So she got as far as: "Dearest Harvey: I am here in a hotel at
Dunkirk"--and then stopped, fairly engulfed in a wave of homesickness.
Not so much for Harvey as for familiar things--Uncle James in his chair
by the fire, with the phonograph playing "My Little Gray Home in the
West"; her own white bedroom; the sun on the red geraniums in the
dining-room window; the voices of happy children wandering home from
school.
She got up and went to the window, first blowing out the candle.
Outside, the town lay asleep, and from a gate in the old wall a sentry
with a bugle blew a quiet "All's well." From somewhere near, on top
of the mairie perhaps, where eyes all night searched the sky for danger,
came the same trumpet call of safety for the time, of a little longer
for quiet sleep.
For two days the girl was alone. There was no sign of Henri. She had
nothing to read, and her eyes, watching hour after hour the panorama
that passed through the square under her window, searched vainly for
his battered gray car. In daytime the panorama was chiefly of motor
lorries--she called them trucks--piled high with supplies, often
fodder for the horses in that vague district beyond ammunition and food.
Now and then a battery rumbled through, its gunners on the limbers,
detached, with folded arms; and always there were soldiers.
Sometimes, from her window, she saw the market people below, in their
striped red-and-white booths, staring up at the sky. She would look up,
too, and there would be an aeroplane sliding along, sometimes so low
that one could hear the faint report of the exhaust.
But it was the ambulances that Sara Lee looked for. Mostly they came
at night, a steady stream of them. Sometimes they moved rapidly.
Again, one would be going very slowly, and other machines would circle
impatiently round it and go on. A silent, grim procession in the
moonlight it was, and it helped the girl to bear the solitude of those
two interminable days.
Inside those long gray cars with the red crosses painted on the tops--a
symbol of mercy that had ceased to protect--inside those cars were
wounded men, men who had perhaps lain for hours without food or care.
Surely, surely it was right that she had come. The little she could do
must count in the great total. She twisted Harvey's ring on her finger
and sent a little message to him.
"You will forgive me when you know, dear," was the message. "It is so
terrible! So pitiful!"