It never rains but it pours. Here I had worried through seventeen years without any answers at all to my prayers and now in a few short months there were more answers than there were prayers—I mean, it was just like having your mail lost somewhere and then getting it all in a bunch. It seemed to me that the Lord must have just returned from a holiday playing golf with the planets and found all my pleas and prayers awaiting his attention, so he set about clearing his desk immediately and thoroughly. Things came so thick that the year 1917 remains in my mind a jumbled nightmare.
Not that everything happened as quickly at all that: the sequence was spread over several months but I had become so accustomed to monotony and so resigned to my fate, that so many things in even so many months was a terrific shock to my nervous system.
The first thing that happened was not strictly my own private affair. The United States went to war when Germany added insult to injury. I was overjoyed, because it seemed to me that surely here was an opportunity for excitement and adventure.... And again I was disappointed. Girls of eighteen are good for only one thing in a war, and you don’t get medals and service stripes for that kind of duty!
Jay-Jay went to work for his father, hoping to get out of going, and then when he saw he would be caught in the draft he managed to secure a soft job supervising the entertainment provisions of the eastern training camps. My hero! A man’s man!
Then I went on the stage, because Jay-Jay offered to get me a place in a new show that was being thrown together up in Connecticut, and because I suspected that he was entertaining the hope that the atmosphere of the show business would help to break down my Puritanical resistance to his Satanic charms. I had to dance almost naked to get the job, but I made a bull’s-eye from the start. The only trouble was that I had to keep thinking that Jay-Jay had practically dared me to join this show and I was so afraid I’d be contaminated by the traditional immorality of show people that I scarcely drew a normal breath while the show lasted. And every time I saw Jay-Jay the old battle was revived. He said he’d do anything to get me—and I believed him implicitly. I wouldn’t have put anything beyond him. He’d try any possible way of skinning the cat, and my part in Love Lights was just another possibility. He was very circumspect in his love-making at the time, probably trying to induce a calm to precede the storm: as he said, “My love for you is so intensely hot that even an iceberg would melt sooner or later!”
Love Lights lasted three months, but I was ready to quit long before that. I had proved that I could stand the gaff and Jay-Jay had given up hopes of skinning the cat by that method. Now he wanted to marry me! Said he’d even marry me if that was the only way he could get me! Can you imagine such a proposal?
But I couldn’t be bothered with it then, so he broached the subject to Aunt Elinor and I found her putting bugs in my ears every time I got near her. However, I stalled for time. I was in no mood to make any entangling alliances.
Also there was something far more important to think about. A miracle was happening before my very eyes! Vyvy contracted a severe case of heroitis and fell in love with the color of khaki, with the logical result that Leon was miserable. He actually lost weight trying to figure out some way of satisfying her demands that he make a hero of himself. The poor fellow hated the thought of war and fighting, loathed the idea of being thrown in with an uncouth gang of comparatively indelicate men, but he couldn’t stand the sight of Vyvy going out with men in uniform and he suspected that a man with a Sam Browne belt could do most anything with her. He talked with her, remonstrated and pleaded, called her hysterical and a lot of worse things—but Vyvy was adamant. “I won’t have a man I can’t be proud of!” she told him, at the height of their last argument on the subject.
Something had to give. It was a real crisis to them. And the next thing I knew Leon was making inquiries at recruiting stations as to the various branches of the service in which he could enlist. It was all very painful for him, but he was between the frying pan and a very hot fire; he had to make a decision of some kind—and he did, although I suspect that somebody dragged him in for examination and made him sign a paper before he realized what he was doing. Anyway, he enlisted—which proves something or other about girls like Vyvy. He came home actually proud of himself over the fact that he had passed the initial physical examination, but I noticed that he didn’t eat much for dinner that evening. And Vyvy very promptly indicated that she would throw over all her soldier friends, now that he had done the trick like a hero. She was not dizzy, after all; she knew that jealousy is a woman’s best weapon.
But poor Leon! He was suffering the torments of hell just thinking about being a soldier. I wished we could exchange places. I knew I would love it all—the coarseness, the roughness, the absolute hellishness of being a soldier appealed to me.... Instead of such a prospect, what I got was another, more importunate proposal of marriage from my hound. I thought this life was certainly a mixture of sweets and bitters, but I guess I was happy enough over the streak of manhood showing in my previously impossible twin.