Part 54

There was another clipping, but no comment. It recorded the death of a Reginald Alexander Travers, aged thirty.

It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself those days, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegation of the English--their attitude not so much of suppressing their private griefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people, they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a private matter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbroken front, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strange one, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England.

A people who had for centuries insisted not only on its rights but on its privileges was now giving as freely as ever it had demanded. It was as though, having hoarded all those years, it had but been hoarding against the day of payment. As it had received it gave--in money, in effort, in life. And without pretext.

So the Traverses, having given up all that had made life for them, sent a clipping only, and no comment. Sara Lee, through a mist of tears, saw them alone in their drawing-room, having tea as usual, and valiantly speaking of small things, and bravely facing the future, but never, in the bitterest moments, making complaint or protest.

Would America, she wondered, if her hour came, be so brave? Harvey had a phrase for such things. It was "stand the gaff." Would America stand the gaff so well? Courage was America's watchword, but a courage of the body rather than of the soul--physical courage, not moral. What would happen if America entered the struggle and the papers were filled, as were the British and the French, with long casualty lists, each name a knife thrust somewhere?

She wondered.

And then, before long, it was Sara Lee's turn to stand the gaff. There was another letter, a curiously incoherent one from Harvey's sister. She referred to something that the society had done, and hoped that Sara Lee would take it in kindness, as it was meant. Harvey was well and much happier. She was to try to understand Harvey's part. He had been almost desperate. Evidently the letter had preceded one that should have arrived at the same time. Sara Lee was sadly puzzled. She went to Henri with it, but he could make nothing out of it. There was nothing to do but to wait.

The next night Henri was to go through the lines again. Since his wounding he had been working on the Allied side, and fewer lights there were in his district that flashed the treacherous message across the flood, between night and morning. But now it was imperative that he go through the German lines again. It was feared that with grappling hooks the enemy was slowly and cautiously withdrawing the barbed wire from the inundated fields; and that could mean but one thing.

On the night he was to go Henri called Sara Lee from the crowded salle à manger and drawing her into the room across closed the door.

"Mademoiselle," he said gravely, "once before, long ago, you permitted me to kiss you. Will you do that for me again?"

She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She did not now. For there was a change in Sara Lee as well as in her outlook. She had been seeing for months the shortness of life, the brief tenure men held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hours that remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and her charm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, to cheer, to comfort and help--that was necessary, because soon the chance might be gone, and there would be long aching years of regret.

So she kissed him gravely and looked up into his eyes, her own full of tears.

"God bless and keep you, dear Henri," she said.

Then she went back to her work.

XXII

Much of Sara Lee's life at home had faded. She seemed to be two people. One was the girl who had knitted the afghan for Anna, and had hidden it away from Uncle James' kind but curious eyes. And one was this present Sara Lee, living on the edge of eternity, and seeing men die or suffer horribly, not to gain anything--except perhaps some honorable advancement for their souls--but that there might be preserved, at any cost, the right of honest folk to labor in their fields, to love, to pray, and at last to sleep in the peace of God.

She had lost the past and she dared not look into the future. So she was living each day as it came, with its labor, its love, its prayers and at last its sleep. Even Harvey seemed remote and stern and bitter. She reread his letters often, but they were forced. And after a time she realized another quality in them. They were self-centered. It was his anxiety, his loneliness, his humiliation. Sara Lee's eyes were looking out, those days, over a suffering world. Harvey's eyes were turned in on himself.

She realized this, but she never formulated it, even to herself. What she did acknowledge was a growing fear of the reunion which must come sometime--that he was cherishing still further bitterness against that day, that he would say things that he would regret later. Sometimes the thought of that day came to her when she was doing a dressing, and her hands would tremble.

Henri had not returned when, the second day after René's death, the letter came which recalled her. She opened it eagerly. Though from Harvey there usually came at the best veiled reproach, the society had always sent its enthusiastic approval.

She read it twice before she understood, and it was only when she read Belle's letter again that she began to comprehend. She was recalled; and the recall was Harvey's work.

She was very close to hating him that day. He had never understood. She would go back to him, as she had promised; but always, all the rest of their lives, there would be this barrier between them. To the barrier of his bitterness would be added her own resentment. She could never even talk to him of her work, of those great days when in her small way she had felt herself a part of the machinery of mercy of the war.

Harvey had lost something out of Sara Lee's love for him. He had done it himself, madly, despairingly. She still loved him, she felt. Nothing could change that or her promise to him. But with that love there was something now of fear. And she felt, too, that after all the years she had known him she had not known him at all. The Harvey she had known was a tender and considerate man, soft-spoken, slow to wrath, always gentle. But the Harvey of his letters and of the recall was a stranger.

It was the result of her upbringing, probably, that she had no thought of revolt. Her tie to Harvey was a real tie. By her promise to him her life was no longer hers to order. It belonged to some one else, to be ordered for her. But, though she accepted, she was too clear a thinker not to resent.

When Henri returned, toward dawn of the following night, he did not come alone. Sara Lee, rising early, found two men in her kitchen--one of them Henri, who was making coffee, and a soldier in a gray-green uniform, with a bad bruise over one eye and a sulky face. His hands were tied, but otherwise he sat at ease, and Henri, having made the coffee, held a cup to his lips.

"It is good for the spirits, man," he said in German. "Drink it."

The German took it, first gingerly, then eagerly. Henri was in high good humor.

"See, I have brought you a gift!" he exclaimed on seeing Sara Lee. "What shall we do with him? Send him to America? To show the appearance of the madmen of Europe?"

The prisoner was only a boy, such a boy as Henri himself; but a peasant, and muscular. Beside his bulk Henri looked slim as a reed. Henri eyed him with a certain tolerant humor.