So then she was started, and Rachel continued her education in oil history. The Groarty’s had entered a community agreement, and then withdrawn from it and entered a smaller one: then they had leased to Sliper and Wilkins, and been sold by those “lease-hounds” to a syndicate; and this syndicate had been plundered and thrown into bankruptcy; after which the lease had been bought by a man whom Mrs. Groarty described as the worst skunk of them all, and he had gone and got a lot of claims and liens against the property, and actually, people were trying to take some money away from the Groartys now, though they had never got one cent out of the well—and look at the way they had had to live all these years!
Here was the record of these transactions, community agreements and leases and quitclaim deeds and notices of release and notices of cancellation of lease, and mortgages, and sales of “percents,” 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 waterfront; 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 at 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 motorcars, 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
