第44章

The general was very tall.In her short skirt and with flying hair she looked like a child beside him as they walked across the fields.Suddenly Sara Lee was terribly afraid she was going to cry.

The troops stood rigidly at attention.And a cold wind flapped Sara Lee's skirts, and the guns hammered at Ypres, and the general blew on his fingers.And soon a low open car came down the street and the King got out.Sara Lee watched him coming - his tall, slightly stooped figure, his fair hair, his plain blue uniform.Sara Lee had never seen a king before, and she had always thought of them as sitting up on a sort of platform - never as trudging through spring mud.

"What shall I do?" she asked nervously.

"He will shake hands, mademoiselle.Bow as he approaches.That is all."The amazing interlude, indeed! With Sara Lee being decorated by the King, and troops drawn up to do her honor, and over all the rumbling of the great guns.A palpitating and dazed Sara Lee, when the decoration was fastened to her black jacket, a Sara Lee whose hat blew off at exactly the worst moment and rolled, end on, like a hoop, into a puddle.

But, oddly, she did not mind about the hat.She had only one conscious thought just then.She hoped that, wherever Uncle James might be in that world of the gone before, he might know what was happening to her - or even see it He would have liked it.He had believed in the Belgians and inthe King.And now - The King did not go at once.He went back to the little house and went through it.And he and one of his generals climbed to the upper floor, and the King stood looking out silently toward the land he loved and which for a time was no longer his.

He came down after a time, stooping his tall figure in the low doorway, and said he would like some tea.So Marie put the kettle on, and Sara Lee and the King talked.It was all rather dazing.Every now and then she forgot certain instructions whispered her by the general, and after a time the King said: "Why do you do that, mademoiselle?"For Sara Lee, with an intent face and moving lips, had been stepping backward.

Sara Lee flushed to the eyes.

"Because, sire, I was told to remain at a distance of six feet.""But we are being informal," said the King, smiling."And it is a very little room."Sara Lee, who had been taught in the schoolroom that kings are usurpers of the divine rights of the people - Sara Lee lost just a bit of her staunch democracy that day.She saw the King of the Belgians for what he really was, a ruler, but a symbol as well.He represented his country, as the Flag she loved represented hers.The flag was America, the King was Belgium.That was all.

It was a very humble and flushed Sara Lee who watched the gray car go lying up the street later on.She went in and told the whole story to Harvey's picture, but it was difficult to feel that he was hearing.His eyes were turned away and his face was set and stern.And at last she gave it up.This thing which meant so much to her would never mean anything to Harvey.She knew, even then, what he would say.

"Decorate you! I should think they might.Medals are cheap.Everybody over there is getting medals.You feed their men and risk your life and your reputation, and they give you a thing to pin on.It's cheap at the price."And later on those were Harvey's very words.But to be fair to him they were but the sloughing of a wound that would not heal.

That evening Henri came again.He was, for the first time, his gay self again - at least on the surface.It was as though, knowing what he was going into, he would leave with Sara Lee no feeling, if he never returned, that she had inflicted a lasting hurt.He was everywhere in the little house, elbowing his way among the men with his cheery nonsense, bantering the weary ones until they smiled, carrying hot water for Sara Lee and helping her now and then with a bad dressing.

"If you would do it in this fashion, mademoiselle," he would say, "with one turn of the bandage over the elbow -"But it won't hold that way."

"You say that to me, mademoiselle? I who have taught you all you know of bandaging?"They would wrangle a bit, and end by doing it in Sara Lee's way.

He had a fund of nonsense that he drew on, too, when a dressing was painful.It would run like this, to an early accompaniment of groans:

"Pierre, what can you put in your left hand that you cannot place in the right? Stop grunting like a pig, and think, man!"Pierre would give a final rumble and begin to think deeply."I cannot think.I - in my left hand, monsieur le capitaine?" "In your left hand."The little crowd in the dressing room would draw in close about the table to listen.

"I do not know, monsieur."

"Idiot!" Henri would say."Your right elbow, man!" And the dressing was done.

He had an inexhaustible stock of such riddles, almost never guessed.He would tell the answer and then laugh delightedly.And pain seemed to leave the little room when he entered it.

It was that night that Henri disappeared.