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.”