"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 fenetre, 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.