Эптон Синклер - Oil!

Bunny no longer felt comfortable about going to the Monastery. But Vee would not let him quit, she argued and pleaded; Annabelle was so kind and good, and would be so hurt if he let horrid political quarrels break up their friendship! Bunny answered—he knew Verne must be sore as the dickens; and imagine Verne being tactful or considerate of a guest!

When you went out into society and refused to take a drink, you caused everybody to begin talking about Prohibition. In the same way, when you did not join in denunciation of the “insurgent” senators in Washington, you caused some one to comment on your sympathy for bomb-throwers. The little bunch of “reds” in Congress were interfering with legislation much desired by the rich, and they were denounced at every dinner table, including Vernon Roscoe’s. The great Schmolsky said, what the hell were they after, anyhow? And Verne replied, “Ask Jim Junior—he’s chummy with them.” Annabelle had to jump in and cry, “No politics! I won’t have you picking on my Bunny!”

Then, later in the evening, when Harvey Manning got drunk, he sat on Bunny’s knee, very affectionate, as he always was, and shook one finger in front of Bunny’s nose and remarked, “You gonna tell ’m bout me?” And when Bunny inquired, “Tell who, Harve?” the other replied, “Those muckrakin friends o yours. I aint gonna have ’em tellin on me! My ole uncle fines out I get drunk he’ll cut me out o his will.” So Bunny knew that his intimacy with the enemy had been a subject of discussion at the Monastery!

There had been a series of violent outbreaks in Angel City. The members of the American Legion, roused by the “red revolutionary raving,” had invaded the headquarters of the I. W. W. and thrown the members down the stairs, and thrown their typewriters and desks after them. Since the courts wouldn’t enforce law and order, these young men were going to attend to it. They had raided bookstores which sold books with red bindings, and dumped the books into the street and burned them. They had beaten up newsdealers who were selling radical magazines. Also they were taking charge of the speakers the public heard—if they didn’t like one, they notified the owner of the hall, and he hastened to break his contract.

John Groby, one of Verne’s oil associates from Oklahoma, was at the dinner-table, and he said, that was the way to handle the rattle-snakes. Groby may not have known that one of the snakes was sitting across the way from him, so Bunny took no offense, but listened quietly. “That’s the way we did the job at home, we turned the Legion loose on ’em and cracked their heads, and they moved on to some other field. You’re too polite out here, Verne.”

Annabelle had put Bunny beside her, so that she might protect him from assaults. Now she started telling him about her new picture, “A Mother’s Heart.” Such a sweet, old-fashioned story! Bunny would call it sentimental, perhaps, but the women would just love it, and it gave her a fine part. Also Vee had a clever scenario for her new picture, “The Golden Couch.” Quite a fetching title, didn’t Bunny think? And all the time, above the soft murmur of Annabelle’s voice, Bunny heard the loud noise of John Groby blessing the Legion. Bunny longed to ask him what the veterans would say to the “Ohio gang,” stealing the funds from their disabled buddies.

Someone mentioned another stunt of the returned soldiers—their setting up a censorship of moving pictures. One Angel City theatre had started to show a German film, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and this Hun invasion had so outraged the Legion men, they had put on their uniforms and blockaded the theatre, and beaten up the people who tried to get in. Tommy Paley laughed—the courage of each of those veterans had been fortified by a five dollar bill, contributed by the association of motion picture producers! They didn’t want foreign films that set them too high a standard!

Then Schmolsky. He was too fat to comprehend such a thing as irony, and he remarked that the directors were mighty damn right. Schmolsky, a Jew from Ruthenia, or Rumelia, or Roumania, or some such country, said that we didn’t want no foreign films breaking in on our production schedules. An hour or so later Bunny heard him telling how the Hollywood films were sweeping the German market—it wouldn’t be three years before we’d own this business. “Vae victis!” remarked Bunny; and Schmolsky looked at him, puzzled, and said, “Huh?”

From such a week end Bunny would return to Angel City, and accompany Rachel to a meeting of the Young People’s Socialist League. In an obscure hall twenty-five or thirty boys and girls of the working class met once a week, and read papers, and discussed problems of politics and economics, the labor movement and the Socialist party. Rachel had grown up with this organization, and had prestige with it because she had got a college education, and because she brought “Comrade Ross” with her. The most thoroughly “class-conscious” young people could not help being thrilled by a spectacle so unusual as a millionaire who sympathized with the workers and had helped to bail out political prisoners.

With these young Socialists, as with the old ones, it was right wing versus left; everybody argued tactics, and got tremendously excited. The Communists also had an organization, the Young Workers’ League, and the two rivals carried on sniping operations; sometimes they held formal debates, and young people would jump up and down in their seats, and carry on the controversy in their homes and working places for weeks afterwards. It was Moscow versus Amsterdam, the Third International versus the Second, the “reds” against the “pinks,” as the mild Socialists were called. And this same struggle was going on in the soul of Bunny. Paul Watkins would pull him forward, and then Rachel Menzies would haul him back; and his trouble seemed to be, he was of the opinion of the one he talked with last. He was so prone to see the other fellow’s point of view, and lose himself in that! Why couldn’t he have a mind of his own?

Theoretically it was possible to bring about the change from Capitalism to Socialism by peaceable, one-step-at-a-time methods. Anyone could lay out the steps. But when you came to take the first one, you confronted the fact that the capitalists didn’t want to be evolved into Socialism, and wouldn’t let you take any step. It was a fact that so far they had outwitted the workers at every turn; they had even forced the government to retrace the steps which had been taken in the emergency of war. It was also true, as Paul contended, that the capitalists would not permit the workers to be peaceable; they resorted to violence every time, and set aside the laws and the constitution when it suited their convenience.

To Bunny that seemed a pathetic thing about the Socialists. Take a man like Chaim Menzies; he had the long vision, the patience of the elderly worker; with ages of toil behind him, and ages ahead of him, he did not shrink from the task of building an organization. But he was never allowed to finish the building, the masters would knock it down overnight; they sent in spies, they bribed the officials and sowed discord, and in time of strikes their police and gunmen raided the offices, and jailed the leaders, and drove the workers back into slavery. So here was a curious situation—the masters in their blindness working as allies of the Communists! Verne and his oil operators and the rest of the open shop crowd saying to the working people, “No, don’t listen to the Socialists, they are a bunch of old fogies. The Communists are the fellows who can tell you what we are like, and how we are going to behave!”