Эптон Синклер - Oil!

Oh, the fury of the capitalist press next day! They didn’t report the meeting, but they published protests about it, and stormed in editorials. The LaFollette “reds” were bad enough, but this was an intolerable outrage—an avowed Moscow agent, who had been expelled from France, permitted to hold a meeting in Angel City and incite union labor to red riot and insurrection! What was our police department for? Where were our patriotic societies and our American Legion and our other forces of law and order?

Bunny called up Ruth next morning; he wanted to see Paul, to talk about the proposed college. Ruth said that Paul had gone down to the harbor, to see about addressing meetings of the long-shoremen. These men had had a big strike while Bunny was abroad, and had taken their full course in capitalist government. Six hundred of them had been swept up off the street, for the crime of marching and singing, and had been packed into tanks with all ventilation shut off, to reduce them to silence. A score of the leaders had been sent to state’s prison for ten or twenty years for “criminal syndicalism”; so the rest ought to be ready to listen to the Communist doctrine, that the workers had to master the capitalist state. There was to be an entertainment that night in the I. W. W. hall at the harbor; there would be music and refreshments, and Paul thought it would be a good chance to get acquainted with the leaders. Bunny said that he and Rachel were going down to Beach City, and they might run over and bring Paul back with them.

Bunny had yielded to the importunities of his sister: wouldn’t he have the decency to help out the estate in at least one way—look into those reports which Vernon Roscoe had rendered concerning the Prospect Hill field? Verne asserted that more than half the wells were off production, and Bertie suspected one more trick to rob them. Bertie wouldn’t know an oil well off production from a hen-coop; but Bunny would know, and couldn’t he go down there, and snoop around a bit, and find out what other oil men thought about the field and its prospects? Bunny took Rachel with him—she went everywhere with her new husband, of course. They had got one of the oldest of the Ypsels to run the magazine office, and Rachel was just manager and editor, very high and mighty. Bunny was a one-arm driver again, and the automobile was lopsided, and Rachel was nervous when he drove fast, because the gods are jealous of such rapture as hers.

Rachel had never seen an oil field at close range. So Bunny took her to the “discovery well,” and told how Mr. Culver had had his ear-drums destroyed, trying to stop the flow with his head. He showed her the first well that Dad had drilled, and on which Bunny had helped to keep the mud flowing. That had been the beginning of Dad’s big wealth; he and perhaps a score of others had got rich, and to balance it, there were in Beach City many thousands of people who had their homes plastered with mortgages, representing losses from the buying of “units.” That was the way most of the money had been made in Prospect Hill—selling paper instead of oil. It was a fact, as Paul had cited, that more money had been put into the ground than had been taken out of it. Here had been a treasure of oil that, wisely drilled, would have lasted thirty years: but now the whole field was “on the pump,” and hundreds of wells producing so little that it no longer paid to pump them. One sixth of the oil had been saved, and five-sixths had been wasted!

That was your blessed “competition,” which they taught you to love and honor in the economics classes! Another aspect of it was those frightful statistics, that of all the thousands of men who had worked here, seventy-three out of every hundred had been killed or seriously injured during the few years of the field’s life! It was literally true that capitalist industry was a world war going on all the time, unheeded by the newspapers.

Bunny did his checking up of the Ross wells; he couldn’t do any “snooping,” because some of the old hands knew him, and came up to greet him. He talked with a number of men, and found their reports about the same as Verne’s. Then, towards evening, as he and Rachel were getting ready to leave, they came to a bungalow, dingy and forlorn, black with oil stains and grey with dust, with a storage-tank in the back yard, and a derrick within ten feet on the next lot, and on the other side a shed which had housed the engine of another derrick. Bunny stopped, and read the number on the front of the bungalow, 5746 Los Robles Blvd. “Here’s where Mrs. Groarty lives! Paul’s aunt—it was in that house we had the meeting about the lease, and I first heard Paul’s voice through the window there!”

He told the story of that night, describing the characters and how they had behaved. Paul said it was a little oil fight, and the world war had been a big oil fight, and they were exactly the same. While they were talking, the door opened, and there emerged a stout, red-faced woman in a dirty wrapper, and Bunny exclaimed, “There’s Mrs. Groarty!” Out he hopped—“Hello, Mrs. Groarty!” How many years it had been since she had seen him; he had to tell her who he was, that little boy grown up, and with a wife—well, well, would you believe it, how time does fly! And so Mr. Ross was dead—Mrs. Groarty’s husband had read the sad news out of the paper. She knew that he had got to be very rich, so she was thrilled by this visit, and invited them in, but all in a flutter because her house wasn’t in order.

They went in, because Bunny wanted Rachel to see that staircase, and to have a laugh on her afterwards, because she wouldn’t notice anything, but would think the staircase led to a second story—in a one-story bungalow! There was the room—not a thing changed, except that it seemed to have shrunk in size, and the shine was all gone. There was the window where Bunny had stood while he listened to Paul’s whispered voice. And by golly, there was “The Ladies’ Guide, a Practical Handbook of Gentility,” still on the centre table, faded and fly-specked gold and blue! Along side was a stack of what appeared to be legal papers, a pile at least eight inches high, and fastened with ribbons and a seal. Mrs. Groarty caught his glance at it; or perhaps it was just that she was longing for someone to tell her troubles to. “That’s the papers about our lot,” she said. “I just took them away from the lawyer, he takes our money and he don’t do nothing.”

So then she was started, and Rachel continued her education in oil history. The Groartys had entered a community agreement, and then withdrawn from it and entered a smaller one: then they had leased to Sliper and Wilkins, and been sold by those “lease hounds” to a syndicate; and this syndicate had been plundered and thrown into bankruptcy; after which the lease had been bought by a man whom Mrs. Groarty described as the worst skunk of them all, and he had gone and got a lot of claims and liens against the property, and actually, people were trying to take some money away from the Groartys now, though they had never got one cent out of the well—and look at the way they had had to live all these years!

Here was the record of these transactions, community agreements and leases and quit claim deeds and notices of release and notices of cancellation of lease, and mortgages, and sales of “percents,” and mechanic’s liens and tax receipts and notices of expiration of agreement—not less than four hundred pages of typewritten material, something like a million and a half of words, mostly legal jargon—“the undersigned hereby agrees” and “in consideration of the premises herein set forth,” and “in view of the failure of the party of the first part to carry out the said operations by the aforesaid date,” and so on—it made you dizzy just to turn the pages. And all this to settle the ownership of what was expected to be ten thousand barrels of oil, and had turned out to be less than one thousand! Here you saw where the money had gone—pale typists shut up in offices all day transcribing copies of this verbiage, and pale clerks checking and rechecking them, or looking them up, or recording them—there were men up in Angel City who had become mighty magnates by employing thousands of men and women slaves, to transcribe and check and recheck and look up and record literally millions of documents like these!