X
Bunny had to study for his fall examinations, and that looked like a problem, for what was Vee going to do? But fate provided a solution—Dad telegraphed to Harvard University, which sent up a young instructor to do tutoring, and he was the solution. He was tall, and had the loveliest fair blue eyes, and a softly curling golden moustache, and soft golden fuzz all over him like a baby; he wore gold nose-glasses, and had a quiet voice and oh, so much culture—one of those master minds which can tutor you in anything if you give them a week's start! Coming as he did from an old Philadelphia family, and having been trained in the haughtiest centre of intellectual snobbery, you might have thought he would look down upon an ex-mule driver and his son, to say nothing of an actress who had been raised in a patent medicine vender's wagon, and had never read a whole book in her life. But as a matter of fact, young Mr. Appleton Laurence just simply collapsed in the presence of the situation he found at this Ontario camp; it was the most romantic and thrilling thing that a young instructor had encountered since Harvard began. As for the patent medicine vender's daughter, he could not take his eyes off her, and when she came near, the tutoring business was scattered as by a hurricane. Vee of course had put her sparkling black eyes to work at once; all those stunts which Tommy Paley had taught her she now tried out on a new victim, and Bunny, as audience, was in position to study them objectively. Vee would wait till Mr. Laurence had set Bunny his morning's work, and then she and the tutor would go for a walk in the woods, and Bunny would sit with one half his mind on his books, while the other half wondered what was happening, and what he had reason to expect from one who had had so many lovers. She did not leave him long in doubt. "Bunny-rabbit," she said, "you aren't going to be worried about my Appie, are you?"—for the hurricane that struck the tutoring business had swept all dignity away, and Mr. Appleton Laurence was "Appie," except when he was "Applesauce." "I won't worry unless you tell me to," Bunny answered. "That's a dear! You must understand, I'm an actress, that's the way I earn my living, and I simply have to know all about love, and how can I learn if I don't practice?" "Well, that's all right, dear—" "Some of the men they give you in Hollywood are such dubs, it makes you sick, you would as soon be in the arms of a clothing dummy. So I have to tell them how to act, and I have to know how a real gentleman behaves—you know what I mean, the highbrows and snobs. Oh, Bunny, it's the cutest thing you ever saw, he falls down on his knees, and the tears come into his eyes, and you know, he can recite all the poets by heart; I never saw anything like it; you'd think he was an old Shakespearean actor. And it's really a great opportunity for me, to cultivate my taste and get refined." "Well, yes, dear, but isn't it a little hard on him?" "Oh, rubbish, it won't hurt him, he'll go off and put it into sonnets—he's doing it already, and maybe he'll get to be famous, and it'd be great publicity! Don't you bother about him, Bunny, and don't bother about me; there's nobody in the world for me but my Bunny-rabbit—all the rest is just a joke." And she put her arms about him. "I know what it is to be jealous, dear, and I wouldn't cause you that unhappiness for anything in the world. If you really mind, you can send old Applesauce packing, and I won't be cross." Bunny laughed. "I can't do that, I've got to be tutored." Vee told Dad about it, too—lest he should be having any vicarious pangs. When Dad heard about the falling on the knees and the tears, he chuckled. Bunny would get the contents of the tutor's mind, and Vee would get the contents of his heart, and they would send him home like a squeezed orange. It appealed to Dad as good business. Back in Paradise, you remember, he was hiring a chemical wizard, paying him six thousand a year, and making millions out of him!
XI
There came another development, to protect Vee from the possibility of boredom. Schmolsky sent her up the "continuity" of the new picture upon which she was to start work in the fall. And then suddenly it was revealed that the world's darling knew how to read! For a whole hour she sat buried in it, and then she leaped up, ready to start rehearsing—and all the hurricanes that ever swept the province of Ontario were as nothing to the one that came now. Clear the way for "The Princess of Patchouli"! It was a popular musical comedy which was to be made into a moving picture. "Patchouli" was one of the little Balkan kingdoms, though it looked and acted very much like Vienna of the Strauss waltzes. A young American engineer came in to build a railroad, and found himself mistaken for a conspirator, and presently he was rescuing the lovely princess from a revolutionary band— no Bolsheviks, these were aristocratic army conspirators, so Bunny wouldn't have his feelings hurt, would he? Of course the hero carried her off, married her for love only, and then got the kingdom thrown in—the bankers who were financing the railroad bought it for him. So here was Vee, being a princess all over the place. It was amazing to watch her work—Bunny suddenly came to realize that her success hadn't been all money and sex, after all. She pounced onto the role like a tiger-cat, and when she got going the rest of the world ceased to exist—except to the extent that she needed it for a foil. "Now, Dad, you're the king; you walk in here—no, no, for God's sake, kings don't walk so fast! And I have to fall at your feet, and plead for his life, 'Oh, mercy, sire, and so-and-so, and so-and-so, and so-and-so!'" It is one of the peculiarities of motion picture acting that it doesn't matter what you say, so long as you are saying something; so Vee would weep, "And so-and-so," and she would croon "And so-and-so" in passionate love-accents to either Bunny or Appie, and she would shriek "And so-and-so" in deadly terror to an executioner with uplifted axe. And if in the course of the scene the other person didn't do it right, then scolding and commands would serve equally well for a love-song, "Hold it, now, you idiot, I adore you, darling"—or maybe it might be, "Take your hands off me, foul beast—don't let go, you goose, grab! That's better, you don't have to be polite when you're a murderer." If Bunny had wanted to rehearse tempestuous emotions, and shriek and scream and tear his hair, he would have sought refuge in the woods, where only the chipmunks could have heard him. But Vee was utterly indifferent to the existence of other humans. That is something one learns on "the lot"; for there will be cameramen and scene-shifters, and property-boys, and carpenters working on the next set, and some visitors that have managed to break in despite the strictest regulations—and you just go on with your work. The first time the executioner lifted his axe and Vee started screaming, the Indian guides came running in alarm; but she hardly stopped even for a laugh, she went on with the scene, while they stood staring with mouths wide open. She and her two lovers would come in from swimming, and suddenly she would call for a rehearsal of some royal pageantry—she could be a princess just as well in a scanty bathing suit, with a carpet of pine-needles under her bare feet. Mr. Appleton Laurence had never met any princesses, but he had read a great deal of history and poetry, and so he was an authority, and must criticise her way of walking, her gestures, her attitudes, her reaction to the love-advances of a handsome young American engineer. "Just imagine you're in love with me yourself, Appie," she would say—and so his emotions became sublimated into art, and he could pour out his soul to her, right before Bunny and Dad and Dad's secretary and the Indians! "You're much better at it than Bunny," she would declare. "I believe he's got used to me, it's as bad as if we were married." So the time passed pleasantly. Until at last Vee had got to feel perfectly at home in her Appie's conception of royalty; she no longer had to ask questions, not to stop and think, but knew instantly what to do—and forever after, in all her entrances to and exits from Hollywood society, she would be a little of a Harvard instructor's Princess of Patchouli. She was impatient now, wanting to see the sets, and to hear Tommy Paley call, "Camera!" Bunny also was loaded up with answers to all possible exam questions, and ready to get back and unload them onto his professors. Dad had run down to Toronto, and signed the last of the papers for his Canadian corporation; he had telegrams from Verne almost every day—the strikers, having held out for nearly four months, had learned their lesson, and the Federal Oil Board had written them a letter, advising them
to go back to work as individuals, and promising there would be no discrimination against union men. Then one day the steamer brought a telegram signed Annabelle, addressed to Bunny, and reading, "Spring lamb for dinner come on home." He explained what that meant, the strike was over; and so the occupants of the camp packed up, and Mr. Appleton Laurence went back to his fair Harvard, with woe in his heart and a packet of immortal sonnets in his suit-case, while Vee Tracy and Dad and Bunny and the secretary made themselves luxurious in compartments on a Canadian-Pacific train bound West.
CHAPTER XVI THE KILLING 1
Bunny passed his examinations, and was duly established as a "grave old senior" in Southern Pacific University. And then he hunted up his friends—and such a load of troubles as fell onto his shoulders! Literally everybody had troubles! Rachel and Jacob Menzies had come back from their summer's fruit-picking, to find their two younger brothers, the "left wingers," in the county jail! The police had raided a Communist meeting and arrested all the speakers, and the organizers, and the literature sellers, and all who had red badges in their buttonholes. They had raided the Communist headquarters—determined, so the newspapers announced, to root every Moscow agent out of the city. They had sorted the prisoners, and fined a few, and were holding the rest, including the Menzies boys, under that convenient universal charge, "suspicion of criminal syndicalism." These foolish boys had made their own trouble, said Rachel; but still it was an outrage to arrest people for their beliefs; and it was tormenting to think of your own flesh and blood shut up in those horrible cages. Bunny asked the bail—it was two thousand dollars per brother. He began explaining his troubles with his father, and his own impotence; and Rachel said of course, she understood, they couldn't expect him to bail out the whole radical movement. And yet that did not entirely restore his peace of mind. Then Harry Seager, whose business college was on the rocks. The boycott had wrecked it, and Harry was trying to sell the debris. He was going to buy him a walnut ranch; it would be harder to boycott walnuts, you couldn't tell the "red" ones from the "white"! And then Dan Irving, whose labor college was in almost as bad a way. The orgy of arrests had frightened the old line labor leaders completely off. The college was still going, but it was in debt, and the head of it hadn't had any salary for several months. Bunny wrote a check for two hundred dollars, and went away debating the question that never would be settled—to what extent had he a right to plunder his father for the benefit of his father's enemies? From Dan Irving he learned that Paul had got out of jail, and was in Angel City, together with Ruth. It was a dirty deal the oil workers had got, said Dan; the operators had made one last use of the oil board, to trick the men into a complete surrender. They had promised the oil board there would be no discrimination against union men, but they had never had the least intention of keeping this promise. They had kept all the strike-breakers at work, and taken back just enough of the strikers to make up their needs. All the active union fellows were begging jobs, and the oil industry was a slave-yard of the "open shop."
II
Bunny went at once to call on Paul and Ruth at the address which Dan Irving gave him. It was a mean and dingy lodging-house, in a part of the city given up to Mexicans and Chinese. An old woman sent him up to the second floor, and told him which door to knock on, but he got no response. He came back later, and found that Ruth had just got in. They were crowded into one little room, with a gas plate and a sink in an unventilated alcove, and another alcove with a curtain before it, and a cot on which Paul slept. Ruth was ashamed to have Bunny see them in such a place, but explained that it wouldn't be long, just till Paul got a job; he was out looking for one now. She herself had got work in a department store, and as soon as they could get ahead, she was going to study trained nursing. She looked pale and worn, but smiled bravely; she didn't really mind anything, so long as Paul was out of jail. Bunny wanted to know all the news, and plied Ruth with questions. Just what had Paul done to get arrested? The first time, Ruth said, the sheriff had raided the Rascum cabin, with a lot of rough, hateful men, who had torn everything to pieces and carried off all of Paul's books and papers—they had them still. They had done the same thing to all the other fellows that used to come to the cabin—they were going to prove them "reds," but what evidence they had or claimed to have was a secret the sheriff or the district attorney or whoever it was was keeping to himself. They had had a lot of spies on the bunch—one fellow was known to be a spy, and two others had disappeared, and would no doubt turn up as witnesses—but who could tell what they would testify? All the other boys were still locked up in those horrible tanks, so dark and dirty, and nothing to do all day or night. The trial was set for next February, and apparently they were to stay there meantime. Paul was free, thanks to Bunny's ten thousand dollars; Ruth could never express her thanks— Never mind about that, Bunny said—what about the second arrest? And Ruth told how Judge Delano had issued an injunction forbidding anyone to interfere with Excelsior Pete in the course of its business, the production and marketing of oil. That meant that you mustn't advocate or encourage the strike; and of course Paul had done that, so the judge had sent him to jail—that was all. Judges were getting so they did that all the time, and what were union men going to do? It had been a fearful ordeal for Paul, he was not very well, and of course he was terribly bitter. He would never go back to Paradise again, it wasn't the same place at all. Ruth smiled a wan smile, "They've cut down all those lovely trees that we planted, Bunny. They needed the room for tanks." Bunny hauled out his check-book, and sought to salve his conscience by making a present to his friends. But Ruth said no, she was sure Paul wouldn't let him do that. They were going to get along all right. Paul was a good carpenter, and sooner or later he would find some boss that didn't mind his having been in jail. Bunny argued, but Ruth was obdurate; even though she were to take the check, Paul would send it back. Bunny did not wait till Paul came home; he made some excuse, and went away. He just did not have the nerve to sit there, in his fashionable clothes which Vee had selected for him in New York, and with his new sport car waiting downstairs, and see Paul come in, half sick, discouraged from seeking work in vain, and with all the black memories of injustice and betrayal in his soul. Bunny could make excuses, of course. Paul did not know that he had been spending the summer at play with the world's darling, Paul would believe that he had gone away on his father's account. But nothing could change the fact that it was on money wrung from Paradise workers that Bunny was living in luxury; nothing could change the fact that it had been to increase the amount of this money, to intensify the exploitation of the workers, that Paul had spent three months in jail, and the other fellows were to spend nearly a year in jail. So long as that was the truth, there was nothing Bunny could do but just run away from Paul!
Oil! A Novel by Upton Sinclair Page 45