Came, then, the planes. Came the regiment, which turned off into a field
and there spread itself, like a snake uncoiling, into a double line.
Came a machine, gray and battered, containing officers. Came a general
with gold braid on his shoulder, and a pleasant smile. Came the strange
event.
The general found Sara Lee in the salle a manger cutting cotton into
three-inch squares, and he stood in the doorway and bowed profoundly.
"Mademoiselle Kennedy?" he inquired.
Sara Lee replied to that, and then gave a quick thought to her larder.
Because generals usually meant tea. But this time at last, Sara Lee was
to receive something, not to give. She turned very white when she was
told, and said she had not deserved it; she was indeed on the verge of
declining, not knowing that there are certain things one does not
decline. But Marie brought her hat and jacket--a smiling, tremulous
Marie--and Sara Lee put them on.
The general was very tall. In her short skirt and with flying hair she
looked like a child beside him as they walked across the fields.
Suddenly Sara Lee was terribly afraid she was going to cry.
The troops stood rigidly at attention. And a cold wind flapped Sara
Lee's skirts, and the guns hammered at Ypres, and the general blew on
his fingers. And soon a low open car came down the street and the
King got out. Sara Lee watched him coming--his tall, slightly stooped
figure, his fair hair, his plain blue uniform. Sara Lee had never seen
a king before, and she had always thought of them as sitting up on a
sort of platform--never as trudging through spring mud.
"What shall I do?" she asked nervously.
"He will shake hands, mademoiselle. Bow as he approaches. That is all."
The amazing interlude, indeed! With Sara Lee being decorated by the
King, and troops drawn up to do her honor, and over all the rumbling of
the great guns. A palpitating and dazed Sara Lee, when the decoration
was fastened to her black jacket, a Sara Lee whose hat blew off at
exactly the worst moment and rolled, end on, like a hoop, into a puddle.
But, oddly, she did not mind about the hat. She had only one conscious
thought just then. She hoped that, wherever Uncle James might be in that
world of the gone before, he might know what was happening to her--or
even see it. He would have liked it. He had believed in the Belgians and
in the King. And now--the King did not go at once. He went back to the
little house and went through it. And he and one of his generals climbed
to the upper floor, and the King stood looking out silently toward the
land he loved and which for a time was no longer his.