第9章

"I'm not afraid about the language," she was saying."I have a phrase book.And a hungry man, maybe sick or wounded, can understand a bowl of soup in any language, I should think.And I can cook!"It was a perplexed and thoughtful Mr.Travers who sipped his Scotch- and-soda in the smoking room before retiring, lie took the problem to bed with him and woke up in the night saying: "Twenty pounds! Good God!"In the morning they left the ship.He found Sara Lee among the K's, waiting to have her passport examined, and asked her where she was stopping in London.She had read somewhere of Claridge's - in a novel probably.

"I shouldn't advise Claridge's," he said, reflecting rather grimly on the charges of that very exclusive hotel."Suppose you let me make a suggestion."So he wrote out the name of a fine old English house on Trafalgar Square, where she could stay until she went to France.There would be the matter of a passport to cross the Channel.It might take a day or two.Perhaps he could help her.He would give himself the pleasure of calling on her very soon.

Sara Lee got on the train and rode up to London.She said to herself over and over: "This is England.I am really in England." But it did not remove the sense of unreality.Even the English grass, bright green in midwinter, only added to the sense of unreality.

She tried, sitting in the strange train with its small compartments, to think of Harvey.She looked at her ring and tried to recall some of the tender things he had said to her.But Harvey eluded her.She could not hear his voice.And when she tried to see him it was Harvey of the wide face and the angry eyes of the last days that she saw.

Morley's comforted her.The man at the door had been there for forty years, and was beyond surprise.He had her story in twenty-four hours,and in forty-eight he was her slave.The elderly chambermaid mothered her, and failed to report that Sara Lee was doing a small washing in her room and had pasted handkerchiefs over the ancient walnut of her wardrobe.

"Going over, are you?" she said."Dear me, what courage you've got, miss! They tell me things is horrible over there.""That's why I'm going," replied Sara Lee, and insisted on helping to make up the bed.

"It's easier when two do it," she said casually.

Mr.Travers put in a fretful twenty-four hours before he came to see her.He lunched at Brooks', and astounded an elderly member of the House by putting her problem to him.