The Amazing Interlude Part 44

"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 s.h.a.ggy 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 s.h.i.+ning kettles. There was the corner of her room, patched by Rene's hands, now so long quiet. A few more sh.e.l.l 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 h.e.l.l across, there was none.

She did her best in the evenings to be cheerful, to take the place, in her small and serious fas.h.i.+on, 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 ca.n.a.ls, there came, brought by a Belgian corporal, the man who swore that Henri had pa.s.sed 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 a.s.serted. "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."

x.x.x

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 s.h.a.ggy 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--"