The Amazing Interlude.
by Mary Roberts Rinehart.
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 scene_, 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 a.s.sumed 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 ba.s.sinet, 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 the matter came up for mention at the little afternoon bridge club, as it did now and then after the prizes were distributed, she always said "Isn"t it horrible!" and changed the subject.
On the night of the nineteenth of December Sara Lee had read her chapter in the Bible--she read it through once each year--and had braided down her hair, which was as smooth and shining and lovely as Sara Lee herself, and had raised her window for the night when Aunt Harriet came in. Sara Lee did not know, at first, that she had a visitor. She stood looking out toward the east, until Aunt Harriet touched her on the arm.
"What in the world!" said Aunt Harriet. "A body would suppose it was August."
"I was just thinking," said Sara Lee.
"You"d better do your thinking in bed. Jump in and I"ll put out your light."
So Sara Lee got into her white bed with the dotted Swiss valance, and drew the covers to her chin, and looked a scant sixteen. Aunt Harriet, who was an unsentimental woman, childless and diffident, found her suddenly very appealing there in her smooth bed, and did an unexpected thing. She kissed her. Then feeling extremely uncomfortable she put out the light and went to the door. There she paused.
"Thinking!" she said. "What about, Sara Lee?"
Perhaps it was because the light was out that Sara Lee became articulate.
Perhaps it was because things that had been forming in her young mind for weeks had at last crystallized into words. Perhaps it was because of a picture she had happened on that day, of a boy lying wounded somewhere on a battlefield and calling "Mother!"
"About--over there," she said rather hesitatingly. "And about Anna."
"Over there?"
"The war," said Sara Lee. "I was just thinking about all those women over there--like Anna, you know. They--they had babies, and got everything ready for them. And then the babies grew up, and they"re all getting killed."
"It"s horrible," said Aunt Harriet. "Do you want another blanket? It"s cold to-night."
Sara Lee did not wish another blanket.
"I"m a little worried about your Uncle James," said Aunt Harriet, at the door. "He"s got indigestion. I think I"ll make him a mustard plaster."
She prepared to go out then, but Sara Lee spoke from her white bed.
"Aunt Harriet," she said, "I don"t think I"ll ever get married."
"I said that too, once," said Aunt Harriet complacently. "What"s got into your head now?"
"I don"t know," Sara Lee replied vaguely. "I just--What"s the use?"
Aunt Harriet was conscious of a hazy impression of indelicacy. Coming from Sara Lee it was startling and revolutionary. In Aunt Harriet"s world young women did not question their duty, which was to marry, preferably some one in the neighborhood, and bear children, who would be wheeled about that same neighborhood in perambulators and who would ultimately grow up and look after themselves.
"The use?" she asked tartly.
"Of having babies, and getting to care about them, and then--There will always be wars, won"t there?"
"You turn over and go to sleep," counseled Aunt Harriet. "And stop looking twenty years or more ahead." She hesitated. "You haven"t quarreled with Harvey, have you?"
Sara Lee turned over obediently.
"No. It"s not that," she said. And the door closed.
Perhaps, had she ever had time during the crowded months that followed, Sara Lee would have dated certain things from that cold frosty night in December when she began to question things. For after all that was what it came to. She did not revolt. She questioned.
She lay in her white bed and looked at things for the first time. The sky had seemed low that night. Things were nearer. The horizon was close. And beyond that peaceful horizon, to the east, something was going on that could not be ignored. Men were dying. Killing and dying.
Men who had been waited for as Anna watched for her child.
Downstairs she could hear Aunt Harriet moving about. The street was quiet, until a crowd of young people--she knew them by their voices--went by, laughing.
"It"s horrible," said Sara Lee to herself. There was a change in her, but she was still inarticulate. Somewhere in her mind, but not formulated, was the feeling that she was too comfortable. Her peace was a cheap peace, bought at no price. Her last waking determination was to finish the afghan quickly and to knit for the men at the war.
Uncle James was ill the next morning. Sara Lee went for the doctor, but Anna"s hour had come and he was with her. Late in the afternoon he came, however looking a bit gray round the mouth with fatigue, but triumphant.
He had on these occasions always a sense of victory; even, in a way, a feeling of being part of a great purpose. He talked at such times of the race, as one may who is doing his best by it.
"Well," he said when Sara Lee opened the door, "it"s a boy. Eight pounds. Going to be red-headed, too." He chuckled.
"A boy!" said Sara Lee. "I--don"t you bring any girl babies any more?"
The doctor put down his hat and glanced at her.
"Wanted a girl, to be named for you?"
"No. It"s not that. It"s only--" She checked herself. He wouldn"t understand. The race required girl babies. "I"ve put a blue bow on my afghan. Pink is for boys," she said, and led the way upstairs.
Very simple and orderly was the small house, as simple and orderly as Sara Lee"s days in it. Time was to come when Sara Lee, having left it, ached for it with every fiber of her body and her soul--for its bright curtains and fresh paint, its regularity, its shining bra.s.ses and growing plants, its very kitchen pans and green-and-white oilcloth. She was to ache, too, for her friends--their small engrossing cares, their kindly interest, their familiar faces.