The Best of Mary Roberts Rinehart

by Mary Roberts Rinehart

  "Not yet, mademoiselle."

  "Leave a warm fire," Sara Lee said. "He will probably come in later."

  Maurice went away, with a civil good night. Sara Lee stood in the doorway after he had gone, looking out. Farther along the line there was a bombardment going on. She knew now what a bombardment meant and her brows contracted. Somewhere there in the trenches men were enduring that, while Henri--

  She said a little additional prayer that night, which was that she should have courage to say to him what she felt--that there were big things to do, and that it should not all be left to these smiling, ill-clad peasant soldiers.

  At that moment Henri, in his gray-green uniform, was cutting wire before a German trench, one of a party of German soldiers, who could not know in the darkness that there had been a strange addition to their group. Cutting wire and learning many things which it was well that he should know.

  Now and then, in perfect German, he whispered a question. Always he received a reply. And stowed it away in his tenacious memory for those it most concerned.

  At daylight he was asleep by Sara Lee's kitchen fire. And at daylight Sara Lee was awakened by much firing, and putting on a dressing gown she went out to see what was happening. René was in the street looking toward the poplar trees.

  "An attack," he said briefly.

  "You mean--the Germans?"

  "Yes, mademoiselle."

  She went back into the little ruined house, heavy-hearted. She knew now what it meant, an attack. That night there would be ambulances in the street, and word would come up that certain men were gone--would never seek warmth and shelter in her kitchen or beg like children for a second bowl of soup.

  On the kitchen floor by the dying fire Henri lay asleep.

  XIII

  Much has been said of the work of spies--said and written. Here is a woman in Paris sending forbidden messages on a marked coin. Men are tapped on the shoulder by a civil gentleman in a sack suit, and walk away with him, never to be seen again.

  But of one sort of spy nothing has been written and but little is known. Yet by him are battles won or lost. On the intelligence he brings attacks are prepared for and counter-attacks launched. It is not always the airman, in these days of camouflage, who brings word of ammunition trains or of new batteries.

  In the early days of the war the work of the secret service at the Front was of the gravest importance. There were fewer air machines, and observation from the air was a new science. Also trench systems were incomplete. Between them, known to a few, were breaks of solid land, guarded from behind. To one who knew, it was possible, though dangerous beyond words, to cross the inundated country that lay between the Belgian Front and the German lines, and even with good luck to go farther.

  Henri, for instance, on that night before had left the advanced trench at the railway line, had crawled through the Belgian barbed wire, and had advanced, standing motionless as each star shell burst overhead, and then moving on quickly. The inundation was his greatest difficulty. Shallow in most places, it was full of hidden wire and crisscrossed with irrigation ditches. Once he stumbled into one, but he got out by swimming. Had he been laden with a rifle and equipment it might have been difficult.

  He swore to himself as his feet touched ground again. For a star shell was hanging overhead, and his efforts had sent wide and ever increasingly widening circles over the placid surface of the lagoon. Let them lap to the German outposts and he was lost.

  Henri's method was peculiar to himself. Where there was dry terrain he did as did the others, crouched and crept. But here in the salt marshes, where the sea had been called to Belgium's aid, he had evolved a system of moving, neck deep in water, stopping under the white night lights, advancing in the darkness. There was no shelter. The country was flat as a hearth.

  He would crawl out at last in the darkness and lie flat, as the dead lie. And then, inch by inch, he would work his way forward, by routes that he knew. Sometimes he went entirely through the German lines, and reconnoitered on the roads behind. They were shallow lines then, for the inundation made the country almost untenable, and a charge in force from the Belgians across was unlikely.

  Henri knew his country well, as well as he loved it. In a farmhouse behind the German lines he sometimes doffed his wet gray-green uniform and put on the clothing of a Belgian peasant. Trust Henri then for being a lout, a simple fellow who spoke only Flemish--but could hear in many tongues. Watch him standing at crossroads and marveling at big guns that rumble by.

  At first Henri had wished, having learned of an attack, to be among those who repelled it. Then one day his King had sent for him to come to that little village which was now his capital city.

  He had been sent in alone and had found the King at the table, writing. Henri bowed and waited. They were not unlike, these two men, only Henri was younger and lighter, and where the King's eyes were gray Henri's were blue. Such a queer setting for a king it was--a tawdry summer home, ill-heated and cheaply furnished. But by the presence of Belgium's man of all time it became royal.

  So Henri bowed and waited, and soon the King got up and shook hands with him. As a matter of fact they knew each other rather well, but to explain more would be to tell that family name of Henri's which must never be known.

  "Sit down," said the King gravely. And he got a box of cigars from the mantelpiece and offered it. "I sent for you because I want to talk to you. You are doing valuable work."

  "I am glad you think it so, sire," said Henri rather unhappily, because he felt what was coming. "But I cannot do it all the time. There are intervals--"

  An ordinary mortal may not interrupt a king, but a king may interrupt anything, except perhaps a German bombardment.

  "Intervals, of course. If there were not you would be done in a month."

  "But I am a soldier. My place is--"

  "Your place is where you are most useful."

  Henri was getting nothing out of the cigar. He flung it away and got up.

  "I want to fight too," he said stubbornly. "We need every man, and I am--rather a good shot. I do this other because I can do it. I speak their infernal tongue. But it's dirty business at the best, sire." He remembered to put in the sire, but rather ungraciously. Indeed he shot it out like a bullet.

  "Dirty business!" said the King thoughtfully. "I see what you mean. It is, of course. But--not so dirty as the things they have done, and are doing."

  He sat still and let Henri stamp up and down, because, as has been said, he knew the boy. And he had never been one to insist on deference, which was why he got so much of it. But at last he got up and when Henri stood still, rather ashamed of himself, he put an arm over the boy's shoulders.

  "I want you to do this thing, for me. And this thing only," he said. "It is the work you do best. There are others who can fight, but--I do not know any one else who can do as you have done."

  Henri promised. He would have promised to go out and drown himself in the sea, just beyond the wind-swept little garden, for the tall grave man who stood before him. Then he bowed and went out, and the King went back to his plain pine table and his work. That was the reason why Sara Lee found him asleep on the floor by her kitchen stove that morning, and went back to her cold bed to lie awake and think. But no explanation came to her.

  The arrival of Marie roused Henri. The worst of the bombardment was over, but there was far-away desultory firing. He listened carefully before, standing outside in the cold, he poured over his head and shoulders a pail of cold water. He was drying himself vigorously when he heard Sara Lee's voice in the kitchen.

  The day began for Henri when first he saw the girl. It might be evening, but it was the beginning for him. So he went in when he had finished his toilet and bowed over her hand.

  "You are cold, mademoiselle."

  "I think I am nervous. There was an attack this morning."

  "Yes?"

  Marie had gone into the next room, and Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to his.


  "Henri," she said desperately--it was the first time she had called him that--"I have something to say to you, and it's not very pleasant."

  "You are going home?" It was the worst thing he could think of. But she shook her head.

  "You will think me most ungrateful and unkind."

  "You? Kindness itself!"

  "But this is different. It is not for myself. It is because I care a great deal about--about--"

  "Mademoiselle!"

  "About your honor. And somehow this morning, when I found you here asleep, and those poor fellows in the trenches fighting--"

  Henri stared at her. So that was it! And he could never tell her. He was sworn to secrecy by every tradition and instinct of his work. He could never tell her, and she would go on thinking him a shirker and a coward. She would be grateful. She would be sweetness itself. But deep in her heart she would loathe him, as only women can hate for a failing they never forgive.

  "But I have told you," he said rather wildly, "I am not idle. I do certain things--not much, but of a degree of importance."

  "You do not fight."

  In Sara Lee's defense many things may be urged--her ignorance of modern warfare; the isolation of her lack of knowledge of the language; but, perhaps more than anything, a certain rigidity of standard that comprehended no halfway ground. Right was right and wrong was wrong to her in those days. Men were brave or were cowards. Henri was worthy or unworthy. And she felt that, for all his kindness to her, he was unworthy.

  He could have set himself right with a word, at that. But his pride was hurt. He said nothing except, when she asked if he had minded what she said, to reply:

  "I am sorry you feel as you do. I am not angry."

  He went away, however, without breakfast. Sara Lee heard his car going at its usual breakneck speed up the street, and went to the door. She would have called him back if she could, for his eyes haunted her. But he did not look back.

  XIV

  For four days the gray car did not come again. Supplies appeared in another gray car, driven by a surly Fleming. The waking hours were full, as usual. Sara Lee grew a little thin, and seemed to be always listening. But there was no Henri, and something that was vivid and joyous seemed to have gone out of the little house.

  Even Marie no longer sang as she swept or washed the kettles, and Sara Lee, making up the records to send home, put little spirit into the letter that went with them.

  On the second day she wrote to Harvey.

  "I am sorry that you feel as you do," she wrote, perhaps unconsciously using Henri's last words to her. "I have not meant to be cruel. And if you were here you would realize that whether others could have done what I am doing or not--and of course many could--it is worth doing. I hear that other women are establishing houses like this, but the British and the French will not allow women so near the lines. The men come in at night from the trenches so tired, so hungry and so cold. Some of them are wounded too. I dress the little wounds. I do give them something, Harvey dear--if it is only a reminder that there are homes in the world, and everything is not mud and waiting and killing."

  She told him that his picture was on her mantel, but she did not say that a corner of her room had been blown away or that the mantel was but a plank from a destroyed house. And she sent a great deal of love, but she did not say that she no longer wore his ring on her finger. And, of course, she was coming back to him if he still wanted her.

  More than Henri's absence was troubling Sara Lee those days. Indeed she herself laid all her anxiety to one thing, a serious one at that. With all the marvels of Henri's buying, and Jean's, her money was not holding out. The scope of the little house had grown with its fame. Now and then there were unexpected calls, too--Marie's mother, starving in Havre; sickness and death in the little town at the crossroads: a dozen small emergencies, but adding to the demands on her slender income. She had, as a matter of fact, already begun to draw on her private capital.

  And during the days when no gray car appeared she faced the situation, took stock, as it were, and grew heavy-eyed and wistful.

  On the fifth day the gray car came again, but Jean drove it alone. He disclaimed any need for sympathy over his wound, and with René's aid carried in the supplies.

  There was the business of checking them off, and the further business of Sara Lee's paying for them in gold. She sat at the table, Jean across, and struggled with centimes and francs and louis d'or, an engrossed frown between her eyebrows.

  Jean, sitting across, thought her rather changed. She smiled very seldom, and her eyes were perhaps more steady. It was a young girl he and Henri had brought out to the little house. It was a very serious and rather anxious young woman who sat across from him and piled up the money he had brought back into little stacks.

  "Jean," she said finally, "I am not going to be able to do it."

  "To do what?"

  "To continue--here."

  "No?"

  "You see I had a little money of my own, and twenty pounds I got in London. You and--and Henri have done miracles for me. But soon I shall have used all my own money, except enough to take me back. And now I shall have to start on my English notes. After that--"

  "You are too good to the men. These cigarettes, now--you could do without them."

  "But they are very cheap, and they mean so much, Jean."

  She sat still, her hands before her on the table. From the kitchen came the bubbling of the eternal soup. Suddenly a tear rolled slowly down her cheek. She had a hatred of crying in public, but Jean apparently did not notice.

  "The trouble, mademoiselle, is that you are trying to feed and comfort too many."

  "Jean," she said suddenly, "where is Henri?"

  "In England, I think."

  The only clear thought in Sara Lee's mind was that Henri was not in France, and that he had gone without telling her. She had hurt him horribly. She knew that. He might never come back to the little house of mercy. There was, in Henri, for all his joyousness, an implacable strain. And she had attacked his honor. What possible right had she to do that?

  The memory of all his thoughtful kindness came back, and it was a pale and distracted Sara Lee who looked across the table at Jean.

  "Did he tell you anything?"

  "Nothing, mademoiselle."

  "He is very angry with me, Jean."

  "But surely no, mademoiselle. With you? It is impossible."

  But though they said nothing more, Jean considered the matter deeply. He understood now, for instance, a certain strangeness in Henri's manner before his departure. They had quarreled, these two. Perhaps it was as well, though Jean was by now a convert to Sara Lee. But he looked out, those days, on but half a world, did Jean. So he saw only the woman hunger in Henri, and nothing deeper. And in Sara Lee a woman, and nothing more.

  And--being Jean he shrugged his shoulders.

  They fell to discussing ways and means. The chocolate could be cut out, but not the cigarettes. Sara Lee, arguing vehemently for them and trying to forget other things, remembered suddenly how Uncle James had hated cigarettes, and that Harvey himself disapproved of them. Somehow Harvey seemed, those days, to present a constant figure of disapproval. He gave her no moral support.

  At Jean's suggestion she added to her report of so many men fed with soup, so much tobacco, sort not specified, so many small wounds dressed--a request that if possible her allowance be increased. She did it nervously, but when the letter had gone she felt a great relief. She enclosed a snapshot of the little house.

  Jean, as it happens, had lied about Henri. Not once, but several times. He had told Marie, for instance, that Henri was in England, and later on he told René. Then, having done his errand, he drove six miles back along the main road to Dunkirk and picked up Henri, who was sitting on the bank of a canal watching an ammunition train go by.

  Jean backed into a lane and turned the car round. After that Henri got in and they went rapidly back toward the Front. It was a different Henri, however, wh
o left the car a mile from the crossroads--a Henri in the uniform of a French private soldier, one of those odd and impracticable uniforms of France during the first year, baggy dark blue trousers, stiff cap, and the long-tailed coat, its skirts turned back and faced. Round his neck he wore a knitted scarf, which covered his chin, and, true to the instinct of the French peasant in a winter campaign, he wore innumerable undergarments, the red of a jersey showing through rents in his coat.

  Gone were Henri's long clean lines, his small waist and broad shoulders, the swing of his walk. Instead, he walked with the bent-kneed swing of the French infantryman, that tireless but awkward marching step which renders the French Army so mobile.

  He carried all the impedimenta of a man going into the trenches, an extra jar of water, a flat loaf of bread strapped to his haversack, and an intrenching tool jingling at his belt.

  Even Jean smiled as he watched him moving along toward the crowded crossroads--smiled and then sighed. For Jean had lost everything in the war. His wife had died of a German bullet long months before, and with her had gone a child much prayed for and soon to come. But Henri had brought back to Jean something to live for--or to die for, as might happen.

  Henri walked along gayly. He hailed other French soldiers. He joined a handful and stood talking to them. But he reached the crossroads before the ammunition train.

  The crossroads was crowded, as usual--many soldiers, at rest, waiting for the word to fall in, a battery held up by the breaking of a wheel. A temporary forge had been set up, and soldiers in leather aprons were working over the fire. A handful of peasants watched, their dull eyes following every gesture. And one of them was a man Henri sought.

  Henri sat down on the ground and lighted a cigarette. The ammunition train rolled in and halted, and the man Henri watched turned his attention to the train. He had been dull and quiet at the forge, but now he became smiling, a good fellow. He found a man he knew among the drivers and offered him a cigarette. He also produced and presented an entire box of matches. Matches were very dear, and hardly to be bought at any price.