And Sara moved too. One moment she was there by the window. And the
next she had given a stifled cry and ran out.
"Bless my soul!" said Mr. Travers, and got up slowly.
Henri was already up and at the window. What he saw was Sara Lee making
her way through the stream of vehicles, taking a dozen chances for her
life. Henri waited until he saw her crouched by the donkey, its head
on her knee. Then he, too, ran out.
That is how Henri, of no other name that may be given, met Sara Lee
Kennedy, of Pennsylvania--under a London motor bus. And that, I think,
will be the picture he carries of her until he dies, her soft eyes full
of pity, utterly regardless of the dirt and the crowd and an
expostulating bobby, with that grotesque and agonized head on her knees.
Henri crawled under the bus, though the policeman was extremely anxious
to keep him out. And he ran a practiced eye over the injured donkey.
"It's dying," said Sara Lee with white lips.
"It will die," replied Henri, "but how soon? They are very strong,
these little beasts."
The conductor of the bus made a suggestion then, one that froze the
blood round Sara Lee's heart: "If you'll move away and let us run over
it proper it'll be out of its trouble, miss."
Sara Lee raised haggard eyes to Henri.
"Did you hear that?" she said. "They'd do it too!"
The total result of a conference between four policemen, the costermonger,
and, by that time, Mr. Travers--was to draw the animal off the street
and into the square. Sara Lee stuck close by. So, naturally, did
Henri. And when the hopeless condition of Nellie, as they learned she
was named, became increasingly evident, Henri behaved like a man and a
soldier.
He got out his revolver and shot her in the brain.
"A kindness," he explained, as Sara Lee would have caught his hand.
"The only way, mademoiselle."
Mr. Travers had the usual British hatred of a crowd and publicity,
coupled with a deadly fear of getting into the papers, except through
an occasional letter to the _Times_. He vanished just before the shot,
and might have been seen moving rapidly through the square, turning
over in his mind the difficulty of trying to treat young American girls
like rational human beings.
But Henri understood. He had had a French mother, and there is a leaven
of French blood in the American temperament, old Huguenot, some of it.
So Americans love beauty and obey their impulses and find life good to
do things rather than to be something or other more or less important.
And so Henri could quite understand how Sara Lee had forgotten herself
when Mr. Travers could not. And he understood, also, when Sara Lee,
having composed the little donkey's quiet figure, straightened up with
tears in her eyes.
"It was very dear of you to come out," she said. "And--of course it was
the best thing."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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