The Amazing Interlude - Mary Roberts Rinehart (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📗
- Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
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Sara Lee stood on the doorstep and looked within. She had come back. Here she would work and wait, and if in the goodness of providence he should come back, here he would find her, all the empty months gone and forgotten.
If he did not—
"I shall still be calling you, and waiting," he had written. She, too, would call and wait, and if not here, then surely in the fullness of time which is eternity the call would be answered.
In October Sara Lee took charge again of the little house. Mrs. Cameron went back to England, but not until the Traverses' plan had been revealed. They would support the little house, as a memorial to the son who had died. It was, Mrs. Travers wrote, the finest tribute they could offer to his memory, that night after night tired and ill and wounded men might find sanctuary, even for a little time, under her care.
Luxuries began to come across the channel, food and dressings and tobacco. Knitted things, too; for another winter was coming, and already the frost lay white on the fields in the mornings. The little house took on a new air of prosperity. There were days when it seemed almost swaggering with opulence.
It had need of everything, however. With the prospect of a second winter, when an advance was impossible, the Germans took to hammering again. Bombardment was incessant. The little village was again under suspicion, and there came days of terror when it seemed as though even the fallen masonry must be reduced to powder. The church went entirely.
By December Sara Lee had ceased to take refuge during the bombardments. The fatalism of the Front had got her. She would die or live according to the great plan, and nothing could change that. She did not greatly care which, except for her work, and even that she felt could be carried on by another as well.
There was no news of Henri, but once the King's equerry, going by, had stopped to see her and had told her the story.
"He was ill, undoubtedly," he said. "Even when he went to London he was ill, and not responsible. The King understands that. He was a brave boy, mademoiselle."
But the last element of hope seemed to go with that verification of his illness. He was delirious, and he had gone in that condition into the filthy chill waters of the inundation. Well and sane there had been a chance, but plunging wild-eyed and reckless, into that hell across, there was none.
She did her best in the evenings to be cheerful, to take the place, in her small and serious fashion, of Henri's old gayety. But the soldiers whispered among themselves that mademoiselle was in grief, as they were, for the blithe young soldier who was gone.
What hope Sara Lee had had died almost entirely early in December. On the evening of a day when a steady rain had turned the roads into slimy pitfalls, and the ditches to canals, there came, brought by a Belgian corporal, the man who swore that Henri had passed him in his trench while the others slept, had shoved him aside, which was unlike his usual courtesy, and had climbed out over the top.
To Sara Lee this Hutin told his story. A short man with a red beard and a kindly smile that revealed teeth almost destroyed from neglect, he was at first diffident in the extreme.
"It was the captain, mademoiselle," he asserted. "I know him well. He has often gone on his errands from near my post. I am"—he smiled—"I am usually in the front line."
"What did he do?"
"He had no cap, mademoiselle. I thought that was odd. And as you know—he does not wear his own uniform on such occasions. But he wore his own uniform, so that at first I did not know what he intended."
"Later on," she asked, "you—did you hear anything?"
"The usual sniping, mademoiselle. Nothing more."
"He went through the inundation?"
"How else could he go? Through the wire first, at the barrier, where there is an opening, if one knows the way, I saw him beyond it, by the light of a fusee. There is a road there, or what was once a road. He stood there. Then the lights went out."
XXX
On a wild night in January Sara Lee inaugurated a new branch of service. There had been a delay in sending up to the Front the men who had been on rest, and an incessant bombardment held the troops prisoners in their trenches.
A field kitchen had been destroyed. The men were hungry, disheartened, wet through. They needed her, she felt. Even the little she could do would help. All day she had made soup, and at evening Marie led from its dilapidated stable the little horse that Henri had once brought up, trundling its cart behind it. The boiler of the cart was scoured, a fire lighted in the fire box. Marie, a country girl, harnessed the shaggy little animal, but with tears of terror.
"You will be killed, mademoiselle," she protested, weeping.
"But I have gone before. Don't you remember the man whose wife was English, and how I wrote a letter for him before he died?"
"What will become of the house if you are killed?"
"Dear Marie," said Sara Lee, "that is all arranged for. You will send to Poperinghe for your aunt, and she will come until Mrs. Cameron or some one else can come from England. And you will stay on. Will you promise that?"
Marie promised in a loud wail.
"Of course I shall come back," Sara Lee said, stirring her soup preparatory to pouring it out. "I shall be very careful."
"You will not come back, mademoiselle. You do not care to live, and to such—"
"Those are the ones who live on," said Sara Lee gravely, and poured out her soup.
She went quite alone. There was a great deal of noise, but no shells fell near her. She led the little horse by its head, and its presence gave her comfort. It had a sense that she had not, too, for it kept her on the road.
In those still early days the Belgian trenches were quite accessible from the rear. There were no long tunneled ways to traverse to reach them. One went along through the darkness until the sound of men's voices, the glare of charcoal in a bucket bored with holes, the flicker of a match, told of the buried army almost underfoot or huddled in its flimsy shelters behind the railway embankment.
Beyond the lines a sentry stopped her, hailing her sharply.
"Qui vive?"
"It is I," she called through the rain. "I have brought some chocolate and some soup."
He lowered his bayonet.
"Pass, mademoiselle."
She went on, the rumbling of her little cart deadened by the Belgian guns.
Through the near-by trenches that night went the word that near the Repose of the Angels—which was but a hole in the ground and scarcely reposeful—there was to be had hot soup and chocolate and cigarettes. A dozen or so at a time, the men were allowed to come. Officers brought their great capes to keep the girl dry. Boards appeared as if by magic for her to stand on. The rain and the bombardment had both ceased, and a full moon made the lagoon across the embankment into a silver lake.
When the last soup had been dipped from the tall boiler, when the final drops of chocolate had oozed from the faucet, Sara Lee turned and went back to the little house again. But before she went she stood a moment staring across toward that land of the shadow on the other side, where Henri had gone and had not returned.
Once, when the King had decorated her, she had wished that, wherever Uncle James might be, on the other side, he could see what was happening. And now she wondered if Henri could know that she had come back, and was again looking after his men while she waited for that reunion he had so firmly believed in.
Then she led the little horse back along the road.
At the poplar trees she turned and looked behind, toward the trenches. The grove was but a skeleton now, a strange and jagged thing of twisted branches, as though it had died in agony. She stood there while the pony nuzzled her gently. If she called, would he come? But, then, all of life was one call now, for her. She went on slowly.
After that it was not unusual for her to go to the trenches, on such nights as no men could come to the little house. Always she was joyously welcomed, and always on her way back she turned to send from the poplar trees that inarticulate aching call that she had come somehow to believe in.
January, wet and raw, went by; February, colder, with snow, was half over. The men had ceased to watch for Henri over the parapet, and his brave deeds had become fireside tales, to be told at home, if ever there were to be homes again for them.
Then one night Henri came back—came as he had gone, out of the shadows that had swallowed him up; came without so much as the sound of a sniper's rifle to herald him. A strange, thin Henri, close to starvation, dripping water over everything from a German uniform, and very close indeed to death before he called out.
There was wild excitement indeed. Bearded private soldiers, forgetting that name and rank of his which must not be told, patted his thin shoulders. Officers who had lived through such horrors as also may not be told, crowded about him and shook hands with him, and with each other.
It was as though from the graveyard back in the fields had come, alive and smiling, some dearly beloved friend.
He would have told the story, but he was wet and weary.
"That can wait," they said, and led him, a motley band of officers and men intermixed, for once forgetting all decorum, toward the village. They overtook the lines of men who had left the trenches and were moving with their slow and weary gait up the road. The news spread through the column. There were muffled cheers. Figures stepped out of the darkness with hands out. Henri clasped as many as he could.
When with his escort he had passed the men they fell, almost without orders, into columns of four, and swung in behind him. There was no band, but from a thousand throats, yet cautiously until they passed the poplar trees, there gradually swelled and grew a marching song.
Behind Henri a strange guard of honor—muddy, tired, torn, even wounded—they marched and sang:
Trou là là, ça ne va guère;
Trou là là, çe ne va pas.
Sara Lee, listening for that first shuffle of many feet that sounded so like the wind in the trees or water over the pebbles of a brook, paused in her work and lifted her head. The rhythm of marching feet came through the wooden shutters. The very building seemed to vibrate with it. And there was a growling sound with it that soon she knew to be the deep voices of singing men.
She went to the door and stood there, looking down the street. Behind her was the warm glow of the lamp, all the snug invitation of the little house.
A group of soldiers had paused in front of the doorway, and from them one emerged—tall, white, infinitely weary—and looked up at her with unbelieving eyes.
After all, there are no words for such meetings. Henri took her hand, still with that sense of unreality, and bent over it. And Sara Lee touched his head as he stooped, because she had called for so long, and only now he had come.
"So you have come back!" she said in what she hoped was a composed tone—because a great many people were listening. He
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