Эптон Синклер - Oil!

Everybody was happy except Bunny, who could think of nothing but the fact that Eunice was angry, and he was risking the loss of her. She had warned him, she would not be left alone; if he deserted her, she would punish him. He knew that she meant it; she had had lovers before him, and would have others after him. This “petting” was a daily necessity for her, and a girl could not get it unless she was willing to “go the limit.” That was the etiquette prevailing in this smart and dashing crowd; the rich high school youths would go out hunting in pairs in their fancy sport-cars, and would pick up girls and drive them, and if the girls did not play the game according to their taste, they would turn them out on the road, anywhere, a score of miles from a town. There was a formula, short and snappy, “Pet or walk!”

Bunny took long tramps, trying to shake off his cruel fever. He would come back to sleep, but instead he would think about Eunice, and the manifold intoxication of his senses would return; she would be there with all her allurements and her abandonments. Bunny tried haltingly once or twice to tell Paul about it; Paul being a sort of god, a firm and dependable moral force, to whom one might flee. Bunny remembered the scorn with which Paul had talked about “fornications,” and Bunny had not known quite what he meant—but Bunny knew now, alas, only too well. He tried to confess, but was ashamed, and could not break down the barriers. Instead, he made some excuse to his father and drove back to Beach City, three days earlier than he had intended; and all the way as he rode he was hearing Paul’s voice, those cruel words of the strike-days: “You’re soft, Bunny, you’re soft.”

The first rain of the season was falling, and Bunny got in fairly late, and found that Eunice was at home, and had not carried out her threat to get another lover. No, she was trying an experiment she had read about in a book of her mother’s, a thing called “mental telepathy”; you sat and shut your eyes and “concentrated,” “willing” that somebody should do something, and then they would do it, and the “new thought” doctrine would be vindicated. Eunice was trying it, and when she heard Bunny’s step on the veranda, she sprang up with a little shriek of delight and rushed into his arms, and while she smothered him with kisses she told him about this marvelous triumph of experimental psychology. “Oh, Bunny, I just knew you couldn’t be so cruel to me! I knew you’d come, because I’m all alone, Mamma has gone to raise money for the Serbian orphans. Oh, Bunny, come on!”—and she started to draw him toward the stairs.

Bunny didn’t think that was quite the thing, and tried to hold back, but she smothered his protest in kisses. “You silly boy, are we going out and park in the rain? Or do you want to go to a hotel in town, where everybody knows us?”

“But, your mother, Eunice—”

“Mother, bunk!” said Eunice. “Mother has a lover and I know it, and she knows I know it. If she don’t know about you and me, it’s time she was making a guess. So you come up to my room.”

“But how’ll I get out, Eunice?”

“You’ll get out when I let you out, and maybe it’ll be morning, and you’ll be treated with decent hospitality.”

“But Eunice, I never heard of such a thing!”

“Bunny, you talk like your grandmother!”

“But what about the servants, dear?”

“Servants, hell!” said Eunice. “You can run your home to please the servants, but that’s not our way—at least, not tonight!” And to save Bunny any embarrassment, she kept him in her room in the morning while she broke the news to her mother; and if there were any mental agonies Bunny never knew it, because the patroness of the Serbian orphans breakfasted in bed, reading in the morning paper the account of her fashionable philanthropies.

After that, the ice was broken—as the French have observed, it is the first step that counts, though it is doubtful if any parent in old-fashioned France has been compelled to take quite so long a step. The rainy season continued, making out-door petting parties uncomfortable, so whenever he was commanded, Bunny would stay in Eunice’s home, and it was all quite domestic and regular according to advanced modern standards. In fact, there was only one small detail left, and Bunny suggested that: “Eunice, why shouldn’t we go and get married, and have it over with?”

He was surprised by the vehemence of the girl’s reaction. “Oh, Bunny, we’re having such a happy time, and why do you want to ruin in?”

“But why would that ruin it?”

“All married people are miserable. I know, because I’ve watched them. Mamma and Papa would give a million dollars—well, maybe not that much but certainly a couple of hundred thousand, if they could get loose without having to go through all the fuss in the courts, and the horrid things the newspapers would publish, and their pictures and all.”

“But we won’t have to do that, dear.”

“How do you know we mightn’t? If we got married, you’d think you had a right to me, and then you wouldn’t do what I say any more, and I wouldn’t be happy. Oh, let’s do our own way, and not what other people try to make us. All my life other people have been making me do things, and I’ve been fighting them—even you, Bunny-bear.” She had a score of such appellatives for him, because, as you can understand, his name was adapted to petting-party uses; they were dancing a contrivance known as the Bunny-hug, and he heard a lot about that.

You went about in this prosperous and fashionable society, and on the surface everything was decorous and proper, fitting the marital formulas laid down in the laws and preached in the churches. But when you got under the surface—anywhere, high or low—what you found was that human beings, finding themselves unhappy, had come to private understandings. Husbands and wives set one another free, they made exchanges of partners, they brought friends into their homes, who were in reality substitute husbands or wives; there were companions and secretaries and governesses and cousins who played such roles—and when the children found it out, they were in position to put pressure on their parents, a kind of informal family blackmail, good for motor-cars and fur-coats and strings of pearls, and most precious of all, the right to have your own way.

Early in the year, while America was getting into the war, the people of Russia had overthrown their Tsar and set up a republic. That had pleased most people in America; it was much pleasanter to be allied with a republic. But now, in the fall, came a terrifying event; there was another revolution, this time not made by respectable scholars and business men, but by wild-eyed fanatics called “Bolshevikis,” who proceeded to confiscate property and smash things up. At once it became apparent what a calamity this was going to mean for the allies; Russia was going to desert them, and the mass of the Germans on the East would be set free to be hurled against the half-exhausted Western front. Already the Russian armies were going to pieces, the soldiers were deserting wholesale and swarming back to the cities or to their villages; at the same time the leaders of the new government were starting a world-wide propaganda attacking the allies and their war-aims.

Who were these leaders? It was enough for America to note that a horde of them, who had been hiding in Switzerland, were loaded into a sealed train by the German government and escorted across Germany and dumped into Russia to make all the trouble they could. That meant Lenin and his crowd were hired agents of the Hun; when they proceeded to attack what they called “allied imperialism,” that was the Kaiser’s voice speaking Russian, and when they published the secret treaties of the allies, taken from the archives of the Tsar, the newspapers in America dismissed the documents as obvious forgeries.