And so immediately after the show, myself and Ma went back to New York to get a twenty-four hour rest before commencing work again.
V
NOW IS THE TIME
I
Believe you me, the world to-day is just about as settled as a green passenger on a trip to Bermuda. There is that same awful feeling of not knowing is something going to happen or not—do you get me? You do! And it can't help but strike even a mere womanly woman and lady like I, that unless the captain and officers keep a firm hand on the crew until we get a little ballast in the hold, we are likely to get in Dutch. Not meaning the Germans necessarily, but the Russians, or something just as bad. And perhaps it may seem strange for me to know about them nautchical terms, but anybody which has once been to Bermuda learns what ballast is on account of their not having hardly any on them boats because of the water not being deep enough, and believe you me, nothing I had to do in the fillum we made after what was left of us arrived there, and it was some fillum at that—$1000. for bathing costumes alone and me as "The Sea King's Conquest" in silver scales, although hardly knowing how to swim—was a patch on the treatment which that unballasted boat handed me on the trip down.
Well anyways, even when sitting in the security of my flat on the Drive, which Gawd knows it aught to be secure what with the salary I get and moving-pictures will be the last thing the common people will give up;—even with this security and the handsomest furniture any installment house could provide, and every other equipment which is necessary to one so prominent in my line as myself, still even in the scarcity of the home, as the poet says, I am conscious that the world is, or could quite easily be, on the blink.
And ain't it the truth? Even the simplest soul, buried in the wilds of Broadway and wholly absorbed in their own small life must feel the unrest. No use kidding ourselves about it. It's time for all good Americans to quit fighting among theirselves and come to the aid of the country. Regardless of race, creed or color, as the free hospital says, and Gawd knows the hospital will be where they'll land if they don't. Do you get me? Probably not. What I mean is, it's time we quit talking and did something. What? I dunno, quite, but it was this general line of thought, which come to me while listening to the director give me my instructions for the ball-room scene in "The Dove of Peace," where I catch the Russian Ambassador giving the nitro-glycerine or some other patent face-cleanser to the fake Senator, caused me to reform the White Kittens. That and Ma's peculiar behavior, plus the new cook.
You see it come over me all of a sudden that we ladies have now a vote and so forth, which unquestionably makes us more or less citizens the same as the men, and if the country went bluey, why wouldn't it be our fault as well? And I come to this partially through the sense of unrest and having eat something that didn't settle good and Ma's behavior. All coming at once they kind of got together and exploded into my idea.
Well anyways, I had just come to a place in my personal life where I seen a little peace and quiet ahead and nothing to do but go up in an aeroplane for the second reel of "The Dove." The war was over without Jim being killed in it and a new chance offered by a big picture contract the minute his uniform should be off him; I was going strong with nothing but Broadway releases and a salary which made Morgan jealous; my spring clothes hadn't a failure among them and only one of my hats was too tight in the head. The fool dogs was both healthy, the cook had stayed a month; the car had been in order for over three weeks, and I had successfully nursed Ma through the flu. And I thought fat could not harm me, as the poet says, for I had dieted to-day. When all of a sudden Ma, who had hardly got over the Influenza, come down with Bolshevism.