III
All this was near the end of the strike; and also it was while America was going to war. So the excitements of sex were mingled in Bunny’s mind with those of patriotism. The two were not so far apart as you might think, for the youth of the country was preparing to march away to battle, and that loosened sexual standards. You might not come back, so it made less difference what you did in the meantime. The girls found their hearts softened toward the boys, and the boys were ready to snatch a bit of pleasure before it was too late.
Bunny was too young for the first draft, but he went to drilling at school, which cast the military halo about him. There was a high school corps, provided with old rifles of the state militia, and the athletic-ield was covered with groups of lads marching, “Hep, hep! Hep, hep! Squad right! Squad left!”—treading on one another’s toes, but keeping the grim look on their young faces. Soon they would have uniforms, and so would the girls of the nurses’ training corps. Boys and girls met in school assembly and sang patriotic songs with fervor.
Yes, it was war! Whole fleets of cargo vessels were taking supplies to England and France, and brigades of engineers and laborers to prepare the way for the army. The President was making speeches—wonderful, glowing, eloquent speeches. There was a race of evil men, the Huns, who had risen up to threaten civilization, and now the might of democratic America was going to put them down. When this job had been done, there would be an end to all the world’s troubles; so the duty of every patriot was to take his part in this last of all wars—the War to end War—the War for Democracy. Statesmen big and little took up the chorus, the newspapers echoed it a million copies every hour, and a host of “four minute men” were trained, to go into factories and theatres, and wherever crowds were gathered, to rouse America for this crusade.
The Ross family, like all other families, read, and listened, and argued. Bunny, the young idealist, swallowed every word of the propaganda; it was exactly what he wanted to believe, his kind of mental food. He would argue with his cool, slow-moving, quietly dubious father. Yes, of course, Dad would say, we had to win the war; we had to win any war we got into. But as to the future, well, it would be time to decide about that when we came to it. First, Dad was occupied with getting the strike settled, and after that, with selling oil on a constantly rising market. There was no sense giving it away, because the government wanted more wells drilled, and how were they to be financed, unless the product was paid for? The government was paying generously, and that was patriotism enough for Dad; he would see to the spouting of his wells, and leave the other kinds of spouting to the politicians.
Aunt Emma considered that a shameful way to talk to a boy, and she scolded vigorously, according to the privilege of in-laws. Aunt Emma would go to the clubs and listen to the patriotic lady-orators, telling about Belgian babies with their hands cut off, and munition depots blown up by German spies, and she would come home in a blaze of militarism. Bertie was even worse, for her young man who took her to the jazz-parties was active in one of the defense societies, and knew the names of all the German agents in Southern California, and the villainies they were planning; so Bertie was full of dark hints, and a sense of awful responsibility.
You could never tell how this war excitement was going to hit any one person. For example, could you have imagined that a perfectly respectable old lady of way over seventy, brought up on a ranch, and supposed to be wrapped up in painting in oils, would suddenly blossom out as a Hun sympathizer? Such was Grandma, who declared that she had no use whatsoever for this war; the Germans were no worse than any of the other people concerned, they were all stained with blood, and all there was to the atrocity stories and spy rubbish was to make people hate the enemy. But Grandma wasn’t going to hate anybody, no matter how much Emma and Bertie and the rest might rage; she proceeded to show her defiance by painting a picture of some Germans in old-time costumes drinking beer out of painted steins. She wanted to hang this in the dining-room, and there was a great row, with Aunt Emma and Bertie trying to persuade Dad to forbid it!
All this was part of Bunny’s education; he listened and learned. From his quiet, steady old father he learned to smile amiably over the foibles of human nature, and to go on gathering in the dollars. Talk was all right, but after all, what was going to win the war was bullets and shells, and to get them to the battlefield you had to have transportation. The oil that Dad brought up out of the ground was driving big trucks that were carrying munitions up to the front; it was moving the biggest and fastest cargo-ships, and the swift destroyers that were protecting them; it was lubricating the machinery in the factories, and more and more was being called for. As soon as the strike was over, Dad proceeded to sign contracts with the government, and to put down a dozen new wells in the Paradise field.
