Эптон Синклер - Oil!

“Nobody seems to see it but the seals.”

“Oh, the papers were full of it; they would never pass up any news about the Thatchers. They send out a reporter once in a while. One time they had a scream of a story—the reporter had worn a suit of chain mail under his trousers, and the dogs had torn at him in vain!”

“She sets dogs on them?”

“That’s why nobody dares go up there to peek at the statues.”

“Good Lord!” exclaimed Bunny. “I peeked at half a dozen of them.”

“Well, you were lucky. That’s why I carried this revolver along; they sometimes come onto the beach, and the neighbors make war on them.”

“Why doesn’t she put up a fence?”

“She’s in a dispute with the county. She claims to own the beach, and every now and then she puts a barrier across it, and the county sends men at night to tear it down. They’ve been fighting it out for the past ten years. Also the state is trying to put a highway through the tract—it would save several miles of the coast route—but she has spent a fortune fighting them; she lives in that castle like a beleaguered princess in the old days—all the shades drawn, and she steals about from room to room with a gun in her hand, looking for burglars and spies. Ask Harve about it—he knows her.”

“Is she insane?”

“It’s a reaction from her life with her husband; he was a profligate, and so she’s a miser. They tell a story about him, he used to pay his hands in cash, and would drive about the country in a buckboard with little canvas bags, each containing a thousand dollars in gold. One time he dropped one bag and didn’t miss it; one of his hands brought it to him, and old Hank looked at the man with contempt, and put his hand into his pocket and pulled out a half dollar. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘here’s the price of a rope; go buy one and hang yourself’!”

“So now she’s taking care of the money!”

“Exactly. She pays all her bills by registered mail, and preserves the receipts, and insists on having a return receipt from the post office, and when that comes she files the two together, and when the receipted bill comes back, she files and indexes that. She won’t let a book-keeper do it, because you can’t find any employees who can be trusted to attend to things properly. She spends hours poring over her business papers, and discovering other people’s carelessness and incompetence. She employs lawyers, and then she employs other lawyers to check them up, and then a detective agency to find out how the lawyers are selling her out. She’s convinced the county authorities are persecuting her, and that they’re all a lot of crooks—she mayn’t be so wrong in that. She’s lean and haggard, and wears herself to a skeleton roaming about the house, dusting the furniture and nagging at the servants because they won’t take care of things.”

The two walked on down the beach. “Up over that hill,” said Vee, “lives old Hank’s sister; he left her part of the estate, and the two women have quarrelled about the boundary line and the water-rights. Tessie Thatcher’s an old rake—hires men to work for her, and makes them her lovers, and writes them tootsie-wootsie letters, and then they try to blackmail her, and she tells them to go to hell, and they bring suit for unpaid salaries, and sell the letters to the newspapers, and they’re all published; but Tessie doesn’t care, she knows that nothing can hurt her social position, she’s too rich; and besides, she’s an old booze-fighter, and knows how to forget her troubles.”

“My God!” exclaimed Bunny. “What property does to people!”

“To women especially,” said Vee. “It’s too much for their nerves. I look at the old women I meet, and think, which of them do I want to be? And I say, Oh, my God! and jump into my car and drive fifty miles an hour to get away from my troubles, and from people who want to tell me theirs!”

“Is that what you were doing when the judge sent you to jail for a week?” laughed Bunny.

“No,” she answered, “that was a publicity stunt, the bright idea of my advertising man.”

Bunny went back to Angel City, and discovered that if he wanted to follow Vee Tracy’s program of dodging other people’s troubles, he had made a fatal mistake to get interested in a labor college! He went to see Mr. Irving, and found the young instructor up to his ears in the growing pains and disputes of the labor movement. All summer long his job had been interviewing leaders and sympathizers, and trying to get them together on a program. He had managed to get the college started, with three teachers and about fifty pupils, mostly coming at night; but it was all precarious—the difficulties seemed overwhelming.

There were a handful of progressive and clear-minded men and women in the labor movement; and then there was the great mass of the bureaucracy, dead from the ears up; also a little bunch of extreme radicals, who would rather have no bread at all than half a loaf. The old-line leaders would have nothing to do with the college if these “reds” got in; on the other hand, if you excluded the “reds,” they would set up a clamor, and a lot of genuine liberals would say, what was the use of a new college that was so much like the old ones?

The labor movement had its traditions, having to do with getting shorter hours and more pay for the workers; and the old officials were bound by that point of view. The average union official was a workingman who had escaped from day-labor by the help of a political machine inside the union. Anything new meant to him the danger of losing his desk job, and having to go back to hard work. He had learned to negotiate with the employers and smoke their cigars, and in a large percentage of cases he was spending more money than his salary. Here in Angel City, the unions had a weekly paper, that lived by soliciting advertising from business men—and what was that but a respectable form of graft? When you took any fighting news to an editor of that sort, he would say the dread word “Bolshevism,” and throw your copy into the trash basket.

And the same thing applied to the movement in its national aspects. The American Federation of Labor was maintaining a bureau in Washington, for the purpose of combatting the radicals, and this bureau was for practical purposes the same as any patriotic society; its function was to collect damaging news about Russia from all over the world, and feed it to the American labor press. And of course, if any labor man was defiant, and insisted upon telling the other side, he would incur the bitter enmity of this machine, and they would throw him to the wolves. There would be a scare story in the capitalist press, telling how the Communists had got possession of the plasterers’ union, or maybe the button workers, and the grand jury was preparing action against a nest of conspirators. The average labor leader, no matter how honest and sincere, shivered in his boots when such a club was swung over his head.

Also there was Harry Seager and his troubles. The Seager Business College had turned out a class of young men and women, thoroughly trained to typewrite, “All men are created free and equal,” and also, “Give me liberty or give me death.” And now these young people were going about in the business offices of Angel City, and discovering that nobody wanted employees to typewrite anything of that sort! In plain words these young people were being told that the Seager Business College was a Bolshevik institution, and the business men of the city had been warned not to employ its graduates. The boycott was illegal in Angel City, and if any labor men tried to apply it, they would be whisked into jail in a jiffy. But imagine Harry Seager asking the district attorney to prosecute the heads of the Merchants’ and Manufacturers’ Association, whose campaign contributions had put the district attorney into office!