Chapter XXI

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

　　By the time Henri was well enough to resume his former activities it wasalmost the first of May. The winter quiet was over with a vengeance, andthe Allies were hammering hard with their first tolerably full supply ofhigh-explosive shells.

　　Cheering reports came daily to the little house—, of rapidly augmentingarmies, of big guns on caterpillar trucks that were moving slowly up tothe Allied Front. Great Britain had at last learned her lesson, thatonly shells of immense destructiveness were of any avail against theGerman batteries. She was moving heaven and earth to get them, but thesupply was still inadequate. With the new shells experiments were beingmade in barrage fire—costly experiments now and then; but the Allieswere apt in learning the ugly game of modern war.

　　Only on the Belgian Front was there small change. The shattered armywas being freshly outfitted. England was sending money and ammunition,and on the sand dunes small bodies of fresh troops drilled and smiledgrimly and drilled again. But there were not, as in England and inFrance, great bodies of young men to draw from. Too many had beencaught beyond the German wall of steel.

　　Yet a wave of renewed courage had come with the sun and the greenfields. And conditions had improved for the Belgians in other ways.They were being paid, for one thing, with something like regularity.Food was better and more plentiful. One day Henri appeared at the topof the street and drove down triumphantly a small unclipped horse,which trundled behind it a vertical boiler on wheels with fire box andstovepipe.

　　"A portable kitchen!" he explained. "See, here for soup and here forcoffee. And more are coming."

　　"Very soon, Henri, they will not need me," Sara Lee said wistfully.

　　But he protested almost violently. He even put the question to thehorse, and blowing in his ear made him shake his head in the negative.

　　She was needed, indeed. To the great base hospital at La Panne wentmore and more wounded men. But to the little house of mercy came thesmall odds and ends in increasing numbers. Medical men were scarce, andbadly overworked. There was talk, for a time, of sending a surgeon tothe little house, but it came to nothing. La Panne was not far away,and all the surgeons they could get there were not too many.

　　So the little house went on much as before. Henri had moved to the mill.He was at work again, and one day, in the King's villa and quietly,because of many reasons, Henri, a very white and erect Henri, received asecond medal, the highest for courage that could be given.

　　He did not tell Sara Lee.

　　But though he and the men who served under him worked hard, they couldnot always perform miracles. The German planes still outnumbered theAllied ones. They had grown more daring with the spring, too, andwhatever Henri might learn of ground operations, he could not foretellthose of the air.

　　On a moonlight night in early May, Sara Lee, setting out her dressings,heard a man running up the street. René challenged him sharply, onlyto step aside. It was Henri. He burst in on Sara Lee.

　　"To the cellar, mademoiselle!" he said.

　　"A bombardment?" asked Sara Lee.

　　"From the air. They may pass over, but there are twelve taubes, andthey are circling overhead."

　　The first bomb dropped then in the street. It was white moonlight andthe Germans must have seen that there were no troops. Probably it wasas Henri said later, that they had learned of the little house, andsince it brought such aid and comfort as might be it was to be destroyed.

　　The house of the mill went with the second bomb. Then followed adeafening uproar as plane after plane dropped its shells on the deadtown. Marie and Sara Lee were in the cellar by that time, but thecellar was scarcely safer than the floor above. From a bombardment byshells from guns miles away there was protection. From a bomb droppedfrom the sky, the floors above were practically useless.

　　Only Henri and René remained on the street floor. Henri wasextinguishing lights. In the passage René stood, not willing to takerefuge until Henri, whom he adored, had done so. For a moment theuproar ceased, and in a spirit of bravado René stepped out into themoonlight and made a gesture of derision into the air.

　　He fell there, struck by a piece of splintered shell.

　　"Come, René!" Henri called. "The brave are those who live to fightagain, not—"

　　But René's figure against the moonlight was gone. Henri ran to thedoorway then and found him lying, his head on the little step where hehad been wont to sit and whittle and sing his Tipperaree. He was dead.Henri carried him in and laid him in the little passage, very reverently.Then he went below.

　　"Where is René?" Sara Lee asked from the darkness.

　　"A foolish boy," said Henri, a catch in his throat. "He is, I think,watching these fiends of the air, from some shelter."

　　"There is no shelter," shivered the girl.

　　He groped for her hand in the darkness, and so they stood, hand in hand,like two children, waiting for what might come.

　　It was not until the thing was over that he told her. He had gone upfirst and so that she would not happen on his silent figure unwarned,had carried René to the open upper floor, where he lay, singularlypeaceful, face up to the awful beauty of the night.

　　"Good night, little brother," Henri said to him, and left him there witha heavy heart. Never again would René sit and whittle on the doorstepand sing his tuneless Tipperaree. Never again would he gaze with boyishadoring eyes at Sara Lee as she moved back and forth in the little house.

　　Henri stared up at the sky. The moon looked down, cold, and cruellybright, on the vanishing squadron of death, on the destroyed town and onthe boy's white face. Somewhere, Henri felt, vanishing like the Germantaubes, but to peace instead of war, was moving René's brave and smilingspirit—a boyish angel, eager and dauntless, and still looking up.

　　Henri took off his cap and crossed himself.

　　Another sentry took René's place the next day, but the little house hadlost something it could not regain. And a greater loss was to come.

　　Jean brought out the mail that day. For Sara Lee, moving about silentand red-eyed, there was a letter from Mr. Travers. He inclosed a hundredpounds and a clipping from a London newspaper entitled The Little Houseof Mercy.

　　"Evidently," he wrote, "you were right and we were wrong. One-half ofthe inclosed check is from my wife, who takes this method of showing heraffectionate gratitude. The balance is from myself. Once, some monthsago, I said to you that almost you restored my faith in human nature.To-day I may say that, in these hours of sorrow for us all, what you havedone and are doing has brought into my gray day a breath of hope."

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

　　It was then that Sara Lee, who was by way of thinking for herself thosedays, and of thinking clearly, recognized the strange new self-abnegationof the English—their attitude not so much of suppressing their privategriefs as of refusing to obtrude them. A strongly individualistic people,they were already commencing to think nationally. Grief was a privatematter, to be borne privately. To the world they must present an unbrokenfront, an unshaken and unshakable faith. A new attitude, and a strangeone, for grumbling, crochety, gouty-souled England.

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

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

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

　　She wondered.

　　And then, before long, it was Sara Lee's turn to stand the gaff. Therewas another letter, a curiously incoherent one from Harvey's sister. Shereferred to something that the society had done, and hoped that Sara Leewould take it in kindness, as it was meant. Harvey was well and muchhappier. She was to try to understand Harvey's part. He had beenalmost desperate. Evidently the letter had preceded one that should havearrived at the same time. Sara Lee was sadly puzzled. She went to Henriwith it, but he could make nothing out of it. There was nothing to dobut to wait.

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

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

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

　　She kissed him at once gravely. Once she would have flushed. She didnot 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 tenuremen held on it, the value of such happiness as might be for the hoursthat remained. She was a woman now, for all her slim young body and hercharm of youth. Values had changed. To love, and to show that love, tocheer, to comfort and help—that was necessary, because soon the chancemight 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 oftears.

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

　　Then she went back to her work.