The Amazing Interlude

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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.