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."
That Henri might be living, somewhere--that some day the Belgians might go home again.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.
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 thesalle à mangerand 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 abal 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.
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."
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 twelvetaubes, 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 Germantaubes, 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 crowdedsalle à mangerand 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.