Did Bunny see anything wrong with that? Bunny answered that he didn’t; the reason he had been “such an old prude,” was just that he hadn’t got to know Eunice. She said that men were supposed not to care for a girl who made advances to them; therefore, she added with her flash of mischief, it would be up to Bunny to make some of the advances from now on. He said he would do so, and would have started at once, only Eunice was driving at forty-some miles an hour, and it would be better to hurt her feelings than to upset the car.
Were there other girls like Eunice, Bunny wanted to know, and she said there were plenty, and named a few, and Bunny was surprised and a little shocked, because some of them were prominent in class affairs, and decorous-seeming. Eunice told him about their ways, and it was a good deal like a secret society, without any officers or formal ritual, but with a strict code none the less. They called themselves “the Zulus,” these bold spirits who had dared to do as they pleased; they kept one another’s secrets faithfully, and helped the younger ones to that knowledge which was so essential to happiness. The old guarded this knowledge jealously—how to keep from having babies, and what to do if you got “caught.” There was a secret lore about the art of love, and books that you bought in certain stores, or found stowed away behind other books in your father’s den. Such volumes would be passed about and read by scores.
It was a new ethical code that these young people were making for themselves, without any help from their parents. Eunice did not know, of course, that she was doing anything so imposing as that; she just talked about her feelings, and what she liked and what she feared. Was it right to love this way or that? And what did Bunny think about the possibility of loving two girls at the same time? Claire Reynolds said you couldn’t, but Billy Rosen said you could, and they were wrangling all the time. But Mary Blake got along quite happily with two boys who loved her and had agreed not to be jealous.—This was a new world into which Bunny was being introduced, and he asked a lot of questions, and could not help blushing at some of Eunice’s matter-of-fact replies.
Bunny crept into the house at two o’clock in the morning, and no member of the family was the wiser. But he was equally as late the next night, and the next—had he not promised Eunice to “make the advances”? So of course the family realized that something was up, and it was interesting to see their reactions. Aunt Emma and Grandma were in a terrible “state,”: but they could not say why—such was the handicap the old generation imposed upon themselves. They both went to Dad, but could only talk about late hours and their effect on a boy’s health. And Dad himself could not do much more. When Bunny said that he had been taking Eunice Hoyt driving, Dad asked about her, was she a “nice” girl? Bunny answered that she was the treasurer of the girls’ basket-ball team, and her father was Mr. Hoyt, whom Dad knew, and she had her own car and had even tried to pay for the supper. So there could be no idea that Bunny was being “vamped,” and all Dad said was “Take it easy, son, don’t try to live your whole life in a couple of weeks.”
Also there was Bunny’s sister, and that was curious. Had some underground message come to Bertie, through connections with the “Zulus”? All that she said was, “I’m glad you’ve consented to take an interest in something beside oil and strikers for a change.” But behind that sentence lay such an ocean of calm feminine knowledge! Bunny was started upon a new train of thought. Could it be that late hours meant the same thing for his sister that they had suddenly come to mean for him? Bertie was supposed to be dancing; and did she always come directly home, or did she also park by the waysides? Bunny had got over being shocked by the parking of Eunice’s car, but it took him longer to get used to the idea of the parking of his sister’s car. He began to notice, as he drove along the highways in the evening—what a great number of parked cars there were!
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.