The Amazing Interlude | Page 6

his war reading to the quarter column
in the morning paper entitled "Salient Points of the Day's War News."
What could he know, for instance, of wounded men who were hungry?
Which is what Mabel wrote about.
"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and
something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but just

now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty of it.
But here--yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy. He
had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or
coffee."
It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a
long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government,
thrust out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and
with no matériel of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army.
France had her own problems--her army, non-productive industrially,
and the great and constantly growing British forces quartered there,
paying for what they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of
the starvation of German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know
and may never know is of the struggle during those early days to feed
the heroic Belgian Army in their wet and almost untenable trenches.
Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained
to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing?
Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew
that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny
living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as
pointed with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over
there Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and--put on her engagement
ring.
Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned
adoringly to her, Sara Lee formulated a question:
"Don't you sometimes feel as though you'd like to go to France and
fight?"
"What for?"
"Well, they need men, don't they?"
"I guess they don't need me, honey. I'd be the dickens of a lot of use!
Never fired a gun in my life."

"You could learn. It isn't hard."
Harvey sat upright and stared at her.
"Oh, if you want me to go--" he said, and waited.
Sara Lee twisted her ring on her finger.
"Nobody wants anybody to go," she said not very elegantly. "I'd
just--I'd rather like to think you wanted to go."
That was almost too subtle for Harvey. Something about him was
rather reminiscent of Uncle James on mornings when he was
determined not to go to church.
"It's not our fight," he said. "And as far as that goes, I'm not so sure
there isn't right on both sides. Or wrong. Most likely wrong. I'd look
fine going over there to help the Allies, and then making up my mind it
was the British who'd spilled the beans. Now let's talk about something
interesting--for instance, how much we love each other."
It was always "we" with Harvey. In his simple creed if a girl accepted a
man and let him kiss her and wore his ring it was a reciprocal love
affair. It never occurred to him that sometimes as the evening dragged
toward a close Sara Lee was just a bit weary of his arms, and that she
sought, after he had gone, the haven of her little white room, and closed
the door, and had to look rather a long time at his photograph before
she was in a properly loving mood again.
But that night after his prolonged leave-taking Sara Lee went upstairs
to her room and faced the situation.
She was going to marry Harvey. She was committed to that. And she
loved him; not as he cared, perhaps, but he was a very definite part of
her life. Once or twice when he had been detained by business she had
missed him, had put in a lonely and most unhappy evening.
Sara Lee had known comparatively few men. In that small and simple

circle of hers, with its tennis court in a vacant lot, its one or two
inexpensive cars, its picnics and porch parties, there was none of the
usual give and take of more sophisticated circles. Boys and girls paired
off rather early, and remained paired by tacit agreement; there was
comparatively little shifting. There were few free lances among the
men, and none among the girls. When she was seventeen Harvey had
made it known unmistakably that Sara Lee was his, and no trespassing.
And for two years he had without intentional selfishness kept Sara Lee
for himself.
That was how matters stood that January night when Sara Lee went
upstairs after Harvey had gone and read Mabel's letter, with Harvey's