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THE AMAZING INTERLUDE

By

Mary Roberts Rinehart

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."

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XXVIII

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