ments and leases and quit claim deeds and notices of release and notices of cancellation of lease, and mortgages, and sales of "per-cents," and mechanic's liens and tax receipts and notices of expiration of agreement—not less than four hundred pages of typewritten material, something like a million and a half of words, mostly legal jargon—"the undersigned hereby agrees" and "in consideration of the premises herein set forth," and "in view of the failure of the party of the first part to carry out the said operations by the aforesaid date," and so on—it made you dizzy just to turn the pages. And all this to settle the ownership of what was expected to be ten thousand barrels of oil, and had turned out to be less than one thousand! Here you saw where the money had gone— pale typists shut up in offices all day transcribing copies of this verbiage, and pale clerks checking and rechecking them, or looking them up, or recording them—there were men up in Angel City who had become mighty magnates by employing thousands of men and women slaves, to transcribe and check and recheck and look up and record literally millions of documents like these!
V
Bunny and Rachel had dinner, and then strolled on the water front; it was one of those warm nights that come now and then in Southern California; there was a moon on the sea, and a long pier with gleaming lights, and the sound of an orchestra drawing the lovers. At the entrance to the pier was a big bare hall, owned by the city, where very proper dancing was chaperoned by a religious city government. Bunny and his bride danced—oh, surely it was all right to dance a little bit, in this well chaperoned place on what ought to have been their honeymoon! But in between the dances, while the orchestra was still, something shook the hall, a dull, sombre blow, like distant thunder, making the windows rattle, and jarring your feet. "What's that?" exclaimed Rachel. "An earthquake?" "The guns," answered Bunny. "Guns?" And he had to explain, the fleet was practicing. There were a score or so of battleships stationed in the harbor, facing some unnamed enemy; and now they were at night target-practice. You heard them now and then, day and night, if you lived near the coast. So Rachel couldn't dance any more then. Each time she heard that dull boom, she saw the bodies of young men blown into fragments. The capitalists were getting ready for their next war; what business had the Socialists to be dancing? They drove along the boulevard which follows the harbor-front. It is fifteen or twenty miles, and there are towns and docks and bridges and railroad tracks and factories, and inland the "subdivisions" for the homes of working people. It is one of the world's great ports in the swift making; and those who have charge of the job, the masters of credit, see rearing before them that monstrous spectre known as "direct action" or "criminal syndicalism." The "Industrial Workers of the World" had a headquarters, where they met to discuss this program; and the masters made incessant war upon them. The address which Ruth had given to Bunny was an obscure street in a working-class quarter. There was a fair-sized hall, with lights in the windows, and the sound of a piano and a child's voice singing. Among the cars parked along the curb Bunny found a vacant space, and backed into it, and was just about to step from his car, when Rachel caught him by the arm. "Wait!" There came rushing down the street a squadron of motor-cars, two abreast and blocking the way entirely; and from them leaped a crowd of some fifty men, carrying weapons of various sorts, clubs, hatchets, pieces of iron pipe. They made a rush for the entrance, and a moment later the music ceased, and there came the sound of shrieks, and the crash of glass and battering of heavy blows. "They're raiding them!" cried Bunny, and would have run to the scene; but Rachel's arms were flung about him, pinning him to his seat. "No! No! Sit still! What can you do?" "My God! We must do something!" "You're not armed, and you can't stop a mob! You can only get killed! Keep still!" The sounds from within had risen to a bedlam; the hall must have been crowded, and everyone inside yelling at the top of his lungs. And that horrible drumming of blows—you couldn't tell whether they were falling on furniture or on human bodies. Bunny was almost beside himself, struggling to get loose, and Rachel fighting like a mad thing—he had never dreamed that she had such strength. "No, Bunny! No! For God's sake! For my sake! Oh, please, please!" She knew in those dreadful minutes the terror that was to haunt the rest of her life—that some day in this hideous class war there would come the moment when it was her husband's duty to get himself killed. But not yet, not yet! Not on their honeymoon! It was like the passing of a tornado, that is gone before you have time to realize it. The attacking party emerged from the hall, as quickly as they had entered. They were dragging half a dozen prisoners, and threw these into the cars, of which the engines were still going; then down the street they went roaring, and silence fell. It was permissible for Bunny to get out now, and run into the hall, with Rachel at his heels. He had one thought, the same as on that night when he had run over Mrs. Groarty's place, crying, "Paul! Paul!" They were certain to have taken Paul away on that lynching party; and how could Bunny save him? The first thing he saw, in the doorway, was a man with a great gash across his forehead, and the blood streaming all over him; he was staggering about, because he couldn't see, and crying, "The sons-o'-bitches! The sons-o'-bitches!" Near him was another man whose hand had been slashed across, and a woman was tearing her skirt to make a bandage. A little girl lay on the floor, screaming in agony, and some one was pulling off her stockings, and the raw flesh was coming with them. "They threw her into the coffee!" said a voice in Bunny's ear. "Jesus Christ, they threw the kids into the boiling coffee!" Everywhere confusion, women in hysterics, or sunk upon the floor sobbing. There was not a stick of furniture in the place that had not been wrecked; the chairs had been split with hatchets; the piano had been gutted, its entrails lay tangled on the floor. Tables were overset, and dishes and crockery trampled, and the metal urn or container in which the coffee had been boiling had been overset, and its steaming contents running here and there. But first they had hurled three children into it, one after another, as their frantic parents dragged them out. The flesh had been cooked off their legs, and they would be crippled for life: one was a ten year old girl known as "the wobbly song-bird"; she had a sweet treble, and sang sentimental ballads and rebel songs, and the mob leader had jerked her from the platform, saying, "We'll shut your damned mouth!" What was the meaning of this raid? According to the newspapers, it was the patriotic indignation of sailors from the fleet. There had been an explosion on one of the battleships, and several men had been killed, and the newspapers had printed a story that one of the wobblies had been heard to laugh with satisfaction. It is an ancient device of the master press. In old Russia the "Black Hundreds" were incited by tales of "ritual murders" committed by the Jews, Christian babies killed for sacrifice. In Britain now the government was forging letters attributed to the Soviet leaders, and using them to carry an election. In America the deportations delirium had been sanctified by a great collection of forged documents, officially endorsed. It was a spontaneous mob, said these law and order newspapers. But this fact was noted: on all other occasions there had been policemen at these wobbly meetings, to take note of criminal utterances; but this night there had been no policeman on hand. Nor were there any afterwards; Bunny and the other "reds" might besiege the police department and the city government, and offer the names of the principal mob leaders, but there would be no step taken to punish anyone for this murderous raid!
VI
Bunny didn't expect to find Paul, but there he lay, flat on his back, with several people bending over him. His left eye was a mass of blood, and seemed as if destroyed by a blow; he lay, limp and motionless, and when Bunny called his name he did not answer. But he was alive, gasping with a kind of snoring sound. A doctor! A doctor! There were several in the neighborhood, and people rushed away to look for them. From the days of Bunny's residence in Beach City he knew the name of a surgeon, and hurried to a phone, and was so fortunate, as to find the surgeon at home. Bunny told what had happened, and the other said he would come at once; in the case of injury to skull or other bones, X-ray pictures would be neede
d, so he gave the name of doctors who did such work, and Bunny did more telephoning, and arranged for one of these to be at his laboratory and await developments. Also he ordered an ambulance from a hospital. Then back to the hall, where Paul lay in the same condition. Rachel had laid a clean handkerchief over the battered eye, and put a pillow under his head. The other victims had been carried away, and the door of the wrecked hall shut against the curious crowd. The surgeon came, and said it was concussion of the brain. There was evidence of a heavy blow at the base of the skull— either Paul had been struck in the eye, and had hit the back of his head in falling, or else he had been knocked down by a blow from behind, and later struck or trampled over the eye. The first thing was a picture; so the unconscious body was taken to the X-ray laboratory, and pictures were made, and the surgeon showed Bunny and Rachel the line of a fracture at the base of the skull, running to the front above the oral cavity. There was nothing to be done, it was impossible to operate in such a place. It was a question of how the brain had been affected, and as to that only time could tell. They must keep the patient quiet. There was a private hospital in the town; so before long Paul was lying on a bed, with a bandage over his eye, and his head in a sling to avoid pressure on the injured place; and Bunny and Rachel were sitting by the bedside, gazing mournfully. Womanlike, Rachel was reading his thoughts. "Dear heart, are you going to blame yourself all your life because you didn't rush in and get your skull broken, too?" No, he couldn't have prevented the harm, he knew it; but oh, why did it have to be Paul's brain—the best brain that Bunny had ever known! He sat with a horrified, brooding stare. But there was another ordeal to be faced. Rachel reminded him, "We've got to tell Ruth." She offered to attend to it, to spare his feelings. She got her brother Jacob on the phone—he had just got home from a committee meeting, and now he must call a taxi, and drive to Ruth's home and bring her to the harbor. Two hours later Ruth came running up the stairs, her face like a mask of fright. "How is he? How is he?" When she entered the room, and saw Paul, she stopped. "Oh, what is it?" And when they told her—"Is he going to live?" She drew nearer, never taking her eyes off his face. Her hands would stretch out to him, and then draw back, because she might not touch him; they would go out again, as if they had a will of their own. Suddenly her knees gave way, and she sank to the floor, and covered her face with her hands, sobbing, sobbing. They tried to comfort her, but she hardly knew they were there. She was along, in the dreadful corridors of grief. Bunny, watching her, felt hot tears stealing down his cheeks. It wasn't natural for a girl to feel that way about a brother, Vee had said; but Bunny knew how it was—Ruth was back in those childhood days on the lonely hills of Paradise, when Paul had been her only friend, a refuge from a family of fanatics, with a father who beat her to make her think like him. Back there she had known that Paul was a great man, and had followed him all these years; she had watched his mind unfolding, and learned everything she knew from it—and now, to see it destroyed by a brute with a piece of iron pipe!
VII
It was long after midnight; and Rachel sought to draw Bunny away. There was nothing more they could do, either for Paul or his sister. There was a small hotel a few doors away, they would get a room there, and rest, and the hospital nurse would notify them if there were any change. And Bunny yielded: he must not be unfair to Rachel. He knew there was something unnatural about his own devotion to Paul, the subjection of his mind to everything that Paul thought, the exactness of his memory of everything Paul had said. Yes, Bertie had told him that, and then Vee—and now Rachel! He could not sleep. So, lying a-bed in the hotel-room, he explained it to her; how Paul had come when Bunny was groping for something different and better in his life. Paul had given him an ideal—something stern and hard—self-sufficiency, independence of judgment, determination to face life and understand it, and not be drawn away in pursuit of money or pleasure. Bunny had not been able to follow that ideal—no, he had lived in luxury, and gone chasing after women; but he had had the vision, the longing to be like Paul. And then, at each new crisis in his life, Paul would come along, a sort of standard by which Bunny could measure himself and what he was doing, and realize how little success he was having. Paul had taught him about the workers, and how they felt; Paul had been the incarnation of the new, awakening working-class. Paul's mind had been a searchlight, illumining the world-situation, showing Bunny what he needed to know. Now the light was out, and Bunny would have to see by his own feeble lantern! "Dear, he may get well," Rachel whispered; but Bunny moaned, no, no, he was going to die. Like a jagged flash of lightning before his mind was that X-ray picture of the crack at the base of Paul's skull. The light was out, at least from this world; a brute with a piece of iron pipe had extinguished it. Rachel put her arms about him and sought to beguile him with caresses. And she succeeded, of course; he could not refuse her love. So presently he slept a little. But Rachel did not sleep, she lay holding him in her arms, because he would jump and start in his sleep, his limbs would quiver—just the way she felt when the great guns went off! What was Bunny doing? Fighting those brutes with their clubs and hatchets and iron pipe? Or back in the old days, when he had hovered over Paul and Ruth, watching events that wrung his soul? Watching Dad deprive the family of their land; watching the oil operators crush the first strike; watching the government tear Paul away and make him into a strike-breaker for Wall Street bankers; watching Vernon Roscoe throw Paul into prison; watching capitalism with its world-wide system of terror drive Paul here and there, harry him, malign him, threaten him—until at last it hired the brute with the iron pipe!
VIII Morning came, and they went back to the hospital room. Nothing was changed. Paul still lay, breathing hoarsely; and Ruth sat in a chair by the bedside, her eyes fixed upon him, her hands clasped tightly. She was whiter, that was all, and her lips were quivering, never still. The hospital nurse begged her to lie down and rest, but she shook her head. No, she was used to watching the sick; she was a nurse too. The other answered that all nurses slept when they could; but no, please—Ruth wanted to stay right here. The surgeon came again. There was nothing he could do, time would have to tell. Bunny took him aside and asked what were the chances. Impossible to say. If Paul were going to get well, he would return to consciousness. If he were going to die, there might be a meningitis, or perhaps a blood clot on the brain. Rachel said the family ought to be notified. So Bunny sent a telegram to Abel Watkins at Paradise, telling him to engage an auto and bring the family at Bunny's expense. He debated whether it was his duty to telegraph Eli, and decided not to. Old Mr. Watkins might do it, but Bunny would be guided by what Paul would have wished. Then he got the morning papers, and read their exultant account of the night's events: the reds had been taught a much-needed lesson, and law and order were safe at the harbor. It was the morning of election day: the culmination of a campaign that had been like a long nightmare to Bunny. Senator LaFollette had been running, with the backing of the Socialists, and the great issue had been the oil steals; the indicted exposers of the crime against the criminals in power. At first the exposers had really made some headway, the people seemed to care. But the enemy was only waiting for the time to strike. In the last three weeks of the campaign he turned loose his reserves, and it was like a vast cloud of hornets, the sky black with a swarm of stinging, burning, poisoning lies! It was the money of Vernon Roscoe and the oil men, of course: plus the money of the bankers and the power interests and the great protected manufacturers, all those who had something to gain by the purchase of government, or something to lose by failure to purchase. Another fifty million dollar campaign; and in every village and hamlet, in every precinct of every city and town, there was a committee for the distribution of terror. The great central factories where it was manufactured were in Washington and New York, and the product was shipped out wholesale, all over the land, and circulated by every agency—newspapers and leaflets, mass meetings, parades, bands, red fire and torchlights, the radio and the moving picture screen.
If LaFollette, the red destroyer were elected, business would be smashed, the workers would be jobless; therefore vote for that strong silent statesman, that great, wise, noble-minded friend of the plain people known as "Cautious Cal." And now, while Paul Watkins lay gasping out his life, there was a snowstorm of ballots falling over the land, nearly a thousand every second. The will of the plain people was being made known.
Oil! A Novel by Upton Sinclair Page 59
