Эптон Синклер - Oil!

When the Paris premiere was over, Dad got him a touring car of royal proportions, and they motored to Berlin, Bunny driving, with Vee by his side, and Dad on the back seat with his secretary and a chauffeur for emergencies. It was all just as grand as their tour to New York; perfect roads, beautiful scenery, humble peasantry standing cap in hand and awestricken, servants rushing to wait upon them at every stop. All Europe owes us money, and this is how it pays.

And then Berlin—“Erste Auffuehrung in Deutschland, Schmolsky-Superba ankuendigt,” etc. And the crowds and the cameras and the reporters—the world was one. This had been enemy country less than six years ago; but did any ex-soldiers in uniform take station at the theatre entrance, and forbid American films to set too high a standard for the native product? They did not; and Bunny smiled, remembering his remark to Schmolsky, “Vae victis!” and the latter’s reply, “Huh?”

They went on to Vienna. It is a poor city now, and hardly repays the advertising; but there is still magic in the name, and it counts with the newspapers. So here was another premiere, less noisy but more genial. Vee and her lover were a little bored now; she had had the last great “kick” that she could get out of life. When a star has had her continental tour, and has got tired of it, she is an old-timer, blasé and world-weary, and life from then on is merely one thing after another.

The person with gift of perennial childhood was Dad. He enjoyed each premiere as if he had never seen the others, and he would have liked to go on to Bucharest, where her majesty the queen—herself a genius at advertising—was to attend the first showing, in honor of Prince Marescu. But another attraction kept Dad in Vienna—the spooks had followed him! His friend, Mrs. Olivier, had given him a letter to a wonderful medium, and they went to a seance, and Vee was told all about the patent medicine vendor who had raised her in a wagon—the very phrases this man had used to the crowd. By golly, if it was a trick, it was certainly a clever one!

There was only one cloud on this second honeymoon, and Bunny kept it hidden in his own soul. There were “youth” papers in both Berlin and Vienna, and he considered himself bound to call at their offices and invite the rebel editors to lunch, and send home letters for Rachel to publish. In Vienna was a paper in the English language devoted to the defense of political prisoners; it was a Communist paper, but so well camouflaged that Bunny didn’t realize the fact, and anyhow, he would have wished to meet the editors. He was still making his pitiful attempt to understand both sides—even here in Central Europe, where the Socialists and the Communists had many times been at open war.

In this obscure office in a working class part of the city Bunny came upon a ghastly experience. There was exhibited to him a creature that had once been a young man, but now was little more than a skeleton covered with a skin of greenish-yellow. It had only one eye and one ear, and it could not speak because its tongue had been pulled out or cut off, and most of its front teeth had been extracted, and its cheeks were pitted with holes made by cigarettes burned into it. Likewise all the creature’s finger-nails had been torn out, and its hands burned with holes; the men in the office bared its shirt, and showed Bunny how the flesh had been ripped and torn by lashes this way and that, like cross-hatchings in a pen and ink drawing.

This was a prisoner escaped from a Roumanian dungeon, and these scars represented the penalty of refusal to betray his comrades to the White Terror. Here in this office were photographs and letters and affidavits—for this kind of thing was being done to thousands of men and women in Roumania. The government was in the hands of a band of ruling class thugs, who were stealing everything in sight, selling the natural resources of the country; one of the biggest of Roumanian oil fields had just been leased to an American syndicate, possibly Comrade Ross had heard of that? And Comrade Ross said that he had. He didn’t add that his father was in on the deal!

This victim of the White Terror was from Bessarabia, a province taken from Russia under the blessed principle of self-determination. It was inhabited by Russian peasants, and the natural struggles of these people for freedom were met by slaughtering or torturing to death not merely everyone who revolted, but everyone who expressed sympathy with the revolt. Nor was this a sporadic thing, it was the condition prevailing all along the Russian border, a thousand miles from the Baltic to the Black Sea. All these provinces and countries, inhabited by Russian peasants, had been taken from the reds and given to the whites. And so you had this situation—on the Eastern side of the line the peasants had the land and the government, they were free men and women, making a civilization of workers; while on the other side they were serfs at the mercy of landlords, robbed of the fruits of their toil, and beaten or shot if they ventured a murmur. It was impossible to prevent peasants from one side crossing to the other; and the contrast between the two civilizations was so plain that no child could fail to understand it. So the class struggle went on all the time, a hideous civil war, of which no word was allowed to leak to the outside world.

Left to themselves, this landlord aristocracy could not survive a year. But they had world capital behind them; they got the munitions with which to do the slaughtering, or the money to make the munitions, from American big business. Yes, it was America which kept alive this White Terror, in order to collect interest on the debts, and to come in and buy up the country—the railroads, the mines, the oil fields, even the great castles and landed estates. Would not Comrade Ross tell the American people what bloody work their money was doing?

Bunny went away with the question on his conscience. Would he tell, or wouldn’t he? Would he begin by telling his darling of the world? Would he mention that the young Prince Marescu, whom she so greatly admired, was the son of one of the bloodiest of these ruling class thugs?

All the time Bunny was driving his darling through winding passes amid the glorious snow-covered mountains of Switzerland, he was not happy as it was his duty to be. He would have long periods of brooding, and she would ask, what was the matter, and he would evade. But then she would pin him down—being shrewd, like most women where love is concerned. “Is it those reds you’ve been visiting?” He said, “Yes, dear, but let’s not talk about it—it isn’t going to make any difference to us.” She answered, ominously, “It is going to make all the difference in the world to us!”

Back in Paris, and there were long letters from Verne; the government had filed suit for the return of its oil lands, and the Sunnyside tract was in the hands of a receiver, and all the development stopped. But they were not to worry—their organization would be put to work on the various foreign concessions, and as for the money, what they were getting out of Paradise would keep them in old age.

Strange to say, Dad worried scarcely at all. Mrs. Olivier had discovered a new medium, even more wonderful than the others, and this Polish peasant woman with bad teeth and epilepsy had brought up from the depths of the universal consciousness the spirit of Dad’s grandfather, who had crossed the continent in a covered wagon and perished in the Mohave desert; also there was the spirit of an Indian chief whom the old pioneer had killed during the journey. Most fascinating to listen while the two warriors told about this early war between the reds and the whites!