" was entirely unconscious. + +"And now," he said, when he had gravely allowed Sara Lee to pay her half +of the breakfast, "we must arrange to get you out of Calais. And that, +mademoiselle, may take time." + +It took time. Sara Lee, growing accustomed now to little rooms entirely +filled with men and typewriters, went from one office to another, walking +along the narrow pavements with Henri, through streets filled with +soldiers. Once they drew aside to let pass a procession of Belgian +refugees, those who had held to their village homes until bombardment +had destroyed them--stout peasant women in short skirts and with huge +bundles, old men, a few young ones, many children. The terror of the +early flight was not theirs, but there was in all of them a sort of +sodden hopelessness that cut Sara Lee to the heart. In an irregular +column they walked along, staring ahead but seeing nothing. Even the +children looked old and tired. + +Sara Lee's eyes filled with tears. + +"My people," said Henri. "Simple country folk, and going to England, +where they will grieve for the things that are gone--their fields and +their sons. The old ones will die, quickly, of homesickness. It is +difficult to transplant an old tree." + +The final formalities seemed to offer certain difficulties. Henri, who +liked to do things quickly and like a prince, flushed with irritation. +He drew himself up rather haughtily in reply to one question, and glanced +uneasily at the girl. But it was all as intelligible as Sanskrit to her. + +It was only after a whispered sentence to the man at the head of the +table that the paper was finally signed. + +As they went down to the street together Sara Lee made a little protest. + +"But I simply must not take all your time," she said, looking up +anxiously. "I begin to realize how foolhardy the whole thing is. I meant +well, but--it is you who are doing everything; not I." + +"I shall not make the soup, mademoiselle," he replied gravely. + + + + +VIII + + +Here were more things to do. Sara Lee's money must be exchanged at a +bank for French gold. She had three hundred dollars, and it had been +given her in a tiny brown canvas bag. And then there was the matter of +going from Calais toward the Front. She had expected to find a train, +but there were no trains. All cars were being used for troops. She +stared at Henri in blank dismay. + +"No trains!" she said blankly. "Would an automobile be very expensive?" + +"They are all under government control, mademoiselle. Even the petrol." + +She stopped in the street. + +"Then I shall have to go back." + +Henri laughed boyishly. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have been requested to take you to a place +where you may render us the service we so badly need. For the present +that is my duty, and nothing else. So if you will accept the offer of +my car, which is a shameful one but travels well, we can continue our +journey." + +Long, long afterward, Sara Lee found a snapshot of Henri's car, taken +by a light-hearted British officer. Found it and sat for a long time +with it in her hand, thinking and remembering that first day she saw it, +in the sun at Calais. A long low car it was, once green, but now +roughly painted gray. But it was not the crude painting, significant +as it was, that brought so close the thing she was going to. It was +that the car was but a shell of a car. The mud guards were crumpled up +against the side. Body and hood were pitted with shrapnel. A door had +been shot away, and the wind shield was but a frame set round with +broken glass. Even the soldier-chauffeur wore a patch over one eye, +and his uniform was ragged. + +"Not a beautiful car, mademoiselle, as I warned you! But a fast one!" + +Henri was having a double enjoyment. He was watching Sara Lee's face +and his chauffeur's remaining eye. + +"But fast; eh, Jean?" he said to the chauffeur. The man nodded and +said something in French. It was probably the thing Henri had hoped for, +and he threw back his head and laughed. + +"Jean is reminding me," he said gayly, "that it is forbidden to officers +to take a lady along the road that we shall travel." But when he saw +how Sara Lee flushed he turned to the man. + +"Mademoiselle has come from America to help us, Jean," he said quietly. +"And now for Dunkirk." + +The road from Dunkirk to Calais was well guarded in those days. From +Nieuport for some miles inland only the shattered remnant of the Belgian +Army held the line. For the cry "On to Paris!" the Germans had +substituted "On to Calais!" + +So, on French soil at least, the road was well guarded. A few miles in +the battered car, then a slowing up, a showing of passports, the clatter +of a great chain as it dropped to the road, a lowering of leveled rifles, +and a salute from the officer--that was the method by which they +advanced. + +Henri sat with the driver and talked in a low tone. Sometimes he sat +quiet, looking ahead. He seemed, somehow, older, more careworn. His +boyishness had gone. Now and then he turned to ask if she was +comfortable, but in the intervals she felt that he had entirely forgotten +her. Once, at something Jean said, he got out a pocket map and went +over it carefully. It was a long time after that before he turned to +see if she was all right. + +Sara Lee sat forward and watched everything. She saw little evidence of +war, beyond the occasional sentries and chains. Women were walking along +the roads. Children stopped and pointed, smiling, at the battered car. +One very small boy saluted, and Henri as gravely returned the salute. + +Some time after that he turned to her. + +"I find that I shall have to leave you in Dunkirk," he said. "A matter +of a day only, probably. But I will see before I go that you are +comfortable." + +"I shall be quite all right, of course." + +But something had gone out of the day for her. + +Sara Lee learned one thing that day, learned it as some women do learn, +by the glance of an eye, the tone of a voice. The chauffeur adored +Henri. His one unbandaged eye stole moments from the road to glance +at him. When he spoke, while Henri read his map, his very voice betrayed +him. And while she pondered the thing, woman-fashion they drew into +the square of Dunkirk, where the statue of Jean Bart, pirate and +privateer stared down at this new procession of war which passed daily +and nightly under his cold eyes. + +Jean and a porter carried in her luggage. Henri and a voluble and +smiling Frenchwoman showed her to her room. She felt like an island of +silence in a rapid-rolling sea of French. The Frenchwoman threw open +the door. + +A great room with high curtained windows; a huge bed with a faded gilt +canopy and heavy draperies; a wardrobe as vast as the bed; and for a +toilet table an enormous mirror reaching to the ceiling and with a +marble shelf below--that was her room. + +"I think you will be comfortable here, mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee, who still clutched her small bag of gold, shook her head. + +"Comfortable, yes," she said. "But I am afraid it is very expensive." + +Henri named an extremely low figure--an exact fourth, to be accurate, +of its real cost. A surprising person Henri, with his worn uniform and +his capacity for kindly mendacity. And seeing something in the +Frenchwoman's face that perhaps he had expected, he turned to her +almost fiercely: + +"You are to understand, madame, that this lady has been placed in my +care by authority that will not be questioned. She is to have every +deference." + +That was all, but was enough. And from that time on Sara Lee Kennedy, +of Ohio, was called, in the tiny box downstairs which constituted the +office, "Mademoiselle La Princesse." + +Henri did a characteristic and kindly thing for Sara Lee before he left +that evening on one of the many mysterious journeys that he was to make +during the time Sara Lee knew him. He came to her door, menus in hand, +and painstakingly ordered for her a dinner for that night, and the +three meals for the day following. + +He made no suggestion of dining with her that evening. Indeed, watching +him from her small table, Sara Lee decided that he had put her entirely +out of his mind. He did not so much as glance at her. Save the cashier +at her boxed-in desk and money drawer, she was the only woman in that +room full of officers. Quite certainly Henri was the only man who did +not find some excuse for glancing in her direction. + +But finishing early, he paused by the cashier's desk to pay for his meal, +and then he gave Sara Lee the stiffest and most ceremonious of bows. + +She felt hurt. Alone in her great room, the curtains drawn by order of +the police, lest a ray of light betray the town to eyes in the air, she +went carefully over the hours she had spent with Henri that day, +looking for a cause of offense. She must have hurt him or he would +surely have stopped to speak to her. + +Perhaps already he was finding her a burden. She flushed with shame +when she remembered about the meals he had had to order for her, and +she sat up in her great bed until late, studying by candlelight such +phrases as: + +"_Il y a une erreur dans la note_," and "_Garçon, quels fruits +avez-vous?_" + +She tried to write to Harvey that night, but she gave it up at last. +There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly +without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered +about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she +was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to +learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based +not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding. + +So she got as far as: "_Dearest Harvey_: I am here in a hotel at +Dunkirk"--and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness. +Not so much for Harvey as for familiar things--Uncle James in his chair +by the fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the +West"; her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the +dining-room window; the voices of happy children wandering home from +school. + +She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle. +Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry +with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top +of the _mairie_ perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger, +came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer +for quiet sleep. + +For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had +nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama +that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for +his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor +lorries--she called them trucks--piled high with supplies, often +fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food. +Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers, +detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers. + +Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their +striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up, +too, and there would be an aëroplane sliding along, sometimes so low +that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust. + +But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came +at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly. +Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle +impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the +moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those +two interminable days. + +Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops--a +symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect--inside those cars were +wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care. +Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do +must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger +and sent a little message to him. + +"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so +terrible! So pitiful!" + +Yet during the day the square was gay enough. Officers in spurs clanked +across, wide capes blowing in the wind. Common soldiers bought fruit +and paper bags of fried potatoes from the booths. Countless dogs fought +under the feet of passers-by, and over all leered the sardonic face of +Jean Bart, pirate and privateer. + +Sara Lee went out daily, but never far. And she practiced French with +the maid, after this fashion: + +"_Draps de toile_," said the smiling maid, putting the linen sheets on +the bed. + +Sara Lee would repeat it some six times. + +"_Taies d'oreiller_," when the pillows came. So Sara Lee called pillows +by the name of their slips from that time forward! Came a bright hour +when she rang the bell for the boy and asked for matches, which she +certainly did not need, with entire success. + +On the second night Sara Lee slept badly. At two o'clock she heard a +sound in the hall, and putting on her kimono, opened the door. On a +stiff chair outside, snoring profoundly, sat Jean, fully dressed. + +The light from her candle roused him and he was wide awake in an instant. + +"Why, Jean!" she said. "Isn't there any place for you to sleep?" + +"I am to remain here, mademoiselle," he replied in English. + +"But surely--not because of me?" + +"It is the captain's order," he said briefly. + +"I don't understand. Why?" + +"All sorts of people come to this place, mademoiselle. But few ladies. +It is best that I remain here." + +She could not move him. He had remained standing while she spoke to him, +and now he yawned, striving to conceal it. Sara Lee felt very +uncomfortable, but Jean's attitude and voice alike were firm. She +thanked him and said good night, but she slept little after that. + +Lying there in the darkness, a warm glow of gratitude to Henri, and a +feeling of her safety in his care, wrapped her like a mantle. She +wondered drowsily if Harvey would ever have thought of all the small +things that seemed second nature to this young Belgian officer. + +She rather thought not. + + + + +IX + + +While she was breakfasting the next morning there was a tap at the door, +and thinking it the maid she called to her to come in. + +But it was Jean, an anxious Jean, twisting his cap in his hands. + +"You have had a message from the captain, mademoiselle?" + +"No, Jean." + +"He was to have returned during the night. He has not come, +mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee forgot her morning negligée in Jean's harassed face. + +"But--where did he go?" + +Jean shrugged his shoulders and did not reply. + +"Are you worried about him?" + +"I am anxious, mademoiselle. But I am often anxious; and--he always +returns." + +He smiled almost sheepishly. Sara Lee, who had no subtlety but a great +deal of intuition, felt that there was a certain relief in the smile, as +though Jean, having had no message from his master, was pleased that +she had none. Which was true enough, at that. Also she felt that Jean's +one eye was inspecting her closely, which was also true. A new factor +had come into Henri's life--by Jean's reasoning, a new and dangerous +one. And there were dangers enough already. + +Highly dangerous, Jean reflected in the back of his head as he backed +out with a bow. A young girl unafraid of the morning sun and sitting +at a little breakfast table as fresh as herself--that was a picture for +a war-weary man. + +Jean forgot for a moment his anxiety for Henri's safety in his fear for +his peace of mind. For a doubt had been removed. The girl was straight. +Jean's one sophisticated eye had grasped that at once. A good girl, +alone, and far from home! And Henri, like all soldiers, woman-hungry +for good women, for unpainted skins and clear eyes and the freshness and +bloom of youth. + +All there, behind that little breakfast table which might so pleasantly +have been laid for two. + +Jean took a walk that morning, and stood staring for twenty minutes into +a clock maker's window, full of clocks. After which he drew out his +watch and looked at the time! + +At two in the afternoon Sara Lee saw Henri's car come into the square. +It was, if possible, more dilapidated than before, and he came like a +gray whirlwind, scattering people and dogs out of his way. Almost +before he had had time to enter the hotel Sara Lee heard him in the +hall, and the next moment he was bowing before her. + +"I have been longer than I expected," he explained. "Have you been +quite comfortable?" + +Sara Lee, however, was gazing at him with startled eyes. He was dirty, +unshaven, and his eyes looked hollow and bloodshot. From his neck to +his heels he was smeared with mud, and his tidy tunic was torn into +ragged holes. + +"But you--you have been fighting!" she gasped. + +"I? No, mademoiselle. There has been no battle." His eyes left her +and traveled over the room. "They are doing everything for you? They +are attentive?" + +"Everything is splendid," said Sara Lee. "If you won't tell me how you +got into that condition, at least you can send your coat down to me to +mend." + +"My tunic!" He looked at it smilingly. "You would do that?" + +"I am nearly frantic for something to do." + +He smiled, and suddenly bending down he took her hand and kissed it. + +"You are not only very beautiful, mademoiselle, but you are very good." + +He went away then, and Sara Lee got out her sewing things. The tunic +came soon, carefully brushed and very ragged. But it was not Jean who +brought it; it was the Flemish boy. + +And upstairs in a small room with two beds Sara Lee might have been +surprised to find Jean, the chauffeur, lying on one, while Henri shaved +himself beside the other. For Jean, of the ragged uniform and the patch +over one eye, was a count of Belgium, and served Henri because he loved +him. And because, too, he was no longer useful in that little army +where lay his heart. + +Sometime a book will be written about the Jeans of this war, the great +friendships it has brought forth between men. And not the least of its +stories will be that of this Jean of the one eye. But its place is not +here. + +And perhaps there will be a book about the Henris, also. But not for a +long time, and even then with care. For the heroes of one department of +an army in the field live and die unsung. Their bravest exploits are +buried in secrecy. And that is as it must be. But it is a fine tale to +go untold. + +After he had bathed and shaved, Henri sat down at a tiny table and wrote. +He drew a plan also, from a rough one before him. Then he took a match +and burned the original drawing until it was but charred black ashes. +When he had finished Jean got up from the bed and put on his overcoat. + +"To the King?" he said. + +"To the King, old friend." + +Jean took the letter and went out. + +Down below, Sara Lee sat with Henri's ragged tunic on her lap and +stitched carefully. Sometime, she reflected, she would be mending worn +garments for another man, now far away. A little flood of tenderness +came over her. So helpless these men! There was so much to do for them! +And soon, please God, she would be helping other tired and weary men, +with food, and perhaps a word--when she had acquired some French--and +perhaps a thread and needle. + +She dined alone that night, as usual. Henri did not appear, though she +had sent what she suspected was his only tunic back to him neatly mended +at five o'clock. As a matter of fact Henri was sound asleep. He had +meant to rest only for an hour a body that was crying aloud with fatigue. +But Jean, coming in quietly, had found him sleeping like a child, and +had put his own blanket over him and left him. Henri slept until morning, +when Jean, coming up from his vigil outside the American girl's door, +found him waking and rested, and rang for coffee. + +Jean sat down on the edge of his bed and put on his shoes and puttees. +He was a taciturn man, but now he had something to say that he did not +like to say. And Henri knew it. + +"What is it?" he asked, his arms under his head. "Come, let us have it! +It is, of course, about the American lady." + +"It is," Jean said bluntly. "You cannot mix women and war." + +"And you think I am doing that?" + +"I am not an idiot," Jean growled. "You do not know what you are doing. +I do. She is young and lonely. You are young and not unattractive to +women. Already she turns pale when I so much as ask if she has heard +from you." + +"You asked her that?" + +"You were gone much longer than--" + +"And you thought I might send her word, and not you!" Henri's voice was +offended. He lay back while the boy brought in the morning coffee and +rolls. + +"Let me tell you something," he said when the boy had gone. "She is +betrothed to an American. She wears a betrothal ring. I am to her--the +French language!" + +But, though Henri laughed, Jean remained grave and brooding. For Henri +had not said what Sara Lee already was to him. + +It was later in the morning that Henri broached the subject again. They +were in the courtyard of an old house, working over the engine of the car. + +"I think I have found a location for the young American lady," he said. + +Jean hammered for a considerable time at a refractory rim. + +"And where?" he asked at last. + +Henri named the little town. Like Henri's family name, it must not be +told. Too many things happened there, and perhaps it is even now Henri's +headquarters. For that portion of the line has changed very little. + +Jean fell to renewed hammering. + +"If you will be silent I shall explain a plan," Henri said in a cautious +tone. "She will make soup, with help which we shall find. And if coming +in for refreshments a soldier shall leave a letter for me it is natural, +is it not?" + +"She will suspect, of course." + +"I think not. And she reads no French. None whatever." + +Yet Jean's suspicions were not entirely allayed. The plan had its +advantages. It was important that Henri receive certain reports, and +already the hotel whispered that Henri was of the secret service. It +brought him added deference, of course, but additional danger. + +So Jean accepted the plan, but with reservation. And it was not long +afterward that he said to Sara Lee, in French: "There is a spider on +your neck, mademoiselle." + +But Sara Lee only said, "I'm sorry, Jean; you'll have to speak English +to me for a while, I'm afraid." + +And though he watched her for five minutes she did not put her hand +to her neck. + +However, that was later on. That afternoon Henri spent an hour with the +Minister of War. And at the end of that time he said: "Thank you, Baron. +I think you will not regret it. America must learn the truth, and how +better than through those friendly people who come to us to help?" + +It is as well to state, however, that he left the Minister of War with +the undoubted impression that Miss Sara Lee Kennedy was a spinster of +uncertain years. + +Sara Lee packed her own suitcase that afternoon, doing it rather +nervously because Henri was standing in the room by the window waiting +for it. He had come in as matter-of-factly as Harvey had entered the +parlor at Aunt Harriet's, except that he carried in his arms some six +towels, a cake of soap and what looked suspiciously like two sheets. + +"The house I have under consideration," he said, "has little to +recommend it but the building, and even that--The occupants have gone +away, and--you are not a soldier." + +Sara Lee eyed the bundle. + +"I don't need sheets," she expostulated. + +"There are but two. And Jean has placed blankets in the car. You must +have a pillow also." + +He calmly took one of the hotel pillows from the bed. + +"What else?" he asked calmly. "Cigarettes? But no, you do not smoke." + +Sara Lee eyed him with something very like despair. + +"Aren't you ever going to let me think for myself?" + +"Would you have thought of these?" he demanded triumphantly. "You--you +think only of soup and tired soldiers. Some one must think of you." + +And there was a touch of tenderness in his voice. Sara Lee felt it and +trembled slightly. He was so fine, and he must not think of her that +way. It was not real. It couldn't be. Men were lonely here, where +everything was hard and cruel. They wanted some of the softness of life, +and all of kindness and sweetness that she could give should be Henri's. +But she must make it clear that there could never be anything more. + +There was a tightness about her mouth as she folded the white frock. + +"I know that garment," he said boyishly. "Do you remember the night you +wore it? And how we wandered in the square and made the plan that has +brought us together again?" + +Sara Lee reached down into her suitcase and brought up Harvey's picture. + +"I would like you to see this," she said a little breathlessly. "It is +the man I am to marry." + +For a moment she thought Henri was not going to take it. But he came, +rather slowly, and held out his hand for it. He went with it to the +window and stood there for some time looking down at it. + +"When are you going to marry him, mademoiselle?" + +"As soon as I go back." + +Sara Lee had expected some other comment, but he made none. He put the +photograph very quietly on the bed before her, and gathered up the linen +and the pillow in his arms. + +"I shall send for your luggage, mademoiselle. And you will find me at +the car outside, waiting." + +And so it was that a very silent Henri sat with Jean going out to that +strange land which was to be Sara Lee's home for many months. And a +very silent Sara Lee, flanked with pillow and blankets, who sat back +alone and tried to recall the tones of Harvey's voice. + +And failed. + + + + +X + + +From Dunkirk to the Front, the road, after the Belgian line was passed, +was lightly guarded. Henri came out of a reverie to explain to Sara Lee. + +"We have not many men," he said. "And those that remain are holding the +line. It is very weary, our army." + +Now at home Uncle James had thought very highly of the Belgian Army. He +had watched the fight they made, and he had tried to interest Sara Lee +in it. But without much result. She had generally said: "Isn't it +wonderful!" or "horrible," as the case might be, and put out of her mind +as soon as possible the ringing words he had been reading. But she had +not forgotten, she found. They came back to her as she rode through that +deserted countryside. Henri, glancing back somewhat later, found her in +tears. + +He climbed back at once into the rear of the car and sat down beside her. + +"You are homesick, I think?" + +"Yes. But not for myself. I am just homesick for all the people who +have lost their homes. You--and Jean, and all the rest." + +"Some day I shall tell you about my home and what has happened to it," +he said gravely. "Not now. It is not pleasant. But you must remember +this: We are going back home, we Belgians." And after a little pause: +"Just as you are." + +He lapsed into silence after that, and Sara Lee, stealing a glance at +him, saw his face set and hard. She had a purely maternal impulse to +reach over and pat his hand. + +Jean did not like Henri's shift to the rear of the car. He drove with +a sort of irritable feverishness, until Henri leaned over and touched +him on the shoulder. + +"We have mademoiselle with us, Jean," he said in French. + +"It is not difficult to believe," growled Jean. But he slackened his +pace somewhat. + +So far the road had been deserted. Now they had come up to a stream of +traffic flowing slowly toward the Front. Armored cars, looking tall and +top-heavy, rumbled and jolted along. Many lorries, one limousine +containing a general, a few Paris buses, all smeared a dingy gray and +filled with French soldiers, numberless and nondescript open machines, +here and there a horse-drawn vehicle--these filled the road. In and +out among them Jean threaded his way, while Sara Lee grew crimson with +the effort to see it all, and Henri sat very stiff and silent. + +At a crossroads they were halted by troops who had fallen out for a rest. +The men stood at ease, and stared their fill at Sara Lee. Save for a +few weary peasants, most of them had seen no women for months. But they +were respectful, if openly admiring. And their admiration of her was +nothing to Sara Lee's feeling toward them. She loved them all--boys +with their first straggly beards on their chins; older men, looking worn +and tired; French and Belgian; smiling and sad. But most of all, for +Uncle James' sake, she loved the Belgians. + +"I cannot tell you," she said breathlessly to Henri. "It is like a +dream come true. And I shall help. You look doubtful sometimes, but +I am sure." + +"You are heaven sent," Henri replied gravely. + +They turned into a crossroad after a time, and there in a little village +Sara Lee found her new home. A strange village indeed, unoccupied and +largely destroyed. Piles of bricks and plaster lined the streets. +Broken glass was everywhere. Jean blew out a tire finally, because of +the glass, and they were obliged to walk the remainder of the way. + +"A poor place, mademoiselle," Henri said as they went along. "A peaceful +little town, and quite beautiful, once. And it harbored no troops. But +everything is meat for the mouths of their guns." + +Sara Lee stopped and looked about her. Her heart was beating fast, but +her lips were steady enough. + +"And it is here that I--" + +"A little distance down the street. You must see before you decide." + +Steady, passionless firing was going on, not near, but far away, like +low thunder before a summer storm. She was for months to live, to eat +and sleep and dream to that rumbling from the Ypres salient, to waken +when it ceased or to look up from her work at the strange silence. But +it was new to her then, and terrible. + +"Do they still shell this--this town?" she asked, rather breathlessly. + +"Not now. They have done their work. Of course--" he did not finish. + +Sara Lee's heart slowed down somewhat. After all, she had asked to be +near the Front. And that meant guns and such destruction as was all +about her. Only one thing troubled her. + +"It is rather far from the trenches, isn't it?" + +He smiled slightly. + +"Far! It is not very far. Not so far as I would wish, mademoiselle. +But, to do what you desire, it is the best I have to offer." + +"How far away are the trenches?" + +"A quarter of a mile beyond those poplar trees." He indicated on a slight +rise a row of great trees broken somewhat but not yet reduced to the +twisted skeletons they were to become later on. In a long line they +faced the enemy like sentinels, winter-quiet but dauntless, and behind +them lay the wreck of the little village, quiet and empty. + +"Will the men know I am here?" Sara Lee asked anxiously. + +"But, yes, mademoiselle. At night they come up from the trenches, and +fresh troops take their places. They come up this street and go on to +wherever they are to rest. And when they find that a house of--mercy +is here--and soup, they will come. More than you wish." + +"Belgian soldiers?" + +"Only Belgian soldiers. That is as you want it to be, I think." + +"If only I spoke French!" + +"You will learn. And in the meantime, mademoiselle, I have taken the +liberty of finding you a servant--a young peasant woman. And you will +also have a soldier always on guard." + +Something that had been in the back of Sara Lee's mind for some time +suddenly went away. She had been thinking of Aunt Harriet and the Ladies' +Aid Society of the Methodist Church. She had, in fact, been wondering +how they would feel when they learned that she was living alone, the +only woman among thousands of men. It had, oddly enough, never occurred +to her before. + +"You have thought of everything," she said gratefully. + +But Henri said nothing. He had indeed thought of everything with a +vengeance, with the net result that he was not looking at Sara Lee more +than he could help. + +These Americans were strange. An American girl would cross the seas, +and come here alone with him--a man and human. And she would take for +granted that he would do what he was doing for love of his kind--which +was partly true; and she would be beautiful and sweet and amiable and +quite unself-conscious. And then she would go back home, warm of heart +with gratitude, and marry the man of the picture. + +The village had but one street, and that deserted and in ruins. Behind +its double row of houses, away from the enemy, lay the fields, a muddy +canal and more poplar trees. And from far away, toward Ypres, there +came constantly that somewhat casual booming of artillery which marked +the first winter of the war. + +The sound of the guns had first alarmed, then interested Sara Lee. It +was detached then, far away. It meant little to her. It was only later, +when she saw some of the results of the sounds she heard, that they +became significant. But this is not a tale of the wounding of men. +There are many such. This is the story of a little house of mercy, and +of a girl with a dauntless spirit, and of two men who loved her. Only +that. + +The maid Henri had found was already in the house, sweeping. Henri +presented her to Sara Lee, and he also brought a smiling little Belgian +boy, in uniform and with a rifle. + +"Your staff, mademoiselle!" he said. "And your residence!" + +Sara Lee looked about her. With the trifling exception that there was +no roof, it was whole. And the roof was not necessary, for the floors +of the upper story served instead. There was a narrow passage with a +room on either side, and a tiny kitchen behind. + +Henri threw open a door on the right. + +"Your bedroom," he said. "Well furnished, as you will see. It should +be, since there has been brought here all the furniture not destroyed +in the village." + +His blacker mood had fallen away before her naive delight. He went +about smiling boyishly, showing her the kettles in the kitchen; the +supply, already so rare, of firewood; the little stove. But he stiffened +somewhat when she placed her hand rather timidly on his arm. + +"How am I ever to thank you?" she asked. + +"By doing much good. And by never going beyond the poplar trees." + +She promised both very earnestly. + +But she was a little sad as she followed Henri about, he volubly +expatiating on such advantages as plenty of air owing to the absence of +a roof; and the attraction of the stove, which he showed much like a +salesman anxious to make a sale. "Such a stove!" he finished +contentedly. "It will make soup even in your absence, mademoiselle! +Our peasants eat much soup; therefore it is what you would call a +trained stove." + +Before Sara Lee's eyes came a picture of Harvey and the Leete house, +its white dining room, its bay window for plants, its comfortable charm +and prettiness. And Harvey's face, as he planned it for her anxious, +pleading, loving. She drew a long breath. If Henri noticed her +abstraction he ignored it. He was all over the little house. One moment +he was instructing Marie volubly, to her evident confusion. On René, +the guard, he descended like a young cyclone, with warnings for +mademoiselle's safety and comfort. He was everywhere, sitting on the +bed to see if it was soft, tramping hard on the upper floor to discover +if any plaster might loosen below, and pausing in that process to look +keenly at a windmill in the field behind. + +When he came down it was to say: "You are not entirely alone in the +village, after all, mademoiselle. The miller has come back. I shall +visit him now and explain." + +He found Sara Lee, however, still depressed. She was sitting in a low +chair in the kitchen gazing thoughtfully at the stove. + +"I am here," she said. "And here is the house, and a stove, +and--everything. But there are no shops; and what shall I make my soup +out of?" + +Henri stared at her rather blankly. + +"True!" he said. "Very true. And I never thought of it!" + +Then suddenly they both laughed, the joyous ringing laugh of ridiculous +youth, which can see its own absurdities and laugh at them. + +Henri counted off on his fingers. + +"I thought of water," he said, "and a house, and firewood, and kettles +and furniture. And there I ceased thinking." + +It was dusk now. Marie lifted the lid from the stove, and a warm red +glow of reflected light filled the little kitchen. It was warm and +cozy; the kettle sang like the purring of a cat. And something else +that had troubled Sara Lee came out. + +"I wonder," she said, "if you are doing all this only because I--well, +because I persuaded you." Which she had not. "Do the men really need +me here?" + +"Need you, mademoiselle?" + +"Do they need what little I can give? They were smiling, all the ones +I saw." + +"A Belgian soldier always smiles. Even when he is fighting." His voice +had lost its gayety and had taken on a deeper note. "Mademoiselle, I +have brought you here, where I can think of no other woman who would +have the courage to come, because you are needed. I cannot promise you +entire safety"--his mouth tightened--"but I can promise you work and +gratitude. Such gratitude, mademoiselle, as you may never know again." + +That reassured her. But in her practical mind the matter of supplies +loomed large. She brought the matter up again directly. + +"It is to be hot chocolate and soup?" he asked. + +"Both, if I find I have enough money. Soup only, perhaps." + +"And soup takes meat, of course." + +"It should, to be strengthening." + +Henri looked up, to see Jean in the doorway smiling grimly. + +"It is very simple," Jean said to him in French. "You have no other +duties of course; so each day you shall buy in the market place at +Dunkirk, with American money. And I shall become a delivery boy and +bring out food for mademoiselle, and whatever is needed." + +Henri smiled back at him cheerfully. "An excellent plan, Jean," he said. +"Not every day, but frequently." + +Jean growled and disappeared. + +However, there was the immediate present to think of, and while Jean +thawed his hands at the fire and Sara Lee was taking housewifely stock +of her new home, Henri disappeared. + +He came back in a half hour, carrying in a small basket butter, eggs, +bread and potatoes. + +"The miller!" he explained cheerfully to Sara Lee. "He has still a few +hens, and hidden somewhere a cow. We can have milk--is there a pail +for Marie to take to the mill?--and bread and an omelet. That is a +meal!" + +There was but one lamp, which hung over the kitchen stove. The room +across from Sara Lee's bedroom contained a small round dining table and +chairs. Sara Lee, enveloped in a large pinafore apron, made the +omelet in the kitchen. Marie brought a pail of fresh milk. Henri, with +a towel over his left arm, and in absurd mimicry of a Parisian waiter, +laid the table; and Jean, dour Jean, caught a bit of the infection, and +finding four bottles set to work with his pocketknife to fit candles +into their necks. + +Standing in corners, smiling, useless against the cheerful English that +flowed from the kitchen stove to the dining room and back again, were +René and Marie. It was of no use to attempt to help. Did the fire burn +low, it was the young officer who went out for fresh wood. But René +could not permit that twice. He brought in great armfuls of firewood +and piled them neatly by the stove. + +Henri was absurdly happy again. He would come to the door gravely, with +Sara Lee's little phrase book in hand, and read from it in a solemn tone: + +"'Shall we have duck or chicken?' 'Where can we get a good dinner at a +moderate price?' 'Waiter, you have spilled wine on my dress.' 'Will +you have a cigar?' 'No, thank you. I prefer a pipe.'" + +And Sara Lee beat up the eggs and found, after a bad moment, some salt +in a box, and then poured her omelet into the pan. She was very anxious +that it be a good omelet. She must make good her claim as a cook or +Henri's sublime faith in her would die. + +It was a divine omelet. Even Jean said so. They sat, the three of them, +in the cold little dining room and never knew that it was cold, and they +ate prodigious quantities of omelet and bread and butter, and bully beef +out of a tin, and drank a great deal of milk. + +Even Jean thawed at last, under the influence of food and Sara Lee. +Before the meal was over he was planning how to get her supplies to her +and making notes on a piece of paper as to what she would need at once. +They adjourned to Sara Lee's bedroom, where Marie had kindled a fire in +the little iron stove, and sat there in the warmth with two candles, +still planning. By that time Sara Lee had quite forgotten that at home +one did not have visitors in one's bedroom. + +Suddenly Henri held up his hand. + +"Listen!" he said. + +That was the first time Sara Lee had ever heard the quiet shuffling step +of tired men, leaving their trenches under cover of darkness. Henri +threw his military cape over her shoulders and she stood in the dark +doorway, watching. + +The empty street was no longer empty. From gutter to gutter flowed a +stream of men, like a sluggish river which narrowed where a fallen house +partly filled the way; not talking, not singing, just moving, bent under +their heavy and mud-covered equipment. Here and there the clack of +wooden sabots on the cobbles told of one poor fellow not outfitted with +leather shoes. The light of a match here and there showed some few +lucky enough to have still remaining cigarettes, and revealed also, in +the immediate vicinity, a white bandage or two. Some few, recognizing +Henri's officer's cap, saluted. Most of them stumbled on, too weary to +so much as glance aside. + +Nothing that Sara Lee had dreamed of war was like this. This was dreary +and sodden and hopeless. Those fresh troops at the crossroads that day +had been blithe and smiling. There had been none of the glitter and +panoply of war, but there had been movement, the beating of a drum, the +sharp cries of officers as the lines re-formed. + +Here there were no lines. Just such a stream of men as at home might +issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they +were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them +were wounded. + +"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as +mine would not be enough." + +"I would to God there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth. + +"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind work +of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by caring for +only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But every night +some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door--men +slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for those +there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhaps a clean +bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will have given +comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You--alone!" + +"I--alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you? +It is you who have made it possible." + +But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid +what lay beyond. Far beyond a star shell had risen above the flat +fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white +light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and +went out. + +"Like that!" Henri said to her, but in French. "Like that you are to me. +Bright and shining--and so soon gone." + +Sara Lee thought he had asked her if she was cold. + + + + +XI + + +The girl was singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she +had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, +though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such +young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness! + +She got the tales by intuition rather than by words, though she was +picking up some French at that. Marie would weep openly, at times. The +most frequent story was of no news from the country held by the Germans, +of families left with nothing and probably starving. The first inquiry +was always for news. Had the American lady any way to make inquiry? + +In time Sara Lee began to take notes of names and addresses, and through +Mr. Travers, in London, and the Relief Commission, in Belgium, bits of +information came back. A certain family was in England at a village in +Surrey. Of another a child had died. Here was one that could not be +located, and another reported massacred during the invasion. + +Later on Sara Lee was to find her little house growing famous, besieged +by anxious soldiers who besought her efforts, so that she used enormous +numbers of stamps and a great deal of effort. But that was later on. +And when that time came she turned to the work as a refuge from her +thoughts. For days were coming when Sara Lee did not want to think. + +But like all big things the little house made a humble beginning. A mere +handful of men, daring the gibes of their comrades, stopped in that first +night the door stood open, with its invitation of firelight and candles. +But these few went away with a strange story--of a beautiful American, +and hot soup, and even a cigarette apiece. That had been Henri's +contribution, the cigarettes. And soon the fame of the little house went +up and down the trenches, and it was like to die of overpopularity. + +It was at night that the little house of mercy bloomed like a flower. +During the daytime it was quiet, and it was then, as time went on, that +Sara Lee wrote her letters home and to England, and sent her lists of +names to be investigated. But from the beginning there was much to do. +Vegetables were to be prepared for the soup, Marie must find and bring +in milk for the chocolate, René must lay aside his rifle and chop +firewood. + +One worry, however, disappeared with the days. Henri was proving a +clever buyer. The money she sent in secured marvels. Only Jean knew, +or ever knew, just how much of Henri's steadily decreasing funds went +to that buying. Certainly not Sara Lee. And Jean expostulated only +once--to be met by such blazing fury as set him sullen for two days. + +"I am doing this," Henri finished, a trifle ashamed of himself, "not for +mademoiselle, but for our army. And since when have you felt that the +best we can give is too much for such a purpose?" + +Which was, however lofty, only a part of the truth. + +So supplies came in plentifully, and Sara Lee pared vegetables and sang +a bit under her breath, and glowed with good will when at night the weary +vanguard of a weary little army stopped at her door and scraped the mud +off its boots and edged in shyly. + +She was very happy, and her soup was growing famous. It is true that +the beef she used was not often beef, but she did not know that, and +merely complained that the meat was stringy. Now and then there was +no beef at all, and she used hares instead. On quiet days, when there +was little firing beyond the poplar trees, she went about with a basket +through the neglected winter gardens of the town. There were Brussels +sprouts, and sometimes she found in a cellar carrots or cabbages. She +had potatoes always. + +It was at night then, from seven in the evening until one, that the +little house was busiest. Word had gone out through the trenches beyond +the poplar trees that slightly wounded men needing rest before walking +back to their billets, exhausted and sick men, were welcome to the little +house. It was soon necessary to give the officers tickets for the men. +René took them in at the door, with his rifle in the hollow of his arm, +and he was as implacable as a ticket taker at the opera. + +Never once in all the months of her life there did Sara Lee have an ugly +word, an offensive glance. But, though she never knew this, many half +articulate and wholly earnest prayers were offered for her in those +little churches behind the lines where sometimes the men slept, and often +they prayed. + +She was very businesslike. She sent home to the Ladies' Aid Society a +weekly record of what had been done: So many bowls of soup; so many +cups of chocolate; so many minor injuries dressed. Because, very soon, +she found first aid added to her activities. She sickened somewhat at +first. Later she allowed to Marie much of the serving of food, and in +the little _salle à manger_ she had ready on the table basins, water, +cotton, iodine and bandages. + +Henri explained the method to her. + +"It is a matter of cleanliness," he said. "First one washes the wound +and then there is the iodine. Then cotton, a bandage, and--a surgeon +could do little more." + +Henri and Jean came often. And more than once during the first ten days +Jean spent the night rolled in a blanket by the kitchen fire, and Henri +disappeared. He was always back in the morning, however, looking dirty +and very tired. Sara Lee sewed more than one rent for him, those days, +but she was strangely incurious. It was as though, where everything was +strange, Henri's erratic comings and goings were but a part with the rest. + +Then one night the unexpected happened. The village was shelled. + +Sara Lee had received her first letter from Harvey that day. The maid +at Morley's had forwarded it to her, and Henri had brought it up. + +"I think I have brought you something you wish for very much," he said, +looking down at her. + +"Mutton?" she inquired anxiously. + +"Better than that." + +"Sugar?" + +"A letter, mademoiselle." + +Afterward he could not quite understand the way she had suddenly drawn +in her breath. He had no memory, as she had, of Harvey's obstinate anger +at her going, his conviction that she was doing a thing criminally wrong +and cruel. + +"Give it to me, please." + +She took it into her room and closed the door. When she came out again +she was composed and quiet, but rather white. Poor Henri! He was half +mad that day with jealousy. Her whiteness he construed as longing. + +This is a part of Harvey's letter: + + + You may think that I have become reconciled, but I have not. If I could + see any reason for it I might. But what reason is there? So many others, + older and more experienced, could do what you are doing, and more + safely. + + In your letter from the steamer you tell me not to worry. Good God, Sara + Lee, how can I help worrying? I do not even know where you are! If you + are in England, well and good. If you are abroad I do not want to know + it. I know these foreigners. I run into them every day. And they do not + understand American women. I get crazy when I think about it. I have had + to let the Leete house go. There is not likely to be such a chance soon + again. Business is good, but I don't seem to care much about it any + more. Honestly, dear, I think you have treated me very badly. I always + feel as though the people I meet are wondering if we have quarreled or + what on earth took you away on this wild-goose chase. I don't know + myself, so how can I tell them? + + I shall always love you, Sara Lee. I guess I'm that sort. But sometimes + I wonder if, when we are married, you will leave me again in some such + uncalled-for way. I warn you now, dear, that I won't stand for it. I'm + suffering too much. + + HARVEY. + + +Sara Lee wore the letter next her heart, but it did not warm her. She +went through the next few hours in a sort of frozen composure and ate +nothing at all. + +Then came the bombardment. + +Henri and Jean, driving out from Dunkirk, had passed on the road +ammunition trains, waiting in the road until dark before moving on to +the Front. Henri had given Sara Lee her letter, had watched jealously +for its effect on her, and then, his own face white and set, had gone on +down the ruined street. + +Here within the walls of a destroyed house he disappeared. The place +was evidently familiar to him, for he moved without hesitation. Broken +furniture still stood in the roofless rooms, and in front of a battered +bureau Henri paused. Still whistling under his breath, he took off his +uniform and donned a strange one, of greenish gray. In the pocket of +the blouse he stuffed a soft round cap of the same color. Then, resuming +his cape and Belgian cap, with its tassel over his forehead, he went out +into the street again. He carried in his belt a pistol, but it was not +the one he had brought in with him. As a matter of fact, by the addition +of the cap in his pocket, Henri was at that moment in the full uniform of +a _lieutenant_ of a Bavarian infantry regiment, pistol and all. + +He went down the street and along the road toward the poplars. He met +the first detachment of men out of the trenches just beyond the trees, +and stepped aside into the mud to let them pass, calling a greeting to +them out of the darkness. + +"_Bonsoir_!" they replied, and saluted stiffly. There were few among them +who did not know his voice, and fewer still who did not suspect his +business. + +"A brave man," they said among themselves as they went on. + +"How long will he last?" asked one young soldier, a boy in his teens. + +"One cannot live long who does as he does," replied a gaunt and bearded +man. "But it is a fine life while it continues. A fine life!" + +The boy stepped out of the shuffling line and looked behind him. He +could see only the glow of Henri's eternal cigarette. "I should like to +go with him," he muttered wistfully. + +The ammunition train was in the village now. It kept the center of the +road, lest it should slide into the mud on either side and be mired. +The men moved out of its way into the ditch, grumbling. + +Henri went whistling softly down the road. + +The first shell fell in the neglected square. The second struck the +rear wagons of the ammunition train. Henri heard the terrific explosion +that followed, and turning ran madly back into the village. More shells +fell into the road. The men scattered like partridges, running for the +fields, but the drivers of the ammunition wagons beat their horses and +came lurching and shouting down the road. + +There was cold terror in Henri's heart. He ran madly, throwing aside +his cape as he went. More shells fell ahead in the street. Once in the +darkness he fell flat over the body of a horse. There was a steady +groaning from the ditch near by. But he got up and ran on, a strange +figure with his flying hair and his German uniform. + +He was all but stabbed by René when he entered the little house. + +"Mademoiselle?" Henri gasped, holding René's bayonet away from his +heaving chest. + +"I am here," said Sara Lee's voice from the little _salle à manger_. +"Let them carry in the wounded. I am getting ready hot water and +bandages. There is not much space, for the corner of the room has been +shot away." + +She was as dead white in the candlelight, but very calm. + +"You cannot stay here," Henri panted. "At any time--" + +Another shell fell, followed by the rumble of falling walls. + +"Some one must stay," said Sara Lee. "There must be wounded in the +streets. Marie is in the cellar." + +Henri pleaded passionately with her to go to the cellar, but she refused. +He would have gathered her up in his arms and carried her there, but +Jean came in, leading a wounded man, and Henri gave up in despair. + +All that night they worked, a ghastly business. More than one man died +that night in the little house, while a blond young man in a German +uniform gave him a last mouthful of water or took down those pitifully +vague addresses which were all the dying Belgians had to give. + +"I have not heard--last at Aarschot, but now--God knows where." + +No more shells fell. At dawn, with all done that could be done, Sara +Lee fainted quietly in the hallway. Henri carried her in and placed +her on her bed. A corner of the room was indeed gone. The mantel was +shattered and the little stove. But on the floor lay Harvey's photograph +uninjured. Henri lifted it and looked at it. Then he placed it on the +table, and very reverently he kissed the palm of Sara Lee's quiet hand. + +Daylight found the street pitiful indeed. Henri, whose costume René had +been casting wondering glances at all night, sent a request for men from +the trenches to clear away the bodies of the horses and bury them, and +somewhat later over a single grave in the fields there was a simple +ceremony of burial for the men who had fallen. Henri had changed again +by that time, but he sternly forbade Sara Lee to attend. + +"On pain," he said, "of no more supplies, mademoiselle. These things +must be. They are war. But you can do nothing to help, and it will +be very sad." + +Ambulances took away the wounded at dawn, and the little house became +quiet once more. With planks René repaired the damage to the corner, +and triumphantly produced and set up another stove. He even put up a +mantelshelf, and on it, smiling somewhat, he placed Harvey's picture. + +Sara Lee saw it there, and a tiny seed of resentment took root and grew. + +"If there had been no one here last night," she said to the photograph, +"many more would have died. How can you say I am cruel to you? Isn't +this worth the doing?" + +But Harvey remained impassive, detached, his eyes on the photographer's +white muslin screen. And the angle of his jaw was set and dogged. + +[Illustration: Henri explained the method.] + + + + +XII + + +That morning there was a conference in the little house--Colonel Lilias, +who had come in before for a mute but appreciative call on Sara Lee, and +for a cup of chocolate; Captain Tournay, Jean and Henri. It was held +round the little table in the _salle à manger_, after Marie had brought +coffee and gone out. + +"They had information undoubtedly," said the colonel. "The same thing +happened at Pervyse when an ammunition train went through. They had the +place, and what is more they had the time. Of course there are the +airmen." + +"It did not leave the main road until too late for observation from the +air," Henri put in shortly. + +"Yet any one who saw it waiting at the crossroads might have learned its +destination. The drivers talk sometimes." + +"But the word had to be carried across," said Captain Tournay. "That is +the point. My men report flashes of lights from the fields. We have +followed them up and found no houses, no anything. In this flat country +a small light travels far." + +"I shall try to learn to-night," Henri said. "It is, of course, +possible that some one from over there--" He shrugged his shoulders. + +"I think not." Colonel Lilias put a hand on Henri's shoulder +affectionately. "They have not your finesse, boy. And I doubt if, in +all their army, they have so brave a man." + +Henri flushed. + +"There is a courage under fire, with their fellows round--that is one +thing. And a courage of attack--that is even more simple. But the +bravest man is the one who works alone--the man to whom capture is death +without honor." + +The meeting broke up. Jean and Henri went away in the car, and though +supplies came up regularly Sara Lee did not see the battered gray car +for four days. At the end of that time Henri came alone. Jean, he said +briefly, was laid up for a little while with a flesh wound in his +shoulder. He would be well very soon. In the meantime here at last was +mutton. It had come from England, and he, Henri, had found it lying +forgotten and lonely and very sad and had brought it along. + +After that Henri disappeared on foot. It was midafternoon and a sunny +day. Sara Lee saw him walking briskly across the fields and watched him +out of sight. She spoke some French now, and she had gathered from René, +who had no scruples about listening at a door, that Henri was the bravest +man in the Belgian Army. + +Until now Sara Lee had given small thought to Henri's occupation. She +knew nothing of war, and the fact that Henri, while wearing a uniform, +was unattached, had not greatly impressed her. Had she known the +constitution of a modern army she might have wondered over his freedom, +his powerful car, his passes and maps. But his detachment had not seemed +odd to her. Even his appearance during the bombardment in the uniform +of a German _lieutenant_ had meant nothing to her. She had never seen a +German uniform. + +That evening, however, when he returned she ventured a question. They +dined together, the two of them, for the first time at the little house +alone. Always before Jean had made the third. And it was a real meal, +for Sara Lee had sacrificed a bit of mutton from her soup, and Henri had +produced from his pocket a few small and withered oranges. + +"A gift!" he said gayly, and piled them in a precarious heap in the +center of the table. On the exact top he placed a walnut. + +"Now speak gently and walk softly," he said. "It is a work of art and +not to be lightly demolished." + +He was alternately gay and silent during the meal, and more than once +Sara Lee found his eyes on her, with something new and different in them. + +"Just you and I together!" he said once. "It is very wonderful." + +And again: "When you go back to him, shall you tell him of your good +friend who has tried hard to serve you?" + +"Of course I shall," said Sara Lee. "And he will write you, I know. He +will be very grateful." + +But it was she who was silent after that, because somehow it would be +hard to make Harvey understand. And as for his being grateful-- + +"Mademoiselle," said Henri later on, "would you object if I make a +suggestion? You wear a very valuable ring. I think it is entirely safe, +but--who can tell? And also it is not entirely kind to remind men who +are far from all they love that you--" + +Sara Lee flushed and took off her ring. + +"I am glad you told me," she said. And Henri did not explain that the +Belgian soldiers would not recognize the ring as either a diamond or a +symbol, but that to him it was close to torture. + +It was when he insisted on carrying out the dishes, singing a little +French song as he did so, that Sara Lee decided to speak what was in her +mind. He was in high spirits then. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "shall I show you something that the eye of no +man has seen before, and that, when we have seen it, shall never be seen +again?" + +On her interested consent he called in Marie and René, making a great +ceremony of the matter, and sending Marie into hysterical giggling. + +"Now see!" he said earnestly. "No eye before has ever seen or will again. +Will you guess, mademoiselle? Or you, Marie? René?" + +"A tear?" ventured Sara Lee. + +"But--do I look like weeping?" + +He did not, indeed. He stood, tall and young and smiling before them, +and produced from his pocket the walnut. + +"Perceive!" he said, breaking it open and showing the kernel. "Has human +eye ever before seen it?" He thrust it into Marie's open mouth. "And +it is gone! _Voilà tout_!" + +It was that evening, while Sara Lee cut bandages and Henri rolled them, +that she asked him what his work was. He looked rather surprised, and +rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work," +he said. "What you call odd jobs." + +"Then you don't do any fighting?" + +"In the trenches--no. But now and then I have a little skirmish." + +A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The +trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this +alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no +detail--was he playing a man's part in the war? + +"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness. +"You say there are too few men. Yet--I can understand Monsieur Jean, +because he has only one eye. But you!" + +"I do something," he said, avoiding her eyes. "It is not a great deal. +It is the thing I can do best. That is all." + +He went away some time after that, leaving the little house full and busy +justifying its existence. The miller's son, who came daily to chat with +Marie, was helping in the kitchen. By the warm stove, and only kept from +standing over it by Marie's sharp orders, were as many men as could get +near. Each held a bowl of hot soup, and--that being a good day--a +piece of bread. Tall soldiers and little ones, all dirty, all weary, +almost all smiling, they peered over each other's shoulders, to catch, +if might be, a glimpse of Marie's face. + +When they came too close she poked an elbow into some hulking fellow and +sent him back. + +"Elbow-room, in the name of God," she would beg. + +Over all the room hung the warm steam from the kettles, and a delicious +odor, and peace. + +Sara Lee had never heard of the word _morale_. She would have been +astonished to have been told that she was helping the _morale_ of an +army. But she gave each night in that little house of mercy something +that nothing else could give--warmth and welcome, but above all a touch +of home. + +That night Henri did not come back. She stood by her table bandaging, +washing small wounds, talking her bits of French, until one o'clock. +Then, the last dressing done, she went to the kitchen. Marie was there, +with Maurice, the miller's son. + +"Has the captain returned?" she asked. + +"Not yet, mademoiselle." + +"Leave a warm fire," Sara Lee said. "He will probably come in later." + +Maurice went away, with a civil good night. Sara Lee stood in the +doorway after he had gone, looking out. Farther along the line there +was a bombardment going on. She knew now what a bombardment meant and +her brows contracted. Somewhere there in the trenches men were enduring +that, while Henri-- + +She said a little additional prayer that night, which was that she +should have courage to say to him what she felt--that there were big +things to do, and that it should not all be left to these smiling, +ill-clad peasant soldiers. + +At that moment Henri, in his gray-green uniform, was cutting wire before +a German trench, one of a party of German soldiers, who could not know +in the darkness that there had been a strange addition to their group. +Cutting wire and learning many things which it was well that he should +know. + +Now and then, in perfect German, he whispered a question. Always he +received a reply. And stowed it away in his tenacious memory for those +it most concerned. + +At daylight he was asleep by Sara Lee's kitchen fire. And at daylight +Sara Lee was awakened by much firing, and putting on a dressing gown she +went out to see what was happening. René was in the street looking +toward the poplar trees. + +"An attack," he said briefly. + +"You mean--the Germans?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +She went back into the little ruined house, heavy-hearted. She knew now +what it meant, an attack. That night there would be ambulances in the +street, and word would come up that certain men were gone--would never +seek warmth and shelter in her kitchen or beg like children for a second +bowl of soup. + +On the kitchen floor by the dying fire Henri lay asleep. + + + + +XIII + + +Much has been said of the work of spies--said and written. Here is a +woman in Paris sending forbidden messages on a marked coin. Men are +tapped on the shoulder by a civil gentleman in a sack suit, and walk +away with him, never to be seen again. + +But of one sort of spy nothing has been written and but little is known. +Yet by him are battles won or lost. On the intelligence he brings +attacks are prepared for and counter-attacks launched. It is not always +the airman, in these days of camouflage, who brings word of ammunition +trains or of new batteries. + +In the early days of the war the work of the secret service at the Front +was of the gravest importance. There were fewer air machines, and +observation from the air was a new science. Also trench systems were +incomplete. Between them, known to a few, were breaks of solid land, +guarded from behind. To one who knew, it was possible, though dangerous +beyond words, to cross the inundated country that lay between the Belgian +Front and the German lines, and even with good luck to go farther. + +Henri, for instance, on that night before had left the advanced trench +at the railway line, had crawled through the Belgian barbed wire, and +had advanced, standing motionless as each star shell burst overhead, and +then moving on quickly. The inundation was his greatest difficulty. +Shallow in most places, it was full of hidden wire and crisscrossed with +irrigation ditches. Once he stumbled into one, but he got out by +swimming. Had he been laden with a rifle and equipment it might have +been difficult. + +He swore to himself as his feet touched ground again. For a star shell +was hanging overhead, and his efforts had sent wide and ever increasingly +widening circles over the placid surface of the lagoon. Let them lap to +the German outposts and he was lost. + +Henri's method was peculiar to himself. Where there was dry terrain he +did as did the others, crouched and crept. But here in the salt marshes, +where the sea had been called to Belgium's aid, he had evolved a system +of moving, neck deep in water, stopping under the white night lights, +advancing in the darkness. There was no shelter. The country was flat +as a hearth. + +He would crawl out at last in the darkness and lie flat, as the dead lie. +And then, inch by inch, he would work his way forward, by routes that he +knew. Sometimes he went entirely through the German lines, and +reconnoitered on the roads behind. They were shallow lines then, for +the inundation made the country almost untenable, and a charge in force +from the Belgians across was unlikely. + +Henri knew his country well, as well as he loved it. In a farmhouse +behind the German lines he sometimes doffed his wet gray-green uniform +and put on the clothing of a Belgian peasant. Trust Henri then for being +a lout, a simple fellow who spoke only Flemish--but could hear in many +tongues. Watch him standing at crossroads and marveling at big guns that +rumble by. + +At first Henri had wished, having learned of an attack, to be among those +who repelled it. Then one day his King had sent for him to come to that +little village which was now his capital city. + +He had been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing. +Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri +was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were +blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was--a tawdry summer home, +ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man +of all time it became royal. + +So Henri bowed and waited, and soon the King got up and shook hands with +him. As a matter of fact they knew each other rather well, but to +explain more would be to tell that family name of Henri's which must +never be known. + +"Sit down," said the King gravely. And he got a box of cigars from the +mantelpiece and offered it. "I sent for you because I want to talk to +you. You are doing valuable work." + +"I am glad you think it so, sire," said Henri rather unhappily, because +he felt what was coming. "But I cannot do it all the time. There are +intervals--" + +An ordinary mortal may not interrupt a king, but a king may interrupt +anything, except perhaps a German bombardment. + +"Intervals, of course. If there were not you would be done in a month." + +"But I am a soldier. My place is--" + +"Your place is where you are most useful." + +Henri was getting nothing out of the cigar. He flung it away and got up. + +"I want to fight too," he said stubbornly. "We need every man, and I +am--rather a good shot. I do this other because I can do it. I speak +their infernal tongue. But it's dirty business at the best, sire." He +remembered to put in the sire, but rather ungraciously. Indeed he shot +it out like a bullet. + +"Dirty business!" said the King thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. It +is, of course. But--not so dirty as the things they have done, and are +doing." + +He sat still and let Henri stamp up and down, because, as has been said, +he knew the boy. And he had never been one to insist on deference, +which was why he got so much of it. But at last he got up and when +Henri stood still, rather ashamed of himself, he put an arm over the +boy's shoulders. + +"I want you to do this thing, for me. And this thing only," he said. +"It is the work you do best. There are others who can fight, but--I do +not know any one else who can do as you have done." + +Henri promised. He would have promised to go out and drown himself in +the sea, just beyond the wind-swept little garden, for the tall grave +man who stood before him. Then he bowed and went out, and the King +went back to his plain pine table and his work. That was the reason why +Sara Lee found him asleep on the floor by her kitchen stove that morning, +and went back to her cold bed to lie awake and think. But no explanation +came to her. + +The arrival of Marie roused Henri. The worst of the bombardment was +over, but there was far-away desultory firing. He listened carefully +before, standing outside in the cold, he poured over his head and +shoulders a pail of cold water. He was drying himself vigorously when +he heard Sara Lee's voice in the kitchen. + +The day began for Henri when first he saw the girl. It might be evening, +but it was the beginning for him. So he went in when he had finished +his toilet and bowed over her hand. + +"You are cold, mademoiselle." + +"I think I am nervous. There was an attack this morning." + +"Yes?" + +Marie had gone into the next room, and Sara Lee raised haggard eyes +to his. + +"Henri," she said desperately--it was the first time she had called him +that--"I have something to say to you, and it's not very pleasant." + +"You are going home?" It was the worst thing he could think of. But +she shook her head. + +"You will think me most ungrateful and unkind." + +"You? Kindness itself!" + +"But this is different. It is not for myself. It is because I care a +great deal about--about--" + +"Mademoiselle!" + +"About your honor. And somehow this morning, when I found you here +asleep, and those poor fellows in the trenches fighting--" + +Henri stared at her. So that was it! And he could never tell her. He +was sworn to secrecy by every tradition and instinct of his work. He +could never tell her, and she would go on thinking him a shirker and a +coward. She would be grateful. She would be sweetness itself. But +deep in her heart she would loathe him, as only women can hate for a +failing they never forgive. + +"But I have told you," he said rather wildly, "I am not idle. I do +certain things--not much, but of a degree of importance." + +"You do not fight." + +In Sara Lee's defense many things may be urged--her ignorance of modern +warfare; the isolation of her lack of knowledge of the language; but, +perhaps more than anything, a certain rigidity of standard that +comprehended no halfway ground. Right was right and wrong was wrong to +her in those days. Men were brave or were cowards. Henri was worthy +or unworthy. And she felt that, for all his kindness to her, he was +unworthy. + +He could have set himself right with a word, at that. But his pride was +hurt. He said nothing except, when she asked if he had minded what she +said, to reply: + +"I am sorry you feel as you do. I am not angry." + +He went away, however, without breakfast. Sara Lee heard his car going +at its usual breakneck speed up the street, and went to the door. She +would have called him back if she could, for his eyes haunted her. But +he did not look back. + + + + +XIV + + +For four days the gray car did not come again. Supplies appeared in +another gray car, driven by a surly Fleming. The waking hours were full, +as usual. Sara Lee grew a little thin, and seemed to be always +listening. But there was no Henri, and something that was vivid and +joyous seemed to have gone out of the little house. + +Even Marie no longer sang as she swept or washed the kettles, and Sara +Lee, making up the records to send home, put little spirit into the +letter that went with them. + +On the second day she wrote to Harvey. + + "I am sorry that you feel as you do," she wrote, perhaps unconsciously + using Henri's last words to her. "I have not meant to be cruel. And + if you were here you would realize that whether others could have done + what I am doing or not--and of course many could--it is worth doing. + I hear that other women are establishing houses like this, but the + British and the French will not allow women so near the lines. The men + come in at night from the trenches so tired, so hungry and so cold. + Some of them are wounded too. I dress the little wounds. I do give + them something, Harvey dear--if it is only a reminder that there are + homes in the world, and everything is not mud and waiting and killing." + + +She told him that his picture was on her mantel, but she did not say +that a corner of her room had been blown away or that the mantel was +but a plank from a destroyed house. And she sent a great deal of love, +but she did not say that she no longer wore his ring on her finger. +And, of course, she was coming back to him if he still wanted her. + +More than Henri's absence was troubling Sara Lee those days. Indeed she +herself laid all her anxiety to one thing, a serious one at that. With +all the marvels of Henri's buying, and Jean's, her money was not holding +out. The scope of the little house had grown with its fame. Now and +then there were unexpected calls, too--Marie's mother, starving in +Havre; sickness and death in the little town at the crossroads: a dozen +small emergencies, but adding to the demands on her slender income. She +had, as a matter of fact, already begun to draw on her private capital. + +And during the days when no gray car appeared she faced the situation, +took stock, as it were, and grew heavy-eyed and wistful. + +On the fifth day the gray car came again, but Jean drove it alone. He +disclaimed any need for sympathy over his wound, and with René's aid +carried in the supplies. + +There was the business of checking them off, and the further business +of Sara Lee's paying for them in gold. She sat at the table, Jean +across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d'or, an +engrossed frown between her eyebrows. + +Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed. She smiled very seldom, +and her eyes were perhaps more steady. It was a young girl he and Henri +had brought out to the little house. It was a very serious and rather +anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he +had brought back into little stacks. + +"Jean," she said finally, "I am not going to be able to do it." + +"To do what?" + +"To continue--here." + +"No?" + +"You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in +London. You and--and Henri have done miracles for me. But soon I +shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back. And +now I shall have to start on my English notes. After that--" + +"You are too good to the men. These cigarettes, now--you could do +without them." + +"But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean." + +She sat still, her hands before her on the table. From the kitchen came +the bubbling of the eternal soup. Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down +her cheek. She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently +did not notice. + +"The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort +too many." + +"Jean," she said suddenly, "where is Henri?" + +"In England, I think." + +The only clear thought in Sara Lee's mind was that Henri was not in +France, and that he had gone without telling her. She had hurt him +horribly. She knew that. He might never come back to the little house +of mercy. There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable +strain. And she had attacked his honor. What possible right had she +to do that? + +The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale +and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean. + +"Did he tell you anything?" + +"Nothing, mademoiselle." + +"He is very angry with me, Jean." + +"But surely no, mademoiselle. With you? It is impossible." + +But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply. +He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri's manner +before his departure. They had quarreled, these two. Perhaps it was as +well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee. But he looked out, +those days, on but half a world, did Jean. So he saw only the woman +hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper. And in Sara Lee a woman, and +nothing more. + +And--being Jean he shrugged his shoulders. + +They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out, +but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and +trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had +hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow +Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval. +He gave her no moral support. + +At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with +soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds +dressed--a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did +it nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She +enclosed a snapshot of the little house. + +Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times. +He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later +on he told René. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back +along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on +the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by. + +Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got +in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different +Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads--a Henri in +the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and +impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue +trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back +and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his +chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter +campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing +through rents in his coat. + +Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders, +the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of +the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which +renders the French Army so mobile. + +He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an +extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and +an intrenching tool jingling at his belt. + +Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded +crossroads--smiled and then sighed. For Jean had lost everything in +the war. His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and +with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come. But Henri +had brought back to Jean something to live for--or to die for, as might +happen. + +Henri walked along gayly. He hailed other French soldiers. He joined a +handful and stood talking to them. But he reached the crossroads before +the ammunition train. + +The crossroads was crowded, as usual--many soldiers, at rest, waiting +for the word to fall in, a battery held up by the breaking of a wheel. +A temporary forge had been set up, and soldiers in leather aprons were +working over the fire. A handful of peasants watched, their dull eyes +following every gesture. And one of them was a man Henri sought. + +Henri sat down on the ground and lighted a cigarette. The ammunition +train rolled in and halted, and the man Henri watched turned his +attention to the train. He had been dull and quiet at the forge, but +now he became smiling, a good fellow. He found a man he knew among the +drivers and offered him a cigarette. He also produced and presented an +entire box of matches. Matches were very dear, and hardly to be bought +at any price. + +Henri watched grimly and hummed a little song: + + "_Trou la la, çà ne va guère_; + _Trou la la, çà ne va pas_." + + +Still humming under his breath, when the peasant left the crossroads he +followed him. Not closely. The peasant cut across the fields. Henri +followed the road and entered the fields at a different angle. He knew +his way quite well, for he had done the same thing each day for four +days. Only twice he had been a Belgian peasant, and once he was an +officer, and once he had been a priest. + +Four days he had done this thing, but to-day was different. To-day there +would be something worth while, he fancied. And he made a mental note +that Sara Lee must not be in the little house that night. + +When he had got to a canal where the pollard willows were already sending +out their tiny red buds, Henri sat down again. The village lay before +him, desolate and ruined, a travesty of homes. And on a slight rise, but +so concealed from him by the willows that only the great wings showed, +stood the windmill. + +It was the noon respite then, and beyond the line of poplars all was quiet. +The enemy liked time for foods and the Belgians crippled by the loss of +that earlier train, were husbanding their ammunition. Far away a gap in +the poplar trees showed a German observation balloon, a tiny dot against +the sky. + +The man Henri watched went slowly, for he carried a bag of grain on his +back. Henri no longed watched him, He watched the wind wheel. It had +been broken, and one plane was now patched with what looked like a red +cloth. There was a good wind, but clearly the miller was idle that day. +The great wings were not turning. + +Henri sat still and smoked. He thought of many things--of Sara Lee's +eyes when in the center of the London traffic she had held the dying +donkey; of her small and radiant figure at the Savoy; of the morning he +had found her at Calais, in the Gare Maritime, quietly unconscious that +she had done a courageous thing. And he thought, too, of the ring and +the photograph she carried. But mostly he remembered the things she had +said to him on their last meeting. + +Perhaps there came to him his temptation too. It would be so easy that +night, if things went well, to make a brave showing before her, to let +her see that these odd jobs he did had their value and their risks. But +he put that from him. The little house of mercy must be empty that +night, for her sake. He shivered as he remembered the room where she +slept, the corner that was shot away and left open to the street. + +So he sat and watched. And at one o'clock the mill wheel began turning. +It was easy to count the revolutions by the red wing. Nine times it +turned, and stopped. After five minutes or so it turned again, thirty +times. Henri smiled: an ugly smile. + +"A good guess," he said to himself. "But it must be more than a guess." + +His work for the afternoon was done. Still with the bent-kneed swing he +struck back to the road, and avoiding the crossroads, went across more +fields to a lane where Jean waited with the car. Henri took a plunge +into the canal when he had removed his French uniform, and producing a +towel from under a bush rubbed himself dry. His lean boyish body +gleamed, arms and legs brown from much swimming under peaceful summer +suns. On his chest he showed two scars, still pink. Shrapnel bites, he +called them. But he had, it is to be feared, a certain young +satisfaction in them. + +He was in high good humor. The water was icy, and Jean had refused to +join him. + +"My passion for cleanliness," Henri said blithely, "is the result of my +English school days. You would have been the better for an English +education, Jean." + +"A canal in March!" Jean grunted. "You will end badly." + +Henri looked longingly at the water. + +"Had I a dry towel," he said, "I would go in again." + +Jean looked at him with his one eye. + +"You would be prettier without those scars," he observed. But in his +heart he prayed that there might be no others added to them, that +nothing might mar or destroy that bright and youthful body. + +"_Dépêchez-vous! Vous sommes pressés_!" he added. + +But Henri was minded to play. He girded himself with the towel and +struck an attitude. + +"The Russian ballet, Jean!" he said, and capering madly sent Jean +into deep grumbles of laughter by his burlesque. + +"I must have exercise," Henri said at last when, breathless and with +flying hair, he began to dress. "That, too, is my English schooling. If +you, Jean--" + +"To the devil with your English schooling!" Jean remonstrated. + +Henri sobered quickly after that. The exhilaration of his cold plunge +was over. + +"The American lady?" he asked. "She is all right?" + +"She is worried. There is not enough money." + +Henri frowned. + +"And I have nothing!" + +This opened up an old wound with Jean. + +"If you would be practical and take pay for what you are doing," he began. + +Henri cut him short. + +"Pay!" he said. "What is there to pay me with? And what is the use of +reopening the matter? A man may be a spy for love of his country. God +knows there is enough lying and deceit in the business. But to be a spy +for money--never!" + +There was a little silence. Then: "Now for mademoiselle," said Henri. +"She must be out of the village to-night. And that, dear friend, must +be your affair. She does not like me." + +All the life had gone out of his voice. + + + + +XV + + +"But why should I go?" Sara Lee asked. "It is kind of you to ask me, +Jean. But I am here to work, not to play." + +Long ago Sara Lee had abandoned her idea of Jean as a paid chauffeur. +She even surmised, from something Marie had said, that he had been a +person of importance in the Belgium of before the war. So she was +grateful, but inclined to be obstinate. + +"You have been so much alone, mademoiselle--" + +"Alone!" + +"Cut off from your own kind. And now and then one finds, at the hotel +in Dunkirk, some English nurses who are having a holiday. You would +like to talk to them perhaps." + +"Jean," she said unexpectedly, "why don't you tell me the truth? You +want me to leave the village to-night. Why?" + +"Because, mademoiselle, there will be a bombardment." + +"The village itself?" + +"We expect it," he answered dryly. + +Sara Lee went a little pale. + +"But then I shall be needed, as I was before." + +"No troops will pass through the town to-night. They will take a road +beyond the fields." + +"How do you know these things?" she asked, wondering. "About the troops +I can understand. But the bombardment." + +"There are ways of finding out, mademoiselle," he replied in his +noncommittal voice. "Now, will you go?" + +"May I tell Marie and René?" + +"No." + +"Then I shall not go. How can you think that I would consider my own +safety and leave them here?" + +Jean had ascertained before speaking that Marie was not in the house. +As for René, he sat on the single doorstep and whittled pegs on which to +hang his rifle inside the door. And as he carved he sang words of his +own to the tune of Tipperary. + +Inside the little _salle à manger_ Jean reassured Sara Lee. It was +important--vital--that René and Marie should not know far in advance +of the bombardment. They were loyal, certainly, but these were his +orders. In abundance of time they would be warned to leave the village. + +"Who is to warn them?" + +"Henri has promised, mademoiselle. And what he promises is done." + +"You said this morning that he was in England." + +"He has returned." + +Sara Lee's heart, which had been going along merely as a matter of duty +all day, suddenly began to beat faster. Her color came up, and then faded +again. He had returned, and he had not come to the little house. But +then--what could Henri mean to her, his coming or his going? Was she +to add to her other sins against Harvey the supreme one of being +interested in Henri? + +Not that she said all that, even to herself. There was a wave of +gladness and then a surge of remorse. That is all. But it was a very +sober Sara Lee who put on her black suit with the white collar that +afternoon and ordered, by Jean's suggestion, the evening's preparations +as though nothing was to happen. + +She looked round her little room before she left it. It might not be +there when she returned. So she placed Harvey's photograph under her +mattress for safety, and rather uncomfortably she laid beside it the +small ivory crucifix that Henri had found in a ruined house and brought +to her. Harvey was not a Catholic. He did not believe in visualizing +his religion. And she had a distinct impression that he considered such +things as did so as bordering on idolatry. + +Sometime after dusk that evening the ammunition train moved out. At a +point a mile or so from the village a dispatch rider on a motor cycle +stopped the rumbling lorry at the head of the procession and delivered +a message, which the guide read by the light of a sheltered match. The +train moved on, but it did not turn down to the village. It went beyond +to a place of safety, and there remained for the night. + +But before that time Henri, lying close in a field, had seen a skulking +figure run from the road to the mill, and soon after had seen the mill +wheel turn once, describing a great arc; and on one of the wings, showing +only toward the poplar trees, was a lighted lantern. + +Five minutes later, exactly time enough for the train to have reached +the village street, German shells began to fall in it. Henri, lying +flat on the ground, swore silently and deeply. + +In every land during this war there have been those who would sell their +country for a price. Sometimes money. Sometimes protection. And of all +betrayals that of the man who sells his own country is the most dastardly. +Henri, lying face down, bit the grass beneath him in sheer rage. + +One thing he had not counted on, he who foresaw most things. The miller +and his son, being what they were, were cowards as well. Doubtless the +mill had been promised protection. It was too valuable to the Germans +to be destroyed. But with the first shot both men left the house by the +mill and scurried like rabbits for the open fields. + +Maurice, poor Marie's lover by now, almost trampled on Henri's prostrate +body. And Henri was alone, and his work was to take them alive. They +had information he must have--how the _modus vivendi_ had been arranged, +through what channels. And under suitable treatment they would tell. + +He could not follow them through the fields. He lay still, during a +fiercer bombardment than the one before, raising his head now and then +to see if the little house of mercy still stood. No shells came his +way, but the sky line of the village altered quickly. The standing +fragment of the church towers went early. There was much sound of +falling masonry. From somewhere behind him a Belgian battery gave +tongue, but not for long. And then came silence. + +Henri moved then. He crept nearer the mill and nearer. And at last he +stood inside and took his bearings. A lamp burned in the kitchen, +showing a dirty brick floor and a littered table--such a house as men +keep, untidy and unhomelike. A burnt kettle stood on the hearth, and +leaning against the wall was the bag of grain Maurice had carried from +the crossroads. + +"A mill which grinds without grain," Henri said to himself. + +There was a boxed-in staircase to the upper floor, and there, with the +door slightly ajar, he stationed himself, pistol in hand. Now and then +he glanced uneasily at the clock. Sara Lee must not be back before he +had taken his prisoners to the little house and turned them over to +those who waited there. + +There were footsteps outside, and Henri drew the door a little closer. +But he was dismayed to find it Marie. She crept in, a white and broken +thing, and looked about her. + +"Maurice!" she called. + +She sat down for a moment, and then, seeing the disorder about her, set +to work to clear the table. It was then that Henri lowered his pistol +and opened the door. + +"Don't shriek, Marie," he said. + +She turned and saw him, and clutched at the table. + +"Monsieur!" + +"Marie," he said quietly, "go up these stairs and remain quiet. Do not +walk round. And do not come down, no matter what you hear!" + +She obeyed him, stumbling somewhat. For she had seen his revolver, and +it frightened her. But as she passed him she clutched at his sleeve. + +"He is good--Maurice," she said, gasping. "Of the father I know nothing, +but Maurice--" + +"Go up and be silent!" was all he said. + +Now, by all that goes to make a story, Sara Lee should have met Mabel at +the Hôtel des Arcades in Dunkirk, and should have been able to make that +efficient young woman burn with jealousy--Mabel, who from the safety of +her hospital in Boulogne considered Dunkirk the Front. + +Indeed Sara Lee, to whom the world was beginning to seem very small, had +had some such faint hope. But Mabel was not there, and it was not until +long after that they met at all, and then only when the lights had gone +down and Sara Lee was again knitting by the fire. + +There were a few nurses there, in their white veils with the red cross +over the forehead, and one or two Englishwomen in hats that sat a trifle +too high on the tops of their heads and with long lists before them +which they checked as they ate. Aviators in leather coats; a few Spahis +in cloak and turban, with full-gathered bloomers and high boots; some +American ambulance drivers, rather noisy and very young; and many +officers, in every uniform of the Allied armies--sat at food together +and for a time forgot their anxieties under the influence of lights, food +and warmth, and red and white wine mixed with water. + +When he chose, Jean could be a delightful companion; not with Henri's +lift of spirits, but quietly interesting. And that evening he was a new +Jean to Sara Lee, a man of the world, talking of world affairs. He +found her apt and intelligent, and for Sara Lee much that had been +clouded cleared up forever that night. Until then she had known only +the humanities of the war, or its inhumanities. There, over that little +table, she learned something of its politics and its inevitability. She +had been working in the dark, with her heart only. Now she began to +grasp the real significance of it all, of Belgium's anxiety for many +years, of Germany's cold and cruel preparation, and empty protests of +friendship. She learned of the flight of the government from Brussels, +the most important state papers being taken away in a hand cart, on top +of which, at the last moment, some flustered official had placed a tall +silk hat! She learned of the failure of great fortifications before the +invaders' heavy guns. And he had drawn for her such a picture of +Albert of Belgium as she was never to forget. + +Perhaps Sara Lee's real growth began that night, over that simple dinner +at the Hôtel des Arcades. + +"I wish," she said at last, "that Uncle James could have heard all this. +He was always so puzzled about it all. And--you make it so clear." + +When dinner was over a bit of tension had relaxed in her somewhat. She +had been too close, for too long. And when a group of Belgian officers, +learning who she was, asked to be presented and gravely thanked her, she +flushed with happiness. + +"We must see if mademoiselle shall not have a medal," said the only one +who spoke English. + +"A medal? For what?" + +"For courage," he said, bowing. "Belgium has little to give, but it can +at least do honor to a brave lady." + +Jean was smiling when they passed on. What a story would this slip of a +girl take home with her! + +But: "I don't think I want a medal, Jean," she said. "I didn't come for +that. And after all it is you and Henri who have done the thing--not I." + +Accustomed to women of a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first +taken her naïveté for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting +her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just +such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of +her--the upraising of her eyes or an unstudied gesture. + +He sighed. + +"You are very wonderful, you Americans," he said. It was the nearest to +a compliment that he had ever come. And after that evening he was always +very gentle with her. Once he had protected her because Henri had asked +him to do so; now he himself became in his silent way her protector. + +The ride home through the dark was very quiet. Sara Lee sat beside him +watching the stars and growing increasingly anxious as they went, not +too rapidly, toward the little house. There were no lights. Air raids +had grown common in Dunkirk, and there were no street lights in the +little city. Once on the highway Jean lighted the lamps, but left them +very low, and two miles from the little house he put them out altogether. +They traveled by starlight then, following as best they could the tall +trees that marked the road. Now and then they went astray at that, and +once they tilted into the ditch and had hard pulling to get out. + +At the top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down. +He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable; +and again Sara Lee shivered. If the little house was gone! + +But it was there, and lighted too. Through its broken shutters came the +yellow glow of the oil lamp that now hung over the table in the _salle à +manger_. + +Whatever Jean's anxieties had been fell from him as he pushed open the +door. Henri's voice was the first thing they heard. He was too much +occupied to notice their approach. + +So it was that Sara Lee saw, for the last time, the miller and his son, +Maurice; saw them, but did not know them, for over their heads were bags +of their own sacking, with eyeholes roughly cut in them. Their hands +were bound, and three soldiers were waiting to take them away. + +"I have covered your heads," Henri was saying in French, "because it is +not well that our brave Belgians should know that they have been betrayed +by those of their own number." + +It was a cold and terrible Henri who spoke. + +"Take them away," he said to the waiting men. + +A few moments later he turned from the door and heard Sara Lee sobbing +in her room. He tapped, and on receiving no reply he went in. The room +was unharmed, and by the light of a candle he saw the girl, face down on +the bed. He spoke to her, but she only lay crouched deeper, her +shoulders shaking. + +"It is war, mademoiselle," he said, and went closer. Then suddenly all +the hurt of the past days, all the bitterness of the last hour, were +lost in an overwhelming burst of tenderness. + +He bent over her and put his arms round her. + +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. "I, who would die for +you, mademoiselle. I who worship you." He buried his face in the warm +hollow of her neck and held her close. He was trembling. "I love you," +he whispered. "I love you." + +She quieted under his touch. He was very strong, and there was refuge +in his arms. For a moment she lay still, happier than she had been for +weeks. It was Henri who was shaken now and the girl who was still. + +But very soon came the thing that, after all, he expected. She drew +herself away from him, and Henri, sensitive to every gesture, stood back. + +"Who are they?" was the first thing she said. It rather stabbed him. +He had just told her that he loved her, and never before in his careless +young life had he said that to any woman. + +"Spies," he said briefly. + +A flushed and tearful Sara Lee stood up then and looked up at him gravely. + +"Then--that is what you do?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +Quite suddenly she went to him and held up her face. + +"Please kiss me, Henri," she said very simply. "I have been cruel and +stupid, and--" + +But he had her in his arms then, and he drew her close as though he +would never let her go. He was one great burst of joy, poor Henri. But +when she gently freed herself at last it was to deliver what seemed for +a time his death wound. + +"You have paid me a great tribute," she said, still simply and gravely. +"I wanted you to kiss me, because of what you said. But that will have +to be all, Henri dear." + +"All?" he said blankly. + +"You haven't forgotten, have you? I--I am engaged to somebody else." + +Henri stood still, swaying a little. + +"And you love him? More than you care for me?" + +"He is--he is my kind," said Sara Lee rather pitifully. "I am not what +you think me. You see me here, doing what you think is good work, and +you are grateful. And you don't see any other women. So I--" + +"And you think I love you because I see no one else?" he demanded, still +rather stunned. + +"Isn't that part of it?" + +He flung out his hands as though he despaired of making her understand. + +"This man at home--" he said bitterly; "this man who loves you so well +that he let you cross the sea and come here alone--do you love him very +dearly?" + +"I am promised to him." + +All at once Sara Lee saw the little parlor at home, and Harvey, gentle, +rather stolid and dependable. Oh, very dependable. She saw him as he +had looked the night he had said he loved her, rather wistful and very, +very tender. She could not hurt him so. She had said she was going +back to him, and she must go. + +"I love him very much, Henri." + +Very quietly, considering the hell that was raging in him, Henri bent +over and kissed her hand. Then he turned it over, and for an instant +he held his cheek against its warmth. He went out at once, and Sara +Lee heard the door slam. + +[Illustration: "That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly.] + + + + +XVI + + +Time passed quickly, as always it does when there is work to do. Round +the ruined houses the gray grass turned green again, and in travesties +of gardens early spring flowers began to show a touch of color. + +The first of them greeted Sara Lee one morning as she stood on her +doorstep in the early sun. She gathered them and placed them, one on +each grave, in the cemetery near the poplar trees, where small wooden +crosses, sometimes surmounted by a cap, marked many graves. + +Marie, a silent subdued Marie, worked steadily in the little house. She +did not weep, but now and then Sara Lee found her stirring something on +the stove and looking toward the quiet mill in the fields. And once +Sara Lee, surprising that look on her face, put her arms about the girl +and held her for a moment. But she did not say anything. There was +nothing to say. + +With the opening up of the spring came increased movement and activity +among the troops. The beach and the sand dunes round La Panne were +filled with drilling men, Belgium's new army. Veterans of the winter, +at rest behind the lines, sat in the sun and pared potatoes for the +midday meal. Convalescents from the hospital appeared in motley +garments from the Ambulance Ocean and walked along the water front, +where the sea, no longer gray and sullen, rolled up in thin white lines +of foam to their very feet. Winter straw came out of wooden sabots. +Winter-bitten hands turned soft. Canal boats blossomed out with great +washings. And the sentry at the gun emplacement in the sand up the +beach gave over gathering sticks for his fire, and lay, when no one was +about, in a hollow in the dune, face to the sky. + +So spring came to that small fragment of Belgium which had been saved, +spring and hope. Soon now the great and powerful Allies would drive out +the Huns, and all would be as it had been. Splendid rumors were about. +The Germans were already yielding at La Bassée. There was to be a great +drive along the entire Front, and hopefully one would return home in +time for the spring planting. + +A sort of informal council took place occasionally in the little house. +Maps replaced the dressings on the table in the _salle à manger_, and +junior officers, armed with Sara Lee's box of pins, thrust back the +enemy at various points and proved conclusively that his position was +untenable. They celebrated these paper victories with Sara Lee's tea, +and went away the better for an hour or so of hope and tea and a girl's +soft voice and quiet eyes. + +Now and then there was one, of course, who lagged behind his fellows, +with a yearning tenderness in his face that a glance from the girl would +have quickly turned to love. But Sara Lee had no coquetry. When, as +occasionally happened, there was a bit too much fervor when her hand was +kissed, she laid it where it belonged--to loneliness and the spring--and +became extremely maternal and very, very kind. Which--both of them--are +death blows to young love. + +The winter floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats +began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire. And +with the lessening of the flood came new activities to the little house. +The spring drive was coming. + +There was spring indeed, everywhere but in Henri's heart. + +Day after day messages were left with Sara Lee by men in +uniform--sometimes letters, sometimes a word. And these she faithfully +cared for until such time as Jean came for them. Now and then it was +Henri who came, but when he stayed in the village he made his +headquarters at the house of the mill. There, with sacking over the +windows, he wrote his reports by lamplight, reports which Jean carried +back to the villa in the fishing village by the sea. + +However, though he no longer came and went as before, Henri made frequent +calls at the house of mercy. But now he came in the evenings, when the +place was full of men. Sara Lee was doing more dressings than before. +The semi-armistice of winter was over, and there were nights when a row +of wounded men lay on the floor in the little _salle à manger_ and waited, +in a sort of dreadful quiet, to be taken away. + +Rumors came of hard fighting farther along the line, and sometimes, on +nights when the clouds hung low, the flashes of the guns at Ypres looked +like incessant lightning. From the sand dunes at Nieuport and Dixmude +there was firing also, and the air seemed sometimes to be full of +scouting planes. + +The Canadians were moving toward the Front at Neuve Chapelle at that +time. And one day a lorry, piled high with boxes, rolled and thumped +down the street, and halted by René. + +"Rather think we are lost," explained the driver, grinning sheepishly +at René. + +There were four boys in khaki on the truck, and not a word of French +among them. Sara Lee, who rolled her own bandages now, heard the +speech and came out. + +"Good gracious!" she said, and gave an alarmed glance at the sky. But +it was the noon hour, when every good German abandons war for food, and +the sky was empty. + +The boys cheered perceptibly. Here was at last some one who spoke a +Christian tongue. + +"Must have taken the wrong turning, miss," said one of them, saluting. + +"Where do you want to go?" she asked. "You are very close to the Belgian +Front here. It is not at all safe." + +They all saluted; then, staring at her curiously, told her. + +"Dear me!" said Sara Lee. "You are a long way off. And a long way +from home too." + +They smiled. They looked, with their clean-shaven faces, absurdly young +after the bearded Belgian soldiers. + +"I am an American, too," said Sara Lee with just a touch of homesickness +in her voice. She had been feeling lonely lately. "If you have time to +come in I could give you luncheon. René can tell us if any German air +machines come over." + +Would they come in? Indeed, yes! They crawled down off the lorry, and +took off their caps, and ate every particle of food in the house. And, +though they were mutely curious at first, soon they were asking questions. +How long had she been there? What did she do? Wasn't it dangerous? + +"Not so dangerous as it looks," said Sara Lee, smiling. "The Germans +seldom bother the town now. It is not worth while." + +Later on they went over the house. They climbed the broken staircase +and stared toward the break in the poplar trees, from the roofless floor +above. + +"Some girl!" one of them said in an undertone. + +The others were gazing intently toward the Front. Never before had they +been so close. Never had they seen a ruined town. War, until now, had +been a thing of Valcartier, of a long voyage, of much drill in the mud +at Salisbury Plain. Now here they saw, at their feet, what war could do. + +"Damn them!" said one of the boys suddenly. "Fellows, we'll get back at +them soon." + +So they went away, a trifle silent and very grateful. But before they +left they had a glimpse of Sara Lee's room, with the corner gone, and +Harvey's picture on the mantel. + +"Some girl!" they repeated as they drove up the street. It was the +tribute of inarticulate youth. + +Sara Lee went back to her bandages and her thoughts. She had not a great +deal of time to think, what with the officers stopping in to fight their +paper-and-pin battles, and with letters to write and dressings to make +and supplies to order. She began to have many visitors--officers from +the French lines, correspondents on tours of the Front, and once even an +English cabinet member, who took six precious lumps of sugar in his tea +and dug a piece of shell out of the wall with his pocketknife as a +souvenir. + +Once a British aviator brought his machine down in the field by the mill, +and walked over with the stiff stride of a man who has been for hours in +the air. She gave him tea and bread and butter, and she learned then of +the big fighting that was to come. + +When she was alone she thought about Henri. Generally her thoughts were +tender; always they were grateful. But she was greatly puzzled. He had +said that he loved her. Then, if he loved her, why should he not be +gentle and kind to her? Men did not hurt the women they loved. And +because she was hurt, she was rather less than just. He had not asked +her to marry him. He had said that he loved her, but that was different. +And the insidious poison of Harvey's letter about foreigners began to +have its effect. + +The truth was that she was tired. The strain was telling on her. And +at a time when she needed every moral support Henri had drawn off behind +a wall of misery, and all her efforts at a renewal of their old +friendship only brought up against a sort of stony despair. + +There were times, too, when she grew a little frightened. She was so +alone. What if Henri went away altogether? What if he took away the +little car, and his protection, and the supplies that came so regularly? +It was not a selfish fear. It was for her work that she trembled. + +For the first time she realized her complete dependence on his good +will. And now and then she felt that it would be good to see Harvey +again, and be safe from all worry, and not have to depend on a man who +loved her as Henri did. For that she never doubted. Inexperienced as +she was in such matters, she knew that the boy loved her. Just how +wildly she did not know until later, too late to undo what the madness +had done. + +Then one day a strange thing happened. It had been raining, and when in +the late afternoon the sun came out it gleamed in the puddles that filled +the shell holes in the road and set to a red blaze the windows of the +house of the mill. + +First, soaring overhead, came a half dozen friendly planes. Next, the +eyes of the enemy having thus been blinded, so to speak, there came a +regiment of fresh troops, swinging down the street for all the world as +though the German Army was safely drinking beer in Munich. They passed +René, standing open-mouthed in the doorway, and one wag of a Belgian boy, +out of sheer joy of spring, did the goose step as he passed the little +sentry and, head screwed round in the German salute, crossed his eyes +over his impudent nose. + +Came, then, the planes. Came the regiment, which turned off into a field +and there spread itself, like a snake uncoiling, into a double line. +Came a machine, gray and battered, containing officers. Came a general +with gold braid on his shoulder, and a pleasant smile. Came the strange +event. + +The general found Sara Lee in the _salle à manger_ cutting cotton into +three-inch squares, and he stood in the doorway and bowed profoundly. + +"Mademoiselle Kennedy?" he inquired. + +Sara Lee replied to that, and then gave a quick thought to her larder. +Because generals usually meant tea. But this time at last, Sara Lee was +to receive something, not to give. She turned very white when she was +told, and said she had not deserved it; she was indeed on the verge of +declining, not knowing that there are certain things one does not +decline. But Marie brought her hat and jacket--a smiling, tremulous +Marie--and Sara Lee put them on. + +The general was very tall. In her short skirt and with flying hair she +looked like a child beside him as they walked across the fields. +Suddenly Sara Lee was terribly afraid she was going to cry. + +The troops stood rigidly at attention. And a cold wind flapped Sara +Lee's skirts, and the guns hammered at Ypres, and the general blew on +his fingers. And soon a low open car came down the street and the +King got out. Sara Lee watched him coming--his tall, slightly stooped +figure, his fair hair, his plain blue uniform. Sara Lee had never seen +a king before, and she had always thought of them as sitting up on a +sort of platform--never as trudging through spring mud. + +"What shall I do?" she asked nervously. + +"He will shake hands, mademoiselle. Bow as he approaches. That is all." + +The amazing interlude, indeed! With Sara Lee being decorated by the +King, and troops drawn up to do her honor, and over all the rumbling of +the great guns. A palpitating and dazed Sara Lee, when the decoration +was fastened to her black jacket, a Sara Lee whose hat blew off at +exactly the worst moment and rolled, end on, like a hoop, into a puddle. + +But, oddly, she did not mind about the hat. She had only one conscious +thought just then. She hoped that, wherever Uncle James might be in that +world of the gone before, he might know what was happening to her--or +even see it. He would have liked it. He had believed in the Belgians and +in the King. And now--the King did not go at once. He went back to the +little house and went through it. And he and one of his generals climbed +to the upper floor, and the King stood looking out silently toward the +land he loved and which for a time was no longer his. + +He came down after a time, stooping his tall figure in the low doorway, +and said he would like some tea. So Marie put the kettle on, and Sara +Lee and the King talked. It was all rather dazing. Every now and then +she forgot certain instructions whispered her by the general, and after +a time the King said: "Why do you do that, mademoiselle?" + +For Sara Lee, with an intent face and moving lips, had been stepping +backward. + +Sara Lee flushed to the eyes. + +"Because, sire, I was told to remain at a distance of six feet." + +"But we are being informal," said the King, smiling. "And it is a very +little room." + +Sara Lee, who had been taught in the schoolroom that kings are usurpers +of the divine rights of the people--Sara Lee lost just a bit of her +staunch democracy that day. She saw the King of the Belgians for what +he really was, a ruler, but a symbol as well. He represented his +country, as the Flag she loved represented hers. The flag was America, +the King was Belgium. That was all. + +It was a very humble and flushed Sara Lee who watched the gray car go +flying up the street later on. She went in and told the whole story to +Harvey's picture, but it was difficult to feel that he was hearing. His +eyes were turned away and his face was set and stern. And, at last, she +gave it up. This thing which meant so much to her would never mean +anything to Harvey. She knew, even then, what he would say. + +"Decorate you! I should think they might. Medals are cheap. Everybody +over there is getting medals. You feed their men and risk your life and +your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on. It's cheap at the +price." + +And later on those were Harvey's very words. But to be fair to him they +were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal. + +That evening Henri came again. He was, for the first time, his gay self +again--at least on the surface. It was as though, knowing what he was +going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never +returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt. He was everywhere in +the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery +nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water +for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing. + +"If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle," he would say, "with +one turn of the bandage over the elbow--" + +"But it won't hold that way." + +"You say that to me, mademoiselle? I who have taught you all you know +of bandaging?" + +They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee's way. + +He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was +painful. It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans: + +"Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the +right? Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!" + +Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply. + +"I cannot think. I--in my left hand, _monsieur le capitaine_?" + +"In your left hand." + +The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table +to listen. + +"I do not know, monsieur." + +"Idiot!" Henri would say. "Your right elbow, man!" + +And the dressing was done. + +He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed. He +would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly. And pain seemed to +leave the little room when he entered it. + +It was that night that Henri disappeared. + + + + +XVII + + +There was a question to settle, and it was for Henri to do it. Two +questions indeed. One was a matter of engineering, and before the bottom +fell out of his world Henri had studied engineering. The second was +more serious. + +For the first, this thing had happened. Of all the trenches to be held, +the Belgians had undeniably the worst. Properly speaking they were not +trenches at all, but shallow gutters dug a foot or two into the saturated +ground and then built man-high with bags of earth or sand. Here and +there they were not dug at all, but were purely shelters, against a +railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from +the deserted track behind which they were hidden. + +For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow +lake. By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea +and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy. The battle front +was a reeking pond. The opposing armies lived like duck hunters in a +swamp. To dig a foot was to encounter water. Machine guns here and +there sat but six inches above the yellow flood. Men lay in pools to +fire them. To reach outposts were narrow paths built first of bags of +earth--a life, sometimes for every bag. And, when this filling was +sufficient, on top a path of fascines, bound together in bundles, made +a footway. + +For this reason the Belgians approached their trenches not through deep +cuts which gave them shelter but with no other cover than the darkness +of night. During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off +from any connection with the world behind them. Food, cooked miles away, +came up at night, cold and unappetizing. For water, having exhausted +their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them, +ill-smelling and reeking of fever. Water carts trundled forward at +night, but often they were far too few. + +The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety, +had been trained to fight. In a way they had been trained to fight a +losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on +the east. But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all, +condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy +artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the +courage of a less desperate people. + +To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a +fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy +that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea, +spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where +fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in +unfordable wallows of mud and water. + +Henri then, knowing all this--none better--had his first question to +settle, which was this: As spring advanced the flood had commenced to +recede. Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind +the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort. In the deeper +ones, the bottom of the trench appeared for the first time. + +On a day previous, however, the water had commenced to come back. There +had been no rain, but little by little in a certain place yellow, +ill-smelling little streams began to flow sluggishly into the trenches. +Seeped, rather than flowed. At first the Belgian officers laid it to +that bad luck that had so persistently pursued them. Then they held a +conference in the small brick house with its maps and its pine tables +and its picture of an American harvester on the wall, which was now +headquarters. + +Sitting under the hanging lamp, with an orderly making coffee at a stove +in the corner, they talked it over. Henri was there, silent before his +elders, but intently listening. And at last they turned to him. + +"I can go and find out," he said quietly. "It is possible, though I do +not see how." He smiled. "They are, I think, only drying themselves at +our expense. It is a bit of German humor." + +But the cry of "Calais in a month!" was in the air, and undoubtedly there +had been renewed activity along the German Front near the sea. The +second question to be answered was dependent on the first. + +Had the Germans, as Henri said, merely shifted the water, by some clever +engineering, to the Belgian trenches, or was there some bigger thing on +hand? What, for instance, if they were about to attempt to drain the +inundation, smash the Belgian line, and march by the Dunkirk road to +Calais? + +So, that night while Henri jested about Pierre's right elbow and watched +Sara Lee for a smile, he had difficult work before him. + +Sometime near midnight he slipped away. Jean was waiting in the street, +and wrung the boy's hand. + +"I could go with you," he said rather wistfully. + +"You don't speak their ugly tongue." + +"I could be mute--shell shock. You could be helping me back." + +But Henri only held his hand a moment and shook his head. + +"You would double the risk, and--what good would it do?" + +"Two pistols are better than one." + +"I have two pistols, my friend," said Henri, and turned the corner of +the building, past the boards René had built in, toward the house of +the mill. But once out of Jean's sight he stopped a moment, his hand +resting against that frail wall to Sara Lee's room. It was his good-by +to her. + +For three days Jean stayed in the village. He slept at the mill, but +he came for his meals to the little house. Once he went to Dunkirk and +brought out provisions and the mail, including Sara Lee's monthly +allowance. But mostly he sat in the mill house and waited. He could +not read. + +"You do not eat at all, Jean," Sara Lee said to him more than once. And +twice she insisted that he was feverish, and placed a hand that was +somewhat marred with much peeling of vegetables, on his forehead. + +"I am entirely well, mademoiselle," he would say, and draw back. He had +anxieties enough just now without being reminded by the touch of a +woman's hand of all that he had lost. + +Long before that Sara Lee had learned not to question Jean about Henri's +absences. Even his knowledge, now, that she knew something of Henri's +work, did not remove the barrier. So Sara Lee waited, as did Jean, but +more helplessly. She knew something was wrong, but she had not Jean's +privilege of going at night to the trenches and there waiting, staring +over the gray water with its ugly floating shadows, for Henri to emerge +from the flood. + +Something rather forced and mechanical there was those days in her work. +Her smile was rather set. She did not sleep well. And one night she +violated Henri's orders and walked across the softened fields to beyond +the poplar trees. + +There was nothing to see except an intermittent flash from the clouds +that hung low over the sea at Nieuport, where British gunboats were +bombarding the coast; or the steady streaks from the Ypres salient, where +night and day the guns never rested. + +From the Belgian trenches, fifteen hundred feet or so away, there was no +sound. A German electric signal blazed its message in code, and went out +quickly. Now and then a rifle shot, thin and sharp, rang out from where, +under the floating starlights, keen eyes on each side watched for +movements on the other. + +Sara Lee sat down under a tree and watched for a while. Then she found +herself crying softly. It was all so sad, and useless, and cruel. And +somewhere there ahead was Henri, Henri with his blue eyes, his smile, +the ardor of his young arms--Henri, who had been to her many friends. + +Sara Lee had never deceived herself about Henri. She loved him. But +she was quite certain she was not in love with him, which is entirely +different. She knew that this last was impossible, because she was +engaged to Harvey. What was probably the truth was that she loved them +both in entirely different ways. Men have always insisted on such +possibilities, and have even asserted their right, now and then, to +love two women at the same time. But women are less frank with +themselves. + +And, in such cases, there is no grand passion. There are tenderness, +and the joy of companionship, and sometimes a touching dependence. But +it is not a love that burns with a white fire. + +Perhaps Sara Lee was one of those women who are always loved more than +they love. There are such women, not selfish, not seeking love, but +softly feminine, kind, appealing and genuine. Men need, after all, but +an altar on which to lay tribute. And the high, remote white altar that +was Sara Lee had already received the love of two strong men. + +She was not troubling her head that night, however, about being an altar, +of a sort. She cried a little at first, because she was terrified for +Henri and because Jean's face was growing pinched and gray. Then she +cried very hard, prone on the ground and face down, because Henri was +young, and all of life should have been before him. And he was missing. + +Henri was undeniably missing. Even the King knew it now, and set down +in his heart, among the other crosses there, Henri's full name, which +we may not know, and took to pacing his little study and looking out at +the spring sea. + +That night Marie, having ladled to the bottom of her kettle, found Sara +Lee missing, and was told by René of the direction she had taken. Marie, +muttering to herself, set out to find her, and almost stumbled over her +in the wood by the road. + +She sat down on the ground without a word and placed a clumsy hand on +the girl's shoulder. It was not until Sara Lee ceased sobbing that +she spoke: + +"It is far from hopeless, mademoiselle." + +They had by now established a system of communication. Sara Lee spoke +her orders in halting French, but general conversation was beyond her. +And much hearing of English had taught the Belgian girl enough to follow. + +Sara Lee replied, then, in smothered English: + +"He is gone, Marie. He will never come back." + +"Who can tell? There are many missing who are not dead." + +Sara Lee shuddered. For spies were not made prisoners. They had no +rights as prisoners of war. Their own governments did not protect them. +To Henri capture was death. But she could not say this to Marie. + +Marie sat softly stroking Sara Lee's hair, her own eyes tragic and +tearless. + +"Even if it were--the other," she said, "it is not so bad to die for +one's country. The thing that is terrible, that leaves behind it only +bitterness and grief and no hope, mademoiselle, even with many prayers, +is that one has died a traitor." + +She coaxed Sara Lee back at last. They went through the fields, for +fresh troops were being thrown into the Belgian trenches and the street +was full of men. Great dray horses were dragging forward batteries, the +heavy guns sliding and slipping In the absence of such information as +only Henri had been wont to bring it was best to provide for the worst. + +The next day Jean did not come over for breakfast, and René handed Sara +Lee a note. + +"I am going to England," Jean had written that dawn in the house of the +mill. "And from there to Holland. I can get past the barrier and shall +work down toward the Front. I must learn what has happened, mademoiselle. +As you know, if he was captured, there is no hope. But there is an +excellent chance that he is in hiding, unable to get back. Look for me +in two weeks." + +There followed what instructions he had given as to her supplies, which +would come as before. Beautifully written in Jean's small fine hand, it +spelled for Sara Lee the last hope. She read Jean's desperation through +its forced cheerfulness. And she faced for the first time a long period +of loneliness in the crowded little house. + +She tried very hard to fill the gap that Henri had left--tried to joke +with the men in her queer bits of French; was more smiling than ever, +for fear she might be less. But now and then in cautious whispers she +heard Henri's name, and her heart contracted with very terror. + +A week. Two weeks. Twice the village was bombarded severely, but the +little house escaped by a miracle. Marie considered it the same miracle +that left holy pictures unhurt on the walls of destroyed houses, and +allowed the frailest of old ebony and rosewood crucifixes to remain +unharmed. + +Great generals, often as tall as they were great, stopped at the little +house to implore Sara Lee to leave. But she only shook her head. + +"Not unless you send me away," she always said; "and that would break +my heart." + +"But to move, mademoiselle, only to the next village!" they would +remonstrate, and as a final argument: "You are too valuable to risk an +injury." + +"I must remain here," she said. And some of them thought they +understood. When an unusually obdurate officer came along, Sara Lee +would insist on taking him to the cellar. + +"You see!" she would say, holding her candle high. "It is a nice cellar, +warm and dry. It is"--proudly--"one of the best cellars in the village. +It is a really homelike cellar." + +The officer would go away then, and send her cigarettes for her men or, +as in more than one case, a squad with bags of earth and other things +to protect the little house as much as possible. After a time the little +house began to represent the ideas in protection and camouflage, then in +its early stages, of many different minds. + +René shot a man there one night, a skulking figure working its way in +the shadows up the street. It was just before dawn, and René, who was +sleepless those days, like the others, called to him. The man started +to run, dodging behind walls. But René ran faster and killed him. + +He was a German in Belgian peasant's clothing. But he wore the great +shoes of the German soldier, and he had been making a rough map of the +Belgian trenches. + +Sara Lee did not see him. But when she heard the shot she went out, and +René told her breathlessly. + +From that time on her terrors took the definite form of Henri lying dead +in a ruined street, and being buried, as this man was buried, without +ceremony and without a prayer, in some sodden spring field. + + + + +XVIII + + +As the spring advanced Harvey grew increasingly bitter; grew morbid +and increasingly self-conscious also. He began to think that people were +smiling behind his back, and when they asked about Sara Lee he met with +almost insulting brevity what he felt was half-contemptuous kindness. +He went nowhere, and worked all day and until late in the night. He did +well in his business, however, and late in March he received a +substantial raise in salary. He took it without enthusiasm, and told +Belle that night at dinner with apathy. + +After the evening meal it was now his custom to go to his room and there, +shut in, to read. He read no books on the war, and even the quarter +column entitled Salient Points of the Day's War News hardly received a +glance from him now. + +In the office when the talk turned to the war, as it did almost hourly, +he would go out or scowl over his letters. + +"Harvey's hit hard," they said there. + +"He's acting like a rotten cub," was likely to be the next sentence. +But sometimes it was: "Well, what'd you expect? Everything ready to get +married, and the girl beating it for France without notice! I'd be sore +myself." + +On the day of the raise in salary his sister got the children to bed and +straightened up the litter of small garments that seemed always to +bestrew the house, even to the lower floor. Then she went into Harvey's +room. Coat and collar off, he was lying on the bed, but not reading. +His book lay beside him, and with his arms under his head he was staring +at the ceiling. + +She did not sit down beside him on the bed. They were an undemonstrative +family, and such endearments as Belle used were lavished on her children. +But her eyes were kind, and a little nervous. + +"Do you mind talking a little, Harvey?" + +"I don't feel like talking much. I'm tired, I guess. But go on. What +is it? Bills?" + +She came to him in her constant financial anxieties, and always he was +ready to help her out. But his tone now was gruff. A slight flush of +resentment colored her cheeks. + +"Not this time, Harve. I was just thinking about things." + +"Sit down." + +She sat on the straight chair beside the bed, the chair on which, in +neat order, Harvey placed his clothing at night, his shoes beneath, his +coat over the back. + +"I wish you'd go out more, Harvey." + +"Why? Go out and talk to a lot of driveling fools who don't care for me +any more than I do for them?" + +"That's not like you, Harve." + +"Sorry." His tone softened. "I don't care much about going round, +Belle. That's all. I guess you know why." + +[Illustration: That Henri might be living, somewhere--that some day the +Belgians might go home again.] + +"So does everybody else." + +He sat up and looked at her. + +"Well, suppose they do? I can't help that, can I? When a fellow has +been jilted--" + +"You haven't been jilted." + +He lay down again, his arms under his head; and Belle knew that his eyes +were on Sara Lee's picture on his dresser. + +"It amounts to the same thing." + +"Harvey," Belle said hesitatingly, "I've brought Sara Lee's report from +the Ladies' Aid. May I read it to you?" + +"I don't want to hear it." Then: "Give it here. I'll look at it." + +He read it carefully, his hands rather unsteady. So many men given soup, +so many given chocolate. So many dressings done. And at the bottom +Sara Lee's request for more money--an apologetic, rather breathless +request, and closing, rather primly with this: + +"I am sure that the society will feel, from the above report, that the +work is worth while, and worth continuing. I am only sorry that I +cannot send photographs of the men who come for aid, but as they come +at night it is impossible. I enclose, however, a small picture of the +house, which is now known as the little house of mercy." + +"At night!" said Harvey. "So she's there alone with a lot of ignorant +foreigners at night. Why the devil don't they come in the daytime?" + +"Here's the picture, Harvey." + +He got up then, and carried the tiny photograph over close to the gas +jet. There he stood for a long time, gazing at it. There was René +with his rifle and his smile. There was Marie in her white apron. And +in the center, the wind blowing her soft hair, was Sara Lee. + +Harvey groaned and Belle came over and putting her hand on his shoulder +looked at the photograph with him. + +"Do you know what I think, Harvey?" she said. "I think Sara Lee is right +and you are wrong." + +He turned on her almost savagely. + +"That's not the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor +devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn +for me she'd never have gone. That's all." + +He returned to a moody survey of the picture. + +"Look at it!" he said. "She insists that she's safe. But that fellow's +got a gun. What for, if she's so safe? And look at that house! There's +a corner shot away; and it's got no upper floor. Safe!" + +Belle held out her hand. + +"I must return the picture to the society, Harve." + +"Not just yet," he said ominously. "I want to look at it. I haven't +got it all yet. And I'll return it myself--with a short speech." + +"Harvey!" + +"Well," he retorted, "why shouldn't I tell that lot of old +scandalmongers what I think of them? They'll sit here safe at home and +beg money--God, one of them was in the office to-day!--and send a young +girl over to--You'd better get out, Belle. I'm not company for any one +to-night." + +She turned away, but he came after her, and suddenly putting his arms +round her he kissed her. + +"Don't worry about me," he said. "I'm done with wearing my heart on my +sleeve. She looks happy, so I guess I can be." He released her. "Good +night. I'll return the picture." + +He sat up very late, alternately reading the report and looking at the +picture. It was unfortunate that Sara Lee had smiled into the camera. +Coupled with her blowing hair it had given her a light-heartedness, a +sort of joyousness, that hurt him to the soul. + +He made some mad plans after he had turned out the lights--to flirt +wildly with the unattached girls he knew; to go to France and confront +Sara Lee and then bring her home. Or--He had found a way. He lay +there and thought it over, and it bore the test of the broken sleep that +followed. In the morning, dressing, he wondered he had not thought of +it before. He was more cheerful at breakfast than he had been for weeks. + + + + +XIX + + +In the little house of mercy two weeks went by, and then a third. +Soldiers marching out to the trenches sometimes wore flowers tucked +gayly in their caps. More and more Allied aëroplanes were in the +air. Sometimes, standing in the streets, Sara Lee saw one far overhead, +while balloon-shaped clouds of bursting shells hung far below it. + +Once or twice in the early morning a German plane, flying so low that +one could easily see the black cross on each wing, reconnoitered the +village for wagon trains or troops. Always they found it empty. + +Hope had almost fled now. In the afternoons Marie went to the ruined +church, and there knelt before the heap of marble and masonry that had +once been the altar, and prayed. And Sara Lee, who had been brought up +a Protestant and had never before entered a Catholic church, took to +going there too. In some strange fashion the peace of former days +seemed to cling to the little structure, roofless as it was. On quiet +days its silence was deeper than elsewhere. On days of much firing the +sound from within its broken walls seemed deadened, far away. + +Marie burned a candle as she prayed, for that soul in purgatory which she +had once loved, and now pitied. Sara Lee burned no candle, but she +knelt, sometimes beside Marie, sometimes alone, and prayed for many +things: that Henri should be living, somewhere; that the war might end; +that that day there would be little wounding; that some day the Belgians +might go home again; and that back in America Harvey might grow to +understand and forgive her. And now and then she looked into the very +depths of her soul, and on those days she prayed that her homeland +might, before it was too late, see this thing as she was seeing it. The +wanton waste of it all, the ghastly cruelty the Germans had brought into +this war. + +Sara Lee's vague thinking began to crystallize. This war was not +a judgment sent from on high to a sinful world. It was the wicked +imposition of one nation on other nations. It was national. It was +almost racial. But most of all it was a war of hate on the German +side. She had never believed in hate. There were ugly passions in the +world--jealousy, envy, suspicion; but not hate. The word was not in her +rather limited vocabulary. + +There was no hate on the part of the men she knew. The officers who +stopped in on their way to and from the trenches were gentlemen and +soldiers. They were determined and grave; they resented, they even +loathed. But they did not hate. The little Belgian soldiers were +bewildered, puzzled, desperately resentful. But of hate, as translated +into terms of frightfulness, they had no understanding. + +Yet from the other side were coming methods of war so wantonly cruel, +so useless save as inflicting needless agony, as only hate could devise. +No strategic value justified them. They were spontaneous outgrowths of +venom, nursed during the winter deadlock and now grown to full size and +destructive power. + +The rumor of a gas that seared and killed came to the little house as +early as February. In March there came the first victims, poor writhing +creatures, deprived of the boon of air, their seared lungs collapsed +and agonized, their faces drawn into masks of suffering. Some of them +died in the little house, and even after death their faces held the +imprint of horror. + +To Sara Lee, burying her own anxiety under the cloak of service, there +came new and terrible thoughts. This was not war. The Germans had sent +their clouds of poisoned gas across the inundation, but had made no +attempt to follow. This was killing, for the lust of killing; suffering, +for the joy of inflicting pain. + +And a day or so later she heard of The Hague Convention. She had not +known of it before. Now she learned of that gentlemen's agreement among +nations, and that it said: "The use of poison or of poisoned weapons is +forbidden." She pondered that carefully, trying to think dispassionately. +Now and then she received a copy of a home newspaper, and she saw that +the use of poison gases was being denied by Germans in America and set +down to rumor and hysteria. + +So, on a cold spring day, she sat down at the table in the _salle à manger_ +and wrote a letter to the President, beginning "_Dear Sir_"; and telling +what she knew of poison gas. She also, on second thought, wrote one to +Andrew Carnegie, who had built a library in her city. She felt that +the expense to him of sending some one over to investigate would not be +prohibitive, and something must be done. + +She never heard from either of her letters, but she felt better for +having written them. And a day or two later she received from Mrs. +Travers, in England, a small supply of the first gas masks of the war. +Simple and primitive they were, those first masks; useless, too, as it +turned out--a square of folded gauze, soaked in some solution and then +dried, with tapes to tie it over the mouth and nose. To adjust them the +soldiers had but to stoop and wet them in the ever-present water in +the trench, and then to tie them on. + +Sara Lee gave them out that night, and there was much mirth in the little +house, such mirth as there had not been since Henri went away. The +Belgians called it a _bal masque_, and putting them on bowed before one +another and requested dances, and even flirted coyly with each other over +their bits of white gauze. And in the very middle of the gayety some +one propounded one of Henri's idiotic riddles; and Sara Lee went across +to her little room and closed the door and stood there with her eyes +shut, for fear she would scream. + +Then, one day, coming out of the little church, she saw the low broken +gray car turn in at the top of the street and come slowly, so very +slowly, toward her. There were two men in it. + +One was Henri. + +She ran, stumbling because of tears, up the street. It was Henri! There +was no mistake. There he sat beside Jean, brushed and very neat; and +very, very white. + +"Mademoiselle!" he said, and came very close to crying himself when he +saw her face. He was greatly excited. His sunken eyes devoured her as +she ran toward him. Almost he held out his arms. But he could not do +that, even if he would, for one was bandaged to his side. + +It is rather sad to record how many times Sara Lee wept during her +amazing interlude. For here is another time. She wept for joy and +wretchedness. She stood on the running board and cried and smiled. And +Jean winked his one eye rapidly. + +"This idiot, mademoiselle," he said gruffly, "this maniac--he would not +remain in Calais, with proper care. He must come on here. And rapidly. +Could he have taken the wheel from me we should have been here an hour +ago. But for once I have an advantage." + +The car jolted to the little house, and Jean helped Henri out. Such a +strange Henri, smiling and joyous, and walking at a crawl, even with +Jean's support. He protested violently against being put to bed, and +when he found himself led into Sara Lee's small room he openly rebelled. + +"Never!" he said stubbornly, halting in the doorway. "This is +mademoiselle's boudoir. Her drawing-room as well. I am going to the +mill house and--" + +He staggered. + +So Sara Lee's room had a different occupant for a time, a thin and +fine-worn young Belgian, who yielded to Sara Lee when Jean gave up in +despair, and who proceeded, most unmanfully, to faint as soon as he was +between the blankets. + +If Sara Lee hoped to nurse Henri she was doomed to disappointment. Jean +it was who took over the care of the boy, a Jean who now ate prodigiously, +and whistled occasionally, and slept at night robed in his blanket on the +floor beside Henri's bed, lest that rebellious invalid get up and try to +move about. + +On the first night, with the door closed, against Henri's entreaties, +while the little house received its evening complement of men, and with +Henri lying back on his pillows, fresh dressed as to the wounds in his +arm and chest, fed with Sara Lee's daintiest, and resting, Jean found the +boy's eyes resting on the mantel. + +"Dear and obstinate friend," said Henri, "do you wish me to be happy?" + +"You shall not leave the room or your bed. That is arranged for." + +"How?" demanded Henri with interest. + +"Because I have hidden away your trousers." + +Henri laughed, but he sobered quickly. + +"If you wish me to be happy," he said, "take away that American +photograph. But first, please to bring it here." + +Jean brought it, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. +And Henri lay back and studied it. + +"It is mademoiselle's fiancé," he said. + +Jean grunted. + +"Look at it, Jean," Henri said in his half-bantering tone, with despair +beneath it; "and then look at me. Or no--remembering me as I was when +I was a man. He is better, eh? It is a good face. But there is a jaw, +a--Do you think he will be kind to her as she requires? She requires +much kindness. Some women--" + +He broke off and watched Jean anxiously. + +"A half face!" Jean said scornfully. "The pretty view! As for +kindness--" He put the photograph face down on the table. "I knew +once a man in Belgium who married an American. At Antwerp. They were +most unhappy." + +Henri smiled. + +"You are lying," he said with boyish pleasure in his own astuteness. +"You knew no such couple. You are trying to make me resigned." + +But quite a little later, when Jean thought he was asleep, he said: +"I shall never be resigned." + +So at last spring had come, and Henri and the great spring drive. The +Germans had not drained the inundation, nor had they broken through to +Calais. And it is not to be known here how much this utter failure had +been due to the information Henri had secured before he was wounded. + +One day in his bed Henri received a visit from the King, and was left +lying with a decoration on his breast and a beatific, if somewhat +sheepish, expression on his face. And one night the village was +bombarded, and on Henri's refusing to be moved to the cellar Sara Lee +took up a determined stand in his doorway, until at last he made a most +humiliating move for safety. + +Bit by bit Sara Lee got the story, its bare detail from Henri, its +courage and sheer recklessness from Jean. It would, for instance, run +like this, with Henri in a chair perhaps, and cutting dressings--since +that might be done with one hand--and Sara Lee, sleeves rolled up and +a great bowl of vegetables before her: + +"And when you got through the water, Henri?" she would ask: "What then?" + +"It was quite simple. They had put up some additional wire, however--" + +"Where?" + +"There was a break," he would explain. "I have told you--between their +trenches. I had used it before to get through." + +"But how could you go through?" + +"Like a snake," he would say, smiling. "Very flat and wriggling. I have +eaten of the dirt, mademoiselle." + +Then he would stop and cut, very awkwardly, with his left hand. + +"Go on," she would prompt him. "But they had put barbed wire there. Is +that it? So you could not get through?" + +"With tin cans on it, and stones in the cans. I thought I had removed +them all, but there was one left. So they heard me." + +More cutting and a muttered French expletive. Henri was not a +particularly patient cripple. And apparently there was an end to the +story. + +"For goodness' sake," Sara Lee would exclaim despairingly; "so they +heard you! That isn't all, is it?" + +"It was almost all," he would say with his boyish smile. + +"And they shot at you?" + +"Even better. They shot me. That was this one." And he would point to +his arm. + +More silence, more cutting, a gathering exasperation on Sara Lee's part. + +"Are you going on or not?" + +"Then I pretended to be one of them, mademoiselle. I speak German as +French. I pretended not to be hurt, but to be on a reconnoissance. And +I got into the trench and we had a talk in the darkness. It was most +interesting. Only if they had shown a light they would have seen that +I was wounded." + +By bits, not that day, but after many days, she got the story. In the +next trench he slipped a sling over the wounded arm and, as a Bavarian +on his way to the dressing station, got back. + +"I had some trouble," he confessed one day. "Now and then one would +offer to go back with me. And I did not care for assistance!" + +But sometime later there was trouble. She was four days getting to that +part of it. He had got behind the lines by that time, and he knew that +in some way suspicion had been roused. He was weak by that time, and +could not go far. He had lain hidden, for a day and part of a night, +without water, in a destroyed barn, and then had escaped. + +He got into the Belgian costume as before, but he could not wear a sling +for his wounded arm. He got the peasant to thrust his helpless right +hand into his pocket, and for two days he made a close inspection of +what was going on. But fever had developed, and on the third night, +half delirious, when he was spoken to by an officer he had replied, of +all tongues, in English. + +The officer shot him instantly in the chest. He fell and lay still and +the officer bent over him. In that moment Henri stabbed him with a +knife in his left hand. Men were coming from every direction, but he +got away--he did not clearly remember how. And at dawn he fell into +the Belgian farmhouse, apparently dying. + +Jean's story, on the other hand, was given early and with no hesitation. +He had crossed the border at Holland in civilian clothes, by the simple +expedient of bribing a sentry. He had got, with little difficulty, to +the farmhouse, and found Henri, now recovering but very weak; he was +lying hidden in a garret, and he was suffering from hunger and lack of +medical attention. In a wagon full of market stuff, Henri hidden in the +bed of it, they had got to the border again. And there Jean had, it +seemed, stabbed the sentry he had bribed before and driven on to neutral +soil. + +Not an unusual story, that of Henri and Jean. The journey across +Belgium in the springless farm wagon was the worst. They had had to +take roundabout lanes, avoiding the main highways. Fortunately, always +at night there were friendly houses, kind hands to lift Henri into warm +fire-lighted interiors. Many messages they had brought back, some of +cheer, but too often of tragedy, from the small farmsteads of Belgium. + +Then finally had been Holland, and the chartering of a boat--and at +last--"Here we are, and here we are, and here we are again," sang Henri, +chopping at his cotton and making a great show of cheerfulness before +Sara Lee. + +But with Jean sometimes he showed the black depression beneath. He +would never be a man again. He was done for. He gained strength so +slowly that he believed he was not gaining at all. He was not happy, +and the unhappy mend slowly. + +After the time he had asked Jean to take away Harvey's photograph he did +not recur to the subject, but he did not need to. Jean knew, perhaps +even better than Henri himself, that the boy was recklessly, hopelessly, +not quite rationally in love with the American girl. + +Also Henri was fretting about his work. Sometimes at night, following +Henri's instructions, Jean wandered quietly along roads and paths that +paralleled the Front. At such times his eyes were turned, not toward +the trenches, but toward that flat country which lay behind, still dotted +at that time with groves of trees, with canals overhung with pollard +willows, and with here and there a farmhouse that at night took on in +the starlight the appearance of being whole again. + +Singularly white and peaceful were those small steadings of Belgium +in the night hours--until cruel dawn showed them for what they +were--skeletons of dead homes, clothed only at night with wraithlike +roofs and chimneys; ghosts of houses, appearing between midnight and +cock crow. + +Jean had not Henri's eyes nor his recklessness nor his speed, for that +matter. Now and then he saw the small appearing and disappearing lights +on some small rise. He would reach the spot, with such shelter as +possible, to find only a sugar-beet field, neglected and unplowed. + +Then, one night, tragedy came to the little house of mercy. + + + + +XX + + +Harvey proceeded to put his plan into effect at once, with the simple +method of an essentially simple nature. The thing had become +intolerable; therefore it must end. + +On the afternoon following his talk with Belle he came home at three +o'clock. Belle heard him moving about in his room, and when she entered +it, after he had gone, she found that he had shaved and put on his best +suit. + +She smiled a little. It was like Harvey to be literal. He had said he +was going to go round and have a good time, and he was losing no time. +But in their restricted social life, where most of the men worked until +five o'clock or even later, there were fewer afternoon calls paid. +Belle wondered with mild sisterly curiosity into what arena Harvey was +about to fling his best hat. + +But though Harvey paid a call that afternoon it was not on any of the +young women he knew. He went to see Mrs. Gregory. She was at home--he +had arranged for that by telephone--and the one butler of the +neighborhood admitted him. It was a truculent young man, for all his +politeness, who confronted Mrs. Gregory in her drawing-room--a quietly +truculent young man, who came to the point while he was still shaking +hands. + +"You're not going to be glad to see me in a minute," he said in reply +to her greeting. + +"How can you know that?" + +"Because I've come to get you to do something you won't want to do." + +"We won't quarrel before we begin, then," she said pleasantly. "Because +I really never do anything I don't wish to do." + +But she gave him a second glance and her smile became a trifle forced. +She knew all about Harvey and Sara Lee. She had heard rumors of his +disapproval also. Though she was not a clever nor a very keen woman, +she saw what was coming and braced herself for it. + +Harvey had prepared in his mind a summary of his position, and he +delivered it with the rapidity and strength of a blow. + +"I know all about the Belgians, Mrs. Gregory," he said. "I'm sorry for +them. So is every one, I suppose. But I want to know if you think a +girl of twenty ought to be over there practically at the Front, and +alone?" He gave her time to reply. "Would you like to have your +daughter there, if you had one?" + +"Perhaps not, under ordinary circumstances. But this is war." + +"It is not our war." + +"Humanity," said Mrs. Gregory, remembering the phrase she had written +for a speech--"humanity has no nationality. It is of all men, for +all men." + +"That's men. Not women!" + +He got up and stood on the hearthrug. He was singularly reminiscent of +the time he had stood on Aunt Harriet's white fur rug and had told Sara +Lee she could not go. + +"Now see here, Mrs. Gregory," he said, "we'll stop beating about the +bush, if you don't mind. She's got to come home. She's coming, if I +have to go and get her!" + +"You needn't look at me so fiercely. I didn't send her. It was her own +idea." + +Harvey sneered. + +"No," he said slowly. "But I notice your society publishes her reports +in the papers, and that the names of the officers are rarely missing." + +Mrs. Gregory colored. + +"We must have publicity to get money," she said. "It is hard to get. +Sometimes I have had to make up the deficit out of my own pocket." + +"Then for God's sake bring her home! If the thing has to go on, send +over there some of the middle-aged women who have no ties. Let 'em get +shot if they want to. They can write as good reports as she can, if +that's all you want. And make as good soup," he added bitterly. + +"It could be done, of course," she said, thoughtfully. "But--I must +tell you this: I doubt if an older woman could have got where she has. +There is no doubt that her charm, her youth and beauty have helped her +greatly. We cannot--" + +The very whites of his eyes turned red then. He shouted furiously that +for their silly work and their love of publicity, they were trading on +a girl's youth and beauty; that if anything happened to her he would +publish the truth in every newspaper in the country; that they would at +once recall Sara Lee or he would placard the city with what they were +doing. These were only a few of the things he threw at her. + +When he was out of breath he jerked the picture of the little house of +mercy out of his pocket and flung it into her lap. + +"There!" he said. "Do you know where that house is? It's in a ruined +village. She hasn't said that, has she? Well, look at the masonry +there. That's a shell hole in the street. That soldier's got a gun. +Why? Because the Germans may march up that street any day on their way +to Calais." + +Mrs. Gregory looked at the picture. Sara Lee smiled into the sun. And +René, ignorant that his single rifle was to oppose the march of the +German Army to Calais--René smiled also. + +Mrs. Gregory rose. + +"I shall report your view to the society," she said coldly. "I +understand how you feel, but I fail to see the reason for this attack +on me." + +"I guess you see all right!" he flung at her. "She's my future wife. +If you hadn't put this nonsense into her head we'd be married now and +she'd be here in God's country and not living with a lot of foreigners +who don't know a good woman when they see one. I want her back, that's +all. But I want her back safe. And if anything happens to her I'll +make you pay--you and all your notoriety hunters." + +He went out then, and was for leaving without his hat or coat, but the +butler caught him at the door. Out in the spring sunlight he walked +rapidly, still seething, remembering other bitter things he had meant +to say, and repeating them to himself. + +But he had said enough. + +Mrs. Gregory's account of his visit she reported at a meeting specially +called. The narrative lost nothing in the repetition. But the kindly +women who sat in the church house sewing or knitting listened to what +Harvey had said and looked troubled. They liked Sara Lee, and many of +them had daughters of their own. + +The photograph was passed around. Undoubtedly Sara Lee was living in a +ruined village. Certainly ruined villages were only found very near the +Front. And René unquestionably held a gun. Tales of German brutalities +to women had come and were coming constantly to their ears. Mabel +Andrews had written to them for supplies, and she had added to the +chapter of horrors. + +Briefly, the sense of the meeting was that Harvey had been brutal, but +that he was right. An older woman in a safe place they might continue +to support, but none of them would assume the responsibility of the +crushing out of a young girl's life. + +To be quite frank, possibly Harvey's appeal would have carried less +weight had it not coincided with Sara Lee's request for more money. +Neither one alone would have brought about the catastrophe, but +altogether they made question and answer, problem and solution. Money +was scarce. Demands were heavy. None of them except Mrs. Gregory had +more than just enough. And there was this additional situation to face: +there was no end of the war in sight; it gave promise now of going on +indefinitely. + +Joifre had said, "I nibble them." But to nibble a hole in the Germany +Army might take years. They had sent Sara Lee for a few months. How +about keeping her there indefinitely? + +Oddly enough, it was Harvey's sister Belle who made the only protest +against the recall. + +"Of course, I want her back," she said slowly. "You'd understand better +if you had to live with Harvey. I'm sorry, Mrs. Gregory, that he spoke +to you as he did, but he's nearly crazy." She eyed the assembly with +her tired shrewd eyes. "I'm no talker," she went on, "but Sara Lee has +done a big thing. We don't realize, I guess, how big it is. And I +think we'll just about kill her if we bring her home." + +"Better to do that than to have her killed over there," some one said. + +And in spite of Belle's protest, that remained the sense of the meeting. +It was put to the vote and decided to recall Sara Lee. She could bring +a report of conditions, and if she thought it wise an older woman could +go later, to a safer place. + +Belle was very quiet that evening. After dinner she went to Harvey's +room and found him dressing to go out. + +"I'm going with a crowd to the theater," he said. "First week of the +summer stock company, you know." + +He tied his tie defiantly, avoiding Belle's eyes in the mirror. + +"Harvey," she said, "they're going to bring Sara Lee home." + +He said nothing, but his hands shook somewhat. "And I think," Belle +said, "that you will be sorry for what you have done--all the rest of +your life." + + + + +XXI + + +By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it was +almost the first of May. The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, and +the Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply of +high-explosive shells. + +Cheering reports came daily to the little house--, of rapidly augmenting +armies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up to +the Allied Front. Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, that +only shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against the +German batteries. She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but the +supply was still inadequate. With the new shells experiments were being +made in barrage fire--costly experiments now and then; but the Allies +were apt in learning the ugly game of modern war. + +Only on the Belgian Front was there small change. The shattered army +was being freshly outfitted. England was sending money and ammunition, +and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiled +grimly and drilled again. But there were not, as in England and in +France, great bodies of young men to draw from. Too many had been +caught beyond the German wall of steel. + +Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the green +fields. And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways. +They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity. +Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the top +of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse, +which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box and +stovepipe. + +"A portable kitchen!" he explained. "See, here for soup and here for +coffee. And more are coming." + +"Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully. + +But he protested almost violently. He even put the question to the +horse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative. + +She was needed, indeed. To the great base hospital at La Panne went +more and more wounded men. But to the little house of mercy came the +small odds and ends in increasing numbers. Medical men were scarce, and +badly overworked. There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon to +the little house, but it came to nothing. La Panne was not far away, +and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many. + +So the little house went on much as before. Henri had moved to the mill. +He was at work again, and one day, in the King's villa and quietly, +because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received a +second medal, the highest for courage that could be given. + +He did not tell Sara Lee. + +But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they could +not always perform miracles. The German planes still outnumbered the +Allied ones. They had grown more daring with the spring, too, and +whatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretell +those of the air. + +On a moonlight night in early May, Sara Lee, setting out her dressings, +heard a man running up the street. René challenged him sharply, only +to step aside. It was Henri. He burst in on Sara Lee. + +"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said. + +"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee. + +"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve _taubes_, and +they are circling overhead." + +The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight and +the Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it was +as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and +since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed. + +The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed a +deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead +town. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the +cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment by +shells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb dropped +from the sky, the floors above were practically useless. + +Only Henri and René remained on the street floor. Henri was +extinguishing lights. In the passage René stood, not willing to take +refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment the +uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado René stepped out into the +moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air. + +He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell. + +"Come, René!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fight +again, not--" + +But René's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to the +doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he +had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead. +Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently. +Then he went below. + +"Where is René?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness. + +"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think, +watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter." + +"There is no shelter," shivered the girl. + +He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand, +like two children, waiting for what might come. + +It was not until the thing was over that he told her. He had gone up +first and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned, +had carried René to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularly +peaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night. + +"Good night, little brother," Henri said to him, and left him there with +a heavy heart. Never again would René sit and whittle on the doorstep +and sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyish +adoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and forth in the little house. + +Henri stared up at the sky. The moon looked down, cold, and cruelly +bright, on the vanishing squadron of death, on the destroyed town and on +the boy's white face. Somewhere, Henri felt, vanishing like the German +_taubes_, but to peace instead of war, was moving René's brave and smiling +spirit--a boyish angel, eager and dauntless, and still looking up. + +Henri took off his cap and crossed himself. + +Another sentry took René's place the next day, but the little house had +lost something it could not regain. And a greater loss was to come. + +Jean brought out the mail that day. For Sara Lee, moving about silent +and red-eyed, there was a letter from Mr. Travers. He inclosed a hundred +pounds and a clipping from a London newspaper entitled The Little House +of Mercy. + +"Evidently," he wrote, "you were right and we were wrong. One-half of +the inclosed check is from my wife, who takes this method of showing her +affectionate gratitude. The balance is from myself. Once, some months +ago, I said to you that almost you restored my faith in human nature. +To-day I may say that, in these hours of sorrow for us all, what you have +done and are doing has brought into my gray day a breath of hope." + +There was another clipping, but no comment. It recorded the death of a +Reginald Alexander Travers, aged thirty. + +It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself those +days, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegation +of the English--their attitude not so much of suppressing their private +griefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people, +they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a private +matter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbroken +front, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strange +one, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England. + +A people who had for centuries insisted not only on its rights but on +its privileges was now giving as freely as ever it had demanded. It +was as though, having hoarded all those years, it had but been hoarding +against the day of payment. As it had received it gave--in money, in +effort, in life. And without pretext. + +So the Traverses, having given up all that had made life for them, sent +a clipping only, and no comment. Sara Lee, through a mist of tears, +saw them alone in their drawing-room, having tea as usual, and valiantly +speaking of small things, and bravely facing the future, but never, in +the bitterest moments, making complaint or protest. + +Would America, she wondered, if her hour came, be so brave? Harvey had +a phrase for such things. It was "stand the gaff." Would America stand +the gaff so well? Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the +body rather than of the soul--physical courage, not moral. What would +happen if America entered the struggle and the papers were filled, as +were the British and the French, with long casualty lists, each name a +knife thrust somewhere? + +She wondered. + +And then, before long, it was Sara Lee's turn to stand the gaff. There +was another letter, a curiously incoherent one from Harvey's sister. She +referred to something that the society had done, and hoped that Sara Lee +would take it in kindness, as it was meant. Harvey was well and much +happier. She was to try to understand Harvey's part. He had been +almost desperate. Evidently the letter had preceded one that should have +arrived at the same time. Sara Lee was sadly puzzled. She went to Henri +with it, but he could make nothing out of it. There was nothing to do +but to wait. + +The next night Henri was to go through the lines again. Since his +wounding he had been working on the Allied side, and fewer lights there +were in his district that flashed the treacherous message across the +flood, between night and morning. But now it was imperative that he go +through the German lines again. It was feared that with grappling hooks +the enemy was slowly and cautiously withdrawing the barbed wire from the +inundated fields; and that could mean but one thing. + +On the night he was to go Henri called Sara Lee from the crowded _salle à +manger_ and drawing her into the room across closed the door. + +"Mademoiselle," he said gravely, "once before, long ago, you permitted +me to kiss you. Will you do that for me again?" + +She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She did +not now. For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook. +She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure +men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours +that remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her +charm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, to +cheer, to comfort and help--that was necessary, because soon the chance +might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret. + +So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of +tears. + +"God bless and keep you, dear Henri," she said. + +Then she went back to her work. + + + + +XXII + + +Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people. +One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it +away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present +Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer +horribly, not to gain anything--except perhaps some honorable +advancement for their souls--but that there might be preserved, at any +cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to +pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God. + +She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she +was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers +and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter. +She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time +she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was +_his_ anxiety, _his_ loneliness, _his_ humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were +looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were +turned in on himself. + +She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What +she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come +sometime--that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that +day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the +thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her +hands would tremble. + +Henri had not returned when, the second day after René's death, the +letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from +Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had +always sent its enthusiastic approval. + +She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read +Belle's letter again that she began to comprehend. She was recalled; +and the recall was Harvey's work. + +She was very close to hating him that day. He had never understood. +She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest +of their lives, there would be this barrier between them. To the +barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment. She could +never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her +small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of +the war. + +Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee's love for him. He had done +it himself, madly, despairingly. She still loved him, she felt. Nothing +could change that or her promise to him. But with that love there was +something now of fear. And she felt, too, that after all the years she +had known him she had not known him at all. The Harvey she had known +was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always +gentle. But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger. + +It was the result of her upbringing, probably, that she had no thought +of revolt. Her tie to Harvey was a real tie. By her promise to him her +life was no longer hers to order. It belonged to some one else, to be +ordered for her. But, though she accepted, she was too clear a thinker +not to resent. + +When Henri returned, toward dawn of the following night, he did not come +alone. Sara Lee, rising early, found two men in her kitchen--one of +them Henri, who was making coffee, and a soldier in a gray-green uniform, +with a bad bruise over one eye and a sulky face. His hands were tied, +but otherwise he sat at ease, and Henri, having made the coffee, held a +cup to his lips. + +"It is good for the spirits, man," he said in German. "Drink it." + +The German took it, first gingerly, then eagerly. Henri was in high +good humor. + +"See, I have brought you a gift!" he exclaimed on seeing Sara Lee. "What +shall we do with him? Send him to America? To show the appearance of +the madmen of Europe?" + +The prisoner was only a boy, such a boy as Henri himself; but a peasant, +and muscular. Beside his bulk Henri looked slim as a reed. Henri eyed +him with a certain tolerant humor. + +"He is young, and a Bavarian," he said. "Other wise I should have +killed him, for he fought hard. He has but just been called." + +There was another conference in the little house that morning, but +Henri's prisoner could tell little. He had heard nothing of an advance. +Further along the line it was said that there was much fighting. He sat +there, pale and bewildered and very civil, and in the end his frightened +politeness brought about a change in the attitude of the men who +questioned him. Hate all Germans as they must, who had suffered so +grossly, this boy was not of those who had outraged them. + +They sent him on at last, and Sara Lee was free to tell Henri her news. +But she had grown very wise as to Henri's moods, and she hesitated. A +certain dissatisfaction had been growing in the boy for some time, a +sense of hopelessness. Further along the spring had brought renewed +activity to the Allied armies. Great movements were taking place. + +But his own men stood in their trenches, or what passed for trenches, or +lay on their hours of relief in such wretched quarters as could be found, +still with no prospect of action. No great guns, drawn by heavy +tractors, came down the roads toward the trenches by the sea. Steady +bombarding, incessant sniping and no movement on either side--that was +the Belgian Front during the first year of the war. Inaction, with that +eating anxiety as to what was going on in the occupied territory, was +the portion of the heroic small army that stretched from Nieuport to +Dixmude. + +And Henri's nerves were not good. He was unhappy--that always--and he +was not yet quite recovered from his wounds. There was on his mind, too, +a certain gun which moved on a railway track, back and forth, behind the +German lines, doing the work of many. He had tried to get to that gun, +and failed. And he hated failure. + +Certainly in this story of Sara Lee and of Henri, whose other name must +not be known, allowance must be made for all those things. Yet--perhaps +no allowance is enough. + +Sara Lee told him that evening of her recall, told him when the shuffling +of many feet in the street told of the first weary men from the trenches +coming up the road. + +He heard her in a dazed silence. Then: + +"But you will not go?" he said. "It is impossible! You--you are +needed, mademoiselle." + +"What can I do, Henri? They have recalled me. My money will not come +now." + +"Perhaps we can arrange that. It does not cost so much. I have +friends--and think, mademoiselle, how many know now of what you are +doing, and love you for it. Some of them would contribute, surely." + +He was desperately revolving expedients in his mind. He could himself +do no more than he had done. He, or rather Jean and he together, had +been bearing a full half of the expense of the little house since the +beginning. But he dared not tell her that. And though he spoke +hopefully, he knew well that he could raise nothing from the Belgians +he knew best. Henri came of a class that held its fortunes in land, and +that land was now in German hands. + +"We will arrange it somehow," he said with forced cheerfulness. "No +beautiful thing--and this is surely beautiful--must die because of +money." + +It was then that Sara Lee took the plunge. + +"It is not only money, Henri." + +"He has sent for you!" + +Harvey was always "he" to Henri. + +"Not exactly. But I think he went to some one and said I should not be +here alone. You can understand how he feels. We were going to be +married very soon, and then I decided to come. It made an awful upset." + +Henri stood with folded arms and listened. At first he said nothing. +When he spoke it was in a voice of ominous calm: + +"So for a stupid convention he would destroy this beautiful thing you +have made! Does he know your work? Does he know what you are to the +men here? Have you ever told him?" + +"I have, of course, but--" + +"Do you want to go back?" + +"No, Henri. Not yet. I--" + +"That is enough. You are needed. You are willing to stay. I shall +attend to the money. It is arranged." + +"You don't understand," said Sara Lee desperately. "I am engaged to him. +I can't wreck his life, can I?" + +"Would it wreck your life?" he demanded. "Tell me that and I shall know +how to reason with you." + +But she only looked at him helplessly. + +Heavy tramping in the passage told of the arrival of the first men. +They did not talk and laugh as usual. As well as they could they came +quietly. For René had been a good friend to many of them, and had +admitted on slack nights many a weary man who had no ticket. Much as +the neighbors had entered the house back home after Uncle James had gone +away, came these bearded men that night. And Sara Lee, hearing their +muffled voices, brushed a hand over her eyes and tried to smile. + +"We can talk about it later," she said. "We mustn't quarrel. I owe so +much to you, Henri." + +Suddenly Henri caught her by the arm and turned her about so that she +faced the lamp. + +"Do you love him?" he demanded. "Sara Lee, look at me!" Only he +pronounced it Saralie. "He has done a very cruel thing. Do you still +love him?" + +Sara Lee shut her eyes. + +"I don't know. I think I do. He is very unhappy, and it is my fault." + +"Your fault!" + +"I must go, Henri. The men are waiting." + +But he still held her arm. + +"Does he love you as I love you?" he demanded. "Would he die for you?" + +"That's rather silly, isn't it? Men don't die for the people they love." + +"I would die for you, Saralie." + +She eyed him rather helplessly. + +"I don't think you mean that." Bad strategy that, for he drew her to +him. His arms were like steel, and it was a rebellious and very rigid +Sara Lee who found she could not free herself. + +"I would die for you, Saralie!" he repeated fiercely. "That would be +easier, far, than living without you. There is nothing that matters but +you. Listen--I would put everything I have--my honor, my life, my +hope of eternity--on one side of the scale and you on the other. And I +would choose you. Is that love?" He freed her. + +"It's insanity," said Sara Lee angrily. "You don't mean it. And I +don't want that kind of love, if that is what you call it." + +"And you will go back to that man who loves himself better than he loves +you?" + +"That's not true!" she flashed at him. "He is sending for me, not to +get me back to him, but to get me back to safety." + +"What sort of safety?" Henri demanded in an ominous tone. "Is he afraid +of me?" + +"He doesn't know anything about you." + +"You have never told him? Why?" His eyes narrowed. + +"He wouldn't have understood, Henri." + +"You are going back to him," he said slowly; "and you will always keep +these days of ours buried in your heart. Is that it?" His eyes softened. +"I am to be a memory! Do you know what I think? I think you care for +me more than you know. We have lived a lifetime together in these +months. You know me better than you know him, already. We have faced +death together. That is a strong tie. And I have held you in my arms. +Do you think you can forget that?" + +"I shall never want to forget you." + +"I shall not let you forget me. You may go--I cannot prevent that +perhaps. But wherever I am; Saralie, I shall stand between that lover +of yours and you. And sometime I shall come from this other side of the +world, and I shall find you, and you will come back with me. Back to +this country--our country." + +They were boyish words, but back of them was the iron determination of a +man. His eyes seemed sunken in his head. His face was white. But there +was almost a prophetic ring in his voice. + +Sara Lee went out and left him there, went out rather terrified and +bewildered, and refusing absolutely to look into her own heart. + + + + +XXIII + + +Late in May she started for home. It had not been necessary to close +the little house. An Englishwoman of mature years and considerable +wealth, hearing from Mr. Travers of Sara Lee's recall, went out a day or +two before she left and took charge. She was a kindly woman, in deep +mourning; and some of the ache left Sara Lee's heart when she had talked +with her successor. + +Perhaps, too, Mrs. Cameron understood some of the things that had +puzzled her before. She had been a trifle skeptical perhaps about Sara +Lee before she saw her. A young girl alone among an army of men! She +was a good woman herself, and not given to harsh judgments, but the +thing had seemed odd. But Sara Lee in her little house, as virginal, as +without sex-consciousness as a child, Sara Lee with her shabby clothes +and her stained hands and her honest eyes--this was not only a good +girl, this was a brave and high-spirited and idealistic woman. + +And after an evening in the house of mercy, with the soldiers openly +adoring and entirely respectful, Mrs. Cameron put her arms round Sara +Lee and kissed her. + +"You must let me thank you," she said. "You have made me feel what I +have not felt since--" + +She stopped. Her mourning was only a month old. "I see to-night that, +after all, many things may be gone, but that while service remains there +is something worth while in life." + +The next day she asked Sara Lee to stay with her, at least through the +summer. Sara Lee hesitated, but at last she agreed to cable. As Henri +had disappeared with the arrival of Mrs. Cameron it was that lady's +chauffeur who took the message to Dunkirk and sent it off. + +She had sent the cable to Harvey. It was no longer a matter of the +Ladies' Aid. It was between Harvey and herself. + +The reply came on the second day. It was curt and decisive. + +"Now or never," was the message Harvey sent out of his black despair, +across the Atlantic to the little house so close under the guns of +Belgium. + +Henri was half mad those last days. Jean tried to counsel him, but he +was irritable, almost savage. And Jean understood. The girl had grown +deep into his own heart. Like Henri, he believed that she was going +back to unhappiness; he even said so to her in the car, on that last sad +day when Sara Lee, having visited René's grave and prayed in the ruined +church, said good-by to the little house, and went away, tearless at the +last, because she was too sad for tears. + +It was not for some time that Jean spoke what was in his mind, and when +he had done so she turned to him gravely: + +"You are wrong, Jean. He is the kindest of men. Once I am back, and +safe, he will be very different. I'm afraid I've given you a wrong +impression of him." + +"You think then, mademoiselle, that he will forget all these months--he +will never be unhappy over them?" + +"Why should he?" said Sara Lee proudly. "When I tell him everything he +will understand. And he will be very proud that I have done my share." + +But Jean's one eye was dubious. + +At the wharf in Dunkirk they found Henri, a pale but composed Henri. +Jean's brows contracted. He had thought that the boy would follow his +advice and stay away. But Henri was there. + +It was as well, perhaps, for Sara Lee had brought him a letter, one of +those missives from the trenches which had been so often left at the +little house. + +Henri thrust it into his pocket without reading it. + +"Everything is prepared," he said. "It is the British Admiralty boat, +and one of the officers has offered his cabin. You will be quite +comfortable." + +He appeared entirely calm. He saw to carrying Sara Lee's small bag on +board; he chatted with the officers; he even wandered over to a +hospital ship moored near by and exchanged civilities with a wounded man +in a chair on the deck. Perhaps he swaggered a bit too much, for Jean +watched him with some anxiety. He saw that the boy was taking it hard. +His eyes were very sunken now, and he moved his right arm stiffly, as +though the old wound troubled him. + +Jean did not like leave-takings. Particularly he did not like taking +leave of Sara Lee. Some time before the boat sailed he kissed her hand, +and then patted it and went away in the car without looking back. + +The boat was preparing to get under way. Henri was standing by her very +quietly. He had not slept the night before, but then there were many +nights when Henri did not sleep. He had wandered about, smoking +incessantly, trying to picture the black future. + +He could see no hope anywhere. America was far away, and peaceful. +Very soon the tranquillity of it all would make the last months seem +dreamlike and unreal. She would forget Belgium, forget him. Or she +would remember him as a soldier who had once loved her. Once loved her, +because she had never seemed to realize the lasting quality of his love. +She had always felt that he would forget her. If he could only make her +believe that he would not, it would not be so hopeless. + +He had written a bit of a love letter on the little table at Dunkirk +that morning, written it with the hope that the sight of the written +words might carry conviction where all his protests had failed. + +"I shall love you all the years of my life," he wrote. "At any time, in +any place, you may come to me and know that I am waiting. Great love +like this comes only once to any man, and once come to him it never goes +away. At any time in the years to come you may know with certainty that +you are still to me what you are now, the love of my life. + +"Sometimes I think, dearest--I may call you that once, now that you +have left me--that far away you will hear this call of mine and come +back to me. Perhaps you will never come. Perhaps I shall not live. I +feel to-day that I do not care greatly to live. + +"If that is to be, then think of me somewhere, perhaps with René by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house +of mercy; and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +He had the letter in the pocket of his tunic, and at last the moment +came when the boat must leave. Suddenly Henri knew that he could not +allow her to cross to England alone. The last few days had brought many +stories of submarine attacks. Here, so far north, the Germans were +particularly active. They had for a long time lurked in waiting for +this British Admiralty boat, with its valuable cargo, its officers and +the government officials who used it. + +"Good-by, Henri," said Sara Lee. "I--of course it is no use to try to +tell you--" + +"I am going across with you." + +"But--" + +"I allowed you to come over alone. I shiver when I think of it. I shall +take you back myself." + +"Is it very dangerous?" + +"Probably not. But can you think of me standing safe on that quay and +letting you go into danger alone?" + +"I am not afraid." + +"I know that. I have never seen you afraid. But if you wish to see a +coward, look at me. I am a coward for you." + +He put his hand into his pocket. It occurred to him to give her the +letter now so that if anything happened she would at least have had it. +He wanted no mistake about that appointment beyond the stars. But the +great world of eternity was very large, and they must have a definite +understanding about that meeting at the little house of mercy Over There. + +Perhaps he had a little fever that day. He was alternately flushed and +pale; and certainly he was not quite rational. His hand shook as he +brought out her letter--and with it the other letter, from the Front. + +"Have you the time to come with me?" Sara Lee asked doubtfully. "I want +you to come, of course, but if your work will suffer--" + +He held out his letter to her. + +"I shall go away," he said, "while you read it. And perhaps you will +not destroy it, because--I should like to feel that you have it always." + +He went away at once, saluting as he passed other officers, who gravely +saluted him. On the deck of the hospital ship the invalid touched his +cap. Word was going about, in the stealthy manner of such things, that +Henri whose family name we may not know, was a brave man and doing brave +things. + +The steamer had not yet cast off. As usual, it was to take a flying +start from the harbor, for it was just outside the harbor that the wolves +of the sea lay in wait. Henri, alone at last, opened his letter, and +stood staring at it. There was again movement behind the German line, +a matter to be looked into, as only he could do it. Probably nothing, +as before; but who could say? + +Henri looked along the shore to where but a few miles away lay the +ragged remnant of his country. And he looked forward to where Sara Lee, +his letter in her hand, was staring blindly at nothing. Then he looked +out toward the sea, where lay who knew what dangers of death and +suffering. + +After that first moment of indecision he never hesitated. He stood on +the deck and watched, rather frozen and rigid, and with a mind that had +ceased working, while the steamer warped out from the quay. If in his +subconsciousness there was any thought it was doubtless that he had done +his best for a long time, and that he had earned the right to protect +for a few hours the girl he loved. That, too, there had been activity +along the German-Belgian line before, without result. + +Perhaps subconsciously those things were there. He himself was conscious +of no thought, of only a dogged determination to get Sara Lee across the +channel safely. He put everything else behind him. He counted no cost. + +The little admiralty boat sped on. In the bow, on the bridge, and at +different stations lookouts kept watch. The lifeboats were hung +overboard, ready to lower instantly. On the horizon a British destroyer +steamed leisurely. Henri stood for a long time on the deck. The land +fell away quickly. From a clear silhouette of the town against the +sky--the dunes, the spire of the cathedral, the roof of the _mairie_--it +became vague, shadowy--the height of a hand--a line--nothing. + +Henri roused himself. He was very thirsty, and the wound in his arm +ached. When he raised his hand to salute the movement was painful. + +It was a very grave Sara Lee he found in the officer's cabin when he +went inside later on. She was sitting on the long seat below the open +port, her hat slightly askew and her hands folded in her lap. Her bag +was beside her, and there was in her eyes a perplexity Henri was too +wretched to notice. + +For the first time Sara Lee was realizing the full value of the thing +she was throwing away. She had persistently discounted it until now. +She had been grateful for it. She had felt unworthy of it. But now, +on the edge of leaving it, she felt that something infinitely precious +and very beautiful was going out of her life. She had already a sense +of loss. + +For the first time, too, she was allowing herself to think of certain +contingencies that were now forever impossible. For instance, suppose +she had stayed with Mrs. Cameron? Suppose she had broken her promise +to Harvey and remained at the little house? Suppose she had done as +Henri had so wildly urged her, and had broken entirely with Harvey? +Would she have married Henri? + +There was a certain element of caution in the girl. It made the chances +she had taken rather more courageous, indeed, because she had always +counted the cost. But marriage was not a matter for taking chances. One +should know not only the man, but his setting, though she would not have +thought of it in that way. Not only the man, but the things that made up +his life--his people, his home. + +And Henri was to her still a figure, not so much now of mystery as of +detachment. Except Jean he had no intimates. He had no family on the +only side of the line she knew. He had not even a country. + +She had reached that point when Henri came below and saluted her stiffly +from the doorway. + +"Henri!" she said. "I believe you are ill!" + +"I am not ill," he said, and threw himself into the corner of the seat. +"You have read it?" + +She nodded. Even thinking of it brought a lump into her throat. He +bent forward, but he did not touch her. + +"I meant it, Saralie," he said. "Sometimes men are infatuated, and +write what they do not mean. They are sincere at the time, and then +later on--But I meant it. I shall always mean it." + +Not then, nor during the three days in London, did he so much as take +her hand. He was not well. He ate nothing, and at night he lay awake +and drank a great deal of water. Once or twice he found her looking at +him anxiously, but he disclaimed all illness. + +He had known from the beginning what he was doing. But he did not touch +her, because in his heart he knew that where once he had been worthy he +was no longer worthy. He had left his work for a woman. + +It is true that he had expected to go back at once. But the +_Philadelphia_, which had been listed to sail the next day, was held up +by a strike in Liverpool, and he waited on, taking such hours as she +could give him, feverishly anxious to make her happy, buying her little +gifts, mostly flowers, which she wore tucked in her belt and smiled +over, because she had never before received flowers from a man. + +He was alternately gay and silent. They walked across the Thames by the +Parliament buildings, and midway across he stopped and looked long at the +stream. And they went to the Zoölogical Gardens, where he gravely named +one of the sea lions for Colonel Lilias because of its mustache, and +insisted on saluting it each time before he flung it a fish. Once he +soberly gathered up a very new baby camel, all legs, in his arms, and +presented it to her. + +"Please accept it, mademoiselle," he said. "With my compliments." + +They dined together every night, very modestly, sitting in some crowded +restaurant perhaps, but seeing little but each other. Sara Lee had +bought a new hat in London--black, of course, but faced with white. +He adored her in it. He would sit for long moments, his elbows propped +on the table, his blond hair gleaming in the candlelight, and watch her. + +"I wonder," he said once, "if you had never met him would you have loved +me?" + +"I do love you, Henri." + +"I don't want that sort of love." And he had turned his head away. + +But one evening he called for her at Morley's, a white and crushed boy, +needing all that she could give him and much more. He came as a man +goes to the woman he loves when he is in trouble, much as a child to his +mother. Sara Lee, coming down to the reception room, found him alone +there, walking rapidly up and down. He turned desperate eyes on her. + +"I have brought bad news," he said abruptly. + +"The little house--" + +"I do not know. I ran away, mademoiselle. I am a traitor. And the +Germans broke through last night." + +"Henri!" + +"They broke through. We were not ready. That is what I have done." + +"Don't you think," Sara Lee said in a frozen voice, "that is what I have +done? I let you come." + +"You? You are taking the blame? Mademoiselle, I have enough to bear +without that." + +He explained further, still standing in his rigid attitude. If he had +been white before at times he was ghastly now. It had not been an attack +in force. A small number had got across and had penetrated beyond the +railway line. There had been hand-to-hand fighting in the road beyond +the poplars. But it looked more like an experiment, an endeavor to +discover the possibility of a real advance through the inundation; or +perhaps a feint to cover operations elsewhere. + +"For every life lost I am responsible," he ended in a flat and lifeless +tone. + +"But you might not have known," she protested wildly. "Even if you had +been there, Henri, you might not have known." She knew something of war +by that time. "How could you have told that a small movement of troops +was to take place?" + +"I should have been there." + +"But--if they came without warning?" + +"I did not tell you," he said, looking away from her. "There had been a +warning. I disregarded it." + +He went back to Belgium that night. Sara Lee, at the last, held out her +hand. She was terrified for him, and she showed it. + +"I shall not touch your hand," he said. "I have forfeited my right to +do that." Then, seeing what was in her face, he reassured her. "I shall +not do _that_," he said. "It would be easier. But I shall have to go +back and see what can be done." + +He was the old Henri to the last, however. He went carefully over her +steamship ticket, and inquired with equal care into the amount of money +she had. + +"It will take you home?" he asked. + +"Very comfortably, Henri." + +"It seems very little." + +Then he said, apropos of nothing: "Poor Jean!" + +When he left her at last he went to the door, very erect and soldierly. +But he turned there and stood for a moment looking at her, as though +through all that was coming he must have with him, to give him strength, +that final picture of her. + +The elderly chambermaid, coming into Sara Lee's room the next morning, +found her fully dressed in the frock she had worn the night before, face +down on her bed. + + + + +XXIV + + +It was early in June when at last the lights went down behind the back +drop and came up in front, to show Sara Lee knitting again, though not +by the fire. The amazing interlude was over. + +Over, except in Sara Lee's heart. The voyage had been a nightmare. She +had been ill for one thing--a combination of seasickness and +heartsickness. She had allowed Henri to come to England with her, and +the Germans had broken through. All the good she had done--and she had +helped--was nothing to this mischief she had wrought. + +It had been a small raid. She gathered that from the papers on board. +But that was not the vital thing. What mattered was that she had let a +man forget his duty to his country in his solicitude for her. + +But as the days went on the excitement of her return dulled the edge of +her misery somewhat. The thing was done. She could do only one thing +to help. She would never go back, never again bring trouble and +suffering where she had meant only to bring aid and comfort. + +She had a faint hope that Harvey would meet her at the pier. She needed +comforting and soothing, and perhaps a bit of praise. She was so very +tired; depressed, too, if the truth be known. She needed a hand to lead +her back to her old place on the stage, and kind faces to make her forget +that she had ever gone away. + +Because that was what she had to do. She must forget Henri and the +little house on the road to the poplar trees; and most of all, she must +forget that because of her Henri had let the Germans through. + +But Harvey did not meet her. There was a telegram saying he would meet +her train if she wired when she was leaving--an exultant message +breathing forgiveness and signed "with much love." She flushed when she +read it. + +Of course he could not meet her in New York. This was not the Continent +in wartime, where convention had died of a great necessity. And he was +not angry, after all. A great wave of relief swept over her. But it +was odd how helpless she felt. Since her arrival in England months +before there had always been Henri to look after things for her. It was +incredible to recall how little she had done for herself. + +Was she glad to be back? She did not ask herself. It was as though the +voyage had automatically detached her from that other Sara Lee of the +little house. That was behind her, a dream--a mirage--or a memory. +Here, a trifle confused by the bustle, was once again the Sara Lee who +had knitted for Anna, and tended the plants in the dining-room window, +and watched Uncle James slowly lowered into his quiet grave. + +Part of her detachment was voluntary. She could not bear to remember. +She had but to close her eyes to see Henri's tragic face that last night +at Morley's. And part of the detachment was because, after all, the +interlude had been but a matter of months, and reaching out familiar +hands to her were the habits and customs and surroundings of all the +earlier years of her life, drawing her back to them. + +It was strange how Henri's face haunted her. She could close her eyes +and see it, line by line, his very swagger--for he did swagger, just a +little; his tall figure and unruly hair; his long, narrow, muscular +hands. Strange and rather uncomfortable. Because she could not summon +Harvey's image at all. She tried to bring before her, that night in the +train speeding west, his solid figure and kind eyes as they would greet +her the next day--tried, and failed. All she got was the profile of +the photograph, and the stubborn angle of the jaw. + +She was up very early the next morning, and it was then, as the train +rolled through familiar country, that she began to find Harvey again. +A flush of tenderness warmed her. She must be very kind to him because +of all that he had suffered. + +The train came to a stop. Rather breathless Sara Lee went out on the +platform. Harvey was there, in the crowd. He did not see her at first. +He was looking toward the front of the train. So her first glimpse of +him was the view of the photograph. His hat was off, and his hair, +carefully brushed back, gave him the eager look of the picture. + +He was a strong and manly figure, as unlike Henri as an oak is unlike +one of Henri's own tall and swaying poplars. Sara Lee drew a long +breath. Here after all were rest and peace; love and gentleness; quiet +days and still evenings. No more crowds and wounds and weary men, no +more great thunderings of guns, no imminence of death. Rest and peace. + +Then Harvey saw her, and the gleam of happiness and relief in his eyes +made her own eyes misty. She saw even in that first glance that he +looked thinner and older. A pang of remorse shot through her. Was +happiness always bought at the cost of happiness? Did one always take +away in order to give? Not in so many words, but in a flash of doubt +the thought went through her mind. + +There was no reserve in Harvey's embrace. He put his arms about her and +held her close. He did not speak at first. Then: + +"My own little girl," he said. "My own little girl!" + +Suddenly Sara Lee was very happy. All her doubts were swept away by his +voice, his arms. There was no thrill for her in his caress, but there +were peace and quiet joy. It was enough for her, just then, that she +had brought back some of the happiness she had robbed him of. + +"Oh, Harvey!" she said. "I'm glad to be back again--with you." + +He held her off then and looked at her. + +"You are thin," he said. "You're not pale, but you are thin." And in a +harder voice: "What did they do to you over there?" + +But he did not wait for a reply. He did not seem to want one. He picked +up her bag, and guiding her by the elbow, piloted her through the crowd. + +"A lot of folks wanted to come and meet you," he said, "but I steered +them off. You'd have thought Roosevelt was coming to town the way +they've been calling up." + +"To meet me?" + +"I expect the Ladies' Aid Society wanted to get into the papers again," +he said rather grimly. "They are merry little advertisers, all right." + +"I don't think that, Harvey." + +"Well, I do," he said, and brought her to a stop facing a smart little +car, very new, very gay. + +"How do you like it?" he asked. + +"Like it? Why, it's not yours, is it?" + +"Surest thing you know. Or, rather, it's ours. Had a few war babies, +and they grew up." + +Sara Lee looked at it, and for just an instant, a rather sickening +instant, she saw Henri's shattered low car, battle-scarred and broken. + +"It's--lovely," said Sara Lee. And Harvey found no fault with her tone. + +Sara Lee had intended to go to Anna's, for a time at least. But she +found that Belle was expecting her and would not take no. + +"She's moved the baby in with the others," Harvey explained as he took +the wheel. "Wait until you see your room. I knew we'd be buying +furniture soon, so I fixed it up." + +He said nothing for a time. He was new to driving a car, and the traffic +engrossed him. But when they had reached a quieter neighborhood he put +a hand over hers. + +"Good God, how I've been hungry for you!" he said. "I guess I was pretty +nearly crazy sometimes." He glanced at her apprehensively, but if she +knew his connection with her recall she showed no resentment. As a +matter of fact there was in his voice something that reminded her of +Henri, the same deeper note, almost husky. + +She was, indeed, asking herself very earnestly what was there in her of +all people that should make two men care for her as both Henri and Harvey +cared. In the humility of all modest women she was bewildered. It made +her rather silent and a little sad. She was so far from being what they +thought her. + +Harvey, stealing a moment from the car to glance at her, saw something +baffling in her face. + +"Do you still care, Sara Lee?" he asked almost diffidently. "As much as +ever?" + +"I have come back to you," she said after an imperceptible pause. + +"Well, I guess that's the answer." + +He drew a deep satisfied breath. "I used to think of you over there, +and all those foreigners in uniform strutting about, and it almost got +me, some times." + +And again, as long before, he read into her passivity his own passion, +and was deeply content. + +Belle was waiting on the small front porch. There was an anxious frown +on her face, and she looked first, not at Sara Lee, but at Harvey. What +she saw there evidently satisfied her, for the frown disappeared. She +kissed Sara Lee impulsively. + +All that afternoon, much to Harvey's resentment, Sara Lee received +callers. The Ladies' Aid came en masse and went out to the dining-room +and there had tea and cake. Harvey disappeared when they came. + +"You are back," he said, "and safe, and all that. But it's not their +fault. And I'll be hanged if I'll stand round and listen to them." + +He got his hat and then, finding her alone in a back hall for a moment, +reverted uneasily to the subject. + +"There are two sides to every story," he said. "They're going to knife +me this afternoon, all right. Damned hypocrites! You just keep your +head, and I'll tell you my side of it later." + +"Harvey," she said slowly, "I want to know now just what you did. I'm +not angry. I've never been angry. But I ought to know." + +It was a very one-sided story that Harvey told her, standing in the +little back hall, with Belle's children hanging over the staircase and +begging for cake. Yet in the main it was true. He had reached his +limit of endurance. She was in danger, as the photograph plainly showed. +And a fellow had a right to fight for his own happiness. + +"I wanted you back, that's all," he ended. And added an anticlimax by +passing a plate of sliced jelly roll through the stair rail to the +clamoring children. + +Sara Lee stood there for a moment after he had gone. He was right, or +at least he had been within his rights. She had never even heard of the +new doctrine of liberty for women. There was nothing in her training to +teach her revolt. She was engaged to Harvey; already, potentially, she +belonged to him. He had interfered with her life, but he had had the +right to interfere. + +And also there was in the back of her mind a feeling that was almost +guilt. She had let Henri tell her he loved her. She had even kissed +him. And there had been many times in the little house when Harvey, for +days at a time, had not even entered her thoughts. There was, therefore, +a very real tenderness in the face she lifted for his good-by kiss. + +To Belle in the front hall Harvey gave a firm order. + +"Don't let any reporters in," he said warningly. "This is strictly our +affair. It's a private matter. It's nobody's business what she did over +there. She's home. That's all that matters." + +Belle assented, but she was uneasy. She knew that Harvey was +unreasonably, madly jealous of Sara Lee's work at the little house of +mercy, and she knew him well enough to know that sooner or later he would +show that jealousy. She felt, too, that the girl should have been +allowed her small triumph without interference. There had been +interference enough already. But it was easier to yield to Harvey than +to argue with him. + +It was rather a worried Belle who served tea that afternoon in her dining +room, with Mrs. Gregory pouring; the more uneasy, because already she +divined a change in Sara Lee. She was as lovely as ever, even lovelier. +But she had a poise, a steadiness, that were new; and silences in which, +to Belle's shrewd eyes, she seemed to be weighing things. + +Reporters clamored to see Sara Lee that day, and, failing to see her, +telephoned Harvey at his office to ask if it was true that she had been +decorated by the King. He was short to the point of affront. + +"I haven't heard anything about it," he snapped. "And I wouldn't say if +I had. But it's not likely. What d'you fellows think she was doing +anyhow? Leading a charge? She was running a soup kitchen. That's all." + +He hung up the receiver with a jerk, but shortly after that he fell to +pacing his small office. She had not said anything about being decorated, +but the reporters had said it had been in a London newspaper. If she +had not told him that, there were probably many things she had not told +him. But of course there had been very little time. He would see if +she mentioned it that night. + +Sara Lee had had a hard day. The children loved her. In the intervals +of calls they crawled over her, and the littlest one called her Saralie. +She held the child in her arms close. + +"Saralie!" said the child, over and over; "Saralie! That's your name. +I love your name." + +And there came, echoing in her ears, Henri and his tender Saralie. + +There was an oppression on her too. Her very bedroom thrust on her her +approaching marriage. This was her own furniture, for her new home. It +was beautiful, simple and good. But she was not ready for marriage. She +had been too close to the great struggle to be prepared to think in terms +of peace so soon. Perhaps, had she dared to look deeper than that, she +would have found something else, a something she had not counted on. + +She and Belle had a little time after the visitors had gone, before +Harvey came home. They sat in Belle's bedroom, and her sentences were +punctuated by little backs briskly presented to have small garments +fastened, or bows put on stiffly bobbed yellow hair. + +"Did you understand my letter?" she asked. "I was sorry I had sent it, +but it was too late then." + +"I put your letter and--theirs, together. I supposed that Harvey--" + +"He was about out of his mind," Belle said in her worried voice. "Stand +still, Mary Ellen! He went to Mrs. Gregory, and I suppose he said a good +bit. You know the way he does. Anyhow, she was very angry. She called +a special meeting, and--I tried to prevent their recalling you. He +doesn't know that, of course." + +"You tried?" + +"Well, I felt as though it was your work," Belle said rather +uncomfortably. "Bring me the comb, Alice. I guess we get pretty narrow +here and--I've been following things more closely since you went over. +I know more than I did. And, of course, after one marries there isn't +much chance. There are children and--" Her face twisted. "I wish I +could do something." + +She got up and brought from the dresser a newspaper clipping. + +"It's the London newspaper," she explained. "I've been taking it, but +Harvey doesn't know. He doesn't care much for the English. This is +about your being decorated." + +Sara Lee held it listlessly in her hands. + +"Shall I tell him, Belle?" she asked. + +Belle hesitated. + +"I don't believe I would," she said forlornly. "He won't like it. +That's why I've never showed him that clipping. He hates it all so." + +Sara Lee dressed that evening in the white frock. She dressed slowly, +thinking hard. All round her was the shiny newness of her furniture, +a trifle crowded in Belle's small room. Sara Lee had a terrible feeling +of being fastened in by it. Wherever she turned it gleamed. She felt +surrounded, smothered. + +She had meant to make a clean breast of things--of the little house, +and of Henri, and of the King, pinning the medal on her shabby black +jacket and shaking hands with her. Henri she must tell about--not his +name of course, nor his madness, nor even his love. But she felt that +she owed it to Harvey to have as few secrets from him as possible. She +would tell about what the boy had done for her, and how he, and he alone, +had made it all possible. + +Surely Harvey would understand. It was a page that was closed. It had +held nothing to hurt him. She had come back. + +She stood by her window, thinking. And a breath of wind set the leaves +outside to rustling. Instantly she was back again in the little house, +and the sound was not leaves, but the shuffling of many stealthy feet +on the cobbles of the street at night, that shuffling that was so like +the rustling of leaves in a wood or the murmur of water running over a +stony creek bed. + + + + +XXV + + +It was clear to Sara Lee from the beginning of the evening that Harvey +did not intend to hear her story. He did not say so; indeed, for a time +he did not talk at all. He sat with his arms round her, content just to +have her there. + +"I have a lot of arrears to make up," he said. "I've got to get used to +having you where I can touch you. To-night when I go upstairs I'm going +to take that damned colorless photograph of you and throw it out the +window." + +"I must tell you about your photograph," she ventured. "It always stood +on the mantel over the stove, and when there was a threatened bombardment +I used to put it under--" + +"Let's not talk, honey." + +When he came out of that particular silence he said abruptly: + +"Will Leete is dead." + +"Oh, no! Poor Will Leete." + +"Died of pneumonia in some God-forsaken hole over there. He's left a +wife and nothing much to keep her. That's what comes of mixing in the +other fellow's fight. I guess we can get the house as soon as we want +it. She has to sell; and it ought to be a bargain." + +"Harvey," she said rather timidly, "you speak of the other fellow's +fight. They say over there that we are sure to be drawn into it sooner +or later." + +"Not on our life!" he replied brusquely. "And if you don't mind, honey, +I don't care to hear about what they think over there." He got up from +his old place on the arm of her chair and stood on the rug. "I'd better +tell you now how I feel about this thing. I can't talk about it, that's +all. We'll finish up now and let it go at that. I'm sorry there's a +war. I'll send money when I can afford it, to help the Belgians, though +my personal opinion is that they're getting theirs for what they did in +the Congo. But I don't want to hear about what you did over there." + +He saw her face, and he went to her and kissed her cheek. + +"I don't want to hurt you, honey," he said. "I love you with all my +heart. But somehow I can't forget that you left me and went over there +when there was no reason for it. You put off our marriage, and I +suppose we'd better get it over. Go ahead and tell me about it." + +He drew up a chair and waited, but the girl smiled rather tremulously. + +"Perhaps we'd better wait, if you feel that way, Harvey." + +His face was set as he looked at her. + +"There's only one thing I want to know," he said. "And I've got a right +to know that. You're a young girl, and you're beautiful--to me, anyhow. +You've been over there with a lot of crazy foreigners." He got up again +and all the bitterness of the empty months was in his voice. "Did any +of them--was there anybody there you cared about?" + +"I came back, Harvey." + +"That's not the question." + +"There were many men--officers--who were kind to me. I--" + +"That's not the question, either." + +"If I had loved any one more than I loved you I should not have come +back." + +"Wait a minute!" he said quickly. "You had to come back, you know." + +"I could have stayed. The Englishwoman who took over my work asked me +to stay on and help her." + +He was satisfied then. He went back to the arm of her chair and kissed +her. + +"All right," he said. "I've suffered the tortures of the damned, +but--that fixes it. Now let's talk about something else. I'm sick of +this war talk." + +"I'd like to tell you about my little house. And poor René--" + +"Who was René?" he demanded. + +"The orderly." + +"The one on the step, with a rifle?" + +"Yes." + +"Look here," he said. "I've got to get to all that gradually. I don't +know that I'll ever get to it cheerfully. But I can't talk about that +place to-night. And I don't want to talk war. The whole business makes +me sick. I've got a car out of it, and if things keep on we may be able +to get the Leete house. But there's no reason in it, no sense. I'm +sick to death of hearing about it. Let's talk of something else." + +But--and here was something strange--Sara Lee could find nothing else +to talk about. The thing that she had looked forward so eagerly to +telling--that was barred. And the small gossip of their little circle, +purely personal and trivial, held only faint interest for her. For the +first time they had no common ground to meet on. + +Yet it was a very happy man who went whistling to his room that night. +He was rather proud of himself too. After all the bitterness of the +past months, he had been gentle and loving to Sara Lee. He had not +scolded her. + +In the next room he could hear her going quietly about, opening and +closing the drawers of the new bureau, moving a chair. Pretty soon, God +willing, they need never be separated. He would have her always, to +protect and cherish and love. + +He went outside to her closed door. + +"Good night, sweetheart," he called softly. + +"Good night, dear," came her soft reply. + +But long after he was asleep Sara Lee stood at her window and listened +to the leaves, so like the feet of weary men on the ruined street over +there. + +For the first time she was questioning the thing she had done. She +loved Harvey--but there were many kinds of love. There was the love of +Jean for Henri, and there was the wonderful love, though the memory now +was cruel and hurt her, of Henri for herself. And there was the love of +Marie for the memory of Maurice the spy. Many kinds of love; and one +heart might love many people, in different ways. + +A small doubt crept into her mind. This feeling she had for Harvey was +not what she had thought it was over there. It was a thing that had +belonged to a certain phase of her life. But that phase was over. It +was, like Marie's, but a memory. + +This Harvey of the new car and the increased income and the occasional +hardness in his voice was not the Harvey she had left. Or perhaps it +was she who had changed. She wondered. She felt precisely the same, +tender toward her friends, unwilling to hurt them. She did not want +to hurt Harvey. + +But she did not love him as he deserved to be loved. And she had a +momentary lift of the veil, when she saw the long vista of the years, +the two of them always together and always between them hidden, +untouched, but eating like a cancer, Harvey's resentment and suspicion +of her months away from him. + +There would always be a barrier between them. Not only on Harvey's side. +There were things she had no right to tell--of Henri, of his love and +care for her, and of that last terrible day when he realized what he had +done. + +That night, lying in the new bed, she faced that situation too. How +much was she to blame? If Henri felt that each life lost was lost by +him wasn't the same true for her? Why had she allowed him to stay in +London? + +But that was one question she did not answer frankly. + +She lay there in the darkness and wondered what punishment he would +receive. He had done so much for them over there. Surely, surely, they +would allow for that. But small things came back to her--the awful +sight of the miller and his son, led away to death, with the sacks over +their heads. The relentlessness of it all, the expecting that men +should give everything, even life itself, and ask for no mercy. + +And this, too, she remembered: Once in a wild moment Henri had said he +would follow her to America, and that there he would prove to her that +his and not Harvey's was the real love of her life--the great love, +that comes but once to any woman, and to some not at all. Yet on that +last night at Morley's he had said what she now felt was a final +farewell. That last look of his, from the doorway--that had been the +look of a man who would fill his eyes for the last time. + +She got up and stood by the window. What had they done to him? What +would they do? She looked at her watch. It was four o'clock in the +morning over there. The little house would be quiet now, but down along +the lines men would be standing on the firing step of the trench, and +waiting, against what the dawn might bring. + +Through the thin wall came the sound of Harvey's heavy, regular +breathing. She remembered Henri's light sleeping on the kitchen floor, +his cap on the table, his cape rolled round him--a sleeping, for all +his weariness, so light that he seemed always half conscious. She +remembered the innumerable times he had come in at this hour, muddy, +sometimes rather gray of face with fatigue, but always cheerful. + +It was just such an hour that she found him giving hot coffee to the +German prisoner. It had been but a little earlier when he had taken her +to the roof and had there shown her René, lying with his face up toward +the sky which had sent him death. + +A hundred memories crowded--Henri's love for the Belgian soldiers, and +theirs for him; his humor; his absurd riddles. There was the one he had +asked René, the very day before the air attack. He had stood stiffly and +frowningly before the boy, and he had asked in a highly official tone: + +"What must a man be to be buried with military honors?" + +"A general?" + +"No." + +"An officer?" + +"No, no! Use your head boy! This is very important. A mistake would +be most serious." + +René had shaken his head dejectedly. + +"He must be dead, René," Henri had said gravely. "Entirely dead. As I +said, it is well to know these things. A mistake would be unfortunate." + +His blue eyes had gleamed with fun, but his face had remained frowning. +It was quite five minutes before she had heard René chuckling on the +doorstep. + +Was he still living, this Henri of the love of life and courting of +death? Could anything so living die? And if he had died had it been +because of her? She faced that squarely for the first time. + +"Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house of mercy; +and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +Beyond the partition Harvey slept on, his arms under his head. + + + + +XXVI + + +Harvey was clamoring for an early wedding. And indeed there were few +arguments against it, save one that Sara Lee buried in her heart. +Belle's house was small, and though she was welcome there, and more than +that, Sara Lee knew that she was crowding the family. + +Perhaps Sara Lee would have agreed in the end. There seemed to be +nothing else to do, though by the end of the first week she was no longer +in any doubt as to what her feeling for Harvey really was. It was +kindness, affection; but it was not love. She would marry him because +she had promised to, and because their small world expected her to do so; +and because she could not shame him again. + +For to her surprise she found that that was what he had felt--a strange, +self-conscious shame, like that of a man who has been jilted. She felt +that by coming back to him she had forfeited the right to break the +engagement. + +So every hour of every day seemed to make the thing more inevitable. +Belle was embroidering towels for her in her scant leisure. Even Anna, +with a second child coming, sent in her contribution to the bride's +linen chest. By almost desperately insisting on a visit to Aunt Harriet +she got a reprieve of a month. And Harvey was inclined to be jealous +even of that. + +Sometimes, but mostly at night when she was alone, a hot wave of +resentment overwhelmed her. Why should she be forced into the thing? +Was there any prospect of happiness after marriage when there was so +little before? + +For she realized now that even Harvey was not happy. He had at last +definitely refused to hear the story of the little house. + +"I'd rather just forget it, honey!" he said. + +But inconsistently he knew she did not forget it, and it angered him. +True to his insistence on ignoring those months of her absence, she made +no attempt to tell him. Now and then, however, closed in the library +together, they would fail of things to talk about, and Sara Lee's +knitting needles would be the only sound in the room. At those times he +would sit back in his chair and watch the far-away look in her eyes, and +it maddened him. + +From her busy life Belle studied them both, with an understanding she +did not reveal. And one morning when the mail came she saw Sara Lee's +face as she turned away, finding there was no letter for her, and made +an excuse to follow her to her room. + +The girl was standing by the window looking out. The children were +playing below, and the maple trees were silent. Belle joined her there +and slipped an arm round her. + +"Why are you doing it, Sara Lee?" she asked. + +"Doing what?" + +"Marrying Harvey." + +Sara Lee looked at her with startled eyes. + +"I'm engaged to him, Belle. I've promised." + +"Exactly," said Belle dryly. "But that's hardly a good reason, is it? +It takes more than a promise." She stared down at the flock of children +in the yard below. "Harvey's a man," she said. "He doesn't understand, +but I do. You've got to care a whole lot, Sara Lee, if you're going to +go through with it. It takes a lot of love, when it comes to having +children and all that." + +"He's so good, Belle. How can I hurt him?" + +"You'll hurt him a lot more by marrying him when you don't love him." + +"If only I could have a little time," she cried wildly. "I'm so--I'm +tired, Belle. And I can't forget about the war and all that. I've +tried. Sometimes I think if we could talk it over together I'd get it +out of my mind." + +"He won't talk about it?" + +"He's my own brother, and I love him dearly. But sometimes I think he's +hard. Not that he's ever ugly," she hastened to add; "but he's stubborn. +There's a sort of wall in him, and he puts some things behind it. And +it's like beating against a rock to try to get at them." + +After a little silence she said hesitatingly: + +"We've got him to think of too. He has a right to be happy. Sometimes +I've looked at you--you're so pretty, Sara Lee--and I've wondered if +there wasn't some one over there who--cared for you." + +"There was one man, an officer--Oh, Belle, I can't tell you. Not _you_!" + +"Why not!" asked Belle practically. "You ought to talk it out to some +one, and if Harvey insists on being a fool that's his own fault." + +For all the remainder of that sunny morning Sara Lee talked what was in +her heart. And Belle--poor, romantic, starved Belle--heard and +thrilled. She made buttonholes as she listened, but once or twice a +new tone in Sara Lee's voice caused her to look up. Here was a new +Sara Lee, a creature of vibrant voice and glowing eyes; and Belle was +not stupid. She saw that it was Henri whose name brought the deeper note. + +Sara Lee had stopped with her recall, had stopped and looked about the +room with its shiny new furniture and had shivered. Belle bent over her +work. + +"Why don't you go back?" she asked. + +Sara Lee looked at her piteously. + +"How can I? There is Harvey. And the society would not send me again. +It's over, Belle. All over." + +After a pause Belle said: "What's become of Henri? He hasn't written, +has he?" + +Sara Lee got up and went to the window. + +"I don't know where he is. He may be dead." + +Her voice was flat and lifeless. Belle knew all that she wanted to know. +She rose and gathered up her sewing. + +"I'm going to talk to Harvey. You're not going to be rushed into a +wedding. You're tired, and it's all nonsense. Well, I'll have to run +now and dress the children." + +That night Harvey and Belle had almost a violent scene. He had taken +Sara Lee over the Leete house that evening. Will Leete's widow had met +them there, a small sad figure in her mourning, but very composed, until +she opened the door into a tiny room upstairs with a desk and a lamp +in it. + +"This was Will's study," she said. "He did his work here in the +evenings, and I sat in that little chair and sewed. I never thought +then--" Her lips quivered. + +"Pretty rotten of Will Leete to leave that little thing alone," said +Harvey on their way home. "He had his fling; and she's paying for it." + +But Sara Lee was silent. It was useless to try to make Harvey understand +the urge that had called Will Leete across the sea to do his share for +the war, and that had brought him that peace of God that passeth all +understanding. + +It was not a good time for Belle to put up to him her suggestion for a +delay in the marriage, that evening after their return. He took it +badly and insisted on sending upstairs for Sara Lee. + +"Did you ask Belle to do this?" he demanded bluntly. + +"To do what?" + +"To put things off." + +"I have already told you, Harvey," Belle put in. "It is my own idea. +She is tired. She's been through a lot. I've heard the story you're +too stubborn to listen to. And I strongly advise her to wait a while." + +And after a time he agreed ungraciously. He would buy the house and fix +it over, and in the early fall it would be ready. + +"Unless," he added to Sara Lee with a bitterness born of +disappointment--"unless you change your mind again." + +He did not kiss her that night when she and Belle went together up the +stairs. But he stared after her gloomily, with hurt and bewilderment in +his eyes. + +He did not understand. He never would. She had come home to him all +gentleness and tenderness, ready to find in him the things she needed so +badly. But out of his obstinacy and hurt he had himself built up a +barrier. + +That night Sara Lee dreamed that she was back in the little house of +mercy. René was there; and Henri; and Jean, with the patch over his eye. +They were waiting for the men to come, and the narrow hall was full of +the odor of Marie's soup. Then she heard them coming, the shuffling of +many feet on the road. She went to the door, with Henri beside her, and +watched them coming up the road, a deeper shadow in the blackness--tired +men, wounded men, homeless men coming to her little house with its +firelight and its warmth. Here and there the match that lighted a +cigarette showed a white but smiling face. They stopped before the door, +and the warm little house, with its guarded lights and its food and +cheer, took them in. + + + + +XXVII + + +Very pale and desperate, Henri took the night A train for Folkestone +after he had said good-by to Sara Lee. He alternately chilled and +burned with fever, and when he slept, as he did now and then, going off +suddenly into a doze and waking with a jerk, it was to dream of horrors. + +He thought, in his wilder intervals, of killing himself. But his code +did not include such a shirker's refuge. He was going back to tell his +story and to take his punishment. + +He had cabled to Jean to meet him at Calais, but when, at dawn the next +morning, the channel boat drew in to the wharf there was no sign of +Jean or the car. Henri regarded the empty quay with apathetic eyes. +They would come, later on. If he could only get his head down and sleep +for a while he would be better able to get toward the Front. For he +knew now that he was ill. He had, indeed, been ill for days, but he did +not realize that. And he hated illness. He regarded it with suspicion, +as a weakness not for a strong man. + +The drowsy girl in her chair at the Gare Maritime regarded him curiously +and with interest. Many women turned to look after Henri, but he did +not know this. Had he known it he would have regarded it much as he +did illness. + +The stupid boy was not round. The girl herself took the key and led the +way down the long corridor upstairs to a room. Henri stumbled in and +fell across the bed. He was almost immediately asleep. + +Late in the afternoon he wakened. Strange that Jean had not come. He +got up and bathed his face. His right arm was very stiff now, and pains +ran from the old wound in his chest down to the fingers of his hand. He +tried to exercise to limber it, and grew almost weak with pain. + +At six o'clock, when Jean had not come, Henri resorted to ways that he +knew of and secured a car. He had had some coffee by that time, and he +felt much better--so well indeed that he sang under his breath a +strange rambling song that sounded rather like René's rendering of +Tipperary. The driver looked at him curiously every now and then. + +It was ten o'clock when they reached La Panne. Henri went at once to +the villa set high on a sand dune where the King's secretary lived. The +house was dark, but in the library at the rear there was a light. He +stumbled along the paths beside the house, and reached at last, after +interminable miles, when the path sometimes came up almost to his eyes +and again fell away so that it seemed to drop from under his feet--at +last he reached the long French doors, with their drawn curtains. He +opened the door suddenly and thereby surprised the secretary, who was a +most dignified and rather nervous gentleman, into laying his hand on a +heavy inkwell. + +"I wish to see the King," said Henri in a loud tone. Because at that +moment the secretary, lamp and inkwell and all, retired suddenly to a +very great distance, as if one had viewed them through the reverse end +of an opera glass. + +The secretary knew Henri. He, too, eyed him curiously. + +"The King has retired, monsieur." + +"I think," said Henri in a dangerous tone, "that he will see me." + +To tell the truth, the secretary rather thought so too. There was a +strange rumor going round, to the effect that the boy had followed a +woman to England at a critical time. Which would have been a pity, the +secretary thought. There were so many women, and so few men like Henri. + +The secretary considered gravely. Henri was by that time in a chair, but +it moved about so that he had to hold very tight to the arms. When he +looked up again the secretary had picked up his soft black hat and was +at the door. + +"I shall inquire," he said. Henri saluted him stiffly, with his left +hand, as he went out. + +The secretary went to His Majesty's equerry, who was in the next house +playing solitaire and trying to forget the family he had left on the +other side of the line. + +So it was that in due time Henri again traversed miles of path and +pavement, between tall borders of wild sea grass, miles which perhaps +were a hundred yards. And went round the screen, and--found the King +on the hearthrug. But when he drew himself stiffly to attention he +overdid the thing rather and went over backward with a crash. + +He was up again almost immediately, very flushed and uncomfortable. +After that he kept himself in hand, but the King, who had a way all his +own of forgetting his divine right to rule, and a great many other +things--the King watched him gravely. + +Henri sat in a chair and made a clean breast of it. Because he was +feeling rather strange he told a great many things that an agent of the +secret service is hardly expected to reveal to his king. He mentioned, +for instance, the color of Sara Lee's eyes, and the way she bandaged, +like one who had been trained. + +Once, in the very middle of his narrative, where he had put the letter +from the Front in his pocket and decided to go to England anyhow, he +stopped and hummed René's version of Tipperary. Only a bar or two. +Then he remembered. + +But one thing brought him round with a start. + +"Then," said the King slowly, "Jean was not with you?" + +Only he did not call him Jean. He gave him his other name, which, like +Henri's, is not to be told. + +Henri's brain cleared then with the news that Jean was missing. When, +somewhat later, he staggered out of the villa, it was under royal +instructions to report to the great hospital along the sea front and +near by, and there to go to bed and have a doctor. Indeed, because the +boy's eyes were wild by that time, the equerry went along and held his +arm. But that was because Henri was in open revolt, and while walking +steadily enough showed a tendency to bolt every now and then. + +He would stop on the way and argue, though one does not argue easily +with an equerry. + +"I must go," he would say fretfully. "God knows where he is. He'd +never give me up if I were the one." + +And once he shook off the equerry violently and said: + +"Let go of me, I tell you! I'll come back and go to bed when I've +found him." + +The equerry soothed him like a child. + +An English nurse took charge of Henri in the hospital, and put him to +bed. He was very polite to her, and extremely cynical. She sat in a +chair by his bed and held the key of the room in her hand. Once he +thought she was Sara Lee, but that was only for a moment. She did not +look like Sara Lee. And she was suspicious, too; for when he asked her +what she could put in her left hand that she could not put in her right, +she moved away and placed the door key on the stand, out of reach. + +However, toward morning she dozed. There was steady firing at Nieuport +and the windows shook constantly. An ambulance came in, followed by a +stirring on the lower floor. Then silence. He got up then and secured +the key. There was no time for dressing, because she was a suspicious +person and likely to waken at any time. He rolled his clothing into a +bundle and carried it under his well arm. The other was almost useless. + +The ambulance was still waiting outside, at the foot of the staircase. +There were voices and lights in the operating room, forward along the +tiled hall. Still in his night clothing, Henri got into the ambulance +and threw his uniform behind him. Then he got the car under way. + +Outside the village he paused long enough to dress. His head was +amazingly clear. He had never felt so sure of himself before. As to +his errand he had no doubt whatever. Jean had learned that he had +crossed the channel. Therefore Jean had taken up his work--Jean, who +had but one eye and was as clumsy as a bear. The thought of Jean +crawling through the German trenches set him laughing until he ended +with a sob. + +It was rather odd about the ambulance. It did not keep the road very +well. Sometimes it was on one side and sometimes on the other. It slid +as though the road were greased. And after a time Henri made an amazing +discovery. He was not alone in the car. + +He looked back, without stopping, and the machine went off in a wide arc. +He brought it back again, grinning. + +"Thought you had me, didn't you?" he observed to the car in general, and +the engine in particular. "Now no tricks!" + +There was a wounded man in the car. He had had morphia and he was very +comfortable. He was not badly hurt, and he considered that he was being +taken to Calais. He was too tired to talk, and the swinging of the car +rather interested him. He would doze and waken and doze again. But at +last he heard something that made him rise on his elbow. + +It was the hammering of the big guns. + +He called Henri's attention to this, but Henri said: + +"Lie down, Jean, and don't talk. We'll make it yet." + +The wounded man intended to make a protest, but he went to sleep instead. + +They had reached the village now where was the little house of mercy. +The ambulance rolled and leaped down the street, with both lights full +on, which was forbidden, and came to a stop at the door. The man inside +was grunting then, and Henri, whose head had never been so clear, got +out and went round to the rear of the car. + +"Now, out with you, comrade!" he said. "I have made an error, but it is +immaterial. Can you walk?" + +He lighted a cigarette, and the man inside saw his burning eyes and +shaking hands. Even through the apathy of the morphia he felt a thrill +of terror. He could walk. He got out while Henri pounded at the door. + +"_Attention_!" he called. "_Attention_!" + +Then he hummed an air of the camps: + + Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + Trou là là, ça ne va pas. + + +When he heard steps inside Henri went back to the ambulance. He got in +and drove it, lights and all, down the street. + + Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + Trou là là, ça ne va pas. + + +Somewhere down the road beyond the poplar trees he abandoned the ambulance. +They found it there the next morning, or rather what was left of it. +Evidently its two unwinking eyes had got on the Germans' nerves. + + * * * * * + +Early the next morning a Saxon regiment, standing on the firing step +ready for what the dawn might bring forth, watched the mist rise from +the water in front of them. It shone on a body in a Belgian uniform, +lying across their wire, and very close indeed. + +Now the Saxons are not Prussians, so no one for sport fired at the body. +Which was rather a good thing, because it moved slightly and stirred. +And then in a loud voice, which is an unusual thing for bodies to +possess, it began to sing: + + Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + Trou là là, ça ne va pas. + + + + +XXVIII + + +Late in August Sara Lee broke her engagement with Harvey. She had been +away, at Cousin Jennie's, for a month, and for the first time since her +return she had had time to think. In the little suburban town there +were long hours of quiet when Cousin Jennie mended on the porch and Aunt +Harriet, enjoying a sort of reflected glory from Sara Lee, presided +at Red Cross meetings. + +Sara Lee decided to send for Harvey, and he came for a week-end, arriving +pathetically eager, but with a sort of defiance too. He was determined +to hold her, but to hold her on his own terms. + +Aunt Harriet had been vaguely uneasy, but Harvey's arrival seemed to put +everything right. She even kissed him when he came, and took great pains +to carry off Cousin Jennie when she showed an inclination toward +conversation and a seat on the porch. + +Sara Lee had made a desperate resolve. She intended to lay all her +cards on the table. He should know all that there was to know. If, +after that, he still wanted to hold her--but she did not go so far. +She was so sure he would release her. + +It was a despairing thing to do, but she was rather despairing those +days. There had been no letter from Henri or from Jean. She had written +them both several times, to Dunkirk, to the Savoy in London, to the +little house near the Front. But no replies had come. Yet mail was +going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly. + +When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come +back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie +on one side and Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent +prayers--that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not +think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital. + +She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy. +Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even +if that truth comprehended the worst. + +Once she received, from some unknown hand, a French journal, and pored +over it for days with her French dictionary, to find if it contained any +news. It was not until a week later that she received a letter from +Mabel, explaining that she had sent the journal, which contained a +description of her hospital. + +All of Harvey's Sunday she spent in trying to bring her courage to the +point of breaking the silence he had imposed on her, but it was not +until evening that she succeeded. The house was empty. The family had +gone to church. On the veranda, with the heavy scent of phlox at night +permeating the still air, Sara Lee made her confession. She began at +the beginning. Harvey did not stir--until she told of the way she had +stowed away to cross the channel. Then he moved. + +"This fellow who planned that for you--did you ever see him again?" + +"He met me in Calais." + +"And then what?" + +"He took me to Dunkirk in his car. Such a hideous car, Harvey--all +wrecked. It had been under fire again and again. I--" + +"He took you to Dunkirk! Who was with you?" + +"Just Jean, the chauffeur." + +"I like his nerve! Wasn't there in all that Godforsaken country a +woman to take with you? You and this--What was his name, anyhow?" + +"I can't tell you that, Harvey." + +"Look here!" he burst out. "How much of this aren't you going to tell? +Because I want it all or not at all." + +"I can't tell you his name. I'm only trying to make you understand the +way I feel about things. His name doesn't matter." She clenched her +hands in the darkness. "I don't think he is alive now." + +He tried to see her face, but she turned it away. + +"Dead, eh? What makes you think that?" + +"I haven't heard from him." + +"Why should you hear from him?" His voice cut like a knife. "Look at +me. Why should he write to you?" + +"He cared for me, Harvey." + +He sat in a heavy silence which alarmed her. + +"Don't be angry, please," she begged. "I couldn't bear it. It wasn't my +fault, or his either." + +"The damned scoundrel!" said Harvey thickly. + +But she reached over and put a trembling hand over his lips. + +"Don't say that," she said. "Don't! I won't allow you to. When I +think what may have happened to him, I--" Her voice broke. + +"Go on," Harvey said in cold tones she had never heard before. "Tell it +all, now you've begun it. God knows I didn't want to hear it. He took +you to the hotel at Dunkirk, the way those foreigners take their women. +And he established you in the house at the Front, I suppose, like a--" + +Sara Lee suddenly stood up and drew off her ring. + +"You needn't go on," she said quietly. "I had a decision to make +to-night, and I have made it. Ever since I came home I have been trying +to go back to where we were before I left. It isn't possible. You are +what you always were, Harvey. But I've changed. I can't go back." + +She put the ring into his hand. + +"It isn't that you don't love me. I think you do. But I've been +thinking things over. It isn't only to-night, or what you just said. +It's because we don't care for the same things, or believe in them." + +"But--if we love each other--" + +"It's not that, either. I used to feel that way. A home, and some one +to care about, and a little pleasure and work." + +"That ought to be enough, honey." + +He was terrified. His anger was gone. He placed an appealing hand on +her arm, and as she stood there in the faint starlight the wonder of her +once again got him by the throat. She had that sort of repressed +eagerness, that look of being poised for flight, that had always made +him feel cheap and unworthy. + +"Isn't that enough, honey?" he repeated. + +"Not now," she said, her eyes turned toward the east. "These are great +days, Harvey. They are greater and more terrible than any one can know +who has not been there. I've been there and I know. I haven't the +right to all this peace and comfort when I know how things are going +over there." + +Down the quiet street of the little town service was over. The last +hymn had been sung. Through the open windows came the mellow sound of +the minister's voice in benediction, too far away to be more than a +tone, like a single deep note of the organ. Sara Lee listened. She +knew the words he was saying, and she listened with her eyes turned to +the east: + + "The peace of God that passeth all understanding + be and abide with you all, forevermore. Amen." + +Sara Lee listened, and from the step below her Harvey watched her with +furtive, haggard eyes. He had not heard the benediction. + +"The peace of God!" she said slowly. "There is only one peace of God, +Harvey, and that is service. I am going back." + +"Service!" he scoffed. "You are going back to him!" + +"I'm afraid he is not there any more. I am going back to work. But if +he is there--" + +Harvey slid the ring into his pocket. "What if he's not there," he +demanded bitterly. "If you think, after all this, that I'm going to +wait, on the chance of your coming back to me, you're mistaken. I've +been a laughing stock long enough." + +In the light of her new decision Sara Lee viewed him for the first time +with the pitiless eyes of women who have lost a faith. She saw him for +what he was, not deliberately cruel, not even unkindly, but selfish, +small, without vision. Harvey was for his own fireside, his office, his +little family group. His labor would always be for himself and his own. +Whereas Sara Lee was, now and forever, for all the world, her hands +consecrated to bind up its little wounds and to soothe its great ones. +Harvey craved a cheap and easy peace. She wanted no peace except that +bought by service, the peace of a tired body, the peace of the little +house in Belgium where, after days of torture, weary men found quiet +and ease and the cheer of the open door. + + + + +XXIX + + +Late in October Sara Lee went back to the little house of mercy; went +unaccredited, and with her own money. She had sold her bit of property. + +In London she went to the Traverses, as before. But with a difference +too. For Sara Lee had learned the strangeness of the English, who are +slow to friendships but who never forget. Indeed a telegram met her at +Liverpool asking her to stop with them in London. She replied, refusing, +but thanking them, and saying she would call the next afternoon. + +Everything was the same at Morley's: Rather a larger percentage of men +in uniform, perhaps; greater crowds in the square; a little less of the +optimism which in the spring had predicted victory before autumn. But +the same high courage, for all that. + +August greeted her like an old friend. Even the waiters bowed to her, +and upstairs the elderly chambermaid fussed over her like a mother. + +"And you're going back!" she exclaimed. "Fancy that, now! You are +brave, miss." + +But her keen eyes saw a change in Sara Lee. Her smile was the same, but +there were times when she forgot to finish a sentence, and she stood, +that first morning, for an hour by the window, looking out as if she saw +nothing. + +She went, before the visit to the Traverses, to the Church of Saint +Martin in the Fields. It was empty, save for a woman in a corner, who +did not kneel, but sat staring quietly before her. Sara Lee prayed an +inarticulate bit of a prayer, that what the Traverses would have to tell +her should not be the thing that she feared, but that, if it were, she +be given courage to meet it and to go on with her work. + +The Traverses would know; Mrs. Cameron was a friend. They would know +about Henri, and about Jean. Soon, within the hour, she would learn +everything. So she asked for strength, and then sat there for a time, +letting the peace of the old church quiet her, as had the broken walls +and shattered altar of that other church, across the channel. + +It was rather a surprise to Sara Lee to have Mrs. Travers put her arms +about her and kiss her. Mr. Travers, too, patted her hand when he took +it. But they had, for all that, the reserve of their class. Much that +they felt about Sara Lee they did not express even to each other. + +"We are so grateful to you," Mrs. Travers said. "I am only one mother, +and of course now--" She looked down at her black dress. "But how many +others there are who will want to thank you, when this terrible thing is +over and they learn about you!" + +Mr. Travers had been eying Sara Lee. + +"Didn't use you up, did it?" he asked. "You're not looking quite fit." + +Sara Lee was very pale just then. In a moment she would know. + +"I'm quite well," she said. "I--do you hear from Mrs. Cameron?" + +"Frequently. She has worked hard, but she is not young." It was Mrs. +Travers who spoke. "She's afraid of the winter there. I rather think, +since you want to go back, that she will be glad to turn your domain +over to you for a time." + +"Then--the little house is still there?" + +"Indeed, yes! A very famous little house, indeed. But it is always +known as your house. She has felt like a temporary chatelaine. She +always thought you would come back." + +Tea had come, as before. The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace +herself. Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down +at her. + +"We have a plan to talk over," he said, "when you have had your tea. I +hope you will agree to it." + +He went back to the hearthrug. + +"When I was there before," Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady, +"there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me. Indeed, all +the credit for what I did belongs to him. And since I went home I +haven't heard--" + +Her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Travers glanced at his wife. Not for +nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends, +in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless +street before the little house. + +"I'm afraid we have bad news for you." Mrs. Travers put down her +untasted tea. "Or rather, we have no news. Of course," she added, +seeing Sara Lee's eyes, "in this war no news may be the best--that is, +he may be a prisoner." + +"That," Sara Lee heard herself say, "is impossible. If they captured +him they would shoot him." + +Mrs. Travers nodded silently. They knew Henri's business, too, by that +time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy. + +"And--Jean?" + +They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away +voice. And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs. +Cameron's and read a part of it aloud. + +"He seems to have been delirious," she read, holding her reading glasses +to her eyes. "A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he +learned this somehow. + +"He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance. He came +straight here and wakened us. There had been a wounded man in the +machine, and he left him on our doorstep. When I got to the door the +car was going wildly toward the Front, with both lamps lighted. We did +not understand then, of course, and no one thought of following it. The +ambulance was found smashed by a shell the next morning, and at first we +thought that he had been in it. But there was no sign that he had been, +and that night one of the men from the trenches insisted that he had +climbed out of a firing trench where the soldier stood, and had gone +forward, bareheaded, toward the German lines. + +"I am afraid it was the end. The men, however, who all loved him, do +not think so. It seems that he has done miracles again and again. I +understand that along the whole Belgian line they watch for him at night. +The other night a German on reconnoissance got very close to our wire, +and was greeted not by shots but by a wild hurrah. He was almost +paralyzed with surprise. They brought him here on the way back to the +prison camp, and he still looked dazed." + +Sara Lee sat with her hands clenched. Mrs. Travers folded the letter +and put it back into its envelope. + +"How long ago was that?" Sara Lee asked in a low tone. "Because, if he +was coming back at all--" + +"Four months." + +Suddenly Sara Lee stood up. + +"I think I ought to tell you," she said with a dead-white face, "that I +am responsible. He cared for me; and I was in love with him too. Only +I didn't know it then. I let him bring me to England, because--I +suppose it was because I loved him. I didn't think then that it was +that. I was engaged to a man at home." + +"Sit down," said Mr. Travers. "My dear child, nothing can be your fault." + +"He came with me, and the Germans got through. He had had word, but--" + +"Have you your salts?" Mr. Travers asked quietly of his wife. + +"I'm not fainting. I'm only utterly wretched." + +The Traverses looked at each other. They were English. They had taken +their own great loss quietly, because it was an individual grief and +must not be intruded on the sorrow of a nation. But they found this +white-faced girl infinitely appealing, a small and fragile figure, to +whose grief must be added, without any fault of hers, a bitter and +lasting remorse. + +Sara Lee stood up and tried to smile. + +"Please don't worry about me," she said. "I need something to do, that's +all. You see, I've been worrying for so long. If I can get to work and +try to make up I'll not be so hopeless. But I am not quite hopeless, +either," she added hastily. It was as though by the very word she had +consigned Henri to death. "You see, I am like the men; I won't give him +up. And perhaps some night he will come across from the other side, out +of the dark." + +Mr. Travers took her back to the hotel. When he returned from paying +off the taxi he found her looking across at the square. + +"Do you remember," she asked him, "the time when the little donkey was +hurt over there?" + +"I shall never forget it." + +"And the young officer who ran out when I did, and shot the poor thing?" + +Mr. Travers remembered. + +"That was he--the man we have been speaking of." + +For the first time that day her eyes filled with tears. + +Sara Lee, at twenty, was already living in her memories. + +So again the lights went down in front, and the back drop became but a +veil, and invisible. And to Sara Lee there came back again some of the +characters of the early _mise en scène_--marching men, forage wagons, +squadrons of French cavalry escorting various staffs, commandeered farm +horses with shaggy fetlocks fastened in rope corrals, artillery rumbling +along rutted roads which shook the gunners almost off the limbers. + +Nothing was changed--and everything. There was no René to smile his +adoring smile, but Marie came out, sobbing and laughing, and threw +herself into the girl's arms. The little house was the same, save for +a hole in the kitchen wall. There were the great piles of white bowls +and the shining kettles. There was the corner of her room, patched by +René's hands, now so long quiet. A few more shell holes in the street, +many more little crosses in the field near the poplar trees, more Allied +aëroplanes in the air--that was all that was changed. + +But to Sara Lee everything was changed, for all that. The little house +was grave and still, like a house of the dead. Once it had echoed to +young laughter, had resounded to the noise and excitement of Henri's +every entrance. Even when he was not there it was as though it but +waited for him to stir it into life, and small echoes of his gayety had +seemed to cling to its old walls. + +Sara Lee stood on the doorstep and looked within. She had come back. +Here she would work and wait, and if in the goodness of providence he +should come back, here he would find her, all the empty months gone and +forgotten. + +If he did not-- + +"I shall still be calling you, and waiting," he had written. She, too, +would call and wait, and if not here, then surely in the fullness of +time which is eternity the call would be answered. + +In October Sara Lee took charge again of the little house. Mrs. Cameron +went back to England, but not until the Traverses' plan had been +revealed. They would support the little house, as a memorial to the son +who had died. It was, Mrs. Travers wrote, the finest tribute they could +offer to his memory, that night after night tired and ill and wounded +men might find sanctuary, even for a little time, under her care. + +Luxuries began to come across the channel, food and dressings and tobacco. +Knitted things, too; for another winter was coming, and already the frost +lay white on the fields in the mornings. The little house took on a new +air of prosperity. There were days when it seemed almost swaggering +with opulence. + +It had need of everything, however. With the prospect of a second +winter, when an advance was impossible, the Germans took to hammering +again. Bombardment was incessant. The little village was again under +suspicion, and there came days of terror when it seemed as though even +the fallen masonry must be reduced to powder. The church went entirely. + +By December Sara Lee had ceased to take refuge during the bombardments. +The fatalism of the Front had got her. She would die or live according +to the great plan, and nothing could change that. She did not greatly +care which, except for her work, and even that she felt could be carried +on by another as well. + +There was no news of Henri, but once the King's equerry, going by, had +stopped to see her and had told her the story. + +"He was ill, undoubtedly," he said. "Even when he went to London he was +ill, and not responsible. The King understands that. He was a brave +boy, mademoiselle." + +But the last element of hope seemed to go with that verification of his +illness. He was delirious, and he had gone in that condition into the +filthy chill waters of the inundation. Well and sane there had been a +chance, but plunging wild-eyed and reckless, into that hell across, +there was none. + +She did her best in the evenings to be cheerful, to take the place, in +her small and serious fashion, of Henri's old gayety. But the soldiers +whispered among themselves that mademoiselle was in grief, as they were, +for the blithe young soldier who was gone. + +What hope Sara Lee had had died almost entirely early in December. On +the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy +pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian +corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench +while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual +courtesy, and had climbed out over the top. + +To Sara Lee this Hutin told his story. A short man with a red beard and +a kindly smile that revealed teeth almost destroyed from neglect, he was +at first diffident in the extreme. + +"It was the captain, mademoiselle," he asserted. "I know him well. He +has often gone on his errands from near my post. I am"--he smiled--"I +am usually in the front line." + +"What did he do?" + +"He had no cap, mademoiselle. I thought that was odd. And as you +know--he does not wear his own uniform on such occasions. But he wore +his own uniform, so that at first I did not know what he intended." + +"Later on," she asked, "you--did you hear anything?" + +"The usual sniping, mademoiselle. Nothing more." + +"He went through the inundation?" + +"How else could he go? Through the wire first, at the barrier, where +there is an opening, if one knows the way, I saw him beyond it, by the +light of a fusee. There is a road there, or what was once a road. He +stood there. Then the lights went out." + + + + +XXX + + +On a wild night in January Sara Lee inaugurated a new branch of service. +There had been a delay in sending up to the Front the men who had been +on rest, and an incessant bombardment held the troops prisoners in their +trenches. + +A field kitchen had been destroyed. The men were hungry, disheartened, +wet through. They needed her, she felt. Even the little she could do +would help. All day she had made soup, and at evening Marie led from +its dilapidated stable the little horse that Henri had once brought up, +trundling its cart behind it. The boiler of the cart was scoured, a +fire lighted in the fire box. Marie, a country girl, harnessed the +shaggy little animal, but with tears of terror. + +"You will be killed, mademoiselle," she protested, weeping. + +"But I have gone before. Don't you remember the man whose wife was +English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?" + +"What will become of the house if you are killed?" + +"Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send +to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or +some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you +promise that?" + +Marie promised in a loud wail. + +"Of course I shall come back," Sara Lee said, stirring her soup +preparatory to pouring it out. "I shall be very careful." + +"You will not come back, mademoiselle. You do not care to live, and to +such--" + +"Those are the ones who live on," said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out +her soup. + +She went quite alone. There was a great deal of noise, but no shells +fell near her. She led the little horse by its head, and its presence +gave her comfort. It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her +on the road. + +In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible +from the rear. There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach +them. One went along through the darkness until the sound of men's +voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker +of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its +flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment. + +Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply. + +"_Qui vive_?" + +"It is I," she called through the rain. "I have brought some chocolate +and some soup." + +He lowered his bayonet. + +"Pass, mademoiselle." + +She went on, the rumbling of her little cart deadened by the Belgian +guns. + +Through the near-by trenches that night went the word that near the +Repose of the Angels--which was but a hole in the ground and scarcely +reposeful--there was to be had hot soup and chocolate and cigarettes. +A dozen or so at a time, the men were allowed to come. Officers brought +their great capes to keep the girl dry. Boards appeared as if by magic +for her to stand on. The rain and the bombardment had both ceased, and +a full moon made the lagoon across the embankment into a silver lake. + +When the last soup had been dipped from the tall boiler, when the final +drops of chocolate had oozed from the faucet, Sara Lee turned and went +back to the little house again. But before she went she stood a moment +staring across toward that land of the shadow on the other side, where +Henri had gone and had not returned. + +Once, when the King had decorated her, she had wished that, wherever +Uncle James might be, on the other side, he could see what was happening. +And now she wondered if Henri could know that she had come back, and was +again looking after his men while she waited for that reunion he had so +firmly believed in. + +Then she led the little horse back along the road. + +At the poplar trees she turned and looked behind, toward the trenches. +The grove was but a skeleton now, a strange and jagged thing of twisted +branches, as though it had died in agony. She stood there while the +pony nuzzled her gently. If she called, would he come? But, then, all +of life was one call now, for her. She went on slowly. + +After that it was not unusual for her to go to the trenches, on such +nights as no men could come to the little house. Always she was joyously +welcomed, and always on her way back she turned to send from the poplar +trees that inarticulate aching call that she had come somehow to +believe in. + +January, wet and raw, went by; February, colder, with snow, was half +over. The men had ceased to watch for Henri over the parapet, and his +brave deeds had become fireside tales, to be told at home, if ever +there were to be homes again for them. + +Then one night Henri came back--came as he had gone, out of the shadows +that had swallowed him up; came without so much as the sound of a +sniper's rifle to herald him. A strange, thin Henri, close to +starvation, dripping water over everything from a German uniform, and +very close indeed to death before he called out. + +There was wild excitement indeed. Bearded private soldiers, forgetting +that name and rank of his which must not be told, patted his thin +shoulders. Officers who had lived through such horrors as also may not +be told, crowded about him and shook hands with him, and with each other. + +It was as though from the graveyard back in the fields had come, alive +and smiling, some dearly beloved friend. + +He would have told the story, but he was wet and weary. + +"That can wait," they said, and led him, a motley band of officers and +men intermixed, for once forgetting all decorum, toward the village. +They overtook the lines of men who had left the trenches and were moving +with their slow and weary gait up the road. The news spread through the +column. There were muffled cheers. Figures stepped out of the darkness +with hands out. Henri clasped as many as he could. + +When with his escort he had passed the men they fell, almost without +orders, into columns of four, and swung in behind him. There was no +band, but from a thousand throats, yet cautiously until they passed the +poplar trees, there gradually swelled and grew a marching song. + +Behind Henri a strange guard of honor--muddy, tired, torn, even +wounded--they marched and sang: + + Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + Trou là là, çe ne va pas. + + +Sara Lee, listening for that first shuffle of many feet that sounded so +like the wind in the trees or water over the pebbles of a brook, paused +in her work and lifted her head. The rhythm of marching feet came +through the wooden shutters. The very building seemed to vibrate with +it. And there was a growling sound with it that soon she knew to be the +deep voices of singing men. + +She went to the door and stood there, looking down the street. Behind +her was the warm glow of the lamp, all the snug invitation of the little +house. + +A group of soldiers had paused in front of the doorway, and from them +one emerged--tall, white, infinitely weary--and looked up at her with +unbelieving eyes. + +After all, there are no words for such meetings. Henri took her hand, +still with that sense of unreality, and bent over it. And Sara Lee +touched his head as he stooped, because she had called for so long, and +only now he had come. + +"So you have come back!" she said in what she hoped was a composed +tone--because a great many people were listening. He raised his head +and looked at her. + +"It is you who have come back, mademoiselle." + + * * * * * + +There was gayety in the little house that night. Every candle was +lighted. They were stuck in rows on mantel-shelves. They blazed--and +melted into strange arcs--above the kitchen stove. There were +cigarettes for everybody, and food; and a dry uniform, rather small, for +Henri. Marie wept over her soup, and ran every few moments to the door +to see if he was still there. She had kissed him on both cheeks when +he came in, and showed signs, every now and then, of doing it again. + +Sara Lee did her bandaging as usual, but with shining eyes. And soon +after Henri's arrival a dispatch rider set off post haste with certain +papers and maps, hurriedly written and drawn. Henri had not only +returned, he had brought back information of great value to all the +Allied armies. + +So Sara Lee bandaged, and in the little room across the way, where no +longer Harvey's photograph sat on the mantel, Henri told his story to +the officers--of his imprisonment in the German prison at Crefeld; of +his finding Jean there, weeks later when he was convalescing from +typhoid; of their escape and long wandering; of Jean's getting into +Holland, whence he would return by way of England. Of his own business, +of what he had done behind the lines after Jean had gone, he said +nothing. But his listeners knew and understood. + +But his dispatches off, his story briefly told, Henri wandered out among +the men again. He was very happy. He had never thought to be so happy. +He felt the touch on his sleeves of hard brown, not overclean hands, +infinitely tender and caressing; and over there, as though she had never +gone, was Sara Lee, slightly flushed and very radiant. + +And as though he also had never gone away, Henri pushed into the _salle +à manger_ and stood before her smiling. + +"You bandage well, mademoiselle," he said gayly. "But I? I bandage +better! See now, a turn here, and it is done! Does it hurt, Paul?" + +The man in the dressing chair squirmed and grinned sheepishly. + +"The iodine," he explained. "It is painful." + +"Then I shall ask you a question, and you will forget the iodine. Why +is a dead German like the tail of a pig?" + +Paul failed. The room failed. Even Colonel Lilias confessed himself at +fault. + +"Because it is the end of the swine," explained Henri, and looked about +him triumphantly. A gust of laughter spread through the room and even +to the kitchen. A door banged. Henri upset a chair. There was noise +again, and gayety in the little house of mercy. And much happiness. + +And there I think we may leave them all--Henri and Sara Lee; and Jean +of the one eye and the faithful heart; and Marie, with her kettles; and +even René, who still in some strange way belonged to the little house, +as though it were something too precious to abandon. + +The amazing interlude had become the play itself. Never again for Sara +Lee would the lights go up in front, and Henri with his adoring eyes +and open arms fade into the shadows. + +The drama of the war plays on. The Great Playwright sees fit, now and +then, to take away some well-beloved players. New faces appear and +disappear. The music is the thunder of many guns. Henri still plays +his big part, Sara Lee her little one. Yet who shall say, in the end, +which one has done the better? There are new and ever new standards, +but love remains the chief. And love is Sara Lee's one quality--love +of her kind, of tired men and weary, the love that shall one day knit +this broken world together. And love of one man. + +On weary nights, when Henri is again lost in the shadows, Sara Lee, +her work done, the men gone, sits in her little house of mercy and +waits. The stars on clear evenings shine down on the roofless buildings, +on the rubbish that was once the mill, on the ruined poplar trees, and +on the small acre of peace where tiny crosses mark the long sleep of +weary soldiers. + +And sometimes, though she knows it now by heart, she reads aloud that +letter of Henri's to her. It comforts her. It is a promise. + +"If that is to be, then think of me, somewhere, perhaps with René by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps, even beyond the stars, they have need of a little +house of mercy. And God knows, wherever I am, I shall have need of you." + +(THE END) + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + +***** This file should be named 1590-8.txt or 1590-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/5/9/1590/ + +Produced by An anonymous PG volunteer and David Garcia + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Amazing Interlude + +Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart + +Release Date: December 23, 2004 [EBook #1590] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + + + + +Produced by An anonymous PG volunteer and David Garcia + + + + + +</pre> + + +<div style="height: 6em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<a name="image-0001"><!--IMG--></a> +<div class="figure" style="width: 70%;"> +<a href="images/illust-01.jpg"><img width="100%" +src="images/illust-01.jpg" alt="Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles." /></a> +<br /> +<b>Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles.</b> +</div> + +<h1> + THE AMAZING INTERLUDE +</h1> +<h2> +By Mary Roberts Rinehart +</h2> + +<p> </p> + +<h4> +ILLUSTRATIONS BY<br /> +THE KINNEYS +</h4> + +<center><small> +[Transcriber's Note: Troy and Margaret West] +</small></center> + +<center><small> +1918 +</small></center> + +<hr class="full" /> + +<p> </p> + +<h2>Contents</h2> + +<p class="toc"><a href="#h2H_4_0002"> +I +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0003"> +II +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0004"> +III +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0005"> +IV +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0006"> +V +</a> +<br /> +<a href="#h2H_4_0007"> +VI +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0008"> +VII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0009"> +VIII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0010"> +IX +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0010a"> +X +</a> +<br /> +<a href="#h2H_4_0011"> +XI +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0012"> +XII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0013"> +XIII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0014"> +XIV +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0015"> +XV +</a> +<br /> +<a href="#h2H_4_0016"> +XVI +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0017"> +XVII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0018"> +XVIII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0019"> +XIX +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0020"> +XX +</a> +<br /> +<a href="#h2H_4_0021"> +XXI +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0022"> +XXII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0023"> +XXIII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0024"> +XXIV +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0026"> +XXV +</a> +<br /> +<a href="#h2H_4_0027"> +XXVI +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0028"> +XXVII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0029"> +XXVIII +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0030"> +XXIX +</a> + +<a href="#h2H_4_0031"> +XXX +</a></p> +<hr /> + +<p> </p> + +<h2>Illustrations</h2> + +<p><a href="#image-0001"> +Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles. +</a></p> +<p><a href="#image-0002"> +Henri explained the method. +</a></p> +<p><a href="#image-0003"> +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. +</a></p> +<p><a href="#image-0004"> +That Henri might be living, somewhere—that some day the Belgians might +go home again. +</a></p> + +<p> </p> + +<hr class="full" /> + +<a name="h2H_4_0002" id="h2H_4_0002"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + I +</h2> +<p> +The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for +most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the +same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits +through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately +the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is +the background for the moving figures of the play. +</p> +<p> +So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of +permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there +should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected +none. +</p> +<p> +But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours: +lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity, +reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes +place. Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on—a new <i>mise +en scène</i>, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left +knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy—Sara Lee became a fairy, of a +sort—and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And +then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the +lady is back by the fire—but with a memory. +</p> +<p> +This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory—and of something more. +</p> +<hr /> +<p> +The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing her part in the +setting of a city in Pennsylvania. An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It +is only fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither quality. She +was far from ugly, and very, very far from rich. She had started her +part with a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one they had +gone away into the wings and had not come back. At nineteen she was +alone knitting by the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop was +of painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for its moment, was the +forest of adventure. A strange forest, too—one that Sara Lee would +not have recognised as a forest. And a prince of course—but a prince +as strange and mysterious as the forest. +</p> +<p> +The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented. If it was +resignation rather than content, no one but Sara Lee knew the difference. +Knitting, too; but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid, knitting an +afghan against an interesting event which involved a friend of hers. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee rather deplored the event—in her own mind, of course, for in +her small circle young unmarried women accepted the major events of life +without question, and certainly without conversation. She never, for +instance, allowed her Uncle James, with whom she lived, to see her +working at the afghan; and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be a +sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee's days, up to the twentieth of December, 1914, had been much +alike. In the mornings she straightened up her room, which she had +copied from one in a woman's magazine, with the result that it gave +somehow the impression of a baby's bassinet, being largely dotted Swiss +and ribbon. Yet in a way it was a perfect setting for Sara Lee herself. +It was fresh and virginal, and very, very neat and white. A resigned +little room, like Sara Lee, resigned to being tucked away in a corner +and to having no particular outlook. Peaceful, too. +</p> +<p> +Sometimes in the morning between straightening her room and going to the +market for Aunt Harriet, Sara Lee looked at a newspaper. So she knew +there was a war. She read the headings, and when the matter came up for +mention at the little afternoon bridge club, as it did now and then after +the prizes were distributed, she always said "Isn't it horrible!" and +changed the subject. +</p> +<p> +On the night of the nineteenth of December Sara Lee had read her chapter +in the Bible—she read it through once each year—and had braided down +her hair, which was as smooth and shining and lovely as Sara Lee herself, +and had raised her window for the night when Aunt Harriet came in. Sara +Lee did not know, at first, that she had a visitor. She stood looking +out toward the east, until Aunt Harriet touched her on the arm. +</p> +<p> +"What in the world!" said Aunt Harriet. "A body would suppose it was +August." +</p> +<p> +"I was just thinking," said Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"You'd better do your thinking in bed. Jump in and I'll put out your +light." +</p> +<p> +So Sara Lee got into her white bed with the dotted Swiss valance, and +drew the covers to her chin, and looked a scant sixteen. Aunt Harriet, +who was an unsentimental woman, childless and diffident, found her +suddenly very appealing there in her smooth bed, and did an unexpected +thing. She kissed her. Then feeling extremely uncomfortable she put +out the light and went to the door. There she paused. +</p> +<p> +"Thinking!" she said. "What about, Sara Lee?" +</p> +<p> +Perhaps it was because the light was out that Sara Lee became articulate. +Perhaps it was because things that had been forming in her young mind for +weeks had at last crystallized into words. Perhaps it was because of a +picture she had happened on that day, of a boy lying wounded somewhere +on a battlefield and calling "Mother!" +</p> +<p> +"About—over there," she said rather hesitatingly. "And about Anna." +</p> +<p> +"Over there?" +</p> +<p> +"The war," said Sara Lee. "I was just thinking about all those women +over there—like Anna, you know. They—they had babies, and got +everything ready for them. And then the babies grew up, and they're all +getting killed." +</p> +<p> +"It's horrible," said Aunt Harriet. "Do you want another blanket? It's +cold to-night." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee did not wish another blanket. +</p> +<p> +"I'm a little worried about your Uncle James," said Aunt Harriet, at the +door. "He's got indigestion. I think I'll make him a mustard plaster." +</p> +<p> +She prepared to go out then, but Sara Lee spoke from her white bed. +</p> +<p> +"Aunt Harriet," she said, "I don't think I'll ever get married." +</p> +<p> +"I said that too, once," said Aunt Harriet complacently. "What's got +into your head now?" +</p> +<p> +"I don't know," Sara Lee replied vaguely. "I just—What's the use?" +</p> +<p> +Aunt Harriet was conscious of a hazy impression of indelicacy. Coming +from Sara Lee it was startling and revolutionary. In Aunt Harriet's +world young women did not question their duty, which was to marry, +preferably some one in the neighborhood, and bear children, who would be +wheeled about that same neighborhood in perambulators and who would +ultimately grow up and look after themselves. +</p> +<p> +"The use?" she asked tartly. +</p> +<p> +"Of having babies, and getting to care about them, and then—There will +always be wars, won't there?" +</p> +<p> +"You turn over and go to sleep," counseled Aunt Harriet. "And stop +looking twenty years or more ahead." She hesitated. "You haven't +quarreled with Harvey, have you?" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee turned over obediently. +</p> +<p> +"No. It's not that," she said. And the door closed. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps, had she ever had time during the crowded months that followed, +Sara Lee would have dated certain things from that cold frosty night in +December when she began to question things. For after all that was what +it came to. She did not revolt. She questioned. +</p> +<p> +She lay in her white bed and looked at things for the first time. The +sky had seemed low that night. Things were nearer. The horizon was +close. And beyond that peaceful horizon, to the east, something was +going on that could not be ignored. Men were dying. Killing and dying. +Men who had been waited for as Anna watched for her child. +</p> +<p> +Downstairs she could hear Aunt Harriet moving about. The street was +quiet, until a crowd of young people—she knew them by their +voices—went by, laughing. +</p> +<p> +"It's horrible," said Sara Lee to herself. There was a change in her, +but she was still inarticulate. Somewhere in her mind, but not +formulated, was the feeling that she was too comfortable. Her peace was +a cheap peace, bought at no price. Her last waking determination was to +finish the afghan quickly and to knit for the men at the war. +</p> +<p> +Uncle James was ill the next morning. Sara Lee went for the doctor, but +Anna's hour had come and he was with her. Late in the afternoon he came, +however looking a bit gray round the mouth with fatigue, but triumphant. +He had on these occasions always a sense of victory; even, in a way, a +feeling of being part of a great purpose. He talked at such times of the +race, as one may who is doing his best by it. +</p> +<p> +"Well," he said when Sara Lee opened the door, "it's a boy. Eight +pounds. Going to be red-headed, too." He chuckled. +</p> +<p> +"A boy!" said Sara Lee. "I—don't you bring any girl babies any more?" +</p> +<p> +The doctor put down his hat and glanced at her. +</p> +<p> +"Wanted a girl, to be named for you?" +</p> +<p> +"No. It's not that. It's only—" She checked herself. He wouldn't +understand. The race required girl babies. "I've put a blue bow on my +afghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs. +</p> +<p> +Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as +Sara Lee's days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it, +ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul—for its bright +curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining brasses and growing +plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to +ache, too, for her friends—their small engrossing cares, their kindly +interest, their familiar faces. +</p> +<p> +Time was to come, too, when she came back, not to the little house, it +is true, but to her friends, to Anna and the others. But they had not +grown and Sara Lee had. And that is the story. +</p> +<p> +Uncle James died the next day. One moment he was there, an uneasy +figure, under the tulip quilt, and the next he had gone away entirely, +leaving a terrible quiet behind him. He had been the center of the +little house, a big and cheery and not over-orderly center. Followed +his going not only quiet, but a wretched tidiness. There was nothing +for Sara Lee to do but to think. +</p> +<p> +And, in the way of mourning women, things that Uncle James had said +which had passed unheeded came back to her. One of them was when he +had proposed to adopt a Belgian child, and Aunt Harriet had offered +horrified protest. +</p> +<p> +"All right," he had said. "Of course, if you feel that way about +it—! But I feel kind of mean, sometimes, sitting here doing nothing +when there's such a lot to be done." +</p> +<p> +Then he had gone for a walk and had come back cheerful enough but rather +quiet. +</p> +<p> +There was that other time, too, when the German Army was hurling itself, +wave after wave, across the Yser—only of course Sara Lee knew nothing +of the Yser then—and when it seemed as though the attenuated Allied +line must surely crack and give. He had said then that if he were only +twenty years younger he would go across and help. +</p> +<p> +"And what about me?" Aunt Harriet had asked. "But I suppose I wouldn't +matter." +</p> +<p> +"You could go to Jennie's, couldn't you?" +</p> +<p> +There had followed one of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt +Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle +James' becoming twenty years younger and going away. +</p> +<p> +And now Uncle James had taken on the wings of the morning and was indeed +gone away. And again it became a question of Jennie's. Aunt Harriet, +rather dazed at first, took to arguing it pro and con. +</p> +<p> +"Of course she has room for me," she would say in her thin voice. +"There's that little room that was Edgar's. There's nobody in it now. +But there's only room for a single bed, Sara Lee." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee was knitting socks now, all a trifle tight as to heel. "I +know," she would say. "I'll get along. Don't you worry about me." +</p> +<p> +Always these talks ended on a note of exasperation for Aunt Harriet. For +Sara Lee's statement that she could manage would draw forth a plaintive +burst from the older woman. +</p> +<p> +"If only you'd marry Harvey," she would say. "I don't know what's come +over you. You used to like him well enough." +</p> +<p> +"I still like him." +</p> +<p> +"I've seen you jump when the telephone bell rang. Your Uncle James often +spoke about it. He noticed more than most people thought." She followed +Sara Lee's eyes down the street to where Anna was wheeling her baby +slowly up and down. Even from that distance Sara Lee could see the bit +of pink which was the bow on her afghan. "I believe you're afraid." +</p> +<p> +"Afraid?" +</p> +<p> +"Of having children," accused Aunt Harriet fretfully. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee colored. +</p> +<p> +"Perhaps I am," she said; "but not the sort of thing you think. I just +don't see the use of it, that's all. Aunt Harriet, how long does it +take to become a hospital nurse?" +</p> +<p> +"Mabel Andrews was three years. It spoiled her looks too. She used to +be a right pretty girl." +</p> +<p> +"Three years," Sara Lee reflected. "By that time—" +</p> +<p> +The house was very quiet and still those days. There was an interlude +of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet +alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things. +At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the +Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading +like wildfire. There were arguments and disagreements. A girl named +Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island +of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval. Mabel Andrews came once +to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross +dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging. Forerunner of the many +first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable +by one thing she said. +</p> +<p> +"You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things," she stated +in her brisk voice. "One of our <i>internes</i> is over there, and he says +we'll be in it before spring." +</p> +<p> +After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm. +</p> +<p> +"Are you going?" she asked. +</p> +<p> +"Leaving day after to-morrow. Why?" +</p> +<p> +"I—couldn't I be useful over there?" +</p> +<p> +Mabel smiled rather grimly. "What can you do?" +</p> +<p> +"I can cook." +</p> +<p> +"Only men cooks, my dear. What else?" +</p> +<p> +"I could clean up, couldn't I? There must be something. I'd do +anything I could. Don't they have people to wash dishes and—all that?" +</p> +<p> +Mabel was on doubtful ground there. She knew of a woman who had been +permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and +buying her own tires and gasoline. +</p> +<p> +"She carries supplies to small hospitals in out-of-the-way places," she +said. "But I don't suppose you can do that, Sara Lee, can you?" +</p> +<p> +However, she gave Sara Lee a New York address, and Sara Lee wrote and +offered herself. She said nothing to Aunt Harriet, who had by that time +elected to take Edgar's room at Cousin Jennie's and was putting Uncle +James' clothes in tearful order to send to Belgium. After a time she +received a reply. +</p> +<p> +"We have put your name on our list of volunteers," said the letter, +"but of course you understand that only trained workers are needed now. +France and England are full of untrained women who are eager to help." +</p> +<p> +It was that night that Sara Lee became engaged to Harvey. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee's attitude toward Harvey was one that she never tried to analyze. +When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This +was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash +about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile, +and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust +forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,—gave him a sort of tense +eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph +Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact he was a bond +salesman. +</p> +<p> +So during the daytime Sara Lee looked—at intervals—at the photograph, +and got that feel of drive and force. And in the evenings Harvey came, +and she lost it. For, outside of a frame, he became a rather sturdy +figure, of no romance, but of a comforting solidity. A kindly young man, +with a rather wide face and hands disfigured as to fingers by much early +baseball. He had heavy shoulders, the sort a girl might rely on to +carry many burdens. A younger and tidier Uncle James, indeed—the same +cheery manner, the same robust integrity, and the same small ambition. +</p> +<p> +To earn enough to keep those dependent on him, and to do it fairly; +to tell the truth and wear clean linen and not run into debt; and to +marry Sara Lee and love and cherish her all his life—this was Harvey. +A plain and likable man, a lover and husband to be sure of. But— +</p> +<p> +He came that night to see Sara Lee. There was nothing unusual about +that. He came every night. But he came that night full of determination. +That was not unusual, either, but it had not carried him far. He had no +idea that his picture was romantic. He would have demanded it back had +he so much as suspected it. He wore his hair in a pompadour because +of the prosaic fact that he had a cow-lick. He was very humble about +himself, and Sara Lee was to him as wonderful as his picture was to her. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee was in the parlor, waiting for him. The one electric lamp was +lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of +reflected light. There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a +white fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The +Encyclopaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the +wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by +the fire. It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as +no doubt Harvey would picture for his own home. He had of course never +seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him. When he had taken off his +ulster and his overshoes—he had been raised by women—and came in, +she was standing by the fire. +</p> +<p> +"Raining," he said. "It's getting colder. May be snow before morning." +</p> +<p> +Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat. +She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her +quietest moments there was that about her—a sort of repressed +eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that +there were times when she had a "flighty" look. +</p> +<p> +And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped +Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his +arms out. +</p> +<p> +"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!" +</p> +<p> +"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically. +</p> +<p> +"I don't know," he muttered. "You—sometimes you look as though—" +Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good +to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek +against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear." +</p> +<p> +A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has +stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel. He +was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures flashed through +her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One was of +Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby. +The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield +and crying "Mother!" +</p> +<p> +Two sorts of maternity—one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, +but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other +vicarious, of all the world. +</p> +<p> +"Don't you love me—that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers. +</p> +<p> +"I don't know." +</p> +<p> +"You don't know!" +</p> +<p> +It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing +at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up, +saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust +forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair +that marked him all man, and virile man. +</p> +<p> +She slipped her hand into his. +</p> +<p> +"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the +complete surrender of a child. +</p> +<p> +He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where +she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his +simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear, +and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion +he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he +read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers. +</p> +<p> +To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's +devotion was something more, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara +Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit, +small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she +was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes, +she had never even dreamed. +</p> +<p> +Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and +behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing, +unsuspected, the <i>mise en scène</i>. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0003" id="h2H_4_0003"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + II +</h2> +<p> +About the middle of January Mabel Andrews wrote to Sara Lee from +France, where she was already installed in a hospital at Calais. +</p> +<p> +The evening before the letter came Harvey had brought round the +engagement ring. He had made a little money in war stocks, and into +the ring he had put every dollar of his profits—and a great love, and +gentleness, and hopes which he did not formulate even to himself. +</p> +<p> +It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger, +than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious +glances for months. +</p> +<p> +"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee looked at it on her finger. +</p> +<p> +"It is lovely! It—it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his +shoulder. +</p> +<p> +Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews, and +he had a tendency to restrict his war reading to the quarter column in +the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News." +</p> +<p> +What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry? Which +is what Mabel wrote about. +</p> +<p> +"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and +something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but +just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty +of it. But here—yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy. +He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or +coffee." +</p> +<p> +It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a +long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust +out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no +<i>matériel</i> of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army. France had +her own problems—her army, non-productive industrially, and the great +and constantly growing British forces quartered there, paying for what +they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of the starvation of +German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know and may never know is of +the struggle during those early days to feed the heroic Belgian Army in +their wet and almost untenable trenches. +</p> +<p> +Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained +to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing? +Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew +that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny +living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as pointed +with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over there +Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and—put on her engagement ring. +</p> +<p> +Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned adoringly +to her, Sara Lee formulated a question: +</p> +<p> +"Don't you sometimes feel as though you'd like to go to France and fight?" +</p> +<p> +"What for?" +</p> +<p> +"Well, they need men, don't they?" +</p> +<p> +"I guess they don't need me, honey. I'd be the dickens of a lot of use! +Never fired a gun in my life." +</p> +<p> +"You could learn. It isn't hard." +</p> +<p> +Harvey sat upright and stared at her. +</p> +<p> +"Oh, if you want me to go—" he said, and waited. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger. +</p> +<p> +"Nobody wants anybody to go," she said not very elegantly. "I'd +just—I'd rather like to think you wanted to go." +</p> +<p> +That was almost too subtle for Harvey. Something about him was rather +reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was determined not to +go to church. +</p> +<p> +"It's not our fight," he said. "And as far as that goes, I'm not so +sure there isn't right on both sides. Or wrong. Most likely wrong. +I'd look fine going over there to help the Allies, and then making up my +mind it was the British who'd spilled the beans. Now let's talk about +something interesting—for instance, how much we love each other." +</p> +<p> +It was always "we" with Harvey. In his simple creed if a girl accepted +a man and let him kiss her and wore his ring it was a reciprocal love +affair. It never occurred to him that sometimes as the evening dragged +toward a close Sara Lee was just a bit weary of his arms, and that she +sought, after he had gone, the haven of her little white room, and closed +the door, and had to look rather a long time at his photograph before +she was in a properly loving mood again. +</p> +<p> +But that night after his prolonged leave-taking Sara Lee went upstairs +to her room and faced the situation. +</p> +<p> +She was going to marry Harvey. She was committed to that. And she loved +him; not as he cared, perhaps, but he was a very definite part of her +life. Once or twice when he had been detained by business she had missed +him, had put in a lonely and most unhappy evening. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had known comparatively few men. In that small and simple +circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two +inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the +usual give and take of more sophisticated circles. Boys and girls paired +off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was +comparatively little shifting. There were few free lances among the men, +and none among the girls. When she was seventeen Harvey had made it +known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing. And for +two years he had without intentional selfishness kept Sara Lee for +himself. +</p> +<p> +That was how matters stood that January night when Sara Lee went +upstairs after Harvey had gone and read Mabel's letter, with Harvey's +photograph turned to the wall. Under her calm exterior a little flame +of rebellion was burning in her. Harvey's perpetual "we," his attitude +toward the war, and Mabel's letter, with what it opened before her, had +set the match to something in Sara Lee she did not recognize—a strain +of the adventurer, a throw-back to some wandering ancestor perhaps. But +more than anything it had set fire to the something maternal that is in +all good women. +</p> +<p> +Yet, had Aunt Harriet not come in just then, the flame might have died. +And had it died a certain small page of the history of this war would +never have been written. +</p> +<p> +Aunt Harriet came in hesitatingly. She wore a black wrapper, and her +face, with her hair drawn back for the night, looked tight and old. +</p> +<p> +"Harvey gone?" she asked. +</p> +<p> +"Yes." +</p> +<p> +"I thought I'd better come in. There's something—I can tell you in +the morning if you're tired." +</p> +<p> +"I'm not tired," said Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +Aunt Harriet sat down miserably on a chair. +</p> +<p> +"I've had a letter from Jennie," she stated. "The girl's gone, and the +children have whooping cough. She'd like me to come right away." +</p> +<p> +"To do the maid's work!" said Sara Lee indignantly. "You mustn't do it, +that's all! She can get somebody." +</p> +<p> +But Aunt Harriet was firm. She was not a fair-weather friend, and since +Jennie was good enough to offer her a home she felt she ought to go at +once. +</p> +<p> +"You'll have to get married right away," she finished. "Goodness knows +it's time enough! For two years Harvey has been barking like a watchdog +in front of the house and keeping every other young man away." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee smiled. +</p> +<p> +"He's only been lying on the doormat, Aunt Harriet," she observed. "I +don't believe he knows how to bark." +</p> +<p> +"Oh, he's mild enough. He may change after marriage. Some do. But," +she added hastily, "he'll be a good husband. He's that sort." +</p> +<p> +Suddenly something that had been taking shape in Sara Lee's small head, +quite unknown to her, developed identity and speech. +</p> +<p> +"But I'm not going to marry him just yet," she said. +</p> +<p> +Aunt Harriet's eyes fell on the photograph with its face to the wall, +and she started. +</p> +<p> +"You haven't quarreled with him, have you?" +</p> +<p> +"No, of course not! I have something else I want to do first. That's +all. Aunt Harriet, I want to go to France." +</p> +<p> +Aunt Harriet began to tremble, and Sara Lee went over and put her young +arms about her. +</p> +<p> +"Don't look like that," she said. "It's only for a little while. I've +got to go. I just have to, that's all!" +</p> +<p> +"Go how?" demanded Aunt Harriet. +</p> +<p> +"I don't know. I'll find some way. I've had a letter from Mabel. +Things are awful over there." +</p> +<p> +"And how will you help them?" Her face worked nervously. "Is it going +to help for you to be shot? Or carried off by the Germans?" The +atrocity stories were all that Aunt Harriet knew of the war, and all +she could think of now. "You'll come back with your hands cut off." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee straightened and looked out where between the white curtains +the spire of the Methodist Church marked the east. +</p> +<p> +"I'm going," she said. And she stood there, already poised for flight. +</p> +<p> +There was no sleep in the little house that night. Sara Lee could hear +the older woman moving about in her lonely bed, where the spring still +sagged from Uncle James' heavy form, and at last she went in and crept +in beside her. Toward morning Aunt Harriet slept, with the girl's arm +across her; and then Sara Lee went back to her room and tried to plan. +</p> +<p> +She had a little money, and she had heard that living was cheap abroad. +She could get across then, and perhaps keep herself. But she must do +more than that, to justify her going. She must get money, and then +decide how the money was to be spent. If she could only talk it over +with Uncle James! Or, with Harvey. Harvey knew about business and money. +</p> +<p> +But she dared not go to Harvey. She was terribly frightened when she +even thought of him. There was no hope of making him understand; and +no chance of reasoning with him, because, to be frank, she had no +reasons. She had only instinct—instinct and a great tenderness toward +suffering. No, obviously Harvey must not know until everything was +arranged. +</p> +<p> +That morning the Methodist Church packed a barrel for the Belgians. +There was a real rite of placing in it Mrs. Augustus Gregory's old +sealskin coat, now a light brown and badly worn, but for years the only +one in the neighborhood. Various familiar articles appeared, to be +thrust into darkness, only to emerge in surroundings never dreamed of +in their better days—the little Howard boy's first trouser suit; the +clothing of a baby that had never lived; big Joe Hemmingway's dress suit, +the one he was married in and now too small for him. And here and there +things that could ill be spared, brought in and offered with resolute +cheerfulness. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee brought some of Uncle James' things, and was at once set to +work. The women there called Sara Lee capable, but it was to take other +surroundings to bring out her real efficiency. +</p> +<p> +And it was when bending over a barrel, while round her went on that +pitying talk of women about a great calamity, that Sara Lee got her +great idea; and later on she made the only speech of her life. +</p> +<p> +That evening Harvey went home in a quiet glow of happiness. He had had +a good day. And he had heard of a little house that would exactly suit +Sara Lee and him. He did not notice his sister's silence when he spoke +about it. He was absorbed, manlike, in his plans. +</p> +<p> +"The Leete house," he said in answer to her perfunctory question. "Will +Leete has lost his mind and volunteered for the ambulance service in +France. Mrs. Leete is going to her mother's." +</p> +<p> +"Maybe he feels it's his duty. He can drive a car, and they have no +children." +</p> +<p> +"Duty nothing!" He seemed almost unduly irritated. "He's tired of the +commission business, that's all. Y'ought to have heard the fellows in +the office. Anyhow, they want to sub-let the house, and I'm going to +take Sara Lee there to-night." +</p> +<p> +His sister looked at him, and there was in her face something of the +expression of the women that day as they packed the barrel. But she +said nothing until he was leaving the house that night. Then she put +a hand on his arm. She was a weary little woman, older than Harvey, +and tired with many children. She had been gathering up small overshoes +in the hall and he had stopped to help her. +</p> +<p> +"You know, Harvey, Sara Lee's not—I always think she's different, +somehow." +</p> +<p> +"Well, I guess yes! There's nobody like her." +</p> +<p> +"You can't bully her, you know." +</p> +<p> +Harvey stared at her with honestly perplexed eyes. +</p> +<p> +"Bully!" he said. "What on earth makes you say that?" +</p> +<p> +Then he laughed. +</p> +<p> +"Don't you worry, Belle," he said. "I know I'm a fierce and domineering +person, but if there's any bullying I know who'll do it." +</p> +<p> +"She's not like the other girls you know," she reiterated rather +helplessly. +</p> +<p> +"Sure she's not! But she's enough like them to need a house to live in. +And if she isn't crazy about the Leete place I'll eat it." +</p> +<p> +He banged out cheerfully, whistling as he went down the street. He +stopped whistling, however, at Sara Lee's door. The neighborhood +preserved certain traditions as to a house of mourning. It lowered +its voice in passing and made its calls of condolence in dark clothes +and a general air of gloom. Pianos near by were played only with the +windows closed, and even the milkman leaving his bottles walked on +tiptoe and presented his monthly bill solemnly. +</p> +<p> +So Harvey stopped whistling, rang the bell apologetically, and—faced a +new and vivid Sara Lee, flushed and with shining eyes, but woefully +frightened. +</p> +<p> +She told him almost at once. He had only reached the dining room of +the Leete house, which he was explaining had a white wainscoting when +she interrupted him. The ladies of the Methodist Church were going to +collect a certain amount each month to support a soup kitchen as near +the Front as possible. +</p> +<p> +"Good work!" said Harvey heartily. "I suppose they do get hungry, poor +devils. Now about the dining room—" +</p> +<p> +"Harvey dear," Sara Lee broke in, "I've not finished. I—I'm going +over to run it." +</p> +<p> +"You are not!" +</p> +<p> +"But I am! It's all arranged. It's my plan. They've all wanted to do +something besides giving clothes. They send barrels, and they never hear +from them again, and it's hard to keep interested. But with me there, +writing home and telling them, 'To-day we served soup to this man, and +that man, perhaps wounded.' And—and that sort of thing—don't you see +how interested every one will be? Mrs. Gregory has promised twenty-five +dollars a month, and—" +</p> +<p> +"You're not going," said Harvey in a flat tone. "That's all. Don't +talk to me about it." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee flushed deeper and started again, but rather hopelessly. +There was no converting a man who would not argue or reason, who based +everything on flat refusal. +</p> +<p> +"But somebody must go," she said with a tightening of her voice. +"Here's Mabel Andrews' letter. Read it and you will understand." +</p> +<p> +"I don't want to read it." +</p> +<p> +Nevertheless he took it and read it. He read slowly. He did nothing +quickly except assert his masculine domination. He had all the faults +of his virtues; he was as slow as he was sure, as unimaginative as he +was faithful. +</p> +<p> +He read it and gave it back to her. +</p> +<p> +"I don't think you mean it," he said. "I give you credit for too much +sense. Maybe some one is needed over there. I guess things are pretty +bad. But why should you make it your affair? There are about a million +women in this country that haven't got anything else to do. Let them go." +</p> +<p> +"Some of them will. But they're afraid, mostly." +</p> +<p> +"Afraid! My God, I should think they would be afraid! And you're asking +me to let you go into danger, to put off our wedding while you wander +about over there with a million men and no women and—" +</p> +<p> +"You're wrong, Harvey dear," said Sara Lee in a low voice. "I am not +asking you at all. I am telling you that I am going." +</p> +<hr /> +<p> +Sara Lee's leaving made an enormous stir in her small community. Opinion +was divided. She was right according to some; she was mad according to +others. The women of the Methodist Church, finding a real field of +activity, stood behind her solidly. Guaranties of funds came in in a +steady flow, though the amounts were small; and, on the word going about +that she was to start a soup kitchen for the wounded, housewives sent +in directions for making their most cherished soups. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee, going to a land where the meat was mostly horse and where +vegetables were scarce and limited to potatoes, Brussels sprouts and +cabbage, found herself the possessor of recipes for making such sick-room +dainties as mushroom soup, cream of asparagus, clam broth with whipped +cream, and from Mrs. Gregory, the wealthy woman of the church—green +turtle and consomme. +</p> +<p> +She was very busy and rather sad. She was helping Aunt Harriet to close +the house and getting her small wardrobe in order. And once a day she +went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a fierce and +kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes like this: <i>Le +livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenêtre</i>, and so on. By the end of ten +days she could say: "<i>La rose sent-elle bon?</i>" +</p> +<p> +Considering that Harvey came every night and ran the gamut of the +emotions, from pleading and expostulation at eight o'clock to black +fury at ten, when he banged out of the house, Sara Lee was amazingly +calm. If she had moments of weakness, when the call from overseas was +less insistent than the call for peace and protection—if the nightly +drawn picture of the Leete house, with tile mantels and a white bathroom, +sometimes obtruded itself as against her approaching homelessness, Sara +Lee made no sign. +</p> +<p> +She had her photograph taken for her passport, and when Harvey refused +one she sent it to him by mail, with the word "Please" in the corner. +Harvey groaned over it, and got it out at night and scolded it wildly; +and then slept with it under his pillows, when he slept at all. +</p> +<p> +Not Sara Lee, and certainly not Harvey, knew what was calling her. And +even later, when waves of homesickness racked her with wild remorse, she +knew that she had had to go and that she could not return until she had +done the thing for which she had been sent, whatever that might be. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0004" id="h2H_4_0004"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + III +</h2> +<p> +The first thing that struck Sara Lee was the way she was saying her +nightly prayers in all sorts of odd places. In trains and in hotels and, +after sufficient interval, in the steamer. She prayed under these novel +circumstances to be made a better girl, and to do a lot of good over +there, and to be forgiven for hurting Harvey. She did this every night, +and then got into her narrow bed and studied French nouns—because she +had decided that there was no time for verbs—and numbers, which put +her to sleep. +</p> +<p> +"Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq," Sara Lee would begin, and go on, rocking +gently in her berth as the steamer rolled, "Vingt, vingt-et-un, +vingt-deux, trente, trente-et-un—" Her voice would die away. The +book on the floor and Harvey's picture on the tiny table, Sara Lee would +sleep. And as the ship trembled the light over her head would shine on +Harvey's ring, and it glistened like a tear. +</p> +<p> +One thing surprised her as she gradually met some of her fellow +passengers. She was not alone on her errand. Others there were on +board, young and old women, and men, too, who had felt the call of mercy +and were going, as ignorant as she, to help. As ignorant, but not so +friendless. Most of them were accredited somewhere. They had definite +objectives. But what was more alarming—they talked in big figures. +Great organizations were behind them. She heard of the rehabilitation +of Belgium, and portable hospitals, and millions of dollars, and Red +Cross trains. +</p> +<p> +Not once did Sara Lee hear of anything so humble as a soup kitchen. The +war was a vast thing, they would observe. It could only be touched by +great organizations. Individual effort was negligible. +</p> +<p> +Once she took her courage in her hands. +</p> +<p> +"But I should think," she said, "that even great organizations depend on +the—on individual efforts." +</p> +<p> +The portable hospital woman turned to her patronizingly. +</p> +<p> +"Certainly, my dear," she said. "But coördinated—coördinated." +</p> +<p> +It is hard to say just when the lights went down on Sara Lee's quiet +stage and the interlude began. Not on the steamer, for after three days +of discouragement and good weather they struck a storm; and Sara Lee's +fine frenzy died for a time, of nausea. She did not appear again until +the boat entered the Mersey, a pale and shaken angel of mercy, not at +all sure of her wings, and most terribly homesick. +</p> +<p> +That night Sara Lee made a friend, one that Harvey would have approved +of, an elderly Englishman named Travers. He was standing by the rail +in the rain looking out at the blinking signal lights on both sides of +the river. The ship for the first time had abandoned its policy of +darkness and the decks were bathed in light. +</p> +<p> +Overhead the yardarm blinkers were signaling, and directly over Sara +Lee's head a great white searchlight swept the water ahead. The wind +was blowing a gale, and the red and green lights of the pilot boat swung +in great arcs that seemed to touch the waves on either side. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee stood beside Mr. Travers, for companionship only. He had +preserved a typically British aloofness during the voyage, and he had +never spoken to her. But there was something forlorn in Sara Lee that +night as she clutched her hat with both hands and stared out at the +shore lights. And if he had been silent during the voyage he had not +been deaf. So he knew why almost every woman on the ship was making +the voyage; but he knew nothing about Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"Bad night," said Mr. Travers. +</p> +<p> +"I was wondering what they are trying to do with that little boat." +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers concealed the surprise of a man who was making his +seventy-second voyage. +</p> +<p> +"That's the pilot boat," he explained. "We are picking up a pilot." +</p> +<p> +"But," marveled Sara Lee rather breathlessly, "have we come all the way +without any pilot?" +</p> +<p> +He explained that to her, and showed her a few moments later how the +pilot came with incredible rapidity up the swaying rope ladder and over +the side. +</p> +<p> +To be honest, he had been watching for the pilot boat, not to see what +to Sara Lee was the thrilling progress of the pilot up the ladder, but +to get the newspapers he would bring on with him. It is perhaps +explanatory of the way things went for Sara Lee from that time on that +he quite forgot his newspapers. +</p> +<p> +The chairs were gone from the decks, preparatory to the morning landing, +so they walked about and Sara Lee at last told him her story—the +ladies of the Methodist Church, and the one hundred dollars a month she +was to have, outside of her traveling expenses, to found and keep going +a soup kitchen behind the lines. +</p> +<p> +"A hundred dollars a month," he said. "That's twenty pounds. Humph! +Good God!" +</p> +<p> +But this last was under his breath. +</p> +<p> +Then she told him of Mabel Andrews' letter, and at last read it to him. +He listened attentively. "Of course," she said when she had put the +letter back into her bag, "I can't feed a lot, even with soup. But if I +only help a few, it's worth doing, isn't it?" +</p> +<p> +"Very much worth doing," he said gravely. "I suppose you are not, by +any chance, going to write a weekly article for one of your newspapers +about what you are doing?" +</p> +<p> +"I hadn't thought of it. Do you think I should?" +</p> +<p> +Quite unexpectedly Mr. Travers patted her shoulder. +</p> +<p> +"My dear child," he said, "now and then I find somebody who helps to +revive my faith in human nature. Thank you." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee did not understand. The touch on the shoulder had made her +think suddenly of Uncle James, and her chin quivered. +</p> +<p> +"I'm just a little frightened," she said in a small voice. +</p> +<p> +"Twenty pounds!" repeated Mr. Travers to himself. "Twenty pounds!" +And aloud: "Of course you speak French?" +</p> +<p> +"Very little. I've had six lessons, and I can count—some." +</p> +<p> +The sense of unreality which the twenty pounds had roused in Mr. Travers' +cautious British mind grew. No money, no French, no objective, just a +great human desire to be useful in her own small way—this was a new type +to him. What a sporting chance this frail bit of a girl was taking! And +he noticed now something that had escaped him before—a dauntlessness, +a courage of the spirit rather than of the body, that was in the very +poise of her head. +</p> +<p> +"I'm not afraid about the language," she was saying. "I have a phrase +book. And a hungry man, maybe sick or wounded, can understand a bowl of +soup in any language, I should think. And I can cook!" +</p> +<p> +It was a perplexed and thoughtful Mr. Travers who sipped his +Scotch-and-soda in the smoking room before retiring, he took the problem +to bed with him and woke up in the night saying: "Twenty pounds! +Good God!" +</p> +<p> +In the morning they left the ship. He found Sara Lee among the K's, +waiting to have her passport examined, and asked her where she was +stopping in London. She had read somewhere of Claridge's—in a novel +probably. +</p> +<p> +"I shouldn't advise Claridge's," he said, reflecting rather grimly on +the charges of that very exclusive hotel. "Suppose you let me make a +suggestion." +</p> +<p> +So he wrote out the name of a fine old English house on Trafalgar +Square, where she could stay until she went to France. There would be +the matter of a passport to cross the Channel. It might take a day or +two. Perhaps he could help her. He would give himself the pleasure of +calling on her very soon. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee got on the train and rode up to London. She said to herself +over and over: "This is England. I am really in England." But it did +not remove the sense of unreality. Even the English grass, bright green +in midwinter, only added to the sense of unreality. +</p> +<p> +She tried, sitting in the strange train with its small compartments, to +think of Harvey. She looked at her ring and tried to recall some of +the tender things he had said to her. But Harvey eluded her. She could +not hear his voice. And when she tried to see him it was Harvey of the +wide face and the angry eyes of the last days that she saw. +</p> +<p> +Morley's comforted her. The man at the door had been there for forty +years, and was beyond surprise. He had her story in twenty-four hours, +and in forty-eight he was her slave. The elderly chambermaid mothered +her, and failed to report that Sara Lee was doing a small washing in +her room and had pasted handkerchiefs over the ancient walnut of her +wardrobe. +</p> +<p> +"Going over, are you?" she said. "Dear me, what courage you've got, +miss! They tell me things is horrible over there." +</p> +<p> +"That's why I'm going," replied Sara Lee, and insisted on helping to +make up the bed. +</p> +<p> +"It's easier when two do it," she said casually. +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers put in a fretful twenty-four hours before he came to see her. +He lunched at Brooks', and astounded an elderly member of the House by +putting her problem to him. +</p> +<p> +"A young girl!" exclaimed the M. P. "Why, deuce take it, it's no place +for a young girl." +</p> +<p> +"An American," explained Mr. Travers uncomfortably. "She's perfectly +able to look after herself." +</p> +<p> +"Probably a correspondent in disguise. They'll go to any lengths." +</p> +<p> +"She's not a correspondent." +</p> +<p> +"Let her stay in Boulogne. There's work there in the hospitals." +</p> +<p> +"She's not a nurse. She's a—well, she's a cook. Or so she says." +</p> +<p> +The M. P. stared at Mr. Travers, and Mr. Travers stared back defiantly. +</p> +<p> +"What in the name of God is she going to cook?" +</p> +<p> +"Soup," said Mr. Travers in a voice of suppressed irritation. "She's +got a little money, and she wants to establish a soup kitchen behind +the Belgian trenches on a line of communication. I suppose," he +continued angrily, "even you will admit that the Belgian Army needs all +the soup it can get." +</p> +<p> +"I don't approve of women near the lines." +</p> +<p> +"Neither do I. But I'm exceedingly glad that a few of them have the +courage to go there." +</p> +<p> +"What's she going to make soup out of?" +</p> +<p> +"I'm not a cooking expert. But I know her and I fancy she'll manage." +</p> +<p> +It ended by the M. P. agreeing to use his influence with the War Office +to get Sara Lee to France. He was very unwilling. The spy question was +looming large those days. Even the Red Cross had unwittingly spread its +protection over more than one German agent. The lines were being +drawn in. +</p> +<p> +"I may possibly get her to France. I don't know, of course," he said in +that ungracious tone in which an Englishman often grants a favor which +he will go to any amount of trouble to do. "After that it's up to her." +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers reflected rather grimly that after that it was apparently up +to him. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee sat in her room at Morley's Hotel and looked out at the life of +London—policemen with chin straps; schoolboys in high silk hats and +Eton suits, the hats generally in disreputable condition; clerks dressed +as men at home dressed for Easter Sunday church; and men in uniforms. +Only a fair sprinkling of these last, in those early days. On the first +afternoon there was a military funeral. A regiment of Scots, in kilts, +came swinging down from the church of St. Martin in the Fields, tall and +wonderful men, grave and very sad. Behind them, on a gun carriage, was +the body of their officer, with the British flag over the casket and his +sword and cap on the top. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee cried bitterly. It was not until they had gone that she +remembered that Harvey had always called the Scots men in women's +petticoats. She felt a thrill of shame for him, and no amount of +looking at his picture seemed to help. +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers called the second afternoon and was received by August at +the door as an old friend. +</p> +<p> +"She's waiting in there," he said. "Very nice young lady, sir. Very +kind to everybody." +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers found her by a window looking out. There was a recruiting +meeting going on in Trafalgar Square, the speakers standing on the +monument. Now and then there was a cheer, and some young fellow +sheepishly offered himself. Sara Lee was having a mad desire to go +over and offer herself too. Because, she reflected, she had been in +London almost two days, and she was as far from France as ever. Not +knowing, of course, that three months was a fair time for the slow +methods then in vogue. +</p> +<p> +There was a young man in the room, but Sara Lee had not noticed him. +He was a tall, very blond young man, in a dark-blue Belgian uniform with +a quaint cap which allowed a gilt tassel to drop over his forehead. He +sat on a sofa, curling up the ends of a very small mustache, his legs, +in cavalry boots, crossed and extending a surprising distance beyond +the sofa. +</p> +<p> +The lights were up now, beyond the back drop, the stage darkened. A +new scene with a vengeance, a scene laid in strange surroundings, with +men, whole men and wounded men and spying men—and Sara Lee and this +young Belgian, whose name was Henri and whose other name, because of +what he suffered and what he did, we may not know. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0005" id="h2H_4_0005"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + IV +</h2> +<p> +Henri sat on his sofa and watched Sara Lee. Also he shamelessly listened +to the conversation, not because he meant to be an eavesdropper but +because he liked Sara Lee's voice. He had expected a highly inflected +British voice, and instead here was something entirely different—that +is, Sara Lee's endeavor to reconcile the English "a" with her normal +western Pennsylvania pronunciation. She did it quite unintentionally, +but she had a good ear and it was difficult, for instance, to say +"rather" when Mr. Travers said "rawther." +</p> +<p> +Henri had a good ear too. And the man he was waiting for did not come. +Also he had been to school in England and spoke English rather better +than most British. So he heard a conversation like this, the gaps being +what he lost: +</p> +<p> +MR. TRAVERS: —— to France, anyhow. After that —— +</p> +<p> +SARA LEE: Awfully sorry to be —— But what shall I do if I do get over? +The chambermaid up-stairs —— very difficult. +</p> +<p> +MR. TRAVERS: The proper and sensible thing is —— home. +</p> +<p> +SARA LEE: To America? But I haven't done anything yet. +</p> +<p> +Henri knew that she was an American. He also realized that she was on +the verge of tears. He glared at poor Mr. Travers, who was doing his +best, and lighted a French cigarette. +</p> +<p> +"There must be some way," said Sara Lee. "If they need help—and I +have read you Mabel Andrews' letter—then I should think they'd be +glad to send me." +</p> +<p> +"They would be, of course," he said. "But the fact is—there's been +some trouble about spies, and—" +</p> +<p> +Henri's eyes narrowed. +</p> +<p> +"Spies! And they think I'm a spy?" +</p> +<p> +"My dear child," remonstrated Mr. Travers, slightly exasperated, +"they're not thinking about you at all. The War Office has never heard +of you. It's a general rule." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee was not placated. +</p> +<p> +"Let them cable home and find out about me. I can give them references. +Why, all sorts of prominent people are sending me money. They must +trust me, or they wouldn't." +</p> +<p> +There were no gaps for Henri now. Sara Lee did not care who heard her, +and even Mr. Travers had slightly raised his voice. Henri was divided +between a conviction that he ought to go away and a mad desire to join +in the conversation, greatly augmented when Sara Lee went to the window +and wiped her eyes. +</p> +<p> +"If you only spoke French—" began Mr. Travers. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee looked over her shoulder. "But of course I do!" she said. +"And German and—and Yiddish, and all sorts of languages. Every spy +does." +</p> +<p> +Henri smiled appreciatively. +</p> +<p> +It might all have ended there very easily. Sara Lee might have fought +the War Office single-handed and won out, but it is extremely unlikely. +The chances at that moment were that she would spend endless days and +hours in anterooms, and tell her story and make her plea a hundred times. +And then—go back home to Harvey and the Leete house, and after a time, +like Mrs. Gregory, speak rather too often of "the time I went abroad." +</p> +<p> +But Sara Lee was to go to France, and even further, to the fragment of +unconquered Belgium that remained. And never so long as she lived, would +she be able to forget those days or to speak of them easily. So she +stood by the window trying not to cry, and a little donkey drawing a +coster's cart moved out in front of the traffic and was caught by a motor +bus. There was only time for the picture—the tiny beast lying there +and her owner wringing his hands. Such of the traffic as could get by +swerved and went on. London must move, though a thousand willing little +beasts lay dying. +</p> +<p> +And Sara moved too. One moment she was there by the window. And the +next she had given a stifled cry and ran out. +</p> +<p> +"Bless my soul!" said Mr. Travers, and got up slowly. +</p> +<p> +Henri was already up and at the window. What he saw was Sara Lee making +her way through the stream of vehicles, taking a dozen chances for her +life. Henri waited until he saw her crouched by the donkey, its head +on her knee. Then he, too, ran out. +</p> +<p> +That is how Henri, of no other name that may be given, met Sara Lee +Kennedy, of Pennsylvania—under a London motor bus. And that, I think, +will be the picture he carries of her until he dies, her soft eyes full +of pity, utterly regardless of the dirt and the crowd and an +expostulating bobby, with that grotesque and agonized head on her knees. +</p> +<p> +Henri crawled under the bus, though the policeman was extremely anxious +to keep him out. And he ran a practiced eye over the injured donkey. +</p> +<p> +"It's dying," said Sara Lee with white lips. +</p> +<p> +"It will die," replied Henri, "but how soon? They are very strong, +these little beasts." +</p> +<p> +The conductor of the bus made a suggestion then, one that froze the +blood round Sara Lee's heart: "If you'll move away and let us run over +it proper it'll be out of its trouble, miss." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to Henri. +</p> +<p> +"Did you hear that?" she said. "They'd do it too!" +</p> +<p> +The total result of a conference between four policemen, the costermonger, +and, by that time, Mr. Travers—was to draw the animal off the street +and into the square. Sara Lee stuck close by. So, naturally, did +Henri. And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she +was named, became increasingly evident, Henri behaved like a man and a +soldier. +</p> +<p> +He got out his revolver and shot her in the brain. +</p> +<p> +"A kindness," he explained, as Sara Lee would have caught his hand. +"The only way, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers had the usual British hatred of a crowd and publicity, +coupled with a deadly fear of getting into the papers, except through +an occasional letter to the <i>Times</i>. He vanished just before the shot, +and might have been seen moving rapidly through the square, turning +over in his mind the difficulty of trying to treat young American girls +like rational human beings. +</p> +<p> +But Henri understood. He had had a French mother, and there is a leaven +of French blood in the American temperament, old Huguenot, some of it. +So Americans love beauty and obey their impulses and find life good to +do things rather than to be something or other more or less important. +And so Henri could quite understand how Sara Lee had forgotten herself +when Mr. Travers could not. And he understood, also, when Sara Lee, +having composed the little donkey's quiet figure, straightened up with +tears in her eyes. +</p> +<p> +"It was very dear of you to come out," she said. "And—of course it was +the best thing." +</p> +<p> +She held out her hand. The crowd had gone. Traffic was moving again, +racing to make up for five lost precious moments. The square was dark, +that first darkness of London, when air raids were threatened but had +not yet taken place. From the top of the Admiralty, near by, a +flashlight shot up into the air and began its nightly process of brushing +the sky. Henri took her hand and bent over it. +</p> +<p> +"You are very brave, mademoiselle," he said, and touched her hand with +his lips. +</p> +<p> +The amazing interlude had commenced. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0006" id="h2H_4_0006"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + V +</h2> +<p> +Yet for a day or two nothing much was changed. Mr. Travers sent Sara +Lee a note that he was taking up her problem with the Foreign Office; +and he did indeed make an attempt. He also requested his wife to ask +Sara Lee to tea. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee was extremely nervous on the day she went. She wore a black +jacket suit with a white collar, and she carried Aunt Harriet's mink +furs, Aunt Harriet mourning thoroughly and completely in black astrachan. +She had the faculty of the young American girl of looking smart without +much expense, and she appeared absurdly young. +</p> +<p> +She followed the neat maid up a wide staircase to a door with a screen +just inside, and heard her name announced for the first time in her life. +Sara Lee took a long breath and went inside, to a most discouraging half +hour. +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers was on the hearth rug. Mrs. Travers was in a chair, a portly +woman with a not unkindly face, but the brusque manner many Englishwomen +acquire after forty. She held Sara Lee's hand and gave her a complete +if smiling inspection. +</p> +<p> +"And it is you who are moving heaven and earth to get to the Front! +You—child!" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee's heart fell, but she smiled also. +</p> +<p> +"But I am older than I look," she said. "And I am very strong." +</p> +<p> +Mrs. Travers looked helplessly at her husband, while she rang the bell +for tea. That was another thing Sara Lee had read about but never +seen—that ringing for tea. At home no one served afternoon tea; but +at a party, when refreshments were coming, the hostess slipped out to +the kitchen and gave a whispered order or two. +</p> +<p> +"I shall be frank with you," said Mrs. Travers. "I think it quite +impossible. It is not getting you over. That might be done. And of +course there are women over there—young ones too. But the army +objects very seriously to their being in danger. And of course one +never knows—" Her voice trailed off vaguely. She implied, however, +that what one never knows was best unknown. +</p> +<p> +"I have a niece over there," she said as the tea tray came in. "Her +mother was fool enough to let her go. Now they can't get her back." +</p> +<p> +"Oh, dear!" said Sara Lee. "Can't they find her?" +</p> +<p> +"She won't come. Little idiot! She's in Paris, however. I daresay +she is safe enough." +</p> +<p> +Mrs. Travers made the tea thoughtfully. So far Mr. Travers had hardly +spoken, but he cheered in true British fashion at the sight of the tea. +Sara Lee, exceedingly curious as to the purpose of a very small stand +somewhat resembling a piano stool, which the maid had placed at her knee, +learned that it was to hold her muffin plate. +</p> +<p> +"And now," said Mr. Travers, "suppose we come to the point. There +doesn't seem to be a chance to get you over, my child. Same answer +everywhere. Place is full of untrained women. Spies have been using +Red Cross passes. Result is that all the lines are drawn as tight as +possible." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee stared at him with wide eyes. +</p> +<p> +"But I can't go back," she said. "I—well, I just can't. They're +raising the money for me, and all sorts of people are giving things. +A—a friend of mine is baking cakes and sending on the money. She +has three children, and—" +</p> +<p> +She gulped. +</p> +<p> +"I thought everybody wanted to get help to the Belgians," she said. +</p> +<p> +A slightly grim smile showed itself on Mrs. Travers' face. +</p> +<p> +"I'm afraid you don't understand. It is you we want to help. Neither +Mr. Travers nor I feel that a girl so young as you, and alone, has any +place near the firing line. And that, I fancy, is where you wish to go. +As to helping the Belgians, we have four in the house now. They do not +belong to the same social circles, so they prefer tea in their own rooms. +You are quite right about their needing help too. They cannot even make +up their own beds." +</p> +<p> +"They are not all like that," broke in Mr. Travers hastily. +</p> +<p> +"Of course not. But I merely think that Miss—er—Kennedy should know +both sides of the picture." +</p> +<p> +Somewhat later Sara Lee was ushered downstairs by the neat maid, who +stood on the steps and blew a whistle for a taxi—Sara Lee had come in +a bus. She carried in her hand the address of a Belgian commission of +relief at the Savoy Hotel, and in her heart, for the first time, a doubt +of her errand. She gave the Savoy address mechanically and, huddled in +a corner, gave way to wild and fearful misgivings. +</p> +<p> +Coming up she had sat on top of the bus and watched with wide curious, +eyes the strange traffic of London. The park had fascinated her—the +little groups of drilling men in khaki, the mellow tones of a bugle, and +here and there on the bridle paths well-groomed men and women on +horseback, as clean-cut as the horses they rode, and on the surface as +careless of what was happening across the Channel. But she saw nothing +now. She sat back and twisted Harvey's ring on her finger, and saw +herself going back, her work undone, her faith in herself shattered. +And Harvey's arms and the Leete house ready to receive her. +</p> +<p> +However, a ray of hope opened for her at the Savoy—not much, a prospect. +</p> +<p> +The Savoy was crowded. Men in uniform, a sprinkling of anxious-faced +wives and daughters, and more than a sprinkling of gaily dressed +and painted women, filled the lobby or made their way slowly up and +down the staircase. It was all so utterly different from what she had +expected—so bright, so full of life. These well-fed people they seemed +happy enough. Were they all wrong back home? Was the war the ghastly +thing they thought it? +</p> +<p> +Long months afterward Sara Lee was to learn that the Savoy was not +London. She was to learn other things—that America knew more, through +a free press, of war conditions than did England. And she was to +learn what never ceased to surprise her—the sporting instinct of the +British which made their early slogan "Business as usual." Business +and pleasure—but only on the surface. Underneath was a dogged and +obstinate determination to make up as soon as possible for the +humiliation of the early days of the war. +</p> +<p> +Those were the transition days in England. The people were slowly +awaking to the magnitude of the thing that was happening to them. Certain +elements of the press, long under political dominion, were preparing to +come out for a coalition ministry. The question of high-explosive +shells as against shrapnel was bitterly fought, some of the men at home +standing fast for shrapnel, as valuable against German artillery as a +garden hose. Men coming back from the Front were pleading for real help, +not men only, not Red Cross, not food and supplies, but for something +more competent than mere man power to hold back the deluge. +</p> +<p> +But over it all was that surface cheerfulness, that best-foot-forward +attitude of London. And Sara Lee saw only that, and lost faith. She +had come far to help. But here was food in plenty and bands playing +and smiling men in uniform drinking tea and playing for a little. That, +too, Sara Lee was to understand later; but just then she did not. At +home there was more surface depression. The atrocities, the plight of +the Belgians, the honor list in the <i>Illustrated London News</i>—that was +the war to Sara Lee. And here! +</p> +<p> +But later on, down in a crowded dark little room, things were different. +She was one of a long line, mostly women. They were unhappy and desolate +enough, God knows. They sat or stood with a sort of weary resignation. +Now and then a short heavy man with an upcurled mustache came out and +took in one or two. The door closed. And overhead the band played +monotonously. +</p> +<p> +It was after seven when Sara Lee's turn came. The heavy-set man spoke +to her in French, but he failed to use a single one of the words she +had memorized. +</p> +<p> +"Don't you speak any English?" she asked helplessly. +</p> +<p> +"I do; but not much," he replied. Though his French had been rapid he +spoke English slowly. "How can we serve you, mademoiselle?" +</p> +<p> +"I don't want any assistance. I—I want to help, if I can." +</p> +<p> +"Here?" +</p> +<p> +"In France. Or Belgium." +</p> +<p> +He shrugged his shoulders. +</p> +<p> +"We have many offers of help. What we need, mademoiselle, is not +workers. We have, at our base hospital, already many English nurses." +</p> +<p> +"I am not a nurse." +</p> +<p> +"I am sorry. The whole world is sorry for Belgium, and many would work. +What we need"—he shrugged his shoulders again—"is food, clothing, +supplies for our brave little soldiers." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee looked extremely small and young. The Belgian sat down on a +chair and surveyed her carefully. +</p> +<p> +"You English are doing a—a fine work for us," he observed. "We are +grateful. But of course the"—he hesitated—"the pulling up of an +entire people—it is colossal." +</p> +<p> +"But I am not English," said Sara Lee. "And I have a little money. I +want to make soup for your wounded men at a railway station or—any +place. I can make good soup. And I shall have money each month to buy +what I need." +</p> +<p> +Only then was Sara Lee admitted to the crowded little room. +</p> +<p> +Long afterward, when the lights behind the back drop had gone down and +Sara Lee was back again in her familiar setting, one of the clearest +pictures she retained of that amazing interlude was of that crowded +little room in the Savoy, its single littered desk, its two typewriters +creating an incredible din, a large gentleman in a dark-blue military +cape seeming to fill the room. And in corners and off stage, so to +speak, perhaps a half dozen men, watching her curiously. +</p> +<p> +The conversation was in French, and Sara Lee's acquaintance of the +passage acted as interpreter. It was only when Sara Lee found that a +considerable discussion was going on in which she had no part that she +looked round and saw her friend of two nights before and of the little +donkey. He was watching her intently, and when he caught her eye +he bowed. +</p> +<p> +Now men, in Sara Lee's mind, had until now been divided into the ones at +home, one's own kind, the sort who married one's friends or oneself, the +kind who called their wives "mother" after the first baby came, and were +easily understood, plain men, decent and God-fearing and self-respecting; +and the men of that world outside America, who were foreigners. One +might like foreigners, but they were outsiders. +</p> +<p> +So there was no self-consciousness in Sara Lee's bow and smile. Later +on Henri was to find that lack of self and sex consciousness one of the +maddening mysteries about Sara Lee. Perhaps he never quite understood +it. But always he respected it. +</p> +<p> +More conversation, in an increasing staccato. Short contributions from +the men crowded into corners. Frenzied beating of the typewriting +machines, and overhead and far away the band. There was no air in the +room. Sara Lee was to find out a great deal later on about the contempt +of the Belgians for air. She loosened Aunt Harriet's neckpiece. +</p> +<p> +So far Henri had not joined in the discussion. But now he came forward +and spoke. Also, having finished, he interpreted to Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"They are most grateful," he explained. "It is a—a practical idea, +mademoiselle. If you were in Belgium"—he smiled rather mirthlessly—"if +you were already in the very small part of Belgium remaining to us, we +could place you very usefully. But—the British War Office is most +careful, just now. You understand—there are reasons." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee flushed indignantly. +</p> +<p> +"They can watch me if they want to," she said. "What trouble can I make? +I've only just landed. You—you'd have to go a good ways to find any +one who knows less than I do about the war." +</p> +<p> +"There is no doubt of that," he said, unconscious of offense. "But the +War Office—" He held out his hands. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee, who had already caught the British "a" and was rather overdoing +it, had a wild impulse to make the same gesture. It meant so much. +</p> +<p> +More conversation. Evidently more difficulties—but with Henri now +holding the center of the stage and speaking rapidly. The heavy-set man +retired and read letters under an electric lamp. The band upstairs was +having dinner. And Henri argued and wrangled. He was quite passionate. +The man in the military cape listened and smiled. And at last he nodded. +</p> +<p> +Henri turned to Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"You Americans are all brave," he said. "You like—what is it you +say?—taking a chance, I think. Would you care to take such a chance?" +</p> +<p> +"What sort of a chance?" +</p> +<p> +"May I visit you this evening at your hotel?" +</p> +<p> +Just for an instant Sara Lee hesitated. There was Harvey at home. He +would not like her receiving a call from any man. And Harvey did not +like foreigners. He always said they had no respect for women. It +struck her suddenly what Harvey would call Henri's bowing and his kissing +her hand, and his passionate gesticulations when he was excited. He +would call it all tomfool nonsense. +</p> +<p> +And she recalled his final words, his arms so close about her that she +could hardly breathe, his voice husky with emotion. +</p> +<p> +"Just let me hear of any of those foreigners bothering you," he said, +"and I'll go over and wipe out the whole damned nation." +</p> +<p> +It had not sounded funny then. It was not funny now. +</p> +<p> +"Please come," said Sara Lee in a small voice. +</p> +<p> +The other gentlemen bowed profoundly. Sara Lee, rather at a loss, gave +them a friendly smile that included them all. And then she and Henri +were walking up the stairs and to the entrance, Henri's tall figure the +target for many women's eyes. He, however, saw no one but Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +Henri, too, called a taxicab. Every one in London seemed to ride in +taxis. And he bent over her hand, once she was in the car, but he did +not kiss it. +</p> +<p> +"It is very kind of you, what you are doing," he said. "But, then, you +Americans are all kind. And wonderful." +</p> +<p> +Back at Morley's Hotel Sara Lee had a short conversation with Harvey's +picture. +</p> +<p> +"You are entirely wrong, dear," she said. She was brushing her hair at +the time, and it is rather a pity that it was a profile picture and that +Harvey's pictured eyes were looking off into space—that is, a piece +of white canvas on a frame, used by photographers to reflect the light +into the eyes. For Sara Lee with her hair down was even lovelier than +with it up. "You were wrong. They are different, but they are kind and +polite. And very, very respectful. And he is coming on business." +</p> +<p> +She intended at first to make no change in her frock. After all, it was +not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the +right footing. +</p> +<p> +But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and +slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her +way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt +and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts +still affect. And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress. She called in +the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over +her clothes. +</p> +<p> +It was the maid, perhaps, then who brought into Sara Lee's life the +strange and mad infatuation for her that was gradually to become a +dominant issue in the next few months. For the maid chose a white dress, +a soft and young affair in which Sara Lee looked like the heart of a rose. +</p> +<p> +"I always like to see a young lady in white, miss," said the maid. +"Especially when there's a healthy skin." +</p> +<p> +So Sara Lee ate her dinner alone, such a dinner as a healthy skin and +body demanded. And she watched tall young Englishwomen with fine +shoulders go out with English officers in khaki, and listened to a babel +of high English voices, and—felt extremely alone and very subdued. +</p> +<p> +Henri came rather late. It was one of the things she was to learn about +him later—that he was frequently late. It was only long afterward that +she realized that such time as he spent with her was gained only at the +cost of almost superhuman effort. But that was when she knew Henri's +story, and his work. She waited for him in the reception room, where a +man and a woman were having coffee and talking in a strange tongue. +Henri found her there, at something before nine, rather downcast and +worried, and debating about going up to bed. She looked up, to find him +bowing before her. +</p> +<p> +"I thought you were not coming," she said. +</p> +<p> +"I? Not come? But I had said that I would come, mademoiselle. I may +sit down?" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee moved over on the velvet sofa, and Henri lowered his long body +onto it. Lowered his voice, too, for the man and woman were staring at +him. +</p> +<p> +"I'm afraid I didn't quite understand about this afternoon," began Sara +Lee. "You spoke about taking a chance. I am not afraid of danger, if +that is what you mean." +</p> +<p> +"That, and a little more, mademoiselle," said Henri. "But now that I am +here I do not know." +</p> +<p> +His eyes were keen. Sara Lee had suddenly a strange feeling that he +was watching the couple who talked over their coffee, and that, oddly +enough, the couple were watching him. Yet he was apparently giving his +undivided attention to her. +</p> +<p> +"Have you walked any to-day?" he asked her unexpectedly. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee remembered the bus, and, with some bitterness, the two taxis. +</p> +<p> +"I haven't had a chance to walk," she said. +</p> +<p> +"But you should walk," he said. "I—will you walk with me? Just about +the square, for air?" And in a lower tone: "It is not necessary that +those two should know the plan, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +"I'll get my coat and hat," Sara Lee said, and proceeded to do so in a +brisk and businesslike fashion. When she came down Henri was emerging +from the telephone booth. His face was impassive. And again when in +time Sara Lee was to know Henri's face better than she had ever known +Harvey's, she was to learn that the masklike look he sometimes wore +meant danger—for somebody. +</p> +<p> +They went out without further speech into the clear cold night. Henri, +as if from custom, threw his head back and scanned the sky. Then they +went on and crossed into the square. +</p> +<p> +"The plan," Henri began abruptly, "is this: You will be provided +to-morrow with a passport to Boulogne. You will, if you agree, take the +midnight train for Folkestone. At the railway station here you will +be searched. At Folkestone a board, sitting in an office on the quay, +will examine your passport." +</p> +<p> +"Does any one in Boulogne speak English?" Sara Lee inquired nervously. +Somehow that babel of French at the Savoy had frightened her. Her +little phrase book seemed pitifully inadequate for the great things +in her mind. +</p> +<p> +"That hardly matters," said Henri, smiling faintly. "Because I think +you shall not go to Boulogne." +</p> +<p> +"Not go!" She stopped dead, under the monument, and looked up at him. +</p> +<p> +"The place for you to go, to start from, is Calais," Henri explained. +He paused, to let pass two lovers, a man in khaki and a girl. "But +Calais is difficult. It is under martial law—a closed city. From +Boulogne to Calais would be perhaps impossible." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee was American and her methods were direct. +</p> +<p> +"How can I get to Calais?" +</p> +<p> +"Will you take the chance I spoke of?" +</p> +<p> +"For goodness' sake," said Sara Lee in an exasperated tone, "how can I +tell you until I know what it is?" +</p> +<p> +Henri told her. He even, standing under a street lamp, drew a small +sketch for her, to make it clear. Sara Lee stood close, watching him, +and some of the lines were not as steady as they might have been. And +in the midst of it he suddenly stopped. +</p> +<p> +"Do you know what it means?" he demanded. +</p> +<p> +"Yes, of course." +</p> +<p> +"And you know what date this is?" +</p> +<p> +"The eighteenth of February." +</p> +<p> +But he saw, after all, that she did not entirely understand. +</p> +<p> +"To-night, this eighteenth of February, the Germans commence a blockade +of this coast. No vessels, if they can prevent them, will leave the +harbors; or if they do, none shall reach the other side!" +</p> +<p> +"Oh!" said Sara Lee blankly. +</p> +<p> +"We are eager to do as you wish, mademoiselle. But"—he commenced +slowly to tear up the sketch—"it is too dangerous. You are too young. +If anything should go wrong and I had—No. We will find another way." +</p> +<p> +He put the fragments of the sketch in his pocket. +</p> +<p> +"How long is this blockade to last?" Sara Lee asked out of bitter +disappointment. +</p> +<p> +He shrugged his shoulders. +</p> +<p> +"Who can say? A week! A year! Not at all!" +</p> +<p> +"Then," said Sara Lee with calm deliberation, "you might as well get out +your pencil and draw another picture—because I'm going." +</p> +<p> +Far enough away now, the little house at home and the peace that dwelt +therein; and Harvey; and the small white bedroom; and the daily round of +quiet duties. Sara Lee had set her face toward the east, and the land +of dying men. And as Henri looked down at her she had again that poised +and eager look, almost of flight, that had brought into Harvey's love +for her just a touch of fear. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0007" id="h2H_4_0007"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + VI +</h2> +<p> +Sara Lee Kennedy was up at dawn the next morning. There was a very +serious matter to decide, for Henri's plan had included only such hand +luggage as she herself could carry. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee carefully laid out on the bed such articles as she could not +possibly do without, and was able to pack into her suitcase less than +a fourth of them. She had fortunately brought a soft wool sweater, +which required little room. Undergarments, several blouses, the sweater +and a pair of heavy shoes—that was her equipment, plus such small +toilet outfit as is necessary when a young woman uses no make-up and +regards cold cream only as a remedy for chapped hands. +</p> +<p> +The maid found her in rather a dismal mood. +</p> +<p> +"Going across, miss!" she said. "Fancy that!" +</p> +<p> +"It's a secret," cautioned Sara Lee. "I am really not sure I am going. +I am only trying to go." +</p> +<p> +The maid, who found Sara Lee and the picture of Harvey on her dressing +table both romantic and appealing, offered to pack. From the first +moment it was evident that she meant to include the white dress. Indeed +she packed it first. +</p> +<p> +"You never know what's going to happen over there," she asserted. "They +do say that royalties are everywhere, going about like common people. +You'd better have a good frock with you." +</p> +<p> +She had an air of subdued excitement, and after she had established the +fact that not only the white frock but slippers and hose also would go +in she went to the door and glanced up and down the passage. Then she +closed the door. +</p> +<p> +"There was queer goings-on here last night, miss," she said cautiously. +"Spies!" +</p> +<p> +"Oh, no!" cried Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"Spies," she repeated. "A man and a woman, pretending to be Belgian +refugees. They took them away at daylight. I expect by now they've +been shot." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee ate very little breakfast that morning. All through England +it was confidently believed that spies were shot on discovery, a theory +that has been persistent—and false, save at the battle line—since +the beginning of the war. And Henri's plan assumed new proportions. +Suppose she made her attempt and failed? Suppose they took her for a +spy, and that tomorrow's sun found her facing a firing squad? Not, +indeed, that she had ever heard of a firing squad, as such. But she +had seen spies shot in the movies. They invariably stood in front of +a brick wall, with the hero in the center. +</p> +<p> +So she absent-mindedly ate her kippered herring, which had been strongly +recommended by the waiter, and tried to think of what a spy would do, so +she might avoid any suspicious movements. It struck her, too, that war +seemed to have made the people on that side of the ocean extremely ready +with weapons. They would be quite likely to shoot first and ask +questions afterwards—which would be too late to be helpful. +</p> +<p> +She remembered Henri, for instance, and the way, without a word, he had +shot the donkey. +</p> +<p> +That day she wrote Harvey a letter. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "<i>Dearest</i>:" it began; "I think I am to leave for France to-night. + Things seem to be moving nicely, and I am being helped by the Belgian + Relief Commission. It is composed of Belgians and is at the Savoy + Hotel." +</p> +<p> +Here she stopped and cried a little. What if she should never see +Harvey again—never have his sturdy arms about her? Harvey gained by +distance. She remembered only his unfailing kindness and strength and +his love for her. He seemed, here at the edge of the whirlpool, a sort +of eddy of peace and quiet. Even then she had no thought of going back +until her work was done, but she did an unusual thing for her, unused +to demonstration of any sort. She kissed his ring. +</p> +<p> +Followed directions about sending the money from the church society, +a description of Morley's and Trafalgar Square, an account of tea at +the Travers', and of the little donkey—without mention, however, of +Henri. She felt that Harvey would not understand Henri. +</p> +<p> +But at the end came the passage which poor Harvey read and re-read +when the letter came, and alternately ground his teeth over and kissed. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "I do love you, Harvey dear. And I am coming back to you. I have felt + that I had to do what I am doing, but I am coming back. That's a + promise. Unless, of course, I should take sick, or something like + that, which isn't likely." +</p> +<p> +There was a long pause in the writing here, but Harvey could not know +that. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "I shall wear your ring always; and always, Harvey, it will mean to + me that I belong to you. With dearest love. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "SARA LEE" +</p> +<p> +Then she added a postscript, of course. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "The War Office is not letting people cross to Calais just now. But + I am going to do it anyhow. It is perfectly simple. And when I get + over I shall write and tell you how. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "S.L." +</p> +<p> +It was the next day that an indignant official in the censor's office +read that postscript, and rose in his wrath and sent a third +Undersomething-or-other to look up Sara Lee at Morley's. But by this +time she was embarked on the big adventure; and by the time a cable +reached Calais there was no trace of Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +During the afternoon she called up Mr. Travers at his office, and rather +gathered that he did not care to use the telephone during business hours. +</p> +<p> +"I just wanted to tell you that you need not bother about me any more," +she said. "I am being sent over and I think everything is all right." +</p> +<p> +He was greatly relieved. Mrs. Travers had not fully indorsed his +encomiums of the girl. She had felt that no really nice girl would +travel so far on so precarious an errand, particularly when she was +alone. And how could one tell, coming from America, how her sympathies +really lay? She might be of German parentage—the very worst sort, +because they spoke American. It was easy enough to change a name. +</p> +<p> +Nevertheless, Mr. Travers felt a trifle low in his mind when he hung up +the receiver. He said twice to himself: "Twenty pounds!" And at last +he put four sovereigns in an envelope and sent them to her anonymously +by messenger. Sara Lee guessed whence they came, but she respected the +manner of the gift and did not thank him. It was almost the first gold +money she had ever seen. +</p> +<p> +She was very carefully searched at the railway station that night and +found that her American Red Cross button, which had come with her dollar +subscription to the association, made the matron inspector rather +kindly inclined. Nevertheless, she took off Sara Lee's shoes, and ran +over the lining of her coat, and quite ruined the maid's packing of the +suitcase. +</p> +<p> +"You are going to Boulogne?" asked the matron inspector. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee did not like to lie. +</p> +<p> +"Wherever the boat takes me," she said with smile. +</p> +<p> +The matron smiled too. +</p> +<p> +"I shouldn't be nervous, miss," she said. "It's a chance, of course, +but they have not done much damage yet." +</p> +<p> +It was after midnight then, and a cold fog made the station a gloomy +thing of blurred yellow lights and raw chill. A few people moved about, +mostly officers in uniform. Half a dozen men in civilian clothes +eyed her as she passed through the gates; Scotland Yard, but she did not +know. And once she thought she saw Henri, but he walked away into the +shadows and disappeared. The train, looking as absurdly small and light +as all English trains do, was waiting out in the shed. There were no +porters, and Sara Lee carried her own bag. +</p> +<p> +She felt quite sure she had been mistaken about Henri, for of course +he would have come and carried it for her. +</p> +<p> +The train was cold and quiet. When it finally moved out it was under +way before she knew that it was going. And then suddenly Sara Lee's +heart began to pound hard. +</p> +<p> +It was a very cold and shivering Sara Lee who curled up, alone in her +compartment, and stared hard at Harvey's ring to keep her courage up. +But a curious thing had happened. Harvey gave her no moral support. +He brought her only disapproval. She found herself remembering none of +the loving things he had said to her, but only the bitter ones. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps it was the best thing for her, after all. For a sort of dogged +determination to go through with it all, at any cost, braced her to her +final effort. +</p> +<p> +So far it had all been busy enough, but not comfortable. She was cold, +and she had eaten almost nothing all day. As the hours went on and the +train slid through the darkness she realized that she was rather faint. +The steam pipes, only warm at the start, were entirely cold by one +o'clock, and by two Sara Lee was sitting on her feet, with a heavy coat +wrapped about her knees. +</p> +<p> +The train moved quietly, as do all English trains, with no jars and +little sound. There were few lights outside, for the towns of Eastern +England were darkened, like London, against air attacks. So when she +looked at the window she saw only her own reflection, white and +wide-eyed, above Aunt Harriet's fur neckpiece. +</p> +<p> +In the next compartment an officer was snoring, but she did not close +her eyes. Perhaps, for that last hour, some of the glow that had brought +her so far failed her. She was not able to think beyond Folkestone, save +occasionally, and that with a feeling that it should not be made so +difficult to do a kind and helpful thing. +</p> +<p> +At a quarter before three the train eased down. In the same proportion +Sara Lee's pulse went up. A long period of crawling along, a stop or +two, but no resultant opening of the doors; and at last, in a cold rain +and a howling wind from the channel, the little seaport city. +</p> +<p> +More officers than she had suspected, a few women, got out. The latter +Sara Lee's experience on the steamer enabled her to place; buyers mostly, +and Americans, on their way to Paris, blockade or no blockade, because +the American woman must be well and smartly gowned and hatted. A man +with a mourning band on his sleeve carried a wailing child. +</p> +<p> +The officers lighted cigarettes. The civilians formed a line on the +jetty under the roof of the shed, and waited, passports in hand, before +a door that gleamed with yellow light. Faces looked pale and anxious. +The blockade was on, and Germany had said that no ships would cross +that night. +</p> +<p> +As if defiantly the Boulogne boat, near at hand, was ablaze, on the shore +side at least, with lights. Stewards came and went. Beyond it lay the +harbor, dark and mysterious save where, from somewhere across, a +flashlight made a brave effort to pierce the fog. +</p> +<p> +One of the buyers ahead of Sara Lee seemed exhilarated by the danger +ahead. +</p> +<p> +"They'll never get us," she said. "Look at that fog!" +</p> +<p> +"It's lifting, dearie," answered a weary voice behind her. "The wind is +carrying it away." +</p> +<p> +When Sara Lee's turn came she was ready. A group of men in civilian +clothes, seated about a long table, looked her over carefully. Her +passports moved deliberately from hand to hand. A long business, and +the baby wailing harder than ever. But the office was at least warm. +Some of her failing courage came back as she moved, following her papers, +round the table. They were given back to her at last, and she went out. +She had passed the first ordeal. +</p> +<p> +Suitcase in hand she wandered down the stone jetty. The Boulogne boat +she passed, and kept on. At the very end, dark and sinister, lay another +boat. It had no lights. The tide was in, and its deck lay almost flush +with the pier. Sara Lee walked on toward it until a voice spoke to her +out of the darkness and near at hand. +</p> +<p> +"Your boat is back there, madam." +</p> +<p> +"I know. Thank you. I am just walking about." +</p> +<p> +The petty officer—he was a petty officer, though Sara Lee had never +heard the term—was inclined to be suspicious. Under excuse of lighting +his pipe he struck a match, and Sara Lee's young figure stood out in full +relief. His suspicions died away with the flare. +</p> +<p> +"Bad night, miss," he offered. +</p> +<p> +"Very," said Sara Lee, and turned back again. +</p> +<p> +This time, bewildered and uneasy, she certainly saw Henri. But he +ignored her. He was alone, and smoking one of his interminable +cigarettes. He had not said he was crossing, and why had he not spoken +to her? He wandered past down the pier, and she lost him in the shadows. +When he came back he paused near her, and at last saluted and spoke. +</p> +<p> +"<i>Pardon</i>," he said. "If you will stand back here you will find less +wind." +</p> +<p> +"Thank you." +</p> +<p> +He carried her suitcase back, and stooping over to place it at her feet +he said: "I shall send him on board with a message to the captain. When +I come back try again." +</p> +<p> +He left her at once. The passengers for Boulogne were embarking now. +A silent lot, they disappeared into the warmth and brightness of the +little boat and were lost. No one paid any attention to Sara Lee +standing in the shadows. +</p> +<p> +Soon Henri came back. He walked briskly and touched his cap as he +passed. He went aboard the Boulogne steamer, and without a backward +glance disappeared. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee watched him out of sight, in a very real panic. He had been +something real and tangible in that shadowy place—something familiar +in an unfamiliar world. But he was gone. She threw up her head. +</p> +<p> +So once more Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and went down the pier. +Now she was unchallenged. What lurking figure might be on the dark deck +of the Calais boat she could not tell. That was the chance she was to +take. The gangway was still out, and as quietly as possible she went +aboard. The Boulogne boat had suddenly gone dark, and she heard the +churning of the screw. With the extinction of the lights on the other +boat came at last deeper night to her aid. A few steps, a stumble, a +gasp—and she was on board the forbidden ship. +</p> +<p> +She turned forward, according to her instructions, where the overhead +deck made below an even deeper shadow. Henri had said that there were +cabins there, and that the chance was of finding an unlocked one. If +they were all locked she would be discovered at dawn, and arrested. And +Sara Lee was not a war correspondent. She was not accustomed to arrest. +Indeed she had a deep conviction that arrest in her case would mean death. +False, of course, but surely it shows her courage. +</p> +<p> +As she stood there, breathless and listening, the Boulogne boat moved +out. She heard the wash against the jetty, felt the rolling of its +waves. But being on the landward side she could not see the faint +gleam of a cigarette that marked Henri's anxious figure at the rail. +So long as the black hulk of the Calais boat was visible, and long +after indeed, Henri stood there, outwardly calm but actually shaken by +many fears. She had looked so small and young; and who could know what +deviltry lurked abroad that night? +</p> +<p> +He had not gone with her because it was necessary that he be in Boulogne +the next morning. And also, the very chance of getting her across lay +in her being alone and unobserved. +</p> +<p> +So he stood by the rail and looked back and said a wordless little prayer +that if there was trouble it come to his boat and not to the other. +Which might very considerably have disturbed the buyers had they known +of it and believed in prayer. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee stood in the shadows and listened. There were voices overhead, +from the bridge. A door opened onto the deck and threw out a ray of +light. Some one came out and went on shore, walking with brisk ringing +steps. And then at last she put down her bag and tried door after door, +without result. +</p> +<p> +The man who had gone ashore called another. The gangway was drawn in. +The engines began to vibrate under foot. Sara Lee, breathless and +terrified, stood close to a cabin door and remained immovable. At one +moment it seemed as if a seaman was coming forward to where she stood. +But he did not come. +</p> +<p> +The Calais boat was waiting until the other steamer had got well out of +the harbor. The fog had lifted, and the searchlight was moving over +the surface. It played round the channel steamer without touching it. +But none of this was visible to Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +At last the lights of the quay began to recede. The little boat rocked +slightly in its own waves as it edged away. It moved slowly through +the shipping and out until, catching the swell of the channel, it shot +ahead at top speed. +</p> +<p> +For an hour Sara Lee stood there. The channel wind caught her and tore +at her skirts until she was almost frozen. And finally, in sheer +desperation, she worked her way round to the other side. She saw no +one. Save for the beating heart of the engine below it might have been +a dead ship. +</p> +<p> +On the other side she found an open door and stumbled into the tiny dark +deck cabin, as chilled and frightened a philanthropist as had ever +crossed that old and tricky and soured bit of seaway. And there, to be +frank, she forgot her fright in as bitter a tribute of seasickness as +even the channel has ever exacted. +</p> +<p> +She had locked herself in, and she fell at last into an exhausted sleep. +When she wakened and peered out through the tiny window it was gray +winter dawn. The boat was quiet, and before her lay the quay of Calais +and the Gare Maritime. A gangway was out and a hurried survey showed +no one in sight. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and opened the door. The fresh morning +air revived her, but nevertheless it was an extremely pale young woman +who, obeying Henri's instructions, went ashore that morning in the gray +dawn unseen, undisturbed and unquestioned. But from the moment she +appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare +Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not +breathe at all. She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and +her heart entirely unreliable. +</p> +<p> +A woman clerk was asleep at a desk. Sara Lee roused her to half +wakefulness, no interest and extremely poor English. A drowsy porter +led her up a staircase and down an endless corridor. Then at last he +was gone, and Sara Lee turned the key in her door and burst into tears. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0008" id="h2H_4_0008"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + VII +</h2> +<p> +Now up to this point Sara Lee's mind had come to rest at Calais. She +must get there; after that the other things would need to be worried +over. Henri had already in their short acquaintance installed himself +as the central figure of this strange and amazing interlude—not as a +good-looking young soldier surprisingly fertile in expedients, but as a +sort of agent of providence, by whom and through whom things were done. +</p> +<p> +And Henri had said she was to go to the Gare Maritime at Calais and make +herself comfortable—if she got there. After that things would be +arranged. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee therefore took a hot bath, though hardly a satisfactory one, +for there was no soap and she had brought none. She learned later on +to carry soap with her everywhere. So she soaked the chill out of her +slim body and then dressed. The room was cold, but a great exultation +kept her warm. She had run the blockade, she had escaped the War +Office—which, by the way, was looking her up almost violently by +that time, via the censor. It had found the trunk she left at Morley's, +and cross-questioned the maid into hysteria—and here she was, +safe in France, the harbor of Calais before her, and here and there +strange-looking war craft taking on coal. Destroyers, she learned later. +Her ignorance was rather appalling at first. +</p> +<p> +It was all unreal—the room with its cold steam pipes, the heavy window +hangings, the very words on the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. A +great vessel moved into the harbor. As it turned she saw its name +printed on its side in huge letters, and the flag, also painted, of a +neutral country—a hoped-for protection against German submarines. It +brought home to her, rather, the thing she had escaped. +</p> +<p> +After a time she thought of food, but rather hopelessly. Her attempts +to get <i>savon</i> from a stupid boy had produced nothing more useful than +a flow of unintelligible French and no soap whatever. She tried a +pantomime of washing her hands, but to the boy she had appeared to be +merely wringing them. And, as a great many females were wringing their +hands in France those days, he had gone away, rather sorry for her. +</p> +<p> +When hunger drove her to the bell again he came back and found her with +her little phrase book in her hands, feverishly turning the pages. She +could find plenty of sentences such as "<i>Garçon, vous avez renversé du +vin sur ma robe</i>," but not an egg lifted its shining pate above the +pages. Not cereal. Not fruit. Not even the word breakfast. +</p> +<p> +Long, long afterward Sara Lee found a quite delightful breakfast +hidden between two pages that were stuck together. But it was then far +too late. +</p> +<p> +"<i>Donnez-moi</i>," began Sara Lee, and turned the pages rapidly, "this; do +you see?" She had found roast beef. +</p> +<p> +The boy observed stolidly, in French, that it was not ready until noon. +She was able to make out, from his failing to depart, that there was no +roast beef. +</p> +<p> +"Good gracious!" she said, ravenous and exasperated. "Go and get me +some bread and coffee, anyhow." She repeated it, slightly louder. +</p> +<p> +That was the tableau that Henri found when, after a custom that may be +war or may be Continental, he had inquired the number of her room and +made his way there. +</p> +<p> +There was a twinkle in his blue eyes as he bowed before her—and a vast +relief too. +</p> +<p> +"So you are here!" he said in a tone of satisfaction. He had put in an +extremely bad night, even for him, by whom nights were seldom wasted in +a bed. While he was with her something of her poise had communicated +itself to him. He had felt the confidence, in men and affairs, that +American girls are given as a birthright. And her desire for service +he had understood as a year or two ago he could not have understood. +But he had stood by the rail staring north, and cursing himself for +having placed her in danger during the entire crossing. +</p> +<p> +There was nothing about him that morning, however to show his bad +hours. He was debonnaire and smiling. +</p> +<p> +"I am famishing," said Sara Lee. "And there are no eggs in this +book—none whatever." +</p> +<p> +"Eggs! You wish eggs?" +</p> +<p> +"I just want food. Almost anything will do. I asked for eggs because +they can come quickly." +</p> +<p> +Henri turned to the boy and sent him off with a rapid order. Then: +"May I come in?" he said. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee cast an uneasy glance over the room. It was extremely tidy, +and unmistakably it was a bedroom. But though her color rose she asked +him in. After all, what did it matter? To have refused would have +looked priggish, she said to herself. And as a matter of fact one of +the early lessons she learned in France was learned that morning—that +though convention had had to go, like many other things in the war, men +who were gentlemen ignored its passing. +</p> +<p> +Henri came in and stood by the center table. +</p> +<p> +"Now, please tell me," he said. "I have been most uneasy. On the quay +last night you looked—frightened." +</p> +<p> +"I was awfully frightened. Nothing happened. I even slept." +</p> +<p> +"You were very brave." +</p> +<p> +"I was very seasick." +</p> +<p> +"I am sorry." +</p> +<p> +Henri took a turn up and down the room. +</p> +<p> +"But," said Sara Lee slowly, "I—I—can't be on your hands, you know. +You must have many things to do. If you are going to have to order my +meals and all that, I'm going to be a dreadful burden." +</p> +<p> +"But you will learn very quickly." +</p> +<p> +"I'm stupid about languages." +</p> +<p> +Henri dismissed that with a gesture. She could not, he felt, be stupid +about anything. He went to the window and looked out. The destroyers +were still coaling, and a small cargo was being taken off the boat at +the quay. The rain was over, and in the early sunlight an officer in +blue tunic, red breeches and black cavalry boots was taking the air, his +head bent over his chest. Not a detail of the scene escaped him. +</p> +<p> +"I have agreed to find the right place for you," he said thoughtfully. +"There is one, but I think—" He hesitated. "I do not wish to place +you again in danger." +</p> +<p> +"You mean that it is near the Front?" +</p> +<p> +"Very near, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +"But I should be rather near, to be useful." +</p> +<p> +"Perhaps, for your work. But what of you? These brutes—they shell +far and wide. One can never be sure." +</p> +<p> +He paused and surveyed her whimsically. +</p> +<p> +"Who allowed you to come, alone, like this?" he demanded. "Is there no +one who objected?" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee glanced down at her ring. +</p> +<p> +"The man I am going to marry. He is very angry." +</p> +<p> +Henri looked at her, and followed her eyes to Harvey's ring. He said +nothing, however, but he went over and gave the bell cord a violent jerk. +</p> +<p> +"You must have food quickly," he said in a rather flat voice. "You are +looking tired and pale." +</p> +<p> +A sense of unreality was growing on Sara Lee. That she should be alone +in France with a man she had never seen three days before; that she knew +nothing whatever about that man; that, for the present at least, she was +utterly and absolutely dependent on him, even for the food she ate—it +was all of a piece with the night's voyage and the little room at the +Savoy. And it was none of it real. +</p> +<p> +When the breakfast tray came Henri was again at the window and silent. +And Sara Lee saw that it was laid for two. She was a little startled, +but the businesslike way in which the young officer drew up two chairs +and held one out for her made protest seem absurd. And the flat-faced +boy, who waited, looked unshocked and uninterested. +</p> +<p> +It was not until she had had some coffee that Henri followed up his +line of thought. +</p> +<p> +"So—the fiance did not approve? It is not difficult to understand. +There is always danger, for there are German aëroplanes even in remote +places. And you are very young. You still wish to establish yourself, +mademoiselle?" +</p> +<p> +"Of course!" +</p> +<p> +"Would it be a comfort to cable your safe arrival in France to the +fiancé?" When he saw her face he smiled. And if it was a rather heroic +smile it was none the less friendly. "I see. What shall I say? Or +will you write it?" +</p> +<p> +So Sara Lee, vastly cheered by two cups of coffee, an egg, and a very +considerable portion of bread and butter, wrote her cable. It was to +be brief, for cables cost money. It said, "Safe. Well. Love." And +Henri, who seemed to have strange and ominous powers, sent it almost +immediately. Total cost, as reported to Sara Lee, two francs. He took +the money she offered him gravely. +</p> +<p> +"We shall cable quite often," he said. "He will be anxious. And I +think he has a right to know." +</p> +<p> +The "we" was entirely unconscious. +</p> +<p> +"And now," he said, when he had gravely allowed Sara Lee to pay her half +of the breakfast, "we must arrange to get you out of Calais. And that, +mademoiselle, may take time." +</p> +<p> +It took time. Sara Lee, growing accustomed now to little rooms entirely +filled with men and typewriters, went from one office to another, walking +along the narrow pavements with Henri, through streets filled with +soldiers. Once they drew aside to let pass a procession of Belgian +refugees, those who had held to their village homes until bombardment +had destroyed them—stout peasant women in short skirts and with huge +bundles, old men, a few young ones, many children. The terror of the +early flight was not theirs, but there was in all of them a sort of +sodden hopelessness that cut Sara Lee to the heart. In an irregular +column they walked along, staring ahead but seeing nothing. Even the +children looked old and tired. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee's eyes filled with tears. +</p> +<p> +"My people," said Henri. "Simple country folk, and going to England, +where they will grieve for the things that are gone—their fields and +their sons. The old ones will die, quickly, of homesickness. It is +difficult to transplant an old tree." +</p> +<p> +The final formalities seemed to offer certain difficulties. Henri, who +liked to do things quickly and like a prince, flushed with irritation. +He drew himself up rather haughtily in reply to one question, and glanced +uneasily at the girl. But it was all as intelligible as Sanskrit to her. +</p> +<p> +It was only after a whispered sentence to the man at the head of the +table that the paper was finally signed. +</p> +<p> +As they went down to the street together Sara Lee made a little protest. +</p> +<p> +"But I simply must not take all your time," she said, looking up +anxiously. "I begin to realize how foolhardy the whole thing is. I meant +well, but—it is you who are doing everything; not I." +</p> +<p> +"I shall not make the soup, mademoiselle," he replied gravely. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0009" id="h2H_4_0009"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + VIII +</h2> +<p> +Here were more things to do. Sara Lee's money must be exchanged at a +bank for French gold. She had three hundred dollars, and it had been +given her in a tiny brown canvas bag. And then there was the matter of +going from Calais toward the Front. She had expected to find a train, +but there were no trains. All cars were being used for troops. She +stared at Henri in blank dismay. +</p> +<p> +"No trains!" she said blankly. "Would an automobile be very expensive?" +</p> +<p> +"They are all under government control, mademoiselle. Even the petrol." +</p> +<p> +She stopped in the street. +</p> +<p> +"Then I shall have to go back." +</p> +<p> +Henri laughed boyishly. +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have been requested to take you to a place +where you may render us the service we so badly need. For the present +that is my duty, and nothing else. So if you will accept the offer of +my car, which is a shameful one but travels well, we can continue our +journey." +</p> +<p> +Long, long afterward, Sara Lee found a snapshot of Henri's car, taken +by a light-hearted British officer. Found it and sat for a long time +with it in her hand, thinking and remembering that first day she saw it, +in the sun at Calais. A long low car it was, once green, but now +roughly painted gray. But it was not the crude painting, significant +as it was, that brought so close the thing she was going to. It was +that the car was but a shell of a car. The mud guards were crumpled up +against the side. Body and hood were pitted with shrapnel. A door had +been shot away, and the wind shield was but a frame set round with +broken glass. Even the soldier-chauffeur wore a patch over one eye, +and his uniform was ragged. +</p> +<p> +"Not a beautiful car, mademoiselle, as I warned you! But a fast one!" +</p> +<p> +Henri was having a double enjoyment. He was watching Sara Lee's face +and his chauffeur's remaining eye. +</p> +<p> +"But fast; eh, Jean?" he said to the chauffeur. The man nodded and +said something in French. It was probably the thing Henri had hoped for, +and he threw back his head and laughed. +</p> +<p> +"Jean is reminding me," he said gayly, "that it is forbidden to officers +to take a lady along the road that we shall travel." But when he saw +how Sara Lee flushed he turned to the man. +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle has come from America to help us, Jean," he said quietly. +"And now for Dunkirk." +</p> +<p> +The road from Dunkirk to Calais was well guarded in those days. From +Nieuport for some miles inland only the shattered remnant of the Belgian +Army held the line. For the cry "On to Paris!" the Germans had +substituted "On to Calais!" +</p> +<p> +So, on French soil at least, the road was well guarded. A few miles in +the battered car, then a slowing up, a showing of passports, the clatter +of a great chain as it dropped to the road, a lowering of leveled rifles, +and a salute from the officer—that was the method by which they +advanced. +</p> +<p> +Henri sat with the driver and talked in a low tone. Sometimes he sat +quiet, looking ahead. He seemed, somehow, older, more careworn. His +boyishness had gone. Now and then he turned to ask if she was +comfortable, but in the intervals she felt that he had entirely forgotten +her. Once, at something Jean said, he got out a pocket map and went +over it carefully. It was a long time after that before he turned to +see if she was all right. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee sat forward and watched everything. She saw little evidence of +war, beyond the occasional sentries and chains. Women were walking along +the roads. Children stopped and pointed, smiling, at the battered car. +One very small boy saluted, and Henri as gravely returned the salute. +</p> +<p> +Some time after that he turned to her. +</p> +<p> +"I find that I shall have to leave you in Dunkirk," he said. "A matter +of a day only, probably. But I will see before I go that you are +comfortable." +</p> +<p> +"I shall be quite all right, of course." +</p> +<p> +But something had gone out of the day for her. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee learned one thing that day, learned it as some women do learn, +by the glance of an eye, the tone of a voice. The chauffeur adored +Henri. His one unbandaged eye stole moments from the road to glance +at him. When he spoke, while Henri read his map, his very voice betrayed +him. And while she pondered the thing, woman-fashion they drew into +the square of Dunkirk, where the statue of Jean Bart, pirate and +privateer stared down at this new procession of war which passed daily +and nightly under his cold eyes. +</p> +<p> +Jean and a porter carried in her luggage. Henri and a voluble and +smiling Frenchwoman showed her to her room. She felt like an island of +silence in a rapid-rolling sea of French. The Frenchwoman threw open +the door. +</p> +<p> +A great room with high curtained windows; a huge bed with a faded gilt +canopy and heavy draperies; a wardrobe as vast as the bed; and for a +toilet table an enormous mirror reaching to the ceiling and with a +marble shelf below—that was her room. +</p> +<p> +"I think you will be comfortable here, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee, who still clutched her small bag of gold, shook her head. +</p> +<p> +"Comfortable, yes," she said. "But I am afraid it is very expensive." +</p> +<p> +Henri named an extremely low figure—an exact fourth, to be accurate, +of its real cost. A surprising person Henri, with his worn uniform and +his capacity for kindly mendacity. And seeing something in the +Frenchwoman's face that perhaps he had expected, he turned to her +almost fiercely: +</p> +<p> +"You are to understand, madame, that this lady has been placed in my +care by authority that will not be questioned. She is to have every +deference." +</p> +<p> +That was all, but was enough. And from that time on Sara Lee Kennedy, +of Ohio, was called, in the tiny box downstairs which constituted the +office, "Mademoiselle La Princesse." +</p> +<p> +Henri did a characteristic and kindly thing for Sara Lee before he left +that evening on one of the many mysterious journeys that he was to make +during the time Sara Lee knew him. He came to her door, menus in hand, +and painstakingly ordered for her a dinner for that night, and the +three meals for the day following. +</p> +<p> +He made no suggestion of dining with her that evening. Indeed, watching +him from her small table, Sara Lee decided that he had put her entirely +out of his mind. He did not so much as glance at her. Save the cashier +at her boxed-in desk and money drawer, she was the only woman in that +room full of officers. Quite certainly Henri was the only man who did +not find some excuse for glancing in her direction. +</p> +<p> +But finishing early, he paused by the cashier's desk to pay for his meal, +and then he gave Sara Lee the stiffest and most ceremonious of bows. +</p> +<p> +She felt hurt. Alone in her great room, the curtains drawn by order of +the police, lest a ray of light betray the town to eyes in the air, she +went carefully over the hours she had spent with Henri that day, +looking for a cause of offense. She must have hurt him or he would +surely have stopped to speak to her. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps already he was finding her a burden. She flushed with shame +when she remembered about the meals he had had to order for her, and +she sat up in her great bed until late, studying by candlelight such +phrases as: +</p> +<p> +"<i>Il y a une erreur dans la note</i>," and "<i>Garçon, quels fruits +avez-vous?</i>" +</p> +<p> +She tried to write to Harvey that night, but she gave it up at last. +There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly +without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered +about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she +was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to +learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based +not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding. +</p> +<p> +So she got as far as: "<i>Dearest Harvey</i>: I am here in a hotel at +Dunkirk"—and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness. +Not so much for Harvey as for familiar things—Uncle James in his chair +by the fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the +West"; her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the +dining-room window; the voices of happy children wandering home from +school. +</p> +<p> +She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle. +Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry +with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top +of the <i>mairie</i> perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger, +came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer +for quiet sleep. +</p> +<p> +For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had +nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama +that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for +his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor +lorries—she called them trucks—piled high with supplies, often +fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food. +Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers, +detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers. +</p> +<p> +Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their +striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up, +too, and there would be an aëroplane sliding along, sometimes so low +that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust. +</p> +<p> +But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came +at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly. +Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle +impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the +moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those +two interminable days. +</p> +<p> +Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops—a +symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect—inside those cars were +wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care. +Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do +must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger +and sent a little message to him. +</p> +<p> +"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so +terrible! So pitiful!" +</p> +<p> +Yet during the day the square was gay enough. Officers in spurs clanked +across, wide capes blowing in the wind. Common soldiers bought fruit +and paper bags of fried potatoes from the booths. Countless dogs fought +under the feet of passers-by, and over all leered the sardonic face of +Jean Bart, pirate and privateer. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee went out daily, but never far. And she practiced French with +the maid, after this fashion: +</p> +<p> +"<i>Draps de toile</i>," said the smiling maid, putting the linen sheets on +the bed. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee would repeat it some six times. +</p> +<p> +"<i>Taies d'oreiller</i>," when the pillows came. So Sara Lee called pillows +by the name of their slips from that time forward! Came a bright hour +when she rang the bell for the boy and asked for matches, which she +certainly did not need, with entire success. +</p> +<p> +On the second night Sara Lee slept badly. At two o'clock she heard a +sound in the hall, and putting on her kimono, opened the door. On a +stiff chair outside, snoring profoundly, sat Jean, fully dressed. +</p> +<p> +The light from her candle roused him and he was wide awake in an instant. +</p> +<p> +"Why, Jean!" she said. "Isn't there any place for you to sleep?" +</p> +<p> +"I am to remain here, mademoiselle," he replied in English. +</p> +<p> +"But surely—not because of me?" +</p> +<p> +"It is the captain's order," he said briefly. +</p> +<p> +"I don't understand. Why?" +</p> +<p> +"All sorts of people come to this place, mademoiselle. But few ladies. +It is best that I remain here." +</p> +<p> +She could not move him. He had remained standing while she spoke to him, +and now he yawned, striving to conceal it. Sara Lee felt very +uncomfortable, but Jean's attitude and voice alike were firm. She +thanked him and said good night, but she slept little after that. +</p> +<p> +Lying there in the darkness, a warm glow of gratitude to Henri, and a +feeling of her safety in his care, wrapped her like a mantle. She +wondered drowsily if Harvey would ever have thought of all the small +things that seemed second nature to this young Belgian officer. +</p> +<p> +She rather thought not. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0010" id="h2H_4_0010"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + IX +</h2> +<p> +While she was breakfasting the next morning there was a tap at the door, +and thinking it the maid she called to her to come in. +</p> +<p> +But it was Jean, an anxious Jean, twisting his cap in his hands. +</p> +<p> +"You have had a message from the captain, mademoiselle?" +</p> +<p> +"No, Jean." +</p> +<p> +"He was to have returned during the night. He has not come, +mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee forgot her morning negligée in Jean's harassed face. +</p> +<p> +"But—where did he go?" +</p> +<p> +Jean shrugged his shoulders and did not reply. +</p> +<p> +"Are you worried about him?" +</p> +<p> +"I am anxious, mademoiselle. But I am often anxious; and—he always +returns." +</p> +<p> +He smiled almost sheepishly. Sara Lee, who had no subtlety but a great +deal of intuition, felt that there was a certain relief in the smile, as +though Jean, having had no message from his master, was pleased that +she had none. Which was true enough, at that. Also she felt that Jean's +one eye was inspecting her closely, which was also true. A new factor +had come into Henri's life—by Jean's reasoning, a new and dangerous +one. And there were dangers enough already. +</p> +<p> +Highly dangerous, Jean reflected in the back of his head as he backed +out with a bow. A young girl unafraid of the morning sun and sitting +at a little breakfast table as fresh as herself—that was a picture for +a war-weary man. +</p> +<p> +Jean forgot for a moment his anxiety for Henri's safety in his fear for +his peace of mind. For a doubt had been removed. The girl was straight. +Jean's one sophisticated eye had grasped that at once. A good girl, +alone, and far from home! And Henri, like all soldiers, woman-hungry +for good women, for unpainted skins and clear eyes and the freshness and +bloom of youth. +</p> +<p> +All there, behind that little breakfast table which might so pleasantly +have been laid for two. +</p> +<p> +Jean took a walk that morning, and stood staring for twenty minutes into +a clock maker's window, full of clocks. After which he drew out his +watch and looked at the time! +</p> +<p> +At two in the afternoon Sara Lee saw Henri's car come into the square. +It was, if possible, more dilapidated than before, and he came like a +gray whirlwind, scattering people and dogs out of his way. Almost +before he had had time to enter the hotel Sara Lee heard him in the +hall, and the next moment he was bowing before her. +</p> +<p> +"I have been longer than I expected," he explained. "Have you been +quite comfortable?" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee, however, was gazing at him with startled eyes. He was dirty, +unshaven, and his eyes looked hollow and bloodshot. From his neck to +his heels he was smeared with mud, and his tidy tunic was torn into +ragged holes. +</p> +<p> +"But you—you have been fighting!" she gasped. +</p> +<p> +"I? No, mademoiselle. There has been no battle." His eyes left her +and traveled over the room. "They are doing everything for you? They +are attentive?" +</p> +<p> +"Everything is splendid," said Sara Lee. "If you won't tell me how you +got into that condition, at least you can send your coat down to me to +mend." +</p> +<p> +"My tunic!" He looked at it smilingly. "You would do that?" +</p> +<p> +"I am nearly frantic for something to do." +</p> +<p> +He smiled, and suddenly bending down he took her hand and kissed it. +</p> +<p> +"You are not only very beautiful, mademoiselle, but you are very good." +</p> +<p> +He went away then, and Sara Lee got out her sewing things. The tunic +came soon, carefully brushed and very ragged. But it was not Jean who +brought it; it was the Flemish boy. +</p> +<p> +And upstairs in a small room with two beds Sara Lee might have been +surprised to find Jean, the chauffeur, lying on one, while Henri shaved +himself beside the other. For Jean, of the ragged uniform and the patch +over one eye, was a count of Belgium, and served Henri because he loved +him. And because, too, he was no longer useful in that little army +where lay his heart. +</p> +<p> +Sometime a book will be written about the Jeans of this war, the great +friendships it has brought forth between men. And not the least of its +stories will be that of this Jean of the one eye. But its place is not +here. +</p> +<p> +And perhaps there will be a book about the Henris, also. But not for a +long time, and even then with care. For the heroes of one department of +an army in the field live and die unsung. Their bravest exploits are +buried in secrecy. And that is as it must be. But it is a fine tale to +go untold. +</p> +<p> +After he had bathed and shaved, Henri sat down at a tiny table and wrote. +He drew a plan also, from a rough one before him. Then he took a match +and burned the original drawing until it was but charred black ashes. +When he had finished Jean got up from the bed and put on his overcoat. +</p> +<p> +"To the King?" he said. +</p> +<p> +"To the King, old friend." +</p> +<p> +Jean took the letter and went out. +</p> +<p> +Down below, Sara Lee sat with Henri's ragged tunic on her lap and +stitched carefully. Sometime, she reflected, she would be mending worn +garments for another man, now far away. A little flood of tenderness +came over her. So helpless these men! There was so much to do for them! +And soon, please God, she would be helping other tired and weary men, +with food, and perhaps a word—when she had acquired some French—and +perhaps a thread and needle. +</p> +<p> +She dined alone that night, as usual. Henri did not appear, though she +had sent what she suspected was his only tunic back to him neatly mended +at five o'clock. As a matter of fact Henri was sound asleep. He had +meant to rest only for an hour a body that was crying aloud with fatigue. +But Jean, coming in quietly, had found him sleeping like a child, and +had put his own blanket over him and left him. Henri slept until morning, +when Jean, coming up from his vigil outside the American girl's door, +found him waking and rested, and rang for coffee. +</p> +<p> +Jean sat down on the edge of his bed and put on his shoes and puttees. +He was a taciturn man, but now he had something to say that he did not +like to say. And Henri knew it. +</p> +<p> +"What is it?" he asked, his arms under his head. "Come, let us have it! +It is, of course, about the American lady." +</p> +<p> +"It is," Jean said bluntly. "You cannot mix women and war." +</p> +<p> +"And you think I am doing that?" +</p> +<p> +"I am not an idiot," Jean growled. "You do not know what you are doing. +I do. She is young and lonely. You are young and not unattractive to +women. Already she turns pale when I so much as ask if she has heard +from you." +</p> +<p> +"You asked her that?" +</p> +<p> +"You were gone much longer than—" +</p> +<p> +"And you thought I might send her word, and not you!" Henri's voice was +offended. He lay back while the boy brought in the morning coffee and +rolls. +</p> +<p> +"Let me tell you something," he said when the boy had gone. "She is +betrothed to an American. She wears a betrothal ring. I am to her—the +French language!" +</p> +<p> +But, though Henri laughed, Jean remained grave and brooding. For Henri +had not said what Sara Lee already was to him. +</p> +<p> +It was later in the morning that Henri broached the subject again. They +were in the courtyard of an old house, working over the engine of the car. +</p> +<p> +"I think I have found a location for the young American lady," he said. +</p> +<p> +Jean hammered for a considerable time at a refractory rim. +</p> +<p> +"And where?" he asked at last. +</p> +<p> +Henri named the little town. Like Henri's family name, it must not be +told. Too many things happened there, and perhaps it is even now Henri's +headquarters. For that portion of the line has changed very little. +</p> +<p> +Jean fell to renewed hammering. +</p> +<p> +"If you will be silent I shall explain a plan," Henri said in a cautious +tone. "She will make soup, with help which we shall find. And if coming +in for refreshments a soldier shall leave a letter for me it is natural, +is it not?" +</p> +<p> +"She will suspect, of course." +</p> +<p> +"I think not. And she reads no French. None whatever." +</p> +<p> +Yet Jean's suspicions were not entirely allayed. The plan had its +advantages. It was important that Henri receive certain reports, and +already the hotel whispered that Henri was of the secret service. It +brought him added deference, of course, but additional danger. +</p> +<p> +So Jean accepted the plan, but with reservation. And it was not long +afterward that he said to Sara Lee, in French: "There is a spider on +your neck, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +But Sara Lee only said, "I'm sorry, Jean; you'll have to speak English +to me for a while, I'm afraid." +</p> +<p> +And though he watched her for five minutes she did not put her hand +to her neck. +</p> +<p> +However, that was later on. That afternoon Henri spent an hour with the +Minister of War. And at the end of that time he said: "Thank you, Baron. +I think you will not regret it. America must learn the truth, and how +better than through those friendly people who come to us to help?" +</p> +<p> +It is as well to state, however, that he left the Minister of War with +the undoubted impression that Miss Sara Lee Kennedy was a spinster of +uncertain years. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee packed her own suitcase that afternoon, doing it rather +nervously because Henri was standing in the room by the window waiting +for it. He had come in as matter-of-factly as Harvey had entered the +parlor at Aunt Harriet's, except that he carried in his arms some six +towels, a cake of soap and what looked suspiciously like two sheets. +</p> +<p> +"The house I have under consideration," he said, "has little to +recommend it but the building, and even that—The occupants have gone +away, and—you are not a soldier." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee eyed the bundle. +</p> +<p> +"I don't need sheets," she expostulated. +</p> +<p> +"There are but two. And Jean has placed blankets in the car. You must +have a pillow also." +</p> +<p> +He calmly took one of the hotel pillows from the bed. +</p> +<p> +"What else?" he asked calmly. "Cigarettes? But no, you do not smoke." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee eyed him with something very like despair. +</p> +<p> +"Aren't you ever going to let me think for myself?" +</p> +<p> +"Would you have thought of these?" he demanded triumphantly. "You—you +think only of soup and tired soldiers. Some one must think of you." +</p> +<p> +And there was a touch of tenderness in his voice. Sara Lee felt it and +trembled slightly. He was so fine, and he must not think of her that +way. It was not real. It couldn't be. Men were lonely here, where +everything was hard and cruel. They wanted some of the softness of life, +and all of kindness and sweetness that she could give should be Henri's. +But she must make it clear that there could never be anything more. +</p> +<p> +There was a tightness about her mouth as she folded the white frock. +</p> +<p> +"I know that garment," he said boyishly. "Do you remember the night you +wore it? And how we wandered in the square and made the plan that has +brought us together again?" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee reached down into her suitcase and brought up Harvey's picture. +</p> +<p> +"I would like you to see this," she said a little breathlessly. "It is +the man I am to marry." +</p> +<p> +For a moment she thought Henri was not going to take it. But he came, +rather slowly, and held out his hand for it. He went with it to the +window and stood there for some time looking down at it. +</p> +<p> +"When are you going to marry him, mademoiselle?" +</p> +<p> +"As soon as I go back." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had expected some other comment, but he made none. He put the +photograph very quietly on the bed before her, and gathered up the linen +and the pillow in his arms. +</p> +<p> +"I shall send for your luggage, mademoiselle. And you will find me at +the car outside, waiting." +</p> +<p> +And so it was that a very silent Henri sat with Jean going out to that +strange land which was to be Sara Lee's home for many months. And a +very silent Sara Lee, flanked with pillow and blankets, who sat back +alone and tried to recall the tones of Harvey's voice. +</p> +<p> +And failed. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0010a" id="h2H_4_0010a"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + X +</h2> + +<p> +From Dunkirk to the Front, the road, after the Belgian line was passed, +was lightly guarded. Henri came out of a reverie to explain to Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"We have not many men," he said. "And those that remain are holding the +line. It is very weary, our army." +</p> +<p> +Now at home Uncle James had thought very highly of the Belgian Army. He +had watched the fight they made, and he had tried to interest Sara Lee +in it. But without much result. She had generally said: "Isn't it +wonderful!" or "horrible," as the case might be, and put out of her mind +as soon as possible the ringing words he had been reading. But she had +not forgotten, she found. They came back to her as she rode through that +deserted countryside. Henri, glancing back somewhat later, found her in +tears. +</p> +<p> +He climbed back at once into the rear of the car and sat down beside her. +</p> +<p> +"You are homesick, I think?" +</p> +<p> +"Yes. But not for myself. I am just homesick for all the people who +have lost their homes. You—and Jean, and all the rest." +</p> +<p> +"Some day I shall tell you about my home and what has happened to it," +he said gravely. "Not now. It is not pleasant. But you must remember +this: We are going back home, we Belgians." And after a little pause: +"Just as you are." +</p> +<p> +He lapsed into silence after that, and Sara Lee, stealing a glance at +him, saw his face set and hard. She had a purely maternal impulse to +reach over and pat his hand. +</p> +<p> +Jean did not like Henri's shift to the rear of the car. He drove with +a sort of irritable feverishness, until Henri leaned over and touched +him on the shoulder. +</p> +<p> +"We have mademoiselle with us, Jean," he said in French. +</p> +<p> +"It is not difficult to believe," growled Jean. But he slackened his +pace somewhat. +</p> +<p> +So far the road had been deserted. Now they had come up to a stream of +traffic flowing slowly toward the Front. Armored cars, looking tall and +top-heavy, rumbled and jolted along. Many lorries, one limousine +containing a general, a few Paris buses, all smeared a dingy gray and +filled with French soldiers, numberless and nondescript open machines, +here and there a horse-drawn vehicle—these filled the road. In and +out among them Jean threaded his way, while Sara Lee grew crimson with +the effort to see it all, and Henri sat very stiff and silent. +</p> +<p> +At a crossroads they were halted by troops who had fallen out for a rest. +The men stood at ease, and stared their fill at Sara Lee. Save for a +few weary peasants, most of them had seen no women for months. But they +were respectful, if openly admiring. And their admiration of her was +nothing to Sara Lee's feeling toward them. She loved them all—boys +with their first straggly beards on their chins; older men, looking worn +and tired; French and Belgian; smiling and sad. But most of all, for +Uncle James' sake, she loved the Belgians. +</p> +<p> +"I cannot tell you," she said breathlessly to Henri. "It is like a +dream come true. And I shall help. You look doubtful sometimes, but +I am sure." +</p> +<p> +"You are heaven sent," Henri replied gravely. +</p> +<p> +They turned into a crossroad after a time, and there in a little village +Sara Lee found her new home. A strange village indeed, unoccupied and +largely destroyed. Piles of bricks and plaster lined the streets. +Broken glass was everywhere. Jean blew out a tire finally, because of +the glass, and they were obliged to walk the remainder of the way. +</p> +<p> +"A poor place, mademoiselle," Henri said as they went along. "A peaceful +little town, and quite beautiful, once. And it harbored no troops. But +everything is meat for the mouths of their guns." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee stopped and looked about her. Her heart was beating fast, but +her lips were steady enough. +</p> +<p> +"And it is here that I—" +</p> +<p> +"A little distance down the street. You must see before you decide." +</p> +<p> +Steady, passionless firing was going on, not near, but far away, like +low thunder before a summer storm. She was for months to live, to eat +and sleep and dream to that rumbling from the Ypres salient, to waken +when it ceased or to look up from her work at the strange silence. But +it was new to her then, and terrible. +</p> +<p> +"Do they still shell this—this town?" she asked, rather breathlessly. +</p> +<p> +"Not now. They have done their work. Of course—" he did not finish. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee's heart slowed down somewhat. After all, she had asked to be +near the Front. And that meant guns and such destruction as was all +about her. Only one thing troubled her. +</p> +<p> +"It is rather far from the trenches, isn't it?" +</p> +<p> +He smiled slightly. +</p> +<p> +"Far! It is not very far. Not so far as I would wish, mademoiselle. +But, to do what you desire, it is the best I have to offer." +</p> +<p> +"How far away are the trenches?" +</p> +<p> +"A quarter of a mile beyond those poplar trees." He indicated on a slight +rise a row of great trees broken somewhat but not yet reduced to the +twisted skeletons they were to become later on. In a long line they +faced the enemy like sentinels, winter-quiet but dauntless, and behind +them lay the wreck of the little village, quiet and empty. +</p> +<p> +"Will the men know I am here?" Sara Lee asked anxiously. +</p> +<p> +"But, yes, mademoiselle. At night they come up from the trenches, and +fresh troops take their places. They come up this street and go on to +wherever they are to rest. And when they find that a house of—mercy +is here—and soup, they will come. More than you wish." +</p> +<p> +"Belgian soldiers?" +</p> +<p> +"Only Belgian soldiers. That is as you want it to be, I think." +</p> +<p> +"If only I spoke French!" +</p> +<p> +"You will learn. And in the meantime, mademoiselle, I have taken the +liberty of finding you a servant—a young peasant woman. And you will +also have a soldier always on guard." +</p> +<p> +Something that had been in the back of Sara Lee's mind for some time +suddenly went away. She had been thinking of Aunt Harriet and the Ladies' +Aid Society of the Methodist Church. She had, in fact, been wondering +how they would feel when they learned that she was living alone, the +only woman among thousands of men. It had, oddly enough, never occurred +to her before. +</p> +<p> +"You have thought of everything," she said gratefully. +</p> +<p> +But Henri said nothing. He had indeed thought of everything with a +vengeance, with the net result that he was not looking at Sara Lee more +than he could help. +</p> +<p> +These Americans were strange. An American girl would cross the seas, +and come here alone with him—a man and human. And she would take for +granted that he would do what he was doing for love of his kind—which +was partly true; and she would be beautiful and sweet and amiable and +quite unself-conscious. And then she would go back home, warm of heart +with gratitude, and marry the man of the picture. +</p> +<p> +The village had but one street, and that deserted and in ruins. Behind +its double row of houses, away from the enemy, lay the fields, a muddy +canal and more poplar trees. And from far away, toward Ypres, there +came constantly that somewhat casual booming of artillery which marked +the first winter of the war. +</p> +<p> +The sound of the guns had first alarmed, then interested Sara Lee. It +was detached then, far away. It meant little to her. It was only later, +when she saw some of the results of the sounds she heard, that they +became significant. But this is not a tale of the wounding of men. +There are many such. This is the story of a little house of mercy, and +of a girl with a dauntless spirit, and of two men who loved her. Only +that. +</p> +<p> +The maid Henri had found was already in the house, sweeping. Henri +presented her to Sara Lee, and he also brought a smiling little Belgian +boy, in uniform and with a rifle. +</p> +<p> +"Your staff, mademoiselle!" he said. "And your residence!" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee looked about her. With the trifling exception that there was +no roof, it was whole. And the roof was not necessary, for the floors +of the upper story served instead. There was a narrow passage with a +room on either side, and a tiny kitchen behind. +</p> +<p> +Henri threw open a door on the right. +</p> +<p> +"Your bedroom," he said. "Well furnished, as you will see. It should +be, since there has been brought here all the furniture not destroyed +in the village." +</p> +<p> +His blacker mood had fallen away before her naive delight. He went +about smiling boyishly, showing her the kettles in the kitchen; the +supply, already so rare, of firewood; the little stove. But he stiffened +somewhat when she placed her hand rather timidly on his arm. +</p> +<p> +"How am I ever to thank you?" she asked. +</p> +<p> +"By doing much good. And by never going beyond the poplar trees." +</p> +<p> +She promised both very earnestly. +</p> +<p> +But she was a little sad as she followed Henri about, he volubly +expatiating on such advantages as plenty of air owing to the absence of +a roof; and the attraction of the stove, which he showed much like a +salesman anxious to make a sale. "Such a stove!" he finished +contentedly. "It will make soup even in your absence, mademoiselle! +Our peasants eat much soup; therefore it is what you would call a +trained stove." +</p> +<p> +Before Sara Lee's eyes came a picture of Harvey and the Leete house, +its white dining room, its bay window for plants, its comfortable charm +and prettiness. And Harvey's face, as he planned it for her anxious, +pleading, loving. She drew a long breath. If Henri noticed her +abstraction he ignored it. He was all over the little house. One moment +he was instructing Marie volubly, to her evident confusion. On René, +the guard, he descended like a young cyclone, with warnings for +mademoiselle's safety and comfort. He was everywhere, sitting on the +bed to see if it was soft, tramping hard on the upper floor to discover +if any plaster might loosen below, and pausing in that process to look +keenly at a windmill in the field behind. +</p> +<p> +When he came down it was to say: "You are not entirely alone in the +village, after all, mademoiselle. The miller has come back. I shall +visit him now and explain." +</p> +<p> +He found Sara Lee, however, still depressed. She was sitting in a low +chair in the kitchen gazing thoughtfully at the stove. +</p> +<p> +"I am here," she said. "And here is the house, and a stove, +and—everything. But there are no shops; and what shall I make my soup +out of?" +</p> +<p> +Henri stared at her rather blankly. +</p> +<p> +"True!" he said. "Very true. And I never thought of it!" +</p> +<p> +Then suddenly they both laughed, the joyous ringing laugh of ridiculous +youth, which can see its own absurdities and laugh at them. +</p> +<p> +Henri counted off on his fingers. +</p> +<p> +"I thought of water," he said, "and a house, and firewood, and kettles +and furniture. And there I ceased thinking." +</p> +<p> +It was dusk now. Marie lifted the lid from the stove, and a warm red +glow of reflected light filled the little kitchen. It was warm and +cozy; the kettle sang like the purring of a cat. And something else +that had troubled Sara Lee came out. +</p> +<p> +"I wonder," she said, "if you are doing all this only because I—well, +because I persuaded you." Which she had not. "Do the men really need +me here?" +</p> +<p> +"Need you, mademoiselle?" +</p> +<p> +"Do they need what little I can give? They were smiling, all the ones +I saw." +</p> +<p> +"A Belgian soldier always smiles. Even when he is fighting." His voice +had lost its gayety and had taken on a deeper note. "Mademoiselle, I +have brought you here, where I can think of no other woman who would +have the courage to come, because you are needed. I cannot promise you +entire safety"—his mouth tightened—"but I can promise you work and +gratitude. Such gratitude, mademoiselle, as you may never know again." +</p> +<p> +That reassured her. But in her practical mind the matter of supplies +loomed large. She brought the matter up again directly. +</p> +<p> +"It is to be hot chocolate and soup?" he asked. +</p> +<p> +"Both, if I find I have enough money. Soup only, perhaps." +</p> +<p> +"And soup takes meat, of course." +</p> +<p> +"It should, to be strengthening." +</p> +<p> +Henri looked up, to see Jean in the doorway smiling grimly. +</p> +<p> +"It is very simple," Jean said to him in French. "You have no other +duties of course; so each day you shall buy in the market place at +Dunkirk, with American money. And I shall become a delivery boy and +bring out food for mademoiselle, and whatever is needed." +</p> +<p> +Henri smiled back at him cheerfully. "An excellent plan, Jean," he said. +"Not every day, but frequently." +</p> +<p> +Jean growled and disappeared. +</p> +<p> +However, there was the immediate present to think of, and while Jean +thawed his hands at the fire and Sara Lee was taking housewifely stock +of her new home, Henri disappeared. +</p> +<p> +He came back in a half hour, carrying in a small basket butter, eggs, +bread and potatoes. +</p> +<p> +"The miller!" he explained cheerfully to Sara Lee. "He has still a few +hens, and hidden somewhere a cow. We can have milk—is there a pail +for Marie to take to the mill?—and bread and an omelet. That is a +meal!" +</p> +<p> +There was but one lamp, which hung over the kitchen stove. The room +across from Sara Lee's bedroom contained a small round dining table and +chairs. Sara Lee, enveloped in a large pinafore apron, made the +omelet in the kitchen. Marie brought a pail of fresh milk. Henri, with +a towel over his left arm, and in absurd mimicry of a Parisian waiter, +laid the table; and Jean, dour Jean, caught a bit of the infection, and +finding four bottles set to work with his pocketknife to fit candles +into their necks. +</p> +<p> +Standing in corners, smiling, useless against the cheerful English that +flowed from the kitchen stove to the dining room and back again, were +René and Marie. It was of no use to attempt to help. Did the fire burn +low, it was the young officer who went out for fresh wood. But René +could not permit that twice. He brought in great armfuls of firewood +and piled them neatly by the stove. +</p> +<p> +Henri was absurdly happy again. He would come to the door gravely, with +Sara Lee's little phrase book in hand, and read from it in a solemn tone: +</p> +<p> +"'Shall we have duck or chicken?' 'Where can we get a good dinner at a +moderate price?' 'Waiter, you have spilled wine on my dress.' 'Will +you have a cigar?' 'No, thank you. I prefer a pipe.'" +</p> +<p> +And Sara Lee beat up the eggs and found, after a bad moment, some salt +in a box, and then poured her omelet into the pan. She was very anxious +that it be a good omelet. She must make good her claim as a cook or +Henri's sublime faith in her would die. +</p> +<p> +It was a divine omelet. Even Jean said so. They sat, the three of them, +in the cold little dining room and never knew that it was cold, and they +ate prodigious quantities of omelet and bread and butter, and bully beef +out of a tin, and drank a great deal of milk. +</p> +<p> +Even Jean thawed at last, under the influence of food and Sara Lee. +Before the meal was over he was planning how to get her supplies to her +and making notes on a piece of paper as to what she would need at once. +They adjourned to Sara Lee's bedroom, where Marie had kindled a fire in +the little iron stove, and sat there in the warmth with two candles, +still planning. By that time Sara Lee had quite forgotten that at home +one did not have visitors in one's bedroom. +</p> +<p> +Suddenly Henri held up his hand. +</p> +<p> +"Listen!" he said. +</p> +<p> +That was the first time Sara Lee had ever heard the quiet shuffling step +of tired men, leaving their trenches under cover of darkness. Henri +threw his military cape over her shoulders and she stood in the dark +doorway, watching. +</p> +<p> +The empty street was no longer empty. From gutter to gutter flowed a +stream of men, like a sluggish river which narrowed where a fallen house +partly filled the way; not talking, not singing, just moving, bent under +their heavy and mud-covered equipment. Here and there the clack of +wooden sabots on the cobbles told of one poor fellow not outfitted with +leather shoes. The light of a match here and there showed some few +lucky enough to have still remaining cigarettes, and revealed also, in +the immediate vicinity, a white bandage or two. Some few, recognizing +Henri's officer's cap, saluted. Most of them stumbled on, too weary to +so much as glance aside. +</p> +<p> +Nothing that Sara Lee had dreamed of war was like this. This was dreary +and sodden and hopeless. Those fresh troops at the crossroads that day +had been blithe and smiling. There had been none of the glitter and +panoply of war, but there had been movement, the beating of a drum, the +sharp cries of officers as the lines re-formed. +</p> +<p> +Here there were no lines. Just such a stream of men as at home might +issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they +were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them +were wounded. +</p> +<p> +"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as +mine would not be enough." +</p> +<p> +"I would to God there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth. +</p> +<p> +"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind work +of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by caring for +only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But every night +some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door—men +slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for those +there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhaps a clean +bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will have given +comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You—alone!" +</p> +<p> +"I—alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you? +It is you who have made it possible." +</p> +<p> +But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid +what lay beyond. Far beyond a star shell had risen above the flat +fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white +light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and +went out. +</p> +<p> +"Like that!" Henri said to her, but in French. "Like that you are to me. +Bright and shining—and so soon gone." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee thought he had asked her if she was cold. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0011" id="h2H_4_0011"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XI +</h2> +<p> +The girl was singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she +had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, +though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such +young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness! +</p> +<p> +She got the tales by intuition rather than by words, though she was +picking up some French at that. Marie would weep openly, at times. The +most frequent story was of no news from the country held by the Germans, +of families left with nothing and probably starving. The first inquiry +was always for news. Had the American lady any way to make inquiry? +</p> +<p> +In time Sara Lee began to take notes of names and addresses, and through +Mr. Travers, in London, and the Relief Commission, in Belgium, bits of +information came back. A certain family was in England at a village in +Surrey. Of another a child had died. Here was one that could not be +located, and another reported massacred during the invasion. +</p> +<p> +Later on Sara Lee was to find her little house growing famous, besieged +by anxious soldiers who besought her efforts, so that she used enormous +numbers of stamps and a great deal of effort. But that was later on. +And when that time came she turned to the work as a refuge from her +thoughts. For days were coming when Sara Lee did not want to think. +</p> +<p> +But like all big things the little house made a humble beginning. A mere +handful of men, daring the gibes of their comrades, stopped in that first +night the door stood open, with its invitation of firelight and candles. +But these few went away with a strange story—of a beautiful American, +and hot soup, and even a cigarette apiece. That had been Henri's +contribution, the cigarettes. And soon the fame of the little house went +up and down the trenches, and it was like to die of overpopularity. +</p> +<p> +It was at night that the little house of mercy bloomed like a flower. +During the daytime it was quiet, and it was then, as time went on, that +Sara Lee wrote her letters home and to England, and sent her lists of +names to be investigated. But from the beginning there was much to do. +Vegetables were to be prepared for the soup, Marie must find and bring +in milk for the chocolate, René must lay aside his rifle and chop +firewood. +</p> +<p> +One worry, however, disappeared with the days. Henri was proving a +clever buyer. The money she sent in secured marvels. Only Jean knew, +or ever knew, just how much of Henri's steadily decreasing funds went +to that buying. Certainly not Sara Lee. And Jean expostulated only +once—to be met by such blazing fury as set him sullen for two days. +</p> +<p> +"I am doing this," Henri finished, a trifle ashamed of himself, "not for +mademoiselle, but for our army. And since when have you felt that the +best we can give is too much for such a purpose?" +</p> +<p> +Which was, however lofty, only a part of the truth. +</p> +<p> +So supplies came in plentifully, and Sara Lee pared vegetables and sang +a bit under her breath, and glowed with good will when at night the weary +vanguard of a weary little army stopped at her door and scraped the mud +off its boots and edged in shyly. +</p> +<p> +She was very happy, and her soup was growing famous. It is true that +the beef she used was not often beef, but she did not know that, and +merely complained that the meat was stringy. Now and then there was +no beef at all, and she used hares instead. On quiet days, when there +was little firing beyond the poplar trees, she went about with a basket +through the neglected winter gardens of the town. There were Brussels +sprouts, and sometimes she found in a cellar carrots or cabbages. She +had potatoes always. +</p> +<p> +It was at night then, from seven in the evening until one, that the +little house was busiest. Word had gone out through the trenches beyond +the poplar trees that slightly wounded men needing rest before walking +back to their billets, exhausted and sick men, were welcome to the little +house. It was soon necessary to give the officers tickets for the men. +René took them in at the door, with his rifle in the hollow of his arm, +and he was as implacable as a ticket taker at the opera. +</p> +<p> +Never once in all the months of her life there did Sara Lee have an ugly +word, an offensive glance. But, though she never knew this, many half +articulate and wholly earnest prayers were offered for her in those +little churches behind the lines where sometimes the men slept, and often +they prayed. +</p> +<p> +She was very businesslike. She sent home to the Ladies' Aid Society a +weekly record of what had been done: So many bowls of soup; so many +cups of chocolate; so many minor injuries dressed. Because, very soon, +she found first aid added to her activities. She sickened somewhat at +first. Later she allowed to Marie much of the serving of food, and in +the little <i>salle à manger</i> she had ready on the table basins, water, +cotton, iodine and bandages. +</p> +<p> +Henri explained the method to her. +</p> +<p> +"It is a matter of cleanliness," he said. "First one washes the wound +and then there is the iodine. Then cotton, a bandage, and—a surgeon +could do little more." +</p> +<p> +Henri and Jean came often. And more than once during the first ten days +Jean spent the night rolled in a blanket by the kitchen fire, and Henri +disappeared. He was always back in the morning, however, looking dirty +and very tired. Sara Lee sewed more than one rent for him, those days, +but she was strangely incurious. It was as though, where everything was +strange, Henri's erratic comings and goings were but a part with the rest. +</p> +<p> +Then one night the unexpected happened. The village was shelled. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had received her first letter from Harvey that day. The maid +at Morley's had forwarded it to her, and Henri had brought it up. +</p> +<p> +"I think I have brought you something you wish for very much," he said, +looking down at her. +</p> +<p> +"Mutton?" she inquired anxiously. +</p> +<p> +"Better than that." +</p> +<p> +"Sugar?" +</p> +<p> +"A letter, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +Afterward he could not quite understand the way she had suddenly drawn +in her breath. He had no memory, as she had, of Harvey's obstinate anger +at her going, his conviction that she was doing a thing criminally wrong +and cruel. +</p> +<p> +"Give it to me, please." +</p> +<p> +She took it into her room and closed the door. When she came out again +she was composed and quiet, but rather white. Poor Henri! He was half +mad that day with jealousy. Her whiteness he construed as longing. +</p> +<p> +This is a part of Harvey's letter: +</p> +<p class="quote"> + You may think that I have become reconciled, but I have not. If I could + see any reason for it I might. But what reason is there? So many others, + older and more experienced, could do what you are doing, and more + safely. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + In your letter from the steamer you tell me not to worry. Good God, Sara + Lee, how can I help worrying? I do not even know where you are! If you + are in England, well and good. If you are abroad I do not want to know + it. I know these foreigners. I run into them every day. And they do not + understand American women. I get crazy when I think about it. I have had + to let the Leete house go. There is not likely to be such a chance soon + again. Business is good, but I don't seem to care much about it any + more. Honestly, dear, I think you have treated me very badly. I always + feel as though the people I meet are wondering if we have quarreled or + what on earth took you away on this wild-goose chase. I don't know + myself, so how can I tell them? +</p> +<p class="quote"> + I shall always love you, Sara Lee. I guess I'm that sort. But sometimes + I wonder if, when we are married, you will leave me again in some such + uncalled-for way. I warn you now, dear, that I won't stand for it. I'm + suffering too much. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + HARVEY. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee wore the letter next her heart, but it did not warm her. She +went through the next few hours in a sort of frozen composure and ate +nothing at all. +</p> +<p> +Then came the bombardment. +</p> +<p> +Henri and Jean, driving out from Dunkirk, had passed on the road +ammunition trains, waiting in the road until dark before moving on to +the Front. Henri had given Sara Lee her letter, had watched jealously +for its effect on her, and then, his own face white and set, had gone on +down the ruined street. +</p> +<p> +Here within the walls of a destroyed house he disappeared. The place +was evidently familiar to him, for he moved without hesitation. Broken +furniture still stood in the roofless rooms, and in front of a battered +bureau Henri paused. Still whistling under his breath, he took off his +uniform and donned a strange one, of greenish gray. In the pocket of +the blouse he stuffed a soft round cap of the same color. Then, resuming +his cape and Belgian cap, with its tassel over his forehead, he went out +into the street again. He carried in his belt a pistol, but it was not +the one he had brought in with him. As a matter of fact, by the addition +of the cap in his pocket, Henri was at that moment in the full uniform of +a <i>lieutenant</i> of a Bavarian infantry regiment, pistol and all. +</p> +<p> +He went down the street and along the road toward the poplars. He met +the first detachment of men out of the trenches just beyond the trees, +and stepped aside into the mud to let them pass, calling a greeting to +them out of the darkness. +</p> +<p> +"<i>Bonsoir</i>!" they replied, and saluted stiffly. There were few among them +who did not know his voice, and fewer still who did not suspect his +business. +</p> +<p> +"A brave man," they said among themselves as they went on. +</p> +<p> +"How long will he last?" asked one young soldier, a boy in his teens. +</p> +<p> +"One cannot live long who does as he does," replied a gaunt and bearded +man. "But it is a fine life while it continues. A fine life!" +</p> +<p> +The boy stepped out of the shuffling line and looked behind him. He +could see only the glow of Henri's eternal cigarette. "I should like to +go with him," he muttered wistfully. +</p> +<p> +The ammunition train was in the village now. It kept the center of the +road, lest it should slide into the mud on either side and be mired. +The men moved out of its way into the ditch, grumbling. +</p> +<p> +Henri went whistling softly down the road. +</p> +<p> +The first shell fell in the neglected square. The second struck the +rear wagons of the ammunition train. Henri heard the terrific explosion +that followed, and turning ran madly back into the village. More shells +fell into the road. The men scattered like partridges, running for the +fields, but the drivers of the ammunition wagons beat their horses and +came lurching and shouting down the road. +</p> +<p> +There was cold terror in Henri's heart. He ran madly, throwing aside +his cape as he went. More shells fell ahead in the street. Once in the +darkness he fell flat over the body of a horse. There was a steady +groaning from the ditch near by. But he got up and ran on, a strange +figure with his flying hair and his German uniform. +</p> +<p> +He was all but stabbed by René when he entered the little house. +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle?" Henri gasped, holding René's bayonet away from his +heaving chest. +</p> +<p> +"I am here," said Sara Lee's voice from the little <i>salle à manger</i>. +"Let them carry in the wounded. I am getting ready hot water and +bandages. There is not much space, for the corner of the room has been +shot away." +</p> +<p> +She was as dead white in the candlelight, but very calm. +</p> +<p> +"You cannot stay here," Henri panted. "At any time—" +</p> +<p> +Another shell fell, followed by the rumble of falling walls. +</p> +<p> +"Some one must stay," said Sara Lee. "There must be wounded in the +streets. Marie is in the cellar." +</p> +<p> +Henri pleaded passionately with her to go to the cellar, but she refused. +He would have gathered her up in his arms and carried her there, but +Jean came in, leading a wounded man, and Henri gave up in despair. +</p> +<p> +All that night they worked, a ghastly business. More than one man died +that night in the little house, while a blond young man in a German +uniform gave him a last mouthful of water or took down those pitifully +vague addresses which were all the dying Belgians had to give. +</p> +<p> +"I have not heard—last at Aarschot, but now—God knows where." +</p> +<p> +No more shells fell. At dawn, with all done that could be done, Sara +Lee fainted quietly in the hallway. Henri carried her in and placed +her on her bed. A corner of the room was indeed gone. The mantel was +shattered and the little stove. But on the floor lay Harvey's photograph +uninjured. Henri lifted it and looked at it. Then he placed it on the +table, and very reverently he kissed the palm of Sara Lee's quiet hand. +</p> +<p> +Daylight found the street pitiful indeed. Henri, whose costume René had +been casting wondering glances at all night, sent a request for men from +the trenches to clear away the bodies of the horses and bury them, and +somewhat later over a single grave in the fields there was a simple +ceremony of burial for the men who had fallen. Henri had changed again +by that time, but he sternly forbade Sara Lee to attend. +</p> +<p> +"On pain," he said, "of no more supplies, mademoiselle. These things +must be. They are war. But you can do nothing to help, and it will +be very sad." +</p> +<p> +Ambulances took away the wounded at dawn, and the little house became +quiet once more. With planks René repaired the damage to the corner, +and triumphantly produced and set up another stove. He even put up a +mantelshelf, and on it, smiling somewhat, he placed Harvey's picture. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee saw it there, and a tiny seed of resentment took root and grew. +</p> +<p> +"If there had been no one here last night," she said to the photograph, +"many more would have died. How can you say I am cruel to you? Isn't +this worth the doing?" +</p> +<p> +But Harvey remained impassive, detached, his eyes on the photographer's +white muslin screen. And the angle of his jaw was set and dogged. +</p> + +<a name="image-0002"><!--IMG--></a> +<div class="figure" style="width: 70%;"> +<a href="images/illust-02.jpg"><img width="100%" +src="images/illust-02.jpg" alt="Henri explained the method." /></a> +<br /> +<b>Henri explained the method.</b> +</div> + +<a name="h2H_4_0012" id="h2H_4_0012"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XII +</h2> +<p> +That morning there was a conference in the little house—Colonel Lilias, +who had come in before for a mute but appreciative call on Sara Lee, and +for a cup of chocolate; Captain Tournay, Jean and Henri. It was held +round the little table in the <i>salle à manger</i>, after Marie had brought +coffee and gone out. +</p> +<p> +"They had information undoubtedly," said the colonel. "The same thing +happened at Pervyse when an ammunition train went through. They had the +place, and what is more they had the time. Of course there are the +airmen." +</p> +<p> +"It did not leave the main road until too late for observation from the +air," Henri put in shortly. +</p> +<p> +"Yet any one who saw it waiting at the crossroads might have learned its +destination. The drivers talk sometimes." +</p> +<p> +"But the word had to be carried across," said Captain Tournay. "That is +the point. My men report flashes of lights from the fields. We have +followed them up and found no houses, no anything. In this flat country +a small light travels far." +</p> +<p> +"I shall try to learn to-night," Henri said. "It is, of course, +possible that some one from over there—" He shrugged his shoulders. +</p> +<p> +"I think not." Colonel Lilias put a hand on Henri's shoulder +affectionately. "They have not your finesse, boy. And I doubt if, in +all their army, they have so brave a man." +</p> +<p> +Henri flushed. +</p> +<p> +"There is a courage under fire, with their fellows round—that is one +thing. And a courage of attack—that is even more simple. But the +bravest man is the one who works alone—the man to whom capture is death +without honor." +</p> +<p> +The meeting broke up. Jean and Henri went away in the car, and though +supplies came up regularly Sara Lee did not see the battered gray car +for four days. At the end of that time Henri came alone. Jean, he said +briefly, was laid up for a little while with a flesh wound in his +shoulder. He would be well very soon. In the meantime here at last was +mutton. It had come from England, and he, Henri, had found it lying +forgotten and lonely and very sad and had brought it along. +</p> +<p> +After that Henri disappeared on foot. It was midafternoon and a sunny +day. Sara Lee saw him walking briskly across the fields and watched him +out of sight. She spoke some French now, and she had gathered from René, +who had no scruples about listening at a door, that Henri was the bravest +man in the Belgian Army. +</p> +<p> +Until now Sara Lee had given small thought to Henri's occupation. She +knew nothing of war, and the fact that Henri, while wearing a uniform, +was unattached, had not greatly impressed her. Had she known the +constitution of a modern army she might have wondered over his freedom, +his powerful car, his passes and maps. But his detachment had not seemed +odd to her. Even his appearance during the bombardment in the uniform +of a German <i>lieutenant</i> had meant nothing to her. She had never seen a +German uniform. +</p> +<p> +That evening, however, when he returned she ventured a question. They +dined together, the two of them, for the first time at the little house +alone. Always before Jean had made the third. And it was a real meal, +for Sara Lee had sacrificed a bit of mutton from her soup, and Henri had +produced from his pocket a few small and withered oranges. +</p> +<p> +"A gift!" he said gayly, and piled them in a precarious heap in the +center of the table. On the exact top he placed a walnut. +</p> +<p> +"Now speak gently and walk softly," he said. "It is a work of art and +not to be lightly demolished." +</p> +<p> +He was alternately gay and silent during the meal, and more than once +Sara Lee found his eyes on her, with something new and different in them. +</p> +<p> +"Just you and I together!" he said once. "It is very wonderful." +</p> +<p> +And again: "When you go back to him, shall you tell him of your good +friend who has tried hard to serve you?" +</p> +<p> +"Of course I shall," said Sara Lee. "And he will write you, I know. He +will be very grateful." +</p> +<p> +But it was she who was silent after that, because somehow it would be +hard to make Harvey understand. And as for his being grateful— +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle," said Henri later on, "would you object if I make a +suggestion? You wear a very valuable ring. I think it is entirely safe, +but—who can tell? And also it is not entirely kind to remind men who +are far from all they love that you—" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee flushed and took off her ring. +</p> +<p> +"I am glad you told me," she said. And Henri did not explain that the +Belgian soldiers would not recognize the ring as either a diamond or a +symbol, but that to him it was close to torture. +</p> +<p> +It was when he insisted on carrying out the dishes, singing a little +French song as he did so, that Sara Lee decided to speak what was in her +mind. He was in high spirits then. +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle," he said, "shall I show you something that the eye of no +man has seen before, and that, when we have seen it, shall never be seen +again?" +</p> +<p> +On her interested consent he called in Marie and René, making a great +ceremony of the matter, and sending Marie into hysterical giggling. +</p> +<p> +"Now see!" he said earnestly. "No eye before has ever seen or will again. +Will you guess, mademoiselle? Or you, Marie? René?" +</p> +<p> +"A tear?" ventured Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"But—do I look like weeping?" +</p> +<p> +He did not, indeed. He stood, tall and young and smiling before them, +and produced from his pocket the walnut. +</p> +<p> +"Perceive!" he said, breaking it open and showing the kernel. "Has human +eye ever before seen it?" He thrust it into Marie's open mouth. "And +it is gone! <i>Voilà tout</i>!" +</p> +<p> +It was that evening, while Sara Lee cut bandages and Henri rolled them, +that she asked him what his work was. He looked rather surprised, and +rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work," +he said. "What you call odd jobs." +</p> +<p> +"Then you don't do any fighting?" +</p> +<p> +"In the trenches—no. But now and then I have a little skirmish." +</p> +<p> +A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The +trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this +alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no +detail—was he playing a man's part in the war? +</p> +<p> +"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness. +"You say there are too few men. Yet—I can understand Monsieur Jean, +because he has only one eye. But you!" +</p> +<p> +"I do something," he said, avoiding her eyes. "It is not a great deal. +It is the thing I can do best. That is all." +</p> +<p> +He went away some time after that, leaving the little house full and busy +justifying its existence. The miller's son, who came daily to chat with +Marie, was helping in the kitchen. By the warm stove, and only kept from +standing over it by Marie's sharp orders, were as many men as could get +near. Each held a bowl of hot soup, and—that being a good day—a +piece of bread. Tall soldiers and little ones, all dirty, all weary, +almost all smiling, they peered over each other's shoulders, to catch, +if might be, a glimpse of Marie's face. +</p> +<p> +When they came too close she poked an elbow into some hulking fellow and +sent him back. +</p> +<p> +"Elbow-room, in the name of God," she would beg. +</p> +<p> +Over all the room hung the warm steam from the kettles, and a delicious +odor, and peace. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had never heard of the word <i>morale</i>. She would have been +astonished to have been told that she was helping the <i>morale</i> of an +army. But she gave each night in that little house of mercy something +that nothing else could give—warmth and welcome, but above all a touch +of home. +</p> +<p> +That night Henri did not come back. She stood by her table bandaging, +washing small wounds, talking her bits of French, until one o'clock. +Then, the last dressing done, she went to the kitchen. Marie was there, +with Maurice, the miller's son. +</p> +<p> +"Has the captain returned?" she asked. +</p> +<p> +"Not yet, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +"Leave a warm fire," Sara Lee said. "He will probably come in later." +</p> +<p> +Maurice went away, with a civil good night. Sara Lee stood in the +doorway after he had gone, looking out. Farther along the line there +was a bombardment going on. She knew now what a bombardment meant and +her brows contracted. Somewhere there in the trenches men were enduring +that, while Henri— +</p> +<p> +She said a little additional prayer that night, which was that she +should have courage to say to him what she felt—that there were big +things to do, and that it should not all be left to these smiling, +ill-clad peasant soldiers. +</p> +<p> +At that moment Henri, in his gray-green uniform, was cutting wire before +a German trench, one of a party of German soldiers, who could not know +in the darkness that there had been a strange addition to their group. +Cutting wire and learning many things which it was well that he should +know. +</p> +<p> +Now and then, in perfect German, he whispered a question. Always he +received a reply. And stowed it away in his tenacious memory for those +it most concerned. +</p> +<p> +At daylight he was asleep by Sara Lee's kitchen fire. And at daylight +Sara Lee was awakened by much firing, and putting on a dressing gown she +went out to see what was happening. René was in the street looking +toward the poplar trees. +</p> +<p> +"An attack," he said briefly. +</p> +<p> +"You mean—the Germans?" +</p> +<p> +"Yes, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +She went back into the little ruined house, heavy-hearted. She knew now +what it meant, an attack. That night there would be ambulances in the +street, and word would come up that certain men were gone—would never +seek warmth and shelter in her kitchen or beg like children for a second +bowl of soup. +</p> +<p> +On the kitchen floor by the dying fire Henri lay asleep. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0013" id="h2H_4_0013"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XIII +</h2> +<p> +Much has been said of the work of spies—said and written. Here is a +woman in Paris sending forbidden messages on a marked coin. Men are +tapped on the shoulder by a civil gentleman in a sack suit, and walk +away with him, never to be seen again. +</p> +<p> +But of one sort of spy nothing has been written and but little is known. +Yet by him are battles won or lost. On the intelligence he brings +attacks are prepared for and counter-attacks launched. It is not always +the airman, in these days of camouflage, who brings word of ammunition +trains or of new batteries. +</p> +<p> +In the early days of the war the work of the secret service at the Front +was of the gravest importance. There were fewer air machines, and +observation from the air was a new science. Also trench systems were +incomplete. Between them, known to a few, were breaks of solid land, +guarded from behind. To one who knew, it was possible, though dangerous +beyond words, to cross the inundated country that lay between the Belgian +Front and the German lines, and even with good luck to go farther. +</p> +<p> +Henri, for instance, on that night before had left the advanced trench +at the railway line, had crawled through the Belgian barbed wire, and +had advanced, standing motionless as each star shell burst overhead, and +then moving on quickly. The inundation was his greatest difficulty. +Shallow in most places, it was full of hidden wire and crisscrossed with +irrigation ditches. Once he stumbled into one, but he got out by +swimming. Had he been laden with a rifle and equipment it might have +been difficult. +</p> +<p> +He swore to himself as his feet touched ground again. For a star shell +was hanging overhead, and his efforts had sent wide and ever increasingly +widening circles over the placid surface of the lagoon. Let them lap to +the German outposts and he was lost. +</p> +<p> +Henri's method was peculiar to himself. Where there was dry terrain he +did as did the others, crouched and crept. But here in the salt marshes, +where the sea had been called to Belgium's aid, he had evolved a system +of moving, neck deep in water, stopping under the white night lights, +advancing in the darkness. There was no shelter. The country was flat +as a hearth. +</p> +<p> +He would crawl out at last in the darkness and lie flat, as the dead lie. +And then, inch by inch, he would work his way forward, by routes that he +knew. Sometimes he went entirely through the German lines, and +reconnoitered on the roads behind. They were shallow lines then, for +the inundation made the country almost untenable, and a charge in force +from the Belgians across was unlikely. +</p> +<p> +Henri knew his country well, as well as he loved it. In a farmhouse +behind the German lines he sometimes doffed his wet gray-green uniform +and put on the clothing of a Belgian peasant. Trust Henri then for being +a lout, a simple fellow who spoke only Flemish—but could hear in many +tongues. Watch him standing at crossroads and marveling at big guns that +rumble by. +</p> +<p> +At first Henri had wished, having learned of an attack, to be among those +who repelled it. Then one day his King had sent for him to come to that +little village which was now his capital city. +</p> +<p> +He had been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing. +Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri +was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were +blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was—a tawdry summer home, +ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man +of all time it became royal. +</p> +<p> +So Henri bowed and waited, and soon the King got up and shook hands with +him. As a matter of fact they knew each other rather well, but to +explain more would be to tell that family name of Henri's which must +never be known. +</p> +<p> +"Sit down," said the King gravely. And he got a box of cigars from the +mantelpiece and offered it. "I sent for you because I want to talk to +you. You are doing valuable work." +</p> +<p> +"I am glad you think it so, sire," said Henri rather unhappily, because +he felt what was coming. "But I cannot do it all the time. There are +intervals—" +</p> +<p> +An ordinary mortal may not interrupt a king, but a king may interrupt +anything, except perhaps a German bombardment. +</p> +<p> +"Intervals, of course. If there were not you would be done in a month." +</p> +<p> +"But I am a soldier. My place is—" +</p> +<p> +"Your place is where you are most useful." +</p> +<p> +Henri was getting nothing out of the cigar. He flung it away and got up. +</p> +<p> +"I want to fight too," he said stubbornly. "We need every man, and I +am—rather a good shot. I do this other because I can do it. I speak +their infernal tongue. But it's dirty business at the best, sire." He +remembered to put in the sire, but rather ungraciously. Indeed he shot +it out like a bullet. +</p> +<p> +"Dirty business!" said the King thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. It +is, of course. But—not so dirty as the things they have done, and are +doing." +</p> +<p> +He sat still and let Henri stamp up and down, because, as has been said, +he knew the boy. And he had never been one to insist on deference, +which was why he got so much of it. But at last he got up and when +Henri stood still, rather ashamed of himself, he put an arm over the +boy's shoulders. +</p> +<p> +"I want you to do this thing, for me. And this thing only," he said. +"It is the work you do best. There are others who can fight, but—I do +not know any one else who can do as you have done." +</p> +<p> +Henri promised. He would have promised to go out and drown himself in +the sea, just beyond the wind-swept little garden, for the tall grave +man who stood before him. Then he bowed and went out, and the King +went back to his plain pine table and his work. That was the reason why +Sara Lee found him asleep on the floor by her kitchen stove that morning, +and went back to her cold bed to lie awake and think. But no explanation +came to her. +</p> +<p> +The arrival of Marie roused Henri. The worst of the bombardment was +over, but there was far-away desultory firing. He listened carefully +before, standing outside in the cold, he poured over his head and +shoulders a pail of cold water. He was drying himself vigorously when +he heard Sara Lee's voice in the kitchen. +</p> +<p> +The day began for Henri when first he saw the girl. It might be evening, +but it was the beginning for him. So he went in when he had finished +his toilet and bowed over her hand. +</p> +<p> +"You are cold, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +"I think I am nervous. There was an attack this morning." +</p> +<p> +"Yes?" +</p> +<p> +Marie had gone into the next room, and Sara Lee raised haggard eyes +to his. +</p> +<p> +"Henri," she said desperately—it was the first time she had called him +that—"I have something to say to you, and it's not very pleasant." +</p> +<p> +"You are going home?" It was the worst thing he could think of. But +she shook her head. +</p> +<p> +"You will think me most ungrateful and unkind." +</p> +<p> +"You? Kindness itself!" +</p> +<p> +"But this is different. It is not for myself. It is because I care a +great deal about—about—" +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle!" +</p> +<p> +"About your honor. And somehow this morning, when I found you here +asleep, and those poor fellows in the trenches fighting—" +</p> +<p> +Henri stared at her. So that was it! And he could never tell her. He +was sworn to secrecy by every tradition and instinct of his work. He +could never tell her, and she would go on thinking him a shirker and a +coward. She would be grateful. She would be sweetness itself. But +deep in her heart she would loathe him, as only women can hate for a +failing they never forgive. +</p> +<p> +"But I have told you," he said rather wildly, "I am not idle. I do +certain things—not much, but of a degree of importance." +</p> +<p> +"You do not fight." +</p> +<p> +In Sara Lee's defense many things may be urged—her ignorance of modern +warfare; the isolation of her lack of knowledge of the language; but, +perhaps more than anything, a certain rigidity of standard that +comprehended no halfway ground. Right was right and wrong was wrong to +her in those days. Men were brave or were cowards. Henri was worthy +or unworthy. And she felt that, for all his kindness to her, he was +unworthy. +</p> +<p> +He could have set himself right with a word, at that. But his pride was +hurt. He said nothing except, when she asked if he had minded what she +said, to reply: +</p> +<p> +"I am sorry you feel as you do. I am not angry." +</p> +<p> +He went away, however, without breakfast. Sara Lee heard his car going +at its usual breakneck speed up the street, and went to the door. She +would have called him back if she could, for his eyes haunted her. But +he did not look back. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0014" id="h2H_4_0014"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XIV +</h2> +<p> +For four days the gray car did not come again. Supplies appeared in +another gray car, driven by a surly Fleming. The waking hours were full, +as usual. Sara Lee grew a little thin, and seemed to be always +listening. But there was no Henri, and something that was vivid and +joyous seemed to have gone out of the little house. +</p> +<p> +Even Marie no longer sang as she swept or washed the kettles, and Sara +Lee, making up the records to send home, put little spirit into the +letter that went with them. +</p> +<p> +On the second day she wrote to Harvey. +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "I am sorry that you feel as you do," she wrote, perhaps unconsciously + using Henri's last words to her. "I have not meant to be cruel. And + if you were here you would realize that whether others could have done + what I am doing or not—and of course many could—it is worth doing. + I hear that other women are establishing houses like this, but the + British and the French will not allow women so near the lines. The men + come in at night from the trenches so tired, so hungry and so cold. + Some of them are wounded too. I dress the little wounds. I do give + them something, Harvey dear—if it is only a reminder that there are + homes in the world, and everything is not mud and waiting and killing." +</p> +<p> +She told him that his picture was on her mantel, but she did not say +that a corner of her room had been blown away or that the mantel was +but a plank from a destroyed house. And she sent a great deal of love, +but she did not say that she no longer wore his ring on her finger. +And, of course, she was coming back to him if he still wanted her. +</p> +<p> +More than Henri's absence was troubling Sara Lee those days. Indeed she +herself laid all her anxiety to one thing, a serious one at that. With +all the marvels of Henri's buying, and Jean's, her money was not holding +out. The scope of the little house had grown with its fame. Now and +then there were unexpected calls, too—Marie's mother, starving in +Havre; sickness and death in the little town at the crossroads: a dozen +small emergencies, but adding to the demands on her slender income. She +had, as a matter of fact, already begun to draw on her private capital. +</p> +<p> +And during the days when no gray car appeared she faced the situation, +took stock, as it were, and grew heavy-eyed and wistful. +</p> +<p> +On the fifth day the gray car came again, but Jean drove it alone. He +disclaimed any need for sympathy over his wound, and with René's aid +carried in the supplies. +</p> +<p> +There was the business of checking them off, and the further business +of Sara Lee's paying for them in gold. She sat at the table, Jean +across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d'or, an +engrossed frown between her eyebrows. +</p> +<p> +Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed. She smiled very seldom, +and her eyes were perhaps more steady. It was a young girl he and Henri +had brought out to the little house. It was a very serious and rather +anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he +had brought back into little stacks. +</p> +<p> +"Jean," she said finally, "I am not going to be able to do it." +</p> +<p> +"To do what?" +</p> +<p> +"To continue—here." +</p> +<p> +"No?" +</p> +<p> +"You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in +London. You and—and Henri have done miracles for me. But soon I +shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back. And +now I shall have to start on my English notes. After that—" +</p> +<p> +"You are too good to the men. These cigarettes, now—you could do +without them." +</p> +<p> +"But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean." +</p> +<p> +She sat still, her hands before her on the table. From the kitchen came +the bubbling of the eternal soup. Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down +her cheek. She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently +did not notice. +</p> +<p> +"The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort +too many." +</p> +<p> +"Jean," she said suddenly, "where is Henri?" +</p> +<p> +"In England, I think." +</p> +<p> +The only clear thought in Sara Lee's mind was that Henri was not in +France, and that he had gone without telling her. She had hurt him +horribly. She knew that. He might never come back to the little house +of mercy. There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable +strain. And she had attacked his honor. What possible right had she +to do that? +</p> +<p> +The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale +and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean. +</p> +<p> +"Did he tell you anything?" +</p> +<p> +"Nothing, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +"He is very angry with me, Jean." +</p> +<p> +"But surely no, mademoiselle. With you? It is impossible." +</p> +<p> +But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply. +He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri's manner +before his departure. They had quarreled, these two. Perhaps it was as +well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee. But he looked out, +those days, on but half a world, did Jean. So he saw only the woman +hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper. And in Sara Lee a woman, and +nothing more. +</p> +<p> +And—being Jean he shrugged his shoulders. +</p> +<p> +They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out, +but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and +trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had +hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow +Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval. +He gave her no moral support. +</p> +<p> +At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with +soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds +dressed—a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did +it nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She +enclosed a snapshot of the little house. +</p> +<p> +Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times. +He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later +on he told René. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back +along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on +the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by. +</p> +<p> +Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got +in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different +Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads—a Henri in +the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and +impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue +trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back +and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his +chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter +campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing +through rents in his coat. +</p> +<p> +Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders, +the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of +the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which +renders the French Army so mobile. +</p> +<p> +He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an +extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and +an intrenching tool jingling at his belt. +</p> +<p> +Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded +crossroads—smiled and then sighed. For Jean had lost everything in +the war. His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and +with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come. But Henri +had brought back to Jean something to live for—or to die for, as might +happen. +</p> +<p> +Henri walked along gayly. He hailed other French soldiers. He joined a +handful and stood talking to them. But he reached the crossroads before +the ammunition train. +</p> +<p> +The crossroads was crowded, as usual—many soldiers, at rest, waiting +for the word to fall in, a battery held up by the breaking of a wheel. +A temporary forge had been set up, and soldiers in leather aprons were +working over the fire. A handful of peasants watched, their dull eyes +following every gesture. And one of them was a man Henri sought. +</p> +<p> +Henri sat down on the ground and lighted a cigarette. The ammunition +train rolled in and halted, and the man Henri watched turned his +attention to the train. He had been dull and quiet at the forge, but +now he became smiling, a good fellow. He found a man he knew among the +drivers and offered him a cigarette. He also produced and presented an +entire box of matches. Matches were very dear, and hardly to be bought +at any price. +</p> +<p> +Henri watched grimly and hummed a little song: +</p> +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<p> "<i>Trou la la, çà ne va guère</i>;</p> +<p> <i>Trou la la, çà ne va pas</i>."</p> +</div> +</div> +<p> +Still humming under his breath, when the peasant left the crossroads he +followed him. Not closely. The peasant cut across the fields. Henri +followed the road and entered the fields at a different angle. He knew +his way quite well, for he had done the same thing each day for four +days. Only twice he had been a Belgian peasant, and once he was an +officer, and once he had been a priest. +</p> +<p> +Four days he had done this thing, but to-day was different. To-day there +would be something worth while, he fancied. And he made a mental note +that Sara Lee must not be in the little house that night. +</p> +<p> +When he had got to a canal where the pollard willows were already sending +out their tiny red buds, Henri sat down again. The village lay before +him, desolate and ruined, a travesty of homes. And on a slight rise, but +so concealed from him by the willows that only the great wings showed, +stood the windmill. +</p> +<p> +It was the noon respite then, and beyond the line of poplars all was quiet. +The enemy liked time for foods and the Belgians crippled by the loss of +that earlier train, were husbanding their ammunition. Far away a gap in +the poplar trees showed a German observation balloon, a tiny dot against +the sky. +</p> +<p> +The man Henri watched went slowly, for he carried a bag of grain on his +back. Henri no longed watched him, He watched the wind wheel. It had +been broken, and one plane was now patched with what looked like a red +cloth. There was a good wind, but clearly the miller was idle that day. +The great wings were not turning. +</p> +<p> +Henri sat still and smoked. He thought of many things—of Sara Lee's +eyes when in the center of the London traffic she had held the dying +donkey; of her small and radiant figure at the Savoy; of the morning he +had found her at Calais, in the Gare Maritime, quietly unconscious that +she had done a courageous thing. And he thought, too, of the ring and +the photograph she carried. But mostly he remembered the things she had +said to him on their last meeting. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps there came to him his temptation too. It would be so easy that +night, if things went well, to make a brave showing before her, to let +her see that these odd jobs he did had their value and their risks. But +he put that from him. The little house of mercy must be empty that +night, for her sake. He shivered as he remembered the room where she +slept, the corner that was shot away and left open to the street. +</p> +<p> +So he sat and watched. And at one o'clock the mill wheel began turning. +It was easy to count the revolutions by the red wing. Nine times it +turned, and stopped. After five minutes or so it turned again, thirty +times. Henri smiled: an ugly smile. +</p> +<p> +"A good guess," he said to himself. "But it must be more than a guess." +</p> +<p> +His work for the afternoon was done. Still with the bent-kneed swing he +struck back to the road, and avoiding the crossroads, went across more +fields to a lane where Jean waited with the car. Henri took a plunge +into the canal when he had removed his French uniform, and producing a +towel from under a bush rubbed himself dry. His lean boyish body +gleamed, arms and legs brown from much swimming under peaceful summer +suns. On his chest he showed two scars, still pink. Shrapnel bites, he +called them. But he had, it is to be feared, a certain young +satisfaction in them. +</p> +<p> +He was in high good humor. The water was icy, and Jean had refused to +join him. +</p> +<p> +"My passion for cleanliness," Henri said blithely, "is the result of my +English school days. You would have been the better for an English +education, Jean." +</p> +<p> +"A canal in March!" Jean grunted. "You will end badly." +</p> +<p> +Henri looked longingly at the water. +</p> +<p> +"Had I a dry towel," he said, "I would go in again." +</p> +<p> +Jean looked at him with his one eye. +</p> +<p> +"You would be prettier without those scars," he observed. But in his +heart he prayed that there might be no others added to them, that +nothing might mar or destroy that bright and youthful body. +</p> +<p> +"<i>Dépêchez-vous! Vous sommes pressés</i>!" he added. +</p> +<p> +But Henri was minded to play. He girded himself with the towel and +struck an attitude. +</p> +<p> +"The Russian ballet, Jean!" he said, and capering madly sent Jean +into deep grumbles of laughter by his burlesque. +</p> +<p> +"I must have exercise," Henri said at last when, breathless and with +flying hair, he began to dress. "That, too, is my English schooling. If +you, Jean—" +</p> +<p> +"To the devil with your English schooling!" Jean remonstrated. +</p> +<p> +Henri sobered quickly after that. The exhilaration of his cold plunge +was over. +</p> +<p> +"The American lady?" he asked. "She is all right?" +</p> +<p> +"She is worried. There is not enough money." +</p> +<p> +Henri frowned. +</p> +<p> +"And I have nothing!" +</p> +<p> +This opened up an old wound with Jean. +</p> +<p> +"If you would be practical and take pay for what you are doing," he began. +</p> +<p> +Henri cut him short. +</p> +<p> +"Pay!" he said. "What is there to pay me with? And what is the use of +reopening the matter? A man may be a spy for love of his country. God +knows there is enough lying and deceit in the business. But to be a spy +for money—never!" +</p> +<p> +There was a little silence. Then: "Now for mademoiselle," said Henri. +"She must be out of the village to-night. And that, dear friend, must +be your affair. She does not like me." +</p> +<p> +All the life had gone out of his voice. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0015" id="h2H_4_0015"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XV +</h2> +<p> +"But why should I go?" Sara Lee asked. "It is kind of you to ask me, +Jean. But I am here to work, not to play." +</p> +<p> +Long ago Sara Lee had abandoned her idea of Jean as a paid chauffeur. +She even surmised, from something Marie had said, that he had been a +person of importance in the Belgium of before the war. So she was +grateful, but inclined to be obstinate. +</p> +<p> +"You have been so much alone, mademoiselle—" +</p> +<p> +"Alone!" +</p> +<p> +"Cut off from your own kind. And now and then one finds, at the hotel +in Dunkirk, some English nurses who are having a holiday. You would +like to talk to them perhaps." +</p> +<p> +"Jean," she said unexpectedly, "why don't you tell me the truth? You +want me to leave the village to-night. Why?" +</p> +<p> +"Because, mademoiselle, there will be a bombardment." +</p> +<p> +"The village itself?" +</p> +<p> +"We expect it," he answered dryly. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee went a little pale. +</p> +<p> +"But then I shall be needed, as I was before." +</p> +<p> +"No troops will pass through the town to-night. They will take a road +beyond the fields." +</p> +<p> +"How do you know these things?" she asked, wondering. "About the troops +I can understand. But the bombardment." +</p> +<p> +"There are ways of finding out, mademoiselle," he replied in his +noncommittal voice. "Now, will you go?" +</p> +<p> +"May I tell Marie and René?" +</p> +<p> +"No." +</p> +<p> +"Then I shall not go. How can you think that I would consider my own +safety and leave them here?" +</p> +<p> +Jean had ascertained before speaking that Marie was not in the house. +As for René, he sat on the single doorstep and whittled pegs on which to +hang his rifle inside the door. And as he carved he sang words of his +own to the tune of Tipperary. +</p> +<p> +Inside the little <i>salle à manger</i> Jean reassured Sara Lee. It was +important—vital—that René and Marie should not know far in advance +of the bombardment. They were loyal, certainly, but these were his +orders. In abundance of time they would be warned to leave the village. +</p> +<p> +"Who is to warn them?" +</p> +<p> +"Henri has promised, mademoiselle. And what he promises is done." +</p> +<p> +"You said this morning that he was in England." +</p> +<p> +"He has returned." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee's heart, which had been going along merely as a matter of duty +all day, suddenly began to beat faster. Her color came up, and then faded +again. He had returned, and he had not come to the little house. But +then—what could Henri mean to her, his coming or his going? Was she +to add to her other sins against Harvey the supreme one of being +interested in Henri? +</p> +<p> +Not that she said all that, even to herself. There was a wave of +gladness and then a surge of remorse. That is all. But it was a very +sober Sara Lee who put on her black suit with the white collar that +afternoon and ordered, by Jean's suggestion, the evening's preparations +as though nothing was to happen. +</p> +<p> +She looked round her little room before she left it. It might not be +there when she returned. So she placed Harvey's photograph under her +mattress for safety, and rather uncomfortably she laid beside it the +small ivory crucifix that Henri had found in a ruined house and brought +to her. Harvey was not a Catholic. He did not believe in visualizing +his religion. And she had a distinct impression that he considered such +things as did so as bordering on idolatry. +</p> +<p> +Sometime after dusk that evening the ammunition train moved out. At a +point a mile or so from the village a dispatch rider on a motor cycle +stopped the rumbling lorry at the head of the procession and delivered +a message, which the guide read by the light of a sheltered match. The +train moved on, but it did not turn down to the village. It went beyond +to a place of safety, and there remained for the night. +</p> +<p> +But before that time Henri, lying close in a field, had seen a skulking +figure run from the road to the mill, and soon after had seen the mill +wheel turn once, describing a great arc; and on one of the wings, showing +only toward the poplar trees, was a lighted lantern. +</p> +<p> +Five minutes later, exactly time enough for the train to have reached +the village street, German shells began to fall in it. Henri, lying +flat on the ground, swore silently and deeply. +</p> +<p> +In every land during this war there have been those who would sell their +country for a price. Sometimes money. Sometimes protection. And of all +betrayals that of the man who sells his own country is the most dastardly. +Henri, lying face down, bit the grass beneath him in sheer rage. +</p> +<p> +One thing he had not counted on, he who foresaw most things. The miller +and his son, being what they were, were cowards as well. Doubtless the +mill had been promised protection. It was too valuable to the Germans +to be destroyed. But with the first shot both men left the house by the +mill and scurried like rabbits for the open fields. +</p> +<p> +Maurice, poor Marie's lover by now, almost trampled on Henri's prostrate +body. And Henri was alone, and his work was to take them alive. They +had information he must have—how the <i>modus vivendi</i> had been arranged, +through what channels. And under suitable treatment they would tell. +</p> +<p> +He could not follow them through the fields. He lay still, during a +fiercer bombardment than the one before, raising his head now and then +to see if the little house of mercy still stood. No shells came his +way, but the sky line of the village altered quickly. The standing +fragment of the church towers went early. There was much sound of +falling masonry. From somewhere behind him a Belgian battery gave +tongue, but not for long. And then came silence. +</p> +<p> +Henri moved then. He crept nearer the mill and nearer. And at last he +stood inside and took his bearings. A lamp burned in the kitchen, +showing a dirty brick floor and a littered table—such a house as men +keep, untidy and unhomelike. A burnt kettle stood on the hearth, and +leaning against the wall was the bag of grain Maurice had carried from +the crossroads. +</p> +<p> +"A mill which grinds without grain," Henri said to himself. +</p> +<p> +There was a boxed-in staircase to the upper floor, and there, with the +door slightly ajar, he stationed himself, pistol in hand. Now and then +he glanced uneasily at the clock. Sara Lee must not be back before he +had taken his prisoners to the little house and turned them over to +those who waited there. +</p> +<p> +There were footsteps outside, and Henri drew the door a little closer. +But he was dismayed to find it Marie. She crept in, a white and broken +thing, and looked about her. +</p> +<p> +"Maurice!" she called. +</p> +<p> +She sat down for a moment, and then, seeing the disorder about her, set +to work to clear the table. It was then that Henri lowered his pistol +and opened the door. +</p> +<p> +"Don't shriek, Marie," he said. +</p> +<p> +She turned and saw him, and clutched at the table. +</p> +<p> +"Monsieur!" +</p> +<p> +"Marie," he said quietly, "go up these stairs and remain quiet. Do not +walk round. And do not come down, no matter what you hear!" +</p> +<p> +She obeyed him, stumbling somewhat. For she had seen his revolver, and +it frightened her. But as she passed him she clutched at his sleeve. +</p> +<p> +"He is good—Maurice," she said, gasping. "Of the father I know nothing, +but Maurice—" +</p> +<p> +"Go up and be silent!" was all he said. +</p> +<p> +Now, by all that goes to make a story, Sara Lee should have met Mabel at +the Hôtel des Arcades in Dunkirk, and should have been able to make that +efficient young woman burn with jealousy—Mabel, who from the safety of +her hospital in Boulogne considered Dunkirk the Front. +</p> +<p> +Indeed Sara Lee, to whom the world was beginning to seem very small, had +had some such faint hope. But Mabel was not there, and it was not until +long after that they met at all, and then only when the lights had gone +down and Sara Lee was again knitting by the fire. +</p> +<p> +There were a few nurses there, in their white veils with the red cross +over the forehead, and one or two Englishwomen in hats that sat a trifle +too high on the tops of their heads and with long lists before them +which they checked as they ate. Aviators in leather coats; a few Spahis +in cloak and turban, with full-gathered bloomers and high boots; some +American ambulance drivers, rather noisy and very young; and many +officers, in every uniform of the Allied armies—sat at food together +and for a time forgot their anxieties under the influence of lights, food +and warmth, and red and white wine mixed with water. +</p> +<p> +When he chose, Jean could be a delightful companion; not with Henri's +lift of spirits, but quietly interesting. And that evening he was a new +Jean to Sara Lee, a man of the world, talking of world affairs. He +found her apt and intelligent, and for Sara Lee much that had been +clouded cleared up forever that night. Until then she had known only +the humanities of the war, or its inhumanities. There, over that little +table, she learned something of its politics and its inevitability. She +had been working in the dark, with her heart only. Now she began to +grasp the real significance of it all, of Belgium's anxiety for many +years, of Germany's cold and cruel preparation, and empty protests of +friendship. She learned of the flight of the government from Brussels, +the most important state papers being taken away in a hand cart, on top +of which, at the last moment, some flustered official had placed a tall +silk hat! She learned of the failure of great fortifications before the +invaders' heavy guns. And he had drawn for her such a picture of +Albert of Belgium as she was never to forget. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps Sara Lee's real growth began that night, over that simple dinner +at the Hôtel des Arcades. +</p> +<p> +"I wish," she said at last, "that Uncle James could have heard all this. +He was always so puzzled about it all. And—you make it so clear." +</p> +<p> +When dinner was over a bit of tension had relaxed in her somewhat. She +had been too close, for too long. And when a group of Belgian officers, +learning who she was, asked to be presented and gravely thanked her, she +flushed with happiness. +</p> +<p> +"We must see if mademoiselle shall not have a medal," said the only one +who spoke English. +</p> +<p> +"A medal? For what?" +</p> +<p> +"For courage," he said, bowing. "Belgium has little to give, but it can +at least do honor to a brave lady." +</p> +<p> +Jean was smiling when they passed on. What a story would this slip of a +girl take home with her! +</p> +<p> +But: "I don't think I want a medal, Jean," she said. "I didn't come for +that. And after all it is you and Henri who have done the thing—not I." +</p> +<p> +Accustomed to women of a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first +taken her naïveté for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting +her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just +such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of +her—the upraising of her eyes or an unstudied gesture. +</p> +<p> +He sighed. +</p> +<p> +"You are very wonderful, you Americans," he said. It was the nearest to +a compliment that he had ever come. And after that evening he was always +very gentle with her. Once he had protected her because Henri had asked +him to do so; now he himself became in his silent way her protector. +</p> +<p> +The ride home through the dark was very quiet. Sara Lee sat beside him +watching the stars and growing increasingly anxious as they went, not +too rapidly, toward the little house. There were no lights. Air raids +had grown common in Dunkirk, and there were no street lights in the +little city. Once on the highway Jean lighted the lamps, but left them +very low, and two miles from the little house he put them out altogether. +They traveled by starlight then, following as best they could the tall +trees that marked the road. Now and then they went astray at that, and +once they tilted into the ditch and had hard pulling to get out. +</p> +<p> +At the top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down. +He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable; +and again Sara Lee shivered. If the little house was gone! +</p> +<p> +But it was there, and lighted too. Through its broken shutters came the +yellow glow of the oil lamp that now hung over the table in the <i>salle à +manger</i>. +</p> +<p> +Whatever Jean's anxieties had been fell from him as he pushed open the +door. Henri's voice was the first thing they heard. He was too much +occupied to notice their approach. +</p> +<p> +So it was that Sara Lee saw, for the last time, the miller and his son, +Maurice; saw them, but did not know them, for over their heads were bags +of their own sacking, with eyeholes roughly cut in them. Their hands +were bound, and three soldiers were waiting to take them away. +</p> +<p> +"I have covered your heads," Henri was saying in French, "because it is +not well that our brave Belgians should know that they have been betrayed +by those of their own number." +</p> +<p> +It was a cold and terrible Henri who spoke. +</p> +<p> +"Take them away," he said to the waiting men. +</p> +<p> +A few moments later he turned from the door and heard Sara Lee sobbing +in her room. He tapped, and on receiving no reply he went in. The room +was unharmed, and by the light of a candle he saw the girl, face down on +the bed. He spoke to her, but she only lay crouched deeper, her +shoulders shaking. +</p> +<p> +"It is war, mademoiselle," he said, and went closer. Then suddenly all +the hurt of the past days, all the bitterness of the last hour, were +lost in an overwhelming burst of tenderness. +</p> +<p> +He bent over her and put his arms round her. +</p> +<p> +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. "I, who would die for +you, mademoiselle. I who worship you." He buried his face in the warm +hollow of her neck and held her close. He was trembling. "I love you," +he whispered. "I love you." +</p> +<p> +She quieted under his touch. He was very strong, and there was refuge +in his arms. For a moment she lay still, happier than she had been for +weeks. It was Henri who was shaken now and the girl who was still. +</p> +<p> +But very soon came the thing that, after all, he expected. She drew +herself away from him, and Henri, sensitive to every gesture, stood back. +</p> +<p> +"Who are they?" was the first thing she said. It rather stabbed him. +He had just told her that he loved her, and never before in his careless +young life had he said that to any woman. +</p> +<p> +"Spies," he said briefly. +</p> +<p> +A flushed and tearful Sara Lee stood up then and looked up at him gravely. +</p> +<p> +"Then—that is what you do?" +</p> +<p> +"Yes, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +Quite suddenly she went to him and held up her face. +</p> +<p> +"Please kiss me, Henri," she said very simply. "I have been cruel and +stupid, and—" +</p> +<p> +But he had her in his arms then, and he drew her close as though he +would never let her go. He was one great burst of joy, poor Henri. But +when she gently freed herself at last it was to deliver what seemed for +a time his death wound. +</p> +<p> +"You have paid me a great tribute," she said, still simply and gravely. +"I wanted you to kiss me, because of what you said. But that will have +to be all, Henri dear." +</p> +<p> +"All?" he said blankly. +</p> +<p> +"You haven't forgotten, have you? I—I am engaged to somebody else." +</p> +<p> +Henri stood still, swaying a little. +</p> +<p> +"And you love him? More than you care for me?" +</p> +<p> +"He is—he is my kind," said Sara Lee rather pitifully. "I am not what +you think me. You see me here, doing what you think is good work, and +you are grateful. And you don't see any other women. So I—" +</p> +<p> +"And you think I love you because I see no one else?" he demanded, still +rather stunned. +</p> +<p> +"Isn't that part of it?" +</p> +<p> +He flung out his hands as though he despaired of making her understand. +</p> +<p> +"This man at home—" he said bitterly; "this man who loves you so well +that he let you cross the sea and come here alone—do you love him very +dearly?" +</p> +<p> +"I am promised to him." +</p> +<p> +All at once Sara Lee saw the little parlor at home, and Harvey, gentle, +rather stolid and dependable. Oh, very dependable. She saw him as he +had looked the night he had said he loved her, rather wistful and very, +very tender. She could not hurt him so. She had said she was going +back to him, and she must go. +</p> +<p> +"I love him very much, Henri." +</p> +<p> +Very quietly, considering the hell that was raging in him, Henri bent +over and kissed her hand. Then he turned it over, and for an instant +he held his cheek against its warmth. He went out at once, and Sara +Lee heard the door slam. +</p> + +<a name="image-0003"><!--IMG--></a> +<div class="figure" style="width: 70%;"> +<a href="images/illust-03.jpg"><img width="100%" +src="images/illust-03.jpg" alt="'That I should have hurt you so!' he said softly." /></a> +<br /> +<b>"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly.</b> +</div> + +<a name="h2H_4_0016" id="h2H_4_0016"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XVI +</h2> +<p> +Time passed quickly, as always it does when there is work to do. Round +the ruined houses the gray grass turned green again, and in travesties +of gardens early spring flowers began to show a touch of color. +</p> +<p> +The first of them greeted Sara Lee one morning as she stood on her +doorstep in the early sun. She gathered them and placed them, one on +each grave, in the cemetery near the poplar trees, where small wooden +crosses, sometimes surmounted by a cap, marked many graves. +</p> +<p> +Marie, a silent subdued Marie, worked steadily in the little house. She +did not weep, but now and then Sara Lee found her stirring something on +the stove and looking toward the quiet mill in the fields. And once +Sara Lee, surprising that look on her face, put her arms about the girl +and held her for a moment. But she did not say anything. There was +nothing to say. +</p> +<p> +With the opening up of the spring came increased movement and activity +among the troops. The beach and the sand dunes round La Panne were +filled with drilling men, Belgium's new army. Veterans of the winter, +at rest behind the lines, sat in the sun and pared potatoes for the +midday meal. Convalescents from the hospital appeared in motley +garments from the Ambulance Ocean and walked along the water front, +where the sea, no longer gray and sullen, rolled up in thin white lines +of foam to their very feet. Winter straw came out of wooden sabots. +Winter-bitten hands turned soft. Canal boats blossomed out with great +washings. And the sentry at the gun emplacement in the sand up the +beach gave over gathering sticks for his fire, and lay, when no one was +about, in a hollow in the dune, face to the sky. +</p> +<p> +So spring came to that small fragment of Belgium which had been saved, +spring and hope. Soon now the great and powerful Allies would drive out +the Huns, and all would be as it had been. Splendid rumors were about. +The Germans were already yielding at La Bassée. There was to be a great +drive along the entire Front, and hopefully one would return home in +time for the spring planting. +</p> +<p> +A sort of informal council took place occasionally in the little house. +Maps replaced the dressings on the table in the <i>salle à manger</i>, and +junior officers, armed with Sara Lee's box of pins, thrust back the +enemy at various points and proved conclusively that his position was +untenable. They celebrated these paper victories with Sara Lee's tea, +and went away the better for an hour or so of hope and tea and a girl's +soft voice and quiet eyes. +</p> +<p> +Now and then there was one, of course, who lagged behind his fellows, +with a yearning tenderness in his face that a glance from the girl would +have quickly turned to love. But Sara Lee had no coquetry. When, as +occasionally happened, there was a bit too much fervor when her hand was +kissed, she laid it where it belonged—to loneliness and the spring—and +became extremely maternal and very, very kind. Which—both of them—are +death blows to young love. +</p> +<p> +The winter floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats +began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire. And +with the lessening of the flood came new activities to the little house. +The spring drive was coming. +</p> +<p> +There was spring indeed, everywhere but in Henri's heart. +</p> +<p> +Day after day messages were left with Sara Lee by men in +uniform—sometimes letters, sometimes a word. And these she faithfully +cared for until such time as Jean came for them. Now and then it was +Henri who came, but when he stayed in the village he made his +headquarters at the house of the mill. There, with sacking over the +windows, he wrote his reports by lamplight, reports which Jean carried +back to the villa in the fishing village by the sea. +</p> +<p> +However, though he no longer came and went as before, Henri made frequent +calls at the house of mercy. But now he came in the evenings, when the +place was full of men. Sara Lee was doing more dressings than before. +The semi-armistice of winter was over, and there were nights when a row +of wounded men lay on the floor in the little <i>salle à manger</i> and waited, +in a sort of dreadful quiet, to be taken away. +</p> +<p> +Rumors came of hard fighting farther along the line, and sometimes, on +nights when the clouds hung low, the flashes of the guns at Ypres looked +like incessant lightning. From the sand dunes at Nieuport and Dixmude +there was firing also, and the air seemed sometimes to be full of +scouting planes. +</p> +<p> +The Canadians were moving toward the Front at Neuve Chapelle at that +time. And one day a lorry, piled high with boxes, rolled and thumped +down the street, and halted by René. +</p> +<p> +"Rather think we are lost," explained the driver, grinning sheepishly +at René. +</p> +<p> +There were four boys in khaki on the truck, and not a word of French +among them. Sara Lee, who rolled her own bandages now, heard the +speech and came out. +</p> +<p> +"Good gracious!" she said, and gave an alarmed glance at the sky. But +it was the noon hour, when every good German abandons war for food, and +the sky was empty. +</p> +<p> +The boys cheered perceptibly. Here was at last some one who spoke a +Christian tongue. +</p> +<p> +"Must have taken the wrong turning, miss," said one of them, saluting. +</p> +<p> +"Where do you want to go?" she asked. "You are very close to the Belgian +Front here. It is not at all safe." +</p> +<p> +They all saluted; then, staring at her curiously, told her. +</p> +<p> +"Dear me!" said Sara Lee. "You are a long way off. And a long way +from home too." +</p> +<p> +They smiled. They looked, with their clean-shaven faces, absurdly young +after the bearded Belgian soldiers. +</p> +<p> +"I am an American, too," said Sara Lee with just a touch of homesickness +in her voice. She had been feeling lonely lately. "If you have time to +come in I could give you luncheon. René can tell us if any German air +machines come over." +</p> +<p> +Would they come in? Indeed, yes! They crawled down off the lorry, and +took off their caps, and ate every particle of food in the house. And, +though they were mutely curious at first, soon they were asking questions. +How long had she been there? What did she do? Wasn't it dangerous? +</p> +<p> +"Not so dangerous as it looks," said Sara Lee, smiling. "The Germans +seldom bother the town now. It is not worth while." +</p> +<p> +Later on they went over the house. They climbed the broken staircase +and stared toward the break in the poplar trees, from the roofless floor +above. +</p> +<p> +"Some girl!" one of them said in an undertone. +</p> +<p> +The others were gazing intently toward the Front. Never before had they +been so close. Never had they seen a ruined town. War, until now, had +been a thing of Valcartier, of a long voyage, of much drill in the mud +at Salisbury Plain. Now here they saw, at their feet, what war could do. +</p> +<p> +"Damn them!" said one of the boys suddenly. "Fellows, we'll get back at +them soon." +</p> +<p> +So they went away, a trifle silent and very grateful. But before they +left they had a glimpse of Sara Lee's room, with the corner gone, and +Harvey's picture on the mantel. +</p> +<p> +"Some girl!" they repeated as they drove up the street. It was the +tribute of inarticulate youth. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee went back to her bandages and her thoughts. She had not a great +deal of time to think, what with the officers stopping in to fight their +paper-and-pin battles, and with letters to write and dressings to make +and supplies to order. She began to have many visitors—officers from +the French lines, correspondents on tours of the Front, and once even an +English cabinet member, who took six precious lumps of sugar in his tea +and dug a piece of shell out of the wall with his pocketknife as a +souvenir. +</p> +<p> +Once a British aviator brought his machine down in the field by the mill, +and walked over with the stiff stride of a man who has been for hours in +the air. She gave him tea and bread and butter, and she learned then of +the big fighting that was to come. +</p> +<p> +When she was alone she thought about Henri. Generally her thoughts were +tender; always they were grateful. But she was greatly puzzled. He had +said that he loved her. Then, if he loved her, why should he not be +gentle and kind to her? Men did not hurt the women they loved. And +because she was hurt, she was rather less than just. He had not asked +her to marry him. He had said that he loved her, but that was different. +And the insidious poison of Harvey's letter about foreigners began to +have its effect. +</p> +<p> +The truth was that she was tired. The strain was telling on her. And +at a time when she needed every moral support Henri had drawn off behind +a wall of misery, and all her efforts at a renewal of their old +friendship only brought up against a sort of stony despair. +</p> +<p> +There were times, too, when she grew a little frightened. She was so +alone. What if Henri went away altogether? What if he took away the +little car, and his protection, and the supplies that came so regularly? +It was not a selfish fear. It was for her work that she trembled. +</p> +<p> +For the first time she realized her complete dependence on his good +will. And now and then she felt that it would be good to see Harvey +again, and be safe from all worry, and not have to depend on a man who +loved her as Henri did. For that she never doubted. Inexperienced as +she was in such matters, she knew that the boy loved her. Just how +wildly she did not know until later, too late to undo what the madness +had done. +</p> +<p> +Then one day a strange thing happened. It had been raining, and when in +the late afternoon the sun came out it gleamed in the puddles that filled +the shell holes in the road and set to a red blaze the windows of the +house of the mill. +</p> +<p> +First, soaring overhead, came a half dozen friendly planes. Next, the +eyes of the enemy having thus been blinded, so to speak, there came a +regiment of fresh troops, swinging down the street for all the world as +though the German Army was safely drinking beer in Munich. They passed +René, standing open-mouthed in the doorway, and one wag of a Belgian boy, +out of sheer joy of spring, did the goose step as he passed the little +sentry and, head screwed round in the German salute, crossed his eyes +over his impudent nose. +</p> +<p> +Came, then, the planes. Came the regiment, which turned off into a field +and there spread itself, like a snake uncoiling, into a double line. +Came a machine, gray and battered, containing officers. Came a general +with gold braid on his shoulder, and a pleasant smile. Came the strange +event. +</p> +<p> +The general found Sara Lee in the <i>salle à manger</i> cutting cotton into +three-inch squares, and he stood in the doorway and bowed profoundly. +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle Kennedy?" he inquired. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee replied to that, and then gave a quick thought to her larder. +Because generals usually meant tea. But this time at last, Sara Lee was +to receive something, not to give. She turned very white when she was +told, and said she had not deserved it; she was indeed on the verge of +declining, not knowing that there are certain things one does not +decline. But Marie brought her hat and jacket—a smiling, tremulous +Marie—and Sara Lee put them on. +</p> +<p> +The general was very tall. In her short skirt and with flying hair she +looked like a child beside him as they walked across the fields. +Suddenly Sara Lee was terribly afraid she was going to cry. +</p> +<p> +The troops stood rigidly at attention. And a cold wind flapped Sara +Lee's skirts, and the guns hammered at Ypres, and the general blew on +his fingers. And soon a low open car came down the street and the +King got out. Sara Lee watched him coming—his tall, slightly stooped +figure, his fair hair, his plain blue uniform. Sara Lee had never seen +a king before, and she had always thought of them as sitting up on a +sort of platform—never as trudging through spring mud. +</p> +<p> +"What shall I do?" she asked nervously. +</p> +<p> +"He will shake hands, mademoiselle. Bow as he approaches. That is all." +</p> +<p> +The amazing interlude, indeed! With Sara Lee being decorated by the +King, and troops drawn up to do her honor, and over all the rumbling of +the great guns. A palpitating and dazed Sara Lee, when the decoration +was fastened to her black jacket, a Sara Lee whose hat blew off at +exactly the worst moment and rolled, end on, like a hoop, into a puddle. +</p> +<p> +But, oddly, she did not mind about the hat. She had only one conscious +thought just then. She hoped that, wherever Uncle James might be in that +world of the gone before, he might know what was happening to her—or +even see it. He would have liked it. He had believed in the Belgians and +in the King. And now—the King did not go at once. He went back to the +little house and went through it. And he and one of his generals climbed +to the upper floor, and the King stood looking out silently toward the +land he loved and which for a time was no longer his. +</p> +<p> +He came down after a time, stooping his tall figure in the low doorway, +and said he would like some tea. So Marie put the kettle on, and Sara +Lee and the King talked. It was all rather dazing. Every now and then +she forgot certain instructions whispered her by the general, and after +a time the King said: "Why do you do that, mademoiselle?" +</p> +<p> +For Sara Lee, with an intent face and moving lips, had been stepping +backward. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee flushed to the eyes. +</p> +<p> +"Because, sire, I was told to remain at a distance of six feet." +</p> +<p> +"But we are being informal," said the King, smiling. "And it is a very +little room." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee, who had been taught in the schoolroom that kings are usurpers +of the divine rights of the people—Sara Lee lost just a bit of her +staunch democracy that day. She saw the King of the Belgians for what +he really was, a ruler, but a symbol as well. He represented his +country, as the Flag she loved represented hers. The flag was America, +the King was Belgium. That was all. +</p> +<p> +It was a very humble and flushed Sara Lee who watched the gray car go +flying up the street later on. She went in and told the whole story to +Harvey's picture, but it was difficult to feel that he was hearing. His +eyes were turned away and his face was set and stern. And, at last, she +gave it up. This thing which meant so much to her would never mean +anything to Harvey. She knew, even then, what he would say. +</p> +<p> +"Decorate you! I should think they might. Medals are cheap. Everybody +over there is getting medals. You feed their men and risk your life and +your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on. It's cheap at the +price." +</p> +<p> +And later on those were Harvey's very words. But to be fair to him they +were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal. +</p> +<p> +That evening Henri came again. He was, for the first time, his gay self +again—at least on the surface. It was as though, knowing what he was +going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never +returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt. He was everywhere in +the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery +nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water +for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing. +</p> +<p> +"If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle," he would say, "with +one turn of the bandage over the elbow—" +</p> +<p> +"But it won't hold that way." +</p> +<p> +"You say that to me, mademoiselle? I who have taught you all you know +of bandaging?" +</p> +<p> +They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee's way. +</p> +<p> +He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was +painful. It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans: +</p> +<p> +"Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the +right? Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!" +</p> +<p> +Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply. +</p> +<p> +"I cannot think. I—in my left hand, <i>monsieur le capitaine</i>?" +</p> +<p> +"In your left hand." +</p> +<p> +The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table +to listen. +</p> +<p> +"I do not know, monsieur." +</p> +<p> +"Idiot!" Henri would say. "Your right elbow, man!" +</p> +<p> +And the dressing was done. +</p> +<p> +He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed. He +would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly. And pain seemed to +leave the little room when he entered it. +</p> +<p> +It was that night that Henri disappeared. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0017" id="h2H_4_0017"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XVII +</h2> +<p> +There was a question to settle, and it was for Henri to do it. Two +questions indeed. One was a matter of engineering, and before the bottom +fell out of his world Henri had studied engineering. The second was +more serious. +</p> +<p> +For the first, this thing had happened. Of all the trenches to be held, +the Belgians had undeniably the worst. Properly speaking they were not +trenches at all, but shallow gutters dug a foot or two into the saturated +ground and then built man-high with bags of earth or sand. Here and +there they were not dug at all, but were purely shelters, against a +railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from +the deserted track behind which they were hidden. +</p> +<p> +For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow +lake. By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea +and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy. The battle front +was a reeking pond. The opposing armies lived like duck hunters in a +swamp. To dig a foot was to encounter water. Machine guns here and +there sat but six inches above the yellow flood. Men lay in pools to +fire them. To reach outposts were narrow paths built first of bags of +earth—a life, sometimes for every bag. And, when this filling was +sufficient, on top a path of fascines, bound together in bundles, made +a footway. +</p> +<p> +For this reason the Belgians approached their trenches not through deep +cuts which gave them shelter but with no other cover than the darkness +of night. During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off +from any connection with the world behind them. Food, cooked miles away, +came up at night, cold and unappetizing. For water, having exhausted +their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them, +ill-smelling and reeking of fever. Water carts trundled forward at +night, but often they were far too few. +</p> +<p> +The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety, +had been trained to fight. In a way they had been trained to fight a +losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on +the east. But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all, +condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy +artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the +courage of a less desperate people. +</p> +<p> +To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a +fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy +that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea, +spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where +fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in +unfordable wallows of mud and water. +</p> +<p> +Henri then, knowing all this—none better—had his first question to +settle, which was this: As spring advanced the flood had commenced to +recede. Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind +the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort. In the deeper +ones, the bottom of the trench appeared for the first time. +</p> +<p> +On a day previous, however, the water had commenced to come back. There +had been no rain, but little by little in a certain place yellow, +ill-smelling little streams began to flow sluggishly into the trenches. +Seeped, rather than flowed. At first the Belgian officers laid it to +that bad luck that had so persistently pursued them. Then they held a +conference in the small brick house with its maps and its pine tables +and its picture of an American harvester on the wall, which was now +headquarters. +</p> +<p> +Sitting under the hanging lamp, with an orderly making coffee at a stove +in the corner, they talked it over. Henri was there, silent before his +elders, but intently listening. And at last they turned to him. +</p> +<p> +"I can go and find out," he said quietly. "It is possible, though I do +not see how." He smiled. "They are, I think, only drying themselves at +our expense. It is a bit of German humor." +</p> +<p> +But the cry of "Calais in a month!" was in the air, and undoubtedly there +had been renewed activity along the German Front near the sea. The +second question to be answered was dependent on the first. +</p> +<p> +Had the Germans, as Henri said, merely shifted the water, by some clever +engineering, to the Belgian trenches, or was there some bigger thing on +hand? What, for instance, if they were about to attempt to drain the +inundation, smash the Belgian line, and march by the Dunkirk road to +Calais? +</p> +<p> +So, that night while Henri jested about Pierre's right elbow and watched +Sara Lee for a smile, he had difficult work before him. +</p> +<p> +Sometime near midnight he slipped away. Jean was waiting in the street, +and wrung the boy's hand. +</p> +<p> +"I could go with you," he said rather wistfully. +</p> +<p> +"You don't speak their ugly tongue." +</p> +<p> +"I could be mute—shell shock. You could be helping me back." +</p> +<p> +But Henri only held his hand a moment and shook his head. +</p> +<p> +"You would double the risk, and—what good would it do?" +</p> +<p> +"Two pistols are better than one." +</p> +<p> +"I have two pistols, my friend," said Henri, and turned the corner of +the building, past the boards René had built in, toward the house of +the mill. But once out of Jean's sight he stopped a moment, his hand +resting against that frail wall to Sara Lee's room. It was his good-by +to her. +</p> +<p> +For three days Jean stayed in the village. He slept at the mill, but +he came for his meals to the little house. Once he went to Dunkirk and +brought out provisions and the mail, including Sara Lee's monthly +allowance. But mostly he sat in the mill house and waited. He could +not read. +</p> +<p> +"You do not eat at all, Jean," Sara Lee said to him more than once. And +twice she insisted that he was feverish, and placed a hand that was +somewhat marred with much peeling of vegetables, on his forehead. +</p> +<p> +"I am entirely well, mademoiselle," he would say, and draw back. He had +anxieties enough just now without being reminded by the touch of a +woman's hand of all that he had lost. +</p> +<p> +Long before that Sara Lee had learned not to question Jean about Henri's +absences. Even his knowledge, now, that she knew something of Henri's +work, did not remove the barrier. So Sara Lee waited, as did Jean, but +more helplessly. She knew something was wrong, but she had not Jean's +privilege of going at night to the trenches and there waiting, staring +over the gray water with its ugly floating shadows, for Henri to emerge +from the flood. +</p> +<p> +Something rather forced and mechanical there was those days in her work. +Her smile was rather set. She did not sleep well. And one night she +violated Henri's orders and walked across the softened fields to beyond +the poplar trees. +</p> +<p> +There was nothing to see except an intermittent flash from the clouds +that hung low over the sea at Nieuport, where British gunboats were +bombarding the coast; or the steady streaks from the Ypres salient, where +night and day the guns never rested. +</p> +<p> +From the Belgian trenches, fifteen hundred feet or so away, there was no +sound. A German electric signal blazed its message in code, and went out +quickly. Now and then a rifle shot, thin and sharp, rang out from where, +under the floating starlights, keen eyes on each side watched for +movements on the other. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee sat down under a tree and watched for a while. Then she found +herself crying softly. It was all so sad, and useless, and cruel. And +somewhere there ahead was Henri, Henri with his blue eyes, his smile, +the ardor of his young arms—Henri, who had been to her many friends. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had never deceived herself about Henri. She loved him. But +she was quite certain she was not in love with him, which is entirely +different. She knew that this last was impossible, because she was +engaged to Harvey. What was probably the truth was that she loved them +both in entirely different ways. Men have always insisted on such +possibilities, and have even asserted their right, now and then, to +love two women at the same time. But women are less frank with +themselves. +</p> +<p> +And, in such cases, there is no grand passion. There are tenderness, +and the joy of companionship, and sometimes a touching dependence. But +it is not a love that burns with a white fire. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps Sara Lee was one of those women who are always loved more than +they love. There are such women, not selfish, not seeking love, but +softly feminine, kind, appealing and genuine. Men need, after all, but +an altar on which to lay tribute. And the high, remote white altar that +was Sara Lee had already received the love of two strong men. +</p> +<p> +She was not troubling her head that night, however, about being an altar, +of a sort. She cried a little at first, because she was terrified for +Henri and because Jean's face was growing pinched and gray. Then she +cried very hard, prone on the ground and face down, because Henri was +young, and all of life should have been before him. And he was missing. +</p> +<p> +Henri was undeniably missing. Even the King knew it now, and set down +in his heart, among the other crosses there, Henri's full name, which +we may not know, and took to pacing his little study and looking out at +the spring sea. +</p> +<p> +That night Marie, having ladled to the bottom of her kettle, found Sara +Lee missing, and was told by René of the direction she had taken. Marie, +muttering to herself, set out to find her, and almost stumbled over her +in the wood by the road. +</p> +<p> +She sat down on the ground without a word and placed a clumsy hand on +the girl's shoulder. It was not until Sara Lee ceased sobbing that +she spoke: +</p> +<p> +"It is far from hopeless, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +They had by now established a system of communication. Sara Lee spoke +her orders in halting French, but general conversation was beyond her. +And much hearing of English had taught the Belgian girl enough to follow. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee replied, then, in smothered English: +</p> +<p> +"He is gone, Marie. He will never come back." +</p> +<p> +"Who can tell? There are many missing who are not dead." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee shuddered. For spies were not made prisoners. They had no +rights as prisoners of war. Their own governments did not protect them. +To Henri capture was death. But she could not say this to Marie. +</p> +<p> +Marie sat softly stroking Sara Lee's hair, her own eyes tragic and +tearless. +</p> +<p> +"Even if it were—the other," she said, "it is not so bad to die for +one's country. The thing that is terrible, that leaves behind it only +bitterness and grief and no hope, mademoiselle, even with many prayers, +is that one has died a traitor." +</p> +<p> +She coaxed Sara Lee back at last. They went through the fields, for +fresh troops were being thrown into the Belgian trenches and the street +was full of men. Great dray horses were dragging forward batteries, the +heavy guns sliding and slipping In the absence of such information as +only Henri had been wont to bring it was best to provide for the worst. +</p> +<p> +The next day Jean did not come over for breakfast, and René handed Sara +Lee a note. +</p> +<p> +"I am going to England," Jean had written that dawn in the house of the +mill. "And from there to Holland. I can get past the barrier and shall +work down toward the Front. I must learn what has happened, mademoiselle. +As you know, if he was captured, there is no hope. But there is an +excellent chance that he is in hiding, unable to get back. Look for me +in two weeks." +</p> +<p> +There followed what instructions he had given as to her supplies, which +would come as before. Beautifully written in Jean's small fine hand, it +spelled for Sara Lee the last hope. She read Jean's desperation through +its forced cheerfulness. And she faced for the first time a long period +of loneliness in the crowded little house. +</p> +<p> +She tried very hard to fill the gap that Henri had left—tried to joke +with the men in her queer bits of French; was more smiling than ever, +for fear she might be less. But now and then in cautious whispers she +heard Henri's name, and her heart contracted with very terror. +</p> +<p> +A week. Two weeks. Twice the village was bombarded severely, but the +little house escaped by a miracle. Marie considered it the same miracle +that left holy pictures unhurt on the walls of destroyed houses, and +allowed the frailest of old ebony and rosewood crucifixes to remain +unharmed. +</p> +<p> +Great generals, often as tall as they were great, stopped at the little +house to implore Sara Lee to leave. But she only shook her head. +</p> +<p> +"Not unless you send me away," she always said; "and that would break +my heart." +</p> +<p> +"But to move, mademoiselle, only to the next village!" they would +remonstrate, and as a final argument: "You are too valuable to risk an +injury." +</p> +<p> +"I must remain here," she said. And some of them thought they +understood. When an unusually obdurate officer came along, Sara Lee +would insist on taking him to the cellar. +</p> +<p> +"You see!" she would say, holding her candle high. "It is a nice cellar, +warm and dry. It is"—proudly—"one of the best cellars in the village. +It is a really homelike cellar." +</p> +<p> +The officer would go away then, and send her cigarettes for her men or, +as in more than one case, a squad with bags of earth and other things +to protect the little house as much as possible. After a time the little +house began to represent the ideas in protection and camouflage, then in +its early stages, of many different minds. +</p> +<p> +René shot a man there one night, a skulking figure working its way in +the shadows up the street. It was just before dawn, and René, who was +sleepless those days, like the others, called to him. The man started +to run, dodging behind walls. But René ran faster and killed him. +</p> +<p> +He was a German in Belgian peasant's clothing. But he wore the great +shoes of the German soldier, and he had been making a rough map of the +Belgian trenches. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee did not see him. But when she heard the shot she went out, and +René told her breathlessly. +</p> +<p> +From that time on her terrors took the definite form of Henri lying dead +in a ruined street, and being buried, as this man was buried, without +ceremony and without a prayer, in some sodden spring field. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0018" id="h2H_4_0018"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XVIII +</h2> +<p> +As the spring advanced Harvey grew increasingly bitter; grew morbid +and increasingly self-conscious also. He began to think that people were +smiling behind his back, and when they asked about Sara Lee he met with +almost insulting brevity what he felt was half-contemptuous kindness. +He went nowhere, and worked all day and until late in the night. He did +well in his business, however, and late in March he received a +substantial raise in salary. He took it without enthusiasm, and told +Belle that night at dinner with apathy. +</p> +<p> +After the evening meal it was now his custom to go to his room and there, +shut in, to read. He read no books on the war, and even the quarter +column entitled Salient Points of the Day's War News hardly received a +glance from him now. +</p> +<p> +In the office when the talk turned to the war, as it did almost hourly, +he would go out or scowl over his letters. +</p> +<p> +"Harvey's hit hard," they said there. +</p> +<p> +"He's acting like a rotten cub," was likely to be the next sentence. +But sometimes it was: "Well, what'd you expect? Everything ready to get +married, and the girl beating it for France without notice! I'd be sore +myself." +</p> +<p> +On the day of the raise in salary his sister got the children to bed and +straightened up the litter of small garments that seemed always to +bestrew the house, even to the lower floor. Then she went into Harvey's +room. Coat and collar off, he was lying on the bed, but not reading. +His book lay beside him, and with his arms under his head he was staring +at the ceiling. +</p> +<p> +She did not sit down beside him on the bed. They were an undemonstrative +family, and such endearments as Belle used were lavished on her children. +But her eyes were kind, and a little nervous. +</p> +<p> +"Do you mind talking a little, Harvey?" +</p> +<p> +"I don't feel like talking much. I'm tired, I guess. But go on. What +is it? Bills?" +</p> +<p> +She came to him in her constant financial anxieties, and always he was +ready to help her out. But his tone now was gruff. A slight flush of +resentment colored her cheeks. +</p> +<p> +"Not this time, Harve. I was just thinking about things." +</p> +<p> +"Sit down." +</p> +<p> +She sat on the straight chair beside the bed, the chair on which, in +neat order, Harvey placed his clothing at night, his shoes beneath, his +coat over the back. +</p> +<p> +"I wish you'd go out more, Harvey." +</p> +<p> +"Why? Go out and talk to a lot of driveling fools who don't care for me +any more than I do for them?" +</p> +<p> +"That's not like you, Harve." +</p> +<p> +"Sorry." His tone softened. "I don't care much about going round, +Belle. That's all. I guess you know why." +</p> + +<a name="image-0004"><!--IMG--></a> +<div class="figure" style="width: 70%;"> +<a href="images/illust-04.jpg"><img width="100%" +src="images/illust-04.jpg" alt="That Henri might be living, somewhere--that some day the Belgians might go home again." /></a> +<br /> +<b>That Henri might be living, somewhere--that some day the Belgians might go home again.</b> +</div> + +<p> +"So does everybody else." +</p> +<p> +He sat up and looked at her. +</p> +<p> +"Well, suppose they do? I can't help that, can I? When a fellow has +been jilted—" +</p> +<p> +"You haven't been jilted." +</p> +<p> +He lay down again, his arms under his head; and Belle knew that his eyes +were on Sara Lee's picture on his dresser. +</p> +<p> +"It amounts to the same thing." +</p> +<p> +"Harvey," Belle said hesitatingly, "I've brought Sara Lee's report from +the Ladies' Aid. May I read it to you?" +</p> +<p> +"I don't want to hear it." Then: "Give it here. I'll look at it." +</p> +<p> +He read it carefully, his hands rather unsteady. So many men given soup, +so many given chocolate. So many dressings done. And at the bottom +Sara Lee's request for more money—an apologetic, rather breathless +request, and closing, rather primly with this: +</p> +<p> +"I am sure that the society will feel, from the above report, that the +work is worth while, and worth continuing. I am only sorry that I +cannot send photographs of the men who come for aid, but as they come +at night it is impossible. I enclose, however, a small picture of the +house, which is now known as the little house of mercy." +</p> +<p> +"At night!" said Harvey. "So she's there alone with a lot of ignorant +foreigners at night. Why the devil don't they come in the daytime?" +</p> +<p> +"Here's the picture, Harvey." +</p> +<p> +He got up then, and carried the tiny photograph over close to the gas +jet. There he stood for a long time, gazing at it. There was René +with his rifle and his smile. There was Marie in her white apron. And +in the center, the wind blowing her soft hair, was Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +Harvey groaned and Belle came over and putting her hand on his shoulder +looked at the photograph with him. +</p> +<p> +"Do you know what I think, Harvey?" she said. "I think Sara Lee is right +and you are wrong." +</p> +<p> +He turned on her almost savagely. +</p> +<p> +"That's not the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor +devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn +for me she'd never have gone. That's all." +</p> +<p> +He returned to a moody survey of the picture. +</p> +<p> +"Look at it!" he said. "She insists that she's safe. But that fellow's +got a gun. What for, if she's so safe? And look at that house! There's +a corner shot away; and it's got no upper floor. Safe!" +</p> +<p> +Belle held out her hand. +</p> +<p> +"I must return the picture to the society, Harve." +</p> +<p> +"Not just yet," he said ominously. "I want to look at it. I haven't +got it all yet. And I'll return it myself—with a short speech." +</p> +<p> +"Harvey!" +</p> +<p> +"Well," he retorted, "why shouldn't I tell that lot of old +scandalmongers what I think of them? They'll sit here safe at home and +beg money—God, one of them was in the office to-day!—and send a young +girl over to—You'd better get out, Belle. I'm not company for any one +to-night." +</p> +<p> +She turned away, but he came after her, and suddenly putting his arms +round her he kissed her. +</p> +<p> +"Don't worry about me," he said. "I'm done with wearing my heart on my +sleeve. She looks happy, so I guess I can be." He released her. "Good +night. I'll return the picture." +</p> +<p> +He sat up very late, alternately reading the report and looking at the +picture. It was unfortunate that Sara Lee had smiled into the camera. +Coupled with her blowing hair it had given her a light-heartedness, a +sort of joyousness, that hurt him to the soul. +</p> +<p> +He made some mad plans after he had turned out the lights—to flirt +wildly with the unattached girls he knew; to go to France and confront +Sara Lee and then bring her home. Or—He had found a way. He lay +there and thought it over, and it bore the test of the broken sleep that +followed. In the morning, dressing, he wondered he had not thought of +it before. He was more cheerful at breakfast than he had been for weeks. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0019" id="h2H_4_0019"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XIX +</h2> +<p> +In the little house of mercy two weeks went by, and then a third. +Soldiers marching out to the trenches sometimes wore flowers tucked +gayly in their caps. More and more Allied aëroplanes were in the +air. Sometimes, standing in the streets, Sara Lee saw one far overhead, +while balloon-shaped clouds of bursting shells hung far below it. +</p> +<p> +Once or twice in the early morning a German plane, flying so low that +one could easily see the black cross on each wing, reconnoitered the +village for wagon trains or troops. Always they found it empty. +</p> +<p> +Hope had almost fled now. In the afternoons Marie went to the ruined +church, and there knelt before the heap of marble and masonry that had +once been the altar, and prayed. And Sara Lee, who had been brought up +a Protestant and had never before entered a Catholic church, took to +going there too. In some strange fashion the peace of former days +seemed to cling to the little structure, roofless as it was. On quiet +days its silence was deeper than elsewhere. On days of much firing the +sound from within its broken walls seemed deadened, far away. +</p> +<p> +Marie burned a candle as she prayed, for that soul in purgatory which she +had once loved, and now pitied. Sara Lee burned no candle, but she +knelt, sometimes beside Marie, sometimes alone, and prayed for many +things: that Henri should be living, somewhere; that the war might end; +that that day there would be little wounding; that some day the Belgians +might go home again; and that back in America Harvey might grow to +understand and forgive her. And now and then she looked into the very +depths of her soul, and on those days she prayed that her homeland +might, before it was too late, see this thing as she was seeing it. The +wanton waste of it all, the ghastly cruelty the Germans had brought into +this war. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee's vague thinking began to crystallize. This war was not +a judgment sent from on high to a sinful world. It was the wicked +imposition of one nation on other nations. It was national. It was +almost racial. But most of all it was a war of hate on the German +side. She had never believed in hate. There were ugly passions in the +world—jealousy, envy, suspicion; but not hate. The word was not in her +rather limited vocabulary. +</p> +<p> +There was no hate on the part of the men she knew. The officers who +stopped in on their way to and from the trenches were gentlemen and +soldiers. They were determined and grave; they resented, they even +loathed. But they did not hate. The little Belgian soldiers were +bewildered, puzzled, desperately resentful. But of hate, as translated +into terms of frightfulness, they had no understanding. +</p> +<p> +Yet from the other side were coming methods of war so wantonly cruel, +so useless save as inflicting needless agony, as only hate could devise. +No strategic value justified them. They were spontaneous outgrowths of +venom, nursed during the winter deadlock and now grown to full size and +destructive power. +</p> +<p> +The rumor of a gas that seared and killed came to the little house as +early as February. In March there came the first victims, poor writhing +creatures, deprived of the boon of air, their seared lungs collapsed +and agonized, their faces drawn into masks of suffering. Some of them +died in the little house, and even after death their faces held the +imprint of horror. +</p> +<p> +To Sara Lee, burying her own anxiety under the cloak of service, there +came new and terrible thoughts. This was not war. The Germans had sent +their clouds of poisoned gas across the inundation, but had made no +attempt to follow. This was killing, for the lust of killing; suffering, +for the joy of inflicting pain. +</p> +<p> +And a day or so later she heard of The Hague Convention. She had not +known of it before. Now she learned of that gentlemen's agreement among +nations, and that it said: "The use of poison or of poisoned weapons is +forbidden." She pondered that carefully, trying to think dispassionately. +Now and then she received a copy of a home newspaper, and she saw that +the use of poison gases was being denied by Germans in America and set +down to rumor and hysteria. +</p> +<p> +So, on a cold spring day, she sat down at the table in the <i>salle à manger</i> +and wrote a letter to the President, beginning "<i>Dear Sir</i>"; and telling +what she knew of poison gas. She also, on second thought, wrote one to +Andrew Carnegie, who had built a library in her city. She felt that +the expense to him of sending some one over to investigate would not be +prohibitive, and something must be done. +</p> +<p> +She never heard from either of her letters, but she felt better for +having written them. And a day or two later she received from Mrs. +Travers, in England, a small supply of the first gas masks of the war. +Simple and primitive they were, those first masks; useless, too, as it +turned out—a square of folded gauze, soaked in some solution and then +dried, with tapes to tie it over the mouth and nose. To adjust them the +soldiers had but to stoop and wet them in the ever-present water in +the trench, and then to tie them on. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee gave them out that night, and there was much mirth in the little +house, such mirth as there had not been since Henri went away. The +Belgians called it a <i>bal masque</i>, and putting them on bowed before one +another and requested dances, and even flirted coyly with each other over +their bits of white gauze. And in the very middle of the gayety some +one propounded one of Henri's idiotic riddles; and Sara Lee went across +to her little room and closed the door and stood there with her eyes +shut, for fear she would scream. +</p> +<p> +Then, one day, coming out of the little church, she saw the low broken +gray car turn in at the top of the street and come slowly, so very +slowly, toward her. There were two men in it. +</p> +<p> +One was Henri. +</p> +<p> +She ran, stumbling because of tears, up the street. It was Henri! There +was no mistake. There he sat beside Jean, brushed and very neat; and +very, very white. +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle!" he said, and came very close to crying himself when he +saw her face. He was greatly excited. His sunken eyes devoured her as +she ran toward him. Almost he held out his arms. But he could not do +that, even if he would, for one was bandaged to his side. +</p> +<p> +It is rather sad to record how many times Sara Lee wept during her +amazing interlude. For here is another time. She wept for joy and +wretchedness. She stood on the running board and cried and smiled. And +Jean winked his one eye rapidly. +</p> +<p> +"This idiot, mademoiselle," he said gruffly, "this maniac—he would not +remain in Calais, with proper care. He must come on here. And rapidly. +Could he have taken the wheel from me we should have been here an hour +ago. But for once I have an advantage." +</p> +<p> +The car jolted to the little house, and Jean helped Henri out. Such a +strange Henri, smiling and joyous, and walking at a crawl, even with +Jean's support. He protested violently against being put to bed, and +when he found himself led into Sara Lee's small room he openly rebelled. +</p> +<p> +"Never!" he said stubbornly, halting in the doorway. "This is +mademoiselle's boudoir. Her drawing-room as well. I am going to the +mill house and—" +</p> +<p> +He staggered. +</p> +<p> +So Sara Lee's room had a different occupant for a time, a thin and +fine-worn young Belgian, who yielded to Sara Lee when Jean gave up in +despair, and who proceeded, most unmanfully, to faint as soon as he was +between the blankets. +</p> +<p> +If Sara Lee hoped to nurse Henri she was doomed to disappointment. Jean +it was who took over the care of the boy, a Jean who now ate prodigiously, +and whistled occasionally, and slept at night robed in his blanket on the +floor beside Henri's bed, lest that rebellious invalid get up and try to +move about. +</p> +<p> +On the first night, with the door closed, against Henri's entreaties, +while the little house received its evening complement of men, and with +Henri lying back on his pillows, fresh dressed as to the wounds in his +arm and chest, fed with Sara Lee's daintiest, and resting, Jean found the +boy's eyes resting on the mantel. +</p> +<p> +"Dear and obstinate friend," said Henri, "do you wish me to be happy?" +</p> +<p> +"You shall not leave the room or your bed. That is arranged for." +</p> +<p> +"How?" demanded Henri with interest. +</p> +<p> +"Because I have hidden away your trousers." +</p> +<p> +Henri laughed, but he sobered quickly. +</p> +<p> +"If you wish me to be happy," he said, "take away that American +photograph. But first, please to bring it here." +</p> +<p> +Jean brought it, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. +And Henri lay back and studied it. +</p> +<p> +"It is mademoiselle's fiancé," he said. +</p> +<p> +Jean grunted. +</p> +<p> +"Look at it, Jean," Henri said in his half-bantering tone, with despair +beneath it; "and then look at me. Or no—remembering me as I was when +I was a man. He is better, eh? It is a good face. But there is a jaw, +a—Do you think he will be kind to her as she requires? She requires +much kindness. Some women—" +</p> +<p> +He broke off and watched Jean anxiously. +</p> +<p> +"A half face!" Jean said scornfully. "The pretty view! As for +kindness—" He put the photograph face down on the table. "I knew +once a man in Belgium who married an American. At Antwerp. They were +most unhappy." +</p> +<p> +Henri smiled. +</p> +<p> +"You are lying," he said with boyish pleasure in his own astuteness. +"You knew no such couple. You are trying to make me resigned." +</p> +<p> +But quite a little later, when Jean thought he was asleep, he said: +"I shall never be resigned." +</p> +<p> +So at last spring had come, and Henri and the great spring drive. The +Germans had not drained the inundation, nor had they broken through to +Calais. And it is not to be known here how much this utter failure had +been due to the information Henri had secured before he was wounded. +</p> +<p> +One day in his bed Henri received a visit from the King, and was left +lying with a decoration on his breast and a beatific, if somewhat +sheepish, expression on his face. And one night the village was +bombarded, and on Henri's refusing to be moved to the cellar Sara Lee +took up a determined stand in his doorway, until at last he made a most +humiliating move for safety. +</p> +<p> +Bit by bit Sara Lee got the story, its bare detail from Henri, its +courage and sheer recklessness from Jean. It would, for instance, run +like this, with Henri in a chair perhaps, and cutting dressings—since +that might be done with one hand—and Sara Lee, sleeves rolled up and +a great bowl of vegetables before her: +</p> +<p> +"And when you got through the water, Henri?" she would ask: "What then?" +</p> +<p> +"It was quite simple. They had put up some additional wire, however—" +</p> +<p> +"Where?" +</p> +<p> +"There was a break," he would explain. "I have told you—between their +trenches. I had used it before to get through." +</p> +<p> +"But how could you go through?" +</p> +<p> +"Like a snake," he would say, smiling. "Very flat and wriggling. I have +eaten of the dirt, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +Then he would stop and cut, very awkwardly, with his left hand. +</p> +<p> +"Go on," she would prompt him. "But they had put barbed wire there. Is +that it? So you could not get through?" +</p> +<p> +"With tin cans on it, and stones in the cans. I thought I had removed +them all, but there was one left. So they heard me." +</p> +<p> +More cutting and a muttered French expletive. Henri was not a +particularly patient cripple. And apparently there was an end to the +story. +</p> +<p> +"For goodness' sake," Sara Lee would exclaim despairingly; "so they +heard you! That isn't all, is it?" +</p> +<p> +"It was almost all," he would say with his boyish smile. +</p> +<p> +"And they shot at you?" +</p> +<p> +"Even better. They shot me. That was this one." And he would point to +his arm. +</p> +<p> +More silence, more cutting, a gathering exasperation on Sara Lee's part. +</p> +<p> +"Are you going on or not?" +</p> +<p> +"Then I pretended to be one of them, mademoiselle. I speak German as +French. I pretended not to be hurt, but to be on a reconnoissance. And +I got into the trench and we had a talk in the darkness. It was most +interesting. Only if they had shown a light they would have seen that +I was wounded." +</p> +<p> +By bits, not that day, but after many days, she got the story. In the +next trench he slipped a sling over the wounded arm and, as a Bavarian +on his way to the dressing station, got back. +</p> +<p> +"I had some trouble," he confessed one day. "Now and then one would +offer to go back with me. And I did not care for assistance!" +</p> +<p> +But sometime later there was trouble. She was four days getting to that +part of it. He had got behind the lines by that time, and he knew that +in some way suspicion had been roused. He was weak by that time, and +could not go far. He had lain hidden, for a day and part of a night, +without water, in a destroyed barn, and then had escaped. +</p> +<p> +He got into the Belgian costume as before, but he could not wear a sling +for his wounded arm. He got the peasant to thrust his helpless right +hand into his pocket, and for two days he made a close inspection of +what was going on. But fever had developed, and on the third night, +half delirious, when he was spoken to by an officer he had replied, of +all tongues, in English. +</p> +<p> +The officer shot him instantly in the chest. He fell and lay still and +the officer bent over him. In that moment Henri stabbed him with a +knife in his left hand. Men were coming from every direction, but he +got away—he did not clearly remember how. And at dawn he fell into +the Belgian farmhouse, apparently dying. +</p> +<p> +Jean's story, on the other hand, was given early and with no hesitation. +He had crossed the border at Holland in civilian clothes, by the simple +expedient of bribing a sentry. He had got, with little difficulty, to +the farmhouse, and found Henri, now recovering but very weak; he was +lying hidden in a garret, and he was suffering from hunger and lack of +medical attention. In a wagon full of market stuff, Henri hidden in the +bed of it, they had got to the border again. And there Jean had, it +seemed, stabbed the sentry he had bribed before and driven on to neutral +soil. +</p> +<p> +Not an unusual story, that of Henri and Jean. The journey across +Belgium in the springless farm wagon was the worst. They had had to +take roundabout lanes, avoiding the main highways. Fortunately, always +at night there were friendly houses, kind hands to lift Henri into warm +fire-lighted interiors. Many messages they had brought back, some of +cheer, but too often of tragedy, from the small farmsteads of Belgium. +</p> +<p> +Then finally had been Holland, and the chartering of a boat—and at +last—"Here we are, and here we are, and here we are again," sang Henri, +chopping at his cotton and making a great show of cheerfulness before +Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +But with Jean sometimes he showed the black depression beneath. He +would never be a man again. He was done for. He gained strength so +slowly that he believed he was not gaining at all. He was not happy, +and the unhappy mend slowly. +</p> +<p> +After the time he had asked Jean to take away Harvey's photograph he did +not recur to the subject, but he did not need to. Jean knew, perhaps +even better than Henri himself, that the boy was recklessly, hopelessly, +not quite rationally in love with the American girl. +</p> +<p> +Also Henri was fretting about his work. Sometimes at night, following +Henri's instructions, Jean wandered quietly along roads and paths that +paralleled the Front. At such times his eyes were turned, not toward +the trenches, but toward that flat country which lay behind, still dotted +at that time with groves of trees, with canals overhung with pollard +willows, and with here and there a farmhouse that at night took on in +the starlight the appearance of being whole again. +</p> +<p> +Singularly white and peaceful were those small steadings of Belgium +in the night hours—until cruel dawn showed them for what they +were—skeletons of dead homes, clothed only at night with wraithlike +roofs and chimneys; ghosts of houses, appearing between midnight and +cock crow. +</p> +<p> +Jean had not Henri's eyes nor his recklessness nor his speed, for that +matter. Now and then he saw the small appearing and disappearing lights +on some small rise. He would reach the spot, with such shelter as +possible, to find only a sugar-beet field, neglected and unplowed. +</p> +<p> +Then, one night, tragedy came to the little house of mercy. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0020" id="h2H_4_0020"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XX +</h2> +<p> +Harvey proceeded to put his plan into effect at once, with the simple +method of an essentially simple nature. The thing had become +intolerable; therefore it must end. +</p> +<p> +On the afternoon following his talk with Belle he came home at three +o'clock. Belle heard him moving about in his room, and when she entered +it, after he had gone, she found that he had shaved and put on his best +suit. +</p> +<p> +She smiled a little. It was like Harvey to be literal. He had said he +was going to go round and have a good time, and he was losing no time. +But in their restricted social life, where most of the men worked until +five o'clock or even later, there were fewer afternoon calls paid. +Belle wondered with mild sisterly curiosity into what arena Harvey was +about to fling his best hat. +</p> +<p> +But though Harvey paid a call that afternoon it was not on any of the +young women he knew. He went to see Mrs. Gregory. She was at home—he +had arranged for that by telephone—and the one butler of the +neighborhood admitted him. It was a truculent young man, for all his +politeness, who confronted Mrs. Gregory in her drawing-room—a quietly +truculent young man, who came to the point while he was still shaking +hands. +</p> +<p> +"You're not going to be glad to see me in a minute," he said in reply +to her greeting. +</p> +<p> +"How can you know that?" +</p> +<p> +"Because I've come to get you to do something you won't want to do." +</p> +<p> +"We won't quarrel before we begin, then," she said pleasantly. "Because +I really never do anything I don't wish to do." +</p> +<p> +But she gave him a second glance and her smile became a trifle forced. +She knew all about Harvey and Sara Lee. She had heard rumors of his +disapproval also. Though she was not a clever nor a very keen woman, +she saw what was coming and braced herself for it. +</p> +<p> +Harvey had prepared in his mind a summary of his position, and he +delivered it with the rapidity and strength of a blow. +</p> +<p> +"I know all about the Belgians, Mrs. Gregory," he said. "I'm sorry for +them. So is every one, I suppose. But I want to know if you think a +girl of twenty ought to be over there practically at the Front, and +alone?" He gave her time to reply. "Would you like to have your +daughter there, if you had one?" +</p> +<p> +"Perhaps not, under ordinary circumstances. But this is war." +</p> +<p> +"It is not our war." +</p> +<p> +"Humanity," said Mrs. Gregory, remembering the phrase she had written +for a speech—"humanity has no nationality. It is of all men, for +all men." +</p> +<p> +"That's men. Not women!" +</p> +<p> +He got up and stood on the hearthrug. He was singularly reminiscent of +the time he had stood on Aunt Harriet's white fur rug and had told Sara +Lee she could not go. +</p> +<p> +"Now see here, Mrs. Gregory," he said, "we'll stop beating about the +bush, if you don't mind. She's got to come home. She's coming, if I +have to go and get her!" +</p> +<p> +"You needn't look at me so fiercely. I didn't send her. It was her own +idea." +</p> +<p> +Harvey sneered. +</p> +<p> +"No," he said slowly. "But I notice your society publishes her reports +in the papers, and that the names of the officers are rarely missing." +</p> +<p> +Mrs. Gregory colored. +</p> +<p> +"We must have publicity to get money," she said. "It is hard to get. +Sometimes I have had to make up the deficit out of my own pocket." +</p> +<p> +"Then for God's sake bring her home! If the thing has to go on, send +over there some of the middle-aged women who have no ties. Let 'em get +shot if they want to. They can write as good reports as she can, if +that's all you want. And make as good soup," he added bitterly. +</p> +<p> +"It could be done, of course," she said, thoughtfully. "But—I must +tell you this: I doubt if an older woman could have got where she has. +There is no doubt that her charm, her youth and beauty have helped her +greatly. We cannot—" +</p> +<p> +The very whites of his eyes turned red then. He shouted furiously that +for their silly work and their love of publicity, they were trading on +a girl's youth and beauty; that if anything happened to her he would +publish the truth in every newspaper in the country; that they would at +once recall Sara Lee or he would placard the city with what they were +doing. These were only a few of the things he threw at her. +</p> +<p> +When he was out of breath he jerked the picture of the little house of +mercy out of his pocket and flung it into her lap. +</p> +<p> +"There!" he said. "Do you know where that house is? It's in a ruined +village. She hasn't said that, has she? Well, look at the masonry +there. That's a shell hole in the street. That soldier's got a gun. +Why? Because the Germans may march up that street any day on their way +to Calais." +</p> +<p> +Mrs. Gregory looked at the picture. Sara Lee smiled into the sun. And +René, ignorant that his single rifle was to oppose the march of the +German Army to Calais—René smiled also. +</p> +<p> +Mrs. Gregory rose. +</p> +<p> +"I shall report your view to the society," she said coldly. "I +understand how you feel, but I fail to see the reason for this attack +on me." +</p> +<p> +"I guess you see all right!" he flung at her. "She's my future wife. +If you hadn't put this nonsense into her head we'd be married now and +she'd be here in God's country and not living with a lot of foreigners +who don't know a good woman when they see one. I want her back, that's +all. But I want her back safe. And if anything happens to her I'll +make you pay—you and all your notoriety hunters." +</p> +<p> +He went out then, and was for leaving without his hat or coat, but the +butler caught him at the door. Out in the spring sunlight he walked +rapidly, still seething, remembering other bitter things he had meant +to say, and repeating them to himself. +</p> +<p> +But he had said enough. +</p> +<p> +Mrs. Gregory's account of his visit she reported at a meeting specially +called. The narrative lost nothing in the repetition. But the kindly +women who sat in the church house sewing or knitting listened to what +Harvey had said and looked troubled. They liked Sara Lee, and many of +them had daughters of their own. +</p> +<p> +The photograph was passed around. Undoubtedly Sara Lee was living in a +ruined village. Certainly ruined villages were only found very near the +Front. And René unquestionably held a gun. Tales of German brutalities +to women had come and were coming constantly to their ears. Mabel +Andrews had written to them for supplies, and she had added to the +chapter of horrors. +</p> +<p> +Briefly, the sense of the meeting was that Harvey had been brutal, but +that he was right. An older woman in a safe place they might continue +to support, but none of them would assume the responsibility of the +crushing out of a young girl's life. +</p> +<p> +To be quite frank, possibly Harvey's appeal would have carried less +weight had it not coincided with Sara Lee's request for more money. +Neither one alone would have brought about the catastrophe, but +altogether they made question and answer, problem and solution. Money +was scarce. Demands were heavy. None of them except Mrs. Gregory had +more than just enough. And there was this additional situation to face: +there was no end of the war in sight; it gave promise now of going on +indefinitely. +</p> +<p> +Joifre had said, "I nibble them." But to nibble a hole in the Germany +Army might take years. They had sent Sara Lee for a few months. How +about keeping her there indefinitely? +</p> +<p> +Oddly enough, it was Harvey's sister Belle who made the only protest +against the recall. +</p> +<p> +"Of course, I want her back," she said slowly. "You'd understand better +if you had to live with Harvey. I'm sorry, Mrs. Gregory, that he spoke +to you as he did, but he's nearly crazy." She eyed the assembly with +her tired shrewd eyes. "I'm no talker," she went on, "but Sara Lee has +done a big thing. We don't realize, I guess, how big it is. And I +think we'll just about kill her if we bring her home." +</p> +<p> +"Better to do that than to have her killed over there," some one said. +</p> +<p> +And in spite of Belle's protest, that remained the sense of the meeting. +It was put to the vote and decided to recall Sara Lee. She could bring +a report of conditions, and if she thought it wise an older woman could +go later, to a safer place. +</p> +<p> +Belle was very quiet that evening. After dinner she went to Harvey's +room and found him dressing to go out. +</p> +<p> +"I'm going with a crowd to the theater," he said. "First week of the +summer stock company, you know." +</p> +<p> +He tied his tie defiantly, avoiding Belle's eyes in the mirror. +</p> +<p> +"Harvey," she said, "they're going to bring Sara Lee home." +</p> +<p> +He said nothing, but his hands shook somewhat. "And I think," Belle +said, "that you will be sorry for what you have done—all the rest of +your life." +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0021" id="h2H_4_0021"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXI +</h2> +<p> +By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it was +almost the first of May. The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, and +the Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply of +high-explosive shells. +</p> +<p> +Cheering reports came daily to the little house—, of rapidly augmenting +armies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up to +the Allied Front. Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, that +only shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against the +German batteries. She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but the +supply was still inadequate. With the new shells experiments were being +made in barrage fire—costly experiments now and then; but the Allies +were apt in learning the ugly game of modern war. +</p> +<p> +Only on the Belgian Front was there small change. The shattered army +was being freshly outfitted. England was sending money and ammunition, +and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiled +grimly and drilled again. But there were not, as in England and in +France, great bodies of young men to draw from. Too many had been +caught beyond the German wall of steel. +</p> +<p> +Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the green +fields. And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways. +They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity. +Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the top +of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse, +which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box and +stovepipe. +</p> +<p> +"A portable kitchen!" he explained. "See, here for soup and here for +coffee. And more are coming." +</p> +<p> +"Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully. +</p> +<p> +But he protested almost violently. He even put the question to the +horse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative. +</p> +<p> +She was needed, indeed. To the great base hospital at La Panne went +more and more wounded men. But to the little house of mercy came the +small odds and ends in increasing numbers. Medical men were scarce, and +badly overworked. There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon to +the little house, but it came to nothing. La Panne was not far away, +and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many. +</p> +<p> +So the little house went on much as before. Henri had moved to the mill. +He was at work again, and one day, in the King's villa and quietly, +because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received a +second medal, the highest for courage that could be given. +</p> +<p> +He did not tell Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they could +not always perform miracles. The German planes still outnumbered the +Allied ones. They had grown more daring with the spring, too, and +whatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretell +those of the air. +</p> +<p> +On a moonlight night in early May, Sara Lee, setting out her dressings, +heard a man running up the street. René challenged him sharply, only +to step aside. It was Henri. He burst in on Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said. +</p> +<p> +"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve <i>taubes</i>, and +they are circling overhead." +</p> +<p> +The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight and +the Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it was +as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and +since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed. +</p> +<p> +The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed a +deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead +town. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the +cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment by +shells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb dropped +from the sky, the floors above were practically useless. +</p> +<p> +Only Henri and René remained on the street floor. Henri was +extinguishing lights. In the passage René stood, not willing to take +refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment the +uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado René stepped out into the +moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air. +</p> +<p> +He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell. +</p> +<p> +"Come, René!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fight +again, not—" +</p> +<p> +But René's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to the +doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he +had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead. +Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently. +Then he went below. +</p> +<p> +"Where is René?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness. +</p> +<p> +"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think, +watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter." +</p> +<p> +"There is no shelter," shivered the girl. +</p> +<p> +He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand, +like two children, waiting for what might come. +</p> +<p> +It was not until the thing was over that he told her. He had gone up +first and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned, +had carried René to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularly +peaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night. +</p> +<p> +"Good night, little brother," Henri said to him, and left him there with +a heavy heart. Never again would René sit and whittle on the doorstep +and sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyish +adoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and forth in the little house. +</p> +<p> +Henri stared up at the sky. The moon looked down, cold, and cruelly +bright, on the vanishing squadron of death, on the destroyed town and on +the boy's white face. Somewhere, Henri felt, vanishing like the German +<i>taubes</i>, but to peace instead of war, was moving René's brave and smiling +spirit—a boyish angel, eager and dauntless, and still looking up. +</p> +<p> +Henri took off his cap and crossed himself. +</p> +<p> +Another sentry took René's place the next day, but the little house had +lost something it could not regain. And a greater loss was to come. +</p> +<p> +Jean brought out the mail that day. For Sara Lee, moving about silent +and red-eyed, there was a letter from Mr. Travers. He inclosed a hundred +pounds and a clipping from a London newspaper entitled The Little House +of Mercy. +</p> +<p> +"Evidently," he wrote, "you were right and we were wrong. One-half of +the inclosed check is from my wife, who takes this method of showing her +affectionate gratitude. The balance is from myself. Once, some months +ago, I said to you that almost you restored my faith in human nature. +To-day I may say that, in these hours of sorrow for us all, what you have +done and are doing has brought into my gray day a breath of hope." +</p> +<p> +There was another clipping, but no comment. It recorded the death of a +Reginald Alexander Travers, aged thirty. +</p> +<p> +It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself those +days, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegation +of the English—their attitude not so much of suppressing their private +griefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people, +they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a private +matter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbroken +front, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strange +one, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England. +</p> +<p> +A people who had for centuries insisted not only on its rights but on +its privileges was now giving as freely as ever it had demanded. It +was as though, having hoarded all those years, it had but been hoarding +against the day of payment. As it had received it gave—in money, in +effort, in life. And without pretext. +</p> +<p> +So the Traverses, having given up all that had made life for them, sent +a clipping only, and no comment. Sara Lee, through a mist of tears, +saw them alone in their drawing-room, having tea as usual, and valiantly +speaking of small things, and bravely facing the future, but never, in +the bitterest moments, making complaint or protest. +</p> +<p> +Would America, she wondered, if her hour came, be so brave? Harvey had +a phrase for such things. It was "stand the gaff." Would America stand +the gaff so well? Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the +body rather than of the soul—physical courage, not moral. What would +happen if America entered the struggle and the papers were filled, as +were the British and the French, with long casualty lists, each name a +knife thrust somewhere? +</p> +<p> +She wondered. +</p> +<p> +And then, before long, it was Sara Lee's turn to stand the gaff. There +was another letter, a curiously incoherent one from Harvey's sister. She +referred to something that the society had done, and hoped that Sara Lee +would take it in kindness, as it was meant. Harvey was well and much +happier. She was to try to understand Harvey's part. He had been +almost desperate. Evidently the letter had preceded one that should have +arrived at the same time. Sara Lee was sadly puzzled. She went to Henri +with it, but he could make nothing out of it. There was nothing to do +but to wait. +</p> +<p> +The next night Henri was to go through the lines again. Since his +wounding he had been working on the Allied side, and fewer lights there +were in his district that flashed the treacherous message across the +flood, between night and morning. But now it was imperative that he go +through the German lines again. It was feared that with grappling hooks +the enemy was slowly and cautiously withdrawing the barbed wire from the +inundated fields; and that could mean but one thing. +</p> +<p> +On the night he was to go Henri called Sara Lee from the crowded <i>salle à +manger</i> and drawing her into the room across closed the door. +</p> +<p> +"Mademoiselle," he said gravely, "once before, long ago, you permitted +me to kiss you. Will you do that for me again?" +</p> +<p> +She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She did +not now. For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook. +She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure +men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours +that remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her +charm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, to +cheer, to comfort and help—that was necessary, because soon the chance +might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret. +</p> +<p> +So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of +tears. +</p> +<p> +"God bless and keep you, dear Henri," she said. +</p> +<p> +Then she went back to her work. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0022" id="h2H_4_0022"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXII +</h2> +<p> +Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people. +One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it +away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present +Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer +horribly, not to gain anything—except perhaps some honorable +advancement for their souls—but that there might be preserved, at any +cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to +pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God. +</p> +<p> +She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she +was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers +and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter. +She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time +she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was +<i>his</i> anxiety, <i>his</i> loneliness, <i>his</i> humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were +looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were +turned in on himself. +</p> +<p> +She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What +she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come +sometime—that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that +day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the +thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her +hands would tremble. +</p> +<p> +Henri had not returned when, the second day after René's death, the +letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from +Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had +always sent its enthusiastic approval. +</p> +<p> +She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read +Belle's letter again that she began to comprehend. She was recalled; +and the recall was Harvey's work. +</p> +<p> +She was very close to hating him that day. He had never understood. +She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest +of their lives, there would be this barrier between them. To the +barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment. She could +never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her +small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of +the war. +</p> +<p> +Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee's love for him. He had done +it himself, madly, despairingly. She still loved him, she felt. Nothing +could change that or her promise to him. But with that love there was +something now of fear. And she felt, too, that after all the years she +had known him she had not known him at all. The Harvey she had known +was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always +gentle. But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger. +</p> +<p> +It was the result of her upbringing, probably, that she had no thought +of revolt. Her tie to Harvey was a real tie. By her promise to him her +life was no longer hers to order. It belonged to some one else, to be +ordered for her. But, though she accepted, she was too clear a thinker +not to resent. +</p> +<p> +When Henri returned, toward dawn of the following night, he did not come +alone. Sara Lee, rising early, found two men in her kitchen—one of +them Henri, who was making coffee, and a soldier in a gray-green uniform, +with a bad bruise over one eye and a sulky face. His hands were tied, +but otherwise he sat at ease, and Henri, having made the coffee, held a +cup to his lips. +</p> +<p> +"It is good for the spirits, man," he said in German. "Drink it." +</p> +<p> +The German took it, first gingerly, then eagerly. Henri was in high +good humor. +</p> +<p> +"See, I have brought you a gift!" he exclaimed on seeing Sara Lee. "What +shall we do with him? Send him to America? To show the appearance of +the madmen of Europe?" +</p> +<p> +The prisoner was only a boy, such a boy as Henri himself; but a peasant, +and muscular. Beside his bulk Henri looked slim as a reed. Henri eyed +him with a certain tolerant humor. +</p> +<p> +"He is young, and a Bavarian," he said. "Other wise I should have +killed him, for he fought hard. He has but just been called." +</p> +<p> +There was another conference in the little house that morning, but +Henri's prisoner could tell little. He had heard nothing of an advance. +Further along the line it was said that there was much fighting. He sat +there, pale and bewildered and very civil, and in the end his frightened +politeness brought about a change in the attitude of the men who +questioned him. Hate all Germans as they must, who had suffered so +grossly, this boy was not of those who had outraged them. +</p> +<p> +They sent him on at last, and Sara Lee was free to tell Henri her news. +But she had grown very wise as to Henri's moods, and she hesitated. A +certain dissatisfaction had been growing in the boy for some time, a +sense of hopelessness. Further along the spring had brought renewed +activity to the Allied armies. Great movements were taking place. +</p> +<p> +But his own men stood in their trenches, or what passed for trenches, or +lay on their hours of relief in such wretched quarters as could be found, +still with no prospect of action. No great guns, drawn by heavy +tractors, came down the roads toward the trenches by the sea. Steady +bombarding, incessant sniping and no movement on either side—that was +the Belgian Front during the first year of the war. Inaction, with that +eating anxiety as to what was going on in the occupied territory, was +the portion of the heroic small army that stretched from Nieuport to +Dixmude. +</p> +<p> +And Henri's nerves were not good. He was unhappy—that always—and he +was not yet quite recovered from his wounds. There was on his mind, too, +a certain gun which moved on a railway track, back and forth, behind the +German lines, doing the work of many. He had tried to get to that gun, +and failed. And he hated failure. +</p> +<p> +Certainly in this story of Sara Lee and of Henri, whose other name must +not be known, allowance must be made for all those things. Yet—perhaps +no allowance is enough. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee told him that evening of her recall, told him when the shuffling +of many feet in the street told of the first weary men from the trenches +coming up the road. +</p> +<p> +He heard her in a dazed silence. Then: +</p> +<p> +"But you will not go?" he said. "It is impossible! You—you are +needed, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +"What can I do, Henri? They have recalled me. My money will not come +now." +</p> +<p> +"Perhaps we can arrange that. It does not cost so much. I have +friends—and think, mademoiselle, how many know now of what you are +doing, and love you for it. Some of them would contribute, surely." +</p> +<p> +He was desperately revolving expedients in his mind. He could himself +do no more than he had done. He, or rather Jean and he together, had +been bearing a full half of the expense of the little house since the +beginning. But he dared not tell her that. And though he spoke +hopefully, he knew well that he could raise nothing from the Belgians +he knew best. Henri came of a class that held its fortunes in land, and +that land was now in German hands. +</p> +<p> +"We will arrange it somehow," he said with forced cheerfulness. "No +beautiful thing—and this is surely beautiful—must die because of +money." +</p> +<p> +It was then that Sara Lee took the plunge. +</p> +<p> +"It is not only money, Henri." +</p> +<p> +"He has sent for you!" +</p> +<p> +Harvey was always "he" to Henri. +</p> +<p> +"Not exactly. But I think he went to some one and said I should not be +here alone. You can understand how he feels. We were going to be +married very soon, and then I decided to come. It made an awful upset." +</p> +<p> +Henri stood with folded arms and listened. At first he said nothing. +When he spoke it was in a voice of ominous calm: +</p> +<p> +"So for a stupid convention he would destroy this beautiful thing you +have made! Does he know your work? Does he know what you are to the +men here? Have you ever told him?" +</p> +<p> +"I have, of course, but—" +</p> +<p> +"Do you want to go back?" +</p> +<p> +"No, Henri. Not yet. I—" +</p> +<p> +"That is enough. You are needed. You are willing to stay. I shall +attend to the money. It is arranged." +</p> +<p> +"You don't understand," said Sara Lee desperately. "I am engaged to him. +I can't wreck his life, can I?" +</p> +<p> +"Would it wreck your life?" he demanded. "Tell me that and I shall know +how to reason with you." +</p> +<p> +But she only looked at him helplessly. +</p> +<p> +Heavy tramping in the passage told of the arrival of the first men. +They did not talk and laugh as usual. As well as they could they came +quietly. For René had been a good friend to many of them, and had +admitted on slack nights many a weary man who had no ticket. Much as +the neighbors had entered the house back home after Uncle James had gone +away, came these bearded men that night. And Sara Lee, hearing their +muffled voices, brushed a hand over her eyes and tried to smile. +</p> +<p> +"We can talk about it later," she said. "We mustn't quarrel. I owe so +much to you, Henri." +</p> +<p> +Suddenly Henri caught her by the arm and turned her about so that she +faced the lamp. +</p> +<p> +"Do you love him?" he demanded. "Sara Lee, look at me!" Only he +pronounced it Saralie. "He has done a very cruel thing. Do you still +love him?" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee shut her eyes. +</p> +<p> +"I don't know. I think I do. He is very unhappy, and it is my fault." +</p> +<p> +"Your fault!" +</p> +<p> +"I must go, Henri. The men are waiting." +</p> +<p> +But he still held her arm. +</p> +<p> +"Does he love you as I love you?" he demanded. "Would he die for you?" +</p> +<p> +"That's rather silly, isn't it? Men don't die for the people they love." +</p> +<p> +"I would die for you, Saralie." +</p> +<p> +She eyed him rather helplessly. +</p> +<p> +"I don't think you mean that." Bad strategy that, for he drew her to +him. His arms were like steel, and it was a rebellious and very rigid +Sara Lee who found she could not free herself. +</p> +<p> +"I would die for you, Saralie!" he repeated fiercely. "That would be +easier, far, than living without you. There is nothing that matters but +you. Listen—I would put everything I have—my honor, my life, my +hope of eternity—on one side of the scale and you on the other. And I +would choose you. Is that love?" He freed her. +</p> +<p> +"It's insanity," said Sara Lee angrily. "You don't mean it. And I +don't want that kind of love, if that is what you call it." +</p> +<p> +"And you will go back to that man who loves himself better than he loves +you?" +</p> +<p> +"That's not true!" she flashed at him. "He is sending for me, not to +get me back to him, but to get me back to safety." +</p> +<p> +"What sort of safety?" Henri demanded in an ominous tone. "Is he afraid +of me?" +</p> +<p> +"He doesn't know anything about you." +</p> +<p> +"You have never told him? Why?" His eyes narrowed. +</p> +<p> +"He wouldn't have understood, Henri." +</p> +<p> +"You are going back to him," he said slowly; "and you will always keep +these days of ours buried in your heart. Is that it?" His eyes softened. +"I am to be a memory! Do you know what I think? I think you care for +me more than you know. We have lived a lifetime together in these +months. You know me better than you know him, already. We have faced +death together. That is a strong tie. And I have held you in my arms. +Do you think you can forget that?" +</p> +<p> +"I shall never want to forget you." +</p> +<p> +"I shall not let you forget me. You may go—I cannot prevent that +perhaps. But wherever I am; Saralie, I shall stand between that lover +of yours and you. And sometime I shall come from this other side of the +world, and I shall find you, and you will come back with me. Back to +this country—our country." +</p> +<p> +They were boyish words, but back of them was the iron determination of a +man. His eyes seemed sunken in his head. His face was white. But there +was almost a prophetic ring in his voice. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee went out and left him there, went out rather terrified and +bewildered, and refusing absolutely to look into her own heart. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0023" id="h2H_4_0023"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXIII +</h2> +<p> +Late in May she started for home. It had not been necessary to close +the little house. An Englishwoman of mature years and considerable +wealth, hearing from Mr. Travers of Sara Lee's recall, went out a day or +two before she left and took charge. She was a kindly woman, in deep +mourning; and some of the ache left Sara Lee's heart when she had talked +with her successor. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps, too, Mrs. Cameron understood some of the things that had +puzzled her before. She had been a trifle skeptical perhaps about Sara +Lee before she saw her. A young girl alone among an army of men! She +was a good woman herself, and not given to harsh judgments, but the +thing had seemed odd. But Sara Lee in her little house, as virginal, as +without sex-consciousness as a child, Sara Lee with her shabby clothes +and her stained hands and her honest eyes—this was not only a good +girl, this was a brave and high-spirited and idealistic woman. +</p> +<p> +And after an evening in the house of mercy, with the soldiers openly +adoring and entirely respectful, Mrs. Cameron put her arms round Sara +Lee and kissed her. +</p> +<p> +"You must let me thank you," she said. "You have made me feel what I +have not felt since—" +</p> +<p> +She stopped. Her mourning was only a month old. "I see to-night that, +after all, many things may be gone, but that while service remains there +is something worth while in life." +</p> +<p> +The next day she asked Sara Lee to stay with her, at least through the +summer. Sara Lee hesitated, but at last she agreed to cable. As Henri +had disappeared with the arrival of Mrs. Cameron it was that lady's +chauffeur who took the message to Dunkirk and sent it off. +</p> +<p> +She had sent the cable to Harvey. It was no longer a matter of the +Ladies' Aid. It was between Harvey and herself. +</p> +<p> +The reply came on the second day. It was curt and decisive. +</p> +<p> +"Now or never," was the message Harvey sent out of his black despair, +across the Atlantic to the little house so close under the guns of +Belgium. +</p> +<p> +Henri was half mad those last days. Jean tried to counsel him, but he +was irritable, almost savage. And Jean understood. The girl had grown +deep into his own heart. Like Henri, he believed that she was going +back to unhappiness; he even said so to her in the car, on that last sad +day when Sara Lee, having visited René's grave and prayed in the ruined +church, said good-by to the little house, and went away, tearless at the +last, because she was too sad for tears. +</p> +<p> +It was not for some time that Jean spoke what was in his mind, and when +he had done so she turned to him gravely: +</p> +<p> +"You are wrong, Jean. He is the kindest of men. Once I am back, and +safe, he will be very different. I'm afraid I've given you a wrong +impression of him." +</p> +<p> +"You think then, mademoiselle, that he will forget all these months—he +will never be unhappy over them?" +</p> +<p> +"Why should he?" said Sara Lee proudly. "When I tell him everything he +will understand. And he will be very proud that I have done my share." +</p> +<p> +But Jean's one eye was dubious. +</p> +<p> +At the wharf in Dunkirk they found Henri, a pale but composed Henri. +Jean's brows contracted. He had thought that the boy would follow his +advice and stay away. But Henri was there. +</p> +<p> +It was as well, perhaps, for Sara Lee had brought him a letter, one of +those missives from the trenches which had been so often left at the +little house. +</p> +<p> +Henri thrust it into his pocket without reading it. +</p> +<p> +"Everything is prepared," he said. "It is the British Admiralty boat, +and one of the officers has offered his cabin. You will be quite +comfortable." +</p> +<p> +He appeared entirely calm. He saw to carrying Sara Lee's small bag on +board; he chatted with the officers; he even wandered over to a +hospital ship moored near by and exchanged civilities with a wounded man +in a chair on the deck. Perhaps he swaggered a bit too much, for Jean +watched him with some anxiety. He saw that the boy was taking it hard. +His eyes were very sunken now, and he moved his right arm stiffly, as +though the old wound troubled him. +</p> +<p> +Jean did not like leave-takings. Particularly he did not like taking +leave of Sara Lee. Some time before the boat sailed he kissed her hand, +and then patted it and went away in the car without looking back. +</p> +<p> +The boat was preparing to get under way. Henri was standing by her very +quietly. He had not slept the night before, but then there were many +nights when Henri did not sleep. He had wandered about, smoking +incessantly, trying to picture the black future. +</p> +<p> +He could see no hope anywhere. America was far away, and peaceful. +Very soon the tranquillity of it all would make the last months seem +dreamlike and unreal. She would forget Belgium, forget him. Or she +would remember him as a soldier who had once loved her. Once loved her, +because she had never seemed to realize the lasting quality of his love. +She had always felt that he would forget her. If he could only make her +believe that he would not, it would not be so hopeless. +</p> +<p> +He had written a bit of a love letter on the little table at Dunkirk +that morning, written it with the hope that the sight of the written +words might carry conviction where all his protests had failed. +</p> +<p> +"I shall love you all the years of my life," he wrote. "At any time, in +any place, you may come to me and know that I am waiting. Great love +like this comes only once to any man, and once come to him it never goes +away. At any time in the years to come you may know with certainty that +you are still to me what you are now, the love of my life. +</p> +<p> +"Sometimes I think, dearest—I may call you that once, now that you +have left me—that far away you will hear this call of mine and come +back to me. Perhaps you will never come. Perhaps I shall not live. I +feel to-day that I do not care greatly to live. +</p> +<p> +"If that is to be, then think of me somewhere, perhaps with René by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house +of mercy; and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." +</p> +<p> +He had the letter in the pocket of his tunic, and at last the moment +came when the boat must leave. Suddenly Henri knew that he could not +allow her to cross to England alone. The last few days had brought many +stories of submarine attacks. Here, so far north, the Germans were +particularly active. They had for a long time lurked in waiting for +this British Admiralty boat, with its valuable cargo, its officers and +the government officials who used it. +</p> +<p> +"Good-by, Henri," said Sara Lee. "I—of course it is no use to try to +tell you—" +</p> +<p> +"I am going across with you." +</p> +<p> +"But—" +</p> +<p> +"I allowed you to come over alone. I shiver when I think of it. I shall +take you back myself." +</p> +<p> +"Is it very dangerous?" +</p> +<p> +"Probably not. But can you think of me standing safe on that quay and +letting you go into danger alone?" +</p> +<p> +"I am not afraid." +</p> +<p> +"I know that. I have never seen you afraid. But if you wish to see a +coward, look at me. I am a coward for you." +</p> +<p> +He put his hand into his pocket. It occurred to him to give her the +letter now so that if anything happened she would at least have had it. +He wanted no mistake about that appointment beyond the stars. But the +great world of eternity was very large, and they must have a definite +understanding about that meeting at the little house of mercy Over There. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps he had a little fever that day. He was alternately flushed and +pale; and certainly he was not quite rational. His hand shook as he +brought out her letter—and with it the other letter, from the Front. +</p> +<p> +"Have you the time to come with me?" Sara Lee asked doubtfully. "I want +you to come, of course, but if your work will suffer—" +</p> +<p> +He held out his letter to her. +</p> +<p> +"I shall go away," he said, "while you read it. And perhaps you will +not destroy it, because—I should like to feel that you have it always." +</p> +<p> +He went away at once, saluting as he passed other officers, who gravely +saluted him. On the deck of the hospital ship the invalid touched his +cap. Word was going about, in the stealthy manner of such things, that +Henri whose family name we may not know, was a brave man and doing brave +things. +</p> +<p> +The steamer had not yet cast off. As usual, it was to take a flying +start from the harbor, for it was just outside the harbor that the wolves +of the sea lay in wait. Henri, alone at last, opened his letter, and +stood staring at it. There was again movement behind the German line, +a matter to be looked into, as only he could do it. Probably nothing, +as before; but who could say? +</p> +<p> +Henri looked along the shore to where but a few miles away lay the +ragged remnant of his country. And he looked forward to where Sara Lee, +his letter in her hand, was staring blindly at nothing. Then he looked +out toward the sea, where lay who knew what dangers of death and +suffering. +</p> +<p> +After that first moment of indecision he never hesitated. He stood on +the deck and watched, rather frozen and rigid, and with a mind that had +ceased working, while the steamer warped out from the quay. If in his +subconsciousness there was any thought it was doubtless that he had done +his best for a long time, and that he had earned the right to protect +for a few hours the girl he loved. That, too, there had been activity +along the German-Belgian line before, without result. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps subconsciously those things were there. He himself was conscious +of no thought, of only a dogged determination to get Sara Lee across the +channel safely. He put everything else behind him. He counted no cost. +</p> +<p> +The little admiralty boat sped on. In the bow, on the bridge, and at +different stations lookouts kept watch. The lifeboats were hung +overboard, ready to lower instantly. On the horizon a British destroyer +steamed leisurely. Henri stood for a long time on the deck. The land +fell away quickly. From a clear silhouette of the town against the +sky—the dunes, the spire of the cathedral, the roof of the <i>mairie</i>—it +became vague, shadowy—the height of a hand—a line—nothing. +</p> +<p> +Henri roused himself. He was very thirsty, and the wound in his arm +ached. When he raised his hand to salute the movement was painful. +</p> +<p> +It was a very grave Sara Lee he found in the officer's cabin when he +went inside later on. She was sitting on the long seat below the open +port, her hat slightly askew and her hands folded in her lap. Her bag +was beside her, and there was in her eyes a perplexity Henri was too +wretched to notice. +</p> +<p> +For the first time Sara Lee was realizing the full value of the thing +she was throwing away. She had persistently discounted it until now. +She had been grateful for it. She had felt unworthy of it. But now, +on the edge of leaving it, she felt that something infinitely precious +and very beautiful was going out of her life. She had already a sense +of loss. +</p> +<p> +For the first time, too, she was allowing herself to think of certain +contingencies that were now forever impossible. For instance, suppose +she had stayed with Mrs. Cameron? Suppose she had broken her promise +to Harvey and remained at the little house? Suppose she had done as +Henri had so wildly urged her, and had broken entirely with Harvey? +Would she have married Henri? +</p> +<p> +There was a certain element of caution in the girl. It made the chances +she had taken rather more courageous, indeed, because she had always +counted the cost. But marriage was not a matter for taking chances. One +should know not only the man, but his setting, though she would not have +thought of it in that way. Not only the man, but the things that made up +his life—his people, his home. +</p> +<p> +And Henri was to her still a figure, not so much now of mystery as of +detachment. Except Jean he had no intimates. He had no family on the +only side of the line she knew. He had not even a country. +</p> +<p> +She had reached that point when Henri came below and saluted her stiffly +from the doorway. +</p> +<p> +"Henri!" she said. "I believe you are ill!" +</p> +<p> +"I am not ill," he said, and threw himself into the corner of the seat. +"You have read it?" +</p> +<p> +She nodded. Even thinking of it brought a lump into her throat. He +bent forward, but he did not touch her. +</p> +<p> +"I meant it, Saralie," he said. "Sometimes men are infatuated, and +write what they do not mean. They are sincere at the time, and then +later on—But I meant it. I shall always mean it." +</p> +<p> +Not then, nor during the three days in London, did he so much as take +her hand. He was not well. He ate nothing, and at night he lay awake +and drank a great deal of water. Once or twice he found her looking at +him anxiously, but he disclaimed all illness. +</p> +<p> +He had known from the beginning what he was doing. But he did not touch +her, because in his heart he knew that where once he had been worthy he +was no longer worthy. He had left his work for a woman. +</p> +<p> +It is true that he had expected to go back at once. But the +<i>Philadelphia</i>, which had been listed to sail the next day, was held up +by a strike in Liverpool, and he waited on, taking such hours as she +could give him, feverishly anxious to make her happy, buying her little +gifts, mostly flowers, which she wore tucked in her belt and smiled +over, because she had never before received flowers from a man. +</p> +<p> +He was alternately gay and silent. They walked across the Thames by the +Parliament buildings, and midway across he stopped and looked long at the +stream. And they went to the Zoölogical Gardens, where he gravely named +one of the sea lions for Colonel Lilias because of its mustache, and +insisted on saluting it each time before he flung it a fish. Once he +soberly gathered up a very new baby camel, all legs, in his arms, and +presented it to her. +</p> +<p> +"Please accept it, mademoiselle," he said. "With my compliments." +</p> +<p> +They dined together every night, very modestly, sitting in some crowded +restaurant perhaps, but seeing little but each other. Sara Lee had +bought a new hat in London—black, of course, but faced with white. +He adored her in it. He would sit for long moments, his elbows propped +on the table, his blond hair gleaming in the candlelight, and watch her. +</p> +<p> +"I wonder," he said once, "if you had never met him would you have loved +me?" +</p> +<p> +"I do love you, Henri." +</p> +<p> +"I don't want that sort of love." And he had turned his head away. +</p> +<p> +But one evening he called for her at Morley's, a white and crushed boy, +needing all that she could give him and much more. He came as a man +goes to the woman he loves when he is in trouble, much as a child to his +mother. Sara Lee, coming down to the reception room, found him alone +there, walking rapidly up and down. He turned desperate eyes on her. +</p> +<p> +"I have brought bad news," he said abruptly. +</p> +<p> +"The little house—" +</p> +<p> +"I do not know. I ran away, mademoiselle. I am a traitor. And the +Germans broke through last night." +</p> +<p> +"Henri!" +</p> +<p> +"They broke through. We were not ready. That is what I have done." +</p> +<p> +"Don't you think," Sara Lee said in a frozen voice, "that is what I have +done? I let you come." +</p> +<p> +"You? You are taking the blame? Mademoiselle, I have enough to bear +without that." +</p> +<p> +He explained further, still standing in his rigid attitude. If he had +been white before at times he was ghastly now. It had not been an attack +in force. A small number had got across and had penetrated beyond the +railway line. There had been hand-to-hand fighting in the road beyond +the poplars. But it looked more like an experiment, an endeavor to +discover the possibility of a real advance through the inundation; or +perhaps a feint to cover operations elsewhere. +</p> +<p> +"For every life lost I am responsible," he ended in a flat and lifeless +tone. +</p> +<p> +"But you might not have known," she protested wildly. "Even if you had +been there, Henri, you might not have known." She knew something of war +by that time. "How could you have told that a small movement of troops +was to take place?" +</p> +<p> +"I should have been there." +</p> +<p> +"But—if they came without warning?" +</p> +<p> +"I did not tell you," he said, looking away from her. "There had been a +warning. I disregarded it." +</p> +<p> +He went back to Belgium that night. Sara Lee, at the last, held out her +hand. She was terrified for him, and she showed it. +</p> +<p> +"I shall not touch your hand," he said. "I have forfeited my right to +do that." Then, seeing what was in her face, he reassured her. "I shall +not do <i>that</i>," he said. "It would be easier. But I shall have to go +back and see what can be done." +</p> +<p> +He was the old Henri to the last, however. He went carefully over her +steamship ticket, and inquired with equal care into the amount of money +she had. +</p> +<p> +"It will take you home?" he asked. +</p> +<p> +"Very comfortably, Henri." +</p> +<p> +"It seems very little." +</p> +<p> +Then he said, apropos of nothing: "Poor Jean!" +</p> +<p> +When he left her at last he went to the door, very erect and soldierly. +But he turned there and stood for a moment looking at her, as though +through all that was coming he must have with him, to give him strength, +that final picture of her. +</p> +<p> +The elderly chambermaid, coming into Sara Lee's room the next morning, +found her fully dressed in the frock she had worn the night before, face +down on her bed. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0024" id="h2H_4_0024"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXIV +</h2> +<p> +It was early in June when at last the lights went down behind the back +drop and came up in front, to show Sara Lee knitting again, though not +by the fire. The amazing interlude was over. +</p> +<p> +Over, except in Sara Lee's heart. The voyage had been a nightmare. She +had been ill for one thing—a combination of seasickness and +heartsickness. She had allowed Henri to come to England with her, and +the Germans had broken through. All the good she had done—and she had +helped—was nothing to this mischief she had wrought. +</p> +<p> +It had been a small raid. She gathered that from the papers on board. +But that was not the vital thing. What mattered was that she had let a +man forget his duty to his country in his solicitude for her. +</p> +<p> +But as the days went on the excitement of her return dulled the edge of +her misery somewhat. The thing was done. She could do only one thing +to help. She would never go back, never again bring trouble and +suffering where she had meant only to bring aid and comfort. +</p> +<p> +She had a faint hope that Harvey would meet her at the pier. She needed +comforting and soothing, and perhaps a bit of praise. She was so very +tired; depressed, too, if the truth be known. She needed a hand to lead +her back to her old place on the stage, and kind faces to make her forget +that she had ever gone away. +</p> +<p> +Because that was what she had to do. She must forget Henri and the +little house on the road to the poplar trees; and most of all, she must +forget that because of her Henri had let the Germans through. +</p> +<p> +But Harvey did not meet her. There was a telegram saying he would meet +her train if she wired when she was leaving—an exultant message +breathing forgiveness and signed "with much love." She flushed when she +read it. +</p> +<p> +Of course he could not meet her in New York. This was not the Continent +in wartime, where convention had died of a great necessity. And he was +not angry, after all. A great wave of relief swept over her. But it +was odd how helpless she felt. Since her arrival in England months +before there had always been Henri to look after things for her. It was +incredible to recall how little she had done for herself. +</p> +<p> +Was she glad to be back? She did not ask herself. It was as though the +voyage had automatically detached her from that other Sara Lee of the +little house. That was behind her, a dream—a mirage—or a memory. +Here, a trifle confused by the bustle, was once again the Sara Lee who +had knitted for Anna, and tended the plants in the dining-room window, +and watched Uncle James slowly lowered into his quiet grave. +</p> +<a name="h2H_PART" id="h2H_PART"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + Part of her detachment was voluntary. She could not bear to remember. +</h2> +<p> +She had but to close her eyes to see Henri's tragic face that last night +at Morley's. And part of the detachment was because, after all, the +interlude had been but a matter of months, and reaching out familiar +hands to her were the habits and customs and surroundings of all the +earlier years of her life, drawing her back to them. +</p> +<p> +It was strange how Henri's face haunted her. She could close her eyes +and see it, line by line, his very swagger—for he did swagger, just a +little; his tall figure and unruly hair; his long, narrow, muscular +hands. Strange and rather uncomfortable. Because she could not summon +Harvey's image at all. She tried to bring before her, that night in the +train speeding west, his solid figure and kind eyes as they would greet +her the next day—tried, and failed. All she got was the profile of +the photograph, and the stubborn angle of the jaw. +</p> +<p> +She was up very early the next morning, and it was then, as the train +rolled through familiar country, that she began to find Harvey again. +A flush of tenderness warmed her. She must be very kind to him because +of all that he had suffered. +</p> +<p> +The train came to a stop. Rather breathless Sara Lee went out on the +platform. Harvey was there, in the crowd. He did not see her at first. +He was looking toward the front of the train. So her first glimpse of +him was the view of the photograph. His hat was off, and his hair, +carefully brushed back, gave him the eager look of the picture. +</p> +<p> +He was a strong and manly figure, as unlike Henri as an oak is unlike +one of Henri's own tall and swaying poplars. Sara Lee drew a long +breath. Here after all were rest and peace; love and gentleness; quiet +days and still evenings. No more crowds and wounds and weary men, no +more great thunderings of guns, no imminence of death. Rest and peace. +</p> +<p> +Then Harvey saw her, and the gleam of happiness and relief in his eyes +made her own eyes misty. She saw even in that first glance that he +looked thinner and older. A pang of remorse shot through her. Was +happiness always bought at the cost of happiness? Did one always take +away in order to give? Not in so many words, but in a flash of doubt +the thought went through her mind. +</p> +<p> +There was no reserve in Harvey's embrace. He put his arms about her and +held her close. He did not speak at first. Then: +</p> +<p> +"My own little girl," he said. "My own little girl!" +</p> +<p> +Suddenly Sara Lee was very happy. All her doubts were swept away by his +voice, his arms. There was no thrill for her in his caress, but there +were peace and quiet joy. It was enough for her, just then, that she +had brought back some of the happiness she had robbed him of. +</p> +<p> +"Oh, Harvey!" she said. "I'm glad to be back again—with you." +</p> +<p> +He held her off then and looked at her. +</p> +<p> +"You are thin," he said. "You're not pale, but you are thin." And in a +harder voice: "What did they do to you over there?" +</p> +<p> +But he did not wait for a reply. He did not seem to want one. He picked +up her bag, and guiding her by the elbow, piloted her through the crowd. +</p> +<p> +"A lot of folks wanted to come and meet you," he said, "but I steered +them off. You'd have thought Roosevelt was coming to town the way +they've been calling up." +</p> +<p> +"To meet me?" +</p> +<p> +"I expect the Ladies' Aid Society wanted to get into the papers again," +he said rather grimly. "They are merry little advertisers, all right." +</p> +<p> +"I don't think that, Harvey." +</p> +<p> +"Well, I do," he said, and brought her to a stop facing a smart little +car, very new, very gay. +</p> +<p> +"How do you like it?" he asked. +</p> +<p> +"Like it? Why, it's not yours, is it?" +</p> +<p> +"Surest thing you know. Or, rather, it's ours. Had a few war babies, +and they grew up." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee looked at it, and for just an instant, a rather sickening +instant, she saw Henri's shattered low car, battle-scarred and broken. +</p> +<p> +"It's—lovely," said Sara Lee. And Harvey found no fault with her tone. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had intended to go to Anna's, for a time at least. But she +found that Belle was expecting her and would not take no. +</p> +<p> +"She's moved the baby in with the others," Harvey explained as he took +the wheel. "Wait until you see your room. I knew we'd be buying +furniture soon, so I fixed it up." +</p> +<p> +He said nothing for a time. He was new to driving a car, and the traffic +engrossed him. But when they had reached a quieter neighborhood he put +a hand over hers. +</p> +<p> +"Good God, how I've been hungry for you!" he said. "I guess I was pretty +nearly crazy sometimes." He glanced at her apprehensively, but if she +knew his connection with her recall she showed no resentment. As a +matter of fact there was in his voice something that reminded her of +Henri, the same deeper note, almost husky. +</p> +<p> +She was, indeed, asking herself very earnestly what was there in her of +all people that should make two men care for her as both Henri and Harvey +cared. In the humility of all modest women she was bewildered. It made +her rather silent and a little sad. She was so far from being what they +thought her. +</p> +<p> +Harvey, stealing a moment from the car to glance at her, saw something +baffling in her face. +</p> +<p> +"Do you still care, Sara Lee?" he asked almost diffidently. "As much as +ever?" +</p> +<p> +"I have come back to you," she said after an imperceptible pause. +</p> +<p> +"Well, I guess that's the answer." +</p> +<p> +He drew a deep satisfied breath. "I used to think of you over there, +and all those foreigners in uniform strutting about, and it almost got +me, some times." +</p> +<p> +And again, as long before, he read into her passivity his own passion, +and was deeply content. +</p> +<p> +Belle was waiting on the small front porch. There was an anxious frown +on her face, and she looked first, not at Sara Lee, but at Harvey. What +she saw there evidently satisfied her, for the frown disappeared. She +kissed Sara Lee impulsively. +</p> +<p> +All that afternoon, much to Harvey's resentment, Sara Lee received +callers. The Ladies' Aid came en masse and went out to the dining-room +and there had tea and cake. Harvey disappeared when they came. +</p> +<p> +"You are back," he said, "and safe, and all that. But it's not their +fault. And I'll be hanged if I'll stand round and listen to them." +</p> +<p> +He got his hat and then, finding her alone in a back hall for a moment, +reverted uneasily to the subject. +</p> +<p> +"There are two sides to every story," he said. "They're going to knife +me this afternoon, all right. Damned hypocrites! You just keep your +head, and I'll tell you my side of it later." +</p> +<p> +"Harvey," she said slowly, "I want to know now just what you did. I'm +not angry. I've never been angry. But I ought to know." +</p> +<p> +It was a very one-sided story that Harvey told her, standing in the +little back hall, with Belle's children hanging over the staircase and +begging for cake. Yet in the main it was true. He had reached his +limit of endurance. She was in danger, as the photograph plainly showed. +And a fellow had a right to fight for his own happiness. +</p> +<p> +"I wanted you back, that's all," he ended. And added an anticlimax by +passing a plate of sliced jelly roll through the stair rail to the +clamoring children. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee stood there for a moment after he had gone. He was right, or +at least he had been within his rights. She had never even heard of the +new doctrine of liberty for women. There was nothing in her training to +teach her revolt. She was engaged to Harvey; already, potentially, she +belonged to him. He had interfered with her life, but he had had the +right to interfere. +</p> +<p> +And also there was in the back of her mind a feeling that was almost +guilt. She had let Henri tell her he loved her. She had even kissed +him. And there had been many times in the little house when Harvey, for +days at a time, had not even entered her thoughts. There was, therefore, +a very real tenderness in the face she lifted for his good-by kiss. +</p> +<p> +To Belle in the front hall Harvey gave a firm order. +</p> +<p> +"Don't let any reporters in," he said warningly. "This is strictly our +affair. It's a private matter. It's nobody's business what she did over +there. She's home. That's all that matters." +</p> +<p> +Belle assented, but she was uneasy. She knew that Harvey was +unreasonably, madly jealous of Sara Lee's work at the little house of +mercy, and she knew him well enough to know that sooner or later he would +show that jealousy. She felt, too, that the girl should have been +allowed her small triumph without interference. There had been +interference enough already. But it was easier to yield to Harvey than +to argue with him. +</p> +<p> +It was rather a worried Belle who served tea that afternoon in her dining +room, with Mrs. Gregory pouring; the more uneasy, because already she +divined a change in Sara Lee. She was as lovely as ever, even lovelier. +But she had a poise, a steadiness, that were new; and silences in which, +to Belle's shrewd eyes, she seemed to be weighing things. +</p> +<p> +Reporters clamored to see Sara Lee that day, and, failing to see her, +telephoned Harvey at his office to ask if it was true that she had been +decorated by the King. He was short to the point of affront. +</p> +<p> +"I haven't heard anything about it," he snapped. "And I wouldn't say if +I had. But it's not likely. What d'you fellows think she was doing +anyhow? Leading a charge? She was running a soup kitchen. That's all." +</p> +<p> +He hung up the receiver with a jerk, but shortly after that he fell to +pacing his small office. She had not said anything about being decorated, +but the reporters had said it had been in a London newspaper. If she +had not told him that, there were probably many things she had not told +him. But of course there had been very little time. He would see if +she mentioned it that night. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had had a hard day. The children loved her. In the intervals +of calls they crawled over her, and the littlest one called her Saralie. +She held the child in her arms close. +</p> +<p> +"Saralie!" said the child, over and over; "Saralie! That's your name. +I love your name." +</p> +<p> +And there came, echoing in her ears, Henri and his tender Saralie. +</p> +<p> +There was an oppression on her too. Her very bedroom thrust on her her +approaching marriage. This was her own furniture, for her new home. It +was beautiful, simple and good. But she was not ready for marriage. She +had been too close to the great struggle to be prepared to think in terms +of peace so soon. Perhaps, had she dared to look deeper than that, she +would have found something else, a something she had not counted on. +</p> +<p> +She and Belle had a little time after the visitors had gone, before +Harvey came home. They sat in Belle's bedroom, and her sentences were +punctuated by little backs briskly presented to have small garments +fastened, or bows put on stiffly bobbed yellow hair. +</p> +<p> +"Did you understand my letter?" she asked. "I was sorry I had sent it, +but it was too late then." +</p> +<p> +"I put your letter and—theirs, together. I supposed that Harvey—" +</p> +<p> +"He was about out of his mind," Belle said in her worried voice. "Stand +still, Mary Ellen! He went to Mrs. Gregory, and I suppose he said a good +bit. You know the way he does. Anyhow, she was very angry. She called +a special meeting, and—I tried to prevent their recalling you. He +doesn't know that, of course." +</p> +<p> +"You tried?" +</p> +<p> +"Well, I felt as though it was your work," Belle said rather +uncomfortably. "Bring me the comb, Alice. I guess we get pretty narrow +here and—I've been following things more closely since you went over. +I know more than I did. And, of course, after one marries there isn't +much chance. There are children and—" Her face twisted. "I wish I +could do something." +</p> +<p> +She got up and brought from the dresser a newspaper clipping. +</p> +<p> +"It's the London newspaper," she explained. "I've been taking it, but +Harvey doesn't know. He doesn't care much for the English. This is +about your being decorated." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee held it listlessly in her hands. +</p> +<p> +"Shall I tell him, Belle?" she asked. +</p> +<p> +Belle hesitated. +</p> +<p> +"I don't believe I would," she said forlornly. "He won't like it. +That's why I've never showed him that clipping. He hates it all so." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee dressed that evening in the white frock. She dressed slowly, +thinking hard. All round her was the shiny newness of her furniture, +a trifle crowded in Belle's small room. Sara Lee had a terrible feeling +of being fastened in by it. Wherever she turned it gleamed. She felt +surrounded, smothered. +</p> +<p> +She had meant to make a clean breast of things—of the little house, +and of Henri, and of the King, pinning the medal on her shabby black +jacket and shaking hands with her. Henri she must tell about—not his +name of course, nor his madness, nor even his love. But she felt that +she owed it to Harvey to have as few secrets from him as possible. She +would tell about what the boy had done for her, and how he, and he alone, +had made it all possible. +</p> +<p> +Surely Harvey would understand. It was a page that was closed. It had +held nothing to hurt him. She had come back. +</p> +<p> +She stood by her window, thinking. And a breath of wind set the leaves +outside to rustling. Instantly she was back again in the little house, +and the sound was not leaves, but the shuffling of many stealthy feet +on the cobbles of the street at night, that shuffling that was so like +the rustling of leaves in a wood or the murmur of water running over a +stony creek bed. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0026" id="h2H_4_0026"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXV +</h2> +<p> +It was clear to Sara Lee from the beginning of the evening that Harvey +did not intend to hear her story. He did not say so; indeed, for a time +he did not talk at all. He sat with his arms round her, content just to +have her there. +</p> +<p> +"I have a lot of arrears to make up," he said. "I've got to get used to +having you where I can touch you. To-night when I go upstairs I'm going +to take that damned colorless photograph of you and throw it out the +window." +</p> +<p> +"I must tell you about your photograph," she ventured. "It always stood +on the mantel over the stove, and when there was a threatened bombardment +I used to put it under—" +</p> +<p> +"Let's not talk, honey." +</p> +<p> +When he came out of that particular silence he said abruptly: +</p> +<p> +"Will Leete is dead." +</p> +<p> +"Oh, no! Poor Will Leete." +</p> +<p> +"Died of pneumonia in some God-forsaken hole over there. He's left a +wife and nothing much to keep her. That's what comes of mixing in the +other fellow's fight. I guess we can get the house as soon as we want +it. She has to sell; and it ought to be a bargain." +</p> +<p> +"Harvey," she said rather timidly, "you speak of the other fellow's +fight. They say over there that we are sure to be drawn into it sooner +or later." +</p> +<p> +"Not on our life!" he replied brusquely. "And if you don't mind, honey, +I don't care to hear about what they think over there." He got up from +his old place on the arm of her chair and stood on the rug. "I'd better +tell you now how I feel about this thing. I can't talk about it, that's +all. We'll finish up now and let it go at that. I'm sorry there's a +war. I'll send money when I can afford it, to help the Belgians, though +my personal opinion is that they're getting theirs for what they did in +the Congo. But I don't want to hear about what you did over there." +</p> +<p> +He saw her face, and he went to her and kissed her cheek. +</p> +<p> +"I don't want to hurt you, honey," he said. "I love you with all my +heart. But somehow I can't forget that you left me and went over there +when there was no reason for it. You put off our marriage, and I +suppose we'd better get it over. Go ahead and tell me about it." +</p> +<p> +He drew up a chair and waited, but the girl smiled rather tremulously. +</p> +<p> +"Perhaps we'd better wait, if you feel that way, Harvey." +</p> +<p> +His face was set as he looked at her. +</p> +<p> +"There's only one thing I want to know," he said. "And I've got a right +to know that. You're a young girl, and you're beautiful—to me, anyhow. +You've been over there with a lot of crazy foreigners." He got up again +and all the bitterness of the empty months was in his voice. "Did any +of them—was there anybody there you cared about?" +</p> +<p> +"I came back, Harvey." +</p> +<p> +"That's not the question." +</p> +<p> +"There were many men—officers—who were kind to me. I—" +</p> +<p> +"That's not the question, either." +</p> +<p> +"If I had loved any one more than I loved you I should not have come +back." +</p> +<p> +"Wait a minute!" he said quickly. "You had to come back, you know." +</p> +<p> +"I could have stayed. The Englishwoman who took over my work asked me +to stay on and help her." +</p> +<p> +He was satisfied then. He went back to the arm of her chair and kissed +her. +</p> +<p> +"All right," he said. "I've suffered the tortures of the damned, +but—that fixes it. Now let's talk about something else. I'm sick of +this war talk." +</p> +<p> +"I'd like to tell you about my little house. And poor René—" +</p> +<p> +"Who was René?" he demanded. +</p> +<p> +"The orderly." +</p> +<p> +"The one on the step, with a rifle?" +</p> +<p> +"Yes." +</p> +<p> +"Look here," he said. "I've got to get to all that gradually. I don't +know that I'll ever get to it cheerfully. But I can't talk about that +place to-night. And I don't want to talk war. The whole business makes +me sick. I've got a car out of it, and if things keep on we may be able +to get the Leete house. But there's no reason in it, no sense. I'm +sick to death of hearing about it. Let's talk of something else." +</p> +<p> +But—and here was something strange—Sara Lee could find nothing else +to talk about. The thing that she had looked forward so eagerly to +telling—that was barred. And the small gossip of their little circle, +purely personal and trivial, held only faint interest for her. For the +first time they had no common ground to meet on. +</p> +<p> +Yet it was a very happy man who went whistling to his room that night. +He was rather proud of himself too. After all the bitterness of the +past months, he had been gentle and loving to Sara Lee. He had not +scolded her. +</p> +<p> +In the next room he could hear her going quietly about, opening and +closing the drawers of the new bureau, moving a chair. Pretty soon, God +willing, they need never be separated. He would have her always, to +protect and cherish and love. +</p> +<p> +He went outside to her closed door. +</p> +<p> +"Good night, sweetheart," he called softly. +</p> +<p> +"Good night, dear," came her soft reply. +</p> +<p> +But long after he was asleep Sara Lee stood at her window and listened +to the leaves, so like the feet of weary men on the ruined street over +there. +</p> +<p> +For the first time she was questioning the thing she had done. She +loved Harvey—but there were many kinds of love. There was the love of +Jean for Henri, and there was the wonderful love, though the memory now +was cruel and hurt her, of Henri for herself. And there was the love of +Marie for the memory of Maurice the spy. Many kinds of love; and one +heart might love many people, in different ways. +</p> +<p> +A small doubt crept into her mind. This feeling she had for Harvey was +not what she had thought it was over there. It was a thing that had +belonged to a certain phase of her life. But that phase was over. It +was, like Marie's, but a memory. +</p> +<p> +This Harvey of the new car and the increased income and the occasional +hardness in his voice was not the Harvey she had left. Or perhaps it +was she who had changed. She wondered. She felt precisely the same, +tender toward her friends, unwilling to hurt them. She did not want +to hurt Harvey. +</p> +<p> +But she did not love him as he deserved to be loved. And she had a +momentary lift of the veil, when she saw the long vista of the years, +the two of them always together and always between them hidden, +untouched, but eating like a cancer, Harvey's resentment and suspicion +of her months away from him. +</p> +<p> +There would always be a barrier between them. Not only on Harvey's side. +There were things she had no right to tell—of Henri, of his love and +care for her, and of that last terrible day when he realized what he had +done. +</p> +<p> +That night, lying in the new bed, she faced that situation too. How +much was she to blame? If Henri felt that each life lost was lost by +him wasn't the same true for her? Why had she allowed him to stay in +London? +</p> +<p> +But that was one question she did not answer frankly. +</p> +<p> +She lay there in the darkness and wondered what punishment he would +receive. He had done so much for them over there. Surely, surely, they +would allow for that. But small things came back to her—the awful +sight of the miller and his son, led away to death, with the sacks over +their heads. The relentlessness of it all, the expecting that men +should give everything, even life itself, and ask for no mercy. +</p> +<p> +And this, too, she remembered: Once in a wild moment Henri had said he +would follow her to America, and that there he would prove to her that +his and not Harvey's was the real love of her life—the great love, +that comes but once to any woman, and to some not at all. Yet on that +last night at Morley's he had said what she now felt was a final +farewell. That last look of his, from the doorway—that had been the +look of a man who would fill his eyes for the last time. +</p> +<p> +She got up and stood by the window. What had they done to him? What +would they do? She looked at her watch. It was four o'clock in the +morning over there. The little house would be quiet now, but down along +the lines men would be standing on the firing step of the trench, and +waiting, against what the dawn might bring. +</p> +<p> +Through the thin wall came the sound of Harvey's heavy, regular +breathing. She remembered Henri's light sleeping on the kitchen floor, +his cap on the table, his cape rolled round him—a sleeping, for all +his weariness, so light that he seemed always half conscious. She +remembered the innumerable times he had come in at this hour, muddy, +sometimes rather gray of face with fatigue, but always cheerful. +</p> +<p> +It was just such an hour that she found him giving hot coffee to the +German prisoner. It had been but a little earlier when he had taken her +to the roof and had there shown her René, lying with his face up toward +the sky which had sent him death. +</p> +<p> +A hundred memories crowded—Henri's love for the Belgian soldiers, and +theirs for him; his humor; his absurd riddles. There was the one he had +asked René, the very day before the air attack. He had stood stiffly and +frowningly before the boy, and he had asked in a highly official tone: +</p> +<p> +"What must a man be to be buried with military honors?" +</p> +<p> +"A general?" +</p> +<p> +"No." +</p> +<p> +"An officer?" +</p> +<p> +"No, no! Use your head boy! This is very important. A mistake would +be most serious." +</p> +<p> +René had shaken his head dejectedly. +</p> +<p> +"He must be dead, René," Henri had said gravely. "Entirely dead. As I +said, it is well to know these things. A mistake would be unfortunate." +</p> +<p> +His blue eyes had gleamed with fun, but his face had remained frowning. +It was quite five minutes before she had heard René chuckling on the +doorstep. +</p> +<p> +Was he still living, this Henri of the love of life and courting of +death? Could anything so living die? And if he had died had it been +because of her? She faced that squarely for the first time. +</p> +<p> +"Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house of mercy; +and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." +</p> +<p> +Beyond the partition Harvey slept on, his arms under his head. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0027" id="h2H_4_0027"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXVI +</h2> +<p> +Harvey was clamoring for an early wedding. And indeed there were few +arguments against it, save one that Sara Lee buried in her heart. +Belle's house was small, and though she was welcome there, and more than +that, Sara Lee knew that she was crowding the family. +</p> +<p> +Perhaps Sara Lee would have agreed in the end. There seemed to be +nothing else to do, though by the end of the first week she was no longer +in any doubt as to what her feeling for Harvey really was. It was +kindness, affection; but it was not love. She would marry him because +she had promised to, and because their small world expected her to do so; +and because she could not shame him again. +</p> +<p> +For to her surprise she found that that was what he had felt—a strange, +self-conscious shame, like that of a man who has been jilted. She felt +that by coming back to him she had forfeited the right to break the +engagement. +</p> +<p> +So every hour of every day seemed to make the thing more inevitable. +Belle was embroidering towels for her in her scant leisure. Even Anna, +with a second child coming, sent in her contribution to the bride's +linen chest. By almost desperately insisting on a visit to Aunt Harriet +she got a reprieve of a month. And Harvey was inclined to be jealous +even of that. +</p> +<p> +Sometimes, but mostly at night when she was alone, a hot wave of +resentment overwhelmed her. Why should she be forced into the thing? +Was there any prospect of happiness after marriage when there was so +little before? +</p> +<p> +For she realized now that even Harvey was not happy. He had at last +definitely refused to hear the story of the little house. +</p> +<p> +"I'd rather just forget it, honey!" he said. +</p> +<p> +But inconsistently he knew she did not forget it, and it angered him. +True to his insistence on ignoring those months of her absence, she made +no attempt to tell him. Now and then, however, closed in the library +together, they would fail of things to talk about, and Sara Lee's +knitting needles would be the only sound in the room. At those times he +would sit back in his chair and watch the far-away look in her eyes, and +it maddened him. +</p> +<p> +From her busy life Belle studied them both, with an understanding she +did not reveal. And one morning when the mail came she saw Sara Lee's +face as she turned away, finding there was no letter for her, and made +an excuse to follow her to her room. +</p> +<p> +The girl was standing by the window looking out. The children were +playing below, and the maple trees were silent. Belle joined her there +and slipped an arm round her. +</p> +<p> +"Why are you doing it, Sara Lee?" she asked. +</p> +<p> +"Doing what?" +</p> +<p> +"Marrying Harvey." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee looked at her with startled eyes. +</p> +<p> +"I'm engaged to him, Belle. I've promised." +</p> +<p> +"Exactly," said Belle dryly. "But that's hardly a good reason, is it? +It takes more than a promise." She stared down at the flock of children +in the yard below. "Harvey's a man," she said. "He doesn't understand, +but I do. You've got to care a whole lot, Sara Lee, if you're going to +go through with it. It takes a lot of love, when it comes to having +children and all that." +</p> +<p> +"He's so good, Belle. How can I hurt him?" +</p> +<p> +"You'll hurt him a lot more by marrying him when you don't love him." +</p> +<p> +"If only I could have a little time," she cried wildly. "I'm so—I'm +tired, Belle. And I can't forget about the war and all that. I've +tried. Sometimes I think if we could talk it over together I'd get it +out of my mind." +</p> +<p> +"He won't talk about it?" +</p> +<p> +"He's my own brother, and I love him dearly. But sometimes I think he's +hard. Not that he's ever ugly," she hastened to add; "but he's stubborn. +There's a sort of wall in him, and he puts some things behind it. And +it's like beating against a rock to try to get at them." +</p> +<p> +After a little silence she said hesitatingly: +</p> +<p> +"We've got him to think of too. He has a right to be happy. Sometimes +I've looked at you—you're so pretty, Sara Lee—and I've wondered if +there wasn't some one over there who—cared for you." +</p> +<p> +"There was one man, an officer—Oh, Belle, I can't tell you. Not <i>you</i>!" +</p> +<p> +"Why not!" asked Belle practically. "You ought to talk it out to some +one, and if Harvey insists on being a fool that's his own fault." +</p> +<p> +For all the remainder of that sunny morning Sara Lee talked what was in +her heart. And Belle—poor, romantic, starved Belle—heard and +thrilled. She made buttonholes as she listened, but once or twice a +new tone in Sara Lee's voice caused her to look up. Here was a new +Sara Lee, a creature of vibrant voice and glowing eyes; and Belle was +not stupid. She saw that it was Henri whose name brought the deeper note. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had stopped with her recall, had stopped and looked about the +room with its shiny new furniture and had shivered. Belle bent over her +work. +</p> +<p> +"Why don't you go back?" she asked. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee looked at her piteously. +</p> +<p> +"How can I? There is Harvey. And the society would not send me again. +It's over, Belle. All over." +</p> +<p> +After a pause Belle said: "What's become of Henri? He hasn't written, +has he?" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee got up and went to the window. +</p> +<p> +"I don't know where he is. He may be dead." +</p> +<p> +Her voice was flat and lifeless. Belle knew all that she wanted to know. +She rose and gathered up her sewing. +</p> +<p> +"I'm going to talk to Harvey. You're not going to be rushed into a +wedding. You're tired, and it's all nonsense. Well, I'll have to run +now and dress the children." +</p> +<p> +That night Harvey and Belle had almost a violent scene. He had taken +Sara Lee over the Leete house that evening. Will Leete's widow had met +them there, a small sad figure in her mourning, but very composed, until +she opened the door into a tiny room upstairs with a desk and a lamp +in it. +</p> +<p> +"This was Will's study," she said. "He did his work here in the +evenings, and I sat in that little chair and sewed. I never thought +then—" Her lips quivered. +</p> +<p> +"Pretty rotten of Will Leete to leave that little thing alone," said +Harvey on their way home. "He had his fling; and she's paying for it." +</p> +<p> +But Sara Lee was silent. It was useless to try to make Harvey understand +the urge that had called Will Leete across the sea to do his share for +the war, and that had brought him that peace of God that passeth all +understanding. +</p> +<p> +It was not a good time for Belle to put up to him her suggestion for a +delay in the marriage, that evening after their return. He took it +badly and insisted on sending upstairs for Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"Did you ask Belle to do this?" he demanded bluntly. +</p> +<p> +"To do what?" +</p> +<p> +"To put things off." +</p> +<p> +"I have already told you, Harvey," Belle put in. "It is my own idea. +She is tired. She's been through a lot. I've heard the story you're +too stubborn to listen to. And I strongly advise her to wait a while." +</p> +<p> +And after a time he agreed ungraciously. He would buy the house and fix +it over, and in the early fall it would be ready. +</p> +<p> +"Unless," he added to Sara Lee with a bitterness born of +disappointment—"unless you change your mind again." +</p> +<p> +He did not kiss her that night when she and Belle went together up the +stairs. But he stared after her gloomily, with hurt and bewilderment in +his eyes. +</p> +<p> +He did not understand. He never would. She had come home to him all +gentleness and tenderness, ready to find in him the things she needed so +badly. But out of his obstinacy and hurt he had himself built up a +barrier. +</p> +<p> +That night Sara Lee dreamed that she was back in the little house of +mercy. René was there; and Henri; and Jean, with the patch over his eye. +They were waiting for the men to come, and the narrow hall was full of +the odor of Marie's soup. Then she heard them coming, the shuffling of +many feet on the road. She went to the door, with Henri beside her, and +watched them coming up the road, a deeper shadow in the blackness—tired +men, wounded men, homeless men coming to her little house with its +firelight and its warmth. Here and there the match that lighted a +cigarette showed a white but smiling face. They stopped before the door, +and the warm little house, with its guarded lights and its food and +cheer, took them in. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0028" id="h2H_4_0028"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXVII +</h2> +<p> +Very pale and desperate, Henri took the night A train for Folkestone +after he had said good-by to Sara Lee. He alternately chilled and +burned with fever, and when he slept, as he did now and then, going off +suddenly into a doze and waking with a jerk, it was to dream of horrors. +</p> +<p> +He thought, in his wilder intervals, of killing himself. But his code +did not include such a shirker's refuge. He was going back to tell his +story and to take his punishment. +</p> +<p> +He had cabled to Jean to meet him at Calais, but when, at dawn the next +morning, the channel boat drew in to the wharf there was no sign of +Jean or the car. Henri regarded the empty quay with apathetic eyes. +They would come, later on. If he could only get his head down and sleep +for a while he would be better able to get toward the Front. For he +knew now that he was ill. He had, indeed, been ill for days, but he did +not realize that. And he hated illness. He regarded it with suspicion, +as a weakness not for a strong man. +</p> +<p> +The drowsy girl in her chair at the Gare Maritime regarded him curiously +and with interest. Many women turned to look after Henri, but he did +not know this. Had he known it he would have regarded it much as he +did illness. +</p> +<p> +The stupid boy was not round. The girl herself took the key and led the +way down the long corridor upstairs to a room. Henri stumbled in and +fell across the bed. He was almost immediately asleep. +</p> +<p> +Late in the afternoon he wakened. Strange that Jean had not come. He +got up and bathed his face. His right arm was very stiff now, and pains +ran from the old wound in his chest down to the fingers of his hand. He +tried to exercise to limber it, and grew almost weak with pain. +</p> +<p> +At six o'clock, when Jean had not come, Henri resorted to ways that he +knew of and secured a car. He had had some coffee by that time, and he +felt much better—so well indeed that he sang under his breath a +strange rambling song that sounded rather like René's rendering of +Tipperary. The driver looked at him curiously every now and then. +</p> +<p> +It was ten o'clock when they reached La Panne. Henri went at once to +the villa set high on a sand dune where the King's secretary lived. The +house was dark, but in the library at the rear there was a light. He +stumbled along the paths beside the house, and reached at last, after +interminable miles, when the path sometimes came up almost to his eyes +and again fell away so that it seemed to drop from under his feet—at +last he reached the long French doors, with their drawn curtains. He +opened the door suddenly and thereby surprised the secretary, who was a +most dignified and rather nervous gentleman, into laying his hand on a +heavy inkwell. +</p> +<p> +"I wish to see the King," said Henri in a loud tone. Because at that +moment the secretary, lamp and inkwell and all, retired suddenly to a +very great distance, as if one had viewed them through the reverse end +of an opera glass. +</p> +<p> +The secretary knew Henri. He, too, eyed him curiously. +</p> +<p> +"The King has retired, monsieur." +</p> +<p> +"I think," said Henri in a dangerous tone, "that he will see me." +</p> +<p> +To tell the truth, the secretary rather thought so too. There was a +strange rumor going round, to the effect that the boy had followed a +woman to England at a critical time. Which would have been a pity, the +secretary thought. There were so many women, and so few men like Henri. +</p> +<p> +The secretary considered gravely. Henri was by that time in a chair, but +it moved about so that he had to hold very tight to the arms. When he +looked up again the secretary had picked up his soft black hat and was +at the door. +</p> +<p> +"I shall inquire," he said. Henri saluted him stiffly, with his left +hand, as he went out. +</p> +<p> +The secretary went to His Majesty's equerry, who was in the next house +playing solitaire and trying to forget the family he had left on the +other side of the line. +</p> +<p> +So it was that in due time Henri again traversed miles of path and +pavement, between tall borders of wild sea grass, miles which perhaps +were a hundred yards. And went round the screen, and—found the King +on the hearthrug. But when he drew himself stiffly to attention he +overdid the thing rather and went over backward with a crash. +</p> +<p> +He was up again almost immediately, very flushed and uncomfortable. +After that he kept himself in hand, but the King, who had a way all his +own of forgetting his divine right to rule, and a great many other +things—the King watched him gravely. +</p> +<p> +Henri sat in a chair and made a clean breast of it. Because he was +feeling rather strange he told a great many things that an agent of the +secret service is hardly expected to reveal to his king. He mentioned, +for instance, the color of Sara Lee's eyes, and the way she bandaged, +like one who had been trained. +</p> +<p> +Once, in the very middle of his narrative, where he had put the letter +from the Front in his pocket and decided to go to England anyhow, he +stopped and hummed René's version of Tipperary. Only a bar or two. +Then he remembered. +</p> +<p> +But one thing brought him round with a start. +</p> +<p> +"Then," said the King slowly, "Jean was not with you?" +</p> +<p> +Only he did not call him Jean. He gave him his other name, which, like +Henri's, is not to be told. +</p> +<p> +Henri's brain cleared then with the news that Jean was missing. When, +somewhat later, he staggered out of the villa, it was under royal +instructions to report to the great hospital along the sea front and +near by, and there to go to bed and have a doctor. Indeed, because the +boy's eyes were wild by that time, the equerry went along and held his +arm. But that was because Henri was in open revolt, and while walking +steadily enough showed a tendency to bolt every now and then. +</p> +<p> +He would stop on the way and argue, though one does not argue easily +with an equerry. +</p> +<p> +"I must go," he would say fretfully. "God knows where he is. He'd +never give me up if I were the one." +</p> +<p> +And once he shook off the equerry violently and said: +</p> +<p> +"Let go of me, I tell you! I'll come back and go to bed when I've +found him." +</p> +<p> +The equerry soothed him like a child. +</p> +<p> +An English nurse took charge of Henri in the hospital, and put him to +bed. He was very polite to her, and extremely cynical. She sat in a +chair by his bed and held the key of the room in her hand. Once he +thought she was Sara Lee, but that was only for a moment. She did not +look like Sara Lee. And she was suspicious, too; for when he asked her +what she could put in her left hand that she could not put in her right, +she moved away and placed the door key on the stand, out of reach. +</p> +<p> +However, toward morning she dozed. There was steady firing at Nieuport +and the windows shook constantly. An ambulance came in, followed by a +stirring on the lower floor. Then silence. He got up then and secured +the key. There was no time for dressing, because she was a suspicious +person and likely to waken at any time. He rolled his clothing into a +bundle and carried it under his well arm. The other was almost useless. +</p> +<p> +The ambulance was still waiting outside, at the foot of the staircase. +There were voices and lights in the operating room, forward along the +tiled hall. Still in his night clothing, Henri got into the ambulance +and threw his uniform behind him. Then he got the car under way. +</p> +<p> +Outside the village he paused long enough to dress. His head was +amazingly clear. He had never felt so sure of himself before. As to +his errand he had no doubt whatever. Jean had learned that he had +crossed the channel. Therefore Jean had taken up his work—Jean, who +had but one eye and was as clumsy as a bear. The thought of Jean +crawling through the German trenches set him laughing until he ended +with a sob. +</p> +<p> +It was rather odd about the ambulance. It did not keep the road very +well. Sometimes it was on one side and sometimes on the other. It slid +as though the road were greased. And after a time Henri made an amazing +discovery. He was not alone in the car. +</p> +<p> +He looked back, without stopping, and the machine went off in a wide arc. +He brought it back again, grinning. +</p> +<p> +"Thought you had me, didn't you?" he observed to the car in general, and +the engine in particular. "Now no tricks!" +</p> +<p> +There was a wounded man in the car. He had had morphia and he was very +comfortable. He was not badly hurt, and he considered that he was being +taken to Calais. He was too tired to talk, and the swinging of the car +rather interested him. He would doze and waken and doze again. But at +last he heard something that made him rise on his elbow. +</p> +<p> +It was the hammering of the big guns. +</p> +<p> +He called Henri's attention to this, but Henri said: +</p> +<p> +"Lie down, Jean, and don't talk. We'll make it yet." +</p> +<p> +The wounded man intended to make a protest, but he went to sleep instead. +</p> +<p> +They had reached the village now where was the little house of mercy. +The ambulance rolled and leaped down the street, with both lights full +on, which was forbidden, and came to a stop at the door. The man inside +was grunting then, and Henri, whose head had never been so clear, got +out and went round to the rear of the car. +</p> +<p> +"Now, out with you, comrade!" he said. "I have made an error, but it is +immaterial. Can you walk?" +</p> +<p> +He lighted a cigarette, and the man inside saw his burning eyes and +shaking hands. Even through the apathy of the morphia he felt a thrill +of terror. He could walk. He got out while Henri pounded at the door. +</p> +<p> +"<i>Attention</i>!" he called. "<i>Attention</i>!" +</p> +<p> +Then he hummed an air of the camps: +</p> +<div class="poem"> +<div class="stanza"> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + </p> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, ça ne va pas. + </p> +</div> +</div> + +<p> +When he heard steps inside Henri went back to the ambulance. He got in +and drove it, lights and all, down the street. +</p> +<div class="poem"> +<div class="stanza"> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + </p> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, ça ne va pas. + </p> +</div> +</div> + +<p> +Somewhere down the road beyond the poplar trees he abandoned the ambulance. +They found it there the next morning, or rather what was left of it. +Evidently its two unwinking eyes had got on the Germans' nerves. +</p> +<hr /> +<p> +Early the next morning a Saxon regiment, standing on the firing step +ready for what the dawn might bring forth, watched the mist rise from +the water in front of them. It shone on a body in a Belgian uniform, +lying across their wire, and very close indeed. +</p> +<p> +Now the Saxons are not Prussians, so no one for sport fired at the body. +Which was rather a good thing, because it moved slightly and stirred. +And then in a loud voice, which is an unusual thing for bodies to +possess, it began to sing: +</p> +<div class="poem"> +<div class="stanza"> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + </p> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, ça ne va pas. + </p> +</div> +</div> + +<a name="h2H_4_0029" id="h2H_4_0029"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXVIII +</h2> +<p> +Late in August Sara Lee broke her engagement with Harvey. She had been +away, at Cousin Jennie's, for a month, and for the first time since her +return she had had time to think. In the little suburban town there +were long hours of quiet when Cousin Jennie mended on the porch and Aunt +Harriet, enjoying a sort of reflected glory from Sara Lee, presided +at Red Cross meetings. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee decided to send for Harvey, and he came for a week-end, arriving +pathetically eager, but with a sort of defiance too. He was determined +to hold her, but to hold her on his own terms. +</p> +<p> +Aunt Harriet had been vaguely uneasy, but Harvey's arrival seemed to put +everything right. She even kissed him when he came, and took great pains +to carry off Cousin Jennie when she showed an inclination toward +conversation and a seat on the porch. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee had made a desperate resolve. She intended to lay all her +cards on the table. He should know all that there was to know. If, +after that, he still wanted to hold her—but she did not go so far. +She was so sure he would release her. +</p> +<p> +It was a despairing thing to do, but she was rather despairing those +days. There had been no letter from Henri or from Jean. She had written +them both several times, to Dunkirk, to the Savoy in London, to the +little house near the Front. But no replies had come. Yet mail was +going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly. +</p> +<p> +When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come +back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie +on one side and Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent +prayers—that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not +think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital. +</p> +<p> +She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy. +Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even +if that truth comprehended the worst. +</p> +<p> +Once she received, from some unknown hand, a French journal, and pored +over it for days with her French dictionary, to find if it contained any +news. It was not until a week later that she received a letter from +Mabel, explaining that she had sent the journal, which contained a +description of her hospital. +</p> +<p> +All of Harvey's Sunday she spent in trying to bring her courage to the +point of breaking the silence he had imposed on her, but it was not +until evening that she succeeded. The house was empty. The family had +gone to church. On the veranda, with the heavy scent of phlox at night +permeating the still air, Sara Lee made her confession. She began at +the beginning. Harvey did not stir—until she told of the way she had +stowed away to cross the channel. Then he moved. +</p> +<p> +"This fellow who planned that for you—did you ever see him again?" +</p> +<p> +"He met me in Calais." +</p> +<p> +"And then what?" +</p> +<p> +"He took me to Dunkirk in his car. Such a hideous car, Harvey—all +wrecked. It had been under fire again and again. I—" +</p> +<p> +"He took you to Dunkirk! Who was with you?" +</p> +<p> +"Just Jean, the chauffeur." +</p> +<p> +"I like his nerve! Wasn't there in all that Godforsaken country a +woman to take with you? You and this—What was his name, anyhow?" +</p> +<p> +"I can't tell you that, Harvey." +</p> +<p> +"Look here!" he burst out. "How much of this aren't you going to tell? +Because I want it all or not at all." +</p> +<p> +"I can't tell you his name. I'm only trying to make you understand the +way I feel about things. His name doesn't matter." She clenched her +hands in the darkness. "I don't think he is alive now." +</p> +<p> +He tried to see her face, but she turned it away. +</p> +<p> +"Dead, eh? What makes you think that?" +</p> +<p> +"I haven't heard from him." +</p> +<p> +"Why should you hear from him?" His voice cut like a knife. "Look at +me. Why should he write to you?" +</p> +<p> +"He cared for me, Harvey." +</p> +<p> +He sat in a heavy silence which alarmed her. +</p> +<p> +"Don't be angry, please," she begged. "I couldn't bear it. It wasn't my +fault, or his either." +</p> +<p> +"The damned scoundrel!" said Harvey thickly. +</p> +<p> +But she reached over and put a trembling hand over his lips. +</p> +<p> +"Don't say that," she said. "Don't! I won't allow you to. When I +think what may have happened to him, I—" Her voice broke. +</p> +<p> +"Go on," Harvey said in cold tones she had never heard before. "Tell it +all, now you've begun it. God knows I didn't want to hear it. He took +you to the hotel at Dunkirk, the way those foreigners take their women. +And he established you in the house at the Front, I suppose, like a—" +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee suddenly stood up and drew off her ring. +</p> +<p> +"You needn't go on," she said quietly. "I had a decision to make +to-night, and I have made it. Ever since I came home I have been trying +to go back to where we were before I left. It isn't possible. You are +what you always were, Harvey. But I've changed. I can't go back." +</p> +<p> +She put the ring into his hand. +</p> +<p> +"It isn't that you don't love me. I think you do. But I've been +thinking things over. It isn't only to-night, or what you just said. +It's because we don't care for the same things, or believe in them." +</p> +<p> +"But—if we love each other—" +</p> +<p> +"It's not that, either. I used to feel that way. A home, and some one +to care about, and a little pleasure and work." +</p> +<p> +"That ought to be enough, honey." +</p> +<p> +He was terrified. His anger was gone. He placed an appealing hand on +her arm, and as she stood there in the faint starlight the wonder of her +once again got him by the throat. She had that sort of repressed +eagerness, that look of being poised for flight, that had always made +him feel cheap and unworthy. +</p> +<p> +"Isn't that enough, honey?" he repeated. +</p> +<p> +"Not now," she said, her eyes turned toward the east. "These are great +days, Harvey. They are greater and more terrible than any one can know +who has not been there. I've been there and I know. I haven't the +right to all this peace and comfort when I know how things are going +over there." +</p> +<p> +Down the quiet street of the little town service was over. The last +hymn had been sung. Through the open windows came the mellow sound of +the minister's voice in benediction, too far away to be more than a +tone, like a single deep note of the organ. Sara Lee listened. She +knew the words he was saying, and she listened with her eyes turned to +the east: +</p> +<p class="quote"> + "The peace of God that passeth all understanding + be and abide with you all, forevermore. Amen." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee listened, and from the step below her Harvey watched her with +furtive, haggard eyes. He had not heard the benediction. +</p> +<p> +"The peace of God!" she said slowly. "There is only one peace of God, +Harvey, and that is service. I am going back." +</p> +<p> +"Service!" he scoffed. "You are going back to him!" +</p> +<p> +"I'm afraid he is not there any more. I am going back to work. But if +he is there—" +</p> +<p> +Harvey slid the ring into his pocket. "What if he's not there," he +demanded bitterly. "If you think, after all this, that I'm going to +wait, on the chance of your coming back to me, you're mistaken. I've +been a laughing stock long enough." +</p> +<p> +In the light of her new decision Sara Lee viewed him for the first time +with the pitiless eyes of women who have lost a faith. She saw him for +what he was, not deliberately cruel, not even unkindly, but selfish, +small, without vision. Harvey was for his own fireside, his office, his +little family group. His labor would always be for himself and his own. +Whereas Sara Lee was, now and forever, for all the world, her hands +consecrated to bind up its little wounds and to soothe its great ones. +Harvey craved a cheap and easy peace. She wanted no peace except that +bought by service, the peace of a tired body, the peace of the little +house in Belgium where, after days of torture, weary men found quiet +and ease and the cheer of the open door. +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0030" id="h2H_4_0030"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXIX +</h2> +<p> +Late in October Sara Lee went back to the little house of mercy; went +unaccredited, and with her own money. She had sold her bit of property. +</p> +<p> +In London she went to the Traverses, as before. But with a difference +too. For Sara Lee had learned the strangeness of the English, who are +slow to friendships but who never forget. Indeed a telegram met her at +Liverpool asking her to stop with them in London. She replied, refusing, +but thanking them, and saying she would call the next afternoon. +</p> +<p> +Everything was the same at Morley's: Rather a larger percentage of men +in uniform, perhaps; greater crowds in the square; a little less of the +optimism which in the spring had predicted victory before autumn. But +the same high courage, for all that. +</p> +<p> +August greeted her like an old friend. Even the waiters bowed to her, +and upstairs the elderly chambermaid fussed over her like a mother. +</p> +<p> +"And you're going back!" she exclaimed. "Fancy that, now! You are +brave, miss." +</p> +<p> +But her keen eyes saw a change in Sara Lee. Her smile was the same, but +there were times when she forgot to finish a sentence, and she stood, +that first morning, for an hour by the window, looking out as if she saw +nothing. +</p> +<p> +She went, before the visit to the Traverses, to the Church of Saint +Martin in the Fields. It was empty, save for a woman in a corner, who +did not kneel, but sat staring quietly before her. Sara Lee prayed an +inarticulate bit of a prayer, that what the Traverses would have to tell +her should not be the thing that she feared, but that, if it were, she +be given courage to meet it and to go on with her work. +</p> +<p> +The Traverses would know; Mrs. Cameron was a friend. They would know +about Henri, and about Jean. Soon, within the hour, she would learn +everything. So she asked for strength, and then sat there for a time, +letting the peace of the old church quiet her, as had the broken walls +and shattered altar of that other church, across the channel. +</p> +<p> +It was rather a surprise to Sara Lee to have Mrs. Travers put her arms +about her and kiss her. Mr. Travers, too, patted her hand when he took +it. But they had, for all that, the reserve of their class. Much that +they felt about Sara Lee they did not express even to each other. +</p> +<p> +"We are so grateful to you," Mrs. Travers said. "I am only one mother, +and of course now—" She looked down at her black dress. "But how many +others there are who will want to thank you, when this terrible thing is +over and they learn about you!" +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers had been eying Sara Lee. +</p> +<p> +"Didn't use you up, did it?" he asked. "You're not looking quite fit." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee was very pale just then. In a moment she would know. +</p> +<p> +"I'm quite well," she said. "I—do you hear from Mrs. Cameron?" +</p> +<p> +"Frequently. She has worked hard, but she is not young." It was Mrs. +Travers who spoke. "She's afraid of the winter there. I rather think, +since you want to go back, that she will be glad to turn your domain +over to you for a time." +</p> +<p> +"Then—the little house is still there?" +</p> +<p> +"Indeed, yes! A very famous little house, indeed. But it is always +known as your house. She has felt like a temporary chatelaine. She +always thought you would come back." +</p> +<p> +Tea had come, as before. The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace +herself. Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down +at her. +</p> +<p> +"We have a plan to talk over," he said, "when you have had your tea. I +hope you will agree to it." +</p> +<p> +He went back to the hearthrug. +</p> +<p> +"When I was there before," Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady, +"there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me. Indeed, all +the credit for what I did belongs to him. And since I went home I +haven't heard—" +</p> +<p> +Her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Travers glanced at his wife. Not for +nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends, +in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless +street before the little house. +</p> +<p> +"I'm afraid we have bad news for you." Mrs. Travers put down her +untasted tea. "Or rather, we have no news. Of course," she added, +seeing Sara Lee's eyes, "in this war no news may be the best—that is, +he may be a prisoner." +</p> +<p> +"That," Sara Lee heard herself say, "is impossible. If they captured +him they would shoot him." +</p> +<p> +Mrs. Travers nodded silently. They knew Henri's business, too, by that +time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy. +</p> +<p> +"And—Jean?" +</p> +<p> +They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away +voice. And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs. +Cameron's and read a part of it aloud. +</p> +<p> +"He seems to have been delirious," she read, holding her reading glasses +to her eyes. "A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he +learned this somehow. +</p> +<p> +"He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance. He came +straight here and wakened us. There had been a wounded man in the +machine, and he left him on our doorstep. When I got to the door the +car was going wildly toward the Front, with both lamps lighted. We did +not understand then, of course, and no one thought of following it. The +ambulance was found smashed by a shell the next morning, and at first we +thought that he had been in it. But there was no sign that he had been, +and that night one of the men from the trenches insisted that he had +climbed out of a firing trench where the soldier stood, and had gone +forward, bareheaded, toward the German lines. +</p> +<p> +"I am afraid it was the end. The men, however, who all loved him, do +not think so. It seems that he has done miracles again and again. I +understand that along the whole Belgian line they watch for him at night. +The other night a German on reconnoissance got very close to our wire, +and was greeted not by shots but by a wild hurrah. He was almost +paralyzed with surprise. They brought him here on the way back to the +prison camp, and he still looked dazed." +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee sat with her hands clenched. Mrs. Travers folded the letter +and put it back into its envelope. +</p> +<p> +"How long ago was that?" Sara Lee asked in a low tone. "Because, if he +was coming back at all—" +</p> +<p> +"Four months." +</p> +<p> +Suddenly Sara Lee stood up. +</p> +<p> +"I think I ought to tell you," she said with a dead-white face, "that I +am responsible. He cared for me; and I was in love with him too. Only +I didn't know it then. I let him bring me to England, because—I +suppose it was because I loved him. I didn't think then that it was +that. I was engaged to a man at home." +</p> +<p> +"Sit down," said Mr. Travers. "My dear child, nothing can be your fault." +</p> +<p> +"He came with me, and the Germans got through. He had had word, but—" +</p> +<p> +"Have you your salts?" Mr. Travers asked quietly of his wife. +</p> +<p> +"I'm not fainting. I'm only utterly wretched." +</p> +<p> +The Traverses looked at each other. They were English. They had taken +their own great loss quietly, because it was an individual grief and +must not be intruded on the sorrow of a nation. But they found this +white-faced girl infinitely appealing, a small and fragile figure, to +whose grief must be added, without any fault of hers, a bitter and +lasting remorse. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee stood up and tried to smile. +</p> +<p> +"Please don't worry about me," she said. "I need something to do, that's +all. You see, I've been worrying for so long. If I can get to work and +try to make up I'll not be so hopeless. But I am not quite hopeless, +either," she added hastily. It was as though by the very word she had +consigned Henri to death. "You see, I am like the men; I won't give him +up. And perhaps some night he will come across from the other side, out +of the dark." +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers took her back to the hotel. When he returned from paying +off the taxi he found her looking across at the square. +</p> +<p> +"Do you remember," she asked him, "the time when the little donkey was +hurt over there?" +</p> +<p> +"I shall never forget it." +</p> +<p> +"And the young officer who ran out when I did, and shot the poor thing?" +</p> +<p> +Mr. Travers remembered. +</p> +<p> +"That was he—the man we have been speaking of." +</p> +<p> +For the first time that day her eyes filled with tears. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee, at twenty, was already living in her memories. +</p> +<p> +So again the lights went down in front, and the back drop became but a +veil, and invisible. And to Sara Lee there came back again some of the +characters of the early <i>mise en scène</i>—marching men, forage wagons, +squadrons of French cavalry escorting various staffs, commandeered farm +horses with shaggy fetlocks fastened in rope corrals, artillery rumbling +along rutted roads which shook the gunners almost off the limbers. +</p> +<p> +Nothing was changed—and everything. There was no René to smile his +adoring smile, but Marie came out, sobbing and laughing, and threw +herself into the girl's arms. The little house was the same, save for +a hole in the kitchen wall. There were the great piles of white bowls +and the shining kettles. There was the corner of her room, patched by +René's hands, now so long quiet. A few more shell holes in the street, +many more little crosses in the field near the poplar trees, more Allied +aëroplanes in the air—that was all that was changed. +</p> +<p> +But to Sara Lee everything was changed, for all that. The little house +was grave and still, like a house of the dead. Once it had echoed to +young laughter, had resounded to the noise and excitement of Henri's +every entrance. Even when he was not there it was as though it but +waited for him to stir it into life, and small echoes of his gayety had +seemed to cling to its old walls. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee stood on the doorstep and looked within. She had come back. +Here she would work and wait, and if in the goodness of providence he +should come back, here he would find her, all the empty months gone and +forgotten. +</p> +<p> +If he did not— +</p> +<p> +"I shall still be calling you, and waiting," he had written. She, too, +would call and wait, and if not here, then surely in the fullness of +time which is eternity the call would be answered. +</p> +<p> +In October Sara Lee took charge again of the little house. Mrs. Cameron +went back to England, but not until the Traverses' plan had been +revealed. They would support the little house, as a memorial to the son +who had died. It was, Mrs. Travers wrote, the finest tribute they could +offer to his memory, that night after night tired and ill and wounded +men might find sanctuary, even for a little time, under her care. +</p> +<p> +Luxuries began to come across the channel, food and dressings and tobacco. +Knitted things, too; for another winter was coming, and already the frost +lay white on the fields in the mornings. The little house took on a new +air of prosperity. There were days when it seemed almost swaggering +with opulence. +</p> +<p> +It had need of everything, however. With the prospect of a second +winter, when an advance was impossible, the Germans took to hammering +again. Bombardment was incessant. The little village was again under +suspicion, and there came days of terror when it seemed as though even +the fallen masonry must be reduced to powder. The church went entirely. +</p> +<p> +By December Sara Lee had ceased to take refuge during the bombardments. +The fatalism of the Front had got her. She would die or live according +to the great plan, and nothing could change that. She did not greatly +care which, except for her work, and even that she felt could be carried +on by another as well. +</p> +<p> +There was no news of Henri, but once the King's equerry, going by, had +stopped to see her and had told her the story. +</p> +<p> +"He was ill, undoubtedly," he said. "Even when he went to London he was +ill, and not responsible. The King understands that. He was a brave +boy, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +But the last element of hope seemed to go with that verification of his +illness. He was delirious, and he had gone in that condition into the +filthy chill waters of the inundation. Well and sane there had been a +chance, but plunging wild-eyed and reckless, into that hell across, +there was none. +</p> +<p> +She did her best in the evenings to be cheerful, to take the place, in +her small and serious fashion, of Henri's old gayety. But the soldiers +whispered among themselves that mademoiselle was in grief, as they were, +for the blithe young soldier who was gone. +</p> +<p> +What hope Sara Lee had had died almost entirely early in December. On +the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy +pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian +corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench +while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual +courtesy, and had climbed out over the top. +</p> +<p> +To Sara Lee this Hutin told his story. A short man with a red beard and +a kindly smile that revealed teeth almost destroyed from neglect, he was +at first diffident in the extreme. +</p> +<p> +"It was the captain, mademoiselle," he asserted. "I know him well. He +has often gone on his errands from near my post. I am"—he smiled—"I +am usually in the front line." +</p> +<p> +"What did he do?" +</p> +<p> +"He had no cap, mademoiselle. I thought that was odd. And as you +know—he does not wear his own uniform on such occasions. But he wore +his own uniform, so that at first I did not know what he intended." +</p> +<p> +"Later on," she asked, "you—did you hear anything?" +</p> +<p> +"The usual sniping, mademoiselle. Nothing more." +</p> +<p> +"He went through the inundation?" +</p> +<p> +"How else could he go? Through the wire first, at the barrier, where +there is an opening, if one knows the way, I saw him beyond it, by the +light of a fusee. There is a road there, or what was once a road. He +stood there. Then the lights went out." +</p> +<a name="h2H_4_0031" id="h2H_4_0031"><!-- H2 anchor --></a> + +<div style="height: 4em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + +<h2> + XXX +</h2> +<p> +On a wild night in January Sara Lee inaugurated a new branch of service. +There had been a delay in sending up to the Front the men who had been +on rest, and an incessant bombardment held the troops prisoners in their +trenches. +</p> +<p> +A field kitchen had been destroyed. The men were hungry, disheartened, +wet through. They needed her, she felt. Even the little she could do +would help. All day she had made soup, and at evening Marie led from +its dilapidated stable the little horse that Henri had once brought up, +trundling its cart behind it. The boiler of the cart was scoured, a +fire lighted in the fire box. Marie, a country girl, harnessed the +shaggy little animal, but with tears of terror. +</p> +<p> +"You will be killed, mademoiselle," she protested, weeping. +</p> +<p> +"But I have gone before. Don't you remember the man whose wife was +English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?" +</p> +<p> +"What will become of the house if you are killed?" +</p> +<p> +"Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send +to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or +some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you +promise that?" +</p> +<p> +Marie promised in a loud wail. +</p> +<p> +"Of course I shall come back," Sara Lee said, stirring her soup +preparatory to pouring it out. "I shall be very careful." +</p> +<p> +"You will not come back, mademoiselle. You do not care to live, and to +such—" +</p> +<p> +"Those are the ones who live on," said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out +her soup. +</p> +<p> +She went quite alone. There was a great deal of noise, but no shells +fell near her. She led the little horse by its head, and its presence +gave her comfort. It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her +on the road. +</p> +<p> +In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible +from the rear. There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach +them. One went along through the darkness until the sound of men's +voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker +of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its +flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment. +</p> +<p> +Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply. +</p> +<p> +"<i>Qui vive</i>?" +</p> +<p> +"It is I," she called through the rain. "I have brought some chocolate +and some soup." +</p> +<p> +He lowered his bayonet. +</p> +<p> +"Pass, mademoiselle." +</p> +<p> +She went on, the rumbling of her little cart deadened by the Belgian +guns. +</p> +<p> +Through the near-by trenches that night went the word that near the +Repose of the Angels—which was but a hole in the ground and scarcely +reposeful—there was to be had hot soup and chocolate and cigarettes. +A dozen or so at a time, the men were allowed to come. Officers brought +their great capes to keep the girl dry. Boards appeared as if by magic +for her to stand on. The rain and the bombardment had both ceased, and +a full moon made the lagoon across the embankment into a silver lake. +</p> +<p> +When the last soup had been dipped from the tall boiler, when the final +drops of chocolate had oozed from the faucet, Sara Lee turned and went +back to the little house again. But before she went she stood a moment +staring across toward that land of the shadow on the other side, where +Henri had gone and had not returned. +</p> +<p> +Once, when the King had decorated her, she had wished that, wherever +Uncle James might be, on the other side, he could see what was happening. +And now she wondered if Henri could know that she had come back, and was +again looking after his men while she waited for that reunion he had so +firmly believed in. +</p> +<p> +Then she led the little horse back along the road. +</p> +<p> +At the poplar trees she turned and looked behind, toward the trenches. +The grove was but a skeleton now, a strange and jagged thing of twisted +branches, as though it had died in agony. She stood there while the +pony nuzzled her gently. If she called, would he come? But, then, all +of life was one call now, for her. She went on slowly. +</p> +<p> +After that it was not unusual for her to go to the trenches, on such +nights as no men could come to the little house. Always she was joyously +welcomed, and always on her way back she turned to send from the poplar +trees that inarticulate aching call that she had come somehow to +believe in. +</p> +<p> +January, wet and raw, went by; February, colder, with snow, was half +over. The men had ceased to watch for Henri over the parapet, and his +brave deeds had become fireside tales, to be told at home, if ever +there were to be homes again for them. +</p> +<p> +Then one night Henri came back—came as he had gone, out of the shadows +that had swallowed him up; came without so much as the sound of a +sniper's rifle to herald him. A strange, thin Henri, close to +starvation, dripping water over everything from a German uniform, and +very close indeed to death before he called out. +</p> +<p> +There was wild excitement indeed. Bearded private soldiers, forgetting +that name and rank of his which must not be told, patted his thin +shoulders. Officers who had lived through such horrors as also may not +be told, crowded about him and shook hands with him, and with each other. +</p> +<p> +It was as though from the graveyard back in the fields had come, alive +and smiling, some dearly beloved friend. +</p> +<p> +He would have told the story, but he was wet and weary. +</p> +<p> +"That can wait," they said, and led him, a motley band of officers and +men intermixed, for once forgetting all decorum, toward the village. +They overtook the lines of men who had left the trenches and were moving +with their slow and weary gait up the road. The news spread through the +column. There were muffled cheers. Figures stepped out of the darkness +with hands out. Henri clasped as many as he could. +</p> +<p> +When with his escort he had passed the men they fell, almost without +orders, into columns of four, and swung in behind him. There was no +band, but from a thousand throats, yet cautiously until they passed the +poplar trees, there gradually swelled and grew a marching song. +</p> +<p> +Behind Henri a strange guard of honor—muddy, tired, torn, even +wounded—they marched and sang: +</p> +<div class="poem"> +<div class="stanza"> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, ça ne va guère; + </p> +<p class="i4"> Trou là là, çe ne va pas. + </p> +</div> +</div> + +<p> +Sara Lee, listening for that first shuffle of many feet that sounded so +like the wind in the trees or water over the pebbles of a brook, paused +in her work and lifted her head. The rhythm of marching feet came +through the wooden shutters. The very building seemed to vibrate with +it. And there was a growling sound with it that soon she knew to be the +deep voices of singing men. +</p> +<p> +She went to the door and stood there, looking down the street. Behind +her was the warm glow of the lamp, all the snug invitation of the little +house. +</p> +<p> +A group of soldiers had paused in front of the doorway, and from them +one emerged—tall, white, infinitely weary—and looked up at her with +unbelieving eyes. +</p> +<p> +After all, there are no words for such meetings. Henri took her hand, +still with that sense of unreality, and bent over it. And Sara Lee +touched his head as he stooped, because she had called for so long, and +only now he had come. +</p> +<p> +"So you have come back!" she said in what she hoped was a composed +tone—because a great many people were listening. He raised his head +and looked at her. +</p> +<p> +"It is you who have come back, mademoiselle." +</p> +<hr /> +<p> +There was gayety in the little house that night. Every candle was +lighted. They were stuck in rows on mantel-shelves. They blazed—and +melted into strange arcs—above the kitchen stove. There were +cigarettes for everybody, and food; and a dry uniform, rather small, for +Henri. Marie wept over her soup, and ran every few moments to the door +to see if he was still there. She had kissed him on both cheeks when +he came in, and showed signs, every now and then, of doing it again. +</p> +<p> +Sara Lee did her bandaging as usual, but with shining eyes. And soon +after Henri's arrival a dispatch rider set off post haste with certain +papers and maps, hurriedly written and drawn. Henri had not only +returned, he had brought back information of great value to all the +Allied armies. +</p> +<p> +So Sara Lee bandaged, and in the little room across the way, where no +longer Harvey's photograph sat on the mantel, Henri told his story to +the officers—of his imprisonment in the German prison at Crefeld; of +his finding Jean there, weeks later when he was convalescing from +typhoid; of their escape and long wandering; of Jean's getting into +Holland, whence he would return by way of England. Of his own business, +of what he had done behind the lines after Jean had gone, he said +nothing. But his listeners knew and understood. +</p> +<p> +But his dispatches off, his story briefly told, Henri wandered out among +the men again. He was very happy. He had never thought to be so happy. +He felt the touch on his sleeves of hard brown, not overclean hands, +infinitely tender and caressing; and over there, as though she had never +gone, was Sara Lee, slightly flushed and very radiant. +</p> +<p> +And as though he also had never gone away, Henri pushed into the <i>salle +à manger</i> and stood before her smiling. +</p> +<p> +"You bandage well, mademoiselle," he said gayly. "But I? I bandage +better! See now, a turn here, and it is done! Does it hurt, Paul?" +</p> +<p> +The man in the dressing chair squirmed and grinned sheepishly. +</p> +<p> +"The iodine," he explained. "It is painful." +</p> +<p> +"Then I shall ask you a question, and you will forget the iodine. Why +is a dead German like the tail of a pig?" +</p> +<p> +Paul failed. The room failed. Even Colonel Lilias confessed himself at +fault. +</p> +<p> +"Because it is the end of the swine," explained Henri, and looked about +him triumphantly. A gust of laughter spread through the room and even +to the kitchen. A door banged. Henri upset a chair. There was noise +again, and gayety in the little house of mercy. And much happiness. +</p> +<p> +And there I think we may leave them all—Henri and Sara Lee; and Jean +of the one eye and the faithful heart; and Marie, with her kettles; and +even René, who still in some strange way belonged to the little house, +as though it were something too precious to abandon. +</p> +<p> +The amazing interlude had become the play itself. Never again for Sara +Lee would the lights go up in front, and Henri with his adoring eyes +and open arms fade into the shadows. +</p> +<p> +The drama of the war plays on. The Great Playwright sees fit, now and +then, to take away some well-beloved players. New faces appear and +disappear. The music is the thunder of many guns. Henri still plays +his big part, Sara Lee her little one. Yet who shall say, in the end, +which one has done the better? There are new and ever new standards, +but love remains the chief. And love is Sara Lee's one quality—love +of her kind, of tired men and weary, the love that shall one day knit +this broken world together. And love of one man. +</p> +<p> +On weary nights, when Henri is again lost in the shadows, Sara Lee, +her work done, the men gone, sits in her little house of mercy and +waits. The stars on clear evenings shine down on the roofless buildings, +on the rubbish that was once the mill, on the ruined poplar trees, and +on the small acre of peace where tiny crosses mark the long sleep of +weary soldiers. +</p> +<p> +And sometimes, though she knows it now by heart, she reads aloud that +letter of Henri's to her. It comforts her. It is a promise. +</p> +<p> +"If that is to be, then think of me, somewhere, perhaps with René by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps, even beyond the stars, they have need of a little +house of mercy. And God knows, wherever I am, I shall have need of you." +</p> +<!-- Transcriber's Note: "The End" is in the text exactly as follows --> +<h4> +(THE END) +</h4> + + +<div style="height: 6em;"><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></div> + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + +***** This file should be named 1590-h.htm or 1590-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/5/9/1590/ + +Produced by An anonymous PG volunteer and David Garcia + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: The Amazing Interlude + +Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart + +Release Date: December 23, 2004 [EBook #1590] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + + + + +Produced by An anonymous PG volunteer and David Garcia + + + + + +[Illustration: Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin +battles.] + + + + +THE AMAZING INTERLUDE + +By Mary Roberts Rinehart + + +ILLUSTRATIONS BY +THE KINNEYS + +[Transcriber's Note: Troy and Margaret West] + + +1918 + + + + +ILLUSTRATIONS + + +Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles. + +Henri explained the method. + +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. + +That Henri might be living, somewhere, that some day the Belgians might +go home again. + + + + + + +I + + +The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for +most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the +same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits +through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately +the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is +the background for the moving figures of the play. + +So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of +permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there +should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected +none. + +But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours: +lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity, +reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes +place. Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on--a new _mise +en scene_, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left +knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy--Sara Lee became a fairy, of a +sort--and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And +then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the +lady is back by the fire--but with a memory. + +This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory--and of something more. + + * * * * * + +The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing her part in the +setting of a city in Pennsylvania. An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It +is only fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither quality. She +was far from ugly, and very, very far from rich. She had started her +part with a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one they had +gone away into the wings and had not come back. At nineteen she was +alone knitting by the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop was +of painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for its moment, was the +forest of adventure. A strange forest, too--one that Sara Lee would +not have recognised as a forest. And a prince of course--but a prince +as strange and mysterious as the forest. + +The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented. If it was +resignation rather than content, no one but Sara Lee knew the difference. +Knitting, too; but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid, knitting an +afghan against an interesting event which involved a friend of hers. + +Sara Lee rather deplored the event--in her own mind, of course, for in +her small circle young unmarried women accepted the major events of life +without question, and certainly without conversation. She never, for +instance, allowed her Uncle James, with whom she lived, to see her +working at the afghan; and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be a +sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions. + +Sara Lee's days, up to the twentieth of December, 1914, had been much +alike. In the mornings she straightened up her room, which she had +copied from one in a woman's magazine, with the result that it gave +somehow the impression of a baby's bassinet, being largely dotted Swiss +and ribbon. Yet in a way it was a perfect setting for Sara Lee herself. +It was fresh and virginal, and very, very neat and white. A resigned +little room, like Sara Lee, resigned to being tucked away in a corner +and to having no particular outlook. Peaceful, too. + +Sometimes in the morning between straightening her room and going to the +market for Aunt Harriet, Sara Lee looked at a newspaper. So she knew +there was a war. She read the headings, and when the matter came up for +mention at the little afternoon bridge club, as it did now and then after +the prizes were distributed, she always said "Isn't it horrible!" and +changed the subject. + +On the night of the nineteenth of December Sara Lee had read her chapter +in the Bible--she read it through once each year--and had braided down +her hair, which was as smooth and shining and lovely as Sara Lee herself, +and had raised her window for the night when Aunt Harriet came in. Sara +Lee did not know, at first, that she had a visitor. She stood looking +out toward the east, until Aunt Harriet touched her on the arm. + +"What in the world!" said Aunt Harriet. "A body would suppose it was +August." + +"I was just thinking," said Sara Lee. + +"You'd better do your thinking in bed. Jump in and I'll put out your +light." + +So Sara Lee got into her white bed with the dotted Swiss valance, and +drew the covers to her chin, and looked a scant sixteen. Aunt Harriet, +who was an unsentimental woman, childless and diffident, found her +suddenly very appealing there in her smooth bed, and did an unexpected +thing. She kissed her. Then feeling extremely uncomfortable she put +out the light and went to the door. There she paused. + +"Thinking!" she said. "What about, Sara Lee?" + +Perhaps it was because the light was out that Sara Lee became articulate. +Perhaps it was because things that had been forming in her young mind for +weeks had at last crystallized into words. Perhaps it was because of a +picture she had happened on that day, of a boy lying wounded somewhere +on a battlefield and calling "Mother!" + +"About--over there," she said rather hesitatingly. "And about Anna." + +"Over there?" + +"The war," said Sara Lee. "I was just thinking about all those women +over there--like Anna, you know. They--they had babies, and got +everything ready for them. And then the babies grew up, and they're all +getting killed." + +"It's horrible," said Aunt Harriet. "Do you want another blanket? It's +cold to-night." + +Sara Lee did not wish another blanket. + +"I'm a little worried about your Uncle James," said Aunt Harriet, at the +door. "He's got indigestion. I think I'll make him a mustard plaster." + +She prepared to go out then, but Sara Lee spoke from her white bed. + +"Aunt Harriet," she said, "I don't think I'll ever get married." + +"I said that too, once," said Aunt Harriet complacently. "What's got +into your head now?" + +"I don't know," Sara Lee replied vaguely. "I just--What's the use?" + +Aunt Harriet was conscious of a hazy impression of indelicacy. Coming +from Sara Lee it was startling and revolutionary. In Aunt Harriet's +world young women did not question their duty, which was to marry, +preferably some one in the neighborhood, and bear children, who would be +wheeled about that same neighborhood in perambulators and who would +ultimately grow up and look after themselves. + +"The use?" she asked tartly. + +"Of having babies, and getting to care about them, and then--There will +always be wars, won't there?" + +"You turn over and go to sleep," counseled Aunt Harriet. "And stop +looking twenty years or more ahead." She hesitated. "You haven't +quarreled with Harvey, have you?" + +Sara Lee turned over obediently. + +"No. It's not that," she said. And the door closed. + +Perhaps, had she ever had time during the crowded months that followed, +Sara Lee would have dated certain things from that cold frosty night in +December when she began to question things. For after all that was what +it came to. She did not revolt. She questioned. + +She lay in her white bed and looked at things for the first time. The +sky had seemed low that night. Things were nearer. The horizon was +close. And beyond that peaceful horizon, to the east, something was +going on that could not be ignored. Men were dying. Killing and dying. +Men who had been waited for as Anna watched for her child. + +Downstairs she could hear Aunt Harriet moving about. The street was +quiet, until a crowd of young people--she knew them by their +voices--went by, laughing. + +"It's horrible," said Sara Lee to herself. There was a change in her, +but she was still inarticulate. Somewhere in her mind, but not +formulated, was the feeling that she was too comfortable. Her peace was +a cheap peace, bought at no price. Her last waking determination was to +finish the afghan quickly and to knit for the men at the war. + +Uncle James was ill the next morning. Sara Lee went for the doctor, but +Anna's hour had come and he was with her. Late in the afternoon he came, +however looking a bit gray round the mouth with fatigue, but triumphant. +He had on these occasions always a sense of victory; even, in a way, a +feeling of being part of a great purpose. He talked at such times of the +race, as one may who is doing his best by it. + +"Well," he said when Sara Lee opened the door, "it's a boy. Eight +pounds. Going to be red-headed, too." He chuckled. + +"A boy!" said Sara Lee. "I--don't you bring any girl babies any more?" + +The doctor put down his hat and glanced at her. + +"Wanted a girl, to be named for you?" + +"No. It's not that. It's only--" She checked herself. He wouldn't +understand. The race required girl babies. "I've put a blue bow on my +afghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs. + +Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as +Sara Lee's days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it, +ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul--for its bright +curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining brasses and growing +plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to +ache, too, for her friends--their small engrossing cares, their kindly +interest, their familiar faces. + +Time was to come, too, when she came back, not to the little house, it +is true, but to her friends, to Anna and the others. But they had not +grown and Sara Lee had. And that is the story. + +Uncle James died the next day. One moment he was there, an uneasy +figure, under the tulip quilt, and the next he had gone away entirely, +leaving a terrible quiet behind him. He had been the center of the +little house, a big and cheery and not over-orderly center. Followed +his going not only quiet, but a wretched tidiness. There was nothing +for Sara Lee to do but to think. + +And, in the way of mourning women, things that Uncle James had said +which had passed unheeded came back to her. One of them was when he +had proposed to adopt a Belgian child, and Aunt Harriet had offered +horrified protest. + +"All right," he had said. "Of course, if you feel that way about +it--! But I feel kind of mean, sometimes, sitting here doing nothing +when there's such a lot to be done." + +Then he had gone for a walk and had come back cheerful enough but rather +quiet. + +There was that other time, too, when the German Army was hurling itself, +wave after wave, across the Yser--only of course Sara Lee knew nothing +of the Yser then--and when it seemed as though the attenuated Allied +line must surely crack and give. He had said then that if he were only +twenty years younger he would go across and help. + +"And what about me?" Aunt Harriet had asked. "But I suppose I wouldn't +matter." + +"You could go to Jennie's, couldn't you?" + +There had followed one of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt +Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle +James' becoming twenty years younger and going away. + +And now Uncle James had taken on the wings of the morning and was indeed +gone away. And again it became a question of Jennie's. Aunt Harriet, +rather dazed at first, took to arguing it pro and con. + +"Of course she has room for me," she would say in her thin voice. +"There's that little room that was Edgar's. There's nobody in it now. +But there's only room for a single bed, Sara Lee." + +Sara Lee was knitting socks now, all a trifle tight as to heel. "I +know," she would say. "I'll get along. Don't you worry about me." + +Always these talks ended on a note of exasperation for Aunt Harriet. For +Sara Lee's statement that she could manage would draw forth a plaintive +burst from the older woman. + +"If only you'd marry Harvey," she would say. "I don't know what's come +over you. You used to like him well enough." + +"I still like him." + +"I've seen you jump when the telephone bell rang. Your Uncle James often +spoke about it. He noticed more than most people thought." She followed +Sara Lee's eyes down the street to where Anna was wheeling her baby +slowly up and down. Even from that distance Sara Lee could see the bit +of pink which was the bow on her afghan. "I believe you're afraid." + +"Afraid?" + +"Of having children," accused Aunt Harriet fretfully. + +Sara Lee colored. + +"Perhaps I am," she said; "but not the sort of thing you think. I just +don't see the use of it, that's all. Aunt Harriet, how long does it +take to become a hospital nurse?" + +"Mabel Andrews was three years. It spoiled her looks too. She used to +be a right pretty girl." + +"Three years," Sara Lee reflected. "By that time--" + +The house was very quiet and still those days. There was an interlude +of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet +alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things. +At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the +Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading +like wildfire. There were arguments and disagreements. A girl named +Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island +of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval. Mabel Andrews came once +to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross +dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging. Forerunner of the many +first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable +by one thing she said. + +"You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things," she stated +in her brisk voice. "One of our _internes_ is over there, and he says +we'll be in it before spring." + +After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm. + +"Are you going?" she asked. + +"Leaving day after to-morrow. Why?" + +"I--couldn't I be useful over there?" + +Mabel smiled rather grimly. "What can you do?" + +"I can cook." + +"Only men cooks, my dear. What else?" + +"I could clean up, couldn't I? There must be something. I'd do +anything I could. Don't they have people to wash dishes and--all that?" + +Mabel was on doubtful ground there. She knew of a woman who had been +permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and +buying her own tires and gasoline. + +"She carries supplies to small hospitals in out-of-the-way places," she +said. "But I don't suppose you can do that, Sara Lee, can you?" + +However, she gave Sara Lee a New York address, and Sara Lee wrote and +offered herself. She said nothing to Aunt Harriet, who had by that time +elected to take Edgar's room at Cousin Jennie's and was putting Uncle +James' clothes in tearful order to send to Belgium. After a time she +received a reply. + +"We have put your name on our list of volunteers," said the letter, +"but of course you understand that only trained workers are needed now. +France and England are full of untrained women who are eager to help." + +It was that night that Sara Lee became engaged to Harvey. + +Sara Lee's attitude toward Harvey was one that she never tried to analyze. +When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This +was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash +about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile, +and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust +forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,--gave him a sort of tense +eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph +Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact he was a bond +salesman. + +So during the daytime Sara Lee looked--at intervals--at the photograph, +and got that feel of drive and force. And in the evenings Harvey came, +and she lost it. For, outside of a frame, he became a rather sturdy +figure, of no romance, but of a comforting solidity. A kindly young man, +with a rather wide face and hands disfigured as to fingers by much early +baseball. He had heavy shoulders, the sort a girl might rely on to +carry many burdens. A younger and tidier Uncle James, indeed--the same +cheery manner, the same robust integrity, and the same small ambition. + +To earn enough to keep those dependent on him, and to do it fairly; +to tell the truth and wear clean linen and not run into debt; and to +marry Sara Lee and love and cherish her all his life--this was Harvey. +A plain and likable man, a lover and husband to be sure of. But-- + +He came that night to see Sara Lee. There was nothing unusual about +that. He came every night. But he came that night full of determination. +That was not unusual, either, but it had not carried him far. He had no +idea that his picture was romantic. He would have demanded it back had +he so much as suspected it. He wore his hair in a pompadour because +of the prosaic fact that he had a cow-lick. He was very humble about +himself, and Sara Lee was to him as wonderful as his picture was to her. + +Sara Lee was in the parlor, waiting for him. The one electric lamp was +lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of +reflected light. There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a +white fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The +Encyclopaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the +wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by +the fire. It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as +no doubt Harvey would picture for his own home. He had of course never +seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom. + +Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him. When he had taken off his +ulster and his overshoes--he had been raised by women--and came in, +she was standing by the fire. + +"Raining," he said. "It's getting colder. May be snow before morning." + +Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat. +She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her +quietest moments there was that about her--a sort of repressed +eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that +there were times when she had a "flighty" look. + +And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped +Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his +arms out. + +"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!" + +"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically. + +"I don't know," he muttered. "You--sometimes you look as though--" +Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good +to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek +against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear." + +A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has +stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel. He +was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures flashed through +her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One was of +Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby. +The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield +and crying "Mother!" + +Two sorts of maternity--one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, +but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other +vicarious, of all the world. + +"Don't you love me--that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers. + +"I don't know." + +"You don't know!" + +It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing +at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up, +saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust +forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair +that marked him all man, and virile man. + +She slipped her hand into his. + +"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the +complete surrender of a child. + +He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where +she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his +simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear, +and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion +he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he +read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers. + +To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's +devotion was something more, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara +Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit, +small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she +was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes, +she had never even dreamed. + +Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and +behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing, +unsuspected, the _mise en scene_. + + + + +II + + +About the middle of January Mabel Andrews wrote to Sara Lee from +France, where she was already installed in a hospital at Calais. + +The evening before the letter came Harvey had brought round the +engagement ring. He had made a little money in war stocks, and into +the ring he had put every dollar of his profits--and a great love, and +gentleness, and hopes which he did not formulate even to himself. + +It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger, +than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious +glances for months. + +"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously. + +Sara Lee looked at it on her finger. + +"It is lovely! It--it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his +shoulder. + +Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews, and +he had a tendency to restrict his war reading to the quarter column in +the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News." + +What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry? Which +is what Mabel wrote about. + +"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and +something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but +just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty +of it. But here--yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy. +He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or +coffee." + +It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a +long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust +out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no +_materiel_ of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army. France had +her own problems--her army, non-productive industrially, and the great +and constantly growing British forces quartered there, paying for what +they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of the starvation of +German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know and may never know is of +the struggle during those early days to feed the heroic Belgian Army in +their wet and almost untenable trenches. + +Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained +to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing? +Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew +that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny +living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as pointed +with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over there +Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and--put on her engagement ring. + +Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned adoringly +to her, Sara Lee formulated a question: + +"Don't you sometimes feel as though you'd like to go to France and fight?" + +"What for?" + +"Well, they need men, don't they?" + +"I guess they don't need me, honey. I'd be the dickens of a lot of use! +Never fired a gun in my life." + +"You could learn. It isn't hard." + +Harvey sat upright and stared at her. + +"Oh, if you want me to go--" he said, and waited. + +Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger. + +"Nobody wants anybody to go," she said not very elegantly. "I'd +just--I'd rather like to think you wanted to go." + +That was almost too subtle for Harvey. Something about him was rather +reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was determined not to +go to church. + +"It's not our fight," he said. "And as far as that goes, I'm not so +sure there isn't right on both sides. Or wrong. Most likely wrong. +I'd look fine going over there to help the Allies, and then making up my +mind it was the British who'd spilled the beans. Now let's talk about +something interesting--for instance, how much we love each other." + +It was always "we" with Harvey. In his simple creed if a girl accepted +a man and let him kiss her and wore his ring it was a reciprocal love +affair. It never occurred to him that sometimes as the evening dragged +toward a close Sara Lee was just a bit weary of his arms, and that she +sought, after he had gone, the haven of her little white room, and closed +the door, and had to look rather a long time at his photograph before +she was in a properly loving mood again. + +But that night after his prolonged leave-taking Sara Lee went upstairs +to her room and faced the situation. + +She was going to marry Harvey. She was committed to that. And she loved +him; not as he cared, perhaps, but he was a very definite part of her +life. Once or twice when he had been detained by business she had missed +him, had put in a lonely and most unhappy evening. + +Sara Lee had known comparatively few men. In that small and simple +circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two +inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the +usual give and take of more sophisticated circles. Boys and girls paired +off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was +comparatively little shifting. There were few free lances among the men, +and none among the girls. When she was seventeen Harvey had made it +known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing. And for +two years he had without intentional selfishness kept Sara Lee for +himself. + +That was how matters stood that January night when Sara Lee went +upstairs after Harvey had gone and read Mabel's letter, with Harvey's +photograph turned to the wall. Under her calm exterior a little flame +of rebellion was burning in her. Harvey's perpetual "we," his attitude +toward the war, and Mabel's letter, with what it opened before her, had +set the match to something in Sara Lee she did not recognize--a strain +of the adventurer, a throw-back to some wandering ancestor perhaps. But +more than anything it had set fire to the something maternal that is in +all good women. + +Yet, had Aunt Harriet not come in just then, the flame might have died. +And had it died a certain small page of the history of this war would +never have been written. + +Aunt Harriet came in hesitatingly. She wore a black wrapper, and her +face, with her hair drawn back for the night, looked tight and old. + +"Harvey gone?" she asked. + +"Yes." + +"I thought I'd better come in. There's something--I can tell you in +the morning if you're tired." + +"I'm not tired," said Sara Lee. + +Aunt Harriet sat down miserably on a chair. + +"I've had a letter from Jennie," she stated. "The girl's gone, and the +children have whooping cough. She'd like me to come right away." + +"To do the maid's work!" said Sara Lee indignantly. "You mustn't do it, +that's all! She can get somebody." + +But Aunt Harriet was firm. She was not a fair-weather friend, and since +Jennie was good enough to offer her a home she felt she ought to go at +once. + +"You'll have to get married right away," she finished. "Goodness knows +it's time enough! For two years Harvey has been barking like a watchdog +in front of the house and keeping every other young man away." + +Sara Lee smiled. + +"He's only been lying on the doormat, Aunt Harriet," she observed. "I +don't believe he knows how to bark." + +"Oh, he's mild enough. He may change after marriage. Some do. But," +she added hastily, "he'll be a good husband. He's that sort." + +Suddenly something that had been taking shape in Sara Lee's small head, +quite unknown to her, developed identity and speech. + +"But I'm not going to marry him just yet," she said. + +Aunt Harriet's eyes fell on the photograph with its face to the wall, +and she started. + +"You haven't quarreled with him, have you?" + +"No, of course not! I have something else I want to do first. That's +all. Aunt Harriet, I want to go to France." + +Aunt Harriet began to tremble, and Sara Lee went over and put her young +arms about her. + +"Don't look like that," she said. "It's only for a little while. I've +got to go. I just have to, that's all!" + +"Go how?" demanded Aunt Harriet. + +"I don't know. I'll find some way. I've had a letter from Mabel. +Things are awful over there." + +"And how will you help them?" Her face worked nervously. "Is it going +to help for you to be shot? Or carried off by the Germans?" The +atrocity stories were all that Aunt Harriet knew of the war, and all +she could think of now. "You'll come back with your hands cut off." + +Sara Lee straightened and looked out where between the white curtains +the spire of the Methodist Church marked the east. + +"I'm going," she said. And she stood there, already poised for flight. + +There was no sleep in the little house that night. Sara Lee could hear +the older woman moving about in her lonely bed, where the spring still +sagged from Uncle James' heavy form, and at last she went in and crept +in beside her. Toward morning Aunt Harriet slept, with the girl's arm +across her; and then Sara Lee went back to her room and tried to plan. + +She had a little money, and she had heard that living was cheap abroad. +She could get across then, and perhaps keep herself. But she must do +more than that, to justify her going. She must get money, and then +decide how the money was to be spent. If she could only talk it over +with Uncle James! Or, with Harvey. Harvey knew about business and money. + +But she dared not go to Harvey. She was terribly frightened when she +even thought of him. There was no hope of making him understand; and +no chance of reasoning with him, because, to be frank, she had no +reasons. She had only instinct--instinct and a great tenderness toward +suffering. No, obviously Harvey must not know until everything was +arranged. + +That morning the Methodist Church packed a barrel for the Belgians. +There was a real rite of placing in it Mrs. Augustus Gregory's old +sealskin coat, now a light brown and badly worn, but for years the only +one in the neighborhood. Various familiar articles appeared, to be +thrust into darkness, only to emerge in surroundings never dreamed of +in their better days--the little Howard boy's first trouser suit; the +clothing of a baby that had never lived; big Joe Hemmingway's dress suit, +the one he was married in and now too small for him. And here and there +things that could ill be spared, brought in and offered with resolute +cheerfulness. + +Sara Lee brought some of Uncle James' things, and was at once set to +work. The women there called Sara Lee capable, but it was to take other +surroundings to bring out her real efficiency. + +And it was when bending over a barrel, while round her went on that +pitying talk of women about a great calamity, that Sara Lee got her +great idea; and later on she made the only speech of her life. + +That evening Harvey went home in a quiet glow of happiness. He had had +a good day. And he had heard of a little house that would exactly suit +Sara Lee and him. He did not notice his sister's silence when he spoke +about it. He was absorbed, manlike, in his plans. + +"The Leete house," he said in answer to her perfunctory question. "Will +Leete has lost his mind and volunteered for the ambulance service in +France. Mrs. Leete is going to her mother's." + +"Maybe he feels it's his duty. He can drive a car, and they have no +children." + +"Duty nothing!" He seemed almost unduly irritated. "He's tired of the +commission business, that's all. Y'ought to have heard the fellows in +the office. Anyhow, they want to sub-let the house, and I'm going to +take Sara Lee there to-night." + +His sister looked at him, and there was in her face something of the +expression of the women that day as they packed the barrel. But she +said nothing until he was leaving the house that night. Then she put +a hand on his arm. She was a weary little woman, older than Harvey, +and tired with many children. She had been gathering up small overshoes +in the hall and he had stopped to help her. + +"You know, Harvey, Sara Lee's not--I always think she's different, +somehow." + +"Well, I guess yes! There's nobody like her." + +"You can't bully her, you know." + +Harvey stared at her with honestly perplexed eyes. + +"Bully!" he said. "What on earth makes you say that?" + +Then he laughed. + +"Don't you worry, Belle," he said. "I know I'm a fierce and domineering +person, but if there's any bullying I know who'll do it." + +"She's not like the other girls you know," she reiterated rather +helplessly. + +"Sure she's not! But she's enough like them to need a house to live in. +And if she isn't crazy about the Leete place I'll eat it." + +He banged out cheerfully, whistling as he went down the street. He +stopped whistling, however, at Sara Lee's door. The neighborhood +preserved certain traditions as to a house of mourning. It lowered +its voice in passing and made its calls of condolence in dark clothes +and a general air of gloom. Pianos near by were played only with the +windows closed, and even the milkman leaving his bottles walked on +tiptoe and presented his monthly bill solemnly. + +So Harvey stopped whistling, rang the bell apologetically, and--faced a +new and vivid Sara Lee, flushed and with shining eyes, but woefully +frightened. + +She told him almost at once. He had only reached the dining room of +the Leete house, which he was explaining had a white wainscoting when +she interrupted him. The ladies of the Methodist Church were going to +collect a certain amount each month to support a soup kitchen as near +the Front as possible. + +"Good work!" said Harvey heartily. "I suppose they do get hungry, poor +devils. Now about the dining room--" + +"Harvey dear," Sara Lee broke in, "I've not finished. I--I'm going +over to run it." + +"You are not!" + +"But I am! It's all arranged. It's my plan. They've all wanted to do +something besides giving clothes. They send barrels, and they never hear +from them again, and it's hard to keep interested. But with me there, +writing home and telling them, 'To-day we served soup to this man, and +that man, perhaps wounded.' And--and that sort of thing--don't you see +how interested every one will be? Mrs. Gregory has promised twenty-five +dollars a month, and--" + +"You're not going," said Harvey in a flat tone. "That's all. Don't +talk to me about it." + +Sara Lee flushed deeper and started again, but rather hopelessly. +There was no converting a man who would not argue or reason, who based +everything on flat refusal. + +"But somebody must go," she said with a tightening of her voice. +"Here's Mabel Andrews' letter. Read it and you will understand." + +"I don't want to read it." + +Nevertheless he took it and read it. He read slowly. He did nothing +quickly except assert his masculine domination. He had all the faults +of his virtues; he was as slow as he was sure, as unimaginative as he +was faithful. + +He read it and gave it back to her. + +"I don't think you mean it," he said. "I give you credit for too much +sense. Maybe some one is needed over there. I guess things are pretty +bad. But why should you make it your affair? There are about a million +women in this country that haven't got anything else to do. Let them go." + +"Some of them will. But they're afraid, mostly." + +"Afraid! My God, I should think they would be afraid! And you're asking +me to let you go into danger, to put off our wedding while you wander +about over there with a million men and no women and--" + +"You're wrong, Harvey dear," said Sara Lee in a low voice. "I am not +asking you at all. I am telling you that I am going." + + * * * * * + +Sara Lee's leaving made an enormous stir in her small community. Opinion +was divided. She was right according to some; she was mad according to +others. The women of the Methodist Church, finding a real field of +activity, stood behind her solidly. Guaranties of funds came in in a +steady flow, though the amounts were small; and, on the word going about +that she was to start a soup kitchen for the wounded, housewives sent +in directions for making their most cherished soups. + +Sara Lee, going to a land where the meat was mostly horse and where +vegetables were scarce and limited to potatoes, Brussels sprouts and +cabbage, found herself the possessor of recipes for making such sick-room +dainties as mushroom soup, cream of asparagus, clam broth with whipped +cream, and from Mrs. Gregory, the wealthy woman of the church--green +turtle and consomme. + +She was very busy and rather sad. She was helping Aunt Harriet to close +the house and getting her small wardrobe in order. And once a day she +went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a fierce and +kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes like this: _Le +livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenetre_, and so on. By the end of ten +days she could say: "_La rose sent-elle bon?_" + +Considering that Harvey came every night and ran the gamut of the +emotions, from pleading and expostulation at eight o'clock to black +fury at ten, when he banged out of the house, Sara Lee was amazingly +calm. If she had moments of weakness, when the call from overseas was +less insistent than the call for peace and protection--if the nightly +drawn picture of the Leete house, with tile mantels and a white bathroom, +sometimes obtruded itself as against her approaching homelessness, Sara +Lee made no sign. + +She had her photograph taken for her passport, and when Harvey refused +one she sent it to him by mail, with the word "Please" in the corner. +Harvey groaned over it, and got it out at night and scolded it wildly; +and then slept with it under his pillows, when he slept at all. + +Not Sara Lee, and certainly not Harvey, knew what was calling her. And +even later, when waves of homesickness racked her with wild remorse, she +knew that she had had to go and that she could not return until she had +done the thing for which she had been sent, whatever that might be. + + + + +III + + +The first thing that struck Sara Lee was the way she was saying her +nightly prayers in all sorts of odd places. In trains and in hotels and, +after sufficient interval, in the steamer. She prayed under these novel +circumstances to be made a better girl, and to do a lot of good over +there, and to be forgiven for hurting Harvey. She did this every night, +and then got into her narrow bed and studied French nouns--because she +had decided that there was no time for verbs--and numbers, which put +her to sleep. + +"Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq," Sara Lee would begin, and go on, rocking +gently in her berth as the steamer rolled, "Vingt, vingt-et-un, +vingt-deux, trente, trente-et-un--" Her voice would die away. The +book on the floor and Harvey's picture on the tiny table, Sara Lee would +sleep. And as the ship trembled the light over her head would shine on +Harvey's ring, and it glistened like a tear. + +One thing surprised her as she gradually met some of her fellow +passengers. She was not alone on her errand. Others there were on +board, young and old women, and men, too, who had felt the call of mercy +and were going, as ignorant as she, to help. As ignorant, but not so +friendless. Most of them were accredited somewhere. They had definite +objectives. But what was more alarming--they talked in big figures. +Great organizations were behind them. She heard of the rehabilitation +of Belgium, and portable hospitals, and millions of dollars, and Red +Cross trains. + +Not once did Sara Lee hear of anything so humble as a soup kitchen. The +war was a vast thing, they would observe. It could only be touched by +great organizations. Individual effort was negligible. + +Once she took her courage in her hands. + +"But I should think," she said, "that even great organizations depend on +the--on individual efforts." + +The portable hospital woman turned to her patronizingly. + +"Certainly, my dear," she said. "But cooerdinated--cooerdinated." + +It is hard to say just when the lights went down on Sara Lee's quiet +stage and the interlude began. Not on the steamer, for after three days +of discouragement and good weather they struck a storm; and Sara Lee's +fine frenzy died for a time, of nausea. She did not appear again until +the boat entered the Mersey, a pale and shaken angel of mercy, not at +all sure of her wings, and most terribly homesick. + +That night Sara Lee made a friend, one that Harvey would have approved +of, an elderly Englishman named Travers. He was standing by the rail +in the rain looking out at the blinking signal lights on both sides of +the river. The ship for the first time had abandoned its policy of +darkness and the decks were bathed in light. + +Overhead the yardarm blinkers were signaling, and directly over Sara +Lee's head a great white searchlight swept the water ahead. The wind +was blowing a gale, and the red and green lights of the pilot boat swung +in great arcs that seemed to touch the waves on either side. + +Sara Lee stood beside Mr. Travers, for companionship only. He had +preserved a typically British aloofness during the voyage, and he had +never spoken to her. But there was something forlorn in Sara Lee that +night as she clutched her hat with both hands and stared out at the +shore lights. And if he had been silent during the voyage he had not +been deaf. So he knew why almost every woman on the ship was making +the voyage; but he knew nothing about Sara Lee. + +"Bad night," said Mr. Travers. + +"I was wondering what they are trying to do with that little boat." + +Mr. Travers concealed the surprise of a man who was making his +seventy-second voyage. + +"That's the pilot boat," he explained. "We are picking up a pilot." + +"But," marveled Sara Lee rather breathlessly, "have we come all the way +without any pilot?" + +He explained that to her, and showed her a few moments later how the +pilot came with incredible rapidity up the swaying rope ladder and over +the side. + +To be honest, he had been watching for the pilot boat, not to see what +to Sara Lee was the thrilling progress of the pilot up the ladder, but +to get the newspapers he would bring on with him. It is perhaps +explanatory of the way things went for Sara Lee from that time on that +he quite forgot his newspapers. + +The chairs were gone from the decks, preparatory to the morning landing, +so they walked about and Sara Lee at last told him her story--the +ladies of the Methodist Church, and the one hundred dollars a month she +was to have, outside of her traveling expenses, to found and keep going +a soup kitchen behind the lines. + +"A hundred dollars a month," he said. "That's twenty pounds. Humph! +Good God!" + +But this last was under his breath. + +Then she told him of Mabel Andrews' letter, and at last read it to him. +He listened attentively. "Of course," she said when she had put the +letter back into her bag, "I can't feed a lot, even with soup. But if I +only help a few, it's worth doing, isn't it?" + +"Very much worth doing," he said gravely. "I suppose you are not, by +any chance, going to write a weekly article for one of your newspapers +about what you are doing?" + +"I hadn't thought of it. Do you think I should?" + +Quite unexpectedly Mr. Travers patted her shoulder. + +"My dear child," he said, "now and then I find somebody who helps to +revive my faith in human nature. Thank you." + +Sara Lee did not understand. The touch on the shoulder had made her +think suddenly of Uncle James, and her chin quivered. + +"I'm just a little frightened," she said in a small voice. + +"Twenty pounds!" repeated Mr. Travers to himself. "Twenty pounds!" +And aloud: "Of course you speak French?" + +"Very little. I've had six lessons, and I can count--some." + +The sense of unreality which the twenty pounds had roused in Mr. Travers' +cautious British mind grew. No money, no French, no objective, just a +great human desire to be useful in her own small way--this was a new type +to him. What a sporting chance this frail bit of a girl was taking! And +he noticed now something that had escaped him before--a dauntlessness, +a courage of the spirit rather than of the body, that was in the very +poise of her head. + +"I'm not afraid about the language," she was saying. "I have a phrase +book. And a hungry man, maybe sick or wounded, can understand a bowl of +soup in any language, I should think. And I can cook!" + +It was a perplexed and thoughtful Mr. Travers who sipped his +Scotch-and-soda in the smoking room before retiring, he took the problem +to bed with him and woke up in the night saying: "Twenty pounds! +Good God!" + +In the morning they left the ship. He found Sara Lee among the K's, +waiting to have her passport examined, and asked her where she was +stopping in London. She had read somewhere of Claridge's--in a novel +probably. + +"I shouldn't advise Claridge's," he said, reflecting rather grimly on +the charges of that very exclusive hotel. "Suppose you let me make a +suggestion." + +So he wrote out the name of a fine old English house on Trafalgar +Square, where she could stay until she went to France. There would be +the matter of a passport to cross the Channel. It might take a day or +two. Perhaps he could help her. He would give himself the pleasure of +calling on her very soon. + +Sara Lee got on the train and rode up to London. She said to herself +over and over: "This is England. I am really in England." But it did +not remove the sense of unreality. Even the English grass, bright green +in midwinter, only added to the sense of unreality. + +She tried, sitting in the strange train with its small compartments, to +think of Harvey. She looked at her ring and tried to recall some of +the tender things he had said to her. But Harvey eluded her. She could +not hear his voice. And when she tried to see him it was Harvey of the +wide face and the angry eyes of the last days that she saw. + +Morley's comforted her. The man at the door had been there for forty +years, and was beyond surprise. He had her story in twenty-four hours, +and in forty-eight he was her slave. The elderly chambermaid mothered +her, and failed to report that Sara Lee was doing a small washing in +her room and had pasted handkerchiefs over the ancient walnut of her +wardrobe. + +"Going over, are you?" she said. "Dear me, what courage you've got, +miss! They tell me things is horrible over there." + +"That's why I'm going," replied Sara Lee, and insisted on helping to +make up the bed. + +"It's easier when two do it," she said casually. + +Mr. Travers put in a fretful twenty-four hours before he came to see her. +He lunched at Brooks', and astounded an elderly member of the House by +putting her problem to him. + +"A young girl!" exclaimed the M. P. "Why, deuce take it, it's no place +for a young girl." + +"An American," explained Mr. Travers uncomfortably. "She's perfectly +able to look after herself." + +"Probably a correspondent in disguise. They'll go to any lengths." + +"She's not a correspondent." + +"Let her stay in Boulogne. There's work there in the hospitals." + +"She's not a nurse. She's a--well, she's a cook. Or so she says." + +The M. P. stared at Mr. Travers, and Mr. Travers stared back defiantly. + +"What in the name of God is she going to cook?" + +"Soup," said Mr. Travers in a voice of suppressed irritation. "She's +got a little money, and she wants to establish a soup kitchen behind +the Belgian trenches on a line of communication. I suppose," he +continued angrily, "even you will admit that the Belgian Army needs all +the soup it can get." + +"I don't approve of women near the lines." + +"Neither do I. But I'm exceedingly glad that a few of them have the +courage to go there." + +"What's she going to make soup out of?" + +"I'm not a cooking expert. But I know her and I fancy she'll manage." + +It ended by the M. P. agreeing to use his influence with the War Office +to get Sara Lee to France. He was very unwilling. The spy question was +looming large those days. Even the Red Cross had unwittingly spread its +protection over more than one German agent. The lines were being +drawn in. + +"I may possibly get her to France. I don't know, of course," he said in +that ungracious tone in which an Englishman often grants a favor which +he will go to any amount of trouble to do. "After that it's up to her." + +Mr. Travers reflected rather grimly that after that it was apparently up +to him. + +Sara Lee sat in her room at Morley's Hotel and looked out at the life of +London--policemen with chin straps; schoolboys in high silk hats and +Eton suits, the hats generally in disreputable condition; clerks dressed +as men at home dressed for Easter Sunday church; and men in uniforms. +Only a fair sprinkling of these last, in those early days. On the first +afternoon there was a military funeral. A regiment of Scots, in kilts, +came swinging down from the church of St. Martin in the Fields, tall and +wonderful men, grave and very sad. Behind them, on a gun carriage, was +the body of their officer, with the British flag over the casket and his +sword and cap on the top. + +Sara Lee cried bitterly. It was not until they had gone that she +remembered that Harvey had always called the Scots men in women's +petticoats. She felt a thrill of shame for him, and no amount of +looking at his picture seemed to help. + +Mr. Travers called the second afternoon and was received by August at +the door as an old friend. + +"She's waiting in there," he said. "Very nice young lady, sir. Very +kind to everybody." + +Mr. Travers found her by a window looking out. There was a recruiting +meeting going on in Trafalgar Square, the speakers standing on the +monument. Now and then there was a cheer, and some young fellow +sheepishly offered himself. Sara Lee was having a mad desire to go +over and offer herself too. Because, she reflected, she had been in +London almost two days, and she was as far from France as ever. Not +knowing, of course, that three months was a fair time for the slow +methods then in vogue. + +There was a young man in the room, but Sara Lee had not noticed him. +He was a tall, very blond young man, in a dark-blue Belgian uniform with +a quaint cap which allowed a gilt tassel to drop over his forehead. He +sat on a sofa, curling up the ends of a very small mustache, his legs, +in cavalry boots, crossed and extending a surprising distance beyond +the sofa. + +The lights were up now, beyond the back drop, the stage darkened. A +new scene with a vengeance, a scene laid in strange surroundings, with +men, whole men and wounded men and spying men--and Sara Lee and this +young Belgian, whose name was Henri and whose other name, because of +what he suffered and what he did, we may not know. + + + + +IV + + +Henri sat on his sofa and watched Sara Lee. Also he shamelessly listened +to the conversation, not because he meant to be an eavesdropper but +because he liked Sara Lee's voice. He had expected a highly inflected +British voice, and instead here was something entirely different--that +is, Sara Lee's endeavor to reconcile the English "a" with her normal +western Pennsylvania pronunciation. She did it quite unintentionally, +but she had a good ear and it was difficult, for instance, to say +"rather" when Mr. Travers said "rawther." + +Henri had a good ear too. And the man he was waiting for did not come. +Also he had been to school in England and spoke English rather better +than most British. So he heard a conversation like this, the gaps being +what he lost: + +MR. TRAVERS: ---- to France, anyhow. After that ---- + +SARA LEE: Awfully sorry to be ---- But what shall I do if I do get over? +The chambermaid up-stairs ---- very difficult. + +MR. TRAVERS: The proper and sensible thing is ---- home. + +SARA LEE: To America? But I haven't done anything yet. + +Henri knew that she was an American. He also realized that she was on +the verge of tears. He glared at poor Mr. Travers, who was doing his +best, and lighted a French cigarette. + +"There must be some way," said Sara Lee. "If they need help--and I +have read you Mabel Andrews' letter--then I should think they'd be +glad to send me." + +"They would be, of course," he said. "But the fact is--there's been +some trouble about spies, and--" + +Henri's eyes narrowed. + +"Spies! And they think I'm a spy?" + +"My dear child," remonstrated Mr. Travers, slightly exasperated, +"they're not thinking about you at all. The War Office has never heard +of you. It's a general rule." + +Sara Lee was not placated. + +"Let them cable home and find out about me. I can give them references. +Why, all sorts of prominent people are sending me money. They must +trust me, or they wouldn't." + +There were no gaps for Henri now. Sara Lee did not care who heard her, +and even Mr. Travers had slightly raised his voice. Henri was divided +between a conviction that he ought to go away and a mad desire to join +in the conversation, greatly augmented when Sara Lee went to the window +and wiped her eyes. + +"If you only spoke French--" began Mr. Travers. + +Sara Lee looked over her shoulder. "But of course I do!" she said. +"And German and--and Yiddish, and all sorts of languages. Every spy +does." + +Henri smiled appreciatively. + +It might all have ended there very easily. Sara Lee might have fought +the War Office single-handed and won out, but it is extremely unlikely. +The chances at that moment were that she would spend endless days and +hours in anterooms, and tell her story and make her plea a hundred times. +And then--go back home to Harvey and the Leete house, and after a time, +like Mrs. Gregory, speak rather too often of "the time I went abroad." + +But Sara Lee was to go to France, and even further, to the fragment of +unconquered Belgium that remained. And never so long as she lived, would +she be able to forget those days or to speak of them easily. So she +stood by the window trying not to cry, and a little donkey drawing a +coster's cart moved out in front of the traffic and was caught by a motor +bus. There was only time for the picture--the tiny beast lying there +and her owner wringing his hands. Such of the traffic as could get by +swerved and went on. London must move, though a thousand willing little +beasts lay dying. + +And Sara moved too. One moment she was there by the window. And the +next she had given a stifled cry and ran out. + +"Bless my soul!" said Mr. Travers, and got up slowly. + +Henri was already up and at the window. What he saw was Sara Lee making +her way through the stream of vehicles, taking a dozen chances for her +life. Henri waited until he saw her crouched by the donkey, its head +on her knee. Then he, too, ran out. + +That is how Henri, of no other name that may be given, met Sara Lee +Kennedy, of Pennsylvania--under a London motor bus. And that, I think, +will be the picture he carries of her until he dies, her soft eyes full +of pity, utterly regardless of the dirt and the crowd and an +expostulating bobby, with that grotesque and agonized head on her knees. + +Henri crawled under the bus, though the policeman was extremely anxious +to keep him out. And he ran a practiced eye over the injured donkey. + +"It's dying," said Sara Lee with white lips. + +"It will die," replied Henri, "but how soon? They are very strong, +these little beasts." + +The conductor of the bus made a suggestion then, one that froze the +blood round Sara Lee's heart: "If you'll move away and let us run over +it proper it'll be out of its trouble, miss." + +Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to Henri. + +"Did you hear that?" she said. "They'd do it too!" + +The total result of a conference between four policemen, the costermonger, +and, by that time, Mr. Travers--was to draw the animal off the street +and into the square. Sara Lee stuck close by. So, naturally, did +Henri. And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she +was named, became increasingly evident, Henri behaved like a man and a +soldier. + +He got out his revolver and shot her in the brain. + +"A kindness," he explained, as Sara Lee would have caught his hand. +"The only way, mademoiselle." + +Mr. Travers had the usual British hatred of a crowd and publicity, +coupled with a deadly fear of getting into the papers, except through +an occasional letter to the _Times_. He vanished just before the shot, +and might have been seen moving rapidly through the square, turning +over in his mind the difficulty of trying to treat young American girls +like rational human beings. + +But Henri understood. He had had a French mother, and there is a leaven +of French blood in the American temperament, old Huguenot, some of it. +So Americans love beauty and obey their impulses and find life good to +do things rather than to be something or other more or less important. +And so Henri could quite understand how Sara Lee had forgotten herself +when Mr. Travers could not. And he understood, also, when Sara Lee, +having composed the little donkey's quiet figure, straightened up with +tears in her eyes. + +"It was very dear of you to come out," she said. "And--of course it was +the best thing." + +She held out her hand. The crowd had gone. Traffic was moving again, +racing to make up for five lost precious moments. The square was dark, +that first darkness of London, when air raids were threatened but had +not yet taken place. From the top of the Admiralty, near by, a +flashlight shot up into the air and began its nightly process of brushing +the sky. Henri took her hand and bent over it. + +"You are very brave, mademoiselle," he said, and touched her hand with +his lips. + +The amazing interlude had commenced. + + + + +V + + +Yet for a day or two nothing much was changed. Mr. Travers sent Sara +Lee a note that he was taking up her problem with the Foreign Office; +and he did indeed make an attempt. He also requested his wife to ask +Sara Lee to tea. + +Sara Lee was extremely nervous on the day she went. She wore a black +jacket suit with a white collar, and she carried Aunt Harriet's mink +furs, Aunt Harriet mourning thoroughly and completely in black astrachan. +She had the faculty of the young American girl of looking smart without +much expense, and she appeared absurdly young. + +She followed the neat maid up a wide staircase to a door with a screen +just inside, and heard her name announced for the first time in her life. +Sara Lee took a long breath and went inside, to a most discouraging half +hour. + +Mr. Travers was on the hearth rug. Mrs. Travers was in a chair, a portly +woman with a not unkindly face, but the brusque manner many Englishwomen +acquire after forty. She held Sara Lee's hand and gave her a complete +if smiling inspection. + +"And it is you who are moving heaven and earth to get to the Front! +You--child!" + +Sara Lee's heart fell, but she smiled also. + +"But I am older than I look," she said. "And I am very strong." + +Mrs. Travers looked helplessly at her husband, while she rang the bell +for tea. That was another thing Sara Lee had read about but never +seen--that ringing for tea. At home no one served afternoon tea; but +at a party, when refreshments were coming, the hostess slipped out to +the kitchen and gave a whispered order or two. + +"I shall be frank with you," said Mrs. Travers. "I think it quite +impossible. It is not getting you over. That might be done. And of +course there are women over there--young ones too. But the army +objects very seriously to their being in danger. And of course one +never knows--" Her voice trailed off vaguely. She implied, however, +that what one never knows was best unknown. + +"I have a niece over there," she said as the tea tray came in. "Her +mother was fool enough to let her go. Now they can't get her back." + +"Oh, dear!" said Sara Lee. "Can't they find her?" + +"She won't come. Little idiot! She's in Paris, however. I daresay +she is safe enough." + +Mrs. Travers made the tea thoughtfully. So far Mr. Travers had hardly +spoken, but he cheered in true British fashion at the sight of the tea. +Sara Lee, exceedingly curious as to the purpose of a very small stand +somewhat resembling a piano stool, which the maid had placed at her knee, +learned that it was to hold her muffin plate. + +"And now," said Mr. Travers, "suppose we come to the point. There +doesn't seem to be a chance to get you over, my child. Same answer +everywhere. Place is full of untrained women. Spies have been using +Red Cross passes. Result is that all the lines are drawn as tight as +possible." + +Sara Lee stared at him with wide eyes. + +"But I can't go back," she said. "I--well, I just can't. They're +raising the money for me, and all sorts of people are giving things. +A--a friend of mine is baking cakes and sending on the money. She +has three children, and--" + +She gulped. + +"I thought everybody wanted to get help to the Belgians," she said. + +A slightly grim smile showed itself on Mrs. Travers' face. + +"I'm afraid you don't understand. It is you we want to help. Neither +Mr. Travers nor I feel that a girl so young as you, and alone, has any +place near the firing line. And that, I fancy, is where you wish to go. +As to helping the Belgians, we have four in the house now. They do not +belong to the same social circles, so they prefer tea in their own rooms. +You are quite right about their needing help too. They cannot even make +up their own beds." + +"They are not all like that," broke in Mr. Travers hastily. + +"Of course not. But I merely think that Miss--er--Kennedy should know +both sides of the picture." + +Somewhat later Sara Lee was ushered downstairs by the neat maid, who +stood on the steps and blew a whistle for a taxi--Sara Lee had come in +a bus. She carried in her hand the address of a Belgian commission of +relief at the Savoy Hotel, and in her heart, for the first time, a doubt +of her errand. She gave the Savoy address mechanically and, huddled in +a corner, gave way to wild and fearful misgivings. + +Coming up she had sat on top of the bus and watched with wide curious, +eyes the strange traffic of London. The park had fascinated her--the +little groups of drilling men in khaki, the mellow tones of a bugle, and +here and there on the bridle paths well-groomed men and women on +horseback, as clean-cut as the horses they rode, and on the surface as +careless of what was happening across the Channel. But she saw nothing +now. She sat back and twisted Harvey's ring on her finger, and saw +herself going back, her work undone, her faith in herself shattered. +And Harvey's arms and the Leete house ready to receive her. + +However, a ray of hope opened for her at the Savoy--not much, a prospect. + +The Savoy was crowded. Men in uniform, a sprinkling of anxious-faced +wives and daughters, and more than a sprinkling of gaily dressed +and painted women, filled the lobby or made their way slowly up and +down the staircase. It was all so utterly different from what she had +expected--so bright, so full of life. These well-fed people they seemed +happy enough. Were they all wrong back home? Was the war the ghastly +thing they thought it? + +Long months afterward Sara Lee was to learn that the Savoy was not +London. She was to learn other things--that America knew more, through +a free press, of war conditions than did England. And she was to +learn what never ceased to surprise her--the sporting instinct of the +British which made their early slogan "Business as usual." Business +and pleasure--but only on the surface. Underneath was a dogged and +obstinate determination to make up as soon as possible for the +humiliation of the early days of the war. + +Those were the transition days in England. The people were slowly +awaking to the magnitude of the thing that was happening to them. Certain +elements of the press, long under political dominion, were preparing to +come out for a coalition ministry. The question of high-explosive +shells as against shrapnel was bitterly fought, some of the men at home +standing fast for shrapnel, as valuable against German artillery as a +garden hose. Men coming back from the Front were pleading for real help, +not men only, not Red Cross, not food and supplies, but for something +more competent than mere man power to hold back the deluge. + +But over it all was that surface cheerfulness, that best-foot-forward +attitude of London. And Sara Lee saw only that, and lost faith. She +had come far to help. But here was food in plenty and bands playing +and smiling men in uniform drinking tea and playing for a little. That, +too, Sara Lee was to understand later; but just then she did not. At +home there was more surface depression. The atrocities, the plight of +the Belgians, the honor list in the _Illustrated London News_--that was +the war to Sara Lee. And here! + +But later on, down in a crowded dark little room, things were different. +She was one of a long line, mostly women. They were unhappy and desolate +enough, God knows. They sat or stood with a sort of weary resignation. +Now and then a short heavy man with an upcurled mustache came out and +took in one or two. The door closed. And overhead the band played +monotonously. + +It was after seven when Sara Lee's turn came. The heavy-set man spoke +to her in French, but he failed to use a single one of the words she +had memorized. + +"Don't you speak any English?" she asked helplessly. + +"I do; but not much," he replied. Though his French had been rapid he +spoke English slowly. "How can we serve you, mademoiselle?" + +"I don't want any assistance. I--I want to help, if I can." + +"Here?" + +"In France. Or Belgium." + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"We have many offers of help. What we need, mademoiselle, is not +workers. We have, at our base hospital, already many English nurses." + +"I am not a nurse." + +"I am sorry. The whole world is sorry for Belgium, and many would work. +What we need"--he shrugged his shoulders again--"is food, clothing, +supplies for our brave little soldiers." + +Sara Lee looked extremely small and young. The Belgian sat down on a +chair and surveyed her carefully. + +"You English are doing a--a fine work for us," he observed. "We are +grateful. But of course the"--he hesitated--"the pulling up of an +entire people--it is colossal." + +"But I am not English," said Sara Lee. "And I have a little money. I +want to make soup for your wounded men at a railway station or--any +place. I can make good soup. And I shall have money each month to buy +what I need." + +Only then was Sara Lee admitted to the crowded little room. + +Long afterward, when the lights behind the back drop had gone down and +Sara Lee was back again in her familiar setting, one of the clearest +pictures she retained of that amazing interlude was of that crowded +little room in the Savoy, its single littered desk, its two typewriters +creating an incredible din, a large gentleman in a dark-blue military +cape seeming to fill the room. And in corners and off stage, so to +speak, perhaps a half dozen men, watching her curiously. + +The conversation was in French, and Sara Lee's acquaintance of the +passage acted as interpreter. It was only when Sara Lee found that a +considerable discussion was going on in which she had no part that she +looked round and saw her friend of two nights before and of the little +donkey. He was watching her intently, and when he caught her eye +he bowed. + +Now men, in Sara Lee's mind, had until now been divided into the ones at +home, one's own kind, the sort who married one's friends or oneself, the +kind who called their wives "mother" after the first baby came, and were +easily understood, plain men, decent and God-fearing and self-respecting; +and the men of that world outside America, who were foreigners. One +might like foreigners, but they were outsiders. + +So there was no self-consciousness in Sara Lee's bow and smile. Later +on Henri was to find that lack of self and sex consciousness one of the +maddening mysteries about Sara Lee. Perhaps he never quite understood +it. But always he respected it. + +More conversation, in an increasing staccato. Short contributions from +the men crowded into corners. Frenzied beating of the typewriting +machines, and overhead and far away the band. There was no air in the +room. Sara Lee was to find out a great deal later on about the contempt +of the Belgians for air. She loosened Aunt Harriet's neckpiece. + +So far Henri had not joined in the discussion. But now he came forward +and spoke. Also, having finished, he interpreted to Sara Lee. + +"They are most grateful," he explained. "It is a--a practical idea, +mademoiselle. If you were in Belgium"--he smiled rather mirthlessly--"if +you were already in the very small part of Belgium remaining to us, we +could place you very usefully. But--the British War Office is most +careful, just now. You understand--there are reasons." + +Sara Lee flushed indignantly. + +"They can watch me if they want to," she said. "What trouble can I make? +I've only just landed. You--you'd have to go a good ways to find any +one who knows less than I do about the war." + +"There is no doubt of that," he said, unconscious of offense. "But the +War Office--" He held out his hands. + +Sara Lee, who had already caught the British "a" and was rather overdoing +it, had a wild impulse to make the same gesture. It meant so much. + +More conversation. Evidently more difficulties--but with Henri now +holding the center of the stage and speaking rapidly. The heavy-set man +retired and read letters under an electric lamp. The band upstairs was +having dinner. And Henri argued and wrangled. He was quite passionate. +The man in the military cape listened and smiled. And at last he nodded. + +Henri turned to Sara Lee. + +"You Americans are all brave," he said. "You like--what is it you +say?--taking a chance, I think. Would you care to take such a chance?" + +"What sort of a chance?" + +"May I visit you this evening at your hotel?" + +Just for an instant Sara Lee hesitated. There was Harvey at home. He +would not like her receiving a call from any man. And Harvey did not +like foreigners. He always said they had no respect for women. It +struck her suddenly what Harvey would call Henri's bowing and his kissing +her hand, and his passionate gesticulations when he was excited. He +would call it all tomfool nonsense. + +And she recalled his final words, his arms so close about her that she +could hardly breathe, his voice husky with emotion. + +"Just let me hear of any of those foreigners bothering you," he said, +"and I'll go over and wipe out the whole damned nation." + +It had not sounded funny then. It was not funny now. + +"Please come," said Sara Lee in a small voice. + +The other gentlemen bowed profoundly. Sara Lee, rather at a loss, gave +them a friendly smile that included them all. And then she and Henri +were walking up the stairs and to the entrance, Henri's tall figure the +target for many women's eyes. He, however, saw no one but Sara Lee. + +Henri, too, called a taxicab. Every one in London seemed to ride in +taxis. And he bent over her hand, once she was in the car, but he did +not kiss it. + +"It is very kind of you, what you are doing," he said. "But, then, you +Americans are all kind. And wonderful." + +Back at Morley's Hotel Sara Lee had a short conversation with Harvey's +picture. + +"You are entirely wrong, dear," she said. She was brushing her hair at +the time, and it is rather a pity that it was a profile picture and that +Harvey's pictured eyes were looking off into space--that is, a piece +of white canvas on a frame, used by photographers to reflect the light +into the eyes. For Sara Lee with her hair down was even lovelier than +with it up. "You were wrong. They are different, but they are kind and +polite. And very, very respectful. And he is coming on business." + +She intended at first to make no change in her frock. After all, it was +not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the +right footing. + +But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and +slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her +way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt +and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts +still affect. And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress. She called in +the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over +her clothes. + +It was the maid, perhaps, then who brought into Sara Lee's life the +strange and mad infatuation for her that was gradually to become a +dominant issue in the next few months. For the maid chose a white dress, +a soft and young affair in which Sara Lee looked like the heart of a rose. + +"I always like to see a young lady in white, miss," said the maid. +"Especially when there's a healthy skin." + +So Sara Lee ate her dinner alone, such a dinner as a healthy skin and +body demanded. And she watched tall young Englishwomen with fine +shoulders go out with English officers in khaki, and listened to a babel +of high English voices, and--felt extremely alone and very subdued. + +Henri came rather late. It was one of the things she was to learn about +him later--that he was frequently late. It was only long afterward that +she realized that such time as he spent with her was gained only at the +cost of almost superhuman effort. But that was when she knew Henri's +story, and his work. She waited for him in the reception room, where a +man and a woman were having coffee and talking in a strange tongue. +Henri found her there, at something before nine, rather downcast and +worried, and debating about going up to bed. She looked up, to find him +bowing before her. + +"I thought you were not coming," she said. + +"I? Not come? But I had said that I would come, mademoiselle. I may +sit down?" + +Sara Lee moved over on the velvet sofa, and Henri lowered his long body +onto it. Lowered his voice, too, for the man and woman were staring at +him. + +"I'm afraid I didn't quite understand about this afternoon," began Sara +Lee. "You spoke about taking a chance. I am not afraid of danger, if +that is what you mean." + +"That, and a little more, mademoiselle," said Henri. "But now that I am +here I do not know." + +His eyes were keen. Sara Lee had suddenly a strange feeling that he +was watching the couple who talked over their coffee, and that, oddly +enough, the couple were watching him. Yet he was apparently giving his +undivided attention to her. + +"Have you walked any to-day?" he asked her unexpectedly. + +Sara Lee remembered the bus, and, with some bitterness, the two taxis. + +"I haven't had a chance to walk," she said. + +"But you should walk," he said. "I--will you walk with me? Just about +the square, for air?" And in a lower tone: "It is not necessary that +those two should know the plan, mademoiselle." + +"I'll get my coat and hat," Sara Lee said, and proceeded to do so in a +brisk and businesslike fashion. When she came down Henri was emerging +from the telephone booth. His face was impassive. And again when in +time Sara Lee was to know Henri's face better than she had ever known +Harvey's, she was to learn that the masklike look he sometimes wore +meant danger--for somebody. + +They went out without further speech into the clear cold night. Henri, +as if from custom, threw his head back and scanned the sky. Then they +went on and crossed into the square. + +"The plan," Henri began abruptly, "is this: You will be provided +to-morrow with a passport to Boulogne. You will, if you agree, take the +midnight train for Folkestone. At the railway station here you will +be searched. At Folkestone a board, sitting in an office on the quay, +will examine your passport." + +"Does any one in Boulogne speak English?" Sara Lee inquired nervously. +Somehow that babel of French at the Savoy had frightened her. Her +little phrase book seemed pitifully inadequate for the great things +in her mind. + +"That hardly matters," said Henri, smiling faintly. "Because I think +you shall not go to Boulogne." + +"Not go!" She stopped dead, under the monument, and looked up at him. + +"The place for you to go, to start from, is Calais," Henri explained. +He paused, to let pass two lovers, a man in khaki and a girl. "But +Calais is difficult. It is under martial law--a closed city. From +Boulogne to Calais would be perhaps impossible." + +Sara Lee was American and her methods were direct. + +"How can I get to Calais?" + +"Will you take the chance I spoke of?" + +"For goodness' sake," said Sara Lee in an exasperated tone, "how can I +tell you until I know what it is?" + +Henri told her. He even, standing under a street lamp, drew a small +sketch for her, to make it clear. Sara Lee stood close, watching him, +and some of the lines were not as steady as they might have been. And +in the midst of it he suddenly stopped. + +"Do you know what it means?" he demanded. + +"Yes, of course." + +"And you know what date this is?" + +"The eighteenth of February." + +But he saw, after all, that she did not entirely understand. + +"To-night, this eighteenth of February, the Germans commence a blockade +of this coast. No vessels, if they can prevent them, will leave the +harbors; or if they do, none shall reach the other side!" + +"Oh!" said Sara Lee blankly. + +"We are eager to do as you wish, mademoiselle. But"--he commenced +slowly to tear up the sketch--"it is too dangerous. You are too young. +If anything should go wrong and I had--No. We will find another way." + +He put the fragments of the sketch in his pocket. + +"How long is this blockade to last?" Sara Lee asked out of bitter +disappointment. + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"Who can say? A week! A year! Not at all!" + +"Then," said Sara Lee with calm deliberation, "you might as well get out +your pencil and draw another picture--because I'm going." + +Far enough away now, the little house at home and the peace that dwelt +therein; and Harvey; and the small white bedroom; and the daily round of +quiet duties. Sara Lee had set her face toward the east, and the land +of dying men. And as Henri looked down at her she had again that poised +and eager look, almost of flight, that had brought into Harvey's love +for her just a touch of fear. + + + + +VI + + +Sara Lee Kennedy was up at dawn the next morning. There was a very +serious matter to decide, for Henri's plan had included only such hand +luggage as she herself could carry. + +Sara Lee carefully laid out on the bed such articles as she could not +possibly do without, and was able to pack into her suitcase less than +a fourth of them. She had fortunately brought a soft wool sweater, +which required little room. Undergarments, several blouses, the sweater +and a pair of heavy shoes--that was her equipment, plus such small +toilet outfit as is necessary when a young woman uses no make-up and +regards cold cream only as a remedy for chapped hands. + +The maid found her in rather a dismal mood. + +"Going across, miss!" she said. "Fancy that!" + +"It's a secret," cautioned Sara Lee. "I am really not sure I am going. +I am only trying to go." + +The maid, who found Sara Lee and the picture of Harvey on her dressing +table both romantic and appealing, offered to pack. From the first +moment it was evident that she meant to include the white dress. Indeed +she packed it first. + +"You never know what's going to happen over there," she asserted. "They +do say that royalties are everywhere, going about like common people. +You'd better have a good frock with you." + +She had an air of subdued excitement, and after she had established the +fact that not only the white frock but slippers and hose also would go +in she went to the door and glanced up and down the passage. Then she +closed the door. + +"There was queer goings-on here last night, miss," she said cautiously. +"Spies!" + +"Oh, no!" cried Sara Lee. + +"Spies," she repeated. "A man and a woman, pretending to be Belgian +refugees. They took them away at daylight. I expect by now they've +been shot." + +Sara Lee ate very little breakfast that morning. All through England +it was confidently believed that spies were shot on discovery, a theory +that has been persistent--and false, save at the battle line--since +the beginning of the war. And Henri's plan assumed new proportions. +Suppose she made her attempt and failed? Suppose they took her for a +spy, and that tomorrow's sun found her facing a firing squad? Not, +indeed, that she had ever heard of a firing squad, as such. But she +had seen spies shot in the movies. They invariably stood in front of +a brick wall, with the hero in the center. + +So she absent-mindedly ate her kippered herring, which had been strongly +recommended by the waiter, and tried to think of what a spy would do, so +she might avoid any suspicious movements. It struck her, too, that war +seemed to have made the people on that side of the ocean extremely ready +with weapons. They would be quite likely to shoot first and ask +questions afterwards--which would be too late to be helpful. + +She remembered Henri, for instance, and the way, without a word, he had +shot the donkey. + +That day she wrote Harvey a letter. + + "_Dearest_:" it began; "I think I am to leave for France to-night. + Things seem to be moving nicely, and I am being helped by the Belgian + Relief Commission. It is composed of Belgians and is at the Savoy + Hotel." + + +Here she stopped and cried a little. What if she should never see +Harvey again--never have his sturdy arms about her? Harvey gained by +distance. She remembered only his unfailing kindness and strength and +his love for her. He seemed, here at the edge of the whirlpool, a sort +of eddy of peace and quiet. Even then she had no thought of going back +until her work was done, but she did an unusual thing for her, unused +to demonstration of any sort. She kissed his ring. + +Followed directions about sending the money from the church society, +a description of Morley's and Trafalgar Square, an account of tea at +the Travers', and of the little donkey--without mention, however, of +Henri. She felt that Harvey would not understand Henri. + +But at the end came the passage which poor Harvey read and re-read +when the letter came, and alternately ground his teeth over and kissed. + + "I do love you, Harvey dear. And I am coming back to you. I have felt + that I had to do what I am doing, but I am coming back. That's a + promise. Unless, of course, I should take sick, or something like + that, which isn't likely." + + +There was a long pause in the writing here, but Harvey could not know +that. + + "I shall wear your ring always; and always, Harvey, it will mean to + me that I belong to you. With dearest love. + + "SARA LEE" + + +Then she added a postscript, of course. + + "The War Office is not letting people cross to Calais just now. But + I am going to do it anyhow. It is perfectly simple. And when I get + over I shall write and tell you how. + + "S.L." + + +It was the next day that an indignant official in the censor's office +read that postscript, and rose in his wrath and sent a third +Undersomething-or-other to look up Sara Lee at Morley's. But by this +time she was embarked on the big adventure; and by the time a cable +reached Calais there was no trace of Sara Lee. + +During the afternoon she called up Mr. Travers at his office, and rather +gathered that he did not care to use the telephone during business hours. + +"I just wanted to tell you that you need not bother about me any more," +she said. "I am being sent over and I think everything is all right." + +He was greatly relieved. Mrs. Travers had not fully indorsed his +encomiums of the girl. She had felt that no really nice girl would +travel so far on so precarious an errand, particularly when she was +alone. And how could one tell, coming from America, how her sympathies +really lay? She might be of German parentage--the very worst sort, +because they spoke American. It was easy enough to change a name. + +Nevertheless, Mr. Travers felt a trifle low in his mind when he hung up +the receiver. He said twice to himself: "Twenty pounds!" And at last +he put four sovereigns in an envelope and sent them to her anonymously +by messenger. Sara Lee guessed whence they came, but she respected the +manner of the gift and did not thank him. It was almost the first gold +money she had ever seen. + +She was very carefully searched at the railway station that night and +found that her American Red Cross button, which had come with her dollar +subscription to the association, made the matron inspector rather +kindly inclined. Nevertheless, she took off Sara Lee's shoes, and ran +over the lining of her coat, and quite ruined the maid's packing of the +suitcase. + +"You are going to Boulogne?" asked the matron inspector. + +Sara Lee did not like to lie. + +"Wherever the boat takes me," she said with smile. + +The matron smiled too. + +"I shouldn't be nervous, miss," she said. "It's a chance, of course, +but they have not done much damage yet." + +It was after midnight then, and a cold fog made the station a gloomy +thing of blurred yellow lights and raw chill. A few people moved about, +mostly officers in uniform. Half a dozen men in civilian clothes +eyed her as she passed through the gates; Scotland Yard, but she did not +know. And once she thought she saw Henri, but he walked away into the +shadows and disappeared. The train, looking as absurdly small and light +as all English trains do, was waiting out in the shed. There were no +porters, and Sara Lee carried her own bag. + +She felt quite sure she had been mistaken about Henri, for of course +he would have come and carried it for her. + +The train was cold and quiet. When it finally moved out it was under +way before she knew that it was going. And then suddenly Sara Lee's +heart began to pound hard. + +It was a very cold and shivering Sara Lee who curled up, alone in her +compartment, and stared hard at Harvey's ring to keep her courage up. +But a curious thing had happened. Harvey gave her no moral support. +He brought her only disapproval. She found herself remembering none of +the loving things he had said to her, but only the bitter ones. + +Perhaps it was the best thing for her, after all. For a sort of dogged +determination to go through with it all, at any cost, braced her to her +final effort. + +So far it had all been busy enough, but not comfortable. She was cold, +and she had eaten almost nothing all day. As the hours went on and the +train slid through the darkness she realized that she was rather faint. +The steam pipes, only warm at the start, were entirely cold by one +o'clock, and by two Sara Lee was sitting on her feet, with a heavy coat +wrapped about her knees. + +The train moved quietly, as do all English trains, with no jars and +little sound. There were few lights outside, for the towns of Eastern +England were darkened, like London, against air attacks. So when she +looked at the window she saw only her own reflection, white and +wide-eyed, above Aunt Harriet's fur neckpiece. + +In the next compartment an officer was snoring, but she did not close +her eyes. Perhaps, for that last hour, some of the glow that had brought +her so far failed her. She was not able to think beyond Folkestone, save +occasionally, and that with a feeling that it should not be made so +difficult to do a kind and helpful thing. + +At a quarter before three the train eased down. In the same proportion +Sara Lee's pulse went up. A long period of crawling along, a stop or +two, but no resultant opening of the doors; and at last, in a cold rain +and a howling wind from the channel, the little seaport city. + +More officers than she had suspected, a few women, got out. The latter +Sara Lee's experience on the steamer enabled her to place; buyers mostly, +and Americans, on their way to Paris, blockade or no blockade, because +the American woman must be well and smartly gowned and hatted. A man +with a mourning band on his sleeve carried a wailing child. + +The officers lighted cigarettes. The civilians formed a line on the +jetty under the roof of the shed, and waited, passports in hand, before +a door that gleamed with yellow light. Faces looked pale and anxious. +The blockade was on, and Germany had said that no ships would cross +that night. + +As if defiantly the Boulogne boat, near at hand, was ablaze, on the shore +side at least, with lights. Stewards came and went. Beyond it lay the +harbor, dark and mysterious save where, from somewhere across, a +flashlight made a brave effort to pierce the fog. + +One of the buyers ahead of Sara Lee seemed exhilarated by the danger +ahead. + +"They'll never get us," she said. "Look at that fog!" + +"It's lifting, dearie," answered a weary voice behind her. "The wind is +carrying it away." + +When Sara Lee's turn came she was ready. A group of men in civilian +clothes, seated about a long table, looked her over carefully. Her +passports moved deliberately from hand to hand. A long business, and +the baby wailing harder than ever. But the office was at least warm. +Some of her failing courage came back as she moved, following her papers, +round the table. They were given back to her at last, and she went out. +She had passed the first ordeal. + +Suitcase in hand she wandered down the stone jetty. The Boulogne boat +she passed, and kept on. At the very end, dark and sinister, lay another +boat. It had no lights. The tide was in, and its deck lay almost flush +with the pier. Sara Lee walked on toward it until a voice spoke to her +out of the darkness and near at hand. + +"Your boat is back there, madam." + +"I know. Thank you. I am just walking about." + +The petty officer--he was a petty officer, though Sara Lee had never +heard the term--was inclined to be suspicious. Under excuse of lighting +his pipe he struck a match, and Sara Lee's young figure stood out in full +relief. His suspicions died away with the flare. + +"Bad night, miss," he offered. + +"Very," said Sara Lee, and turned back again. + +This time, bewildered and uneasy, she certainly saw Henri. But he +ignored her. He was alone, and smoking one of his interminable +cigarettes. He had not said he was crossing, and why had he not spoken +to her? He wandered past down the pier, and she lost him in the shadows. +When he came back he paused near her, and at last saluted and spoke. + +"_Pardon_," he said. "If you will stand back here you will find less +wind." + +"Thank you." + +He carried her suitcase back, and stooping over to place it at her feet +he said: "I shall send him on board with a message to the captain. When +I come back try again." + +He left her at once. The passengers for Boulogne were embarking now. +A silent lot, they disappeared into the warmth and brightness of the +little boat and were lost. No one paid any attention to Sara Lee +standing in the shadows. + +Soon Henri came back. He walked briskly and touched his cap as he +passed. He went aboard the Boulogne steamer, and without a backward +glance disappeared. + +Sara Lee watched him out of sight, in a very real panic. He had been +something real and tangible in that shadowy place--something familiar +in an unfamiliar world. But he was gone. She threw up her head. + +So once more Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and went down the pier. +Now she was unchallenged. What lurking figure might be on the dark deck +of the Calais boat she could not tell. That was the chance she was to +take. The gangway was still out, and as quietly as possible she went +aboard. The Boulogne boat had suddenly gone dark, and she heard the +churning of the screw. With the extinction of the lights on the other +boat came at last deeper night to her aid. A few steps, a stumble, a +gasp--and she was on board the forbidden ship. + +She turned forward, according to her instructions, where the overhead +deck made below an even deeper shadow. Henri had said that there were +cabins there, and that the chance was of finding an unlocked one. If +they were all locked she would be discovered at dawn, and arrested. And +Sara Lee was not a war correspondent. She was not accustomed to arrest. +Indeed she had a deep conviction that arrest in her case would mean death. +False, of course, but surely it shows her courage. + +As she stood there, breathless and listening, the Boulogne boat moved +out. She heard the wash against the jetty, felt the rolling of its +waves. But being on the landward side she could not see the faint +gleam of a cigarette that marked Henri's anxious figure at the rail. +So long as the black hulk of the Calais boat was visible, and long +after indeed, Henri stood there, outwardly calm but actually shaken by +many fears. She had looked so small and young; and who could know what +deviltry lurked abroad that night? + +He had not gone with her because it was necessary that he be in Boulogne +the next morning. And also, the very chance of getting her across lay +in her being alone and unobserved. + +So he stood by the rail and looked back and said a wordless little prayer +that if there was trouble it come to his boat and not to the other. +Which might very considerably have disturbed the buyers had they known +of it and believed in prayer. + +Sara Lee stood in the shadows and listened. There were voices overhead, +from the bridge. A door opened onto the deck and threw out a ray of +light. Some one came out and went on shore, walking with brisk ringing +steps. And then at last she put down her bag and tried door after door, +without result. + +The man who had gone ashore called another. The gangway was drawn in. +The engines began to vibrate under foot. Sara Lee, breathless and +terrified, stood close to a cabin door and remained immovable. At one +moment it seemed as if a seaman was coming forward to where she stood. +But he did not come. + +The Calais boat was waiting until the other steamer had got well out of +the harbor. The fog had lifted, and the searchlight was moving over +the surface. It played round the channel steamer without touching it. +But none of this was visible to Sara Lee. + +At last the lights of the quay began to recede. The little boat rocked +slightly in its own waves as it edged away. It moved slowly through +the shipping and out until, catching the swell of the channel, it shot +ahead at top speed. + +For an hour Sara Lee stood there. The channel wind caught her and tore +at her skirts until she was almost frozen. And finally, in sheer +desperation, she worked her way round to the other side. She saw no +one. Save for the beating heart of the engine below it might have been +a dead ship. + +On the other side she found an open door and stumbled into the tiny dark +deck cabin, as chilled and frightened a philanthropist as had ever +crossed that old and tricky and soured bit of seaway. And there, to be +frank, she forgot her fright in as bitter a tribute of seasickness as +even the channel has ever exacted. + +She had locked herself in, and she fell at last into an exhausted sleep. +When she wakened and peered out through the tiny window it was gray +winter dawn. The boat was quiet, and before her lay the quay of Calais +and the Gare Maritime. A gangway was out and a hurried survey showed +no one in sight. + +Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and opened the door. The fresh morning +air revived her, but nevertheless it was an extremely pale young woman +who, obeying Henri's instructions, went ashore that morning in the gray +dawn unseen, undisturbed and unquestioned. But from the moment she +appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare +Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not +breathe at all. She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and +her heart entirely unreliable. + +A woman clerk was asleep at a desk. Sara Lee roused her to half +wakefulness, no interest and extremely poor English. A drowsy porter +led her up a staircase and down an endless corridor. Then at last he +was gone, and Sara Lee turned the key in her door and burst into tears. + + + + +VII + + +Now up to this point Sara Lee's mind had come to rest at Calais. She +must get there; after that the other things would need to be worried +over. Henri had already in their short acquaintance installed himself +as the central figure of this strange and amazing interlude--not as a +good-looking young soldier surprisingly fertile in expedients, but as a +sort of agent of providence, by whom and through whom things were done. + +And Henri had said she was to go to the Gare Maritime at Calais and make +herself comfortable--if she got there. After that things would be +arranged. + +Sara Lee therefore took a hot bath, though hardly a satisfactory one, +for there was no soap and she had brought none. She learned later on +to carry soap with her everywhere. So she soaked the chill out of her +slim body and then dressed. The room was cold, but a great exultation +kept her warm. She had run the blockade, she had escaped the War +Office--which, by the way, was looking her up almost violently by +that time, via the censor. It had found the trunk she left at Morley's, +and cross-questioned the maid into hysteria--and here she was, +safe in France, the harbor of Calais before her, and here and there +strange-looking war craft taking on coal. Destroyers, she learned later. +Her ignorance was rather appalling at first. + +It was all unreal--the room with its cold steam pipes, the heavy window +hangings, the very words on the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. A +great vessel moved into the harbor. As it turned she saw its name +printed on its side in huge letters, and the flag, also painted, of a +neutral country--a hoped-for protection against German submarines. It +brought home to her, rather, the thing she had escaped. + +After a time she thought of food, but rather hopelessly. Her attempts +to get _savon_ from a stupid boy had produced nothing more useful than +a flow of unintelligible French and no soap whatever. She tried a +pantomime of washing her hands, but to the boy she had appeared to be +merely wringing them. And, as a great many females were wringing their +hands in France those days, he had gone away, rather sorry for her. + +When hunger drove her to the bell again he came back and found her with +her little phrase book in her hands, feverishly turning the pages. She +could find plenty of sentences such as "_Garcon, vous avez renverse du +vin sur ma robe_," but not an egg lifted its shining pate above the +pages. Not cereal. Not fruit. Not even the word breakfast. + +Long, long afterward Sara Lee found a quite delightful breakfast +hidden between two pages that were stuck together. But it was then far +too late. + +"_Donnez-moi_," began Sara Lee, and turned the pages rapidly, "this; do +you see?" She had found roast beef. + +The boy observed stolidly, in French, that it was not ready until noon. +She was able to make out, from his failing to depart, that there was no +roast beef. + +"Good gracious!" she said, ravenous and exasperated. "Go and get me +some bread and coffee, anyhow." She repeated it, slightly louder. + +That was the tableau that Henri found when, after a custom that may be +war or may be Continental, he had inquired the number of her room and +made his way there. + +There was a twinkle in his blue eyes as he bowed before her--and a vast +relief too. + +"So you are here!" he said in a tone of satisfaction. He had put in an +extremely bad night, even for him, by whom nights were seldom wasted in +a bed. While he was with her something of her poise had communicated +itself to him. He had felt the confidence, in men and affairs, that +American girls are given as a birthright. And her desire for service +he had understood as a year or two ago he could not have understood. +But he had stood by the rail staring north, and cursing himself for +having placed her in danger during the entire crossing. + +There was nothing about him that morning, however to show his bad +hours. He was debonnaire and smiling. + +"I am famishing," said Sara Lee. "And there are no eggs in this +book--none whatever." + +"Eggs! You wish eggs?" + +"I just want food. Almost anything will do. I asked for eggs because +they can come quickly." + +Henri turned to the boy and sent him off with a rapid order. Then: +"May I come in?" he said. + +Sara Lee cast an uneasy glance over the room. It was extremely tidy, +and unmistakably it was a bedroom. But though her color rose she asked +him in. After all, what did it matter? To have refused would have +looked priggish, she said to herself. And as a matter of fact one of +the early lessons she learned in France was learned that morning--that +though convention had had to go, like many other things in the war, men +who were gentlemen ignored its passing. + +Henri came in and stood by the center table. + +"Now, please tell me," he said. "I have been most uneasy. On the quay +last night you looked--frightened." + +"I was awfully frightened. Nothing happened. I even slept." + +"You were very brave." + +"I was very seasick." + +"I am sorry." + +Henri took a turn up and down the room. + +"But," said Sara Lee slowly, "I--I--can't be on your hands, you know. +You must have many things to do. If you are going to have to order my +meals and all that, I'm going to be a dreadful burden." + +"But you will learn very quickly." + +"I'm stupid about languages." + +Henri dismissed that with a gesture. She could not, he felt, be stupid +about anything. He went to the window and looked out. The destroyers +were still coaling, and a small cargo was being taken off the boat at +the quay. The rain was over, and in the early sunlight an officer in +blue tunic, red breeches and black cavalry boots was taking the air, his +head bent over his chest. Not a detail of the scene escaped him. + +"I have agreed to find the right place for you," he said thoughtfully. +"There is one, but I think--" He hesitated. "I do not wish to place +you again in danger." + +"You mean that it is near the Front?" + +"Very near, mademoiselle." + +"But I should be rather near, to be useful." + +"Perhaps, for your work. But what of you? These brutes--they shell +far and wide. One can never be sure." + +He paused and surveyed her whimsically. + +"Who allowed you to come, alone, like this?" he demanded. "Is there no +one who objected?" + +Sara Lee glanced down at her ring. + +"The man I am going to marry. He is very angry." + +Henri looked at her, and followed her eyes to Harvey's ring. He said +nothing, however, but he went over and gave the bell cord a violent jerk. + +"You must have food quickly," he said in a rather flat voice. "You are +looking tired and pale." + +A sense of unreality was growing on Sara Lee. That she should be alone +in France with a man she had never seen three days before; that she knew +nothing whatever about that man; that, for the present at least, she was +utterly and absolutely dependent on him, even for the food she ate--it +was all of a piece with the night's voyage and the little room at the +Savoy. And it was none of it real. + +When the breakfast tray came Henri was again at the window and silent. +And Sara Lee saw that it was laid for two. She was a little startled, +but the businesslike way in which the young officer drew up two chairs +and held one out for her made protest seem absurd. And the flat-faced +boy, who waited, looked unshocked and uninterested. + +It was not until she had had some coffee that Henri followed up his +line of thought. + +"So--the fiance did not approve? It is not difficult to understand. +There is always danger, for there are German aeroplanes even in remote +places. And you are very young. You still wish to establish yourself, +mademoiselle?" + +"Of course!" + +"Would it be a comfort to cable your safe arrival in France to the +fiance?" When he saw her face he smiled. And if it was a rather heroic +smile it was none the less friendly. "I see. What shall I say? Or +will you write it?" + +So Sara Lee, vastly cheered by two cups of coffee, an egg, and a very +considerable portion of bread and butter, wrote her cable. It was to +be brief, for cables cost money. It said, "Safe. Well. Love." And +Henri, who seemed to have strange and ominous powers, sent it almost +immediately. Total cost, as reported to Sara Lee, two francs. He took +the money she offered him gravely. + +"We shall cable quite often," he said. "He will be anxious. And I +think he has a right to know." + +The "we" was entirely unconscious. + +"And now," he said, when he had gravely allowed Sara Lee to pay her half +of the breakfast, "we must arrange to get you out of Calais. And that, +mademoiselle, may take time." + +It took time. Sara Lee, growing accustomed now to little rooms entirely +filled with men and typewriters, went from one office to another, walking +along the narrow pavements with Henri, through streets filled with +soldiers. Once they drew aside to let pass a procession of Belgian +refugees, those who had held to their village homes until bombardment +had destroyed them--stout peasant women in short skirts and with huge +bundles, old men, a few young ones, many children. The terror of the +early flight was not theirs, but there was in all of them a sort of +sodden hopelessness that cut Sara Lee to the heart. In an irregular +column they walked along, staring ahead but seeing nothing. Even the +children looked old and tired. + +Sara Lee's eyes filled with tears. + +"My people," said Henri. "Simple country folk, and going to England, +where they will grieve for the things that are gone--their fields and +their sons. The old ones will die, quickly, of homesickness. It is +difficult to transplant an old tree." + +The final formalities seemed to offer certain difficulties. Henri, who +liked to do things quickly and like a prince, flushed with irritation. +He drew himself up rather haughtily in reply to one question, and glanced +uneasily at the girl. But it was all as intelligible as Sanskrit to her. + +It was only after a whispered sentence to the man at the head of the +table that the paper was finally signed. + +As they went down to the street together Sara Lee made a little protest. + +"But I simply must not take all your time," she said, looking up +anxiously. "I begin to realize how foolhardy the whole thing is. I meant +well, but--it is you who are doing everything; not I." + +"I shall not make the soup, mademoiselle," he replied gravely. + + + + +VIII + + +Here were more things to do. Sara Lee's money must be exchanged at a +bank for French gold. She had three hundred dollars, and it had been +given her in a tiny brown canvas bag. And then there was the matter of +going from Calais toward the Front. She had expected to find a train, +but there were no trains. All cars were being used for troops. She +stared at Henri in blank dismay. + +"No trains!" she said blankly. "Would an automobile be very expensive?" + +"They are all under government control, mademoiselle. Even the petrol." + +She stopped in the street. + +"Then I shall have to go back." + +Henri laughed boyishly. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have been requested to take you to a place +where you may render us the service we so badly need. For the present +that is my duty, and nothing else. So if you will accept the offer of +my car, which is a shameful one but travels well, we can continue our +journey." + +Long, long afterward, Sara Lee found a snapshot of Henri's car, taken +by a light-hearted British officer. Found it and sat for a long time +with it in her hand, thinking and remembering that first day she saw it, +in the sun at Calais. A long low car it was, once green, but now +roughly painted gray. But it was not the crude painting, significant +as it was, that brought so close the thing she was going to. It was +that the car was but a shell of a car. The mud guards were crumpled up +against the side. Body and hood were pitted with shrapnel. A door had +been shot away, and the wind shield was but a frame set round with +broken glass. Even the soldier-chauffeur wore a patch over one eye, +and his uniform was ragged. + +"Not a beautiful car, mademoiselle, as I warned you! But a fast one!" + +Henri was having a double enjoyment. He was watching Sara Lee's face +and his chauffeur's remaining eye. + +"But fast; eh, Jean?" he said to the chauffeur. The man nodded and +said something in French. It was probably the thing Henri had hoped for, +and he threw back his head and laughed. + +"Jean is reminding me," he said gayly, "that it is forbidden to officers +to take a lady along the road that we shall travel." But when he saw +how Sara Lee flushed he turned to the man. + +"Mademoiselle has come from America to help us, Jean," he said quietly. +"And now for Dunkirk." + +The road from Dunkirk to Calais was well guarded in those days. From +Nieuport for some miles inland only the shattered remnant of the Belgian +Army held the line. For the cry "On to Paris!" the Germans had +substituted "On to Calais!" + +So, on French soil at least, the road was well guarded. A few miles in +the battered car, then a slowing up, a showing of passports, the clatter +of a great chain as it dropped to the road, a lowering of leveled rifles, +and a salute from the officer--that was the method by which they +advanced. + +Henri sat with the driver and talked in a low tone. Sometimes he sat +quiet, looking ahead. He seemed, somehow, older, more careworn. His +boyishness had gone. Now and then he turned to ask if she was +comfortable, but in the intervals she felt that he had entirely forgotten +her. Once, at something Jean said, he got out a pocket map and went +over it carefully. It was a long time after that before he turned to +see if she was all right. + +Sara Lee sat forward and watched everything. She saw little evidence of +war, beyond the occasional sentries and chains. Women were walking along +the roads. Children stopped and pointed, smiling, at the battered car. +One very small boy saluted, and Henri as gravely returned the salute. + +Some time after that he turned to her. + +"I find that I shall have to leave you in Dunkirk," he said. "A matter +of a day only, probably. But I will see before I go that you are +comfortable." + +"I shall be quite all right, of course." + +But something had gone out of the day for her. + +Sara Lee learned one thing that day, learned it as some women do learn, +by the glance of an eye, the tone of a voice. The chauffeur adored +Henri. His one unbandaged eye stole moments from the road to glance +at him. When he spoke, while Henri read his map, his very voice betrayed +him. And while she pondered the thing, woman-fashion they drew into +the square of Dunkirk, where the statue of Jean Bart, pirate and +privateer stared down at this new procession of war which passed daily +and nightly under his cold eyes. + +Jean and a porter carried in her luggage. Henri and a voluble and +smiling Frenchwoman showed her to her room. She felt like an island of +silence in a rapid-rolling sea of French. The Frenchwoman threw open +the door. + +A great room with high curtained windows; a huge bed with a faded gilt +canopy and heavy draperies; a wardrobe as vast as the bed; and for a +toilet table an enormous mirror reaching to the ceiling and with a +marble shelf below--that was her room. + +"I think you will be comfortable here, mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee, who still clutched her small bag of gold, shook her head. + +"Comfortable, yes," she said. "But I am afraid it is very expensive." + +Henri named an extremely low figure--an exact fourth, to be accurate, +of its real cost. A surprising person Henri, with his worn uniform and +his capacity for kindly mendacity. And seeing something in the +Frenchwoman's face that perhaps he had expected, he turned to her +almost fiercely: + +"You are to understand, madame, that this lady has been placed in my +care by authority that will not be questioned. She is to have every +deference." + +That was all, but was enough. And from that time on Sara Lee Kennedy, +of Ohio, was called, in the tiny box downstairs which constituted the +office, "Mademoiselle La Princesse." + +Henri did a characteristic and kindly thing for Sara Lee before he left +that evening on one of the many mysterious journeys that he was to make +during the time Sara Lee knew him. He came to her door, menus in hand, +and painstakingly ordered for her a dinner for that night, and the +three meals for the day following. + +He made no suggestion of dining with her that evening. Indeed, watching +him from her small table, Sara Lee decided that he had put her entirely +out of his mind. He did not so much as glance at her. Save the cashier +at her boxed-in desk and money drawer, she was the only woman in that +room full of officers. Quite certainly Henri was the only man who did +not find some excuse for glancing in her direction. + +But finishing early, he paused by the cashier's desk to pay for his meal, +and then he gave Sara Lee the stiffest and most ceremonious of bows. + +She felt hurt. Alone in her great room, the curtains drawn by order of +the police, lest a ray of light betray the town to eyes in the air, she +went carefully over the hours she had spent with Henri that day, +looking for a cause of offense. She must have hurt him or he would +surely have stopped to speak to her. + +Perhaps already he was finding her a burden. She flushed with shame +when she remembered about the meals he had had to order for her, and +she sat up in her great bed until late, studying by candlelight such +phrases as: + +"_Il y a une erreur dans la note_," and "_Garcon, quels fruits +avez-vous?_" + +She tried to write to Harvey that night, but she gave it up at last. +There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly +without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered +about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she +was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to +learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based +not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding. + +So she got as far as: "_Dearest Harvey_: I am here in a hotel at +Dunkirk"--and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness. +Not so much for Harvey as for familiar things--Uncle James in his chair +by the fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the +West"; her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the +dining-room window; the voices of happy children wandering home from +school. + +She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle. +Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry +with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top +of the _mairie_ perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger, +came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer +for quiet sleep. + +For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had +nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama +that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for +his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor +lorries--she called them trucks--piled high with supplies, often +fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food. +Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers, +detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers. + +Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their +striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up, +too, and there would be an aeroplane sliding along, sometimes so low +that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust. + +But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came +at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly. +Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle +impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the +moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those +two interminable days. + +Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops--a +symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect--inside those cars were +wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care. +Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do +must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger +and sent a little message to him. + +"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so +terrible! So pitiful!" + +Yet during the day the square was gay enough. Officers in spurs clanked +across, wide capes blowing in the wind. Common soldiers bought fruit +and paper bags of fried potatoes from the booths. Countless dogs fought +under the feet of passers-by, and over all leered the sardonic face of +Jean Bart, pirate and privateer. + +Sara Lee went out daily, but never far. And she practiced French with +the maid, after this fashion: + +"_Draps de toile_," said the smiling maid, putting the linen sheets on +the bed. + +Sara Lee would repeat it some six times. + +"_Taies d'oreiller_," when the pillows came. So Sara Lee called pillows +by the name of their slips from that time forward! Came a bright hour +when she rang the bell for the boy and asked for matches, which she +certainly did not need, with entire success. + +On the second night Sara Lee slept badly. At two o'clock she heard a +sound in the hall, and putting on her kimono, opened the door. On a +stiff chair outside, snoring profoundly, sat Jean, fully dressed. + +The light from her candle roused him and he was wide awake in an instant. + +"Why, Jean!" she said. "Isn't there any place for you to sleep?" + +"I am to remain here, mademoiselle," he replied in English. + +"But surely--not because of me?" + +"It is the captain's order," he said briefly. + +"I don't understand. Why?" + +"All sorts of people come to this place, mademoiselle. But few ladies. +It is best that I remain here." + +She could not move him. He had remained standing while she spoke to him, +and now he yawned, striving to conceal it. Sara Lee felt very +uncomfortable, but Jean's attitude and voice alike were firm. She +thanked him and said good night, but she slept little after that. + +Lying there in the darkness, a warm glow of gratitude to Henri, and a +feeling of her safety in his care, wrapped her like a mantle. She +wondered drowsily if Harvey would ever have thought of all the small +things that seemed second nature to this young Belgian officer. + +She rather thought not. + + + + +IX + + +While she was breakfasting the next morning there was a tap at the door, +and thinking it the maid she called to her to come in. + +But it was Jean, an anxious Jean, twisting his cap in his hands. + +"You have had a message from the captain, mademoiselle?" + +"No, Jean." + +"He was to have returned during the night. He has not come, +mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee forgot her morning negligee in Jean's harassed face. + +"But--where did he go?" + +Jean shrugged his shoulders and did not reply. + +"Are you worried about him?" + +"I am anxious, mademoiselle. But I am often anxious; and--he always +returns." + +He smiled almost sheepishly. Sara Lee, who had no subtlety but a great +deal of intuition, felt that there was a certain relief in the smile, as +though Jean, having had no message from his master, was pleased that +she had none. Which was true enough, at that. Also she felt that Jean's +one eye was inspecting her closely, which was also true. A new factor +had come into Henri's life--by Jean's reasoning, a new and dangerous +one. And there were dangers enough already. + +Highly dangerous, Jean reflected in the back of his head as he backed +out with a bow. A young girl unafraid of the morning sun and sitting +at a little breakfast table as fresh as herself--that was a picture for +a war-weary man. + +Jean forgot for a moment his anxiety for Henri's safety in his fear for +his peace of mind. For a doubt had been removed. The girl was straight. +Jean's one sophisticated eye had grasped that at once. A good girl, +alone, and far from home! And Henri, like all soldiers, woman-hungry +for good women, for unpainted skins and clear eyes and the freshness and +bloom of youth. + +All there, behind that little breakfast table which might so pleasantly +have been laid for two. + +Jean took a walk that morning, and stood staring for twenty minutes into +a clock maker's window, full of clocks. After which he drew out his +watch and looked at the time! + +At two in the afternoon Sara Lee saw Henri's car come into the square. +It was, if possible, more dilapidated than before, and he came like a +gray whirlwind, scattering people and dogs out of his way. Almost +before he had had time to enter the hotel Sara Lee heard him in the +hall, and the next moment he was bowing before her. + +"I have been longer than I expected," he explained. "Have you been +quite comfortable?" + +Sara Lee, however, was gazing at him with startled eyes. He was dirty, +unshaven, and his eyes looked hollow and bloodshot. From his neck to +his heels he was smeared with mud, and his tidy tunic was torn into +ragged holes. + +"But you--you have been fighting!" she gasped. + +"I? No, mademoiselle. There has been no battle." His eyes left her +and traveled over the room. "They are doing everything for you? They +are attentive?" + +"Everything is splendid," said Sara Lee. "If you won't tell me how you +got into that condition, at least you can send your coat down to me to +mend." + +"My tunic!" He looked at it smilingly. "You would do that?" + +"I am nearly frantic for something to do." + +He smiled, and suddenly bending down he took her hand and kissed it. + +"You are not only very beautiful, mademoiselle, but you are very good." + +He went away then, and Sara Lee got out her sewing things. The tunic +came soon, carefully brushed and very ragged. But it was not Jean who +brought it; it was the Flemish boy. + +And upstairs in a small room with two beds Sara Lee might have been +surprised to find Jean, the chauffeur, lying on one, while Henri shaved +himself beside the other. For Jean, of the ragged uniform and the patch +over one eye, was a count of Belgium, and served Henri because he loved +him. And because, too, he was no longer useful in that little army +where lay his heart. + +Sometime a book will be written about the Jeans of this war, the great +friendships it has brought forth between men. And not the least of its +stories will be that of this Jean of the one eye. But its place is not +here. + +And perhaps there will be a book about the Henris, also. But not for a +long time, and even then with care. For the heroes of one department of +an army in the field live and die unsung. Their bravest exploits are +buried in secrecy. And that is as it must be. But it is a fine tale to +go untold. + +After he had bathed and shaved, Henri sat down at a tiny table and wrote. +He drew a plan also, from a rough one before him. Then he took a match +and burned the original drawing until it was but charred black ashes. +When he had finished Jean got up from the bed and put on his overcoat. + +"To the King?" he said. + +"To the King, old friend." + +Jean took the letter and went out. + +Down below, Sara Lee sat with Henri's ragged tunic on her lap and +stitched carefully. Sometime, she reflected, she would be mending worn +garments for another man, now far away. A little flood of tenderness +came over her. So helpless these men! There was so much to do for them! +And soon, please God, she would be helping other tired and weary men, +with food, and perhaps a word--when she had acquired some French--and +perhaps a thread and needle. + +She dined alone that night, as usual. Henri did not appear, though she +had sent what she suspected was his only tunic back to him neatly mended +at five o'clock. As a matter of fact Henri was sound asleep. He had +meant to rest only for an hour a body that was crying aloud with fatigue. +But Jean, coming in quietly, had found him sleeping like a child, and +had put his own blanket over him and left him. Henri slept until morning, +when Jean, coming up from his vigil outside the American girl's door, +found him waking and rested, and rang for coffee. + +Jean sat down on the edge of his bed and put on his shoes and puttees. +He was a taciturn man, but now he had something to say that he did not +like to say. And Henri knew it. + +"What is it?" he asked, his arms under his head. "Come, let us have it! +It is, of course, about the American lady." + +"It is," Jean said bluntly. "You cannot mix women and war." + +"And you think I am doing that?" + +"I am not an idiot," Jean growled. "You do not know what you are doing. +I do. She is young and lonely. You are young and not unattractive to +women. Already she turns pale when I so much as ask if she has heard +from you." + +"You asked her that?" + +"You were gone much longer than--" + +"And you thought I might send her word, and not you!" Henri's voice was +offended. He lay back while the boy brought in the morning coffee and +rolls. + +"Let me tell you something," he said when the boy had gone. "She is +betrothed to an American. She wears a betrothal ring. I am to her--the +French language!" + +But, though Henri laughed, Jean remained grave and brooding. For Henri +had not said what Sara Lee already was to him. + +It was later in the morning that Henri broached the subject again. They +were in the courtyard of an old house, working over the engine of the car. + +"I think I have found a location for the young American lady," he said. + +Jean hammered for a considerable time at a refractory rim. + +"And where?" he asked at last. + +Henri named the little town. Like Henri's family name, it must not be +told. Too many things happened there, and perhaps it is even now Henri's +headquarters. For that portion of the line has changed very little. + +Jean fell to renewed hammering. + +"If you will be silent I shall explain a plan," Henri said in a cautious +tone. "She will make soup, with help which we shall find. And if coming +in for refreshments a soldier shall leave a letter for me it is natural, +is it not?" + +"She will suspect, of course." + +"I think not. And she reads no French. None whatever." + +Yet Jean's suspicions were not entirely allayed. The plan had its +advantages. It was important that Henri receive certain reports, and +already the hotel whispered that Henri was of the secret service. It +brought him added deference, of course, but additional danger. + +So Jean accepted the plan, but with reservation. And it was not long +afterward that he said to Sara Lee, in French: "There is a spider on +your neck, mademoiselle." + +But Sara Lee only said, "I'm sorry, Jean; you'll have to speak English +to me for a while, I'm afraid." + +And though he watched her for five minutes she did not put her hand +to her neck. + +However, that was later on. That afternoon Henri spent an hour with the +Minister of War. And at the end of that time he said: "Thank you, Baron. +I think you will not regret it. America must learn the truth, and how +better than through those friendly people who come to us to help?" + +It is as well to state, however, that he left the Minister of War with +the undoubted impression that Miss Sara Lee Kennedy was a spinster of +uncertain years. + +Sara Lee packed her own suitcase that afternoon, doing it rather +nervously because Henri was standing in the room by the window waiting +for it. He had come in as matter-of-factly as Harvey had entered the +parlor at Aunt Harriet's, except that he carried in his arms some six +towels, a cake of soap and what looked suspiciously like two sheets. + +"The house I have under consideration," he said, "has little to +recommend it but the building, and even that--The occupants have gone +away, and--you are not a soldier." + +Sara Lee eyed the bundle. + +"I don't need sheets," she expostulated. + +"There are but two. And Jean has placed blankets in the car. You must +have a pillow also." + +He calmly took one of the hotel pillows from the bed. + +"What else?" he asked calmly. "Cigarettes? But no, you do not smoke." + +Sara Lee eyed him with something very like despair. + +"Aren't you ever going to let me think for myself?" + +"Would you have thought of these?" he demanded triumphantly. "You--you +think only of soup and tired soldiers. Some one must think of you." + +And there was a touch of tenderness in his voice. Sara Lee felt it and +trembled slightly. He was so fine, and he must not think of her that +way. It was not real. It couldn't be. Men were lonely here, where +everything was hard and cruel. They wanted some of the softness of life, +and all of kindness and sweetness that she could give should be Henri's. +But she must make it clear that there could never be anything more. + +There was a tightness about her mouth as she folded the white frock. + +"I know that garment," he said boyishly. "Do you remember the night you +wore it? And how we wandered in the square and made the plan that has +brought us together again?" + +Sara Lee reached down into her suitcase and brought up Harvey's picture. + +"I would like you to see this," she said a little breathlessly. "It is +the man I am to marry." + +For a moment she thought Henri was not going to take it. But he came, +rather slowly, and held out his hand for it. He went with it to the +window and stood there for some time looking down at it. + +"When are you going to marry him, mademoiselle?" + +"As soon as I go back." + +Sara Lee had expected some other comment, but he made none. He put the +photograph very quietly on the bed before her, and gathered up the linen +and the pillow in his arms. + +"I shall send for your luggage, mademoiselle. And you will find me at +the car outside, waiting." + +And so it was that a very silent Henri sat with Jean going out to that +strange land which was to be Sara Lee's home for many months. And a +very silent Sara Lee, flanked with pillow and blankets, who sat back +alone and tried to recall the tones of Harvey's voice. + +And failed. + + + + +X + + +From Dunkirk to the Front, the road, after the Belgian line was passed, +was lightly guarded. Henri came out of a reverie to explain to Sara Lee. + +"We have not many men," he said. "And those that remain are holding the +line. It is very weary, our army." + +Now at home Uncle James had thought very highly of the Belgian Army. He +had watched the fight they made, and he had tried to interest Sara Lee +in it. But without much result. She had generally said: "Isn't it +wonderful!" or "horrible," as the case might be, and put out of her mind +as soon as possible the ringing words he had been reading. But she had +not forgotten, she found. They came back to her as she rode through that +deserted countryside. Henri, glancing back somewhat later, found her in +tears. + +He climbed back at once into the rear of the car and sat down beside her. + +"You are homesick, I think?" + +"Yes. But not for myself. I am just homesick for all the people who +have lost their homes. You--and Jean, and all the rest." + +"Some day I shall tell you about my home and what has happened to it," +he said gravely. "Not now. It is not pleasant. But you must remember +this: We are going back home, we Belgians." And after a little pause: +"Just as you are." + +He lapsed into silence after that, and Sara Lee, stealing a glance at +him, saw his face set and hard. She had a purely maternal impulse to +reach over and pat his hand. + +Jean did not like Henri's shift to the rear of the car. He drove with +a sort of irritable feverishness, until Henri leaned over and touched +him on the shoulder. + +"We have mademoiselle with us, Jean," he said in French. + +"It is not difficult to believe," growled Jean. But he slackened his +pace somewhat. + +So far the road had been deserted. Now they had come up to a stream of +traffic flowing slowly toward the Front. Armored cars, looking tall and +top-heavy, rumbled and jolted along. Many lorries, one limousine +containing a general, a few Paris buses, all smeared a dingy gray and +filled with French soldiers, numberless and nondescript open machines, +here and there a horse-drawn vehicle--these filled the road. In and +out among them Jean threaded his way, while Sara Lee grew crimson with +the effort to see it all, and Henri sat very stiff and silent. + +At a crossroads they were halted by troops who had fallen out for a rest. +The men stood at ease, and stared their fill at Sara Lee. Save for a +few weary peasants, most of them had seen no women for months. But they +were respectful, if openly admiring. And their admiration of her was +nothing to Sara Lee's feeling toward them. She loved them all--boys +with their first straggly beards on their chins; older men, looking worn +and tired; French and Belgian; smiling and sad. But most of all, for +Uncle James' sake, she loved the Belgians. + +"I cannot tell you," she said breathlessly to Henri. "It is like a +dream come true. And I shall help. You look doubtful sometimes, but +I am sure." + +"You are heaven sent," Henri replied gravely. + +They turned into a crossroad after a time, and there in a little village +Sara Lee found her new home. A strange village indeed, unoccupied and +largely destroyed. Piles of bricks and plaster lined the streets. +Broken glass was everywhere. Jean blew out a tire finally, because of +the glass, and they were obliged to walk the remainder of the way. + +"A poor place, mademoiselle," Henri said as they went along. "A peaceful +little town, and quite beautiful, once. And it harbored no troops. But +everything is meat for the mouths of their guns." + +Sara Lee stopped and looked about her. Her heart was beating fast, but +her lips were steady enough. + +"And it is here that I--" + +"A little distance down the street. You must see before you decide." + +Steady, passionless firing was going on, not near, but far away, like +low thunder before a summer storm. She was for months to live, to eat +and sleep and dream to that rumbling from the Ypres salient, to waken +when it ceased or to look up from her work at the strange silence. But +it was new to her then, and terrible. + +"Do they still shell this--this town?" she asked, rather breathlessly. + +"Not now. They have done their work. Of course--" he did not finish. + +Sara Lee's heart slowed down somewhat. After all, she had asked to be +near the Front. And that meant guns and such destruction as was all +about her. Only one thing troubled her. + +"It is rather far from the trenches, isn't it?" + +He smiled slightly. + +"Far! It is not very far. Not so far as I would wish, mademoiselle. +But, to do what you desire, it is the best I have to offer." + +"How far away are the trenches?" + +"A quarter of a mile beyond those poplar trees." He indicated on a slight +rise a row of great trees broken somewhat but not yet reduced to the +twisted skeletons they were to become later on. In a long line they +faced the enemy like sentinels, winter-quiet but dauntless, and behind +them lay the wreck of the little village, quiet and empty. + +"Will the men know I am here?" Sara Lee asked anxiously. + +"But, yes, mademoiselle. At night they come up from the trenches, and +fresh troops take their places. They come up this street and go on to +wherever they are to rest. And when they find that a house of--mercy +is here--and soup, they will come. More than you wish." + +"Belgian soldiers?" + +"Only Belgian soldiers. That is as you want it to be, I think." + +"If only I spoke French!" + +"You will learn. And in the meantime, mademoiselle, I have taken the +liberty of finding you a servant--a young peasant woman. And you will +also have a soldier always on guard." + +Something that had been in the back of Sara Lee's mind for some time +suddenly went away. She had been thinking of Aunt Harriet and the Ladies' +Aid Society of the Methodist Church. She had, in fact, been wondering +how they would feel when they learned that she was living alone, the +only woman among thousands of men. It had, oddly enough, never occurred +to her before. + +"You have thought of everything," she said gratefully. + +But Henri said nothing. He had indeed thought of everything with a +vengeance, with the net result that he was not looking at Sara Lee more +than he could help. + +These Americans were strange. An American girl would cross the seas, +and come here alone with him--a man and human. And she would take for +granted that he would do what he was doing for love of his kind--which +was partly true; and she would be beautiful and sweet and amiable and +quite unself-conscious. And then she would go back home, warm of heart +with gratitude, and marry the man of the picture. + +The village had but one street, and that deserted and in ruins. Behind +its double row of houses, away from the enemy, lay the fields, a muddy +canal and more poplar trees. And from far away, toward Ypres, there +came constantly that somewhat casual booming of artillery which marked +the first winter of the war. + +The sound of the guns had first alarmed, then interested Sara Lee. It +was detached then, far away. It meant little to her. It was only later, +when she saw some of the results of the sounds she heard, that they +became significant. But this is not a tale of the wounding of men. +There are many such. This is the story of a little house of mercy, and +of a girl with a dauntless spirit, and of two men who loved her. Only +that. + +The maid Henri had found was already in the house, sweeping. Henri +presented her to Sara Lee, and he also brought a smiling little Belgian +boy, in uniform and with a rifle. + +"Your staff, mademoiselle!" he said. "And your residence!" + +Sara Lee looked about her. With the trifling exception that there was +no roof, it was whole. And the roof was not necessary, for the floors +of the upper story served instead. There was a narrow passage with a +room on either side, and a tiny kitchen behind. + +Henri threw open a door on the right. + +"Your bedroom," he said. "Well furnished, as you will see. It should +be, since there has been brought here all the furniture not destroyed +in the village." + +His blacker mood had fallen away before her naive delight. He went +about smiling boyishly, showing her the kettles in the kitchen; the +supply, already so rare, of firewood; the little stove. But he stiffened +somewhat when she placed her hand rather timidly on his arm. + +"How am I ever to thank you?" she asked. + +"By doing much good. And by never going beyond the poplar trees." + +She promised both very earnestly. + +But she was a little sad as she followed Henri about, he volubly +expatiating on such advantages as plenty of air owing to the absence of +a roof; and the attraction of the stove, which he showed much like a +salesman anxious to make a sale. "Such a stove!" he finished +contentedly. "It will make soup even in your absence, mademoiselle! +Our peasants eat much soup; therefore it is what you would call a +trained stove." + +Before Sara Lee's eyes came a picture of Harvey and the Leete house, +its white dining room, its bay window for plants, its comfortable charm +and prettiness. And Harvey's face, as he planned it for her anxious, +pleading, loving. She drew a long breath. If Henri noticed her +abstraction he ignored it. He was all over the little house. One moment +he was instructing Marie volubly, to her evident confusion. On Rene, +the guard, he descended like a young cyclone, with warnings for +mademoiselle's safety and comfort. He was everywhere, sitting on the +bed to see if it was soft, tramping hard on the upper floor to discover +if any plaster might loosen below, and pausing in that process to look +keenly at a windmill in the field behind. + +When he came down it was to say: "You are not entirely alone in the +village, after all, mademoiselle. The miller has come back. I shall +visit him now and explain." + +He found Sara Lee, however, still depressed. She was sitting in a low +chair in the kitchen gazing thoughtfully at the stove. + +"I am here," she said. "And here is the house, and a stove, +and--everything. But there are no shops; and what shall I make my soup +out of?" + +Henri stared at her rather blankly. + +"True!" he said. "Very true. And I never thought of it!" + +Then suddenly they both laughed, the joyous ringing laugh of ridiculous +youth, which can see its own absurdities and laugh at them. + +Henri counted off on his fingers. + +"I thought of water," he said, "and a house, and firewood, and kettles +and furniture. And there I ceased thinking." + +It was dusk now. Marie lifted the lid from the stove, and a warm red +glow of reflected light filled the little kitchen. It was warm and +cozy; the kettle sang like the purring of a cat. And something else +that had troubled Sara Lee came out. + +"I wonder," she said, "if you are doing all this only because I--well, +because I persuaded you." Which she had not. "Do the men really need +me here?" + +"Need you, mademoiselle?" + +"Do they need what little I can give? They were smiling, all the ones +I saw." + +"A Belgian soldier always smiles. Even when he is fighting." His voice +had lost its gayety and had taken on a deeper note. "Mademoiselle, I +have brought you here, where I can think of no other woman who would +have the courage to come, because you are needed. I cannot promise you +entire safety"--his mouth tightened--"but I can promise you work and +gratitude. Such gratitude, mademoiselle, as you may never know again." + +That reassured her. But in her practical mind the matter of supplies +loomed large. She brought the matter up again directly. + +"It is to be hot chocolate and soup?" he asked. + +"Both, if I find I have enough money. Soup only, perhaps." + +"And soup takes meat, of course." + +"It should, to be strengthening." + +Henri looked up, to see Jean in the doorway smiling grimly. + +"It is very simple," Jean said to him in French. "You have no other +duties of course; so each day you shall buy in the market place at +Dunkirk, with American money. And I shall become a delivery boy and +bring out food for mademoiselle, and whatever is needed." + +Henri smiled back at him cheerfully. "An excellent plan, Jean," he said. +"Not every day, but frequently." + +Jean growled and disappeared. + +However, there was the immediate present to think of, and while Jean +thawed his hands at the fire and Sara Lee was taking housewifely stock +of her new home, Henri disappeared. + +He came back in a half hour, carrying in a small basket butter, eggs, +bread and potatoes. + +"The miller!" he explained cheerfully to Sara Lee. "He has still a few +hens, and hidden somewhere a cow. We can have milk--is there a pail +for Marie to take to the mill?--and bread and an omelet. That is a +meal!" + +There was but one lamp, which hung over the kitchen stove. The room +across from Sara Lee's bedroom contained a small round dining table and +chairs. Sara Lee, enveloped in a large pinafore apron, made the +omelet in the kitchen. Marie brought a pail of fresh milk. Henri, with +a towel over his left arm, and in absurd mimicry of a Parisian waiter, +laid the table; and Jean, dour Jean, caught a bit of the infection, and +finding four bottles set to work with his pocketknife to fit candles +into their necks. + +Standing in corners, smiling, useless against the cheerful English that +flowed from the kitchen stove to the dining room and back again, were +Rene and Marie. It was of no use to attempt to help. Did the fire burn +low, it was the young officer who went out for fresh wood. But Rene +could not permit that twice. He brought in great armfuls of firewood +and piled them neatly by the stove. + +Henri was absurdly happy again. He would come to the door gravely, with +Sara Lee's little phrase book in hand, and read from it in a solemn tone: + +"'Shall we have duck or chicken?' 'Where can we get a good dinner at a +moderate price?' 'Waiter, you have spilled wine on my dress.' 'Will +you have a cigar?' 'No, thank you. I prefer a pipe.'" + +And Sara Lee beat up the eggs and found, after a bad moment, some salt +in a box, and then poured her omelet into the pan. She was very anxious +that it be a good omelet. She must make good her claim as a cook or +Henri's sublime faith in her would die. + +It was a divine omelet. Even Jean said so. They sat, the three of them, +in the cold little dining room and never knew that it was cold, and they +ate prodigious quantities of omelet and bread and butter, and bully beef +out of a tin, and drank a great deal of milk. + +Even Jean thawed at last, under the influence of food and Sara Lee. +Before the meal was over he was planning how to get her supplies to her +and making notes on a piece of paper as to what she would need at once. +They adjourned to Sara Lee's bedroom, where Marie had kindled a fire in +the little iron stove, and sat there in the warmth with two candles, +still planning. By that time Sara Lee had quite forgotten that at home +one did not have visitors in one's bedroom. + +Suddenly Henri held up his hand. + +"Listen!" he said. + +That was the first time Sara Lee had ever heard the quiet shuffling step +of tired men, leaving their trenches under cover of darkness. Henri +threw his military cape over her shoulders and she stood in the dark +doorway, watching. + +The empty street was no longer empty. From gutter to gutter flowed a +stream of men, like a sluggish river which narrowed where a fallen house +partly filled the way; not talking, not singing, just moving, bent under +their heavy and mud-covered equipment. Here and there the clack of +wooden sabots on the cobbles told of one poor fellow not outfitted with +leather shoes. The light of a match here and there showed some few +lucky enough to have still remaining cigarettes, and revealed also, in +the immediate vicinity, a white bandage or two. Some few, recognizing +Henri's officer's cap, saluted. Most of them stumbled on, too weary to +so much as glance aside. + +Nothing that Sara Lee had dreamed of war was like this. This was dreary +and sodden and hopeless. Those fresh troops at the crossroads that day +had been blithe and smiling. There had been none of the glitter and +panoply of war, but there had been movement, the beating of a drum, the +sharp cries of officers as the lines re-formed. + +Here there were no lines. Just such a stream of men as at home might +issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they +were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them +were wounded. + +"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as +mine would not be enough." + +"I would to God there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth. + +"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind work +of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by caring for +only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But every night +some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door--men +slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for those +there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhaps a clean +bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will have given +comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You--alone!" + +"I--alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you? +It is you who have made it possible." + +But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid +what lay beyond. Far beyond a star shell had risen above the flat +fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white +light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and +went out. + +"Like that!" Henri said to her, but in French. "Like that you are to me. +Bright and shining--and so soon gone." + +Sara Lee thought he had asked her if she was cold. + + + + +XI + + +The girl was singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she +had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, +though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such +young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness! + +She got the tales by intuition rather than by words, though she was +picking up some French at that. Marie would weep openly, at times. The +most frequent story was of no news from the country held by the Germans, +of families left with nothing and probably starving. The first inquiry +was always for news. Had the American lady any way to make inquiry? + +In time Sara Lee began to take notes of names and addresses, and through +Mr. Travers, in London, and the Relief Commission, in Belgium, bits of +information came back. A certain family was in England at a village in +Surrey. Of another a child had died. Here was one that could not be +located, and another reported massacred during the invasion. + +Later on Sara Lee was to find her little house growing famous, besieged +by anxious soldiers who besought her efforts, so that she used enormous +numbers of stamps and a great deal of effort. But that was later on. +And when that time came she turned to the work as a refuge from her +thoughts. For days were coming when Sara Lee did not want to think. + +But like all big things the little house made a humble beginning. A mere +handful of men, daring the gibes of their comrades, stopped in that first +night the door stood open, with its invitation of firelight and candles. +But these few went away with a strange story--of a beautiful American, +and hot soup, and even a cigarette apiece. That had been Henri's +contribution, the cigarettes. And soon the fame of the little house went +up and down the trenches, and it was like to die of overpopularity. + +It was at night that the little house of mercy bloomed like a flower. +During the daytime it was quiet, and it was then, as time went on, that +Sara Lee wrote her letters home and to England, and sent her lists of +names to be investigated. But from the beginning there was much to do. +Vegetables were to be prepared for the soup, Marie must find and bring +in milk for the chocolate, Rene must lay aside his rifle and chop +firewood. + +One worry, however, disappeared with the days. Henri was proving a +clever buyer. The money she sent in secured marvels. Only Jean knew, +or ever knew, just how much of Henri's steadily decreasing funds went +to that buying. Certainly not Sara Lee. And Jean expostulated only +once--to be met by such blazing fury as set him sullen for two days. + +"I am doing this," Henri finished, a trifle ashamed of himself, "not for +mademoiselle, but for our army. And since when have you felt that the +best we can give is too much for such a purpose?" + +Which was, however lofty, only a part of the truth. + +So supplies came in plentifully, and Sara Lee pared vegetables and sang +a bit under her breath, and glowed with good will when at night the weary +vanguard of a weary little army stopped at her door and scraped the mud +off its boots and edged in shyly. + +She was very happy, and her soup was growing famous. It is true that +the beef she used was not often beef, but she did not know that, and +merely complained that the meat was stringy. Now and then there was +no beef at all, and she used hares instead. On quiet days, when there +was little firing beyond the poplar trees, she went about with a basket +through the neglected winter gardens of the town. There were Brussels +sprouts, and sometimes she found in a cellar carrots or cabbages. She +had potatoes always. + +It was at night then, from seven in the evening until one, that the +little house was busiest. Word had gone out through the trenches beyond +the poplar trees that slightly wounded men needing rest before walking +back to their billets, exhausted and sick men, were welcome to the little +house. It was soon necessary to give the officers tickets for the men. +Rene took them in at the door, with his rifle in the hollow of his arm, +and he was as implacable as a ticket taker at the opera. + +Never once in all the months of her life there did Sara Lee have an ugly +word, an offensive glance. But, though she never knew this, many half +articulate and wholly earnest prayers were offered for her in those +little churches behind the lines where sometimes the men slept, and often +they prayed. + +She was very businesslike. She sent home to the Ladies' Aid Society a +weekly record of what had been done: So many bowls of soup; so many +cups of chocolate; so many minor injuries dressed. Because, very soon, +she found first aid added to her activities. She sickened somewhat at +first. Later she allowed to Marie much of the serving of food, and in +the little _salle a manger_ she had ready on the table basins, water, +cotton, iodine and bandages. + +Henri explained the method to her. + +"It is a matter of cleanliness," he said. "First one washes the wound +and then there is the iodine. Then cotton, a bandage, and--a surgeon +could do little more." + +Henri and Jean came often. And more than once during the first ten days +Jean spent the night rolled in a blanket by the kitchen fire, and Henri +disappeared. He was always back in the morning, however, looking dirty +and very tired. Sara Lee sewed more than one rent for him, those days, +but she was strangely incurious. It was as though, where everything was +strange, Henri's erratic comings and goings were but a part with the rest. + +Then one night the unexpected happened. The village was shelled. + +Sara Lee had received her first letter from Harvey that day. The maid +at Morley's had forwarded it to her, and Henri had brought it up. + +"I think I have brought you something you wish for very much," he said, +looking down at her. + +"Mutton?" she inquired anxiously. + +"Better than that." + +"Sugar?" + +"A letter, mademoiselle." + +Afterward he could not quite understand the way she had suddenly drawn +in her breath. He had no memory, as she had, of Harvey's obstinate anger +at her going, his conviction that she was doing a thing criminally wrong +and cruel. + +"Give it to me, please." + +She took it into her room and closed the door. When she came out again +she was composed and quiet, but rather white. Poor Henri! He was half +mad that day with jealousy. Her whiteness he construed as longing. + +This is a part of Harvey's letter: + + + You may think that I have become reconciled, but I have not. If I could + see any reason for it I might. But what reason is there? So many others, + older and more experienced, could do what you are doing, and more + safely. + + In your letter from the steamer you tell me not to worry. Good God, Sara + Lee, how can I help worrying? I do not even know where you are! If you + are in England, well and good. If you are abroad I do not want to know + it. I know these foreigners. I run into them every day. And they do not + understand American women. I get crazy when I think about it. I have had + to let the Leete house go. There is not likely to be such a chance soon + again. Business is good, but I don't seem to care much about it any + more. Honestly, dear, I think you have treated me very badly. I always + feel as though the people I meet are wondering if we have quarreled or + what on earth took you away on this wild-goose chase. I don't know + myself, so how can I tell them? + + I shall always love you, Sara Lee. I guess I'm that sort. But sometimes + I wonder if, when we are married, you will leave me again in some such + uncalled-for way. I warn you now, dear, that I won't stand for it. I'm + suffering too much. + + HARVEY. + + +Sara Lee wore the letter next her heart, but it did not warm her. She +went through the next few hours in a sort of frozen composure and ate +nothing at all. + +Then came the bombardment. + +Henri and Jean, driving out from Dunkirk, had passed on the road +ammunition trains, waiting in the road until dark before moving on to +the Front. Henri had given Sara Lee her letter, had watched jealously +for its effect on her, and then, his own face white and set, had gone on +down the ruined street. + +Here within the walls of a destroyed house he disappeared. The place +was evidently familiar to him, for he moved without hesitation. Broken +furniture still stood in the roofless rooms, and in front of a battered +bureau Henri paused. Still whistling under his breath, he took off his +uniform and donned a strange one, of greenish gray. In the pocket of +the blouse he stuffed a soft round cap of the same color. Then, resuming +his cape and Belgian cap, with its tassel over his forehead, he went out +into the street again. He carried in his belt a pistol, but it was not +the one he had brought in with him. As a matter of fact, by the addition +of the cap in his pocket, Henri was at that moment in the full uniform of +a _lieutenant_ of a Bavarian infantry regiment, pistol and all. + +He went down the street and along the road toward the poplars. He met +the first detachment of men out of the trenches just beyond the trees, +and stepped aside into the mud to let them pass, calling a greeting to +them out of the darkness. + +"_Bonsoir_!" they replied, and saluted stiffly. There were few among them +who did not know his voice, and fewer still who did not suspect his +business. + +"A brave man," they said among themselves as they went on. + +"How long will he last?" asked one young soldier, a boy in his teens. + +"One cannot live long who does as he does," replied a gaunt and bearded +man. "But it is a fine life while it continues. A fine life!" + +The boy stepped out of the shuffling line and looked behind him. He +could see only the glow of Henri's eternal cigarette. "I should like to +go with him," he muttered wistfully. + +The ammunition train was in the village now. It kept the center of the +road, lest it should slide into the mud on either side and be mired. +The men moved out of its way into the ditch, grumbling. + +Henri went whistling softly down the road. + +The first shell fell in the neglected square. The second struck the +rear wagons of the ammunition train. Henri heard the terrific explosion +that followed, and turning ran madly back into the village. More shells +fell into the road. The men scattered like partridges, running for the +fields, but the drivers of the ammunition wagons beat their horses and +came lurching and shouting down the road. + +There was cold terror in Henri's heart. He ran madly, throwing aside +his cape as he went. More shells fell ahead in the street. Once in the +darkness he fell flat over the body of a horse. There was a steady +groaning from the ditch near by. But he got up and ran on, a strange +figure with his flying hair and his German uniform. + +He was all but stabbed by Rene when he entered the little house. + +"Mademoiselle?" Henri gasped, holding Rene's bayonet away from his +heaving chest. + +"I am here," said Sara Lee's voice from the little _salle a manger_. +"Let them carry in the wounded. I am getting ready hot water and +bandages. There is not much space, for the corner of the room has been +shot away." + +She was as dead white in the candlelight, but very calm. + +"You cannot stay here," Henri panted. "At any time--" + +Another shell fell, followed by the rumble of falling walls. + +"Some one must stay," said Sara Lee. "There must be wounded in the +streets. Marie is in the cellar." + +Henri pleaded passionately with her to go to the cellar, but she refused. +He would have gathered her up in his arms and carried her there, but +Jean came in, leading a wounded man, and Henri gave up in despair. + +All that night they worked, a ghastly business. More than one man died +that night in the little house, while a blond young man in a German +uniform gave him a last mouthful of water or took down those pitifully +vague addresses which were all the dying Belgians had to give. + +"I have not heard--last at Aarschot, but now--God knows where." + +No more shells fell. At dawn, with all done that could be done, Sara +Lee fainted quietly in the hallway. Henri carried her in and placed +her on her bed. A corner of the room was indeed gone. The mantel was +shattered and the little stove. But on the floor lay Harvey's photograph +uninjured. Henri lifted it and looked at it. Then he placed it on the +table, and very reverently he kissed the palm of Sara Lee's quiet hand. + +Daylight found the street pitiful indeed. Henri, whose costume Rene had +been casting wondering glances at all night, sent a request for men from +the trenches to clear away the bodies of the horses and bury them, and +somewhat later over a single grave in the fields there was a simple +ceremony of burial for the men who had fallen. Henri had changed again +by that time, but he sternly forbade Sara Lee to attend. + +"On pain," he said, "of no more supplies, mademoiselle. These things +must be. They are war. But you can do nothing to help, and it will +be very sad." + +Ambulances took away the wounded at dawn, and the little house became +quiet once more. With planks Rene repaired the damage to the corner, +and triumphantly produced and set up another stove. He even put up a +mantelshelf, and on it, smiling somewhat, he placed Harvey's picture. + +Sara Lee saw it there, and a tiny seed of resentment took root and grew. + +"If there had been no one here last night," she said to the photograph, +"many more would have died. How can you say I am cruel to you? Isn't +this worth the doing?" + +But Harvey remained impassive, detached, his eyes on the photographer's +white muslin screen. And the angle of his jaw was set and dogged. + +[Illustration: Henri explained the method.] + + + + +XII + + +That morning there was a conference in the little house--Colonel Lilias, +who had come in before for a mute but appreciative call on Sara Lee, and +for a cup of chocolate; Captain Tournay, Jean and Henri. It was held +round the little table in the _salle a manger_, after Marie had brought +coffee and gone out. + +"They had information undoubtedly," said the colonel. "The same thing +happened at Pervyse when an ammunition train went through. They had the +place, and what is more they had the time. Of course there are the +airmen." + +"It did not leave the main road until too late for observation from the +air," Henri put in shortly. + +"Yet any one who saw it waiting at the crossroads might have learned its +destination. The drivers talk sometimes." + +"But the word had to be carried across," said Captain Tournay. "That is +the point. My men report flashes of lights from the fields. We have +followed them up and found no houses, no anything. In this flat country +a small light travels far." + +"I shall try to learn to-night," Henri said. "It is, of course, +possible that some one from over there--" He shrugged his shoulders. + +"I think not." Colonel Lilias put a hand on Henri's shoulder +affectionately. "They have not your finesse, boy. And I doubt if, in +all their army, they have so brave a man." + +Henri flushed. + +"There is a courage under fire, with their fellows round--that is one +thing. And a courage of attack--that is even more simple. But the +bravest man is the one who works alone--the man to whom capture is death +without honor." + +The meeting broke up. Jean and Henri went away in the car, and though +supplies came up regularly Sara Lee did not see the battered gray car +for four days. At the end of that time Henri came alone. Jean, he said +briefly, was laid up for a little while with a flesh wound in his +shoulder. He would be well very soon. In the meantime here at last was +mutton. It had come from England, and he, Henri, had found it lying +forgotten and lonely and very sad and had brought it along. + +After that Henri disappeared on foot. It was midafternoon and a sunny +day. Sara Lee saw him walking briskly across the fields and watched him +out of sight. She spoke some French now, and she had gathered from Rene, +who had no scruples about listening at a door, that Henri was the bravest +man in the Belgian Army. + +Until now Sara Lee had given small thought to Henri's occupation. She +knew nothing of war, and the fact that Henri, while wearing a uniform, +was unattached, had not greatly impressed her. Had she known the +constitution of a modern army she might have wondered over his freedom, +his powerful car, his passes and maps. But his detachment had not seemed +odd to her. Even his appearance during the bombardment in the uniform +of a German _lieutenant_ had meant nothing to her. She had never seen a +German uniform. + +That evening, however, when he returned she ventured a question. They +dined together, the two of them, for the first time at the little house +alone. Always before Jean had made the third. And it was a real meal, +for Sara Lee had sacrificed a bit of mutton from her soup, and Henri had +produced from his pocket a few small and withered oranges. + +"A gift!" he said gayly, and piled them in a precarious heap in the +center of the table. On the exact top he placed a walnut. + +"Now speak gently and walk softly," he said. "It is a work of art and +not to be lightly demolished." + +He was alternately gay and silent during the meal, and more than once +Sara Lee found his eyes on her, with something new and different in them. + +"Just you and I together!" he said once. "It is very wonderful." + +And again: "When you go back to him, shall you tell him of your good +friend who has tried hard to serve you?" + +"Of course I shall," said Sara Lee. "And he will write you, I know. He +will be very grateful." + +But it was she who was silent after that, because somehow it would be +hard to make Harvey understand. And as for his being grateful-- + +"Mademoiselle," said Henri later on, "would you object if I make a +suggestion? You wear a very valuable ring. I think it is entirely safe, +but--who can tell? And also it is not entirely kind to remind men who +are far from all they love that you--" + +Sara Lee flushed and took off her ring. + +"I am glad you told me," she said. And Henri did not explain that the +Belgian soldiers would not recognize the ring as either a diamond or a +symbol, but that to him it was close to torture. + +It was when he insisted on carrying out the dishes, singing a little +French song as he did so, that Sara Lee decided to speak what was in her +mind. He was in high spirits then. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "shall I show you something that the eye of no +man has seen before, and that, when we have seen it, shall never be seen +again?" + +On her interested consent he called in Marie and Rene, making a great +ceremony of the matter, and sending Marie into hysterical giggling. + +"Now see!" he said earnestly. "No eye before has ever seen or will again. +Will you guess, mademoiselle? Or you, Marie? Rene?" + +"A tear?" ventured Sara Lee. + +"But--do I look like weeping?" + +He did not, indeed. He stood, tall and young and smiling before them, +and produced from his pocket the walnut. + +"Perceive!" he said, breaking it open and showing the kernel. "Has human +eye ever before seen it?" He thrust it into Marie's open mouth. "And +it is gone! _Voila tout_!" + +It was that evening, while Sara Lee cut bandages and Henri rolled them, +that she asked him what his work was. He looked rather surprised, and +rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work," +he said. "What you call odd jobs." + +"Then you don't do any fighting?" + +"In the trenches--no. But now and then I have a little skirmish." + +A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The +trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this +alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no +detail--was he playing a man's part in the war? + +"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness. +"You say there are too few men. Yet--I can understand Monsieur Jean, +because he has only one eye. But you!" + +"I do something," he said, avoiding her eyes. "It is not a great deal. +It is the thing I can do best. That is all." + +He went away some time after that, leaving the little house full and busy +justifying its existence. The miller's son, who came daily to chat with +Marie, was helping in the kitchen. By the warm stove, and only kept from +standing over it by Marie's sharp orders, were as many men as could get +near. Each held a bowl of hot soup, and--that being a good day--a +piece of bread. Tall soldiers and little ones, all dirty, all weary, +almost all smiling, they peered over each other's shoulders, to catch, +if might be, a glimpse of Marie's face. + +When they came too close she poked an elbow into some hulking fellow and +sent him back. + +"Elbow-room, in the name of God," she would beg. + +Over all the room hung the warm steam from the kettles, and a delicious +odor, and peace. + +Sara Lee had never heard of the word _morale_. She would have been +astonished to have been told that she was helping the _morale_ of an +army. But she gave each night in that little house of mercy something +that nothing else could give--warmth and welcome, but above all a touch +of home. + +That night Henri did not come back. She stood by her table bandaging, +washing small wounds, talking her bits of French, until one o'clock. +Then, the last dressing done, she went to the kitchen. Marie was there, +with Maurice, the miller's son. + +"Has the captain returned?" she asked. + +"Not yet, mademoiselle." + +"Leave a warm fire," Sara Lee said. "He will probably come in later." + +Maurice went away, with a civil good night. Sara Lee stood in the +doorway after he had gone, looking out. Farther along the line there +was a bombardment going on. She knew now what a bombardment meant and +her brows contracted. Somewhere there in the trenches men were enduring +that, while Henri-- + +She said a little additional prayer that night, which was that she +should have courage to say to him what she felt--that there were big +things to do, and that it should not all be left to these smiling, +ill-clad peasant soldiers. + +At that moment Henri, in his gray-green uniform, was cutting wire before +a German trench, one of a party of German soldiers, who could not know +in the darkness that there had been a strange addition to their group. +Cutting wire and learning many things which it was well that he should +know. + +Now and then, in perfect German, he whispered a question. Always he +received a reply. And stowed it away in his tenacious memory for those +it most concerned. + +At daylight he was asleep by Sara Lee's kitchen fire. And at daylight +Sara Lee was awakened by much firing, and putting on a dressing gown she +went out to see what was happening. Rene was in the street looking +toward the poplar trees. + +"An attack," he said briefly. + +"You mean--the Germans?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +She went back into the little ruined house, heavy-hearted. She knew now +what it meant, an attack. That night there would be ambulances in the +street, and word would come up that certain men were gone--would never +seek warmth and shelter in her kitchen or beg like children for a second +bowl of soup. + +On the kitchen floor by the dying fire Henri lay asleep. + + + + +XIII + + +Much has been said of the work of spies--said and written. Here is a +woman in Paris sending forbidden messages on a marked coin. Men are +tapped on the shoulder by a civil gentleman in a sack suit, and walk +away with him, never to be seen again. + +But of one sort of spy nothing has been written and but little is known. +Yet by him are battles won or lost. On the intelligence he brings +attacks are prepared for and counter-attacks launched. It is not always +the airman, in these days of camouflage, who brings word of ammunition +trains or of new batteries. + +In the early days of the war the work of the secret service at the Front +was of the gravest importance. There were fewer air machines, and +observation from the air was a new science. Also trench systems were +incomplete. Between them, known to a few, were breaks of solid land, +guarded from behind. To one who knew, it was possible, though dangerous +beyond words, to cross the inundated country that lay between the Belgian +Front and the German lines, and even with good luck to go farther. + +Henri, for instance, on that night before had left the advanced trench +at the railway line, had crawled through the Belgian barbed wire, and +had advanced, standing motionless as each star shell burst overhead, and +then moving on quickly. The inundation was his greatest difficulty. +Shallow in most places, it was full of hidden wire and crisscrossed with +irrigation ditches. Once he stumbled into one, but he got out by +swimming. Had he been laden with a rifle and equipment it might have +been difficult. + +He swore to himself as his feet touched ground again. For a star shell +was hanging overhead, and his efforts had sent wide and ever increasingly +widening circles over the placid surface of the lagoon. Let them lap to +the German outposts and he was lost. + +Henri's method was peculiar to himself. Where there was dry terrain he +did as did the others, crouched and crept. But here in the salt marshes, +where the sea had been called to Belgium's aid, he had evolved a system +of moving, neck deep in water, stopping under the white night lights, +advancing in the darkness. There was no shelter. The country was flat +as a hearth. + +He would crawl out at last in the darkness and lie flat, as the dead lie. +And then, inch by inch, he would work his way forward, by routes that he +knew. Sometimes he went entirely through the German lines, and +reconnoitered on the roads behind. They were shallow lines then, for +the inundation made the country almost untenable, and a charge in force +from the Belgians across was unlikely. + +Henri knew his country well, as well as he loved it. In a farmhouse +behind the German lines he sometimes doffed his wet gray-green uniform +and put on the clothing of a Belgian peasant. Trust Henri then for being +a lout, a simple fellow who spoke only Flemish--but could hear in many +tongues. Watch him standing at crossroads and marveling at big guns that +rumble by. + +At first Henri had wished, having learned of an attack, to be among those +who repelled it. Then one day his King had sent for him to come to that +little village which was now his capital city. + +He had been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing. +Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri +was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were +blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was--a tawdry summer home, +ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man +of all time it became royal. + +So Henri bowed and waited, and soon the King got up and shook hands with +him. As a matter of fact they knew each other rather well, but to +explain more would be to tell that family name of Henri's which must +never be known. + +"Sit down," said the King gravely. And he got a box of cigars from the +mantelpiece and offered it. "I sent for you because I want to talk to +you. You are doing valuable work." + +"I am glad you think it so, sire," said Henri rather unhappily, because +he felt what was coming. "But I cannot do it all the time. There are +intervals--" + +An ordinary mortal may not interrupt a king, but a king may interrupt +anything, except perhaps a German bombardment. + +"Intervals, of course. If there were not you would be done in a month." + +"But I am a soldier. My place is--" + +"Your place is where you are most useful." + +Henri was getting nothing out of the cigar. He flung it away and got up. + +"I want to fight too," he said stubbornly. "We need every man, and I +am--rather a good shot. I do this other because I can do it. I speak +their infernal tongue. But it's dirty business at the best, sire." He +remembered to put in the sire, but rather ungraciously. Indeed he shot +it out like a bullet. + +"Dirty business!" said the King thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. It +is, of course. But--not so dirty as the things they have done, and are +doing." + +He sat still and let Henri stamp up and down, because, as has been said, +he knew the boy. And he had never been one to insist on deference, +which was why he got so much of it. But at last he got up and when +Henri stood still, rather ashamed of himself, he put an arm over the +boy's shoulders. + +"I want you to do this thing, for me. And this thing only," he said. +"It is the work you do best. There are others who can fight, but--I do +not know any one else who can do as you have done." + +Henri promised. He would have promised to go out and drown himself in +the sea, just beyond the wind-swept little garden, for the tall grave +man who stood before him. Then he bowed and went out, and the King +went back to his plain pine table and his work. That was the reason why +Sara Lee found him asleep on the floor by her kitchen stove that morning, +and went back to her cold bed to lie awake and think. But no explanation +came to her. + +The arrival of Marie roused Henri. The worst of the bombardment was +over, but there was far-away desultory firing. He listened carefully +before, standing outside in the cold, he poured over his head and +shoulders a pail of cold water. He was drying himself vigorously when +he heard Sara Lee's voice in the kitchen. + +The day began for Henri when first he saw the girl. It might be evening, +but it was the beginning for him. So he went in when he had finished +his toilet and bowed over her hand. + +"You are cold, mademoiselle." + +"I think I am nervous. There was an attack this morning." + +"Yes?" + +Marie had gone into the next room, and Sara Lee raised haggard eyes +to his. + +"Henri," she said desperately--it was the first time she had called him +that--"I have something to say to you, and it's not very pleasant." + +"You are going home?" It was the worst thing he could think of. But +she shook her head. + +"You will think me most ungrateful and unkind." + +"You? Kindness itself!" + +"But this is different. It is not for myself. It is because I care a +great deal about--about--" + +"Mademoiselle!" + +"About your honor. And somehow this morning, when I found you here +asleep, and those poor fellows in the trenches fighting--" + +Henri stared at her. So that was it! And he could never tell her. He +was sworn to secrecy by every tradition and instinct of his work. He +could never tell her, and she would go on thinking him a shirker and a +coward. She would be grateful. She would be sweetness itself. But +deep in her heart she would loathe him, as only women can hate for a +failing they never forgive. + +"But I have told you," he said rather wildly, "I am not idle. I do +certain things--not much, but of a degree of importance." + +"You do not fight." + +In Sara Lee's defense many things may be urged--her ignorance of modern +warfare; the isolation of her lack of knowledge of the language; but, +perhaps more than anything, a certain rigidity of standard that +comprehended no halfway ground. Right was right and wrong was wrong to +her in those days. Men were brave or were cowards. Henri was worthy +or unworthy. And she felt that, for all his kindness to her, he was +unworthy. + +He could have set himself right with a word, at that. But his pride was +hurt. He said nothing except, when she asked if he had minded what she +said, to reply: + +"I am sorry you feel as you do. I am not angry." + +He went away, however, without breakfast. Sara Lee heard his car going +at its usual breakneck speed up the street, and went to the door. She +would have called him back if she could, for his eyes haunted her. But +he did not look back. + + + + +XIV + + +For four days the gray car did not come again. Supplies appeared in +another gray car, driven by a surly Fleming. The waking hours were full, +as usual. Sara Lee grew a little thin, and seemed to be always +listening. But there was no Henri, and something that was vivid and +joyous seemed to have gone out of the little house. + +Even Marie no longer sang as she swept or washed the kettles, and Sara +Lee, making up the records to send home, put little spirit into the +letter that went with them. + +On the second day she wrote to Harvey. + + "I am sorry that you feel as you do," she wrote, perhaps unconsciously + using Henri's last words to her. "I have not meant to be cruel. And + if you were here you would realize that whether others could have done + what I am doing or not--and of course many could--it is worth doing. + I hear that other women are establishing houses like this, but the + British and the French will not allow women so near the lines. The men + come in at night from the trenches so tired, so hungry and so cold. + Some of them are wounded too. I dress the little wounds. I do give + them something, Harvey dear--if it is only a reminder that there are + homes in the world, and everything is not mud and waiting and killing." + + +She told him that his picture was on her mantel, but she did not say +that a corner of her room had been blown away or that the mantel was +but a plank from a destroyed house. And she sent a great deal of love, +but she did not say that she no longer wore his ring on her finger. +And, of course, she was coming back to him if he still wanted her. + +More than Henri's absence was troubling Sara Lee those days. Indeed she +herself laid all her anxiety to one thing, a serious one at that. With +all the marvels of Henri's buying, and Jean's, her money was not holding +out. The scope of the little house had grown with its fame. Now and +then there were unexpected calls, too--Marie's mother, starving in +Havre; sickness and death in the little town at the crossroads: a dozen +small emergencies, but adding to the demands on her slender income. She +had, as a matter of fact, already begun to draw on her private capital. + +And during the days when no gray car appeared she faced the situation, +took stock, as it were, and grew heavy-eyed and wistful. + +On the fifth day the gray car came again, but Jean drove it alone. He +disclaimed any need for sympathy over his wound, and with Rene's aid +carried in the supplies. + +There was the business of checking them off, and the further business +of Sara Lee's paying for them in gold. She sat at the table, Jean +across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d'or, an +engrossed frown between her eyebrows. + +Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed. She smiled very seldom, +and her eyes were perhaps more steady. It was a young girl he and Henri +had brought out to the little house. It was a very serious and rather +anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he +had brought back into little stacks. + +"Jean," she said finally, "I am not going to be able to do it." + +"To do what?" + +"To continue--here." + +"No?" + +"You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in +London. You and--and Henri have done miracles for me. But soon I +shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back. And +now I shall have to start on my English notes. After that--" + +"You are too good to the men. These cigarettes, now--you could do +without them." + +"But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean." + +She sat still, her hands before her on the table. From the kitchen came +the bubbling of the eternal soup. Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down +her cheek. She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently +did not notice. + +"The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort +too many." + +"Jean," she said suddenly, "where is Henri?" + +"In England, I think." + +The only clear thought in Sara Lee's mind was that Henri was not in +France, and that he had gone without telling her. She had hurt him +horribly. She knew that. He might never come back to the little house +of mercy. There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable +strain. And she had attacked his honor. What possible right had she +to do that? + +The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale +and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean. + +"Did he tell you anything?" + +"Nothing, mademoiselle." + +"He is very angry with me, Jean." + +"But surely no, mademoiselle. With you? It is impossible." + +But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply. +He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri's manner +before his departure. They had quarreled, these two. Perhaps it was as +well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee. But he looked out, +those days, on but half a world, did Jean. So he saw only the woman +hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper. And in Sara Lee a woman, and +nothing more. + +And--being Jean he shrugged his shoulders. + +They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out, +but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and +trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had +hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow +Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval. +He gave her no moral support. + +At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with +soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds +dressed--a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did +it nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She +enclosed a snapshot of the little house. + +Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times. +He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later +on he told Rene. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back +along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on +the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by. + +Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got +in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different +Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads--a Henri in +the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and +impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue +trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back +and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his +chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter +campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing +through rents in his coat. + +Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders, +the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of +the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which +renders the French Army so mobile. + +He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an +extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and +an intrenching tool jingling at his belt. + +Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded +crossroads--smiled and then sighed. For Jean had lost everything in +the war. His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and +with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come. But Henri +had brought back to Jean something to live for--or to die for, as might +happen. + +Henri walked along gayly. He hailed other French soldiers. He joined a +handful and stood talking to them. But he reached the crossroads before +the ammunition train. + +The crossroads was crowded, as usual--many soldiers, at rest, waiting +for the word to fall in, a battery held up by the breaking of a wheel. +A temporary forge had been set up, and soldiers in leather aprons were +working over the fire. A handful of peasants watched, their dull eyes +following every gesture. And one of them was a man Henri sought. + +Henri sat down on the ground and lighted a cigarette. The ammunition +train rolled in and halted, and the man Henri watched turned his +attention to the train. He had been dull and quiet at the forge, but +now he became smiling, a good fellow. He found a man he knew among the +drivers and offered him a cigarette. He also produced and presented an +entire box of matches. Matches were very dear, and hardly to be bought +at any price. + +Henri watched grimly and hummed a little song: + + "_Trou la la, ca ne va guere_; + _Trou la la, ca ne va pas_." + + +Still humming under his breath, when the peasant left the crossroads he +followed him. Not closely. The peasant cut across the fields. Henri +followed the road and entered the fields at a different angle. He knew +his way quite well, for he had done the same thing each day for four +days. Only twice he had been a Belgian peasant, and once he was an +officer, and once he had been a priest. + +Four days he had done this thing, but to-day was different. To-day there +would be something worth while, he fancied. And he made a mental note +that Sara Lee must not be in the little house that night. + +When he had got to a canal where the pollard willows were already sending +out their tiny red buds, Henri sat down again. The village lay before +him, desolate and ruined, a travesty of homes. And on a slight rise, but +so concealed from him by the willows that only the great wings showed, +stood the windmill. + +It was the noon respite then, and beyond the line of poplars all was quiet. +The enemy liked time for foods and the Belgians crippled by the loss of +that earlier train, were husbanding their ammunition. Far away a gap in +the poplar trees showed a German observation balloon, a tiny dot against +the sky. + +The man Henri watched went slowly, for he carried a bag of grain on his +back. Henri no longed watched him, He watched the wind wheel. It had +been broken, and one plane was now patched with what looked like a red +cloth. There was a good wind, but clearly the miller was idle that day. +The great wings were not turning. + +Henri sat still and smoked. He thought of many things--of Sara Lee's +eyes when in the center of the London traffic she had held the dying +donkey; of her small and radiant figure at the Savoy; of the morning he +had found her at Calais, in the Gare Maritime, quietly unconscious that +she had done a courageous thing. And he thought, too, of the ring and +the photograph she carried. But mostly he remembered the things she had +said to him on their last meeting. + +Perhaps there came to him his temptation too. It would be so easy that +night, if things went well, to make a brave showing before her, to let +her see that these odd jobs he did had their value and their risks. But +he put that from him. The little house of mercy must be empty that +night, for her sake. He shivered as he remembered the room where she +slept, the corner that was shot away and left open to the street. + +So he sat and watched. And at one o'clock the mill wheel began turning. +It was easy to count the revolutions by the red wing. Nine times it +turned, and stopped. After five minutes or so it turned again, thirty +times. Henri smiled: an ugly smile. + +"A good guess," he said to himself. "But it must be more than a guess." + +His work for the afternoon was done. Still with the bent-kneed swing he +struck back to the road, and avoiding the crossroads, went across more +fields to a lane where Jean waited with the car. Henri took a plunge +into the canal when he had removed his French uniform, and producing a +towel from under a bush rubbed himself dry. His lean boyish body +gleamed, arms and legs brown from much swimming under peaceful summer +suns. On his chest he showed two scars, still pink. Shrapnel bites, he +called them. But he had, it is to be feared, a certain young +satisfaction in them. + +He was in high good humor. The water was icy, and Jean had refused to +join him. + +"My passion for cleanliness," Henri said blithely, "is the result of my +English school days. You would have been the better for an English +education, Jean." + +"A canal in March!" Jean grunted. "You will end badly." + +Henri looked longingly at the water. + +"Had I a dry towel," he said, "I would go in again." + +Jean looked at him with his one eye. + +"You would be prettier without those scars," he observed. But in his +heart he prayed that there might be no others added to them, that +nothing might mar or destroy that bright and youthful body. + +"_Depechez-vous! Vous sommes presses_!" he added. + +But Henri was minded to play. He girded himself with the towel and +struck an attitude. + +"The Russian ballet, Jean!" he said, and capering madly sent Jean +into deep grumbles of laughter by his burlesque. + +"I must have exercise," Henri said at last when, breathless and with +flying hair, he began to dress. "That, too, is my English schooling. If +you, Jean--" + +"To the devil with your English schooling!" Jean remonstrated. + +Henri sobered quickly after that. The exhilaration of his cold plunge +was over. + +"The American lady?" he asked. "She is all right?" + +"She is worried. There is not enough money." + +Henri frowned. + +"And I have nothing!" + +This opened up an old wound with Jean. + +"If you would be practical and take pay for what you are doing," he began. + +Henri cut him short. + +"Pay!" he said. "What is there to pay me with? And what is the use of +reopening the matter? A man may be a spy for love of his country. God +knows there is enough lying and deceit in the business. But to be a spy +for money--never!" + +There was a little silence. Then: "Now for mademoiselle," said Henri. +"She must be out of the village to-night. And that, dear friend, must +be your affair. She does not like me." + +All the life had gone out of his voice. + + + + +XV + + +"But why should I go?" Sara Lee asked. "It is kind of you to ask me, +Jean. But I am here to work, not to play." + +Long ago Sara Lee had abandoned her idea of Jean as a paid chauffeur. +She even surmised, from something Marie had said, that he had been a +person of importance in the Belgium of before the war. So she was +grateful, but inclined to be obstinate. + +"You have been so much alone, mademoiselle--" + +"Alone!" + +"Cut off from your own kind. And now and then one finds, at the hotel +in Dunkirk, some English nurses who are having a holiday. You would +like to talk to them perhaps." + +"Jean," she said unexpectedly, "why don't you tell me the truth? You +want me to leave the village to-night. Why?" + +"Because, mademoiselle, there will be a bombardment." + +"The village itself?" + +"We expect it," he answered dryly. + +Sara Lee went a little pale. + +"But then I shall be needed, as I was before." + +"No troops will pass through the town to-night. They will take a road +beyond the fields." + +"How do you know these things?" she asked, wondering. "About the troops +I can understand. But the bombardment." + +"There are ways of finding out, mademoiselle," he replied in his +noncommittal voice. "Now, will you go?" + +"May I tell Marie and Rene?" + +"No." + +"Then I shall not go. How can you think that I would consider my own +safety and leave them here?" + +Jean had ascertained before speaking that Marie was not in the house. +As for Rene, he sat on the single doorstep and whittled pegs on which to +hang his rifle inside the door. And as he carved he sang words of his +own to the tune of Tipperary. + +Inside the little _salle a manger_ Jean reassured Sara Lee. It was +important--vital--that Rene and Marie should not know far in advance +of the bombardment. They were loyal, certainly, but these were his +orders. In abundance of time they would be warned to leave the village. + +"Who is to warn them?" + +"Henri has promised, mademoiselle. And what he promises is done." + +"You said this morning that he was in England." + +"He has returned." + +Sara Lee's heart, which had been going along merely as a matter of duty +all day, suddenly began to beat faster. Her color came up, and then faded +again. He had returned, and he had not come to the little house. But +then--what could Henri mean to her, his coming or his going? Was she +to add to her other sins against Harvey the supreme one of being +interested in Henri? + +Not that she said all that, even to herself. There was a wave of +gladness and then a surge of remorse. That is all. But it was a very +sober Sara Lee who put on her black suit with the white collar that +afternoon and ordered, by Jean's suggestion, the evening's preparations +as though nothing was to happen. + +She looked round her little room before she left it. It might not be +there when she returned. So she placed Harvey's photograph under her +mattress for safety, and rather uncomfortably she laid beside it the +small ivory crucifix that Henri had found in a ruined house and brought +to her. Harvey was not a Catholic. He did not believe in visualizing +his religion. And she had a distinct impression that he considered such +things as did so as bordering on idolatry. + +Sometime after dusk that evening the ammunition train moved out. At a +point a mile or so from the village a dispatch rider on a motor cycle +stopped the rumbling lorry at the head of the procession and delivered +a message, which the guide read by the light of a sheltered match. The +train moved on, but it did not turn down to the village. It went beyond +to a place of safety, and there remained for the night. + +But before that time Henri, lying close in a field, had seen a skulking +figure run from the road to the mill, and soon after had seen the mill +wheel turn once, describing a great arc; and on one of the wings, showing +only toward the poplar trees, was a lighted lantern. + +Five minutes later, exactly time enough for the train to have reached +the village street, German shells began to fall in it. Henri, lying +flat on the ground, swore silently and deeply. + +In every land during this war there have been those who would sell their +country for a price. Sometimes money. Sometimes protection. And of all +betrayals that of the man who sells his own country is the most dastardly. +Henri, lying face down, bit the grass beneath him in sheer rage. + +One thing he had not counted on, he who foresaw most things. The miller +and his son, being what they were, were cowards as well. Doubtless the +mill had been promised protection. It was too valuable to the Germans +to be destroyed. But with the first shot both men left the house by the +mill and scurried like rabbits for the open fields. + +Maurice, poor Marie's lover by now, almost trampled on Henri's prostrate +body. And Henri was alone, and his work was to take them alive. They +had information he must have--how the _modus vivendi_ had been arranged, +through what channels. And under suitable treatment they would tell. + +He could not follow them through the fields. He lay still, during a +fiercer bombardment than the one before, raising his head now and then +to see if the little house of mercy still stood. No shells came his +way, but the sky line of the village altered quickly. The standing +fragment of the church towers went early. There was much sound of +falling masonry. From somewhere behind him a Belgian battery gave +tongue, but not for long. And then came silence. + +Henri moved then. He crept nearer the mill and nearer. And at last he +stood inside and took his bearings. A lamp burned in the kitchen, +showing a dirty brick floor and a littered table--such a house as men +keep, untidy and unhomelike. A burnt kettle stood on the hearth, and +leaning against the wall was the bag of grain Maurice had carried from +the crossroads. + +"A mill which grinds without grain," Henri said to himself. + +There was a boxed-in staircase to the upper floor, and there, with the +door slightly ajar, he stationed himself, pistol in hand. Now and then +he glanced uneasily at the clock. Sara Lee must not be back before he +had taken his prisoners to the little house and turned them over to +those who waited there. + +There were footsteps outside, and Henri drew the door a little closer. +But he was dismayed to find it Marie. She crept in, a white and broken +thing, and looked about her. + +"Maurice!" she called. + +She sat down for a moment, and then, seeing the disorder about her, set +to work to clear the table. It was then that Henri lowered his pistol +and opened the door. + +"Don't shriek, Marie," he said. + +She turned and saw him, and clutched at the table. + +"Monsieur!" + +"Marie," he said quietly, "go up these stairs and remain quiet. Do not +walk round. And do not come down, no matter what you hear!" + +She obeyed him, stumbling somewhat. For she had seen his revolver, and +it frightened her. But as she passed him she clutched at his sleeve. + +"He is good--Maurice," she said, gasping. "Of the father I know nothing, +but Maurice--" + +"Go up and be silent!" was all he said. + +Now, by all that goes to make a story, Sara Lee should have met Mabel at +the Hotel des Arcades in Dunkirk, and should have been able to make that +efficient young woman burn with jealousy--Mabel, who from the safety of +her hospital in Boulogne considered Dunkirk the Front. + +Indeed Sara Lee, to whom the world was beginning to seem very small, had +had some such faint hope. But Mabel was not there, and it was not until +long after that they met at all, and then only when the lights had gone +down and Sara Lee was again knitting by the fire. + +There were a few nurses there, in their white veils with the red cross +over the forehead, and one or two Englishwomen in hats that sat a trifle +too high on the tops of their heads and with long lists before them +which they checked as they ate. Aviators in leather coats; a few Spahis +in cloak and turban, with full-gathered bloomers and high boots; some +American ambulance drivers, rather noisy and very young; and many +officers, in every uniform of the Allied armies--sat at food together +and for a time forgot their anxieties under the influence of lights, food +and warmth, and red and white wine mixed with water. + +When he chose, Jean could be a delightful companion; not with Henri's +lift of spirits, but quietly interesting. And that evening he was a new +Jean to Sara Lee, a man of the world, talking of world affairs. He +found her apt and intelligent, and for Sara Lee much that had been +clouded cleared up forever that night. Until then she had known only +the humanities of the war, or its inhumanities. There, over that little +table, she learned something of its politics and its inevitability. She +had been working in the dark, with her heart only. Now she began to +grasp the real significance of it all, of Belgium's anxiety for many +years, of Germany's cold and cruel preparation, and empty protests of +friendship. She learned of the flight of the government from Brussels, +the most important state papers being taken away in a hand cart, on top +of which, at the last moment, some flustered official had placed a tall +silk hat! She learned of the failure of great fortifications before the +invaders' heavy guns. And he had drawn for her such a picture of +Albert of Belgium as she was never to forget. + +Perhaps Sara Lee's real growth began that night, over that simple dinner +at the Hotel des Arcades. + +"I wish," she said at last, "that Uncle James could have heard all this. +He was always so puzzled about it all. And--you make it so clear." + +When dinner was over a bit of tension had relaxed in her somewhat. She +had been too close, for too long. And when a group of Belgian officers, +learning who she was, asked to be presented and gravely thanked her, she +flushed with happiness. + +"We must see if mademoiselle shall not have a medal," said the only one +who spoke English. + +"A medal? For what?" + +"For courage," he said, bowing. "Belgium has little to give, but it can +at least do honor to a brave lady." + +Jean was smiling when they passed on. What a story would this slip of a +girl take home with her! + +But: "I don't think I want a medal, Jean," she said. "I didn't come for +that. And after all it is you and Henri who have done the thing--not I." + +Accustomed to women of a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first +taken her naivete for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting +her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just +such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of +her--the upraising of her eyes or an unstudied gesture. + +He sighed. + +"You are very wonderful, you Americans," he said. It was the nearest to +a compliment that he had ever come. And after that evening he was always +very gentle with her. Once he had protected her because Henri had asked +him to do so; now he himself became in his silent way her protector. + +The ride home through the dark was very quiet. Sara Lee sat beside him +watching the stars and growing increasingly anxious as they went, not +too rapidly, toward the little house. There were no lights. Air raids +had grown common in Dunkirk, and there were no street lights in the +little city. Once on the highway Jean lighted the lamps, but left them +very low, and two miles from the little house he put them out altogether. +They traveled by starlight then, following as best they could the tall +trees that marked the road. Now and then they went astray at that, and +once they tilted into the ditch and had hard pulling to get out. + +At the top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down. +He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable; +and again Sara Lee shivered. If the little house was gone! + +But it was there, and lighted too. Through its broken shutters came the +yellow glow of the oil lamp that now hung over the table in the _salle a +manger_. + +Whatever Jean's anxieties had been fell from him as he pushed open the +door. Henri's voice was the first thing they heard. He was too much +occupied to notice their approach. + +So it was that Sara Lee saw, for the last time, the miller and his son, +Maurice; saw them, but did not know them, for over their heads were bags +of their own sacking, with eyeholes roughly cut in them. Their hands +were bound, and three soldiers were waiting to take them away. + +"I have covered your heads," Henri was saying in French, "because it is +not well that our brave Belgians should know that they have been betrayed +by those of their own number." + +It was a cold and terrible Henri who spoke. + +"Take them away," he said to the waiting men. + +A few moments later he turned from the door and heard Sara Lee sobbing +in her room. He tapped, and on receiving no reply he went in. The room +was unharmed, and by the light of a candle he saw the girl, face down on +the bed. He spoke to her, but she only lay crouched deeper, her +shoulders shaking. + +"It is war, mademoiselle," he said, and went closer. Then suddenly all +the hurt of the past days, all the bitterness of the last hour, were +lost in an overwhelming burst of tenderness. + +He bent over her and put his arms round her. + +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. "I, who would die for +you, mademoiselle. I who worship you." He buried his face in the warm +hollow of her neck and held her close. He was trembling. "I love you," +he whispered. "I love you." + +She quieted under his touch. He was very strong, and there was refuge +in his arms. For a moment she lay still, happier than she had been for +weeks. It was Henri who was shaken now and the girl who was still. + +But very soon came the thing that, after all, he expected. She drew +herself away from him, and Henri, sensitive to every gesture, stood back. + +"Who are they?" was the first thing she said. It rather stabbed him. +He had just told her that he loved her, and never before in his careless +young life had he said that to any woman. + +"Spies," he said briefly. + +A flushed and tearful Sara Lee stood up then and looked up at him gravely. + +"Then--that is what you do?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +Quite suddenly she went to him and held up her face. + +"Please kiss me, Henri," she said very simply. "I have been cruel and +stupid, and--" + +But he had her in his arms then, and he drew her close as though he +would never let her go. He was one great burst of joy, poor Henri. But +when she gently freed herself at last it was to deliver what seemed for +a time his death wound. + +"You have paid me a great tribute," she said, still simply and gravely. +"I wanted you to kiss me, because of what you said. But that will have +to be all, Henri dear." + +"All?" he said blankly. + +"You haven't forgotten, have you? I--I am engaged to somebody else." + +Henri stood still, swaying a little. + +"And you love him? More than you care for me?" + +"He is--he is my kind," said Sara Lee rather pitifully. "I am not what +you think me. You see me here, doing what you think is good work, and +you are grateful. And you don't see any other women. So I--" + +"And you think I love you because I see no one else?" he demanded, still +rather stunned. + +"Isn't that part of it?" + +He flung out his hands as though he despaired of making her understand. + +"This man at home--" he said bitterly; "this man who loves you so well +that he let you cross the sea and come here alone--do you love him very +dearly?" + +"I am promised to him." + +All at once Sara Lee saw the little parlor at home, and Harvey, gentle, +rather stolid and dependable. Oh, very dependable. She saw him as he +had looked the night he had said he loved her, rather wistful and very, +very tender. She could not hurt him so. She had said she was going +back to him, and she must go. + +"I love him very much, Henri." + +Very quietly, considering the hell that was raging in him, Henri bent +over and kissed her hand. Then he turned it over, and for an instant +he held his cheek against its warmth. He went out at once, and Sara +Lee heard the door slam. + +[Illustration: "That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly.] + + + + +XVI + + +Time passed quickly, as always it does when there is work to do. Round +the ruined houses the gray grass turned green again, and in travesties +of gardens early spring flowers began to show a touch of color. + +The first of them greeted Sara Lee one morning as she stood on her +doorstep in the early sun. She gathered them and placed them, one on +each grave, in the cemetery near the poplar trees, where small wooden +crosses, sometimes surmounted by a cap, marked many graves. + +Marie, a silent subdued Marie, worked steadily in the little house. She +did not weep, but now and then Sara Lee found her stirring something on +the stove and looking toward the quiet mill in the fields. And once +Sara Lee, surprising that look on her face, put her arms about the girl +and held her for a moment. But she did not say anything. There was +nothing to say. + +With the opening up of the spring came increased movement and activity +among the troops. The beach and the sand dunes round La Panne were +filled with drilling men, Belgium's new army. Veterans of the winter, +at rest behind the lines, sat in the sun and pared potatoes for the +midday meal. Convalescents from the hospital appeared in motley +garments from the Ambulance Ocean and walked along the water front, +where the sea, no longer gray and sullen, rolled up in thin white lines +of foam to their very feet. Winter straw came out of wooden sabots. +Winter-bitten hands turned soft. Canal boats blossomed out with great +washings. And the sentry at the gun emplacement in the sand up the +beach gave over gathering sticks for his fire, and lay, when no one was +about, in a hollow in the dune, face to the sky. + +So spring came to that small fragment of Belgium which had been saved, +spring and hope. Soon now the great and powerful Allies would drive out +the Huns, and all would be as it had been. Splendid rumors were about. +The Germans were already yielding at La Bassee. There was to be a great +drive along the entire Front, and hopefully one would return home in +time for the spring planting. + +A sort of informal council took place occasionally in the little house. +Maps replaced the dressings on the table in the _salle a manger_, and +junior officers, armed with Sara Lee's box of pins, thrust back the +enemy at various points and proved conclusively that his position was +untenable. They celebrated these paper victories with Sara Lee's tea, +and went away the better for an hour or so of hope and tea and a girl's +soft voice and quiet eyes. + +Now and then there was one, of course, who lagged behind his fellows, +with a yearning tenderness in his face that a glance from the girl would +have quickly turned to love. But Sara Lee had no coquetry. When, as +occasionally happened, there was a bit too much fervor when her hand was +kissed, she laid it where it belonged--to loneliness and the spring--and +became extremely maternal and very, very kind. Which--both of them--are +death blows to young love. + +The winter floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats +began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire. And +with the lessening of the flood came new activities to the little house. +The spring drive was coming. + +There was spring indeed, everywhere but in Henri's heart. + +Day after day messages were left with Sara Lee by men in +uniform--sometimes letters, sometimes a word. And these she faithfully +cared for until such time as Jean came for them. Now and then it was +Henri who came, but when he stayed in the village he made his +headquarters at the house of the mill. There, with sacking over the +windows, he wrote his reports by lamplight, reports which Jean carried +back to the villa in the fishing village by the sea. + +However, though he no longer came and went as before, Henri made frequent +calls at the house of mercy. But now he came in the evenings, when the +place was full of men. Sara Lee was doing more dressings than before. +The semi-armistice of winter was over, and there were nights when a row +of wounded men lay on the floor in the little _salle a manger_ and waited, +in a sort of dreadful quiet, to be taken away. + +Rumors came of hard fighting farther along the line, and sometimes, on +nights when the clouds hung low, the flashes of the guns at Ypres looked +like incessant lightning. From the sand dunes at Nieuport and Dixmude +there was firing also, and the air seemed sometimes to be full of +scouting planes. + +The Canadians were moving toward the Front at Neuve Chapelle at that +time. And one day a lorry, piled high with boxes, rolled and thumped +down the street, and halted by Rene. + +"Rather think we are lost," explained the driver, grinning sheepishly +at Rene. + +There were four boys in khaki on the truck, and not a word of French +among them. Sara Lee, who rolled her own bandages now, heard the +speech and came out. + +"Good gracious!" she said, and gave an alarmed glance at the sky. But +it was the noon hour, when every good German abandons war for food, and +the sky was empty. + +The boys cheered perceptibly. Here was at last some one who spoke a +Christian tongue. + +"Must have taken the wrong turning, miss," said one of them, saluting. + +"Where do you want to go?" she asked. "You are very close to the Belgian +Front here. It is not at all safe." + +They all saluted; then, staring at her curiously, told her. + +"Dear me!" said Sara Lee. "You are a long way off. And a long way +from home too." + +They smiled. They looked, with their clean-shaven faces, absurdly young +after the bearded Belgian soldiers. + +"I am an American, too," said Sara Lee with just a touch of homesickness +in her voice. She had been feeling lonely lately. "If you have time to +come in I could give you luncheon. Rene can tell us if any German air +machines come over." + +Would they come in? Indeed, yes! They crawled down off the lorry, and +took off their caps, and ate every particle of food in the house. And, +though they were mutely curious at first, soon they were asking questions. +How long had she been there? What did she do? Wasn't it dangerous? + +"Not so dangerous as it looks," said Sara Lee, smiling. "The Germans +seldom bother the town now. It is not worth while." + +Later on they went over the house. They climbed the broken staircase +and stared toward the break in the poplar trees, from the roofless floor +above. + +"Some girl!" one of them said in an undertone. + +The others were gazing intently toward the Front. Never before had they +been so close. Never had they seen a ruined town. War, until now, had +been a thing of Valcartier, of a long voyage, of much drill in the mud +at Salisbury Plain. Now here they saw, at their feet, what war could do. + +"Damn them!" said one of the boys suddenly. "Fellows, we'll get back at +them soon." + +So they went away, a trifle silent and very grateful. But before they +left they had a glimpse of Sara Lee's room, with the corner gone, and +Harvey's picture on the mantel. + +"Some girl!" they repeated as they drove up the street. It was the +tribute of inarticulate youth. + +Sara Lee went back to her bandages and her thoughts. She had not a great +deal of time to think, what with the officers stopping in to fight their +paper-and-pin battles, and with letters to write and dressings to make +and supplies to order. She began to have many visitors--officers from +the French lines, correspondents on tours of the Front, and once even an +English cabinet member, who took six precious lumps of sugar in his tea +and dug a piece of shell out of the wall with his pocketknife as a +souvenir. + +Once a British aviator brought his machine down in the field by the mill, +and walked over with the stiff stride of a man who has been for hours in +the air. She gave him tea and bread and butter, and she learned then of +the big fighting that was to come. + +When she was alone she thought about Henri. Generally her thoughts were +tender; always they were grateful. But she was greatly puzzled. He had +said that he loved her. Then, if he loved her, why should he not be +gentle and kind to her? Men did not hurt the women they loved. And +because she was hurt, she was rather less than just. He had not asked +her to marry him. He had said that he loved her, but that was different. +And the insidious poison of Harvey's letter about foreigners began to +have its effect. + +The truth was that she was tired. The strain was telling on her. And +at a time when she needed every moral support Henri had drawn off behind +a wall of misery, and all her efforts at a renewal of their old +friendship only brought up against a sort of stony despair. + +There were times, too, when she grew a little frightened. She was so +alone. What if Henri went away altogether? What if he took away the +little car, and his protection, and the supplies that came so regularly? +It was not a selfish fear. It was for her work that she trembled. + +For the first time she realized her complete dependence on his good +will. And now and then she felt that it would be good to see Harvey +again, and be safe from all worry, and not have to depend on a man who +loved her as Henri did. For that she never doubted. Inexperienced as +she was in such matters, she knew that the boy loved her. Just how +wildly she did not know until later, too late to undo what the madness +had done. + +Then one day a strange thing happened. It had been raining, and when in +the late afternoon the sun came out it gleamed in the puddles that filled +the shell holes in the road and set to a red blaze the windows of the +house of the mill. + +First, soaring overhead, came a half dozen friendly planes. Next, the +eyes of the enemy having thus been blinded, so to speak, there came a +regiment of fresh troops, swinging down the street for all the world as +though the German Army was safely drinking beer in Munich. They passed +Rene, standing open-mouthed in the doorway, and one wag of a Belgian boy, +out of sheer joy of spring, did the goose step as he passed the little +sentry and, head screwed round in the German salute, crossed his eyes +over his impudent nose. + +Came, then, the planes. Came the regiment, which turned off into a field +and there spread itself, like a snake uncoiling, into a double line. +Came a machine, gray and battered, containing officers. Came a general +with gold braid on his shoulder, and a pleasant smile. Came the strange +event. + +The general found Sara Lee in the _salle a manger_ cutting cotton into +three-inch squares, and he stood in the doorway and bowed profoundly. + +"Mademoiselle Kennedy?" he inquired. + +Sara Lee replied to that, and then gave a quick thought to her larder. +Because generals usually meant tea. But this time at last, Sara Lee was +to receive something, not to give. She turned very white when she was +told, and said she had not deserved it; she was indeed on the verge of +declining, not knowing that there are certain things one does not +decline. But Marie brought her hat and jacket--a smiling, tremulous +Marie--and Sara Lee put them on. + +The general was very tall. In her short skirt and with flying hair she +looked like a child beside him as they walked across the fields. +Suddenly Sara Lee was terribly afraid she was going to cry. + +The troops stood rigidly at attention. And a cold wind flapped Sara +Lee's skirts, and the guns hammered at Ypres, and the general blew on +his fingers. And soon a low open car came down the street and the +King got out. Sara Lee watched him coming--his tall, slightly stooped +figure, his fair hair, his plain blue uniform. Sara Lee had never seen +a king before, and she had always thought of them as sitting up on a +sort of platform--never as trudging through spring mud. + +"What shall I do?" she asked nervously. + +"He will shake hands, mademoiselle. Bow as he approaches. That is all." + +The amazing interlude, indeed! With Sara Lee being decorated by the +King, and troops drawn up to do her honor, and over all the rumbling of +the great guns. A palpitating and dazed Sara Lee, when the decoration +was fastened to her black jacket, a Sara Lee whose hat blew off at +exactly the worst moment and rolled, end on, like a hoop, into a puddle. + +But, oddly, she did not mind about the hat. She had only one conscious +thought just then. She hoped that, wherever Uncle James might be in that +world of the gone before, he might know what was happening to her--or +even see it. He would have liked it. He had believed in the Belgians and +in the King. And now--the King did not go at once. He went back to the +little house and went through it. And he and one of his generals climbed +to the upper floor, and the King stood looking out silently toward the +land he loved and which for a time was no longer his. + +He came down after a time, stooping his tall figure in the low doorway, +and said he would like some tea. So Marie put the kettle on, and Sara +Lee and the King talked. It was all rather dazing. Every now and then +she forgot certain instructions whispered her by the general, and after +a time the King said: "Why do you do that, mademoiselle?" + +For Sara Lee, with an intent face and moving lips, had been stepping +backward. + +Sara Lee flushed to the eyes. + +"Because, sire, I was told to remain at a distance of six feet." + +"But we are being informal," said the King, smiling. "And it is a very +little room." + +Sara Lee, who had been taught in the schoolroom that kings are usurpers +of the divine rights of the people--Sara Lee lost just a bit of her +staunch democracy that day. She saw the King of the Belgians for what +he really was, a ruler, but a symbol as well. He represented his +country, as the Flag she loved represented hers. The flag was America, +the King was Belgium. That was all. + +It was a very humble and flushed Sara Lee who watched the gray car go +flying up the street later on. She went in and told the whole story to +Harvey's picture, but it was difficult to feel that he was hearing. His +eyes were turned away and his face was set and stern. And, at last, she +gave it up. This thing which meant so much to her would never mean +anything to Harvey. She knew, even then, what he would say. + +"Decorate you! I should think they might. Medals are cheap. Everybody +over there is getting medals. You feed their men and risk your life and +your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on. It's cheap at the +price." + +And later on those were Harvey's very words. But to be fair to him they +were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal. + +That evening Henri came again. He was, for the first time, his gay self +again--at least on the surface. It was as though, knowing what he was +going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never +returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt. He was everywhere in +the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery +nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water +for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing. + +"If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle," he would say, "with +one turn of the bandage over the elbow--" + +"But it won't hold that way." + +"You say that to me, mademoiselle? I who have taught you all you know +of bandaging?" + +They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee's way. + +He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was +painful. It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans: + +"Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the +right? Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!" + +Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply. + +"I cannot think. I--in my left hand, _monsieur le capitaine_?" + +"In your left hand." + +The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table +to listen. + +"I do not know, monsieur." + +"Idiot!" Henri would say. "Your right elbow, man!" + +And the dressing was done. + +He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed. He +would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly. And pain seemed to +leave the little room when he entered it. + +It was that night that Henri disappeared. + + + + +XVII + + +There was a question to settle, and it was for Henri to do it. Two +questions indeed. One was a matter of engineering, and before the bottom +fell out of his world Henri had studied engineering. The second was +more serious. + +For the first, this thing had happened. Of all the trenches to be held, +the Belgians had undeniably the worst. Properly speaking they were not +trenches at all, but shallow gutters dug a foot or two into the saturated +ground and then built man-high with bags of earth or sand. Here and +there they were not dug at all, but were purely shelters, against a +railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from +the deserted track behind which they were hidden. + +For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow +lake. By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea +and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy. The battle front +was a reeking pond. The opposing armies lived like duck hunters in a +swamp. To dig a foot was to encounter water. Machine guns here and +there sat but six inches above the yellow flood. Men lay in pools to +fire them. To reach outposts were narrow paths built first of bags of +earth--a life, sometimes for every bag. And, when this filling was +sufficient, on top a path of fascines, bound together in bundles, made +a footway. + +For this reason the Belgians approached their trenches not through deep +cuts which gave them shelter but with no other cover than the darkness +of night. During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off +from any connection with the world behind them. Food, cooked miles away, +came up at night, cold and unappetizing. For water, having exhausted +their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them, +ill-smelling and reeking of fever. Water carts trundled forward at +night, but often they were far too few. + +The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety, +had been trained to fight. In a way they had been trained to fight a +losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on +the east. But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all, +condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy +artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the +courage of a less desperate people. + +To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a +fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy +that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea, +spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where +fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in +unfordable wallows of mud and water. + +Henri then, knowing all this--none better--had his first question to +settle, which was this: As spring advanced the flood had commenced to +recede. Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind +the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort. In the deeper +ones, the bottom of the trench appeared for the first time. + +On a day previous, however, the water had commenced to come back. There +had been no rain, but little by little in a certain place yellow, +ill-smelling little streams began to flow sluggishly into the trenches. +Seeped, rather than flowed. At first the Belgian officers laid it to +that bad luck that had so persistently pursued them. Then they held a +conference in the small brick house with its maps and its pine tables +and its picture of an American harvester on the wall, which was now +headquarters. + +Sitting under the hanging lamp, with an orderly making coffee at a stove +in the corner, they talked it over. Henri was there, silent before his +elders, but intently listening. And at last they turned to him. + +"I can go and find out," he said quietly. "It is possible, though I do +not see how." He smiled. "They are, I think, only drying themselves at +our expense. It is a bit of German humor." + +But the cry of "Calais in a month!" was in the air, and undoubtedly there +had been renewed activity along the German Front near the sea. The +second question to be answered was dependent on the first. + +Had the Germans, as Henri said, merely shifted the water, by some clever +engineering, to the Belgian trenches, or was there some bigger thing on +hand? What, for instance, if they were about to attempt to drain the +inundation, smash the Belgian line, and march by the Dunkirk road to +Calais? + +So, that night while Henri jested about Pierre's right elbow and watched +Sara Lee for a smile, he had difficult work before him. + +Sometime near midnight he slipped away. Jean was waiting in the street, +and wrung the boy's hand. + +"I could go with you," he said rather wistfully. + +"You don't speak their ugly tongue." + +"I could be mute--shell shock. You could be helping me back." + +But Henri only held his hand a moment and shook his head. + +"You would double the risk, and--what good would it do?" + +"Two pistols are better than one." + +"I have two pistols, my friend," said Henri, and turned the corner of +the building, past the boards Rene had built in, toward the house of +the mill. But once out of Jean's sight he stopped a moment, his hand +resting against that frail wall to Sara Lee's room. It was his good-by +to her. + +For three days Jean stayed in the village. He slept at the mill, but +he came for his meals to the little house. Once he went to Dunkirk and +brought out provisions and the mail, including Sara Lee's monthly +allowance. But mostly he sat in the mill house and waited. He could +not read. + +"You do not eat at all, Jean," Sara Lee said to him more than once. And +twice she insisted that he was feverish, and placed a hand that was +somewhat marred with much peeling of vegetables, on his forehead. + +"I am entirely well, mademoiselle," he would say, and draw back. He had +anxieties enough just now without being reminded by the touch of a +woman's hand of all that he had lost. + +Long before that Sara Lee had learned not to question Jean about Henri's +absences. Even his knowledge, now, that she knew something of Henri's +work, did not remove the barrier. So Sara Lee waited, as did Jean, but +more helplessly. She knew something was wrong, but she had not Jean's +privilege of going at night to the trenches and there waiting, staring +over the gray water with its ugly floating shadows, for Henri to emerge +from the flood. + +Something rather forced and mechanical there was those days in her work. +Her smile was rather set. She did not sleep well. And one night she +violated Henri's orders and walked across the softened fields to beyond +the poplar trees. + +There was nothing to see except an intermittent flash from the clouds +that hung low over the sea at Nieuport, where British gunboats were +bombarding the coast; or the steady streaks from the Ypres salient, where +night and day the guns never rested. + +From the Belgian trenches, fifteen hundred feet or so away, there was no +sound. A German electric signal blazed its message in code, and went out +quickly. Now and then a rifle shot, thin and sharp, rang out from where, +under the floating starlights, keen eyes on each side watched for +movements on the other. + +Sara Lee sat down under a tree and watched for a while. Then she found +herself crying softly. It was all so sad, and useless, and cruel. And +somewhere there ahead was Henri, Henri with his blue eyes, his smile, +the ardor of his young arms--Henri, who had been to her many friends. + +Sara Lee had never deceived herself about Henri. She loved him. But +she was quite certain she was not in love with him, which is entirely +different. She knew that this last was impossible, because she was +engaged to Harvey. What was probably the truth was that she loved them +both in entirely different ways. Men have always insisted on such +possibilities, and have even asserted their right, now and then, to +love two women at the same time. But women are less frank with +themselves. + +And, in such cases, there is no grand passion. There are tenderness, +and the joy of companionship, and sometimes a touching dependence. But +it is not a love that burns with a white fire. + +Perhaps Sara Lee was one of those women who are always loved more than +they love. There are such women, not selfish, not seeking love, but +softly feminine, kind, appealing and genuine. Men need, after all, but +an altar on which to lay tribute. And the high, remote white altar that +was Sara Lee had already received the love of two strong men. + +She was not troubling her head that night, however, about being an altar, +of a sort. She cried a little at first, because she was terrified for +Henri and because Jean's face was growing pinched and gray. Then she +cried very hard, prone on the ground and face down, because Henri was +young, and all of life should have been before him. And he was missing. + +Henri was undeniably missing. Even the King knew it now, and set down +in his heart, among the other crosses there, Henri's full name, which +we may not know, and took to pacing his little study and looking out at +the spring sea. + +That night Marie, having ladled to the bottom of her kettle, found Sara +Lee missing, and was told by Rene of the direction she had taken. Marie, +muttering to herself, set out to find her, and almost stumbled over her +in the wood by the road. + +She sat down on the ground without a word and placed a clumsy hand on +the girl's shoulder. It was not until Sara Lee ceased sobbing that +she spoke: + +"It is far from hopeless, mademoiselle." + +They had by now established a system of communication. Sara Lee spoke +her orders in halting French, but general conversation was beyond her. +And much hearing of English had taught the Belgian girl enough to follow. + +Sara Lee replied, then, in smothered English: + +"He is gone, Marie. He will never come back." + +"Who can tell? There are many missing who are not dead." + +Sara Lee shuddered. For spies were not made prisoners. They had no +rights as prisoners of war. Their own governments did not protect them. +To Henri capture was death. But she could not say this to Marie. + +Marie sat softly stroking Sara Lee's hair, her own eyes tragic and +tearless. + +"Even if it were--the other," she said, "it is not so bad to die for +one's country. The thing that is terrible, that leaves behind it only +bitterness and grief and no hope, mademoiselle, even with many prayers, +is that one has died a traitor." + +She coaxed Sara Lee back at last. They went through the fields, for +fresh troops were being thrown into the Belgian trenches and the street +was full of men. Great dray horses were dragging forward batteries, the +heavy guns sliding and slipping In the absence of such information as +only Henri had been wont to bring it was best to provide for the worst. + +The next day Jean did not come over for breakfast, and Rene handed Sara +Lee a note. + +"I am going to England," Jean had written that dawn in the house of the +mill. "And from there to Holland. I can get past the barrier and shall +work down toward the Front. I must learn what has happened, mademoiselle. +As you know, if he was captured, there is no hope. But there is an +excellent chance that he is in hiding, unable to get back. Look for me +in two weeks." + +There followed what instructions he had given as to her supplies, which +would come as before. Beautifully written in Jean's small fine hand, it +spelled for Sara Lee the last hope. She read Jean's desperation through +its forced cheerfulness. And she faced for the first time a long period +of loneliness in the crowded little house. + +She tried very hard to fill the gap that Henri had left--tried to joke +with the men in her queer bits of French; was more smiling than ever, +for fear she might be less. But now and then in cautious whispers she +heard Henri's name, and her heart contracted with very terror. + +A week. Two weeks. Twice the village was bombarded severely, but the +little house escaped by a miracle. Marie considered it the same miracle +that left holy pictures unhurt on the walls of destroyed houses, and +allowed the frailest of old ebony and rosewood crucifixes to remain +unharmed. + +Great generals, often as tall as they were great, stopped at the little +house to implore Sara Lee to leave. But she only shook her head. + +"Not unless you send me away," she always said; "and that would break +my heart." + +"But to move, mademoiselle, only to the next village!" they would +remonstrate, and as a final argument: "You are too valuable to risk an +injury." + +"I must remain here," she said. And some of them thought they +understood. When an unusually obdurate officer came along, Sara Lee +would insist on taking him to the cellar. + +"You see!" she would say, holding her candle high. "It is a nice cellar, +warm and dry. It is"--proudly--"one of the best cellars in the village. +It is a really homelike cellar." + +The officer would go away then, and send her cigarettes for her men or, +as in more than one case, a squad with bags of earth and other things +to protect the little house as much as possible. After a time the little +house began to represent the ideas in protection and camouflage, then in +its early stages, of many different minds. + +Rene shot a man there one night, a skulking figure working its way in +the shadows up the street. It was just before dawn, and Rene, who was +sleepless those days, like the others, called to him. The man started +to run, dodging behind walls. But Rene ran faster and killed him. + +He was a German in Belgian peasant's clothing. But he wore the great +shoes of the German soldier, and he had been making a rough map of the +Belgian trenches. + +Sara Lee did not see him. But when she heard the shot she went out, and +Rene told her breathlessly. + +From that time on her terrors took the definite form of Henri lying dead +in a ruined street, and being buried, as this man was buried, without +ceremony and without a prayer, in some sodden spring field. + + + + +XVIII + + +As the spring advanced Harvey grew increasingly bitter; grew morbid +and increasingly self-conscious also. He began to think that people were +smiling behind his back, and when they asked about Sara Lee he met with +almost insulting brevity what he felt was half-contemptuous kindness. +He went nowhere, and worked all day and until late in the night. He did +well in his business, however, and late in March he received a +substantial raise in salary. He took it without enthusiasm, and told +Belle that night at dinner with apathy. + +After the evening meal it was now his custom to go to his room and there, +shut in, to read. He read no books on the war, and even the quarter +column entitled Salient Points of the Day's War News hardly received a +glance from him now. + +In the office when the talk turned to the war, as it did almost hourly, +he would go out or scowl over his letters. + +"Harvey's hit hard," they said there. + +"He's acting like a rotten cub," was likely to be the next sentence. +But sometimes it was: "Well, what'd you expect? Everything ready to get +married, and the girl beating it for France without notice! I'd be sore +myself." + +On the day of the raise in salary his sister got the children to bed and +straightened up the litter of small garments that seemed always to +bestrew the house, even to the lower floor. Then she went into Harvey's +room. Coat and collar off, he was lying on the bed, but not reading. +His book lay beside him, and with his arms under his head he was staring +at the ceiling. + +She did not sit down beside him on the bed. They were an undemonstrative +family, and such endearments as Belle used were lavished on her children. +But her eyes were kind, and a little nervous. + +"Do you mind talking a little, Harvey?" + +"I don't feel like talking much. I'm tired, I guess. But go on. What +is it? Bills?" + +She came to him in her constant financial anxieties, and always he was +ready to help her out. But his tone now was gruff. A slight flush of +resentment colored her cheeks. + +"Not this time, Harve. I was just thinking about things." + +"Sit down." + +She sat on the straight chair beside the bed, the chair on which, in +neat order, Harvey placed his clothing at night, his shoes beneath, his +coat over the back. + +"I wish you'd go out more, Harvey." + +"Why? Go out and talk to a lot of driveling fools who don't care for me +any more than I do for them?" + +"That's not like you, Harve." + +"Sorry." His tone softened. "I don't care much about going round, +Belle. That's all. I guess you know why." + +[Illustration: That Henri might be living, somewhere--that some day the +Belgians might go home again.] + +"So does everybody else." + +He sat up and looked at her. + +"Well, suppose they do? I can't help that, can I? When a fellow has +been jilted--" + +"You haven't been jilted." + +He lay down again, his arms under his head; and Belle knew that his eyes +were on Sara Lee's picture on his dresser. + +"It amounts to the same thing." + +"Harvey," Belle said hesitatingly, "I've brought Sara Lee's report from +the Ladies' Aid. May I read it to you?" + +"I don't want to hear it." Then: "Give it here. I'll look at it." + +He read it carefully, his hands rather unsteady. So many men given soup, +so many given chocolate. So many dressings done. And at the bottom +Sara Lee's request for more money--an apologetic, rather breathless +request, and closing, rather primly with this: + +"I am sure that the society will feel, from the above report, that the +work is worth while, and worth continuing. I am only sorry that I +cannot send photographs of the men who come for aid, but as they come +at night it is impossible. I enclose, however, a small picture of the +house, which is now known as the little house of mercy." + +"At night!" said Harvey. "So she's there alone with a lot of ignorant +foreigners at night. Why the devil don't they come in the daytime?" + +"Here's the picture, Harvey." + +He got up then, and carried the tiny photograph over close to the gas +jet. There he stood for a long time, gazing at it. There was Rene +with his rifle and his smile. There was Marie in her white apron. And +in the center, the wind blowing her soft hair, was Sara Lee. + +Harvey groaned and Belle came over and putting her hand on his shoulder +looked at the photograph with him. + +"Do you know what I think, Harvey?" she said. "I think Sara Lee is right +and you are wrong." + +He turned on her almost savagely. + +"That's not the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor +devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn +for me she'd never have gone. That's all." + +He returned to a moody survey of the picture. + +"Look at it!" he said. "She insists that she's safe. But that fellow's +got a gun. What for, if she's so safe? And look at that house! There's +a corner shot away; and it's got no upper floor. Safe!" + +Belle held out her hand. + +"I must return the picture to the society, Harve." + +"Not just yet," he said ominously. "I want to look at it. I haven't +got it all yet. And I'll return it myself--with a short speech." + +"Harvey!" + +"Well," he retorted, "why shouldn't I tell that lot of old +scandalmongers what I think of them? They'll sit here safe at home and +beg money--God, one of them was in the office to-day!--and send a young +girl over to--You'd better get out, Belle. I'm not company for any one +to-night." + +She turned away, but he came after her, and suddenly putting his arms +round her he kissed her. + +"Don't worry about me," he said. "I'm done with wearing my heart on my +sleeve. She looks happy, so I guess I can be." He released her. "Good +night. I'll return the picture." + +He sat up very late, alternately reading the report and looking at the +picture. It was unfortunate that Sara Lee had smiled into the camera. +Coupled with her blowing hair it had given her a light-heartedness, a +sort of joyousness, that hurt him to the soul. + +He made some mad plans after he had turned out the lights--to flirt +wildly with the unattached girls he knew; to go to France and confront +Sara Lee and then bring her home. Or--He had found a way. He lay +there and thought it over, and it bore the test of the broken sleep that +followed. In the morning, dressing, he wondered he had not thought of +it before. He was more cheerful at breakfast than he had been for weeks. + + + + +XIX + + +In the little house of mercy two weeks went by, and then a third. +Soldiers marching out to the trenches sometimes wore flowers tucked +gayly in their caps. More and more Allied aeroplanes were in the +air. Sometimes, standing in the streets, Sara Lee saw one far overhead, +while balloon-shaped clouds of bursting shells hung far below it. + +Once or twice in the early morning a German plane, flying so low that +one could easily see the black cross on each wing, reconnoitered the +village for wagon trains or troops. Always they found it empty. + +Hope had almost fled now. In the afternoons Marie went to the ruined +church, and there knelt before the heap of marble and masonry that had +once been the altar, and prayed. And Sara Lee, who had been brought up +a Protestant and had never before entered a Catholic church, took to +going there too. In some strange fashion the peace of former days +seemed to cling to the little structure, roofless as it was. On quiet +days its silence was deeper than elsewhere. On days of much firing the +sound from within its broken walls seemed deadened, far away. + +Marie burned a candle as she prayed, for that soul in purgatory which she +had once loved, and now pitied. Sara Lee burned no candle, but she +knelt, sometimes beside Marie, sometimes alone, and prayed for many +things: that Henri should be living, somewhere; that the war might end; +that that day there would be little wounding; that some day the Belgians +might go home again; and that back in America Harvey might grow to +understand and forgive her. And now and then she looked into the very +depths of her soul, and on those days she prayed that her homeland +might, before it was too late, see this thing as she was seeing it. The +wanton waste of it all, the ghastly cruelty the Germans had brought into +this war. + +Sara Lee's vague thinking began to crystallize. This war was not +a judgment sent from on high to a sinful world. It was the wicked +imposition of one nation on other nations. It was national. It was +almost racial. But most of all it was a war of hate on the German +side. She had never believed in hate. There were ugly passions in the +world--jealousy, envy, suspicion; but not hate. The word was not in her +rather limited vocabulary. + +There was no hate on the part of the men she knew. The officers who +stopped in on their way to and from the trenches were gentlemen and +soldiers. They were determined and grave; they resented, they even +loathed. But they did not hate. The little Belgian soldiers were +bewildered, puzzled, desperately resentful. But of hate, as translated +into terms of frightfulness, they had no understanding. + +Yet from the other side were coming methods of war so wantonly cruel, +so useless save as inflicting needless agony, as only hate could devise. +No strategic value justified them. They were spontaneous outgrowths of +venom, nursed during the winter deadlock and now grown to full size and +destructive power. + +The rumor of a gas that seared and killed came to the little house as +early as February. In March there came the first victims, poor writhing +creatures, deprived of the boon of air, their seared lungs collapsed +and agonized, their faces drawn into masks of suffering. Some of them +died in the little house, and even after death their faces held the +imprint of horror. + +To Sara Lee, burying her own anxiety under the cloak of service, there +came new and terrible thoughts. This was not war. The Germans had sent +their clouds of poisoned gas across the inundation, but had made no +attempt to follow. This was killing, for the lust of killing; suffering, +for the joy of inflicting pain. + +And a day or so later she heard of The Hague Convention. She had not +known of it before. Now she learned of that gentlemen's agreement among +nations, and that it said: "The use of poison or of poisoned weapons is +forbidden." She pondered that carefully, trying to think dispassionately. +Now and then she received a copy of a home newspaper, and she saw that +the use of poison gases was being denied by Germans in America and set +down to rumor and hysteria. + +So, on a cold spring day, she sat down at the table in the _salle a manger_ +and wrote a letter to the President, beginning "_Dear Sir_"; and telling +what she knew of poison gas. She also, on second thought, wrote one to +Andrew Carnegie, who had built a library in her city. She felt that +the expense to him of sending some one over to investigate would not be +prohibitive, and something must be done. + +She never heard from either of her letters, but she felt better for +having written them. And a day or two later she received from Mrs. +Travers, in England, a small supply of the first gas masks of the war. +Simple and primitive they were, those first masks; useless, too, as it +turned out--a square of folded gauze, soaked in some solution and then +dried, with tapes to tie it over the mouth and nose. To adjust them the +soldiers had but to stoop and wet them in the ever-present water in +the trench, and then to tie them on. + +Sara Lee gave them out that night, and there was much mirth in the little +house, such mirth as there had not been since Henri went away. The +Belgians called it a _bal masque_, and putting them on bowed before one +another and requested dances, and even flirted coyly with each other over +their bits of white gauze. And in the very middle of the gayety some +one propounded one of Henri's idiotic riddles; and Sara Lee went across +to her little room and closed the door and stood there with her eyes +shut, for fear she would scream. + +Then, one day, coming out of the little church, she saw the low broken +gray car turn in at the top of the street and come slowly, so very +slowly, toward her. There were two men in it. + +One was Henri. + +She ran, stumbling because of tears, up the street. It was Henri! There +was no mistake. There he sat beside Jean, brushed and very neat; and +very, very white. + +"Mademoiselle!" he said, and came very close to crying himself when he +saw her face. He was greatly excited. His sunken eyes devoured her as +she ran toward him. Almost he held out his arms. But he could not do +that, even if he would, for one was bandaged to his side. + +It is rather sad to record how many times Sara Lee wept during her +amazing interlude. For here is another time. She wept for joy and +wretchedness. She stood on the running board and cried and smiled. And +Jean winked his one eye rapidly. + +"This idiot, mademoiselle," he said gruffly, "this maniac--he would not +remain in Calais, with proper care. He must come on here. And rapidly. +Could he have taken the wheel from me we should have been here an hour +ago. But for once I have an advantage." + +The car jolted to the little house, and Jean helped Henri out. Such a +strange Henri, smiling and joyous, and walking at a crawl, even with +Jean's support. He protested violently against being put to bed, and +when he found himself led into Sara Lee's small room he openly rebelled. + +"Never!" he said stubbornly, halting in the doorway. "This is +mademoiselle's boudoir. Her drawing-room as well. I am going to the +mill house and--" + +He staggered. + +So Sara Lee's room had a different occupant for a time, a thin and +fine-worn young Belgian, who yielded to Sara Lee when Jean gave up in +despair, and who proceeded, most unmanfully, to faint as soon as he was +between the blankets. + +If Sara Lee hoped to nurse Henri she was doomed to disappointment. Jean +it was who took over the care of the boy, a Jean who now ate prodigiously, +and whistled occasionally, and slept at night robed in his blanket on the +floor beside Henri's bed, lest that rebellious invalid get up and try to +move about. + +On the first night, with the door closed, against Henri's entreaties, +while the little house received its evening complement of men, and with +Henri lying back on his pillows, fresh dressed as to the wounds in his +arm and chest, fed with Sara Lee's daintiest, and resting, Jean found the +boy's eyes resting on the mantel. + +"Dear and obstinate friend," said Henri, "do you wish me to be happy?" + +"You shall not leave the room or your bed. That is arranged for." + +"How?" demanded Henri with interest. + +"Because I have hidden away your trousers." + +Henri laughed, but he sobered quickly. + +"If you wish me to be happy," he said, "take away that American +photograph. But first, please to bring it here." + +Jean brought it, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. +And Henri lay back and studied it. + +"It is mademoiselle's fiance," he said. + +Jean grunted. + +"Look at it, Jean," Henri said in his half-bantering tone, with despair +beneath it; "and then look at me. Or no--remembering me as I was when +I was a man. He is better, eh? It is a good face. But there is a jaw, +a--Do you think he will be kind to her as she requires? She requires +much kindness. Some women--" + +He broke off and watched Jean anxiously. + +"A half face!" Jean said scornfully. "The pretty view! As for +kindness--" He put the photograph face down on the table. "I knew +once a man in Belgium who married an American. At Antwerp. They were +most unhappy." + +Henri smiled. + +"You are lying," he said with boyish pleasure in his own astuteness. +"You knew no such couple. You are trying to make me resigned." + +But quite a little later, when Jean thought he was asleep, he said: +"I shall never be resigned." + +So at last spring had come, and Henri and the great spring drive. The +Germans had not drained the inundation, nor had they broken through to +Calais. And it is not to be known here how much this utter failure had +been due to the information Henri had secured before he was wounded. + +One day in his bed Henri received a visit from the King, and was left +lying with a decoration on his breast and a beatific, if somewhat +sheepish, expression on his face. And one night the village was +bombarded, and on Henri's refusing to be moved to the cellar Sara Lee +took up a determined stand in his doorway, until at last he made a most +humiliating move for safety. + +Bit by bit Sara Lee got the story, its bare detail from Henri, its +courage and sheer recklessness from Jean. It would, for instance, run +like this, with Henri in a chair perhaps, and cutting dressings--since +that might be done with one hand--and Sara Lee, sleeves rolled up and +a great bowl of vegetables before her: + +"And when you got through the water, Henri?" she would ask: "What then?" + +"It was quite simple. They had put up some additional wire, however--" + +"Where?" + +"There was a break," he would explain. "I have told you--between their +trenches. I had used it before to get through." + +"But how could you go through?" + +"Like a snake," he would say, smiling. "Very flat and wriggling. I have +eaten of the dirt, mademoiselle." + +Then he would stop and cut, very awkwardly, with his left hand. + +"Go on," she would prompt him. "But they had put barbed wire there. Is +that it? So you could not get through?" + +"With tin cans on it, and stones in the cans. I thought I had removed +them all, but there was one left. So they heard me." + +More cutting and a muttered French expletive. Henri was not a +particularly patient cripple. And apparently there was an end to the +story. + +"For goodness' sake," Sara Lee would exclaim despairingly; "so they +heard you! That isn't all, is it?" + +"It was almost all," he would say with his boyish smile. + +"And they shot at you?" + +"Even better. They shot me. That was this one." And he would point to +his arm. + +More silence, more cutting, a gathering exasperation on Sara Lee's part. + +"Are you going on or not?" + +"Then I pretended to be one of them, mademoiselle. I speak German as +French. I pretended not to be hurt, but to be on a reconnoissance. And +I got into the trench and we had a talk in the darkness. It was most +interesting. Only if they had shown a light they would have seen that +I was wounded." + +By bits, not that day, but after many days, she got the story. In the +next trench he slipped a sling over the wounded arm and, as a Bavarian +on his way to the dressing station, got back. + +"I had some trouble," he confessed one day. "Now and then one would +offer to go back with me. And I did not care for assistance!" + +But sometime later there was trouble. She was four days getting to that +part of it. He had got behind the lines by that time, and he knew that +in some way suspicion had been roused. He was weak by that time, and +could not go far. He had lain hidden, for a day and part of a night, +without water, in a destroyed barn, and then had escaped. + +He got into the Belgian costume as before, but he could not wear a sling +for his wounded arm. He got the peasant to thrust his helpless right +hand into his pocket, and for two days he made a close inspection of +what was going on. But fever had developed, and on the third night, +half delirious, when he was spoken to by an officer he had replied, of +all tongues, in English. + +The officer shot him instantly in the chest. He fell and lay still and +the officer bent over him. In that moment Henri stabbed him with a +knife in his left hand. Men were coming from every direction, but he +got away--he did not clearly remember how. And at dawn he fell into +the Belgian farmhouse, apparently dying. + +Jean's story, on the other hand, was given early and with no hesitation. +He had crossed the border at Holland in civilian clothes, by the simple +expedient of bribing a sentry. He had got, with little difficulty, to +the farmhouse, and found Henri, now recovering but very weak; he was +lying hidden in a garret, and he was suffering from hunger and lack of +medical attention. In a wagon full of market stuff, Henri hidden in the +bed of it, they had got to the border again. And there Jean had, it +seemed, stabbed the sentry he had bribed before and driven on to neutral +soil. + +Not an unusual story, that of Henri and Jean. The journey across +Belgium in the springless farm wagon was the worst. They had had to +take roundabout lanes, avoiding the main highways. Fortunately, always +at night there were friendly houses, kind hands to lift Henri into warm +fire-lighted interiors. Many messages they had brought back, some of +cheer, but too often of tragedy, from the small farmsteads of Belgium. + +Then finally had been Holland, and the chartering of a boat--and at +last--"Here we are, and here we are, and here we are again," sang Henri, +chopping at his cotton and making a great show of cheerfulness before +Sara Lee. + +But with Jean sometimes he showed the black depression beneath. He +would never be a man again. He was done for. He gained strength so +slowly that he believed he was not gaining at all. He was not happy, +and the unhappy mend slowly. + +After the time he had asked Jean to take away Harvey's photograph he did +not recur to the subject, but he did not need to. Jean knew, perhaps +even better than Henri himself, that the boy was recklessly, hopelessly, +not quite rationally in love with the American girl. + +Also Henri was fretting about his work. Sometimes at night, following +Henri's instructions, Jean wandered quietly along roads and paths that +paralleled the Front. At such times his eyes were turned, not toward +the trenches, but toward that flat country which lay behind, still dotted +at that time with groves of trees, with canals overhung with pollard +willows, and with here and there a farmhouse that at night took on in +the starlight the appearance of being whole again. + +Singularly white and peaceful were those small steadings of Belgium +in the night hours--until cruel dawn showed them for what they +were--skeletons of dead homes, clothed only at night with wraithlike +roofs and chimneys; ghosts of houses, appearing between midnight and +cock crow. + +Jean had not Henri's eyes nor his recklessness nor his speed, for that +matter. Now and then he saw the small appearing and disappearing lights +on some small rise. He would reach the spot, with such shelter as +possible, to find only a sugar-beet field, neglected and unplowed. + +Then, one night, tragedy came to the little house of mercy. + + + + +XX + + +Harvey proceeded to put his plan into effect at once, with the simple +method of an essentially simple nature. The thing had become +intolerable; therefore it must end. + +On the afternoon following his talk with Belle he came home at three +o'clock. Belle heard him moving about in his room, and when she entered +it, after he had gone, she found that he had shaved and put on his best +suit. + +She smiled a little. It was like Harvey to be literal. He had said he +was going to go round and have a good time, and he was losing no time. +But in their restricted social life, where most of the men worked until +five o'clock or even later, there were fewer afternoon calls paid. +Belle wondered with mild sisterly curiosity into what arena Harvey was +about to fling his best hat. + +But though Harvey paid a call that afternoon it was not on any of the +young women he knew. He went to see Mrs. Gregory. She was at home--he +had arranged for that by telephone--and the one butler of the +neighborhood admitted him. It was a truculent young man, for all his +politeness, who confronted Mrs. Gregory in her drawing-room--a quietly +truculent young man, who came to the point while he was still shaking +hands. + +"You're not going to be glad to see me in a minute," he said in reply +to her greeting. + +"How can you know that?" + +"Because I've come to get you to do something you won't want to do." + +"We won't quarrel before we begin, then," she said pleasantly. "Because +I really never do anything I don't wish to do." + +But she gave him a second glance and her smile became a trifle forced. +She knew all about Harvey and Sara Lee. She had heard rumors of his +disapproval also. Though she was not a clever nor a very keen woman, +she saw what was coming and braced herself for it. + +Harvey had prepared in his mind a summary of his position, and he +delivered it with the rapidity and strength of a blow. + +"I know all about the Belgians, Mrs. Gregory," he said. "I'm sorry for +them. So is every one, I suppose. But I want to know if you think a +girl of twenty ought to be over there practically at the Front, and +alone?" He gave her time to reply. "Would you like to have your +daughter there, if you had one?" + +"Perhaps not, under ordinary circumstances. But this is war." + +"It is not our war." + +"Humanity," said Mrs. Gregory, remembering the phrase she had written +for a speech--"humanity has no nationality. It is of all men, for +all men." + +"That's men. Not women!" + +He got up and stood on the hearthrug. He was singularly reminiscent of +the time he had stood on Aunt Harriet's white fur rug and had told Sara +Lee she could not go. + +"Now see here, Mrs. Gregory," he said, "we'll stop beating about the +bush, if you don't mind. She's got to come home. She's coming, if I +have to go and get her!" + +"You needn't look at me so fiercely. I didn't send her. It was her own +idea." + +Harvey sneered. + +"No," he said slowly. "But I notice your society publishes her reports +in the papers, and that the names of the officers are rarely missing." + +Mrs. Gregory colored. + +"We must have publicity to get money," she said. "It is hard to get. +Sometimes I have had to make up the deficit out of my own pocket." + +"Then for God's sake bring her home! If the thing has to go on, send +over there some of the middle-aged women who have no ties. Let 'em get +shot if they want to. They can write as good reports as she can, if +that's all you want. And make as good soup," he added bitterly. + +"It could be done, of course," she said, thoughtfully. "But--I must +tell you this: I doubt if an older woman could have got where she has. +There is no doubt that her charm, her youth and beauty have helped her +greatly. We cannot--" + +The very whites of his eyes turned red then. He shouted furiously that +for their silly work and their love of publicity, they were trading on +a girl's youth and beauty; that if anything happened to her he would +publish the truth in every newspaper in the country; that they would at +once recall Sara Lee or he would placard the city with what they were +doing. These were only a few of the things he threw at her. + +When he was out of breath he jerked the picture of the little house of +mercy out of his pocket and flung it into her lap. + +"There!" he said. "Do you know where that house is? It's in a ruined +village. She hasn't said that, has she? Well, look at the masonry +there. That's a shell hole in the street. That soldier's got a gun. +Why? Because the Germans may march up that street any day on their way +to Calais." + +Mrs. Gregory looked at the picture. Sara Lee smiled into the sun. And +Rene, ignorant that his single rifle was to oppose the march of the +German Army to Calais--Rene smiled also. + +Mrs. Gregory rose. + +"I shall report your view to the society," she said coldly. "I +understand how you feel, but I fail to see the reason for this attack +on me." + +"I guess you see all right!" he flung at her. "She's my future wife. +If you hadn't put this nonsense into her head we'd be married now and +she'd be here in God's country and not living with a lot of foreigners +who don't know a good woman when they see one. I want her back, that's +all. But I want her back safe. And if anything happens to her I'll +make you pay--you and all your notoriety hunters." + +He went out then, and was for leaving without his hat or coat, but the +butler caught him at the door. Out in the spring sunlight he walked +rapidly, still seething, remembering other bitter things he had meant +to say, and repeating them to himself. + +But he had said enough. + +Mrs. Gregory's account of his visit she reported at a meeting specially +called. The narrative lost nothing in the repetition. But the kindly +women who sat in the church house sewing or knitting listened to what +Harvey had said and looked troubled. They liked Sara Lee, and many of +them had daughters of their own. + +The photograph was passed around. Undoubtedly Sara Lee was living in a +ruined village. Certainly ruined villages were only found very near the +Front. And Rene unquestionably held a gun. Tales of German brutalities +to women had come and were coming constantly to their ears. Mabel +Andrews had written to them for supplies, and she had added to the +chapter of horrors. + +Briefly, the sense of the meeting was that Harvey had been brutal, but +that he was right. An older woman in a safe place they might continue +to support, but none of them would assume the responsibility of the +crushing out of a young girl's life. + +To be quite frank, possibly Harvey's appeal would have carried less +weight had it not coincided with Sara Lee's request for more money. +Neither one alone would have brought about the catastrophe, but +altogether they made question and answer, problem and solution. Money +was scarce. Demands were heavy. None of them except Mrs. Gregory had +more than just enough. And there was this additional situation to face: +there was no end of the war in sight; it gave promise now of going on +indefinitely. + +Joifre had said, "I nibble them." But to nibble a hole in the Germany +Army might take years. They had sent Sara Lee for a few months. How +about keeping her there indefinitely? + +Oddly enough, it was Harvey's sister Belle who made the only protest +against the recall. + +"Of course, I want her back," she said slowly. "You'd understand better +if you had to live with Harvey. I'm sorry, Mrs. Gregory, that he spoke +to you as he did, but he's nearly crazy." She eyed the assembly with +her tired shrewd eyes. "I'm no talker," she went on, "but Sara Lee has +done a big thing. We don't realize, I guess, how big it is. And I +think we'll just about kill her if we bring her home." + +"Better to do that than to have her killed over there," some one said. + +And in spite of Belle's protest, that remained the sense of the meeting. +It was put to the vote and decided to recall Sara Lee. She could bring +a report of conditions, and if she thought it wise an older woman could +go later, to a safer place. + +Belle was very quiet that evening. After dinner she went to Harvey's +room and found him dressing to go out. + +"I'm going with a crowd to the theater," he said. "First week of the +summer stock company, you know." + +He tied his tie defiantly, avoiding Belle's eyes in the mirror. + +"Harvey," she said, "they're going to bring Sara Lee home." + +He said nothing, but his hands shook somewhat. "And I think," Belle +said, "that you will be sorry for what you have done--all the rest of +your life." + + + + +XXI + + +By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it was +almost the first of May. The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, and +the Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply of +high-explosive shells. + +Cheering reports came daily to the little house--, of rapidly augmenting +armies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up to +the Allied Front. Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, that +only shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against the +German batteries. She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but the +supply was still inadequate. With the new shells experiments were being +made in barrage fire--costly experiments now and then; but the Allies +were apt in learning the ugly game of modern war. + +Only on the Belgian Front was there small change. The shattered army +was being freshly outfitted. England was sending money and ammunition, +and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiled +grimly and drilled again. But there were not, as in England and in +France, great bodies of young men to draw from. Too many had been +caught beyond the German wall of steel. + +Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the green +fields. And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways. +They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity. +Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the top +of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse, +which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box and +stovepipe. + +"A portable kitchen!" he explained. "See, here for soup and here for +coffee. And more are coming." + +"Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully. + +But he protested almost violently. He even put the question to the +horse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative. + +She was needed, indeed. To the great base hospital at La Panne went +more and more wounded men. But to the little house of mercy came the +small odds and ends in increasing numbers. Medical men were scarce, and +badly overworked. There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon to +the little house, but it came to nothing. La Panne was not far away, +and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many. + +So the little house went on much as before. Henri had moved to the mill. +He was at work again, and one day, in the King's villa and quietly, +because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received a +second medal, the highest for courage that could be given. + +He did not tell Sara Lee. + +But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they could +not always perform miracles. The German planes still outnumbered the +Allied ones. They had grown more daring with the spring, too, and +whatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretell +those of the air. + +On a moonlight night in early May, Sara Lee, setting out her dressings, +heard a man running up the street. Rene challenged him sharply, only +to step aside. It was Henri. He burst in on Sara Lee. + +"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said. + +"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee. + +"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve _taubes_, and +they are circling overhead." + +The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight and +the Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it was +as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and +since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed. + +The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed a +deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead +town. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the +cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment by +shells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb dropped +from the sky, the floors above were practically useless. + +Only Henri and Rene remained on the street floor. Henri was +extinguishing lights. In the passage Rene stood, not willing to take +refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment the +uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado Rene stepped out into the +moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air. + +He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell. + +"Come, Rene!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fight +again, not--" + +But Rene's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to the +doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he +had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead. +Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently. +Then he went below. + +"Where is Rene?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness. + +"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think, +watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter." + +"There is no shelter," shivered the girl. + +He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand, +like two children, waiting for what might come. + +It was not until the thing was over that he told her. He had gone up +first and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned, +had carried Rene to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularly +peaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night. + +"Good night, little brother," Henri said to him, and left him there with +a heavy heart. Never again would Rene sit and whittle on the doorstep +and sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyish +adoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and forth in the little house. + +Henri stared up at the sky. The moon looked down, cold, and cruelly +bright, on the vanishing squadron of death, on the destroyed town and on +the boy's white face. Somewhere, Henri felt, vanishing like the German +_taubes_, but to peace instead of war, was moving Rene's brave and smiling +spirit--a boyish angel, eager and dauntless, and still looking up. + +Henri took off his cap and crossed himself. + +Another sentry took Rene's place the next day, but the little house had +lost something it could not regain. And a greater loss was to come. + +Jean brought out the mail that day. For Sara Lee, moving about silent +and red-eyed, there was a letter from Mr. Travers. He inclosed a hundred +pounds and a clipping from a London newspaper entitled The Little House +of Mercy. + +"Evidently," he wrote, "you were right and we were wrong. One-half of +the inclosed check is from my wife, who takes this method of showing her +affectionate gratitude. The balance is from myself. Once, some months +ago, I said to you that almost you restored my faith in human nature. +To-day I may say that, in these hours of sorrow for us all, what you have +done and are doing has brought into my gray day a breath of hope." + +There was another clipping, but no comment. It recorded the death of a +Reginald Alexander Travers, aged thirty. + +It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself those +days, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegation +of the English--their attitude not so much of suppressing their private +griefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people, +they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a private +matter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbroken +front, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strange +one, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England. + +A people who had for centuries insisted not only on its rights but on +its privileges was now giving as freely as ever it had demanded. It +was as though, having hoarded all those years, it had but been hoarding +against the day of payment. As it had received it gave--in money, in +effort, in life. And without pretext. + +So the Traverses, having given up all that had made life for them, sent +a clipping only, and no comment. Sara Lee, through a mist of tears, +saw them alone in their drawing-room, having tea as usual, and valiantly +speaking of small things, and bravely facing the future, but never, in +the bitterest moments, making complaint or protest. + +Would America, she wondered, if her hour came, be so brave? Harvey had +a phrase for such things. It was "stand the gaff." Would America stand +the gaff so well? Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the +body rather than of the soul--physical courage, not moral. What would +happen if America entered the struggle and the papers were filled, as +were the British and the French, with long casualty lists, each name a +knife thrust somewhere? + +She wondered. + +And then, before long, it was Sara Lee's turn to stand the gaff. There +was another letter, a curiously incoherent one from Harvey's sister. She +referred to something that the society had done, and hoped that Sara Lee +would take it in kindness, as it was meant. Harvey was well and much +happier. She was to try to understand Harvey's part. He had been +almost desperate. Evidently the letter had preceded one that should have +arrived at the same time. Sara Lee was sadly puzzled. She went to Henri +with it, but he could make nothing out of it. There was nothing to do +but to wait. + +The next night Henri was to go through the lines again. Since his +wounding he had been working on the Allied side, and fewer lights there +were in his district that flashed the treacherous message across the +flood, between night and morning. But now it was imperative that he go +through the German lines again. It was feared that with grappling hooks +the enemy was slowly and cautiously withdrawing the barbed wire from the +inundated fields; and that could mean but one thing. + +On the night he was to go Henri called Sara Lee from the crowded _salle a +manger_ and drawing her into the room across closed the door. + +"Mademoiselle," he said gravely, "once before, long ago, you permitted +me to kiss you. Will you do that for me again?" + +She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She did +not now. For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook. +She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure +men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours +that remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her +charm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, to +cheer, to comfort and help--that was necessary, because soon the chance +might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret. + +So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of +tears. + +"God bless and keep you, dear Henri," she said. + +Then she went back to her work. + + + + +XXII + + +Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people. +One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it +away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present +Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer +horribly, not to gain anything--except perhaps some honorable +advancement for their souls--but that there might be preserved, at any +cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to +pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God. + +She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she +was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers +and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter. +She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time +she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was +_his_ anxiety, _his_ loneliness, _his_ humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were +looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were +turned in on himself. + +She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What +she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come +sometime--that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that +day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the +thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her +hands would tremble. + +Henri had not returned when, the second day after Rene's death, the +letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from +Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had +always sent its enthusiastic approval. + +She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read +Belle's letter again that she began to comprehend. She was recalled; +and the recall was Harvey's work. + +She was very close to hating him that day. He had never understood. +She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest +of their lives, there would be this barrier between them. To the +barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment. She could +never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her +small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of +the war. + +Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee's love for him. He had done +it himself, madly, despairingly. She still loved him, she felt. Nothing +could change that or her promise to him. But with that love there was +something now of fear. And she felt, too, that after all the years she +had known him she had not known him at all. The Harvey she had known +was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always +gentle. But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger. + +It was the result of her upbringing, probably, that she had no thought +of revolt. Her tie to Harvey was a real tie. By her promise to him her +life was no longer hers to order. It belonged to some one else, to be +ordered for her. But, though she accepted, she was too clear a thinker +not to resent. + +When Henri returned, toward dawn of the following night, he did not come +alone. Sara Lee, rising early, found two men in her kitchen--one of +them Henri, who was making coffee, and a soldier in a gray-green uniform, +with a bad bruise over one eye and a sulky face. His hands were tied, +but otherwise he sat at ease, and Henri, having made the coffee, held a +cup to his lips. + +"It is good for the spirits, man," he said in German. "Drink it." + +The German took it, first gingerly, then eagerly. Henri was in high +good humor. + +"See, I have brought you a gift!" he exclaimed on seeing Sara Lee. "What +shall we do with him? Send him to America? To show the appearance of +the madmen of Europe?" + +The prisoner was only a boy, such a boy as Henri himself; but a peasant, +and muscular. Beside his bulk Henri looked slim as a reed. Henri eyed +him with a certain tolerant humor. + +"He is young, and a Bavarian," he said. "Other wise I should have +killed him, for he fought hard. He has but just been called." + +There was another conference in the little house that morning, but +Henri's prisoner could tell little. He had heard nothing of an advance. +Further along the line it was said that there was much fighting. He sat +there, pale and bewildered and very civil, and in the end his frightened +politeness brought about a change in the attitude of the men who +questioned him. Hate all Germans as they must, who had suffered so +grossly, this boy was not of those who had outraged them. + +They sent him on at last, and Sara Lee was free to tell Henri her news. +But she had grown very wise as to Henri's moods, and she hesitated. A +certain dissatisfaction had been growing in the boy for some time, a +sense of hopelessness. Further along the spring had brought renewed +activity to the Allied armies. Great movements were taking place. + +But his own men stood in their trenches, or what passed for trenches, or +lay on their hours of relief in such wretched quarters as could be found, +still with no prospect of action. No great guns, drawn by heavy +tractors, came down the roads toward the trenches by the sea. Steady +bombarding, incessant sniping and no movement on either side--that was +the Belgian Front during the first year of the war. Inaction, with that +eating anxiety as to what was going on in the occupied territory, was +the portion of the heroic small army that stretched from Nieuport to +Dixmude. + +And Henri's nerves were not good. He was unhappy--that always--and he +was not yet quite recovered from his wounds. There was on his mind, too, +a certain gun which moved on a railway track, back and forth, behind the +German lines, doing the work of many. He had tried to get to that gun, +and failed. And he hated failure. + +Certainly in this story of Sara Lee and of Henri, whose other name must +not be known, allowance must be made for all those things. Yet--perhaps +no allowance is enough. + +Sara Lee told him that evening of her recall, told him when the shuffling +of many feet in the street told of the first weary men from the trenches +coming up the road. + +He heard her in a dazed silence. Then: + +"But you will not go?" he said. "It is impossible! You--you are +needed, mademoiselle." + +"What can I do, Henri? They have recalled me. My money will not come +now." + +"Perhaps we can arrange that. It does not cost so much. I have +friends--and think, mademoiselle, how many know now of what you are +doing, and love you for it. Some of them would contribute, surely." + +He was desperately revolving expedients in his mind. He could himself +do no more than he had done. He, or rather Jean and he together, had +been bearing a full half of the expense of the little house since the +beginning. But he dared not tell her that. And though he spoke +hopefully, he knew well that he could raise nothing from the Belgians +he knew best. Henri came of a class that held its fortunes in land, and +that land was now in German hands. + +"We will arrange it somehow," he said with forced cheerfulness. "No +beautiful thing--and this is surely beautiful--must die because of +money." + +It was then that Sara Lee took the plunge. + +"It is not only money, Henri." + +"He has sent for you!" + +Harvey was always "he" to Henri. + +"Not exactly. But I think he went to some one and said I should not be +here alone. You can understand how he feels. We were going to be +married very soon, and then I decided to come. It made an awful upset." + +Henri stood with folded arms and listened. At first he said nothing. +When he spoke it was in a voice of ominous calm: + +"So for a stupid convention he would destroy this beautiful thing you +have made! Does he know your work? Does he know what you are to the +men here? Have you ever told him?" + +"I have, of course, but--" + +"Do you want to go back?" + +"No, Henri. Not yet. I--" + +"That is enough. You are needed. You are willing to stay. I shall +attend to the money. It is arranged." + +"You don't understand," said Sara Lee desperately. "I am engaged to him. +I can't wreck his life, can I?" + +"Would it wreck your life?" he demanded. "Tell me that and I shall know +how to reason with you." + +But she only looked at him helplessly. + +Heavy tramping in the passage told of the arrival of the first men. +They did not talk and laugh as usual. As well as they could they came +quietly. For Rene had been a good friend to many of them, and had +admitted on slack nights many a weary man who had no ticket. Much as +the neighbors had entered the house back home after Uncle James had gone +away, came these bearded men that night. And Sara Lee, hearing their +muffled voices, brushed a hand over her eyes and tried to smile. + +"We can talk about it later," she said. "We mustn't quarrel. I owe so +much to you, Henri." + +Suddenly Henri caught her by the arm and turned her about so that she +faced the lamp. + +"Do you love him?" he demanded. "Sara Lee, look at me!" Only he +pronounced it Saralie. "He has done a very cruel thing. Do you still +love him?" + +Sara Lee shut her eyes. + +"I don't know. I think I do. He is very unhappy, and it is my fault." + +"Your fault!" + +"I must go, Henri. The men are waiting." + +But he still held her arm. + +"Does he love you as I love you?" he demanded. "Would he die for you?" + +"That's rather silly, isn't it? Men don't die for the people they love." + +"I would die for you, Saralie." + +She eyed him rather helplessly. + +"I don't think you mean that." Bad strategy that, for he drew her to +him. His arms were like steel, and it was a rebellious and very rigid +Sara Lee who found she could not free herself. + +"I would die for you, Saralie!" he repeated fiercely. "That would be +easier, far, than living without you. There is nothing that matters but +you. Listen--I would put everything I have--my honor, my life, my +hope of eternity--on one side of the scale and you on the other. And I +would choose you. Is that love?" He freed her. + +"It's insanity," said Sara Lee angrily. "You don't mean it. And I +don't want that kind of love, if that is what you call it." + +"And you will go back to that man who loves himself better than he loves +you?" + +"That's not true!" she flashed at him. "He is sending for me, not to +get me back to him, but to get me back to safety." + +"What sort of safety?" Henri demanded in an ominous tone. "Is he afraid +of me?" + +"He doesn't know anything about you." + +"You have never told him? Why?" His eyes narrowed. + +"He wouldn't have understood, Henri." + +"You are going back to him," he said slowly; "and you will always keep +these days of ours buried in your heart. Is that it?" His eyes softened. +"I am to be a memory! Do you know what I think? I think you care for +me more than you know. We have lived a lifetime together in these +months. You know me better than you know him, already. We have faced +death together. That is a strong tie. And I have held you in my arms. +Do you think you can forget that?" + +"I shall never want to forget you." + +"I shall not let you forget me. You may go--I cannot prevent that +perhaps. But wherever I am; Saralie, I shall stand between that lover +of yours and you. And sometime I shall come from this other side of the +world, and I shall find you, and you will come back with me. Back to +this country--our country." + +They were boyish words, but back of them was the iron determination of a +man. His eyes seemed sunken in his head. His face was white. But there +was almost a prophetic ring in his voice. + +Sara Lee went out and left him there, went out rather terrified and +bewildered, and refusing absolutely to look into her own heart. + + + + +XXIII + + +Late in May she started for home. It had not been necessary to close +the little house. An Englishwoman of mature years and considerable +wealth, hearing from Mr. Travers of Sara Lee's recall, went out a day or +two before she left and took charge. She was a kindly woman, in deep +mourning; and some of the ache left Sara Lee's heart when she had talked +with her successor. + +Perhaps, too, Mrs. Cameron understood some of the things that had +puzzled her before. She had been a trifle skeptical perhaps about Sara +Lee before she saw her. A young girl alone among an army of men! She +was a good woman herself, and not given to harsh judgments, but the +thing had seemed odd. But Sara Lee in her little house, as virginal, as +without sex-consciousness as a child, Sara Lee with her shabby clothes +and her stained hands and her honest eyes--this was not only a good +girl, this was a brave and high-spirited and idealistic woman. + +And after an evening in the house of mercy, with the soldiers openly +adoring and entirely respectful, Mrs. Cameron put her arms round Sara +Lee and kissed her. + +"You must let me thank you," she said. "You have made me feel what I +have not felt since--" + +She stopped. Her mourning was only a month old. "I see to-night that, +after all, many things may be gone, but that while service remains there +is something worth while in life." + +The next day she asked Sara Lee to stay with her, at least through the +summer. Sara Lee hesitated, but at last she agreed to cable. As Henri +had disappeared with the arrival of Mrs. Cameron it was that lady's +chauffeur who took the message to Dunkirk and sent it off. + +She had sent the cable to Harvey. It was no longer a matter of the +Ladies' Aid. It was between Harvey and herself. + +The reply came on the second day. It was curt and decisive. + +"Now or never," was the message Harvey sent out of his black despair, +across the Atlantic to the little house so close under the guns of +Belgium. + +Henri was half mad those last days. Jean tried to counsel him, but he +was irritable, almost savage. And Jean understood. The girl had grown +deep into his own heart. Like Henri, he believed that she was going +back to unhappiness; he even said so to her in the car, on that last sad +day when Sara Lee, having visited Rene's grave and prayed in the ruined +church, said good-by to the little house, and went away, tearless at the +last, because she was too sad for tears. + +It was not for some time that Jean spoke what was in his mind, and when +he had done so she turned to him gravely: + +"You are wrong, Jean. He is the kindest of men. Once I am back, and +safe, he will be very different. I'm afraid I've given you a wrong +impression of him." + +"You think then, mademoiselle, that he will forget all these months--he +will never be unhappy over them?" + +"Why should he?" said Sara Lee proudly. "When I tell him everything he +will understand. And he will be very proud that I have done my share." + +But Jean's one eye was dubious. + +At the wharf in Dunkirk they found Henri, a pale but composed Henri. +Jean's brows contracted. He had thought that the boy would follow his +advice and stay away. But Henri was there. + +It was as well, perhaps, for Sara Lee had brought him a letter, one of +those missives from the trenches which had been so often left at the +little house. + +Henri thrust it into his pocket without reading it. + +"Everything is prepared," he said. "It is the British Admiralty boat, +and one of the officers has offered his cabin. You will be quite +comfortable." + +He appeared entirely calm. He saw to carrying Sara Lee's small bag on +board; he chatted with the officers; he even wandered over to a +hospital ship moored near by and exchanged civilities with a wounded man +in a chair on the deck. Perhaps he swaggered a bit too much, for Jean +watched him with some anxiety. He saw that the boy was taking it hard. +His eyes were very sunken now, and he moved his right arm stiffly, as +though the old wound troubled him. + +Jean did not like leave-takings. Particularly he did not like taking +leave of Sara Lee. Some time before the boat sailed he kissed her hand, +and then patted it and went away in the car without looking back. + +The boat was preparing to get under way. Henri was standing by her very +quietly. He had not slept the night before, but then there were many +nights when Henri did not sleep. He had wandered about, smoking +incessantly, trying to picture the black future. + +He could see no hope anywhere. America was far away, and peaceful. +Very soon the tranquillity of it all would make the last months seem +dreamlike and unreal. She would forget Belgium, forget him. Or she +would remember him as a soldier who had once loved her. Once loved her, +because she had never seemed to realize the lasting quality of his love. +She had always felt that he would forget her. If he could only make her +believe that he would not, it would not be so hopeless. + +He had written a bit of a love letter on the little table at Dunkirk +that morning, written it with the hope that the sight of the written +words might carry conviction where all his protests had failed. + +"I shall love you all the years of my life," he wrote. "At any time, in +any place, you may come to me and know that I am waiting. Great love +like this comes only once to any man, and once come to him it never goes +away. At any time in the years to come you may know with certainty that +you are still to me what you are now, the love of my life. + +"Sometimes I think, dearest--I may call you that once, now that you +have left me--that far away you will hear this call of mine and come +back to me. Perhaps you will never come. Perhaps I shall not live. I +feel to-day that I do not care greatly to live. + +"If that is to be, then think of me somewhere, perhaps with Rene by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house +of mercy; and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +He had the letter in the pocket of his tunic, and at last the moment +came when the boat must leave. Suddenly Henri knew that he could not +allow her to cross to England alone. The last few days had brought many +stories of submarine attacks. Here, so far north, the Germans were +particularly active. They had for a long time lurked in waiting for +this British Admiralty boat, with its valuable cargo, its officers and +the government officials who used it. + +"Good-by, Henri," said Sara Lee. "I--of course it is no use to try to +tell you--" + +"I am going across with you." + +"But--" + +"I allowed you to come over alone. I shiver when I think of it. I shall +take you back myself." + +"Is it very dangerous?" + +"Probably not. But can you think of me standing safe on that quay and +letting you go into danger alone?" + +"I am not afraid." + +"I know that. I have never seen you afraid. But if you wish to see a +coward, look at me. I am a coward for you." + +He put his hand into his pocket. It occurred to him to give her the +letter now so that if anything happened she would at least have had it. +He wanted no mistake about that appointment beyond the stars. But the +great world of eternity was very large, and they must have a definite +understanding about that meeting at the little house of mercy Over There. + +Perhaps he had a little fever that day. He was alternately flushed and +pale; and certainly he was not quite rational. His hand shook as he +brought out her letter--and with it the other letter, from the Front. + +"Have you the time to come with me?" Sara Lee asked doubtfully. "I want +you to come, of course, but if your work will suffer--" + +He held out his letter to her. + +"I shall go away," he said, "while you read it. And perhaps you will +not destroy it, because--I should like to feel that you have it always." + +He went away at once, saluting as he passed other officers, who gravely +saluted him. On the deck of the hospital ship the invalid touched his +cap. Word was going about, in the stealthy manner of such things, that +Henri whose family name we may not know, was a brave man and doing brave +things. + +The steamer had not yet cast off. As usual, it was to take a flying +start from the harbor, for it was just outside the harbor that the wolves +of the sea lay in wait. Henri, alone at last, opened his letter, and +stood staring at it. There was again movement behind the German line, +a matter to be looked into, as only he could do it. Probably nothing, +as before; but who could say? + +Henri looked along the shore to where but a few miles away lay the +ragged remnant of his country. And he looked forward to where Sara Lee, +his letter in her hand, was staring blindly at nothing. Then he looked +out toward the sea, where lay who knew what dangers of death and +suffering. + +After that first moment of indecision he never hesitated. He stood on +the deck and watched, rather frozen and rigid, and with a mind that had +ceased working, while the steamer warped out from the quay. If in his +subconsciousness there was any thought it was doubtless that he had done +his best for a long time, and that he had earned the right to protect +for a few hours the girl he loved. That, too, there had been activity +along the German-Belgian line before, without result. + +Perhaps subconsciously those things were there. He himself was conscious +of no thought, of only a dogged determination to get Sara Lee across the +channel safely. He put everything else behind him. He counted no cost. + +The little admiralty boat sped on. In the bow, on the bridge, and at +different stations lookouts kept watch. The lifeboats were hung +overboard, ready to lower instantly. On the horizon a British destroyer +steamed leisurely. Henri stood for a long time on the deck. The land +fell away quickly. From a clear silhouette of the town against the +sky--the dunes, the spire of the cathedral, the roof of the _mairie_--it +became vague, shadowy--the height of a hand--a line--nothing. + +Henri roused himself. He was very thirsty, and the wound in his arm +ached. When he raised his hand to salute the movement was painful. + +It was a very grave Sara Lee he found in the officer's cabin when he +went inside later on. She was sitting on the long seat below the open +port, her hat slightly askew and her hands folded in her lap. Her bag +was beside her, and there was in her eyes a perplexity Henri was too +wretched to notice. + +For the first time Sara Lee was realizing the full value of the thing +she was throwing away. She had persistently discounted it until now. +She had been grateful for it. She had felt unworthy of it. But now, +on the edge of leaving it, she felt that something infinitely precious +and very beautiful was going out of her life. She had already a sense +of loss. + +For the first time, too, she was allowing herself to think of certain +contingencies that were now forever impossible. For instance, suppose +she had stayed with Mrs. Cameron? Suppose she had broken her promise +to Harvey and remained at the little house? Suppose she had done as +Henri had so wildly urged her, and had broken entirely with Harvey? +Would she have married Henri? + +There was a certain element of caution in the girl. It made the chances +she had taken rather more courageous, indeed, because she had always +counted the cost. But marriage was not a matter for taking chances. One +should know not only the man, but his setting, though she would not have +thought of it in that way. Not only the man, but the things that made up +his life--his people, his home. + +And Henri was to her still a figure, not so much now of mystery as of +detachment. Except Jean he had no intimates. He had no family on the +only side of the line she knew. He had not even a country. + +She had reached that point when Henri came below and saluted her stiffly +from the doorway. + +"Henri!" she said. "I believe you are ill!" + +"I am not ill," he said, and threw himself into the corner of the seat. +"You have read it?" + +She nodded. Even thinking of it brought a lump into her throat. He +bent forward, but he did not touch her. + +"I meant it, Saralie," he said. "Sometimes men are infatuated, and +write what they do not mean. They are sincere at the time, and then +later on--But I meant it. I shall always mean it." + +Not then, nor during the three days in London, did he so much as take +her hand. He was not well. He ate nothing, and at night he lay awake +and drank a great deal of water. Once or twice he found her looking at +him anxiously, but he disclaimed all illness. + +He had known from the beginning what he was doing. But he did not touch +her, because in his heart he knew that where once he had been worthy he +was no longer worthy. He had left his work for a woman. + +It is true that he had expected to go back at once. But the +_Philadelphia_, which had been listed to sail the next day, was held up +by a strike in Liverpool, and he waited on, taking such hours as she +could give him, feverishly anxious to make her happy, buying her little +gifts, mostly flowers, which she wore tucked in her belt and smiled +over, because she had never before received flowers from a man. + +He was alternately gay and silent. They walked across the Thames by the +Parliament buildings, and midway across he stopped and looked long at the +stream. And they went to the Zooelogical Gardens, where he gravely named +one of the sea lions for Colonel Lilias because of its mustache, and +insisted on saluting it each time before he flung it a fish. Once he +soberly gathered up a very new baby camel, all legs, in his arms, and +presented it to her. + +"Please accept it, mademoiselle," he said. "With my compliments." + +They dined together every night, very modestly, sitting in some crowded +restaurant perhaps, but seeing little but each other. Sara Lee had +bought a new hat in London--black, of course, but faced with white. +He adored her in it. He would sit for long moments, his elbows propped +on the table, his blond hair gleaming in the candlelight, and watch her. + +"I wonder," he said once, "if you had never met him would you have loved +me?" + +"I do love you, Henri." + +"I don't want that sort of love." And he had turned his head away. + +But one evening he called for her at Morley's, a white and crushed boy, +needing all that she could give him and much more. He came as a man +goes to the woman he loves when he is in trouble, much as a child to his +mother. Sara Lee, coming down to the reception room, found him alone +there, walking rapidly up and down. He turned desperate eyes on her. + +"I have brought bad news," he said abruptly. + +"The little house--" + +"I do not know. I ran away, mademoiselle. I am a traitor. And the +Germans broke through last night." + +"Henri!" + +"They broke through. We were not ready. That is what I have done." + +"Don't you think," Sara Lee said in a frozen voice, "that is what I have +done? I let you come." + +"You? You are taking the blame? Mademoiselle, I have enough to bear +without that." + +He explained further, still standing in his rigid attitude. If he had +been white before at times he was ghastly now. It had not been an attack +in force. A small number had got across and had penetrated beyond the +railway line. There had been hand-to-hand fighting in the road beyond +the poplars. But it looked more like an experiment, an endeavor to +discover the possibility of a real advance through the inundation; or +perhaps a feint to cover operations elsewhere. + +"For every life lost I am responsible," he ended in a flat and lifeless +tone. + +"But you might not have known," she protested wildly. "Even if you had +been there, Henri, you might not have known." She knew something of war +by that time. "How could you have told that a small movement of troops +was to take place?" + +"I should have been there." + +"But--if they came without warning?" + +"I did not tell you," he said, looking away from her. "There had been a +warning. I disregarded it." + +He went back to Belgium that night. Sara Lee, at the last, held out her +hand. She was terrified for him, and she showed it. + +"I shall not touch your hand," he said. "I have forfeited my right to +do that." Then, seeing what was in her face, he reassured her. "I shall +not do _that_," he said. "It would be easier. But I shall have to go +back and see what can be done." + +He was the old Henri to the last, however. He went carefully over her +steamship ticket, and inquired with equal care into the amount of money +she had. + +"It will take you home?" he asked. + +"Very comfortably, Henri." + +"It seems very little." + +Then he said, apropos of nothing: "Poor Jean!" + +When he left her at last he went to the door, very erect and soldierly. +But he turned there and stood for a moment looking at her, as though +through all that was coming he must have with him, to give him strength, +that final picture of her. + +The elderly chambermaid, coming into Sara Lee's room the next morning, +found her fully dressed in the frock she had worn the night before, face +down on her bed. + + + + +XXIV + + +It was early in June when at last the lights went down behind the back +drop and came up in front, to show Sara Lee knitting again, though not +by the fire. The amazing interlude was over. + +Over, except in Sara Lee's heart. The voyage had been a nightmare. She +had been ill for one thing--a combination of seasickness and +heartsickness. She had allowed Henri to come to England with her, and +the Germans had broken through. All the good she had done--and she had +helped--was nothing to this mischief she had wrought. + +It had been a small raid. She gathered that from the papers on board. +But that was not the vital thing. What mattered was that she had let a +man forget his duty to his country in his solicitude for her. + +But as the days went on the excitement of her return dulled the edge of +her misery somewhat. The thing was done. She could do only one thing +to help. She would never go back, never again bring trouble and +suffering where she had meant only to bring aid and comfort. + +She had a faint hope that Harvey would meet her at the pier. She needed +comforting and soothing, and perhaps a bit of praise. She was so very +tired; depressed, too, if the truth be known. She needed a hand to lead +her back to her old place on the stage, and kind faces to make her forget +that she had ever gone away. + +Because that was what she had to do. She must forget Henri and the +little house on the road to the poplar trees; and most of all, she must +forget that because of her Henri had let the Germans through. + +But Harvey did not meet her. There was a telegram saying he would meet +her train if she wired when she was leaving--an exultant message +breathing forgiveness and signed "with much love." She flushed when she +read it. + +Of course he could not meet her in New York. This was not the Continent +in wartime, where convention had died of a great necessity. And he was +not angry, after all. A great wave of relief swept over her. But it +was odd how helpless she felt. Since her arrival in England months +before there had always been Henri to look after things for her. It was +incredible to recall how little she had done for herself. + +Was she glad to be back? She did not ask herself. It was as though the +voyage had automatically detached her from that other Sara Lee of the +little house. That was behind her, a dream--a mirage--or a memory. +Here, a trifle confused by the bustle, was once again the Sara Lee who +had knitted for Anna, and tended the plants in the dining-room window, +and watched Uncle James slowly lowered into his quiet grave. + +Part of her detachment was voluntary. She could not bear to remember. +She had but to close her eyes to see Henri's tragic face that last night +at Morley's. And part of the detachment was because, after all, the +interlude had been but a matter of months, and reaching out familiar +hands to her were the habits and customs and surroundings of all the +earlier years of her life, drawing her back to them. + +It was strange how Henri's face haunted her. She could close her eyes +and see it, line by line, his very swagger--for he did swagger, just a +little; his tall figure and unruly hair; his long, narrow, muscular +hands. Strange and rather uncomfortable. Because she could not summon +Harvey's image at all. She tried to bring before her, that night in the +train speeding west, his solid figure and kind eyes as they would greet +her the next day--tried, and failed. All she got was the profile of +the photograph, and the stubborn angle of the jaw. + +She was up very early the next morning, and it was then, as the train +rolled through familiar country, that she began to find Harvey again. +A flush of tenderness warmed her. She must be very kind to him because +of all that he had suffered. + +The train came to a stop. Rather breathless Sara Lee went out on the +platform. Harvey was there, in the crowd. He did not see her at first. +He was looking toward the front of the train. So her first glimpse of +him was the view of the photograph. His hat was off, and his hair, +carefully brushed back, gave him the eager look of the picture. + +He was a strong and manly figure, as unlike Henri as an oak is unlike +one of Henri's own tall and swaying poplars. Sara Lee drew a long +breath. Here after all were rest and peace; love and gentleness; quiet +days and still evenings. No more crowds and wounds and weary men, no +more great thunderings of guns, no imminence of death. Rest and peace. + +Then Harvey saw her, and the gleam of happiness and relief in his eyes +made her own eyes misty. She saw even in that first glance that he +looked thinner and older. A pang of remorse shot through her. Was +happiness always bought at the cost of happiness? Did one always take +away in order to give? Not in so many words, but in a flash of doubt +the thought went through her mind. + +There was no reserve in Harvey's embrace. He put his arms about her and +held her close. He did not speak at first. Then: + +"My own little girl," he said. "My own little girl!" + +Suddenly Sara Lee was very happy. All her doubts were swept away by his +voice, his arms. There was no thrill for her in his caress, but there +were peace and quiet joy. It was enough for her, just then, that she +had brought back some of the happiness she had robbed him of. + +"Oh, Harvey!" she said. "I'm glad to be back again--with you." + +He held her off then and looked at her. + +"You are thin," he said. "You're not pale, but you are thin." And in a +harder voice: "What did they do to you over there?" + +But he did not wait for a reply. He did not seem to want one. He picked +up her bag, and guiding her by the elbow, piloted her through the crowd. + +"A lot of folks wanted to come and meet you," he said, "but I steered +them off. You'd have thought Roosevelt was coming to town the way +they've been calling up." + +"To meet me?" + +"I expect the Ladies' Aid Society wanted to get into the papers again," +he said rather grimly. "They are merry little advertisers, all right." + +"I don't think that, Harvey." + +"Well, I do," he said, and brought her to a stop facing a smart little +car, very new, very gay. + +"How do you like it?" he asked. + +"Like it? Why, it's not yours, is it?" + +"Surest thing you know. Or, rather, it's ours. Had a few war babies, +and they grew up." + +Sara Lee looked at it, and for just an instant, a rather sickening +instant, she saw Henri's shattered low car, battle-scarred and broken. + +"It's--lovely," said Sara Lee. And Harvey found no fault with her tone. + +Sara Lee had intended to go to Anna's, for a time at least. But she +found that Belle was expecting her and would not take no. + +"She's moved the baby in with the others," Harvey explained as he took +the wheel. "Wait until you see your room. I knew we'd be buying +furniture soon, so I fixed it up." + +He said nothing for a time. He was new to driving a car, and the traffic +engrossed him. But when they had reached a quieter neighborhood he put +a hand over hers. + +"Good God, how I've been hungry for you!" he said. "I guess I was pretty +nearly crazy sometimes." He glanced at her apprehensively, but if she +knew his connection with her recall she showed no resentment. As a +matter of fact there was in his voice something that reminded her of +Henri, the same deeper note, almost husky. + +She was, indeed, asking herself very earnestly what was there in her of +all people that should make two men care for her as both Henri and Harvey +cared. In the humility of all modest women she was bewildered. It made +her rather silent and a little sad. She was so far from being what they +thought her. + +Harvey, stealing a moment from the car to glance at her, saw something +baffling in her face. + +"Do you still care, Sara Lee?" he asked almost diffidently. "As much as +ever?" + +"I have come back to you," she said after an imperceptible pause. + +"Well, I guess that's the answer." + +He drew a deep satisfied breath. "I used to think of you over there, +and all those foreigners in uniform strutting about, and it almost got +me, some times." + +And again, as long before, he read into her passivity his own passion, +and was deeply content. + +Belle was waiting on the small front porch. There was an anxious frown +on her face, and she looked first, not at Sara Lee, but at Harvey. What +she saw there evidently satisfied her, for the frown disappeared. She +kissed Sara Lee impulsively. + +All that afternoon, much to Harvey's resentment, Sara Lee received +callers. The Ladies' Aid came en masse and went out to the dining-room +and there had tea and cake. Harvey disappeared when they came. + +"You are back," he said, "and safe, and all that. But it's not their +fault. And I'll be hanged if I'll stand round and listen to them." + +He got his hat and then, finding her alone in a back hall for a moment, +reverted uneasily to the subject. + +"There are two sides to every story," he said. "They're going to knife +me this afternoon, all right. Damned hypocrites! You just keep your +head, and I'll tell you my side of it later." + +"Harvey," she said slowly, "I want to know now just what you did. I'm +not angry. I've never been angry. But I ought to know." + +It was a very one-sided story that Harvey told her, standing in the +little back hall, with Belle's children hanging over the staircase and +begging for cake. Yet in the main it was true. He had reached his +limit of endurance. She was in danger, as the photograph plainly showed. +And a fellow had a right to fight for his own happiness. + +"I wanted you back, that's all," he ended. And added an anticlimax by +passing a plate of sliced jelly roll through the stair rail to the +clamoring children. + +Sara Lee stood there for a moment after he had gone. He was right, or +at least he had been within his rights. She had never even heard of the +new doctrine of liberty for women. There was nothing in her training to +teach her revolt. She was engaged to Harvey; already, potentially, she +belonged to him. He had interfered with her life, but he had had the +right to interfere. + +And also there was in the back of her mind a feeling that was almost +guilt. She had let Henri tell her he loved her. She had even kissed +him. And there had been many times in the little house when Harvey, for +days at a time, had not even entered her thoughts. There was, therefore, +a very real tenderness in the face she lifted for his good-by kiss. + +To Belle in the front hall Harvey gave a firm order. + +"Don't let any reporters in," he said warningly. "This is strictly our +affair. It's a private matter. It's nobody's business what she did over +there. She's home. That's all that matters." + +Belle assented, but she was uneasy. She knew that Harvey was +unreasonably, madly jealous of Sara Lee's work at the little house of +mercy, and she knew him well enough to know that sooner or later he would +show that jealousy. She felt, too, that the girl should have been +allowed her small triumph without interference. There had been +interference enough already. But it was easier to yield to Harvey than +to argue with him. + +It was rather a worried Belle who served tea that afternoon in her dining +room, with Mrs. Gregory pouring; the more uneasy, because already she +divined a change in Sara Lee. She was as lovely as ever, even lovelier. +But she had a poise, a steadiness, that were new; and silences in which, +to Belle's shrewd eyes, she seemed to be weighing things. + +Reporters clamored to see Sara Lee that day, and, failing to see her, +telephoned Harvey at his office to ask if it was true that she had been +decorated by the King. He was short to the point of affront. + +"I haven't heard anything about it," he snapped. "And I wouldn't say if +I had. But it's not likely. What d'you fellows think she was doing +anyhow? Leading a charge? She was running a soup kitchen. That's all." + +He hung up the receiver with a jerk, but shortly after that he fell to +pacing his small office. She had not said anything about being decorated, +but the reporters had said it had been in a London newspaper. If she +had not told him that, there were probably many things she had not told +him. But of course there had been very little time. He would see if +she mentioned it that night. + +Sara Lee had had a hard day. The children loved her. In the intervals +of calls they crawled over her, and the littlest one called her Saralie. +She held the child in her arms close. + +"Saralie!" said the child, over and over; "Saralie! That's your name. +I love your name." + +And there came, echoing in her ears, Henri and his tender Saralie. + +There was an oppression on her too. Her very bedroom thrust on her her +approaching marriage. This was her own furniture, for her new home. It +was beautiful, simple and good. But she was not ready for marriage. She +had been too close to the great struggle to be prepared to think in terms +of peace so soon. Perhaps, had she dared to look deeper than that, she +would have found something else, a something she had not counted on. + +She and Belle had a little time after the visitors had gone, before +Harvey came home. They sat in Belle's bedroom, and her sentences were +punctuated by little backs briskly presented to have small garments +fastened, or bows put on stiffly bobbed yellow hair. + +"Did you understand my letter?" she asked. "I was sorry I had sent it, +but it was too late then." + +"I put your letter and--theirs, together. I supposed that Harvey--" + +"He was about out of his mind," Belle said in her worried voice. "Stand +still, Mary Ellen! He went to Mrs. Gregory, and I suppose he said a good +bit. You know the way he does. Anyhow, she was very angry. She called +a special meeting, and--I tried to prevent their recalling you. He +doesn't know that, of course." + +"You tried?" + +"Well, I felt as though it was your work," Belle said rather +uncomfortably. "Bring me the comb, Alice. I guess we get pretty narrow +here and--I've been following things more closely since you went over. +I know more than I did. And, of course, after one marries there isn't +much chance. There are children and--" Her face twisted. "I wish I +could do something." + +She got up and brought from the dresser a newspaper clipping. + +"It's the London newspaper," she explained. "I've been taking it, but +Harvey doesn't know. He doesn't care much for the English. This is +about your being decorated." + +Sara Lee held it listlessly in her hands. + +"Shall I tell him, Belle?" she asked. + +Belle hesitated. + +"I don't believe I would," she said forlornly. "He won't like it. +That's why I've never showed him that clipping. He hates it all so." + +Sara Lee dressed that evening in the white frock. She dressed slowly, +thinking hard. All round her was the shiny newness of her furniture, +a trifle crowded in Belle's small room. Sara Lee had a terrible feeling +of being fastened in by it. Wherever she turned it gleamed. She felt +surrounded, smothered. + +She had meant to make a clean breast of things--of the little house, +and of Henri, and of the King, pinning the medal on her shabby black +jacket and shaking hands with her. Henri she must tell about--not his +name of course, nor his madness, nor even his love. But she felt that +she owed it to Harvey to have as few secrets from him as possible. She +would tell about what the boy had done for her, and how he, and he alone, +had made it all possible. + +Surely Harvey would understand. It was a page that was closed. It had +held nothing to hurt him. She had come back. + +She stood by her window, thinking. And a breath of wind set the leaves +outside to rustling. Instantly she was back again in the little house, +and the sound was not leaves, but the shuffling of many stealthy feet +on the cobbles of the street at night, that shuffling that was so like +the rustling of leaves in a wood or the murmur of water running over a +stony creek bed. + + + + +XXV + + +It was clear to Sara Lee from the beginning of the evening that Harvey +did not intend to hear her story. He did not say so; indeed, for a time +he did not talk at all. He sat with his arms round her, content just to +have her there. + +"I have a lot of arrears to make up," he said. "I've got to get used to +having you where I can touch you. To-night when I go upstairs I'm going +to take that damned colorless photograph of you and throw it out the +window." + +"I must tell you about your photograph," she ventured. "It always stood +on the mantel over the stove, and when there was a threatened bombardment +I used to put it under--" + +"Let's not talk, honey." + +When he came out of that particular silence he said abruptly: + +"Will Leete is dead." + +"Oh, no! Poor Will Leete." + +"Died of pneumonia in some God-forsaken hole over there. He's left a +wife and nothing much to keep her. That's what comes of mixing in the +other fellow's fight. I guess we can get the house as soon as we want +it. She has to sell; and it ought to be a bargain." + +"Harvey," she said rather timidly, "you speak of the other fellow's +fight. They say over there that we are sure to be drawn into it sooner +or later." + +"Not on our life!" he replied brusquely. "And if you don't mind, honey, +I don't care to hear about what they think over there." He got up from +his old place on the arm of her chair and stood on the rug. "I'd better +tell you now how I feel about this thing. I can't talk about it, that's +all. We'll finish up now and let it go at that. I'm sorry there's a +war. I'll send money when I can afford it, to help the Belgians, though +my personal opinion is that they're getting theirs for what they did in +the Congo. But I don't want to hear about what you did over there." + +He saw her face, and he went to her and kissed her cheek. + +"I don't want to hurt you, honey," he said. "I love you with all my +heart. But somehow I can't forget that you left me and went over there +when there was no reason for it. You put off our marriage, and I +suppose we'd better get it over. Go ahead and tell me about it." + +He drew up a chair and waited, but the girl smiled rather tremulously. + +"Perhaps we'd better wait, if you feel that way, Harvey." + +His face was set as he looked at her. + +"There's only one thing I want to know," he said. "And I've got a right +to know that. You're a young girl, and you're beautiful--to me, anyhow. +You've been over there with a lot of crazy foreigners." He got up again +and all the bitterness of the empty months was in his voice. "Did any +of them--was there anybody there you cared about?" + +"I came back, Harvey." + +"That's not the question." + +"There were many men--officers--who were kind to me. I--" + +"That's not the question, either." + +"If I had loved any one more than I loved you I should not have come +back." + +"Wait a minute!" he said quickly. "You had to come back, you know." + +"I could have stayed. The Englishwoman who took over my work asked me +to stay on and help her." + +He was satisfied then. He went back to the arm of her chair and kissed +her. + +"All right," he said. "I've suffered the tortures of the damned, +but--that fixes it. Now let's talk about something else. I'm sick of +this war talk." + +"I'd like to tell you about my little house. And poor Rene--" + +"Who was Rene?" he demanded. + +"The orderly." + +"The one on the step, with a rifle?" + +"Yes." + +"Look here," he said. "I've got to get to all that gradually. I don't +know that I'll ever get to it cheerfully. But I can't talk about that +place to-night. And I don't want to talk war. The whole business makes +me sick. I've got a car out of it, and if things keep on we may be able +to get the Leete house. But there's no reason in it, no sense. I'm +sick to death of hearing about it. Let's talk of something else." + +But--and here was something strange--Sara Lee could find nothing else +to talk about. The thing that she had looked forward so eagerly to +telling--that was barred. And the small gossip of their little circle, +purely personal and trivial, held only faint interest for her. For the +first time they had no common ground to meet on. + +Yet it was a very happy man who went whistling to his room that night. +He was rather proud of himself too. After all the bitterness of the +past months, he had been gentle and loving to Sara Lee. He had not +scolded her. + +In the next room he could hear her going quietly about, opening and +closing the drawers of the new bureau, moving a chair. Pretty soon, God +willing, they need never be separated. He would have her always, to +protect and cherish and love. + +He went outside to her closed door. + +"Good night, sweetheart," he called softly. + +"Good night, dear," came her soft reply. + +But long after he was asleep Sara Lee stood at her window and listened +to the leaves, so like the feet of weary men on the ruined street over +there. + +For the first time she was questioning the thing she had done. She +loved Harvey--but there were many kinds of love. There was the love of +Jean for Henri, and there was the wonderful love, though the memory now +was cruel and hurt her, of Henri for herself. And there was the love of +Marie for the memory of Maurice the spy. Many kinds of love; and one +heart might love many people, in different ways. + +A small doubt crept into her mind. This feeling she had for Harvey was +not what she had thought it was over there. It was a thing that had +belonged to a certain phase of her life. But that phase was over. It +was, like Marie's, but a memory. + +This Harvey of the new car and the increased income and the occasional +hardness in his voice was not the Harvey she had left. Or perhaps it +was she who had changed. She wondered. She felt precisely the same, +tender toward her friends, unwilling to hurt them. She did not want +to hurt Harvey. + +But she did not love him as he deserved to be loved. And she had a +momentary lift of the veil, when she saw the long vista of the years, +the two of them always together and always between them hidden, +untouched, but eating like a cancer, Harvey's resentment and suspicion +of her months away from him. + +There would always be a barrier between them. Not only on Harvey's side. +There were things she had no right to tell--of Henri, of his love and +care for her, and of that last terrible day when he realized what he had +done. + +That night, lying in the new bed, she faced that situation too. How +much was she to blame? If Henri felt that each life lost was lost by +him wasn't the same true for her? Why had she allowed him to stay in +London? + +But that was one question she did not answer frankly. + +She lay there in the darkness and wondered what punishment he would +receive. He had done so much for them over there. Surely, surely, they +would allow for that. But small things came back to her--the awful +sight of the miller and his son, led away to death, with the sacks over +their heads. The relentlessness of it all, the expecting that men +should give everything, even life itself, and ask for no mercy. + +And this, too, she remembered: Once in a wild moment Henri had said he +would follow her to America, and that there he would prove to her that +his and not Harvey's was the real love of her life--the great love, +that comes but once to any woman, and to some not at all. Yet on that +last night at Morley's he had said what she now felt was a final +farewell. That last look of his, from the doorway--that had been the +look of a man who would fill his eyes for the last time. + +She got up and stood by the window. What had they done to him? What +would they do? She looked at her watch. It was four o'clock in the +morning over there. The little house would be quiet now, but down along +the lines men would be standing on the firing step of the trench, and +waiting, against what the dawn might bring. + +Through the thin wall came the sound of Harvey's heavy, regular +breathing. She remembered Henri's light sleeping on the kitchen floor, +his cap on the table, his cape rolled round him--a sleeping, for all +his weariness, so light that he seemed always half conscious. She +remembered the innumerable times he had come in at this hour, muddy, +sometimes rather gray of face with fatigue, but always cheerful. + +It was just such an hour that she found him giving hot coffee to the +German prisoner. It had been but a little earlier when he had taken her +to the roof and had there shown her Rene, lying with his face up toward +the sky which had sent him death. + +A hundred memories crowded--Henri's love for the Belgian soldiers, and +theirs for him; his humor; his absurd riddles. There was the one he had +asked Rene, the very day before the air attack. He had stood stiffly and +frowningly before the boy, and he had asked in a highly official tone: + +"What must a man be to be buried with military honors?" + +"A general?" + +"No." + +"An officer?" + +"No, no! Use your head boy! This is very important. A mistake would +be most serious." + +Rene had shaken his head dejectedly. + +"He must be dead, Rene," Henri had said gravely. "Entirely dead. As I +said, it is well to know these things. A mistake would be unfortunate." + +His blue eyes had gleamed with fun, but his face had remained frowning. +It was quite five minutes before she had heard Rene chuckling on the +doorstep. + +Was he still living, this Henri of the love of life and courting of +death? Could anything so living die? And if he had died had it been +because of her? She faced that squarely for the first time. + +"Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house of mercy; +and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +Beyond the partition Harvey slept on, his arms under his head. + + + + +XXVI + + +Harvey was clamoring for an early wedding. And indeed there were few +arguments against it, save one that Sara Lee buried in her heart. +Belle's house was small, and though she was welcome there, and more than +that, Sara Lee knew that she was crowding the family. + +Perhaps Sara Lee would have agreed in the end. There seemed to be +nothing else to do, though by the end of the first week she was no longer +in any doubt as to what her feeling for Harvey really was. It was +kindness, affection; but it was not love. She would marry him because +she had promised to, and because their small world expected her to do so; +and because she could not shame him again. + +For to her surprise she found that that was what he had felt--a strange, +self-conscious shame, like that of a man who has been jilted. She felt +that by coming back to him she had forfeited the right to break the +engagement. + +So every hour of every day seemed to make the thing more inevitable. +Belle was embroidering towels for her in her scant leisure. Even Anna, +with a second child coming, sent in her contribution to the bride's +linen chest. By almost desperately insisting on a visit to Aunt Harriet +she got a reprieve of a month. And Harvey was inclined to be jealous +even of that. + +Sometimes, but mostly at night when she was alone, a hot wave of +resentment overwhelmed her. Why should she be forced into the thing? +Was there any prospect of happiness after marriage when there was so +little before? + +For she realized now that even Harvey was not happy. He had at last +definitely refused to hear the story of the little house. + +"I'd rather just forget it, honey!" he said. + +But inconsistently he knew she did not forget it, and it angered him. +True to his insistence on ignoring those months of her absence, she made +no attempt to tell him. Now and then, however, closed in the library +together, they would fail of things to talk about, and Sara Lee's +knitting needles would be the only sound in the room. At those times he +would sit back in his chair and watch the far-away look in her eyes, and +it maddened him. + +From her busy life Belle studied them both, with an understanding she +did not reveal. And one morning when the mail came she saw Sara Lee's +face as she turned away, finding there was no letter for her, and made +an excuse to follow her to her room. + +The girl was standing by the window looking out. The children were +playing below, and the maple trees were silent. Belle joined her there +and slipped an arm round her. + +"Why are you doing it, Sara Lee?" she asked. + +"Doing what?" + +"Marrying Harvey." + +Sara Lee looked at her with startled eyes. + +"I'm engaged to him, Belle. I've promised." + +"Exactly," said Belle dryly. "But that's hardly a good reason, is it? +It takes more than a promise." She stared down at the flock of children +in the yard below. "Harvey's a man," she said. "He doesn't understand, +but I do. You've got to care a whole lot, Sara Lee, if you're going to +go through with it. It takes a lot of love, when it comes to having +children and all that." + +"He's so good, Belle. How can I hurt him?" + +"You'll hurt him a lot more by marrying him when you don't love him." + +"If only I could have a little time," she cried wildly. "I'm so--I'm +tired, Belle. And I can't forget about the war and all that. I've +tried. Sometimes I think if we could talk it over together I'd get it +out of my mind." + +"He won't talk about it?" + +"He's my own brother, and I love him dearly. But sometimes I think he's +hard. Not that he's ever ugly," she hastened to add; "but he's stubborn. +There's a sort of wall in him, and he puts some things behind it. And +it's like beating against a rock to try to get at them." + +After a little silence she said hesitatingly: + +"We've got him to think of too. He has a right to be happy. Sometimes +I've looked at you--you're so pretty, Sara Lee--and I've wondered if +there wasn't some one over there who--cared for you." + +"There was one man, an officer--Oh, Belle, I can't tell you. Not _you_!" + +"Why not!" asked Belle practically. "You ought to talk it out to some +one, and if Harvey insists on being a fool that's his own fault." + +For all the remainder of that sunny morning Sara Lee talked what was in +her heart. And Belle--poor, romantic, starved Belle--heard and +thrilled. She made buttonholes as she listened, but once or twice a +new tone in Sara Lee's voice caused her to look up. Here was a new +Sara Lee, a creature of vibrant voice and glowing eyes; and Belle was +not stupid. She saw that it was Henri whose name brought the deeper note. + +Sara Lee had stopped with her recall, had stopped and looked about the +room with its shiny new furniture and had shivered. Belle bent over her +work. + +"Why don't you go back?" she asked. + +Sara Lee looked at her piteously. + +"How can I? There is Harvey. And the society would not send me again. +It's over, Belle. All over." + +After a pause Belle said: "What's become of Henri? He hasn't written, +has he?" + +Sara Lee got up and went to the window. + +"I don't know where he is. He may be dead." + +Her voice was flat and lifeless. Belle knew all that she wanted to know. +She rose and gathered up her sewing. + +"I'm going to talk to Harvey. You're not going to be rushed into a +wedding. You're tired, and it's all nonsense. Well, I'll have to run +now and dress the children." + +That night Harvey and Belle had almost a violent scene. He had taken +Sara Lee over the Leete house that evening. Will Leete's widow had met +them there, a small sad figure in her mourning, but very composed, until +she opened the door into a tiny room upstairs with a desk and a lamp +in it. + +"This was Will's study," she said. "He did his work here in the +evenings, and I sat in that little chair and sewed. I never thought +then--" Her lips quivered. + +"Pretty rotten of Will Leete to leave that little thing alone," said +Harvey on their way home. "He had his fling; and she's paying for it." + +But Sara Lee was silent. It was useless to try to make Harvey understand +the urge that had called Will Leete across the sea to do his share for +the war, and that had brought him that peace of God that passeth all +understanding. + +It was not a good time for Belle to put up to him her suggestion for a +delay in the marriage, that evening after their return. He took it +badly and insisted on sending upstairs for Sara Lee. + +"Did you ask Belle to do this?" he demanded bluntly. + +"To do what?" + +"To put things off." + +"I have already told you, Harvey," Belle put in. "It is my own idea. +She is tired. She's been through a lot. I've heard the story you're +too stubborn to listen to. And I strongly advise her to wait a while." + +And after a time he agreed ungraciously. He would buy the house and fix +it over, and in the early fall it would be ready. + +"Unless," he added to Sara Lee with a bitterness born of +disappointment--"unless you change your mind again." + +He did not kiss her that night when she and Belle went together up the +stairs. But he stared after her gloomily, with hurt and bewilderment in +his eyes. + +He did not understand. He never would. She had come home to him all +gentleness and tenderness, ready to find in him the things she needed so +badly. But out of his obstinacy and hurt he had himself built up a +barrier. + +That night Sara Lee dreamed that she was back in the little house of +mercy. Rene was there; and Henri; and Jean, with the patch over his eye. +They were waiting for the men to come, and the narrow hall was full of +the odor of Marie's soup. Then she heard them coming, the shuffling of +many feet on the road. She went to the door, with Henri beside her, and +watched them coming up the road, a deeper shadow in the blackness--tired +men, wounded men, homeless men coming to her little house with its +firelight and its warmth. Here and there the match that lighted a +cigarette showed a white but smiling face. They stopped before the door, +and the warm little house, with its guarded lights and its food and +cheer, took them in. + + + + +XXVII + + +Very pale and desperate, Henri took the night A train for Folkestone +after he had said good-by to Sara Lee. He alternately chilled and +burned with fever, and when he slept, as he did now and then, going off +suddenly into a doze and waking with a jerk, it was to dream of horrors. + +He thought, in his wilder intervals, of killing himself. But his code +did not include such a shirker's refuge. He was going back to tell his +story and to take his punishment. + +He had cabled to Jean to meet him at Calais, but when, at dawn the next +morning, the channel boat drew in to the wharf there was no sign of +Jean or the car. Henri regarded the empty quay with apathetic eyes. +They would come, later on. If he could only get his head down and sleep +for a while he would be better able to get toward the Front. For he +knew now that he was ill. He had, indeed, been ill for days, but he did +not realize that. And he hated illness. He regarded it with suspicion, +as a weakness not for a strong man. + +The drowsy girl in her chair at the Gare Maritime regarded him curiously +and with interest. Many women turned to look after Henri, but he did +not know this. Had he known it he would have regarded it much as he +did illness. + +The stupid boy was not round. The girl herself took the key and led the +way down the long corridor upstairs to a room. Henri stumbled in and +fell across the bed. He was almost immediately asleep. + +Late in the afternoon he wakened. Strange that Jean had not come. He +got up and bathed his face. His right arm was very stiff now, and pains +ran from the old wound in his chest down to the fingers of his hand. He +tried to exercise to limber it, and grew almost weak with pain. + +At six o'clock, when Jean had not come, Henri resorted to ways that he +knew of and secured a car. He had had some coffee by that time, and he +felt much better--so well indeed that he sang under his breath a +strange rambling song that sounded rather like Rene's rendering of +Tipperary. The driver looked at him curiously every now and then. + +It was ten o'clock when they reached La Panne. Henri went at once to +the villa set high on a sand dune where the King's secretary lived. The +house was dark, but in the library at the rear there was a light. He +stumbled along the paths beside the house, and reached at last, after +interminable miles, when the path sometimes came up almost to his eyes +and again fell away so that it seemed to drop from under his feet--at +last he reached the long French doors, with their drawn curtains. He +opened the door suddenly and thereby surprised the secretary, who was a +most dignified and rather nervous gentleman, into laying his hand on a +heavy inkwell. + +"I wish to see the King," said Henri in a loud tone. Because at that +moment the secretary, lamp and inkwell and all, retired suddenly to a +very great distance, as if one had viewed them through the reverse end +of an opera glass. + +The secretary knew Henri. He, too, eyed him curiously. + +"The King has retired, monsieur." + +"I think," said Henri in a dangerous tone, "that he will see me." + +To tell the truth, the secretary rather thought so too. There was a +strange rumor going round, to the effect that the boy had followed a +woman to England at a critical time. Which would have been a pity, the +secretary thought. There were so many women, and so few men like Henri. + +The secretary considered gravely. Henri was by that time in a chair, but +it moved about so that he had to hold very tight to the arms. When he +looked up again the secretary had picked up his soft black hat and was +at the door. + +"I shall inquire," he said. Henri saluted him stiffly, with his left +hand, as he went out. + +The secretary went to His Majesty's equerry, who was in the next house +playing solitaire and trying to forget the family he had left on the +other side of the line. + +So it was that in due time Henri again traversed miles of path and +pavement, between tall borders of wild sea grass, miles which perhaps +were a hundred yards. And went round the screen, and--found the King +on the hearthrug. But when he drew himself stiffly to attention he +overdid the thing rather and went over backward with a crash. + +He was up again almost immediately, very flushed and uncomfortable. +After that he kept himself in hand, but the King, who had a way all his +own of forgetting his divine right to rule, and a great many other +things--the King watched him gravely. + +Henri sat in a chair and made a clean breast of it. Because he was +feeling rather strange he told a great many things that an agent of the +secret service is hardly expected to reveal to his king. He mentioned, +for instance, the color of Sara Lee's eyes, and the way she bandaged, +like one who had been trained. + +Once, in the very middle of his narrative, where he had put the letter +from the Front in his pocket and decided to go to England anyhow, he +stopped and hummed Rene's version of Tipperary. Only a bar or two. +Then he remembered. + +But one thing brought him round with a start. + +"Then," said the King slowly, "Jean was not with you?" + +Only he did not call him Jean. He gave him his other name, which, like +Henri's, is not to be told. + +Henri's brain cleared then with the news that Jean was missing. When, +somewhat later, he staggered out of the villa, it was under royal +instructions to report to the great hospital along the sea front and +near by, and there to go to bed and have a doctor. Indeed, because the +boy's eyes were wild by that time, the equerry went along and held his +arm. But that was because Henri was in open revolt, and while walking +steadily enough showed a tendency to bolt every now and then. + +He would stop on the way and argue, though one does not argue easily +with an equerry. + +"I must go," he would say fretfully. "God knows where he is. He'd +never give me up if I were the one." + +And once he shook off the equerry violently and said: + +"Let go of me, I tell you! I'll come back and go to bed when I've +found him." + +The equerry soothed him like a child. + +An English nurse took charge of Henri in the hospital, and put him to +bed. He was very polite to her, and extremely cynical. She sat in a +chair by his bed and held the key of the room in her hand. Once he +thought she was Sara Lee, but that was only for a moment. She did not +look like Sara Lee. And she was suspicious, too; for when he asked her +what she could put in her left hand that she could not put in her right, +she moved away and placed the door key on the stand, out of reach. + +However, toward morning she dozed. There was steady firing at Nieuport +and the windows shook constantly. An ambulance came in, followed by a +stirring on the lower floor. Then silence. He got up then and secured +the key. There was no time for dressing, because she was a suspicious +person and likely to waken at any time. He rolled his clothing into a +bundle and carried it under his well arm. The other was almost useless. + +The ambulance was still waiting outside, at the foot of the staircase. +There were voices and lights in the operating room, forward along the +tiled hall. Still in his night clothing, Henri got into the ambulance +and threw his uniform behind him. Then he got the car under way. + +Outside the village he paused long enough to dress. His head was +amazingly clear. He had never felt so sure of himself before. As to +his errand he had no doubt whatever. Jean had learned that he had +crossed the channel. Therefore Jean had taken up his work--Jean, who +had but one eye and was as clumsy as a bear. The thought of Jean +crawling through the German trenches set him laughing until he ended +with a sob. + +It was rather odd about the ambulance. It did not keep the road very +well. Sometimes it was on one side and sometimes on the other. It slid +as though the road were greased. And after a time Henri made an amazing +discovery. He was not alone in the car. + +He looked back, without stopping, and the machine went off in a wide arc. +He brought it back again, grinning. + +"Thought you had me, didn't you?" he observed to the car in general, and +the engine in particular. "Now no tricks!" + +There was a wounded man in the car. He had had morphia and he was very +comfortable. He was not badly hurt, and he considered that he was being +taken to Calais. He was too tired to talk, and the swinging of the car +rather interested him. He would doze and waken and doze again. But at +last he heard something that made him rise on his elbow. + +It was the hammering of the big guns. + +He called Henri's attention to this, but Henri said: + +"Lie down, Jean, and don't talk. We'll make it yet." + +The wounded man intended to make a protest, but he went to sleep instead. + +They had reached the village now where was the little house of mercy. +The ambulance rolled and leaped down the street, with both lights full +on, which was forbidden, and came to a stop at the door. The man inside +was grunting then, and Henri, whose head had never been so clear, got +out and went round to the rear of the car. + +"Now, out with you, comrade!" he said. "I have made an error, but it is +immaterial. Can you walk?" + +He lighted a cigarette, and the man inside saw his burning eyes and +shaking hands. Even through the apathy of the morphia he felt a thrill +of terror. He could walk. He got out while Henri pounded at the door. + +"_Attention_!" he called. "_Attention_!" + +Then he hummed an air of the camps: + + Trou la la, ca ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + + +When he heard steps inside Henri went back to the ambulance. He got in +and drove it, lights and all, down the street. + + Trou la la, ca ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + + +Somewhere down the road beyond the poplar trees he abandoned the ambulance. +They found it there the next morning, or rather what was left of it. +Evidently its two unwinking eyes had got on the Germans' nerves. + + * * * * * + +Early the next morning a Saxon regiment, standing on the firing step +ready for what the dawn might bring forth, watched the mist rise from +the water in front of them. It shone on a body in a Belgian uniform, +lying across their wire, and very close indeed. + +Now the Saxons are not Prussians, so no one for sport fired at the body. +Which was rather a good thing, because it moved slightly and stirred. +And then in a loud voice, which is an unusual thing for bodies to +possess, it began to sing: + + Trou la la, ca ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + + + + +XXVIII + + +Late in August Sara Lee broke her engagement with Harvey. She had been +away, at Cousin Jennie's, for a month, and for the first time since her +return she had had time to think. In the little suburban town there +were long hours of quiet when Cousin Jennie mended on the porch and Aunt +Harriet, enjoying a sort of reflected glory from Sara Lee, presided +at Red Cross meetings. + +Sara Lee decided to send for Harvey, and he came for a week-end, arriving +pathetically eager, but with a sort of defiance too. He was determined +to hold her, but to hold her on his own terms. + +Aunt Harriet had been vaguely uneasy, but Harvey's arrival seemed to put +everything right. She even kissed him when he came, and took great pains +to carry off Cousin Jennie when she showed an inclination toward +conversation and a seat on the porch. + +Sara Lee had made a desperate resolve. She intended to lay all her +cards on the table. He should know all that there was to know. If, +after that, he still wanted to hold her--but she did not go so far. +She was so sure he would release her. + +It was a despairing thing to do, but she was rather despairing those +days. There had been no letter from Henri or from Jean. She had written +them both several times, to Dunkirk, to the Savoy in London, to the +little house near the Front. But no replies had come. Yet mail was +going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly. + +When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come +back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie +on one side and Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent +prayers--that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not +think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital. + +She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy. +Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even +if that truth comprehended the worst. + +Once she received, from some unknown hand, a French journal, and pored +over it for days with her French dictionary, to find if it contained any +news. It was not until a week later that she received a letter from +Mabel, explaining that she had sent the journal, which contained a +description of her hospital. + +All of Harvey's Sunday she spent in trying to bring her courage to the +point of breaking the silence he had imposed on her, but it was not +until evening that she succeeded. The house was empty. The family had +gone to church. On the veranda, with the heavy scent of phlox at night +permeating the still air, Sara Lee made her confession. She began at +the beginning. Harvey did not stir--until she told of the way she had +stowed away to cross the channel. Then he moved. + +"This fellow who planned that for you--did you ever see him again?" + +"He met me in Calais." + +"And then what?" + +"He took me to Dunkirk in his car. Such a hideous car, Harvey--all +wrecked. It had been under fire again and again. I--" + +"He took you to Dunkirk! Who was with you?" + +"Just Jean, the chauffeur." + +"I like his nerve! Wasn't there in all that Godforsaken country a +woman to take with you? You and this--What was his name, anyhow?" + +"I can't tell you that, Harvey." + +"Look here!" he burst out. "How much of this aren't you going to tell? +Because I want it all or not at all." + +"I can't tell you his name. I'm only trying to make you understand the +way I feel about things. His name doesn't matter." She clenched her +hands in the darkness. "I don't think he is alive now." + +He tried to see her face, but she turned it away. + +"Dead, eh? What makes you think that?" + +"I haven't heard from him." + +"Why should you hear from him?" His voice cut like a knife. "Look at +me. Why should he write to you?" + +"He cared for me, Harvey." + +He sat in a heavy silence which alarmed her. + +"Don't be angry, please," she begged. "I couldn't bear it. It wasn't my +fault, or his either." + +"The damned scoundrel!" said Harvey thickly. + +But she reached over and put a trembling hand over his lips. + +"Don't say that," she said. "Don't! I won't allow you to. When I +think what may have happened to him, I--" Her voice broke. + +"Go on," Harvey said in cold tones she had never heard before. "Tell it +all, now you've begun it. God knows I didn't want to hear it. He took +you to the hotel at Dunkirk, the way those foreigners take their women. +And he established you in the house at the Front, I suppose, like a--" + +Sara Lee suddenly stood up and drew off her ring. + +"You needn't go on," she said quietly. "I had a decision to make +to-night, and I have made it. Ever since I came home I have been trying +to go back to where we were before I left. It isn't possible. You are +what you always were, Harvey. But I've changed. I can't go back." + +She put the ring into his hand. + +"It isn't that you don't love me. I think you do. But I've been +thinking things over. It isn't only to-night, or what you just said. +It's because we don't care for the same things, or believe in them." + +"But--if we love each other--" + +"It's not that, either. I used to feel that way. A home, and some one +to care about, and a little pleasure and work." + +"That ought to be enough, honey." + +He was terrified. His anger was gone. He placed an appealing hand on +her arm, and as she stood there in the faint starlight the wonder of her +once again got him by the throat. She had that sort of repressed +eagerness, that look of being poised for flight, that had always made +him feel cheap and unworthy. + +"Isn't that enough, honey?" he repeated. + +"Not now," she said, her eyes turned toward the east. "These are great +days, Harvey. They are greater and more terrible than any one can know +who has not been there. I've been there and I know. I haven't the +right to all this peace and comfort when I know how things are going +over there." + +Down the quiet street of the little town service was over. The last +hymn had been sung. Through the open windows came the mellow sound of +the minister's voice in benediction, too far away to be more than a +tone, like a single deep note of the organ. Sara Lee listened. She +knew the words he was saying, and she listened with her eyes turned to +the east: + + "The peace of God that passeth all understanding + be and abide with you all, forevermore. Amen." + +Sara Lee listened, and from the step below her Harvey watched her with +furtive, haggard eyes. He had not heard the benediction. + +"The peace of God!" she said slowly. "There is only one peace of God, +Harvey, and that is service. I am going back." + +"Service!" he scoffed. "You are going back to him!" + +"I'm afraid he is not there any more. I am going back to work. But if +he is there--" + +Harvey slid the ring into his pocket. "What if he's not there," he +demanded bitterly. "If you think, after all this, that I'm going to +wait, on the chance of your coming back to me, you're mistaken. I've +been a laughing stock long enough." + +In the light of her new decision Sara Lee viewed him for the first time +with the pitiless eyes of women who have lost a faith. She saw him for +what he was, not deliberately cruel, not even unkindly, but selfish, +small, without vision. Harvey was for his own fireside, his office, his +little family group. His labor would always be for himself and his own. +Whereas Sara Lee was, now and forever, for all the world, her hands +consecrated to bind up its little wounds and to soothe its great ones. +Harvey craved a cheap and easy peace. She wanted no peace except that +bought by service, the peace of a tired body, the peace of the little +house in Belgium where, after days of torture, weary men found quiet +and ease and the cheer of the open door. + + + + +XXIX + + +Late in October Sara Lee went back to the little house of mercy; went +unaccredited, and with her own money. She had sold her bit of property. + +In London she went to the Traverses, as before. But with a difference +too. For Sara Lee had learned the strangeness of the English, who are +slow to friendships but who never forget. Indeed a telegram met her at +Liverpool asking her to stop with them in London. She replied, refusing, +but thanking them, and saying she would call the next afternoon. + +Everything was the same at Morley's: Rather a larger percentage of men +in uniform, perhaps; greater crowds in the square; a little less of the +optimism which in the spring had predicted victory before autumn. But +the same high courage, for all that. + +August greeted her like an old friend. Even the waiters bowed to her, +and upstairs the elderly chambermaid fussed over her like a mother. + +"And you're going back!" she exclaimed. "Fancy that, now! You are +brave, miss." + +But her keen eyes saw a change in Sara Lee. Her smile was the same, but +there were times when she forgot to finish a sentence, and she stood, +that first morning, for an hour by the window, looking out as if she saw +nothing. + +She went, before the visit to the Traverses, to the Church of Saint +Martin in the Fields. It was empty, save for a woman in a corner, who +did not kneel, but sat staring quietly before her. Sara Lee prayed an +inarticulate bit of a prayer, that what the Traverses would have to tell +her should not be the thing that she feared, but that, if it were, she +be given courage to meet it and to go on with her work. + +The Traverses would know; Mrs. Cameron was a friend. They would know +about Henri, and about Jean. Soon, within the hour, she would learn +everything. So she asked for strength, and then sat there for a time, +letting the peace of the old church quiet her, as had the broken walls +and shattered altar of that other church, across the channel. + +It was rather a surprise to Sara Lee to have Mrs. Travers put her arms +about her and kiss her. Mr. Travers, too, patted her hand when he took +it. But they had, for all that, the reserve of their class. Much that +they felt about Sara Lee they did not express even to each other. + +"We are so grateful to you," Mrs. Travers said. "I am only one mother, +and of course now--" She looked down at her black dress. "But how many +others there are who will want to thank you, when this terrible thing is +over and they learn about you!" + +Mr. Travers had been eying Sara Lee. + +"Didn't use you up, did it?" he asked. "You're not looking quite fit." + +Sara Lee was very pale just then. In a moment she would know. + +"I'm quite well," she said. "I--do you hear from Mrs. Cameron?" + +"Frequently. She has worked hard, but she is not young." It was Mrs. +Travers who spoke. "She's afraid of the winter there. I rather think, +since you want to go back, that she will be glad to turn your domain +over to you for a time." + +"Then--the little house is still there?" + +"Indeed, yes! A very famous little house, indeed. But it is always +known as your house. She has felt like a temporary chatelaine. She +always thought you would come back." + +Tea had come, as before. The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace +herself. Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down +at her. + +"We have a plan to talk over," he said, "when you have had your tea. I +hope you will agree to it." + +He went back to the hearthrug. + +"When I was there before," Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady, +"there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me. Indeed, all +the credit for what I did belongs to him. And since I went home I +haven't heard--" + +Her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Travers glanced at his wife. Not for +nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends, +in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless +street before the little house. + +"I'm afraid we have bad news for you." Mrs. Travers put down her +untasted tea. "Or rather, we have no news. Of course," she added, +seeing Sara Lee's eyes, "in this war no news may be the best--that is, +he may be a prisoner." + +"That," Sara Lee heard herself say, "is impossible. If they captured +him they would shoot him." + +Mrs. Travers nodded silently. They knew Henri's business, too, by that +time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy. + +"And--Jean?" + +They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away +voice. And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs. +Cameron's and read a part of it aloud. + +"He seems to have been delirious," she read, holding her reading glasses +to her eyes. "A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he +learned this somehow. + +"He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance. He came +straight here and wakened us. There had been a wounded man in the +machine, and he left him on our doorstep. When I got to the door the +car was going wildly toward the Front, with both lamps lighted. We did +not understand then, of course, and no one thought of following it. The +ambulance was found smashed by a shell the next morning, and at first we +thought that he had been in it. But there was no sign that he had been, +and that night one of the men from the trenches insisted that he had +climbed out of a firing trench where the soldier stood, and had gone +forward, bareheaded, toward the German lines. + +"I am afraid it was the end. The men, however, who all loved him, do +not think so. It seems that he has done miracles again and again. I +understand that along the whole Belgian line they watch for him at night. +The other night a German on reconnoissance got very close to our wire, +and was greeted not by shots but by a wild hurrah. He was almost +paralyzed with surprise. They brought him here on the way back to the +prison camp, and he still looked dazed." + +Sara Lee sat with her hands clenched. Mrs. Travers folded the letter +and put it back into its envelope. + +"How long ago was that?" Sara Lee asked in a low tone. "Because, if he +was coming back at all--" + +"Four months." + +Suddenly Sara Lee stood up. + +"I think I ought to tell you," she said with a dead-white face, "that I +am responsible. He cared for me; and I was in love with him too. Only +I didn't know it then. I let him bring me to England, because--I +suppose it was because I loved him. I didn't think then that it was +that. I was engaged to a man at home." + +"Sit down," said Mr. Travers. "My dear child, nothing can be your fault." + +"He came with me, and the Germans got through. He had had word, but--" + +"Have you your salts?" Mr. Travers asked quietly of his wife. + +"I'm not fainting. I'm only utterly wretched." + +The Traverses looked at each other. They were English. They had taken +their own great loss quietly, because it was an individual grief and +must not be intruded on the sorrow of a nation. But they found this +white-faced girl infinitely appealing, a small and fragile figure, to +whose grief must be added, without any fault of hers, a bitter and +lasting remorse. + +Sara Lee stood up and tried to smile. + +"Please don't worry about me," she said. "I need something to do, that's +all. You see, I've been worrying for so long. If I can get to work and +try to make up I'll not be so hopeless. But I am not quite hopeless, +either," she added hastily. It was as though by the very word she had +consigned Henri to death. "You see, I am like the men; I won't give him +up. And perhaps some night he will come across from the other side, out +of the dark." + +Mr. Travers took her back to the hotel. When he returned from paying +off the taxi he found her looking across at the square. + +"Do you remember," she asked him, "the time when the little donkey was +hurt over there?" + +"I shall never forget it." + +"And the young officer who ran out when I did, and shot the poor thing?" + +Mr. Travers remembered. + +"That was he--the man we have been speaking of." + +For the first time that day her eyes filled with tears. + +Sara Lee, at twenty, was already living in her memories. + +So again the lights went down in front, and the back drop became but a +veil, and invisible. And to Sara Lee there came back again some of the +characters of the early _mise en scene_--marching men, forage wagons, +squadrons of French cavalry escorting various staffs, commandeered farm +horses with shaggy fetlocks fastened in rope corrals, artillery rumbling +along rutted roads which shook the gunners almost off the limbers. + +Nothing was changed--and everything. There was no Rene to smile his +adoring smile, but Marie came out, sobbing and laughing, and threw +herself into the girl's arms. The little house was the same, save for +a hole in the kitchen wall. There were the great piles of white bowls +and the shining kettles. There was the corner of her room, patched by +Rene's hands, now so long quiet. A few more shell holes in the street, +many more little crosses in the field near the poplar trees, more Allied +aeroplanes in the air--that was all that was changed. + +But to Sara Lee everything was changed, for all that. The little house +was grave and still, like a house of the dead. Once it had echoed to +young laughter, had resounded to the noise and excitement of Henri's +every entrance. Even when he was not there it was as though it but +waited for him to stir it into life, and small echoes of his gayety had +seemed to cling to its old walls. + +Sara Lee stood on the doorstep and looked within. She had come back. +Here she would work and wait, and if in the goodness of providence he +should come back, here he would find her, all the empty months gone and +forgotten. + +If he did not-- + +"I shall still be calling you, and waiting," he had written. She, too, +would call and wait, and if not here, then surely in the fullness of +time which is eternity the call would be answered. + +In October Sara Lee took charge again of the little house. Mrs. Cameron +went back to England, but not until the Traverses' plan had been +revealed. They would support the little house, as a memorial to the son +who had died. It was, Mrs. Travers wrote, the finest tribute they could +offer to his memory, that night after night tired and ill and wounded +men might find sanctuary, even for a little time, under her care. + +Luxuries began to come across the channel, food and dressings and tobacco. +Knitted things, too; for another winter was coming, and already the frost +lay white on the fields in the mornings. The little house took on a new +air of prosperity. There were days when it seemed almost swaggering +with opulence. + +It had need of everything, however. With the prospect of a second +winter, when an advance was impossible, the Germans took to hammering +again. Bombardment was incessant. The little village was again under +suspicion, and there came days of terror when it seemed as though even +the fallen masonry must be reduced to powder. The church went entirely. + +By December Sara Lee had ceased to take refuge during the bombardments. +The fatalism of the Front had got her. She would die or live according +to the great plan, and nothing could change that. She did not greatly +care which, except for her work, and even that she felt could be carried +on by another as well. + +There was no news of Henri, but once the King's equerry, going by, had +stopped to see her and had told her the story. + +"He was ill, undoubtedly," he said. "Even when he went to London he was +ill, and not responsible. The King understands that. He was a brave +boy, mademoiselle." + +But the last element of hope seemed to go with that verification of his +illness. He was delirious, and he had gone in that condition into the +filthy chill waters of the inundation. Well and sane there had been a +chance, but plunging wild-eyed and reckless, into that hell across, +there was none. + +She did her best in the evenings to be cheerful, to take the place, in +her small and serious fashion, of Henri's old gayety. But the soldiers +whispered among themselves that mademoiselle was in grief, as they were, +for the blithe young soldier who was gone. + +What hope Sara Lee had had died almost entirely early in December. On +the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy +pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian +corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench +while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual +courtesy, and had climbed out over the top. + +To Sara Lee this Hutin told his story. A short man with a red beard and +a kindly smile that revealed teeth almost destroyed from neglect, he was +at first diffident in the extreme. + +"It was the captain, mademoiselle," he asserted. "I know him well. He +has often gone on his errands from near my post. I am"--he smiled--"I +am usually in the front line." + +"What did he do?" + +"He had no cap, mademoiselle. I thought that was odd. And as you +know--he does not wear his own uniform on such occasions. But he wore +his own uniform, so that at first I did not know what he intended." + +"Later on," she asked, "you--did you hear anything?" + +"The usual sniping, mademoiselle. Nothing more." + +"He went through the inundation?" + +"How else could he go? Through the wire first, at the barrier, where +there is an opening, if one knows the way, I saw him beyond it, by the +light of a fusee. There is a road there, or what was once a road. He +stood there. Then the lights went out." + + + + +XXX + + +On a wild night in January Sara Lee inaugurated a new branch of service. +There had been a delay in sending up to the Front the men who had been +on rest, and an incessant bombardment held the troops prisoners in their +trenches. + +A field kitchen had been destroyed. The men were hungry, disheartened, +wet through. They needed her, she felt. Even the little she could do +would help. All day she had made soup, and at evening Marie led from +its dilapidated stable the little horse that Henri had once brought up, +trundling its cart behind it. The boiler of the cart was scoured, a +fire lighted in the fire box. Marie, a country girl, harnessed the +shaggy little animal, but with tears of terror. + +"You will be killed, mademoiselle," she protested, weeping. + +"But I have gone before. Don't you remember the man whose wife was +English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?" + +"What will become of the house if you are killed?" + +"Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send +to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or +some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you +promise that?" + +Marie promised in a loud wail. + +"Of course I shall come back," Sara Lee said, stirring her soup +preparatory to pouring it out. "I shall be very careful." + +"You will not come back, mademoiselle. You do not care to live, and to +such--" + +"Those are the ones who live on," said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out +her soup. + +She went quite alone. There was a great deal of noise, but no shells +fell near her. She led the little horse by its head, and its presence +gave her comfort. It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her +on the road. + +In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible +from the rear. There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach +them. One went along through the darkness until the sound of men's +voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker +of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its +flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment. + +Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply. + +"_Qui vive_?" + +"It is I," she called through the rain. "I have brought some chocolate +and some soup." + +He lowered his bayonet. + +"Pass, mademoiselle." + +She went on, the rumbling of her little cart deadened by the Belgian +guns. + +Through the near-by trenches that night went the word that near the +Repose of the Angels--which was but a hole in the ground and scarcely +reposeful--there was to be had hot soup and chocolate and cigarettes. +A dozen or so at a time, the men were allowed to come. Officers brought +their great capes to keep the girl dry. Boards appeared as if by magic +for her to stand on. The rain and the bombardment had both ceased, and +a full moon made the lagoon across the embankment into a silver lake. + +When the last soup had been dipped from the tall boiler, when the final +drops of chocolate had oozed from the faucet, Sara Lee turned and went +back to the little house again. But before she went she stood a moment +staring across toward that land of the shadow on the other side, where +Henri had gone and had not returned. + +Once, when the King had decorated her, she had wished that, wherever +Uncle James might be, on the other side, he could see what was happening. +And now she wondered if Henri could know that she had come back, and was +again looking after his men while she waited for that reunion he had so +firmly believed in. + +Then she led the little horse back along the road. + +At the poplar trees she turned and looked behind, toward the trenches. +The grove was but a skeleton now, a strange and jagged thing of twisted +branches, as though it had died in agony. She stood there while the +pony nuzzled her gently. If she called, would he come? But, then, all +of life was one call now, for her. She went on slowly. + +After that it was not unusual for her to go to the trenches, on such +nights as no men could come to the little house. Always she was joyously +welcomed, and always on her way back she turned to send from the poplar +trees that inarticulate aching call that she had come somehow to +believe in. + +January, wet and raw, went by; February, colder, with snow, was half +over. The men had ceased to watch for Henri over the parapet, and his +brave deeds had become fireside tales, to be told at home, if ever +there were to be homes again for them. + +Then one night Henri came back--came as he had gone, out of the shadows +that had swallowed him up; came without so much as the sound of a +sniper's rifle to herald him. A strange, thin Henri, close to +starvation, dripping water over everything from a German uniform, and +very close indeed to death before he called out. + +There was wild excitement indeed. Bearded private soldiers, forgetting +that name and rank of his which must not be told, patted his thin +shoulders. Officers who had lived through such horrors as also may not +be told, crowded about him and shook hands with him, and with each other. + +It was as though from the graveyard back in the fields had come, alive +and smiling, some dearly beloved friend. + +He would have told the story, but he was wet and weary. + +"That can wait," they said, and led him, a motley band of officers and +men intermixed, for once forgetting all decorum, toward the village. +They overtook the lines of men who had left the trenches and were moving +with their slow and weary gait up the road. The news spread through the +column. There were muffled cheers. Figures stepped out of the darkness +with hands out. Henri clasped as many as he could. + +When with his escort he had passed the men they fell, almost without +orders, into columns of four, and swung in behind him. There was no +band, but from a thousand throats, yet cautiously until they passed the +poplar trees, there gradually swelled and grew a marching song. + +Behind Henri a strange guard of honor--muddy, tired, torn, even +wounded--they marched and sang: + + Trou la la, ca ne va guere; + Trou la la, ce ne va pas. + + +Sara Lee, listening for that first shuffle of many feet that sounded so +like the wind in the trees or water over the pebbles of a brook, paused +in her work and lifted her head. The rhythm of marching feet came +through the wooden shutters. The very building seemed to vibrate with +it. And there was a growling sound with it that soon she knew to be the +deep voices of singing men. + +She went to the door and stood there, looking down the street. Behind +her was the warm glow of the lamp, all the snug invitation of the little +house. + +A group of soldiers had paused in front of the doorway, and from them +one emerged--tall, white, infinitely weary--and looked up at her with +unbelieving eyes. + +After all, there are no words for such meetings. Henri took her hand, +still with that sense of unreality, and bent over it. And Sara Lee +touched his head as he stooped, because she had called for so long, and +only now he had come. + +"So you have come back!" she said in what she hoped was a composed +tone--because a great many people were listening. He raised his head +and looked at her. + +"It is you who have come back, mademoiselle." + + * * * * * + +There was gayety in the little house that night. Every candle was +lighted. They were stuck in rows on mantel-shelves. They blazed--and +melted into strange arcs--above the kitchen stove. There were +cigarettes for everybody, and food; and a dry uniform, rather small, for +Henri. Marie wept over her soup, and ran every few moments to the door +to see if he was still there. She had kissed him on both cheeks when +he came in, and showed signs, every now and then, of doing it again. + +Sara Lee did her bandaging as usual, but with shining eyes. And soon +after Henri's arrival a dispatch rider set off post haste with certain +papers and maps, hurriedly written and drawn. Henri had not only +returned, he had brought back information of great value to all the +Allied armies. + +So Sara Lee bandaged, and in the little room across the way, where no +longer Harvey's photograph sat on the mantel, Henri told his story to +the officers--of his imprisonment in the German prison at Crefeld; of +his finding Jean there, weeks later when he was convalescing from +typhoid; of their escape and long wandering; of Jean's getting into +Holland, whence he would return by way of England. Of his own business, +of what he had done behind the lines after Jean had gone, he said +nothing. But his listeners knew and understood. + +But his dispatches off, his story briefly told, Henri wandered out among +the men again. He was very happy. He had never thought to be so happy. +He felt the touch on his sleeves of hard brown, not overclean hands, +infinitely tender and caressing; and over there, as though she had never +gone, was Sara Lee, slightly flushed and very radiant. + +And as though he also had never gone away, Henri pushed into the _salle +a manger_ and stood before her smiling. + +"You bandage well, mademoiselle," he said gayly. "But I? I bandage +better! See now, a turn here, and it is done! Does it hurt, Paul?" + +The man in the dressing chair squirmed and grinned sheepishly. + +"The iodine," he explained. "It is painful." + +"Then I shall ask you a question, and you will forget the iodine. Why +is a dead German like the tail of a pig?" + +Paul failed. The room failed. Even Colonel Lilias confessed himself at +fault. + +"Because it is the end of the swine," explained Henri, and looked about +him triumphantly. A gust of laughter spread through the room and even +to the kitchen. A door banged. Henri upset a chair. There was noise +again, and gayety in the little house of mercy. And much happiness. + +And there I think we may leave them all--Henri and Sara Lee; and Jean +of the one eye and the faithful heart; and Marie, with her kettles; and +even Rene, who still in some strange way belonged to the little house, +as though it were something too precious to abandon. + +The amazing interlude had become the play itself. Never again for Sara +Lee would the lights go up in front, and Henri with his adoring eyes +and open arms fade into the shadows. + +The drama of the war plays on. The Great Playwright sees fit, now and +then, to take away some well-beloved players. New faces appear and +disappear. The music is the thunder of many guns. Henri still plays +his big part, Sara Lee her little one. Yet who shall say, in the end, +which one has done the better? There are new and ever new standards, +but love remains the chief. And love is Sara Lee's one quality--love +of her kind, of tired men and weary, the love that shall one day knit +this broken world together. And love of one man. + +On weary nights, when Henri is again lost in the shadows, Sara Lee, +her work done, the men gone, sits in her little house of mercy and +waits. The stars on clear evenings shine down on the roofless buildings, +on the rubbish that was once the mill, on the ruined poplar trees, and +on the small acre of peace where tiny crosses mark the long sleep of +weary soldiers. + +And sometimes, though she knows it now by heart, she reads aloud that +letter of Henri's to her. It comforts her. It is a promise. + +"If that is to be, then think of me, somewhere, perhaps with Rene by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps, even beyond the stars, they have need of a little +house of mercy. And God knows, wherever I am, I shall have need of you." + +(THE END) + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + +***** This file should be named 1590.txt or 1590.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/1/5/9/1590/ + +Produced by An anonymous PG volunteer and David Garcia + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. 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Hart, Project Gutenberg + + + + + +THE AMAZING INTERLUDE + +by Mary Roberts Rinehart + + + + +I + + +The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for +most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the +same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits +through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately +the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is +the background for the moving figures of the play. + +So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of +permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there +should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected +none. + +But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours: +lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity, +reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes +place. Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on - a new mise +en scene, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left +knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy - Sara Lee became a fairy, of a +sort - and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And +then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the +lady is back by the fire - but with a memory. + +This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory - and of something more. + +The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing her part in the +setting of a city in Pennsylvania. An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It +is only fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither quality. She +was far from ugly, and very, very far from rich. She had started her +part with a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one they had +gone away into the wings and had not come back. At nineteen she was +alone knitting by the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop was +of painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for its moment, was the +forest of adventure. A strange forest, too - one that Sara Lee would +not have recognised as a forest. And a prince of course - but a prince +as strange and mysterious as the forest. + +The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented. If it was +resignation rather than content, no one but Sara Lee knew the difference. +Knitting, too; but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid, knitting an +afghan against an interesting event which involved a friend of hers. + +Sara Lee rather deplored the event - in her own mind, of course, for in +her small circle young unmarried women accepted the major events of life +without question, and certainly without conversation. She never, for +instance, allowed her Uncle James, with whom she lived, to see her +working at the afghan; and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be a +sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions. + +Sara Lee's days, up to the twentieth of December, 1914, had been much +alike. In the mornings she straightened up her room, which she had +copied from one in a woman's magazine, with the result that it gave +somehow the impression of a baby's bassinet, being largely dotted Swiss +and ribbon. Yet in a way it was a perfect setting for Sara Lee herself. +It was fresh and virginal, and very, very neat and white. A resigned +little room, like Sara Lee, resigned to being tucked away in a corner +and to having no particular outlook. Peaceful, too. + +Sometimes in the morning between straightening her room and going to the +market for Aunt Harriet, Sara Lee looked at a newspaper. So she knew +there was a war. She read the headings, and when the matter came up for +mention at the little afternoon bridge club, as it did now and then after +the prizes were distributed, she always said "Isn't it horrible!" and +changed the subject. + +On the night of the nineteenth of December Sara Lee had read her chapter +in the Bible - she read it through once each year - and had braided down +her hair, which was as smooth and shining and lovely as Sara Lee herself, +and had raised her window for the night when Aunt Harriet came in. Sara +Lee did not know, at first, that she had a visitor. She stood looking +out toward the east, until Aunt Harriet touched her on the arm. + +"What in the world!" said Aunt Harriet. "A body would suppose it was +August." + +"I was just thinking," said Sara Lee. + +"You'd better do your thinking in bed. Jump in and I'll put out your +light." + +So Sara Lee got into her white bed with the dotted Swiss valance, and +drew the covers to her chin, and looked a scant sixteen. Aunt Harriet, +who was an unsentimental woman, childless and diffident, found her +suddenly very appealing there in her smooth bed, and did an unexpected +thing. She kissed her. Then feeling extremely uncomfortable she put +out the light and went to the door. There she paused. + +"Thinking!" she said. "What about, Sara Lee?" + +Perhaps it was because the light was out that Sara Lee became articulate. +Perhaps it was because things that had been forming in her young mind for +weeks had at last crystallized into words. Perhaps it was because of a +picture she had happened on that day, of a boy lying wounded somewhere +on a battlefield and calling "Mother!" + +"About - over there," she said rather hesitatingly. "And about Anna." + +"Over there?" + +"The war," said Sara Lee. "I was just thinking about all those women +over there - like Anna, you know. They - they had babies, and got +everything ready for them. And then the babies grew up, and they're all +getting killed." + +"It's horrible," said Aunt Harriet. "Do you want another blanket? It's +cold to-night." + +Sara Lee did not wish another blanket. + +"I'm a little worried about your Uncle James," said Aunt Harriet, at the +door. "He's got indigestion. I think I'll make him a mustard plaster." + +She prepared to go out then, but Sara Lee spoke from her white bed. + +"Aunt Harriet," she said, "I don't think I'll ever get married." + +"I said that too, once," said Aunt Harriet complacently. "What's got +into your head now?" + +"I don't know," Sara Lee replied vaguely. "I Just - What's the use?" + +Aunt Harriet was conscious of a hazy impression of indelicacy. Coming +from Sara Lee it was startling and revolutionary. In Aunt Harriet's +world young women did not question their duty, which was to marry, +preferably some one in the neighborhood, and bear children, who would be +wheeled ahout that same neighborhood in perambulators and who would +ultimately grow up and look after themselves. + +"The use?" she asked tartly. + +"Of having babies, and getting to care about them, and then - There will +always be wars, won't there?" + +"You turn over and go to sleep," counseled Aunt Harriet. "And stop +looking twenty years or more ahead." She hesitated. "You haven't +quarreled with Harvey, have you?" + +Sara Lee turned over obediently. + +"No. It's not that," she said. And the door closed. + +Perhaps, had she ever had time during the crowded months that followed, +Sara Lee would have dated certain things from that cold frosty night in +December when she began to question things. For after all that was what +it came to. She did not revolt. She questioned. + +She lay in her white bed and looked at things for the first time. The +sky had seemed low that night. Things were nearer. The horizon was +close. And beyond that peaceful horizon, to the east, something was +going on that could not be ignored. Men were dying. Killing and dying. +Men who had been waited for as Anna watched for her child. + +Downstairs she could hear Aunt Harriet moving about. The street was +quiet, until a crowd of young people - she knew them by their voices - +went by, laughing. + +"It's horrible," said Sara Lee to herself. There was a change in her, +but she was still inarticulate. Somewhere in her mind, but not +formulated, was the feeling that she was too comfortable. Her peace was +a cheap peace, bought at no price. Her last waking determination was to +finish the afghan quickly and to to knit for the men at the war. + +Uncle James was ill the next morning. Sara Lee went for the doctor, but +Anna's hour had come and he was with her. Late in the afternoon he came, +however looking a bit gray round the mouth with fatigue, but triumphant. +He had on these occasions always a sense of victory; even, in a way, a +eeling of being part of a great purpose. He talked at such times of the +race, as one may who is doing his best by it. + +"Well," he said when Sara Lee opened the door, "it's a boy. Eight +pounds. Going to be red-headed, too." He chuckled. + +"A boy!" said Sara Lee. "I - don't you bring any girl babies any more?" + +The doctor put down his hat and glanced at her. + +"Wanted a girl, to be named for you?" + +"No. It's not that. It's only -" She checked herself. He wouldn't +understand. The race required girl babies. "I've put a blue bow on my +afghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs. + +Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as +Sara Lee's days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it, +ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul - for its bright +curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining brasses and growing +plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to +ache, too, for her friends - their small engrossing cares, their kindly +interest, their familiar faces. + +Time was to come, too, when she came back, not to the little house, it +is true, but to her friends, to Anna and the others. But they had not +grown and Sara Lee had. And that is the story. + +Uncle James died the next day. One moment he was there, an uneasy +figure, under the tulip quilt, and the next he had gone away entirely, +leaving a terrible quiet behind him. He had been the center of the +little house, a big and cheery and not over-orderly center. Followed +his going not only quiet, but a wretched tidiness. There was nothing +for Sara Lee to do but to think. + +And, in the way of mourning women, things that Uncle James had said +which had passed unheeded came back to her. One of them was when he +had proposed to adopt a Belgian child, and Aunt Harriet had offered +horrified protest. + +"All right," he had said. "Of course, if you feel that way about +it - ! But I feel kind of mean, sometimes, sitting here doing nothing +when there's such a lot to be done." + +Then he had gone for a walk and had come back cheerful enough but rather +quiet. + +There was that other time, too, when the German Army was hurling itself, +wave after wave, across the Yser - only of course Sara Lee knew nothing +of the Yser then - and when it seemed as though the attenuated Allied +line must surely crack and give. He had said then that if he were only +twenty years younger he would go across and help. + +"And what about me?" Aunt Harriet had asked. " But I suppose I wouldn't +matter." + +"You could go to Jennie's, couldn't you?" + +There had followed one of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt +Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle +James' becoming twenty years younger and going away. + +And now Uncle James had taken on the wings of the morning and was indeed +gone away. And again it became a question of Jennie's. Aunt Harriet, +rather dazed at first, took to arguing it pro and con. + +"Of course she has room for me," she would say in her thin voice. +"There's that little room that was Edgar's. There's nobody in it now. +But there's only room for a single bed, Sara Lee." + +Sara Lee was knitting socks now, all a trifle tight as to heel. "I +know," she would say. "I'll get along. Don't you worry about me." + +Always these talks ended on a note of exasperation for Aunt Harriet. For +Sara Lee's statement that she could manage would draw forth a plaintive +burst from the older woman. + +"If only you'd marry Harvey," she would say. "I don't know what's come +over you. You used to like him well enough." + +I still like him." + +"I've seen you jump when the telephone bell rang. Your Uncle James often +spoke about it. He noticed more than most people thought." She followed +Sara Lee's eyes down the street to where Anna was wheeling her baby +slowly up and down. Even from that distance Sara Lee could see the bit +of pink which was the bow on her afghan. "I believe you're afraid." + +"Afraid?" + +"Of having children," accused Aunt Harriet fretfully. + +Sara Lee colored. + +"Perhaps I am," she said; "but not the sort of thing you think. I just +don't see the use of it, that's all. Aunt Harriet, how long does it +take to become a hospital nurse?" + +"Mabel Andrews was three years. It spoiled her looks too. She used to +be a right pretty girl." + +"Three years," Sara Lee reflected. "By that time-" + +The house was very quiet and still those days. There was an interlude +of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet +alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things. +At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the +Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading +like wildfire. There were arguments and disagreements. A girl named +Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island +of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval. Mabel Andrews came once +to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross +dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging. Forerunner of the many +first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable +by one thing she said. + +"You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things," she stated +in her brisk voice. "One of our internes is over there, and he says +we'll be in it before spring." + +After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm. + +"Are you going?" she asked. + +"Leaving day after to-morrow. Why?" + +I - couldn't I be useful over there?" + +Mabel smiled rather grimly. "What can you do?" + +"I can cook." + +"Only men cooks, my dear. What else?" + +"I could clean up, couldn't I? There must be something. I'd do +anything I could. Don't they have people to wash dishes and-all that?" + +Mabel was on doubtful ground there. She knew of a woman who had been +permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and +buying her own tires and gasoline. + +She carries supplies to small hospitals in out-of-the-way places," she +said. "But I don't suppose you can do that, Sara Lee, can you?" + +However, she gave Sara Lee a New York address, and Sara Lee wrote and +offered herself. She said nothing to Aunt Harriet, who had by that time +elected to take Edgar's room at Cousin Jennie's and was putting Uncle +James' clothes in tearful order to send to Belgium. After a time she +received a reply. + +We have put your name on our list of volunteers," said the letter, +but of course you understand that only trained workers are needed now. +France and England are full of untrained women who are eager to help." + +It was that night that Sara Lee became engaged to Harvey. + +Sara Lee's attitude toward Harvey was one that she never tried to analyze. +When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This +was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash +about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile, +and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust +forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,- gave him a sort of tense +eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph +Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact he was a bond +salesman. + +So during the daytime Sarah Lee looked - at intervals - at the photograph, +and got that feel of drive and force. And in the evenings Harvey came, +and she lost it. For, outside of a frame, he became a rather sturdy +figure, of no romance, but of a comforting solidity. A kindly young man, +with a rather wide face and hands disfigured as to fingers by much early +baseball. He had heavy shoulders, the sort a girl might rely on to +carry many burdens. A younger and tidier Uncle James, indeed - the same +cheery manner, the same robust integrity, and the same small ambition. + +To earn enough to keep those dependent on him, and to do it fairly; to +tell the truth and wear clean linen and not run into debt; and to marry +Sara Lee and love and cherish her all his life - this was Harvey. A +plain and likable man, a lover and husband to be sure of. But - + +He came that night to see Sarah Lee. There was nothing unusual about +that. He came every night. But he came that night full of determination. +That was not unusual, either, but it had not carried him far. He had no +idea that his picture was romantic. He would have demanded it back had +he so much as suspected it. He wore his hair in a pompadour because +of the prosaic fact that he had a cow-lick. He was very humble about +himself, and Sara Lee was to him as wonderful as his picture was to her. + +Sara Lee was in the parlor, waiting for him. The one electric lamp was +lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of +reflected light. There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a +white fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The +Encyc1opaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the +wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by +the fire. It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as +no doubt Harvey would picture for his own home. He had of course never +seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom. + +Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him. When he had taken off his +ulster and his overshoes - he had been raised by women - and came in, +she was standing by the fire. + +"Raining," he said. "It's getting colder. May be snow before morning." + +Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat. +She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her +quietest moments there was that about her - a sort of repressed +eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that +there were times when she had a "flighty" look. + +And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped +Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his +arms out. + +"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!" + +"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically. + +"I don't know," he muttered. "You - sometimes you look as though -" +Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good +to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek +against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear." + +A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has +stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel. He +was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures f1ashed through +her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One was of +Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby. +The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield +and crying "Mother!" + +Two sorts of maternity - one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, +but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other +vicarious, of all the world. + +"Don't you love me - that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers. + +"I don't know." + +"You don't know!" + +It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing +at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up, +saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust +forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair +that marked him all man, and virile man. + +She slipped her hand into his. + +"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the +complete surrender of a child. + +He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where +she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his +simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear, +and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion +he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he +read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers. + +To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's +devotion was something mote, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara +Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit, +small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she +was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes, +she had never even dreamed. + +Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and +behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing, +unsuspected, the mise en scene. + + + + II + + +About the middle of January Mabel Andrews A wrote to Sara Lee from +France, where she was already installed in a hospital at Calais. + +The evening before the letter came Harvey had brought round the +engagement ring. He had made a little money in war stocks, and into +the ring he had put every dollar of his profits - and a great love, and +gentleness, and hopes which he did not formulate even to himself. + +It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger, +than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious +glances for months. + +"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously. + +Sara Lee looked at it on her finger. + +"It is lovely! It - it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his +shoulder. + +Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews, and +he had a tendency to restrict his war reading to the quarter column in +the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News." + +What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry? Which +is what Mabel wrote about. + +"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and +something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but +just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty +of it. But here - yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy. +He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or +coffee." + +It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a +long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust +out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no +materiel of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army. France had +her own problems - her army, non-productive industrially, and the great +and constantly growing British forces quartered there, paying for what +they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of the starvation of +German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know and may never know is of +the struggle during those early days to feed the heroic Belgian Army in +their wet and almost untenable trenches. + +Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained +to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing? +Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew +that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny +living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as pointed +with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over there +Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and - put on her engagement ring. + +Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned adoringly +to her, Sara Lee formulated a question: + +"Don't you sometimes feel as though you'd like to go to France and fight?" + +"What for?" + +"Well, they need men, don't they?" + +"I guess they don't need me, honey. I'd be the dickens of a lot of use! +Never fired a gun in my life." + +"You could learn. It isn't hard." + +Harvey sat upright and stared at her. + +"Oh, if you want me to go -" he said, and waited. + +Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger. + +"Nobody wants anybody to go," she said not very elegantly. "I'd just + - I'd rather like to think you wanted to go." + +That was almost too subtle for Harvey. Something about him was rather +reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was determined not to +go to church. + +"It's not our fight," he said. "And as far as that goes, I'm not so +sure there isn't right on both sides. Or wrong. Most likely wrong. +I'd look fine going over there to help the Allies, and then making up my +mind it was the British who'd spilled the beans. Now let's talk about +something interesting - for instance, how much we love each other." + +It was always "we" with Harvey. In his simple creed if a girl accepted +a man and let him kiss her and wore his ring it was a reciprocal love +affair. It never occurred to him that sometimes as the evening dragged +toward a close Sara Lee was just a bit weary of his arms, and that she +sought, after he had gone, the haven of her little white room, and closed +the door, and had to look rather a long time at his photograph before +she was in a properly loving mood again. + +But that night after his prolonged leave-taking Sara Lee went upstairs +to her room and faced the situation. + +She was going to marry Harvey. She was committed to that. And she loved +him; not as he cared, perhaps, but he was a very definite part of her +life. Once or twice when he had been detained by business she had missed +him, had put in a lonely and most unhappy evening. + +Sara Lee had known comparatively few men. In that small and simple +circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two +inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the +usual give and take of more sophisticated circles. Boys and girls paired +off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was +comparatively little shifting. There were few free lances among the men, +and none among the girls. When she was seventeen Harvey had made it +known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing. And for +two years he had without intentional selfishness kept Sara Lee for +himself. + +That was how matters stood that January night when Sara Lee went +upstairs after Harvey had gone and read Mabel's letter, with Harvey's +photograph turned to the wall. Under her calm exterior a little flame +of rebellion was burning in her. Harvey's perpetual "we," his attitude +toward the war, and Mabel's letter, with what it opened before her, had +set the match to something in Sara Lee she did not recognize - a strain +of the adventurer, a throw-back to some wandering ancestor perhaps. But +more than anything it had set fire to the something maternal that is in +all good women. + +Yet, had Aunt Harriet not come in just then, the flame might have died. +And had it died a certain small page of the history of this war would +never have been written. + +Aunt Harriet came in hesitatingly. She wore a black wrapper, and her +face, with her hair drawn back for the night, looked tight and old. + +Harvey gone? " she asked. + +" Yes." + +"I thought I'd better come in. There's something - I can tell you in +the morning if you're tired." + +"I'm not tired," said Sara Lee. + +Aunt Harriet sat down miserably on a chair. + +"I've had a letter from Jennie," she stated. "The girl's gone, and the +children have whooping cough. She'd like me to come right away." + +"To do the maid's work!" said Sara Lee indig nantly. "You mustn't do it, +that's all! She can get somebody." + +But Aunt Harriet was firm. She was not a fair-weather friend, and since +Jennie was good enough to offer her a home she felt she ought to go at +once. + +"You'll have to get married right away," she finished. "Goodness knows +it's time enough! For two years Harvey has been barking like a watchdog +in front of the house and keeping every other young man away." + +Sara Lee smiled. + +"He's only been lying on the doormat, Aunt Harriet," she observed. "I +don't believe he knows how to bark." + +"Oh, he's mild enough. He may change after marriage. Some do. But," +she added hastily, "he'll be a good husband. He's that sort." + +Suddenly something that had been taking shape in Sara Lee's small head, +quite unknown to her, developed identity and speech. + +"But I'm not going to marry him just yet," she said. + +Aunt Harriet's eyes fell on the photograph with its face to the wall, +and she started. + +"You haven't quarreled with him, have you?" + +"No, of course not! I have something else I want to do first. That's +all. Aunt Harriet, I want to go to France." + +Aunt Harriet began to tremble, and Sara Lee went over and put her young +arms about her. + +"Don't look like that," she said. "It's only for a little while. I've +got to go. I just have to, that's all!" + +"Go how?" demanded Aunt Harriet. + +"I don't know. I'll find some way. I've had a letter from Mabel. +Things are awful over there." + +"And how will you help them?" Her face worked nervously. "Is it going +to help for you to be shot? Or carried off by the Germans?" The +atrocity stories were all that Aunt Harriet knew of the war, and all +she could think of now. "You'll come back with your hands cut off." + +Sara Lee straightened and looked out where between the white curtains +the spire of the Methodist Church marked the east. + +"I'm going," she said. And she stood there, already poised for flight. + +There was no sleep in the little house that night. Sara Lee could hear +the older woman moving about in her lonely bed, where the spring still +sagged from Uncle James' heavy form, and at last she went in and crept +in beside her. Toward morning Aunt Harriet slept, with the girl's arm +cross her; and then Sara Lee went back to her room and tried to plan. + +She had a little money, and she had heard that living was cheap abroad. +She could get across then, and perhaps keep herself. But she must do +more than that, to justify her going. She must get money, and then +decide how the money was to be spent. If she could only talk it over +with Uncle James! Or, with Harvey. Harvey knew about business and money. + +But she dared not go to Harvey. She was terribly frightened when she +even thought of him. There was no hope of making him understand; and +no chance of reasoning with him, because, to be frank, she had no +reasons. She had only instinct - instinct and a great tenderness toward +suffering. No, obviously Harvey must not know until everything was +arranged. + +That morning the Methodist Church packed a barrel for the Belgians. +There was a real rite of placing in it Mrs. Augustus Gregory's old +sealskin coat, now a light brown and badly worn, but for years the only +one in the neighborhood. Various familiar articles appeared, to be +thrust into darkness, only to emerge in surroundings never dreamed of +in their better days - the little Howard boy's first trouser suit ; the +clothing of a baby that had never lived; big Joe Hemmingway's dress suit, +the one he was married in and now too small for him. And here and there +things that could ill be spared, brought in and offered with resolute +cheerfulness. + +Sara Lee brought some of Uncle James' things, and was at once set to +work. The women there called Sara Lee capable, but it was to take other +surroundings to bring out her real efficiency. + +And it was when bending over a barrel, while round her went on that +pitying talk of women about a great calamity, that Sara Lee got her +great idea; and later on she made the only speech of her life. + +That evening Harvey went home in a quiet glow of happiness. He had had +a good day. And he had heard of a little house that would exactly suit +Sara Lee and him. He did not notice his sister's silence when he spoke +about it. He was absorbed, manlike, in his plans. + +"The Leete house," he said in answer to her perfunctory question. "Will +Leete has lost his mind and volunteered for the ambulance service in +France. Mrs. Leete is going to her mother's." + +"Maybe he feels it's his duty. He can drive a car, and they have no +children." + +"Duty nothing!" He seemed almost unduly irritated. " He's tired of the +commission business, that's all. Y'ought to have heard the fellows in +the office. Anyhow, they want to sub-let the house, and I'm going to +take Sara Lee there to-night." + +His sister looked at him, and there was in her face something of the +expression of the women that day as they packed the barrel. But she +said nothing until he was leaving the house that night. Then she put +a hand on his arm. She was a weary little woman, older than Harvey, +and tired with many children. She had been gathering up small overshoes +in the hall and he had stopped to help her. + +"You know, Harvey, Sara Lee's not - I always think she's different, +somehow." + +"Well, I guess yes! There's nobody like her." + +"You can't bully her, you know." + +arvey stared at her with honestly perplexed eyes. + +"Bully!" he said. "What on earth makes you say that?" + +Then he laughed. + +"Don't you worry, Belle," he said. "I know I'm a fierce and domineering +person, but if there's any bullying I know who'll do it." + +"She's not like the other girls you know," she reiterated rather +helplessly. + +"Sure she's not! But she's enough like them to need a house to live in. +And if she isn't crazy about the Leete place I'll eat it." + +He banged out cheerfully, whistling as he went down the street. He +stopped whistling, however, at Sara Lee's door. The neighborhood +preserved certain traditions as to a house of mourning. It lowered +its voice in passing and made its calls of condolence in dark clothes +and a general air of gloom. Pianos near by were played only with the +windows closed, and even the milkman leaving his bottles walked on +tiptoe and presented his monthly bill solemnly. + +So Harvey stopped whistling, rang the bell apologetically, and - faced a +new and vivid Sara Lee, flushed and with shining eyes, but woefully +frightened. + +She told him almost at once. He had only reached the dining room of +the Leete house, which he was explaining had a white wainscoting when +she interrupted him. The ladies of the Methodist Church were going to +collect a certain amount each month to support a soup kitchen as near +the Front as possible. + +"Good work!" said Harvey heartily. "I suppose they do get hungry, poor +devils. Now about the dining room - " + +"Harvey dear," Sara Lee broke in, "I've not finished. I - I'm going +over to run it." + +"You are not!" + +"But I am! It's all arranged. It's my plan. They've all wanted to do +something besides giving clothes. They send barrels, and they never +hear from them again, and it's hard to keep interested. But with me +there, writing home and telling them, 'To-day we served soup to this +man, and that man, perhaps wounded.' And - and that sort of thing - +don't you see how interested every one will be? Mrs. Gregory has +promised twenty-five dollars a month, and - " + +"You're not going," said Harvey in a flat tone. "That's all. Don't +talk to me about it." + +Sara Lee flushed deeper and started again, but rather hopelessly. +There was no converting a man who would not argue or reason, who based +everything on flat refusal. + +"But somebody must go," she said with a tightening of her voice. +"Here's Mabel Andrews' letter. Read it and you will understand." + +" I don't want to read it." + +Nevertheless he took it and read it. He read slowly. He did nothing +quickly except assert his masculine domination. He had all the faults +of his virtues; he was as slow as he was sure, as unimaginative as he +was faithful. + +He read it and gave it back to her. + +"I don't think you mean it," he said. "I give you credit for too much +sense. Maybe some one is needed over there. I guess things are pretty +bad. But why should you make it your affair? There are about a million +women in this Country that haven't got anything else to do. Let them go." + +Some of them will. But they're afraid, mostly." + +"Afraid! My God, I should think they would be afraid! And you're asking +me to let you go into danger, to put off our wedding while you wander +about over there with a million men and no women and - " + +"You're wrong, Harvey dear," said Sara Lee in a low voice. "I am not +asking you at all. I am telling you that I am going." + +Sara Lee's leaving made an enormous stir in her small community. Opinion +was divided. She was right according to some; she was mad according to +others. The women of the Methodist Church, finding a real field of +activity, stood behind her solidly. Guaranties of funds came in in a +steady flow, though the amounts were small; and, on the word going about +that she was to start a soup kitchen for the wounded, housewives sent +in directions for making their most cherished soups. + +Sara Lee, going to a land where the meat was mostly horse and where +vegetables were scarce and limited to potatoes, Brussels sprouts and +cabbage, found herself the possessor of recipes for making such sick-room +dainties as mushroom soup, cream of asparagus, clam broth with whipped +cream, and from Mrs. Gregory, the wealthy woman of the church - green +turtle and consomme. + +She was very busy and rather sad. She was helping Aunt Harriet to close +the house and getting her small wardrobe in order. And once a day she +went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a fierce and +kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes like this: Le +livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenetre, and so on. By the end of ten +days she could say: "La rose sent-elle bon?" + +Considering that Harvey came every night and ran the gamut of the +emotions, from pleading and expostulation at eight o'clock to black +fury at ten, when he banged out of the house, Sara Lee was amazingly +calm. If she had moments of weakness, when the call from overseas was +less insistent than the call for peace and protection - if the nightly +drawn picture of the Leete house, with tile mantels and a white bathroom, +sometimes obtruded itself as against her approaching homelessness, Sara +Lee made no sign. + +She had her photograph taken for her passport, and when Harvey refused +one she sent it to him by mail, with the word "Please" in the corner. +Harvey groaned over it, and got it out at night and scolded it wildly; +and then slept with it under his pillows, when he slept at all. + +Not Sara Lee, and certainly not Harvey, knew what was calling her. And +even later, when waves of homesickness racked her with wild remorse, she +knew that she had had to go and that she could not return until she had +done the thing for which she had been sent, whatever that might be. + + + + III + + +The first thing that struck Sara Lee was the way she was saying her +nightly prayers in all sorts of odd places. In trains and in hotels and, +after sufficient interval, in the steamer. She prayed under these novel +circumstances to be made a better girl, and to do a lot of good over +there, and to be forgiven for hurting Harvey. She did this every night, +and then got into her narrow bed and studied French nouns - because she +had decided that there was no time for verbs - and numbers, which put +her to sleep. + +"Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq," Sara Lee would begin, and go on, rocking +gently in her berth as the steamer roIled, "Vingt, vii gt-et-un, +vingt-deux, trente, trente -et- un - " Her voice would die away. The +book on the floor and Harvey's picture on the tiny table, Sara Lee would +sleep. And as the ship trembled the light over her bead would shine on +Harvey's ring, and it glistened like a tear. + +One thing surprised her as she gradually met some of her fellow +passengers. She was not alone on her errand. Others there were on +board, young and old women, an4 men, too who had felt the call of mercy +and were going, as ignorant as she, to help. As ignorant, but not so +friendless. Most of them were accredited somewhere. They had definite +objectives. But what was more alarming - they talked in big figures. +Great organizations were behind them. She heard of the rehabilitation +of Belgium, and portable hospitals, and millions of dollars, and Red +Cross trains. + +Not once did Sara Lee hear of anything so humble as a soup kitchen. The +war was a vast thing, they would observe. It could only be touched by +great organizations. Individual effort was negligible. + +Once she took her courage in her hands. + +"But I should think," she said, "that even great organizations depend on +the - on individual efforts." + +The portable hospital woman turned to her patronizingly. + +"Certainly, my dear," she said. "But coordinated - coordinated." + +It is hard to say just when the lights went down on Sara Lee's quiet +stage and the interlude began. Not on the steamer, for after three days +of discouragement and good weather they struck a storm; and Sara Lee's +fine frenzy died for a time, of nausea. She did not appear again until +the boat entered the Mersey, a pale and shaken angel of mercy, not at +all sure of her wings, and most terribly homesick. + +That night Sara Lee made a friend, one that Harvey would have approved +of, an elderly Englishman named Travers. He was standing by the rail +in the rain looking out at the blinking signal lights on both sides of +the river. The ship for the first time had abandoned its policy of +darkness and the decks were bathed in light. + +Overhead the yardarm blinkers were signaling, and directly over Sara +Lee's head a great white searchlight swept the water ahead. The wind +was blowing a gale, and the red and green lights of the pilot boat swung +in great arcs that seemed to touch the waves on either side. + +Sara Lee stood beside Mr. Travers, for companionship only. He had +preserved a typically British aloofness during the voyage, and he had +never spoken to her. But there was something forlorn in Sara Lee that +night as she clutched her hat with both hands and stared out at the +shore lights. And if he had been silent during the voyage he had not +been deaf. So he knew why almost every woman on the ship was making +the voyage; but he knew nothing about Sara Lee. + +"Bad night," said Mr. Travers. + +"I was wondering what they are trying to do with that little boat." + +Mr. Travers concealed the surprise of a man who was making his +seventy-second voyage. + +"That's the pilot boat," he explained. "We are picking up a pilot." + +"But," marveled Sara Lee rather breathlessly, "have we come all the way +without any pilot?" + +He explained that to her, and showed her a few moments later how the +pilot came with incredible rapidity up the swaying rope ladder and over +the side. + +To be honest, he had been watching for the pilot boat, not to see what +to Sara Lee was the thrilling progress of the pilot up the ladder, but +to get the newspapers he would bring on with him. It is perhaps +explanatory of the way things went for Sara Lee from that time on that +he quite forgot his newspapers. + +The chairs were gone from the decks, preparatory to the morning landing, +so they walked about and Sara Lee at last told him her story - the +ladies of the Methodist Church, and the one hundred dollars a month she +was to have, outside of her traveling expenses, to found and keep going +a soup kitchen behind the lines. + +"A hundred dollars a month," he said. "That's twenty pounds. Humph! +Good God!" + +But this last was under his breath. + +Then she told him of Mabel Andrews' letter, and at last read it to him. +He listened attentively. "Of course," she said when she had put the +letter back into her bag, "I can't feed a lot, even with soup. But if I +only help a few, it's worth doing, isn't it?" + +"Very much worth doing," he said gravely. "I suppose you are not, by +any chance, going to write a weekly article for one of your newspapers +about what you are doing?" + +"I hadn't thought of it. Do you think I should?" + +Quite unexpectedly Mr. Travers patted her shoulder. + +"My dear child," he said, "now and then I find somebody who helps to +revive my faith in human nature. Thank you." + +Sara Lee did not understand. The touch on the shoulder had made her +think suddenly of Uncle James, and her chin quivered. + +"I'm just a little frightened," she said in a small voice. + +"Twenty pounds!" repeated Mr. Travers to himself. "Twenty pounds!" +And aloud: "Of course you speak French?" + +"Very little. I've had six lessons, and I can count - some." + +The sense of unreality which the twenty pounds had roused in Mr. Travers' +cautious British mind grew. No money, no French, no objective, just a +great human desire to be useful in her own small way - this was a new type +to him. What a sporting chance this frail bit of a girl was taking! And +he noticed now something that had escaped him before - a dauntlessness, +a courage of the spirit rather than of the body, that was in the very +poise of her head. + +"I'm not afraid about the language," she was saying. "I have a phrase +book. And a hungry man, maybe sick or wounded, can understand a bowl of +soup in any language, I should think. And I can cook!" + +It was a perplexed and thoughtful Mr. Travers who sipped his +Scotch-and-soda in the smoking room before retiring, lie took the problem +to bed with him and woke up in the night saying: "Twenty pounds! +Good God!" + +In the morning they left the ship. He found Sara Lee among the K's, +waiting to have her passport examined, and asked her where she was +stopping in London. She had read somewhere of Claridge's - in a novel +probably. + +"I shouldn't advise Claridge's," he said, reflecting rather grimly on +the charges of that very exclusive hotel. "Suppose you let me make a +suggestion." + +So he wrote out the name of a fine old English house on Trafalgar +Square, where she could stay until she went to France. There would be +the matter of a passport to cross the Channel. It might take a day or +two. Perhaps he could help her. He would give himself the pleasure of +calling on her very soon. + +Sara Lee got on the train and rode up to London. She said to herself +over and over: "This is England. I am really in England." But it did +not remove the sense of unreality. Even the English grass, bright green +in midwinter, only added to the sense of unreality. + +She tried, sitting in the strange train with its small compartments, to +think of Harvey. She looked at her ring and tried to recall some of +the tender things he had said to her. But Harvey eluded her. She could +not hear his voice. And when she tried to see him it was Harvey of the +wide face and the angry eyes of the last days that she saw. + +Morley's comforted her. The man at the door had been there for forty +years, and was beyond surprise. He had her story in twenty-four hours, +and in forty-eight he was her slave. The elderly chambermaid mothered +her, and failed to report that Sara Lee was doing a small washing in +her room and had pasted handkerchiefs over the ancient walnut of her +wardrobe. + +"Going over, are you?" she said. "Dear me, what courage you've got, +miss! They tell me things is horrible over there." + +"That's why I'm going," replied Sara Lee, and insisted on helping to +make up the bed. + +"It's easier when two do it," she said casually. + +Mr. Travers put in a fretful twenty-four hours before he came to see her. +He lunched at Brooks', and astounded an elderly member of the House by +putting her problem to him. + +"A young girl!" exclaimed the M. P. "Why, deuce take it, it's no place +for a young girl." + +"An American," explained Mr. Travers uncomfortably. " She's perfectly +able to look after herself." + +"Probably a correspondent in disguise. They'll go to any lengths." + +"She's not a correspondent." + +"Let her stay in Boulogne. There's work there in the hospitals." + +"She's not a nurse. She's a - well, she's a cook. Or so she says." + +The M. P. stared at Mr. Travers, and Mr. Travers stared back defiantly. + +"What in the name of God is she going to cook?" + +"Soup," said Mr. Travers in a voice of suppressed irritation. "She's +got a little money, and she wants to establish a soup kitchen behind +the Belgian trenches on a line of communication. I suppose," he +continued angrily, "even you will admit that the Belgian Army needs all +the soup it can get." + +"I don't approve of women near the lines." + +"Neither do I. But I'm exceedingly glad that a few of them have the +courage to go there." + +"What's she going to make soup out of?" + +"I'm not a cooking expert. But I know her and I fancy she'll manage." + +It ended by the M. P. agreeing to use his influence with the War Office +to get Sara Lee to France. He was very unwilling. The spy question was +looming large those days. Even the Red Cross had unwittingly spread its +protection over more than one German agent. The lines were being +drawn in. + +"I may possibly get her to France. I don't know, of course," he said in +that ungracious tone in which an Englishman often grants a favor which +he will go to any amount of trouble to do. "After that it's up to her." + +Mr. Travers reflected rather grimly that after that it was apparently up +to him. + +Sara Lee sat in her room at Morley's Hotel and looked out at the life of +London - policemen with chin straps; schoolboys in high silk hats and +Eton suits, the hats generally in disreputable condition; clerks dressed +as men at home dressed for Easter Sunday church; and men in uniforms. +Only a fair sprinkling of these last, in those early days. On the first +afternoon there was a military funeral. A regiment of Scots, in kilts, +came swinging down from the church of St. Martin in the Fields, tall and +wonderful men, grave and very sad. Behind them, on a gun carriage, was +the body of their officer, with the British flag over the casket and his +sword and cap on the top. + +Sara Lee cried bitterly. It was not until they had gone that she +remembered that Harvey had always called the Scots men in women's +petticoats. She felt a thrill of shame for him, and no amount of +looking at his picture seemed to help. + +Mr. Travers called the second afternoon and was received by August at +the door as an old friend. + +"She's waiting in there," he said. "Very nice young lady, sir. Very +kind to everybody." + +Mr. Travers found her by a window looking out. There was a recruiting +meeting going on in Trafalgar Square, the speakers standing on the +monument. Now and then there was a cheer, and some young fellow +sheepishly offered himself. Sara Lee was having a mad desire to go +over and offer herself too. Because, she reflected, she had been in +London almost two days, and she was as far from France as ever. Not +knowing, of course, that three months was a fair time for the slow +methods then in vogue. + +There was a young man in the room, but Sara Lee had not noticed him. +He was a tall, very blond young man, in a dark-blue Belgian uniform with +a quaint cap which allowed a gilt tassel to drop over his forehead. He +sat on a sofa, curling up the ends of a very small mustache, his legs, +in cavalry boots, crossed and extending a surprising distance beyond +the sofa. + +The lights were up now, beyond the back drop, the stage darkened. A +new scene with a vengeance, a scene laid in strange surroundings, with +men, whole men and wounded men and spying men - and Sara Lee and this +young Belgian, whose name was Henri and whose other name, because of +what he suffered and what be did, we may not know. + + + + IV + + +Henri sat on his sofa and watched Sara Lee. Also he shamelessly listened +to the conversation, not because he meant to be an eavesdropper but +because he liked Sara Lee's voice. He had expected a highly inflected +British voice, and instead here was something entirely different - that +is, Sara Lee's endeavor to reconcile the English "a" with her normal +western Pennsylvania pronunciation. She did it quite unintentionally, +but she had a good ear and it was difficult, for instance, to say +"rather" when Mr. Travers said "rawther." + +Henri had a good ear too. And the man he was waiting for did not come. +Also he had been to school in England and spoke English rather better +than most British. So he heard a conversation like this, the gaps being +what he lost: + +MR. TRAVERS: - to France, anyhow. After that - + +SARA LEE: Awfully sorry to be - But what shall I do if I do get over? +The chambermaid up- stairs - very difficult. + +MR. TRAVERS: The proper and sensible thing is - home. + +SARA LEE: To America? But I haven't done anything yet. + +Henri knew that she was an American. He also realized that she was on +the verge of tears. He glared at poor Mr. Travers, who was doing his +best, and lighted a French cigarette. + +"There must be some way," said Sara Lee. "If they need help - and I +have read you Mabel Andrews' letter - then I should think they'd be +glad to send me." + +"They would be, of course," he said. "But the fact is - there's been +some trouble about spies, and -" + +Henri's eyes narrowed. + +"Spies! And they think I'm a spy?" + +"My dear child," remonstrated Mr. Travers, slightly exasperated, +"they're not thinking about you at all. The War Office has never heard +of you. It's a general rule." + +Sara Lee was not placated. + +"Let them cable home and find out about me. I can give them references. +Why, all sorts of prominent people are sending me money. They must +trust me, or they wouldn't." + +There were no gaps for Henri now. Sara Lee did not care who heard her, +and even Mr. Travers had slightly raised his voice. Henri was divided +between a conviction that he ought to go away and a mad desire to join +in the conversation, greatly augmented when Sara Lee went to the window +and wiped her eyes. + +"If you only spoke French - " began Mr. Travers. + +Sara Lee looked over her shoulder. "But of course I do!" she said. +"And German and - and Yiddish, and all sorts of languages. Every spy +does." + +Henri smiled appreciatively. + +It might all have ended there very easily. Sara Lee might have fought +the War Office single-handed and won out, but it is extremely unlikely. +The chances at that moment were that she would spend endless days and +hours in anterooms, and tell her story and make her plea a hundred times. +And then - go back home to Harvey and the Leete house, and after a time, +like Mrs. Gregory, speak rather too often of "the time I went abroad." + +But Sara Lee was to go to France, and even further, to the fragment of +unconquered Belgium that remained. And never so long as she lived, would +she be able to forget those days or to speak of them easily. So she +stood by the window trying not to cry, and a little donkey drawing a +coster's cart moved out in front of the traffic and was caught by a motor +bus. There was only time for the picture - the tiny beast lying there +and her owner wringing his hands. Such of the traffic as could get by +swerved and went on. London must move, though a thousand willing little +beasts lay dying. + +And Sara moved too. One moment she was there by the window. And the +next she had given a stifled cry and ran out. + +"Bless my soul!" said Mr. Travers, and got up slowly. + +Henri was already up and at the window. What he saw was Sara Lee making +her way through the stream of vehicles, taking a dozen chances for her +life. Henri waited until he saw her crouched by the donkey, its head +on her knee. Then he, too, ran out. + +That is how Henri, of no other name that may be given, met Sara Lee +Kennedy, of Pennsylvania - under a London motor bus. And that, I think, +will be the picture he carries of her until he dies, her soft eyes full +of pity, utterly regardless of the dirt and the crowd and an +expostulating bobby, with that grotesque and agonized head on her knees. + +Henri crawled under the bus, though the policeman was extremely anxious +to keep him out. And he ran a practiced eye over the injured donkey. + +"It's dying," said Sara Lee with white lips. + +"It will die," replied Henri, "but how soon? They are very strong, +these little beasts." + +The conductor of the bus made a suggestion then, one that froze the +blood round Sara Lee's heart: "If you'll move away and let us run over +it proper it'll be out of its trouble, miss. + +Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to Henri. + +"Did you hear that?" she said. "They'd do it too! + +The total result of a conference between four policemen, the costermonger, +and, by that time, Mr. Travers - was to draw the animal off the street +and into the square. Sara Lee stuck close by. So, naturally, did +Henri. And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she +was named, became increasingly evident, Henri behaved like a man and a +soldier. + +He got out his revolver and shot her in the brain. + +"A kindness," he explained, as Sara Lee would have caught his hand. +"The only way, mademoiselle." + +Mr. Travers had the usual British hatred of a crowd and publicity, +coupled with a deadly fear of getting into the papers, except through +an occasional letter to the Times. He vanished just before the shot, +and might have been seen moving rapidly through the square, turning +over in his mind the difficulty of trying to treat young American girls +like rational human beings. + +But Henri understood. He had had a French mother, and there is a leaven +of French blood in the American temperament, old Huguenot, some of it. +So Americans love beauty and obey their impulses and find life good to +do things rather than to be something or other more or less important. +And so Henri could quite understand how Sara Lee had forgotten herself +when Mr. Travers could not. And he understood, also, when Sara Lee, +having composed the little dondey's quiet figure, straightened up with +tears in her eyes. + +"It was very dear of you to come out," she said. "And-of course it was +the best thing." + +She held out her hand. The crowd had gone. Traffic was moving again, +racing to make up for five lost precious moments. The square was dark, +that first darkness of London, when air raids were threatened but had +not yet taken place. From the top of the Admiralty, near by, a +flashlight shot up into the air and began its nightly process of brushing +the sky. Henri took her hand and bent over it. + +"You are very brave, mademoiselle," he said, and touched her hand with +his lips. + +The amazing interlude had commenced. + + + + V + + +Yet for a day or two nothing much was changed. Mr. Travers sent Sara +Lee a note that be was taking up her problem with the Foreign Office; +and he did indeed make an attempt. He also requested his wife to ask +Sara Lee to tea. + +Sara Lee was extremely nervous on the day she went. She wore a black +jacket suit with a white collar, and she carried Aunt Harriet's mink +furs, Aunt Harriet mourning thoroughly and completely in black astrachan. +She had the faculty of the young American girl of looking smart without +much expense, and she appeared absurdly young. + +She followed the neat maid up a wide staircase to a door with a screen +just inside, and heard her name announced for the first time in her life. +Sara Lee took a long breath and went inside, to a most discouraging half +hour. + +Mr. Travers was on the hearth rug. Mrs. Travers was in a chair, a portly +woman with a not unkindly face, but the brusque manner many Englishwomen +acquire after forty. She held Sara Lee's hand and gave her a complete +if smiling inspection. + +"And it is you who are moving heaven and earth to get to the Front! +You - child!" + +Sara Lee's heart fell, but she smiled also. + +"But I am older than I look," she said. "And I am very strong." + +Mrs. Travers looked helplessly at her husband, while she rang the bell +for tea. That was another thing Sara Lee had read about but never +seen - that ringing for tea. At home no one served afternoon tea; but +at a party, when refreshments were coming, the hostess slipped out to +the kitchen and gave a whispered order or two. + +"I shall be frank with you," said Mrs. Travers. "I think it quite +impossible. It is not getting you over. That might be done. And of +course there are women over there - young ones too. But the army +objects very seriously to their being in danger. And of course one +never knows -" Her voice trailed off vaguely. She implied, however, +that what one never knows was best unknown. + +"I have a niece over there," she said as the tea tray came in. "Her +mother was fool enough to let her go. Now they can't get her back." + +"Oh, dear!" said Sara Lee. "Can't they find her?" + +"She won't come. Little idiot! She's in Paris, however. I daresay +she is safe enough." + +Mrs. Travers made the tea thoughtfully. So far Mr. Travers had hardly +spoken, but he cheered in true British fashion at the sight of the tea. +Sara Lee, exceedingly curious as to the purpose of a very small stand +somewhat resembling a piano stool, which the maid had placed at her knee, +learned that it was to hold her muffin plate. + +"And now," said Mr. Travers, "suppose we come to the point. There +doesn't seem to be a chance to get you over, my child. Same answer +everywhere. Place is full of untrained women. Spies have been using +Red Cross passes. Result is that all the lines are drawn as tight as +possible." + +Sara Lee stared at him with wide eyes. + +"But I can't go back," she said. "I - well, I just can't. They're +raising the money for me, and all sorts of people are giving things. +A - a friend of mine is baking cakes and sending on the money. She +has three children, and -" + +She gulped. + +"I thought everybody wanted to get help to the Belgians," she said. + +A slightly grim smile showed itself on Mrs. Travers' face. + +"I'm afraid you don't understand. It is you we want to help. Neither +Mr. Travers nor I feel that a girl so young as you, and alone, has any +place near the firing line. And that, I fancy, is where you wish to go. +As to helping the Belgians, we have four in the house now. They do not +belong to the same social circles, so they prefer tea in their own rooms. +You are quite right about their needing help too. They cannot even make +up their own beds." + +"They are not all like that," broke in Mr. Travers hastily. + +"Of course not. But I merely think that Miss - er - Kennedy should know +both sides of the picture." + +Somewhat later Sara Lee was ushered downstairs by the neat maid, who +stood on the steps and blew a whistle for a taxi - Sara Lee had come in +a bus. She carried in her hand the address of a Belgian commission of +relief at the Savoy Hotel, and in her heart, for the first time, a doubt +of her errand. She gave the Savoy address mechanically and, huddled in +a corner, gave way to wild and fearful misgivings. + +Coming up she had sat on top of the bus and watched with wide curious, +eyes the strange traffic of London. The park had fascinated her - the +little groups of drilling men in khaki, the mellow tones of a bugle, and +here and there on the bridle paths well-groomed men and women on +horseback, as clean-cut as the horses they rode, and on the surface as +careless of what was happening across the Channel. But she saw nothing +now. She sat back and twisted Harvey's ring on her finger, and saw +herself going back, her work undone, her faith in herself shattered. +And Harvey's arms and the Leete house ready to receive her. + +However, a ray of hope opened for her at the Savoy - not much, a prospect. + +The Savoy was crowded. Men in uniform, a sprinkling of anxious-faced +wives and daughters, and more than a sprinkling of gaily dressed and +painted women, filled the lobby or made their way slowly up and down the +staircase. It was all so utterly different from what she had expected - +so bright, so full of life. These well-fed people they seemed happy +enough. Were they all wrong back home? Was the war the ghastly thing +they thought it? + +Long months afterward Sara Lee was to learn that the Savoy was not +London. She was to learn other things - that America knew more, through +a free press, of war conditions than did England. And she was to +learn what never ceased to surprise her - the sporting instinct of the +British which made their early slogan "Business as usual." Business +and pleasure - but only on the surface. Underneath was a dogged and +obstinate determination to make up as soon as possible for the +humiliation of the early days of the war. + +Those were the transition days in England. The people were slowly +awaking to the magnitude of the thing that was happening to them. Certain +elements the press, long under political dominion, were preparing to +come out for a coalition ministry. The question of high-explosive +shells as against shrapnel was bitterly fought, some of the men at home +standing fast for shrapnel, as valuable against, German artillery as a +garden hose. Men coming back from the Front were pleading for real help, +not men only, not Red Cross, not food and supplies, but for something +more competent than mere man power to hold back the deluge. + +But over it all was that surface cheerfulness, that best-foot-forward +attitude of London. And Sara Lee saw only that, and lost faith. She +had come far to help. But here was food in plenty and bands playing +and smiling men in uniform drinking tea and playing for a little. That, +too, Sara Lee was to understand later; but just then she did not. At +home there was more surface depression. The atrocities, the plight of +the Belgians, the honor list in the Illustrated London News - that was +the war to Sara Lee. And here! + +But later on, down in a crowded dark little room, things were different. +She was one of a long line, mostly women. They were unhappy and desolate +enough, God knows. They sat or stood with a sort of weary resignation. +Now and then a short heavy man with an upcurled mustache caine out and +took in one or two. The door closed. And overhead the band played +monotonously. + +It was after seven when Sara Lee's turn came. The heavy-set man spoke +to her in French, but he failed to use a single one of the words she +had memorized. + +"Don't you speak any English?" she asked helplessly. + +"I do; but not much," he replied. Though his French had been rapid he +spoke English slowly. "How can we serve you, mademoiselle?" + +"I don't want any assistance. I - I want to help, if I can." + +"Here?" + +"In France. Or Belgium." + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"We have many offers of help. What we need, mademoiselle, is not +workers. We have, at our base hospital, already many English nurses." + +"I am not a nurse." + +"I am sorry. The whole world is sorry for Belgium, and many would work. +What we need " - he shrugged his shoulders again -"is food, clothing, +supplies for our brave little soldiers." + +Sara Lee looked extremely small and young. The Belgian sat down on a +chair and surveyed her carefully. + +"You English are doing a - a fine work for us," he observed. "We are +grateful. But of course the" - he hesitated -" the pulling up of an +entire people - it is colossal." + +"But I am not English," said Sara Lee. "And I have a little money. I +want to make soup for your wounded men at a railway station or - any +place. I can make good soup. And I shall have money each month to buy +what I need." + +Only then was Sara Lee admitted to the crowded little room. + +Long afterward, when the lights behind the back drop had gone down and +Sara Lee was back again in her familiar setting, one of the clearest +pictures she retained of that amazing interlude was of that crowded +little room in the Savoy, its single littered desk, its two typewriters +creating an incredible din, a large gentleman in a dark-blue military +cape seeming to fill the room. And in corners and off stage, so to +speak, perhaps a half dozen men, watching her curiously. + +The conversation was in French, and Sara Lee's acquaintance of the +passage acted as interpreter. It was only when Sara Lee found that a +considerable discussion was going on in which she had no part that she +looked round and saw her friend of two nights before and of the little +donkey. He was watching her intently, and when he caught her eye +he bowed. + +Now men, in Sara Lee's mind, had until now been divided into the ones at +home, one's own kind, the sort who married one's friends or oneself, the +kind who called their wives "mother" after the first baby came, and were +easily understood, plain men, decent and God-fearing and self-respecting; +and the men of that world outside America, who were foreigners. One +might like foreigners, but they were outsiders. + +So there was no self-consciousness in Sara Lee's bow and smile. Later +on Henri was to find that lack of self and sex consciousness one of the +maddening mysteries about Sara Lee. Perhaps he never quite understood +it. But always he respected it. + +More conversation, in an increasing staccato. Short contributions from +the men crowded into corners. Frenzied beating of the typewriting +machines, and overhead and far away the band. There was no air in the +room. Sara Lee was to find out a great deal later on about the contempt +of the Belgians for air. She loosened Aunt Harriet's neckpiece. + +So far Henri had not joined in the discussion. But now he came forward +and spoke. Also, having finished, he interpreted to Sara Lee. + +"They are most grateful," he explained. "It is a - a practical idea, +mademoiselle. If you were in Belgium " - he smiled rather mirthlessly -" +if you were already in the very small part of Belgium remaining to us, +we could place you very usefully. But - the British War Office is most +careful, just now. You understand - there are reasons." + +Sara Lee flushed indignantly. + +"They can watch me if they want to," she said. "What trouble can I make? +I've only just landed. You - you'd have to go a good ways to find any +one who knows less than I do about the war." + +"There is no doubt of that," he said, unconscious of offense. "But the +War Office - " He held out his hands. + +Sara Lee, who had already caught the British "a" and was rather overdoing +it, had a wild impulse to make the same gesture. It meant so much. + +More conversation. Evidently more difficulties - but with Henri now +holding the center of the stage and speaking rapidly. The heavy-set man +retired and read letters under an electric lamp. The band upstairs was +having dinner. And Henri argued and wrangled. He was quite passionate. +The man in the military cape listened and smiled. And at last he nodded. + +Henri turned to Sara Lee. + +"You Americans are all brave," he said. "You like - what is it you +say? - taking a chance, I think. Would you care to take such a chance?" + +"What sort of a chance?" + +"May I visit you this evening at your hotel?" + +Just for an instant Sara Lee hesitated. There was Harvey at home. He +would not like her receiving a call from any man. And Harvey did not +like foreigners. He always said they had no respect for women. It +struck her suddenly what Harvey would call Henri's bowing and his kissing +her hand, and his passionate gesticulations when he was excited. He +would call it all tomfool nonsense. + +And she recalled his final words, his arms so close about her that she +could hardly breathe, his voice husky with emotion. + +"Just let me hear of any of those foreigners bothering you," he said, +"and I'll go over and wipe out the whole damned nation." + +It had not sounded funny then. It was not funny now. + +"Please come," said Sara Lee in a small voice. + +The other gentlemen bowed profoundly. Sara Lee, rather at a loss, gave +them a friendly smile that included them all. And then she and Henri +were walking up the stairs and to the entrance, Henri's tall figure the +target for many women's eyes. He, however, saw no one but Sara Lee. + +Henri, too, called a taxicab. Every one in London seemed to ride in +taxis. And he bent over her hand, once she was in the car, but he did +not kiss it. + +"It is very kind of you, what you are doing," he said. "But, then, you +Americans are all kind. And wonderful." + +Back at Morley's Hotel Sara Lee had a short conversation with Harvey's +picture. + +"You are entirely wrong, dear," she said. She was brushing her hair at +the time, and it is rather a pity that it was a profile picture and that +Harvey's pictured eyes were looking off into space - that is, a piece +of white canvas on a frame, used by photographers to reflect the light +into the eyes. For Sara Lee with her hair down was even lovelier than +with it up. "You were wrong. They are different, but they are kind and +polite. And very, very respectful. And he is coming on business." + +She intended at first to make no change in her frock. After all, it was +not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the +right footing. + +But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and +slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her +way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt +and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts +still affect. And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress. She called in +the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over +her clothes. + +It was the maid, perhaps; then who brought into Sara Lee's life the +strange and mad infatuation for her that was gradually to become a +dominant issue in the next few months. For the maid chose a white dress, +a soft and young affair in which Sara Lee looked like the heart of a rose. + +"I always like to see a young lady in white, miss," said the maid. +"Especially when there's a healthy skin." + +So Sara Lee ate her dinner alone, such a dinner as a healthy skin and +body demanded. And she watched tall young Englishwomen with fine +shoulders go out with English officers in khaki, and listened to a babel +of high English voices, and - felt extremely alone and very subdued. + +Henri came rather late. It was one of the things she was to learn about +him later - that he was frequently late It was only long afterward that +she realized that such time as he spent with her was gained only at the +cost of almost superhuman effort. But that was when she knew Henri's +story, and his work. She waited for him in the reception room, where a +man and a woman were having coffee and talking in a strange tongue. +Henri found her there, at something before nine, rather downcast and +worried, and debating about going up to bed. She looked up, to find him +bowing before her. + +"I thought you were not coming," she said. + +"I? Not come? But I had said that I would come, mademoiselle. I may +sit down?" + +Sara Lee moved over on the velvet sofa, and Henri lowered his long body +onto it. Lowered his voice, too, for the man and woman were staring at +him. + +"I'm afraid I didn't quite understand about this afternoon," began Sara +Lee. "You spoke about taking a chance. I am not afraid of danger, if +that is what you mean." + +"That, and a little more, mademoiselle," said Henri. "But now that I am +here I do not know. + +His eyes were keen. Sara Lee had suddenly a strange feeling that he +was watching the couple who talked over their coffee, and that, oddly +enough, the couple were watching him. Yet he was apparently giving his +undivided attention to her. + +"Have you walked any to-day?" he asked her unexpectedly. + +Sara Lee remembered the bus, and, with some bitterness, the two taxis. + +"I haven't had a chance to walk," she said. + +"But you should walk," he said. "I - will you walk with me? Just about +the square, for air?" And in a lower tone: "It is not necessary that +those two should know the plan, mademoiselle." + +"I'll get my coat and hat," Sara Lee said, and proceeded to do so in a +brisk and businesslike fashion. When she came down Henri was emerging +from the telephone booth. His face was impassive. And again when in +time Sara Lee was to know Henri's face better than she had ever known +Harvey's, she was to learn that the masklike look he sometimes wore +meant danger - for somebody. + +They went out without further speech into the clear cold night. Henri, +as if from custom, threw his head back and scanned the sky. Then they +went on and crossed into the square. + +"The plan," Henri began abruptly, "is this: You will be provided +to-morrow with a passport to Boulogne. You will, if you agree, take the +midnight train for Folkestone. At the railway station here you will +be searched. At Folkestone a board, sitting in an office on the quay, +will examine your passport." + +"Does any one in Boulogne speak English?" Sara Lee inquired nervously. +Somehow that babel of French at the Savoy had frightened her. Her +little phrase book seemed pitifully inadequate for the great things +in her mind. + +"That hardly matters," said Henri, smiling faintly. "Because I think +you shall not go to Boulogne." + +"Not go!" She stopped dead, under the monument, and looked up at him. + +"The place for you to go, to start from, is Calais," Henri explained. +He paused, to let pass two lovers, a man in khaki and a girl. "But +Calais is difficult. It is under martial law - a closed city. From +Boulogne to Calais would be perhaps impossible." + +Sara Lee was American and her methods were direct. + +"How can I get to Calais?" + +"Will you take the chance I spoke of?" + +"For goodness' sake," said Sara Lee in an exasperated tone, "how can I +tell you until I know what it is?" + +Henri told her. He even, standing under a street lamp, drew a small +sketch for her, to make it clear. Sara Lee stood close, watching him, +and some of the lines were not as steady as they might have been. And +in the midst of it he suddenly stopped. + +"Do you know what it means?" he demanded. + +"Yes, of course." + +"And you know what date this is?" + +"The eighteenth of Pebruary." + +But he saw, after all, that she did not entirely understand. + +"To-night, this eighteenth of February, the Germans commence a blockade + of this coast. No vessels, if they can prevent them, will leave the +harbors; or if they do, none shall reach the other side!" + +"Oh!" said Sara Lee blankly. + +"We are eager to do as you wish, mademoiselle. But "- he commenced +slowly to tear up the sketch - "it is too dangerous. You are too young. +If anything should go wrong and I had - No. We will find another way." + +He put the fragments of the sketch in his pocket. + +"How long is this blockade to last?" Sara Lee asked out of bitter +disappointment. + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"Who can say? A week! A year! Not at all!" + +"Then," said Sara Lee with calm deliberation, "you might as well get out +your pencil and draw another picture - because I'm going." + +Far enough away now, the little house at home and the peace that dwelt +therein; and Harvey; and the small white bedroom; and the daily round of +quiet duties. Sara Lee had set her face toward the east, and the land +of dying men. And as Henri looked down at her she had again that poised +and eager look, almost of flight, that had brought into Harvey's love +for her just a touch of fear. + + + + VI + +Sara Lee Kennedy was up at dawn the next morning. There was a very +serious matter to decide, for Henri's plan had included only such hand +luggage as she herself could carry. + +Sara Lee care fully laid out on the bed such articles as she could not +possibly do without, and was able to pack into her suitcase less than +a fourth of them. She had fortunately brought a soft wool sweater, +which required little room. Undergarments, several blouses, the sweater +and a pair of heavy shoes - that was her equipment, plus such small +toilet outfit as is necessary when a young woman uses no make-up and +regards cold cream only as a remedy for chapped hands. + +The maid found her in rather a dismal mood. + +"Going across, miss!" she said. "Fancy that!" + +"It's a secret," cautioned Sara Lee. "I am really not sure I am going. +I am only trying to go." + +The maid, who found Sara Lee and the picture of Harvey on her dressing +table both romantic and appealing, offered to pack. From the first +moment it was evident that she meant to include the white dress. Indeed +she packed it first. + +"You never know what's going to happen over there," she asserted. "They +do say that royalties are everywhere, going about like common people. +You'd better have a good frock with you." + +She had an air of subdued excitement, and after she had established the +fact that not only the white frock but slippers and hose also would go +in she went to the door and glanced up and down the passage. Then she +closed the door. + +"There was queer goings-on here last night, miss," she said cautiously. +"Spies!" + +"Oh, no!" cried Sara Lee. + +"Spies," she repeated. "A man and a woman, pretending to be Belgian +refugees. They took them away at daylight. I expect by now they've +been shot." + +Sara Lee ate very little breakfast that morning. All through England +it was confidently believed that spies were shot on discovery, a theory +that has been persistent - and false, save at the battle line - since +the beginning of the war. And Henri's plan assumed new proportions. +Suppose she made her attempt and failed? Suppose they took her for a +spy, and that tomorrow's sun found her facing a firing squad? Not, +indeed, that she had ever heard of a firing squad, as such. But she +had seen spies shot in the movies. They invariably stood in front of +a brick wall, with the hero in the center. + +So she absent-mindedly ate her kippered herring, which had been strongly +recommended by the waiter, and tried to think of what a spy would do, so +she might avoid any suspicious movements. It struck her, too, that war +seemed to have made the people on that side of the ocean extremely ready +with weapons. They would be quite likely to shoot first and ask +questions afterwards - which would be too late to be helpful. + +She remembered Henri, for instance, and the way, without a word, he had +shot the donkey. + +That day she wrote Harvey a letter. + +"Dearest:" it began; "I think I am to leave for France to-night. Things +seem to be moving nicely, and I am being helped by the Belgian Relief +Commission. It is composed of Belgians and is at the Savoy Hotel." + +Here she stopped and cried a little. What if she should never see +Harvey again - never have his sturdy arms about her? Harvey gained by +distance. She remembered only his unfailing kindness and strength and +his love for her. He seemed, here at the edge of the whirlpool, a sort +of eddy of peace and quiet. Even then she had no thought of going back +until her work was done, but she did an unusual thing for her, unused +to demonstration of any sort. She kissed his ring. + +Followed directions about sending the money from the church society, +a description of Morley's and Trafalgar Square, an account of tea at +the Travers', and of the little donkey - without mention, however, of +Henri. She felt that Harvey would not understand Henri. + +But at the end came the passage which poor Harvey read and re-read +when the letter came, and alternately ground his teeth over and kissed. + +"I do love you, Harvey dear. And I am coming back to you. I have felt +that I had to do what I am doing, but I am coming back. That's a +promise. Unless, of course, I should take sick, or something like that, +which isn't likely." + +There was a long pause in the writing here, but Harvey could not know +that. + +"I shall wear your ring always; and always, Harvey, it will mean to me +that I belong to you. With dearest love. + "SARA LEE" + +Then she added a postscript, of course. + +"The War Office is not letting people cross to Calais just now. But I +am going to do it anyhow. It is perfectly simple. And when I get over +I shall write and tell you how. + "S. L." + +It was the next day that an indignant official in the censor's office +read that postscript, and rose in his wrath and sent a third +Undersomething-or-other to look up Sara Lee at Morley's. But by this +time she was embarked on the big adventure; and by the time a cable +reached Calais there was no trace of Sara Lee. + +During the afternoon she called up Mr. Travers at his office, and rather +gathered that he did not care to use the telephone during business hours. + +"I just wanted to tell you that you need not bother about me any more," +she said. "I am being sent over and I think everything is all right." + +He was greatly relieved. Mrs. Travers had not fully indorsed his +encomiums of the girl. She had felt that no really nice girl would +travel so far on so precarious an errand, particularly when she was +alone. And how could one tell, coming from America, how her sympathies +really lay? She might be of German parentage - the very worst sort, +because they spoke American. It was easy enough to change a name. + +Nevertheless, Mr. Travers felt a trifle low in his mind when he hung up +the receiver. He said twice to himself: "Twenty pounds!" And at last +he put four sovereigns in an envelope and sent them to her anonymously +by messenger. Sara Lee guessed whence they came, but she respected the +manner of the gift and did not thank him. It was almost the first gold +money she had ever seen. + +She was very carefully searched at the railway station that night and +found that her American Red Cross button, which had come with her dollar +subscription to the association, made the matron inspector rather +kindly inclined. Nevertheless, she took off Sara Lee's shoes, and ran +over the lining of her coat, and quite ruined the maid's packing of the +suitcase. + +"You are going to Boulogne?" asked the matron inspector. + +Sara Lee did not like to lie. + +"Wherever the boat takes me," she said with smile. + +The matron smiled too. + +"I shouldn't be nervous, miss," she said. "It's a chance, of course, +but they have not done much damage yet." + +It was after midnight then, and a cold fog made the station a gloomy +thing of blurred yellow lights and raw chill. A few people moved about, +mostly officers in uniform. Half a dozen men in civilian clothes +eyed her as she passed through the gates; Scotland Yard, but she did not +know. And once she thought she saw Henri, but he walked away into the +shadows and disappeared. The train, looking as absurdly small and light +as all English trains do, was waiting out in the shed. There were no +porters, and Sara Lee carried her own bag. + +She felt quite sure she had been mistaken about Henri, for of course +he would have come and carried it for her. + +The train was cold and quiet. When it finally moved out it was under +way before she knew that it was going. And then suddenly Sara Lee's +heart began to pound hard. + +It was a very cold and shivering Sara Lee who curled up, alone in her +compartment, and stared hard at Harvey's ring to keep her courage up. +But a curious thing had happened. Harvey gave her no moral support. +He brought her only disapproval. She found herself remembering none of +the loving things he had said to her, but only the bitter ones. + +Perhaps it was the best thing for her, after all. For a sort of dogged +determination to go through with it all, at any cost, braced her to her +final effort. + +So far it had all been busy enough, but not comfortable. She was cold, +and she had eaten almost nothing all day. As the hours went on and the +train slid through the darkness she realized that she was rather faint. +The steam pipes, only warm at the start, were entirely cold by one +o'clock, and by two Sara Lee was sitting on her feet, with a heavy coat +wrapped about her knees. + +The train moved quietly, as do all English trains, with no jars and +little sound. There were few lights outside, for the towns of Eastern +England were darkened, like London, against air attacks. So when she +looked at the window she saw only her own reflection, white and +wide-eyed, above Aunt Harriet's fur neckpiece. + +In the next compartment an officer was snoring, but she did not close +her eyes. Perhaps, for that last hour, some of the glow that had brought +her so far failed her. She was not able to think beyond Folkestone, save +occasionally, and that with a feeling that it should not be made so +difficult to do a kind and helpful thing. + +At a quarter before three the train eased down. In the same proportion +Sara Lee's pulse went up. A long period of crawling along, a stop or +two, but no resultant opening of the doors; and at last, in a cold rain +and a howling wind from the channel, the little seaport city. + +More officers than she had suspected, a few women, got out. The latter +Sara Lee's experience on the steamer enabled her to place; buyers mostly, +and Americans, on their way to Paris, blockade or no blockade, because +the American woman must be well and smartly gowned and hatted. A man +with a mourning band on his sleeve carried a wailing child. + +The officers lighted cigarettes. The civilians formed a line on the +jetty under the roof of the shed, and waited, passports in hand, before +a door that gleamed with yellow light. Faces looked pale and anxious. +The blockade was on, and Germany had said that no ships would cross +that night. + +As if defiantly the Boulogne boat, near at hand, was ablaze, on the shore +side at least, with lights. Stewards came and went. Beyond it lay the +harbor, dark and mysterious save where, from somewhere across, a +flashlight made a brave effort to pierce the fog. + +One of the buyers ahead of Sara' Lee seemed exhilarated by the danger +ahead. + +"They'll never get us," she said. "Look at that fog!" + +"It's lifting, dearie," answered a weary voice behind her. "The wind is +carrying it away." + +When Sara Lee's turn came she was ready. A group of men in civilian +clothes, seated about a long table, looked her over carefully. Her +passports moved deliberately from hand to hand. A long business, and +the baby wailing harder than ever. But the office was at least warm. +Some of her failing courage came back as she moved, following her papers, +round the table. They were given back to her at last, and she went out. +She had passed the first ordeal. + +Suitcase in hand she wandered down the stone jetty. The Boulogne boat +she passed, and kept on. At the very end, dark and sinister, lay another +boat. It had no lights. The tide was in, and its deck lay almost flush +with the pier. Sara Lee walked on toward it until a voice spoke to her +out of the darkness and near at hand. + +"Your boat is back there, madam." + +"I know. Thank you. I am just walking about." + +The petty officer - he was a petty officer, though Sara Lee had never +heard the term - was inclined to be suspicious. Under excuse of lighting +his pipe he struck a match, and Sara Lee's young figure stood out in full +relief. His suspicions died away with the flare. + +"Bad night, miss," he offered. + +"Very," said Sara Lee, and turned back again. + +This time, bewildered and uneasy, she certainly saw Henri. But he +ignored her. He was alone, and smoking one of his interminable +cigarettes. He had not said he was crossing, and why had he not spoken +to her? He wandered past down the pier, and she lost him in the shadows. +When he came back he paused near her, and at last saluted and spoke. + +"Pardon," he said. "If you will stand back here you will find less wind." + +Thank you." + +He carried her suitcase back, and stooping over to place it at her feet +he said: "I shall send him on board with a message to the captain. When +I come back try again." + +He left her at once. The passengers for Boulogne were embarking now. +A silent lot, they disappeared into the warmth and brightness of the +little boat and were lost. No one paid any attention to Sara Lee +standing in the shadows. + +Soon Henri came back. He walked briskly and touched his cap as he +passed. He went aboard the Boulogne steamer, and without a backward +glance disappeared. + +Sara Lee watched him out of sight, in a very real panic. He had been +something real and tangible in that shadowy place - something familiar +in an unfamiliar world. But he was gone. She threw up her head. + +So once more Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and went down the pier. +Now she was unchallenged. What lurking figure might he on the dark deck +of the Calais boat she could not tell. That was the chance she was to +take. The gangway was still out, and as quietly as possible she went +aboard. The Boulogne boat had suddenly gone dark, and she heard the +churning of the screw. With the extinction of the lights on the other +boat came at last deeper night to her aid. A few steps, a stumble, a +gasp - and she was on board the forbidden ship. + +She turned forward, according to her instructions, where the overhead +deck made below an even deeper shadow. Henri had said that there were +cabins there, and that the chance was of finding an unlocked one. If +they were all locked she would be discovered at dawn, and arrested. And +Sara Lee was not a war correspondent. She was not accustomed to arrest. +Indeed she had a deep conviction that arrest in her case would mean death. +False, of course, but surely it shows her courage. + +As she stood there, breathless and listening, the Boulogne boat moved +out. She heard the wash against the jetty, felt the rolling of its +waves. But being on the landward side she could not see the faint +gleam of a cigarette that marked Henri's anxious figure at the rail. +So long as the black hulk of the Calais boat was visible, and long +after indeed, Henri stood there, outwardly calm but actually shaken by +many fears. She had looked so small and young; and who could know what +deviltry lurked abroad that night? + +He had not gone with her because it was necessary that he be in Boulogne +the next morning. And also, the very chance of getting her across lay +in her being alone and unobserved. + +So he stood by the rail and looked back and said a wordless little prayer +that if there was trouble it come to his boat and not to the other. +Which might very considerably have disturbed the buyers had they known +of it and believed in prayer. + +Sara Lee stood in the shadows and listened. There were voices overhead, +from the bridge. A door opened onto the deck and threw out a ray of +light. Some one came out and went on shore, walking with brisk ringing +steps. And then at last she put down her bag and tried door after door, +without result. + +The man who had gone ashore called another. The gangway was drawn in. +The engines began to vibrate under foot. Sara Lee, breathless and +terrified, stood close to a cabin door and remained immovable. At one +moment it seemed as if a seaman was coming forward to where she stood. +But he did not come. + +The Calais boat was waiting until the other steamer had got well out of +the harbor. The fog had lifted, and the searchlight was moving over +the surface. It played round the channel steamer without touching it. +But none of this was visible to Sara Lee. + +At last the lights of the quay began to recede. The little boat rocked +slightly in its own waves as it edged away. It moved slowly through +the shipping and out until, catching the swell of the channel, it shot +ahead at top speed. + +For an hour Sara Lee stood there. The channel wind caught her and tore +at her skirts until she was almost frozen. And finally, in sheer +desperation, she worked her way round to the other side. She saw no +one. Save for the beating heart of the engine below it might have been +a dead ship. + +On the other side she found an open door and stumbled into the tiny dark +deck cabin, as chilled and frightened a philanthropist as had ever +crossed that old and tricky and soured bit of seaway. And there, to be +frank, she forgot her fright in as bitter a tribute of seasickness as +even the channel has ever exacted. + +She had locked herself in, and she fell at last into an exhausted sleep. +When she wakened and peered out through the tiny window it was gray +winter dawn. The boat was quiet, and before her lay the quay of Calais +and the Gare Maritime. A gangway was out and a hurried survey showed +no one in sight. + +Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and opened the door. The fresh morning +air revived her, but nevertheless it was an extremely pale young woman +who, obeying Henri's instructions, went ashore that morning in the gray +dawn unseen, undisturbed and unqestioned. But from the moment she +appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare +Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not +breathe at all. She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and +her heart entirely unreliable. + +A woman clerk was asleep at a desk. Sara Lee roused her to half +wakefulness, no interest and extremely poor English. A drowsy porter +led her up a staircase and down an endless corridor. Then at last he +was gone, and Sara Lee turned the key in her door and burst into tears. + + + + VII + + +Now up to this point Sara Lee's mind had come to rest at Calais. She +must get there; after that the other things would need to be worried +over. Henri had already in their short acquaintance installed himself +as the central figure of this strange and amazing interlude - not as a +good-looking young soldier surprisingly fertile in expedients, but as a +sort of agent of providence, by whom and through whom things were done. + +And Henri had said she was to go to the Gare Maritime at Calais and make +herself comfortable - if she got there. After that things would be +arranged. + +Sara Lee therefore took a hot bath, though hardly a satisfactory one, +for there was no soap and she had brought none. She learned later on +to carry soap with her everywhere. So she soaked the chill out of her +slim body and then dressed. The room was cold, but a great exultation +kept her warm. She had run the blockade, she had escaped the War +Office - which, by the way, was looking her up almost violently by +that time, via the censor. It had found the trunk she left at Morley's, +and cross-questioned the maid into hys-teria - and here she was, +safe in France, the harbor of Calais before her, and here and there +strange-looking war craft taking on coal. Destroyers, she learned later. +Her ignorance was rather appalling at first. + +It was all unreal - the room with its cold steam pipes, the heavy window +hangings, the very words on the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. A +great vessel moved into the harbor. As it turned she saw its name +printed on its side in huge letters, and the flag, also painted, of a +neutral country - a hoped-for protection against German submarines. It +brought home to her, rather, the thing she had escaped. + +After a time she thought of food, but rather hopelessly. Her attempts +to get savon from a stupid boy had produced nothing more useful than a +flow of unintelligible French and no soap whatever. She tried a +pantomime of washing her hands, but to the boy she had appeared to be +merely wringing them. And, as a great many females were wringing their +hands in France those days, he had gone away, rather sorry for her. + +When hunger drove her to the bell again he came back and found her with +her little phrase book in her hands, feverishly turning the pages. She +could find plenty of sentences such as "Garcon, vous avez renverse du +vin sur ma robe," but not an egg lifted its shining pate above the pages. +Not cereal. Not fruit. Not even the word breakfast. + +Long, long after ward Sara Lee found a quite delightful breakfast +hidden between two pages that were stuck together. But it was then far +too late. + +"Donnez-moi," began Sara Lee, and turned the pages rapidly, "this; do +you see?" She had found roast beef. + +The boy observed stolidly, in French, that it was not ready until noon. +She was able to make out, from his failing to depart, that there was no +roast beef. + +" Good gracious!" she said, ravenous and exasperated. "Go and get me +some bread and coffee, anyhow." She repeated it, slightly louder. + +That was the tableau that Henri found when, after a custom that may be +war or may be Continental, he had inquired the number of her room and +made his way there. + +There was a twinkle in his blue eyes as he bowed before her - and a vast +relief too. + +"So you are here!" he said in a tone of satisfaction. He had put in an +extremely bad night, even for him, by whom nights were seldom wasted in +a bed. While he was with her something of her poise had communicated +itself to him. He had felt the confidence, in men and affairs, that +American girls are given as a birthright. And her desire for service +he had understood as a year or two ago he could not have understood. +But he had stood by the rail staring north, and cursing himself for +having placed her in danger during the entire crossing. + +There was nothing about him that morning, however to show his bad +hours. He was debonnaire and smiling. + +"I am famishing," said Sara Lee. "And there are no eggs in this book + - none whatever." + +"Eggs! You wish eggs?" + +"I just want food. Almost anything will do. I asked for eggs because +they can come quickly." + +Henri turned to the boy and sent him off with a rapid order. Then: +"May I come in?" he said. + +Sara Lee cast an uneasy glance over the room. It was extremely tidy, +and unmistakably it was a bedroom. But though her color rose she asked +him in. After all, what did it matter? To have refused would have +looked priggish, she said to herself. And as a matter of fact one of +the early lessons she learned in France was learned that morning - that +though convention had had to go, like many other things in the war, men +who were gentlemen ignored its passing. + +Henri came in and stood by the center table. + +"Now, please tell me," he said. "I have been most uneasy. On the quay +last night you looked - frightened." + +"I was awfully frightened. Nothing happened. I even slept." + +"You were very brave." + +"I was very seasick." + +"I am sorry." + +Henri took a turn up and down the room. + +"But," said Sara Lee slowly, "I-I- can't be on your hands, you know. +You must have many things to do. If you are going to have to order my +meals and all that, I'm going to he a dreadful burden." + +"But you will learn very quickly." + +"I'm stupid about languages." + +Henri dismissed that with a gesture. She could not, he felt, be stupid +about anything. He went to the window and looked out. The destroyers +were still coaling, and a small cargo was being taken off the boat at +the quay. The rain was over, and in the early sunlight an officer in +blue tunic, red breeches and black cavalry boots was taking the air, his +head bent over his chest. Not a detail of the scene escaped him. + +"I have agreed to find the right place for you," he said thoughtfully. +"There is one, but I think - " He hesitated. "I do not wish to place +you again in danger." + +"You mean that it is near the Front?" + +"Very near, mademoiselle." + +"But I should be rather near, to be useful." + +"Perhaps, for your work. But what of you? These brutes - they shell +far and wide. One can never be sure." + +He paused and surveyed her whimsically. + +"Who allowed you to come, alone, like this?" he demanded. "Is there no +one who objected?" + +Sara Lee glanced down at her ring. + +"The man I am going to marry. He is very angry. + +Henri looked at her, and followed her eyes to Harvey's ring. He said +nothing, however, but he went over and gave the bell cord a violent jerk. + +"You must have food quickly," he said in a rather flat voice. "You are +looking tired and pale." + +A sense of unreality was growing on Sara Lee. That she should be alone +in France with a man she had never seen three days before; that she knew +nothing whatever about that man; that, for the present at least, she was +utterly and absolutely dependent on him, even for the food she ate - it +was all of a piece with the night's voyage and the little room at the +Savoy. And it was none of it real. + +When the breakfast tray came Henri was again at the window and silent. +And Sara Lee saw that it was laid for two. She was a little startled, +but the businesslike way in which the young officer drew up two chairs +and held one out for her made protest seem absurd. And the flat-faced +boy, who waited, looked unshocked and uninterested. + +It was not until she had had some coffee that Henri followed up his +line of thought. + +"So - the fiance did not approve? It is not difficult to understand. +There is always danger, for there are German aeroplanes even in remote +places. And you are very young. You still wish to establish yourself, +mademoiselle?" + +"Of course!" + +"Would it be a comfort to cable your safe arrival in France to the +flance?" When he saw her face he smiled. And if it was a rather heroic +smile it was none the less friendly. "I see. What shall I say? Or +will you write it?" + +So Sara Lee, vastly cheered by two cups of coffee, an egg, and a very +considerable portion of bread and butter, wrote her cable. It was to +be brief, for cables cost money. It said, "Safe. Well. Love." And +Henri, who seemed to have strange and ominous powers, sent it almost +immediately. Total cost, as reported to Sara Lee, two francs. He took +the money she offered him gravely. + +"We shall cable quite often," he said. "He will be anxious. And I +think he has a right to know." + +The "we" was entirely unconscious. + +"And now," he said, when he had gravely allowed Sara Lee to pay her half +of the breakfast, "we must arrange to get you out of Calais. And that, +mademoiselle, may take time." + +It took time. Sara Lee, growing accustomed now to little rooms entirely +filled with men and typewriters, went from one office to another, walking +along the narrow pavements with Henri, through streets filled with +soldiers. Once they drew aside to let pass a procession of Belgian +refugees, those who had held to their village homes until bombardment +had destroyed them - stout peasant women in short skirts and with huge +bundles, old men, a few young ones, many children. The terror of the +early flight was not theirs, but there was in all of them a sort of +sodden hopelessness that cut Sara Lee to the heart. In an irregular +column they walked along, staring ahead but seeing nothing. Even the +children looked old and tired. + +Sara Lee's eyes filled with tears. + +"My people," said Henri. "Simple country folk, and going to England, +where they will grieve for the things that are gone - their fields and +their sons. The old ones will die, quickly, of homesickness. It is +difficult to transplant an old tree." + +The final formalities seemed to offer certain difficulties. Henri, who +liked to do things quickly and like a prince, flushed with irritation. +He drew himself up rather haughtily in reply to one question, and glanced +uneasily at the girl. But it was all as intelligible as Sanskrit to her. + +It was only after a whispered sentence to the man at the head of the +table that the paper was finally signed. + +As they went down to the street together Sara Lee made a little protest. + +"But I simply must not take all your time," she said, looking up anxiously. +"I begin to realize how foolhardy the whole thing is. I meant well, but + - it is you who are doing everything; not I." + +"I shall not make the soup, mademoiselle," he replied gravely. + + + + VIII + + Here were more things to do. Sara Lee's money must be exchanged at a +bank for French gold. She had three hundred dollars, and it had been +given her in a tiny brown canvas bag. And then there was the matter of +going from Calais toward the Front. She had expected to find a train, +but there were no trains. All cars were being used for troops. She +stared at Henri in blank dismay. + +"No trains!" she said blankly. "Would an automobile be very expensive?" + +"They are all under government control, mademoiselle. Even the petrol." + +She stopped in the street. + +"Then I shall have to go back." + +Henri laughed boyishly. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have been requested to take you to a place +where you may render us the service we so badly need. For the present +that is my duty, and nothing else. So if you will accept the offer of +my car, which is a shameful one but travels well, we can continue our +journey." + +Long, long afterward, Sara Lee found a snapshot of Henri's car, taken +by a light-hearted British officer. Found it and sat for a long time +with it in her hand, thinking and remembering that first day she saw it, +in the sun at Calais. A long low car it was, once green, but now +roughly painted gray. But it was not the crude painting, significant +as it was, that brought so close the thing she was going to. It was +that the car was but a shell of a car. The mud guards were crumpled up +against the side. Body and hood were pitted with shrapnel. A door had +been shot away, and the wind shield was but a frame set round with +broken glass. Even the soldier-chauffeur wore a patch over one eye, +and his uniform was ragged. + +"Not a beautiful car, mademoiselle, as I warned you! But a fast one!" + +Henri was having a double enjoyment. He was watching Sara Lee's face +and his chauffeur's remaining eye. + +"But fast; eh, Jean?" he said to the chauffeur. The man nodded and +said something in French. It was probably the thing Henri had hoped for, +and he threw back his head and laughed. + +"Jean is reminding me," he said gayly, "that it is forbidden to officers +to take a lady along the road that we shall travel." But when he saw +how Sara Lee flushed he turned to the man. + +"Mademoiselle has come from America to help us, Jean," he said quietly. +"And now for Dunkirk." + +The road from Dunkirk to Calais was well guarded in those days. From +Nieuport for some miles inland only the shattered remnant of the Belgian +Army held the line. For the cry "On to Paris!" the Germans had +substituted "On to Calais!" + +So, on French soil at least, the road was well guarded. A few miles in +the battered car, then a slowing up, a showing of passports, the clatter +of a great chain as it dropped to the road, a lowering of leveled rifles, +and a salute from the officer - that was the method by which they +advanced. + +Henri sat with the driver and talked in a low tone. Sometimes he sat +quiet, looking ahead. He seemed, somehow, older, more careworn. His +boyishness had gone. Now and then he turned to ask if she was +comfortable, but in the intervals she felt that he had entirely forgotten +her. Once, at something Jean said, he got out a pocket map and went +over it carefully. It was a long time after that before he turned to +see if she was all right. + +Sara Lee sat forward and watched everything. She saw little evidence of +war, beyond the occasional sentries and chains. Women were walking along +the roads. Children stopped and pointed, smiling, at the battered car. +One very small boy saluted, and Henri as gravely returned the salute. + +Some time after that he turned to her. + +"I find that I shall have to leave you in Dunkirk," he said. "A matter + of a day only, probably. But I ill see before I go that you are +comfortable." + +"I shall be quite all right, of course." + +But something had gone out of the day for her. + +Sara Lee learned one thing that day, learned it as some women do learn, +by the glance of an eye, the tone of a voice. The chauffeur adored +Henri. His one unbandaged eye stole moments from the road to glance +at him. When he spoke, while Henri read his map his very voice betrayed +him. And while she pondered the thing, woman-fashion they drew into +the square of Dunkirk, where the statue of Jean Bart, pirate and +privateer stared down at this new procession of war which passed daily +and nightly under his cold eyes. + +Jean and a porter carried in her luggage. Henri and a voluble and +smiling Frenchwoman showed her to her room. She felt like an island of +silence in a rapid-rolling sea of French. The Frenchwoman threw open +the door. + +A great room with high curtained windows; a huge bed with a faded gilt +canopy and heavy draperies; a wardrobe as vast as the bed; and for a +toilet table an enormous mirror reaching to the ceiling and with a +marble shelf below - that was her room. + +"I think you will be comfortable here, mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee, who still clutched her small bag of gold, Shook her head. + +"Comfortable, yes," she said. "But I am afraid it is very expensive." + +Henri named an extremely low figure - an exact fourth, to be accurate, +of its real cost. A surprising person Henri, with his worn uniform and +his capacity for kindly mendacity. And seeing something in the +Frenchwoman's face that perhaps he had expected, he turned to her +almost fiercely: + +"You are to understand, madame, that this lady has been placed in my +care by authority that will not be questioned. She is to have every +deference." + +That was all, but was enough. And from that time on Sara Lee Kennedy, +of Ohio, was called, in the tiny box downstairs which constituted the +office, "Mademoiselle La Princesse." + +Henri did a characteristic and kindly thing for Sara Lee before he left +that evening on one of the many mysterious journeys that he was to make +during the time Sara Lee knew him. He came to her doors menus in hand, +and painstakingly ordered for her a dinner for that night, and the +three meals for the day following. + +He made no suggestion of dining with her that evening. Indeed watching +him from her small table Sara Lee decided that he had put her entirely +out of his mind. He did not so much as glance at her. Save the cashier +at her boxed-in desk and money drawer, she was the only woman in that +room full of officers. Quite certainly Henri was the only man who did +not find some excuse for glancing in her direction. + +But finishing early, he paused by the cashier's desk to pay for his meal, +and then he gave Sara Lee the stiffest and most ceremonious of bows. + +She felt hurt. Alone in her great room, the curtains drawn by order of +the police, lest a ray of light betray the town to eyes in the air, she +went carefully over the hours she had spent with Henri that day, +looking for a cause of offense. She must have hurt him or he would +surely have stopped to speak to her. + +Perhaps already he was finding her a burden. She flushed with shame +when she remembered about the meals he had had to order for her, and +she sat up in her great bed until late, studying by candlelight such +phrases as: + +"Il y a une erreur dans La note," and " Garcon, quels fruits avez-vous?" + +She tried to write to Harvey that night, but she gave it up at last. +There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly +without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered +about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she +was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to +learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based +not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding. + +So she got as far as: "Dearest Harvey: I am here in a hotel at Dunkirk" +- and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness. Not so +much for Harvey as for familiar things - Uncle James in his chair by the +fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the West"; +her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the dining-room +window; the voices of happy children wandering home from school. + +She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle. +Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry +with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top +of the mairie perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger, +came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer +for quiet sleep. + +For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had +nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama +that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for +his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor +lorries - she called them trucks - piled high with supplies, often +fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food. +Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers, +detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers. + +Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their +striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up, +too, and there would be an aeroplane sliding along, sometimes so low +that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust. + +But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came +at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly. +Again one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle +impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the +moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those +two interminable days. + +Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops - a +symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect - inside those cars were +wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care. +Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do +must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger +and sent a little message to him. + +"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so +terrible! So pitiful!" + +Yet during the day the square was gay enough. Officers in spurs clanked +across, wide capes blowing in the wind. Common soldiers bought fruit +and paper bags of fried potatoes from the booths. Countless dogs fought +under the feet of passers-by, and over all leered the sardonic face of +ean Bart, pirate and privateer. + +Sara Lee went out daily, but never far. And she practiced French with +the maid, after this fashion: + +"Draps de toile," said the smiling maid, putting the linen sheets on +the bed. + +Sara Lee would repeat it some six times. + +"Taies d'oreiller," when the pillows came. So Sara Lee called pillows +by the name of their slips from that time forward! Came a bright hour +when she rang the bell for the boy and asked for matches, which she +certainly did not need, with entire success. + +On the second night Sara Lee slept badly. At two o'clock she heard a +sound in the hall, and putting on her kimono, opened the door. On a +stiff chair outside, snoring profoundly, sat Jean, fully dressed. + +The light from her candle roused him and he was wide awake in an instant. + +"Why, Jean!" she said. "Isn't there any place for you to sleep?" + +"I am to remain here, mademoiselle," he replied in English. + +"But surely - not because of me?" + +"It is the captain's order," he said briefly. + +"I don't understand. Why?" + +"All sorts of people come to this place, mademoiselle. But few ladies. +It is best that I remain here." + +She could not move him. He had remained standing while she spoke to him, +and now he yawned, striving to conceal it. Sara Lee felt very +uncomfortable, but Jean's attitude and voice alike were firm. She +thanked him and said good night, but she slept little after that. + +Lying there in the darkness, a warm glow of gratitude to Henri, and a +feeling of her safety in his care, wrapped her like a mantle. She +wondered drowsily if Harvey would ever have thought of all the small +things that seemed second nature to this young Belgian officer. + +She rather thought not. + + + + IX + + +While she was breakfasting the next morning there was a tap at the door, +and thinking it the maid she called to her to come in. + +But it was Jean, an anxious Jean, twisting his cap in his hands. + +"You have had a message from the captain, mademoiselle?" + +"No, Jean." + +"He was to have returned during the night. He has not come, +mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee forgot her morning negligee in Jean's harassed face. + +"But - where did he go?" + +Jean shrugged his shoulders and did not reply. + +"Are you worried about him?" + +"I am anxious, mademoiselle. But I am often anxious; and - he always +returns." + +He smiled almost sheepishly. Sara Lee, who had no subtlety but a great +deal of intuition, felt that there was a certain relief in the smile, as +though Jean, having had no message from his master, was pleased that +she had none. Which was true enough, at that. Also she felt that Jean's +one eye was inspecting her closely, which was also true. A new factor +had come into Henri's life - by Jean's reasoning, a new and dangerous +one. And there were dangers enough already. + +Highly dangerous, Jean reflected in the back of his head as he backed +out with a bow. A young girl unafraid of the morning sun and sitting +at a little breakfast table as fresh as herself - that was a picture for +a war-weary man. + +Jean forgot for a moment his anxiety for Henri's safety in his fear for +his peace of mind. For a doubt had been removed. The girl was straight. +Jean's one sophisticated eye had grasped that at once. A good girl, +alone, and far from home! And Henri, like all soldiers, woman-hungry +for good women, for unpainted skins and clear eyes and the freshness and +bloom of youth. + +All there, behind that little breakfast table which might so pleasantly +have been laid for two. + +Jean took a walk that morning, and stood staring for twenty minutes into +a clock maker's window, full of clocks. After which he drew out his +watch and looked at the time! + +At two in the afternoon Sara Lee saw Henri's car come into the square. +It was, if possible, more dilapidated than before, and he came like a +gray whirlwind, scattering people and dogs out of his way. Almost +before he had had time to enter the hotel Sara Lee heard him in the +hall, and the next moment he was bowing before her. + +"I have been longer than I expected," he explained. "Have you been +quite comfortable?" + +Sara Lee, however, was gazing at him with startled eyes. He was dirty, +unshaven, and his eyes looked hollow and bloodshot. From his neck to +his heels he was smeared with mud, and his tidy tunic was torn into +ragged holes. + +"But you - you have been fighting!" she gasped. + +"I? No, mademoiselle. There has been no battle." His eyes left her +and traveled over the room. "They are doing everything for you? They +are attentive?" + +"Everything is splendid," said Sara Lee. "If you won't tell me how you +got into that condition, at least you can send your coat down to me to +mend." + +"My tunic!" He looked at it smilingly. "You would do that?" + +"I am nearly frantic for something to do." + +He smiled, and suddenly bending down he took her hand and kissed it. + +"You are not only very beautiful, mademoiselle, but you are very good." + +He went away then, and Sara Lee got out her sewing things. The tunic +came soon, carefully brushed and very ragged. But it was not Jean who +brought it; it was the Flemish boy. + +And up pstairs in a small room with two beds Sara Lee might have been +surprised to find Jean, the chauffeur, lying on one, while Henri shaved +himself beside the other. For Jean, of the ragged uniform and the patch +over one eye, was a count of Belgium, and served Henri because he loved +him. And because, too, he was no longer useful in that little army +where lay his heart. + +Sometime a book will be written about the Jeans of this war, the great +friendships it has brought forth between men. And not the least of its +stories will be that of this Jean of the one eye. But its place is not +here. + +And perhaps there will be a book about the Henris, also. But not for a +long time, and even then with care. For the heroes of one department of +an army in the field live and die unsung. Their bravest exploits are +buried in secrecy. And that is as it must be. But it is a fine tale to +go untold. + +After he had bathed and shaved, Henri sat down at a tiny table and wrote. +He drew a plan also, from a rough one before him. Then he took a match +and burned the original drawing until it was but charred black ashes. +When he had finished Jean got up from the bed and put on his overcoat. + +"To the King?" he said. + +To the King, old friend." + +Jean took the letter and went out. + +Down below, Sara Lee sat with Henri's ragged tunic on her lap and +stitched carefully. Sometime, she reflected, she would be mending worn +garments for another man, now far away. A little flood of tenderness +came over her. So helpless these men! There was so much to do for them! +And soon, please God, she would be helping other tired and weary men, +with food, and perhaps a word - when she had acquired some French - and +perhaps a thread and needle. + +She dined alone that night, as usual. Henri did not appear, though she +had sent what she suspected was his only tunic back to him neatly mended +at five o'clock. As a matter of fact Henri was sound asleep. He had +meant to rest only for an hour a body that was crying aloud with fatigue. +But Jean, coming in quietly, had found him sleeping like a child, and +had put his own blanket over him and left him. Henri slept until morning, +when Jean, coming up from his vigil outside the American girl's door, +found him waking and rested, and rang for coffee. + +Jean sat down on the edge of his bed and put on his shoes and puttees. +He was a taciturn man, but now he had something to say that he did not +like to say. And Henri knew it. + +"What is it?" he asked, his arms under his head. "Come, let us have it! +It is, of course, about the American lady." + +"It is," Jean said bluntly. "You cannot mix women and war." + +"And you think I am doing that?" + +"I am not an idiot," Jean growled. "You do not know what you are doing. +I do. She is young and lonely. You are young and not unattractive to +women. Already she turns pale when I so much as ask if she has heard +from you." + +"You asked her that?" + +"You were gone much longer than -" + +"And you thought I might send her word, and not you!" Henri's voice was +offended. He lay back while the boy brought in the morning coffee and +rolls. + +"Let me tell you something," he said when the boy had gone. "She is +betrothed to an American. She wears a betrothal ring. I am to her - the +French language!" + +But though Henri laughed Jean remained grave and brooding. For Henri +had not said what Sara Lee already was to him. + +It was later in the morning that Henri broached the subject again. They +were in the courtyard of an old house, working over the engine of the car. + +"I think I have found a location for the young American lady," he said. + +Jean hammered for a considerable time at a refractory rim. + +"And where?" he asked at last. + +Henri named the little town. Like Henri's family name, it must not be +told. Too many things happened there, and perhaps it is even now Henri's +headquarters. For that portion of the line has changed very little. + +Jean fell to renewed hammering. + +"If you will be silent I shall explain a plan," Henri said in a cautious +tone. "She will make soup, with help which we shall find. And if coming +in for refreshments a soldier shall leave a letter for me it is natural, +is it not?" + +"She will suspect, of course." + +"I think not. And she reads no French. None whatever." + +Yet Jean's suspicions were not entirely allayed. The plan had its +advantages. It was important that Henri receive certain reports, and +already the hotel whispered that Henri was of the secret service. It +brought him added deference, of course, but additional danger. + +So Jean accepted the plan, but with reservation. And it was not long +afterward that he said to Sara Lee, in French: "There is a spider on +your neck, mademoiselle." + +But Sara Lee only said, "I'm sorry, Jean; you'll have to speak English +to me for a while, I'm afraid." + +And though he watched her for five minutes she did not put her hand +to her neck. + +However, that was later on. That afternoon Henri spent an hour with the +Minister of War. And at the end of that time he said: "Thank you, Baron. +I think you will not regret it. America must learn the truth, and how +better than through those friendly people who come to us to help?" + +It is as well to state, however, that he left the Minister of War with +the undoubted impression that Miss Sara Lee Kennedy was a spinster of +uncertain years. + +Sara Lee packed her own suitcase that afternoon, doing it rather +nervously because Henri was standing in the room by the window waiting +for it. He had come in as matter-of-factly as Harvey had entered the +parlor at Aunt Harriet's, except that he carried in his arms some six +towels, a cake of soap and what looked suspiciously like two sheets. + +"The house I have under consideration," he said, "has little to +recommend it but the building, and even that - The occupants have gone +away, and - you are not a soldier." + +Sara Lee eyed the bundle. + +"I don't need sheets," she expostulated. + +"There are but two. And Jean has placed blankets in the car. You must +have a pillow also." + +He calmly took one of the hotel pillows from the bed. + +"What else?" he asked calmly. "Cigarettes? But no, you do not smoke." + +Sara Lee eyed him with something very like despair. + +"Aren't you ever going to let me think for myself?" + +"Would you have thought of these?" he demanded triumphantly. "You - you +think only of soup and tired soldiers. Some one must think of you." + +And there was a touch of tenderness in his voice. Sara Lee felt it and +trembled slightly. He was so fine, and he must not think of her that +way. It was not real. It couldn't be. Men were lonely here, where +everything was hard and cruel. They wanted some of the softness of life, +and all of kindness and sweetness that she could give should be Henri's. +But she must make it clear that there could never be anything more. + +There was a tightness about her mouth as she folded the white frock. + +"I know that garment," he said boyishly. "Do you remember the night you +wore it? And how we wandered in the square and made the plan that has +brought us together again?" + +Sara Lee reached down into her suitcase and brought up Harvey's picture. + +"I would like you to see this," she said a little breathlessly. "It is +the man I am to marry." + +For a moment she thought Henri was not going to take it. But he came, +rather slowly, and held out his hand for it. He went with it to the +window and stood there for some time looking down at it. + +"When are you going to marry him, mademoielle? + +"As soon as I go back." + +Sara Lee had expected some other comment, but he made none. He put the +photograph very quietly on the bed before her, and gathered up the linen +and the pillow in his arms. + +"I shall send for your luggage, mademoiselle. And you will find me at +the car outside, waiting." + +And so it was that a very silent Henri sat with Jean going out to that +strange land which was to be Sara Lee's home for many months. And a +very silent Sara Lee, flanked with pillow and blankets, who sat back +alone and tried to recall the tones of Harvey's voice. + +And failed. + + + X + + +FROM Dunkirk to the Front, the road, after the Belgian line was passed, +was lightly guarded. Henri came out of a reverie to explain to Sara Lee. + +"We have not many men," he said. "And those that remain are holding the +line. It is very weary, our army." + +Now at home Uncle James had thought very highly of the Belgian Army. He +had watched the fight they made, and he had tried to interest Sara Lee +in it. But without much result. She had generally said: "Isn't it +wonderful!" or "horrible," as the case might be, and put out of her mind +as soon as possible the ringing words he had been reading. But she had +not forgotten, she found. They came back to her as she rode through that +deserted countryside. Henri, glancing back somewhat later, found her in +tears. + +He climbed back at once into the rear of the car and sat down beside her. + +"You are homesick, I think?" + +"Yes. But not for myself. I am just homesick for all the people who +have lost their homes. You - and Jean, and all the rest." + +"Some day I shall tell you about my home and what has happened to it," +he said gravely. "Not now. It is not pleasant. But you must remember +this: We are going back home, we Belgians." And after a little pause: +"Just as you are." + +He lapsed into silence after that, and Sara Lee, stealing a glance at +him, saw his face set and hard. She had a purely maternal impulse to +reach over and pat his hand. + +Jean did not like Henri's shift to the rear of the car. He drove with +a sort of irritable feverishness, until Henri leaned over and touched +him on the shoulder. + +"We have mademoiselle with us, Jean," he said in French. + +"It is not difficult to believe," growled Jean. But he slackened his +pace somewhat. + +So far the road had been deserted. Now they had come up to a stream of +traffic flowing slowly toward the Front. Armored cars, looking tall and +top-heavy, rumbled and jolted along. Many lorries, one limousine +containing a general, a few Paris buses, all smeared a dingy gray and +filled with French soldiers, numberless and nondescript open machines, +here and there a horse-drawn vehicle - these filled the road. In and +out among them Jean threaded his way, while Sara Lee grew crimson with +the effort to see it all, and Henri sat very stiff and silent. + +At a crossroads they were halted by troops who had fallen out for a rest. +The men stood at ease, and stared their fill at Sara Lee. Save for a +few weary peasants, most of them had seen no women for months. But they +were respectful, if openly admiring. And their admiration of her was +nothing to Sara Lee's feeling toward them. She loved them all - boys +with their first straggly beards on their chins; older men, looking worn +and tired; French and Belgian; smiling and sad. But most of all, for +Uncle James' sake, she loved the Belgians. + +"I cannot tell you," she said breathlessly to Henri. "It is like a +dream come true. And I shall help. You look doubtful sometimes, but +I am sure." + +"You are heaven sent," Henri replied gravely. + +They turned into a crossroad after a time, and there in a little village +Sara Lee found her new home. A strange village indeed, unoccupied and +largely destroyed. Piles of bricks and plaster lined the streets. +Broken glass was everywhere. Jean blew out a tire finally, because of +the glass, and they were obliged to walk the remainder of the way. + +"A poor place, mademoiselle," Henri said as they went along. "A peaceful +little town, and quite beautiful, once. And it harbored no troops. But +everything is meat for the mouths of their guns." + +Sara Lee stopped and looked about her. Her heart was beating fast, but +her lips were steady enough. + +"And it is here that I -" + +"A little distance down the street. You must see before you decide." + +Steady, passionless firing was going on, not near, but far away, like +low thunder before a summer storm. She was for months to live, to eat +and sleep and dream to that rumbling from the Ypres salient, to waken +when it ceased or to look up from her work at the strange silence. But +it was new to her then, and terrible. + +"Do they still shell this - this town?" she asked, rather breathlessly. + +"Not now. They have done their work. Of course -" he did not finish. + +Sara Lee's heart slowed down somewhat. After all, she had asked to be +near the Front. And that meant guns and such destruction as was all +about her. Only one thing troubled her. + +"It is rather far from the trenches, isn't it?" + +He smiled slightly. + +"Far! It is not very far. Not so far as I would wish, mademoiselle. +But, to do what you desire, it is the best I have to offer." + +"How far away are the trenches?" + +A quarter of a mile beyond those poplar trees. He indicated on a slight +rise a row of great trees broken somewhat but not yet reduced to the +twisted skeletons they were to become later on. In a long line they +faced the enemy like sentinels, winter-quiet but dauntless, and behind +them lay the wreck of the little village, quiet and empty. + +"Will the men know I am here?" Sara Lee asked anxiously. + +"But, yes, mademoiselle. At night they come up from the trenches, and +fresh troops take their places. They come up this street and go on to +wherever they are to rest. And when they find that a house of - mercy +is here - and soup, they will come. More than you wish." + +"Belgian soldiers?" + +"Only Belgian soldiers. That is as you want it to be, I think." + +"If only I spoke French!" + +"You will learn. And in the meantime, mademoiselle, I have taken the +liberty of finding you a servant - a young peasant woman. And you will +also have a soldier always on guard." + +Something that had been in the back of Sara Lee's mind for some time +suddenly went away. She had been thinking of Aunt Harriet and the Ladies' +Aid Society of the Methodist Church. She had, in fact, been wondering +how they would feel when they learned that she was living alone, the +only woman among thousands of men. It had, oddly enough, never occurred +to her before. + +"You have thought of everything," she said gratefully. + +But Henri said nothing. He had indeed thought of everything with a +vengeance, with the net result that he was not looking at Sara Lee more +than he could help. + +These Americans were strange. An American girl would cross the seas, +and come here alone with him - a man and human. And she would take for +granted that he would do what he was doing for love of his kind - which +was partly true; and she would be beautiful and sweet and amiable and +quite unself-conscious. And then she would go back home, warm of heart +with gratitude, and marry the man of the picture. + +The village had but one street, and that deserted and in ruins. Behind +its double row of houses, away from the enemy, lay the fields, a muddy +canal and more poplar trees. And from far away, toward Ypres, there +came constantly that somewhat casual booming of artillery which marked +the first winter of the war. + +The sound of the guns had first alarmed, then interested Sara Lee. It +was detached then, far away. It meant little to her. It was only later, +when she saw some of the results of the sounds she heard, that they +became significant. But this is not a tale of the wounding of men. +There are many such. This is the story of a little house of mercy, and +of a girl with a dauntless spirit, and of two men who loved her. Only +that. + +The maid Henri had found was already in the house, sweeping. Henri +presented her to Sara Lee, and he also brought a smiling little Belgian +boy, in uniform and with a rifle. + +"Your staff, mademoiselle!" he said. "And your residence!" + +Sara Lee looked about her. With the trifling exception that there was +no roof, it was whole. And the roof was not necessary, for the floors +of the upper story served instead. There was a narrow passage with a +room on either side, and a tiny kitchen behind. + +Henri threw open a door on the right. + +"Your bedroom," he said. "Well furnished, as you will see. It should +be, since there has been brought here all the furniture not destroyed +in the village." + +His blacker mood had fallen away before her naive delight. He went +about smiling boyishly, showing her the kettles in the kitchen; the +supply, already so rare, of firewood; the little stove. But he stiffened +somewhat when she placed her hand rather timidly on his arm. + +"How am I ever to thank you?" she asked. + +"By doing much good. And by never going beyond the poplar trees." + +She promised both very earnestly. + +But she was a little sad as she followed Henri about, he volubly +expatiating on such advantages as plenty of air owing to the absence of +a roof; and the attraction of the stove, which he showed much like a +salesman anxious to make a sale. "Such a stove!" he finished +contentedly. "It will make soup even in your absence, mademoiselle! +Our peasants eat much soup; therefore it is what you would call a +trained stove." + +Before Sara Lee's eyes came a picture of Harvey and the Leete house, +its white dining room, its bay window for plants, its comfortable charm +and prettiness. And Harvey's face, as he planned it for her anxious, +pleading, loving. She drew a long breath. If Henri noticed her +abstraction he ignored it. He was all over the little house. One moment +he was instructing Marie volubly, to her evident confusion. On Rene, +the guard, he descended like a young cyclone, with warnings for +mademoiselle's safety and comfort. He was everywhere, sitting on the +bed to see if it was soft, tramping hard on the upper floor to discover +if any plaster might loosen below, and pausing in that process to look +keenly at a windmill in the field behind. + +When he came down it was to say: "You are not entirely alone in the +village, after all, mademoiselle. The miller has come back. I shall +visit him now and explain." + +He found Sara Lee, however, still depressed. She was sitting in a low +chair in the kitchen gazing thoughtfully at the stove. + +"I am here," she said. "And here is the house, and a stove, and - +everything. But there are no shops; and what shall I make my soup +out of?" + +Henri stared at her rather blankly. + +"True!" he said. "Very true. And I never thought of it!" + +Then suddenly they both laughed, the joyous ringing laugh of ridiculous +youth, which can see its own absurdities and laugh at them. + +Henri counted off on his fingers. + +"I thought of water," he said, "and a house, and firewood, and kettles +and furniture. And there I ceased thinking." + +It was dusk now. Marie lifted the lid from the stove, and a warm red +glow of reflected light filled the little kitchen. It was warm and +cozy; the kettle sang like the purring of a cat. And something else +that had troubled Sara Lee came out. + +"I wonder," she said, "if you are doing all this only because I - well, +because I persuaded you." Which she had not. "Do the men really need +me here?" + +"Need you, mademoiselle?" + +"Do they need what little I can give? They were smiling, all the ones +I saw." + +"A Belgian soldier always smiles. Even when he is fighting." His voice +had lost its gayety and had taken on a deeper note. "Mademoiselle, I +have brought you here, where I can think of no other woman who would +have the courage to come, because you are needed. I cannot promise you +entire safety" - his mouth tightened -"but I can promise you work and +gratitude. Such gratitude, mademoiselle, as you may never know again." + +That reassured her. But in her practical mind the matter of supplies +loomed large. She brought the matter up again directly. + +"It is to be hot chocolate and soup?" he asked. + +"Both, if I find I have enough money. Soup only, perhaps." + +"And soup takes meat, of course." + +"It should, to be strengthening." + +Henri looked up, to see Jean in the doorway smiling grimly. + +"It is very simple," Jean said to him in French. "You have no other +duties of course; so each day you shall buy in the market place at +Dunkirk, with American money. And I shall become a delivery boy and +bring out food for mademoiselle, and whatever is needed." + +Henri smiled back at him cheerfully. "An excellent plan, Jean," he said. +"Not every day, but frequently." + +Jean growled and disappeared. + +However, there was the immediate present to think of, and while Jean +thawed his hands at the fire and Sara Lee was taking housewifely stock +of her new home, Henri disappeared. + +He came back in a half hour, carrying in a small basket butter, eggs, +bread and potatoes. + +"The miller!" he explained cheerfully to Sara Lee. "He has still a few +hens, and hidden somewhere a cow. We can have milk - is there a pail +for Marie to take to the mill? - and bread and an omelet. That is a +meal!" + +There was but one lamp, which hung over the kitchen stove. The room +across from Sara Lee's bedroom contained a small round dining table and +chairs. Sara Lee, enveloped in a large pinafore apron, made the +omelet in the kitchen. Marie brought a pail of fresh milk. Henri, with +a towel over his left arm, and in absurd mimicry of a Parisian waiter, +laid the table; and Jean, dour Jean, caught a bit of the infection, and +finding four bottles set to work with his pocketknife to fit candles +into their necks. + +Standing in corners, smiling, useless against the cheerful English that +flowed from the kitchen stove to the dining room and back again, were +Rene and Marie. It was of no use to attempt to help. Did the fire burn +low, it was the young officer who went out for fresh wood. But Rene +could not permit that twice. He brought in great armfuls of firewood +and piled them neatly by the stove. + +Henri was absurdly happy again. He would come to the door gravely, with +Sara Lee's little phrase book in hand, and read from it in a solemn tone: + +"'Shall we have duck or chicken?' 'Where can we get a good dinner at a +moderate price?' 'Waiter, you have spilled wine on my dress.' 'Will +you have a cigar?' 'No, thank you. I prefer a pipe.'" + +And Sara Lee beat up the eggs and found, after a bad moment, some salt +in a box, and then poured her omelet into the pan. She was very anxious +that it be a good omelet. She must make good her claim as a cook or +Henri's sublime faith in her would die. + +It was a divine omelet. Even Jean said so. They sat, the three of them, +in the cold little dining room and never knew that it was cold, and they +ate prodigious quantities of omelet and bread and butter, and bully beef +out of a tin, and drank a great deal of milk. + +Even Jean thawed at last, under the influence of food and Sara Lee. +Before the meal was over he was planning how to get her supplies to her +and making notes on a piece of paper as to what she would need at once. +They adjourned to Sara Lee's bedroom, where Marie had kindled a fire in +the little iron stove, and sat there in the warmth with two candles, +still planning. By that time Sara Lee had quite forgotten that at home +one did not have visitors in one's bedroom. + +Suddenly Henri held up his hand. + +"Listen!" he said. + +That was the first time Sara Lee had ever heard the quiet shuffling step +of tired men, leaving their trenches under cover of darkness. Henri +threw his military cape over her shoulders and she stood in the dark +doorway, watching. + +The empty street was no longer empty. From gutter to gutter flowed a +stream of men, like a sluggish river which narrowed where a fallen house +partly filled the way; not talking, not singing, just moving, bent under +their heavy and mud-covered equipment. Here and there the clack of +wooden sabots on the cobbles told of one poor fellow not outfitted with +leather shoes. The light of a match here and there showed some few +lucky enough to have still remaining cigarettes, and revealed also, in +the immediate vicinity, a white bandage or two. Some few, recognizing +Henri's officer's cap, saluted. Most of them stumbled on, too weary to +so much as glance aside. + +Nothing that Sara Lee had dreamed of war was like this. This was dreary +and sodden and hopeless. Those fresh troops at the crossroads that day +had been blithe and smiling. There had been none of the glitter and +panoply of war, but there had been movement, the beating of a drum, the +sharp cries of officers as the lines re-formed. + +Here there were no lines. Just such a stream of men as at home might +issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they +were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them +were wounded. + +"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as +mine would not be enough." + +"I would to God there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth. + +"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind +work of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by +caring for only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But +every night some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door + - men slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for +those there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhapps +a clean bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will +have given comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You - alone!" + +"I - alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you? +It is you who have made it possible." + +But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid +what lay beyond. Far beyond a star shell had risen above the flat +fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white +light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and +went out. + +"Like that!" Henri said to her, but in French. "Like that you are to me. +Bright and shining - and so soon gone." + +Sara Lee thought he had asked her if she was cold. + + + + XI + +The girl was singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she +had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, +though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such +young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness! + +She got the tales by intuition rather than by words, though she was +picking up some French at that. Marie would weep openly, at times. The +most frequent story was of no news from the country held by the Germans, +of families left with nothing and probably starving. The first inquiry +was always for news. Had the American lady any way to make inquiry? + +In time Sara Lee began to take notes of names and addresses, and through +Mr. Travers, in London, and the Relief Commission, in Belgium, bits of +information came back. A certain family was in England at a village in +Surrey. Of another a child had died. Here was one that could not be +located, and another reported massacred during the invasion. + +Later on Sara Lee was to find her little house growing famous, besieged +by anxious soldiers who besought her efforts, so that she used enormous +numbers of stamps and a great deal of effort. But that was later on. +And when that time came she turned to the work as a refuge from her +thoughts. For days were coming when Sara Lee did not want to think. + +But like all big things the little house made a humble beginning. A mere +handful of men, daring the gibes of their comrades, stopped in that first +night the door stood open, with its invitation of firelight and candles. +But these few went away with a strange story - of a beautiful American, +and hot soup, and even a cigarette apiece. That had been Henri's +contribution, the cigarettes. And soon the fame of the little house went +up and down the trenches, and it was like to die of overpopularity. + +It was at night that the little house of mercy bloomed like a flower. +During the daytime it was quiet, and it was then, as time went on, that +Sara Lee wrote her letters home and to England, and sent her lists of +names to be investigated. But from the beginning there was much to do. +Vegetables were to be prepared for the soup, Marie must find and bring +in milk for the chocolate, Rene must lay aside his rifle and chop +firewood. + +One worry, however, disappeared with the days. Henri was proving a +clever buyer. The money she sent in secured marvels. Only Jean knew, +or ever knew, just how much of Henri's steadily decreasing funds went +to that buying. Certainly not Sara Lee. And Jean expostulated only +once - to be met by such blazing fury as set him sullen for two days. + +"I am doing this," Henri finished, a trifle ashamed of himself, "not for +mademoiselle, but for our army. And since when have you felt that the +best we can give is too much for such a purpose?" + +Which was, however lofty, only a part of the truth. + +So supplies came in plentifully, and Sara Lee pared vegetables and sang +a bit under her breath, and glowed with good will when at night the weary +vanguard of a weary little army stopped at her door and scraped the mud +off its boots and edged in shyly. + +She was very happy, and her soup was growing famous. It is true that +the beef she used was not often beef, but she did not know that, and +merely complained that the meat was stringy. Now and then there was +no beef at all, and she used hares instead. On quiet days, when there +was little firing beyond the poplar trees, she went about with a basket +through the neglected winter gardens of the town. There were Brussels +sprouts, and sometimes she found in a cellar carrots or cabbages. She +had potatoes always. + +It was at night then, from seven in the evening until one, that the, +little house was busiest. Word had gone out through the trenches beyond +the poplar trees that slightly wounded men needing rest before walking +back to their billets, exhausted and sick men, were welcome to the little +house. It was soon necessary to give the officers tickets for the men. +Rene took them in at the door, with his rifle in the hollow of his arm, +and he was as implacable as a ticket taker at the opera. + +Never once in all the months of her life there did Sara Lee have an ugly +word, an offensive glance. But, though she never knew this, many half +articulate and wholly earnest prayers were offered for her in those +little churches behind the lines where sometimes the men slept, and often +they prayed. + +She was very businesslike. She sent home to the Ladies' Aid Society a +weekly record of what had been done: So many bowls of soup; so many +cups of chocolate; so many minor injuries dressed. Because, very soon, +she found first aid added to her activities. She sickened somewhat at +first. Later she allowed to Marie much of the serving of food, and in +the little salle manger she had ready on the table basins, water, cotton, +iodine and bandages. + +Henri explained the method to her. + +"It is a matter of cleanliness," he said. "First one washes the wound +and then there is the iodine. Then cotton, a bandage, and - a surgeon +could do little more." + +Henri and Jean came often. And more than once during the first ten days +Jean spent the night rolled in a blanket by the kitchen fire, and Henri +disappeared. He was always back in the morning, however, looking dirty +and very tired. Sara Lee sewed more than one rent for him, those days, +but she was strangely incurious. It was as though, where everything was +strange, Henri's erratic comings and goings were but a part with the rest. + +Then one night the unexpected happened. The village was shelled. + +Sara Lee had received her first letter from Harvey that day. The maid +at Morley's had forwarded it to her, and Henri had brought it up. + +"I think I have brought you something you wish for very much," he said, +looking down at her. + +"Mutton?" she inquired anxiously. + +" Better than that." + +"Sugar?" + +"A letter, mademoiselle." + +Afterward he could not quite understand the way she had suddenly drawn +in her breath. He had no memory, as she had, of Harvey's obstinate anger +at her going, his conviction that she was doing a thing criminally wrong +and cruel. + +"Give it to me, please." + +She took it into her room and closed the door. When she came out again +she was composed and quiet, but rather white. Poor Henri! He was half +mad that day with jealousy. Her whiteness he construed as longing. + +This is a part of Harvey's letter: + + +You may think that I have become reconciled, but I have not. If I could +see any reason for it I might. But what reason is there? So many +others, older and more experienced, could do what you are doing, and +more safely. + +In your letter from the steamer you tell me not to worry. Good God, Sara +Lee, how can I help worrying? I do not even know where you are! If you +are in England, well and good. If you are abroad I do not want to know +it. I know these foreigners. I run into them every day. And they do +not understand American women. I get crazy when I think about it. I +have had to let the Leete house go. There is not likely to be such a +chance soon again. Business is good, but I don't seem to care much about +it any more. Honestly, dear, I think you have treated me very badly. I +always feel as though the people I meet are wondering if we have quarreled +or what on earth took you away on this wild-goose chase. I don't know +myself, so how can I tell them? + +I shall always love you, Sara Lee. I guess I'm that sort. But sometimes +I wonder if, when we are married, you will leave me again in some such +uncalled-for way. I warn you now, dear, that I won't stand for it. I'm +suffering too much. + HARVEY. + + +Sara Lee wore the letter next her heart, but it did not warm her. She +went through the next few hours in a sort of frozen composure and ate +nothing at all. + +Then came the bombardment. + +Henri and Jean, driving out from Dunkirk, had passed on the road +ammunition trains, waiting in the road until dark before moving on to +the Front. Henri had given Sara Lee her letter, had watched jealously +for its effect on her, and then, his own face white and set, had gone on +down the ruined street. + +Here within the walls of a destroyed house he disappeared. The place +was evidently familiar to him, for he moved without hesitation. Broken +furniture still stood in the roofless rooms, and in front of a battered +bureau Henri paused. Still whistling under his breath, he took off his +uniform and donned a strange one, of greenish gray. In the pocket of +the blouse he stuffed a soft round cap of the same color. Then, resuming +his cape and Belgian cap, with its tassel over his forehead, he went out +into the street again. He carried in his belt a pistol, but it was not +the one he had brought in with him. As a matter of fact, by the addition +of the cap in his pocket, Henri was at that moment in the full uniform of +a lieutenant of a Bavarian infantry regiment, pistol and all. + +He went down the street and along the road toward the poplars. He met +the first detachment of men out of the trenches just beyond the trees, +and stepped aside into the mud to let them pass, calling a greeting to +them out of the darkness. + +"Bonsoir ! they replied, and saluted stiffly. There were few among them +who did not know his voice, and fewer still who did not suspect his +business. + +"A brave man," they said among themselves as they went on. + +"How long will he last?" asked one young soldier, a boy in his teens. + +"One cannot live long who does as he does," replied a gaunt and bearded +man. "But it is a fine life while it continues. A fine life!" + +The boy stepped out of the shuffling line and looked behind him. He +could see only the glow of Henri's eternal cigarette. "I should like to +go with him," he muttered wistfully. + +The ammunition train was in the village now. It kept the center of the +road, lest it should slide into the mud on either side and be mired. +The men moved out of its way into the ditch, grumbling. + +Henri went whistling softly down the road. + +The first shell fell in the neglected square. The second struck the +rear wagons of the ammunition train Henri heard the terrific explosion +that followed, and turning ran madly back into the village. More shells +fell into the road. The men scattered like partridges, running for the +fields, but the drivers of the ammunition wagons beat their horses and +came lurching and shouting down the road. + +There was cold terror in Henri's heart. He ran madly, throwing aside +his cape as he went. More shells fell ahead in the street. Once in the +darkness he fell flat over the body of a horse. There was a steady +groaning from the ditch near by. But he got up and ran on, a strange +figure with his flying hair and his German uniform. + +He was all but stabbed by Rene when he entered the little house. + +"Mademoiselle?" Henri gasped, holding Rene's bayonet away from his +heaving chest. + +"I am here," said Sara Lee's voice from the little salle a manger. "Let +them carry in the wounded. I am getting ready hot water and bandages. +There is not much space, for the corner of room has been shot away," + +She was as dead white in the candlelight, but very calm. + +Yon cannot stay here," Henri panted. "At any time -" + +Another shell fell, followed by the rumble of falling walls. + +Some one must stay," said Sara Lee. "There must be wounded in the +streets. Marie is in the cellar." + +Henri pleaded passionately with her to go to the cellar,but she refused. +He would have gathered her up in his arms and carried her rhere, but +Jean came in, leading a wounded man, and Henri gave up in despair. + +All that night they worked, a ghastly business. More than one man died +that night in the little house, while a blond young man in a German +uniform gave him last mouthful of water or took down those pittifully +vague addresses which were all the dying Belgians had to give. + +I have not heard - last at Aersehot, hut now - God knows where." + +No more shells fell, At dawn, with all done that could be done. Sara +Lee fainted quietly in the hallway. Henri carrried her in and placed +her on her bed. A corner of theroom was indeed gone. The mantel was +shattered and the little stove. But on the floor lay Harvey's photograph +uninjured. Henri lifted it and looked at it. Then he placed it on the +table, and very reverentiv he kissed the palm of Sara Lee's quiet hand. + +Daylight found the street pitiful indeed, Henri, whose costume Rene had +been casting wondering glances all night, sent a request for men from the +trenches to clear away the bodies of the horses and bury them, and +somewhat later over a single grave in the fields there was a simple +ceremony of burial for the men who had fallen. Henri had changed again +by that time, but he sternly forbade Sara Lee to attend. + +"On pain," he said, "of no more supplies, mademoiselle. These things +must be. They are war. But you can do nothing to help, and it will +be very sad." + +Ambulances took away the wounded at dawn, and the little house became +quiet once more. With planks Rene repaired the damage to the corner, +and triumphantly produced and set up another stove. He even put up a +mantelshelf, and on it, smiling somewhat, he placed Harvey's picture. + +Sara Lee saw it there, and a tiny seed of resentment took root and grew. + +"If there had been no one here last night," she said to the photograph, +"many more would have died. How can you say I am cruel to you? Isn't +this worth the doing?" + +But Harvey remained impassive, detached, his eyes on the photographer's +white muslin screen. And the angle of his jaw was set and dogged. + + + + XII + + +That morning there was a conference in the little house - Colonel Lilias, +who had come in before for a mute but appreciative call on Sara Lee, and +for a cup of chocolate; Captain Tournay, Jean and Henri. It was held +round the little table in the salle a manger, after Marie had brought +coffee and gone out. + +"They had information undoubtedly," said the colonel. "The same thing +happened at Pervyse when an ammunition train went through. They had the +place, and what is more they had the time. Of course there are the +airmen." + +"It did not leave the main road until too late for observation from the +air," Henri put in shortly. + +"Yet any one who saw it waiting at the crossroads might have learned its +destination. The drivers talk sometimes." + +"But the word had to be carried across," said Captain Tournay. "That is +the point. My men report flashes of lights from the fields. We have +followed them up and found no houses, no anything. In this flat country +a small light travels far." + +"I shall try to learn to-night," Henri said. "It is, of course, +possible that some one from over there -" He shrugged his shoulders. + +"I think not." Colonel Lilias put a hand on Henri's shoulder +affectionately. "They have not your finesse, boy. And I doubt if, in +all their army, they have so brave a man." + +Henri flushed. + +"There is a courage under fire, with their fellows round - that is one +thing. And a courage of attack - that is even more simple. But the +bravest man is the one who works alone - the man to whom capture is death +without honor." + +The meeting broke up. Jean and Henri went away in the car, and though +supplies came up regularly Sara Lee did not see the battered gray car +for four days. At the end of that time Henri came alone. Jean, he said +briefly, was laid up for a little while with a flesh wound in his +shoulder. He would be well very soon. In the meantime here at last was +mutton. It had come from England, and he, Henri, had found it lying +forgotten and lonely and very sad and had brought it along. + +After that Henri disappeared on foot. It was midafternoon and a sunny +day. Sara Lee saw him walking briskly across the fields and watched him +out of sight. She spoke some French now, and she had gathered from Rene, +who had no scruples about listening at a door, that Henri was the bravest +man in the Belgian Army. + +Until now Sara Lee had given small thought to Henri's occupation. She +knew nothing of war, and the fact that Henri, while wearing a uniform, +was unattached, had not greatly impressed her. Had she known the +constitution of a modern army she might have wondered over his freedom, +his powerful car, his passes and maps. But his detachment had not seemed +odd to her. Even his appearance during the bombardment in the uniform +of a German lieutenant had meant nothing to her. She had never seen a +German uniform. + +That evening, however, when he returned she ventured a question. They +dined together, the two of them, for the first time at the little house +alone. Always before Jean had made the third. And it was a real meal, +for Sara Lee had sacrificed a bit of mutton from her soup, and Henri had +produced from his pocket a few small and withered oranges. + +"A gift!" he said gayly, and piled them in a precarious heap in the +center of the table. On the exact top he placed a walnut. + +"Now speak gently and walk softly," he said. "It is a work of art and +not to be lightly demolished." + +He was alternately gay and silent during the meal, and more than once +Sara Lee found his eyes on her, with something new and different in them. + +"Just you and I together!" he said once. "It is very wonderful." + +And again: "When you go back to him, shall you tell him of your good +friend who has tried hard to serve you?" + +"Of course I shall," said Sara Lee. "And he will write you, I know. He +will be very grateful." + +But it was she who was silent after that, because somehow it would be +hard to make Harvey understand. And as for his being grateful - + +"Mademoiselle," said Henri later on, "would you object if I make a +suggestion? You wear.a very valuable ring. I think it is entirely safe, +but - who can tell? And also it is not entirely kind to remind men who +are far from all they love that you -" + +Sara Lee flushed and took off her ring. + +"I am glad you told me," she said. And Henri did not explain that the +Belgian soldiers would not recognize the ring as either a diamond or a +symbol, but that to him it was close to torture. + +It was when he insisted on carrying out the dishes, singing a little +French song as he did so, that Sara Lee decided to speak what was in her +mind. He was in high spirits then. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "shall I show you something that the eye of no +man has seen before, and that, when we have seen it, shall never be seen +again?" + +On her interested consent he called in Marie and Rene, making a great +ceremony of the matter, and sending Marie into hysterical giggling. + +"Now see!" he said earnestly. "No eye before has ever seen or will again. +Will you guess, mademoiselle? Or you, Marie? Rene?" + +"A tear?" ventured Sara Lee. + +"But - do I look like weeping?" + +He did not, indeed. He stood, tall and young and smiling before them, +and produced from his pocket the walnut. + +"Perceive!" he said, breaking it open and showing the kernel. "Has human +eye ever before seen it?" He thrust it into Marie's open mouth. "And +it is gone! Voila tout!" + +It was that evening, while Sara Lee cut bandages and Henri rolled them, +that she asked him what his work was. He looked rather surprised, and +rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work," +he said. "What you call odd jobs." + +"Then you don't do any fighting?" + +"In the trenches - no. But now and then I have a little skirmish." + +A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The +trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this +alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no +detail - was he playing a man's part in the war? + +"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness. +"You say there are too few men. Yet - I can understand Monsieur Jean, +because he has only one eye. But you!" + +"I do something," he said, avoiding her eyes. "It is not a great deal. +It is the thing I can do best. That is all." + +He went away some time after that, leaving the littie house full and busy +justifying its existence. The miller's son, who came daily to chat with +Marie, was helping in the kitchen. By the warm stove, and only kept from +standing over it by Marie's sharp orders, were as many men as could get +near. Each held a bowl of hot soup, and - that being a good day - a +piece of bread. Tall soldiers and little ones, all dirty, all weary, +almost all smiling, they peered over each other's shoulders, to catch, +if might be, a glimpse of Marie's face. + +When they came too close she poked an elbow into some hulking fellow and +sent him back. + +"Elbow-room, in the name of God," she would beg. + +Over all the room hung the warm steam from the kettles, and a delicious +odor, and peace. + +Sara Lee had never heard of the word morale. She would have been +astonished to have been told that she was helping the morale of an army. +But she gave each night in that little house of mercy something that +nothing else could give - warmth and welcome, but above all a touch of +home. + +That night Henri did not come back. She stood by her table bandaging, +washing small wounds, talking her bits of French, until one o'clock. +Then, the last dressing done, she went to the kitchen. Marie was there, +with Maurice, the miller's son. + +"Has the captain returned?" she asked. + +"Not yet, mademoiselle." + +"Leave a warm fire," Sara Lee said. "He will probably come in later." + +Maurice went away, with a civil good night. Sara Lee stood in the +doorway after he had gone, looking out. Farther along the line there +was a bombardment going on. She knew now what a bombardment meant and +her brows contracted. Somewhere there in the trenches men were enduring +that, while Henri - + +She said a little additional prayer that night, which was that she +should have courage to say to him what she felt - that there were big +things to do, and that it should not all be left to these smiling, +ill-clad peasant soldiers. + +At that moment Henri, in his gray-green uniform, was cutting wire before +a German trench, one of a party of German soldiers, who could not know +in the darkness that there had been a strange addition to their group. +Cutting wire and learning many things which it was well that he should +know. + +Now and then, in perfect German, he whispered a question. Always he +received a reply. And stowed it away in his tenacious memory for those +it most concerned. + +At daylight he was asleep by Sara Lee's kitchen fire. And at daylight +Sara Lee was awakened by much firing, and putting on a dressing gown she +went out to see what was happening. Rene was in the street looking +toward the poplar trees. + +"An attack," he said briefly. + +"You mean - the Germans?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +She went back into the little ruined house, heavy-hearted. She knew now +what it meant, an attack. That night there would be ambulances in the +street, and word would come up that certain men were gone - would never +seek warmth and shelter in her kitchen or beg like children for a second +bowl of soup. + +On the kitchen floor by the dying fire Henri lay asleep. + + + + XIII + + +Much has been said of the work of spies - said and written. Here is a +woman in Paris sending forbidden messages on a marked coin. Men are +tapped on the shoulder by a civil gentleman in a sack suit, and walk +away with him, never to be seen again. + +But of one sort of spy nothing has been written and but little is known. +Yet by him are battles won or lost. On the intelligence he brings +attacks are prepared for and counter-attacks launched. It is not always +the airman, in these days of camouflage, who brings word of ammunition +trains or of new batteries. + +In the early days of the war the work of the secret service at the Front +was of the gravest importance. There were fewer air machines, and +observation from the air was a new science. Also trench systems were +incomplete. Between them, known to a few, were breaks of solid land, +guarded from behind. To one who knew, it was possible, though dangerous +beyond words, to cross the inundated country that lay between the Belgian +Front and the German lines, and even with good luck to go farther. + +Henri, for instance, on that night before had left the advanced trench +at the railway line, had crawled through the Belgian barbed wire, and +had advanced, standing motionless as each star shell burst overhead, and +then moving on quickly. The inundation was his greatest difficulty. +Shallow in most places, it was full of hidden wire and crisscrossed with +irrigation ditches. Once he stumbled into one, but he got out by +swimming. Had he been laden with a rifle and equipment it might have +been difficult. + +He swore to himself as his feet touched ground again. For a star shell +was hanging overhead, and his efforts had sent wide and ever increasingly +widening circles over the placid surface of the lagoon. Let them lap to +the German outposts and he was lost. + +Henri's method was peculiar to himself. Where there was dry terrain he +did as did the others, crouched and crept. But here in the salt marshes, +where the sea had been called to Belgium's aid, he had evolved a system +of moving, neck deep in water, stopping under the white night lights, +advancing in the darkness. There was no shelter. The country was flat +as a hearth. + +He would crawl out at last in the darkness and lie flat, as the dead lie. +And then, inch by inch, he would work his way forward, by routes that he +knew. Sometimes he went entirely through the German lines, and +reconnoitered on the roads behind. They were shallow lines then, for +the inundation made the country almost untenable, and a charge in force +from the Belgians across was unlikely. + +Henri knew his country well, as well as he loved it. In a farmhouse +behind the German lines he sometimes doffed his wet gray-green uniform +and put on the clothing of a Belgian peasant. Trust Henri then for being +a lout, a simple fellow who spoke only Flemish - but could hear in many +tongues. Watch him standing at crossroads and marveling at big guns that +rumble by. + +At first Henri had wished, having learned of an attack, to be among those +who repelled it. Then one day his King had sent for him to come to that +little viilage which was now his capital city. + +He had been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing. +Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri +was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were +blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was - a tawdry summer home, +ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man +of all time it became royal. + +So Henri bowed and waited, and soon the King got up and shook hands with +him. As a matter of fact they knew each other rather well, but to +explain more would be to tell that family name of Henri's which must +never be known. + +"Sit down," said the King gravely. And he got a box of cigars from the +mantelpiece and offered it. "I sent for you because I want to talk to +you. You are doing valuable work." + +"I am glad you think it so, sire," said Henri rather unhappily, because +he felt what was coming. "But I cannot do it all the time. There are +intervals-" + +An ordinary mortal may not interrupt a king, but a king may interrupt +anything, except perhaps a German bombardment. + +"Intervals, of course. If there were not you would be done in a month." + +"But I am a soldier. My place is -" + +"Your place is where you are most useful." + +Henri was getting nothing out of the cigar. He flung it away and got up. + +"I want to fight too," he said stubbornly. "We need every man, and I am + - rather a good shot. I do this other because I can do it. I speak +their infernal tongue. But it's dirty business at the best, sire. He +remembered to put in the sire, but rather ungraciously. Indeed he shot +it out like a bullet. + +"Dirty business!" said the King thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. It +is, of course. But - not so dirty as the things they have done, and are +doing." + +He sat still and let Henri stamp up and down, because, as has been said, +he knew the boy. And he had never been one to insist on deference, +which was why he got so much of it. But at last he got up and when +Henri stood still, rather ashamed of himself, he put an arm over the +boy's shoulders. + +"I want you to do this thing, for me. And this thing only," he said. +"It is the work you do best. There are others who can fight, but - I do +not know any one else who can do as you have done." + +Henri promised. He would have promised to go out and drown himself in +the sea, just beyond the wind-swept little garden, for the tall grave +man who stood before him. Then he bowed and went out, and the King +went back to his plain pine table and his work. That was the reason why +Sara Lee found him asleep on the floor by her kitchen stove that morning, +and went back to her cold bed to lie awake and think. But no explanation +came to her. + +The arrival of Marie roused Henri. The worst of the bombardment was +over, but there was far-away desultory firing. He listened carefully +before, standing outside in the cold, he poured over his head and +shoulders a pail of cold water. He was drying himself vigorously when +he heard Sara Lee's voice in the kitchen. + +The day began for Henri when first he saw the girl. It might be evening, +but it was the beginning for him. So he went in when he had finished +his toilet and bowed over her hand. + +"You are cold, mademoiselle." + +"I think I am nervous. There was an attack this morning." + +"Yes?" + +Marie had gone into the next room, and Sara Lee raised haggard eyes +to his. + +"Henri," she said desperately - it was the first time she had called him +that -" I have something to say to you, and it's not very pleasant." + +"You are going home?" It was the worst thing he could think of. But +she shook her head. + +"You will think me most ungrateful and unkind." + +"You? Kindness itself!" + +"But this is different. It is not for myself. It is because I care a +great deal about - about -" + +"Mademoiselle!" + +"About your honor. And somehow this morning, when I found you here +asleep, and those poor fellows in the trenches fighting -" + +Henri stared at her. So that was it! And he could never tell her. He +was sworn to secrecy by every tradition and instinct of his work. He +could never tell her, and she would go on thinking him a shirker and a +coward. She would be grateful. She would be sweetness itself. But +deep in her heart she would loathe him, as only women can hate for a +failing they never forgive. + +"But I have told you," he said rather wildly, "I am not idle. I do +certain things - not much, but of a degree of importance." + +"You do not fight." + +In Sara Lee's defense many things may be urged - her ignorance of modern +warfare; the isolation of her lack of knowledge of the language; but, +perhaps more than anything, a certain rigidity of standard that +comprehended no halfway ground. Right was right and wrong was wrong to +her in those days. Men were brave or were cowards. Henri was worthy +or unworthy. And she felt that, for all his kindness to her, he was +unworthy. + +He could have set himself right with a word, at that. But his pride was +hurt. He said nothing except, when she asked if he had minded what she +said, to reply: + +"I am sorry you feel as you do. I am not angry." + +He went away, however, without breakfast. Sara Lee heard his car going +at its usual breakneck speed up the street, and went to the door. She +would have called him back if she could, for his eyes haunted her. But +he did not look back. + + + + XIV + + +For four days the gray car did not come again. Supplies appeared in +another gray car, driven by a surly Fleming. The waking hours were full, +as usual. Sara Lee grew a little thin, and seemed to be always +listening. But there was no Henri, and something that was vivid and +joyous seemed to have gone out of the little house. + +Even Marie no longer sang as she swept or washed the kettles, and Sara +Lee, making up the records to send home, put little spirit into the +letter that went with them. + +On the second day she wrote to Harvey. + +"I am sorry that you feel as you do," she wrote, perhaps unconsciously +using Henri's last words to her. "I have not meant to be cruel. And +if you were here you would realize that whether others could have done +what I am doing or not - and of course many could - it is worth doing. +I hear that other women are establishing houses like this, but the +British and the French will not allow women so near the lines. The men +come in at night from the trenches so tired, so hungry and so cold. +Some of them are wounded too. I dress the little wounds. I do give +them something, Harvey dear - if it is only a reminder that there are +homes in the world, and everything is not mud and waiting and killing." + +She told him that his picture was on her mantel, but she did not say +that a corner of her room had been blown away or that the mantel was +but a plank from a destroyed house. And she sent a great deal of love, +but she did not say that she no longer wore his ring on her finger. +And of course she was coming back to him if he still wanted her. + +More than Henri's absence was troubling Sara Lee those days. Indeed she +herself laid all her anxiety to one thing, a serious one at that. With +all the marvels of Henri's buying, and Jean's, her money was not holding +out. The scope of the little house had grown with its fame. Now and +then there were unexpected calls, too - Marie's mother, starving in +Havre; sickness and death in the little town at the crossroads: a dozen +small emergencies, but adding to the demands on her slender income. She +had, as a matter of fact, already begun to draw on her private capital. + +And during the days when no gray car appeared she faced the situation, +took stock, as it were, and grew heavy-eyed and wistful. + +On the fifth day the gray car came again, but Jean drove it alone. He +disclaimed any need for sympathy over his wound, and with Rene's aid +carried in the supplies. + +There was the business of checking them off, and the further business +of Sara Lee's paying for them in gold. She sat at the table, Jean +across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d'or, an +engrossed frown between her eyebrows. + +Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed. She smiled very seldom, +and her eyes were perhaps more steady. It was a young' girl he and Henri +had brought out to the little house. It was a very serious and rather +anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he +had brought back into little stacks. + +"Jean," she said finally, "I am not going to be able to do it." + +"To do what?" + +"To continue - here." + +"No?" + +"You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in +London. You and - and Henri have done miracles for me. But soon I +shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back. And +now I shall have to start on my English notes. After that -" + +"You are too good to the men. These cigarettes, now - you could do +without them." + +"But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean." + +She sat still, her hands before her on the table. From the kitchen came +the bubbling of the eternal soup. Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down +her cheek. She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently +did not notice. + +"The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort +too many." + +"Jean," she said suddenly, "where is Henri?" + +"In England, I think." + +The only clear thought in Sara Lee's mind was that Henri was not in +France, and that he had gone without telling her. She had hurt him +orribly. She knew that. He might never come back to the little house +of mercy. There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable +strain. And she had attacked his honor. What possible right had she +to do that? + +The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale +and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean. + +"Did he tell you anything?" + +"Nothing, mademoiselle." + +"He is very angry with me, Jean." + +"But surely no, mademoiselle. With you? It is impossible." + +But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply. +He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri's manner +before his departure. They had quarreled, these two. Perhaps it was as +well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee. But he looked out, +those days, on but half a world, did Jean. So he saw only the woman +hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper. And in Sara Lee a woman, and +nothing more. + +And - being Jean he shrugged his shoulders. + +They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out, +but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and +trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had +hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow +Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval. +He gave her no moral support. + +At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with +soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so `many small wounds dressed +- a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did it +nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She +inclosed a snapshot of the little house. + +Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times. +He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later +on he told Rene. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back +along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on +the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by. + +Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got +in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different +Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads - a Henri in +the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and +mpracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue +trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back +and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his +chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter +campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing +through rents in his coat. + +Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders, +the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of +the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which +renders the French Army so mobile. + +He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an +extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and +an intrenching tool jingling at his belt. + +Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded +crossroads - smiled and then sighed. For Jean had lost everything in +the war. His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and +with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come. But Henri +had brought back to Jean something to live for - or to die for, as might +happen. + +Henri walked along gayly. He hailed other French soldiers. He joined a +handful and stood talking to them. But he reached the crossroads before +the ammunition train. + +The crossroads was crowded, as usual - many soldiers, at rest, waiting +for the word to fall in, a battery held up by the breaking of a wheel. +A temporary forge had been set up, and soldiers in leather aprons were +working over the fire. A handful of peasants watched, their dull eyes +following every gesture. And one of them was a man Henri sought. + +Henri sat down on the ground and lighted a cigarette. The ammunition +train rolled in and halted, and the man Henri watched turned his +attention to the train. He had been dull and quiet at the forge, but +now he became smiling, a good fellow. He found a man he knew among the +drivers and offered him a cigarette. He also produced and presented an +entire box of matches. Matches were very dear, and hardly to be bought +at any price. + +Henri watched grimly and hummed a little song: + + "Trou la la, ce ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas." + +Still humming under his breath, when the peasant left the crossroads he +followed him. Not closely. The peasant cut across the fields. Henri +followed the road and entered the fields at a different angle. He knew +his way quite well, for he had done the same thing each day for four +days. Only twice he had been a Belgian peasant, and once he was an +officer, and once he had been a priest. + +Four days he had done this thing, but to-day was different. To-day there +would be something worth while, he fancied. And he made a mental note +that Sara Lee must not be in the little house that night. + +When he had got to a canal where the pollard willows were already sending +out their tiny red buds, Henri sat down again. The village lay before +him, desolate and ruined, a travesty of homes. And on a slight rise, but +so concealed from him by the willows that only the great wings showed, +stood the windmill. + +It was the noon respite then, and beyond the line of popiars all as quiet. +The enemy liked time for foods and the Belgians crippled by the loss of +that earlier train, were husbanding their ammunition. Far away a gap in +the poplar trees showed a German observation balloon, a tiny dot against +the sky. + +The man Henri watched went slowly, for he carried a bag of grain on his +back. Henri no longed watched him, He watched the wind wheel. It had +been broken, and one plane was now patched with what looked like a red +cloth. There was a good wind, but clearly the miller was idle that day. +The great wings were not turning. + +Henri sat still and smoked. He thought of many things - of Sara Lee's +eyes when in the center of the London traffic she had held the dying +donkey; of her small and radiant figure at the Savoy; of the morning he +had found her at Calais, in the Gare Maritime, quietly unconscious that +she had done a courageous thing. And he thought, too, of the ring and +the photograph she carried. But mostly he remembered the things she had +said to him on their last meeting. + +Perhaps there came to him his temptation too. It would be so easy that +night, if things went well, to make a brave showing before her, to let +her see that these odd jobs he did had their value and their risks. But +he put that from him. The little house of mercy must be empty that +night, for her sake. He shivered as he remembered the room where she +slept, the corner that was shot away and left open to the street. + +So he sat and watched. And at one o'clock the mill wheel began turning. +It was easy to count the revolutions by the red wing. Nine times it +turned, and stopped. After five minutes or so it turned again, thirty +times. Henri smiled: an ugly smile. + +"A good guess," he said to himself. "But it must be more than a guess." + +His work for the afternoon was done. Still with the bent-kneed swing he +struck back to the road, and avoiding the crossroads, went across more +fields to a lane where Jean waited with the car. Henri took a plunge +into the canal when he had removed his French uniform, and producing a +towel from under a hush rubbed himself dry. His lean boyish body +gleamed, arms and legs brown from much swimming under peaceful summer +suns. On his chest he showed two scars, still pink. Shrapnel bites, he +called them. But he had, it is to be feared, a certain young +satisfaction in them. + +He was in high good humor. The water was icy, and Jean had refused to +join him. + +My passion for cleanliness," Henri said blithely, "is the result of my +English school days. You would have been the better for an English +education, Jean." + +A canal in March!" Jean grunted. "You will end badly." + +Henri looked longingly at the water. + +"Had I a dry towel," he said, "I would go in again" + +Jean looked at him with his one eye. + +"You would be prettier without those scars" he observed. But in his +heart he prayed that there might be no others added to them, that +nothing might mar or destroy that bright and youthful body. + +"Depechez-vous! Vous sommes Presses!" he added. + +But Henri was minded to play. He girded himself with the towel and +struck an attitude. + "The Russian ballet, Jean!" he said, and capering madly sent Jean +into deep grumbles of laughter by his burlesque. + +"I must have exercise," Henri said at last when, breathless and with +flying hair, he began to dress. That, too, is my English schooling. If +you, Jean. -" + +"To the devil with your English schooling!" Jean remonstrated. + +Henri sobered quickly after that. The exhilaration of his cold plunge +was over. + +"The American lady?" he asked. "She is all right?" + +"She is worried. There is not enough money." + +Henri frowned. + +"And I have nothing!" + +This opened up an old wound with Jean. + +"If you would be practical and take pay for what you are doing," he began. + +Henri cut him short. + +"Pay!" he said. "What is there to pay me with? And what is the use of +reopening the matter? A man may be a spy for love of his country. God +knows there is enough lying and deceit in the business. But to be a spy +or money-never!" + +There was a little silence. Then: "Now for mademoiselle," said Henri. +"She must be out of the village to-night. And that, dear friend, must +be your affair. She does not like me." + +All the life had gone out of his voice. + + + + XV + + +"But why should I go?" Sara Lee asked. "It is kind of you to ask me, +Jean. But I am here to work, not to play." + +Long ago Sara Lee had abandoned her idea of Jean as a paid chauffeur. +She even surmised, from something Marie had said, that he had been a +person of importance in the Belgium of before the war. So she was +grateful, but inclined to be obstinate. + +"You have been so much alone, mademoiselle -" + +"Alone!" + +"Cut off from your own kind. And now and then one finds, at the hotel +in Dunkirk, some English nurses who are having a holiday. You would +like to talk to them perhaps." + +"Jean," she said unexpectedly, "why don't you tell me the truth? You +want me to leave the village tonight. Why?" + +"Because, mademoiselle, there will be a bombardment." + +"The village itself?" + +"We expect it," he answered dryly. + +Sara Lee went a little pale. + +"But then I shall be needed, as I was before." + +"No troops will pass through the town to-night. They will take a road +beyond the fields." + +"How do you know these things?" she asked, wondering. "About the troops +I can understand. But the bombardment." + +"There are ways of finding out, mademoiselle," he replied in his +noncommittal voice. "Now, will you go?" + +May I tell Marie and Rene?" + +" No." + +"Then I shall not go. How can you think that I would consider my own +safety and leave them here?" + +Jean had ascertained before speaking that Marie was not in the house. +As for Rene, he sat on the single doorstep and whittled pegs on which to +hang his rifle inside the door. And as he carved he sang words of his +own to the tune of Tipperary. + +Inside the little salle a manger Jean reassured Sara Lee. It was +important - vital - that Rene and Marie should not know far in advance +of the bombardment. They were loyal, certainly, but these were his +orders. In abundance of time they would be warned to leave the village. + +"Who is to warn them?" + +"Henri has promised, mademoiselle. And what he promises is done." + +"You said this morning that he was in England." + +"He has returned." + +Sara Lee's heart, which had been going along nerely as a matter of duty +ll day, suddenly began to beat faster. Her color came up, and then faded +again. He had returned, and he had not come to the little house. But +then - what could Henri mean to her, his coming or his going? Was she +to add to her other sins against Harvey the supreme one of being +interested in Henri? + +Not that she said all that, even to herself. There was a wave of +gladness and then a surge of remorse. That is all. But it was a very +sober Sara Lee who put on her black suit with the white collar that +afternoon and ordered, by Jean's suggestion, the evening's preparations +as though nothing was to happen. + +She looked round her little room before she left it. It might not be +there when she returned. So she placed Harvey's photograph under her +mattress for safety, and rather uncomfortably she laid beside it the +small ivory crucifix that Henri had found in a ruined house and brought +to her. Harvey was not a Catholic. He did not believe in visualizing +his religion. And she had a distinct impression that he considered such +things as did so as bordering on idolatry. + +Sometime after dusk that evening the ammunition train moved out. At a +point a mile or so from the village a dispatch rider on a motor cycle +stopped the rumbling lorry at the head of the procession and delivered +a message, which the guide read by the light of a sheltered match. The +train moved on, but it did not turn down to the village. It went beyond +to a place of safety, and there remained for the night. + +But before that time Henri, lying close in a field, had seen a skulking +figure run from the road to the mill, and soon after had seen the mill +wheel turn once, describing a great arc; and on one of the wings, showing +only toward the poplar trees, was a lighted lantern. + +Five minutes later, exactly time enough for the train to have reached +the village street, German shells began to fall in it. Henri, lying +flat on the ground, swore silently and deeply. + +In every land during this war there have been those who would sell their +country for a price. Sometimes money. Sometimes protection. And of all +betrayals that of the man who sells his own country is the most dastardly. +Henri, lying face down, bit the grass beneath him in sheer rage. + +One thing he had not counted on, he who foresaw most things. The miller +and his son, being what they were, were cowards as well. Doubtless the +mill had been promised protection. It was too valuable to the Germans +to be destroyed. But with the first shot both men left the house by the +mill and scurried like rabbits for the open fields. + +Maurice, poor Marie's lover by now, almost trampled on Henri's prostrate +body. And Henri was alone, and his work was to take them alive. They +had information he must have - how the modus vivendi had been arranged, +through what channels. And under suitable treatment they would tell. + +He could not follow them through the fields. He lay still, during a +iercer bombardment than the one before, raising his head now and then +to see if the little house of mercy still stood. No shells came his +way, but the sky line of the village altered quickly. The standing +fragment of the church towers went early. There was much sound of +falling masonry. From somewhere behind him a Belgian battery gave +tongue, but not for long. And then came silence. + +Henri moved then. He crept nearer the mill and nearer. And at last he +stood inside and took his bearings. A lamp burned in the kitchen, +showing a dirty brick floor and a littered table - such a house as men +keep, untidy and unhomelike. A burnt kettle stood on the hearth, and +leaning against the wall was the bag of grain Maurice had carried from +the crossroads. + +"A mill which grinds without grain," Henri said to himself. + +There was a boxed-in staircase to the upper floor, and there, with the +door slightly ajar, he stationed himself, pistol in hand. Now and then +he glanced uneasily at the clock. Sara Lee must not be back before he +had taken his prisoners to the little house and turned them over to +those who waited there. + +There were footsteps outside, and Henri drew the door a little closer. +But he was dismayed to find it Marie. She crept in, a white and broken +thing, and looked about her. + +"Maurice!" she called. + +She sat down for a moment, and then, seeing the disorder about her, set +to work to clear the table. It was then that Henri lowered his pistol +and opened the door. + +"Don't shriek, Marie," he said. + +She turned and saw him, and clutched at the table. + +"Monsieur!" + +"Marie," he said quietly, "go up these stairs and remain quiet. Do not +walk round. And do not come down, no matter what you hear!" + +She obeyed him, stumbling somewhat. For she had seen his revolver, and +it frightened her. But as she passed him she clutched at his sleeve. + +"He is good - Maurice," she said, gasping. "Of the father I know nothing, +but Maurice -" + +"Go up and be silent!" was all he said. + +Now, by all that goes to make a story, Sara Lee should have met Mabel at +the Hotel des Arcades in Dunkirk, and should have been able to make that +efficient young woman burn with jealousy - Mabel, who from the safety of +her hospital in Boulogne considered Dunkirk the Front. + +Indeed Sara Lee, to whom the world was beginning to seem very small, had +had some such faint hope. But Mabel was not there, and it was not until +long after that they met at all, and then only when the lights had gone +down and Sara Lee was again knitting by the fire. + +There were a few nurses there, in their white veils with the red cross +over the forehead, and one or two Englishwomen in hats that sat a trifle +too high on the tops of their heads and with long lists before them +which they checked as they ate. Aviators in leather coats; a few Spahis +in cloak and turban, with full-gathered bloomers and high boots; some +American amhulance drivers, rather noisy and very young; and many +officers, in every uniform of the Allied armies - sat at food together +and for a time forgot their anxieties under the influence of lights, food +and warmth, and red and white wine mixed with water. + +When he chose, Jean could be a delightful companion; not with Henri's +lift of spirits, but quietly interesting. And that evening he was a new +Jean to Sara Lee, a man of the world, talking of world affairs. He +found her apt and intelligent, and for Sara Lee much that had been +clouded cleared up forever that night. Until then she had known only +the humanities of the war, or its inhumanities. There, over that little +table, she learned something of its politics and its inevitability. She +had been working in the dark, with her heart only. Now she began to +grasp the real significance of it all, of Belgium's anxiety for many +years, of Germany's cold and cruel preparation, and empty protests of +friendship. She learned of the flight of the government from Brussels, +the most important state papers being taken away in a hand cart, on top +of which, at the last moment, some flustered official had placed a tall +silk hat! She learned of the failure of great fortifications before the +invaders' heavy guns. And she had drawn for her such a picture of +Albert of Belgium as she was never to forget. + +Perhaps Sara Lee's real growth began that night, over that simple diuner +at the Hotel des Arcades. + +"I wish," she said at last, "that Uncle James could have heard all this. +He was always so puzzled about it all. And - you make it so clear." + +When dinner was over a bit of tension had relaxed in her somewhat. She +had been too close, for too long. And when a group of Belgian omcers, +learning who she was, asked to be presented and gravely thanked her, she +flushed with happiness. + +"We must see if mademoiselle shall not have a medal," said the only one +who spoke English. + +"A medal? For what?" + +"For courage," he said, bowing. "Belgium has little to give, but it can +at least do honor to a brave lady." + +Jean was smiling when they passed on. What a story would this slip of a +girl take home with her! + +But: "I don't think I want a medal, Jean," she said. "I didn't come for +that. And after all it is you and Henri who have done the thing - not I." + +Accustomed to women of a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first +taken her naivete for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting +her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just +such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of +her - the upraising of her eyes or an unstudied gesture. + +He sighed. + +"You are very wonderful, you Americans," he said. It was the nearest to +a compliment that he had ever come. And after that evening he was always +very gentle with her. Once he had protected her because Henri had asked +him to do so; now he himself became in his silent way her protector. + +The ride home through the dark was very quiet. Sara Lee sat beside him +watching the stars and growing increasingly anxious as they went, not +too rapidly, toward the little house. There were no lights. Air raids +had grown common in Dunkirk, and there were no street lights in the +little city. Once on the highway Jean lighted the lamps, but left them +very low, and two miles from the little house he put them out altogether. +They traveled by starlight then, following as best they could the tall +trees that marked the road. Now and then they went astray at that, and +once they tilted into the ditch and had hard pulling to get out. + +At the top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down. +He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable; +and again Sara Lee shivered. If the little house was gone! + +But it was there, and lighted too. Through its broken shutters came the +yellow glow of the oil lamp that now hung over the table in the salle a +manger. + +Whatever Jean's anxieties had been fell from him as he pushed open the +door. Henri's voice was the first thing they heard. He was too much +occupied to notice their approach. + +So it was that Sara Lee saw, for the last time, the miller and his son, +Maurice; saw them, but did not know them, for over their heads were bags +of their own sacking, with eyeholes roughly cut in them. Their hands +were bound, and three soldiers were waiting to take them away. + +"I have covered your heads," Henri was saying in French, "because it is +not well that our brave Belgians should know that they have been betrayed +by those of their own number." + +It was a cold and terrible Henri who spoke. + +"Take them away," he said to the waiting men. + +A few moments later he turned from the door and heard Sara Lee sobbing +in her room. He tapped, and on receiving no reply he went in. The room +was unharmed, and by the light of a candle he saw the girl, face down on +the bed. He spoke to her, but she only lay crouched deeper, her +shoulders shaking. + +"It is war, mademoiselle," he said, and went closer. Then suddenly all +the hurt of the past days, all the bitterness of the last hour, were +lost in an overwhelming burst of tenderness. + +He bent over her and put his arms round her. + +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. "I, who wouki die for +you, mademoiselle. I who worship you." He buried his face in the warm +hollow of her neck and held her close. He was trembling. "I love you," +he whispered. "I love you." + +She quieted under his touch. He was very strong, and there was refuge +in his arms. For a moment she lay still, happier than she had been for +weeks. It was Henri who was shaken now and the girl who was still. + +But very soon came the thing that, after all, he expected. She drew +herself away from him, and Henri, sensitive to every gesture, stood back. + +"Who are they?" was the first thing she said. It rather stabbed him. +He had just told her that he loved her, and never before in his careless +young life had he said that to any woman. + +"Spies," he said briefly. + +A flushed and tearful Sara Lee stood up then and looked up at him gravely. + +"Then - that is what you do?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +Quite suddenly she went to him and held up her face. + +"PLease kiss me, Henri," she said very simply. "I have been cruel and +stupid, and -" + +But he had her in his arms then, and he drew her close as though he +would never let her go. He was one great burst of joy, poor Henri. But +when she gently freed herself at last it was to deliver what seemed for +a time his death wound. + +"You have paid me a great tribute," she said, still simply and gravely. +"I wanted you to kiss me, because of what you said. But that will have +to be all, Henri dear." + +"All?" he said blankly. + +"You haven't forgotten, have you? I - I am engaged to somebody else." + +Henri stood still, swaying a little. + +"And you love him? More than you care for me?" + +"He is - he is my kind," said Sara Lee rather pitifully. "I am not what +you think me. You see me here, doing what you think is good work, and +you are grateful. And you don't see any other women. So I-" + +"And you think I love you because I see no one else?" he demanded, still +rather stunned. + +"Isn't that part of it?" + +He flung out his hands as though he despaired of making her understand. + +"This man at home -" he said bitterly; "this man who loves you so well +that he let you cross the sea and come here alone - do you love him very +dearly?" + +"I am promised to him." + +All at once Sara Lee saw the little parlor at home, and Harvey, gentle, +rather stolid and dependable. Oh, very dependable. She saw him as he +had looked the night he had said he loved her, rather wistful and very, +very tender. She could not hurt him so. She had said she was going +back to him, and she must go. + +"I love him very much, Henri." + +Very quietly, considering the hell that was raging in him, Henri bent +over and kissed her hand. Then he turned it over, and for an instant +he held his cheek against its warmth. He went out at once, and Sara +Lee heard the door slam. + + + + XVI + + +Time passed quickly, as always it does when there is work to do. Round +the ruined houses the gray grass turned green again, and in travesties +of gardens early spring flowers began to show a touch of color. + +The first of them greeted Sara Lee one morning as she stood on her +doorstep in the early sun. She gathered them and placed them, one on +each grave, in the cemetery near the poplar trees, where small wooden +crosses, sometimes surmounted by a cap, marked many graves. + +Marie, a silent subdued Marie, worked steadily in the little house. She +did not weep, but now and then Sara Lee found her stirring something on +the stove and looking toward the quiet mill in the fields. And once +Sara Lee, surprising that look on her face, put her arms about the girl +and held her for a moment. But she did not say anything. There was +nothing to say. + +With the opening up of the spring came increased movement and activity +among the troops. The beach and the sand dunes round La Panne were +filled with drilling men, Belgium's new army. Veterans of the winter, +at rest behind the lines, sat in the sun and pared potatoes for the +midday meal. Convalescents from the hospital appeared in motley +garments from the Ambulance Ocean and walked along the water front, +where the sea, no longer gray and sullen, rolled up in thin white lines +of foam to their very feet. Winter straw came out of wooden sabots. +Winter-bitten hands turned soft. Canal boats blossomed out with great +washings. And the sentry at the gun emplacement in the sand up the +beach gave over gathering sticks for his fire, and lay, when no one was +about, in a hollow in the dune, face to the sky. + +So spring came to that small fragment of Belgium which had been saved +spring and hope. Soon now the great and powerful Allies would drive out +the Huns, and all would be as it had been. Splendid rumors were about. +The Germans were already yielding at La Bassee. There was to be a great +drive along the entire Front, and hopefully one would return home in +time for the spring planting. + +A sort of informal council took place occasionally in the little house. +Maps replaced the dressings on the table in the salle a manger, and +junior officers, armed with Sara Lee's box of pins, thrust back the +enemy at various points and proved conclusively that his position was +untenable. They celebrated these paper victories with Sara Lee's tea, +and went away the better for an hour or so of hope and tea and a girl's +soft voice and quiet eyes. + +Now and then there was one, of course, who lagged behind his fellows, +with a yearning tenderness in his face that a glance from the girl would +have quickly turned to love. But Sara Lee had no coquetry. When, as +occasionally happened, there was a bit too much fervor when her hand was +kissed, she laid it where it belonged - to loneliness and the spring - +and became extremely maternal and very, very kind. Which - both of them + - are death blows to young love. + +The winter floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats +began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire. And +with the lessening of the flood came new activities to the little house. +The spring drive was coming. + +There was spring indeed, everywhere but in Henri's heart. + +Day after day messages were left with Sara Lee by men in uniform - +sometimes letters, sometimes a word. And these she faithfully cared for +until such time as Jean came for them. Now and then it was Henri who +came, but when he stayed in the village he made his headquarters at the +house of the mill. There, with sacking over the windows, he wrote his +reports by lamplight, reports which Jean carried back to the villa in +the fishing village by the sea. + +However, though he no longer came and went as before, Henri made frequent +calls at the house of mercy. But now he came in the evenings, when the +place was full of men. Sara Lee was doing more dressings than before. +The semi-armistice of winter was over, and there were nights when a row +of wounded men lay on the floor in the little salle a manger and waited, +in a sort of dreadful quiet, to be taken away. + +Rumors came of hard fighting farther along the line, and sometimes, on +nights when the clouds hung low, the flashes of the guns at Ypres looked +like incessant lightning. From the sand dunes at Nieuport and Dixmude +there was firing also, and the air seemed sometimes to be full of +scouting planes. + +The Canadians were moving toward the Front at Neuve Chapelle at that +time. And one day a lorry, piled high with boxes, rolled and thumped +down the Street, and halted by Rene. + +"Rather think we are lost," explained the driver, grinning sheepishly +at Rene. + +There were four boys in khaki on the truck, and not a word of French +among them. Sara Lee, who rolled her own bandages now, heard the +speech and came out. + +"Good gracious!" she said, and gave an alarmed glance at the sky. But +it was the noon hour, when every good German abandons war for food, and +the sky was empty. + +The boys cheered perceptibly. Here was at last some one who spoke a +Christian tongue. + +"Must have taken the wrong turning, miss," said one of them, saluting. + +"Where do you want to go?" she asked. "You are very close to the Belgian +Front here. It is not at all safe." + +They all saluted; then, staring at her curiously, told her. + +"Dear me!" said Sara Lee. "You are a long way off. And a long way +from home too." + +They smiled. They looked, with their clean-shaven faces, absurdly young +after the bearded Belgian soldiers. + +"I am an American, too," said Sara Lee with just a touch of homesickness +in her voice. She had been feeling lonely lately. "If you have time to +come in I could give you luncheon. Rene can tell us if any German air +machines come over." + +Would they come in? Indeed, yes! They crawled down off the lorry, and +took off their caps, and ate every particle of food in the house. And, +though they were mutely curious at first, soon they were asking questions. +How long had she been there? What did she do? Wasn't it dangerous? + +"Not so dangerous as it looks," said Sara Lee, smiling. "The Germans +seldom bother the town now. It is not worth while." + +Later on they went over the house. They climbed the broken staircase +nd stared toward the break in the poplar trees, from the roofless floor +above. + +"Some girl!" one of them said in an undertone. + +The others were gazing intently toward the Front. Never before had they +been so close. Never had they seen a ruined town. War, until now, had +been a thing of Valcartier, of a long voyage, of much drill in the mud +at Salisbury Plain. Now here they saw, at their feet, what war could do. + +"Damn them!" said one of the boys suddenly. "Fellows, we'll get back at +them soon." + +So they went away, a trifle silent and very grateful. But before they +left they had a glimpse of Sara Lee's room, with the corner gone, and +Harvey's picture on the mantel. + +"Some girl!" they repeated as they drove up the street. It was the +tribute of inarticulate youth. + +Sara Lee went back to her bandages and her thoughts. She had not a great +deal of time to think, what with the officers stopping in to fight their +paper-and-pin battles, and with letters to write and dressings to make +and supplies to order. She began to have many visitors - officers from +the French lines, correspondents on tours of the Front, and once even an +English cabinet member, who took six precious lumps of sugar in his tea +nd dug a piece of shell out of the wall with his pocketknife as a +souvenir. + +Once a British aviator brought his machine down in the field by the mill, +and walked over with the stiff stride of a man who has been for hours in +the air. She gave him tea and bread and butter, and she learned then of +the big fighting that was to come. + +When she was alone she thought about Henri. Generally her thoughts were +tender; always they were grateful. But she was greatly puzzled. He had +said that he loved her. Then, if he loved her, why should he not be +gentle and kind to her? Men did not hurt the women they loved. And +because she was hurt, she was rather less than just. He had not asked +her to marry him. He had said that he loved her, but that was different. +And the insidious poison of Harvey's letter about foreigners began to +have its effect. + +The truth was that she was tired. The strain was telling on her. And +at a time when she needed every moral support Henri had drawn off behind +a wall of misery, and all her efforts at a renewal of their old +friendship only brought up against a sort of stony despair. + +There were times, too, when she grew a little frightened. She was so +alone. What if Henri went away altogether? What if he took away the +little car, and his protection, and the supplies that came so regularly? +It was not a selfish fear. It was for her work that she trembled. + +For the first time she realized her complete dependence on his good +will. And now and then she felt that it would be good to see Harvey +again, and be safe from all worry, and not have to depend on a man who +loved her as Henri did. For that she never doubted. Inexperienced as +she was in such matters, she knew that the boy loved her. Just how +wildly she did not know until later, too late to undo what the madness +had done. + +Then one day a strange thing happened. It had been raining, and when in +the late afternoon the sun came out it gleamed in the puddles that filled +the shell holes in the road and set to a red blaze the windows of the +house of the mill. + +First, soaring overhead, came a half dozen friendly planes. Next, the +eyes of the enemy having thus been blinded, so to speak, there came a +regiment of fresh troops, swinging down the street for all the world as +though the German Army was safely drinking beer in Munich. They passed +Rene, standing open-mouthed in the doorway, and one wag of a Belgian boy, +out of sheer joy of spring, did the goose step as he passed the little +sentry and, head screwed round in the German salute, crossed his eyes +over his impudent nose. + +Came, then, the planes. Came the regiment, which turned off into a field +and there spread itself, like a snake uncoiling, into a double line. +Came a machine, gray and battered, containing officers. Came a general +with gold braid on his shoulder, and a pleasant smile. Came the strange +event. + +The general found Sara Lee in the salle manger cutting cotton into +three-inch squares, and he stood in the doorway and bowed profoundly. + +"Mademoiselle Kennedy?" he inquired. + +Sara Lee replied to that, and then gave a quick thought to her larder. +Because generals usually meant tea. But this time at last Sara Lee was +to receive something, not to give. She turned very white when she was +told, and said she had not deserved it; she was indeed on the verge of +declining, not knowing that there are certain things one does not +decline. But Marie brought her hat and jacket - a smiling, tremulous +Marie - and Sara Lee put them on. + +The general was very tall. In her short skirt and with flying hair she +looked like a child beside him as they walked across the fields. +Suddenly Sara Lee was terribly afraid she was going to cry. + +The troops stood rigidly at attention. And a cold wind flapped Sara +Lee's skirts, and the guns hammered at Ypres, and the general blew on +his fingers. And soon a low open car came down the street and the +King got out. Sara Lee watched him coming - his tall, slightly stooped +figure, his fair hair, his plain blue uniform. Sara Lee had never seen +a king before, and she had always thought of them as sitting up on a +sort of platform - never as trudging through spring mud. + +"What shall I do?" she asked nervously. + +"He will shake hands, mademoiselle. Bow as he approaches. That is all." + +The amazing interlude, indeed! With Sara Lee being decorated by the +King, and troops drawn up to do her honor, and over all the rumbling of +the great guns. A palpitating and dazed Sara Lee, when the decoration +was fastened to her black jacket, a Sara Lee whose hat blew off at +exactly the worst moment and rolled, end on, like a hoop, into a puddle. + +But, oddly, she did not mind about the hat. She had only one conscious +thought just then. She hoped that, wherever Uncle James might be in +that world of the gone before, he might know what was happening to her + - or even see it He would have liked it. He had believed in the +Belgians and in the King. And now - The King did not go at once. He +went back to the little house and went through it. And he and one of +his generals climbed to the upper floor, and the King stood looking out +silently toward the land he loved and which for a time was no longer his. + +He came down after a time, stooping his tall figure in the low doorway, +and said he would like some tea. So Marie put the kettle on, and Sara +Lee and the King talked. It was all rather dazing. Every now and then +she forgot certain instructions whispered her by the general, and after +a time the King said: "Why do you do that, mademoiselle?" + +For Sara Lee, with an intent face and moving lips, had been stepping +backward. + +Sara Lee flushed to the eyes. + +"Because, sire, I was told to remain at a distance of six feet." + +"But we are being informal," said the King, smiling. "And it is a very +little room." + +Sara Lee, who had been taught in the schoolroom that kings are usurpers +of the divine rights of the people - Sara Lee lost just a bit of her +staunch democracy that day. She saw the King of the Belgians for what +he really was, a ruler, but a symbol as well. He represented his +country, as the Flag she loved represented hers. The flag was America, +the King was Belgium. That was all. + +It was a very humble and flushed Sara Lee who watched the gray car go +lying up the street later on. She went in and told the whole story to +Harvey's picture, but it was difficult to feel that he was hearing. His +eyes were turned away and his face was set and stern. And at last she +gave it up. This thing which meant so much to her would never mean +anything to Harvey. She knew, even then, what he would say. + +"Decorate you! I should think they might. Medals are cheap. Everybody +over there is getting medals. You feed their men and risk your life and +your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on. It's cheap at the +price." + +And later on those were Harvey's very words. But to be fair to him they +were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal. + +That evening Henri came again. He was, for the first time, his gay self +again - at least on the surface. It was as though, knowing what he was +going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never +returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt. He was everywhere in +the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery +nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water +for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing. + +"If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle," he would say, "with +one turn of the bandage over the elbow -" + +But it won't hold that way." + +"You say that to me, mademoiselle? I who have taught you all you know +of bandaging?" + +They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee's way. + +He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was +painful. It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans: + +"Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the +right? Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!" + +Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply. + +"I cannot think. I - in my left hand, monsieur le capitaine?" + +"In your left hand." + +The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table +to listen. + +"I do not know, monsieur." + +"Idiot!" Henri would say. "Your right elbow, man!" + +And the dressing was done. + +He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed. He +would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly. And pain seemed to +leave the little room when he entered it. + +It was that night that Henri disappeared. + + + + XVII + +THERE was a question to settle, and it was for Henri to do it. Two +questions indeed. One was a matter of engineering, and before the bottom +fell out of his world Henri had studied engineering. The second was +more serious. + +For the first, this thing had happened. Of all the trenches to be held, +the Belgians had undeniably the worst. Properly speaking they were not +trenches at all, but shallow gutters dug a foot or two into the saturated +ground and then built man-high with bags of earth or sand. Here and +there they were not dug at all, but were purely shelters, against a +railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from +the deserted track behind which they were hidden. + +For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow +lake. By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea +and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy. The battle front +was a reeking pond. The opposing armies lived like duck hunters in a +swamp. To dig a foot was to encounter water. Machine guns here and +there sat but six inches above the yellow flood. Men lay in pools to +fire them. To reach outposts were narrow paths built first of bags of +earth - a life, sometimes for every bag. And, when this filling was +sufficient, on top a path of fascines, bound together in bundles, made +a footway. + +For this reason the Belgians approached their trenches not through deep +cuts which gave them shelter but with no other cover than the darkness +of night. During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off +from any connection with the world behind them. Food, cooked miles away, +came up at night, cold and unappetizing. For water, having exhausted +their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them, ill +smelling and reeking of fever. Water carts trundled forward at night, +but often they were far too few. + +The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety, +had been trained to fight. In a way they had been trained to fight a +losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on +the east. But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all, +condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy +artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the +courage of a less desperate people. + +To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a +fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy +that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea, +spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where +fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in +unfordable wallows of mud and water. + +Henri then, knowing all this - none better - had his first question to +settle, which was this: As spring advanced the flood had commenced to +recede. Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind +the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort. In the deeper +ones the bottom of the trench appeared for the first time. + +On a day previous, however, the water had commenced to come back. There +had been no rain, but little by little in a certain place yellow, +ill-smelling little streams began to flow sluggishly into the trenches. +Seeped, rather than flowed. At first the Belgian officers laid it to +that bad luck that bad so persistently pursued them. Then they held a +conference in the small brick house with its maps and its pine tables +and its picture of an American harvester on the wall, which was now +headquarters. + +Sitting under the hanging lamp, with an orderly making coffee at a stove +in the corner, they talked it over. Henri was there, silent before his +elders, but intently listening. And at last they turned to him. + +"I can go and find out," he said quietly. "It is possible, though I do +not see how." He smiled. "They are, I think, only drying themselves at +our expense. It is a bit of German humor." + +But the cry of "Calais in a month!" was in the air, and undoubtedly there +had been renewed activity along the German Front near the sea. The +second question to be answered was dependent on the first. + +Had the Germans, as Henri said, merely shifted the water, by some clever +engineering, to the Belgian trenches, or was there some bigger thing on +hand? What, for instance, if they were about to attempt to drain the +inundation, smash the Belgian line, and march by the Dunkirk road to +Calais? + +So, that night while Henri jested about Pierre's right elbow and watched +Sara Lee for a smile, he had difficult work before him. + +Sometime near midnight he slipped away. Jean was waiting in the street, +and wrung the boy's hand. + +"I could go with you," he said rather wistfully. + +"You don't speak their ugly tongue." + +"I could be mute - shell shock. You could be helping me back." + +But Henri only held his hand a moment and shook his head. + +"You would double the risk, and - what good would it do?" + +Two pistols are better than one." + +"I have two pistols, my friend," said Henri, and turned the corner of +the building, past the boards Rene had built in, toward the house of +the mill. But once out of Jean's sight he stopped a moment, his hand +resting against that frail wall to Sara Lee's room. It was his good-by +to her. + +For three days Jean stayed in the village. He slept at the mill, but +he came for his meals to the little house. Once he went to Dunkirk and +brought out provisions and the mail, including Sara Lee's monthly +allowance. But mostly he sat in the mill house and waited. He could +not read. + +"You do not eat at all, Jean," Sara Lee said to him more than once. And +twice she insisted that he was feverish, and placed a hand that was +somewhat marred with much peeling of vegetables, on his forehead. + +"I am entirely well, mademoiselle," he would say, and draw back. He had +anxieties enough just now without being reminded by the touch of a +woman's hand of all that he had lost. + +Long before that Sara Lee had learned not to question Jean about Henri's +absences. Even his knowledge, now, that she knew something of Henri's +work, did not remove the barrier. So Sara Lee waited, as did Jean, but +more helplessly. She knew something was wrong, but she had not Jean's +privilege of going at night to the trenches and there waiting, staring +over the gray water with its ugly floating shadows, for Henri to emerge +from the flood. + +Something rather forced and mechanical there was those days in her work. +Her smile was rather set. She did not sleep well. And one night she +violated Henri's orders and walked across the softened fields to beyond +the poplar trees. + +There was nothing to see except an intermittent flash from the clouds +that hung low over the sea at Nieuport, where British gunboats were +bombarding the coast; or the steady streaks from the Ypres salient, where +night and day the guns never rested. + +>From the Belgian trenches, fifteen hundred feet or so away, there was no +sound. A German electric signal blazed its message in code, and went out +quickly. - Now and then a rifle shot, thin and sharp, rang out from where, +under the floating starlights, keen eyes on each side watched for +movements on the other. + +Sara Lee sat down under a tree and watched for a while. Then she found +herself crying softly. It was all so sad, and useless, and cruel. And +somewhere there ahead was Henri, Henri with his blue eyes, his smile, +the ardor of his young arms - Henri, who had been to her many friends. + +Sara Lee had never deceived herself about Henri. She loved him. But +she was quite certain she was not in love with him, which is entirely +different. She knew that this last was impossible, because she was +engaged to Harvey. What was probably the truth was that she loved them +both in entirely different ways. Men have always insisted on such +possibilities, and have even asserted their right, now and then, to +love two women at the same time. But women are less frank with +themselves. + +And, in such cases, there is no grand passion. There are tenderness, +and the joy of companionship, and sometimes a touching dependence. But +it is not a love that burns with a white fire. + +Perhaps Sara Lee was one of those women who are always loved more than +they love. There are such women, not selfish, not seeking love, but +softly feminine, kind, appealing and genuine. Men need, after all, but +an altar on which to lay tribute. And the high, remote white altar that +was Sara Lee had already received the love of two strong men. + +She was not troubling her head that night, however, about being an altar, +of a sort. She cried a little at first, because she was terrified for +Henri and because Jean's face was growing pinched and gray. Then she +cried very hard, prone on the ground and face down, because Henri was +young, and all of life should have been before him. And he was missing. + +Henri was undeniably missing. Even the King knew it now, and set down +in his heart, among the other crosses there, Henri's full name, which +we may not know, and took to pacing his little study and looking out at +the spring sea. + +That night Marie, having ladled to the bottom of her kettle, found Sara +Lee missing, and was told by Rene of the direction she had taken. Marie, +muttering to herself, set out to find her, and almost stumbled over her +in the wood by the road. + +She sat down on the ground without a word and placed a clumsy hand on +the girl's shoulder. It was not until Sara Lee ceased sobbing that +she spoke: + +"It is far from hopeless, mademoiselle." + +They had by now established a system of communication. Sara Lee spoke +her orders in halting French, but general conversation was beyond her. +And much hearing of English had taught the Belgian girl enough to follow. + +Sara Lee replied, then, in smothered English: + +"He is gone, Marie. He will never come back." + +"Who can tell? There are many missing who are not dead." + +Sara Lee shuddered. For spies were not made prisoners. They had no +rights as prisoners of war. Their own governments did not protect them. +To Henri capture was death. But she could not say this to Marie. + +Marie sat softly stroking Sara Lee's hair, her own eyes tragic and +tearless. + +"Even if it were - the other," she said, "it is not so bad to die for +one's country. The thing that is terrible, that leaves behind it only +bitterness and grief and no hope, mademoiselle, even with many prayers, +is that one has died a traitor." + +She coaxed Sara Lee back at last. They went through the fields, for +fresh troops were being thrown into the Belgian trenches and the street +was full of men. Great dray horses were dragging forward batteries, the +heavy guns sliding and slipping In the absence of such information as +only Henri had been wont to bring it was best to provide for the worst. + +The next day Jean did not come over for breakfast, and Rene handed Sara +Lee a note. + +"I am going to England," Jean had written that dawn in the house of the +mill. "And from there to Holland. I can get past the barrier and shall +work down toward the Front. I must learn what has happened, mademoiselle. +As you know, if he was captured, there is no hope. But there is an +excellent chance that he is in hiding, unable to get back. Look for me +in two weeks." + +There followed what instructions he had given as to her supplies, which +would come as before. Beautifully written in Jean's small fine hand, it +spelled for Sara Lee the last hope. She read Jean's desperation through +its forced cheerfulness. And she faced for the first time a long period +of loneliness in the crowded little house. + +She tried very hard to fill the gap that Henri had left - tried to joke +with the men in her queer bits of French; was more smiling than ever, +or fear she might be less. But now and then in cautious whispers she +heard Henri's name, and her heart contracted with very terror. + +A week. Two weeks. Twice the village was bombarded severely, but the +little house escaped by a miracle. Marie considered it the same miracle +that left holy pictures unhurt on the walls of destroyed houses, and +allowed the frailest of old ebony and rosewood crucifixes to remain +nharmed. + +Great generals, often as tall as they were great, stopped at the little +house to implore Sara Lee to leave. But she only shook her head. + +"Not unless you send me away," she always said; "and that would break +my heart." + +"But to move, mademoiselle, only to the next village!" they would +remonstrate, and as a final argument: " You are too valuable to risk an +injury." + +"I must remain here," she said. And some of them thought they +understood. When an unusually obdurate officer came along, Sara Lee +would insist on taking him to the cellar. + +"You see!" she would say, holding her candle high. "It is a nice cellar, +warm and dry. It is "- proudly one of the best cellars in the village. +It is a really homelike cellar." + +The officer would go away then, and send her cigarettes for her men or, +as in more than one case, a squad with bags of earth and other things +to protect the little house as much as possible. After a time the little +house began to represent the ideas in protection and camouflage, then in +its early stages, of many different minds. + +Rene shot a man there one night, a skulking figure working its way in +the shadows up the street. It was just before dawn, and Rene, who was +sleepless those days, like the others, called to him. The man started +to run, dodging behind walls. But Rene ran faster and killed him. + +He was a German in Belgian peasant's clothing. But he wore the great +shoes of the German soldier, and he had been making a rough map of the +Belgian trenches. + +Sara Lee did not see him. But when she heard the shot she went out, and +Rene told her breathlessly. + +>From that time on her terrors took the definite form of Henri lying dead +in a ruined street, and being buried, as this man was buried, without +ceremony and without a prayer, in some sodden spring field. + + + + XVIII + + +As the spring advanced Harvey grew increasA ingly bitter; grew morbid +and increasingly selfconscious also. He began to think that people were +smiling behind his back, and when they asked about Sara Lee he met with +almost insulting brevity what he felt was half-contemptuous kindness. +He went nowhere, and worked all day and until late in the night He did +well in his business, however, and late in March he received a +substantial raise in salary. He took it without enthusiasm, and told +Belle that night at dinner with apathy. + +After the evening meal it was now his custom to go to his room and there, +shut in, to read. He read no books on the war, and even the quarter +column entitled Salient Points of the Day's War News hardly received a +glance from him now. + +In the office when the talk turned to the war, as it did almost hourly, +he would go out or scowl over his letters. + +"Harvey's hit hard," they said there. + +"He's acting like a rotten cub," was likely to be the next sentence. +But sometimes it was: "Well, what'd you expect? Everything ready to get +married, and the girl beating it for France without notice! I'd be sore +myself." + +On the day of the raise in salary his sister got the children to bed and +straightened up the litter of small garments that seemed always to +bestrew the house, even to the lower floor. Then she went into Harvey's +room. Coat and collar off, he was lying on the bed, but not reading. +His book lay beside him, and with his arms under his head he was staring +at the ceiling. + +She did not sit down beside him on the bed. They were an undemonstrative +family, and such endearments as Belle used were lavished on her children. +But her eyes were kind, and a little nervous. + +"Do you mind talking a little, Harvey?" + +"I don't feel like talking much. I'm tired, I guess. But go on. What +is it? Bills?" + +She came to him in her constant financial anxieties, and always he was +ready to help her out. But his tone now was gruff. A slight flush of +resentment colored her cheeks. + +"Not this time, Harve. I was just thinking about things." + +"Sit down." + +She sat on the straight chair beside the bed, the chair on which, in +neat order, Harvey placed his clothing at night, his shoes beneath, his +coat over the back. + +"I wish you'd go out more, Harvey." + +"Why? Go out and talk to a lot of driveling fools who don't care for me +any more than I do for them?" + +"That's not like you, Harve." + +"Sorry." His tone softened. "I don't care much about going round, +Belle. That's all. I guess you know why." + +"So does everybody else." + +He sat up and looked at her. + +"Well, suppose they do? I can't help that, can I? When a fellow has +been jilted -" + +"You haven't been jilted." + +He lay down again, his arms under his head; and Belie knew that his eyes +were on Sara Lee's picture on his dresser. + +"It amounts to the same thing." + +"Harvey," Belle said hesitatingly, "I've brought Sara Lee's report from +the Ladies' Aid. May I read it to you?" + +"I don't want to hear it." Then: "Give it here. I'll look at it." + +He read it carefully, his hands rather unsteady. So many men given soup, +so many given chocolate. So many dressings done. And at the bottom +Sara Lee's request for more money - an apologetic, rather breathless +request, and closing, rather primly with this: + +"I am sure that the society will feel, from the above report, that the +work is worth while, and worth continuing. I am only sorry that I +cannot send photographs of the men who come for aid, but as they come +at night it is impossible. I enclose, however, a small picture of the +house, which is now known as the little house of mercy." + +"At night!" said Harvey. "So she's there alone with a lot of ignorant +foreigners at night. Why the devil don't they come in the daytime?" + +"Here's the picture, Harvey." + +He got up then, and carried the tiny photograph over close to the gas +jet. There he stood for a long time, gazing at it. There was Rene +with his rifle and his smile. There was Marie in her white apron. And +in the center, the wind blowing her soft hair, was Sara Lee. + +Harvey groaned and Belle came over and putting her hand on his shoulder +looked at the photograph with him. + +"Do you know what I think, Harvey?" she said. "I think Sara Lee is right +and you are wrong." + +He turned on her almost savagely. + +"That's not the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor +devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's dam +for me she'd never have gone. That's all." + +He returned to a moody survey of the picture. + +"Look at it!" he said. "She insists that she's safe. But that fellow's +got a gun. What for, if she's so safe? And look at that house! There's +a corner shot away; and it's got no upper floor. Safe!" + +Belle held out her hand. + +"I must return the picture to the society, Harve." + +"Not just yet," he said ominously. "I want to look at it. I haven't +got it all yet. And I'll return it myself - with a short speech." + +"Harvey!" + +"Well," he retorted, "why shouldn't I tell that lot of old scandalmongers +what I think of them? They'll sit here safe at home and beg money - God, +one of them was in the office to-day! - and send a young girl over to - +You'd better get out, Belle. I'm not company for any one to-night." + +She turned away, but he came after her, and suddenly putting his arms +round her he kissed her. + +"Don't worry about me," he said. "I'm done with wearing my heart on my +sleeve." She looks happy, so I guess I can be." He released her. "Good +night. I'll return the picture." + +He sat up very late, alternately reading the report and looking at the +picture. It was unfortunate that Sara Lee had smiled into the camera. +Coupled with her blowing hair it had given her a light-heartedness, a +sort of joyousness, that hurt him to the soul. + +He made some mad plans after he had turned out the lights - to flirt +wildly with the unattached girls he knew; to go to France and confront +Sara Lee and then bring her home. Or - He had found a way. He lay +there and thought it over, and it bore the test of the broken sleep that +followed. In the morning, dressing, he wondered he had not thought of +it before. He was more cheerful at breakfast than he had been for weeks. + + + + XIX + + +In the little house of mercy two weeks went by, and then a third. +Soldiers marching out to the trenches sometimes wore flowers tucked +gayly in their caps. More and more Allied aeiroplanes were in the +air. Sometimes, standing in the streets, Sara Lee saw one far overhead, +while balloon-shaped clouds of bursting shells hung far below it. + +Once or twice in the early morning a German plane, flying so low that +one could easily see the black cross on each wing, reconnoitered the +village for wagon trains or troops. Always they found it empty. + +Hope had almost fled now. In the afternoons Marie went to the ruined +church, and there knelt before the heap of marble and masonry that had +once been the altar, and prayed. And Sara Lee, who bad been brought up +a Protestant and had never before entered a Catholic church, took to +going there too. In some strange fashion the peace of former days +seemed to cling to the little structure, roofless as it was. On quiet +days it silence was deeper than elsewhere. On days of much firing the +sound from within its broken walls seemed deadened, far away. + +Marie burned a candle as she prayed, for that soul in purgatory which she +had once loved, and now pitied. Sara Lee burned no candle, but she +knelt, sometimes beside Marie, sometimes alone, and prayed for many +things: that Henri should be living, somewhere; that the war might end; +that that day there would be little wounding; that some day the Belgians +might go home again; and that back in America Harvey might grow to +understand and forgive her. And now and then she looked into the very +depths of her soul, and on those days she prayed that her homeland +might, before it was too late, see this thing as she was seeing it. The +wanton waste of it all, the ghastly cruelty the Germans had brought into +this war. + +Sara Lee's vague thinking began to crystallize. This war was not a +judgment sent from on high to a sinful world. It was the wicked +imposition of one nation on other nations. It was national. It was +almost racial. But most of all it was a war of hate on the German side. +She had never believed in hate. There were ugly passions in the world + - jealousy, envy, suspicion; but not hate. The word was not in her +rather limited vocabulary. + +There was no hate on the part of the men she knew. The officers who +stopped in on their way to and from the trenches were gentlemen and +soldiers. They were determined and grave; they resented, they even +loathed. But they did not hate. The little Belgian soldiers were +bewildered, puzzled, desperately resentful. But of hate, as translated +into terms of frightfulness, they had no understanding. + +Yet from the other side were coming methods of war so wantonly cruel, +so useless save as inflicting needless agony, as only hate could devise. +No strategic value justified them. They were spontaneous outgrowths of +venom, nursed during the winter deadlock and now grown to full size and +destructive power. + +The rumor of a gas that seared and killed came to the little house as +early as February. In March there came the first victims, poor writhing +creatures, deprived of the boon of air, their seared lungs collapsed +and agonized, their faces drawn into masks of suffering. Some of them +died in the little house, and even after death their faces held the +imprint of horror. + +To Sara Lee, burying her own anxiety under the cloak of service, there +came new and terrible thoughts. This was not war. The Germans had sent +their clouds of poisoned gas across the inundation, but had made no +attempt to follow. This was killing, for the lust of killing; suffering, +for the joy of inflicting pain. + +And a day or so later she heard of The Hague Convention. She had not +known of it before. Now she learned of that gentlemen's agreement among +nations, and that it said: "The use of poison or of poisoned weapons is +forbidden." She pondered that carefully, trying to think dispassionately. +Now and then she received a copy of a home newspaper, and she saw that +the use of poison gases was being denied by Germans in America and set +down to rumor and hysteria. + +So, on a cold spring day, she sat down at the table in the salle manger +and wrote a letter to the President, beginning " Dear Sir"; and telling +what she knew of poison gas. She also, on second thought, wrote one to +Andrew Carnegie, who had built a library in her city. She felt that +the expense to him of sending some one over to investigate would not be +prohibitive, and something must be done. + +She never heard from either of her letters, but she felt better for +having written them. And a day or two later she received from Mrs. +Travers, in England, a small supply of the first gas masks of the war. +Simple and primitive they were, those first masks; useless, too, as it +turned out - a square of folded gauze, soaked in some solution and then +dried, with tapes to tie it over the mouth and nose. To adjust them the +soldiers had but to stoop and wet them in the ever-present water in +the trench, and then to tie them on. + +Sara Lee gave them out that night, and there was much mirth in the little +house, such mirth as there had not been since Henri went away. The +Belgians called it a bal masque, and putting them on bowed before one +another and requested dances, and even flirted coyly with each other over +their bits of white gauze. And in the very middle of the gayety some +one propounded one of Henri's idiotic riddles; and Sara Lee went across +to her little room and closed the door and stood there with her eyes +shut, for fear she would scream. + +Then, one day, coming out of the little church, she saw the low broken +gray car turn in at the top of the street and come slowly, so very +slowly, toward her. There were two men in it. + +One was Henri. + +She ran, stumbling because of tears, up the street. It was Henri! There +was no mistake. There he sat beside Jean, brushed and very neat; and +very, very white. + +"Mademoiselle!" he said, and came very close to crying himself when he +saw her face. He was greatly excited. His sunken eyes devoured her as +she ran toward him. Almost he held out his arms. But he could not do +that, even if he would, for one was bandaged to his side. + +It is rather sad to record how many times Sara Lee wept during her +amazing interlude. For here is another time. She wept for joy and +wretchedness. She stood on the running board and cried and smiled. And +Jean winked his one eye rapidly. + +"This idiot, mademoiselle," he said gruffly, "this maniac - he would not +remain in Calais, with proper care. He must come on here. And rapidly. +Could he have taken the wheel from me we should have been here an hour +ago. But for once I have an advantage." + +The car jolted to the little house, and Jean helped Henri out. Such a +strange Henri, smiling and joyous, and walking at a crawl, even with +Jean's support. He protested violently against being put to bed, and +when he found himself led into Sara Lee's small room he openly rebelled. + +"Never!" he said stubbornly, halting in the doorway. "This is +mademoiselle's boudoir. Her drawing-room as well. I am going to the +mill house and -" + +He staggered. + +So Sara Lee's room had a different occupant for a time, a thin and +fine-worn young Belgian, who yielded to Sara Lee when Jean gave up in +despair, and who proceeded, most unmanfully, to faint as soon as he was +between the blankets. + +If Sara Lee hoped to nurse Henri she was doomed to disappointment. Jean +it was who took over the care of the boy, a Jean who now ate prodigiously, +and whistled occasionally, and slept at night robed in his blanket on the +floor beside Henri's bed, lest that rebellious invalid get up and try to +move about. + +On the first night, with the door closed, against Henri's entreaties, +while the little house received its evening complement of men, and with +Henri lying back on his pillows, fresh dressed as to the wounds in his +arm and chest, fed with Sara Lee's daintiest, and resting, Jean found the +boy's eyes resting on the mantel. + +"Dear and obstinate friend," said Henri, "do you wish me to be happy?" + +"You shall not leave the room or your bed. That is arranged for." + +"How?" demanded Henri with interest. + +Because I have hidden away your trousers." + +Henri laughed, but he sobered quickly. + +"If you wish me to be happy," he said, "take away that American +photograph. But first, please to bring it here." + +Jean brought it, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. +And Henri lay back and studied it. + +"It is mademoiselle's fiance," he said. + +Jean grunted. + +"Look at it, Jean," Henri said in his half-bantering tone, with despair +beneath it; "and then look at me. Or no - remembering me as I was when +I was a man. He is better, eh? It is a good face. But there is a jaw, +a - Do you think he will be kind to her as she requires? She requires +much kindness. Some women -" + +He broke off and watched Jean anxiously. + +"A half face!" Jean said scornfully. "The pretty view! As for +kindness -" He put the photograph face down on the table. "I knew +once a man in Belgium who married an American. At Antwerp. They were +most unhappy." + +Henri smiled. + +"You are lying," he said with boyish pleasure in his own astuteness. +"You knew no such couple. You are trying to make me resigned." + +But quite a little later, when Jean thought he was asleep, he said: +"I shall never be resigned." + +So at last spring had come, and Henri and the great spring drive. The +Germans had not drained the inundation, nor had they broken through to +Calais. And it is not to be known here how much this utter failure had +been due to the information Henri had secured before he was wounded. + +One day in his bed Henri received a visit from the King, and was left +lying with a decoration on his breast and a beatific, if somewhat +sheepish, expression on his face. And one night the village was +bombarded, and on Henri's refusing to be moved to the cellar Sara Lee +took up a determined stand in his doorway, until at last he made a most +humiliating move for safety. + +Bit by bit Sara Lee got the story, its bare detail from Henri, its +courage and sheer recklessness from Jean. It would, for instance, run +like this, with Henri in a chair perhaps, and cutting dressings - since +that might be done with one hand - and Sara Lee, sleeves rolled up and +a great bowl of vegetables before her: + +"And when you got through the water, Henri?" she would ask: "What then?" + +It was quite simple. They had put up some additional wire, however -" + +"Where?" + +"There was a break," he would explain. "I have told you - between their +trenches. I had used it before to get through." + +"But how could you go through?" + +"Like a snake," he would say, smiling. "Very flat and wriggling. I have +eaten of the dirt, mademoiselle." + +Then he would stop and cut, very awkwardly, with his left hand. + +"Go on," she would prompt him. "But they had put barbed wire there. Is +that it? So you could not get through?" + +"With tin cans on it, and stones in the cans. I thought I had removed +them all, but there was one left. So they heard me." + +More cutting and a muttered French expletive. Henri was not a +particularly patient cripple. And apparently there was an end to the +story. + +"For goodness' sake," Sara Lee would exclaim despairingly; "so they +heard you! That isn't all, is it?" + +"It was almost all," he would say with his boyish smile. + +"And they shot at you?" + +"Even better. They shot me. That was this one." And he would point to +his arm. + +More silence, more cutting, a gathering exasperation on Sara Lee's part. + +"Are you going on or not?" + +"Then I pretended to be one of them, mademoiselle. I speak German as +French. I pretended not to be hurt, but to be on a reconnoissance. And +I got into the trench and we had a talk in the darkness. It was most +interesting. Only if they had shown a light they would have seen that +I was wounded." + +By bits, not that day, but after many days, she got the story. In the +next trench he slipped a sling over the wounded arm and, as a Bavarian +on his way to the dressing station, got back. + +"I had some trouble," he confessed one day. "Now and then one would +offer to go back with me. And I did not care for assistance!" + +But sometime later there was trouble. She was four days getting to that +part of it. He had got behind the lines by that time, and he knew that +in some way suspicion had been roused. He was weak by that time, and +could not go far. He had lain hidden, for a day and part of a night, +without water, in a destroyed barn, and then had escaped. + +He got into the Belgian costume as before, but he could not wear a sling +for his wounded arm. He got the peasant to thrust his helpless right +hand into his pocket, and for two days he made a close inspection of +what was going on. But fever had developed, and on the third night, +half delirious, when he was spoken to by an officer he had replied, of +all tongues, in English. + +The officer shot him instantly in the chest. He fell and lay still and +the officer bent over him. In that moment Henri stabbed him with a +knife in his left hand. Men were coming from every direction, but he +got away - he did not clearly remember how. And at dawn he fell into +the Belgian farmhouse, apparently dying. + +Jean's story, on the other hand, was given early and with no hesitation. +He had crossed the border at Holland in civilian clothes, by the simple +expedient of bribing a sentry. He had got, with little difficulty, to +the farmhouse, and found Henri, now recovering but very weak; he was +lying hidden in a garret, and he was suffering from hunger and lack of +medical attention. In a wagon full of market stuff, Henri hidden in the +bed of it, they had got to the border again. And there Jean had, it +seemed, stabbed the sentry he had bribed before and driven on to neutral +soil. + +Not an unusual story, that of Henri and Jean. The journey across +Belgium in the springless farm wagon was the worst. They had had to +take roundabout lanes, avoiding the main highways. Fortunately, always +at night there were friendly houses, kind hands to lift Henri into warm +fire-lighted interiors. Many messages they had brought back, some of +cheer, but too often of tragedy, from the small farmsteads of Belgium. + +Then finally had been Holland, and the chartering of a boat - and at +last - "Here we are, and here we are, and here we are again," sang Henri, +chopping at his cotton and making a great show of cheerfulness before +Sara Lee. + +But with Jean sometimes he showed the black depression beneath. He +would never be a man again. He was done for. He gained strength so +slowly that he believed he was not gaining at all. He was not happy, +and the unhappy mend slowly. + +After the time he had asked Jean to take away Harvey's photograph he did +not recur to the subject, but he did not need to. Jean knew, perhaps +even better than Henri himself, that the boy was recklessly, hopelessly, +not quite rationally in love with the American girl. + +Also Henri was fretting about his work. Sometimes at night, following +Henri's instructions, Jean wandered quietly along roads and paths that +paralleled the Front. At such times his eyes were turned, not toward +the trenches, but toward that flat country which lay behind, still dotted +at that time with groves of trees, with canals overhung with pollard +willows, and with here and there a farmhouse that at night took on in +the starlight the appearance of being whole again. + +Singularly white and peaceful were those small steadings of Belgium in +the night hours - until cruel dawn showed them for what they were - +skeletons of dead homes, clothed only at night with wraithlike roofs and +chimneys; ghosts of houses, appearing between midnight and cock crow. + +Jean had not Henri's eyes nor his recklessness nor his speed, for that +matter. Now and then he saw the small appearing and disappearing lights +on some smaIl rise. He would reach the spot, with such shelter as +possible, to find only a sugar-beet field, neglected and unplowed. + +Then, one night, tragedy came to the little house of mercy. + + + + XX + + +HARVEY proceeded to put his plan into effect at once, with the simple +method of an essentially simple nature. The thing had become +intolerable; therefore it must end. + +On the afternoon following his talk with Belle he came home at three +o'clock. Belle heard him moving about in, his room, and when she entered +it, after he had gone, she found that he had shaved and put on his best +suit. + +She smiled a little. It was like Harvey to be literal. He had said he +was going to go round and have a good time, and he was losing no time. +But in their restricted social life, where most of the men worked until +five o'clock or even later, there were fewer afternoon calls paid. +Belle wondered with mild sisterly curiosity into what arena Harvey was +about to fling his best hat. + +But though Harvey paid a call that afternoon it was not on any of the +young women he knew. He went to see Mrs. Gregory. She was at home - he +had arranged for that by telephone - and the one butler of the +eighborhood admitted him. It was a truculent young man, for all his +politeness, who confronted Mrs. Gregory in her drawing-room - a quietly +truculent young man, who came to the point while he was still shaking +hands. + +"You're not going to be glad to see me in a minute," he said in reply +to her greeting. + +"How can you know that?" + +"Because I've come to get you to do something you won't want to do." + +"We won't quarrel before we begin, then," she said pleasantly. "Because +I really never do anything I don't wish to do." + +But she gave him a second glance and her smile became a trifle forced. +She knew all about Harvey and Sara Lee. She had heard rumors of his +disapproval also. Though she was not a clever nor a very keen woman, +she saw what was coming and braced herself for it. + +Harvey had prepared in his mind a summary of his position, and he +delivered it with the rapidity and strength of a blow. + +"I know all about the Belgians, Mrs. Gregory," he said. "I'm sorry for +them. So is every one, I suppose. But I want to know if you think a +girl of twenty ought to be over there practically at the Front, and +alone?" He gave her time to reply. "Would you like to have your +daughter there, if you had one?" + +"Perhaps not, under ordinary circumstances. But this is war." + +"It is not our war." + +"Humanity," said Mrs. Gregory, remembering the phrase she had written +for a speech -" humanity has no nationality. It is of all men, for +all men." + +"That's men. Not women!" + +He got up and stood on the hearthrug. He was singularly reminiscent of +the time he had stood on Aunt Harriet's white fur rug and had told Sara +Lee she could not go. + +"Now see here, Mrs. Gregory," he said, "we'll stop beating about the +bush, if you don't mind. She's got to come home. She's coming, if I +have to go and get her!" + +"You needn't look at me so fiercely. I didn't send her. It was her own +idea." + +Harvey sneered. + +"No," he said slowly. "But I notice your society publishes her reports +in the papers, and that the names of the officers are rarely missing." + +Mrs. Gregory colored. + +"We must have publicity to get money," she said. "It is hard to get. +Sometimes I have had to make up the deficit out of my own pocket." + +"Then for God's sake bring her home! If the thing has to go on, send +over there some of the middle-aged women who have no ties. Let `em get +shot if they want to. They can write as good reports as she can, if +that's all you want. And make as good soup," he added bitterly. + +It could be done, of course," she said, thoughtfully. "But - I must +tell you this: I doubt if an older woman could have got where she has. +There is no doubt that her charm, her youth and beauty have helped her +greatly. We cannot - " + +The very whites of his eyes turned red then. He shouted furiously that +for their silly work and their love of publicity, they were trading on +a girl's youth and beauty; that if anything happened to her he would +publish the truth in every newspaper in the country; that they would at +once recall Sara Lee or he would placard the city with what they were +doing. These were only a few of the things he threw at her. + +When he was out of breath he jerked the picture of the little house of +mercy out of his pocket and flung it into her lap. + +"There!" he said. "Do you know where that house is? It's in a ruined +village. She hasn't said that, has she? Well, look at the masonry +there. That's a shell hole in the street. That soldier's got a gun. +Why? Because the Germans may march up that street any day on their way +to Calais." + +Mrs. Gregory looked at the picture. Sara Lee smiled into the sun. And +Rene, ignorant that his single rifle was to oppose the march of the +German Army to Calais - Rene smiled also. + +Mrs. Gregory rose. + +"I shall report your view to the society," she said coldly. "I +understand how you feel, but I fail to see the reason for this attack +on me." + +"I guess you see all right!" he flung at her. "She's my future wife. +If you hadn't put this nonsense into her head we'd be married now and +she'd be here in God's country and not living with a lot of foreigners +who don't know a good woman when they see one. I want her back, that's +all. But I want her back safe. And if anything happens to her I'll +make you pay - you and all your notoriety hunters." + +He went out then, and was for leaving without his hat or coat, but the +butler caught him at the door. Out in the spring sunlight he walked +rapidly, still seething, remembering other bitter things he had meant +to say, and repeating them to himself. + +But he had said enough. + +Mrs. Gregory's account of his visit she reported at a meeting specially +called. The narrative lost nothing in the repetition. But the kindly +women who sat in the church house sewing or knitting listened to what +Harvey had said and looked troubled. They liked Sara Lee, and many of +them had daughters of their own. + +The photograph was passed around. Undoubtedly Sara Lee was living in a +ruined village. Certainly ruined villages were only found very near the +Front. And Rene unquestionably held a gun. Tales of German brutalities +to women had come and were coming constantly to their ears. Mabel +Andrews had written to them for supplies, and she had added to the +chapter of horrors. + +Briefly, the sense of the meeting was that Harvey had been brutal, but +that he was right. An older woman in a safe place they might continue +to support, but none of them would assume the responsibility of the +crushing out of a young girl's life. + +To be quite frank, possibly Harvey's appeal would have carried less +weight had it not coincided with Sara Lee's request for more money. +Neither one alone would have brought about the catastrophe, but +altogether they made question and answer, problem and solution. Money +was scarce. Demands were heavy. None of them except Mrs. Gregory had +more than just enough. And there was this additional situation to face: +there was no end of the war in sight; it gave promise now of going on +indefinitely. + +Joifre had said, "I nibble them." But to nibble a hole in the Germany +Army might take years. They had sent Sara Lee for a few months. How +about keeping her there indefinitely? + +Oddly enough, it was Harvey's sister Belle who made the only protest +against the recall. + +"Of course, I want her back," she said slowly. "You'd understand better +if you had to live with Harvey. I'm sorry, Mrs. Gregory, that he spoke +to you as he did, but he's nearly crazy." She eyed the assembly with +her tired shrewd eyes. "I'm no talker," she went on, "but Sara Lee has +done a big thing. We don't realize, I guess, how big it is. And I +think we'll just about kill her if we bring her home." + +"Better to do that than to have her killed over there," some one said. + +And in spite of Belle's protest, that remained the sense of the meeting. +It was put to the vote and decided to recall Sara Lee. She could bring +a report of conditions, and if she thought it wise an older woman could +go later, to a safer place. + +Belle was very quiet that evening. After dinner she went to Harvey's +room and found him dressing to go out. + +"I'm going with a crowd to the theater," he said. "First week of the +summer stock company, you know." + +He tied his tie defiantly, avoiding Belle's eyes in the mirror. + +"Harvey," she said, "they're going to bring Sara Lee home." + +He said nothing, but his hands shook somewhat. "And I think," Belle +said, "that you will be sorry for what you have done - all the rest of +your life." + + + + XXI + + +By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it was +almost the first of May. The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, and +the Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply of +high-explosive shells. + +Cheering reports came daily to the little house -, of rapidly augmenting +armies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up to +the Allied Front. Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, that +only shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against the +German batteries. She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but the +supply was still inadequate. With the new shells experiments were being +made in barrage fire - costly experiments now and then; but the Allies +were apt in learning the ugly game of modem war. + +Only on the Belgian Front was there small change. The shattered army +was being freshly outfitted. England was sending money and ammunition, +and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiled +grimly and drilled again. But there were not, as in England and in +France, great bodies of young men to draw from. Too many had been +caught beyond the German wall of steel. + +Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the green +fields. And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways. +They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity. +Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the top +of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse, +which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box and +stovepipe. + +"A portable kitchen!" he explained. "See, here for soup and here for +coffee. And more are coming." + +"Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully. + +But he protested almost violently. He even put the question to the +horse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative. + +She was needed, indeed. To the great base hospital at La Panne went +more and more wounded men. But to the little house of mercy came the +small odds and ends in increasing numbers. Medical men were scarce, and +badly overworked. There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon to +the little house, but it came to nothing. La Panne was not far away, +and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many. + +So the little house went on much as before. Henri had moved to the mill. +He was at work again, and one day, in the King's villa and quietly, +because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received a +second medal, the highest for courage that could be given. + +He did not teli Sara Lee. + +But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they could +not always perform miracles. The German planes still outnumbered the +Allied ones. They had grown more daring with the spring, too, and +whatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretell +those of the air. + +On a moonlight night in early May Sara Lee, setting out her dressings, +heard a man running up the street. Rene challenged him sharply, only +to step aside. It was Henri. He burst in on Sara Lee. + +"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said. + +"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee. + +"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve taubes, and +they are circling overhead." + +The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight and +the Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it was +as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and +since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed. + +The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed a +deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead +town. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the +cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment by +shells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb dropped +from the sky, the floors above were practically useless. + +Only Henri and Rene remained on the street floor. Henri was +extinguishing lights. In the passage Rene stood, not willing to take +refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment the +uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado Rene stepped out into the +moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air. + +He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell. + +"Come, Rene!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fight +again, not -" + +But Rene's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to the +doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he +had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead. +Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently. +Then he went below. + +"Where is Rene?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness. + +"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think, +watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter." + +"There is no shelter," shivered the girl. + +He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand, +like two children, waiting for what might come. + +It was not until the thing was over that he told her. He had gone up +first and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned, +had carried Rene to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularly +peaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night. + +"Good night, little brother," Henri said to him, and left him there with +a heavy heart. Never again would Rene sit and whittle on the doorstep +and sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyish +adoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and forth in the little house. + +Henri stared up at the sky. The moon looked down, cold. and cruelly +bright, on the vanishing squadron of death, on the destroyed town and on +the boy's white face. Somewhere, Henri felt, vanishing like the German +taubes, but to peace instead of war, was moving Rene's brave and smiling +spirit - a boyish angel, eager and dauntless, and still looking up. + +Henri took off his cap and crossed himself. + +Another sentry took Rene's place the next day, but the little house had +lost something it could not regain. And a greater loss was to come. + +Jean brought out the mail that day. For Sara Lee, moving about silent +and red-eyed, there was a letter from Mr. Travers. He inclosed a hundred +pounds and a clipping from a London newspaper entitled The Little House +of Mercy. + +"Evidently," he wrote, "you were right and we were wrong. One-half of +the inclosed check is from my wife, who takes this method of showing her +affectionate gratitude. The balance is from myself. Once, some months +ago, I said to you that almost you restored my faith in human nature. +To-day I may say that, in these hours of sorrow for us all, what you have +done and are doing has brought into my gray day a breath of hope." + +There was another clipping, but no comment. It recorded the death of a +Reginald Alexander Travers, aged thirty. + +It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself those +days, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegation +of the English - their attitude not so much of suppressing their private +griefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people, +they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a private +matter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbroken +front, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strange +one, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England. + +A people who had for centuries insisted not only on its rights but on +its privileges was now giving as freely as ever it had demanded. It +was as though, having hoarded all those years, it had but been hoarding +against the day of payment. As it had received it gave - in money, in +effort, in life. And without pretext. + +So the Traverses, having given up all that had made life for them, sent +a clipping only, and no comment. Sara Lee, through' a mist of tears, +saw them alone in their drawing-room, having tea as usual, and valiantly +speaking of small things, and bravely facing the future, but never, in +the bitterest moments, making complaint or protest. + +Would America, she wondered, if her hour came, be so brave? Harvey had +a phrase for such things. It was "stand the gaff." Would America stand +the gaff so well? Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the +body rather than of the soul - physical courage, not moral. What would +happen if America entered the strnggle and the papers were filled, as +were the British and the French, with long casualty lists, each name a +knife thrust somewhere? + +She wondered. + +And then, before long, it was Sara Lee's turn to, stand the gaff. There +was another letter, a curiously incoherent one from Harvey's sister. She +referred to something that the society had done, and hoped that Sara Lee +would take it in kindness, as it was meant. Harvey was well and much +happier. She was to try to understand Harvey's part. He had been +almost desperate. Evidently the letter had preceded one that should have +arrived at the same time. Sara Lee was sadly puzzled. She went to Henri +with it, but he could make nothing out of it. There was nothing to do +but to wait. + +The next night Henri was to go through the lines again. Since his +wounding he had been working on the Allied side, and fewer lights there +were in his district that flashed the treacherous message across the +flood, between night and morning. But now it was imperative that he go +through the German lines again. It was feared that with grappling hooks +the enemy was slowly and cautiously withdrawing the barbed wire from the +inundated fields; and that could mean but one thing. + +On the night he was to go Henri called Sara Lee from the crowded salle a +manger and drawing her into the room across closed the door. + +"Mademoiselle," he said gravely, "once before, long ago, you permitted +me to kiss you. Will you do that for me again?" + +She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She did +not now. For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook. +She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure +men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours +that remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her +charm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, to +cheer, to comfort and help - that was necessary, because soon the chance +might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret. + +So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of +tears. + +"God bless and keep you, dear Henri," she said. + +Then she went back to her work. + + + + + XXII + +Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people. +One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it +away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present +Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer +horribly, not to gain anything - except perhaps some honorable +advancement for their souls - but that there might be preserved, at any +cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to +pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God. + +She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she +was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers +and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter. +She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time +she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was +his anxiety, his loneliness, his humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were +looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were +turned in on himself. + +She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What +she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come +sometime - that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that +day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the +thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her +hands would tremble. + +Henri had not returned when, the second day after Rene's death, the +letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from +Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had +always sent its enthusiastic approval. + +She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read +Belle's letter again that she began to comprehend. She was recalled; +and the recall was Harvey's work. + +She was very close to hating him that day. He had never understood. +She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest +of their lives, there would be this barrier between them. To the +barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment. She could +never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her +small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of +the war. + +Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee's love for him. He had done +it himself, madly, despairingly. She still loved him, she felt. Nothing +could change that or her promise to him. But with that love there was +something now of fear. And she felt, too, that after all the years she +had known him she had not known him at all. The Harvey she had known +was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always +gentle. But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger. + +It was the result of her upbringing, probably, that she had no thought +of revolt. Her tie to Harvey was a real tie. By her promise to him her +life was no longer hers to order. It belonged to some one else, to be +ordered for her. But, though she accepted, she was too clear a thinker +not to resent. + +When Henri returned, toward dawn of the following night, he did not come +alone. Sara Lee, rising early, found two men in her kitchen - one of +them Henri, who was making coffee, and a soldier in a gray-green uniform, +with a bad bruise over one eye and a sulky face. His hands were tied, +but otherwise he sat at ease, and Henri, having made the coffee, held a +cup to his lips. + +"It is good for the spirits, man," he said in German. "Drink it." + +The German took it, first gingerly, then eagerly. Henri was in high +good humor. + +"See, I have brought you a gift!" he exclaimed on seeing Sara Lee. "What +shall we do with him? Send him to America? To show the appearance of +the madmen of Europe?" + +The prisoner was only a boy, such a boy as Henri himself; but a peasant, +and muscular. Beside his bulk Henri looked slim as a reed. Henri eyed +him with a certain tolerant humor. + +"He is young, and a Bavarian," he said. "Other wise I should have +killed him, for he fought hard. He has but just been called." + +There was another conference in the little house that morning, but +Henri's prisoner could tell little. He had heard nothing of an advance. +Further along the line it was said that there was much fighting. He sat +there, pale and bewildered and very civil, and in the end his frightened +politeness brought about a change in the attitude of the men who +questioned him. Hate all Germans as they must, who had suffered so +grossly, this boy was not of those who had outraged them. + +They sent him on at last, and Sara Lee was free to tell Henri her news. +But she had grown very wise as to Henri's moods, and she hesitated. A +certain dissatisfaction had been growing in the boy for some time, a +sense of hopelessness. Further along the spring had brought renewed +activity to the Allied armies. Great movements were taking place. + +But his own men stood in their trenches, or what passed for trenches, or +lay on their hours of relief in such wretched quarters as could be found, +still with no prospect of action. No great guns, drawn by heavy +tractors, came down the roads toward the trenches by the sea. Steady +bombarding, incessant sniping and no movement on either side - that was +the Belgian Front during the first year of the war. Inaction, with that +eating anxiety as to what was going on in the occupied territory, was +the portion of the heroic small army that stretched from Nieuport to +Dixmude. + +And Henri's nerves were not good. He was unhappy - that always - and he +was not yet quite recovered from his wounds. There was on his mind, too, +a certain gun which moved on a railway track, back and forth, behind the +German lines, doing the work of many. He had tried to get to that gun, +and failed. And he hated failure. + +Certainly in this story of Sara Lee and of Henri, whose other name must +not be known, allowance must be made for all those things. Yet - perhaps +no allowance is enough. + +Sara Lee told him that evening of her recall, told him when the shuffling +of many feet in the street told of the first weary men from the trenches +coming up the road. + +He heard her in a dazed silence. Then: + +"But you will not go?" he said. "It is impossible! You - you are +needed, mademoiselle." + +"What can I do, Henri? They have recalled me. My money will not come +now." + +"Perhaps we can arrange that. It does not cost so much. I have friends + - and think, mademoiselle, how many know now of what you are doing, and +love you for it. Some of them would contribute, surely." + +He was desperately revolving expedients in his mind. He could himself +do no more than he had done. He, or rather Jean and he together, had +been bearing a full half of the expense of the little house since the +beginning. But he dared not tell her that. And though he spoke +hopefully, he knew well that he could raise nothing from the Belgians +he knew best. Henri came of a class that held its fortunes in land, and +that land was now in German hands. + +"We will arrange it somehow," he said with forced cheerfulness. "No +beautiful thing - and this is surely beautiful -must die because of +money." + +It was then that Sara Lee took the plunge. + +"It is not only money, Henri." + +"He has sent for you!" + +Harvey was always "he" to. Henri. + +"Not exactly. But I think he went to some one and said I should not be +here alone. You can understand how he feels. We were going to be +married very soon, and then I decided to come. It made an awful upset." + +Henri stood with folded arms and listened. At first he said nothing. +When he spoke it was in a voice of ominous calm: + +"So for a stupid convention he would destroy this beautiful thing you +have made! Does he know your work? Does he know what you are to the +men here? Have you ever told him?" + +"I have, of course, but -" + +"Do you want to go back?" + +"No, Henri. Not yet. I -" + +"That is enough. You are needed. You are willing to stay. I shall +attend to the money. It is arranged." + +"You don't understand," said Sara Lee desperately. "I am engaged to him. +I can't wreck his life, can I?" + +"Would it wreck your life?" he demanded. "Tell me that and I shall know +how to reason with you." + +But she only looked at him helplessly. + +Heavy tramping in the passage told of the arrival of the first men. +They did not talk and laugh as usual. As well as they could they came +quietly. For Rene had been a good friend to many of them, and had +admitted on slack nights many a weary man who had no ticket. Much as +the neighbors had entered the house back home after Uncle James had gone +away, came these bearded men that night. And Sara Lee, hearing their +muffled voices, brushed a hand over her eyes and tried to smile. + +"We can talk about it later," she said. "We mustn't quarrel. I owe so +much to you, Henri." + +Suddenly Henri caught her by the arm and turned her about so that she +faced the lamp. + +"Do you love him?" he demanded. "Sara Lee, look at me!" Only he +pronounced it Saralie. "He has done a very cruel thing. Do you still +love him?" + +Sara Lee shut her eyes. + +"I don't know. I think I do. He is very unhappy, and it is my fault." + +"Your fault!" + +"I must go, Henri. The men are waiting." + +But he still held her arm. + +"Does he love you as I love you?" he demanded. "Would he die for you.?" + +"That's rather silly, isn't it? Men don't die for the people they love." + +"I would die for you, Saralie." + +She eyed him rather helplessly. + +"I don't think you mean that." Bad strategy that, for he drew her to +him. His arms were like steel, and it was a rebellious and very rigid +Sara Lee who found she could not free herself. + +"I would die for you, Saralie!" he repeated fiercely. "That would be +easier, far, than living without you. There is nothing that matters but +you. Listen - I would put everything I have - my honor, my life, my +hope of eternity - on one side of the scale and you on the other. And I +would choose you. Is that love?" He freed her. + +"It's insanity," said Sara Lee angrily. "You don't mean it. And I +don't want that kind of love, if that is what you call it." + +"And you will go back to that man who loves himself better than he loves +you?" + +"That's not true!" she flashed at him. "He is sending for me, not to +get me back to him, but to get me back to safety." + +"What sort of safety?" Henri demanded in an ominous tone. "Is he afraid +of me?" + +"He doesn't know anything about you." + +"You have never told him? Why?" His eyes narrowed. + +"He wouldn't have understood, Henri." + +"You are going back to him," he said slowly; "and you will always keep +these days of ours buried in your beart. Is that it? His eyes softened. +"I am to be a memory! Do you know what I think? I think you care for +me more than you know. We have lived a lifetime together in these +months. You know me better than you know him, already. We have faced +death together. That is a strong tie. And I have held you in my arms. +Do you think you can forget that?" + +"I shall never want to forget you." + +"I shall not let you forget me. You may go - I cannot prevent that +perhaps. But wherever I am; Saralie, I shall stand between that lover +of yours and you. And sometime I shall come from this other side of the +world, and I shall find you, and you will come back with me. Back to +this country - our country." + +They were boyish words, but back of them was the iron determination of a +man. His eyes seemed sunken in his head. His face was white. But there +was almost a prophetic ring in his voice. + +Sara Lee went out and left him there, went out rather terrified and +bewildered, and refusing absolutely to look into her own heart. + + + + + XXIII + +Late in May she started for home. It had not been necessary to close +the little house. An Englishwoman of mature years and considerable +wealth, hearing from Mr. Travers of Sara Lee's recall, went out a day or +two before she left and took charge. She was a kindly woman, in deep +mourning; and some of the ache left Sara Lee's heart when she had talked +with her successor. + +Perhaps, too, Mrs. Cameron understood some of the things that had +puzzled her before. She had been a trifle skeptical perhaps about Sara +Lee before she saw her. A young girl alone among an army of men! She +was a good woman herself, and not given to harsh judgments, but the +thing had seemed odd. But Sara Lee in her little house, as virginal, as +without sex-consciousness as a child, Sara Lee with her shabby clothes +and her stained hands and her honest eyes - this was not only a good +girl, this was a brave and high-spirited and idealistic woman. + +And after an evening in the house of mercy, with the soldiers openly +adoring and entirely respectful, Mrs. Cameron put her arms round Sara +Lee and kissed her. + +"You must let me thank you," she said. "You have made me feel what I +have not felt since-" + +She stopped. Her mourning was only a month old. "I see to-night that, +after all, many things may be gone, but that while service remains there +is something worth while in life." + +The next day she asked Sara Lee to stay with her, at least through the +summer. Sara Lee hesitated, but at last she agreed to cable. As Henri +had disappeared with the arrival of Mrs. Cameron it was that lady's +chauffeur who took the message to Dunkirk and sent it off. + +She had sent the cable to Harvey. It was no longer a matter of the +Ladies' Aid. It was between Harvey and herself. + +The reply came on the second day. It was curt and decisive. + +"Now or never," was the message Harvey sent out of his black despair, +across the Atlantic to the little house so dose under the guns of +Belgium. + +Henri was half mad those last days. Jean tried to counsel him, but he +was irritable, almost savage. And Jean understood. The girl had grown +deep into his own heart. Like Henri, he believed that she was going +back to unhappiness; he even said so to her in the car, on that last sad +day when Sara Lee, having visited Rene's grave and prayed in the ruined +church, said good-by to the little house, and went away, tearless at the +last, because she was too sad for tears. + +It was not for some time that Jean spoke what was in his mind, and when +he had done so she turned to him gravely: + +"You are wrong, Jean. He is the kindest of men. Once I am back, and +safe, he will be very different. I'm afraid I've given you a wrong +impression of him." + +"You think then, mademoiselle, that he will forget all these months - +he will never be unhappy over them?" + +"Why should he?" said Sara Lee proudly. "When I tell him everything he +will understand. And he will be very proud that I have done my share." + +But Jean's one eye was dubious. + +At the wharf in Dunkirk they found Henri, a pale but composed Henri. +Jean's brows contracted. He had thought that the boy would follow his +advice and stay away. But Henri was there. + +It was as well, perhaps, for Sara Lee had brought him a letter, one of +those missives from the trenches which had been so often left at the +little house. + +Henri thrust it into his pocket without reading it. + +"Everything is prepared," he said. "It is the British Admiralty boat, +and one of the officers has offered his cabin. You will be quite +comfortable." + +He appeared entirely calm. He saw to carrying Sara Lee's small bag on +board; he chatted with the officers; he even wandered over to a +hospital ship moored near by and exchanged civilities with a wounded man +in a chair on the deck. Perhaps he swaggered a bit too much, for Jean +watched him with some anxiety. He saw that the boy was taking it hard. +His eyes were very sunken now, and he moved his right arm stiffly, as +though the old wound troubled him. + +Jean did not like leave-takings. Particularly he did not like taking +leave of Sara Lee. Some time before the boat sailed he kissed her hand, +and then patted it and went away in the car without looking back. + +The boat was preparing to get under way. Henri was standing by her very +quietly. He had not slept the night before, but then there were many +nights when Henri did not sleep. He had wandered about, smoking +incessantly, trying to picture the black future. + +He could see no hope anywhere. America was far away, and peaceful. +Very soon the tranquillity of it all would make the last months seem +dreamlike and unreal. She would forget Belgium, forget him. Or she +would remember him as a soldier who had once loved her. Once loved her, +because she had never seemed to realize the lasting quality of his love. +She had always felt that he would forget her. If he could only make her +believe that he would not, it would not be so hopeless. + +He had written a bit of a love letter on the little table at Dunkirk +that morning, written it with the hope that the sight of the written +words might carry conviction where all his protests had failed. + +"I shall love you all the years of my life," he wrote. "At any time, in +any place, you may come to me and know that I am waiting. Great love +like this comes only once to any man, and once come to him it never goes +away. At any time in the years to come you may know with certainty that +you are still to me what you are now, the love of my life. + +"Sometimes I think, dearest - I may call you that once, now that you +have left me - that far away you will hear this call of mine and come +back to me. Perhaps you will never come. Perhaps I shall not live. I +feel to-day that I do not care greatly to live. + +"If that is to be, then think of me somewhere, perhaps with Rene by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house +of mercy; and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +He had the letter in the pocket of his tunic, and at last the moment +came when the boat must leave. Suddenly Henri knew that he could not +allow her to cross to England alone. The last few days had brought many +stories of submarine attacks. Here, so far north, the Germans were +particularly active. They had for a long time lurked in waiting for +this British Admiralty boat, with its valuable cargo, its officers and +the government oflicials who used it. + +"Good-by, Henri," said Sara Lee. "I - of course it is no use to try to +tell you -" + +"I am going across with you." + +But -" + +"I allowed you to come over alone. I shiver when I think of it. I shall +take you back myself." + +"Is it very dangerous?" + +"Probably not. But can you think of me standing safe on that quay and +letting you go into danger alone?" + +"I am not afraid." + +"I know that. I have never seen you afraid. But if you wish to see a +coward, look at me. I am a coward for you." + +He put his hand into his pocket. It occurred to him to give her the +letter now so that if anything happened she would at least have had it. +He wanted no mistake about that appointment beyond the stars. But the +great world of eternity was very large, and they must have a definite +understanding about that meeting at the little house of mercy Over There. + +Perhaps he had a little fever that day. He was alternately flushed and +pale; and certainly he was not quite rational. His hand shook as he +brought out her letter - and with it the other letter, from the Front. + +"Have you the time to come with me?" Sara Lee asked doubtfully. "I want +you to come, of course, but if your work will suffer -" + +He held out his letter to her. + +"I shall go away," he said, "while you read it. And perhaps you will +not destroy it, because - I should like to feel that you have it always." + +He went away at once, saluting as he passed other officers, who gravely +saluted him. On the deck of the hospital ship the invalid touched his +cap. Word was going about, in the stealthy manner of such things, that +Henri whose family name we may not know, was a brave man and doing brave +things. + +The steamer had not yet cast off. As usual, it was to take a flying +start from the harbor, for it was just outside the harbor that the wolves +of the sea lay in wait. Henri, alone at last, opened his letter, and +stood staring at it. There was again movement behind the German line, +a matter to be looked into, as only he could do it. Probably nothing, +as before; but who could say? + +Henri looked along the shore to where but a few miles away lay the +ragged remnant of his country. And he looked forward to where Sara Lee, +his letter in her hand, was staring blindly at nothing. Then he looked +out toward the sea, where lay who knew what dangers of death and +suffering. + +After that first moment of indecision he never hesitated. He stood on +the deck and watched, rather frozen and rigid, and with a mind that had +ceased working, while the steamer warped out from the quay. If in his +subconsciousness there was any thought it was doubtless that he had done +his best for a long time, and that he had earned the right to protect +for a few hours the girl he loved. That, too, there had been activity +along the German-Belgian line before, without result. + +Perhaps subconsciously those things were there. He himself was conscious +of no thought, of only a dogged determination to get Sara Lee across the +channel safely. He put everything else behind him. He counted no cost. + +The little admiralty boat sped on. In the bow, on the bridge, and at +different stations lookouts kept watch. The lifeboats were hung +overboard, ready to lower instantly. On the horizon a British destroyer +steamed leisurely. Henri stood for a long time on the deck. The land +fell away quickly. From a clear silhouette of the town against the sky + - the dunes, thespire of the cathedral, the roof of the mairie - it +became vague, shadowy - the height of a hand - a line - nothing. + +Henri roused himself. He was very thirsty, and the wound in his arm +ached. When he raised his hand to salute the movement was painful. + +It was a very grave Sara Lee he found in the officer's cabin when he +went inside later on. She was sitting on the long seat below the open +port, her hat slightly askew and her hands folded in her lap. Her bag +was beside her, and there was in her eyes a perplexity Henri was too +wretched to notice. + +For the first time Sara Lee was realizing the full value of the thing +she was throwing away. She had persistently discounted it until now. +She had been grateful for it. She had felt unworthy of it. But now, +on the edge of leaving it, she felt that something infinitely precious +and very beautiful was going out of her life. She had already a sense +of loss. + +For the first time, too, she was allowing herself to think of certain +contingencies that were now forever impossible. For instance, suppose +she had stayed with Mrs. Cameron? Suppose she had broken her promise +to Harvey and remained at the little house? Suppose she had done as +Henri had so wildly urged her, and had broken entirely with Harvey? +Would she have married Henri? + +There was a certain element of caution in the girl. It made the chances +she had taken rather more courageous, indeed, because she had always +counted the cost. But marriage was not a matter for taking chances. One +should know not only the man, but his setting, though she would not have +thought of it in that way. Not only the man, but the things that made up +his life - his people, his home. + +And Henri was to her still a figure, not so much now of mystery as of +detachment. Except Jean he had no intimates. He had no family on the +only side of the line she knew. He had not even a country. + +She had reached that point when Henri came below and saluted her stiffly +from the doorway. + +"Henri!" she said. "I believe you are ill!" + +I am not ill," he said, and threw himself into the corner of the seat. +"You have read it?" + +She nodded. Even thinking of it brought a lump into her throat. He +bent forward, but he did not touch her. + +"I meant it, Saralie," he said. "Sometimes men are infatuated, and +write what they do not mean. They are sincere at the time, and then +later on - But I meant it. I shall always mean it." + +Not then, nor during the three days in London, did he so much as take +her hand. He was not well. He ate nothing, and at night he lay awake +and drank a great deal of water. Once or twice he found her looking at +him anxiously, but he disclaimed all illness. + +He had known from the beginning what he was doing. But he did not touch +her, because in his heart he knew that where once he had been worthy he +was no longer worthy. He had left his work for a woman. + +It is true that he had expected to go back at once. But the Philadelphia, +which had been listed to sail the next day, was held up by a strike in +Liverpool, and he waited on, taking such hours as she could give him, +feverishly anxious to make her happy, buying her little gifts mostly +flowers, which she wore tucked in her belt and smiled over, because she +had never before received flowers from a man. + +He was alternately gay and silent. They walked across the Thames by the +Parliament buildings, and midway across he stopped and looked long at the +stream. And they went to the Zoological Gardens, where he gravely named +one of the sea lions for Colonel Lilias because of its mustache, and +insisted on saluting it each time before he flung it a fish. Once he +soberly gathered up a very new baby camel, all legs, in his arms, and +presented it to her. + +"Please accept it, mademoiselle," he said. "With my compliments." + +They dined together every night, very modestly, sitting in some crowded +restaurant perhaps, but seeing little but each other. Sara Lee had +bought a new hat in London - black, of course, but faced with white. +He adored her in it. He would sit for long moments, his elbows propped +on the table, his blond hair gleaming in the candlelight, and watch her. + +"I wonder," he said once, "if you had never met him would you have loved +me?" + +"I do love you, Henri." + +"I don't want that sort of love." And he had turned his head away. + +But one evening he called for her at Morley's, a white and crushed boy, +needing all that she could give him and much more. He came as a man +goes to the woman he loves when he is in trouble, much as a child to his +mother. Sara Lee; coming down to the reception room, found him alone +there, walking rapidly up and down. He turned desperate eyes on her. + +"I have brought bad news," he said abruptly. + +"The little house -" + +"I do not know. I ran away, mademoiselle. I am a traitor. And the +Germans broke through last night." + +"Henri!" + +"They broke through We were not ready. That is what I have done." + +"Don't you think," Sara Lee said in a frozen voice, "that is what I have +done? I let you come." + +"You? You are taking the blame? Mademoiselle, I have enough to bear +without that." + +He explained further, still standing in his rigid attitude. If he had +been white before at times he was ghastly now. It had not been an attack +in force. A small number had got across and had penetrated beyond the +railway line. There had been hand-to-hand fighting in the road beyond +the poplars. But it looked more like an experiment, an endeavor to +discover the possibility of a real advance through the inundation; or +perhaps a feint to cover operations elsewhere. + +"For every life lost I am responsible," he ended in a flat and lifeless +tone. + +"But you might not have known," she protested wildly. "Even if you had +been there, Henri, you might not have known." She knew something of war +by that time. "How could you have told that a small movement of troops +was to take place?" + +"I should have been there." + +"But - if they came without warning?" + +"I did not tell you," he said, looking away from her. "There had been a +warning. I disregarded it." + +He went back to Belgium that night. Sara Lee, at the last, held out her +hand. She was terrified for him, and she showed it. + +"I shall not touch your hand," he said. "I have forfeited my right to +do that." Then, seeing what was in her face, he reassured her. "I shall +not do that," he said. "It would be easier. But I shall have to go +back and see what can be done." + +He was the old Henri to the last, however. He went carefully over her +steamship ticket, and inquired with equal care into the amount of money +she had. + +"It will take you home?" he asked. + +"Very comfortably, Henri." + +"It seems very little." + +Then he said, apropos of nothing: "Poor Jean!" + +When he left her at last he went to the door, very erect and soldierly. +But he turned there and stood for a moment looking at her, as though +through all that was coming he must have with him, to give him strength, +that final picture of her. + +The elderly chambermaid, coming into Sara Lee's room the next morning, +found her fully dressed in the frock she had worn the night before, face +down on her bed. + + + + + XXIV + +It was early in June when at last the lights went down behind the back +drop and came up in front, to show Sara Lee knitting again, though not +by the fire. The amazing interlude was over. + +Over, except in Sara Lee's heart. The voyage had been a nightmare. She +had been ill for one thing - a combination of seasickness and +heartsickness. She had allowed Henri to come to England with her, and +the Germans had broken through. All the good she had done - and she had +helped - was nothing to this mischief she had wrought. + +It had been a small raid. She gathered that from the papers on board. +But that was not the vital thing. What mattered was that she had let a +man forget his duty to his country in his solicitude for her. + +But as the days went on the excitement of her return dulled the edge of +her misery somewhat. The thing was done. She could do only one thing +to help. She would never go back, never again bring trouble and +suffering where she had meant only to bring aid and comfort. + +She had a faint hope that Harvey would meet her at the pier. She needed +comforting and soothing, and perhaps a bit of praise. She was so very +tired; depressed, too, if the truth be known. She needed a hand to lead +her back to her old place on the stage, and kind faces to make her forget +that she had ever gone away. + +Because that was what she had to do. She must forget Henri and the +little house on the road to the poplar trees; and most of all, she must +forget that because of her Henri had let the Germans through. + +But Harvey did not meet her. There was a telegram saying he would meet +her train if she wired when she was leaving - an exultant message +breathing forgiveness and signed "with much love." She flushed when she +read it. + +Of course he could not meet her in New York. This was not the Continent +in wartime, where convention had died of a great necessity. And he was +not angry, after all. A great wave of relief swept over her. But it +was odd how helpless she felt. Since her arrival in England months +before there had always been Henri to look after things for her. It was +incredible to recall how little she had done for herself. + +Was she glad to be back? She did not ask herself. It was as though the +voyage had automatically detached her from that other Sara Lee of the +little house. That was behind her, a dream - a mirage - or a memory. +Here, a trifle confused by the bustle, was once again the Sara Lee who +had knitted for Anna, and tended the plants in the dining-room window, +and watched Uncle James slowly lowered into his quiet grave. + +Part of her detachment was voluntary. She could not bear to remember. +She had but to close her eyes to see Henri's tragic face that last night +at Morley's. And part of the detachment was because, after all, the +interlude had been but a matter of months, and reaching out familiar +hands to her were the habits and customs and surroundings of all the +earlier years of her life, drawing her back to them. + +It was strange how Henri's face haunted her. She could close her eyes +and see it, line by line, his very swagger - for he did swagger, just a +little; his tall figure and unruly hair; his long, narrow, muscular +hands. Strange and rather uncomfortable. Because she could not summon +Harvey's image at all. She tried to bring before her, that night in the +train speeding west, his solid figure and kind eyes as they would greet +her the next day - tried, and failed. All she got was the profile of +the photograph, and the stubborn angle of the jaw. + +She was up very early the next morning, and it was then, as the train +rolled through familiar country, that she began to find Harvey again. +A flush of tenderness warmed her. She must be very kind to him because +of all that he had suffered. + +The train came to a stop. Rather breathless Sara Lee went out on the +platform. Harvey was there, in the crowd. He did not see her at first. +He was looking toward the front of the train. So her first glimpse of +him was the view of the photograph. His hat was off, and his hair, +carefully brushed back, gave him the eager look of the picture. + +He was a strong and manly figure, as unlike Henri as an oak is unlike +one of Henri's own tall and swaying poplars. Sara Lee drew a long +breath. Here after all were rest and peace; love and gentleness; quiet +days and still evenings. No more crowds and wounds and weary men, no +more great thunderings of guns, no imminence of death. Rest and peace. + +Then Harvey saw her, and the gleam of happiness and relief in his eyes +made her own eyes misty. She saw even in that first glance that he +looked thinner and older. A pang of remorse shot through her. Was +happiness always bought at the cost of happiness? Did one always take +away in order to give? Not in so many words, but in a flash of doubt +the thought went through her mind. + +There was no reserve in Harvey's embrace. He put his arms about her and +held her close. He did not speak at first. Then: + +"My own little girl," he said. "My own little girl!" + +Suddenly Sara Lee was very happy. All her doubts were swept away by his +voice, his arms. There was no thrill for her in his caress, but there +were peace and quiet joy. It was enough for her, just then, that she +had brought back some of the happiness she had robbed him of. + +"Oh, Harvey!" she said. "I'm glad to be back again - with you." + +He held her off then and looked at her. + +"You are thin," he said. "You're not pale, but you are thin." And in a +harder voice: "What did they do to you over there?" + +But he did not wait for a reply. He did not seem to want one. He picked +up her bag, and guiding her by the elbow, piloted her through the crowd. + +"A lot of folks wanted to come and meet you," he said, "but I steered +them off. You'd have thought Roosevelt was coming to town the way +they've been calling up." + +"To meet me?" + +"I expect the Ladies' Aid Society wanted to get into the papers again," +he said rather grimly. "They are merry little advertisers, all right." + +"I don't think that, Harvey." + +"Well, I do," he said, and brought her to a stop facing a smart little +car, very new, very gay. + +"How do you like it?" he asked. + +"Like it? Why, it's not yours, is it?" + +"Surest thing you know. Or, rather, it's ours. Had a few war babies, +and they grew up." + +Sara Lee looked at it, and for just an instant, a rather sickening +instant, she saw Henri's shattered low car, battle-scarred and broken. + +"It's - lovely," said Sara Lee. And Harvey found no fault with her tone. + +Sara Lee had intended to go to Anna's, for a time at least. But she +found that Belle was expecting her and would not take no. + +"She's moved the baby in with the others," Harvey explained as he took +the wheel. "Wait until you see your room. I knew we'd be buying +furniture soon, so I fixed it up." + +He said nothing for a time. He was new to driving a car, and the traffic +engrossed him. But when they had reached a quieter neighborhood he put +a hand over hers. + +"Good God, how I've been hungry for you!" he said. "I guess I was pretty +nearly crazy sometimes." He glanced at her apprehensively, but if she +knew his connection with her recall she showed no resentment. As a +matter of fact there was in his voice something that reminded her of +Henri, the same deeper note, almost husky. + +She was, indeed, asking herself very earnestly what was there in her of +all people that should make two men care for her as both Henri and Harvey +cared. In the humility of all modest women she was bewildered. It made +her rather silent and a little sad. She was so far from being what they +thought her. + +Harvey, stealing a moment from the car to glance at her, saw something +baffling in her face. + +"Do you still care, Sara Lee?" he asked almost diffidently. "As much as +ever?" + +"I have come back to you," she said after an imperceptible pause. + +Well, I guess that's the answer." + +He drew a deep satisfied breath. "I used to think of you over there, +and all those foreigners in uniform strutting about, and it almost got +me, some times." + +And again, as long before, he read into her passivity his own passion, +and was deeply content. + +Belle was waiting on the small front porch. There was an anxious frown +on her face, and she looked first, not at Sara Lee, but at Harvey. What +she saw there evidently satisfied her, for the frown disappeared. She +kissed Sara Lee impulsively. + +All that afternoon, much to Harvey's resentment, Sara Lee received +callers. The Ladies' Aid came en masse and went out to the dining-room +and there had tea and cake. Harvey disappeared when they came. + +"You are back," he said, "and safe, and all that. "But it's not their +fault. And I'll be hanged if I'll stand round and listen to them." + +He got his hat and then, finding her alone in a back hall for a moment, +reverted uneasily to the subject. + +"There are two sides to every story," he said. "They're going to knife +me this afternoon, all right. Damned hypocrites! You just keep your +head, and I'll tell you my side of it later." + +"Harvey," she said slowly, "I want to know now just what you did. I'm +not angry. I've never been angry. But I ought to know." + +It was a very one-sided story that Harvey told her, standing in the +little back hall, with Belle's children hanging over the staircase and +begging for cake. Yet in the main it was true. He had reached his +limit of endurance. She was in danger, as the photograph plainly showed. +And a fellow had a right to fight for his own happiness. + +"I wanted you back, that's all," he ended. And added an anticlimax by +passing a plate of sliced jelly roll through the stair rail to the +clamoring children. + +Sara Lee stood there for a moment after he had gone. He was right, or +at least he had been within his rights. She had never even heard of the +new doctrine of liberty for women. There was nothing in her training to +teach her revolt. She was engaged to Harvey; already, potentially, she +belonged to him. He had interfered with her life, but he had had the +right to interfere. + +And also there was in the back of her mind a feeling that was almost +guilt. She had let Henri tell her he loved her. She had even kissed +him. And there had been many times in the little house when Harvey, for +days at a time, had not even entered her thoughts. There was, therefore, +a very real tenderness in the face she lifted for his good-by kiss. + +To Belle in the front hail Harvey gave a firm order. + +"Don't let any reporters in," he said warningly. "This is strictly our +affair. It's a private matter. It's nobody's business what she did over +there. She's home. That's all that matters." + +Belle assented, but she was uneasy. She knew that Harvey was +unreasonably, madly jealous of Sara Lee's work at the little house of +mercy, and she knew him well enough to know that sooner or later he would +show that jealousy. She felt, too, that the girl should have been +allowed her small triumph without interference. There had been +interference enough already. But it was easier to yield to Harvey than +to argue with him. + +It was rather a worried Belle who served tea that afternoon in her dining +room, with Mrs. Gregory pouring; the more uneasy, because already she +divined a change in Sara Lee. She was as lovely as ever, even lovelier. +But she had a poise, a steadiness, that were new; and silences in which, +to Belle's shrewd eyes, she seemed to be weighing things. + +Reporters clamored to see Sara Lee that day, and, failing to see her, +telephoned Harvey at his office to ask if it was true that she had been +decorated by the King. He was short to the point of affront. + +"I haven't heard anything about it," he snapped. "And I wouldn't say if +I had. But it's not likely. What d'you fellows think she was doing +anyhow? Leading a charge? She was running a soup kitchen. That's all." + +He hung up the receiver with a jerk, but shortly after that he fell to +pacing his small office. She had not said anything about being decorated, +but the reporters had said it had been in a London newspaper. If she +had not told him that, there were probably many things she had not told +him. But of course there had been very little time. He would see if +she mentioned it that night. + +Sara Lee had had a hard day. The children loved her. In the intervals +of calls they crawled over her, and the littlest one called her Saralie. +She held the child in her arms close. + +"Saralie!" said the child, over and over; "Saralie! That's your name. +I love your name." + +And there came, echoing in her ears, Henri and his tender Saralie. + +There was an oppression on her too. Her very bedroom thrust on her her +approaching marriage. This was her own furniture, for her new home. It +was beautiful, simple and good. But she was not ready for marriage. She +had been too close to the great struggle to be prepared to think in terms +of peace so soon. Perhaps, had she dared to look deeper than that, she +would have found something else, a something she had not counted on. + +She and Belle had a little time after the visitors had gone, before +Harvey came home. They sat in Belle's bedroom, and her sentences were +punctuated by little backs briskly presented to have small garments +fastened, or bows put on stiffly bobbed yellow hair. + +"Did you understand my letter?" she asked. "I was sorry I had sent it, +but it was too late then." + +"I put your letter and - theirs, together. I supposed that Harvey -" + +"He was about out of his mind," Belle said in her worried voice. "Stand +still, Mary Ellen! He went to Mrs. Gregory, and I suppose he said a good +bit. You know the way he does. Anyhow, she was very angry. She called +a special meeting, and - I tried to prevent their recalling you. He +doesn't know that, of course." + +"You tried?" + +"Well, I felt as though it was your work," Belle said rather +uncomfortably. "Bring me the comb, Alice. I guess we get pretty narrow +here and - I've been following things more closely since you went over. +I know more than I did. And, of course, after one marries there isn't +much chance. There are children and -" Her face twisted. "I wish I +could do something." + +She got up and brought from the dresser a newspaper clipping. + +"It's the London newspaper," she explained. "I've been taking it, but +Harvey doesn't know. He doesn't care much for the English. This is +about your being decorated." + +Sara Lee held it listlessly in her hands. + +"Shall I tell him, Belle?" she asked. + +Belle hesitated. + +"I don't believe I would," she said forlornly. "He won't like it. +That's why I've never showed him that clipping. He hates it all so." + +Sara Lee dressed that evening in the white frock. She dressed slowly, +thinking hard. All round her was the shiny newness of her furniture, +a trifle crowded in Belle's small room. Sara Lee had a terrible feeling +of being fastened in by it. Wherever she turned it gleamed. She felt +surrounded, smothered. + +She had meant to make a clean breast of things - of the little house, +and of Henri, and of the King, pinning the medal on her shabby black +jacket and shaking hands with her. Henri she must tell about - not his +name of course, nor his madness, nor even his love. But she felt that +she owed it to Harvey to have as few secrets from him as possible. She +would tell about what the boy had done for her, and how he, and he alone, +had made it all possible. + +Surely Harvey would understand. It was a page that was closed. It had +held nothing to hurt him. She had come back. + +She stood by her window, thinking. And a breath of wind set the leaves +outside to rustling. Instantly she was back again in the little house, +and the sound was not leaves, but the shuffling of many stealthy feet +on the cobbles of the street at night, that shuffling that was so like +the rustling of leaves in a wood or the murmur of water running over a +stony creek bed. + + + + + XXV + + +It was clear to Sara Lee from the beginning of the evening that Harvey +did not intend to hear her story. He did not say so; indeed, for a time +he did not talk at all. He sat with his arms round her, content just to +have her there. + +"I have a lot of arrears to make up," he said. "I've got to get used to +having you where I can touch you. To-night when I go Upstairs I'm going +to take that damned colorless photograph of you and throw it out the +window." + +"I must tell you about your photograph," she ventured. "It always stood +on the mantel over the stove, and when there was a threatened bombardment +I used to put it under -" + +Let's not talk, honey." + +When he came out of that particular silence he said abruptly: + +"Will Leete is dead." + +"Oh, no! Poor Will Leete." + +"Died of pneumonia in some God-forsaken hole over there. He's left a +wife and nothing much to keep her. That's what comes of mixing in the +other fellow's fight. I guess we can get the house as soon as we want +it. She has to sell; and it ought to be a bargain" + +"Harvey," she said rather timidly, "you speak of the other fellow's +fight. They say over there that we are sure to be drawn into it sooner +or later." + +"Not on our life!" he replied brusquely. "And if you don't mind, honey, +I don't care to hear about what they think over there." He got up from +his old place on the arm of her chair and stood on the rug. "I'd better +tell you now how I feel about this thing. I can't talk about it, that's +all. We'll finish up now and let it go at that. I'm sorry there's a +war. I'll send money when I can afford it, to help the Belgians, though +my personal opinion is that they're getting theirs for what they did in +the Congo. But I don't want to hear about what you did over there." + +He saw her face, and he went to her and kissed her cheek. + +"I don't want to hurt you, honey," he said. "I love you with all my +heart. But somehow I can't forget that you left me and went over there +when there was no reason for it. You put off our marriage, and I +suppose we'd better get it over. Go ahead and tell me about it." + +He drew up a chair and waited, but the girl smiled rather tremulously. + +"Perhaps we'd better wait, if you feel that way, Harvey." + +His face was set as he looked at her. + +"There's only one thing I want to know," he said. "And I've got a right +to know that. You're a young girl, and you're beautiful - to me, anyhow. +You've been over there with a lot of crazy foreigners." He got up again +and all the bitterness of the empty months was in his voice. "Did any +of them - was there anybody there you cared about?" + +"I came back, Harvey." + +"That's not the question." + +"There were many men - officers - who were kind to me. I -" + +"That's not the question, either." + +"If I had loved any one more than I loved you I should not have come +back." + +"Wait a minute!" he said quickly. "You had to come back, you know." + +"I could have stayed. The Englishwoman who took over my work asked me +to stay on and help her." + +He was satisfied then. He went back to the arm of her chair and kissed +her. + +"All right," he said. "I've suffered the tortures of the damned, but + - that fixes it. Now let's talk about something else. I'm sick of +this war talk." + +"I'd like to tell you about my little house. And poor Rene -" + +"Who was Rene?" he demanded. + +"The orderly." + . +"The one on the step, with a rifle?" + +"Yes." + +"Look here," he said. "I've got to get to all that gradually. I don't +know that I'll ever get to it cheerfully. But I can't talk about that +place to-night. And I don't want to talk war. The whole business makes +me sick. I've got a car out of it, and if things keep on we may be able +to get the Leete house. But there's no reason in it, no sense. I'm +sick to death of hearing about it. Let's talk of something else." + +But - and here was something strange - Sara Lee could find nothing else +to talk about. The thing that she had looked forward so eagerly to +telling - that was barred. And the small gossip of their little circle, +purely personal and trivial, held only faint interest for her. For the +first time they had no common ground to meet on. + +Yet it was a very happy man who went whistling to his room that night. +He was rather proud of himself too. After all the bitterness of the +past months, he had been gentle and loving to Sara Lee. He had not +scolded her. + +In the next room he could hear her going quietly about, opening and +closing the drawers of the new bureau, moving a chair. Pretty soon, God +willing, they need never be separated. He would have her always, to +protect and cherish and love. + +He went outside to her closed door. + +"Good night, sweetheart," he called softly. + +"Good night, dear," came her soft reply. + +But long after he was asleep Sara Lee stood at her window and listened +to the leaves, so like the feet of weary men on the ruined street over +there. + +For the first time she was questioning the thing she had done. She +loved Harvey - but there were many kinds of love. There was the love of +Jean for Henri, and there was the wonderful love, though the memory now +was cruel and hurt her, of Henri for herself. And there was the love of +Marie for the memory of Maurice the spy. Many kinds of love; and one +heart might love many people, in different ways. + +A small doubt crept into her mind. This feeling she had for Harvey was +not what she had thought it was over there. It was a thing that had +belonged to a certain phase of her life. But that phase was over. It +was, like Marie's, but a memory. + +This Harvey of the new car and the increased income and the occasional +hardness in his voice was not the Harvey she had left. Or perhaps it +was she who had changed. She wondered. She felt precisely the same, +tender toward her friends, unwilling to hurt them. She did not want +to hurt Harvey. + +But she did not love him as he deserved to be loved. And she had a +momentary lift of the veil, when she saw the long vista of the years, +the two of them always together and always between them hidden, +untouched, but eating like a cancer, Harvey's resentment and suspicion +of her months away from him. + +There would always be a barrier between them. Not only on Harvey's side. +There were things she had no right to tell - of Henri, of his love and +care for her, and of that last terrible day when he realized what he had +done. + +That night, lying in the new bed, she faced that situation too. How +much was she to blame? If Henri felt that each life lost was lost by +him wasn't the same true for her? Why had she allowed him to stay in +London? + +But that was one question she did not answer frankly. + +She lay there in the darkness and wondered what punishment he would +receive. He had done so much for them over there. Surely, surely, they +would allow for that. But small things came back to her - the awful +sight of the miller and his son, led away to death, with the sacks over +their heads. The relentlessness of it all, the expecting that men +should give everything, even life itself, and ask for no mercy. + +And this, too, she remembered: Once in a wild moment Henri had said he +would follow her to America, and that there he would prove to her that +his and not Harvey's was the real love of her life - the great love, +that comes but once to any woman, and to some not at all. Yet on that +last night at Morley's he had said what she now felt was a final +farewell. That last look of his, from the doorway - that had been the +look of a man who would fill his eyes for the last time. + +She got up and stood by the window. What had they done to him? What +would they do? She looked at her watch. It was four o'clock in the +morning over there. The little house would be quiet now, but down along +the lines men would be standing on the firing step of the trench, and +waiting, against what the dawn might bring. + +Through the thin wall came the sound of Harvey's heavy, regular +breathing. She remembered Henri's light sleeping on the kitchen floor, +his cap on the table, his cape rolled round him - a sleeping, for all +his weariness, so light that he seemed always half conscious. She +remembered the innumerable times he had come in at this hour, muddy, +sometimes rather gray of face with fatigue, but always cheerful. + +It was just such an hour that she found him giving hot coffee to the +German prisoner. It had been but a little earlier when he had taken her +to the roof and had there shown her Rene, lying with his face up toward +the sky which had sent him death. + +A hundred memories crowded - Henri's love for the Belgian soldiers, and +theirs for him; his humor; his absurd riddles. There was the one he had +asked Rene, the very day before the air attack. He had stood stiffly and + frowningly before the boy, and he had asked in a highly official tone: + +"What must a man be to be buried with military honors?" + +"A general?" + +"No." + +"An officer?" + +"No, no! Use your head boy! This is very important. A mistake would +be most serious. + +Rene had shaken his head dejectedly. + +"He must be dead, Rene," Henri had said gravely. "Entirely dead. As I +said, it is well to know these things. A mistake would be unfortunate." + +His blue eyes had gleamed with fun, but his face had remained frowning. +It was quite five minutes before she had heard Rene chuckling on the +doorstep. + +Was he still living, this Henri of the love of life and courting of +death? Could anything so living die? And if he had died had it been +because of her? She faced that squarely for the first time. + +"Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house of mercy; +and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +Beyond the partition Harvey slept on, his arms under his head. + + + + + XXVI + +Harvey was clamoring for an early wedding. And indeed there were few +arguments against it, save one that Sara Lee buried in her heart. +Belle's house was small, and though she was welcome there, and more than +that, Sara Lee knew that she was crowding the family. + +Perhaps Sara Lee would have agreed in the end. There seemed to be +nothing else to do, though by the end of the first week she was no longer +in any doubt as to what her feeling for Harvey really was. It was +kindness, affection; but it was not love. She would marry him because +she had promised to, and because their small world expected her to do so; +and because she could not shame him again. + +For to her surprise she found that that was what he had felt - a strange, +self-conscious shame, like that of a man who has been jilted. She felt +that by coming back to him she had forfeited the right to break the +engagement. + +So every hour of every day seemed to make the thing more inevitable. +Belle was embroidering towels for her in her scant leisure. Even Anna, +with a second child coming, sent in her contribution to the bride's +linen chest. By almost desperately insisting on a visit to Aunt Harriet +she got a reprieve of a month. And Harvey was inclined to be jealous +even of that. + +Sometimes, but mostly at night when she was alone, a hot wave of +resentment overwhelmed her. Why should she be forced into the thing? +Was there any prospect of happiness after marriage when there was so +little before? + +For she realized now that even Harvey was not happy. He had at last +definitely refused to hear the story of the little house. + +"I'd rather just forget it, honey!" he said. + +But inconsistently he knew she did not forget it, and it angered him. +True to his insistence on ignoring those months of her absence, she made +no attempt to tell him. Now and then, however, closed in the library +together, they would fail of things to talk about, and Sara Lee's +knitting needles would be the only sound in the room. At those times he +would sit back in his chair and watch the far-away look in her eyes, and +it maddened him. + +>From her busy life Belle studied them both, with an understanding she +did not reveal. And one morning when the mail came she saw Sara Lee's +face as she turned away, finding there was no letter for her, and made +an excuse to follow her to her room. + +The girl was standing by the window looking out. The children were +playing below, and the maple trees were silent. Belle joined her there +and slipped an arm round her. + +"Why are you doing it, Sara Lee?" she asked. + +"Doing what?" + +Marrying Harvey." + +Sara Lee looked at her with startled eyes. + +"I'm engaged to him, Belle. I've promised." + +"Exactly," said Belle dryly. "But that's hardly a good reason, is it? +It takes more than a promise." She stared down at the flock of children +in the yard below. "Harvey's a man," she said. "He doesn't understand, +but I do. You've got to care a whole lot, Sara Lee, if you're going to +go through with it. It takes a lot of love, when it comes to having +children and all that." + +"He's so good, Belle. How can I hurt him?" + +"You'll hurt him a lot more by marrying him when you don't love him." + +"If only I could have a little time," she cried wildly. "I'm so - I'm +tired, Belle. And I can't forget about the war and all that. I've +tried. Sometimes I think if we could talk it over together I'd get it +out of my mind." + +He won't talk about it?" + +"He's my own brother, and I love him dearly. But sometimes I think he's +hard. Not that he's ever ugly," she hastened to add; "but he's stubborn. +There's a sort of wall in him, and he puts some things behind it. And +it's like beating against a rock to try to get at them." + +After a little silence she said hesitatingly: + +"We've got him to think of too. He has a right to be happy. Sometimes +I've looked at you - you're so pretty, Sara Lee - and I've wondered if +there wasn't some one over there who - cared for you." + +"There was one man, an officer - Oh, Belle, I can't tell you. Not you!" + +"Why not!" asked Belle practically. "You ought to talk it out to some +one, and if Harvey insists on being a fool that's his own fault." + +For all the remainder of that sunny morning Sara Lee talked what was in +her heart. And Belle - poor, romantic, starved Belle - heard and +thrilled. She made buttonholes as she listened, but once or twice a +new tone in Sara Lee's voice caused her to look up. Here was a new +Sara Lee, a creature of vibrant voice and glowing eyes; and Belle was +not stupid. She saw that it was Henri whose name brought the deeper note. + +Sara Lee had stopped with her recall, had stopped and looked about the +room with its shiny new furniture and had shivered. Belle bent over her +work. + +"Why don't you go back?" she asked. + +Sara Lee looked at her piteously. + +"How can I? There is Harvey. And the society would not send me again. +It's over, Belle. All over." + +After a pause Belle said: "What's become of Henri? He hasn't written, +has he?" + +Sara Lee got up and went to the window. + +"I don't know where he is. He may be dead." + +Her voice was flat and lifeless. Belle knew all that she wanted to know. +She rose and gathered up her sewing. + +"I'm going to talk to Harvey. You're not going to be rushed into a +wedding. You're tired, and it's all nonsense. Well, I'll have to run +now and dress the children." + +That night Harvey and Belle had almost a violent scene. He had taken +Sara Lee over the Leete house that evening. Will Leete's widow had met +them there, a small sad figure in her mourning, but very composed, until +she opened the door into a tiny room upstairs with a desk and a lamp +in it. + +"This was Will's study," she said. "He did his work here in the +evenings, and I sat in that little chair and sewed. I never thought +then -" Her lips quivered. + +"Pretty rotten of Will Leete to leave that little thing alone," said +Harvey on their way home. "He had his fling; and she's paying for it." + +But Sara Lee was silent. It was useless to try to make Harvey understand +the urge that had called Will Leete across the sea to do his share for +the war, and that had brought him that peace of God that passeth all +understanding. + +It was not a good time for Belle to put up to him her suggestion for a +delay in the marriage, that evening after their return. He took it +badly and insisted on sending upstairs for Sara Lee. + +"Did you ask Belle to do this?" he demanded bluntly. + +"To do what?" + +"To put things off." + +"I have already told you, Harvey," Belle put in. "It is my own idea. +She is tired. She's been through a lot. I've heard the story you're +too stubborn to listen to. And I strongly advise her to wait a while." + +And after a time he agreed ungraciously. He would buy the house and ftx +it over, and in the early fall it would be ready. + +"Unless," he added to Sara Lee with a bitterness born of disappointment -" +unless you change your mind again." + +He did not kiss her that night when she and Belle went together up the +stairs. But he stared after her gloomily, with hurt and bewilderment in +his eyes. + +He did not understand. He never would. She had come home to him all +gentleness and tenderness, ready to find in him the things she needed so +badly. But out of his obstinacy and hurt he had himself built up a +barrier. + +That night Sara Lee dreamed that she was back in the little house of +mercy. Rene was there; and Henri; and Jean, with the patch over his eye. +They were waiting for the men to come, and the narrow hall was full of +the odor of Marie's soup. Then she heard them coming, the shuffling of +many feet on the road. She went to the door, with Henri beside her, and +watched them coming up the road, a deeper shadow in the blackness - tired +men, wounded men, homeless men coming to her little house with its +firelight and its warmth. Here and there the match that lighted a +cigarette showed a white but smiling face. They stopped before the door, +and the warm little house, with its guarded lights and its food and +cheer, took them in. + + + + + XXVII + + +Very pale and desperate Henri took the night A train for Folkestone +after he had said good-by to Sara Lee. He alternately chilled and +burned with fever, and when he slept, as he did now and then, going off +suddenly into a doze and waking with a jerk, it was to dream of horrors. + +He thought, in his wilder intervals, of killing himself. But his code +did not include such a shirker's refuge. He was going back to tell his +story and to take his punishment. + +He had cabled to Jean to meet him at Calais, but when, at dawn the next +morning, the channel boat drew in to the wharf there was no sign of +Jean or the car. Henri regarded the empty quay with apathetic eyes. +They would come, later on. If he could only get his head down and sleep +for a while he would be better able to get toward the Front. For he +knew now that he was ill. He had, indeed, been ill for days, but he did +not realize that. And he hated illness. He regarded it with suspicion, +as a weakness not for a strong man. + +The drowsy girl in her chair at the Gare Maritime regarded him curiously +and with interest. Many women turned to look after Henri, but he did +not know this. Had he known it he would have regarded it much as he +did illness. + +The stupid boy was not round. The girl herself took the key and led the +way down the long corridor upstairs to a room. Henri stumbled in and +fell across the bed. He was almost immediately asleep. + +Late in the afternoon he wakened. Strange that Jean had not come. He +got up and bathed his face. His right arm was very stiff now, and pains +ran from the old wound in his chest down to the fingers of his hand. He +tried to exercise to limber it, and grew almost weak with pain. + +At six o'clock, when Jean had not come, Henri resorted to ways that he +knew of and secured a car. He had had some coffee by that time, and he +felt much better - so well indeed that he sang under his breath a +strange rambling song that sounded rather like Rene's rendering of +Tipperary. The driver looked at him curiously every now and then. + +It was ten o'clock when they reached La Panne. Henri went at once to +the villa set high on a sand dune where the King's secretary lived. The +house was dark, but in the library at the rear there was a light. He +stumbled along the paths beside the house, and reached at last, after +interminable miles, when the path sometimes came up almost to his eyes +and again fell away so that it seemed to drop from under his feet - at +last he reached the long French doors, with their drawn curtains. He +opened the door suddenly and thereby surprised the secretary, who was a +most dignified and rather nervous gentleman, into laying his hand on a +heavy inkwell. + +"I wish to see the King," said Henri in a loud tone. Because at that +moment the secretary, lamp and inkwell and all, retired suddenly to a +very great distance, as if one had viewed them through the reverse end +of an opera glass. + +The secretary knew Henri. He, too, eyed him curiously. + +The King has retired, monsieur." + +"I think," said Henri in a dangerous tone, "that he will see me." + +To tell the truth, the secretary rather thought so too. There was a +strange rumor going round, to the effect that the boy had followed a +woman to England at a critical time. Which would have been a pity, the +secretary thought. There were so many women, and so few men like Henri. + +The secretary considerd gravely. Henri was by that time in a chair, but +it moved about so that he had to hold very tight to the arms. When he +looked up again the secretary had picked up his soft black hat and was +at the door. + +"I shall inquire," he said. Henri saluted him stiffly, with his left +hand, as he went out. + +The secretary went to His Majesty's equerry, who was in the next house +playing solitaire and trying to forget the family he had left on the +other side of the line. + +So it was that in due time Henri again traversed miles of path and +pavement, between tall borders of wild sea grass, miles which perhaps +were a hundred yards. And went round the screen, and - found the King +on the hearthrug. But when he drew himself stiffly to attention he +overdid the thing rather and went over backward with a crash. + +He was up again almost immediately, very flushed and uncomfortable. +After that he kept himself in hand, but the King, who had a way all his +own of forgetting his divine right to rule, and a great many other +things - the King watched him gravely. + +Henri sat in a chair and made a clean breast of it. Because he was +feeling rather strange he told a great many things that an agent of the +secret service is hardly expected to reveal to his king. He mentioned, +for instance, the color of Sara Lee's eyes, and the way she bandaged, +like one who had been trained. + +Once, in the very middle of his narrative, where he had put the letter +from the Front in his pocket and decided to go to England anyhow, he +stopped and hummed Rene's version of Tipperary. Only a bar or two. +Then he remembered. + +But one thing brought him round with a start. + +"Then," said the King slowly, "Jean was not with you?" + +Only he did not call him Jean. He gave him his other name, which, like +Henri's, is not to be told. + +Henri's brain cleared then with the news that Jean was missing. When, +somewhat later, he staggered out of the villa, it was under royal +instructions to report to the great hospital along the sea front and +near by, and there to go to bed and have a doctor. Indeed, because the +boy's eyes were wild by that time, the equerry went along and held his +arm. But that was because Henri was in open revolt, and while walking +steadily enough showed a tendency to bolt every now and then. + +He would stop on the way and argue, though one does not argue easily +with an equerry. + +"I must go," he would say fretfully. "God knows where he is. He'd +never give me up if I were the one." + +And once he shook off the equerry violently and said: + +"Let go of me, I tell you! I'll come back and go to bed when I've +found him." + +The equerry soothed him like a child. + +An English nurse took charge of Henri in the hospital, and put him to +bed. He was very polite to her, and extremely cynical. She sat in a +chair by his bed and held the key of the room in her hand. Once he +thought she was Sara Lee, but that was only for a moment. She did not +look like Sara Lee. And she was suspicious, too; for when he asked her +what she could put in her left hand that she could not put in her right, +she moved away and placed the door key on the stand, out of reach. + +However, toward morning she dozed. There was steady firing at Nieuport +and the windows shook constantly. An ambulance came in, followed by a +stirring on the lower floor. Then silence. He got up then and secured +the key. There was no time for dressing, because she was a Suspicious +person and likely to waken at any time. He rolled his clothing into a +bundle and carried it under his well arm. The other was almost useless. + +The ambulance was still waiting outside, at the foot of the staircase. +There were voices and lights in the operating room, forward along the +tiled hall. Still in his night clothing, Henri got into the ambulance +and threw his uniform behind him. Then he got the car under way. + +Outside the village he paused long enough to dress. His head was +amazingly clear. He had never felt so sure of himself before. As to +his errand he had no doubt whatever. Jean had learned that he had +crossed the channel. Therefore Jean had taken up his work - Jean, who +had but one eye and was as clumsy as a bear. The thought of Jean +crawling through the German trenches set him laughing until he ended +with a sob. + +It was rather odd about the ambulance. It did not keep the road very +well. Sometimes it was on one side and sometimes on the other. It slid +as though the road were greased. And after a time Henri made an amazing +discovery. He was not alone in the car. + +He looked back, without stopping, and the machine went off in a wide arc. +He brought it back again, grinning. + +"Thought you had me, didn't you?" he observed to the car in general, and +the engine in particular. "Now no tricks!" + +There was a wounded man in the car. He had had morphia and he was very +comfortable. He was not badly hurt, and he considered that he was being +taken to Calais. He was too tired to talk, and the swinging of the car +rather interested him. He would doze and waken and doze again. But at +last he heard something that made him rise on his elbow. + +It was the hammering of the big guns. + +He called Henri's attention to this, but Henri said: + +"Lie down, Jean, and don't talk. We'll make it yet." + +The wounded man intended to make a protest, but he went to sleep instead. + +They had reached the village now where was the little house of mercy. +The ambulance rolled and leaped down the street, with both lights full +on, which was forbidden, and came to a stop at the door. The man inside +was grunting then, and Henri, whose head had never been so clear, got +out and went round to the rear of the car. + +"Now, out with you, comrade!" he said. "I have made an error, but it is +immaterial. Can you walk?" + +He lighted a cigarette, and the man inside saw his burning eyes and +shaking hands. Even through the apathy of the morphia he felt a thrill +of terror. He could walk. He got out while Henri pounded at the door. + +Attention!" he called. "Attention!" + +Then he hummed an air of the camps: + + Trou la la, ca ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + +When he heard steps inside Henri went back to the ambulance. He got in +and drove it, lights and all, down the street. + + Trou la la, ca ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + +Somewhere down the road beyond the poplar trees he abandoned the ambulance. +They found it there the next morning, or rather what was left of it. +Evidently its two unwinking eyes had got on the Germans' nerves. + +Early the next morning a Saxon regiment, standing on the firing step +ready for what the dawn might bring forth, watched the mist rise from +the water in front of them. It shone on a body in a Belgian uniform, +lying across their wire, and very close indeed. + +Now the Saxons are not Prussians, so no one for sport fired at the body. +Which was rather a good thing, because it moved slightly and stirred. +And then in a loud voice, which is an unusual thing for bodies to +possess, it began to sing: + + Trou la la, ca ne va guere; + Thou la la, ca ne va pas. + + + + + XXVIII + + +Late in August Sara Lee broke her engagement with Harvey. She had been +away, at Cousin Jennie's, for a month, and for the first time since her +return she had had time to think. In the little suburban town there +were long hours of quiet when Cousin Jennie mended on the porch and Aunt +Harriet, enjoying a sort of reflected glory from Sara Lee, presided +at Red Cross meetings. + +Sara Lee decided to send for Harvey, and he came for a week-end, arriving +pathetically eager, but with a sort of defiance too. He was determined +to hold her, but to hold her on his own terms. + +Aunt Harriet had been vaguely uneasy, but Harvey's arrival seemed to put +everything right. She even kissed him when he came, and took great pains +to carry off Cousin Jennie when she showed an inclination toward +conversation and a seat on the porch. + +Sara Lee had made a desperate resolve. She intended to lay all her +cards on the table. He should know all that there was to know. If, +after that, he still wanted to hold her - but she did not go so far. +She was so sure he would release her. + +It was a despairing thing to do, but she was rather despairing those +days. There had been no letter from Henri or from Jean. She had written +them both several times, to Dunkirk, to the Savoy in London, to the +little house near the Front. But no replies had come. Yet mail was +going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly. + +When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come +back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie +on one side ard Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent +prayers - that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not +think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital. + +She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy. +Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even +if that truth comprehended the worst. + +Once she received, from some unknown hand, a French journal, and pored +over it for days with her French dictionary, to find if it contained any +news. It was not until a week later that she received a letter from +Mabel, explaining that she had sent the journal, which contained a +description of her hospital. + +All of Harvey's Sunday she spent in trying to bring her courage to the +point of breaking the silence he had imposed on her, but it was not +until evening that she succeeded. The house was empty. The family had +gone to church. On the veranda, with the heavy scent of phlox at night +permeating the still air, Sara Lee made her confession. She began at +the beginning. Harvey did not stir - until she told of the way she had +stowed away to cross the channel. Then he moved. + +"This fellow who planned that for you - did you ever see him again?" + +He met me in Calais." + +And then what?" + +"He took me to Dunkirk in his car. Such a hideons car, Harvey - all +wrecked. It had been under fire again and again. I -" + +"He took you to Dunkirk! Who was with you?" + +"Just Jean, the chauffeur." + + "I like his nerve! Wasn't there in all that Godforsaken country a +woman to take with you? You and this - What was his name. anyhow?" + + " I can't tell you that, Harvey." + + "Look here!" he burst out. "How much of this aren't you going to tell? +Because I want it all or not at all." + +"I can't tell you his name. I'm only trying to make you urderstand the +way I feel about things. His name doesn't matter." She clenched her +hands in the dark ness. I don't think he is alive now. + + He tried to see her face, but she turned it away. + +"Dead, eh? What makes you think that?" + +"I haven't heard from him." + +"Why should you hear from him?" His voice cut like a knife. "Look at +me. Why should he write to you?" + +"He cared for me, Harvey." + +He sat in a heavy silence which alarmed her. + +"Don't he angry, please," she begged "I couldn't bear it. It wasn't my +fault, or his either." + +"The damned scoundrel!" said Harvey thickly. + +But she reached over and put a trembling hand over his lips. + +"Don't say that," she said. "Don't! I won't allow you to. When I +think what may have happened to him, I -" Her voice broke. + +"Go on," Harvey said in cold tones she had never heard before. "Tell it +all, now you've begun it. God knows I didn't want to hear it. He took +you to the hotel at Dunkirk, the way those foreigners take their women. +And he established you in the house at the Front, I suppose, like a -" + +Sara Lee suddenly stood up and drew off her ring. + +"You needn't go on," she said quietly. "I had a decision to make +to-night, and I have made it. Ever since I came home I have been trying +to go back to where we were before I left. It isn't possible. You are +what you always were, Harvey. But I've changed. I can't go back." + +She put the ring into his hand. + +"It isn't that you don't love me. I think you do. But I've been +thinking things over. It isn't only to-night, or what you just said. +It's because we don't care for the same things, or believe in them." + +But - if we love each other -" + +"It's not that, either. I used to feel that way. A home, and some one +to care about, and a little pleasure and work." + +That ought to be enough, honey." + +He was terrified. His anger was gone. He placed an appealing hand on +her arm, and as she stood there in the faint starlight the wonder of her +once again got him by the throat. She had that sort of repressed +eagerness, that look of being poised for flight, that had always made +him feel cheap and unworthy. + +"Isn't that enough, honey?" he repeated. + +"Not now," she said, her eyes turned toward the east. "These are great +days, Harvey. They are greater and more terrible than any one can know +who has not been there. I've been there and I know. I haven't the +right to all this peace and comfort when I know how things are going +over there." + +Down the quiet street of the little town service was over. The last +hymn had been sung. Through the open windows came the mellow sound of +the minister's voice in benediction, too far away to be more than a +tone, like a single deep note of the organ. Sara Lee listened. She +knew the words he was saying, and she listened with her eyes turned to +the east: + + "The peace of God that passeth all understanding + be and abide with you all, forevermore. Amen." + +Sara Lee listened, and from the step below her Harvey watched her with +furtive, haggard eyes. He had not heard the benediction. + +"The peace of God!" she said slowly. "There is only one peace of God, +Harvey, and that is service. I am going back." + +"Service!" he scoffed. "You are going back to him!" + +"I'm afraid he is not there any more. I am going back to work. But if +he is there -" + +Harvey slid the ring into his pocket. "What if he's not there," he +demanded bitterly. "If you think, after all this, that I'm going to +wait, on the chance of your coming back to me, you're mistaken. I've +been a laughing stock long enough." + +In the light of her new decision Sara Lee viewed him for the first time +with the pitiless eyes of women who have lost a faith. She saw him for +what he was, not deliberately cruel, not even unkindly, but selfish, +small, without vision. Harvey was for his own fireside, his office, his +little family group. His labor would always be for himself and his own. +Whereas Sara Lee was, now and forever, for all the world, her hands +consecrated to bind up its little wounds and to soothe its great ones. +Harvey craved a cheap and easy peace. She wanted no peace except that +bought by service, the peace of a tired body, the peace of the little +house in Belgium where, after days of torture, weary men found quiet +and ease and the cheer of the open door. + + + + + XXIX + + +Late in October Sara Lee went back to the little house of mercy; went +unaccredited, and with her own money. She had sold her bit of property. + +In London she went to the Traverses, as before. But with a difference +too. For Sara Lee had learned the strangeness of the English, who are +slow to friendships but who never forget. Indeed a telegram met her at +Liverpool asking her to stop with them in London. She replied, refusing, +but thanking them, and saying she would call the next afternoon. + +Everything was the same at Morley's: Rather a larger percentage of men +in uniform, perhaps; greater crow(ls in the square; a little less of the +optimism which in the spring had predicted victory before autumn. But +the same high courage, for all that. + +August greeted her like an old friend. Even the waiters bowed to her, +and upstairs the elderly chambermaid fussed over her like a mother. + +"And you're going back!" she exclaimed. "Fancy that, now! You are +brave, miss." + +But her keen eyes saw a change in Sara Lee. Her smile was the same, but +there were times when she forgot to finish a sentence, and she stood, +that first morning, for an hour by the window, looking out as if she saw +nothing. + +She went, before the visit to the Traverses, to the Church of Saint +Martin in the Fields. It was empty, save for a woman in a corner, who +did not kneel, but sat staring quietly before her. Sara Lee prayed an +inarticulate bit of a prayer, that what the Traverses would have to tell +her should not be the thing that she feared, but that, if it were, she +be given courage to meet it and to go on with her work. + +The Traverses would know; Mrs. Cameron was a friend. They would know +about Henri, and about Jean. Soon, within the hour, she would learn +everything. So she asked for strength, and then sat there for a time, +letting the peace of the old church quiet her, as had the broken walls +and shattered altar of that other church, across the channel. + +It was rather a surprise to Sara Lee to have Mrs. Travers put her arms +about her and kiss her. Mr. Travers, too, patted her hand when he took +it. But they had, for all that, the reserve of their class. Much that +they felt about Sara Lee they did not express even to each other. + +"We are so grateful to you," Mrs. Travers said. "I am only one mother, +and of course now -" She looked down at her black dress. "But how many +others there are who will want to thank you, when this terrible thing is +over and they learn about you!" + +Mr. Travers had been eying Sara Lee. + +"Didn't use you up, did it?" he asked. "You're not looking quite fit." + +Sara Lee was very pale just then. In a moment she would know. + +"I'm quite well," she said. "I - do you hear from Mrs. Cameron?" + +"Frequently. She has worked hard, but she is not young." It was Mrs. +Travers who spoke. "She's afraid of the winter there. I rather think, +since you want to go back, that she will be glad to turn your domain +over to you for a time." + +"Then - the little house is still there?" + +"Indeed, yes! A very famous little house, indeed. But it is always +known as your house. She has felt like a temporary chatelaine. She +always thought you would come back." + +Tea had come, as before. The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace +herself. Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down +at her. + +"We have a plan to talk over," he said, "when you have had your tea. I +hope you will agree to it." + +He went back to the hearthrug. + +"When I was there before," Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady, +"there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me. Indeed, all +the credit for what I did belongs to him. And since I went home I +haven't heard -" + +Her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Travers glanced at his wife. Not for +nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends, +in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless +street be fore the little house. + +"I'm afraid we have bad news for you." Mrs. Travers put down her +untasted tea. "Or rather, we have no news. Of course," she added, +seeing Sara Lee's eyes, "in this war no news may be the best - that is, +he may be a prisoner." + +"That," Sara Lee heard herself say, "is impossible. If they captured +him they would shoot him." + +Mrs. Travers nodded silently. They knew Henri's business, too, by that +time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy. + +"And - Jean?" + +They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away +voice. And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs. +Cameron's and read a part of it aloud. + +"He seems to have been delirious," she read, holding her reading glasses +to her eyes. "A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he +learned this somehow. + +"He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance. He came +straight here and wakened us. There had been a wounded man in the +machine, and he left him on our doorstep. When I got to the door the +car was going wildly toward the Front, with both lamps lighted. We did +not understand then, of course, and no one thought of following it. The +ambulance was found smashed by a shell the next morning, and at first we +thought that he had been in it. But there was no sign that he had been, +and that night one of the men from the trenches insisted that he had +climbed out of a firing trench where the soldier stood, and had gone +forward, bareheaded, toward the German lines. + +"I am afraid it was the end. The men, however, who all loved him, do +not think so. It seems that he has done miracles again and again. I +understand that along the whole Belgian line they watch for him at night. +The other night a German on reconnoissance got very close to our wire, +and was greeted not by shots but by a wild hurrah. He was almost +paralyzed with surprise. They brought him here on the way back to the +prison camp, and he still looked dazed." + +Sara Lee sat with her hands clenched. Mrs. Travers folded the letter +and put it back into its envelope. + +"How long ago was that?" Sara Lee asked in a low tone. "Because, if he +was coming back at all -" + +"Four months." + +uddenly Sara Lee stood up. + +I think I ought to tell you," she said with a dead-white face, "that I +am responsible. He cared for me; and I was in love with him too. Only +I didn't know it then. I let him bring me to England, because - I +suppose it was because I loved him. I didn't think then that it was +that. I was engaged to a man at home." + +"Sit down," said Mr. Travers. "My dear child, nothing can be your fault." + +"He came with me, and the Germans got through. He had had word, but -" + +"Have you your salts?" Mr. Travers asked quietly of his wife. + +"I'm not fainting. I'm only utterly wretched." + +The Traverses looked at each other. They were English. They had taken +their own great loss quietly, because it was an individual grief and +must not be intruded on the sorrow of a nation. But they found this +white-faced girl infinitely appealing, a small and fragile figure, to +whose grief must be added, without any fault of hers, a bitter and +lasting remorse. + +Sara Lee stood up and tried to smile. + +"Please don't worry about me," she said. "I need something to do, that's +all. You see, I've been worrying for so long. If I can get to work and +try to make up I'll not be so hopeless. But I am not quite hopeless, +either," she added hastily. It was as though by the very word she had +consigned Henri to death. "You see, I am like the men; I won't give him +up. And perhaps some night he will come across from the other side, out +of the dark." + +Mr. Travers took her back to the hotel. When he returned from paying +off the taxi he found her looking across at the square. + +"Do you remember," she asked him, "the time when the little donkey was +hurt over there?" + +"I shall never forget it." + +"And the young officer who ran out when I did, and shot the poor thing?" + +Mr. Travers remembered. + +"That was he - the man we have been speaking of." + +For the first time that day her eyes filled with tears. + +Sara Lee, at twenty, was already living in her memories. + +So again the lights went down in front, and the back drop became but a +veil, and invisible. And to Sara Lee there came back again some of the +characters of the early mise en scene - marching men, forage wagons, +squadrons of French cavalry escorting various staffs, commandeered farm +horses with shaggy fetlocks fastened in rope corrals, artillery rumbling +along rutted roads which shook the gunners almost off the limbers. + +Nothing was changed - and everything. There was no Rene to smile his +adoring smile, but Marie came out, sobbing and laughing, and threw +herself into the girl's arms. The little house was the same, save for +a hole in the kitchen wall. There were the great piles of white bowls +and the shining kettles. There was the corner of her room, patched by +Rene's hands, now so long quiet. A few more shell holes in the street, +many more little crosses in the field near the poplar trees, more Allied +aeroplanes in the air - that was ail that was changed. + +But to Sara Lee everything was changed, for all that. The little house +was grave and still, like a house of the dead. Once it had echoed to +young laughter, had resounded to the noise and excitement of Henri's +every entrance. Even when he was not there it was as though it but +waited for him to stir it into life, and small echoes of his gayety had +seemed to cling to its old walls. + +Sara Lee stood on the doorstep and looked within. She had come back. +Here she would work and wait, and if in the goodness of providence he +should come back, here he would find her, all the empty months gone and +forgotten. +If he did not - +"I shall still be calling you, and waiting," be had written. She, too, +would call and wait, and if not here, then surely in the fullness of +time which is eternity the call would be answered. + +In October Sara Lee took charge again of the little house. Mrs. Cameron +went back to England, but not until the Traverses' plan had been +revealed. They would support the little house, as a memorial to the son +who had died. It was, Mrs. Travers wrote, the finest tribute they could +offer to his memory, that night after night tired and ill and wounded +men might find sanctuary, even for a little time, under her care. + +Luxuries began to come across the channel, food and dressings and tobacco. +Knitted things, too; for another winter was coming, and already the frost +lay white on the fields in the mornings. The little house took on a new +air of prosperity. There were days when it seemed almost swaggering +with opulence. + +It had need of everything, however. With the prospect of a second +winter, when an advance was impossible, the Germans took to hammering +again. Bombardment was incessant. The little village was again under +suspicion, and there came days of terror when it seemed as though even +the fallen masonry must be reduced to powder. The church went entirely. + +By December Sara Lee had ceased to take refuge during the bombardments. +The fatalism of the Front had got her. She would die or live according +to the great plan, and nothing could change that. She did not greatly +care which, except for her work, and even that she felt could be carried +on by another as well. + +There was no news of Henri, but once the King's equerry, going by, had +stopped to see her and had told her the story. + +"He was ill, undoubtedly," he said. "Even when he went to London he was +ill, and not responsible. The King understands that. He was a brave +boy, mademoiselle." + +But the last element of hope seemed to go with that verification of his +illness. He was delirious, and he had gone in that condition into the +filthy chill waters of the inundation. Well and sane there had been a +chance, but plunging wild-eyed and reckless, into that hell across, +there was none. + +She did her best in the evenings to be cheerful, to take the place, in +her small and serious fashion, of Henri's old gayety. But the soldiers +whispered among themselves that mademoiselle was in grief, as they were, +for the blithe young soldier who was gone. + +What hope Sara Lee had had died almost entirely early in December. On +the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy +pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian +corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench +while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual +courtesy, and had climbed out over the top. + +To Sara Lee this Hutin told his story. A short man with a red beard and +a kindly smile that revealed teeth almost destroyed from neglect, he was +at first diffident in the extreme. + +"It was the captain, mademoiselle," he asserted. "I knnw hm well. He +has often gone on his errands from near my post. I am "- he smiled -" I +am usually in the front line," + +"What did he do?" + +"He had no cap, mademoiselle. I thought that was odd, And as you know + - he does not near his own uniform on such occasions. But he wore his +own uniform, so that at first I did not know what he intended." + +"Later on," she asked, "you - did you hear anything?" + +"The usual sniping, mademoiselle. Nothing more," + +"He went through the inundation?" + +"How else could he go? Through the wire first, at the barrier, where +there is an opening, if one knows the way, I aw him beyond it, by the +light of a fusee. There is a road there, or what was once a road. He +stood there. Then the lights went out." + + + + + XXX + + +On a wild night in January Sara Lee inaugurated a new branch of service. +There had been a delay in sending up to the Front the men who bad been +on rest, and an incessant bombardment held the troops prisoners in their +trenches. + +A field kitchen had been destroyed. The men were hungry, disheartened, +wet through. They needed her, she felt. Even the little she could do +would help. All day she had made soup, and at evening Marie led from +its dilapidated stable the little horse that Henri had once brought up, +trundling its cart behind it. The boiler of the cart was scoured, a +fire lighted in the fire box. Marie, a country girl, harnessed the +shaggy little animal, but with tears of terror. + +"You will be killed, mademoiselle," she protested, weeping. + +"But I haxe gone before. Don't you remember the man whose wife was +English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?" + +"What will become of the house if you are killed?" + +"Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send +to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or +some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you +promise that?" + +Marie promised in a loud wail. + +"Of course I shall come back," Sara Lee said, stirring her soup +preparatory to pouring it out. "I shall be very carefuL" + +"You will not come back, mademoiselle. You do not care to live, and to +such -" + +"Those are the ones who live on," said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out +her soup. + +She went quite alone. There was a great deal of noise, but no shells +fell near her. She led the little horse by its head, and its presence +gave her comfort. It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her +on the road. + +In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible +from the rear. There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach +them. One went along through the darkness until the sound of men's +voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker +of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its +flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment. + +Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply. + +"Qui vive?" + +"It is I," she called through the rain. "I have brought some chocolate +and some soup." + +He lowered his bayonet. + +"Pass, mademoiselle." + +She went on, the rumbling of her little cart dead ened by the Belgian +guns. + +Through the near-by trenches that night went the word that near the +Repose of the Angels - which was but a hole in the ground and scarcely +reposeful - there was to be had hot soup and chocolate and cigarettes. +A dozen or so at a time, the men were allowed to come. Officers brought +their great capes to keep the girl dry. Boards appeared as if by magic +for her to stand on. The rain and the bombardment had both ceased, and +a full moon made the lagoon across the embankment into a silver lake. + +When the last soup had been dipped from the tall boiler, when the final +drops of chocolate had oozed from the faucet, Sara Lee turned and went +back to the little house again. But before she went she stood a moment +staring across toward that land of the shadow on the other side, where +Henri had gone and had not returned. + +Once, when the King had decorated her, she had wished that, wherever +Uncle James might be, on the other side, he could see what was happening. +And now she wondered if Henri could know that she had come back, and was +again looking after his men while she waited for that reunion he had so +firmly believed in. + +Then she led the little horse back along the road. + +At the poplar trees she turned and looked behind, toward the trenches. +The grove was but a skeleton now, a strange and jagged thing of twisted +branches, as though it had died in agony. She stood there while the +pony nuzzled her gently. If she called, would he come? But, then, all +of life was one call now, for her. She went on slowly. + +After that it was not unusual for her to go to the trenches, on such +nights as no men could come to the little house. Always she was joyously +welcomed, and always on her way back she turned to send from the poplar +trees that inarticulate aching call that she had come somehow to +believe in. + +January, wet and raw, went by; February, colder, with snow, was half +over. The men had ceased to watch for Henri over the parapet, and his +brave deeds had become fireside tales, to be told at home, if ever +there were to be homes again for them. + +Then one night Henri came back - came as he had gone, out of the shadows +that had swallowed him up; came without so much as the sound of a +sniper's rifle to herald him. A strange, thin Henri, close to +starvation, dripping water over everything from a German uniform, and +very close indeed to death before he called out. + +There was wild excitement indeed. Bearded private soldiers, forgetting +that name and rank of his which must not be told, patted his thin +shoulders. Officers who had lived through such horrors as also may not +be told, crowded about him and shook hands with him, and with each other. + +It was as though from the graveyard back in the fields had come, alive +and smiling, some dearly beloved friend. + +He would have told the story, but he was wet and weary. + +"That can wait," they said, and led him, a motley band of officers and +men intermixed, for once forgetting all decorum, toward the village. +They overtook the lines of men who had left the trenches and were moving +with their slow and weary gait up the road. The news spread through the +column. There were muffled cheers. Figures stepped out of the darkness +with hands out. Henri clasped as many as he could. + +When with his escort he had passed the men they fell, almost without +orders, into columns of four, and swung in behind him. There was no +band, but from a thousand throats, yet cautiously until they passed the +poplar trees, there gradually swelled and grew a marching song. + +Behind Henri a strange guard of honor - muddy, tired, torn, even wounded + - they marched and sang: + + Thou la la, ca ne va guere; + Trou la la, ce ne va pas. + +Sara Lee, listening for that first shuffle of many feet that sounded so +like the wind in the trees or water over the pebbles of a brook, paused +in her work and lifted her head. The rhythm of marching feet came +through the wooden shutters. The very building seemed to vibrate with +it. And there was a growling sound with it that soon she knew to be the +deep voices of singing men. + +She went to the door and stood there, looking down the street. Behind +her was the warm glow of the lamp, all the snug invitation of the little +house. + +A group of soldiers had paused in front of the doorway, and from them +one emerged - tall, white, infinitely weary - and looked up at her with +unbelieving eyes. + +After all, there are no words for such meetings. Henri took her hand, +still with that sense of unreality, and bent over it. And Sara Lee +touched his head as he stooped, because she had called for so long, and +only now he had come. + +"So you have come back!" she said in what she hoped was a composed +tone - because a great many people were listening. He raised his head +and looked at her. + +"It is you who have come back, mademoiselle." + +There was gayety in the little house that night. Every candle was +lighted. They were stuck in rows on mantel-shelves. They blazed - and +melted into strange arcs - above the kitchen stove. There were +cigarettes for everybody, and food; and a dry uniform, rather small, for +Henri. Marie wept over her soup, and ran every few moments to the door +to see if he was still there. She had kissed him on both cheeks when +he came in, and showed signs, every now and then, of doing it again. + +Sara Lee did her bandaging as usual, but with shining eyes. And soon +after Henri's arrival a dispatch rider set off post haste with certain +papers and maps, hurriedly written and drawn. Henri had not only +returned, he had brought back information of great value to all the +Allied armies. + +So Sara Lee bandaged, and in the little room across the way, where no +longer Harvey's photograph sat on the mantel, Henri told his story to +the officers - of his imprisonment in the German prison at Crefeld; of +his finding Jean there, weeks later when he was convalescing from +typhoid; of their escape and long wandering; of Jean's getting into +Holland, whence he would return by way of England. Of his own business, +of what he had done behind the lines after Jean had gone, he said +nothing. But his listeners knew and understood. + +But his dispatches off, his story briefly told, Henri wandered out among +the men again. He was very happy. He had never thought to be so happy. +He felt the touch on his sleeves of hard brown, not overclean hands, +infinitely tender and caressing; and over there, as though she had never +gone, was Sara Lee, slightly flushed and very radiant. + +And as though he also had never gone away, Henri pushed into the salle +a manger and stood before her smiling. + +"You bandage well, mademoiselle," he said gayly. "But I? I bandage +better! See now, a turn here, and it is done! Does it hurt, Paul?" + +The man in the dressing chair squirmed and grinned sheepishly. + +"The iodine," he explained. "It is painful." + +"Then I shall ask you a question, and you will forget the iodine. Why +is a dead German like the tail of a pig?" + +Paul failed. The room failed. Even Colonel Lilias confessed himself at +fault. + +"Because it is the end of the swine," explained Henri, and looked about +him triumphantly. A gust of laughter spread through the room and even +to the kitchen. A door banged. Henri upset a chair. There was noise +again, and gayety in the little house of mercy. And much happiness. + +And there I think we may leave them all - Henri and Sara Lee; and Jean +of the one eye and the faithful heart; and Marie, with her kettles; and +even Rene, who still in some strange way belonged to the little house, +as though it were something too precious to abandon. + +The amazing interlude had become the play itself. Never again for Sara +Lee would the lights go up in front, and Henri with his adoring eyes +and open arms fade into the shadows. + +The drama of the war plays on. The Great Playwright sees fit, now and +then, to take away some well-beloved players. New faces appear and +disappear. The music is the thunder of many guns. Henri still plays +his big part, Sara Lee her little one. Yet who shall say, in the end, +which one has done the better? There are new and ever new standards, +but love remains the chief. And love is Sara Lee's one quality - love +of her kind, of tired men and weary, the love that shall one day knit +this broken world together. And love of one man. + +On weary nights, when Henri is again lost in the shadows, Sara Lee, +her work done, the men gone, sits in her little house of mercy and +waits. The stars on clear evenings shine down on the roofless buildings, +on the rubbish that was once the mill, on the ruined poplar trees, and +on the small acre of peace where tiny crosses mark the long sleep of +weary soldiers. + +And sometimes, though she knows it now by heart, she reads aloud that +letter of Henri's to her. It comforts her. It is a promise. + +"If that is to be, then think of me, somewhere, perhaps with Rene by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps, even beyond the stars, they have need of a little +house of mercy. And God knows, wherever I am, I shall have need of you." + + + + + +End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of The Amazing Interlude + diff --git a/old/mzgnt10.zip b/old/mzgnt10.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..c7317f2 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/mzgnt10.zip diff --git a/old/mzgnt11.txt b/old/mzgnt11.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..37a388c --- /dev/null +++ b/old/mzgnt11.txt @@ -0,0 +1,8936 @@ +Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart +#5 in our series by Mary Roberts Rinehart + +Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the +copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing +this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook. + +This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project +Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the +header without written permission. + +Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the +eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is +important information about your specific rights and restrictions in +how the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a +donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + + +Title: The Amazing Interlude + +Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart + +Release Date: January, 1999 [EBook #1590] +[This file was last updated on December 10, 2002] + +Edition: 11 + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + + + + +This Etext was produced by another of our anonymous volnteers: +to whom I give great thanks! Michael S. Hart, Project Gutenberg + + + + + +THE AMAZING INTERLUDE + +by Mary Roberts Rinehart + + + + +I + + +The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for +most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the +same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits +through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately +the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is +the background for the moving figures of the play. + +So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of +permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there +should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected +none. + +But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours: +lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity, +reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes +place. Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on--a new mise +en scene, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left +knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy--Sara Lee became a fairy, of a +sort--and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And +then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the +lady is back by the fire--but with a memory. + +This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory--and of something more. + +The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing her part in the +setting of a city in Pennsylvania. An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It +is only fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither quality. She +was far from ugly, and very, very far from rich. She had started her +part with a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one they had +gone away into the wings and had not come back. At nineteen she was +alone knitting by the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop was +of painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for its moment, was the +forest of adventure. A strange forest, too--one that Sara Lee would +not have recognised as a forest. And a prince of course--but a prince +as strange and mysterious as the forest. + +The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented. If it was +resignation rather than content, no one but Sara Lee knew the difference. +Knitting, too; but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid, knitting an +afghan against an interesting event which involved a friend of hers. + +Sara Lee rather deplored the event--in her own mind, of course, for in +her small circle young unmarried women accepted the major events of life +without question, and certainly without conversation. She never, for +instance, allowed her Uncle James, with whom she lived, to see her +working at the afghan; and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be a +sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions. + +Sara Lee's days, up to the twentieth of December, 1914, had been much +alike. In the mornings she straightened up her room, which she had +copied from one in a woman's magazine, with the result that it gave +somehow the impression of a baby's bassinet, being largely dotted Swiss +and ribbon. Yet in a way it was a perfect setting for Sara Lee herself. +It was fresh and virginal, and very, very neat and white. A resigned +little room, like Sara Lee, resigned to being tucked away in a corner +and to having no particular outlook. Peaceful, too. + +Sometimes in the morning between straightening her room and going to the +market for Aunt Harriet, Sara Lee looked at a newspaper. So she knew +there was a war. She read the headings, and when the matter came up for +mention at the little afternoon bridge club, as it did now and then after +the prizes were distributed, she always said "Isn't it horrible!" and +changed the subject. + +On the night of the nineteenth of December Sara Lee had read her chapter +in the Bible--she read it through once each year--and had braided down +her hair, which was as smooth and shining and lovely as Sara Lee herself, +and had raised her window for the night when Aunt Harriet came in. Sara +Lee did not know, at first, that she had a visitor. She stood looking +out toward the east, until Aunt Harriet touched her on the arm. + +"What in the world!" said Aunt Harriet. "A body would suppose it was +August." + +"I was just thinking," said Sara Lee. + +"You'd better do your thinking in bed. Jump in and I'll put out your +light." + +So Sara Lee got into her white bed with the dotted Swiss valance, and +drew the covers to her chin, and looked a scant sixteen. Aunt Harriet, +who was an unsentimental woman, childless and diffident, found her +suddenly very appealing there in her smooth bed, and did an unexpected +thing. She kissed her. Then feeling extremely uncomfortable she put +out the light and went to the door. There she paused. + +"Thinking!" she said. "What about, Sara Lee?" + +Perhaps it was because the light was out that Sara Lee became articulate. +Perhaps it was because things that had been forming in her young mind for +weeks had at last crystallized into words. Perhaps it was because of a +picture she had happened on that day, of a boy lying wounded somewhere +on a battlefield and calling "Mother!" + +"About--over there," she said rather hesitatingly. "And about Anna." + +"Over there?" + +"The war," said Sara Lee. "I was just thinking about all those women +over there--like Anna, you know. They--they had babies, and got +everything ready for them. And then the babies grew up, and they're all +getting killed." + +"It's horrible," said Aunt Harriet. "Do you want another blanket? It's +cold to-night." + +Sara Lee did not wish another blanket. + +"I'm a little worried about your Uncle James," said Aunt Harriet, at the +door. "He's got indigestion. I think I'll make him a mustard plaster." + +She prepared to go out then, but Sara Lee spoke from her white bed. + +"Aunt Harriet," she said, "I don't think I'll ever get married." + +"I said that too, once," said Aunt Harriet complacently. "What's got +into your head now?" + +"I don't know," Sara Lee replied vaguely. "I just--What's the use?" + +Aunt Harriet was conscious of a hazy impression of indelicacy. Coming +from Sara Lee it was startling and revolutionary. In Aunt Harriet's +world young women did not question their duty, which was to marry, +preferably some one in the neighborhood, and bear children, who would be +wheeled about that same neighborhood in perambulators and who would +ultimately grow up and look after themselves. + +"The use?" she asked tartly. + +"Of having babies, and getting to care about them, and then--There will +always be wars, won't there?" + +"You turn over and go to sleep," counseled Aunt Harriet. "And stop +looking twenty years or more ahead." She hesitated. "You haven't +quarreled with Harvey, have you?" + +Sara Lee turned over obediently. + +"No. It's not that," she said. And the door closed. + +Perhaps, had she ever had time during the crowded months that followed, +Sara Lee would have dated certain things from that cold frosty night in +December when she began to question things. For after all that was what +it came to. She did not revolt. She questioned. + +She lay in her white bed and looked at things for the first time. The +sky had seemed low that night. Things were nearer. The horizon was +close. And beyond that peaceful horizon, to the east, something was +going on that could not be ignored. Men were dying. Killing and dying. +Men who had been waited for as Anna watched for her child. + +Downstairs she could hear Aunt Harriet moving about. The street was +quiet, until a crowd of young people--she knew them by their voices-- +went by, laughing. + +"It's horrible," said Sara Lee to herself. There was a change in her, +but she was still inarticulate. Somewhere in her mind, but not +formulated, was the feeling that she was too comfortable. Her peace was +a cheap peace, bought at no price. Her last waking determination was to +finish the afghan quickly and to knit for the men at the war. + +Uncle James was ill the next morning. Sara Lee went for the doctor, but +Anna's hour had come and he was with her. Late in the afternoon he came, +however looking a bit gray round the mouth with fatigue, but triumphant. +He had on these occasions always a sense of victory; even, in a way, a +feeling of being part of a great purpose. He talked at such times of the +race, as one may who is doing his best by it. + +"Well," he said when Sara Lee opened the door, "it's a boy. Eight +pounds. Going to be red-headed, too." He chuckled. + +"A boy!" said Sara Lee. "I--don't you bring any girl babies any more?" + +The doctor put down his hat and glanced at her. + +"Wanted a girl, to be named for you?" + +"No. It's not that. It's only--" She checked herself. He wouldn't +understand. The race required girl babies. "I've put a blue bow on my +afghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs. + +Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as +Sara Lee's days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it, +ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul--for its bright +curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining brasses and growing +plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to +ache, too, for her friends--their small engrossing cares, their kindly +interest, their familiar faces. + +Time was to come, too, when she came back, not to the little house, it +is true, but to her friends, to Anna and the others. But they had not +grown and Sara Lee had. And that is the story. + +Uncle James died the next day. One moment he was there, an uneasy +figure, under the tulip quilt, and the next he had gone away entirely, +leaving a terrible quiet behind him. He had been the center of the +little house, a big and cheery and not over-orderly center. Followed +his going not only quiet, but a wretched tidiness. There was nothing +for Sara Lee to do but to think. + +And, in the way of mourning women, things that Uncle James had said +which had passed unheeded came back to her. One of them was when he +had proposed to adopt a Belgian child, and Aunt Harriet had offered +horrified protest. + +"All right," he had said. "Of course, if you feel that way about +it--! But I feel kind of mean, sometimes, sitting here doing nothing +when there's such a lot to be done." + +Then he had gone for a walk and had come back cheerful enough but rather +quiet. + +There was that other time, too, when the German Army was hurling itself, +wave after wave, across the Yser--only of course Sara Lee knew nothing +of the Yser then--and when it seemed as though the attenuated Allied +line must surely crack and give. He had said then that if he were only +twenty years younger he would go across and help. + +"And what about me?" Aunt Harriet had asked. "But I suppose I wouldn't +matter." + +"You could go to Jennie's, couldn't you?" + +There had followed one of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt +Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle +James' becoming twenty years younger and going away. + +And now Uncle James had taken on the wings of the morning and was indeed +gone away. And again it became a question of Jennie's. Aunt Harriet, +rather dazed at first, took to arguing it pro and con. + +"Of course she has room for me," she would say in her thin voice. +"There's that little room that was Edgar's. There's nobody in it now. +But there's only room for a single bed, Sara Lee." + +Sara Lee was knitting socks now, all a trifle tight as to heel. "I +know," she would say. "I'll get along. Don't you worry about me." + +Always these talks ended on a note of exasperation for Aunt Harriet. For +Sara Lee's statement that she could manage would draw forth a plaintive +burst from the older woman. + +"If only you'd marry Harvey," she would say. "I don't know what's come +over you. You used to like him well enough." + +"I still like him." + +"I've seen you jump when the telephone bell rang. Your Uncle James often +spoke about it. He noticed more than most people thought." She followed +Sara Lee's eyes down the street to where Anna was wheeling her baby +slowly up and down. Even from that distance Sara Lee could see the bit +of pink which was the bow on her afghan. "I believe you're afraid." + +"Afraid?" + +"Of having children," accused Aunt Harriet fretfully. + +Sara Lee colored. + +"Perhaps I am," she said; "but not the sort of thing you think. I just +don't see the use of it, that's all. Aunt Harriet, how long does it +take to become a hospital nurse?" + +"Mabel Andrews was three years. It spoiled her looks too. She used to +be a right pretty girl." + +"Three years," Sara Lee reflected. "By that time--" + +The house was very quiet and still those days. There was an interlude +of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet +alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things. +At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the +Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading +like wildfire. There were arguments and disagreements. A girl named +Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island +of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval. Mabel Andrews came once +to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross +dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging. Forerunner of the many +first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable +by one thing she said. + +"You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things," she stated +in her brisk voice. "One of our internes is over there, and he says +we'll be in it before spring." + +After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm. + +"Are you going?" she asked. + +"Leaving day after to-morrow. Why?" + +"I--couldn't I be useful over there?" + +Mabel smiled rather grimly. "What can you do?" + +"I can cook." + +"Only men cooks, my dear. What else?" + +"I could clean up, couldn't I? There must be something. I'd do +anything I could. Don't they have people to wash dishes and--all that?" + +Mabel was on doubtful ground there. She knew of a woman who had been +permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and +buying her own tires and gasoline. + +"She carries supplies to small hospitals in out-of-the-way places," she +said. "But I don't suppose you can do that, Sara Lee, can you?" + +However, she gave Sara Lee a New York address, and Sara Lee wrote and +offered herself. She said nothing to Aunt Harriet, who had by that time +elected to take Edgar's room at Cousin Jennie's and was putting Uncle +James' clothes in tearful order to send to Belgium. After a time she +received a reply. + +"We have put your name on our list of volunteers," said the letter, +"but of course you understand that only trained workers are needed now. +France and England are full of untrained women who are eager to help." + +It was that night that Sara Lee became engaged to Harvey. + +Sara Lee's attitude toward Harvey was one that she never tried to analyze. +When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This +was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash +about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile, +and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust +forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,--gave him a sort of tense +eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph +Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact he was a bond +salesman. + +So during the daytime Sara Lee looked--at intervals--at the photograph, +and got that feel of drive and force. And in the evenings Harvey came, +and she lost it. For, outside of a frame, he became a rather sturdy +figure, of no romance, but of a comforting solidity. A kindly young man, +with a rather wide face and hands disfigured as to fingers by much early +baseball. He had heavy shoulders, the sort a girl might rely on to +carry many burdens. A younger and tidier Uncle James, indeed--the same +cheery manner, the same robust integrity, and the same small ambition. + +To earn enough to keep those dependent on him, and to do it fairly; to +tell the truth and wear clean linen and not run into debt; and to marry +Sara Lee and love and cherish her all his life--this was Harvey. A +plain and likable man, a lover and husband to be sure of. But-- + +He came that night to see Sara Lee. There was nothing unusual about +that. He came every night. But he came that night full of determination. +That was not unusual, either, but it had not carried him far. He had no +idea that his picture was romantic. He would have demanded it back had +he so much as suspected it. He wore his hair in a pompadour because +of the prosaic fact that he had a cow-lick. He was very humble about +himself, and Sara Lee was to him as wonderful as his picture was to her. + +Sara Lee was in the parlor, waiting for him. The one electric lamp was +lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of +reflected light. There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a +white fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The +Encyclopaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the +wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by +the fire. It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as +no doubt Harvey would picture for his own home. He had of course never +seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom. + +Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him. When he had taken off his +ulster and his overshoes--he had been raised by women--and came in, +she was standing by the fire. + +"Raining," he said. "It's getting colder. May be snow before morning." + +Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat. +She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her +quietest moments there was that about her--a sort of repressed +eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that +there were times when she had a "flighty" look. + +And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped +Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his +arms out. + +"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!" + +"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically. + +"I don't know," he muttered. "You--sometimes you look as though--" +Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good +to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek +against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear." + +A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has +stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel. He +was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures flashed through +her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One was of +Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby. +The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield +and crying "Mother!" + +Two sorts of maternity--one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, +but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other +vicarious, of all the world. + +"Don't you love me--that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers. + +"I don't know." + +"You don't know!" + +It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing +at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up, +saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust +forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair +that marked him all man, and virile man. + +She slipped her hand into his. + +"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the +complete surrender of a child. + +He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where +she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his +simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear, +and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion +he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he +read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers. + +To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's +devotion was something mote, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara +Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit, +small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she +was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes, +she had never even dreamed. + +Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and +behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing, +unsuspected, the mise en scene. + + + + II + + +About the middle of January Mabel Andrews wrote to Sara Lee from +France, where she was already installed in a hospital at Calais. + +The evening before the letter came Harvey had brought round the +engagement ring. He had made a little money in war stocks, and into +the ring he had put every dollar of his profits--and a great love, and +gentleness, and hopes which he did not formulate even to himself. + +It was a solitaire diamond, conventionally set, and larger, far larger, +than the modest little stone on which Harvey had been casting anxious +glances for months. + +"Do you like it, honey?" he asked anxiously. + +Sara Lee looked at it on her finger. + +"It is lovely! It--it's terrible!" said poor Sara Lee, and cried on his +shoulder. + +Harvey was not subtle. He had never even heard of Mabel Andrews, and +he had a tendency to restrict his war reading to the quarter column in +the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News." + +What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry? Which +is what Mabel wrote about. + +"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and +something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but +just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty +of it. But here--yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy. +He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or +coffee." + +It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a +long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust +out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no +materiel of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army. France had +her own problems--her army, non-productive industrially, and the great +and constantly growing British forces quartered there, paying for what +they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of the starvation of +German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know and may never know is of +the struggle during those early days to feed the heroic Belgian Army in +their wet and almost untenable trenches. + +Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained +to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing? +Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew +that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny +living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as pointed +with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over there +Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and--put on her engagement ring. + +Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned adoringly +to her, Sara Lee formulated a question: + +"Don't you sometimes feel as though you'd like to go to France and fight?" + +"What for?" + +"Well, they need men, don't they?" + +"I guess they don't need me, honey. I'd be the dickens of a lot of use! +Never fired a gun in my life." + +"You could learn. It isn't hard." + +Harvey sat upright and stared at her. + +"Oh, if you want me to go--" he said, and waited. + +Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger. + +"Nobody wants anybody to go," she said not very elegantly. "I'd just +--I'd rather like to think you wanted to go." + +That was almost too subtle for Harvey. Something about him was rather +reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was determined not to +go to church. + +"It's not our fight," he said. "And as far as that goes, I'm not so +sure there isn't right on both sides. Or wrong. Most likely wrong. +I'd look fine going over there to help the Allies, and then making up my +mind it was the British who'd spilled the beans. Now let's talk about +something interesting--for instance, how much we love each other." + +It was always "we" with Harvey. In his simple creed if a girl accepted +a man and let him kiss her and wore his ring it was a reciprocal love +affair. It never occurred to him that sometimes as the evening dragged +toward a close Sara Lee was just a bit weary of his arms, and that she +sought, after he had gone, the haven of her little white room, and closed +the door, and had to look rather a long time at his photograph before +she was in a properly loving mood again. + +But that night after his prolonged leave-taking Sara Lee went upstairs +to her room and faced the situation. + +She was going to marry Harvey. She was committed to that. And she loved +him; not as he cared, perhaps, but he was a very definite part of her +life. Once or twice when he had been detained by business she had missed +him, had put in a lonely and most unhappy evening. + +Sara Lee had known comparatively few men. In that small and simple +circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two +inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the +usual give and take of more sophisticated circles. Boys and girls paired +off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was +comparatively little shifting. There were few free lances among the men, +and none among the girls. When she was seventeen Harvey had made it +known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing. And for +two years he had without intentional selfishness kept Sara Lee for +himself. + +That was how matters stood that January night when Sara Lee went +upstairs after Harvey had gone and read Mabel's letter, with Harvey's +photograph turned to the wall. Under her calm exterior a little flame +of rebellion was burning in her. Harvey's perpetual "we," his attitude +toward the war, and Mabel's letter, with what it opened before her, had +set the match to something in Sara Lee she did not recognize--a strain +of the adventurer, a throw-back to some wandering ancestor perhaps. But +more than anything it had set fire to the something maternal that is in +all good women. + +Yet, had Aunt Harriet not come in just then, the flame might have died. +And had it died a certain small page of the history of this war would +never have been written. + +Aunt Harriet came in hesitatingly. She wore a black wrapper, and her +face, with her hair drawn back for the night, looked tight and old. + +"Harvey gone?" she asked. + +"Yes." + +"I thought I'd better come in. There's something--I can tell you in +the morning if you're tired." + +"I'm not tired," said Sara Lee. + +Aunt Harriet sat down miserably on a chair. + +"I've had a letter from Jennie," she stated. "The girl's gone, and the +children have whooping cough. She'd like me to come right away." + +"To do the maid's work!" said Sara Lee indignantly. "You mustn't do it, +that's all! She can get somebody." + +But Aunt Harriet was firm. She was not a fair-weather friend, and since +Jennie was good enough to offer her a home she felt she ought to go at +once. + +"You'll have to get married right away," she finished. "Goodness knows +it's time enough! For two years Harvey has been barking like a watchdog +in front of the house and keeping every other young man away." + +Sara Lee smiled. + +"He's only been lying on the doormat, Aunt Harriet," she observed. "I +don't believe he knows how to bark." + +"Oh, he's mild enough. He may change after marriage. Some do. But," +she added hastily, "he'll be a good husband. He's that sort." + +Suddenly something that had been taking shape in Sara Lee's small head, +quite unknown to her, developed identity and speech. + +"But I'm not going to marry him just yet," she said. + +Aunt Harriet's eyes fell on the photograph with its face to the wall, +and she started. + +"You haven't quarreled with him, have you?" + +"No, of course not! I have something else I want to do first. That's +all. Aunt Harriet, I want to go to France." + +Aunt Harriet began to tremble, and Sara Lee went over and put her young +arms about her. + +"Don't look like that," she said. "It's only for a little while. I've +got to go. I just have to, that's all!" + +"Go how?" demanded Aunt Harriet. + +"I don't know. I'll find some way. I've had a letter from Mabel. +Things are awful over there." + +"And how will you help them?" Her face worked nervously. "Is it going +to help for you to be shot? Or carried off by the Germans?" The +atrocity stories were all that Aunt Harriet knew of the war, and all +she could think of now. "You'll come back with your hands cut off." + +Sara Lee straightened and looked out where between the white curtains +the spire of the Methodist Church marked the east. + +"I'm going," she said. And she stood there, already poised for flight. + +There was no sleep in the little house that night. Sara Lee could hear +the older woman moving about in her lonely bed, where the spring still +sagged from Uncle James' heavy form, and at last she went in and crept +in beside her. Toward morning Aunt Harriet slept, with the girl's arm +across her; and then Sara Lee went back to her room and tried to plan. + +She had a little money, and she had heard that living was cheap abroad. +She could get across then, and perhaps keep herself. But she must do +more than that, to justify her going. She must get money, and then +decide how the money was to be spent. If she could only talk it over +with Uncle James! Or, with Harvey. Harvey knew about business and money. + +But she dared not go to Harvey. She was terribly frightened when she +even thought of him. There was no hope of making him understand; and +no chance of reasoning with him, because, to be frank, she had no +reasons. She had only instinct--instinct and a great tenderness toward +suffering. No, obviously Harvey must not know until everything was +arranged. + +That morning the Methodist Church packed a barrel for the Belgians. +There was a real rite of placing in it Mrs. Augustus Gregory's old +sealskin coat, now a light brown and badly worn, but for years the only +one in the neighborhood. Various familiar articles appeared, to be +thrust into darkness, only to emerge in surroundings never dreamed of +in their better days--the little Howard boy's first trouser suit; the +clothing of a baby that had never lived; big Joe Hemmingway's dress suit, +the one he was married in and now too small for him. And here and there +things that could ill be spared, brought in and offered with resolute +cheerfulness. + +Sara Lee brought some of Uncle James' things, and was at once set to +work. The women there called Sara Lee capable, but it was to take other +surroundings to bring out her real efficiency. + +And it was when bending over a barrel, while round her went on that +pitying talk of women about a great calamity, that Sara Lee got her +great idea; and later on she made the only speech of her life. + +That evening Harvey went home in a quiet glow of happiness. He had had +a good day. And he had heard of a little house that would exactly suit +Sara Lee and him. He did not notice his sister's silence when he spoke +about it. He was absorbed, manlike, in his plans. + +"The Leete house," he said in answer to her perfunctory question. "Will +Leete has lost his mind and volunteered for the ambulance service in +France. Mrs. Leete is going to her mother's." + +"Maybe he feels it's his duty. He can drive a car, and they have no +children." + +"Duty nothing!" He seemed almost unduly irritated. "He's tired of the +commission business, that's all. Y'ought to have heard the fellows in +the office. Anyhow, they want to sub-let the house, and I'm going to +take Sara Lee there to-night." + +His sister looked at him, and there was in her face something of the +expression of the women that day as they packed the barrel. But she +said nothing until he was leaving the house that night. Then she put +a hand on his arm. She was a weary little woman, older than Harvey, +and tired with many children. She had been gathering up small overshoes +in the hall and he had stopped to help her. + +"You know, Harvey, Sara Lee's not--I always think she's different, +somehow." + +"Well, I guess yes! There's nobody like her." + +"You can't bully her, you know." + +Harvey stared at her with honestly perplexed eyes. + +"Bully!" he said. "What on earth makes you say that?" + +Then he laughed. + +"Don't you worry, Belle," he said. "I know I'm a fierce and domineering +person, but if there's any bullying I know who'll do it." + +"She's not like the other girls you know," she reiterated rather +helplessly. + +"Sure she's not! But she's enough like them to need a house to live in. +And if she isn't crazy about the Leete place I'll eat it." + +He banged out cheerfully, whistling as he went down the street. He +stopped whistling, however, at Sara Lee's door. The neighborhood +preserved certain traditions as to a house of mourning. It lowered +its voice in passing and made its calls of condolence in dark clothes +and a general air of gloom. Pianos near by were played only with the +windows closed, and even the milkman leaving his bottles walked on +tiptoe and presented his monthly bill solemnly. + +So Harvey stopped whistling, rang the bell apologetically, and--faced a +new and vivid Sara Lee, flushed and with shining eyes, but woefully +frightened. + +She told him almost at once. He had only reached the dining room of +the Leete house, which he was explaining had a white wainscoting when +she interrupted him. The ladies of the Methodist Church were going to +collect a certain amount each month to support a soup kitchen as near +the Front as possible. + +"Good work!" said Harvey heartily. "I suppose they do get hungry, poor +devils. Now about the dining room--" + +"Harvey dear," Sara Lee broke in, "I've not finished. I--I'm going +over to run it." + +"You are not!" + +"But I am! It's all arranged. It's my plan. They've all wanted to do +something besides giving clothes. They send barrels, and they never +hear from them again, and it's hard to keep interested. But with me +there, writing home and telling them, 'To-day we served soup to this +man, and that man, perhaps wounded.' And--and that sort of thing-- +don't you see how interested every one will be? Mrs. Gregory has +promised twenty-five dollars a month, and--" + +"You're not going," said Harvey in a flat tone. "That's all. Don't +talk to me about it." + +Sara Lee flushed deeper and started again, but rather hopelessly. +There was no converting a man who would not argue or reason, who based +everything on flat refusal. + +"But somebody must go," she said with a tightening of her voice. +"Here's Mabel Andrews' letter. Read it and you will understand." + +"I don't want to read it." + +Nevertheless he took it and read it. He read slowly. He did nothing +quickly except assert his masculine domination. He had all the faults +of his virtues; he was as slow as he was sure, as unimaginative as he +was faithful. + +He read it and gave it back to her. + +"I don't think you mean it," he said. "I give you credit for too much +sense. Maybe some one is needed over there. I guess things are pretty +bad. But why should you make it your affair? There are about a million +women in this country that haven't got anything else to do. Let them go." + +"Some of them will. But they're afraid, mostly." + +"Afraid! My God, I should think they would be afraid! And you're asking +me to let you go into danger, to put off our wedding while you wander +about over there with a million men and no women and--" + +"You're wrong, Harvey dear," said Sara Lee in a low voice. "I am not +asking you at all. I am telling you that I am going." + +Sara Lee's leaving made an enormous stir in her small community. Opinion +was divided. She was right according to some; she was mad according to +others. The women of the Methodist Church, finding a real field of +activity, stood behind her solidly. Guaranties of funds came in in a +steady flow, though the amounts were small; and, on the word going about +that she was to start a soup kitchen for the wounded, housewives sent +in directions for making their most cherished soups. + +Sara Lee, going to a land where the meat was mostly horse and where +vegetables were scarce and limited to potatoes, Brussels sprouts and +cabbage, found herself the possessor of recipes for making such sick-room +dainties as mushroom soup, cream of asparagus, clam broth with whipped +cream, and from Mrs. Gregory, the wealthy woman of the church--green +turtle and consomme. + +She was very busy and rather sad. She was helping Aunt Harriet to close +the house and getting her small wardrobe in order. And once a day she +went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a fierce and +kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes like this: Le +livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenetre, and so on. By the end of ten +days she could say: "La rose sent-elle bon?" + +Considering that Harvey came every night and ran the gamut of the +emotions, from pleading and expostulation at eight o'clock to black +fury at ten, when he banged out of the house, Sara Lee was amazingly +calm. If she had moments of weakness, when the call from overseas was +less insistent than the call for peace and protection--if the nightly +drawn picture of the Leete house, with tile mantels and a white bathroom, +sometimes obtruded itself as against her approaching homelessness, Sara +Lee made no sign. + +She had her photograph taken for her passport, and when Harvey refused +one she sent it to him by mail, with the word "Please" in the corner. +Harvey groaned over it, and got it out at night and scolded it wildly; +and then slept with it under his pillows, when he slept at all. + +Not Sara Lee, and certainly not Harvey, knew what was calling her. And +even later, when waves of homesickness racked her with wild remorse, she +knew that she had had to go and that she could not return until she had +done the thing for which she had been sent, whatever that might be. + + + + III + + +The first thing that struck Sara Lee was the way she was saying her +nightly prayers in all sorts of odd places. In trains and in hotels and, +after sufficient interval, in the steamer. She prayed under these novel +circumstances to be made a better girl, and to do a lot of good over +there, and to be forgiven for hurting Harvey. She did this every night, +and then got into her narrow bed and studied French nouns--because she +had decided that there was no time for verbs--and numbers, which put +her to sleep. + +"Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq," Sara Lee would begin, and go on, rocking +gently in her berth as the steamer rolled, "Vingt, vingt-et-un, +vingt-deux, trente, trente--et--un--" Her voice would die away. The +book on the floor and Harvey's picture on the tiny table, Sara Lee would +sleep. And as the ship trembled the light over her head would shine on +Harvey's ring, and it glistened like a tear. + +One thing surprised her as she gradually met some of her fellow +passengers. She was not alone on her errand. Others there were on +board, young and old women, and men, too, who had felt the call of mercy +and were going, as ignorant as she, to help. As ignorant, but not so +friendless. Most of them were accredited somewhere. They had definite +objectives. But what was more alarming--they talked in big figures. +Great organizations were behind them. She heard of the rehabilitation +of Belgium, and portable hospitals, and millions of dollars, and Red +Cross trains. + +Not once did Sara Lee hear of anything so humble as a soup kitchen. The +war was a vast thing, they would observe. It could only be touched by +great organizations. Individual effort was negligible. + +Once she took her courage in her hands. + +"But I should think," she said, "that even great organizations depend on +the--on individual efforts." + +The portable hospital woman turned to her patronizingly. + +"Certainly, my dear," she said. "But coordinated--coordinated." + +It is hard to say just when the lights went down on Sara Lee's quiet +stage and the interlude began. Not on the steamer, for after three days +of discouragement and good weather they struck a storm; and Sara Lee's +fine frenzy died for a time, of nausea. She did not appear again until +the boat entered the Mersey, a pale and shaken angel of mercy, not at +all sure of her wings, and most terribly homesick. + +That night Sara Lee made a friend, one that Harvey would have approved +of, an elderly Englishman named Travers. He was standing by the rail +in the rain looking out at the blinking signal lights on both sides of +the river. The ship for the first time had abandoned its policy of +darkness and the decks were bathed in light. + +Overhead the yardarm blinkers were signaling, and directly over Sara +Lee's head a great white searchlight swept the water ahead. The wind +was blowing a gale, and the red and green lights of the pilot boat swung +in great arcs that seemed to touch the waves on either side. + +Sara Lee stood beside Mr. Travers, for companionship only. He had +preserved a typically British aloofness during the voyage, and he had +never spoken to her. But there was something forlorn in Sara Lee that +night as she clutched her hat with both hands and stared out at the +shore lights. And if he had been silent during the voyage he had not +been deaf. So he knew why almost every woman on the ship was making +the voyage; but he knew nothing about Sara Lee. + +"Bad night," said Mr. Travers. + +"I was wondering what they are trying to do with that little boat." + +Mr. Travers concealed the surprise of a man who was making his +seventy-second voyage. + +"That's the pilot boat," he explained. "We are picking up a pilot." + +"But," marveled Sara Lee rather breathlessly, "have we come all the way +without any pilot?" + +He explained that to her, and showed her a few moments later how the +pilot came with incredible rapidity up the swaying rope ladder and over +the side. + +To be honest, he had been watching for the pilot boat, not to see what +to Sara Lee was the thrilling progress of the pilot up the ladder, but +to get the newspapers he would bring on with him. It is perhaps +explanatory of the way things went for Sara Lee from that time on that +he quite forgot his newspapers. + +The chairs were gone from the decks, preparatory to the morning landing, +so they walked about and Sara Lee at last told him her story--the +ladies of the Methodist Church, and the one hundred dollars a month she +was to have, outside of her traveling expenses, to found and keep going +a soup kitchen behind the lines. + +"A hundred dollars a month," he said. "That's twenty pounds. Humph! +Good God!" + +But this last was under his breath. + +Then she told him of Mabel Andrews' letter, and at last read it to him. +He listened attentively. "Of course," she said when she had put the +letter back into her bag, "I can't feed a lot, even with soup. But if I +only help a few, it's worth doing, isn't it?" + +"Very much worth doing," he said gravely. "I suppose you are not, by +any chance, going to write a weekly article for one of your newspapers +about what you are doing?" + +"I hadn't thought of it. Do you think I should?" + +Quite unexpectedly Mr. Travers patted her shoulder. + +"My dear child," he said, "now and then I find somebody who helps to +revive my faith in human nature. Thank you." + +Sara Lee did not understand. The touch on the shoulder had made her +think suddenly of Uncle James, and her chin quivered. + +"I'm just a little frightened," she said in a small voice. + +"Twenty pounds!" repeated Mr. Travers to himself. "Twenty pounds!" +And aloud: "Of course you speak French?" + +"Very little. I've had six lessons, and I can count--some." + +The sense of unreality which the twenty pounds had roused in Mr. Travers' +cautious British mind grew. No money, no French, no objective, just a +great human desire to be useful in her own small way--this was a new type +to him. What a sporting chance this frail bit of a girl was taking! And +he noticed now something that had escaped him before--a dauntlessness, +a courage of the spirit rather than of the body, that was in the very +poise of her head. + +"I'm not afraid about the language," she was saying. "I have a phrase +book. And a hungry man, maybe sick or wounded, can understand a bowl of +soup in any language, I should think. And I can cook!" + +It was a perplexed and thoughtful Mr. Travers who sipped his +Scotch-and-soda in the smoking room before retiring, he took the problem +to bed with him and woke up in the night saying: "Twenty pounds! +Good God!" + +In the morning they left the ship. He found Sara Lee among the K's, +waiting to have her passport examined, and asked her where she was +stopping in London. She had read somewhere of Claridge's--in a novel +probably. + +"I shouldn't advise Claridge's," he said, reflecting rather grimly on +the charges of that very exclusive hotel. "Suppose you let me make a +suggestion." + +So he wrote out the name of a fine old English house on Trafalgar +Square, where she could stay until she went to France. There would be +the matter of a passport to cross the Channel. It might take a day or +two. Perhaps he could help her. He would give himself the pleasure of +calling on her very soon. + +Sara Lee got on the train and rode up to London. She said to herself +over and over: "This is England. I am really in England." But it did +not remove the sense of unreality. Even the English grass, bright green +in midwinter, only added to the sense of unreality. + +She tried, sitting in the strange train with its small compartments, to +think of Harvey. She looked at her ring and tried to recall some of +the tender things he had said to her. But Harvey eluded her. She could +not hear his voice. And when she tried to see him it was Harvey of the +wide face and the angry eyes of the last days that she saw. + +Morley's comforted her. The man at the door had been there for forty +years, and was beyond surprise. He had her story in twenty-four hours, +and in forty-eight he was her slave. The elderly chambermaid mothered +her, and failed to report that Sara Lee was doing a small washing in +her room and had pasted handkerchiefs over the ancient walnut of her +wardrobe. + +"Going over, are you?" she said. "Dear me, what courage you've got, +miss! They tell me things is horrible over there." + +"That's why I'm going," replied Sara Lee, and insisted on helping to +make up the bed. + +"It's easier when two do it," she said casually. + +Mr. Travers put in a fretful twenty-four hours before he came to see her. +He lunched at Brooks', and astounded an elderly member of the House by +putting her problem to him. + +"A young girl!" exclaimed the M. P. "Why, deuce take it, it's no place +for a young girl." + +"An American," explained Mr. Travers uncomfortably. "She's perfectly +able to look after herself." + +"Probably a correspondent in disguise. They'll go to any lengths." + +"She's not a correspondent." + +"Let her stay in Boulogne. There's work there in the hospitals." + +"She's not a nurse. She's a--well, she's a cook. Or so she says." + +The M. P. stared at Mr. Travers, and Mr. Travers stared back defiantly. + +"What in the name of God is she going to cook?" + +"Soup," said Mr. Travers in a voice of suppressed irritation. "She's +got a little money, and she wants to establish a soup kitchen behind +the Belgian trenches on a line of communication. I suppose," he +continued angrily, "even you will admit that the Belgian Army needs all +the soup it can get." + +"I don't approve of women near the lines." + +"Neither do I. But I'm exceedingly glad that a few of them have the +courage to go there." + +"What's she going to make soup out of?" + +"I'm not a cooking expert. But I know her and I fancy she'll manage." + +It ended by the M. P. agreeing to use his influence with the War Office +to get Sara Lee to France. He was very unwilling. The spy question was +looming large those days. Even the Red Cross had unwittingly spread its +protection over more than one German agent. The lines were being +drawn in. + +"I may possibly get her to France. I don't know, of course," he said in +that ungracious tone in which an Englishman often grants a favor which +he will go to any amount of trouble to do. "After that it's up to her." + +Mr. Travers reflected rather grimly that after that it was apparently up +to him. + +Sara Lee sat in her room at Morley's Hotel and looked out at the life of +London--policemen with chin straps; schoolboys in high silk hats and +Eton suits, the hats generally in disreputable condition; clerks dressed +as men at home dressed for Easter Sunday church; and men in uniforms. +Only a fair sprinkling of these last, in those early days. On the first +afternoon there was a military funeral. A regiment of Scots, in kilts, +came swinging down from the church of St. Martin in the Fields, tall and +wonderful men, grave and very sad. Behind them, on a gun carriage, was +the body of their officer, with the British flag over the casket and his +sword and cap on the top. + +Sara Lee cried bitterly. It was not until they had gone that she +remembered that Harvey had always called the Scots men in women's +petticoats. She felt a thrill of shame for him, and no amount of +looking at his picture seemed to help. + +Mr. Travers called the second afternoon and was received by August at +the door as an old friend. + +"She's waiting in there," he said. "Very nice young lady, sir. Very +kind to everybody." + +Mr. Travers found her by a window looking out. There was a recruiting +meeting going on in Trafalgar Square, the speakers standing on the +monument. Now and then there was a cheer, and some young fellow +sheepishly offered himself. Sara Lee was having a mad desire to go +over and offer herself too. Because, she reflected, she had been in +London almost two days, and she was as far from France as ever. Not +knowing, of course, that three months was a fair time for the slow +methods then in vogue. + +There was a young man in the room, but Sara Lee had not noticed him. +He was a tall, very blond young man, in a dark-blue Belgian uniform with +a quaint cap which allowed a gilt tassel to drop over his forehead. He +sat on a sofa, curling up the ends of a very small mustache, his legs, +in cavalry boots, crossed and extending a surprising distance beyond +the sofa. + +The lights were up now, beyond the back drop, the stage darkened. A +new scene with a vengeance, a scene laid in strange surroundings, with +men, whole men and wounded men and spying men--and Sara Lee and this +young Belgian, whose name was Henri and whose other name, because of +what he suffered and what he did, we may not know. + + + + IV + + +Henri sat on his sofa and watched Sara Lee. Also he shamelessly listened +to the conversation, not because he meant to be an eavesdropper but +because he liked Sara Lee's voice. He had expected a highly inflected +British voice, and instead here was something entirely different--that +is, Sara Lee's endeavor to reconcile the English "a" with her normal +western Pennsylvania pronunciation. She did it quite unintentionally, +but she had a good ear and it was difficult, for instance, to say +"rather" when Mr. Travers said "rawther." + +Henri had a good ear too. And the man he was waiting for did not come. +Also he had been to school in England and spoke English rather better +than most British. So he heard a conversation like this, the gaps being +what he lost: + +MR. TRAVERS: ---- to France, anyhow. After that ---- + +SARA LEE: Awfully sorry to be ---- But what shall I do if I do get over? +The chambermaid up-stairs ---- very difficult. + +MR. TRAVERS: The proper and sensible thing is ---- home. + +SARA LEE: To America? But I haven't done anything yet. + +Henri knew that she was an American. He also realized that she was on +the verge of tears. He glared at poor Mr. Travers, who was doing his +best, and lighted a French cigarette. + +"There must be some way," said Sara Lee. "If they need help--and I +have read you Mabel Andrews' letter--then I should think they'd be +glad to send me." + +"They would be, of course," he said. "But the fact is--there's been +some trouble about spies, and--" + +Henri's eyes narrowed. + +"Spies! And they think I'm a spy?" + +"My dear child," remonstrated Mr. Travers, slightly exasperated, +"they're not thinking about you at all. The War Office has never heard +of you. It's a general rule." + +Sara Lee was not placated. + +"Let them cable home and find out about me. I can give them references. +Why, all sorts of prominent people are sending me money. They must +trust me, or they wouldn't." + +There were no gaps for Henri now. Sara Lee did not care who heard her, +and even Mr. Travers had slightly raised his voice. Henri was divided +between a conviction that he ought to go away and a mad desire to join +in the conversation, greatly augmented when Sara Lee went to the window +and wiped her eyes. + +"If you only spoke French--" began Mr. Travers. + +Sara Lee looked over her shoulder. "But of course I do!" she said. +"And German and--and Yiddish, and all sorts of languages. Every spy +does." + +Henri smiled appreciatively. + +It might all have ended there very easily. Sara Lee might have fought +the War Office single-handed and won out, but it is extremely unlikely. +The chances at that moment were that she would spend endless days and +hours in anterooms, and tell her story and make her plea a hundred times. +And then--go back home to Harvey and the Leete house, and after a time, +like Mrs. Gregory, speak rather too often of "the time I went abroad." + +But Sara Lee was to go to France, and even further, to the fragment of +unconquered Belgium that remained. And never so long as she lived, would +she be able to forget those days or to speak of them easily. So she +stood by the window trying not to cry, and a little donkey drawing a +coster's cart moved out in front of the traffic and was caught by a motor +bus. There was only time for the picture--the tiny beast lying there +and her owner wringing his hands. Such of the traffic as could get by +swerved and went on. London must move, though a thousand willing little +beasts lay dying. + +And Sara moved too. One moment she was there by the window. And the +next she had given a stifled cry and ran out. + +"Bless my soul!" said Mr. Travers, and got up slowly. + +Henri was already up and at the window. What he saw was Sara Lee making +her way through the stream of vehicles, taking a dozen chances for her +life. Henri waited until he saw her crouched by the donkey, its head +on her knee. Then he, too, ran out. + +That is how Henri, of no other name that may be given, met Sara Lee +Kennedy, of Pennsylvania--under a London motor bus. And that, I think, +will be the picture he carries of her until he dies, her soft eyes full +of pity, utterly regardless of the dirt and the crowd and an +expostulating bobby, with that grotesque and agonized head on her knees. + +Henri crawled under the bus, though the policeman was extremely anxious +to keep him out. And he ran a practiced eye over the injured donkey. + +"It's dying," said Sara Lee with white lips. + +"It will die," replied Henri, "but how soon? They are very strong, +these little beasts." + +The conductor of the bus made a suggestion then, one that froze the +blood round Sara Lee's heart: "If you'll move away and let us run over +it proper it'll be out of its trouble, miss." + +Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to Henri. + +"Did you hear that?" she said. "They'd do it too!" + +The total result of a conference between four policemen, the costermonger, +and, by that time, Mr. Travers--was to draw the animal off the street +and into the square. Sara Lee stuck close by. So, naturally, did +Henri. And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she +was named, became increasingly evident, Henri behaved like a man and a +soldier. + +He got out his revolver and shot her in the brain. + +"A kindness," he explained, as Sara Lee would have caught his hand. +"The only way, mademoiselle." + +Mr. Travers had the usual British hatred of a crowd and publicity, +coupled with a deadly fear of getting into the papers, except through +an occasional letter to the Times. He vanished just before the shot, +and might have been seen moving rapidly through the square, turning +over in his mind the difficulty of trying to treat young American girls +like rational human beings. + +But Henri understood. He had had a French mother, and there is a leaven +of French blood in the American temperament, old Huguenot, some of it. +So Americans love beauty and obey their impulses and find life good to +do things rather than to be something or other more or less important. +And so Henri could quite understand how Sara Lee had forgotten herself +when Mr. Travers could not. And he understood, also, when Sara Lee, +having composed the little donkey's quiet figure, straightened up with +tears in her eyes. + +"It was very dear of you to come out," she said. "And--of course it was +the best thing." + +She held out her hand. The crowd had gone. Traffic was moving again, +racing to make up for five lost precious moments. The square was dark, +that first darkness of London, when air raids were threatened but had +not yet taken place. From the top of the Admiralty, near by, a +flashlight shot up into the air and began its nightly process of brushing +the sky. Henri took her hand and bent over it. + +"You are very brave, mademoiselle," he said, and touched her hand with +his lips. + +The amazing interlude had commenced. + + + + V + + +Yet for a day or two nothing much was changed. Mr. Travers sent Sara +Lee a note that he was taking up her problem with the Foreign Office; +and he did indeed make an attempt. He also requested his wife to ask +Sara Lee to tea. + +Sara Lee was extremely nervous on the day she went. She wore a black +jacket suit with a white collar, and she carried Aunt Harriet's mink +furs, Aunt Harriet mourning thoroughly and completely in black astrachan. +She had the faculty of the young American girl of looking smart without +much expense, and she appeared absurdly young. + +She followed the neat maid up a wide staircase to a door with a screen +just inside, and heard her name announced for the first time in her life. +Sara Lee took a long breath and went inside, to a most discouraging half +hour. + +Mr. Travers was on the hearth rug. Mrs. Travers was in a chair, a portly +woman with a not unkindly face, but the brusque manner many Englishwomen +acquire after forty. She held Sara Lee's hand and gave her a complete +if smiling inspection. + +"And it is you who are moving heaven and earth to get to the Front! +You--child!" + +Sara Lee's heart fell, but she smiled also. + +"But I am older than I look," she said. "And I am very strong." + +Mrs. Travers looked helplessly at her husband, while she rang the bell +for tea. That was another thing Sara Lee had read about but never +seen--that ringing for tea. At home no one served afternoon tea; but +at a party, when refreshments were coming, the hostess slipped out to +the kitchen and gave a whispered order or two. + +"I shall be frank with you," said Mrs. Travers. "I think it quite +impossible. It is not getting you over. That might be done. And of +course there are women over there--young ones too. But the army +objects very seriously to their being in danger. And of course one +never knows--" Her voice trailed off vaguely. She implied, however, +that what one never knows was best unknown. + +"I have a niece over there," she said as the tea tray came in. "Her +mother was fool enough to let her go. Now they can't get her back." + +"Oh, dear!" said Sara Lee. "Can't they find her?" + +"She won't come. Little idiot! She's in Paris, however. I daresay +she is safe enough." + +Mrs. Travers made the tea thoughtfully. So far Mr. Travers had hardly +spoken, but he cheered in true British fashion at the sight of the tea. +Sara Lee, exceedingly curious as to the purpose of a very small stand +somewhat resembling a piano stool, which the maid had placed at her knee, +learned that it was to hold her muffin plate. + +"And now," said Mr. Travers, "suppose we come to the point. There +doesn't seem to be a chance to get you over, my child. Same answer +everywhere. Place is full of untrained women. Spies have been using +Red Cross passes. Result is that all the lines are drawn as tight as +possible." + +Sara Lee stared at him with wide eyes. + +"But I can't go back," she said. "I--well, I just can't. They're +raising the money for me, and all sorts of people are giving things. +A--a friend of mine is baking cakes and sending on the money. She +has three children, and--" + +She gulped. + +"I thought everybody wanted to get help to the Belgians," she said. + +A slightly grim smile showed itself on Mrs. Travers' face. + +"I'm afraid you don't understand. It is you we want to help. Neither +Mr. Travers nor I feel that a girl so young as you, and alone, has any +place near the firing line. And that, I fancy, is where you wish to go. +As to helping the Belgians, we have four in the house now. They do not +belong to the same social circles, so they prefer tea in their own rooms. +You are quite right about their needing help too. They cannot even make +up their own beds." + +"They are not all like that," broke in Mr. Travers hastily. + +"Of course not. But I merely think that Miss--er--Kennedy should know +both sides of the picture." + +Somewhat later Sara Lee was ushered downstairs by the neat maid, who +stood on the steps and blew a whistle for a taxi--Sara Lee had come in +a bus. She carried in her hand the address of a Belgian commission of +relief at the Savoy Hotel, and in her heart, for the first time, a doubt +of her errand. She gave the Savoy address mechanically and, huddled in +a corner, gave way to wild and fearful misgivings. + +Coming up she had sat on top of the bus and watched with wide curious, +eyes the strange traffic of London. The park had fascinated her--the +little groups of drilling men in khaki, the mellow tones of a bugle, and +here and there on the bridle paths well-groomed men and women on +horseback, as clean-cut as the horses they rode, and on the surface as +careless of what was happening across the Channel. But she saw nothing +now. She sat back and twisted Harvey's ring on her finger, and saw +herself going back, her work undone, her faith in herself shattered. +And Harvey's arms and the Leete house ready to receive her. + +However, a ray of hope opened for her at the Savoy--not much, a prospect. + +The Savoy was crowded. Men in uniform, a sprinkling of anxious-faced +wives and daughters, and more than a sprinkling of gaily dressed and +painted women, filled the lobby or made their way slowly up and down the +staircase. It was all so utterly different from what she had expected-- +so bright, so full of life. These well-fed people they seemed happy +enough. Were they all wrong back home? Was the war the ghastly thing +they thought it? + +Long months afterward Sara Lee was to learn that the Savoy was not +London. She was to learn other things--that America knew more, through +a free press, of war conditions than did England. And she was to +learn what never ceased to surprise her--the sporting instinct of the +British which made their early slogan "Business as usual." Business +and pleasure--but only on the surface. Underneath was a dogged and +obstinate determination to make up as soon as possible for the +humiliation of the early days of the war. + +Those were the transition days in England. The people were slowly +awaking to the magnitude of the thing that was happening to them. Certain +elements of the press, long under political dominion, were preparing to +come out for a coalition ministry. The question of high-explosive +shells as against shrapnel was bitterly fought, some of the men at home +standing fast for shrapnel, as valuable against German artillery as a +garden hose. Men coming back from the Front were pleading for real help, +not men only, not Red Cross, not food and supplies, but for something +more competent than mere man power to hold back the deluge. + +But over it all was that surface cheerfulness, that best-foot-forward +attitude of London. And Sara Lee saw only that, and lost faith. She +had come far to help. But here was food in plenty and bands playing +and smiling men in uniform drinking tea and playing for a little. That, +too, Sara Lee was to understand later; but just then she did not. At +home there was more surface depression. The atrocities, the plight of +the Belgians, the honor list in the Illustrated London News--that was +the war to Sara Lee. And here! + +But later on, down in a crowded dark little room, things were different. +She was one of a long line, mostly women. They were unhappy and desolate +enough, God knows. They sat or stood with a sort of weary resignation. +Now and then a short heavy man with an upcurled mustache came out and +took in one or two. The door closed. And overhead the band played +monotonously. + +It was after seven when Sara Lee's turn came. The heavy-set man spoke +to her in French, but he failed to use a single one of the words she +had memorized. + +"Don't you speak any English?" she asked helplessly. + +"I do; but not much," he replied. Though his French had been rapid he +spoke English slowly. "How can we serve you, mademoiselle?" + +"I don't want any assistance. I--I want to help, if I can." + +"Here?" + +"In France. Or Belgium." + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"We have many offers of help. What we need, mademoiselle, is not +workers. We have, at our base hospital, already many English nurses." + +"I am not a nurse." + +"I am sorry. The whole world is sorry for Belgium, and many would work. +What we need"--he shrugged his shoulders again--"is food, clothing, +supplies for our brave little soldiers." + +Sara Lee looked extremely small and young. The Belgian sat down on a +chair and surveyed her carefully. + +"You English are doing a--a fine work for us," he observed. "We are +grateful. But of course the"--he hesitated--"the pulling up of an +entire people--it is colossal." + +"But I am not English," said Sara Lee. "And I have a little money. I +want to make soup for your wounded men at a railway station or--any +place. I can make good soup. And I shall have money each month to buy +what I need." + +Only then was Sara Lee admitted to the crowded little room. + +Long afterward, when the lights behind the back drop had gone down and +Sara Lee was back again in her familiar setting, one of the clearest +pictures she retained of that amazing interlude was of that crowded +little room in the Savoy, its single littered desk, its two typewriters +creating an incredible din, a large gentleman in a dark-blue military +cape seeming to fill the room. And in corners and off stage, so to +speak, perhaps a half dozen men, watching her curiously. + +The conversation was in French, and Sara Lee's acquaintance of the +passage acted as interpreter. It was only when Sara Lee found that a +considerable discussion was going on in which she had no part that she +looked round and saw her friend of two nights before and of the little +donkey. He was watching her intently, and when he caught her eye +he bowed. + +Now men, in Sara Lee's mind, had until now been divided into the ones at +home, one's own kind, the sort who married one's friends or oneself, the +kind who called their wives "mother" after the first baby came, and were +easily understood, plain men, decent and God-fearing and self-respecting; +and the men of that world outside America, who were foreigners. One +might like foreigners, but they were outsiders. + +So there was no self-consciousness in Sara Lee's bow and smile. Later +on Henri was to find that lack of self and sex consciousness one of the +maddening mysteries about Sara Lee. Perhaps he never quite understood +it. But always he respected it. + +More conversation, in an increasing staccato. Short contributions from +the men crowded into corners. Frenzied beating of the typewriting +machines, and overhead and far away the band. There was no air in the +room. Sara Lee was to find out a great deal later on about the contempt +of the Belgians for air. She loosened Aunt Harriet's neckpiece. + +So far Henri had not joined in the discussion. But now he came forward +and spoke. Also, having finished, he interpreted to Sara Lee. + +"They are most grateful," he explained. "It is a--a practical idea, +mademoiselle. If you were in Belgium"--he smiled rather mirthlessly-- +"if you were already in the very small part of Belgium remaining to us, +we could place you very usefully. But--the British War Office is most +careful, just now. You understand--there are reasons." + +Sara Lee flushed indignantly. + +"They can watch me if they want to," she said. "What trouble can I make? +I've only just landed. You--you'd have to go a good ways to find any +one who knows less than I do about the war." + +"There is no doubt of that," he said, unconscious of offense. "But the +War Office--" He held out his hands. + +Sara Lee, who had already caught the British "a" and was rather overdoing +it, had a wild impulse to make the same gesture. It meant so much. + +More conversation. Evidently more difficulties--but with Henri now +holding the center of the stage and speaking rapidly. The heavy-set man +retired and read letters under an electric lamp. The band upstairs was +having dinner. And Henri argued and wrangled. He was quite passionate. +The man in the military cape listened and smiled. And at last he nodded. + +Henri turned to Sara Lee. + +"You Americans are all brave," he said. "You like--what is it you +say?--taking a chance, I think. Would you care to take such a chance?" + +"What sort of a chance?" + +"May I visit you this evening at your hotel?" + +Just for an instant Sara Lee hesitated. There was Harvey at home. He +would not like her receiving a call from any man. And Harvey did not +like foreigners. He always said they had no respect for women. It +struck her suddenly what Harvey would call Henri's bowing and his kissing +her hand, and his passionate gesticulations when he was excited. He +would call it all tomfool nonsense. + +And she recalled his final words, his arms so close about her that she +could hardly breathe, his voice husky with emotion. + +"Just let me hear of any of those foreigners bothering you," he said, +"and I'll go over and wipe out the whole damned nation." + +It had not sounded funny then. It was not funny now. + +"Please come," said Sara Lee in a small voice. + +The other gentlemen bowed profoundly. Sara Lee, rather at a loss, gave +them a friendly smile that included them all. And then she and Henri +were walking up the stairs and to the entrance, Henri's tall figure the +target for many women's eyes. He, however, saw no one but Sara Lee. + +Henri, too, called a taxicab. Every one in London seemed to ride in +taxis. And he bent over her hand, once she was in the car, but he did +not kiss it. + +"It is very kind of you, what you are doing," he said. "But, then, you +Americans are all kind. And wonderful." + +Back at Morley's Hotel Sara Lee had a short conversation with Harvey's +picture. + +"You are entirely wrong, dear," she said. She was brushing her hair at +the time, and it is rather a pity that it was a profile picture and that +Harvey's pictured eyes were looking off into space--that is, a piece +of white canvas on a frame, used by photographers to reflect the light +into the eyes. For Sara Lee with her hair down was even lovelier than +with it up. "You were wrong. They are different, but they are kind and +polite. And very, very respectful. And he is coming on business." + +She intended at first to make no change in her frock. After all, it was +not a social call, and if she did not dress it would put things on the +right footing. + +But slipping along the corridor after her bath, clad in a kimono and +slippers and extremely nervous, she encountered a young woman on her +way to dinner, and she was dressed in that combination of street skirt +and evening blouse that some Englishwomen from the outlying districts +still affect. And Sara Lee thereupon decided to dress. She called in +the elderly maid, who was already her slave, and together they went over +her clothes. + +It was the maid, perhaps, then who brought into Sara Lee's life the +strange and mad infatuation for her that was gradually to become a +dominant issue in the next few months. For the maid chose a white dress, +a soft and young affair in which Sara Lee looked like the heart of a rose. + +"I always like to see a young lady in white, miss," said the maid. +"Especially when there's a healthy skin." + +So Sara Lee ate her dinner alone, such a dinner as a healthy skin and +body demanded. And she watched tall young Englishwomen with fine +shoulders go out with English officers in khaki, and listened to a babel +of high English voices, and--felt extremely alone and very subdued. + +Henri came rather late. It was one of the things she was to learn about +him later--that he was frequently late. It was only long afterward that +she realized that such time as he spent with her was gained only at the +cost of almost superhuman effort. But that was when she knew Henri's +story, and his work. She waited for him in the reception room, where a +man and a woman were having coffee and talking in a strange tongue. +Henri found her there, at something before nine, rather downcast and +worried, and debating about going up to bed. She looked up, to find him +bowing before her. + +"I thought you were not coming," she said. + +"I? Not come? But I had said that I would come, mademoiselle. I may +sit down?" + +Sara Lee moved over on the velvet sofa, and Henri lowered his long body +onto it. Lowered his voice, too, for the man and woman were staring at +him. + +"I'm afraid I didn't quite understand about this afternoon," began Sara +Lee. "You spoke about taking a chance. I am not afraid of danger, if +that is what you mean." + +"That, and a little more, mademoiselle," said Henri. "But now that I am +here I do not know." + +His eyes were keen. Sara Lee had suddenly a strange feeling that he +was watching the couple who talked over their coffee, and that, oddly +enough, the couple were watching him. Yet he was apparently giving his +undivided attention to her. + +"Have you walked any to-day?" he asked her unexpectedly. + +Sara Lee remembered the bus, and, with some bitterness, the two taxis. + +"I haven't had a chance to walk," she said. + +"But you should walk," he said. "I--will you walk with me? Just about +the square, for air?" And in a lower tone: "It is not necessary that +those two should know the plan, mademoiselle." + +"I'll get my coat and hat," Sara Lee said, and proceeded to do so in a +brisk and businesslike fashion. When she came down Henri was emerging +from the telephone booth. His face was impassive. And again when in +time Sara Lee was to know Henri's face better than she had ever known +Harvey's, she was to learn that the masklike look he sometimes wore +meant danger--for somebody. + +They went out without further speech into the clear cold night. Henri, +as if from custom, threw his head back and scanned the sky. Then they +went on and crossed into the square. + +"The plan," Henri began abruptly, "is this: You will be provided +to-morrow with a passport to Boulogne. You will, if you agree, take the +midnight train for Folkestone. At the railway station here you will +be searched. At Folkestone a board, sitting in an office on the quay, +will examine your passport." + +"Does any one in Boulogne speak English?" Sara Lee inquired nervously. +Somehow that babel of French at the Savoy had frightened her. Her +little phrase book seemed pitifully inadequate for the great things +in her mind. + +"That hardly matters," said Henri, smiling faintly. "Because I think +you shall not go to Boulogne." + +"Not go!" She stopped dead, under the monument, and looked up at him. + +"The place for you to go, to start from, is Calais," Henri explained. +He paused, to let pass two lovers, a man in khaki and a girl. "But +Calais is difficult. It is under martial law--a closed city. From +Boulogne to Calais would be perhaps impossible." + +Sara Lee was American and her methods were direct. + +"How can I get to Calais?" + +"Will you take the chance I spoke of?" + +"For goodness' sake," said Sara Lee in an exasperated tone, "how can I +tell you until I know what it is?" + +Henri told her. He even, standing under a street lamp, drew a small +sketch for her, to make it clear. Sara Lee stood close, watching him, +and some of the lines were not as steady as they might have been. And +in the midst of it he suddenly stopped. + +"Do you know what it means?" he demanded. + +"Yes, of course." + +"And you know what date this is?" + +"The eighteenth of February." + +But he saw, after all, that she did not entirely understand. + +"To-night, this eighteenth of February, the Germans commence a blockade +of this coast. No vessels, if they can prevent them, will leave the +harbors; or if they do, none shall reach the other side!" + +"Oh!" said Sara Lee blankly. + +"We are eager to do as you wish, mademoiselle. But"--he commenced +slowly to tear up the sketch--"it is too dangerous. You are too young. +If anything should go wrong and I had--No. We will find another way." + +He put the fragments of the sketch in his pocket. + +"How long is this blockade to last?" Sara Lee asked out of bitter +disappointment. + +He shrugged his shoulders. + +"Who can say? A week! A year! Not at all!" + +"Then," said Sara Lee with calm deliberation, "you might as well get out +your pencil and draw another picture--because I'm going." + +Far enough away now, the little house at home and the peace that dwelt +therein; and Harvey; and the small white bedroom; and the daily round of +quiet duties. Sara Lee had set her face toward the east, and the land +of dying men. And as Henri looked down at her she had again that poised +and eager look, almost of flight, that had brought into Harvey's love +for her just a touch of fear. + + + + VI + +Sara Lee Kennedy was up at dawn the next morning. There was a very +serious matter to decide, for Henri's plan had included only such hand +luggage as she herself could carry. + +Sara Lee carefully laid out on the bed such articles as she could not +possibly do without, and was able to pack into her suitcase less than +a fourth of them. She had fortunately brought a soft wool sweater, +which required little room. Undergarments, several blouses, the sweater +and a pair of heavy shoes--that was her equipment, plus such small +toilet outfit as is necessary when a young woman uses no make-up and +regards cold cream only as a remedy for chapped hands. + +The maid found her in rather a dismal mood. + +"Going across, miss!" she said. "Fancy that!" + +"It's a secret," cautioned Sara Lee. "I am really not sure I am going. +I am only trying to go." + +The maid, who found Sara Lee and the picture of Harvey on her dressing +table both romantic and appealing, offered to pack. From the first +moment it was evident that she meant to include the white dress. Indeed +she packed it first. + +"You never know what's going to happen over there," she asserted. "They +do say that royalties are everywhere, going about like common people. +You'd better have a good frock with you." + +She had an air of subdued excitement, and after she had established the +fact that not only the white frock but slippers and hose also would go +in she went to the door and glanced up and down the passage. Then she +closed the door. + +"There was queer goings-on here last night, miss," she said cautiously. +"Spies!" + +"Oh, no!" cried Sara Lee. + +"Spies," she repeated. "A man and a woman, pretending to be Belgian +refugees. They took them away at daylight. I expect by now they've +been shot." + +Sara Lee ate very little breakfast that morning. All through England +it was confidently believed that spies were shot on discovery, a theory +that has been persistent--and false, save at the battle line--since +the beginning of the war. And Henri's plan assumed new proportions. +Suppose she made her attempt and failed? Suppose they took her for a +spy, and that tomorrow's sun found her facing a firing squad? Not, +indeed, that she had ever heard of a firing squad, as such. But she +had seen spies shot in the movies. They invariably stood in front of +a brick wall, with the hero in the center. + +So she absent-mindedly ate her kippered herring, which had been strongly +recommended by the waiter, and tried to think of what a spy would do, so +she might avoid any suspicious movements. It struck her, too, that war +seemed to have made the people on that side of the ocean extremely ready +with weapons. They would be quite likely to shoot first and ask +questions afterwards--which would be too late to be helpful. + +She remembered Henri, for instance, and the way, without a word, he had +shot the donkey. + +That day she wrote Harvey a letter. + +"Dearest:" it began; "I think I am to leave for France to-night. Things +seem to be moving nicely, and I am being helped by the Belgian Relief +Commission. It is composed of Belgians and is at the Savoy Hotel." + +Here she stopped and cried a little. What if she should never see +Harvey again--never have his sturdy arms about her? Harvey gained by +distance. She remembered only his unfailing kindness and strength and +his love for her. He seemed, here at the edge of the whirlpool, a sort +of eddy of peace and quiet. Even then she had no thought of going back +until her work was done, but she did an unusual thing for her, unused +to demonstration of any sort. She kissed his ring. + +Followed directions about sending the money from the church society, +a description of Morley's and Trafalgar Square, an account of tea at +the Travers', and of the little donkey--without mention, however, of +Henri. She felt that Harvey would not understand Henri. + +But at the end came the passage which poor Harvey read and re-read +when the letter came, and alternately ground his teeth over and kissed. + +"I do love you, Harvey dear. And I am coming back to you. I have felt +that I had to do what I am doing, but I am coming back. That's a +promise. Unless, of course, I should take sick, or something like that, +which isn't likely." + +There was a long pause in the writing here, but Harvey could not know +that. + +"I shall wear your ring always; and always, Harvey, it will mean to me +that I belong to you. With dearest love. + "SARA LEE" + +Then she added a postscript, of course. + +"The War Office is not letting people cross to Calais just now. But I +am going to do it anyhow. It is perfectly simple. And when I get over +I shall write and tell you how. + "S. L." + +It was the next day that an indignant official in the censor's office +read that postscript, and rose in his wrath and sent a third +Undersomething-or-other to look up Sara Lee at Morley's. But by this +time she was embarked on the big adventure; and by the time a cable +reached Calais there was no trace of Sara Lee. + +During the afternoon she called up Mr. Travers at his office, and rather +gathered that he did not care to use the telephone during business hours. + +"I just wanted to tell you that you need not bother about me any more," +she said. "I am being sent over and I think everything is all right." + +He was greatly relieved. Mrs. Travers had not fully indorsed his +encomiums of the girl. She had felt that no really nice girl would +travel so far on so precarious an errand, particularly when she was +alone. And how could one tell, coming from America, how her sympathies +really lay? She might be of German parentage--the very worst sort, +because they spoke American. It was easy enough to change a name. + +Nevertheless, Mr. Travers felt a trifle low in his mind when he hung up +the receiver. He said twice to himself: "Twenty pounds!" And at last +he put four sovereigns in an envelope and sent them to her anonymously +by messenger. Sara Lee guessed whence they came, but she respected the +manner of the gift and did not thank him. It was almost the first gold +money she had ever seen. + +She was very carefully searched at the railway station that night and +found that her American Red Cross button, which had come with her dollar +subscription to the association, made the matron inspector rather +kindly inclined. Nevertheless, she took off Sara Lee's shoes, and ran +over the lining of her coat, and quite ruined the maid's packing of the +suitcase. + +"You are going to Boulogne?" asked the matron inspector. + +Sara Lee did not like to lie. + +"Wherever the boat takes me," she said with smile. + +The matron smiled too. + +"I shouldn't be nervous, miss," she said. "It's a chance, of course, +but they have not done much damage yet." + +It was after midnight then, and a cold fog made the station a gloomy +thing of blurred yellow lights and raw chill. A few people moved about, +mostly officers in uniform. Half a dozen men in civilian clothes +eyed her as she passed through the gates; Scotland Yard, but she did not +know. And once she thought she saw Henri, but he walked away into the +shadows and disappeared. The train, looking as absurdly small and light +as all English trains do, was waiting out in the shed. There were no +porters, and Sara Lee carried her own bag. + +She felt quite sure she had been mistaken about Henri, for of course +he would have come and carried it for her. + +The train was cold and quiet. When it finally moved out it was under +way before she knew that it was going. And then suddenly Sara Lee's +heart began to pound hard. + +It was a very cold and shivering Sara Lee who curled up, alone in her +compartment, and stared hard at Harvey's ring to keep her courage up. +But a curious thing had happened. Harvey gave her no moral support. +He brought her only disapproval. She found herself remembering none of +the loving things he had said to her, but only the bitter ones. + +Perhaps it was the best thing for her, after all. For a sort of dogged +determination to go through with it all, at any cost, braced her to her +final effort. + +So far it had all been busy enough, but not comfortable. She was cold, +and she had eaten almost nothing all day. As the hours went on and the +train slid through the darkness she realized that she was rather faint. +The steam pipes, only warm at the start, were entirely cold by one +o'clock, and by two Sara Lee was sitting on her feet, with a heavy coat +wrapped about her knees. + +The train moved quietly, as do all English trains, with no jars and +little sound. There were few lights outside, for the towns of Eastern +England were darkened, like London, against air attacks. So when she +looked at the window she saw only her own reflection, white and +wide-eyed, above Aunt Harriet's fur neckpiece. + +In the next compartment an officer was snoring, but she did not close +her eyes. Perhaps, for that last hour, some of the glow that had brought +her so far failed her. She was not able to think beyond Folkestone, save +occasionally, and that with a feeling that it should not be made so +difficult to do a kind and helpful thing. + +At a quarter before three the train eased down. In the same proportion +Sara Lee's pulse went up. A long period of crawling along, a stop or +two, but no resultant opening of the doors; and at last, in a cold rain +and a howling wind from the channel, the little seaport city. + +More officers than she had suspected, a few women, got out. The latter +Sara Lee's experience on the steamer enabled her to place; buyers mostly, +and Americans, on their way to Paris, blockade or no blockade, because +the American woman must be well and smartly gowned and hatted. A man +with a mourning band on his sleeve carried a wailing child. + +The officers lighted cigarettes. The civilians formed a line on the +jetty under the roof of the shed, and waited, passports in hand, before +a door that gleamed with yellow light. Faces looked pale and anxious. +The blockade was on, and Germany had said that no ships would cross +that night. + +As if defiantly the Boulogne boat, near at hand, was ablaze, on the shore +side at least, with lights. Stewards came and went. Beyond it lay the +harbor, dark and mysterious save where, from somewhere across, a +flashlight made a brave effort to pierce the fog. + +One of the buyers ahead of Sara Lee seemed exhilarated by the danger +ahead. + +"They'll never get us," she said. "Look at that fog!" + +"It's lifting, dearie," answered a weary voice behind her. "The wind is +carrying it away." + +When Sara Lee's turn came she was ready. A group of men in civilian +clothes, seated about a long table, looked her over carefully. Her +passports moved deliberately from hand to hand. A long business, and +the baby wailing harder than ever. But the office was at least warm. +Some of her failing courage came back as she moved, following her papers, +round the table. They were given back to her at last, and she went out. +She had passed the first ordeal. + +Suitcase in hand she wandered down the stone jetty. The Boulogne boat +she passed, and kept on. At the very end, dark and sinister, lay another +boat. It had no lights. The tide was in, and its deck lay almost flush +with the pier. Sara Lee walked on toward it until a voice spoke to her +out of the darkness and near at hand. + +"Your boat is back there, madam." + +"I know. Thank you. I am just walking about." + +The petty officer--he was a petty officer, though Sara Lee had never +heard the term--was inclined to be suspicious. Under excuse of lighting +his pipe he struck a match, and Sara Lee's young figure stood out in full +relief. His suspicions died away with the flare. + +"Bad night, miss," he offered. + +"Very," said Sara Lee, and turned back again. + +This time, bewildered and uneasy, she certainly saw Henri. But he +ignored her. He was alone, and smoking one of his interminable +cigarettes. He had not said he was crossing, and why had he not spoken +to her? He wandered past down the pier, and she lost him in the shadows. +When he came back he paused near her, and at last saluted and spoke. + +"Pardon," he said. "If you will stand back here you will find less wind." + +"Thank you." + +He carried her suitcase back, and stooping over to place it at her feet +he said: "I shall send him on board with a message to the captain. When +I come back try again." + +He left her at once. The passengers for Boulogne were embarking now. +A silent lot, they disappeared into the warmth and brightness of the +little boat and were lost. No one paid any attention to Sara Lee +standing in the shadows. + +Soon Henri came back. He walked briskly and touched his cap as he +passed. He went aboard the Boulogne steamer, and without a backward +glance disappeared. + +Sara Lee watched him out of sight, in a very real panic. He had been +something real and tangible in that shadowy place--something familiar +in an unfamiliar world. But he was gone. She threw up her head. + +So once more Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and went down the pier. +Now she was unchallenged. What lurking figure might be on the dark deck +of the Calais boat she could not tell. That was the chance she was to +take. The gangway was still out, and as quietly as possible she went +aboard. The Boulogne boat had suddenly gone dark, and she heard the +churning of the screw. With the extinction of the lights on the other +boat came at last deeper night to her aid. A few steps, a stumble, a +gasp--and she was on board the forbidden ship. + +She turned forward, according to her instructions, where the overhead +deck made below an even deeper shadow. Henri had said that there were +cabins there, and that the chance was of finding an unlocked one. If +they were all locked she would be discovered at dawn, and arrested. And +Sara Lee was not a war correspondent. She was not accustomed to arrest. +Indeed she had a deep conviction that arrest in her case would mean death. +False, of course, but surely it shows her courage. + +As she stood there, breathless and listening, the Boulogne boat moved +out. She heard the wash against the jetty, felt the rolling of its +waves. But being on the landward side she could not see the faint +gleam of a cigarette that marked Henri's anxious figure at the rail. +So long as the black hulk of the Calais boat was visible, and long +after indeed, Henri stood there, outwardly calm but actually shaken by +many fears. She had looked so small and young; and who could know what +deviltry lurked abroad that night? + +He had not gone with her because it was necessary that he be in Boulogne +the next morning. And also, the very chance of getting her across lay +in her being alone and unobserved. + +So he stood by the rail and looked back and said a wordless little prayer +that if there was trouble it come to his boat and not to the other. +Which might very considerably have disturbed the buyers had they known +of it and believed in prayer. + +Sara Lee stood in the shadows and listened. There were voices overhead, +from the bridge. A door opened onto the deck and threw out a ray of +light. Some one came out and went on shore, walking with brisk ringing +steps. And then at last she put down her bag and tried door after door, +without result. + +The man who had gone ashore called another. The gangway was drawn in. +The engines began to vibrate under foot. Sara Lee, breathless and +terrified, stood close to a cabin door and remained immovable. At one +moment it seemed as if a seaman was coming forward to where she stood. +But he did not come. + +The Calais boat was waiting until the other steamer had got well out of +the harbor. The fog had lifted, and the searchlight was moving over +the surface. It played round the channel steamer without touching it. +But none of this was visible to Sara Lee. + +At last the lights of the quay began to recede. The little boat rocked +slightly in its own waves as it edged away. It moved slowly through +the shipping and out until, catching the swell of the channel, it shot +ahead at top speed. + +For an hour Sara Lee stood there. The channel wind caught her and tore +at her skirts until she was almost frozen. And finally, in sheer +desperation, she worked her way round to the other side. She saw no +one. Save for the beating heart of the engine below it might have been +a dead ship. + +On the other side she found an open door and stumbled into the tiny dark +deck cabin, as chilled and frightened a philanthropist as had ever +crossed that old and tricky and soured bit of seaway. And there, to be +frank, she forgot her fright in as bitter a tribute of seasickness as +even the channel has ever exacted. + +She had locked herself in, and she fell at last into an exhausted sleep. +When she wakened and peered out through the tiny window it was gray +winter dawn. The boat was quiet, and before her lay the quay of Calais +and the Gare Maritime. A gangway was out and a hurried survey showed +no one in sight. + +Sara Lee picked up her suitcase and opened the door. The fresh morning +air revived her, but nevertheless it was an extremely pale young woman +who, obeying Henri's instructions, went ashore that morning in the gray +dawn unseen, undisturbed and unquestioned. But from the moment she +appeared on the gangway until the double glass doors of the Gare +Maritime closed behind her this apparently calm young woman did not +breathe at all. She arrived, indeed, with lungs fairly collapsed and +her heart entirely unreliable. + +A woman clerk was asleep at a desk. Sara Lee roused her to half +wakefulness, no interest and extremely poor English. A drowsy porter +led her up a staircase and down an endless corridor. Then at last he +was gone, and Sara Lee turned the key in her door and burst into tears. + + + + VII + + +Now up to this point Sara Lee's mind had come to rest at Calais. She +must get there; after that the other things would need to be worried +over. Henri had already in their short acquaintance installed himself +as the central figure of this strange and amazing interlude--not as a +good-looking young soldier surprisingly fertile in expedients, but as a +sort of agent of providence, by whom and through whom things were done. + +And Henri had said she was to go to the Gare Maritime at Calais and make +herself comfortable--if she got there. After that things would be +arranged. + +Sara Lee therefore took a hot bath, though hardly a satisfactory one, +for there was no soap and she had brought none. She learned later on +to carry soap with her everywhere. So she soaked the chill out of her +slim body and then dressed. The room was cold, but a great exultation +kept her warm. She had run the blockade, she had escaped the War +Office--which, by the way, was looking her up almost violently by +that time, via the censor. It had found the trunk she left at Morley's, +and cross-questioned the maid into hysteria--and here she was, +safe in France, the harbor of Calais before her, and here and there +strange-looking war craft taking on coal. Destroyers, she learned later. +Her ignorance was rather appalling at first. + +It was all unreal--the room with its cold steam pipes, the heavy window +hangings, the very words on the hot and cold taps in the bathroom. A +great vessel moved into the harbor. As it turned she saw its name +printed on its side in huge letters, and the flag, also painted, of a +neutral country--a hoped-for protection against German submarines. It +brought home to her, rather, the thing she had escaped. + +After a time she thought of food, but rather hopelessly. Her attempts +to get savon from a stupid boy had produced nothing more useful than a +flow of unintelligible French and no soap whatever. She tried a +pantomime of washing her hands, but to the boy she had appeared to be +merely wringing them. And, as a great many females were wringing their +hands in France those days, he had gone away, rather sorry for her. + +When hunger drove her to the bell again he came back and found her with +her little phrase book in her hands, feverishly turning the pages. She +could find plenty of sentences such as "Garcon, vous avez renverse du +vin sur ma robe," but not an egg lifted its shining pate above the pages. +Not cereal. Not fruit. Not even the word breakfast. + +Long, long afterward Sara Lee found a quite delightful breakfast +hidden between two pages that were stuck together. But it was then far +too late. + +"Donnez-moi," began Sara Lee, and turned the pages rapidly, "this; do +you see?" She had found roast beef. + +The boy observed stolidly, in French, that it was not ready until noon. +She was able to make out, from his failing to depart, that there was no +roast beef. + +"Good gracious!" she said, ravenous and exasperated. "Go and get me +some bread and coffee, anyhow." She repeated it, slightly louder. + +That was the tableau that Henri found when, after a custom that may be +war or may be Continental, he had inquired the number of her room and +made his way there. + +There was a twinkle in his blue eyes as he bowed before her--and a vast +relief too. + +"So you are here!" he said in a tone of satisfaction. He had put in an +extremely bad night, even for him, by whom nights were seldom wasted in +a bed. While he was with her something of her poise had communicated +itself to him. He had felt the confidence, in men and affairs, that +American girls are given as a birthright. And her desire for service +he had understood as a year or two ago he could not have understood. +But he had stood by the rail staring north, and cursing himself for +having placed her in danger during the entire crossing. + +There was nothing about him that morning, however to show his bad +hours. He was debonnaire and smiling. + +"I am famishing," said Sara Lee. "And there are no eggs in this book +--none whatever." + +"Eggs! You wish eggs?" + +"I just want food. Almost anything will do. I asked for eggs because +they can come quickly." + +Henri turned to the boy and sent him off with a rapid order. Then: +"May I come in?" he said. + +Sara Lee cast an uneasy glance over the room. It was extremely tidy, +and unmistakably it was a bedroom. But though her color rose she asked +him in. After all, what did it matter? To have refused would have +looked priggish, she said to herself. And as a matter of fact one of +the early lessons she learned in France was learned that morning--that +though convention had had to go, like many other things in the war, men +who were gentlemen ignored its passing. + +Henri came in and stood by the center table. + +"Now, please tell me," he said. "I have been most uneasy. On the quay +last night you looked--frightened." + +"I was awfully frightened. Nothing happened. I even slept." + +"You were very brave." + +"I was very seasick." + +"I am sorry." + +Henri took a turn up and down the room. + +"But," said Sara Lee slowly, "I--I--can't be on your hands, you know. +You must have many things to do. If you are going to have to order my +meals and all that, I'm going to be a dreadful burden." + +"But you will learn very quickly." + +"I'm stupid about languages." + +Henri dismissed that with a gesture. She could not, he felt, be stupid +about anything. He went to the window and looked out. The destroyers +were still coaling, and a small cargo was being taken off the boat at +the quay. The rain was over, and in the early sunlight an officer in +blue tunic, red breeches and black cavalry boots was taking the air, his +head bent over his chest. Not a detail of the scene escaped him. + +"I have agreed to find the right place for you," he said thoughtfully. +"There is one, but I think--" He hesitated. "I do not wish to place +you again in danger." + +"You mean that it is near the Front?" + +"Very near, mademoiselle." + +"But I should be rather near, to be useful." + +"Perhaps, for your work. But what of you? These brutes--they shell +far and wide. One can never be sure." + +He paused and surveyed her whimsically. + +"Who allowed you to come, alone, like this?" he demanded. "Is there no +one who objected?" + +Sara Lee glanced down at her ring. + +"The man I am going to marry. He is very angry." + +Henri looked at her, and followed her eyes to Harvey's ring. He said +nothing, however, but he went over and gave the bell cord a violent jerk. + +"You must have food quickly," he said in a rather flat voice. "You are +looking tired and pale." + +A sense of unreality was growing on Sara Lee. That she should be alone +in France with a man she had never seen three days before; that she knew +nothing whatever about that man; that, for the present at least, she was +utterly and absolutely dependent on him, even for the food she ate--it +was all of a piece with the night's voyage and the little room at the +Savoy. And it was none of it real. + +When the breakfast tray came Henri was again at the window and silent. +And Sara Lee saw that it was laid for two. She was a little startled, +but the businesslike way in which the young officer drew up two chairs +and held one out for her made protest seem absurd. And the flat-faced +boy, who waited, looked unshocked and uninterested. + +It was not until she had had some coffee that Henri followed up his +line of thought. + +"So--the fiance did not approve? It is not difficult to understand. +There is always danger, for there are German aeroplanes even in remote +places. And you are very young. You still wish to establish yourself, +mademoiselle?" + +"Of course!" + +"Would it be a comfort to cable your safe arrival in France to the +fiance?" When he saw her face he smiled. And if it was a rather heroic +smile it was none the less friendly. "I see. What shall I say? Or +will you write it?" + +So Sara Lee, vastly cheered by two cups of coffee, an egg, and a very +considerable portion of bread and butter, wrote her cable. It was to +be brief, for cables cost money. It said, "Safe. Well. Love." And +Henri, who seemed to have strange and ominous powers, sent it almost +immediately. Total cost, as reported to Sara Lee, two francs. He took +the money she offered him gravely. + +"We shall cable quite often," he said. "He will be anxious. And I +think he has a right to know." + +The "we" was entirely unconscious. + +"And now," he said, when he had gravely allowed Sara Lee to pay her half +of the breakfast, "we must arrange to get you out of Calais. And that, +mademoiselle, may take time." + +It took time. Sara Lee, growing accustomed now to little rooms entirely +filled with men and typewriters, went from one office to another, walking +along the narrow pavements with Henri, through streets filled with +soldiers. Once they drew aside to let pass a procession of Belgian +refugees, those who had held to their village homes until bombardment +had destroyed them--stout peasant women in short skirts and with huge +bundles, old men, a few young ones, many children. The terror of the +early flight was not theirs, but there was in all of them a sort of +sodden hopelessness that cut Sara Lee to the heart. In an irregular +column they walked along, staring ahead but seeing nothing. Even the +children looked old and tired. + +Sara Lee's eyes filled with tears. + +"My people," said Henri. "Simple country folk, and going to England, +where they will grieve for the things that are gone--their fields and +their sons. The old ones will die, quickly, of homesickness. It is +difficult to transplant an old tree." + +The final formalities seemed to offer certain difficulties. Henri, who +liked to do things quickly and like a prince, flushed with irritation. +He drew himself up rather haughtily in reply to one question, and glanced +uneasily at the girl. But it was all as intelligible as Sanskrit to her. + +It was only after a whispered sentence to the man at the head of the +table that the paper was finally signed. + +As they went down to the street together Sara Lee made a little protest. + +"But I simply must not take all your time," she said, looking up anxiously. +"I begin to realize how foolhardy the whole thing is. I meant well, but +--it is you who are doing everything; not I." + +"I shall not make the soup, mademoiselle," he replied gravely. + + + + VIII + +Here were more things to do. Sara Lee's money must be exchanged at a +bank for French gold. She had three hundred dollars, and it had been +given her in a tiny brown canvas bag. And then there was the matter of +going from Calais toward the Front. She had expected to find a train, +but there were no trains. All cars were being used for troops. She +stared at Henri in blank dismay. + +"No trains!" she said blankly. "Would an automobile be very expensive?" + +"They are all under government control, mademoiselle. Even the petrol." + +She stopped in the street. + +"Then I shall have to go back." + +Henri laughed boyishly. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "I have been requested to take you to a place +where you may render us the service we so badly need. For the present +that is my duty, and nothing else. So if you will accept the offer of +my car, which is a shameful one but travels well, we can continue our +journey." + +Long, long afterward, Sara Lee found a snapshot of Henri's car, taken +by a light-hearted British officer. Found it and sat for a long time +with it in her hand, thinking and remembering that first day she saw it, +in the sun at Calais. A long low car it was, once green, but now +roughly painted gray. But it was not the crude painting, significant +as it was, that brought so close the thing she was going to. It was +that the car was but a shell of a car. The mud guards were crumpled up +against the side. Body and hood were pitted with shrapnel. A door had +been shot away, and the wind shield was but a frame set round with +broken glass. Even the soldier-chauffeur wore a patch over one eye, +and his uniform was ragged. + +"Not a beautiful car, mademoiselle, as I warned you! But a fast one!" + +Henri was having a double enjoyment. He was watching Sara Lee's face +and his chauffeur's remaining eye. + +"But fast; eh, Jean?" he said to the chauffeur. The man nodded and +said something in French. It was probably the thing Henri had hoped for, +and he threw back his head and laughed. + +"Jean is reminding me," he said gayly, "that it is forbidden to officers +to take a lady along the road that we shall travel." But when he saw +how Sara Lee flushed he turned to the man. + +"Mademoiselle has come from America to help us, Jean," he said quietly. +"And now for Dunkirk." + +The road from Dunkirk to Calais was well guarded in those days. From +Nieuport for some miles inland only the shattered remnant of the Belgian +Army held the line. For the cry "On to Paris!" the Germans had +substituted "On to Calais!" + +So, on French soil at least, the road was well guarded. A few miles in +the battered car, then a slowing up, a showing of passports, the clatter +of a great chain as it dropped to the road, a lowering of leveled rifles, +and a salute from the officer--that was the method by which they +advanced. + +Henri sat with the driver and talked in a low tone. Sometimes he sat +quiet, looking ahead. He seemed, somehow, older, more careworn. His +boyishness had gone. Now and then he turned to ask if she was +comfortable, but in the intervals she felt that he had entirely forgotten +her. Once, at something Jean said, he got out a pocket map and went +over it carefully. It was a long time after that before he turned to +see if she was all right. + +Sara Lee sat forward and watched everything. She saw little evidence of +war, beyond the occasional sentries and chains. Women were walking along +the roads. Children stopped and pointed, smiling, at the battered car. +One very small boy saluted, and Henri as gravely returned the salute. + +Some time after that he turned to her. + +"I find that I shall have to leave you in Dunkirk," he said. "A matter +of a day only, probably. But I will see before I go that you are +comfortable." + +"I shall be quite all right, of course." + +But something had gone out of the day for her. + +Sara Lee learned one thing that day, learned it as some women do learn, +by the glance of an eye, the tone of a voice. The chauffeur adored +Henri. His one unbandaged eye stole moments from the road to glance +at him. When he spoke, while Henri read his map, his very voice betrayed +him. And while she pondered the thing, woman-fashion they drew into +the square of Dunkirk, where the statue of Jean Bart, pirate and +privateer stared down at this new procession of war which passed daily +and nightly under his cold eyes. + +Jean and a porter carried in her luggage. Henri and a voluble and +smiling Frenchwoman showed her to her room. She felt like an island of +silence in a rapid-rolling sea of French. The Frenchwoman threw open +the door. + +A great room with high curtained windows; a huge bed with a faded gilt +canopy and heavy draperies; a wardrobe as vast as the bed; and for a +toilet table an enormous mirror reaching to the ceiling and with a +marble shelf below--that was her room. + +"I think you will be comfortable here, mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee, who still clutched her small bag of gold, shook her head. + +"Comfortable, yes," she said. "But I am afraid it is very expensive." + +Henri named an extremely low figure--an exact fourth, to be accurate, +of its real cost. A surprising person Henri, with his worn uniform and +his capacity for kindly mendacity. And seeing something in the +Frenchwoman's face that perhaps he had expected, he turned to her +almost fiercely: + +"You are to understand, madame, that this lady has been placed in my +care by authority that will not be questioned. She is to have every +deference." + +That was all, but was enough. And from that time on Sara Lee Kennedy, +of Ohio, was called, in the tiny box downstairs which constituted the +office, "Mademoiselle La Princesse." + +Henri did a characteristic and kindly thing for Sara Lee before he left +that evening on one of the many mysterious journeys that he was to make +during the time Sara Lee knew him. He came to her door, menus in hand, +and painstakingly ordered for her a dinner for that night, and the +three meals for the day following. + +He made no suggestion of dining with her that evening. Indeed, watching +him from her small table, Sara Lee decided that he had put her entirely +out of his mind. He did not so much as glance at her. Save the cashier +at her boxed-in desk and money drawer, she was the only woman in that +room full of officers. Quite certainly Henri was the only man who did +not find some excuse for glancing in her direction. + +But finishing early, he paused by the cashier's desk to pay for his meal, +and then he gave Sara Lee the stiffest and most ceremonious of bows. + +She felt hurt. Alone in her great room, the curtains drawn by order of +the police, lest a ray of light betray the town to eyes in the air, she +went carefully over the hours she had spent with Henri that day, +looking for a cause of offense. She must have hurt him or he would +surely have stopped to speak to her. + +Perhaps already he was finding her a burden. She flushed with shame +when she remembered about the meals he had had to order for her, and +she sat up in her great bed until late, studying by candlelight such +phrases as: + +"Il y a une erreur dans la note," and "Garcon, quels fruits avez-vous?" + +She tried to write to Harvey that night, but she gave it up at last. +There was too much he would not understand. She could not write frankly +without telling of Henri, and to this point everything had centered +about Henri. It all rather worried her, because there was nothing she +was ashamed of, nothing she should have had to conceal. She had yet to +learn, had Sara Lee, that many of the concealments of life are based +not on wrongdoing but on fear of misunderstanding. + +So she got as far as: "Dearest Harvey: I am here in a hotel at Dunkirk" +--and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness. Not so +much for Harvey as for familiar things--Uncle James in his chair by the +fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the West"; +her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the dining-room +window; the voices of happy children wandering home from school. + +She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle. +Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry +with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top +of the mairie perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger, +came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer +for quiet sleep. + +For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had +nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama +that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for +his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor +lorries--she called them trucks--piled high with supplies, often +fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food. +Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers, +detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers. + +Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their +striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up, +too, and there would be an aeroplane sliding along, sometimes so low +that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust. + +But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came +at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly. +Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle +impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the +moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those +two interminable days. + +Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops--a +symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect--inside those cars were +wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care. +Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do +must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger +and sent a little message to him. + +"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so +terrible! So pitiful!" + +Yet during the day the square was gay enough. Officers in spurs clanked +across, wide capes blowing in the wind. Common soldiers bought fruit +and paper bags of fried potatoes from the booths. Countless dogs fought +under the feet of passers-by, and over all leered the sardonic face of +Jean Bart, pirate and privateer. + +Sara Lee went out daily, but never far. And she practiced French with +the maid, after this fashion: + +"Draps de toile," said the smiling maid, putting the linen sheets on +the bed. + +Sara Lee would repeat it some six times. + +"Taies d'oreiller," when the pillows came. So Sara Lee called pillows +by the name of their slips from that time forward! Came a bright hour +when she rang the bell for the boy and asked for matches, which she +certainly did not need, with entire success. + +On the second night Sara Lee slept badly. At two o'clock she heard a +sound in the hall, and putting on her kimono, opened the door. On a +stiff chair outside, snoring profoundly, sat Jean, fully dressed. + +The light from her candle roused him and he was wide awake in an instant. + +"Why, Jean!" she said. "Isn't there any place for you to sleep?" + +"I am to remain here, mademoiselle," he replied in English. + +"But surely--not because of me?" + +"It is the captain's order," he said briefly. + +"I don't understand. Why?" + +"All sorts of people come to this place, mademoiselle. But few ladies. +It is best that I remain here." + +She could not move him. He had remained standing while she spoke to him, +and now he yawned, striving to conceal it. Sara Lee felt very +uncomfortable, but Jean's attitude and voice alike were firm. She +thanked him and said good night, but she slept little after that. + +Lying there in the darkness, a warm glow of gratitude to Henri, and a +feeling of her safety in his care, wrapped her like a mantle. She +wondered drowsily if Harvey would ever have thought of all the small +things that seemed second nature to this young Belgian officer. + +She rather thought not. + + + + IX + + +While she was breakfasting the next morning there was a tap at the door, +and thinking it the maid she called to her to come in. + +But it was Jean, an anxious Jean, twisting his cap in his hands. + +"You have had a message from the captain, mademoiselle?" + +"No, Jean." + +"He was to have returned during the night. He has not come, +mademoiselle." + +Sara Lee forgot her morning negligee in Jean's harassed face. + +"But--where did he go?" + +Jean shrugged his shoulders and did not reply. + +"Are you worried about him?" + +"I am anxious, mademoiselle. But I am often anxious; and--he always +returns." + +He smiled almost sheepishly. Sara Lee, who had no subtlety but a great +deal of intuition, felt that there was a certain relief in the smile, as +though Jean, having had no message from his master, was pleased that +she had none. Which was true enough, at that. Also she felt that Jean's +one eye was inspecting her closely, which was also true. A new factor +had come into Henri's life--by Jean's reasoning, a new and dangerous +one. And there were dangers enough already. + +Highly dangerous, Jean reflected in the back of his head as he backed +out with a bow. A young girl unafraid of the morning sun and sitting +at a little breakfast table as fresh as herself--that was a picture for +a war-weary man. + +Jean forgot for a moment his anxiety for Henri's safety in his fear for +his peace of mind. For a doubt had been removed. The girl was straight. +Jean's one sophisticated eye had grasped that at once. A good girl, +alone, and far from home! And Henri, like all soldiers, woman-hungry +for good women, for unpainted skins and clear eyes and the freshness and +bloom of youth. + +All there, behind that little breakfast table which might so pleasantly +have been laid for two. + +Jean took a walk that morning, and stood staring for twenty minutes into +a clock maker's window, full of clocks. After which he drew out his +watch and looked at the time! + +At two in the afternoon Sara Lee saw Henri's car come into the square. +It was, if possible, more dilapidated than before, and he came like a +gray whirlwind, scattering people and dogs out of his way. Almost +before he had had time to enter the hotel Sara Lee heard him in the +hall, and the next moment he was bowing before her. + +"I have been longer than I expected," he explained. "Have you been +quite comfortable?" + +Sara Lee, however, was gazing at him with startled eyes. He was dirty, +unshaven, and his eyes looked hollow and bloodshot. From his neck to +his heels he was smeared with mud, and his tidy tunic was torn into +ragged holes. + +"But you--you have been fighting!" she gasped. + +"I? No, mademoiselle. There has been no battle." His eyes left her +and traveled over the room. "They are doing everything for you? They +are attentive?" + +"Everything is splendid," said Sara Lee. "If you won't tell me how you +got into that condition, at least you can send your coat down to me to +mend." + +"My tunic!" He looked at it smilingly. "You would do that?" + +"I am nearly frantic for something to do." + +He smiled, and suddenly bending down he took her hand and kissed it. + +"You are not only very beautiful, mademoiselle, but you are very good." + +He went away then, and Sara Lee got out her sewing things. The tunic +came soon, carefully brushed and very ragged. But it was not Jean who +brought it; it was the Flemish boy. + +And upstairs in a small room with two beds Sara Lee might have been +surprised to find Jean, the chauffeur, lying on one, while Henri shaved +himself beside the other. For Jean, of the ragged uniform and the patch +over one eye, was a count of Belgium, and served Henri because he loved +him. And because, too, he was no longer useful in that little army +where lay his heart. + +Sometime a book will be written about the Jeans of this war, the great +friendships it has brought forth between men. And not the least of its +stories will be that of this Jean of the one eye. But its place is not +here. + +And perhaps there will be a book about the Henris, also. But not for a +long time, and even then with care. For the heroes of one department of +an army in the field live and die unsung. Their bravest exploits are +buried in secrecy. And that is as it must be. But it is a fine tale to +go untold. + +After he had bathed and shaved, Henri sat down at a tiny table and wrote. +He drew a plan also, from a rough one before him. Then he took a match +and burned the original drawing until it was but charred black ashes. +When he had finished Jean got up from the bed and put on his overcoat. + +"To the King?" he said. + +"To the King, old friend." + +Jean took the letter and went out. + +Down below, Sara Lee sat with Henri's ragged tunic on her lap and +stitched carefully. Sometime, she reflected, she would be mending worn +garments for another man, now far away. A little flood of tenderness +came over her. So helpless these men! There was so much to do for them! +And soon, please God, she would be helping other tired and weary men, +with food, and perhaps a word--when she had acquired some French--and +perhaps a thread and needle. + +She dined alone that night, as usual. Henri did not appear, though she +had sent what she suspected was his only tunic back to him neatly mended +at five o'clock. As a matter of fact Henri was sound asleep. He had +meant to rest only for an hour a body that was crying aloud with fatigue. +But Jean, coming in quietly, had found him sleeping like a child, and +had put his own blanket over him and left him. Henri slept until morning, +when Jean, coming up from his vigil outside the American girl's door, +found him waking and rested, and rang for coffee. + +Jean sat down on the edge of his bed and put on his shoes and puttees. +He was a taciturn man, but now he had something to say that he did not +like to say. And Henri knew it. + +"What is it?" he asked, his arms under his head. "Come, let us have it! +It is, of course, about the American lady." + +"It is," Jean said bluntly. "You cannot mix women and war." + +"And you think I am doing that?" + +"I am not an idiot," Jean growled. "You do not know what you are doing. +I do. She is young and lonely. You are young and not unattractive to +women. Already she turns pale when I so much as ask if she has heard +from you." + +"You asked her that?" + +"You were gone much longer than--" + +"And you thought I might send her word, and not you!" Henri's voice was +offended. He lay back while the boy brought in the morning coffee and +rolls. + +"Let me tell you something," he said when the boy had gone. "She is +betrothed to an American. She wears a betrothal ring. I am to her--the +French language!" + +But, though Henri laughed, Jean remained grave and brooding. For Henri +had not said what Sara Lee already was to him. + +It was later in the morning that Henri broached the subject again. They +were in the courtyard of an old house, working over the engine of the car. + +"I think I have found a location for the young American lady," he said. + +Jean hammered for a considerable time at a refractory rim. + +"And where?" he asked at last. + +Henri named the little town. Like Henri's family name, it must not be +told. Too many things happened there, and perhaps it is even now Henri's +headquarters. For that portion of the line has changed very little. + +Jean fell to renewed hammering. + +"If you will be silent I shall explain a plan," Henri said in a cautious +tone. "She will make soup, with help which we shall find. And if coming +in for refreshments a soldier shall leave a letter for me it is natural, +is it not?" + +"She will suspect, of course." + +"I think not. And she reads no French. None whatever." + +Yet Jean's suspicions were not entirely allayed. The plan had its +advantages. It was important that Henri receive certain reports, and +already the hotel whispered that Henri was of the secret service. It +brought him added deference, of course, but additional danger. + +So Jean accepted the plan, but with reservation. And it was not long +afterward that he said to Sara Lee, in French: "There is a spider on +your neck, mademoiselle." + +But Sara Lee only said, "I'm sorry, Jean; you'll have to speak English +to me for a while, I'm afraid." + +And though he watched her for five minutes she did not put her hand +to her neck. + +However, that was later on. That afternoon Henri spent an hour with the +Minister of War. And at the end of that time he said: "Thank you, Baron. +I think you will not regret it. America must learn the truth, and how +better than through those friendly people who come to us to help?" + +It is as well to state, however, that he left the Minister of War with +the undoubted impression that Miss Sara Lee Kennedy was a spinster of +uncertain years. + +Sara Lee packed her own suitcase that afternoon, doing it rather +nervously because Henri was standing in the room by the window waiting +for it. He had come in as matter-of-factly as Harvey had entered the +parlor at Aunt Harriet's, except that he carried in his arms some six +towels, a cake of soap and what looked suspiciously like two sheets. + +"The house I have under consideration," he said, "has little to +recommend it but the building, and even that--The occupants have gone +away, and--you are not a soldier." + +Sara Lee eyed the bundle. + +"I don't need sheets," she expostulated. + +"There are but two. And Jean has placed blankets in the car. You must +have a pillow also." + +He calmly took one of the hotel pillows from the bed. + +"What else?" he asked calmly. "Cigarettes? But no, you do not smoke." + +Sara Lee eyed him with something very like despair. + +"Aren't you ever going to let me think for myself?" + +"Would you have thought of these?" he demanded triumphantly. "You--you +think only of soup and tired soldiers. Some one must think of you." + +And there was a touch of tenderness in his voice. Sara Lee felt it and +trembled slightly. He was so fine, and he must not think of her that +way. It was not real. It couldn't be. Men were lonely here, where +everything was hard and cruel. They wanted some of the softness of life, +and all of kindness and sweetness that she could give should be Henri's. +But she must make it clear that there could never be anything more. + +There was a tightness about her mouth as she folded the white frock. + +"I know that garment," he said boyishly. "Do you remember the night you +wore it? And how we wandered in the square and made the plan that has +brought us together again?" + +Sara Lee reached down into her suitcase and brought up Harvey's picture. + +"I would like you to see this," she said a little breathlessly. "It is +the man I am to marry." + +For a moment she thought Henri was not going to take it. But he came, +rather slowly, and held out his hand for it. He went with it to the +window and stood there for some time looking down at it. + +"When are you going to marry him, mademoiselle?" + +"As soon as I go back." + +Sara Lee had expected some other comment, but he made none. He put the +photograph very quietly on the bed before her, and gathered up the linen +and the pillow in his arms. + +"I shall send for your luggage, mademoiselle. And you will find me at +the car outside, waiting." + +And so it was that a very silent Henri sat with Jean going out to that +strange land which was to be Sara Lee's home for many months. And a +very silent Sara Lee, flanked with pillow and blankets, who sat back +alone and tried to recall the tones of Harvey's voice. + +And failed. + + + X + + +From Dunkirk to the Front, the road, after the Belgian line was passed, +was lightly guarded. Henri came out of a reverie to explain to Sara Lee. + +"We have not many men," he said. "And those that remain are holding the +line. It is very weary, our army." + +Now at home Uncle James had thought very highly of the Belgian Army. He +had watched the fight they made, and he had tried to interest Sara Lee +in it. But without much result. She had generally said: "Isn't it +wonderful!" or "horrible," as the case might be, and put out of her mind +as soon as possible the ringing words he had been reading. But she had +not forgotten, she found. They came back to her as she rode through that +deserted countryside. Henri, glancing back somewhat later, found her in +tears. + +He climbed back at once into the rear of the car and sat down beside her. + +"You are homesick, I think?" + +"Yes. But not for myself. I am just homesick for all the people who +have lost their homes. You--and Jean, and all the rest." + +"Some day I shall tell you about my home and what has happened to it," +he said gravely. "Not now. It is not pleasant. But you must remember +this: We are going back home, we Belgians." And after a little pause: +"Just as you are." + +He lapsed into silence after that, and Sara Lee, stealing a glance at +him, saw his face set and hard. She had a purely maternal impulse to +reach over and pat his hand. + +Jean did not like Henri's shift to the rear of the car. He drove with +a sort of irritable feverishness, until Henri leaned over and touched +him on the shoulder. + +"We have mademoiselle with us, Jean," he said in French. + +"It is not difficult to believe," growled Jean. But he slackened his +pace somewhat. + +So far the road had been deserted. Now they had come up to a stream of +traffic flowing slowly toward the Front. Armored cars, looking tall and +top-heavy, rumbled and jolted along. Many lorries, one limousine +containing a general, a few Paris buses, all smeared a dingy gray and +filled with French soldiers, numberless and nondescript open machines, +here and there a horse-drawn vehicle--these filled the road. In and +out among them Jean threaded his way, while Sara Lee grew crimson with +the effort to see it all, and Henri sat very stiff and silent. + +At a crossroads they were halted by troops who had fallen out for a rest. +The men stood at ease, and stared their fill at Sara Lee. Save for a +few weary peasants, most of them had seen no women for months. But they +were respectful, if openly admiring. And their admiration of her was +nothing to Sara Lee's feeling toward them. She loved them all--boys +with their first straggly beards on their chins; older men, looking worn +and tired; French and Belgian; smiling and sad. But most of all, for +Uncle James' sake, she loved the Belgians. + +"I cannot tell you," she said breathlessly to Henri. "It is like a +dream come true. And I shall help. You look doubtful sometimes, but +I am sure." + +"You are heaven sent," Henri replied gravely. + +They turned into a crossroad after a time, and there in a little village +Sara Lee found her new home. A strange village indeed, unoccupied and +largely destroyed. Piles of bricks and plaster lined the streets. +Broken glass was everywhere. Jean blew out a tire finally, because of +the glass, and they were obliged to walk the remainder of the way. + +"A poor place, mademoiselle," Henri said as they went along. "A peaceful +little town, and quite beautiful, once. And it harbored no troops. But +everything is meat for the mouths of their guns." + +Sara Lee stopped and looked about her. Her heart was beating fast, but +her lips were steady enough. + +"And it is here that I--" + +"A little distance down the street. You must see before you decide." + +Steady, passionless firing was going on, not near, but far away, like +low thunder before a summer storm. She was for months to live, to eat +and sleep and dream to that rumbling from the Ypres salient, to waken +when it ceased or to look up from her work at the strange silence. But +it was new to her then, and terrible. + +"Do they still shell this--this town?" she asked, rather breathlessly. + +"Not now. They have done their work. Of course--" he did not finish. + +Sara Lee's heart slowed down somewhat. After all, she had asked to be +near the Front. And that meant guns and such destruction as was all +about her. Only one thing troubled her. + +"It is rather far from the trenches, isn't it?" + +He smiled slightly. + +"Far! It is not very far. Not so far as I would wish, mademoiselle. +But, to do what you desire, it is the best I have to offer." + +"How far away are the trenches?" + +"A quarter of a mile beyond those poplar trees." He indicated on a slight +rise a row of great trees broken somewhat but not yet reduced to the +twisted skeletons they were to become later on. In a long line they +faced the enemy like sentinels, winter-quiet but dauntless, and behind +them lay the wreck of the little village, quiet and empty. + +"Will the men know I am here?" Sara Lee asked anxiously. + +"But, yes, mademoiselle. At night they come up from the trenches, and +fresh troops take their places. They come up this street and go on to +wherever they are to rest. And when they find that a house of--mercy +is here--and soup, they will come. More than you wish." + +"Belgian soldiers?" + +"Only Belgian soldiers. That is as you want it to be, I think." + +"If only I spoke French!" + +"You will learn. And in the meantime, mademoiselle, I have taken the +liberty of finding you a servant--a young peasant woman. And you will +also have a soldier always on guard." + +Something that had been in the back of Sara Lee's mind for some time +suddenly went away. She had been thinking of Aunt Harriet and the Ladies' +Aid Society of the Methodist Church. She had, in fact, been wondering +how they would feel when they learned that she was living alone, the +only woman among thousands of men. It had, oddly enough, never occurred +to her before. + +"You have thought of everything," she said gratefully. + +But Henri said nothing. He had indeed thought of everything with a +vengeance, with the net result that he was not looking at Sara Lee more +than he could help. + +These Americans were strange. An American girl would cross the seas, +and come here alone with him--a man and human. And she would take for +granted that he would do what he was doing for love of his kind--which +was partly true; and she would be beautiful and sweet and amiable and +quite unself-conscious. And then she would go back home, warm of heart +with gratitude, and marry the man of the picture. + +The village had but one street, and that deserted and in ruins. Behind +its double row of houses, away from the enemy, lay the fields, a muddy +canal and more poplar trees. And from far away, toward Ypres, there +came constantly that somewhat casual booming of artillery which marked +the first winter of the war. + +The sound of the guns had first alarmed, then interested Sara Lee. It +was detached then, far away. It meant little to her. It was only later, +when she saw some of the results of the sounds she heard, that they +became significant. But this is not a tale of the wounding of men. +There are many such. This is the story of a little house of mercy, and +of a girl with a dauntless spirit, and of two men who loved her. Only +that. + +The maid Henri had found was already in the house, sweeping. Henri +presented her to Sara Lee, and he also brought a smiling little Belgian +boy, in uniform and with a rifle. + +"Your staff, mademoiselle!" he said. "And your residence!" + +Sara Lee looked about her. With the trifling exception that there was +no roof, it was whole. And the roof was not necessary, for the floors +of the upper story served instead. There was a narrow passage with a +room on either side, and a tiny kitchen behind. + +Henri threw open a door on the right. + +"Your bedroom," he said. "Well furnished, as you will see. It should +be, since there has been brought here all the furniture not destroyed +in the village." + +His blacker mood had fallen away before her naive delight. He went +about smiling boyishly, showing her the kettles in the kitchen; the +supply, already so rare, of firewood; the little stove. But he stiffened +somewhat when she placed her hand rather timidly on his arm. + +"How am I ever to thank you?" she asked. + +"By doing much good. And by never going beyond the poplar trees." + +She promised both very earnestly. + +But she was a little sad as she followed Henri about, he volubly +expatiating on such advantages as plenty of air owing to the absence of +a roof; and the attraction of the stove, which he showed much like a +salesman anxious to make a sale. "Such a stove!" he finished +contentedly. "It will make soup even in your absence, mademoiselle! +Our peasants eat much soup; therefore it is what you would call a +trained stove." + +Before Sara Lee's eyes came a picture of Harvey and the Leete house, +its white dining room, its bay window for plants, its comfortable charm +and prettiness. And Harvey's face, as he planned it for her anxious, +pleading, loving. She drew a long breath. If Henri noticed her +abstraction he ignored it. He was all over the little house. One moment +he was instructing Marie volubly, to her evident confusion. On Rene, +the guard, he descended like a young cyclone, with warnings for +mademoiselle's safety and comfort. He was everywhere, sitting on the +bed to see if it was soft, tramping hard on the upper floor to discover +if any plaster might loosen below, and pausing in that process to look +keenly at a windmill in the field behind. + +When he came down it was to say: "You are not entirely alone in the +village, after all, mademoiselle. The miller has come back. I shall +visit him now and explain." + +He found Sara Lee, however, still depressed. She was sitting in a low +chair in the kitchen gazing thoughtfully at the stove. + +"I am here," she said. "And here is the house, and a stove, and-- +everything. But there are no shops; and what shall I make my soup +out of?" + +Henri stared at her rather blankly. + +"True!" he said. "Very true. And I never thought of it!" + +Then suddenly they both laughed, the joyous ringing laugh of ridiculous +youth, which can see its own absurdities and laugh at them. + +Henri counted off on his fingers. + +"I thought of water," he said, "and a house, and firewood, and kettles +and furniture. And there I ceased thinking." + +It was dusk now. Marie lifted the lid from the stove, and a warm red +glow of reflected light filled the little kitchen. It was warm and +cozy; the kettle sang like the purring of a cat. And something else +that had troubled Sara Lee came out. + +"I wonder," she said, "if you are doing all this only because I--well, +because I persuaded you." Which she had not. "Do the men really need +me here?" + +"Need you, mademoiselle?" + +"Do they need what little I can give? They were smiling, all the ones +I saw." + +"A Belgian soldier always smiles. Even when he is fighting." His voice +had lost its gayety and had taken on a deeper note. "Mademoiselle, I +have brought you here, where I can think of no other woman who would +have the courage to come, because you are needed. I cannot promise you +entire safety"--his mouth tightened--"but I can promise you work and +gratitude. Such gratitude, mademoiselle, as you may never know again." + +That reassured her. But in her practical mind the matter of supplies +loomed large. She brought the matter up again directly. + +"It is to be hot chocolate and soup?" he asked. + +"Both, if I find I have enough money. Soup only, perhaps." + +"And soup takes meat, of course." + +"It should, to be strengthening." + +Henri looked up, to see Jean in the doorway smiling grimly. + +"It is very simple," Jean said to him in French. "You have no other +duties of course; so each day you shall buy in the market place at +Dunkirk, with American money. And I shall become a delivery boy and +bring out food for mademoiselle, and whatever is needed." + +Henri smiled back at him cheerfully. "An excellent plan, Jean," he said. +"Not every day, but frequently." + +Jean growled and disappeared. + +However, there was the immediate present to think of, and while Jean +thawed his hands at the fire and Sara Lee was taking housewifely stock +of her new home, Henri disappeared. + +He came back in a half hour, carrying in a small basket butter, eggs, +bread and potatoes. + +"The miller!" he explained cheerfully to Sara Lee. "He has still a few +hens, and hidden somewhere a cow. We can have milk--is there a pail +for Marie to take to the mill?--and bread and an omelet. That is a +meal!" + +There was but one lamp, which hung over the kitchen stove. The room +across from Sara Lee's bedroom contained a small round dining table and +chairs. Sara Lee, enveloped in a large pinafore apron, made the +omelet in the kitchen. Marie brought a pail of fresh milk. Henri, with +a towel over his left arm, and in absurd mimicry of a Parisian waiter, +laid the table; and Jean, dour Jean, caught a bit of the infection, and +finding four bottles set to work with his pocketknife to fit candles +into their necks. + +Standing in corners, smiling, useless against the cheerful English that +flowed from the kitchen stove to the dining room and back again, were +Rene and Marie. It was of no use to attempt to help. Did the fire burn +low, it was the young officer who went out for fresh wood. But Rene +could not permit that twice. He brought in great armfuls of firewood +and piled them neatly by the stove. + +Henri was absurdly happy again. He would come to the door gravely, with +Sara Lee's little phrase book in hand, and read from it in a solemn tone: + +"'Shall we have duck or chicken?' 'Where can we get a good dinner at a +moderate price?' 'Waiter, you have spilled wine on my dress.' 'Will +you have a cigar?' 'No, thank you. I prefer a pipe.'" + +And Sara Lee beat up the eggs and found, after a bad moment, some salt +in a box, and then poured her omelet into the pan. She was very anxious +that it be a good omelet. She must make good her claim as a cook or +Henri's sublime faith in her would die. + +It was a divine omelet. Even Jean said so. They sat, the three of them, +in the cold little dining room and never knew that it was cold, and they +ate prodigious quantities of omelet and bread and butter, and bully beef +out of a tin, and drank a great deal of milk. + +Even Jean thawed at last, under the influence of food and Sara Lee. +Before the meal was over he was planning how to get her supplies to her +and making notes on a piece of paper as to what she would need at once. +They adjourned to Sara Lee's bedroom, where Marie had kindled a fire in +the little iron stove, and sat there in the warmth with two candles, +still planning. By that time Sara Lee had quite forgotten that at home +one did not have visitors in one's bedroom. + +Suddenly Henri held up his hand. + +"Listen!" he said. + +That was the first time Sara Lee had ever heard the quiet shuffling step +of tired men, leaving their trenches under cover of darkness. Henri +threw his military cape over her shoulders and she stood in the dark +doorway, watching. + +The empty street was no longer empty. From gutter to gutter flowed a +stream of men, like a sluggish river which narrowed where a fallen house +partly filled the way; not talking, not singing, just moving, bent under +their heavy and mud-covered equipment. Here and there the clack of +wooden sabots on the cobbles told of one poor fellow not outfitted with +leather shoes. The light of a match here and there showed some few +lucky enough to have still remaining cigarettes, and revealed also, in +the immediate vicinity, a white bandage or two. Some few, recognizing +Henri's officer's cap, saluted. Most of them stumbled on, too weary to +so much as glance aside. + +Nothing that Sara Lee had dreamed of war was like this. This was dreary +and sodden and hopeless. Those fresh troops at the crossroads that day +had been blithe and smiling. There had been none of the glitter and +panoply of war, but there had been movement, the beating of a drum, the +sharp cries of officers as the lines re-formed. + +Here there were no lines. Just such a stream of men as at home might +issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they +were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them +were wounded. + +"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as +mine would not be enough." + +"I would to God there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth. + +"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind +work of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by +caring for only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But +every night some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door +--men slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for +those there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhaps +a clean bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will +have given comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You--alone!" + +"I--alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you? +It is you who have made it possible." + +But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid +what lay beyond. Far beyond a star shell had risen above the flat +fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white +light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and +went out. + +"Like that!" Henri said to her, but in French. "Like that you are to me. +Bright and shining--and so soon gone." + +Sara Lee thought he had asked her if she was cold. + + + + XI + +The girl was singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she +had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, +though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such +young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness! + +She got the tales by intuition rather than by words, though she was +picking up some French at that. Marie would weep openly, at times. The +most frequent story was of no news from the country held by the Germans, +of families left with nothing and probably starving. The first inquiry +was always for news. Had the American lady any way to make inquiry? + +In time Sara Lee began to take notes of names and addresses, and through +Mr. Travers, in London, and the Relief Commission, in Belgium, bits of +information came back. A certain family was in England at a village in +Surrey. Of another a child had died. Here was one that could not be +located, and another reported massacred during the invasion. + +Later on Sara Lee was to find her little house growing famous, besieged +by anxious soldiers who besought her efforts, so that she used enormous +numbers of stamps and a great deal of effort. But that was later on. +And when that time came she turned to the work as a refuge from her +thoughts. For days were coming when Sara Lee did not want to think. + +But like all big things the little house made a humble beginning. A mere +handful of men, daring the gibes of their comrades, stopped in that first +night the door stood open, with its invitation of firelight and candles. +But these few went away with a strange story--of a beautiful American, +and hot soup, and even a cigarette apiece. That had been Henri's +contribution, the cigarettes. And soon the fame of the little house went +up and down the trenches, and it was like to die of overpopularity. + +It was at night that the little house of mercy bloomed like a flower. +During the daytime it was quiet, and it was then, as time went on, that +Sara Lee wrote her letters home and to England, and sent her lists of +names to be investigated. But from the beginning there was much to do. +Vegetables were to be prepared for the soup, Marie must find and bring +in milk for the chocolate, Rene must lay aside his rifle and chop +firewood. + +One worry, however, disappeared with the days. Henri was proving a +clever buyer. The money she sent in secured marvels. Only Jean knew, +or ever knew, just how much of Henri's steadily decreasing funds went +to that buying. Certainly not Sara Lee. And Jean expostulated only +once--to be met by such blazing fury as set him sullen for two days. + +"I am doing this," Henri finished, a trifle ashamed of himself, "not for +mademoiselle, but for our army. And since when have you felt that the +best we can give is too much for such a purpose?" + +Which was, however lofty, only a part of the truth. + +So supplies came in plentifully, and Sara Lee pared vegetables and sang +a bit under her breath, and glowed with good will when at night the weary +vanguard of a weary little army stopped at her door and scraped the mud +off its boots and edged in shyly. + +She was very happy, and her soup was growing famous. It is true that +the beef she used was not often beef, but she did not know that, and +merely complained that the meat was stringy. Now and then there was +no beef at all, and she used hares instead. On quiet days, when there +was little firing beyond the poplar trees, she went about with a basket +through the neglected winter gardens of the town. There were Brussels +sprouts, and sometimes she found in a cellar carrots or cabbages. She +had potatoes always. + +It was at night then, from seven in the evening until one, that the +little house was busiest. Word had gone out through the trenches beyond +the poplar trees that slightly wounded men needing rest before walking +back to their billets, exhausted and sick men, were welcome to the little +house. It was soon necessary to give the officers tickets for the men. +Rene took them in at the door, with his rifle in the hollow of his arm, +and he was as implacable as a ticket taker at the opera. + +Never once in all the months of her life there did Sara Lee have an ugly +word, an offensive glance. But, though she never knew this, many half +articulate and wholly earnest prayers were offered for her in those +little churches behind the lines where sometimes the men slept, and often +they prayed. + +She was very businesslike. She sent home to the Ladies' Aid Society a +weekly record of what had been done: So many bowls of soup; so many +cups of chocolate; so many minor injuries dressed. Because, very soon, +she found first aid added to her activities. She sickened somewhat at +first. Later she allowed to Marie much of the serving of food, and in +the little salle a manger she had ready on the table basins, water, cotton, +iodine and bandages. + +Henri explained the method to her. + +"It is a matter of cleanliness," he said. "First one washes the wound +and then there is the iodine. Then cotton, a bandage, and--a surgeon +could do little more." + +Henri and Jean came often. And more than once during the first ten days +Jean spent the night rolled in a blanket by the kitchen fire, and Henri +disappeared. He was always back in the morning, however, looking dirty +and very tired. Sara Lee sewed more than one rent for him, those days, +but she was strangely incurious. It was as though, where everything was +strange, Henri's erratic comings and goings were but a part with the rest. + +Then one night the unexpected happened. The village was shelled. + +Sara Lee had received her first letter from Harvey that day. The maid +at Morley's had forwarded it to her, and Henri had brought it up. + +"I think I have brought you something you wish for very much," he said, +looking down at her. + +"Mutton?" she inquired anxiously. + +"Better than that." + +"Sugar?" + +"A letter, mademoiselle." + +Afterward he could not quite understand the way she had suddenly drawn +in her breath. He had no memory, as she had, of Harvey's obstinate anger +at her going, his conviction that she was doing a thing criminally wrong +and cruel. + +"Give it to me, please." + +She took it into her room and closed the door. When she came out again +she was composed and quiet, but rather white. Poor Henri! He was half +mad that day with jealousy. Her whiteness he construed as longing. + +This is a part of Harvey's letter: + + +You may think that I have become reconciled, but I have not. If I could +see any reason for it I might. But what reason is there? So many +others, older and more experienced, could do what you are doing, and +more safely. + +In your letter from the steamer you tell me not to worry. Good God, Sara +Lee, how can I help worrying? I do not even know where you are! If you +are in England, well and good. If you are abroad I do not want to know +it. I know these foreigners. I run into them every day. And they do +not understand American women. I get crazy when I think about it. I +have had to let the Leete house go. There is not likely to be such a +chance soon again. Business is good, but I don't seem to care much about +it any more. Honestly, dear, I think you have treated me very badly. I +always feel as though the people I meet are wondering if we have quarreled +or what on earth took you away on this wild-goose chase. I don't know +myself, so how can I tell them? + +I shall always love you, Sara Lee. I guess I'm that sort. But sometimes +I wonder if, when we are married, you will leave me again in some such +uncalled-for way. I warn you now, dear, that I won't stand for it. I'm +suffering too much. + HARVEY. + + +Sara Lee wore the letter next her heart, but it did not warm her. She +went through the next few hours in a sort of frozen composure and ate +nothing at all. + +Then came the bombardment. + +Henri and Jean, driving out from Dunkirk, had passed on the road +ammunition trains, waiting in the road until dark before moving on to +the Front. Henri had given Sara Lee her letter, had watched jealously +for its effect on her, and then, his own face white and set, had gone on +down the ruined street. + +Here within the walls of a destroyed house he disappeared. The place +was evidently familiar to him, for he moved without hesitation. Broken +furniture still stood in the roofless rooms, and in front of a battered +bureau Henri paused. Still whistling under his breath, he took off his +uniform and donned a strange one, of greenish gray. In the pocket of +the blouse he stuffed a soft round cap of the same color. Then, resuming +his cape and Belgian cap, with its tassel over his forehead, he went out +into the street again. He carried in his belt a pistol, but it was not +the one he had brought in with him. As a matter of fact, by the addition +of the cap in his pocket, Henri was at that moment in the full uniform of +a lieutenant of a Bavarian infantry regiment, pistol and all. + +He went down the street and along the road toward the poplars. He met +the first detachment of men out of the trenches just beyond the trees, +and stepped aside into the mud to let them pass, calling a greeting to +them out of the darkness. + +"Bonsoir!" they replied, and saluted stiffly. There were few among them +who did not know his voice, and fewer still who did not suspect his +business. + +"A brave man," they said among themselves as they went on. + +"How long will he last?" asked one young soldier, a boy in his teens. + +"One cannot live long who does as he does," replied a gaunt and bearded +man. "But it is a fine life while it continues. A fine life!" + +The boy stepped out of the shuffling line and looked behind him. He +could see only the glow of Henri's eternal cigarette. "I should like to +go with him," he muttered wistfully. + +The ammunition train was in the village now. It kept the center of the +road, lest it should slide into the mud on either side and be mired. +The men moved out of its way into the ditch, grumbling. + +Henri went whistling softly down the road. + +The first shell fell in the neglected square. The second struck the +rear wagons of the ammunition train. Henri heard the terrific explosion +that followed, and turning ran madly back into the village. More shells +fell into the road. The men scattered like partridges, running for the +fields, but the drivers of the ammunition wagons beat their horses and +came lurching and shouting down the road. + +There was cold terror in Henri's heart. He ran madly, throwing aside +his cape as he went. More shells fell ahead in the street. Once in the +darkness he fell flat over the body of a horse. There was a steady +groaning from the ditch near by. But he got up and ran on, a strange +figure with his flying hair and his German uniform. + +He was all but stabbed by Rene when he entered the little house. + +"Mademoiselle?" Henri gasped, holding Rene's bayonet away from his +heaving chest. + +"I am here," said Sara Lee's voice from the little salle a manger. "Let +them carry in the wounded. I am getting ready hot water and bandages. +There is not much space, for the corner of the room has been shot away." + +She was as dead white in the candlelight, but very calm. + +"You cannot stay here," Henri panted. "At any time--" + +Another shell fell, followed by the rumble of falling walls. + +"Some one must stay," said Sara Lee. "There must be wounded in the +streets. Marie is in the cellar." + +Henri pleaded passionately with her to go to the cellar, but she refused. +He would have gathered her up in his arms and carried her there, but +Jean came in, leading a wounded man, and Henri gave up in despair. + +All that night they worked, a ghastly business. More than one man died +that night in the little house, while a blond young man in a German +uniform gave him a last mouthful of water or took down those pitifully +vague addresses which were all the dying Belgians had to give. + +"I have not heard--last at Aarschot, but now--God knows where." + +No more shells fell. At dawn, with all done that could be done, Sara +Lee fainted quietly in the hallway. Henri carried her in and placed +her on her bed. A corner of the room was indeed gone. The mantel was +shattered and the little stove. But on the floor lay Harvey's photograph +uninjured. Henri lifted it and looked at it. Then he placed it on the +table, and very reverently he kissed the palm of Sara Lee's quiet hand. + +Daylight found the street pitiful indeed. Henri, whose costume Rene had +been casting wondering glances at all night, sent a request for men from +the trenches to clear away the bodies of the horses and bury them, and +somewhat later over a single grave in the fields there was a simple +ceremony of burial for the men who had fallen. Henri had changed again +by that time, but he sternly forbade Sara Lee to attend. + +"On pain," he said, "of no more supplies, mademoiselle. These things +must be. They are war. But you can do nothing to help, and it will +be very sad." + +Ambulances took away the wounded at dawn, and the little house became +quiet once more. With planks Rene repaired the damage to the corner, +and triumphantly produced and set up another stove. He even put up a +mantelshelf, and on it, smiling somewhat, he placed Harvey's picture. + +Sara Lee saw it there, and a tiny seed of resentment took root and grew. + +"If there had been no one here last night," she said to the photograph, +"many more would have died. How can you say I am cruel to you? Isn't +this worth the doing?" + +But Harvey remained impassive, detached, his eyes on the photographer's +white muslin screen. And the angle of his jaw was set and dogged. + + + + XII + + +That morning there was a conference in the little house--Colonel Lilias, +who had come in before for a mute but appreciative call on Sara Lee, and +for a cup of chocolate; Captain Tournay, Jean and Henri. It was held +round the little table in the salle a manger, after Marie had brought +coffee and gone out. + +"They had information undoubtedly," said the colonel. "The same thing +happened at Pervyse when an ammunition train went through. They had the +place, and what is more they had the time. Of course there are the +airmen." + +"It did not leave the main road until too late for observation from the +air," Henri put in shortly. + +"Yet any one who saw it waiting at the crossroads might have learned its +destination. The drivers talk sometimes." + +"But the word had to be carried across," said Captain Tournay. "That is +the point. My men report flashes of lights from the fields. We have +followed them up and found no houses, no anything. In this flat country +a small light travels far." + +"I shall try to learn to-night," Henri said. "It is, of course, +possible that some one from over there--" He shrugged his shoulders. + +"I think not." Colonel Lilias put a hand on Henri's shoulder +affectionately. "They have not your finesse, boy. And I doubt if, in +all their army, they have so brave a man." + +Henri flushed. + +"There is a courage under fire, with their fellows round--that is one +thing. And a courage of attack--that is even more simple. But the +bravest man is the one who works alone--the man to whom capture is death +without honor." + +The meeting broke up. Jean and Henri went away in the car, and though +supplies came up regularly Sara Lee did not see the battered gray car +for four days. At the end of that time Henri came alone. Jean, he said +briefly, was laid up for a little while with a flesh wound in his +shoulder. He would be well very soon. In the meantime here at last was +mutton. It had come from England, and he, Henri, had found it lying +forgotten and lonely and very sad and had brought it along. + +After that Henri disappeared on foot. It was midafternoon and a sunny +day. Sara Lee saw him walking briskly across the fields and watched him +out of sight. She spoke some French now, and she had gathered from Rene, +who had no scruples about listening at a door, that Henri was the bravest +man in the Belgian Army. + +Until now Sara Lee had given small thought to Henri's occupation. She +knew nothing of war, and the fact that Henri, while wearing a uniform, +was unattached, had not greatly impressed her. Had she known the +constitution of a modern army she might have wondered over his freedom, +his powerful car, his passes and maps. But his detachment had not seemed +odd to her. Even his appearance during the bombardment in the uniform +of a German lieutenant had meant nothing to her. She had never seen a +German uniform. + +That evening, however, when he returned she ventured a question. They +dined together, the two of them, for the first time at the little house +alone. Always before Jean had made the third. And it was a real meal, +for Sara Lee had sacrificed a bit of mutton from her soup, and Henri had +produced from his pocket a few small and withered oranges. + +"A gift!" he said gayly, and piled them in a precarious heap in the +center of the table. On the exact top he placed a walnut. + +"Now speak gently and walk softly," he said. "It is a work of art and +not to be lightly demolished." + +He was alternately gay and silent during the meal, and more than once +Sara Lee found his eyes on her, with something new and different in them. + +"Just you and I together!" he said once. "It is very wonderful." + +And again: "When you go back to him, shall you tell him of your good +friend who has tried hard to serve you?" + +"Of course I shall," said Sara Lee. "And he will write you, I know. He +will be very grateful." + +But it was she who was silent after that, because somehow it would be +hard to make Harvey understand. And as for his being grateful-- + +"Mademoiselle," said Henri later on, "would you object if I make a +suggestion? You wear a very valuable ring. I think it is entirely safe, +but--who can tell? And also it is not entirely kind to remind men who +are far from all they love that you--" + +Sara Lee flushed and took off her ring. + +"I am glad you told me," she said. And Henri did not explain that the +Belgian soldiers would not recognize the ring as either a diamond or a +symbol, but that to him it was close to torture. + +It was when he insisted on carrying out the dishes, singing a little +French song as he did so, that Sara Lee decided to speak what was in her +mind. He was in high spirits then. + +"Mademoiselle," he said, "shall I show you something that the eye of no +man has seen before, and that, when we have seen it, shall never be seen +again?" + +On her interested consent he called in Marie and Rene, making a great +ceremony of the matter, and sending Marie into hysterical giggling. + +"Now see!" he said earnestly. "No eye before has ever seen or will again. +Will you guess, mademoiselle? Or you, Marie? Rene?" + +"A tear?" ventured Sara Lee. + +"But--do I look like weeping?" + +He did not, indeed. He stood, tall and young and smiling before them, +and produced from his pocket the walnut. + +"Perceive!" he said, breaking it open and showing the kernel. "Has human +eye ever before seen it?" He thrust it into Marie's open mouth. "And +it is gone! Voila tout!" + +It was that evening, while Sara Lee cut bandages and Henri rolled them, +that she asked him what his work was. He looked rather surprised, and +rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work," +he said. "What you call odd jobs." + +"Then you don't do any fighting?" + +"In the trenches--no. But now and then I have a little skirmish." + +A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The +trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this +alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no +detail--was he playing a man's part in the war? + +"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness. +"You say there are too few men. Yet--I can understand Monsieur Jean, +because he has only one eye. But you!" + +"I do something," he said, avoiding her eyes. "It is not a great deal. +It is the thing I can do best. That is all." + +He went away some time after that, leaving the little house full and busy +justifying its existence. The miller's son, who came daily to chat with +Marie, was helping in the kitchen. By the warm stove, and only kept from +standing over it by Marie's sharp orders, were as many men as could get +near. Each held a bowl of hot soup, and--that being a good day--a +piece of bread. Tall soldiers and little ones, all dirty, all weary, +almost all smiling, they peered over each other's shoulders, to catch, +if might be, a glimpse of Marie's face. + +When they came too close she poked an elbow into some hulking fellow and +sent him back. + +"Elbow-room, in the name of God," she would beg. + +Over all the room hung the warm steam from the kettles, and a delicious +odor, and peace. + +Sara Lee had never heard of the word morale. She would have been +astonished to have been told that she was helping the morale of an army. +But she gave each night in that little house of mercy something that +nothing else could give--warmth and welcome, but above all a touch of +home. + +That night Henri did not come back. She stood by her table bandaging, +washing small wounds, talking her bits of French, until one o'clock. +Then, the last dressing done, she went to the kitchen. Marie was there, +with Maurice, the miller's son. + +"Has the captain returned?" she asked. + +"Not yet, mademoiselle." + +"Leave a warm fire," Sara Lee said. "He will probably come in later." + +Maurice went away, with a civil good night. Sara Lee stood in the +doorway after he had gone, looking out. Farther along the line there +was a bombardment going on. She knew now what a bombardment meant and +her brows contracted. Somewhere there in the trenches men were enduring +that, while Henri-- + +She said a little additional prayer that night, which was that she +should have courage to say to him what she felt--that there were big +things to do, and that it should not all be left to these smiling, +ill-clad peasant soldiers. + +At that moment Henri, in his gray-green uniform, was cutting wire before +a German trench, one of a party of German soldiers, who could not know +in the darkness that there had been a strange addition to their group. +Cutting wire and learning many things which it was well that he should +know. + +Now and then, in perfect German, he whispered a question. Always he +received a reply. And stowed it away in his tenacious memory for those +it most concerned. + +At daylight he was asleep by Sara Lee's kitchen fire. And at daylight +Sara Lee was awakened by much firing, and putting on a dressing gown she +went out to see what was happening. Rene was in the street looking +toward the poplar trees. + +"An attack," he said briefly. + +"You mean--the Germans?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +She went back into the little ruined house, heavy-hearted. She knew now +what it meant, an attack. That night there would be ambulances in the +street, and word would come up that certain men were gone--would never +seek warmth and shelter in her kitchen or beg like children for a second +bowl of soup. + +On the kitchen floor by the dying fire Henri lay asleep. + + + + XIII + + +Much has been said of the work of spies--said and written. Here is a +woman in Paris sending forbidden messages on a marked coin. Men are +tapped on the shoulder by a civil gentleman in a sack suit, and walk +away with him, never to be seen again. + +But of one sort of spy nothing has been written and but little is known. +Yet by him are battles won or lost. On the intelligence he brings +attacks are prepared for and counter-attacks launched. It is not always +the airman, in these days of camouflage, who brings word of ammunition +trains or of new batteries. + +In the early days of the war the work of the secret service at the Front +was of the gravest importance. There were fewer air machines, and +observation from the air was a new science. Also trench systems were +incomplete. Between them, known to a few, were breaks of solid land, +guarded from behind. To one who knew, it was possible, though dangerous +beyond words, to cross the inundated country that lay between the Belgian +Front and the German lines, and even with good luck to go farther. + +Henri, for instance, on that night before had left the advanced trench +at the railway line, had crawled through the Belgian barbed wire, and +had advanced, standing motionless as each star shell burst overhead, and +then moving on quickly. The inundation was his greatest difficulty. +Shallow in most places, it was full of hidden wire and crisscrossed with +irrigation ditches. Once he stumbled into one, but he got out by +swimming. Had he been laden with a rifle and equipment it might have +been difficult. + +He swore to himself as his feet touched ground again. For a star shell +was hanging overhead, and his efforts had sent wide and ever increasingly +widening circles over the placid surface of the lagoon. Let them lap to +the German outposts and he was lost. + +Henri's method was peculiar to himself. Where there was dry terrain he +did as did the others, crouched and crept. But here in the salt marshes, +where the sea had been called to Belgium's aid, he had evolved a system +of moving, neck deep in water, stopping under the white night lights, +advancing in the darkness. There was no shelter. The country was flat +as a hearth. + +He would crawl out at last in the darkness and lie flat, as the dead lie. +And then, inch by inch, he would work his way forward, by routes that he +knew. Sometimes he went entirely through the German lines, and +reconnoitered on the roads behind. They were shallow lines then, for +the inundation made the country almost untenable, and a charge in force +from the Belgians across was unlikely. + +Henri knew his country well, as well as he loved it. In a farmhouse +behind the German lines he sometimes doffed his wet gray-green uniform +and put on the clothing of a Belgian peasant. Trust Henri then for being +a lout, a simple fellow who spoke only Flemish--but could hear in many +tongues. Watch him standing at crossroads and marveling at big guns that +rumble by. + +At first Henri had wished, having learned of an attack, to be among those +who repelled it. Then one day his King had sent for him to come to that +little village which was now his capital city. + +He had been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing. +Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri +was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were +blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was--a tawdry summer home, +ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man +of all time it became royal. + +So Henri bowed and waited, and soon the King got up and shook hands with +him. As a matter of fact they knew each other rather well, but to +explain more would be to tell that family name of Henri's which must +never be known. + +"Sit down," said the King gravely. And he got a box of cigars from the +mantelpiece and offered it. "I sent for you because I want to talk to +you. You are doing valuable work." + +"I am glad you think it so, sire," said Henri rather unhappily, because +he felt what was coming. "But I cannot do it all the time. There are +intervals--" + +An ordinary mortal may not interrupt a king, but a king may interrupt +anything, except perhaps a German bombardment. + +"Intervals, of course. If there were not you would be done in a month." + +"But I am a soldier. My place is--" + +"Your place is where you are most useful." + +Henri was getting nothing out of the cigar. He flung it away and got up. + +"I want to fight too," he said stubbornly. "We need every man, and I am +--rather a good shot. I do this other because I can do it. I speak +their infernal tongue. But it's dirty business at the best, sire." He +remembered to put in the sire, but rather ungraciously. Indeed he shot +it out like a bullet. + +"Dirty business!" said the King thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. It +is, of course. But--not so dirty as the things they have done, and are +doing." + +He sat still and let Henri stamp up and down, because, as has been said, +he knew the boy. And he had never been one to insist on deference, +which was why he got so much of it. But at last he got up and when +Henri stood still, rather ashamed of himself, he put an arm over the +boy's shoulders. + +"I want you to do this thing, for me. And this thing only," he said. +"It is the work you do best. There are others who can fight, but--I do +not know any one else who can do as you have done." + +Henri promised. He would have promised to go out and drown himself in +the sea, just beyond the wind-swept little garden, for the tall grave +man who stood before him. Then he bowed and went out, and the King +went back to his plain pine table and his work. That was the reason why +Sara Lee found him asleep on the floor by her kitchen stove that morning, +and went back to her cold bed to lie awake and think. But no explanation +came to her. + +The arrival of Marie roused Henri. The worst of the bombardment was +over, but there was far-away desultory firing. He listened carefully +before, standing outside in the cold, he poured over his head and +shoulders a pail of cold water. He was drying himself vigorously when +he heard Sara Lee's voice in the kitchen. + +The day began for Henri when first he saw the girl. It might be evening, +but it was the beginning for him. So he went in when he had finished +his toilet and bowed over her hand. + +"You are cold, mademoiselle." + +"I think I am nervous. There was an attack this morning." + +"Yes?" + +Marie had gone into the next room, and Sara Lee raised haggard eyes +to his. + +"Henri," she said desperately--it was the first time she had called him +that--"I have something to say to you, and it's not very pleasant." + +"You are going home?" It was the worst thing he could think of. But +she shook her head. + +"You will think me most ungrateful and unkind." + +"You? Kindness itself!" + +"But this is different. It is not for myself. It is because I care a +great deal about--about--" + +"Mademoiselle!" + +"About your honor. And somehow this morning, when I found you here +asleep, and those poor fellows in the trenches fighting--" + +Henri stared at her. So that was it! And he could never tell her. He +was sworn to secrecy by every tradition and instinct of his work. He +could never tell her, and she would go on thinking him a shirker and a +coward. She would be grateful. She would be sweetness itself. But +deep in her heart she would loathe him, as only women can hate for a +failing they never forgive. + +"But I have told you," he said rather wildly, "I am not idle. I do +certain things--not much, but of a degree of importance." + +"You do not fight." + +In Sara Lee's defense many things may be urged--her ignorance of modern +warfare; the isolation of her lack of knowledge of the language; but, +perhaps more than anything, a certain rigidity of standard that +comprehended no halfway ground. Right was right and wrong was wrong to +her in those days. Men were brave or were cowards. Henri was worthy +or unworthy. And she felt that, for all his kindness to her, he was +unworthy. + +He could have set himself right with a word, at that. But his pride was +hurt. He said nothing except, when she asked if he had minded what she +said, to reply: + +"I am sorry you feel as you do. I am not angry." + +He went away, however, without breakfast. Sara Lee heard his car going +at its usual breakneck speed up the street, and went to the door. She +would have called him back if she could, for his eyes haunted her. But +he did not look back. + + + + XIV + + +For four days the gray car did not come again. Supplies appeared in +another gray car, driven by a surly Fleming. The waking hours were full, +as usual. Sara Lee grew a little thin, and seemed to be always +listening. But there was no Henri, and something that was vivid and +joyous seemed to have gone out of the little house. + +Even Marie no longer sang as she swept or washed the kettles, and Sara +Lee, making up the records to send home, put little spirit into the +letter that went with them. + +On the second day she wrote to Harvey. + +"I am sorry that you feel as you do," she wrote, perhaps unconsciously +using Henri's last words to her. "I have not meant to be cruel. And +if you were here you would realize that whether others could have done +what I am doing or not--and of course many could--it is worth doing. +I hear that other women are establishing houses like this, but the +British and the French will not allow women so near the lines. The men +come in at night from the trenches so tired, so hungry and so cold. +Some of them are wounded too. I dress the little wounds. I do give +them something, Harvey dear--if it is only a reminder that there are +homes in the world, and everything is not mud and waiting and killing." + +She told him that his picture was on her mantel, but she did not say +that a corner of her room had been blown away or that the mantel was +but a plank from a destroyed house. And she sent a great deal of love, +but she did not say that she no longer wore his ring on her finger. +And, of course, she was coming back to him if he still wanted her. + +More than Henri's absence was troubling Sara Lee those days. Indeed she +herself laid all her anxiety to one thing, a serious one at that. With +all the marvels of Henri's buying, and Jean's, her money was not holding +out. The scope of the little house had grown with its fame. Now and +then there were unexpected calls, too--Marie's mother, starving in +Havre; sickness and death in the little town at the crossroads: a dozen +small emergencies, but adding to the demands on her slender income. She +had, as a matter of fact, already begun to draw on her private capital. + +And during the days when no gray car appeared she faced the situation, +took stock, as it were, and grew heavy-eyed and wistful. + +On the fifth day the gray car came again, but Jean drove it alone. He +disclaimed any need for sympathy over his wound, and with Rene's aid +carried in the supplies. + +There was the business of checking them off, and the further business +of Sara Lee's paying for them in gold. She sat at the table, Jean +across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d'or, an +engrossed frown between her eyebrows. + +Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed. She smiled very seldom, +and her eyes were perhaps more steady. It was a young girl he and Henri +had brought out to the little house. It was a very serious and rather +anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he +had brought back into little stacks. + +"Jean," she said finally, "I am not going to be able to do it." + +"To do what?" + +"To continue--here." + +"No?" + +"You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in +London. You and--and Henri have done miracles for me. But soon I +shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back. And +now I shall have to start on my English notes. After that--" + +"You are too good to the men. These cigarettes, now--you could do +without them." + +"But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean." + +She sat still, her hands before her on the table. From the kitchen came +the bubbling of the eternal soup. Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down +her cheek. She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently +did not notice. + +"The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort +too many." + +"Jean," she said suddenly, "where is Henri?" + +"In England, I think." + +The only clear thought in Sara Lee's mind was that Henri was not in +France, and that he had gone without telling her. She had hurt him +horribly. She knew that. He might never come back to the little house +of mercy. There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable +strain. And she had attacked his honor. What possible right had she +to do that? + +The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale +and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean. + +"Did he tell you anything?" + +"Nothing, mademoiselle." + +"He is very angry with me, Jean." + +"But surely no, mademoiselle. With you? It is impossible." + +But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply. +He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri's manner +before his departure. They had quarreled, these two. Perhaps it was as +well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee. But he looked out, +those days, on but half a world, did Jean. So he saw only the woman +hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper. And in Sara Lee a woman, and +nothing more. + +And--being Jean he shrugged his shoulders. + +They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out, +but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and +trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had +hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow +Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval. +He gave her no moral support. + +At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with +soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds dressed +--a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did it +nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She +enclosed a snapshot of the little house. + +Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times. +He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later +on he told Rene. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back +along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on +the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by. + +Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got +in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different +Henri, however, who left the car a mile from the crossroads--a Henri in +the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and +impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue +trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back +and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his +chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter +campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing +through rents in his coat. + +Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders, +the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of +the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which +renders the French Army so mobile. + +He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an +extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and +an intrenching tool jingling at his belt. + +Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded +crossroads--smiled and then sighed. For Jean had lost everything in +the war. His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and +with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come. But Henri +had brought back to Jean something to live for--or to die for, as might +happen. + +Henri walked along gayly. He hailed other French soldiers. He joined a +handful and stood talking to them. But he reached the crossroads before +the ammunition train. + +The crossroads was crowded, as usual--many soldiers, at rest, waiting +for the word to fall in, a battery held up by the breaking of a wheel. +A temporary forge had been set up, and soldiers in leather aprons were +working over the fire. A handful of peasants watched, their dull eyes +following every gesture. And one of them was a man Henri sought. + +Henri sat down on the ground and lighted a cigarette. The ammunition +train rolled in and halted, and the man Henri watched turned his +attention to the train. He had been dull and quiet at the forge, but +now he became smiling, a good fellow. He found a man he knew among the +drivers and offered him a cigarette. He also produced and presented an +entire box of matches. Matches were very dear, and hardly to be bought +at any price. + +Henri watched grimly and hummed a little song: + + "Trou la la, ce ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas." + +Still humming under his breath, when the peasant left the crossroads he +followed him. Not closely. The peasant cut across the fields. Henri +followed the road and entered the fields at a different angle. He knew +his way quite well, for he had done the same thing each day for four +days. Only twice he had been a Belgian peasant, and once he was an +officer, and once he had been a priest. + +Four days he had done this thing, but to-day was different. To-day there +would be something worth while, he fancied. And he made a mental note +that Sara Lee must not be in the little house that night. + +When he had got to a canal where the pollard willows were already sending +out their tiny red buds, Henri sat down again. The village lay before +him, desolate and ruined, a travesty of homes. And on a slight rise, but +so concealed from him by the willows that only the great wings showed, +stood the windmill. + +It was the noon respite then, and beyond the line of poplars all was quiet. +The enemy liked time for foods and the Belgians crippled by the loss of +that earlier train, were husbanding their ammunition. Far away a gap in +the poplar trees showed a German observation balloon, a tiny dot against +the sky. + +The man Henri watched went slowly, for he carried a bag of grain on his +back. Henri no longed watched him, He watched the wind wheel. It had +been broken, and one plane was now patched with what looked like a red +cloth. There was a good wind, but clearly the miller was idle that day. +The great wings were not turning. + +Henri sat still and smoked. He thought of many things--of Sara Lee's +eyes when in the center of the London traffic she had held the dying +donkey; of her small and radiant figure at the Savoy; of the morning he +had found her at Calais, in the Gare Maritime, quietly unconscious that +she had done a courageous thing. And he thought, too, of the ring and +the photograph she carried. But mostly he remembered the things she had +said to him on their last meeting. + +Perhaps there came to him his temptation too. It would be so easy that +night, if things went well, to make a brave showing before her, to let +her see that these odd jobs he did had their value and their risks. But +he put that from him. The little house of mercy must be empty that +night, for her sake. He shivered as he remembered the room where she +slept, the corner that was shot away and left open to the street. + +So he sat and watched. And at one o'clock the mill wheel began turning. +It was easy to count the revolutions by the red wing. Nine times it +turned, and stopped. After five minutes or so it turned again, thirty +times. Henri smiled: an ugly smile. + +"A good guess," he said to himself. "But it must be more than a guess." + +His work for the afternoon was done. Still with the bent-kneed swing he +struck back to the road, and avoiding the crossroads, went across more +fields to a lane where Jean waited with the car. Henri took a plunge +into the canal when he had removed his French uniform, and producing a +towel from under a bush rubbed himself dry. His lean boyish body +gleamed, arms and legs brown from much swimming under peaceful summer +suns. On his chest he showed two scars, still pink. Shrapnel bites, he +called them. But he had, it is to be feared, a certain young +satisfaction in them. + +He was in high good humor. The water was icy, and Jean had refused to +join him. + +"My passion for cleanliness," Henri said blithely, "is the result of my +English school days. You would have been the better for an English +education, Jean." + +"A canal in March!" Jean grunted. "You will end badly." + +Henri looked longingly at the water. + +"Had I a dry towel," he said, "I would go in again" + +Jean looked at him with his one eye. + +"You would be prettier without those scars," he observed. But in his +heart he prayed that there might be no others added to them, that +nothing might mar or destroy that bright and youthful body. + +"Depechez-vous! Vous sommes presses!" he added. + +But Henri was minded to play. He girded himself with the towel and +struck an attitude. + +"The Russian ballet, Jean!" he said, and capering madly sent Jean +into deep grumbles of laughter by his burlesque. + +"I must have exercise," Henri said at last when, breathless and with +flying hair, he began to dress. "That, too, is my English schooling. If +you, Jean--" + +"To the devil with your English schooling!" Jean remonstrated. + +Henri sobered quickly after that. The exhilaration of his cold plunge +was over. + +"The American lady?" he asked. "She is all right?" + +"She is worried. There is not enough money." + +Henri frowned. + +"And I have nothing!" + +This opened up an old wound with Jean. + +"If you would be practical and take pay for what you are doing," he began. + +Henri cut him short. + +"Pay!" he said. "What is there to pay me with? And what is the use of +reopening the matter? A man may be a spy for love of his country. God +knows there is enough lying and deceit in the business. But to be a spy +for money--never!" + +There was a little silence. Then: "Now for mademoiselle," said Henri. +"She must be out of the village to-night. And that, dear friend, must +be your affair. She does not like me." + +All the life had gone out of his voice. + + + + XV + + +"But why should I go?" Sara Lee asked. "It is kind of you to ask me, +Jean. But I am here to work, not to play." + +Long ago Sara Lee had abandoned her idea of Jean as a paid chauffeur. +She even surmised, from something Marie had said, that he had been a +person of importance in the Belgium of before the war. So she was +grateful, but inclined to be obstinate. + +"You have been so much alone, mademoiselle--" + +"Alone!" + +"Cut off from your own kind. And now and then one finds, at the hotel +in Dunkirk, some English nurses who are having a holiday. You would +like to talk to them perhaps." + +"Jean," she said unexpectedly, "why don't you tell me the truth? You +want me to leave the village to-night. Why?" + +"Because, mademoiselle, there will be a bombardment." + +"The village itself?" + +"We expect it," he answered dryly. + +Sara Lee went a little pale. + +"But then I shall be needed, as I was before." + +"No troops will pass through the town to-night. They will take a road +beyond the fields." + +"How do you know these things?" she asked, wondering. "About the troops +I can understand. But the bombardment." + +"There are ways of finding out, mademoiselle," he replied in his +noncommittal voice. "Now, will you go?" + +"May I tell Marie and Rene?" + +"No." + +"Then I shall not go. How can you think that I would consider my own +safety and leave them here?" + +Jean had ascertained before speaking that Marie was not in the house. +As for Rene, he sat on the single doorstep and whittled pegs on which to +hang his rifle inside the door. And as he carved he sang words of his +own to the tune of Tipperary. + +Inside the little salle a manger Jean reassured Sara Lee. It was +important--vital--that Rene and Marie should not know far in advance +of the bombardment. They were loyal, certainly, but these were his +orders. In abundance of time they would be warned to leave the village. + +"Who is to warn them?" + +"Henri has promised, mademoiselle. And what he promises is done." + +"You said this morning that he was in England." + +"He has returned." + +Sara Lee's heart, which had been going along merely as a matter of duty +all day, suddenly began to beat faster. Her color came up, and then faded +again. He had returned, and he had not come to the little house. But +then--what could Henri mean to her, his coming or his going? Was she +to add to her other sins against Harvey the supreme one of being +interested in Henri? + +Not that she said all that, even to herself. There was a wave of +gladness and then a surge of remorse. That is all. But it was a very +sober Sara Lee who put on her black suit with the white collar that +afternoon and ordered, by Jean's suggestion, the evening's preparations +as though nothing was to happen. + +She looked round her little room before she left it. It might not be +there when she returned. So she placed Harvey's photograph under her +mattress for safety, and rather uncomfortably she laid beside it the +small ivory crucifix that Henri had found in a ruined house and brought +to her. Harvey was not a Catholic. He did not believe in visualizing +his religion. And she had a distinct impression that he considered such +things as did so as bordering on idolatry. + +Sometime after dusk that evening the ammunition train moved out. At a +point a mile or so from the village a dispatch rider on a motor cycle +stopped the rumbling lorry at the head of the procession and delivered +a message, which the guide read by the light of a sheltered match. The +train moved on, but it did not turn down to the village. It went beyond +to a place of safety, and there remained for the night. + +But before that time Henri, lying close in a field, had seen a skulking +figure run from the road to the mill, and soon after had seen the mill +wheel turn once, describing a great arc; and on one of the wings, showing +only toward the poplar trees, was a lighted lantern. + +Five minutes later, exactly time enough for the train to have reached +the village street, German shells began to fall in it. Henri, lying +flat on the ground, swore silently and deeply. + +In every land during this war there have been those who would sell their +country for a price. Sometimes money. Sometimes protection. And of all +betrayals that of the man who sells his own country is the most dastardly. +Henri, lying face down, bit the grass beneath him in sheer rage. + +One thing he had not counted on, he who foresaw most things. The miller +and his son, being what they were, were cowards as well. Doubtless the +mill had been promised protection. It was too valuable to the Germans +to be destroyed. But with the first shot both men left the house by the +mill and scurried like rabbits for the open fields. + +Maurice, poor Marie's lover by now, almost trampled on Henri's prostrate +body. And Henri was alone, and his work was to take them alive. They +had information he must have--how the modus vivendi had been arranged, +through what channels. And under suitable treatment they would tell. + +He could not follow them through the fields. He lay still, during a +fiercer bombardment than the one before, raising his head now and then +to see if the little house of mercy still stood. No shells came his +way, but the sky line of the village altered quickly. The standing +fragment of the church towers went early. There was much sound of +falling masonry. From somewhere behind him a Belgian battery gave +tongue, but not for long. And then came silence. + +Henri moved then. He crept nearer the mill and nearer. And at last he +stood inside and took his bearings. A lamp burned in the kitchen, +showing a dirty brick floor and a littered table--such a house as men +keep, untidy and unhomelike. A burnt kettle stood on the hearth, and +leaning against the wall was the bag of grain Maurice had carried from +the crossroads. + +"A mill which grinds without grain," Henri said to himself. + +There was a boxed-in staircase to the upper floor, and there, with the +door slightly ajar, he stationed himself, pistol in hand. Now and then +he glanced uneasily at the clock. Sara Lee must not be back before he +had taken his prisoners to the little house and turned them over to +those who waited there. + +There were footsteps outside, and Henri drew the door a little closer. +But he was dismayed to find it Marie. She crept in, a white and broken +thing, and looked about her. + +"Maurice!" she called. + +She sat down for a moment, and then, seeing the disorder about her, set +to work to clear the table. It was then that Henri lowered his pistol +and opened the door. + +"Don't shriek, Marie," he said. + +She turned and saw him, and clutched at the table. + +"Monsieur!" + +"Marie," he said quietly, "go up these stairs and remain quiet. Do not +walk round. And do not come down, no matter what you hear!" + +She obeyed him, stumbling somewhat. For she had seen his revolver, and +it frightened her. But as she passed him she clutched at his sleeve. + +"He is good--Maurice," she said, gasping. "Of the father I know nothing, +but Maurice--" + +"Go up and be silent!" was all he said. + +Now, by all that goes to make a story, Sara Lee should have met Mabel at +the Hotel des Arcades in Dunkirk, and should have been able to make that +efficient young woman burn with jealousy--Mabel, who from the safety of +her hospital in Boulogne considered Dunkirk the Front. + +Indeed Sara Lee, to whom the world was beginning to seem very small, had +had some such faint hope. But Mabel was not there, and it was not until +long after that they met at all, and then only when the lights had gone +down and Sara Lee was again knitting by the fire. + +There were a few nurses there, in their white veils with the red cross +over the forehead, and one or two Englishwomen in hats that sat a trifle +too high on the tops of their heads and with long lists before them +which they checked as they ate. Aviators in leather coats; a few Spahis +in cloak and turban, with full-gathered bloomers and high boots; some +American ambulance drivers, rather noisy and very young; and many +officers, in every uniform of the Allied armies--sat at food together +and for a time forgot their anxieties under the influence of lights, food +and warmth, and red and white wine mixed with water. + +When he chose, Jean could be a delightful companion; not with Henri's +lift of spirits, but quietly interesting. And that evening he was a new +Jean to Sara Lee, a man of the world, talking of world affairs. He +found her apt and intelligent, and for Sara Lee much that had been +clouded cleared up forever that night. Until then she had known only +the humanities of the war, or its inhumanities. There, over that little +table, she learned something of its politics and its inevitability. She +had been working in the dark, with her heart only. Now she began to +grasp the real significance of it all, of Belgium's anxiety for many +years, of Germany's cold and cruel preparation, and empty protests of +friendship. She learned of the flight of the government from Brussels, +the most important state papers being taken away in a hand cart, on top +of which, at the last moment, some flustered official had placed a tall +silk hat! She learned of the failure of great fortifications before the +invaders' heavy guns. And he had drawn for her such a picture of +Albert of Belgium as she was never to forget. + +Perhaps Sara Lee's real growth began that night, over that simple dinner +at the Hotel des Arcades. + +"I wish," she said at last, "that Uncle James could have heard all this. +He was always so puzzled about it all. And--you make it so clear." + +When dinner was over a bit of tension had relaxed in her somewhat. She +had been too close, for too long. And when a group of Belgian officers, +learning who she was, asked to be presented and gravely thanked her, she +flushed with happiness. + +"We must see if mademoiselle shall not have a medal," said the only one +who spoke English. + +"A medal? For what?" + +"For courage," he said, bowing. "Belgium has little to give, but it can +at least do honor to a brave lady." + +Jean was smiling when they passed on. What a story would this slip of a +girl take home with her! + +But: "I don't think I want a medal, Jean," she said. "I didn't come for +that. And after all it is you and Henri who have done the thing--not I." + +Accustomed to women of a more sophisticated class, Jean had at first +taken her naivete for the height of subtlety. He was always expecting +her to betray herself. But after that evening with her he changed. Just +such simplicity had been his wife's. Sometimes Sara Lee reminded him of +her--the upraising of her eyes or an unstudied gesture. + +He sighed. + +"You are very wonderful, you Americans," he said. It was the nearest to +a compliment that he had ever come. And after that evening he was always +very gentle with her. Once he had protected her because Henri had asked +him to do so; now he himself became in his silent way her protector. + +The ride home through the dark was very quiet. Sara Lee sat beside him +watching the stars and growing increasingly anxious as they went, not +too rapidly, toward the little house. There were no lights. Air raids +had grown common in Dunkirk, and there were no street lights in the +little city. Once on the highway Jean lighted the lamps, but left them +very low, and two miles from the little house he put them out altogether. +They traveled by starlight then, following as best they could the tall +trees that marked the road. Now and then they went astray at that, and +once they tilted into the ditch and had hard pulling to get out. + +At the top of the street Jean stopped and went on foot a little way down. +He came back, with the report that new shells had made the way impassable; +and again Sara Lee shivered. If the little house was gone! + +But it was there, and lighted too. Through its broken shutters came the +yellow glow of the oil lamp that now hung over the table in the salle a +manger. + +Whatever Jean's anxieties had been fell from him as he pushed open the +door. Henri's voice was the first thing they heard. He was too much +occupied to notice their approach. + +So it was that Sara Lee saw, for the last time, the miller and his son, +Maurice; saw them, but did not know them, for over their heads were bags +of their own sacking, with eyeholes roughly cut in them. Their hands +were bound, and three soldiers were waiting to take them away. + +"I have covered your heads," Henri was saying in French, "because it is +not well that our brave Belgians should know that they have been betrayed +by those of their own number." + +It was a cold and terrible Henri who spoke. + +"Take them away," he said to the waiting men. + +A few moments later he turned from the door and heard Sara Lee sobbing +in her room. He tapped, and on receiving no reply he went in. The room +was unharmed, and by the light of a candle he saw the girl, face down on +the bed. He spoke to her, but she only lay crouched deeper, her +shoulders shaking. + +"It is war, mademoiselle," he said, and went closer. Then suddenly all +the hurt of the past days, all the bitterness of the last hour, were +lost in an overwhelming burst of tenderness. + +He bent over her and put his arms round her. + +"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly. "I, who would die for +you, mademoiselle. I who worship you." He buried his face in the warm +hollow of her neck and held her close. He was trembling. "I love you," +he whispered. "I love you." + +She quieted under his touch. He was very strong, and there was refuge +in his arms. For a moment she lay still, happier than she had been for +weeks. It was Henri who was shaken now and the girl who was still. + +But very soon came the thing that, after all, he expected. She drew +herself away from him, and Henri, sensitive to every gesture, stood back. + +"Who are they?" was the first thing she said. It rather stabbed him. +He had just told her that he loved her, and never before in his careless +young life had he said that to any woman. + +"Spies," he said briefly. + +A flushed and tearful Sara Lee stood up then and looked up at him gravely. + +"Then--that is what you do?" + +"Yes, mademoiselle." + +Quite suddenly she went to him and held up her face. + +"Please kiss me, Henri," she said very simply. "I have been cruel and +stupid, and--" + +But he had her in his arms then, and he drew her close as though he +would never let her go. He was one great burst of joy, poor Henri. But +when she gently freed herself at last it was to deliver what seemed for +a time his death wound. + +"You have paid me a great tribute," she said, still simply and gravely. +"I wanted you to kiss me, because of what you said. But that will have +to be all, Henri dear." + +"All?" he said blankly. + +"You haven't forgotten, have you? I--I am engaged to somebody else." + +Henri stood still, swaying a little. + +"And you love him? More than you care for me?" + +"He is--he is my kind," said Sara Lee rather pitifully. "I am not what +you think me. You see me here, doing what you think is good work, and +you are grateful. And you don't see any other women. So I--" + +"And you think I love you because I see no one else?" he demanded, still +rather stunned. + +"Isn't that part of it?" + +He flung out his hands as though he despaired of making her understand. + +"This man at home--" he said bitterly; "this man who loves you so well +that he let you cross the sea and come here alone--do you love him very +dearly?" + +"I am promised to him." + +All at once Sara Lee saw the little parlor at home, and Harvey, gentle, +rather stolid and dependable. Oh, very dependable. She saw him as he +had looked the night he had said he loved her, rather wistful and very, +very tender. She could not hurt him so. She had said she was going +back to him, and she must go. + +"I love him very much, Henri." + +Very quietly, considering the hell that was raging in him, Henri bent +over and kissed her hand. Then he turned it over, and for an instant +he held his cheek against its warmth. He went out at once, and Sara +Lee heard the door slam. + + + + XVI + + +Time passed quickly, as always it does when there is work to do. Round +the ruined houses the gray grass turned green again, and in travesties +of gardens early spring flowers began to show a touch of color. + +The first of them greeted Sara Lee one morning as she stood on her +doorstep in the early sun. She gathered them and placed them, one on +each grave, in the cemetery near the poplar trees, where small wooden +crosses, sometimes surmounted by a cap, marked many graves. + +Marie, a silent subdued Marie, worked steadily in the little house. She +did not weep, but now and then Sara Lee found her stirring something on +the stove and looking toward the quiet mill in the fields. And once +Sara Lee, surprising that look on her face, put her arms about the girl +and held her for a moment. But she did not say anything. There was +nothing to say. + +With the opening up of the spring came increased movement and activity +among the troops. The beach and the sand dunes round La Panne were +filled with drilling men, Belgium's new army. Veterans of the winter, +at rest behind the lines, sat in the sun and pared potatoes for the +midday meal. Convalescents from the hospital appeared in motley +garments from the Ambulance Ocean and walked along the water front, +where the sea, no longer gray and sullen, rolled up in thin white lines +of foam to their very feet. Winter straw came out of wooden sabots. +Winter-bitten hands turned soft. Canal boats blossomed out with great +washings. And the sentry at the gun emplacement in the sand up the +beach gave over gathering sticks for his fire, and lay, when no one was +about, in a hollow in the dune, face to the sky. + +So spring came to that small fragment of Belgium which had been saved, +spring and hope. Soon now the great and powerful Allies would drive out +the Huns, and all would be as it had been. Splendid rumors were about. +The Germans were already yielding at La Bassee. There was to be a great +drive along the entire Front, and hopefully one would return home in +time for the spring planting. + +A sort of informal council took place occasionally in the little house. +Maps replaced the dressings on the table in the salle a manger, and +junior officers, armed with Sara Lee's box of pins, thrust back the +enemy at various points and proved conclusively that his position was +untenable. They celebrated these paper victories with Sara Lee's tea, +and went away the better for an hour or so of hope and tea and a girl's +soft voice and quiet eyes. + +Now and then there was one, of course, who lagged behind his fellows, +with a yearning tenderness in his face that a glance from the girl would +have quickly turned to love. But Sara Lee had no coquetry. When, as +occasionally happened, there was a bit too much fervor when her hand was +kissed, she laid it where it belonged--to loneliness and the spring-- +and became extremely maternal and very, very kind. Which--both of them +--are death blows to young love. + +The winter floods were receding. Along the Yser Canal mud-caked flats +began to appear, with here and there rusty tangles of barbed wire. And +with the lessening of the flood came new activities to the little house. +The spring drive was coming. + +There was spring indeed, everywhere but in Henri's heart. + +Day after day messages were left with Sara Lee by men in uniform-- +sometimes letters, sometimes a word. And these she faithfully cared for +until such time as Jean came for them. Now and then it was Henri who +came, but when he stayed in the village he made his headquarters at the +house of the mill. There, with sacking over the windows, he wrote his +reports by lamplight, reports which Jean carried back to the villa in +the fishing village by the sea. + +However, though he no longer came and went as before, Henri made frequent +calls at the house of mercy. But now he came in the evenings, when the +place was full of men. Sara Lee was doing more dressings than before. +The semi-armistice of winter was over, and there were nights when a row +of wounded men lay on the floor in the little salle a manger and waited, +in a sort of dreadful quiet, to be taken away. + +Rumors came of hard fighting farther along the line, and sometimes, on +nights when the clouds hung low, the flashes of the guns at Ypres looked +like incessant lightning. From the sand dunes at Nieuport and Dixmude +there was firing also, and the air seemed sometimes to be full of +scouting planes. + +The Canadians were moving toward the Front at Neuve Chapelle at that +time. And one day a lorry, piled high with boxes, rolled and thumped +down the street, and halted by Rene. + +"Rather think we are lost," explained the driver, grinning sheepishly +at Rene. + +There were four boys in khaki on the truck, and not a word of French +among them. Sara Lee, who rolled her own bandages now, heard the +speech and came out. + +"Good gracious!" she said, and gave an alarmed glance at the sky. But +it was the noon hour, when every good German abandons war for food, and +the sky was empty. + +The boys cheered perceptibly. Here was at last some one who spoke a +Christian tongue. + +"Must have taken the wrong turning, miss," said one of them, saluting. + +"Where do you want to go?" she asked. "You are very close to the Belgian +Front here. It is not at all safe." + +They all saluted; then, staring at her curiously, told her. + +"Dear me!" said Sara Lee. "You are a long way off. And a long way +from home too." + +They smiled. They looked, with their clean-shaven faces, absurdly young +after the bearded Belgian soldiers. + +"I am an American, too," said Sara Lee with just a touch of homesickness +in her voice. She had been feeling lonely lately. "If you have time to +come in I could give you luncheon. Rene can tell us if any German air +machines come over." + +Would they come in? Indeed, yes! They crawled down off the lorry, and +took off their caps, and ate every particle of food in the house. And, +though they were mutely curious at first, soon they were asking questions. +How long had she been there? What did she do? Wasn't it dangerous? + +"Not so dangerous as it looks," said Sara Lee, smiling. "The Germans +seldom bother the town now. It is not worth while." + +Later on they went over the house. They climbed the broken staircase +and stared toward the break in the poplar trees, from the roofless floor +above. + +"Some girl!" one of them said in an undertone. + +The others were gazing intently toward the Front. Never before had they +been so close. Never had they seen a ruined town. War, until now, had +been a thing of Valcartier, of a long voyage, of much drill in the mud +at Salisbury Plain. Now here they saw, at their feet, what war could do. + +"Damn them!" said one of the boys suddenly. "Fellows, we'll get back at +them soon." + +So they went away, a trifle silent and very grateful. But before they +left they had a glimpse of Sara Lee's room, with the corner gone, and +Harvey's picture on the mantel. + +"Some girl!" they repeated as they drove up the street. It was the +tribute of inarticulate youth. + +Sara Lee went back to her bandages and her thoughts. She had not a great +deal of time to think, what with the officers stopping in to fight their +paper-and-pin battles, and with letters to write and dressings to make +and supplies to order. She began to have many visitors--officers from +the French lines, correspondents on tours of the Front, and once even an +English cabinet member, who took six precious lumps of sugar in his tea +and dug a piece of shell out of the wall with his pocketknife as a +souvenir. + +Once a British aviator brought his machine down in the field by the mill, +and walked over with the stiff stride of a man who has been for hours in +the air. She gave him tea and bread and butter, and she learned then of +the big fighting that was to come. + +When she was alone she thought about Henri. Generally her thoughts were +tender; always they were grateful. But she was greatly puzzled. He had +said that he loved her. Then, if he loved her, why should he not be +gentle and kind to her? Men did not hurt the women they loved. And +because she was hurt, she was rather less than just. He had not asked +her to marry him. He had said that he loved her, but that was different. +And the insidious poison of Harvey's letter about foreigners began to +have its effect. + +The truth was that she was tired. The strain was telling on her. And +at a time when she needed every moral support Henri had drawn off behind +a wall of misery, and all her efforts at a renewal of their old +friendship only brought up against a sort of stony despair. + +There were times, too, when she grew a little frightened. She was so +alone. What if Henri went away altogether? What if he took away the +little car, and his protection, and the supplies that came so regularly? +It was not a selfish fear. It was for her work that she trembled. + +For the first time she realized her complete dependence on his good +will. And now and then she felt that it would be good to see Harvey +again, and be safe from all worry, and not have to depend on a man who +loved her as Henri did. For that she never doubted. Inexperienced as +she was in such matters, she knew that the boy loved her. Just how +wildly she did not know until later, too late to undo what the madness +had done. + +Then one day a strange thing happened. It had been raining, and when in +the late afternoon the sun came out it gleamed in the puddles that filled +the shell holes in the road and set to a red blaze the windows of the +house of the mill. + +First, soaring overhead, came a half dozen friendly planes. Next, the +eyes of the enemy having thus been blinded, so to speak, there came a +regiment of fresh troops, swinging down the street for all the world as +though the German Army was safely drinking beer in Munich. They passed +Rene, standing open-mouthed in the doorway, and one wag of a Belgian boy, +out of sheer joy of spring, did the goose step as he passed the little +sentry and, head screwed round in the German salute, crossed his eyes +over his impudent nose. + +Came, then, the planes. Came the regiment, which turned off into a field +and there spread itself, like a snake uncoiling, into a double line. +Came a machine, gray and battered, containing officers. Came a general +with gold braid on his shoulder, and a pleasant smile. Came the strange +event. + +The general found Sara Lee in the salle a manger cutting cotton into +three-inch squares, and he stood in the doorway and bowed profoundly. + +"Mademoiselle Kennedy?" he inquired. + +Sara Lee replied to that, and then gave a quick thought to her larder. +Because generals usually meant tea. But this time at last, Sara Lee was +to receive something, not to give. She turned very white when she was +told, and said she had not deserved it; she was indeed on the verge of +declining, not knowing that there are certain things one does not +decline. But Marie brought her hat and jacket--a smiling, tremulous +Marie--and Sara Lee put them on. + +The general was very tall. In her short skirt and with flying hair she +looked like a child beside him as they walked across the fields. +Suddenly Sara Lee was terribly afraid she was going to cry. + +The troops stood rigidly at attention. And a cold wind flapped Sara +Lee's skirts, and the guns hammered at Ypres, and the general blew on +his fingers. And soon a low open car came down the street and the +King got out. Sara Lee watched him coming--his tall, slightly stooped +figure, his fair hair, his plain blue uniform. Sara Lee had never seen +a king before, and she had always thought of them as sitting up on a +sort of platform--never as trudging through spring mud. + +"What shall I do?" she asked nervously. + +"He will shake hands, mademoiselle. Bow as he approaches. That is all." + +The amazing interlude, indeed! With Sara Lee being decorated by the +King, and troops drawn up to do her honor, and over all the rumbling of +the great guns. A palpitating and dazed Sara Lee, when the decoration +was fastened to her black jacket, a Sara Lee whose hat blew off at +exactly the worst moment and rolled, end on, like a hoop, into a puddle. + +But, oddly, she did not mind about the hat. She had only one conscious +thought just then. She hoped that, wherever Uncle James might be in +that world of the gone before, he might know what was happening to her +--or even see it. He would have liked it. He had believed in the +Belgians and in the King. And now--the King did not go at once. He +went back to the little house and went through it. And he and one of +his generals climbed to the upper floor, and the King stood looking out +silently toward the land he loved and which for a time was no longer his. + +He came down after a time, stooping his tall figure in the low doorway, +and said he would like some tea. So Marie put the kettle on, and Sara +Lee and the King talked. It was all rather dazing. Every now and then +she forgot certain instructions whispered her by the general, and after +a time the King said: "Why do you do that, mademoiselle?" + +For Sara Lee, with an intent face and moving lips, had been stepping +backward. + +Sara Lee flushed to the eyes. + +"Because, sire, I was told to remain at a distance of six feet." + +"But we are being informal," said the King, smiling. "And it is a very +little room." + +Sara Lee, who had been taught in the schoolroom that kings are usurpers +of the divine rights of the people--Sara Lee lost just a bit of her +staunch democracy that day. She saw the King of the Belgians for what +he really was, a ruler, but a symbol as well. He represented his +country, as the Flag she loved represented hers. The flag was America, +the King was Belgium. That was all. + +It was a very humble and flushed Sara Lee who watched the gray car go +flying up the street later on. She went in and told the whole story to +Harvey's picture, but it was difficult to feel that he was hearing. His +eyes were turned away and his face was set and stern. And, at last, she +gave it up. This thing which meant so much to her would never mean +anything to Harvey. She knew, even then, what he would say. + +"Decorate you! I should think they might. Medals are cheap. Everybody +over there is getting medals. You feed their men and risk your life and +your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on. It's cheap at the +price." + +And later on those were Harvey's very words. But to be fair to him they +were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal. + +That evening Henri came again. He was, for the first time, his gay self +again--at least on the surface. It was as though, knowing what he was +going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never +returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt. He was everywhere in +the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery +nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water +for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing. + +"If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle," he would say, "with +one turn of the bandage over the elbow--" + +"But it won't hold that way." + +"You say that to me, mademoiselle? I who have taught you all you know +of bandaging?" + +They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee's way. + +He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was +painful. It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans: + +"Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the +right? Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!" + +Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply. + +"I cannot think. I--in my left hand, monsieur le capitaine?" + +"In your left hand." + +The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table +to listen. + +"I do not know, monsieur." + +"Idiot!" Henri would say. "Your right elbow, man!" + +And the dressing was done. + +He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed. He +would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly. And pain seemed to +leave the little room when he entered it. + +It was that night that Henri disappeared. + + + + XVII + +There was a question to settle, and it was for Henri to do it. Two +questions indeed. One was a matter of engineering, and before the bottom +fell out of his world Henri had studied engineering. The second was +more serious. + +For the first, this thing had happened. Of all the trenches to be held, +the Belgians had undeniably the worst. Properly speaking they were not +trenches at all, but shallow gutters dug a foot or two into the saturated +ground and then built man-high with bags of earth or sand. Here and +there they were not dug at all, but were purely shelters, against a +railway embankment, of planks or sandbags, and reinforced by rails from +the deserted track behind which they were hidden. + +For this corner of Belgium had been saved by turning it into a shallow +lake. By opening the gates in the dikes the Allies had let in the sea +and placed a flood in front of the advancing enemy. The battle front +was a reeking pond. The opposing armies lived like duck hunters in a +swamp. To dig a foot was to encounter water. Machine guns here and +there sat but six inches above the yellow flood. Men lay in pools to +fire them. To reach outposts were narrow paths built first of bags of +earth--a life, sometimes for every bag. And, when this filling was +sufficient, on top a path of fascines, bound together in bundles, made +a footway. + +For this reason the Belgians approached their trenches not through deep +cuts which gave them shelter but with no other cover than the darkness +of night. During the day, they lay in their shallow dugouts, cut off +from any connection with the world behind them. Food, cooked miles away, +came up at night, cold and unappetizing. For water, having exhausted +their canteens, there was nothing but the brackish tide before them, ill- +smelling and reeking of fever. Water carts trundled forward at night, +but often they were far too few. + +The Belgians, having faced their future through long years of anxiety, +had been trained to fight. In a way they had been trained to fight a +losing war, for they could not hope to defeat their greedy neighbor on +the east. But now they found themselves fighting almost not at all, +condemned to inactivity, to being almost passively slaughtered by enemy +artillery, and to living under such conditions as would have sapped the +courage of a less desperate people. + +To add to the difficulties, not only did the sea encroach, turning a +fertile land into a salt marsh, but the winter rains, unusually heavy +that tragic first winter, and lacking their usual egress to the sea, +spread the flood. There were many places well back of the lines where +fields were flooded, and where roads, sadly needed, lost themselves in +unfordable wallows of mud and water. + +Henri then, knowing all this--none better--had his first question to +settle, which was this: As spring advanced the flood had commenced to +recede. Time came when, in those trenches now huddled shallow behind +the railway track, one could live in a certain comfort. In the deeper +ones, the bottom of the trench appeared for the first time. + +On a day previous, however, the water had commenced to come back. There +had been no rain, but little by little in a certain place yellow, +ill-smelling little streams began to flow sluggishly into the trenches. +Seeped, rather than flowed. At first the Belgian officers laid it to +that bad luck that had so persistently pursued them. Then they held a +conference in the small brick house with its maps and its pine tables +and its picture of an American harvester on the wall, which was now +headquarters. + +Sitting under the hanging lamp, with an orderly making coffee at a stove +in the corner, they talked it over. Henri was there, silent before his +elders, but intently listening. And at last they turned to him. + +"I can go and find out," he said quietly. "It is possible, though I do +not see how." He smiled. "They are, I think, only drying themselves at +our expense. It is a bit of German humor." + +But the cry of "Calais in a month!" was in the air, and undoubtedly there +had been renewed activity along the German Front near the sea. The +second question to be answered was dependent on the first. + +Had the Germans, as Henri said, merely shifted the water, by some clever +engineering, to the Belgian trenches, or was there some bigger thing on +hand? What, for instance, if they were about to attempt to drain the +inundation, smash the Belgian line, and march by the Dunkirk road to +Calais? + +So, that night while Henri jested about Pierre's right elbow and watched +Sara Lee for a smile, he had difficult work before him. + +Sometime near midnight he slipped away. Jean was waiting in the street, +and wrung the boy's hand. + +"I could go with you," he said rather wistfully. + +"You don't speak their ugly tongue." + +"I could be mute--shell shock. You could be helping me back." + +But Henri only held his hand a moment and shook his head. + +"You would double the risk, and--what good would it do?" + +"Two pistols are better than one." + +"I have two pistols, my friend," said Henri, and turned the corner of +the building, past the boards Rene had built in, toward the house of +the mill. But once out of Jean's sight he stopped a moment, his hand +resting against that frail wall to Sara Lee's room. It was his good-by +to her. + +For three days Jean stayed in the village. He slept at the mill, but +he came for his meals to the little house. Once he went to Dunkirk and +brought out provisions and the mail, including Sara Lee's monthly +allowance. But mostly he sat in the mill house and waited. He could +not read. + +"You do not eat at all, Jean," Sara Lee said to him more than once. And +twice she insisted that he was feverish, and placed a hand that was +somewhat marred with much peeling of vegetables, on his forehead. + +"I am entirely well, mademoiselle," he would say, and draw back. He had +anxieties enough just now without being reminded by the touch of a +woman's hand of all that he had lost. + +Long before that Sara Lee had learned not to question Jean about Henri's +absences. Even his knowledge, now, that she knew something of Henri's +work, did not remove the barrier. So Sara Lee waited, as did Jean, but +more helplessly. She knew something was wrong, but she had not Jean's +privilege of going at night to the trenches and there waiting, staring +over the gray water with its ugly floating shadows, for Henri to emerge +from the flood. + +Something rather forced and mechanical there was those days in her work. +Her smile was rather set. She did not sleep well. And one night she +violated Henri's orders and walked across the softened fields to beyond +the poplar trees. + +There was nothing to see except an intermittent flash from the clouds +that hung low over the sea at Nieuport, where British gunboats were +bombarding the coast; or the steady streaks from the Ypres salient, where +night and day the guns never rested. + +From the Belgian trenches, fifteen hundred feet or so away, there was no +sound. A German electric signal blazed its message in code, and went out +quickly. Now and then a rifle shot, thin and sharp, rang out from where, +under the floating starlights, keen eyes on each side watched for +movements on the other. + +Sara Lee sat down under a tree and watched for a while. Then she found +herself crying softly. It was all so sad, and useless, and cruel. And +somewhere there ahead was Henri, Henri with his blue eyes, his smile, +the ardor of his young arms--Henri, who had been to her many friends. + +Sara Lee had never deceived herself about Henri. She loved him. But +she was quite certain she was not in love with him, which is entirely +different. She knew that this last was impossible, because she was +engaged to Harvey. What was probably the truth was that she loved them +both in entirely different ways. Men have always insisted on such +possibilities, and have even asserted their right, now and then, to +love two women at the same time. But women are less frank with +themselves. + +And, in such cases, there is no grand passion. There are tenderness, +and the joy of companionship, and sometimes a touching dependence. But +it is not a love that burns with a white fire. + +Perhaps Sara Lee was one of those women who are always loved more than +they love. There are such women, not selfish, not seeking love, but +softly feminine, kind, appealing and genuine. Men need, after all, but +an altar on which to lay tribute. And the high, remote white altar that +was Sara Lee had already received the love of two strong men. + +She was not troubling her head that night, however, about being an altar, +of a sort. She cried a little at first, because she was terrified for +Henri and because Jean's face was growing pinched and gray. Then she +cried very hard, prone on the ground and face down, because Henri was +young, and all of life should have been before him. And he was missing. + +Henri was undeniably missing. Even the King knew it now, and set down +in his heart, among the other crosses there, Henri's full name, which +we may not know, and took to pacing his little study and looking out at +the spring sea. + +That night Marie, having ladled to the bottom of her kettle, found Sara +Lee missing, and was told by Rene of the direction she had taken. Marie, +muttering to herself, set out to find her, and almost stumbled over her +in the wood by the road. + +She sat down on the ground without a word and placed a clumsy hand on +the girl's shoulder. It was not until Sara Lee ceased sobbing that +she spoke: + +"It is far from hopeless, mademoiselle." + +They had by now established a system of communication. Sara Lee spoke +her orders in halting French, but general conversation was beyond her. +And much hearing of English had taught the Belgian girl enough to follow. + +Sara Lee replied, then, in smothered English: + +"He is gone, Marie. He will never come back." + +"Who can tell? There are many missing who are not dead." + +Sara Lee shuddered. For spies were not made prisoners. They had no +rights as prisoners of war. Their own governments did not protect them. +To Henri capture was death. But she could not say this to Marie. + +Marie sat softly stroking Sara Lee's hair, her own eyes tragic and +tearless. + +"Even if it were--the other," she said, "it is not so bad to die for +one's country. The thing that is terrible, that leaves behind it only +bitterness and grief and no hope, mademoiselle, even with many prayers, +is that one has died a traitor." + +She coaxed Sara Lee back at last. They went through the fields, for +fresh troops were being thrown into the Belgian trenches and the street +was full of men. Great dray horses were dragging forward batteries, the +heavy guns sliding and slipping In the absence of such information as +only Henri had been wont to bring it was best to provide for the worst. + +The next day Jean did not come over for breakfast, and Rene handed Sara +Lee a note. + +"I am going to England," Jean had written that dawn in the house of the +mill. "And from there to Holland. I can get past the barrier and shall +work down toward the Front. I must learn what has happened, mademoiselle. +As you know, if he was captured, there is no hope. But there is an +excellent chance that he is in hiding, unable to get back. Look for me +in two weeks." + +There followed what instructions he had given as to her supplies, which +would come as before. Beautifully written in Jean's small fine hand, it +spelled for Sara Lee the last hope. She read Jean's desperation through +its forced cheerfulness. And she faced for the first time a long period +of loneliness in the crowded little house. + +She tried very hard to fill the gap that Henri had left--tried to joke +with the men in her queer bits of French; was more smiling than ever, +for fear she might be less. But now and then in cautious whispers she +heard Henri's name, and her heart contracted with very terror. + +A week. Two weeks. Twice the village was bombarded severely, but the +little house escaped by a miracle. Marie considered it the same miracle +that left holy pictures unhurt on the walls of destroyed houses, and +allowed the frailest of old ebony and rosewood crucifixes to remain +unharmed. + +Great generals, often as tall as they were great, stopped at the little +house to implore Sara Lee to leave. But she only shook her head. + +"Not unless you send me away," she always said; "and that would break +my heart." + +"But to move, mademoiselle, only to the next village!" they would +remonstrate, and as a final argument: "You are too valuable to risk an +injury." + +"I must remain here," she said. And some of them thought they +understood. When an unusually obdurate officer came along, Sara Lee +would insist on taking him to the cellar. + +"You see!" she would say, holding her candle high. "It is a nice cellar, +warm and dry. It is"--proudly--"one of the best cellars in the village. +It is a really homelike cellar." + +The officer would go away then, and send her cigarettes for her men or, +as in more than one case, a squad with bags of earth and other things +to protect the little house as much as possible. After a time the little +house began to represent the ideas in protection and camouflage, then in +its early stages, of many different minds. + +Rene shot a man there one night, a skulking figure working its way in +the shadows up the street. It was just before dawn, and Rene, who was +sleepless those days, like the others, called to him. The man started +to run, dodging behind walls. But Rene ran faster and killed him. + +He was a German in Belgian peasant's clothing. But he wore the great +shoes of the German soldier, and he had been making a rough map of the +Belgian trenches. + +Sara Lee did not see him. But when she heard the shot she went out, and +Rene told her breathlessly. + +From that time on her terrors took the definite form of Henri lying dead +in a ruined street, and being buried, as this man was buried, without +ceremony and without a prayer, in some sodden spring field. + + + + XVIII + + +As the spring advanced Harvey grew increasingly bitter; grew morbid +and increasingly self-conscious also. He began to think that people were +smiling behind his back, and when they asked about Sara Lee he met with +almost insulting brevity what he felt was half-contemptuous kindness. +He went nowhere, and worked all day and until late in the night. He did +well in his business, however, and late in March he received a +substantial raise in salary. He took it without enthusiasm, and told +Belle that night at dinner with apathy. + +After the evening meal it was now his custom to go to his room and there, +shut in, to read. He read no books on the war, and even the quarter +column entitled Salient Points of the Day's War News hardly received a +glance from him now. + +In the office when the talk turned to the war, as it did almost hourly, +he would go out or scowl over his letters. + +"Harvey's hit hard," they said there. + +"He's acting like a rotten cub," was likely to be the next sentence. +But sometimes it was: "Well, what'd you expect? Everything ready to get +married, and the girl beating it for France without notice! I'd be sore +myself." + +On the day of the raise in salary his sister got the children to bed and +straightened up the litter of small garments that seemed always to +bestrew the house, even to the lower floor. Then she went into Harvey's +room. Coat and collar off, he was lying on the bed, but not reading. +His book lay beside him, and with his arms under his head he was staring +at the ceiling. + +She did not sit down beside him on the bed. They were an undemonstrative +family, and such endearments as Belle used were lavished on her children. +But her eyes were kind, and a little nervous. + +"Do you mind talking a little, Harvey?" + +"I don't feel like talking much. I'm tired, I guess. But go on. What +is it? Bills?" + +She came to him in her constant financial anxieties, and always he was +ready to help her out. But his tone now was gruff. A slight flush of +resentment colored her cheeks. + +"Not this time, Harve. I was just thinking about things." + +"Sit down." + +She sat on the straight chair beside the bed, the chair on which, in +neat order, Harvey placed his clothing at night, his shoes beneath, his +coat over the back. + +"I wish you'd go out more, Harvey." + +"Why? Go out and talk to a lot of driveling fools who don't care for me +any more than I do for them?" + +"That's not like you, Harve." + +"Sorry." His tone softened. "I don't care much about going round, +Belle. That's all. I guess you know why." + +"So does everybody else." + +He sat up and looked at her. + +"Well, suppose they do? I can't help that, can I? When a fellow has +been jilted--" + +"You haven't been jilted." + +He lay down again, his arms under his head; and Belle knew that his eyes +were on Sara Lee's picture on his dresser. + +"It amounts to the same thing." + +"Harvey," Belle said hesitatingly, "I've brought Sara Lee's report from +the Ladies' Aid. May I read it to you?" + +"I don't want to hear it." Then: "Give it here. I'll look at it." + +He read it carefully, his hands rather unsteady. So many men given soup, +so many given chocolate. So many dressings done. And at the bottom +Sara Lee's request for more money--an apologetic, rather breathless +request, and closing, rather primly with this: + +"I am sure that the society will feel, from the above report, that the +work is worth while, and worth continuing. I am only sorry that I +cannot send photographs of the men who come for aid, but as they come +at night it is impossible. I enclose, however, a small picture of the +house, which is now known as the little house of mercy." + +"At night!" said Harvey. "So she's there alone with a lot of ignorant +foreigners at night. Why the devil don't they come in the daytime?" + +"Here's the picture, Harvey." + +He got up then, and carried the tiny photograph over close to the gas +jet. There he stood for a long time, gazing at it. There was Rene +with his rifle and his smile. There was Marie in her white apron. And +in the center, the wind blowing her soft hair, was Sara Lee. + +Harvey groaned and Belle came over and putting her hand on his shoulder +looked at the photograph with him. + +"Do you know what I think, Harvey?" she said. "I think Sara Lee is right +and you are wrong." + +He turned on her almost savagely. + +"That's not the point!" he snapped out. "I don't begrudge the poor +devils their soup. What I feel is this: If she'd cared a tinker's damn +for me she'd never have gone. That's all." + +He returned to a moody survey of the picture. + +"Look at it!" he said. "She insists that she's safe. But that fellow's +got a gun. What for, if she's so safe? And look at that house! There's +a corner shot away; and it's got no upper floor. Safe!" + +Belle held out her hand. + +"I must return the picture to the society, Harve." + +"Not just yet," he said ominously. "I want to look at it. I haven't +got it all yet. And I'll return it myself--with a short speech." + +"Harvey!" + +"Well," he retorted, "why shouldn't I tell that lot of old scandalmongers +what I think of them? They'll sit here safe at home and beg money--God, +one of them was in the office to-day!--and send a young girl over to-- +You'd better get out, Belle. I'm not company for any one to-night." + +She turned away, but he came after her, and suddenly putting his arms +round her he kissed her. + +"Don't worry about me," he said. "I'm done with wearing my heart on my +sleeve. She looks happy, so I guess I can be." He released her. "Good +night. I'll return the picture." + +He sat up very late, alternately reading the report and looking at the +picture. It was unfortunate that Sara Lee had smiled into the camera. +Coupled with her blowing hair it had given her a light-heartedness, a +sort of joyousness, that hurt him to the soul. + +He made some mad plans after he had turned out the lights--to flirt +wildly with the unattached girls he knew; to go to France and confront +Sara Lee and then bring her home. Or--He had found a way. He lay +there and thought it over, and it bore the test of the broken sleep that +followed. In the morning, dressing, he wondered he had not thought of +it before. He was more cheerful at breakfast than he had been for weeks. + + + + XIX + + +In the little house of mercy two weeks went by, and then a third. +Soldiers marching out to the trenches sometimes wore flowers tucked +gayly in their caps. More and more Allied aeroplanes were in the +air. Sometimes, standing in the streets, Sara Lee saw one far overhead, +while balloon-shaped clouds of bursting shells hung far below it. + +Once or twice in the early morning a German plane, flying so low that +one could easily see the black cross on each wing, reconnoitered the +village for wagon trains or troops. Always they found it empty. + +Hope had almost fled now. In the afternoons Marie went to the ruined +church, and there knelt before the heap of marble and masonry that had +once been the altar, and prayed. And Sara Lee, who had been brought up +a Protestant and had never before entered a Catholic church, took to +going there too. In some strange fashion the peace of former days +seemed to cling to the little structure, roofless as it was. On quiet +days its silence was deeper than elsewhere. On days of much firing the +sound from within its broken walls seemed deadened, far away. + +Marie burned a candle as she prayed, for that soul in purgatory which she +had once loved, and now pitied. Sara Lee burned no candle, but she +knelt, sometimes beside Marie, sometimes alone, and prayed for many +things: that Henri should be living, somewhere; that the war might end; +that that day there would be little wounding; that some day the Belgians +might go home again; and that back in America Harvey might grow to +understand and forgive her. And now and then she looked into the very +depths of her soul, and on those days she prayed that her homeland +might, before it was too late, see this thing as she was seeing it. The +wanton waste of it all, the ghastly cruelty the Germans had brought into +this war. + +Sara Lee's vague thinking began to crystallize. This war was not a +judgment sent from on high to a sinful world. It was the wicked +imposition of one nation on other nations. It was national. It was +almost racial. But most of all it was a war of hate on the German side. +She had never believed in hate. There were ugly passions in the world +--jealousy, envy, suspicion; but not hate. The word was not in her +rather limited vocabulary. + +There was no hate on the part of the men she knew. The officers who +stopped in on their way to and from the trenches were gentlemen and +soldiers. They were determined and grave; they resented, they even +loathed. But they did not hate. The little Belgian soldiers were +bewildered, puzzled, desperately resentful. But of hate, as translated +into terms of frightfulness, they had no understanding. + +Yet from the other side were coming methods of war so wantonly cruel, +so useless save as inflicting needless agony, as only hate could devise. +No strategic value justified them. They were spontaneous outgrowths of +venom, nursed during the winter deadlock and now grown to full size and +destructive power. + +The rumor of a gas that seared and killed came to the little house as +early as February. In March there came the first victims, poor writhing +creatures, deprived of the boon of air, their seared lungs collapsed +and agonized, their faces drawn into masks of suffering. Some of them +died in the little house, and even after death their faces held the +imprint of horror. + +To Sara Lee, burying her own anxiety under the cloak of service, there +came new and terrible thoughts. This was not war. The Germans had sent +their clouds of poisoned gas across the inundation, but had made no +attempt to follow. This was killing, for the lust of killing; suffering, +for the joy of inflicting pain. + +And a day or so later she heard of The Hague Convention. She had not +known of it before. Now she learned of that gentlemen's agreement among +nations, and that it said: "The use of poison or of poisoned weapons is +forbidden." She pondered that carefully, trying to think dispassionately. +Now and then she received a copy of a home newspaper, and she saw that +the use of poison gases was being denied by Germans in America and set +down to rumor and hysteria. + +So, on a cold spring day, she sat down at the table in the salle a manger +and wrote a letter to the President, beginning "Dear Sir"; and telling +what she knew of poison gas. She also, on second thought, wrote one to +Andrew Carnegie, who had built a library in her city. She felt that +the expense to him of sending some one over to investigate would not be +prohibitive, and something must be done. + +She never heard from either of her letters, but she felt better for +having written them. And a day or two later she received from Mrs. +Travers, in England, a small supply of the first gas masks of the war. +Simple and primitive they were, those first masks; useless, too, as it +turned out--a square of folded gauze, soaked in some solution and then +dried, with tapes to tie it over the mouth and nose. To adjust them the +soldiers had but to stoop and wet them in the ever-present water in +the trench, and then to tie them on. + +Sara Lee gave them out that night, and there was much mirth in the little +house, such mirth as there had not been since Henri went away. The +Belgians called it a bal masque, and putting them on bowed before one +another and requested dances, and even flirted coyly with each other over +their bits of white gauze. And in the very middle of the gayety some +one propounded one of Henri's idiotic riddles; and Sara Lee went across +to her little room and closed the door and stood there with her eyes +shut, for fear she would scream. + +Then, one day, coming out of the little church, she saw the low broken +gray car turn in at the top of the street and come slowly, so very +slowly, toward her. There were two men in it. + +One was Henri. + +She ran, stumbling because of tears, up the street. It was Henri! There +was no mistake. There he sat beside Jean, brushed and very neat; and +very, very white. + +"Mademoiselle!" he said, and came very close to crying himself when he +saw her face. He was greatly excited. His sunken eyes devoured her as +she ran toward him. Almost he held out his arms. But he could not do +that, even if he would, for one was bandaged to his side. + +It is rather sad to record how many times Sara Lee wept during her +amazing interlude. For here is another time. She wept for joy and +wretchedness. She stood on the running board and cried and smiled. And +Jean winked his one eye rapidly. + +"This idiot, mademoiselle," he said gruffly, "this maniac--he would not +remain in Calais, with proper care. He must come on here. And rapidly. +Could he have taken the wheel from me we should have been here an hour +ago. But for once I have an advantage." + +The car jolted to the little house, and Jean helped Henri out. Such a +strange Henri, smiling and joyous, and walking at a crawl, even with +Jean's support. He protested violently against being put to bed, and +when he found himself led into Sara Lee's small room he openly rebelled. + +"Never!" he said stubbornly, halting in the doorway. "This is +mademoiselle's boudoir. Her drawing-room as well. I am going to the +mill house and--" + +He staggered. + +So Sara Lee's room had a different occupant for a time, a thin and +fine-worn young Belgian, who yielded to Sara Lee when Jean gave up in +despair, and who proceeded, most unmanfully, to faint as soon as he was +between the blankets. + +If Sara Lee hoped to nurse Henri she was doomed to disappointment. Jean +it was who took over the care of the boy, a Jean who now ate prodigiously, +and whistled occasionally, and slept at night robed in his blanket on the +floor beside Henri's bed, lest that rebellious invalid get up and try to +move about. + +On the first night, with the door closed, against Henri's entreaties, +while the little house received its evening complement of men, and with +Henri lying back on his pillows, fresh dressed as to the wounds in his +arm and chest, fed with Sara Lee's daintiest, and resting, Jean found the +boy's eyes resting on the mantel. + +"Dear and obstinate friend," said Henri, "do you wish me to be happy?" + +"You shall not leave the room or your bed. That is arranged for." + +"How?" demanded Henri with interest. + +"Because I have hidden away your trousers." + +Henri laughed, but he sobered quickly. + +"If you wish me to be happy," he said, "take away that American +photograph. But first, please to bring it here." + +Jean brought it, holding it gingerly between his thumb and forefinger. +And Henri lay back and studied it. + +"It is mademoiselle's fiance," he said. + +Jean grunted. + +"Look at it, Jean," Henri said in his half-bantering tone, with despair +beneath it; "and then look at me. Or no--remembering me as I was when +I was a man. He is better, eh? It is a good face. But there is a jaw, +a-- Do you think he will be kind to her as she requires? She requires +much kindness. Some women--" + +He broke off and watched Jean anxiously. + +"A half face!" Jean said scornfully. "The pretty view! As for +kindness--" He put the photograph face down on the table. "I knew +once a man in Belgium who married an American. At Antwerp. They were +most unhappy." + +Henri smiled. + +"You are lying," he said with boyish pleasure in his own astuteness. +"You knew no such couple. You are trying to make me resigned." + +But quite a little later, when Jean thought he was asleep, he said: +"I shall never be resigned." + +So at last spring had come, and Henri and the great spring drive. The +Germans had not drained the inundation, nor had they broken through to +Calais. And it is not to be known here how much this utter failure had +been due to the information Henri had secured before he was wounded. + +One day in his bed Henri received a visit from the King, and was left +lying with a decoration on his breast and a beatific, if somewhat +sheepish, expression on his face. And one night the village was +bombarded, and on Henri's refusing to be moved to the cellar Sara Lee +took up a determined stand in his doorway, until at last he made a most +humiliating move for safety. + +Bit by bit Sara Lee got the story, its bare detail from Henri, its +courage and sheer recklessness from Jean. It would, for instance, run +like this, with Henri in a chair perhaps, and cutting dressings--since +that might be done with one hand--and Sara Lee, sleeves rolled up and +a great bowl of vegetables before her: + +"And when you got through the water, Henri?" she would ask: "What then?" + +"It was quite simple. They had put up some additional wire, however--" + +"Where?" + +"There was a break," he would explain. "I have told you--between their +trenches. I had used it before to get through." + +"But how could you go through?" + +"Like a snake," he would say, smiling. "Very flat and wriggling. I have +eaten of the dirt, mademoiselle." + +Then he would stop and cut, very awkwardly, with his left hand. + +"Go on," she would prompt him. "But they had put barbed wire there. Is +that it? So you could not get through?" + +"With tin cans on it, and stones in the cans. I thought I had removed +them all, but there was one left. So they heard me." + +More cutting and a muttered French expletive. Henri was not a +particularly patient cripple. And apparently there was an end to the +story. + +"For goodness' sake," Sara Lee would exclaim despairingly; "so they +heard you! That isn't all, is it?" + +"It was almost all," he would say with his boyish smile. + +"And they shot at you?" + +"Even better. They shot me. That was this one." And he would point to +his arm. + +More silence, more cutting, a gathering exasperation on Sara Lee's part. + +"Are you going on or not?" + +"Then I pretended to be one of them, mademoiselle. I speak German as +French. I pretended not to be hurt, but to be on a reconnoissance. And +I got into the trench and we had a talk in the darkness. It was most +interesting. Only if they had shown a light they would have seen that +I was wounded." + +By bits, not that day, but after many days, she got the story. In the +next trench he slipped a sling over the wounded arm and, as a Bavarian +on his way to the dressing station, got back. + +"I had some trouble," he confessed one day. "Now and then one would +offer to go back with me. And I did not care for assistance!" + +But sometime later there was trouble. She was four days getting to that +part of it. He had got behind the lines by that time, and he knew that +in some way suspicion had been roused. He was weak by that time, and +could not go far. He had lain hidden, for a day and part of a night, +without water, in a destroyed barn, and then had escaped. + +He got into the Belgian costume as before, but he could not wear a sling +for his wounded arm. He got the peasant to thrust his helpless right +hand into his pocket, and for two days he made a close inspection of +what was going on. But fever had developed, and on the third night, +half delirious, when he was spoken to by an officer he had replied, of +all tongues, in English. + +The officer shot him instantly in the chest. He fell and lay still and +the officer bent over him. In that moment Henri stabbed him with a +knife in his left hand. Men were coming from every direction, but he +got away--he did not clearly remember how. And at dawn he fell into +the Belgian farmhouse, apparently dying. + +Jean's story, on the other hand, was given early and with no hesitation. +He had crossed the border at Holland in civilian clothes, by the simple +expedient of bribing a sentry. He had got, with little difficulty, to +the farmhouse, and found Henri, now recovering but very weak; he was +lying hidden in a garret, and he was suffering from hunger and lack of +medical attention. In a wagon full of market stuff, Henri hidden in the +bed of it, they had got to the border again. And there Jean had, it +seemed, stabbed the sentry he had bribed before and driven on to neutral +soil. + +Not an unusual story, that of Henri and Jean. The journey across +Belgium in the springless farm wagon was the worst. They had had to +take roundabout lanes, avoiding the main highways. Fortunately, always +at night there were friendly houses, kind hands to lift Henri into warm +fire-lighted interiors. Many messages they had brought back, some of +cheer, but too often of tragedy, from the small farmsteads of Belgium. + +Then finally had been Holland, and the chartering of a boat--and at +last--"Here we are, and here we are, and here we are again," sang Henri, +chopping at his cotton and making a great show of cheerfulness before +Sara Lee. + +But with Jean sometimes he showed the black depression beneath. He +would never be a man again. He was done for. He gained strength so +slowly that he believed he was not gaining at all. He was not happy, +and the unhappy mend slowly. + +After the time he had asked Jean to take away Harvey's photograph he did +not recur to the subject, but he did not need to. Jean knew, perhaps +even better than Henri himself, that the boy was recklessly, hopelessly, +not quite rationally in love with the American girl. + +Also Henri was fretting about his work. Sometimes at night, following +Henri's instructions, Jean wandered quietly along roads and paths that +paralleled the Front. At such times his eyes were turned, not toward +the trenches, but toward that flat country which lay behind, still dotted +at that time with groves of trees, with canals overhung with pollard +willows, and with here and there a farmhouse that at night took on in +the starlight the appearance of being whole again. + +Singularly white and peaceful were those small steadings of Belgium in +the night hours--until cruel dawn showed them for what they were-- +skeletons of dead homes, clothed only at night with wraithlike roofs and +chimneys; ghosts of houses, appearing between midnight and cock crow. + +Jean had not Henri's eyes nor his recklessness nor his speed, for that +matter. Now and then he saw the small appearing and disappearing lights +on some small rise. He would reach the spot, with such shelter as +possible, to find only a sugar-beet field, neglected and unplowed. + +Then, one night, tragedy came to the little house of mercy. + + + + XX + + +Harvey proceeded to put his plan into effect at once, with the simple +method of an essentially simple nature. The thing had become +intolerable; therefore it must end. + +On the afternoon following his talk with Belle he came home at three +o'clock. Belle heard him moving about in his room, and when she entered +it, after he had gone, she found that he had shaved and put on his best +suit. + +She smiled a little. It was like Harvey to be literal. He had said he +was going to go round and have a good time, and he was losing no time. +But in their restricted social life, where most of the men worked until +five o'clock or even later, there were fewer afternoon calls paid. +Belle wondered with mild sisterly curiosity into what arena Harvey was +about to fling his best hat. + +But though Harvey paid a call that afternoon it was not on any of the +young women he knew. He went to see Mrs. Gregory. She was at home--he +had arranged for that by telephone--and the one butler of the +neighborhood admitted him. It was a truculent young man, for all his +politeness, who confronted Mrs. Gregory in her drawing-room--a quietly +truculent young man, who came to the point while he was still shaking +hands. + +"You're not going to be glad to see me in a minute," he said in reply +to her greeting. + +"How can you know that?" + +"Because I've come to get you to do something you won't want to do." + +"We won't quarrel before we begin, then," she said pleasantly. "Because +I really never do anything I don't wish to do." + +But she gave him a second glance and her smile became a trifle forced. +She knew all about Harvey and Sara Lee. She had heard rumors of his +disapproval also. Though she was not a clever nor a very keen woman, +she saw what was coming and braced herself for it. + +Harvey had prepared in his mind a summary of his position, and he +delivered it with the rapidity and strength of a blow. + +"I know all about the Belgians, Mrs. Gregory," he said. "I'm sorry for +them. So is every one, I suppose. But I want to know if you think a +girl of twenty ought to be over there practically at the Front, and +alone?" He gave her time to reply. "Would you like to have your +daughter there, if you had one?" + +"Perhaps not, under ordinary circumstances. But this is war." + +"It is not our war." + +"Humanity," said Mrs. Gregory, remembering the phrase she had written +for a speech--"humanity has no nationality. It is of all men, for +all men." + +"That's men. Not women!" + +He got up and stood on the hearthrug. He was singularly reminiscent of +the time he had stood on Aunt Harriet's white fur rug and had told Sara +Lee she could not go. + +"Now see here, Mrs. Gregory," he said, "we'll stop beating about the +bush, if you don't mind. She's got to come home. She's coming, if I +have to go and get her!" + +"You needn't look at me so fiercely. I didn't send her. It was her own +idea." + +Harvey sneered. + +"No," he said slowly. "But I notice your society publishes her reports +in the papers, and that the names of the officers are rarely missing." + +Mrs. Gregory colored. + +"We must have publicity to get money," she said. "It is hard to get. +Sometimes I have had to make up the deficit out of my own pocket." + +"Then for God's sake bring her home! If the thing has to go on, send +over there some of the middle-aged women who have no ties. Let 'em get +shot if they want to. They can write as good reports as she can, if +that's all you want. And make as good soup," he added bitterly. + +"It could be done, of course," she said, thoughtfully. "But--I must +tell you this: I doubt if an older woman could have got where she has. +There is no doubt that her charm, her youth and beauty have helped her +greatly. We cannot--" + +The very whites of his eyes turned red then. He shouted furiously that +for their silly work and their love of publicity, they were trading on +a girl's youth and beauty; that if anything happened to her he would +publish the truth in every newspaper in the country; that they would at +once recall Sara Lee or he would placard the city with what they were +doing. These were only a few of the things he threw at her. + +When he was out of breath he jerked the picture of the little house of +mercy out of his pocket and flung it into her lap. + +"There!" he said. "Do you know where that house is? It's in a ruined +village. She hasn't said that, has she? Well, look at the masonry +there. That's a shell hole in the street. That soldier's got a gun. +Why? Because the Germans may march up that street any day on their way +to Calais." + +Mrs. Gregory looked at the picture. Sara Lee smiled into the sun. And +Rene, ignorant that his single rifle was to oppose the march of the +German Army to Calais--Rene smiled also. + +Mrs. Gregory rose. + +"I shall report your view to the society," she said coldly. "I +understand how you feel, but I fail to see the reason for this attack +on me." + +"I guess you see all right!" he flung at her. "She's my future wife. +If you hadn't put this nonsense into her head we'd be married now and +she'd be here in God's country and not living with a lot of foreigners +who don't know a good woman when they see one. I want her back, that's +all. But I want her back safe. And if anything happens to her I'll +make you pay--you and all your notoriety hunters." + +He went out then, and was for leaving without his hat or coat, but the +butler caught him at the door. Out in the spring sunlight he walked +rapidly, still seething, remembering other bitter things he had meant +to say, and repeating them to himself. + +But he had said enough. + +Mrs. Gregory's account of his visit she reported at a meeting specially +called. The narrative lost nothing in the repetition. But the kindly +women who sat in the church house sewing or knitting listened to what +Harvey had said and looked troubled. They liked Sara Lee, and many of +them had daughters of their own. + +The photograph was passed around. Undoubtedly Sara Lee was living in a +ruined village. Certainly ruined villages were only found very near the +Front. And Rene unquestionably held a gun. Tales of German brutalities +to women had come and were coming constantly to their ears. Mabel +Andrews had written to them for supplies, and she had added to the +chapter of horrors. + +Briefly, the sense of the meeting was that Harvey had been brutal, but +that he was right. An older woman in a safe place they might continue +to support, but none of them would assume the responsibility of the +crushing out of a young girl's life. + +To be quite frank, possibly Harvey's appeal would have carried less +weight had it not coincided with Sara Lee's request for more money. +Neither one alone would have brought about the catastrophe, but +altogether they made question and answer, problem and solution. Money +was scarce. Demands were heavy. None of them except Mrs. Gregory had +more than just enough. And there was this additional situation to face: +there was no end of the war in sight; it gave promise now of going on +indefinitely. + +Joifre had said, "I nibble them." But to nibble a hole in the Germany +Army might take years. They had sent Sara Lee for a few months. How +about keeping her there indefinitely? + +Oddly enough, it was Harvey's sister Belle who made the only protest +against the recall. + +"Of course, I want her back," she said slowly. "You'd understand better +if you had to live with Harvey. I'm sorry, Mrs. Gregory, that he spoke +to you as he did, but he's nearly crazy." She eyed the assembly with +her tired shrewd eyes. "I'm no talker," she went on, "but Sara Lee has +done a big thing. We don't realize, I guess, how big it is. And I +think we'll just about kill her if we bring her home." + +"Better to do that than to have her killed over there," some one said. + +And in spite of Belle's protest, that remained the sense of the meeting. +It was put to the vote and decided to recall Sara Lee. She could bring +a report of conditions, and if she thought it wise an older woman could +go later, to a safer place. + +Belle was very quiet that evening. After dinner she went to Harvey's +room and found him dressing to go out. + +"I'm going with a crowd to the theater," he said. "First week of the +summer stock company, you know." + +He tied his tie defiantly, avoiding Belle's eyes in the mirror. + +"Harvey," she said, "they're going to bring Sara Lee home." + +He said nothing, but his hands shook somewhat. "And I think," Belle +said, "that you will be sorry for what you have done--all the rest of +your life." + + + + XXI + + +By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it was +almost the first of May. The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, and +the Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply of +high-explosive shells. + +Cheering reports came daily to the little house--, of rapidly augmenting +armies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up to +the Allied Front. Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, that +only shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against the +German batteries. She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but the +supply was still inadequate. With the new shells experiments were being +made in barrage fire--costly experiments now and then; but the Allies +were apt in learning the ugly game of modern war. + +Only on the Belgian Front was there small change. The shattered army +was being freshly outfitted. England was sending money and ammunition, +and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiled +grimly and drilled again. But there were not, as in England and in +France, great bodies of young men to draw from. Too many had been +caught beyond the German wall of steel. + +Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the green +fields. And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways. +They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity. +Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the top +of the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse, +which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box and +stovepipe. + +"A portable kitchen!" he explained. "See, here for soup and here for +coffee. And more are coming." + +"Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully. + +But he protested almost violently. He even put the question to the +horse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative. + +She was needed, indeed. To the great base hospital at La Panne went +more and more wounded men. But to the little house of mercy came the +small odds and ends in increasing numbers. Medical men were scarce, and +badly overworked. There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon to +the little house, but it came to nothing. La Panne was not far away, +and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many. + +So the little house went on much as before. Henri had moved to the mill. +He was at work again, and one day, in the King's villa and quietly, +because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received a +second medal, the highest for courage that could be given. + +He did not tell Sara Lee. + +But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they could +not always perform miracles. The German planes still outnumbered the +Allied ones. They had grown more daring with the spring, too, and +whatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretell +those of the air. + +On a moonlight night in early May, Sara Lee, setting out her dressings, +heard a man running up the street. Rene challenged him sharply, only +to step aside. It was Henri. He burst in on Sara Lee. + +"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said. + +"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee. + +"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve taubes, and +they are circling overhead." + +The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight and +the Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it was +as Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, and +since it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed. + +The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed a +deafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the dead +town. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but the +cellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment by +shells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb dropped +from the sky, the floors above were practically useless. + +Only Henri and Rene remained on the street floor. Henri was +extinguishing lights. In the passage Rene stood, not willing to take +refuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment the +uproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado Rene stepped out into the +moonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air. + +He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell. + +"Come, Rene!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fight +again, not--" + +But Rene's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to the +doorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where he +had been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead. +Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently. +Then he went below. + +"Where is Rene?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness. + +"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think, +watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter." + +"There is no shelter," shivered the girl. + +He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand, +like two children, waiting for what might come. + +It was not until the thing was over that he told her. He had gone up +first and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned, +had carried Rene to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularly +peaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night. + +"Good night, little brother," Henri said to him, and left him there with +a heavy heart. Never again would Rene sit and whittle on the doorstep +and sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyish +adoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and forth in the little house. + +Henri stared up at the sky. The moon looked down, cold, and cruelly +bright, on the vanishing squadron of death, on the destroyed town and on +the boy's white face. Somewhere, Henri felt, vanishing like the German +taubes, but to peace instead of war, was moving Rene's brave and smiling +spirit--a boyish angel, eager and dauntless, and still looking up. + +Henri took off his cap and crossed himself. + +Another sentry took Rene's place the next day, but the little house had +lost something it could not regain. And a greater loss was to come. + +Jean brought out the mail that day. For Sara Lee, moving about silent +and red-eyed, there was a letter from Mr. Travers. He inclosed a hundred +pounds and a clipping from a London newspaper entitled The Little House +of Mercy. + +"Evidently," he wrote, "you were right and we were wrong. One-half of +the inclosed check is from my wife, who takes this method of showing her +affectionate gratitude. The balance is from myself. Once, some months +ago, I said to you that almost you restored my faith in human nature. +To-day I may say that, in these hours of sorrow for us all, what you have +done and are doing has brought into my gray day a breath of hope." + +There was another clipping, but no comment. It recorded the death of a +Reginald Alexander Travers, aged thirty. + +It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself those +days, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegation +of the English--their attitude not so much of suppressing their private +griefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people, +they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a private +matter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbroken +front, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strange +one, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England. + +A people who had for centuries insisted not only on its rights but on +its privileges was now giving as freely as ever it had demanded. It +was as though, having hoarded all those years, it had but been hoarding +against the day of payment. As it had received it gave--in money, in +effort, in life. And without pretext. + +So the Traverses, having given up all that had made life for them, sent +a clipping only, and no comment. Sara Lee, through a mist of tears, +saw them alone in their drawing-room, having tea as usual, and valiantly +speaking of small things, and bravely facing the future, but never, in +the bitterest moments, making complaint or protest. + +Would America, she wondered, if her hour came, be so brave? Harvey had +a phrase for such things. It was "stand the gaff." Would America stand +the gaff so well? Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the +body rather than of the soul--physical courage, not moral. What would +happen if America entered the struggle and the papers were filled, as +were the British and the French, with long casualty lists, each name a +knife thrust somewhere? + +She wondered. + +And then, before long, it was Sara Lee's turn to stand the gaff. There +was another letter, a curiously incoherent one from Harvey's sister. She +referred to something that the society had done, and hoped that Sara Lee +would take it in kindness, as it was meant. Harvey was well and much +happier. She was to try to understand Harvey's part. He had been +almost desperate. Evidently the letter had preceded one that should have +arrived at the same time. Sara Lee was sadly puzzled. She went to Henri +with it, but he could make nothing out of it. There was nothing to do +but to wait. + +The next night Henri was to go through the lines again. Since his +wounding he had been working on the Allied side, and fewer lights there +were in his district that flashed the treacherous message across the +flood, between night and morning. But now it was imperative that he go +through the German lines again. It was feared that with grappling hooks +the enemy was slowly and cautiously withdrawing the barbed wire from the +inundated fields; and that could mean but one thing. + +On the night he was to go Henri called Sara Lee from the crowded salle a +manger and drawing her into the room across closed the door. + +"Mademoiselle," he said gravely, "once before, long ago, you permitted +me to kiss you. Will you do that for me again?" + +She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She did +not now. For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook. +She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure +men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours +that remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her +charm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, to +cheer, to comfort and help--that was necessary, because soon the chance +might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret. + +So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of +tears. + +"God bless and keep you, dear Henri," she said. + +Then she went back to her work. + + + + + XXII + +Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people. +One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it +away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present +Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer +horribly, not to gain anything--except perhaps some honorable +advancement for their souls--but that there might be preserved, at any +cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to +pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God. + +She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she +was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers +and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter. +She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time +she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was +his anxiety, his loneliness, his humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were +looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were +turned in on himself. + +She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What +she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come +sometime--that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that +day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the +thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her +hands would tremble. + +Henri had not returned when, the second day after Rene's death, the +letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from +Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had +always sent its enthusiastic approval. + +She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read +Belle's letter again that she began to comprehend. She was recalled; +and the recall was Harvey's work. + +She was very close to hating him that day. He had never understood. +She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest +of their lives, there would be this barrier between them. To the +barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment. She could +never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her +small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of +the war. + +Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee's love for him. He had done +it himself, madly, despairingly. She still loved him, she felt. Nothing +could change that or her promise to him. But with that love there was +something now of fear. And she felt, too, that after all the years she +had known him she had not known him at all. The Harvey she had known +was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always +gentle. But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger. + +It was the result of her upbringing, probably, that she had no thought +of revolt. Her tie to Harvey was a real tie. By her promise to him her +life was no longer hers to order. It belonged to some one else, to be +ordered for her. But, though she accepted, she was too clear a thinker +not to resent. + +When Henri returned, toward dawn of the following night, he did not come +alone. Sara Lee, rising early, found two men in her kitchen--one of +them Henri, who was making coffee, and a soldier in a gray-green uniform, +with a bad bruise over one eye and a sulky face. His hands were tied, +but otherwise he sat at ease, and Henri, having made the coffee, held a +cup to his lips. + +"It is good for the spirits, man," he said in German. "Drink it." + +The German took it, first gingerly, then eagerly. Henri was in high +good humor. + +"See, I have brought you a gift!" he exclaimed on seeing Sara Lee. "What +shall we do with him? Send him to America? To show the appearance of +the madmen of Europe?" + +The prisoner was only a boy, such a boy as Henri himself; but a peasant, +and muscular. Beside his bulk Henri looked slim as a reed. Henri eyed +him with a certain tolerant humor. + +"He is young, and a Bavarian," he said. "Other wise I should have +killed him, for he fought hard. He has but just been called." + +There was another conference in the little house that morning, but +Henri's prisoner could tell little. He had heard nothing of an advance. +Further along the line it was said that there was much fighting. He sat +there, pale and bewildered and very civil, and in the end his frightened +politeness brought about a change in the attitude of the men who +questioned him. Hate all Germans as they must, who had suffered so +grossly, this boy was not of those who had outraged them. + +They sent him on at last, and Sara Lee was free to tell Henri her news. +But she had grown very wise as to Henri's moods, and she hesitated. A +certain dissatisfaction had been growing in the boy for some time, a +sense of hopelessness. Further along the spring had brought renewed +activity to the Allied armies. Great movements were taking place. + +But his own men stood in their trenches, or what passed for trenches, or +lay on their hours of relief in such wretched quarters as could be found, +still with no prospect of action. No great guns, drawn by heavy +tractors, came down the roads toward the trenches by the sea. Steady +bombarding, incessant sniping and no movement on either side--that was +the Belgian Front during the first year of the war. Inaction, with that +eating anxiety as to what was going on in the occupied territory, was +the portion of the heroic small army that stretched from Nieuport to +Dixmude. + +And Henri's nerves were not good. He was unhappy--that always--and he +was not yet quite recovered from his wounds. There was on his mind, too, +a certain gun which moved on a railway track, back and forth, behind the +German lines, doing the work of many. He had tried to get to that gun, +and failed. And he hated failure. + +Certainly in this story of Sara Lee and of Henri, whose other name must +not be known, allowance must be made for all those things. Yet--perhaps +no allowance is enough. + +Sara Lee told him that evening of her recall, told him when the shuffling +of many feet in the street told of the first weary men from the trenches +coming up the road. + +He heard her in a dazed silence. Then: + +"But you will not go?" he said. "It is impossible! You--you are +needed, mademoiselle." + +"What can I do, Henri? They have recalled me. My money will not come +now." + +"Perhaps we can arrange that. It does not cost so much. I have friends +--and think, mademoiselle, how many know now of what you are doing, and +love you for it. Some of them would contribute, surely." + +He was desperately revolving expedients in his mind. He could himself +do no more than he had done. He, or rather Jean and he together, had +been bearing a full half of the expense of the little house since the +beginning. But he dared not tell her that. And though he spoke +hopefully, he knew well that he could raise nothing from the Belgians +he knew best. Henri came of a class that held its fortunes in land, and +that land was now in German hands. + +"We will arrange it somehow," he said with forced cheerfulness. "No +beautiful thing--and this is surely beautiful--must die because of +money." + +It was then that Sara Lee took the plunge. + +"It is not only money, Henri." + +"He has sent for you!" + +Harvey was always "he" to Henri. + +"Not exactly. But I think he went to some one and said I should not be +here alone. You can understand how he feels. We were going to be +married very soon, and then I decided to come. It made an awful upset." + +Henri stood with folded arms and listened. At first he said nothing. +When he spoke it was in a voice of ominous calm: + +"So for a stupid convention he would destroy this beautiful thing you +have made! Does he know your work? Does he know what you are to the +men here? Have you ever told him?" + +"I have, of course, but--" + +"Do you want to go back?" + +"No, Henri. Not yet. I--" + +"That is enough. You are needed. You are willing to stay. I shall +attend to the money. It is arranged." + +"You don't understand," said Sara Lee desperately. "I am engaged to him. +I can't wreck his life, can I?" + +"Would it wreck your life?" he demanded. "Tell me that and I shall know +how to reason with you." + +But she only looked at him helplessly. + +Heavy tramping in the passage told of the arrival of the first men. +They did not talk and laugh as usual. As well as they could they came +quietly. For Rene had been a good friend to many of them, and had +admitted on slack nights many a weary man who had no ticket. Much as +the neighbors had entered the house back home after Uncle James had gone +away, came these bearded men that night. And Sara Lee, hearing their +muffled voices, brushed a hand over her eyes and tried to smile. + +"We can talk about it later," she said. "We mustn't quarrel. I owe so +much to you, Henri." + +Suddenly Henri caught her by the arm and turned her about so that she +faced the lamp. + +"Do you love him?" he demanded. "Sara Lee, look at me!" Only he +pronounced it Saralie. "He has done a very cruel thing. Do you still +love him?" + +Sara Lee shut her eyes. + +"I don't know. I think I do. He is very unhappy, and it is my fault." + +"Your fault!" + +"I must go, Henri. The men are waiting." + +But he still held her arm. + +"Does he love you as I love you?" he demanded. "Would he die for you?" + +"That's rather silly, isn't it? Men don't die for the people they love." + +"I would die for you, Saralie." + +She eyed him rather helplessly. + +"I don't think you mean that." Bad strategy that, for he drew her to +him. His arms were like steel, and it was a rebellious and very rigid +Sara Lee who found she could not free herself. + +"I would die for you, Saralie!" he repeated fiercely. "That would be +easier, far, than living without you. There is nothing that matters but +you. Listen--I would put everything I have--my honor, my life, my +hope of eternity--on one side of the scale and you on the other. And I +would choose you. Is that love?" He freed her. + +"It's insanity," said Sara Lee angrily. "You don't mean it. And I +don't want that kind of love, if that is what you call it." + +"And you will go back to that man who loves himself better than he loves +you?" + +"That's not true!" she flashed at him. "He is sending for me, not to +get me back to him, but to get me back to safety." + +"What sort of safety?" Henri demanded in an ominous tone. "Is he afraid +of me?" + +"He doesn't know anything about you." + +"You have never told him? Why?" His eyes narrowed. + +"He wouldn't have understood, Henri." + +"You are going back to him," he said slowly; "and you will always keep +these days of ours buried in your heart. Is that it?" His eyes softened. +"I am to be a memory! Do you know what I think? I think you care for +me more than you know. We have lived a lifetime together in these +months. You know me better than you know him, already. We have faced +death together. That is a strong tie. And I have held you in my arms. +Do you think you can forget that?" + +"I shall never want to forget you." + +"I shall not let you forget me. You may go--I cannot prevent that +perhaps. But wherever I am; Saralie, I shall stand between that lover +of yours and you. And sometime I shall come from this other side of the +world, and I shall find you, and you will come back with me. Back to +this country--our country." + +They were boyish words, but back of them was the iron determination of a +man. His eyes seemed sunken in his head. His face was white. But there +was almost a prophetic ring in his voice. + +Sara Lee went out and left him there, went out rather terrified and +bewildered, and refusing absolutely to look into her own heart. + + + + + XXIII + +Late in May she started for home. It had not been necessary to close +the little house. An Englishwoman of mature years and considerable +wealth, hearing from Mr. Travers of Sara Lee's recall, went out a day or +two before she left and took charge. She was a kindly woman, in deep +mourning; and some of the ache left Sara Lee's heart when she had talked +with her successor. + +Perhaps, too, Mrs. Cameron understood some of the things that had +puzzled her before. She had been a trifle skeptical perhaps about Sara +Lee before she saw her. A young girl alone among an army of men! She +was a good woman herself, and not given to harsh judgments, but the +thing had seemed odd. But Sara Lee in her little house, as virginal, as +without sex-consciousness as a child, Sara Lee with her shabby clothes +and her stained hands and her honest eyes--this was not only a good +girl, this was a brave and high-spirited and idealistic woman. + +And after an evening in the house of mercy, with the soldiers openly +adoring and entirely respectful, Mrs. Cameron put her arms round Sara +Lee and kissed her. + +"You must let me thank you," she said. "You have made me feel what I +have not felt since--" + +She stopped. Her mourning was only a month old. "I see to-night that, +after all, many things may be gone, but that while service remains there +is something worth while in life." + +The next day she asked Sara Lee to stay with her, at least through the +summer. Sara Lee hesitated, but at last she agreed to cable. As Henri +had disappeared with the arrival of Mrs. Cameron it was that lady's +chauffeur who took the message to Dunkirk and sent it off. + +She had sent the cable to Harvey. It was no longer a matter of the +Ladies' Aid. It was between Harvey and herself. + +The reply came on the second day. It was curt and decisive. + +"Now or never," was the message Harvey sent out of his black despair, +across the Atlantic to the little house so close under the guns of +Belgium. + +Henri was half mad those last days. Jean tried to counsel him, but he +was irritable, almost savage. And Jean understood. The girl had grown +deep into his own heart. Like Henri, he believed that she was going +back to unhappiness; he even said so to her in the car, on that last sad +day when Sara Lee, having visited Rene's grave and prayed in the ruined +church, said good-by to the little house, and went away, tearless at the +last, because she was too sad for tears. + +It was not for some time that Jean spoke what was in his mind, and when +he had done so she turned to him gravely: + +"You are wrong, Jean. He is the kindest of men. Once I am back, and +safe, he will be very different. I'm afraid I've given you a wrong +impression of him." + +"You think then, mademoiselle, that he will forget all these months-- +he will never be unhappy over them?" + +"Why should he?" said Sara Lee proudly. "When I tell him everything he +will understand. And he will be very proud that I have done my share." + +But Jean's one eye was dubious. + +At the wharf in Dunkirk they found Henri, a pale but composed Henri. +Jean's brows contracted. He had thought that the boy would follow his +advice and stay away. But Henri was there. + +It was as well, perhaps, for Sara Lee had brought him a letter, one of +those missives from the trenches which had been so often left at the +little house. + +Henri thrust it into his pocket without reading it. + +"Everything is prepared," he said. "It is the British Admiralty boat, +and one of the officers has offered his cabin. You will be quite +comfortable." + +He appeared entirely calm. He saw to carrying Sara Lee's small bag on +board; he chatted with the officers; he even wandered over to a +hospital ship moored near by and exchanged civilities with a wounded man +in a chair on the deck. Perhaps he swaggered a bit too much, for Jean +watched him with some anxiety. He saw that the boy was taking it hard. +His eyes were very sunken now, and he moved his right arm stiffly, as +though the old wound troubled him. + +Jean did not like leave-takings. Particularly he did not like taking +leave of Sara Lee. Some time before the boat sailed he kissed her hand, +and then patted it and went away in the car without looking back. + +The boat was preparing to get under way. Henri was standing by her very +quietly. He had not slept the night before, but then there were many +nights when Henri did not sleep. He had wandered about, smoking +incessantly, trying to picture the black future. + +He could see no hope anywhere. America was far away, and peaceful. +Very soon the tranquillity of it all would make the last months seem +dreamlike and unreal. She would forget Belgium, forget him. Or she +would remember him as a soldier who had once loved her. Once loved her, +because she had never seemed to realize the lasting quality of his love. +She had always felt that he would forget her. If he could only make her +believe that he would not, it would not be so hopeless. + +He had written a bit of a love letter on the little table at Dunkirk +that morning, written it with the hope that the sight of the written +words might carry conviction where all his protests had failed. + +"I shall love you all the years of my life," he wrote. "At any time, in +any place, you may come to me and know that I am waiting. Great love +like this comes only once to any man, and once come to him it never goes +away. At any time in the years to come you may know with certainty that +you are still to me what you are now, the love of my life. + +"Sometimes I think, dearest--I may call you that once, now that you +have left me--that far away you will hear this call of mine and come +back to me. Perhaps you will never come. Perhaps I shall not live. I +feel to-day that I do not care greatly to live. + +"If that is to be, then think of me somewhere, perhaps with Rene by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house +of mercy; and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +He had the letter in the pocket of his tunic, and at last the moment +came when the boat must leave. Suddenly Henri knew that he could not +allow her to cross to England alone. The last few days had brought many +stories of submarine attacks. Here, so far north, the Germans were +particularly active. They had for a long time lurked in waiting for +this British Admiralty boat, with its valuable cargo, its officers and +the government officials who used it. + +"Good-by, Henri," said Sara Lee. "I--of course it is no use to try to +tell you--" + +"I am going across with you." + +"But--" + +"I allowed you to come over alone. I shiver when I think of it. I shall +take you back myself." + +"Is it very dangerous?" + +"Probably not. But can you think of me standing safe on that quay and +letting you go into danger alone?" + +"I am not afraid." + +"I know that. I have never seen you afraid. But if you wish to see a +coward, look at me. I am a coward for you." + +He put his hand into his pocket. It occurred to him to give her the +letter now so that if anything happened she would at least have had it. +He wanted no mistake about that appointment beyond the stars. But the +great world of eternity was very large, and they must have a definite +understanding about that meeting at the little house of mercy Over There. + +Perhaps he had a little fever that day. He was alternately flushed and +pale; and certainly he was not quite rational. His hand shook as he +brought out her letter--and with it the other letter, from the Front. + +"Have you the time to come with me?" Sara Lee asked doubtfully. "I want +you to come, of course, but if your work will suffer--" + +He held out his letter to her. + +"I shall go away," he said, "while you read it. And perhaps you will +not destroy it, because--I should like to feel that you have it always." + +He went away at once, saluting as he passed other officers, who gravely +saluted him. On the deck of the hospital ship the invalid touched his +cap. Word was going about, in the stealthy manner of such things, that +Henri whose family name we may not know, was a brave man and doing brave +things. + +The steamer had not yet cast off. As usual, it was to take a flying +start from the harbor, for it was just outside the harbor that the wolves +of the sea lay in wait. Henri, alone at last, opened his letter, and +stood staring at it. There was again movement behind the German line, +a matter to be looked into, as only he could do it. Probably nothing, +as before; but who could say? + +Henri looked along the shore to where but a few miles away lay the +ragged remnant of his country. And he looked forward to where Sara Lee, +his letter in her hand, was staring blindly at nothing. Then he looked +out toward the sea, where lay who knew what dangers of death and +suffering. + +After that first moment of indecision he never hesitated. He stood on +the deck and watched, rather frozen and rigid, and with a mind that had +ceased working, while the steamer warped out from the quay. If in his +subconsciousness there was any thought it was doubtless that he had done +his best for a long time, and that he had earned the right to protect +for a few hours the girl he loved. That, too, there had been activity +along the German-Belgian line before, without result. + +Perhaps subconsciously those things were there. He himself was conscious +of no thought, of only a dogged determination to get Sara Lee across the +channel safely. He put everything else behind him. He counted no cost. + +The little admiralty boat sped on. In the bow, on the bridge, and at +different stations lookouts kept watch. The lifeboats were hung +overboard, ready to lower instantly. On the horizon a British destroyer +steamed leisurely. Henri stood for a long time on the deck. The land +fell away quickly. From a clear silhouette of the town against the sky +--the dunes, the spire of the cathedral, the roof of the mairie--it +became vague, shadowy--the height of a hand--a line--nothing. + +Henri roused himself. He was very thirsty, and the wound in his arm +ached. When he raised his hand to salute the movement was painful. + +It was a very grave Sara Lee he found in the officer's cabin when he +went inside later on. She was sitting on the long seat below the open +port, her hat slightly askew and her hands folded in her lap. Her bag +was beside her, and there was in her eyes a perplexity Henri was too +wretched to notice. + +For the first time Sara Lee was realizing the full value of the thing +she was throwing away. She had persistently discounted it until now. +She had been grateful for it. She had felt unworthy of it. But now, +on the edge of leaving it, she felt that something infinitely precious +and very beautiful was going out of her life. She had already a sense +of loss. + +For the first time, too, she was allowing herself to think of certain +contingencies that were now forever impossible. For instance, suppose +she had stayed with Mrs. Cameron? Suppose she had broken her promise +to Harvey and remained at the little house? Suppose she had done as +Henri had so wildly urged her, and had broken entirely with Harvey? +Would she have married Henri? + +There was a certain element of caution in the girl. It made the chances +she had taken rather more courageous, indeed, because she had always +counted the cost. But marriage was not a matter for taking chances. One +should know not only the man, but his setting, though she would not have +thought of it in that way. Not only the man, but the things that made up +his life--his people, his home. + +And Henri was to her still a figure, not so much now of mystery as of +detachment. Except Jean he had no intimates. He had no family on the +only side of the line she knew. He had not even a country. + +She had reached that point when Henri came below and saluted her stiffly +from the doorway. + +"Henri!" she said. "I believe you are ill!" + +"I am not ill," he said, and threw himself into the corner of the seat. +"You have read it?" + +She nodded. Even thinking of it brought a lump into her throat. He +bent forward, but he did not touch her. + +"I meant it, Saralie," he said. "Sometimes men are infatuated, and +write what they do not mean. They are sincere at the time, and then +later on-- But I meant it. I shall always mean it." + +Not then, nor during the three days in London, did he so much as take +her hand. He was not well. He ate nothing, and at night he lay awake +and drank a great deal of water. Once or twice he found her looking at +him anxiously, but he disclaimed all illness. + +He had known from the beginning what he was doing. But he did not touch +her, because in his heart he knew that where once he had been worthy he +was no longer worthy. He had left his work for a woman. + +It is true that he had expected to go back at once. But the Philadelphia, +which had been listed to sail the next day, was held up by a strike in +Liverpool, and he waited on, taking such hours as she could give him, +feverishly anxious to make her happy, buying her little gifts, mostly +flowers, which she wore tucked in her belt and smiled over, because she +had never before received flowers from a man. + +He was alternately gay and silent. They walked across the Thames by the +Parliament buildings, and midway across he stopped and looked long at the +stream. And they went to the Zoological Gardens, where he gravely named +one of the sea lions for Colonel Lilias because of its mustache, and +insisted on saluting it each time before he flung it a fish. Once he +soberly gathered up a very new baby camel, all legs, in his arms, and +presented it to her. + +"Please accept it, mademoiselle," he said. "With my compliments." + +They dined together every night, very modestly, sitting in some crowded +restaurant perhaps, but seeing little but each other. Sara Lee had +bought a new hat in London--black, of course, but faced with white. +He adored her in it. He would sit for long moments, his elbows propped +on the table, his blond hair gleaming in the candlelight, and watch her. + +"I wonder," he said once, "if you had never met him would you have loved +me?" + +"I do love you, Henri." + +"I don't want that sort of love." And he had turned his head away. + +But one evening he called for her at Morley's, a white and crushed boy, +needing all that she could give him and much more. He came as a man +goes to the woman he loves when he is in trouble, much as a child to his +mother. Sara Lee, coming down to the reception room, found him alone +there, walking rapidly up and down. He turned desperate eyes on her. + +"I have brought bad news," he said abruptly. + +"The little house--" + +"I do not know. I ran away, mademoiselle. I am a traitor. And the +Germans broke through last night." + +"Henri!" + +"They broke through. We were not ready. That is what I have done." + +"Don't you think," Sara Lee said in a frozen voice, "that is what I have +done? I let you come." + +"You? You are taking the blame? Mademoiselle, I have enough to bear +without that." + +He explained further, still standing in his rigid attitude. If he had +been white before at times he was ghastly now. It had not been an attack +in force. A small number had got across and had penetrated beyond the +railway line. There had been hand-to-hand fighting in the road beyond +the poplars. But it looked more like an experiment, an endeavor to +discover the possibility of a real advance through the inundation; or +perhaps a feint to cover operations elsewhere. + +"For every life lost I am responsible," he ended in a flat and lifeless +tone. + +"But you might not have known," she protested wildly. "Even if you had +been there, Henri, you might not have known." She knew something of war +by that time. "How could you have told that a small movement of troops +was to take place?" + +"I should have been there." + +"But--if they came without warning?" + +"I did not tell you," he said, looking away from her. "There had been a +warning. I disregarded it." + +He went back to Belgium that night. Sara Lee, at the last, held out her +hand. She was terrified for him, and she showed it. + +"I shall not touch your hand," he said. "I have forfeited my right to +do that." Then, seeing what was in her face, he reassured her. "I shall +not do that," he said. "It would be easier. But I shall have to go +back and see what can be done." + +He was the old Henri to the last, however. He went carefully over her +steamship ticket, and inquired with equal care into the amount of money +she had. + +"It will take you home?" he asked. + +"Very comfortably, Henri." + +"It seems very little." + +Then he said, apropos of nothing: "Poor Jean!" + +When he left her at last he went to the door, very erect and soldierly. +But he turned there and stood for a moment looking at her, as though +through all that was coming he must have with him, to give him strength, +that final picture of her. + +The elderly chambermaid, coming into Sara Lee's room the next morning, +found her fully dressed in the frock she had worn the night before, face +down on her bed. + + + + + XXIV + +It was early in June when at last the lights went down behind the back +drop and came up in front, to show Sara Lee knitting again, though not +by the fire. The amazing interlude was over. + +Over, except in Sara Lee's heart. The voyage had been a nightmare. She +had been ill for one thing--a combination of seasickness and +heartsickness. She had allowed Henri to come to England with her, and +the Germans had broken through. All the good she had done--and she had +helped--was nothing to this mischief she had wrought. + +It had been a small raid. She gathered that from the papers on board. +But that was not the vital thing. What mattered was that she had let a +man forget his duty to his country in his solicitude for her. + +But as the days went on the excitement of her return dulled the edge of +her misery somewhat. The thing was done. She could do only one thing +to help. She would never go back, never again bring trouble and +suffering where she had meant only to bring aid and comfort. + +She had a faint hope that Harvey would meet her at the pier. She needed +comforting and soothing, and perhaps a bit of praise. She was so very +tired; depressed, too, if the truth be known. She needed a hand to lead +her back to her old place on the stage, and kind faces to make her forget +that she had ever gone away. + +Because that was what she had to do. She must forget Henri and the +little house on the road to the poplar trees; and most of all, she must +forget that because of her Henri had let the Germans through. + +But Harvey did not meet her. There was a telegram saying he would meet +her train if she wired when she was leaving--an exultant message +breathing forgiveness and signed "with much love." She flushed when she +read it. + +Of course he could not meet her in New York. This was not the Continent +in wartime, where convention had died of a great necessity. And he was +not angry, after all. A great wave of relief swept over her. But it +was odd how helpless she felt. Since her arrival in England months +before there had always been Henri to look after things for her. It was +incredible to recall how little she had done for herself. + +Was she glad to be back? She did not ask herself. It was as though the +voyage had automatically detached her from that other Sara Lee of the +little house. That was behind her, a dream--a mirage--or a memory. +Here, a trifle confused by the bustle, was once again the Sara Lee who +had knitted for Anna, and tended the plants in the dining-room window, +and watched Uncle James slowly lowered into his quiet grave. + +Part of her detachment was voluntary. She could not bear to remember. +She had but to close her eyes to see Henri's tragic face that last night +at Morley's. And part of the detachment was because, after all, the +interlude had been but a matter of months, and reaching out familiar +hands to her were the habits and customs and surroundings of all the +earlier years of her life, drawing her back to them. + +It was strange how Henri's face haunted her. She could close her eyes +and see it, line by line, his very swagger--for he did swagger, just a +little; his tall figure and unruly hair; his long, narrow, muscular +hands. Strange and rather uncomfortable. Because she could not summon +Harvey's image at all. She tried to bring before her, that night in the +train speeding west, his solid figure and kind eyes as they would greet +her the next day--tried, and failed. All she got was the profile of +the photograph, and the stubborn angle of the jaw. + +She was up very early the next morning, and it was then, as the train +rolled through familiar country, that she began to find Harvey again. +A flush of tenderness warmed her. She must be very kind to him because +of all that he had suffered. + +The train came to a stop. Rather breathless Sara Lee went out on the +platform. Harvey was there, in the crowd. He did not see her at first. +He was looking toward the front of the train. So her first glimpse of +him was the view of the photograph. His hat was off, and his hair, +carefully brushed back, gave him the eager look of the picture. + +He was a strong and manly figure, as unlike Henri as an oak is unlike +one of Henri's own tall and swaying poplars. Sara Lee drew a long +breath. Here after all were rest and peace; love and gentleness; quiet +days and still evenings. No more crowds and wounds and weary men, no +more great thunderings of guns, no imminence of death. Rest and peace. + +Then Harvey saw her, and the gleam of happiness and relief in his eyes +made her own eyes misty. She saw even in that first glance that he +looked thinner and older. A pang of remorse shot through her. Was +happiness always bought at the cost of happiness? Did one always take +away in order to give? Not in so many words, but in a flash of doubt +the thought went through her mind. + +There was no reserve in Harvey's embrace. He put his arms about her and +held her close. He did not speak at first. Then: + +"My own little girl," he said. "My own little girl!" + +Suddenly Sara Lee was very happy. All her doubts were swept away by his +voice, his arms. There was no thrill for her in his caress, but there +were peace and quiet joy. It was enough for her, just then, that she +had brought back some of the happiness she had robbed him of. + +"Oh, Harvey!" she said. "I'm glad to be back again--with you." + +He held her off then and looked at her. + +"You are thin," he said. "You're not pale, but you are thin." And in a +harder voice: "What did they do to you over there?" + +But he did not wait for a reply. He did not seem to want one. He picked +up her bag, and guiding her by the elbow, piloted her through the crowd. + +"A lot of folks wanted to come and meet you," he said, "but I steered +them off. You'd have thought Roosevelt was coming to town the way +they've been calling up." + +"To meet me?" + +"I expect the Ladies' Aid Society wanted to get into the papers again," +he said rather grimly. "They are merry little advertisers, all right." + +"I don't think that, Harvey." + +"Well, I do," he said, and brought her to a stop facing a smart little +car, very new, very gay. + +"How do you like it?" he asked. + +"Like it? Why, it's not yours, is it?" + +"Surest thing you know. Or, rather, it's ours. Had a few war babies, +and they grew up." + +Sara Lee looked at it, and for just an instant, a rather sickening +instant, she saw Henri's shattered low car, battle-scarred and broken. + +"It's--lovely," said Sara Lee. And Harvey found no fault with her tone. + +Sara Lee had intended to go to Anna's, for a time at least. But she +found that Belle was expecting her and would not take no. + +"She's moved the baby in with the others," Harvey explained as he took +the wheel. "Wait until you see your room. I knew we'd be buying +furniture soon, so I fixed it up." + +He said nothing for a time. He was new to driving a car, and the traffic +engrossed him. But when they had reached a quieter neighborhood he put +a hand over hers. + +"Good God, how I've been hungry for you!" he said. "I guess I was pretty +nearly crazy sometimes." He glanced at her apprehensively, but if she +knew his connection with her recall she showed no resentment. As a +matter of fact there was in his voice something that reminded her of +Henri, the same deeper note, almost husky. + +She was, indeed, asking herself very earnestly what was there in her of +all people that should make two men care for her as both Henri and Harvey +cared. In the humility of all modest women she was bewildered. It made +her rather silent and a little sad. She was so far from being what they +thought her. + +Harvey, stealing a moment from the car to glance at her, saw something +baffling in her face. + +"Do you still care, Sara Lee?" he asked almost diffidently. "As much as +ever?" + +"I have come back to you," she said after an imperceptible pause. + +"Well, I guess that's the answer." + +He drew a deep satisfied breath. "I used to think of you over there, +and all those foreigners in uniform strutting about, and it almost got +me, some times." + +And again, as long before, he read into her passivity his own passion, +and was deeply content. + +Belle was waiting on the small front porch. There was an anxious frown +on her face, and she looked first, not at Sara Lee, but at Harvey. What +she saw there evidently satisfied her, for the frown disappeared. She +kissed Sara Lee impulsively. + +All that afternoon, much to Harvey's resentment, Sara Lee received +callers. The Ladies' Aid came en masse and went out to the dining-room +and there had tea and cake. Harvey disappeared when they came. + +"You are back," he said, "and safe, and all that. But it's not their +fault. And I'll be hanged if I'll stand round and listen to them." + +He got his hat and then, finding her alone in a back hall for a moment, +reverted uneasily to the subject. + +"There are two sides to every story," he said. "They're going to knife +me this afternoon, all right. Damned hypocrites! You just keep your +head, and I'll tell you my side of it later." + +"Harvey," she said slowly, "I want to know now just what you did. I'm +not angry. I've never been angry. But I ought to know." + +It was a very one-sided story that Harvey told her, standing in the +little back hall, with Belle's children hanging over the staircase and +begging for cake. Yet in the main it was true. He had reached his +limit of endurance. She was in danger, as the photograph plainly showed. +And a fellow had a right to fight for his own happiness. + +"I wanted you back, that's all," he ended. And added an anticlimax by +passing a plate of sliced jelly roll through the stair rail to the +clamoring children. + +Sara Lee stood there for a moment after he had gone. He was right, or +at least he had been within his rights. She had never even heard of the +new doctrine of liberty for women. There was nothing in her training to +teach her revolt. She was engaged to Harvey; already, potentially, she +belonged to him. He had interfered with her life, but he had had the +right to interfere. + +And also there was in the back of her mind a feeling that was almost +guilt. She had let Henri tell her he loved her. She had even kissed +him. And there had been many times in the little house when Harvey, for +days at a time, had not even entered her thoughts. There was, therefore, +a very real tenderness in the face she lifted for his good-by kiss. + +To Belle in the front hall Harvey gave a firm order. + +"Don't let any reporters in," he said warningly. "This is strictly our +affair. It's a private matter. It's nobody's business what she did over +there. She's home. That's all that matters." + +Belle assented, but she was uneasy. She knew that Harvey was +unreasonably, madly jealous of Sara Lee's work at the little house of +mercy, and she knew him well enough to know that sooner or later he would +show that jealousy. She felt, too, that the girl should have been +allowed her small triumph without interference. There had been +interference enough already. But it was easier to yield to Harvey than +to argue with him. + +It was rather a worried Belle who served tea that afternoon in her dining +room, with Mrs. Gregory pouring; the more uneasy, because already she +divined a change in Sara Lee. She was as lovely as ever, even lovelier. +But she had a poise, a steadiness, that were new; and silences in which, +to Belle's shrewd eyes, she seemed to be weighing things. + +Reporters clamored to see Sara Lee that day, and, failing to see her, +telephoned Harvey at his office to ask if it was true that she had been +decorated by the King. He was short to the point of affront. + +"I haven't heard anything about it," he snapped. "And I wouldn't say if +I had. But it's not likely. What d'you fellows think she was doing +anyhow? Leading a charge? She was running a soup kitchen. That's all." + +He hung up the receiver with a jerk, but shortly after that he fell to +pacing his small office. She had not said anything about being decorated, +but the reporters had said it had been in a London newspaper. If she +had not told him that, there were probably many things she had not told +him. But of course there had been very little time. He would see if +she mentioned it that night. + +Sara Lee had had a hard day. The children loved her. In the intervals +of calls they crawled over her, and the littlest one called her Saralie. +She held the child in her arms close. + +"Saralie!" said the child, over and over; "Saralie! That's your name. +I love your name." + +And there came, echoing in her ears, Henri and his tender Saralie. + +There was an oppression on her too. Her very bedroom thrust on her her +approaching marriage. This was her own furniture, for her new home. It +was beautiful, simple and good. But she was not ready for marriage. She +had been too close to the great struggle to be prepared to think in terms +of peace so soon. Perhaps, had she dared to look deeper than that, she +would have found something else, a something she had not counted on. + +She and Belle had a little time after the visitors had gone, before +Harvey came home. They sat in Belle's bedroom, and her sentences were +punctuated by little backs briskly presented to have small garments +fastened, or bows put on stiffly bobbed yellow hair. + +"Did you understand my letter?" she asked. "I was sorry I had sent it, +but it was too late then." + +"I put your letter and--theirs, together. I supposed that Harvey--" + +"He was about out of his mind," Belle said in her worried voice. "Stand +still, Mary Ellen! He went to Mrs. Gregory, and I suppose he said a good +bit. You know the way he does. Anyhow, she was very angry. She called +a special meeting, and--I tried to prevent their recalling you. He +doesn't know that, of course." + +"You tried?" + +"Well, I felt as though it was your work," Belle said rather +uncomfortably. "Bring me the comb, Alice. I guess we get pretty narrow +here and--I've been following things more closely since you went over. +I know more than I did. And, of course, after one marries there isn't +much chance. There are children and--" Her face twisted. "I wish I +could do something." + +She got up and brought from the dresser a newspaper clipping. + +"It's the London newspaper," she explained. "I've been taking it, but +Harvey doesn't know. He doesn't care much for the English. This is +about your being decorated." + +Sara Lee held it listlessly in her hands. + +"Shall I tell him, Belle?" she asked. + +Belle hesitated. + +"I don't believe I would," she said forlornly. "He won't like it. +That's why I've never showed him that clipping. He hates it all so." + +Sara Lee dressed that evening in the white frock. She dressed slowly, +thinking hard. All round her was the shiny newness of her furniture, +a trifle crowded in Belle's small room. Sara Lee had a terrible feeling +of being fastened in by it. Wherever she turned it gleamed. She felt +surrounded, smothered. + +She had meant to make a clean breast of things--of the little house, +and of Henri, and of the King, pinning the medal on her shabby black +jacket and shaking hands with her. Henri she must tell about--not his +name of course, nor his madness, nor even his love. But she felt that +she owed it to Harvey to have as few secrets from him as possible. She +would tell about what the boy had done for her, and how he, and he alone, +had made it all possible. + +Surely Harvey would understand. It was a page that was closed. It had +held nothing to hurt him. She had come back. + +She stood by her window, thinking. And a breath of wind set the leaves +outside to rustling. Instantly she was back again in the little house, +and the sound was not leaves, but the shuffling of many stealthy feet +on the cobbles of the street at night, that shuffling that was so like +the rustling of leaves in a wood or the murmur of water running over a +stony creek bed. + + + + + XXV + + +It was clear to Sara Lee from the beginning of the evening that Harvey +did not intend to hear her story. He did not say so; indeed, for a time +he did not talk at all. He sat with his arms round her, content just to +have her there. + +"I have a lot of arrears to make up," he said. "I've got to get used to +having you where I can touch you. To-night when I go upstairs I'm going +to take that damned colorless photograph of you and throw it out the +window." + +"I must tell you about your photograph," she ventured. "It always stood +on the mantel over the stove, and when there was a threatened bombardment +I used to put it under--" + +"Let's not talk, honey." + +When he came out of that particular silence he said abruptly: + +"Will Leete is dead." + +"Oh, no! Poor Will Leete." + +"Died of pneumonia in some God-forsaken hole over there. He's left a +wife and nothing much to keep her. That's what comes of mixing in the +other fellow's fight. I guess we can get the house as soon as we want +it. She has to sell; and it ought to be a bargain." + +"Harvey," she said rather timidly, "you speak of the other fellow's +fight. They say over there that we are sure to be drawn into it sooner +or later." + +"Not on our life!" he replied brusquely. "And if you don't mind, honey, +I don't care to hear about what they think over there." He got up from +his old place on the arm of her chair and stood on the rug. "I'd better +tell you now how I feel about this thing. I can't talk about it, that's +all. We'll finish up now and let it go at that. I'm sorry there's a +war. I'll send money when I can afford it, to help the Belgians, though +my personal opinion is that they're getting theirs for what they did in +the Congo. But I don't want to hear about what you did over there." + +He saw her face, and he went to her and kissed her cheek. + +"I don't want to hurt you, honey," he said. "I love you with all my +heart. But somehow I can't forget that you left me and went over there +when there was no reason for it. You put off our marriage, and I +suppose we'd better get it over. Go ahead and tell me about it." + +He drew up a chair and waited, but the girl smiled rather tremulously. + +"Perhaps we'd better wait, if you feel that way, Harvey." + +His face was set as he looked at her. + +"There's only one thing I want to know," he said. "And I've got a right +to know that. You're a young girl, and you're beautiful--to me, anyhow. +You've been over there with a lot of crazy foreigners." He got up again +and all the bitterness of the empty months was in his voice. "Did any +of them--was there anybody there you cared about?" + +"I came back, Harvey." + +"That's not the question." + +"There were many men--officers--who were kind to me. I--" + +"That's not the question, either." + +"If I had loved any one more than I loved you I should not have come +back." + +"Wait a minute!" he said quickly. "You had to come back, you know." + +"I could have stayed. The Englishwoman who took over my work asked me +to stay on and help her." + +He was satisfied then. He went back to the arm of her chair and kissed +her. + +"All right," he said. "I've suffered the tortures of the damned, but +--that fixes it. Now let's talk about something else. I'm sick of +this war talk." + +"I'd like to tell you about my little house. And poor Rene--" + +"Who was Rene?" he demanded. + +"The orderly." + +"The one on the step, with a rifle?" + +"Yes." + +"Look here," he said. "I've got to get to all that gradually. I don't +know that I'll ever get to it cheerfully. But I can't talk about that +place to-night. And I don't want to talk war. The whole business makes +me sick. I've got a car out of it, and if things keep on we may be able +to get the Leete house. But there's no reason in it, no sense. I'm +sick to death of hearing about it. Let's talk of something else." + +But--and here was something strange--Sara Lee could find nothing else +to talk about. The thing that she had looked forward so eagerly to +telling--that was barred. And the small gossip of their little circle, +purely personal and trivial, held only faint interest for her. For the +first time they had no common ground to meet on. + +Yet it was a very happy man who went whistling to his room that night. +He was rather proud of himself too. After all the bitterness of the +past months, he had been gentle and loving to Sara Lee. He had not +scolded her. + +In the next room he could hear her going quietly about, opening and +closing the drawers of the new bureau, moving a chair. Pretty soon, God +willing, they need never be separated. He would have her always, to +protect and cherish and love. + +He went outside to her closed door. + +"Good night, sweetheart," he called softly. + +"Good night, dear," came her soft reply. + +But long after he was asleep Sara Lee stood at her window and listened +to the leaves, so like the feet of weary men on the ruined street over +there. + +For the first time she was questioning the thing she had done. She +loved Harvey--but there were many kinds of love. There was the love of +Jean for Henri, and there was the wonderful love, though the memory now +was cruel and hurt her, of Henri for herself. And there was the love of +Marie for the memory of Maurice the spy. Many kinds of love; and one +heart might love many people, in different ways. + +A small doubt crept into her mind. This feeling she had for Harvey was +not what she had thought it was over there. It was a thing that had +belonged to a certain phase of her life. But that phase was over. It +was, like Marie's, but a memory. + +This Harvey of the new car and the increased income and the occasional +hardness in his voice was not the Harvey she had left. Or perhaps it +was she who had changed. She wondered. She felt precisely the same, +tender toward her friends, unwilling to hurt them. She did not want +to hurt Harvey. + +But she did not love him as he deserved to be loved. And she had a +momentary lift of the veil, when she saw the long vista of the years, +the two of them always together and always between them hidden, +untouched, but eating like a cancer, Harvey's resentment and suspicion +of her months away from him. + +There would always be a barrier between them. Not only on Harvey's side. +There were things she had no right to tell--of Henri, of his love and +care for her, and of that last terrible day when he realized what he had +done. + +That night, lying in the new bed, she faced that situation too. How +much was she to blame? If Henri felt that each life lost was lost by +him wasn't the same true for her? Why had she allowed him to stay in +London? + +But that was one question she did not answer frankly. + +She lay there in the darkness and wondered what punishment he would +receive. He had done so much for them over there. Surely, surely, they +would allow for that. But small things came back to her--the awful +sight of the miller and his son, led away to death, with the sacks over +their heads. The relentlessness of it all, the expecting that men +should give everything, even life itself, and ask for no mercy. + +And this, too, she remembered: Once in a wild moment Henri had said he +would follow her to America, and that there he would prove to her that +his and not Harvey's was the real love of her life--the great love, +that comes but once to any woman, and to some not at all. Yet on that +last night at Morley's he had said what she now felt was a final +farewell. That last look of his, from the doorway--that had been the +look of a man who would fill his eyes for the last time. + +She got up and stood by the window. What had they done to him? What +would they do? She looked at her watch. It was four o'clock in the +morning over there. The little house would be quiet now, but down along +the lines men would be standing on the firing step of the trench, and +waiting, against what the dawn might bring. + +Through the thin wall came the sound of Harvey's heavy, regular +breathing. She remembered Henri's light sleeping on the kitchen floor, +his cap on the table, his cape rolled round him--a sleeping, for all +his weariness, so light that he seemed always half conscious. She +remembered the innumerable times he had come in at this hour, muddy, +sometimes rather gray of face with fatigue, but always cheerful. + +It was just such an hour that she found him giving hot coffee to the +German prisoner. It had been but a little earlier when he had taken her +to the roof and had there shown her Rene, lying with his face up toward +the sky which had sent him death. + +A hundred memories crowded--Henri's love for the Belgian soldiers, and +theirs for him; his humor; his absurd riddles. There was the one he had +asked Rene, the very day before the air attack. He had stood stiffly and +frowningly before the boy, and he had asked in a highly official tone: + +"What must a man be to be buried with military honors?" + +"A general?" + +"No." + +"An officer?" + +"No, no! Use your head boy! This is very important. A mistake would +be most serious." + +Rene had shaken his head dejectedly. + +"He must be dead, Rene," Henri had said gravely. "Entirely dead. As I +said, it is well to know these things. A mistake would be unfortunate." + +His blue eyes had gleamed with fun, but his face had remained frowning. +It was quite five minutes before she had heard Rene chuckling on the +doorstep. + +Was he still living, this Henri of the love of life and courting of +death? Could anything so living die? And if he had died had it been +because of her? She faced that squarely for the first time. + +"Perhaps even beyond the stars they have need of a little house of mercy; +and, God knows, wherever I am I shall have need of you." + +Beyond the partition Harvey slept on, his arms under his head. + + + + + XXVI + +Harvey was clamoring for an early wedding. And indeed there were few +arguments against it, save one that Sara Lee buried in her heart. +Belle's house was small, and though she was welcome there, and more than +that, Sara Lee knew that she was crowding the family. + +Perhaps Sara Lee would have agreed in the end. There seemed to be +nothing else to do, though by the end of the first week she was no longer +in any doubt as to what her feeling for Harvey really was. It was +kindness, affection; but it was not love. She would marry him because +she had promised to, and because their small world expected her to do so; +and because she could not shame him again. + +For to her surprise she found that that was what he had felt--a strange, +self-conscious shame, like that of a man who has been jilted. She felt +that by coming back to him she had forfeited the right to break the +engagement. + +So every hour of every day seemed to make the thing more inevitable. +Belle was embroidering towels for her in her scant leisure. Even Anna, +with a second child coming, sent in her contribution to the bride's +linen chest. By almost desperately insisting on a visit to Aunt Harriet +she got a reprieve of a month. And Harvey was inclined to be jealous +even of that. + +Sometimes, but mostly at night when she was alone, a hot wave of +resentment overwhelmed her. Why should she be forced into the thing? +Was there any prospect of happiness after marriage when there was so +little before? + +For she realized now that even Harvey was not happy. He had at last +definitely refused to hear the story of the little house. + +"I'd rather just forget it, honey!" he said. + +But inconsistently he knew she did not forget it, and it angered him. +True to his insistence on ignoring those months of her absence, she made +no attempt to tell him. Now and then, however, closed in the library +together, they would fail of things to talk about, and Sara Lee's +knitting needles would be the only sound in the room. At those times he +would sit back in his chair and watch the far-away look in her eyes, and +it maddened him. + +From her busy life Belle studied them both, with an understanding she +did not reveal. And one morning when the mail came she saw Sara Lee's +face as she turned away, finding there was no letter for her, and made +an excuse to follow her to her room. + +The girl was standing by the window looking out. The children were +playing below, and the maple trees were silent. Belle joined her there +and slipped an arm round her. + +"Why are you doing it, Sara Lee?" she asked. + +"Doing what?" + +"Marrying Harvey." + +Sara Lee looked at her with startled eyes. + +"I'm engaged to him, Belle. I've promised." + +"Exactly," said Belle dryly. "But that's hardly a good reason, is it? +It takes more than a promise." She stared down at the flock of children +in the yard below. "Harvey's a man," she said. "He doesn't understand, +but I do. You've got to care a whole lot, Sara Lee, if you're going to +go through with it. It takes a lot of love, when it comes to having +children and all that." + +"He's so good, Belle. How can I hurt him?" + +"You'll hurt him a lot more by marrying him when you don't love him." + +"If only I could have a little time," she cried wildly. "I'm so--I'm +tired, Belle. And I can't forget about the war and all that. I've +tried. Sometimes I think if we could talk it over together I'd get it +out of my mind." + +"He won't talk about it?" + +"He's my own brother, and I love him dearly. But sometimes I think he's +hard. Not that he's ever ugly," she hastened to add; "but he's stubborn. +There's a sort of wall in him, and he puts some things behind it. And +it's like beating against a rock to try to get at them." + +After a little silence she said hesitatingly: + +"We've got him to think of too. He has a right to be happy. Sometimes +I've looked at you--you're so pretty, Sara Lee--and I've wondered if +there wasn't some one over there who--cared for you." + +"There was one man, an officer--Oh, Belle, I can't tell you. Not you!" + +"Why not!" asked Belle practically. "You ought to talk it out to some +one, and if Harvey insists on being a fool that's his own fault." + +For all the remainder of that sunny morning Sara Lee talked what was in +her heart. And Belle--poor, romantic, starved Belle--heard and +thrilled. She made buttonholes as she listened, but once or twice a +new tone in Sara Lee's voice caused her to look up. Here was a new +Sara Lee, a creature of vibrant voice and glowing eyes; and Belle was +not stupid. She saw that it was Henri whose name brought the deeper note. + +Sara Lee had stopped with her recall, had stopped and looked about the +room with its shiny new furniture and had shivered. Belle bent over her +work. + +"Why don't you go back?" she asked. + +Sara Lee looked at her piteously. + +"How can I? There is Harvey. And the society would not send me again. +It's over, Belle. All over." + +After a pause Belle said: "What's become of Henri? He hasn't written, +has he?" + +Sara Lee got up and went to the window. + +"I don't know where he is. He may be dead." + +Her voice was flat and lifeless. Belle knew all that she wanted to know. +She rose and gathered up her sewing. + +"I'm going to talk to Harvey. You're not going to be rushed into a +wedding. You're tired, and it's all nonsense. Well, I'll have to run +now and dress the children." + +That night Harvey and Belle had almost a violent scene. He had taken +Sara Lee over the Leete house that evening. Will Leete's widow had met +them there, a small sad figure in her mourning, but very composed, until +she opened the door into a tiny room upstairs with a desk and a lamp +in it. + +"This was Will's study," she said. "He did his work here in the +evenings, and I sat in that little chair and sewed. I never thought +then--" Her lips quivered. + +"Pretty rotten of Will Leete to leave that little thing alone," said +Harvey on their way home. "He had his fling; and she's paying for it." + +But Sara Lee was silent. It was useless to try to make Harvey understand +the urge that had called Will Leete across the sea to do his share for +the war, and that had brought him that peace of God that passeth all +understanding. + +It was not a good time for Belle to put up to him her suggestion for a +delay in the marriage, that evening after their return. He took it +badly and insisted on sending upstairs for Sara Lee. + +"Did you ask Belle to do this?" he demanded bluntly. + +"To do what?" + +"To put things off." + +"I have already told you, Harvey," Belle put in. "It is my own idea. +She is tired. She's been through a lot. I've heard the story you're +too stubborn to listen to. And I strongly advise her to wait a while." + +And after a time he agreed ungraciously. He would buy the house and fix +it over, and in the early fall it would be ready. + +"Unless," he added to Sara Lee with a bitterness born of disappointment-- +"unless you change your mind again." + +He did not kiss her that night when she and Belle went together up the +stairs. But he stared after her gloomily, with hurt and bewilderment in +his eyes. + +He did not understand. He never would. She had come home to him all +gentleness and tenderness, ready to find in him the things she needed so +badly. But out of his obstinacy and hurt he had himself built up a +barrier. + +That night Sara Lee dreamed that she was back in the little house of +mercy. Rene was there; and Henri; and Jean, with the patch over his eye. +They were waiting for the men to come, and the narrow hall was full of +the odor of Marie's soup. Then she heard them coming, the shuffling of +many feet on the road. She went to the door, with Henri beside her, and +watched them coming up the road, a deeper shadow in the blackness--tired +men, wounded men, homeless men coming to her little house with its +firelight and its warmth. Here and there the match that lighted a +cigarette showed a white but smiling face. They stopped before the door, +and the warm little house, with its guarded lights and its food and +cheer, took them in. + + + + + XXVII + + +Very pale and desperate, Henri took the night A train for Folkestone +after he had said good-by to Sara Lee. He alternately chilled and +burned with fever, and when he slept, as he did now and then, going off +suddenly into a doze and waking with a jerk, it was to dream of horrors. + +He thought, in his wilder intervals, of killing himself. But his code +did not include such a shirker's refuge. He was going back to tell his +story and to take his punishment. + +He had cabled to Jean to meet him at Calais, but when, at dawn the next +morning, the channel boat drew in to the wharf there was no sign of +Jean or the car. Henri regarded the empty quay with apathetic eyes. +They would come, later on. If he could only get his head down and sleep +for a while he would be better able to get toward the Front. For he +knew now that he was ill. He had, indeed, been ill for days, but he did +not realize that. And he hated illness. He regarded it with suspicion, +as a weakness not for a strong man. + +The drowsy girl in her chair at the Gare Maritime regarded him curiously +and with interest. Many women turned to look after Henri, but he did +not know this. Had he known it he would have regarded it much as he +did illness. + +The stupid boy was not round. The girl herself took the key and led the +way down the long corridor upstairs to a room. Henri stumbled in and +fell across the bed. He was almost immediately asleep. + +Late in the afternoon he wakened. Strange that Jean had not come. He +got up and bathed his face. His right arm was very stiff now, and pains +ran from the old wound in his chest down to the fingers of his hand. He +tried to exercise to limber it, and grew almost weak with pain. + +At six o'clock, when Jean had not come, Henri resorted to ways that he +knew of and secured a car. He had had some coffee by that time, and he +felt much better--so well indeed that he sang under his breath a +strange rambling song that sounded rather like Rene's rendering of +Tipperary. The driver looked at him curiously every now and then. + +It was ten o'clock when they reached La Panne. Henri went at once to +the villa set high on a sand dune where the King's secretary lived. The +house was dark, but in the library at the rear there was a light. He +stumbled along the paths beside the house, and reached at last, after +interminable miles, when the path sometimes came up almost to his eyes +and again fell away so that it seemed to drop from under his feet--at +last he reached the long French doors, with their drawn curtains. He +opened the door suddenly and thereby surprised the secretary, who was a +most dignified and rather nervous gentleman, into laying his hand on a +heavy inkwell. + +"I wish to see the King," said Henri in a loud tone. Because at that +moment the secretary, lamp and inkwell and all, retired suddenly to a +very great distance, as if one had viewed them through the reverse end +of an opera glass. + +The secretary knew Henri. He, too, eyed him curiously. + +"The King has retired, monsieur." + +"I think," said Henri in a dangerous tone, "that he will see me." + +To tell the truth, the secretary rather thought so too. There was a +strange rumor going round, to the effect that the boy had followed a +woman to England at a critical time. Which would have been a pity, the +secretary thought. There were so many women, and so few men like Henri. + +The secretary considered gravely. Henri was by that time in a chair, but +it moved about so that he had to hold very tight to the arms. When he +looked up again the secretary had picked up his soft black hat and was +at the door. + +"I shall inquire," he said. Henri saluted him stiffly, with his left +hand, as he went out. + +The secretary went to His Majesty's equerry, who was in the next house +playing solitaire and trying to forget the family he had left on the +other side of the line. + +So it was that in due time Henri again traversed miles of path and +pavement, between tall borders of wild sea grass, miles which perhaps +were a hundred yards. And went round the screen, and--found the King +on the hearthrug. But when he drew himself stiffly to attention he +overdid the thing rather and went over backward with a crash. + +He was up again almost immediately, very flushed and uncomfortable. +After that he kept himself in hand, but the King, who had a way all his +own of forgetting his divine right to rule, and a great many other +things--the King watched him gravely. + +Henri sat in a chair and made a clean breast of it. Because he was +feeling rather strange he told a great many things that an agent of the +secret service is hardly expected to reveal to his king. He mentioned, +for instance, the color of Sara Lee's eyes, and the way she bandaged, +like one who had been trained. + +Once, in the very middle of his narrative, where he had put the letter +from the Front in his pocket and decided to go to England anyhow, he +stopped and hummed Rene's version of Tipperary. Only a bar or two. +Then he remembered. + +But one thing brought him round with a start. + +"Then," said the King slowly, "Jean was not with you?" + +Only he did not call him Jean. He gave him his other name, which, like +Henri's, is not to be told. + +Henri's brain cleared then with the news that Jean was missing. When, +somewhat later, he staggered out of the villa, it was under royal +instructions to report to the great hospital along the sea front and +near by, and there to go to bed and have a doctor. Indeed, because the +boy's eyes were wild by that time, the equerry went along and held his +arm. But that was because Henri was in open revolt, and while walking +steadily enough showed a tendency to bolt every now and then. + +He would stop on the way and argue, though one does not argue easily +with an equerry. + +"I must go," he would say fretfully. "God knows where he is. He'd +never give me up if I were the one." + +And once he shook off the equerry violently and said: + +"Let go of me, I tell you! I'll come back and go to bed when I've +found him." + +The equerry soothed him like a child. + +An English nurse took charge of Henri in the hospital, and put him to +bed. He was very polite to her, and extremely cynical. She sat in a +chair by his bed and held the key of the room in her hand. Once he +thought she was Sara Lee, but that was only for a moment. She did not +look like Sara Lee. And she was suspicious, too; for when he asked her +what she could put in her left hand that she could not put in her right, +she moved away and placed the door key on the stand, out of reach. + +However, toward morning she dozed. There was steady firing at Nieuport +and the windows shook constantly. An ambulance came in, followed by a +stirring on the lower floor. Then silence. He got up then and secured +the key. There was no time for dressing, because she was a suspicious +person and likely to waken at any time. He rolled his clothing into a +bundle and carried it under his well arm. The other was almost useless. + +The ambulance was still waiting outside, at the foot of the staircase. +There were voices and lights in the operating room, forward along the +tiled hall. Still in his night clothing, Henri got into the ambulance +and threw his uniform behind him. Then he got the car under way. + +Outside the village he paused long enough to dress. His head was +amazingly clear. He had never felt so sure of himself before. As to +his errand he had no doubt whatever. Jean had learned that he had +crossed the channel. Therefore Jean had taken up his work--Jean, who +had but one eye and was as clumsy as a bear. The thought of Jean +crawling through the German trenches set him laughing until he ended +with a sob. + +It was rather odd about the ambulance. It did not keep the road very +well. Sometimes it was on one side and sometimes on the other. It slid +as though the road were greased. And after a time Henri made an amazing +discovery. He was not alone in the car. + +He looked back, without stopping, and the machine went off in a wide arc. +He brought it back again, grinning. + +"Thought you had me, didn't you?" he observed to the car in general, and +the engine in particular. "Now no tricks!" + +There was a wounded man in the car. He had had morphia and he was very +comfortable. He was not badly hurt, and he considered that he was being +taken to Calais. He was too tired to talk, and the swinging of the car +rather interested him. He would doze and waken and doze again. But at +last he heard something that made him rise on his elbow. + +It was the hammering of the big guns. + +He called Henri's attention to this, but Henri said: + +"Lie down, Jean, and don't talk. We'll make it yet." + +The wounded man intended to make a protest, but he went to sleep instead. + +They had reached the village now where was the little house of mercy. +The ambulance rolled and leaped down the street, with both lights full +on, which was forbidden, and came to a stop at the door. The man inside +was grunting then, and Henri, whose head had never been so clear, got +out and went round to the rear of the car. + +"Now, out with you, comrade!" he said. "I have made an error, but it is +immaterial. Can you walk?" + +He lighted a cigarette, and the man inside saw his burning eyes and +shaking hands. Even through the apathy of the morphia he felt a thrill +of terror. He could walk. He got out while Henri pounded at the door. + +"Attention!" he called. "Attention!" + +Then he hummed an air of the camps: + + Trou la la, ce ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + +When he heard steps inside Henri went back to the ambulance. He got in +and drove it, lights and all, down the street. + + Trou la la, ce ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + +Somewhere down the road beyond the poplar trees he abandoned the ambulance. +They found it there the next morning, or rather what was left of it. +Evidently its two unwinking eyes had got on the Germans' nerves. + +Early the next morning a Saxon regiment, standing on the firing step +ready for what the dawn might bring forth, watched the mist rise from +the water in front of them. It shone on a body in a Belgian uniform, +lying across their wire, and very close indeed. + +Now the Saxons are not Prussians, so no one for sport fired at the body. +Which was rather a good thing, because it moved slightly and stirred. +And then in a loud voice, which is an unusual thing for bodies to +possess, it began to sing: + + Trou la la, ce ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + + + + + XXVIII + + +Late in August Sara Lee broke her engagement with Harvey. She had been +away, at Cousin Jennie's, for a month, and for the first time since her +return she had had time to think. In the little suburban town there +were long hours of quiet when Cousin Jennie mended on the porch and Aunt +Harriet, enjoying a sort of reflected glory from Sara Lee, presided +at Red Cross meetings. + +Sara Lee decided to send for Harvey, and he came for a week-end, arriving +pathetically eager, but with a sort of defiance too. He was determined +to hold her, but to hold her on his own terms. + +Aunt Harriet had been vaguely uneasy, but Harvey's arrival seemed to put +everything right. She even kissed him when he came, and took great pains +to carry off Cousin Jennie when she showed an inclination toward +conversation and a seat on the porch. + +Sara Lee had made a desperate resolve. She intended to lay all her +cards on the table. He should know all that there was to know. If, +after that, he still wanted to hold her--but she did not go so far. +She was so sure he would release her. + +It was a despairing thing to do, but she was rather despairing those +days. There had been no letter from Henri or from Jean. She had written +them both several times, to Dunkirk, to the Savoy in London, to the +little house near the Front. But no replies had come. Yet mail was +going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly. + +When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come +back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie +on one side and Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent +prayers--that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not +think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital. + +She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy. +Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even +if that truth comprehended the worst. + +Once she received, from some unknown hand, a French journal, and pored +over it for days with her French dictionary, to find if it contained any +news. It was not until a week later that she received a letter from +Mabel, explaining that she had sent the journal, which contained a +description of her hospital. + +All of Harvey's Sunday she spent in trying to bring her courage to the +point of breaking the silence he had imposed on her, but it was not +until evening that she succeeded. The house was empty. The family had +gone to church. On the veranda, with the heavy scent of phlox at night +permeating the still air, Sara Lee made her confession. She began at +the beginning. Harvey did not stir--until she told of the way she had +stowed away to cross the channel. Then he moved. + +"This fellow who planned that for you--did you ever see him again?" + +"He met me in Calais." + +"And then what?" + +"He took me to Dunkirk in his car. Such a hideous car, Harvey--all +wrecked. It had been under fire again and again. I--" + +"He took you to Dunkirk! Who was with you?" + +"Just Jean, the chauffeur." + +"I like his nerve! Wasn't there in all that Godforsaken country a +woman to take with you? You and this--What was his name, anyhow?" + +"I can't tell you that, Harvey." + +"Look here!" he burst out. "How much of this aren't you going to tell? +Because I want it all or not at all." + +"I can't tell you his name. I'm only trying to make you understand the +way I feel about things. His name doesn't matter." She clenched her +hands in the darkness. "I don't think he is alive now." + +He tried to see her face, but she turned it away. + +"Dead, eh? What makes you think that?" + +"I haven't heard from him." + +"Why should you hear from him?" His voice cut like a knife. "Look at +me. Why should he write to you?" + +"He cared for me, Harvey." + +He sat in a heavy silence which alarmed her. + +"Don't be angry, please," she begged. "I couldn't bear it. It wasn't my +fault, or his either." + +"The damned scoundrel!" said Harvey thickly. + +But she reached over and put a trembling hand over his lips. + +"Don't say that," she said. "Don't! I won't allow you to. When I +think what may have happened to him, I--" Her voice broke. + +"Go on," Harvey said in cold tones she had never heard before. "Tell it +all, now you've begun it. God knows I didn't want to hear it. He took +you to the hotel at Dunkirk, the way those foreigners take their women. +And he established you in the house at the Front, I suppose, like a--" + +Sara Lee suddenly stood up and drew off her ring. + +"You needn't go on," she said quietly. "I had a decision to make +to-night, and I have made it. Ever since I came home I have been trying +to go back to where we were before I left. It isn't possible. You are +what you always were, Harvey. But I've changed. I can't go back." + +She put the ring into his hand. + +"It isn't that you don't love me. I think you do. But I've been +thinking things over. It isn't only to-night, or what you just said. +It's because we don't care for the same things, or believe in them." + +"But--if we love each other--" + +"It's not that, either. I used to feel that way. A home, and some one +to care about, and a little pleasure and work." + +"That ought to be enough, honey." + +He was terrified. His anger was gone. He placed an appealing hand on +her arm, and as she stood there in the faint starlight the wonder of her +once again got him by the throat. She had that sort of repressed +eagerness, that look of being poised for flight, that had always made +him feel cheap and unworthy. + +"Isn't that enough, honey?" he repeated. + +"Not now," she said, her eyes turned toward the east. "These are great +days, Harvey. They are greater and more terrible than any one can know +who has not been there. I've been there and I know. I haven't the +right to all this peace and comfort when I know how things are going +over there." + +Down the quiet street of the little town service was over. The last +hymn had been sung. Through the open windows came the mellow sound of +the minister's voice in benediction, too far away to be more than a +tone, like a single deep note of the organ. Sara Lee listened. She +knew the words he was saying, and she listened with her eyes turned to +the east: + + "The peace of God that passeth all understanding + be and abide with you all, forevermore. Amen." + +Sara Lee listened, and from the step below her Harvey watched her with +furtive, haggard eyes. He had not heard the benediction. + +"The peace of God!" she said slowly. "There is only one peace of God, +Harvey, and that is service. I am going back." + +"Service!" he scoffed. "You are going back to him!" + +"I'm afraid he is not there any more. I am going back to work. But if +he is there--" + +Harvey slid the ring into his pocket. "What if he's not there," he +demanded bitterly. "If you think, after all this, that I'm going to +wait, on the chance of your coming back to me, you're mistaken. I've +been a laughing stock long enough." + +In the light of her new decision Sara Lee viewed him for the first time +with the pitiless eyes of women who have lost a faith. She saw him for +what he was, not deliberately cruel, not even unkindly, but selfish, +small, without vision. Harvey was for his own fireside, his office, his +little family group. His labor would always be for himself and his own. +Whereas Sara Lee was, now and forever, for all the world, her hands +consecrated to bind up its little wounds and to soothe its great ones. +Harvey craved a cheap and easy peace. She wanted no peace except that +bought by service, the peace of a tired body, the peace of the little +house in Belgium where, after days of torture, weary men found quiet +and ease and the cheer of the open door. + + + + + XXIX + + +Late in October Sara Lee went back to the little house of mercy; went +unaccredited, and with her own money. She had sold her bit of property. + +In London she went to the Traverses, as before. But with a difference +too. For Sara Lee had learned the strangeness of the English, who are +slow to friendships but who never forget. Indeed a telegram met her at +Liverpool asking her to stop with them in London. She replied, refusing, +but thanking them, and saying she would call the next afternoon. + +Everything was the same at Morley's: Rather a larger percentage of men +in uniform, perhaps; greater crowds in the square; a little less of the +optimism which in the spring had predicted victory before autumn. But +the same high courage, for all that. + +August greeted her like an old friend. Even the waiters bowed to her, +and upstairs the elderly chambermaid fussed over her like a mother. + +"And you're going back!" she exclaimed. "Fancy that, now! You are +brave, miss." + +But her keen eyes saw a change in Sara Lee. Her smile was the same, but +there were times when she forgot to finish a sentence, and she stood, +that first morning, for an hour by the window, looking out as if she saw +nothing. + +She went, before the visit to the Traverses, to the Church of Saint +Martin in the Fields. It was empty, save for a woman in a corner, who +did not kneel, but sat staring quietly before her. Sara Lee prayed an +inarticulate bit of a prayer, that what the Traverses would have to tell +her should not be the thing that she feared, but that, if it were, she +be given courage to meet it and to go on with her work. + +The Traverses would know; Mrs. Cameron was a friend. They would know +about Henri, and about Jean. Soon, within the hour, she would learn +everything. So she asked for strength, and then sat there for a time, +letting the peace of the old church quiet her, as had the broken walls +and shattered altar of that other church, across the channel. + +It was rather a surprise to Sara Lee to have Mrs. Travers put her arms +about her and kiss her. Mr. Travers, too, patted her hand when he took +it. But they had, for all that, the reserve of their class. Much that +they felt about Sara Lee they did not express even to each other. + +"We are so grateful to you," Mrs. Travers said. "I am only one mother, +and of course now--" She looked down at her black dress. "But how many +others there are who will want to thank you, when this terrible thing is +over and they learn about you!" + +Mr. Travers had been eying Sara Lee. + +"Didn't use you up, did it?" he asked. "You're not looking quite fit." + +Sara Lee was very pale just then. In a moment she would know. + +"I'm quite well," she said. "I--do you hear from Mrs. Cameron?" + +"Frequently. She has worked hard, but she is not young." It was Mrs. +Travers who spoke. "She's afraid of the winter there. I rather think, +since you want to go back, that she will be glad to turn your domain +over to you for a time." + +"Then--the little house is still there?" + +"Indeed, yes! A very famous little house, indeed. But it is always +known as your house. She has felt like a temporary chatelaine. She +always thought you would come back." + +Tea had come, as before. The momentary stir gave her a chance to brace +herself. Mr. Travers brought her cup to her and smiled gently down +at her. + +"We have a plan to talk over," he said, "when you have had your tea. I +hope you will agree to it." + +He went back to the hearthrug. + +"When I was there before," Sara Lee said, trying to hold her cup steady, +"there was a young Belgian officer who was very kind to me. Indeed, all +the credit for what I did belongs to him. And since I went home I +haven't heard--" + +Her voice broke suddenly. Mr. Travers glanced at his wife. Not for +nothing had Mrs. Cameron written her long letters to these old friends, +in the quiet summer afternoons when the sun shone down on the lifeless +street before the little house. + +"I'm afraid we have bad news for you." Mrs. Travers put down her +untasted tea. "Or rather, we have no news. Of course," she added, +seeing Sara Lee's eyes, "in this war no news may be the best--that is, +he may be a prisoner." + +"That," Sara Lee heard herself say, "is impossible. If they captured +him they would shoot him." + +Mrs. Travers nodded silently. They knew Henri's business, too, by that +time, and that there was no hope for a captured spy. + +"And--Jean?" + +They did not know of Jean; so she told them, still in that far-away +voice. And at last Mrs. Travers brought an early letter of Mrs. +Cameron's and read a part of it aloud. + +"He seems to have been delirious," she read, holding her reading glasses +to her eyes. "A friend of his, very devoted to him, was missing, and he +learned this somehow. + +"He escaped from the hospital and got away in an ambulance. He came +straight here and wakened us. There had been a wounded man in the +machine, and he left him on our doorstep. When I got to the door the +car was going wildly toward the Front, with both lamps lighted. We did +not understand then, of course, and no one thought of following it. The +ambulance was found smashed by a shell the next morning, and at first we +thought that he had been in it. But there was no sign that he had been, +and that night one of the men from the trenches insisted that he had +climbed out of a firing trench where the soldier stood, and had gone +forward, bareheaded, toward the German lines. + +"I am afraid it was the end. The men, however, who all loved him, do +not think so. It seems that he has done miracles again and again. I +understand that along the whole Belgian line they watch for him at night. +The other night a German on reconnoissance got very close to our wire, +and was greeted not by shots but by a wild hurrah. He was almost +paralyzed with surprise. They brought him here on the way back to the +prison camp, and he still looked dazed." + +Sara Lee sat with her hands clenched. Mrs. Travers folded the letter +and put it back into its envelope. + +"How long ago was that?" Sara Lee asked in a low tone. "Because, if he +was coming back at all--" + +"Four months." + +Suddenly Sara Lee stood up. + +"I think I ought to tell you," she said with a dead-white face, "that I +am responsible. He cared for me; and I was in love with him too. Only +I didn't know it then. I let him bring me to England, because--I +suppose it was because I loved him. I didn't think then that it was +that. I was engaged to a man at home." + +"Sit down," said Mr. Travers. "My dear child, nothing can be your fault." + +"He came with me, and the Germans got through. He had had word, but--" + +"Have you your salts?" Mr. Travers asked quietly of his wife. + +"I'm not fainting. I'm only utterly wretched." + +The Traverses looked at each other. They were English. They had taken +their own great loss quietly, because it was an individual grief and +must not be intruded on the sorrow of a nation. But they found this +white-faced girl infinitely appealing, a small and fragile figure, to +whose grief must be added, without any fault of hers, a bitter and +lasting remorse. + +Sara Lee stood up and tried to smile. + +"Please don't worry about me," she said. "I need something to do, that's +all. You see, I've been worrying for so long. If I can get to work and +try to make up I'll not be so hopeless. But I am not quite hopeless, +either," she added hastily. It was as though by the very word she had +consigned Henri to death. "You see, I am like the men; I won't give him +up. And perhaps some night he will come across from the other side, out +of the dark." + +Mr. Travers took her back to the hotel. When he returned from paying +off the taxi he found her looking across at the square. + +"Do you remember," she asked him, "the time when the little donkey was +hurt over there?" + +"I shall never forget it." + +"And the young officer who ran out when I did, and shot the poor thing?" + +Mr. Travers remembered. + +"That was he--the man we have been speaking of." + +For the first time that day her eyes filled with tears. + +Sara Lee, at twenty, was already living in her memories. + +So again the lights went down in front, and the back drop became but a +veil, and invisible. And to Sara Lee there came back again some of the +characters of the early mise en scene--marching men, forage wagons, +squadrons of French cavalry escorting various staffs, commandeered farm +horses with shaggy fetlocks fastened in rope corrals, artillery rumbling +along rutted roads which shook the gunners almost off the limbers. + +Nothing was changed--and everything. There was no Rene to smile his +adoring smile, but Marie came out, sobbing and laughing, and threw +herself into the girl's arms. The little house was the same, save for +a hole in the kitchen wall. There were the great piles of white bowls +and the shining kettles. There was the corner of her room, patched by +Rene's hands, now so long quiet. A few more shell holes in the street, +many more little crosses in the field near the poplar trees, more Allied +aeroplanes in the air--that was all that was changed. + +But to Sara Lee everything was changed, for all that. The little house +was grave and still, like a house of the dead. Once it had echoed to +young laughter, had resounded to the noise and excitement of Henri's +every entrance. Even when he was not there it was as though it but +waited for him to stir it into life, and small echoes of his gayety had +seemed to cling to its old walls. + +Sara Lee stood on the doorstep and looked within. She had come back. +Here she would work and wait, and if in the goodness of providence he +should come back, here he would find her, all the empty months gone and +forgotten. + +If he did not-- + +"I shall still be calling you, and waiting," he had written. She, too, +would call and wait, and if not here, then surely in the fullness of +time which is eternity the call would be answered. + +In October Sara Lee took charge again of the little house. Mrs. Cameron +went back to England, but not until the Traverses' plan had been +revealed. They would support the little house, as a memorial to the son +who had died. It was, Mrs. Travers wrote, the finest tribute they could +offer to his memory, that night after night tired and ill and wounded +men might find sanctuary, even for a little time, under her care. + +Luxuries began to come across the channel, food and dressings and tobacco. +Knitted things, too; for another winter was coming, and already the frost +lay white on the fields in the mornings. The little house took on a new +air of prosperity. There were days when it seemed almost swaggering +with opulence. + +It had need of everything, however. With the prospect of a second +winter, when an advance was impossible, the Germans took to hammering +again. Bombardment was incessant. The little village was again under +suspicion, and there came days of terror when it seemed as though even +the fallen masonry must be reduced to powder. The church went entirely. + +By December Sara Lee had ceased to take refuge during the bombardments. +The fatalism of the Front had got her. She would die or live according +to the great plan, and nothing could change that. She did not greatly +care which, except for her work, and even that she felt could be carried +on by another as well. + +There was no news of Henri, but once the King's equerry, going by, had +stopped to see her and had told her the story. + +"He was ill, undoubtedly," he said. "Even when he went to London he was +ill, and not responsible. The King understands that. He was a brave +boy, mademoiselle." + +But the last element of hope seemed to go with that verification of his +illness. He was delirious, and he had gone in that condition into the +filthy chill waters of the inundation. Well and sane there had been a +chance, but plunging wild-eyed and reckless, into that hell across, +there was none. + +She did her best in the evenings to be cheerful, to take the place, in +her small and serious fashion, of Henri's old gayety. But the soldiers +whispered among themselves that mademoiselle was in grief, as they were, +for the blithe young soldier who was gone. + +What hope Sara Lee had had died almost entirely early in December. On +the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy +pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian +corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench +while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual +courtesy, and had climbed out over the top. + +To Sara Lee this Hutin told his story. A short man with a red beard and +a kindly smile that revealed teeth almost destroyed from neglect, he was +at first diffident in the extreme. + +"It was the captain, mademoiselle," he asserted. "I know him well. He +has often gone on his errands from near my post. I am"--he smiled--"I +am usually in the front line." + +"What did he do?" + +"He had no cap, mademoiselle. I thought that was odd. And as you know +--he does not wear his own uniform on such occasions. But he wore his +own uniform, so that at first I did not know what he intended." + +"Later on," she asked, "you--did you hear anything?" + +"The usual sniping, mademoiselle. Nothing more." + +"He went through the inundation?" + +"How else could he go? Through the wire first, at the barrier, where +there is an opening, if one knows the way, I saw him beyond it, by the +light of a fusee. There is a road there, or what was once a road. He +stood there. Then the lights went out." + + + + + XXX + + +On a wild night in January Sara Lee inaugurated a new branch of service. +There had been a delay in sending up to the Front the men who had been +on rest, and an incessant bombardment held the troops prisoners in their +trenches. + +A field kitchen had been destroyed. The men were hungry, disheartened, +wet through. They needed her, she felt. Even the little she could do +would help. All day she had made soup, and at evening Marie led from +its dilapidated stable the little horse that Henri had once brought up, +trundling its cart behind it. The boiler of the cart was scoured, a +fire lighted in the fire box. Marie, a country girl, harnessed the +shaggy little animal, but with tears of terror. + +"You will be killed, mademoiselle," she protested, weeping. + +"But I have gone before. Don't you remember the man whose wife was +English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?" + +"What will become of the house if you are killed?" + +"Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send +to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or +some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you +promise that?" + +Marie promised in a loud wail. + +"Of course I shall come back," Sara Lee said, stirring her soup +preparatory to pouring it out. "I shall be very careful." + +"You will not come back, mademoiselle. You do not care to live, and to +such--" + +"Those are the ones who live on," said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out +her soup. + +She went quite alone. There was a great deal of noise, but no shells +fell near her. She led the little horse by its head, and its presence +gave her comfort. It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her +on the road. + +In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible +from the rear. There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach +them. One went along through the darkness until the sound of men's +voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker +of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its +flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment. + +Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply. + +"Qui vive?" + +"It is I," she called through the rain. "I have brought some chocolate +and some soup." + +He lowered his bayonet. + +"Pass, mademoiselle." + +She went on, the rumbling of her little cart deadened by the Belgian +guns. + +Through the near-by trenches that night went the word that near the +Repose of the Angels--which was but a hole in the ground and scarcely +reposeful--there was to be had hot soup and chocolate and cigarettes. +A dozen or so at a time, the men were allowed to come. Officers brought +their great capes to keep the girl dry. Boards appeared as if by magic +for her to stand on. The rain and the bombardment had both ceased, and +a full moon made the lagoon across the embankment into a silver lake. + +When the last soup had been dipped from the tall boiler, when the final +drops of chocolate had oozed from the faucet, Sara Lee turned and went +back to the little house again. But before she went she stood a moment +staring across toward that land of the shadow on the other side, where +Henri had gone and had not returned. + +Once, when the King had decorated her, she had wished that, wherever +Uncle James might be, on the other side, he could see what was happening. +And now she wondered if Henri could know that she had come back, and was +again looking after his men while she waited for that reunion he had so +firmly believed in. + +Then she led the little horse back along the road. + +At the poplar trees she turned and looked behind, toward the trenches. +The grove was but a skeleton now, a strange and jagged thing of twisted +branches, as though it had died in agony. She stood there while the +pony nuzzled her gently. If she called, would he come? But, then, all +of life was one call now, for her. She went on slowly. + +After that it was not unusual for her to go to the trenches, on such +nights as no men could come to the little house. Always she was joyously +welcomed, and always on her way back she turned to send from the poplar +trees that inarticulate aching call that she had come somehow to +believe in. + +January, wet and raw, went by; February, colder, with snow, was half +over. The men had ceased to watch for Henri over the parapet, and his +brave deeds had become fireside tales, to be told at home, if ever +there were to be homes again for them. + +Then one night Henri came back--came as he had gone, out of the shadows +that had swallowed him up; came without so much as the sound of a +sniper's rifle to herald him. A strange, thin Henri, close to +starvation, dripping water over everything from a German uniform, and +very close indeed to death before he called out. + +There was wild excitement indeed. Bearded private soldiers, forgetting +that name and rank of his which must not be told, patted his thin +shoulders. Officers who had lived through such horrors as also may not +be told, crowded about him and shook hands with him, and with each other. + +It was as though from the graveyard back in the fields had come, alive +and smiling, some dearly beloved friend. + +He would have told the story, but he was wet and weary. + +"That can wait," they said, and led him, a motley band of officers and +men intermixed, for once forgetting all decorum, toward the village. +They overtook the lines of men who had left the trenches and were moving +with their slow and weary gait up the road. The news spread through the +column. There were muffled cheers. Figures stepped out of the darkness +with hands out. Henri clasped as many as he could. + +When with his escort he had passed the men they fell, almost without +orders, into columns of four, and swung in behind him. There was no +band, but from a thousand throats, yet cautiously until they passed the +poplar trees, there gradually swelled and grew a marching song. + +Behind Henri a strange guard of honor--muddy, tired, torn, even wounded +--they marched and sang: + + Trou la la, ce ne va guere; + Trou la la, ca ne va pas. + +Sara Lee, listening for that first shuffle of many feet that sounded so +like the wind in the trees or water over the pebbles of a brook, paused +in her work and lifted her head. The rhythm of marching feet came +through the wooden shutters. The very building seemed to vibrate with +it. And there was a growling sound with it that soon she knew to be the +deep voices of singing men. + +She went to the door and stood there, looking down the street. Behind +her was the warm glow of the lamp, all the snug invitation of the little +house. + +A group of soldiers had paused in front of the doorway, and from them +one emerged--tall, white, infinitely weary--and looked up at her with +unbelieving eyes. + +After all, there are no words for such meetings. Henri took her hand, +still with that sense of unreality, and bent over it. And Sara Lee +touched his head as he stooped, because she had called for so long, and +only now he had come. + +"So you have come back!" she said in what she hoped was a composed +tone--because a great many people were listening. He raised his head +and looked at her. + +"It is you who have come back, mademoiselle." + +There was gayety in the little house that night. Every candle was +lighted. They were stuck in rows on mantel-shelves. They blazed--and +melted into strange arcs--above the kitchen stove. There were +cigarettes for everybody, and food; and a dry uniform, rather small, for +Henri. Marie wept over her soup, and ran every few moments to the door +to see if he was still there. She had kissed him on both cheeks when +he came in, and showed signs, every now and then, of doing it again. + +Sara Lee did her bandaging as usual, but with shining eyes. And soon +after Henri's arrival a dispatch rider set off post haste with certain +papers and maps, hurriedly written and drawn. Henri had not only +returned, he had brought back information of great value to all the +Allied armies. + +So Sara Lee bandaged, and in the little room across the way, where no +longer Harvey's photograph sat on the mantel, Henri told his story to +the officers--of his imprisonment in the German prison at Crefeld; of +his finding Jean there, weeks later when he was convalescing from +typhoid; of their escape and long wandering; of Jean's getting into +Holland, whence he would return by way of England. Of his own business, +of what he had done behind the lines after Jean had gone, he said +nothing. But his listeners knew and understood. + +But his dispatches off, his story briefly told, Henri wandered out among +the men again. He was very happy. He had never thought to be so happy. +He felt the touch on his sleeves of hard brown, not overclean hands, +infinitely tender and caressing; and over there, as though she had never +gone, was Sara Lee, slightly flushed and very radiant. + +And as though he also had never gone away, Henri pushed into the salle +a manger and stood before her smiling. + +"You bandage well, mademoiselle," he said gayly. "But I? I bandage +better! See now, a turn here, and it is done! Does it hurt, Paul?" + +The man in the dressing chair squirmed and grinned sheepishly. + +"The iodine," he explained. "It is painful." + +"Then I shall ask you a question, and you will forget the iodine. Why +is a dead German like the tail of a pig?" + +Paul failed. The room failed. Even Colonel Lilias confessed himself at +fault. + +"Because it is the end of the swine," explained Henri, and looked about +him triumphantly. A gust of laughter spread through the room and even +to the kitchen. A door banged. Henri upset a chair. There was noise +again, and gayety in the little house of mercy. And much happiness. + +And there I think we may leave them all--Henri and Sara Lee; and Jean +of the one eye and the faithful heart; and Marie, with her kettles; and +even Rene, who still in some strange way belonged to the little house, +as though it were something too precious to abandon. + +The amazing interlude had become the play itself. Never again for Sara +Lee would the lights go up in front, and Henri with his adoring eyes +and open arms fade into the shadows. + +The drama of the war plays on. The Great Playwright sees fit, now and +then, to take away some well-beloved players. New faces appear and +disappear. The music is the thunder of many guns. Henri still plays +his big part, Sara Lee her little one. Yet who shall say, in the end, +which one has done the better? There are new and ever new standards, +but love remains the chief. And love is Sara Lee's one quality--love +of her kind, of tired men and weary, the love that shall one day knit +this broken world together. And love of one man. + +On weary nights, when Henri is again lost in the shadows, Sara Lee, +her work done, the men gone, sits in her little house of mercy and +waits. The stars on clear evenings shine down on the roofless buildings, +on the rubbish that was once the mill, on the ruined poplar trees, and +on the small acre of peace where tiny crosses mark the long sleep of +weary soldiers. + +And sometimes, though she knows it now by heart, she reads aloud that +letter of Henri's to her. It comforts her. It is a promise. + +"If that is to be, then think of me, somewhere, perhaps with Rene by my +side, since he, too, loved you. And I shall still be calling you, and +waiting. Perhaps, even beyond the stars, they have need of a little +house of mercy. And God knows, wherever I am, I shall have need of you." + + + + + + + + + + + +End of Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart + +*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMAZING INTERLUDE *** + +This file should be named mzgnt11.txt or mzgnt11.zip +Corrected EDITIONS of our eBooks get a new NUMBER, mzgnt11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, mzgnt10a.txt + +This Etext was produced by another of our anonymous volnteers: +to whom I give great thanks! Michael S. Hart, Project Gutenberg + +Project Gutenberg eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the US +unless a copyright notice is included. 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