CHAPTER XIITHE SIREN
Springtime had come again, and Bunny was finishing his second year at Southern Pacific. But the bloom was now worn off the peach; he no longer took the great institution at its own valuation. He knew that the courses were dull, and that they taught you masses of facts of little importance, and were afraid of new and original thinking. The one thing he had got was a clue to some worthwhile books; he wanted to read them—but you could do that better at home. He was debating whether he would come back next year.
Things were freer at Paradise, it seemed. Paul had gone back to work as a boss-carpenter for the company; he had recovered a part of his strength, and was making good money—building labor was scarce, because the country was making up for the lost construction of war-time. Ruth was happy again; at least three of the oil workers were in love with her, but she would think of no one but her wonderful brother. Paul was studying again; but not the biology books, all his money now went for magazines and pamphlets and books that dealt with the labor struggle. There were a good many returned soldiers with the company, some of whom had come to think about the war just as Paul did; twice a week they had regular classes, reading aloud a chapter from a book and discussing it.
So the Rascum cabin became what the Angel City newspapers were accustomed to describe as a “Bolshevik nest.” Much as these workingmen might differ about tactics, they were a unit on the proposition that capital and labor had nothing in common but a fight. And they made no bones about saying it; they would start an argument on the job, or while a bunch of the men were eating their lunch; the echoes would spread all over the place. There were “wobblies” in the field also, you would find their literature in the bunk-houses. Dad must have known about it, but he did nothing; his men had always been free to say what they pleased, and he would take his chances. Indeed, he could hardly do anything else, while every man on the place knew that the discoverer and heir-apparent of the field was one of the “reddest” of the bunch!
Ever since the war, the union of the oil workers had been recognized and dealt with, as the government had decreed. But now the hand of Uncle Sam was beginning to relax; the idealistic President was a semi-invalid in Washington, and in Angel City the “open shop” crowd were getting ready to bring back the good old days. At least that was the rumor among the union officials, and how were they going to meet the employers’ move? The wage agreements expired towards the end of the year, and this was the issue to which all the arguments of the oil workers led, whether among the “reds” in Paul’s cabin, or among the rank and file. Over Bunny’s head the prospect of another strike hung like a black shadow of doom.
Dad never gave up longing to have his son take an interest in the company and its growing activities. And Bunny, always aware of this loving bond, would study monthly reports of production, and cost sheets and price schedules, and go out to the wells that were drilling, and take part in long consultations with the foremen. Only a few years ago, an oil well had been to him the most interesting thing in the world; but now cruel fate had brought it about that one oil well seemed exactly like another oil well! Number 142 had brought in six hundred thousand dollars, whereas Number 143 had brought in only four hundred and fifty thousand. But what difference did it make, when all you would do with the extra hundred and fifty thousand was to drill another well?
Dad’s answer was kept in stock on the shelves of his mind: “The world has got to have oil.” But then, you looked at the world, and saw enormous crowds of people driving to places where they were no better off than at home! But it would annoy Dad to have you say that—it was a step outside the range of his thinking. To Bunny he now seemed like an old horse in a treadmill; he climbed and climbed, all day long, and at night he climbed in dreams. But if you should let him out of the treadmill, he would die—for lack of any reason for living.
So Bunny learned more and more to keep his traitor doubts to himself; those theories of the “class struggle” that he learned from Paul and his fellows, and the rumors of a strike that he read in the oil workers’ journal. Instead, he would take Dad fishing, and they would pretend they were just as happy as of old in the bosom of their mother Nature—though the sad truth was that Dad was too heavy and too stiff in the joints to get much fun out of scrambling over the rocks.
Bunny spent his Easter holidays at Paradise, and it happened that Vernon Roscoe paid a visit to the tract. He had been there before, but only while Bunny was away; their meetings so far had been brief ones at the office, amid the press of business. Bunny had got a general impression of a big face and a big body and a big voice. Dad said that “Verne” had also a big heart; but Bunny’s only evidence was that Mr. Roscoe had patted him on the back, and called him “Jim Junior,” with great gusto.
Now he came; and it happened that a desert wind came with him, and made a funny combination. As a rule the heat of the day was endurable at Paradise, and the nights were always cold and refreshing; but three or four times in a year the place would be struck by a wind off the desert, and it would be like a hot hand reaching out and holding you by the throat. “A hundred and fourteen in the shade and their ain’t any shade,” was the way the oil workers put it, as they went on working in the sun, drinking barley water by the quart. The worst of it was, the hot wind blew all night, and the houses, which had heated up like furnaces, stayed that way for three or four days.
The “oil magnate,” as the newspapers called Vernon Roscoe, left Angel City after dinner, and reached the tract just before midnight. Dad and Bunny were expecting him, sitting out on the veranda, and he saw them, and his voice started before the engine of his car stopped. “Hello, Jim! Hello, Jim Junior! By Jees, what’s this you’re doing to me! Christ amighty, man, I never felt such heat. Is it going to be like this tomorrow? By Jees, I think I’ll turn my tail and run!”
He was out of the car, and coming up the path, his face as round as the moon that shone down on his half-bald head. He had taken off his coat and shirt, and was in a pink silk under-shirt; no perspiration, of course, because you were always dry when you drove in this desert heat—you might stop at a filling station and stand under a hose and soak yourself, and the wind would dry everything but your sitting down place in a couple of minutes.
“Hello, Verne,” said Dad; and Bunny said, “How are you Mr. Roscoe?” He was careful to get a grip on the magnate’s paw before the magnate got a grip on his—for he would make the bones crunch with his mighty grasp. He had been a cattle-puncher back in Oklahoma, and it was said that he had grabbed a Mexican horse-thief with his two hands and bent him backwards until he broke. He still had that strength, in spite of his rolls of fat.
“I’m hot as hell,” he said, answering Bunny’s polite inquiry. “Say, Jim, do you think I’d better stay?”
“You’ve got to stay,” said Dad. “I’m not going ahead with development on that Bandy tract till you’ve looked the field over. We’ll sit you on ice.”
“Has my beer come? Hey, there, Kuno”—this to the Jap, who was grinning in the doorway. “Bring me some of my beer! Bring me a bucketful—a tubful. By Jees, I brought some in my car—I wouldn’t take a chance. Did you hear what happened to Pete O’Reilly? Damn fool tried to come across the border with a crate of whiskey in his car; told me it cost him a hundred dollars a quart before he got through! Christ amighty, Verne, how do you stand this?”
“Well, for one thing, I drink lemonade instead of beer.” This was a reform which Bunny had imposed upon his father, and now Dad was very proud of it.
“No pop for me!” said Verne. “By Jees, I’ll have my suds in the bath-tub. Any women about, Verne?” And Mr. Roscoe kicked off his shoes and his trousers, and sat himself under an electric fan. “The damn thing blows hot air!” he said; and then he looked at Bunny. “Well, here’s our boy Bolsheviki! Where’s the red flag?”
Now Bunny was expecting to reach the impressive age of twenty-one in a month or two, and he had heard all possible variations on this “Bolsheviki” joke. But he was host, and had to smile. “I see you read the papers.”
“Say, kiddo, you made the front page all right! It did me a lot of good in some negotiations. Come down to the office and I’ll introduce you to a Soviet commissar in disguise; they’re trying to sell me a concession in the Urals. ‘Where the hell is that?’ I says; but it seems there is really such a place, unless they have forged some atlases. The guy started to pull this brotherhood of man stuff on me, and I says, ‘Sure, I’m great on that dope,’ I says. ‘The junior member of our firm is in the business! Look at this, by Jees,’ and I showed him the papers, and we’ve been ‘Tovarish’ ever since!”
Well, Tovarish Roscoe went to bed, in Nile green silk pajamas on a cot out in the court alongside the fountain; and at five in the morning they woke him, so that he might go out with Dad and the geologist and the engineer, to O. K. the plans for the Bandy tract. He came back with the sunrise in his eyes, puffing and snorting, and yelling for beer instead of breakfast, and how would he get some more when this gave out? They persuaded him that he must not try to cross the desert until the sun went down, so he and Dad and Bunny retired into the living-room, and shut all the doors and windows, to stick it out as best they could.
Well, the sun got to work on the roof and walls of that house, and every ten minutes the great man would get up and look at the thermometer and emit another string of mule-skinner’s technicalities. By the middle of the morning he was frantic; declaring that surely there must be some way to cool a house. By Jees, let’s get a hose and soak this room! But Bunny, who had studied physics, said that would only shift them from the climate of the desert to the climate of the Congo river. Mr. Roscoe suggested turning the hose on the veranda and the roof; and Bunny called the gardener boy, and pretty soon there were half a dozen sprinklers going, a regular rain-storm over the doors and windows of the living-room.
But that was not enough, so Dad went to the phone and called up the foreman of the sheet metal shop, and he said sure thing, he could design a refrigerator; and Dad said to drop everything else and build one, and he’d pay the men a dollar apiece extra if they finished it inside an hour. So here came four fellows with a truck and a big metal box with double walls all the way from the floor to the ceiling; and they cut a hole in the floor for a vent-pipe, and brought in about half a ton of cracked ice from the ice-plant, and a couple of sacks of salt, and in a few minutes the thermometer showed a zero wind blowing out from the bottom of that box. The great man moved over close to it, and in a little while he began to sigh with content, and in half an hour he gave a loud “Kerchoo!” and they all roared with laughter.
After that he was sleepy, with all the beer he had drunk, and had a nap on the lounge, while Dad went out to see to the drilling. And then the party had lunch, and Mr. Roscoe had another nap, after which he felt fine, and did a lot of talking, and Bunny learned some more about the world in which he lived. “Jim,” said the “magnate,” “I want two hundred thousand dollars of your money.”
“Where’s your gun?” said Dad, amiably.
“You’ll get it back many times over. It’s a little fund we’re raising, me and Pete O’Reilly and Fred Orpan. We can’t talk about it except to a few.”
“What is it, Verne?”
“Well, we’re getting ready for the Republican convention, and by Jees, it’s not going to be any god-damn snivelling long-faced college professor! We’re going to get a round-faced man, like you and me, Jim! I’m going on to Chicago and pick him out.”
“You got anybody in mind?”
“I’m negotiating with a fellow from Ohio, Barney Brockway, that runs the party there. He wants us to take their Senator Harding; big chap with a fine presence, good orator and all that, and can be trusted—he’s been governor there, and does what he’s told. Brockway thinks he can put him over with two or three million, and he’ll pledge us the secretary of the interior.”
“I see,” said Dad—not having to ask what that meant.
“I’ve got my eye on a tract—been watching it the last ten years, and it’s a wonder. Excelsior Pete put down two test wells, and then they capped them and hushed it up; there was a government report that mentioned it, but they had it suppressed and you can’t get a copy anywhere—but I had one stolen for me. There’s about forty thousand acres, all oil.”
“But how can you get it away from Excelsior?”
“The government has taken the whole district—supposed to be an oil reserve for the navy. But what the hell use will it be to the navy, with no developments? The damn fools think you can drill wells and build pipe-lines and storage tanks while Congress is voting a declaration of war. Let us get in there and get out the oil, and we’ll sell the navy all they want.”
That was Dad’s doctrine, so there was nothing to discuss. He laughed, and said, “You’d better be on the safe side, Verne, and get the attorney-general as well as the secretary of the interior.”
“I thought of that,” said the other, not noticing the laugh. “Barney Brockway will be the attorney-general himself. That’s a part of his bargain with Harding.”
And then all at once Mr. Roscoe recollected Bunny, sitting over by the window, supposed to be reading a book. “I suppose our boy Bolsheviki will understand, this ain’t for use on the soap-box.”
Dad answered, quickly, “Bunny has known about my affairs ever since he was knee-high to a grass-hopper. All right, Verne, I’ll send you a check when you’re ready.”
The sun went down, and it was time for Mr. Roscoe to make his get-away. But first he had dinner; and when he was through with his ice-cream and coffee, he pushed his plate away, and took his napkin out of his neck, and leaned back in his chair with a sigh of content; and while he was unrolling his cigar from its gold foil, he fixed his shrewd eyes upon Bunny across the table, and said, “Jim Junior, I’ll tell you what’s the matter with you.”
“All right,” said Jim Junior, receptively.
“You’re a nice kid, but you’re too god-damn serious. You take life too hard—you and your old man both. You got to get a little fun as you go along, and I know what you need. You got a girl, kid?”
“Not right now,” said Bunny, blushing a trifle.
“I thought so. You need one, to take you out and cheer you up. Mind you, I don’t mean one of these jazz-babies—get a girl that’s got some sense, like my Annabelle. You know Annabelle Ames?”
“I’ve never met her. I’ve seen her, of course.”
“Did you see her in ‘Madame Tee-Zee’? By Jees, that’s what I call a picture—only one I ever made any money out of, by the way! Well, that girl takes care of me like a mother—if she’d been up here, I wouldn’t ’a drunk all that beer, you bet! You come up to my place some time, and Annabelle’ll find you a girl—lots of ’em up there, with the ginger in ’em, too, and she’s a regular little match-maker—never so happy as when she’s pairing ’em off, two little love-birds in a cage. Why don’t you drive back with me now?”
“I’ve got to go to college the day after tomorrow,” said Bunny.
“Well, you come some time, and bring the old man along. That’s what he needs too, a girl—I’ve told him so a dozen times. You got a girl yet, Jim? By Jees, look at him blush, the old maid in pants! I could tell the kid some things about you that would bust the rouge-pots in your cheeks—hey, old skeezicks?” And the great man, who had been getting out of his chair as he discoursed, fetched Dad a couple of thumps on the back and burst into a roar of laughter.
It was things like that that made you know Vernon Roscoe had a “big heart.” He seemed to have really taken a fancy to Bunny, and was concerned that he should learn to enjoy life. “You come see me some time, kiddo,” he said, as he was loading himself into his big limousine. “Don’t you forget it now, I mean it. I’ll show you what a country place can be like, and you make the old man get one too.” And Bunny said all right, he would come; and the engine began to purr, and the car rolled off in the moonlight, and the big laughing voice died away among the hills. “So long, kiddo!”
Bunny came back into the house, and followed Dad into his study and shut the door. “Dad, are you really going to put up that money with Mr. Roscoe?”
“Why, sure, son, I got to; why not?” Dad looked genuinely surprised—as he always did in these cases. You could never be sure how much of it was acting, for he was sly as the devil, and not above using his arts on those he loved.
“Dad, you’re proposing to buy the presidency of the United States!”
“Well, son, you can put it that way—”
“But that’s what itis, Dad!”
“Well, that’s one way to say it. Another is that we’re protecting ourselves against rivals that want to put us out of business. If we don’t take care of politics, we’ll wake up after election and find we’re done for. There’s a bunch of big fellows in the East have put up a couple of millions to put General Leonard Wood across. Are you rooting for him?”
Bunny understood that this was a rhetorical question, and did not answer it. “It’s such a dirty game, Dad!”
“I know, but it’s the only game there is. Of course, I can quit, and have enough to live on, but I don’t feel like being laid on the shelf, son.”
“Couldn’t we just run our own business, Dad?” It was, you may remember, a question Bunny had asked before.
“There’s no such thing, son—they’re jist crowding you all the time. They block you at the refineries, they block you at the markets, they block you in the banks—I don’t tell you much about it, because it’s troubles, but there’s jist no place in the business world for the little feller any more. You think I’m a big feller because I got twenty million, and I think Verne is a big feller because he’s got fifty; but there’s Excelsior Pete—thirty or forty companies, all working as one—that’s close to a billion dollars you’re up against. And there’s Victor, three or four hundred million more, and all the banks and insurance company resources behind them—what chance have we independents got? Look at this slump in the price of gas right now—the newspapers tell you there’s a glut, but that’s all rot—what makes the glut, but the Big Five dumping onto the market to break the little fellers? Why, they’re jist wiping ’em off the slate!”
“But how can public officials prevent that?”
“There’s a thousand things that come up, son—we got to land the first wallop—right at the sound of the bell! How do we get pipe-line right-o’-ways? How do we get terminal facilities? You saw how it was when we came into Paradise; would we ever ’a got this development if I hadn’t ’a paid Jake Coffey? Where would Verne and me be right now, if we didn’t sit down with him and go over the slate, and make sure the fellers he puts on it are right? And now—what’s the difference? Jist this, we got bigger, we’re playin’ the game on a national scale—that’s all. If Verne and me and Pete O’Reilly and Fred Orpan can get the tracts we got our eyes on, well, there’ll be the Big Six or Big Seven or Big Eight in the oil-game, that’s all—and you set this down for sure, son, we’ll be doin’ what the other fellers done, from the day that petroleum came into use, fifty years ago.”
They were on an old familiar trail now, and Bunny knew the landscape by heart.
“It’s all very well for a feller to go off in his study and figure out how the world ought to be; but that don’t make it that way, son. There has got to be oil, and we fellers that know how to get it out of the ground are the ones that are doing it. You listen to these Socialists and Bolshevikis, but my God, imagine if the government was to start buying oil lands and developing them—there’d be more graft than all the wealth of America could pay for. I’m on the inside, where I can watch it, and I know that when you turn over anything to the government, you might jist as good bury it ten thousand miles deep in the earth. You talk about laws, but there’s economic laws, too, and government can’t stand against them, no more than anybody else. When government does fool things, then people find a way to get round it, and business men that do it are no more to blame than any other kind of men. This is an oil age, and when you try to shut oil off from production, it’s jist like you tried to dam Niagara falls.”
It was a critical moment in their lives. In after years Bunny would look back upon it, and think, oh why had he not put his foot down? He could have broken his father, if he had been determined enough! If he had said, “Dad, I will not stand for buying the presidency; and if you go in with Mr. Roscoe on that deal, you’ve got to know that I renounce my inheritance, I will not touch a cent of your money from this day on. I’ll go out and get myself a job, and you can leave your money to Bertie if you want to.” Yes, if he had said that, Dad would have given way; he would have been mortally hurt, and Mr. Roscoe would have been hurt, but Dad would not have helped to nominate Senator Harding.
Why didn’t Bunny do it? It wasn’t cowardice—he didn’t know enough about life as yet to be afraid of it. He had never earned a dollar in his life, yet he had the serene conviction that he could go out and “get a job,” and provide for himself those comforts and luxuries that were a matter of course to him. But the trouble was, he couldn’t bear to hurt people. It was what Paul meant when he said that Bunny was “soft.” He entered too easily into other people’s point of view. He saw too clearly why Dad and Mr. Roscoe wanted to buy the Republican convention; and then, a few hours later, he would go over to the Rascum cabin, and sit down with Paul and “Bud” Stoner and “Jick” Duggan and the rest of the “Bolshevik bunch,” and see too clearly why they wanted the oil workers to organize and educate themselves, and take over the oil wells from Dad and Mr. Roscoe!
Bunny went back to Southern Pacific, and just as he was finishing his year’s work, the convention of the Republican party met in Chicago, a thousand delegates and as many alternates, and as many newspaper correspondents and special writers, to tell the world about this mighty historic event. The convention listened to impressive “key-note” speeches, and smoked enormous quantities of tobacco, and drank enormous quantities of bootleg liquor; and meantime, in a room in the Blackstone Hotel, the half-dozen bosses who controlled the votes sat down to make their deals. In the millions of words that went out over the wires concerning the convention, the name of Vernon Roscoe was never mentioned; but he had his suite adjoining that hotel room, and he made exactly the right offers, and paid his certified checks to exactly the right men, and after a long deadlock and the taking of eight ballots, amid wild excitement on the convention floor, the support of General Leonard Wood began suddenly to crumble, and on the ninth ballot Warren Gamaliel Harding of Ohio became the Republican party’s standard-bearer.
College was over; and Gregor Nikolaieff went up to San Francisco to ship on one of the vessels of the “canning fleet,” which went up to Alaska to catch and pack salmon. Rachel Menzies and her brother joined three other Jewish students who had equipped themselves with a battered Ford car, to follow the fruit-picking; moving from place to place, sleeping under the stars, and gathering apricots, peaches, prunes and grapes for the canners and driers. Bunny was the only one of the little group of “reds” who did not have to work all summer; and he was the only one who didn’t know what to do with himself.
In the old days, when he and Dad were drilling one well at a time, Bunny would pitch in and help at anything there was to do; he was only a “kid” then, and the men liked it. But now he was of age, and supposed to be dignified; the company was of age, too, a huge machine in which every cog had its place, and must not be interfered with. Bunny could not even cultivate the plants at home without trespassing on the job of the gardener! He had resolved to study some of Paul’s books; but he had never heard of anyone studying eight hours a day, and he couldn’t take Paul’s job for part of the time, because he wasn’t a good enough carpenter!
It was a world in which some people worked all the time, and others played all the time. To work all the time was a bore, and no one would do it unless he had to; but to play all the time was equally a bore, and the people who did it never had anything to talk about that Bunny wanted to listen to. They talked about their play, just as solemnly as if it had been work: tennis tournaments, golf tournaments, polo matches—all sorts of complicated ways of hitting a little ball about a field! Now, it was all right, when you needed exercise and recreation, to go out and hit a little ball; but to make a life-work of it, to give all your time and thought to it, to practice it religiously, read and write books about it, discuss it for hours on end—Bunny looked at these fully grown men and women, with their elaborate outfits of “sport clothes,” and it seemed to him they must be exercising a kind of hypnosis upon themselves, to make themselves believe that they were really enjoying their lives.
Bertie came along, making one more effort to drag her brother out into this play world, to which by right of inheritance and natural gifts he belonged. Bertie had broken off her affair with Eldon Burdick. He was a “dud,” she told Bunny, and always wanting to have his own way. There was another affair on, a very desperate one, Bunny gathered, since his sister exposed her feelings even to him. It was the only son of the late August Norman, founder of Occidental Steel; the boy’s name was Charlie, and he was a little wild, Bertie said, but oh, so fascinating, and rich as Croesus. He had nobody to take care of him but a rather silly mother, who was still trying to be young and giddy, dressing like a debutante, and having surgical operations performed on her face to keep it from “sagging.” They had a most gorgeous yacht down at the harbor, and had asked Bertie to bring her brother, and why wouldn’t he go and help her, as he so easily could, with his good looks and everything?
Bunny thought his sister must indeed be hard hit, if she was counting upon his reluctant social charms! But he went; and as they drove to the harbor Bertie coached and scolded him—he must not talk about his horrible Bolshevik ideas, and if they mentioned his disgrace at Southern Pacific, he must make a joke of it. Bunny had already learned that that was the thing to do; and so he did it, and found that it was very easy, for Charlie Norman was one of those brilliant young persons who found something funny to say about everything that came up; if he couldn’t do any better, he would make a bad pun out of your remark.
Here was the “Siren,” a floating mansion, all white paint and shining brass, finished in hand-carved mahogany, and upholstered in hand-painted silk. The sailors who shined and polished, and the Filipino boys who flitted here and there with trays full of glasses, were spick and span enough for the vaudeville stage. The party of guests would step into a launch, and from that into several motor-cars, and be transported to a golf-links, and from there to a country club for luncheon; they would dance for an hour or two, and then be whirled away to a bathing-beach, and then to a tennis-court, and then back to the “Siren” to dress for dinner, which was served with all the style you would have expected at an ambassador’s banquet. There would be many-colored electric lights on the deck, and an orchestra, and friends would come out in launches, and dance until dawn, while the waves lapped softly against the sides of the vessel, and the tangle of lights along the shore made dim the stars.
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 had 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.
Mrs. Norman had the young oil man next to her at table; and when they danced, she asked him would he dance with her—these horrid young fellows neglected their hostess quite shamelessly. They danced, and Bunny discovered that she was a good dancer, and she said that he was an exquisite dancer, she just adored it, and would he dance some more with her? Bunny was willing; there was no one else he particularly wanted to dance with. She had a faint elusive perfume, and he might have learned about that also from Aunt Emma, but he had the vague impression that women somehow naturally smelled that way, and it was very sweet of them. The steel-widow’s bosom was bare most of the way, and her back was bare all the way, down to where he put his hand.
Charlie teased them, and the rest of the company giggled. But next morning, when they took a long walk about the deck, Bunny realized that it took these young people less than twenty-four hours to get used to anything, and after that it was a bore. So he sat with Mrs. Norman, and drove with her, and danced with her, and played golf with her, while Charlie did all these things with Bertie, and it suited at least three of them completely.
Then one evening there was something in a magazine that Bunny wanted to read, and towards midnight he slipped away to his own cabin, and settled himself in his gold-plated bed, with hand-embroidered pink silk pillows, and a gold-plated, or possibly solid gold lamp-stand at his head, and presently was far away—in Russia seeing the famine stragglers dying by the roadside, or maybe in Hungary, where they were putting down the social revolution by the simple plan of slaughtering everybody who believed in it; using, as always, machine gun bullets made in American steel mills, and purchased with an American loan. Bunny was so much absorbed in these unhappy far-off things, that he did not hear the door of his cabin very softly opened, nor the key very gently turned on the inside. The first thing he noticed was the faint elusive sweet odor, and he gazed upon a vision standing by his bedside, clad in a purple kimono with huge red hibiscus flowers. The vision looked timorous, and had its two hands clasped in front of it, and it whispered in a voice he could hardly hear, “Bunny, may I talk to you a little?”
Of course Bunny had to say that it might; and the vision sank down on its knees by the bed, and gently one of the soft hands touched his, and the soft voice trembled, “Bunny, I’m so lonely and so unhappy! I don’t know if you can understand what it means to a woman to be so lonely, but you are the first man I’ve wanted to trust for a long, long time. I know I shouldn’t come like this, but I have to tell you, and why shouldn’t men and women be frank with each other?”
Bunny didn’t know any reason why they shouldn’t, and so they were. The substance of the frankness was that the dream of love had stirred once more in the soul of a woman who was utterly bewildered about life. He must not think that she was shallow or light, she had never done anything like this before, and it was honest—the tears came into her eyes as she said it, and oh, please, please not to despise her, she wanted to be happy, and there were so few people you could love. “Bunny, tell me, are you in love with any other woman?”
It might have been a kindness to tell her that he was; but this was his first adventure of the sort, and he told the truth, and it was like sunlight after an April shower, as the smile shone through her tears. There was a little catch in her voice, as she whispered, “I’m being silly, the tears will come, and they make a woman look so ugly, let me put out the light.” So she pulled the little golden chain, and was no longer the least bit ugly, but only sweet-smelling, as she clung to his hand with her two hands, and whispered, “Bunny, do you think you could love me just a little?”
He had to say it, somehow or other. “Mrs. Norman,” he began—but she stopped him: “Thelma.” He stammered, “Thelma—I hadn’t thought—”
“I know, Bunny, I’m older than you; but look at these flappers, how empty their heads are! And believe me, I really do care for you, I would do anything for you, give you anything you wanted.”
Bunny learned something from this incident. He knew that he had only to stretch out his arms and take her; and he knew what to do—Eunice Hoyt had taught him how to love a woman. He could have swept her into ecstasy, and from that hour forth she would have been his slave, he could have had everything she owned; he might have mistreated her, used her money to keep other women, but still she would have been his slave. So now he could understand things that went on under his eyes, in this world that was a gamblers’ paradise. There were men who would not share Bunny’s lofty indifference to luxury and power, but would go in deliberately to seduce Dame Fortune; turning their bodily charms and social graces into weapons of prey—there were many names for them, lounge lizards, parlor snakes, tame cats, Romeos, sheiks. How many years had old August Norman slaved to build a great steel plant, and a floating mansion in the ocean, and a ten times bigger one on the shore; and here all these treasures were magically incorporated in one feminine body, clad in—well, the kimono had slid off, and there was a night-dress so filmy that it was nothing, and a faint sweet odor, and a pair of soft caressing arms, and lips pressing hot, moist kisses. “Bunny,” whispered the voice, “I would marry you if you wanted me to. I would give you everything you asked for.”
Bunny had learned from Eunice that when you are disposed to love, the lips can be seductive; he now learned from Mrs.—no, Thelma—that when you are not so disposed, they are repellant. “You know, Thelma,” he pleaded, “I don’t happen to need anything.”
“I know, and I’m a horrid vulgar thing. But I’m trying in my poor blundering way to make you understand that I do care for you, and you mustn’t think ill of me!”
That gave him his lead, and he explained to her that he would never think ill of her; but he did not love her, he had thought of her as a friend. And so gradually her clasp relaxed, and she sank down in a pitiful heap by the bedside, sobbing that he would be sure to loathe her, he would never want to see her again. He pleaded that that was not so, there was no disgrace about it, there was no reason to quarrel because you did not happen to love. She was so abject, he was sorry for her, and put out his hand to comfort her; but he saw at once that this would not do, she had caught his hand and was kissing it, and he was being tempted by his sympathy. Away back in the eighteenth century, one of the English poets had announced the discovery that pity moves the soul to love.
One has to think these matters out in advance, and have a standard of conduct. Bunny had made up his mind that the next time he embraced a woman, it would be one he truly loved; and now the clear cold voice of his reason told him that he did not love Charlie Norman’s mother, it would only be an intrigue, and neither of them would be happy very long. So he said, gently, that he thought she had better go; and slowly and sadly she gathered up the kimono from the floor, and rose to her feet. “Bunny,” she said, “people have nasty minds. If they hear about this they will make it horrid.”
“Don’t think of that,” he answered. “I shall not tell.”
He heard the door softly opened, and softly closed again; and he turned on the light, and locked the door—never again would he fail to take that precaution at a house-party! For a while he paced the floor, thinking over this alarming experience. He told himself, with becoming modesty, that it wasn’t because he was irresistibly fascinating; but in this new pagan civilization women were so startled by an encounter with chastity, it struck them as something colossal, superhuman.
Next morning the nautical maid had her first natural blush in many years when she encountered the young Adonis on deck. But she soon got over it, and they talked about Theosophy, as spiritually as ever, and were perfectly good friends; he called her Thelma, and Charlie did not even make a joke. But on the way home Bertie wanted to know all about it, had Mrs. Norman made love to him, and how much? And when Bunny blushed, she laughed at him, and was provoked because he was silly and wouldn’t tell. She decided that of course they had had an affair. That was all right, there had been other affairs on board the “Siren”—the lights were dim in the central hall-way, so that you needn’t be recognized as you flitted from door to door. “But don’t imagine she’ll ever marry you,” added Bertie, sagely. “She talks a lot of reincarnation bunk, but she hangs onto her Occidental Steel bonds for this incarnation!”
Occidental Steel had a bad slump in the market a few days after this, and Bertie was worried—taking a proprietary interest in the concern. She asked Dad about it, and he said it was “jist manipulation.” But right away a lot of other stocks went tumbling, including Ross Consolidated, and then Dad said there were fools who would gamble and bid stocks up, and then they had to come down. But the trouble continued to spread over the country, and there were reports of big concerns, and even banks, in trouble. There was panic in the air, and Dad and “Verne” held anxious consultations, and stopped all their development work, and laid off several hundred men; “pulling in their horns,” as Dad phrased it. There was plenty of money in the banks, Dad said, but only the big fellows had the use of it; “Verne” was in a rage with Mark Eisenberg, the banker, who had “thrown him down.” It was the “Big Five,” at their old tricks of trying to freeze out the independents. Wouldn’t they jist like to get Ross Consolidated in a hole, and buy it up for five or ten millions!
Bunny had a talk with Mr. Irving, who told him that it was the Federal Reserve system at work; a device of the big Wall Street banks, a supposed-to-be government board, but really just a committee of bankers, who had the power to create unlimited new paper money in times of crisis. This money was turned over to the big banks, and in turn loaned by them to the big industries whose securities they held and must protect. So, whenever a panic came, the big fellows were saved, while the little fellows went to the wall.
In this case it was the farmers who were being “deflated.” They were unorganized, and had no one to protect them; they had to dump their crops onto the market, and the prices were tumbling—literally millions of farmers would be bankrupt before this year was by. But the price of manufactured goods would not drop to the same extent, because the big trusts, having the Wall Street banks behind them, could hold onto their stocks. Bunny took this explanation to his father, who passed it on to Mr. Roscoe, who said it was exactly right, by Jees; he knew the bunch that had their fingers in the till of the Federal Reserve bank here on the coast, and they were buying up everything in sight, the blankety-blank-blanks, but they weren’t going to get the Roscoe-Ross properties.
Money was so scarce, Bertie could not have a new car, despite the fact that she had damaged hers in a collision; and Dad talked economy at meal-times, until Aunt Emma took to feeding them on hash made from yesterday’s roast! Shortage everywhere, and worry in people’s faces, and hints of bankruptcy and unemployment in the newspapers—they tried their best to hide it, but it leaked out between the lines.
Then a funny thing happened. A big limousine with a chauffeur drove up before the Ross home one summer evening, and out stepped a stately personage in snow-white flannels; a tall young man with yellow hair and a solemn visage—Eli Watkins, by heck! He shook hands all round—he had developed the manners of an archbishop—and then asked for a private conference with Dad. He was taken into the “den,” and half an hour later came out smiling, and bowed himself away; and Dad said nothing until he was alone with Bunny, and then his face expanded into a grin and he chuckled, by Judas Priest, Eli had gone into the real estate business. He had found a block on the outskirts of the city which was exactly the size for the temple which the angel of the Lord had commanded him to build; or rather he had found some real estate subdividers who had a pull with the city board of supervisors, and had got permission to create a block of this unprecedented size. So the word of the Lord had been vindicated, and the golden temple was to arise. But for some reason unknown the Lord had failed to tip off Eli to the panic, and here he was “stuck,” just like any common, unholy business man, with a payment on his hundred and seventy-five thousand dollar tract nearly a month overdue. The collections at the revivals had fallen off, and the Lord had made it manifest that He desired Eli to employ some other method of raising funds.
“What did he want of you, Dad?”
“The Lord had revealed to him that I would take a second mortgage on the property. But I told him the Lord had failed to reveal where I was to get the cash. I gave him five hundred to help him over.”
“Good God, Dad! I thought we were economizing!”
“Well, Eli pointed out that he had blessed that first well on the Paradise tract, and that was why we had got all the oil. You can see, it would ’a been sort of blasphemy if I’d denied it.”
“But Dad, you know you don’t believe in Eli Watkins’ bunk!”
“I know, but that fellow has got a tremendous following, and we might need him some day, you can’t be sure. If there should come a close election, here or at Paradise, we might get our money back many times by getting Eli to endorse our ticket.”
Bunny thought this over, and then summoned his nerve, and went back to his father. “Look here, Dad! If you’ve got five hundred for a joke with Eli Watkins, I want five hundred for something serious.”
Dad looked alarmed right away. He should not have told Bunny about that money! “What is it, son?”
“I’ve been to see Mr. Irving, Dad, and he’s in trouble, he can’t get a teaching job anywhere. They’ve got him blacklisted. You see, he has to mention that he’s been teaching at Southern Pacific the last two years, and the people write to enquire about him, and he’s convinced that somebody in the university is telling them he’s a red.”
“I shouldn’t wonder,” said Dad. “But that’s not your fault.”
“Yes, it is, Dad! I was the one that dragged him out and made him talk to me. I thought I could keep it to myself, but they had some one spying on us.”
“Well, son, is he trying to borrow money from you?”
“No, I offered him a little, but he wouldn’t take it. But I know he needs it, and I’ve been talking about it with Harry Seager, and with Peter Nagle—they know some of the labor men in the city, and they think there is a possibility of starting a labor college here. We all agree that Mr. Irving is the ideal man to run it.”
“A labor college?” said Dad. “That’s a new one on me.”
“It’s to educate the young workers.”
“But why can’t they go to the regular schools, that are free?”
“They don’t teach them anything about labor. At least they don’t teach them anything that’s true. So the labor men are founding places where bright young fellows can be fitted to take their part in the labor struggle.”
Dad thought it over. “You mean, son, it’s a place where a bunch of you reds teach Socialism and such stuff.”
“No, that’s not fair, Dad; we don’t propose to teach any doctrines. We want to teach the open mind—that has always been Mr. Irving’s idea. He wants the labor men to think for themselves.”
But that kind of talk didn’t fool Dad for a moment. “They’ll all turn into reds before they get through,” he said. “And see here, son—I don’t mind your giving five hundred to Mr. Irving, but it’s going to be kind of tough on me if I’m to spend my life earning money, and then you spend it teaching young people that I haven’t got any right to it!”
And Bunny laughed—that was the best way to take it. But he thought it over—more and more as the years passed—and he realized how that shrewd old man looked into the future and read life!