The Amazing Interlude - Mary Roberts Rinehart (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📗

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?"

Mabel smiled rather grimly. "What can you do?"

"I can cook."

"Only men cooks, my dear. What else?"

"I could clean up, couldn't I? There must be something. I'd do anything I could. Don't they have people to wash dishes and—all that?"

Mabel was on doubtful ground there. She knew of a woman who had been permitted to take over her own automobile, paying all her expenses and buying her own tires and gasoline.

"She carries supplies to small hospitals in out-of-the-way places," she said. "But I don't suppose you can do that, Sara Lee, can you?"

However, she gave Sara Lee a New York address, and Sara Lee wrote and offered herself. She said nothing to Aunt Harriet, who had by that time elected to take Edgar's room at Cousin Jennie's and was putting Uncle James' clothes in tearful order to send to Belgium. After a time she received a reply.

"We have put your name on our list of volunteers," said the letter, "but of course you understand that only trained workers are needed now. France and England are full of untrained women who are eager to help."

It was that night that Sara Lee became engaged to Harvey.

Sara Lee's attitude toward Harvey was one that she never tried to analyze. When he was not with her she thought of him tenderly, romantically. This was perhaps due to the photograph of him on her mantel. There was a dash about the picture rather lacking in the original, for it was a profile, and in it the young man's longish hair, worn pompadour, the slight thrust forward of the head, the arch of the nostrils,—gave him a sort of tense eagerness, a look of running against the wind. From the photograph Harvey might have been a gladiator; as a matter of fact he was a bond salesman.

So during the daytime Sara Lee looked—at intervals—at the photograph, and got that feel of drive and force. And in the evenings Harvey came, and she lost it. For, outside of a frame, he became a rather sturdy figure, of no romance, but of a comforting solidity. A kindly young man, with a rather wide face and hands disfigured as to fingers by much early baseball. He had heavy shoulders, the sort a girl might rely on to carry many burdens. A younger and tidier Uncle James, indeed—the same cheery manner, the same robust integrity, and the same small ambition.

To earn enough to keep those dependent on him, and to do it fairly; to tell the truth and wear clean linen and not run into debt; and to marry Sara Lee and love and cherish her all his life—this was Harvey. A plain and likable man, a lover and husband to be sure of. But—

He came that night to see Sara Lee. There was nothing unusual about that. He came every night. But he came that night full of determination. That was not unusual, either, but it had not carried him far. He had no idea that his picture was romantic. He would have demanded it back had he so much as suspected it. He wore his hair in a pompadour because of the prosaic fact that he had a cow-lick. He was very humble about himself, and Sara Lee was to him as wonderful as his picture was to her.

Sara Lee was in the parlor, waiting for him. The one electric lamp was lighted, so that the phonograph in one corner became only a bit of reflected light. There was a gas fire going, and in front of it was a white fur rug. In Aunt Harriet's circle there were few orientals. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, not yet entirely paid for, stood against the wall, and a leather chair, hollowed by Uncle James' solid body, was by the fire. It was just such a tidy, rather vulgar and homelike room as no doubt Harvey would picture for his own home. He had of course never seen the white simplicity of Sara Lee's bedroom.

Sara Lee, in a black dress, admitted him. When he had taken off his ulster and his overshoes—he had been raised by women—and came in, she was standing by the fire.

"Raining," he said. "It's getting colder. May be snow before morning."

Then he stopped. Sometimes the wonder of Sara Lee got him in the throat. She had so much the look of being poised for flight. Even in her quietest moments there was that about her—a sort of repressed eagerness, a look of seeing things far away. Aunt Harriet said that there were times when she had a "flighty" look.

And that night it was that impression of elusiveness that stopped Harvey's amiable prattle about the weather and took him to her with his arms out.

"Sara Lee!" he said. "Don't look like that!"

"Like what?" said Sara Lee prosaically.

"I don't know," he muttered. "You—sometimes you look as though—" Then he put his arms round her. "I love you," he said. "I'll be good to you, Sara Lee, if you'll have me." He bent down and put his cheek against hers. "If you'll only marry me, dear."

A woman has a way of thinking most clearly and lucidly when the man has stopped thinking. With his arms about her Harvey could only feel. He was trembling. As for Sara Lee, instantly two pictures flashed through her mind, each distinct, each clear, almost photographic. One was of Anna, in her tiny house down the street, dragged with a nursing baby. The other was that one from a magazine of a boy dying on a battlefield and crying "Mother!"

Two sorts of maternity—one quiet, peaceful, not always beautiful, but the thing by which and to which she had been reared; the other vicarious, of all the world.

"Don't you love me—that way?" he said, his cheek still against hers.

"I don't know."

"You don't know!"

It was then that he straightened away from her and looked without seeing at the blur of light which was the phonograph. Sara Lee, glancing up, saw him then as he was in the photograph, face set and head thrust forward, and that clean-cut drive of jaw and backward flow of heavy hair that marked him all man, and virile man.

She slipped her hand into his.

"I do love you, Harvey," she said, and went into his arms with the complete surrender of a child.

He was outrageously happy. He sat on the arm of Uncle James' chair where she was almost swallowed up, and with his face against hers he made his simple plans. Now and then he kissed the little hollow under her ear, and because he knew nothing of the abandon of a woman in a great passion he missed nothing in her attitude. Into her silence and passivity he read the reflection of his own adoring love and thought it hers.

To be fair to Sara Lee, she imagined that her content in Harvey's devotion was something more, as much more as was necessary. For in Sara Lee's experience marriage was a thing compounded of affection, habit, small differences and a home. Of passion, that passion which later she was to meet and suffer from, the terrible love that hurts and agonizes, she had never even dreamed.

Great days were before Sara Lee. She sat by the fire and knitted, and behind the back drop on the great stage of the world was preparing, unsuspected, the mise en scène.