The Amazing Interlude Part 17

Henri stared at her rather blankly.

"True!" he said. "Very true. And I never thought of it!"

Then suddenly they both laughed, the joyous ringing laugh of ridiculous youth, which can see its own absurdities and laugh at them.

Henri counted off on his fingers.

"I thought of water," he said, "and a house, and firewood, and kettles and furniture. And there I ceased thinking."

It was dusk now. Marie lifted the lid from the stove, and a warm red glow of reflected light filled the little kitchen. It was warm and cozy; the kettle sang like the purring of a cat. And something else that had troubled Sara Lee came out.

"I wonder," she said, "if you are doing all this only because I--well, because I persuaded you." Which she had not. "Do the men really need me here?"

"Need you, mademoiselle?"

"Do they need what little I can give? They were smiling, all the ones I saw."

"A Belgian soldier always smiles. Even when he is fighting." His voice had lost its gayety and had taken on a deeper note. "Mademoiselle, I have brought you here, where I can think of no other woman who would have the courage to come, because you are needed. I cannot promise you entire safety"--his mouth tightened--"but I can promise you work and grat.i.tude. Such grat.i.tude, mademoiselle, as you may never know again."

That rea.s.sured her. But in her practical mind the matter of supplies loomed large. She brought the matter up again directly.

"It is to be hot chocolate and soup?" he asked.

"Both, if I find I have enough money. Soup only, perhaps."

"And soup takes meat, of course."

"It should, to be strengthening."

Henri looked up, to see Jean in the doorway smiling grimly.

"It is very simple," Jean said to him in French. "You have no other duties of course; so each day you shall buy in the market place at Dunkirk, with American money. And I shall become a delivery boy and bring out food for mademoiselle, and whatever is needed."

Henri smiled back at him cheerfully. "An excellent plan, Jean," he said.

"Not every day, but frequently."

Jean growled and disappeared.

However, there was the immediate present to think of, and while Jean thawed his hands at the fire and Sara Lee was taking housewifely stock of her new home, Henri disappeared.

He came back in a half hour, carrying in a small basket b.u.t.ter, eggs, bread and potatoes.

"The miller!" he explained cheerfully to Sara Lee. "He has still a few hens, and hidden somewhere a cow. We can have milk--is there a pail for Marie to take to the mill?--and bread and an omelet. That is a meal!"

There was but one lamp, which hung over the kitchen stove. The room across from Sara Lee's bedroom contained a small round dining table and chairs. Sara Lee, enveloped in a large pinafore ap.r.o.n, made the omelet in the kitchen. Marie brought a pail of fresh milk. Henri, with a towel over his left arm, and in absurd mimicry of a Parisian waiter, laid the table; and Jean, dour Jean, caught a bit of the infection, and finding four bottles set to work with his pocketknife to fit candles into their necks.

Standing in corners, smiling, useless against the cheerful English that flowed from the kitchen stove to the dining room and back again, were Rene and Marie. It was of no use to attempt to help. Did the fire burn low, it was the young officer who went out for fresh wood. But Rene could not permit that twice. He brought in great armfuls of firewood and piled them neatly by the stove.

Henri was absurdly happy again. He would come to the door gravely, with Sara Lee's little phrase book in hand, and read from it in a solemn tone:

"'Shall we have duck or chicken?' 'Where can we get a good dinner at a moderate price?' 'Waiter, you have spilled wine on my dress.' 'Will you have a cigar?' 'No, thank you. I prefer a pipe.'"

And Sara Lee beat up the eggs and found, after a bad moment, some salt in a box, and then poured her omelet into the pan. She was very anxious that it be a good omelet. She must make good her claim as a cook or Henri's sublime faith in her would die.

It was a divine omelet. Even Jean said so. They sat, the three of them, in the cold little dining room and never knew that it was cold, and they ate prodigious quant.i.ties of omelet and bread and b.u.t.ter, and bully beef out of a tin, and drank a great deal of milk.

Even Jean thawed at last, under the influence of food and Sara Lee.

Before the meal was over he was planning how to get her supplies to her and making notes on a piece of paper as to what she would need at once.

They adjourned to Sara Lee's bedroom, where Marie had kindled a fire in the little iron stove, and sat there in the warmth with two candles, still planning. By that time Sara Lee had quite forgotten that at home one did not have visitors in one's bedroom.

Suddenly Henri held up his hand.

"Listen!" he said.

That was the first time Sara Lee had ever heard the quiet shuffling step of tired men, leaving their trenches under cover of darkness. Henri threw his military cape over her shoulders and she stood in the dark doorway, watching.

The empty street was no longer empty. From gutter to gutter flowed a stream of men, like a sluggish river which narrowed where a fallen house partly filled the way; not talking, not singing, just moving, bent under their heavy and mud-covered equipment. Here and there the clack of wooden sabots on the cobbles told of one poor fellow not outfitted with leather shoes. The light of a match here and there showed some few lucky enough to have still remaining cigarettes, and revealed also, in the immediate vicinity, a white bandage or two. Some few, recognizing Henri's officer's cap, saluted. Most of them stumbled on, too weary to so much as glance aside.

Nothing that Sara Lee had dreamed of war was like this. This was dreary and sodden and hopeless. Those fresh troops at the crossroads that day had been blithe and smiling. There had been none of the glitter and panoply of war, but there had been movement, the beating of a drum, the sharp cries of officers as the lines re-formed.

Here there were no lines. Just such a stream of men as at home might issue at night from a coal mine, too weary for speech. Only here they were packed together closely, and they did not speak, and some of them were wounded.

"There are so many!" she whispered to Henri. "A hundred such efforts as mine would not be enough."

"I would to G.o.d there were more!" Henri replied, through shut teeth.

"Listen, mademoiselle," he said later. "You cannot do all the kind work of the world. But you can do your part. And you will start by caring for only such as are wounded or ill. The others can go on. But every night some twenty or thirty, or even more, will come to your door--men slightly wounded or too weary to go on without a rest. And for those there will be a chair by the fire, and something hot, or perhaps a clean bandage. It sounds small? But in a month, think! You will have given comfort to perhaps a thousand men. You--alone!"

"I--alone!" she said in a queer choking voice. "And what about you?

It is you who have made it possible."

But Henri was looking down the street to where the row of poplars hid what lay beyond. Far beyond a star sh.e.l.l had risen above the flat fields and floated there, a pure and lovely thing, shedding its white light over the terrain below. It gleamed for some thirty seconds and went out.

"Like that!" Henri said to her, but in French. "Like that you are to me.

Bright and shining--and so soon gone."

Sara Lee thought he had asked her if she was cold.

XI

The girl was singularly adaptable. In a few days it was as though she had been for years in her little ruined house. She was very happy, though there was scarcely a day when her heart was not wrung. Such young-old faces! Such weary men! And such tales of wretchedness!

She got the tales by intuition rather than by words, though she was picking up some French at that. Marie would weep openly, at times. The most frequent story was of no news from the country held by the Germans, of families left with nothing and probably starving. The first inquiry was always for news. Had the American lady any way to make inquiry?

In time Sara Lee began to take notes of names and addresses, and through Mr. Travers, in London, and the Relief Commission, in Belgium, bits of information came back. A certain family was in England at a village in Surrey. Of another a child had died. Here was one that could not be located, and another reported ma.s.sacred during the invasion.