Troy and Jacks perched on a packing box, and talked a little with their neighbours; but suddenly they were interrupted by the noise of a motor stopping outside. There was a stir at the mouth of the cavern, and a girl said eagerly: "Here she comes!"
Instantly the cellar woke up. The soldiers' faces grew young again, they flattened themselves laughingly against the walls of the entrance, the door above was cautiously opened, and a girl in a long blue cloak appeared at the head of the stairs.
"Well, boys—you see I managed it!" she cried; and Troy instantly recognized the piercing accents and azure gaze of Miss Hinda Warlick.
"She managed it!" the whole cellar roared as one man, drowning her answer in a cheer: and "Of course I did!" she continued, laughing and nodding right and left as she made her triumphant way down the lane of khaki to what, at her appearance, had somehow instantly become the stage at the farther end of a packed theatre. The elderly Y. M. C. A. official who accompanied her puffed out his chest like a general, and blinked knowingly behind his gold eye-glasses.
Troy's first movement had been one of impatience. He hated all that Miss Warlick personified, and hated it most of all on this sacred soil, and at this fateful moment, with the iron wings of doom clanging so close above their heads. But it would have been almost impossible to fight his way out through the crowd that had closed in behind her—and he stayed.
The cheering subsided, she gained her improvised platform—a door laid on some biscuit-boxes—and the recitation began.
She gave them all sorts of things, ranging from grave to gay, and extracting from the sentimental numbers a peculiarly piercing effect that hurt Troy like the twinge of a dental instrument. And her audience loved it all, indiscriminately and voraciously, with souls hungry for the home-flavour and long nurtured on what Troy called "cereal-fiction." One had to admit that Miss Warlick knew her public, and could play on every cord.
It might have been funny, if it had not been so infinitely touching. They were all so young, so serious, so far from home, and bound on a quest so glorious! And there overhead, just above them, brooded and clanged the black wings of their doom . . . Troy's mockery was softened to tenderness, and he felt, under the hard shell of his youthful omniscience, the stir of all the things to which the others were unconsciously responding.
"And now, by special request, Miss Warlick is going to say a few words,"—the elderly eye-glassed officer importantly announced.
Ah, what a pity! If only she had ended on that last jolly chorus, so full of artless laughter and tears! Troy remembered her dissertations on the steamer, and winced at a fresh display of such fatuity, in such a scene.