Эптон Синклер - Oil!

These people talked about the appearance and peculiarities and adventures of all their acquaintances, and it was hard to follow their conversation unless you were one of their set; they even had slang words of their own, and the less possible it was for an outsider to understand them, the funnier they seemed to themselves. They talked about clothes, and what was going to be the newest “thing.” They talked about their bootleggers, and who was reliable. For the rest of the time they talked about the hitting of little balls about a field; the scores they made that day and previous days, and the relative abilities of various experts in the art. Was the tennis-champion going to hold his own for another year? How were the American golf players making out in England? Was the polo team coming from Philadelphia, and would they carry off the cup? There were beautiful silver and gold-plated trophies with engraved inscriptions, which helped to hypnotize you into thinking that the hitting of little balls about a field was of major importance!

Sitting on the deck of this floating mansion, Bunny read about the famine on the Volga. The crops had failed, over huge districts, and the peasants were slowly starving; eating grass and roots, eating their dead babies, migrating in hordes, and strewing their corpses along the way. It was the last and final proof of the futility of Communism, said the newspaper editors; and if Charlie Norman did not take the occasion to do some “joshing” of Bunny, it was only because Charlie never read a newspaper.

Bunny had talked with Harry Seager, and got a different view of famines in Russia. They were caused by drought, not by Communism; they had been chronic ever since the dawn of history, and their occurrence had never been taken as evidence of the futility of Tsarism. Conditions were bad now, because of the breakdown of the railroads. But people who blamed that on Communism overlooked the fact that the railroads had broken down before the revolution; and that under the Soviet administration they had had to stand the strain of three years of civil war, and of outside invasion on twenty-six fronts. Newspapers which had incited these invasions, and applauded the spending of hundreds of millions of American money to promote them, now blamed the Bolsheviks because they were not ready to cope with a famine!

You can understand how a young man with such thoughts in his mind would not fit altogether into this play party. He tried his best to be like the others, but they found out that he was different; and presently Charlie’s mother took to sitting beside him. “Bunny,” she said—for you were Bunny or Bertie or Baby or Beauty to this crowd as soon as you had played nine holes of golf and had one drink out of anybody’s hip-pocket flask—“Bunny, you go to the university, don’t you? And I’m sure you study some.”

“Not very much, I fear.”

“I wish you would tell me how to get Charlie to study some. I can’t get him to do anything but play and make love to the girls.”

Bunny wanted to say, “Try cutting off his allowance,” but he realized that that would be one of those “horrid” things for which Bertie was always rebuking him. So he said, “It’s quite a problem”—in the style of a diplomat or politician.

“The young people are too much of a problem for me,” said Charlie’s mother. “They want to race about all day, and they just insist on dragging you with them, and it’s getting to be more than I can stand.” So then Bunny was sorry for Charlie’s mother—he had supposed that she did all this “gadding” because she enjoyed it. To look at her, she was a nautical maid, plump but shapely, clad in spotless white and blue, with fluffy brown hair that the breeze was always blowing into her bright blue eyes. Bunny stole a glance now and then, and judged that the surgical operations upon her face must have been successes, for he saw no trace of them.

“I’ve devoted my whole life to that boy,” the nautical maid was saying, “and he doesn’t appreciate it a bit. The more you do for people the more they take it as a matter of course. This afternoon I think I’ll go on strike! Will you back me up?”

So when the golfing expedition was setting out, Charlie announced, in a tone loud enough for the whole company, “Mumsie’s not going—she’s got a crush on Bunny!” At which they all laughed merrily, and trooped down the ladder, secretly relieved to be rid of one of the old folks, who insisted on “tagging along,” and trying to pretend to be one of the crowd, when it was perfectly evident that they were not and could not.

So Bunny and Mrs. Norman sat on the deck of the “Siren,” in two big canvas chairs under a striped canvas awning, and sipped fruit juices and chatted about many things. She wanted to know about his life, and his family; Bunny, having heard something about the ways of “mumsies,” guessed that she was investigating Bertie as a possible daughter-in-law, so he mentioned all the nice things he could. Assuming that she would not be entirely indifferent to practical matters, he told about the Ross tract, how he and Dad had discovered it, and how the wells continued to flow. And Mrs. Norman said, “Oh, money, money, always money! We all of us have too much, and don’t know how to buy happiness with it!”

She went on to reveal that she was Theosophist, and how there was a great mahatma coming, and we were all going to learn to live on a different astral plane. She had noticed that Bunny, when he stood against a dark background at night, had a very decided golden aura—had anyone ever mentioned it to him? It meant that he had a spiritual nature, and was destined for higher things.

Then she began to ask about his ideas; she had heard nothing about his “disgrace” at the university, apparently, and he gave her just a hint as to his conviction that there was something wrong with our social order, the world’s distribution of wealth. The nautical maid, leaning back among her silken cushions, replied, “Oh, but that’s all material! And it seems to me we’re too much slaves to material things already; our happiness lies in learning to rise above them.”

That was a large question, and Bunny dodged it, and presently Mrs. Norman was talking about herself. Her life was very unhappy. She had married when she was very young, too young to know what she was doing, except obeying her parents. Her husband had been a bad man, he had kept mistresses and treated her cruelly. She had devoted her life to her son, but it all seemed a disappointment, the more you gave to people the more they would take. Charlie was always in love, but he didn’t really know anything about love, he wasn’t capable of unselfishness. What did Bunny think about love?

This was another large question; and again Bunny ducked. He said he didn’t know what to think, he saw that people made themselves unhappy, and he was waiting, trying to learn more about the matter. So Mrs. Norman proceeded to tell him more. The dream of love, a really true and great love, never died in the soul of a man or woman; they might become cynical, and say they didn’t believe in it, but they were always unhappy, and secretly hoping and waiting, because really, love was the greatest thing in the world. It made Mrs. Norman happy to know that among this loud and noisy generation there was one young man who was not making himself cheap.

The loud and noisy generation came back to the “Siren,” and cut off these intimacies. Charlie’s “mumsie” went below, and when she reappeared, it was in the dining-saloon, with painted panels of Watteau nymphs and shepherds, and seventeenth century ladies reclining to the lascivious pleasing of a lute. The hostess was no longer the nautical maid, but instead a great lady of many charms, a shimmer of pale blue satin, and a gleam of golden hair, and snowy bosom and shoulders, and a double rope of pearls. It was a striking transformation, and Bunny, who had watched Aunt Emma at work, ought to have understood, but his mind had been on other matters.