Paul sat with his head lying back. His face had always been sombre, a prominent nose and wide mouth with a tendency to droop at the corners; haggard as he was, this tendency was accentuated, he looked like a mask of sorrow. “What happened to me?” he said, in his slow voice; and then he seemed to raise himself to the effort of recalling it. “I’ll tell you what happened, son; I was kidnapped.”
“Kidnapped!” The two of them echoed the word together.
“Yes, just that. I thought I went into the army to put down the Kaiser, but I was kidnapped by some Wall Street bankers, and put to work as a strikebreaker, a scab.”
Ruth and Bunny could only sit and gaze at Paul, and wait for him to say what he meant by these strange words.
“You remember our oil strike, Bunny? Those guards the Federation sent up here—husky fellows, with plenty of guns, and good warm clothes, raincoats and waterproof hats and everything. Well, that’s what I’ve been doing for a year and a half—putting down a strike for Wall Street bankers. The guards here at Paradise got ten dollars a day, and if they didn’t like it, they could quit; but I got thirty a month and beans, and if I tried to quit they’d have shot me. That was the cinch the bankers had.”
Again there was a pause. Paul had closed his eyes, and he told a part of his story that way, looking at things he saw inside his mind.
“First thing, the allies took the city of Vladivostok. The strikers had that city, with a perfectly good government, everything orderly and fine. They didn’t make much resistance—they were too surprised at our behavior. We shot a few longshoremen, who tried to defend one building, and the strikers had a big funeral with a procession; they brought the red coffins to the American consulate with banners that asked us why we had shot their people. It happened to be the Fourth of July, and we were celebrating our revolution; why had we overthrown theirs? Of course we couldn’t answer; none of us knew why we had done it; but little by little we began to find out.”
Paul paused, and waited so long that Bunny thought he wasn’t going on. “Why, Paul?”
“Well, just outside that city, along the railroad track, there were fields—I guess there must have been ten or twenty acres, piled twenty feet high with stuff—guns and shells, railroad locomotives, rails and machinery, motortrucks—every kind of thing you could think of to help win a war. Some of it was in cases, and some without even a tarpaulin over it, just lying there in the rain, and sinking slowly—some of the heavy stuff two feet down in the mud. There was a hundred million dollars of it, that had been put off the steamers, intended to be taken across to Russia; but then the revolution had come, and there it lay. One of our jobs was to guard it. At first, of course, we thought it belonged to the government; but then little by little we got the story. Originally the British government had bought it for the Tsar’s government, and taken bonds for it. Later, when we came into the war, the firm of Morgan and Company took over the bonds from the British government, and these supplies were Morgan’s collateral, and we had overthrown the Vladivostok government to protect it for him.”
Again there was a pause. “Paul,” said Bunny, anxiously, “do you really know that?”
Paul laughed, but without any happiness. “Know it?” he said. “Listen, son. They sent out an expedition, two hundred and eighty men to run the railroad—every kind of expert, traffic men, telegraphers, linemen, engineers. They all wore army uniforms, and the lowest man had the rank of second lieutenant; of course we thought they were part of the army, like the rest of us. But they got fancy pay, and by God, it wasn’t army pay, it was checks on a Wall Street bank! I’ve seen dozens of those checks. It was a private expedition, sent to run the railroad for the bankers.”
“But why, Paul?”
“I’ve told you—to break the strike. The biggest strike in all history—the Russian workers against the landlords and the bankers; and we were to put the workers down, and the landlords and bankers up! Here and there were bunches of refugees, former officers of the Tsar’s army, grand dukes and their mistresses, landowners and their families; they would get together and call themselves a government, and it was our job to rush them supplies, and they would print paper money, and hire some adventurers, and grab a bunch of peasants and ‘conscript’ them, and that would be an army, and we’d move them on the railroad, and they’d overthrow another Soviet government, and slaughter a few more hundreds or thousands of workingmen. That’s been my job for the past year and half; do you wonder I’m sick?”
“Paul, did you have to kill people?” It was Ruth’s voice of horror.
“No, I don’t think I killed anybody. I was a carpenter, and my only fights were with the Japs, that were supposed to be our allies. You see, the Japs were there to grab the country, so they didn’t want either the ‘white’ Russians or the ‘red’ ones to succeed. The first thing they did was to counterfeit the money of the ‘white’ government; they brought in billions of fake roubles, and bought everything in sight—banks and hotels and stores and real estate—they made themselves the capitalists, and broke the ‘white’ government with their fake money. They resented our being there, and the fact that we really tried to help the ‘whites’; they butted in on our job, and there were times when we lined up our troops and threatened to fire in five minutes if they didn’t move out. They were always picking on our men; I was fired at
