The Amazing Interlude - Mary Roberts Rinehart (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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He would stop on the way and argue, though one does not argue easily with an equerry.
"I must go," he would say fretfully. "God knows where he is. He'd never give me up if I were the one."
And once he shook off the equerry violently and said:
"Let go of me, I tell you! I'll come back and go to bed when I've found him."
The equerry soothed him like a child.
An English nurse took charge of Henri in the hospital, and put him to bed. He was very polite to her, and extremely cynical. She sat in a chair by his bed and held the key of the room in her hand. Once he thought she was Sara Lee, but that was only for a moment. She did not look like Sara Lee. And she was suspicious, too; for when he asked her what she could put in her left hand that she could not put in her right, she moved away and placed the door key on the stand, out of reach.
However, toward morning she dozed. There was steady firing at Nieuport and the windows shook constantly. An ambulance came in, followed by a stirring on the lower floor. Then silence. He got up then and secured the key. There was no time for dressing, because she was a suspicious person and likely to waken at any time. He rolled his clothing into a bundle and carried it under his well arm. The other was almost useless.
The ambulance was still waiting outside, at the foot of the staircase. There were voices and lights in the operating room, forward along the tiled hall. Still in his night clothing, Henri got into the ambulance and threw his uniform behind him. Then he got the car under way.
Outside the village he paused long enough to dress. His head was amazingly clear. He had never felt so sure of himself before. As to his errand he had no doubt whatever. Jean had learned that he had crossed the channel. Therefore Jean had taken up his work—Jean, who had but one eye and was as clumsy as a bear. The thought of Jean crawling through the German trenches set him laughing until he ended with a sob.
It was rather odd about the ambulance. It did not keep the road very well. Sometimes it was on one side and sometimes on the other. It slid as though the road were greased. And after a time Henri made an amazing discovery. He was not alone in the car.
He looked back, without stopping, and the machine went off in a wide arc. He brought it back again, grinning.
"Thought you had me, didn't you?" he observed to the car in general, and the engine in particular. "Now no tricks!"
There was a wounded man in the car. He had had morphia and he was very comfortable. He was not badly hurt, and he considered that he was being taken to Calais. He was too tired to talk, and the swinging of the car rather interested him. He would doze and waken and doze again. But at last he heard something that made him rise on his elbow.
It was the hammering of the big guns.
He called Henri's attention to this, but Henri said:
"Lie down, Jean, and don't talk. We'll make it yet."
The wounded man intended to make a protest, but he went to sleep instead.
They had reached the village now where was the little house of mercy. The ambulance rolled and leaped down the street, with both lights full on, which was forbidden, and came to a stop at the door. The man inside was grunting then, and Henri, whose head had never been so clear, got out and went round to the rear of the car.
"Now, out with you, comrade!" he said. "I have made an error, but it is immaterial. Can you walk?"
He lighted a cigarette, and the man inside saw his burning eyes and shaking hands. Even through the apathy of the morphia he felt a thrill of terror. He could walk. He got out while Henri pounded at the door.
"Attention!" he called. "Attention!"
Then he hummed an air of the camps:
Trou là là, ça ne va guère;
Trou là là, ça ne va pas.
When he heard steps inside Henri went back to the ambulance. He got in and drove it, lights and all, down the street.
Trou là là, ça ne va guère;
Trou là là, ça ne va pas.
Somewhere down the road beyond the poplar trees he abandoned the ambulance. They found it there the next morning, or rather what was left of it. Evidently its two unwinking eyes had got on the Germans' nerves.
Early the next morning a Saxon regiment, standing on the firing step ready for what the dawn might bring forth, watched the mist rise from the water in front of them. It shone on a body in a Belgian uniform, lying across their wire, and very close indeed.
Now the Saxons are not Prussians, so no one for sport fired at the body. Which was rather a good thing, because it moved slightly and stirred. And then in a loud voice, which is an unusual thing for bodies to possess, it began to sing:
Trou là là, ça ne va guère;
Trou là là, ça ne va pas.
XXVIII
Late in August Sara Lee broke her engagement with Harvey. She had been away, at Cousin Jennie's, for a month, and for the first time since her return she had had time to think. In the little suburban town there were long hours of quiet when Cousin Jennie mended on the porch and Aunt Harriet, enjoying a sort of reflected glory from Sara Lee, presided at Red Cross meetings.
Sara Lee decided to send for Harvey, and he came for a week-end, arriving pathetically eager, but with a sort of defiance too. He was determined to hold her, but to hold her on his own terms.
Aunt Harriet had been vaguely uneasy, but Harvey's arrival seemed to put everything right. She even kissed him when he came, and took great pains to carry off Cousin Jennie when she showed an inclination toward conversation and a seat on the porch.
Sara Lee had made a desperate resolve. She intended to lay all her cards on the table. He should know all that there was to know. If, after that, he still wanted to hold her—but she did not go so far. She was so sure he would release her.
It was a despairing thing to do, but she was rather despairing those days. There had been no letter from Henri or from Jean. She had written them both several times, to Dunkirk, to the Savoy in London, to the little house near the Front. But no replies had come. Yet mail was going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly.
When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie on one side and Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent prayers—that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital.
She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy. Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even if that truth comprehended the worst.
Once she received, from some unknown hand, a French journal, and pored over it for days with her French dictionary, to find if it contained any news. It was not until a week later that she received a letter from Mabel, explaining that she had sent the journal, which contained a description of her hospital.
All of Harvey's Sunday she spent in trying to bring her courage to the point of breaking the silence he had imposed on her, but it was not until evening that she succeeded. The house was empty. The family had gone to church. On the veranda, with the heavy scent of phlox at night permeating the still air, Sara Lee made her confession. She began at the beginning. Harvey did not stir—until she told of the way she had stowed away to cross the channel. Then he moved.
"This fellow who planned that for you—did you ever see him again?"
"He met me in Calais."
"And then what?"
"He took me to Dunkirk in his car. Such a hideous car, Harvey—all wrecked. It had been under fire again and again. I—"
"He took you to Dunkirk! Who was with you?"
"Just Jean, the chauffeur."
"I like his nerve! Wasn't there in all that Godforsaken country a woman to take with you? You and this—What was his name, anyhow?"
"I can't tell you that, Harvey."
"Look here!" he burst out. "How much of this aren't you going to tell? Because I want it all or not at all."
"I can't tell you his name. I'm only trying to make you understand the way I feel about things. His name doesn't matter." She clenched her hands in the darkness. "I don't think he is alive now."
He tried to see her face, but she turned it away.
"Dead, eh? What makes you think that?"
"I haven't heard from him."
"Why should you hear from him?" His voice cut like a knife. "Look at me. Why should he write to you?"
"He cared for me, Harvey."
He sat in a heavy silence which alarmed her.
"Don't be angry, please," she begged. "I couldn't bear it. It wasn't my fault, or his either."
"The damned scoundrel!" said Harvey thickly.
But she reached over and put a trembling hand over his lips.
"Don't say that," she said. "Don't! I won't allow you to. When I think what may have happened to him, I—" Her voice broke.
"Go on," Harvey said in cold tones she had never heard before. "Tell it all, now you've begun it. God knows I didn't want to hear it. He took you to the hotel at Dunkirk, the way those foreigners take their women. And he established you in the house at the Front, I suppose, like a—"
Sara Lee suddenly stood up and drew off her ring.
"You needn't go on," she said quietly. "I had a decision to make to-night, and I have made it. Ever since I came home I have been trying to go back to where we were before I left. It isn't possible. You are what you always were, Harvey. But I've changed. I can't go back."
She put the ring into his hand.
"It isn't that you don't love me. I think you do. But I've been thinking things over. It isn't only to-night, or what you just said. It's because we don't care for the same things, or believe in them."
"But—if we love each other—"
"It's not that, either. I used to feel that way. A home, and some one to care about, and a little pleasure and work."
"That ought to be enough, honey."
He was terrified. His anger was gone. He placed an appealing hand on her arm, and as she stood there in the faint starlight the wonder of her once again got him by the throat. She had that sort of repressed eagerness, that look of being poised for flight, that had always made him feel cheap and unworthy.
"Isn't that enough, honey?" he repeated.
"Not now," she said, her eyes turned toward the east. "These are great days, Harvey. They are greater and more terrible than any one can know who has not been there. I've been there and I know. I haven't the right to all this peace and comfort when I know how things are going over there."
Down the quiet street of the little town service was over. The last hymn had been sung. Through the open windows came the mellow
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