_The Lady Barber Quartette_
The following morning when just before dawn Gale and Jan wound in and
out among the trees of the Secret Forest on their way to work, it seemed
as if they were in another world. Where yesterday only moss and ferns
could be seen, tents had blossomed in abundance. Beside these stood
tanks and trucks.
Here and there they passed sleepy sentries. These saluted them with a
wave and a friendly smile.
"They like us!" Jan exclaimed. "Golly! Ain't that swell!"
"It's your figure they like," Gale laughed.
"Yeah--sure," Jan agreed. "Fine and sturdy." You couldn't get Jan's
goat.
Further on they passed a portable kitchen that gave off pungent odors of
burning wood, frying ham and brewing coffee.
"Hmm!" Jan sniffed. "Good old Virginia hickory-smoked ham! Let's stop
for breakfast!"
"You'll have toast, and coffee from a bottle, same as usual," Gale
replied grimly. "This is the most important day of our lives thus far.
Think what it would mean if a big formation of enemy bombers flew over
and dropped their hate on all this." She swung her arms wide.
Despite her fears, Gale passed a quiet day in her hideout on the ridge.
Twice she thought she had picked up the scent of a wolf-pack of enemy
planes coming her way, but both times the scent faded and she knew that
her fears were not well founded.
Just at sunset she received a sudden shock. With the skies all clear and
no sight of enemies about, she stepped out on the rocky ledge for a
breath of air. She had not been there a minute when on a ridge fully
half a mile away, she spied a lone figure walking slowly.
"He's no soldier," she told herself, lifting binoculars to her eyes.
"Some native in a long, black robe," she decided. "And," she caught her
breath--"he walks as if he were a little lame in both feet."
At that instant, as if he had caught a flash of light from her glasses,
as indeed he might have done, the lone walker quickened his strange,
halting steps to disappear behind the ridge.
"It's strange," Gale said to Jan a moment later. "Twice before I have
seen such a man,--once up there in the temple at the edge of the city."
"He was the one who locked Isabelle in the room of Absolute Silence and
tried to poison you with incense fumes," Jan suggested.
"That's what we thought," Gale said. "Of course, we couldn't prove it."
"And the other time he was with the woman in purple," said Jan.
"That's right. Can you tie that! Last night it was the woman in purple
we saw in a temple! And now it's the two-legged cripple again!"
"Looks as if they were shadowing us," said Jan with a shudder. "Gives me
the willies."
"They'll get shadowed," Gale declared. "Isabelle probably has set the
army intelligence service on them by now."
"Or the colonel," said Jan. "He'd be worse."
An hour later they found themselves once more riding in the shadows of
the Secret Forest.
They were met at the tent door by a tremendously excited Isabelle. "Come
on!" she exclaimed. "Get cleaned up, quick! You won't have much time for
chow. Here! I brought you a huge can of coffee and I've made you some
marmalade sandwiches. You'll just have time to gulp them down and get
into your costumes."
"Costumes!" Jan exclaimed, catching Isabelle's excitement,--"You mean
uniforms, don't you? Does the big push into Burma really start right
now, and are we to go with the army? Oh! Glory be! Yippy!" She was
fairly dancing.
"Who said anything about the big push?" Isabelle demanded. "And I don't
mean uniforms. I said costumes, and I mean our barber costumes."
"Barber costumes! Oh! Good grief!" Gale sat down quite suddenly. "You
don't mean to say you brought those things along!"
"At the colonel's request," Isabelle nodded.
"But the colonel!" Jan exploded. "He never saw us do that skit back
there at the Club in the city."
"That's what you think!" Than Shwe put in. "What the colonel doesn't see
isn't worth seeing."
"The colonel slid into a back seat the night of the Club entertainment
when we did our Lady Barber Quartette feature," Isabelle explained. "He
liked it, so--"
"So we are to do it for his entire army, I suppose!" Gale did an
imitation collapse.
"It's not really a big army," Isabelle defended. "I don't think there
are more than twenty thousand. There's a much larger army striking at
the Japs from another direction, and--"
"And that's the next spot on our barn-storming tour," Gale exploded.
"I didn't say that," Isabelle replied quietly. "Truth is," she admitted,
"I too had my misgivings. Jan is such a clown! She's--"
"Oh! I am, am I!" Jan exploded. "Just for that I'll do the skit alone!"
"Indeed you'll not!" Gale stormed. "There's got to be a little dignity
to our part of the outfit, even if we are a small group."
"Here, you two." Than Shwe held out steaming cups of coffee to Jan and
Gale. "Drink these and quiet down. You know what the colonel wants he's
going to have. Besides, he brought you three WACS along when it was
against the rules, and if you're not nice little girls he can send you
back."
"That," Gale agreed after burning her tongue on the coffee, "is the
plain unvarnished truth."
All of which meant that at one of the home talent shows given by army
women at the Club for women only back there in India, the four jolly
comrades, led by Gale, had dressed up in barber's coats and slacks, with
combs behind their ears, and had put on a Lady Barber Quartette stunt.
Jan, who blacked her face and sang as the bootblack of the shop, had
nearly stolen the show. It had been quite a success. The colonel had
seen and liked it, so there they were, confronted with the prospect of
doing their stunt all over again before thousands of khaki-clad boys
from the old USA, a breath taking adventure if ever there was one.
"I'd rather go through a bombing," Gale declared. "But what the colonel
wants is what he's going to get."
The scene that lay before them when, after coming up a ridge the back
way and entering the impromptu dressing-room--an army tent--and then
taking their places on a board platform backed by a sounding-board, was
one they would not soon forget. The platform had been erected on a broad
rock facing a hillside that rose like the tiers of seats in an opera
house.
"Seats for twenty thousand, and every seat taken," Isabelle whispered.
This, Gale thought, must be true. She found herself looking into a sea
of faces. "The colonel's army." She swallowed hard. "Thousands of nice
boys from my own native land. Tonight they are here to be entertained,
and tomorrow, perhaps--" She closed her eyes on the morrow.
There were other features than theirs on the program. All the
participants were on the stage.
When the great throng stood up, when some soldiers struck the chords of
Star Spangled Banner and those men, twenty thousand of them, roared out
the national anthem, Gale felt her soul lifted to the stars that shone
above the treetops.
The colonel stepped to the microphone and like a football coach before
the big game of the season, gave the boys a pep-talk that was brief as
it was impressive.
A band swarmed onto the platform and played two stirring marches. The
boys roared their approval.
"We--we're next," Gale gulped as the band trooped off.
The colonel announced them only as the Barber Shop Quartette. "They'll
think we're boys," Jan whispered.
They sang Sweet Adeline, giving it everything.
There came a scattered applause. "We're a flop!" Gale thought.
Then a big rawboned tank sergeant from the deep south, who had somehow
made a surprising discovery, stood up to roar:
"Hey! You guys! Them's gals! How about givin' 'em a hand?"
The applause was as great as the look of surprise on ten thousand faces.
Enheartened, Gale proposed a glorious song that had been the prime
favorite of another war.
"There's a long, long trail a-winding
Into the land of my dreams," they sang.
"Where the nightingales are singing
And the white moon beams."
Perhaps most of those boys had never heard that song. Perhaps in the
hearts of the singers was the same old deep longing that hung over all
of the Secret Forest. However that may have been, when the song
ended--"Till the day when I'll be walking down that long, long trail
with you," every boy was on his feet with a shout of approval.
It had been planned that Jan should sing a solo, dressed as a ragged
colored man. "Oh, I can't! I just can't," she wailed when they were back
in the dressing room and the band was back on the stage.
"Oh, you'll wow them!" Gale insisted.
And so, ten minutes later, dressed in a coat two sizes too large,
striped trousers and plug hat, leaning on a cane, Jan slipped out on the
platform alone. For ten seconds there was silence. Then a roar shook the
treetops.
Jan had a strange voice. It wasn't basso or tenor. It wasn't contralto.
Just a voice singing in a wilderness. But when she began to sing "Old
Man River" there was absolute silence. When she sang on, rolling her
eyes and swaying like a rolling river,
"That old man river, he must know something
But he don't say nothin'
He jes' goes rolling along,"
the silence continued.
When she sang,--
"Tired of livin' an' feared o' dying," a great silence hung over the
forest.
But when she finished, that forest exploded just as truly as it would
have had the Japs staged an air raid.
Nothing would do after that short of an encore. So leaning on her cane,
Jan sang: "Old Black Joe."
Perhaps that song has been rendered in a better manner ten thousand
times before, but you'd never convince those soldiers of that. They were
from America. Old Black Joe was part of America.
"Listen to them!" Isabelle exclaimed. The applause came roaring back to
them. "You don't have to die for them, Jan. All you've got to do is sing
for them."
"I'll sing for them!
"I'll sing for them forever!" Jan sprang up.
This time she sang,--"I Got Plenty of Nothin'", and as she sang she
turned her pockets wrong side out, one by one.
In the middle of the song with all her empty pockets hanging out, she
stopped suddenly.
"Say!" she exclaimed. "Has any of you all got a pipe?"
"Sure! Sure! Oh, sure!" came in a roar.
"That's fine! Has any of you all got a little 'bacca?"
"Sure! Sure!" came again.
"That's swell. Has any of you all got a match?"
The roar came again, this time accompanied with a shower of match boxes.
"Oh! You all keep 'em!" Jan shouted. "You all's goin' to need 'em--maybe
tomorrow. Nobody don't never know. But me," she sang, "I got plenty of
nothing, and nothing is plenty for me."
That show was a huge success and it didn't take a dramatic critic to
tell that the Lady Barber Quartette had been THE feature that evening.