The stage on which we play our little dramas of life
and love has for most of us but one setting.
It is furnished out with approximately the same things.
Characters come, move about and make their final exits
through long-familiar doors. And the back drop
remains approximately the same from beginning to end.
Palace or hovel, forest or sea, it is the background
for the moving figures of the play.
So Sara Lee Kennedy had a back drop that had every
appearance of permanency. The great Scene Painter
apparently intended that there should be no change
of set for her. Sara Lee herself certainly expected
none.
But now and then amazing things are done on this great
stage of ours: lights go down; the back drop,
which had given the illusion of solidity, reveals
itself transparent. A sort of fairyland transformation
takes place. Beyond the once solid wall strange
figures move on—a new mise en scene, with
the old blotted out in darkness. The lady, whom
we left knitting by the fire, becomes a fairy—Sara
Lee became a fairy, of a sort—and meets
the prince. Adventure, too; and love, of course.
And then the lights go out, and it is the same old
back drop again, and the lady is back by the fire—but
with a memory.
This is the story of Sara Lee Kennedy’s memory—and
of something more.
The early days of the great war saw Sara Lee playing
her part in the setting of a city in Pennsylvania.
An ugly city, but a wealthy one. It is only
fair to Sara Lee to say that she shared in neither
quality. She was far from ugly, and very, very
far from rich. She had started her part with
a full stage, to carry on the figure, but one by one
they had gone away into the wings and had not come
back. At nineteen she was alone knitting by
the fire, with no idea whatever that the back drop
was of painted net, and that beyond it, waiting for
its moment, was the forest of adventure. A strange
forest, too—one that Sara Lee would not
have recognised as a forest. And a prince of
course—but a prince as strange and mysterious
as the forest.
The end of December, 1914, found Sara Lee quite contented.
If it was resignation rather than content, no one
but Sara Lee knew the difference. Knitting, too;
but not for soldiers. She was, to be candid,
knitting an afghan against an interesting event which
involved a friend of hers.
Sara Lee rather deplored the event—in her
own mind, of course, for in her small circle young
unmarried women accepted the major events of life
without question, and certainly without conversation.
She never, for instance, allowed her Uncle James,
with whom she lived, to see her working at the afghan;
and even her Aunt Harriet had supposed it to be a
sweater until it assumed uncompromising proportions.
