California, Southern -- Fiction; Motion picture industry -- Fiction; Petroleum industry and trade -- Fiction; Political fiction
Bunny went back to Beach City, to face a trial of the same sort. Grandma
did not cry out or faint, she just went up to her studio-room and locked
the door and did not appear, even for meals. When Bunny was ready to go,
he went and knocked on the door, and Grandma let him into her laboratory
of paints and oils and high art. Her face was drawn but grim, and only
her withered red eyelids gave her away. “Little boy,” she said—he was
still that to her, he would never grow up—“little boy, you are a victim
of the old men’s crimes. That means nothing to you now, but remember it,
and some day, long after I’m gone, you’ll understand.”
She kissed him without a sound, and he stole out, with tears running
down his cheeks, and feeling somehow as if he himself were committing a
crime. He felt still more that way when, a week later, he received a
telegram saying that Grandmother Ross had been found dead in bed. He got
a three day leave to come home and attend the funeral, and had to say
his good-byes to the rest of the family all over again.
The training-camp was located in the South, a place of blazing sunshine
and vigorous perspiration. It was crowded with boys from every part of
the state, mostly high school and college fellows, with a sprinkling of
others who had got into the officer class by having military experience.
The sons of grape-growers and orange and walnut and peach and prune
growers, of cowmen and lumbermen, and business and professional men in
the cities—Bunny wanted to know what they were like, and what they
thought about life and love and the war. He drilled until his back
ached, and he studied, much the same as at school; but he lived in a
tent, and ate ravenously, and grew in all directions.
Now and then he would explore the country with a companion, but keeping
himself out of the sex adventures that occupied most of the army’s free
time. Here was a place where no bones were made about plain talk; your
superiors took it for granted that when you went out of the camp you
went to look for a woman, and they told you what to do when you came
back, and had a treatment-station where you lined up with the other
fellows and made jokes about where you had been and what it had cost
you. Bunny knew enough to realize that the women in the neighborhood of
this camp who were open to adventures must be pretty well debauched
after a year, so he had little interest in their glances or the trim
silk-stockinged ankles they displayed.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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