Эптон Синклер - Oil!

They arrived at Paradise, and the instructor was duly installed in the fine new Spanish “ranch-house” which Dad had erected on the tract for the use of himself and his guests. It was built around the four sides of a court, with a fountain splashing in the center, and date palms and banana plants and big shoots from the bougainvillea vine starting to climb the stucco walls. There was a Japanese who served the double function of butler and cook, and a boy who combined gardening with dish-washing, while Ruth had been promoted to be housekeeper and general boss. There were six guest-rooms, and when the executives and directors and geologists and engineers of Ross Consolidated came up to the tract, they were always Dad’s guests, and it was one big happy family. They would settle around a green baize table in the living-room right after supper and start playing poker; they would pull off their coats and unhitch their suspenders, and ring for the Jap to bring more cigars and whiskey and soda, and they would fill the room with blue smoke and never move from their seats until the small hours of the morning. It was an amusing illustration of the double standard of morals, that Dad was glad his son preferred to stay in his own room and read, and not hear the stories which the oil men would tell when they broke loose.

But there was no gambling this time—this was to be a high-brow week-end, in honor of “the professor,” as Dad persisted in referring to his guest. The elder Ross was naively proud to have a “professor” visiting him, and to show him the well that was spudding in, and the one that was bailing, and the score that were drilling. They inspected the new refinery, something really special, that had been exploited in the newspapers as the latest miracle in petroleum engineering; incidentally it was a work of art, buildings of concrete and shining, newly-painted metal, set in a regular pleasure park. Oil wells are black and greasy, incurably so, but a refinery is different; the stuff comes in underground pipes, and most of it is taken away in the same fashion, so a refinery can be laid out according to the taste of a young idealist, with neat fences of steel mesh covered with rose vines, and plots of grass with gravelled roads winding between. The Ross refinery was as big as a good-sized village, only most of its houses were tanks; big tanks and little tanks, high tanks and squat tanks, round tanks, oblong tanks and square tanks, black tanks, red tanks, and tanks with an infinite variety of colors inside where they did not show.

The main feature was an enormous battery of stills, set in a row and joined together with a tangle of pipes; each still big enough to have served the purposes of all the bootleggers of the United States. In the first still the crude oil was heated to a certain temperature, and it gave off one of its products; this was the “cracking” process. The remainder went on to the next still, where it got a little hotter, and gave off something else. So it went from still to still—the process known as “continuous” distillation. The product from each still was run into a big condenser, and from there into its own tank; so you got gasoline of several qualities, and kerosene and benzine and naphtha, and a dozen different grades of lubricating oil, and petrolatum, and thick, black lovely tar, and endless pans of smooth, white paraffin wax.

You can see how in these processes there was room for no end of management, and the discovery of new methods. Dad had a chemist that he never tired of telling about—say, that fellow was a wonder! Dad paid him six thousand a year, and owned everything he discovered, and he had saved the company several millions since it had started. That McEnnis jist lived on carbon rings and chains—he would draw you diagrams on the black board, and it would be a purple dye, and then he would add another C-unit, and by golly, it was some green stuff that would cure tape-worms, and the name of it was longer than any tape-worm ever measured.

They must meet this wizard; so they went over to the laboratory, which was on a little hill-top away off by itself, so that the inmate might be free to blow himself up as many times as he wanted. McEnnis was pale, stoop-shouldered and partly bald, and peered at you through big spectacles. Dad was proud to introduce “Professor” Irving, and the chemist showed them a row of test-tubes and retorts, and explained that he was trying to ascertain why normal hexane and the more stable methyl cyclopentane are so much less stable to heat than saturated hydrocarbons of the same molecular weight. There was a chance here to effect the biggest saving in refining history, but the trouble was, the maximum percent of clefines demanded by the simple general equation—and here the chemist began to write on the blackboard—RCH 2—CH 2—CH 2R 1 RCH 3+ CH 2= CH.R 1—was seldom attained owing to polymerization of the clefines and the formation of naphthenes.

After learning which, they went back to the “ranch house” for a supper of fried chicken, with fresh green corn and honeydew melons from Imperial valley, and then they settled down for a chat. Mr. Irving behaved beautifully; they talked till midnight, and he answered a hundred of Dad’s questions about world affairs, and told what he had seen of relief work in Greece and of diplomacy in France.

The young instructor had some relatives in high positions, so he knew things on the inside; they fitted in with what Dad knew—yes, it was awful, the way things were being bungled. My God, here were we jist telling the Japs to help themselves to Saghalien, that had more oil perhaps than all the rest of the world; and the British of course were getting to work to repair the pipe lines at Baku, and at Mosul they had the whole field, and the French were getting into Persia with the British, and the same in Syria, and where was your Uncle Sam? Vernon Roscoe was jist raising hell, because he had had some contracts at Baku, and what was the use of kicking out the Bolshevikis and putting in the Anglo-Dutch? Roscoe said this country needed a practical man for president and not a college professor—

Dad stopped, afraid that he had made a “break”; but Mr. Irving laughed, and said, “Don’t worry, Mr. Ross, I am not entitled to that high honor, and don’t expect ever to make it.” So Dad went on with Roscoe’s tirade; the oil men by golly had had their lesson, and were going to get together and have something to say about the next election—they were going to have a business man for president. Bunny and his Bolshevik instructor exchanged the faintest trace of a glance, but Dad suspected nothing. Afterwards, when he was alone with Bunny, he remarked, “Son, that’s a bright young fellow. It’s a pleasure to talk with a man that understands affairs like him.” You see how the Bolshevik propaganda was spreading!

Bunny spent that summer “playing about,” as the phrase ran; he read a few books on the international situation, he studied some of the confidential reports of Vernon Roscoe’s foreign agents, and watched the derricks climb over a couple more hills of the Ross Junior tract. Bertie telephoned, insisting that he should make his debut into society and meet some “eligible” girls; so he went with her to spend a week at the camp of the ultra-fashionable Woodbridge Rileys, located high in the mountains, in a “club” to which only the elect might attain. Here people boated and swam, but otherwise lived as complicated lives as in the city, tangled in the same web of social duties and engagements, and dressing several times a day. They drank a great deal at dinner, and danced to the music of a Negro jazz orchestra until daybreak, after which the young people would go horseback riding, and have a late breakfast, and sleep a couple of hours before keeping a luncheon engagement.