Oil! A Novel by Upton Sinclair

by Upton Sinclair

  CHAPTER XVIII

  THE FLIGHT 1

  This summer of 1923 was a pleasant one for Bunny. To be one of the editors of a little paper, and be able to say what you thought, and print it week by week and distribute it, with no Dean Squirge to take it away from you, and no police or patriots to raid your office! To mail it to every one you knew, and flatter yourself with the idea that they were reading it, and being cured of their prejudices! Bunny had put all his former classmates on the mailing list of "The Young Student," and in the fall the "Ypsels" were going to sell it on the college campuses, and maybe trouble would begin then, and they would get some advertising free! Dad was slowly picking up. He read the little paper every week, a sort of loving censorship. But it wasn't needed, because Rachel, orthodox Socialist party member, was wasting no space on the left wingers. When these extremists got hold of Bunny and cajoled him into thinking that both sides ought to have a hearing, Rachel would say, what was the matter with their getting out a paper of their own? So here was Bunny, being "bossed" as usual—and by a woman! It was almost as bad as being married! Another source of relief—Vee was not quarreling with him so much. She had been so shocked by his mad proposal to go off and get himself killed in heavy industry, that she was glad to compromise and take half his time, and let Rachel and "The Young Student" have the other half. Vee was working hard on her new picture, "The Golden Couch," telling about an American darling of luxury who fell into the toils of a fake prince from some Balkan country. To play the part they had got a real Roumanian prince, who had most charming manners, and was willing to devote himself to Vee at all times when Bunny was busy with his Socialist Jewess. Also they were getting agreeable letters from Bertie, who had been transported to heaven. Such a brilliant world, with such important things going on! She had lunched with the Prince de This, and dined with the Duchesse de That. Why wouldn't Dad and Bunny come over and visit them—Bunny might make a really brilliant marriage. Dad chuckled; the idea of him going to Paree and trying to polly voo Francy! The blackmailers were busy, of course; but since his illness Dad had left all that trouble to Verne. Congress was on vacation, which meant a partial respite; the senatorial reds might denounce the oil leases in their home states, but the papers no longer had to print what they said. A curious superstition, that when things were said in Congress, even the most respectable newspapers found it necessary to mention them. Such things brought politics into disrepute with business men. The drilling of the Sunnyside tract was under way. A dozen wells were flowing, and justifying all that had been expected of them. Sometimes Dad was driven to the office, but most of the time the bright young executives would come out to his home, and sit in the den and get their orders. Such clean-cut efficient young men, with all their faculties concentrated upon getting oil out of the ground! No visions tormenting them, no strains of music haunting them, no hesitations, no uncertainties, never a doubt that to get oil out of the ground was the purpose of man's life! So they kept their wits about them, and mastered their departments, and increased their prestige and their salaries; and when any one of them had taken his departure, there was an unuttered sadness between Dad and his son. Why couldn't Bunny have been like young Simmons, or young Heimann, or young Boiling?

  II

  The doctor had said that Dad must not think about business more than two hours a day; so Bunny would tempt him for a stroll, a very slow one, and perhaps they would hear a sermon of Eli's as they walked along the street, and that never failed to divert Dad's mind and set him to chuckling. He took a kind of malicious delight in watching the glory sweep of the Third Revelation; by proving that the masses were boobs, you made it all right to take their naval reserves! Dad subscribed to a little paper issued by one of the rival religious showmen of the town, full of denunciations of Eli and exposures of his trickery. The regular churches were jealous of this new Revelation, which had burst so rudely upon them. Eli was an upstart and a mountebank, and Tom Poober, the clerical rival, declared that he faked a lot of his alleged cures, he hired people to stand up and tell how their crippled limbs had healed and their cancers had disappeared. Also, Eli's followers had not been willing to give up their customs of rolling and talking in tongues, and Eli had had to build for them a number of sound-proof rooms in the Tabernacle, where these rites were carried on. "Tarrying rooms," they were called, because you went there to "tarry with Jesus"; and when things got going, you would see a hundred men and women rolling on the floor, pawing one another, tearing off their clothing; you would see a woman jerking her head back, or leaping several feet at a time, here and there, exactly like a chicken with its head cut off. The orgies would end with a mass of human creatures piled into a heap, wriggling and writhing, amid a smell of sweat that would make you ill. The Reverend Poober would print such things, and send newsboys to sell the paper in front of the Tabernacle; the newsboys would be fallen upon and beaten, and the police would fail to arrest the assailants, or having arrested them, would turn them loose. Were the politicians of Angel City afraid of the power of this stuffed prophet? Tom Poober would ask in large capital letters, and Dad would chuckle—in the mood of that Western pioneer who came home and found his wife in a hand-to-hand conflict with a bear, and rested his gun upon the fence and took a seat and called, "Go it, woman! Go it, bear!" There was another charge—the prophet was said to be fond of the company of handsome young women. That was a cruel thing to hint, because Eli was strenuous in denouncing fornications and adulteries, as much so as any Hebrew prophet of the First Revelation. Dad chuckled and speculated; until it happened one day that he and Bunny took a long drive, and stopped at an unfrequented beach, looking for a place for Bunny to get a swim. There was a cheap hotel on the waterfront, and coming out of the door, whom should they run into but Eli Watkins, with an indubitably handsome young woman! The young woman walked quickly on, and Eli exchanged greetings with Dad and Bunny, and then excused himself. Dad stood for a minute, looking after the couple and saying, "By golly!" Then he turned and went into the hotel, and to the man at the desk remarked, in a casual tone, "I met that gentleman, but his name has slipped my memory—the one that just went out." "That's Mr. T. C. Brown, of Santa Ynez." "Is he staying here?" "He just checked out." Dad began to glance over the hotel register, and there he read, as big as life, "T. C. Brown and wife, Santa Ynez." And in the crude scrawly handwriting of Eli Watkins, which Dad had at home upon several business letters! It was all Dad could do to keep from bursting out laughing. By golly, if he were to tip off Tom Poober to the contents of that hotel register, he would knock the Third Revelation as high as a kite!

  III

  President Harding died; and Dan Irving wrote Bunny the gossip from Washington. The old gentleman had been reluctant to take the oil men's money, so Barney Brock way and his "fixer" had fixed things for him—they had "carried an account" in a Wall Street brokerage, a method whereby business men make life comfortable for statesmen. Every now and then they would bring the old gentleman a bundle of liberty bonds which they had "won" for him. And now his widow had found several hundred thousand dollars of these bonds in a safe deposit box, and become convinced that he had meant them for another woman, and was in such a fury about it that she was telling all her friends, and giving great glee to Washington gossip. And then the new president: a little man whose fame was based upon the legend that he had put down a strike of the Boston policemen, when the truth was that he had been hiding in his hotel room, with a black eye presented to him by the mayor of the city. His dream in life, as reported by himself, was to keep a store, and that was the measure of his mentality. He didn't know what to say, and so the newspapers called him a "strong silent man." Bunny didn't publish much of this, because Rachel didn't approve of gossip. But they did publish some of the inside facts about professionalism in college athletics, and when this was offered for sale on the campuses, the athletic students mobbed the "Ypsels." But even the mobbers read the paper, and Bunny was having the time of his life. In December the new Congress assemble
d, and an alarming state of affairs was revealed; the "insurgents" had the balance of power in the Senate, and their first move was to combine with the Democrats and order an investigation of the oil leases. This news fell upon Dad and Verne like a thunderbolt—their scouts in Washington had failed to foresee such a calamity, and Verne had to jump into his private car and hurry to Washington, to see what a last-minute expenditure of cash might do. Apparently it didn't do much, for the committee proceeded to put witnesses on the stand and "grill" them—a terrifying newspaper phrase, but really it was not so much a culinary operation as an explosion, with the debris scattered all over the front pages of the press. The thing was too sensational to be held down any longer. It didn't read like politics, but like some blood and thunder movie. Secretary Crisby hadn't had the sense to put his oil money into liberty bonds and hide them in a safe deposit box—he had gone like a fool and paid off a big mortgage on his Texas ranch, and bought a lot of stuff that everybody could see; he had even told the foreman of his ranch that he had got sixty-eight thousand dollars from Vernon Roscoe, and the foreman had told one of the ranch-hands. Now the senators put the badly rattled foreman on the witness stand, and he had to explain that it was all a misunderstanding— what he had said was not "sixty-eight thousand dollars," but "six or eight cows." You can see how easy it was for such a mistake to happen! But then it was shown that Secretary Crisby had deposited a hundred thousand dollars in his bank one day; and where had he got that? A great Washington newspaper publisher came forward to declare that he had loaned his dear friend the secretary that littie sum for no particular reason. The great publisher then went off to Florida to spend the winter, and he was sick and couldn't possibly be disturbed. But the perverse committee sent one of its members to Florida and put the publisher on the witness stand, and in the presence of half a hundred newspaper reporters pinned him down and made him admit that his story had been a friendly fairy-tale. Where had the hundred thousand come from? The scandalmongers were busy, of course—fellows like Dan Irving running to the committee with tales of what Washington gossip was saying. So the committee grabbed "Young Pete" O'Reilly, and "grilled" him, and made him admit that he had carried the trifling sum of a hundred thousand dollars to Secretary Crisby in a little black bag—more stuff right out of a movie! And then they grabbed "Old Pete," and he claimed it was just a loan—he had got a note, but he couldn't recollect where the note was. He finally produced a signature which he said had been cut off the note, but he couldn't tell what had become of the rest of it; he was very careless about notes, and thought he had given this one to his wife, who had misplaced all but the signature. And these scandalous details about the leaders of the most fashionable society in Washington and Angel City! The newspapers published it, even while they shivered at their own irreverence.

  IV

  Every day Dad was getting long telegrams from Verne, not coming direct, of course, but addressed to Mrs. Boiling, the wife of the trusty young executive; they were signed "A. H. Dory"—a play upon Dad's favorite formula, "All hunkydory." They were not the sort of telegrams that a doctor would have picked out for the soothing of his patient's nerves; no, they kept the patient in a fever of anxiety—how many, many times he wished that he had listened to the warnings of his young idealist, and kept clear of this mess of corruption! But of course Bunny couldn't say that now; he could only read the news and wait and wonder at what hour the thunderbolt would descend upon them. Annabelle's new picture was done, "A Mother's Heart," and there was going to be an especially grand premiere, and Bunny was to take Vee, of course, and Dad was to take Aunt Emma, and everything would be all hunkydory for that one night at least. Bunny came home from reading the proofs of the next issue of the paper, and there in the entrance hall he found his aunt waiting for him, her hands shaking with excitement, and her teeth chattering. "Oh, Bunny! The most dreadful thing! They're trying to arrest your father!" "Arrest him?" "Men are after him—right in front of the house! You've got to get away without being seen—they'll follow you—oh, I'm so frightened—oh, please, please, be careful! Don't, let them catch your father!" He managed to get the story, and it was really almost as melodramatic as her wild words conveyed. Young Boiling, the trusty executive, had been to the house a few minutes ago, looking for Bunny with a message from Dad of the utmost urgency; he had written it out, and Bunny read it: he was to drive in his car, and make absolutely certain that he was not being followed—there would be men trying to follow him, in order to trail Dad. As soon as he had shaken off these men, he must leave his car, which of course had his name on the license; he must go to some automobile place where he was not known, and buy a closed car under an assumed name; it must not be a new car, because they might have to do very fast driving. Still making sure that he was not being followed, Bunny must proceed to the suburban town of San Pasqual, and at a certain corner Dad would join him. Mr. Boiling had given Aunt Emma five thousand dollars in bills, and then had gone away, hoping that the men who were watching the house would follow him. Bunny said a few words to comfort the poor old lady. Nobody wanted to put Dad into jail, they just wanted to get him on the witness stand, the way they had done the "Petes," young and old. Bunny threw a few clothes into an old suit-case, that had no name or initials on it, and hurried out to his car. Sure enough, there was another car just down the street, and when Bunny started, this other started also. Bunny swung round half a dozen corners, but the other car kept on his trail. He bethought himself of the traffic jam in the heart of the city, which was at its worst right now, between five and six in the evening. The traffic was controlled by signals, with two or three officers at the crowded corners, and it would be possible by dodging here and there to get several cars between you and a pursuing car, and sooner or later to get across just as the bell rang and compelled your pursuer to wait. Bunny worked the trick, and shook off the other car; then he left his own in a public garage for storage, and made the purchase of a two-passenger closed car under the name of "Alex H. Jones." The dealers' receipt would serve for a license temporarily, and Bunny counted out eighteen of his hundred dollar bills, and drove away. Half an hour later he was in the town of San Pasqual, driving past the corner specified. He passed it twice, and the second time Dad stepped out of a hotel, and Bunny slowed up, and then away they went! "Anybody following you?" were Dad's first words, and Bunny said, "I don't think so, but we'll make sure." They swung round several corners, and Dad kept watch through the rear window. "All hunkydory," he said, at last, and Bunny asked, "Where are we going?" The answer was, "To Canada"; and Bunny, who had been prepared for anything, took the boulevard that led North out of San Pasqual. While he drove, Dad told him the news. The first thing, Verne had skipped to Europe; at least, his steamer was sailing today, and it was hoped he had not been caught. "A. H. Dory" had telegraphed to Mrs. Boiling, advising her that it was absolutely necessary for Mr. Paradise—that was Dad's code name—to meet his friends in Vancouver immediately, and he must start tonight, otherwise he would be too late for the appointment. Dad hadn't needed any further hint; he had learned yesterday—though he had kept the painful news from Bunny—that the Senate investigators had got wind of that Canadian corporation, and were planning to subpoena all its organizers. Undoubtedly the subpoenas had been issued that day, and telegraphed to Angel City, with instructions to the United States marshal to serve them at once. Dad and young Boiling had made their getaway from the office by means of a fire-escape—more movie stuff, you see! And here they were, Alex H. Jones and Paul K. Jones, driving all night on a rain-battered highway, not daring to stop at any hotel, because a United States marshal might be lurking in the lobby; not daring even to pass through the big cities, for fear the all-seeing eye of their irate Uncle Sam might be spying from a window!