"Mademoiselle," he said, "shall I show you something that the eye of no
man has seen before, and that, when we have seen it, shall never be seen
again?"
On her interested consent he called in Marie and Rene, making a great
ceremony of the matter, and sending Marie into hysterical giggling.
"Now see!" he said earnestly. "No eye before has ever seen or will again.
Will you guess, mademoiselle? Or you, Marie? Rene?"
"A tear?" ventured Sara Lee.
"But--do I look like weeping?"
He did not, indeed. He stood, tall and young and smiling before them,
and produced from his pocket the walnut.
"Perceive!" he said, breaking it open and showing the kernel. "Has human
eye ever before seen it?" He thrust it into Marie's open mouth. "And
it is gone! Voila tout!"
It was that evening, while Sara Lee cut bandages and Henri rolled them,
that she asked him what his work was. He looked rather surprised, and
rolled for a moment without replying. Then: "I am a man of all work,"
he said. "What you call odd jobs."
"Then you don't do any fighting?"
"In the trenches--no. But now and then I have a little skirmish."
A sort of fear had been formulating itself in Sara Lee's mind. The
trenches she could understand or was beginning to understand. But this
alternately joyous and silent idler, this soldier of no regiment and no
detail--was he playing a man's part in the war?
"Why don't you go into the trenches?" she asked with her usual directness.
"You say there are too few men. Yet--I can understand Monsieur Jean,
because he has only one eye. But you!"
"I do something," he said, avoiding her eyes. "It is not a great deal.
It is the thing I can do best. That is all."
He went away some time after that, leaving the little house full and busy
justifying its existence. The miller's son, who came daily to chat with
Marie, was helping in the kitchen. By the warm stove, and only kept from
standing over it by Marie's sharp orders, were as many men as could get
near. Each held a bowl of hot soup, and--that being a good day--a
piece of bread. Tall soldiers and little ones, all dirty, all weary,
almost all smiling, they peered over each other's shoulders, to catch,
if might be, a glimpse of Marie's face.
When they came too close she poked an elbow into some hulking fellow and
sent him back.