Эптон Синклер - Oil!

The first term of Bunny’s school ended in February, and he passed his examinations with reasonable success; then there was a brief holiday, and Dad produced a wonderful scheme. He could not help feeling a little uncomfortable, with the Watkins family living right there on the tract, and he taking millions of dollars out of the ground for which he had paid them thirty-seven hundred. Dad had an impulse to do something, yet he was afraid to do too much, for fear he might “spoil” them, giving them the notion he owed them more. What he proposed was a family excursion; he would take Bunny and Ruth and Meelie and Sadie in the big limousine, and hire an extra car for old Mr. Watkins and his wife, and drive to the cantonment where Paul was working, and pay him a visit and see the new army in the making. They would stay a couple of days at some hotel nearby, and see all the sights, including the revival meetings which Eli was holding in a huge tent near the encampment.

The girls of course were wild with happiness. It was the first time they had ever had a long automobile trip in the whole of their unsophisticated lives. Bunny spoke to Ruth, who spoke to her mother, who in turn spoke to her husband, and obtained his promise that he would do his best to persuade the Holy Spirit not to send them any revelations or inspire any rolling or talking in tongues until they had got to the camp-meeting. As a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit had recently declared, through Eli as prophet of the Third Revelation, that these inspirational gymnastics had served their purpose and were to be dropped. No reason was vouchsafed, but there were rumors that the well-to-do people who were backing Eli in his evangelical campaigns were opposed to the rolling, and did not regard the speech of the archangels as having any meaning for mortal ears. One of these disciples was an eminent judge, and another was a proprietor of chain grocery-stores; their wives had taken Eli in hand and rubbed off the rough spots and improved his grammar, explaining that because one said heathen, one did not necessarily say healen; also they had taught him where to get his clothes and how to hold a knife and fork, so that Eli was becoming a social success.

It was almost like going to see the war: this tremendous city of canvas and corrugated iron and redwood siding which had arisen as if by Arabian Nights magic, swarming with eager young men in khaki, all of them as busy as ants—yet never too busy to take note of the presence of three good-looking girls in a row! You could go through this city at certain hours, if you got the proper permit, and see a bit of the drilling; at certain other hours Paul could get off, and while the old folks and the girls went to hear Eli, Dad and Bunny and Paul sat on the hotel veranda and talked about the state of the world.

The Russians had just concluded a peace with Germany, withdrawing entirely from the war, and giving up a lot of territory to the enemy. Dad discussed this event, and repeated his opinion of the treacherous “Bolshevikis.” Then Paul said how it seemed to him; Bunny saw that even here, with all the work he had to do, Paul had found time to read and to think his own thoughts. “Bunny,” he said, “do you remember our oil-strike, and what we read about it in the papers? Suppose you had never been to Paradise, and didn’t know the strikers, but had got all your impressions from the Angel City newspapers! Well, that’s the way it seems to me about Russia; this is the biggest strike in history, and the strikers have won, and seized the oil-wells. Some day maybe we’ll know what they’re doing, but it won’t be from newspaper stories made up by the allied diplomats and the exiled grand dukes.”

That made Dad rather warm, because he had been reading this news for three or four months, and believing every word of it. He wanted to know if Paul didn’t believe there had been any killing of the rich classes in Russia. Paul said he didn’t doubt there had been some, because he had read about the French revolution. What you had to remember was the way the Russian people had been treated by their ruling classes, and the kind of government they were used to; you had to judge their revolution by their standards and not by ours. Paul smiled and added that it was a mistake for an American employer who had tried to give his men a square deal, to identify himself with those masters in Russia who had beaten their men with knouts, and turned them over to the Cossacks if they attempted any protest.

That pacified Dad a little, but he said the way it seemed to him, these Bolshevikis were jist so many German agents. He told about the train that had carried Lenin—Dad called him Lee-nyne—through Germany. But Paul asked whether he had watched the news that had come from the peace negotiations; the Germans had apparently been as much afraid of the Russians as we were. These Bolsheviks were fighting the ruling classes of both sides, and the Germans might find the peace they had made more dangerous to them than the fighting; the revolutionary propaganda might spread in their armies, and even to the Western front.

There was no use expecting Dad to see anything so complicated as that. He declared that if the Russians had really wanted to help the cause of peace and justice, they should have stood by the allies until the Kaiser was put out of business. Then Paul asked whether Mr. Ross had read the secret treaties of the allies, and Dad was obliged to confess that he had never even heard of them. Paul explained how the Soviets, after demanding that the allies should make known their war aims, and having no attention paid to the request, had revealed to the world all the secret agreements which the allies had made with the Tsar, for dividing up the territories they meant to take from the Germans and Austrians and Turks. Paul declared that the text of these treaties, the most important news of the day, had been suppressed by the American newspapers. If we were going into this war blindfolded, to help Great Britain and France and Italy and Japan in their imperialist aims, then our people were being deceived, and some day they would have a bitter awakening.

Dad’s answer to that was simple: Paul might rest assured, those secret treaties would turn out to be Bolshevik forgeries. Had not our government already given out a lot of documents it had obtained in Russia, proving the Bolshevik leaders to be German agents? Those were the true documents, and Paul would find it out some day, and be ashamed of having doubted our allies. How could he suppose that President Wilson would let us be jockeyed?

Bunny sat, taking in every word of this discussion. It was puzzling, and hard to be sure about, but it seemed to him that Dad was right, what could a good American do, in war-time like this, but trust his government? Bunny was a little shocked to hear a man wearing the uniform of the army sit there and express doubts about his superiors, and he considered it his duty to get Paul off by himself, and tell him some of the things the four minute men had said in school, and try to inspire him with a more intense patriotism. But Paul only laughed, and patted Bunny on the back, saying that they got any quantity of propaganda here in the training-camp.

One evening they all went to hear Eli; in a great tent such as would hold a three ring circus, with thousands of cars parked in the fields about, and sawdust strewn in the aisles, and hundreds of wooden benches, crowded with soldier boys and ranchers and their wives and children. There was a platform with the evangelist, wearing a white robe with a golden star on his bosom, for all the world like some Persian magus; and there was a “silver band,” with trumpets and bass-tubas gleaming so that they put your eyes out. When those big blarers started a hymn of glory, and the audience started to rock and shout, “Praise the Lord!” the top of that tent would bulge up!