The Amazing Interlude

The Amazing Interlude

Project Gutenberg's The Amazing Interlude, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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Title: The Amazing Interlude
Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart
Release Date: December 23, 2004 [EBook #1590]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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AMAZING INTERLUDE ***

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[Illustration: Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles.]

THE AMAZING INTERLUDE
By Mary Roberts Rinehart

ILLUSTRATIONS BY THE KINNEYS
[Transcriber's Note: Troy and Margaret West]
1918

ILLUSTRATIONS
Officers stopping in to fight their paper and pin battles.
Henri explained the method.
"That I should have hurt you so!" he said softly.
That Henri might be living, somewhere, that some day the Belgians
might go home again.

I
The stage on which we play our little dramas of life and love has for
most of us but one setting. It is furnished out with approximately the
same things. Characters come, move about and make their final exits
through long-familiar doors. And the back drop remains approximately
the same from beginning to end. Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is the
background for the moving figures of the play.
So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every appearance of
permanency. The great Scene Painter apparently intended that there
should be no change of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected
none.
But now and then amazing things are done on this great stage of ours:
lights go down; the back drop, which had given the illusion of solidity,
reveals itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation takes place.
Beyond the once solid wall strange figures move on--a new mise en
scène, with the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom we left

knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy--Sara Lee became a fairy, of a
sort--and meets the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course. And
then the lights go out, and it is the same old back drop again, and the
lady is back by the fire--but with a memory.
This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy's memory--and of something
more.
* * * * *
The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing her part in the
setting of a city in Pennsylvania. An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It is
only fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither quality. She was
far from ugly, and very, very far from rich. She had started her part
with a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one they had gone
away into the wings and had not come back. At nineteen she was alone
knitting by the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop was of
painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for its moment, was the forest
of adventure. A strange forest, too--one that Sara Lee would not have
recognised as a forest. And a prince of course--but a prince as strange
and mysterious as the forest.
The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented. If it was
resignation rather than content, no one but Sara Lee knew the
difference. Knitting, too; but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid,
knitting an afghan against an interesting event which involved a friend
of hers.
Sara Lee rather deplored the event--in her own mind, of course, for in
her small circle young unmarried women accepted the major events of
life without question, and certainly without conversation. She never, for
instance, allowed her Uncle James, with whom she lived, to see her
working at the afghan; and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be
a sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions.
Sara Lee's days, up to the twentieth of December, 1914, had been much
alike. In the mornings she straightened up her room, which she had
copied from one in a woman's magazine, with the result that it gave

somehow the impression of a baby's bassinet, being largely dotted
Swiss and ribbon. Yet in a way it was a perfect setting for Sara Lee
herself. It was fresh and virginal, and very, very neat and white. A
resigned little room, like Sara Lee, resigned to being tucked away in a
corner and to having no particular outlook. Peaceful, too.
Sometimes in the morning between straightening her room and going to
the market for Aunt Harriet, Sara Lee looked at a newspaper. So she
knew there was a war. She read the headings, and when