“Why, sure, son, I got to; why not?” Dad looked genuinely surprised—as he always did in these cases. You could never be sure how much of it was acting, for he was sly as the devil, and not above using his arts on those he loved.
“Dad, you’re proposing to buy the presidency of the United States!”
“Well, son, you can put it that way—”
“But that’s what it is, Dad!”
“Well, that’s one way to say it. Another is that we’re protecting ourselves against rivals that want to put us out of business. If we don’t take care of politics, we’ll wake up after election and find we’re done for. There’s a bunch of big fellows in the East have put up a couple of millions to put General Leonard Wood across. Are you rooting for him?”
Bunny understood that this was a rhetorical question, and did not answer it. “It’s such a dirty game, Dad!”
“I know, but it’s the only game there is. Of course, I can quit, and have enough to live on, but I don’t feel like being laid on the shelf, son.”
“Couldn’t we just run our own business, Dad?” It was, you may remember, a question Bunny had asked before.
“There’s no such thing, son—they’re jist crowding you all the time. They block you at the refineries, they block you at the markets, they block you in the banks—I don’t tell you much about it, because it’s troubles, but there’s jist no place in the business world for the little feller any more. You think I’m a big feller because I got twenty million, and I think Verne is a big feller because he’s got fifty; but there’s Excelsior Pete—thirty or forty companies, all working as one—that’s close to a billion dollars you’re up against. And there’s Victor, three or four hundred million more, and all the banks and insurance company resources behind them—what chance have we independents got? Look at this slump in the price of gas right now—the newspapers tell you there’s a glut, but that’s all rot—what makes the glut, but the Big Five dumping onto the market to break the little fellers? Why, they’re jist wiping ’em off the slate!”
“But how can public officials prevent that?”
“There’s a thousand things that come up, son—we got to land the first wallop—right at the sound of the bell! How do we get pipeline right-o’-ways? How do we get terminal facilities? You saw how it was when we came into Paradise; would we ever ’a got this development if I hadn’t ’a paid Jake Coffey? Where would Verne and me be right now, if we didn’t sit down with him and go over the slate, and make sure the fellers he puts on it are right? And now—what’s the difference? Jist this, we got bigger, we’re playin’ the game on a national scale—that’s all. If Verne and me and Pete O’Reilly and Fred Orpan can get the tracts we got our eyes on, well, there’ll be the Big Six or Big Seven or Big Eight in the oil-game, that’s all—and you set this down for sure, son, we’ll be doin’ what the other fellers done, from the day that petroleum came into use, fifty years ago.”
They were on an old familiar trail now, and Bunny knew the landscape by heart.
“It’s all very well for a feller to go off in his study and figure out how the world ought to be; but that don’t make it that way, son. There has got to be oil, and we fellers that know how to get it out of the ground are the ones that are doing it. You listen to these Socialists and Bolshevikis, but my God, imagine if the government was to start buying oil lands and developing them—there’d be more graft than all the wealth of America could pay for. I’m on the inside, where I can watch it, and I know that when you turn over anything to the government, you might jist as good bury it ten thousand miles deep in the earth. You talk about laws, but there’s economic laws, too, and government can’t stand against them, no more than anybody else. When government does fool things, then people find a way to get round it, and business men that do it are no more to blame than any other kind of men. This is an oil age, and when you try to shut oil off from production, it’s jist like you tried to dam Niagara falls.”
It was a critical moment in their lives. In after years Bunny would look back upon it, and think, oh why had he not put his foot down? He could have broken his father, if he had been determined enough! If he had said, “Dad, I will not stand for buying the presidency; and if you go in with Mr. Roscoe on that deal, you’ve got to know that I renounce my inheritance, I will not touch a cent of your money from this day on. I’ll go out and get myself a job, and you can leave your money to Bertie if you want to.” Yes, if he had said that, Dad would have given way; he would have been mortally hurt, and Mr. Roscoe would have been hurt, but Dad would not have helped to nominate Senator Harding.
Why didn’t Bunny do it? It wasn’t cowardice—he didn’t know enough about life as yet to be afraid of it. He had never earned a dollar in his life, yet he had the serene conviction that he could go out and “get a job,” and provide for himself those comforts and luxuries that were a matter of course to him. But the trouble was, he couldn’t bear to hurt people. It was what Paul meant when he said that Bunny was “soft.” He entered too easily into other
