Эптон Синклер - Oil!

It was a curious thing—the nature of women! They seemed so gentle and impressionable; but it was the pliability of rubber, or of water—that comes right back the way it was before! From the very first—look at Eunice Hoyt, so set upon having her own way! And even little Rosie Taintor—if he had married her, he would have discovered that she had a fixed religious conviction as to the proper style of window curtains, and how often they had to be laundered! And Vee Tracy, who had given up her happiness—she would not be happy with a Roumanian prince, Bunny knew. And Ruth and Grandma, in the matter of the war! And Bertie, so hell-bent upon getting into fashionable society, in spite of having been born a mule-driver’s daughter! And now here was Rachel Menzies, and Bunny knew exactly the situation—it would break her heart to give up the little paper, she had adopted it with the passion of a mother for a child; but she would walk out of the office in a moment, if ever Bunny should fall victim to the Communist process of “boring from within.”

Bertie arrived in Angel City a week behind her brother, and afforded him still more evidence of the unchangeable nature of femininity. Bertie had come to get her share of the estate, and she went after it with the single-mindedness of a rabbit-hound. Bertie knew a lawyer—her kind of lawyer, another rabbit-hound—and she saw him the day of her arrival; and then Bunny must come to this lawyer’s office, and with the help of Bertie and a stenographer have the insides of his mind turned out and recorded: exactly what Dad had said about his arrangements with Mrs. Alyse Huntington Forsythe Olivier—Dad hadn’t said a word about it to Bertie, alas, nor to anyone else; he had made a will, of course, and that infamous woman had destroyed it—Bertie knew that with the certainty of God.

And then, everything else about Dad’s affairs that Bunny could recall; where he had kept his money and his papers, what secret hiding-place for stocks and bonds he may have had, what he had spent, so far as Bunny could guess, who had been in his confidence. And then the statements which Vernon Roscoe rendered; and all the files of Dad’s correspondence with Verne; and the trusted young executives—Bolling and Heimann and Simmons and the rest; and the bankers and their clerks; and Dad’s secretary whom Bertie had brought back from Paris with her—a veritable mountain of detail, and Bunny was required to attend all the sessions, and be just as much a rabbit-hound as the rest. He told himself that it was his duty to the movement, which so badly needed the aid of a “fat angel”!

Right at the outset, there was one bitter pill that Bertie had to swallow. Her lawyer advised her that there was no chance of depriving Mrs. Alyse Ross of her half of the estate. Bunny’s testimony was worth, in law, precisely nothing; and so, unless there should be found another will, they must accept the inevitable, and combine with the widow to get as much as possible out of Vernon Roscoe. Mrs. Ross’s Paris lawyers had named some very high priced lawyers in Angel City as their representatives, and Bertie had to swallow her rage and admit these men to their counsels.

There were troubles enough to need the very highest-priced lawyers. Accountants were put to work on the books of J. Arnold Ross, and on the statements rendered by his partner, and in a few days there began to emerge out of the tangle one colossal fact: over and above all the money that Dad had put into new business ventures with Verne and others, above all the cash which he had handled through his bank, there was more than ten million dollars’ worth of stocks and bonds which had disappeared without a trace. Verne declared that these securities had been taken by Dad, and used by him for purposes unknown; and Bertie declared that was idiocy, and that Vernon Roscoe was the biggest thief in all history. Having access to Dad’s safe deposit box, he had simply helped himself to the contents. And with rage Bertie turned upon her brother, asserting that he was to blame—Verne knew that Bunny would use his money to try to overturn society, and so it was only common sense to keep him down.

Nor could Bunny deny that this sounded reasonable. It was easy to imagine Verne saying to himself that Bunny was a social danger, and Bertie a social waster, and the widow a poor half-wit, while he, Verne, was a capable business man, who would use those securities for the proper purpose—to bring more oil out of the ground. Learning of Dad’s death, Verne had quietly transferred the securities from Dad’s strong box to his own, before the state inheritance tax commissioner came along to make his records! Verne wouldn’t consider that stealing, but simply common sense—the same as taking the naval reserves away from a government which hadn’t intelligence enough to develop them.

Now Bertie wanted to start a law-suit against her father’s partner, and put him on the stand and make him tell everything about his affairs; and Bunny, with the help of the lawyers, had to argue with her, and bear the brunt of her rage. So far, Verne had been careful to put nothing into writing; and when he took the stand, he would have a story fixed up to leave them helpless. He could say that Dad had given him the securities, and how could they disprove it? He could say that Dad had taken the securities, unknown to his partner, and lost the money on the stock market—how could they disprove that? Even if they traced the sales of Dad’s securities through Verne’s brokers, they would gain nothing, because Verne could say that he had turned over the money to Dad, or that he had been authorized to invest it, and had lost it—a hundred different tales he could invent! “Then we’ve simply got to take what that scoundrel allows us!” cried Bertie; and the lawyers agreed that was the situation. Being themselves on a percentage basis, their advice was sincere!

Then an incident that multiplied the bitterness between Bertie and her brother. Bunny went to the storage warehouse where his belongings had been put away, and in an atlas that his father had occasionally consulted he came upon five liberty bonds for ten thousand dollars each. It was some money Dad had been keeping handy—possibly to bribe the officers in case he should be caught; anyhow, here it was, and Bunny would have been free to consider it a part of the million which Dad had tried to give him in Paris. But he haughtily decided that he would not join in plundering the estate; he would turn the bonds in, to be counted as part of the assets.

But he made the mistake of telling Bertie about it—and oh, what a riot! The imbecile, to make Alyse and her lawyers a present of twenty-five thousand dollars! Instead of quietly dividing with his sister, and holding his mouth! That twenty-five thousand became to Bertie a thing of more importance than all the millions that Verne had got away with; these bonds were something tangible—or almost tangible—until Bunny took them out of her reach, and made them a present to those greedy vultures! And right when both of them needed cash, and were having to go to one of their father’s bankers to borrow money on the basis of their claims to the estate.

Bertie raved and stormed, and Bunny, to get it over with, took the bonds to the bank and turned them in; and after that Bertie never forgave him, she would mention his imbecility every time they were alone. She was making herself ill with all this hatred and fuming; she would sit up half the night poring over figures, and then she couldn’t sleep for excitement. Like all young society ladies, she set much store by the freshness of her skin and its freedom from wrinkles; but now she was throwing away her charms, and making herself pale and haggard. In after years she would be going to beauty specialists and having the corners of her mouth lifted, and the skin of her face treated with chemicals and peeled off—because now she could not control her fury of disappointment, that she was to get only a paltry one or two million, instead of the glorious ten or fifteen million she had been confident of some day possessing.