Эптон Синклер - Oil!

Bunny and Rachel had dinner, and then strolled on the water front; it was one of those warm nights that come now and then in Southern California; there was a moon on the sea, and a long pier with gleaming lights, and the sound of an orchestra drawing the lovers. At the entrance to the pier was a big bare hall, owned by the city, where very proper dancing was chaperoned by a religious city government. Bunny and his bride danced—oh, surely it was all right to dance a little bit, in this well chaperoned place on what ought to have been their honeymoon!

But in between the dances, while the orchestra was still, something shook the hall, a dull, sombre blow, like distant thunder, making the windows rattle, and jarring your feet. “What’s that?” exclaimed Rachel. “An earthquake?”

“The guns,” answered Bunny.

“Guns?” And he had to explain, the fleet was practicing. There were a score or so of battleships stationed in the harbor, facing some unnamed enemy; and now they were at night target-practice. You heard them now and then, day and night, if you lived near the coast.

So Rachel couldn’t dance any more then. Each time she heard that dull boom, she saw the bodies of young men blown into fragments. The capitalists were getting ready for their next war; what business had the Socialists to be dancing?

They drove along the boulevard which follows the harbor-front. It is fifteen or twenty miles, and there are towns and docks and bridges and railroad tracks and factories, and inland the “subdivisions” for the homes of working people. It is one of the world’s great ports in the swift making; and those who have charge of the job, the masters of credit, see rearing before them that monstrous spectre known as “direct action” or “criminal syndicalism.” The “Industrial Workers of the World” had a headquarters, where they met to discuss this program; and the masters made incessant war upon them.

The address which Ruth had given to Bunny was an obscure street in a working-class quarter. There was a fair-sized hall, with lights in the windows, and the sound of a piano and a child’s voice singing. Among the cars parked along the curb Bunny found a vacant space, and backed into it, and was just about to step from his car, when Rachel caught him by the arm. “Wait!” There came rushing down the street a squadron of motor-cars, two abreast and blocking the way entirely; and from them leaped a crowd of some fifty men, carrying weapons of various sorts, clubs, hatchets, pieces of iron pipe. They made a rush for the entrance, and a moment later the music ceased, and there came the sound of shrieks, and the crash of glass and battering of heavy blows.

“They’re raiding them!” cried Bunny, and would have run to the scene; but Rachel’s arms were flung about him, pinning him to his seat. “No! No! Sit still! What can you do?”

“My God! We must do something!”

“You’re not armed, and you can’t stop a mob! You can only get killed! Keep still!”

The sounds from within had risen to a bedlam; the hall must have been crowded, and everyone inside yelling at the top of his lungs. And that horrible drumming of blows—you couldn’t tell whether they were falling on furniture or on human bodies. Bunny was almost beside himself, struggling to get loose, and Rachel fighting like a mad thing—he had never dreamed that she had such strength. “No, Bunny! No! For God’s sake! For my sake! Oh, please, please!” She knew in those dreadful minutes the terror that was to haunt the rest of her life—that some day in this hideous class war there would come the moment when it was her husband’s duty to get himself killed. But not yet, not yet! Not on their honeymoon!

It was like the passing of a tornado, that is gone before you have time to realize it. The attacking party emerged from the hall, as quickly as they had entered. They were dragging half a dozen prisoners, and threw these into the cars, of which the engines were still going; then down the street they went roaring, and silence fell.

It was permissible for Bunny to get out now, and run into the hall, with Rachel at his heels. He had one thought, the same as on that night when he had run over Mrs. Groarty’s place, crying, “Paul! Paul!” They were certain to have taken Paul away on that lynching party; and how could Bunny save him?

The first thing he saw, in the doorway, was a man with a great gash across his forehead, and the blood streaming all over him; he was staggering about, because he couldn’t see, and crying, “The sons-o’-bitches! The sons-o’-bitches!” Near him was another man whose hand had been slashed across, and a woman was tearing her skirt to make a bandage. A little girl lay on the floor, screaming in agony, and some one was pulling off her stockings, and the raw flesh was coming with them. “They threw her into the coffee!” said a voice in Bunny’s ear. “Jesus Christ, they threw the kids into the boiling coffee!”

Everywhere confusion, women in hysterics, or sunk upon the floor sobbing. There was not a stick of furniture in the place that had not been wrecked; the chairs had been split with hatchets; the piano had been gutted, its entrails lay tangled on the floor. Tables were overset, and dishes and crockery trampled, and the metal urn or container in which the coffee had been boiling had been overset, and its steaming contents running here and there. But first they had hurled three children into it, one after another, as their frantic parents dragged them out. The flesh had been cooked off their legs, and they would be crippled for life: one was a ten year old girl known as “the wobbly song-bird”; she had a sweet treble, and sang sentimental ballads and rebel songs, and the mob leader had jerked her from the platform, saying, “We’ll shut your damned mouth!”

What was the meaning of this raid? According to the newspapers, it was the patriotic indignation of sailors from the fleet. There had been an explosion on one of the battleships, and several men had been killed, and the newspapers had printed a story that one of the wobblies had been heard to laugh with satisfaction. It is an ancient device of the master press. In old Russia the “Black Hundreds” were incited by tales of “ritual murders” committed by the Jews, Christian babies killed for sacrifice. In Britain now the government was forging letters attributed to the Soviet leaders, and using them to carry an election. In America the deportations delirium had been sanctified by a great collection of forged documents, officially endorsed.

It was a spontaneous mob, said these law and order newspapers. But this fact was noted: on all other occasions there had been policemen at these wobbly meetings, to take note of criminal utterances; but this night there had been no policeman on hand. Nor were there any afterwards; Bunny and the other “reds” might besiege the police department and the city government, and offer the names of the principal mob leaders, but there would be no step taken to punish anyone for this murderous raid!

Bunny didn’t expect to find Paul, but there he lay, flat on his back, with several people bending over him. His left eye was a mass of blood, and seemed as if destroyed by a blow; he lay, limp and motionless, and when Bunny called his name he did not answer. But he was alive, gasping with a kind of snoring sound.

A doctor! A doctor! There were several in the neighborhood, and people rushed away to look for them. From the days of Bunny’s residence in Beach City he knew the name of a surgeon, and hurried to a phone, and was so fortunate, as to find the surgeon at home. Bunny told what had happened, and the other said he would come at once; in the case of injury to skull or other bones, X-ray pictures would be needed, so he gave the name of doctors who did such work, and Bunny did more telephoning, and arranged for one of these to be at his laboratory and await developments. Also he ordered an ambulance from a hospital.