Oil, p.41
Oil!, page 41
Such was the fundamental faith of all “radicals,” and Bunny accepted the doctrine joyfully, as a way of escape from the tangle of commercialism and war. Labor was to organize, and take over industry, and rebuild it upon a basis of service. The formula was simple, and worthy of all trust; but alas, Bunny was being forced to admit that the reality was complicated. The makers of the new society were not able to agree upon plans for the structure, nor how to get the old one out of the way. They were split into a number of factions, and spent a good part of their energies quarreling among themselves. Bunny would have thought that here in Southern California at least, the labor movement had enemies enough in the federations of the employers, with their strikebreaking and spy agencies, their system of blacklist and persecution, and their politicians, hired to turn the law against the workers. But alas, it did not seem so to the young radicals; they had to make enemies of one another!
Just now they were in a fever over the Russian revolution; a colossal event that had shaken the labor movement of the whole world. Here for the first time in history the workers had got possession of a government; and what were they making of the chance? The capitalist press of the world was, of course, portraying Russia as a nightmare; but the Soviets continued to survive, and every day of survival was a fresh defeat for the newspaper campaign. The workers could run a government! The workers were running a government! Just look!
So, in every country of the world, the labor movement became divided into two factions, those who thought the workers in their country could follow the example of the Russians, and should organize and prepare to do it; and those who thought that for one reason or another it couldn’t be done, and the attempt was madness. This great division showed itself in every faction and school of thought. The Socialists split into those who wanted to follow Russia and those who didn’t; the Anarchists split in the same way, and so did the “Wobblies”; even the old-line labor leaders divided into those who wanted to let the Soviet government alone, and those who wanted to help the capitalists to put it down!
For Bunny this struggle was embodied in the Menzies family. Papa Menzies was an old-time Social Democrat from abroad, active in the clothing workers’ union. Of his six children, two daughters had followed their mother—an old-time, Orthodox Jewess who wore a dirty wig, and kept all the feast days in the home, and wept and prayed for the souls of her lost ones, stolen from the faith of their fathers by America, which had made them work on Saturdays, and by the radical movement, which had made them agnostics and scoffers. Rachel and the oldest boy, Jacob, were Socialists like their father; but the other two, Joe and Ikey, had gone over to the “left wing,” and were clamoring for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
II
Bunny received a letter from Rachel. “Dear Mr. Ross”—she always addressed him that way, alone of his classmates; it was her way of maintaining her proletarian dignity, in dealing with a person of great social pretensions. “We are home after picking all the prunes in California, and next week we begin on the grapes. You said you wanted to attend a meeting of the Socialist local, and there is to be an important one tomorrow evening, at the Garment Workers’ Hall. My father and brothers will be there, and would be glad to meet you.”
Bunny replied by a telegram, inviting one old and four young Jewish Socialists to have dinner with him before the meeting. He took them to an expensive restaurant—thinking to do them honor, and forgetting that they might feel uneasy as to their clothes and their table manners. Verily, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the feelings of the disinherited.[1]
Bunny found Rachel quite altered from the drab, hardworking girl he had known. She belonged to that oriental type which can pick fruit in the sun for several weeks without worrying about complexions; she had sunset in her cheeks and sunrise in her spirit, and for the first time it occurred to Bunny that she was quite an interesting-looking girl. She told about their adventures, which seemed to him extraordinarily romantic. Most people, when they indulged in daydreaming, would picture themselves as the son and heir of a great oil magnate, with millions of dollars pouring in upon them, and a sporty car to drive, and steel widows and other sirens to make love to them. But Bunny’s idea of a fairy story was to go off with a bunch of youngsters in a rattletrap old Ford that broke down every now and then, and camp out in a tent that the wind blew away, and get a job picking fruit alongside of Mexicans and Japanese and Hindus, and send home a post-office order for ten or twelve dollars every week!
Papa Menzies was a stocky, powerful-looking man with curly yellow hair over his head, and a deep chest—though most of it seemed to be in back instead of in front, so much was he bent over by toil. There were certain English letters he could never pronounce; he would say, contemptuously, “Dis talk about de vorld revolution.” His son Jacob, the Socialist one, Bunny knew as a stoop-shouldered, pale student, and found him much improved by outdoor life. The other two boys, the young “left-wingers,” were talkative and egotistical, and repelled the fastidious Bunny, who had not insight enough to guess that they were meeting a young plutocrat for the first time in their lives, and this was their uneasy effort to protect their working-class integrity. Nobody was going to say that they had been overawed! In addition to this, they were hardly on speaking terms with the rest of the family, because of the bitter political dispute going on.
They went to the hall, which was crowded with people, mostly workers, all tense with excitement. There had been a committee appointed to deal with the policy of the “local,” and this committee brought in a report in favor of expelling the “left-wingers”; also there was a minority report, in favor of expelling everybody else! So then the fat was in the fire; and Bunny listened, and tried valiantly to keep from being disillusioned with the radical movement. They were so noisy, and Bunny had such a prejudice in favor of quiet! He wouldn’t expect working people to have perfect manners, he told himself, nor to use perfect English; but did they need to shriek and shake their fists in the air? Couldn’t they debate ideas, without calling each other “labor fakers” and “yellow skunks” and so on? Bunny had chosen to call upon Local Angel City of the Socialist party at a critical moment of its history; and decidedly it was not putting on company manners for him!
Here was Papa Menzies, clambering onto the platform, and shouting at his own sons that they were a bunch of jackasses, to imagine they could bring about mass revolution in America. “Vy did de revolution come in Russia? Because de whole country had been ruined by de var. But it vould take ten years of var to bring de capitalist class in America to such a breakdown; and meanvile, vot are you young fools doing? You vant to deliver de Socialist party over to de police! Dey have got spies here—yes, and dose spies is de mainspring of your fool left-ving movement!”
That seemed reasonable enough to Bunny. The businessmen of Angel City would want the radical movement to go to extremes, so that they might have an excuse to smash it; and when they wanted something to happen, they did not scruple to make it happen. But to say this to the young extremists was like waving a red rag before a herd of bulls. “What?” shouted Ikey Menzies at his own father. “You talk about the police? What are your beloved Social Democrats doing now in Germany? They have got charge of the police, and they are shooting down Communist workers for the benefit of the capitalist class!”[2]
“Yes, and they will do the same thing in California!” cried the other brother. “You are a bunch of class collaborators!” That was a new word, and a dreadful one, it appeared. The question was whether the tottering capitalist system could be propped up for another ten years or so; and the “right-wingers” would take office under the capitalists, and help to save them. “You make yourself their agent,” proclaimed Joe Menzies, “to bribe the workers by two cents more wages per hour!”
And so there was a bust-up in Local Angel City, as everywhere else in the world; the “reds” withdrew, and presently split into three different Communist groups; and Joe and Ikey Menzies left home, and set up housekeeping with two girl workers of their own way of thinking. So Bunny was more perplexed than ever; life appeared so complicated, and happiness so hard to find!
III
One Saturday the telephone rang, and it was Vernon Roscoe calling Dad. Bunny happened to answer, and heard the jovial voice, “Hello, how’s the boy Bolshevik? Say, Jim Junior, I thought you were coming up to my place! Eventually—why not now? Annabelle is resting from Pangs of Passion—she’ll be glad to see you. Vee Tracy is there, and Harvey Manning—quite a bunch of people over Sunday. Sure, I’ll be up! You go ahead, your old man will tell you the way.”
Bunny told Dad he had accepted the invitation, and Dad said that Mr. Roscoe’s domestic arrangements were such that Bunny ought to be told about them in advance. Annabelle Ames, the moving picture actress, was what people called his mistress, but it wasn’t really that, because she was devoted to him, and all their friends knew about it, and it was jist the same as being married; only, of course, there was Mrs. Roscoe, who lived in the house in the city, with her four sons. Mrs. Roscoe went in for society and all that, and had tried to drag Verne in, but he wasn’t cut out for that life. Sometimes Mrs. Roscoe would go out to the Monastery, as the country place was called, but of course not when Miss Ames was there; Dad said they must have some system to keep from running into each other. Miss Ames had her own house, near to the studio, and the Monastery was a “showplace,” where they took their friends over weekends.
You drove up behind a chain of mountains that lined the coast: another of those wonderful roads, a magic ribbon of concrete, laid out by a giant’s hand. The engine purred softly and you raced ahead of the wind, up long slopes and down long slopes, and winding through mazes of hills; there were steep grades and vistas of tumbled mountains, and broad sweeps of valley, and stretches of shore with fishermen’s huts, and boats, and nets drying in the sun; then more hills and mountain grades—for hours you flew, as fast as you pleased, for you were twenty-one now, and Dad no longer expected you to obey the speed laws.
There was a road that branched off toward the ocean, and after climbing ten miles or so, you came to a high steel fence, and steel gates, and a sign: “Private: Turn Back Here.”—and a wide place in the road, made especially so that you might obey! The gate was open, so Bunny drove on, and climbed another hill, and came over the brow, and then, oh, wonderful!—a great bowl of yellow and green, two or three miles across, with one side broken out toward the ocean, and in the center of the bowl the gray stone towers of the Monastery! Mountains on every side, and the oil magnate owned everything in sight, both the land and the landscape; if the public wanted to see his retreat, it would have to get a rowboat, or swim.
You rolled down the winding drive, through tumbled masses of rocks and clumps of live oaks a century or two old, and came to a fork in the road, and one way said “Delivery,” and the other said, “Guests.” If you were so fortunate as to be a guest, your road led under a porte cochere big enough for half a dozen double-decker stages; a footman appeared, and summoned a chauffeur to take your car to the garage, and you were escorted into a living room—well, it was like going into a cathedral, your eyes would follow the arches overhead, and you might trip yourself on the skin of an aurochs or a gnu or whatever the dickens it was.[3] What grim sardonic architect had played this jest of Gothic towers and steeples and crenellations and machicolations—here in the midst of a new pagan empire, and called by such a very suggestive name! Assuredly, the Monastery would need to be of pre-Reformation style, to fit the ways of the monk who occupied it!
The transept of the cathedral concealed an elevator, Bunny discovered; and out of it tripped suddenly a diminutive vision in lemon-colored chiffon, with lemon-colored stockings and shoes, and a big lemon-colored hat such as shepherdesses used to wear when having their portraits painted. It was complete and costly enough for a fancy-dress ball; and no introduction was needed, for Bunny was one of that ninety percent of all males in the civilized world, and perhaps seventy percent in Madagascar, Paraguay, Nova Zembla, Tibet and New Guinea, who could have told the number of lashes in each of Annabelle Ames’s eyelids, or drawn a diagram of her dimples, and the exact course of a tear down her cheek.[4] He had seen her as the “wild” daughter of a Pittsburgh steel king, duly chastened and brought to faith in mother, home and heaven; as the mistress of a French king, dying elegantly to expiate elegant sins; as the mistreated and eloping heiress of a Georgian manor house; as a bare-legged “mountainy-girl” in the Blue Ridge—“Howdy, stranger, be you-all one of them revenooers?”[5] All this in the “movies”; and now here she was in the “speakies”!
“So this is Mr. Ross!” Her “speakie” was a queer little high treble. “Papa has told me so much about you!” (Papa was Mr. Roscoe.) “I’m so glad to have you here, and do make yourself at home. Do whatever you please, for this is liberty hall.” Bunny recalled the caption—but was it from Hearts of Steel, or from The Maid of the Manor?
“And here is Harve,” the mistress of the manor was saying. “Oh, Harve, come here, this is Bunny Ross; Harvey Manning. It’s the first time Mr. Ross has been here, and please be nice to him so he’ll come back. He’s going to college, and reads a lot and knows everything, and we’re going to seem so ignorant and frivolous!”
Harvey Manning was coming in through one of the French windows which took the place of the stations of the cross in this cathedral. He was walking slowly, and did not increase his pace; he talked slowly also, a dry sort of drawl—having never had to hurry, because he came of one of the old families of the state. He had a queer, ugly face, with a great many wrinkles, and Bunny never was clear whether he was old or young. “Hello, Ross,” he said, “pleased-to-meecher. I got an uncle that’s spending a hundred thousand dollars to put you in jail.”
“Is that so?” said Bunny, a trifle startled.
“Sure thing! He’s nuts on this red-hunting business, and the pinks are worse than the reds, he says.[6] I’ve been worried about you.”
“Never mind,” said Bunny, perceiving that this was a “josh,” such as helps to make life tolerable for idle men, young and old. “Dad will spend two hundred thousand and get me out again.”
“Come to think of it, I guess Verne would chip in—wouldn’t he, Annabelle?”
“None of my guests ever stay in jail,” replied the star. “They phone to Papa, and he phones to the chief of police, who lets them out right away.”
She said this without smiling; and Harvey Manning remarked, “You see, Ross, Annabelle has a literal mind.”
IV
Yes, that was the truth about this bright luminary of the screen, as Bunny came to observe it; she had a literal mind. All the poetry and romance the public imagined about her—that was in the public’s eye, so to say. All that Annabelle had to contribute was a youthful figure and a pliable face; the highly paid directors did the rest. She produced pictures as a matter of business, and her talk was of production costs, and percentages on foreign sales, just as if it had been an oil well. That was why she got along with Vernon Roscoe, who also had a literal mind. A primrose by the river’s brim a yellow primrose was to him, and to Annabelle it was a decoration for an “interior,” or a background on “location.”[7]
There was a certain grim honesty about this, as Bunny discovered; it was Annabelle’s desire to be an actress rather than a mistress. “By Jees,” Verne would proclaim to his guests, “it’s cost me eight million dollars to make a movie queen out of this baby.” And the thirty-year-old baby had the dream that someday she would achieve a masterpiece, that would earn this eight million and vindicate her honor. Meantime, she paid installments by taking care of Verne—so publicly that it was quite touching, and respectable according to the strictest bourgeois standards. If the oil magnate had ever had the idea that in taking to his bosom a movie star he was going to lead a wild and roistering life, he had made a sad mistake, for he was the most henpecked of all “butter and egg men.”[8]
“Now, Papa,” Annabelle would say, “you’ve had enough to drink. Put that down.” She would say it before a company assembled in their gladdest rags for a dinner party; and Verne would protest, “My God, baby, I ain’t got started yet!”
“Well, you stop before you start tonight. Remember what Doctor Wilkins says about your liver.”
Verne would bluster, “To hell with livers!” and the answer would be, “Now, Papa, you told me to make you obey! Have I got to make you ashamed before all this company?”
“Me ashamed? I’d like to see anybody make me ashamed!”
“Well, Papa, you know you’ll be ashamed if I tell what you said to me the last time you were drunk.”
Verne paused, with his glass halfway in the air, trying to remember; and the company burst into clamor, “Oh, tell us! Tell us!”
“Shall I tell them, Papa?” It was a bluff, for Annabelle was very prim, and never indulged in vulgarity. But the bluff went, and the great man set down his glass. “I surrender! Take the stuff away.” Whereat everybody applauded, and it gave the party a merry start.
Strange as it might seem, Annabelle was a pious Catholic. Just how she managed to fix things up with her priests Bunny never knew, but she gave freely to charity, and you would find her featured at benefits for Catholic orphan asylums and things of that sort. At the same time her little head was as full of superstitions as an old Negro mammy. She would not have started a picture on a Friday for the whole of Vernon’s eight-million-dollar endowment. When you spilled the salt, she not merely advised you to throw some of it over your shoulder, she did it for you, if necessary. Once, at luncheon, she made a girlfriend eat at a side table, because otherwise there would have been thirteen, and this girl, being the youngest, would have fallen the victim.
