Эптон Синклер - Oil!

Bunny wrestled it out with his own soul, in such free moments as he could get. He told himself that it was to help his father—a more respectable excuse than entertaining a mistress! But did his father have a right to expect so much? Did any one person have a right to replace all the rest of humanity? If it was the duty of the young to sacrifice themselves for the old, how could there ever be any progress in the world? As time passed, and the struggle in the oil fields grew more tense, the agony of the workers more evident, Bunny came to the clear decision that his flight had been cowardly.

He tried to explain his point of view to Vee, but only to run into a stone wall. It was not a subject for reasoning, it was a matter of instinct with her. She believed in her money; she had starved for it, sold herself, body and mind, for it, and she meant to hang onto it. Bunny’s so-called “radical movement” meant to her that others wanted to take it away. He discovered a strange, hard streak in her; she would spend money lavishly, for silks and furs and jewels, for motor-cars and parties—but that was all professional, it was part of her advertising bill. But, on the other hand, where no display was involved, where the public did not enter—there she hated to spend money; he overheard her wrangling with a washerwoman over the amount to be charged for the ironing of her lingerie, and those filmy night-dresses in which she seduced his soul.

No, he could never make a “radical” out of this darling of the world; he would have to make up his mind to that. She would listen to him, because she loved him, even the sound of his voice talking nonsense; she would make a feeble pretense at agreeing, but all the time it was as if he had the measles and she waiting for him to get cured; as if he were drunk and she trying to get him “on the wagon.” She had apologized to Rachel, and had got Paul out of jail, but merely to please him, and in reality she hated both these people. Still more did she hate Ruth, with a cold, implacable hatred—an intriguing minx, pretending to be a simple country maiden in order to win an oil prince! No women were simple, if you believed Vee, and damn few of them were maidens.

Nor would Ruth ever stop being a nuisance. In the midst of one of their happiest times, she sent Bunny another telegram—her brother was in jail again, this time it was contempt of court. Bunny considered it necessary to paddle down to the nearest telegraph office and wire Mr. Dolliver, the lawyer, to investigate and report. The answer came that nothing could be done—Paul and others of the strike leaders had disregarded an injunction forbidding them to do this and that, and there was no bail and no appeal, neither habeas corpusses nor counter-injunctions, and Paul would have to serve his three months’ sentence.

Bunny was bitter and rebellious against judges who issued injunctions, and Vee was afraid to speak, because it seemed obvious to her that somebody had to control strikers. Of course after that there was a shadow over their holiday—Bunny brooding upon his friend shut up in the county jail. He sent Ruth five hundred dollars, to take care of all the prisoners; and in course of time got a letter, saying that the prisoners had refused the money, and Ruth had turned it over to the strike relief. It was a terrible thing to see children without enough to eat; terrible also that men who had power should use it to starve children! Thus the “simple” Ruth—not meaning any hint at Dad!

Bunny had to study for his fall examinations, and that looked like a problem, for what was Vee going to do? But fate provided a solution—Dad telegraphed to Harvard University, which sent up a young instructor to do tutoring, and he was the solution. He was tall, and had the loveliest fair blue eyes, and a softly curling golden moustache, and soft golden fuzz all over him like a baby; he wore gold nose-glasses, and had a quiet voice and oh, so much culture—one of those master minds which can tutor you in anything if you give them a week’s start!

Coming as he did from an old Philadelphia family, and having been trained in the haughtiest centre of intellectual snobbery, you might have thought he would look down upon an ex-mule driver and his son, to say nothing of an actress who had been raised in a patent medicine vender’s wagon, and had never read a whole book in her life. But as a matter of fact, young Mr. Appleton Laurence just simply collapsed in the presence of the situation he found at this Ontario camp; it was the most romantic and thrilling thing that a young instructor had encountered since Harvard began. As for the patent medicine vender’s daughter, he could not take his eyes off her, and when she came near, the tutoring business was scattered as by a hurricane.

Vee of course had put her sparkling black eyes to work at once; all those stunts which Tommy Paley had taught her she now tried out on a new victim, and Bunny, as audience, was in position to study them objectively. Vee would wait till Mr. Laurence had set Bunny his morning’s work, and then she and the tutor would go for a walk in the woods, and Bunny would sit with one half his mind on his books, while the other half wondered what was happening, and what he had reason to expect from one who had had so many lovers.

She did not leave him long in doubt. “Bunny-rabbit,” she said, “you aren’t going to be worried about my Appie, are you?”—for the hurricane that struck the tutoring business had swept all dignity away, and Mr. Appleton Laurence was “Appie,” except when he was “Applesauce.”

“I won’t worry unless you tell me to,” Bunny answered.

“That’s a dear! You must understand, I’m an actress, that’s the way I earn my living, and I simply have to know all about love, and how can I learn if I don’t practice?”

“Well, that’s all right, dear—”

“Some of the men they give you in Hollywood are such dubs, it makes you sick, you would as soon be in the arms of a clothing dummy. So I have to tell them how to act, and I have to know how a real gentleman behaves—you know what I mean, the highbrows and snobs. Oh, Bunny, it’s the cutest thing you ever saw, he falls down on his knees, and the tears come into his eyes, and you know, he can recite all the poets by heart; I never saw anything like it; you’d think he was an old Shakespearean actor. And it’s really a great opportunity for me, to cultivate my taste and get refined.”

“Well, yes, dear, but isn’t it a little hard on him?”

“Oh, rubbish, it won’t hurt him, he’ll go off and put it into sonnets—he’s doing it already, and maybe he’ll get to be famous, and it’d be great publicity! Don’t you bother about him, Bunny, and don’t bother about me; there’s nobody in the world for me but my Bunny-rabbit—all the rest is just a joke.” And she put her arms about him. “I know what it is to be jealous, dear, and I wouldn’t cause you that unhappiness for anything in the world. If you really mind, you can send old Applesauce packing, and I won’t be cross.”

Bunny laughed. “I can’t do that, I’ve got to be tutored.”

Vee told Dad about it, too—lest he should be having any vicarious pangs. When Dad heard about the falling on the knees and the tears, he chuckled. Bunny would get the contents of the tutor’s mind, and Vee would get the contents of his heart, and they would send him home like a squeezed orange. It appealed to Dad as good business. Back in Paradise, you remember, he was hiring a chemical wizard, paying him six thousand a year, and making millions out of him!

There came another development, to protect Vee from the possibility of boredom. Schmolsky sent her up the “continuity” of the new picture upon which she was to start work in the fall. And then suddenly it was revealed that the world’s darling knew how to read! For a whole hour she sat buried in it, and then she leaped up, ready to start rehearsing—and all the hurricanes that ever swept the province of Ontario were as nothing to the one that came now. Clear the way for “The Princess of Patchouli”!