That evening, after a hard and harrowing day's work between postes de secours and a base hospital, they found themselves in a darkened village, where, after a summary meal under flying shells, some one suggested ending up at the Y.M.C.A. hut.
The shelling had ceased, and there seemed nothing better to do than to wander down the dark street to the underground shelter packed with American soldiers. Troy was sleepy and tired, and would have preferred to crawl into his bed at the inn; he felt, more keenly than ever, the humiliation (the word was stupid, but he could find no other) of being among all these young men, only a year or two his seniors, and none, he was sure, more passionately eager than himself for the work that lay ahead, and yet so hopelessly divided from him by that stupid difference in age. But Hubert Jacks was seemingly unconscious of this, and only desirous of ending his night cheerfully. It would have looked unfriendly not to accompany him, so they pushed their way together through the cellar door surmounted by the sociable red triangle.
It was a big cellar, but brown uniforms and ruddy faces crowded it from wall to wall. In one corner the men were sitting on packing-boxes at a long table made of boards laid across barrels, the smoky light of little oil lamps reddening their cheeks and deepening the furrows in their white foreheads as they laboured over their correspondence. Others were playing checkers, or looking at the illustrated papers, and everybody was smoking and talking—not in large groups, but quietly, by twos or threes. Young women in trig uniforms, with fresh innocent faces, moved among the barrels and boxes, distributing stamps or books, chatting with the soldiers, and being generally homelike and sisterly. The men gave them back glances as honest, and almost as innocent, and an air of simple daylight friendliness pervaded the Avernian cave.
It was the first time that Troy had ever seen a large group of his compatriots so close to the fighting front, and in an hour of ease, and he was struck by the gravity of the young faces, and the low tones of their talk. Everything was in a minor key. No one was laughing or singing or larking: the note was that which might have prevailed in a club of quiet elderly men, or in a drawing-room where the guests did not know each other well. Troy was all the more surprised because he remembered the jolly calls of the young soldiers in the motor-trucks, and the songs and horse-play of the gangs of trench-diggers and hut-builders he had passed on the way. Was it that his compatriots did not know how to laugh when they were at leisure, or was it rather that, in the intervals of work, the awe of the unknown laid its hand on these untried hearts?
Troy and Jacks perched on a packing-box, and talked a little with their neighbours; but presently 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 near 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 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 promptly 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.