I should have liked to eat my dinner first, but I couldn’t think of suggesting it.  These boys had done a long, hard day’s work.  Then they had marched ten miles, and, on top of all that, had waited two hours for me and fixed up a stage and a lighting system.  They were quite as tired as I, I decided—­and they had done a lot more.  And so I told the faithful Johnson to bring wee Tinkle Tom along, and get him up to the little stage, and I faced my audience in the midst of a storm of the ghostliest applause I ever hope to hear!

I could hear them, do you ken, but I could no see a face before me!  In the theater, bright though the footlights are, and greatly as they dim what lies beyond them, you can still see the white faces of your audience.  At least, you do see something—­your eyes help you to know the audience is there, and, gradually, you can see perfectly, and pick out a face, maybe, and sing to some one person in the audience, that you may be sure of your effects.

It was utter, Stygian darkness that lay beyond the pool of blinding light in which I stood.  Gradually I did make out a little of what lay beyond, very close to me.  I could see dim outlines of human bodies moving around.  And now I was sure there were fireflies about.  But then they stayed so still that I realized, suddenly, with a smile, just what they were—­the glowing ends of cigarettes, of course!

There were many tall poplar trees around the chateau.  I knew where to look for them, but that night I could scarcely see them.  I tried to find them, for it was a strange, weird sensation to be there as I was, and I wanted all the help fixed objects could give me.  I managed to pick out their feathery lines in the black distance—­the darkness made them seem more remote than they were, really.  Their branches, when I found them, waved like spirit arms, and I could hear the wind whispering and sighing among the topmost branches.

Now and then what we call in Scotland a “batty bird” skimmed past my face, attracted, I suppose, by the bright light.  I suppose that bats that have not been disturbed before for generations have been aroused by the blast of war through all that region and have come out of dark cavernous hiding-places, as those that night must have done, to see what it is all about, the tumult and the shouting!

They were verra disconcertin’, those bats!  They bothered me almost as much as the whizz bangs had done, earlier in the day!  They swished suddenly out of the darkness against my face, and I would start back, and hear a ripple of laughter run through that unseen audience of mine.  Aye, it was verra funny for them, but I did not like that part of it a bit!  No man likes to have a bat touch his skin.  And I had to duck quickly to evade those winged cousins of the mouse—­and then hear a soft guffaw arising as I did it.