How you can love!
Oh! Johnny! Oh! Johnny!
Heavens above.”
“Catchy,” said Cherry, beginning to hum it.
Catchy was right, and Cherry was the one person in all the world to set England on fire with it.
That night in the chill damp of the subway, she sang it over and over. Next day in the airdromes and factories, barracks, schools, stores and on the street, one might hear: “Oh! Johnny! Oh! Johnny!”
The song was made. So too was Cherry. In the days that followed she was to become the sweetheart of all England. Newspapers were to print her picture in color. These pictures were to appear on the rough board walls of cantonments all over England, and in the cabins of boats, large and small, sailing the dangerous North Sea.
She was to be taken up by the nobility. Lady Perkins, a friend of the Young Lord, who lived in London, was to make her a part of her household, with privilege of coming and going as she pleased.
Only now and then did she sleep with some working girls in the subway. Most nights after the “all clear” had sounded, she sped away to creep beneath downy covers in a wing of Lady Perkins’ mammoth old home.
“It’s not that I crave magnificence,” she confided to Dave, “It’s just that I must have rest. It—well, you see—it all must seem so simple and easy, my singing. And it truly is, but,”—she heaved a sigh—“when it’s all over, I’m a rag.”