Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles.
Henri explained the method.
"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly.
That Henri might be living, somewhere, that some day the Belgians might
go home again.
I
The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for
most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the
same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits
through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately
the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is
the background for the moving figures of the play.
So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of
permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there
should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected
none.
But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours:
lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity,
reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes
place. Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on--a new _mise
en scène_, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left
knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy--Sara Lee became a fairy, of a
sort--and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And
then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the
lady is back by the fire--but with a memory.
This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory--and of something more.
* * * * *
The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing her part in the
setting of a city in Pennsylvania. An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It
is only fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither quality. She
was far from ugly, and very, very far from rich. She had started her
part with a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one they had
gone away into the wings and had not come back. At nineteen she was
alone knitting by the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop was
of painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for its moment, was the
forest of adventure. A strange forest, too--one that Sara Lee would
not have recognised as a forest. And a prince of course--but a prince
as strange and mysterious as the forest.
The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented. If it was
resignation rather than content, no one but Sara Lee knew the difference.
Knitting, too; but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid, knitting an
afghan against an interesting event which involved a friend of hers.
Sara Lee rather deplored the event--in her own mind, of course, for in
her small circle young unmarried women accepted the major events of life
without question, and certainly without conversation. She never, for
instance, allowed her Uncle James, with whom she lived, to see her
working at the afghan; and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be a
sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions.
Sara Lee's days, up to the twentieth of December, 1914, had been much
alike. In the mornings she straightened up her room, which she had
copied from one in a woman's magazine, with the result that it gave
somehow the impression of a baby's bassinet, being largely dotted Swiss
and ribbon. Yet in a way it was a perfect setting for Sara Lee herself.
It was fresh and virginal, and very, very neat and white. A resigned
little room, like Sara Lee, resigned to being tucked away in a corner
and to having no particular outlook. Peaceful, too.
Sometimes in the morning between straightening her room and going to the
market for Aunt Harriet, Sara Lee looked at a newspaper. So she knew
there was a war. She read the headings, and when the matter came up for
mention at the little afternoon bridge club, as it did now and then after
the prizes were distributed, she always said "Isn't it horrible!" and
changed the subject.
On the night of the nineteenth of December Sara Lee had read her chapter
in the Bible--she read it through once each year--and had braided down
her hair, which was as smooth and shining and lovely as Sara Lee herself,
and had raised her window for the night when Aunt Harriet came in. Sara
Lee did not know, at first, that she had a visitor. She stood looking
out toward the east, until Aunt Harriet touched her on the arm.
"What in the world!" said Aunt Harriet. "A body would suppose it was
August."
"I was just thinking," said Sara Lee.
"You'd better do your thinking in bed. Jump in and I'll put out your
light."
So Sara Lee got into her white bed with the dotted Swiss valance, and
drew the covers to her chin, and looked a scant sixteen. Aunt Harriet,
who was an unsentimental woman, childless and diffident, found her
suddenly very appealing there in her smooth bed, and did an unexpected
thing. She kissed her. Then feeling extremely uncomfortable she put
out the light and went to the door. There she paused.
"Thinking!" she said. "What about, Sara Lee?"
Perhaps it was because the light was out that Sara Lee became articulate.
Perhaps it was because things that had been forming in her young mind for
weeks had at last crystallized into words. Perhaps it was because of a
picture she had happened on that day, of a boy lying wounded somewhere
on a battlefield and calling "Mother!"
"About--over there," she said rather hesitatingly. "And about Anna."
"Over there?"
"The war," said Sara Lee. "I was just thinking about all those women
over there--like Anna, you know. They--they had babies, and got
everything ready for them. And then the babies grew up, and they're all
getting killed."
"It's horrible," said Aunt Harriet. "Do you want another blanket? It's
cold to-night."
Sara Lee did not wish another blanket.
"I'm a little worried about your Uncle James," said Aunt Harriet, at the
door. "He's got indigestion. I think I'll make him a mustard plaster."
She prepared to go out then, but Sara Lee spoke from her white bed.
"Aunt Harriet," she said, "I don't think I'll ever get married."
"I said that too, once," said Aunt Harriet complacently. "What's got
into your head now?"
"I don't know," Sara Lee replied vaguely. "I just--What's the use?"
Aunt Harriet was conscious of a hazy impression of indelicacy. Coming
from Sara Lee it was startling and revolutionary. In Aunt Harriet's
world young women did not question their duty, which was to marry,
preferably some one in the neighborhood, and bear children, who would be
wheeled about that same neighborhood in perambulators and who would
ultimately grow up and look after themselves.
"The use?" she asked tartly.
"Of having babies, and getting to care about them, and then--There will
always be wars, won't there?"
"You turn over and go to sleep," counseled Aunt Harriet. "And stop
looking twenty years or more ahead." She hesitated. "You haven't
quarreled with Harvey, have you?"
Sara Lee turned over obediently.
"No. It's not that," she said. And the door closed.
Perhaps, had she ever had time during the crowded months that followed,
Sara Lee would have dated certain things from that cold frosty night in
December when she began to question things. For after all that was what
it came to. She did not revolt. She questioned.
She lay in her white bed and looked at things for the first time. The
sky had seemed low that night. Things were nearer. The horizon was
close. And beyond that peaceful horizon, to the east, something was
going on that could not be ignored. Men were dying. Killing and dying.
Men who had been waited for as Anna watched for her child.
Downstairs she could hear Aunt Harriet moving about. The street was
quiet, until a crowd of young people--she knew them by their
voices--went by, laughing.
"It's horrible," said Sara Lee to herself. There was a change in her,
but she was still inarticulate. Somewhere in her mind, but not
formulated, was the feeling that she was too comfortable. Her peace was
a cheap peace, bought at no price. Her last waking determination was to
finish the afghan quickly and to knit for the men at the war.
Uncle James was ill the next morning. Sara Lee went for the doctor, but
Anna's hour had come and he was with her. Late in the afternoon he came,
however looking a bit gray round the mouth with fatigue, but triumphant.
He had on these occasions always a sense of victory; even, in a way, a
feeling of being part of a great purpose. He talked at such times of the
race, as one may who is doing his best by it.
"Well," he said when Sara Lee opened the door, "it's a boy. Eight
pounds. Going to be red-headed, too." He chuckled.
"A boy!" said Sara Lee. "I--don't you bring any girl babies any more?"
The doctor put down his hat and glanced at her.
"Wanted a girl, to be named for you?"
"No. It's not that. It's only--" She checked herself. He wouldn't
understand. The race required girl babies. "I've put a blue bow on my
afghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs.
Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as
Sara Lee's days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it,
ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul--for its bright
curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining brasses and growing
plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to
ache, too, for her friends--their small engrossing cares, their kindly
interest, their familiar faces.
Time was to come, too, when she came back, not to the little house, it
is true, but to her friends, to Anna and the others. But they had not
grown and Sara Lee had. And that is the story.
Uncle James died the next day. One moment he was there, an uneasy
figure, under the tulip quilt, and the next he had gone away entirely,
leaving a terrible quiet behind him. He had been the center of the
little house, a big and cheery and not over-orderly center. Followed
his going not only quiet, but a wretched tidiness. There was nothing
for Sara Lee to do but to think.
And, in the way of mourning women, things that Uncle James had said
which had passed unheeded came back to her. One of them was when he
had proposed to adopt a Belgian child, and Aunt Harriet had offered
horrified protest.
"All right," he had said. "Of course, if you feel that way about
it--! But I feel kind of mean, sometimes, sitting here doing nothing
when there's such a lot to be done."
Then he had gone for a walk and had come back cheerful enough but rather
quiet.
There was that other time, too, when the German Army was hurling itself,
wave after wave, across the Yser--only of course Sara Lee knew nothing
of the Yser then--and when it seemed as though the attenuated Allied
line must surely crack and give. He had said then that if he were only
twenty years younger he would go across and help.
"And what about me?" Aunt Harriet had asked. "But I suppose I wouldn't
matter."
"You could go to Jennie's, couldn't you?"
There had followed one of those absurd wrangles as to whether or not Aunt
Harriet would go to Jennie's in the rather remote contingency of Uncle
James' becoming twenty years younger and going away.
And now Uncle James had taken on the wings of the morning and was indeed
gone away. And again it became a question of Jennie's. Aunt Harriet,
rather dazed at first, took to arguing it pro and con.
"Of course she has room for me," she would say in her thin voice.
"There's that little room that was Edgar's. There's nobody in it now.
But there's only room for a single bed, Sara Lee."
Sara Lee was knitting socks now, all a trifle tight as to heel. "I
know," she would say. "I'll get along. Don't you worry about me."
Always these talks ended on a note of exasperation for Aunt Harriet. For
Sara Lee's statement that she could manage would draw forth a plaintive
burst from the older woman.
"If only you'd marry Harvey," she would say. "I don't know what's come
over you. You used to like him well enough."
"I still like him."
"I've seen you jump when the telephone bell rang. Your Uncle James often
spoke about it. He noticed more than most people thought." She followed
Sara Lee's eyes down the street to where Anna was wheeling her baby
slowly up and down. Even from that distance Sara Lee could see the bit
of pink which was the bow on her afghan. "I believe you're afraid."
"Afraid?"
"Of having children," accused Aunt Harriet fretfully.
Sara Lee colored.
"Perhaps I am," she said; "but not the sort of thing you think. I just
don't see the use of it, that's all. Aunt Harriet, how long does it
take to become a hospital nurse?"
"Mabel Andrews was three years. It spoiled her looks too. She used to
be a right pretty girl."
"Three years," Sara Lee reflected. "By that time--"
The house was very quiet and still those days. There was an interlude
of emptiness and order, of long days during which Aunt Harriet
alternately grieved and planned, and Sara Lee thought of many things.
At the Red Cross meetings all sorts of stories were circulated; the
Belgian atrocity tales had just reached the country, and were spreading
like wildfire. There were arguments and disagreements. A girl named
Schmidt was militant against them and soon found herself a small island
of defiance entirely surrounded by disapproval. Mabel Andrews came once
to a meeting and in businesslike fashion explained the Red Cross
dressings and gave a lesson in bandaging. Forerunner of the many
first-aid classes to come was that hour of Mabel's, and made memorable
by one thing she said.
"You might as well all get busy and learn to do such things," she stated
in her brisk voice. "One of our _internes_ is over there, and he says
we'll be in it before spring."
After the meeting Sara Lee went up to Mabel and put a hand on her arm.
"Are you going?" she asked.
"Leaving day after to-morrow. Why?"
"I--couldn't I be useful over there?"