The Amazing Interlude | Page 9

read slowly. He did nothing
quickly except assert his masculine domination. He had all the faults of
his virtues; he was as slow as he was sure, as unimaginative as he was
faithful.

He read it and gave it back to her.
"I don't think you mean it," he said. "I give you credit for too much
sense. Maybe some one is needed over there. I guess things are pretty
bad. But why should you make it your affair? There are about a million
women in this country that haven't got anything else to do. Let them
go."
"Some of them will. But they're afraid, mostly."
"Afraid! My God, I should think they would be afraid! And you're
asking me to let you go into danger, to put off our wedding while you
wander about over there with a million men and no women and--"
"You're wrong, Harvey dear," said Sara Lee in a low voice. "I am not
asking you at all. I am telling you that I am going."
* * * * *
Sara Lee's leaving made an enormous stir in her small community.
Opinion was divided. She was right according to some; she was mad
according to others. The women of the Methodist Church, finding a
real field of activity, stood behind her solidly. Guaranties of funds
came in in a steady flow, though the amounts were small; and, on the
word going about that she was to start a soup kitchen for the wounded,
housewives sent in directions for making their most cherished soups.
Sara Lee, going to a land where the meat was mostly horse and where
vegetables were scarce and limited to potatoes, Brussels sprouts and
cabbage, found herself the possessor of recipes for making such
sick-room dainties as mushroom soup, cream of asparagus, clam broth
with whipped cream, and from Mrs. Gregory, the wealthy woman of
the church--green turtle and consomme.
She was very busy and rather sad. She was helping Aunt Harriet to
close the house and getting her small wardrobe in order. And once a
day she went to a school of languages and painfully learned from a
fierce and kindly old Frenchman a list of French nouns and prefixes

like this: Le livre, le crayon, la plume, la fenêtre, and so on. By the end
of ten days she could say: "La rose sent-elle bon?"
Considering that Harvey came every night and ran the gamut of the
emotions, from pleading and expostulation at eight o'clock to black
fury at ten, when he banged out of the house, Sara Lee was amazingly
calm. If she had moments of weakness, when the call from overseas
was less insistent than the call for peace and protection--if the nightly
drawn picture of the Leete house, with tile mantels and a white
bathroom, sometimes obtruded itself as against her approaching
homelessness, Sara Lee made no sign.
She had her photograph taken for her passport, and when Harvey
refused one she sent it to him by mail, with the word "Please" in the
corner. Harvey groaned over it, and got it out at night and scolded it
wildly; and then slept with it under his pillows, when he slept at all.
Not Sara Lee, and certainly not Harvey, knew what was calling her.
And even later, when waves of homesickness racked her with wild
remorse, she knew that she had had to go and that she could not return
until she had done the thing for which she had been sent, whatever that
might be.

III
The first thing that struck Sara Lee was the way she was saying her
nightly prayers in all sorts of odd places. In trains and in hotels and,
after sufficient interval, in the steamer. She prayed under these novel
circumstances to be made a better girl, and to do a lot of good over
there, and to be forgiven for hurting Harvey. She did this every night,
and then got into her narrow bed and studied French nouns--because
she had decided that there was no time for verbs--and numbers, which
put her to sleep.
"Un, deux, trois, quatre, cinq," Sara Lee would begin, and go on,
rocking gently in her berth as the steamer rolled, "Vingt, vingt-et-un,

vingt-deux, trente, trente-et-un--" Her voice would die away. The book
on the floor and Harvey's picture on the tiny table, Sara Lee would
sleep. And as the ship trembled the light over her head would shine on
Harvey's ring, and it glistened like a tear.
One thing surprised her as she gradually met some of her fellow
passengers. She was not alone on her errand. Others there were on
board, young and old women, and men, too, who had felt the call of
mercy and were going, as ignorant as she, to help. As