The girls of course were wild with happiness. It was the first time they had ever had a long automobile trip in the whole of their unsophisticated lives. Bunny spoke to Ruth, who spoke to her mother, who in turn spoke to her husband, and obtained his promise that he would do his best to persuade the Holy Spirit not to send them any revelations or inspire any rolling or talking in tongues until they had got to the camp-meeting. As a matter of fact, the Holy Spirit had recently declared, through Eli as prophet of the Third Revelation, that these inspirational gymnastics had served their purpose and were to be dropped. No reason was vouchsafed, but there were rumors that the well-to-do people who were backing Eli in his evangelical campaigns were opposed to the rolling, and did not regard the speech of the archangels as having any meaning for mortal ears. One of these disciples was an eminent judge, and another was a proprietor of chain grocery-stores; their wives had taken Eli in hand and rubbed off the rough spots and improved his grammar, explaining that because one said heathen, one did not necessarily say healen; also they had taught him where to get his clothes and how to hold a knife and fork, so that Eli was becoming a social success.
It was almost like going to see the war: this tremendous city of canvas and corrugated iron and redwood siding which had arisen as if by Arabian Nights magic, swarming with eager young men in khaki, all of them as busy as ants—yet never too busy to take note of the presence of three good-looking girls in a row! You could go through this city at certain hours, if you got the proper permit, and see a bit of the drilling; at certain other hours Paul could get off, and while the old folks and the girls went to hear Eli, Dad and Bunny and Paul sat on the hotel veranda and talked about the state of the world.
The Russians had just concluded a peace with Germany, withdrawing entirely from the war, and giving up a lot of territory to the enemy. Dad discussed this event, and repeated his opinion of the treacherous “Bolshevikis.” Then Paul said how it seemed to him; Bunny saw that even here, with all the work he had to do, Paul had found time to read and to think his own thoughts. “Bunny,” he said, “do you remember our oil strike, and what we read about it in the papers? Suppose you had never been to Paradise, and didn’t know the strikers, but had got all your impressions from the Angel City newspapers! Well, that’s the way it seems to me about Russia; this is the biggest strike in history, and the strikers have won, and seized the oil wells. Some day maybe we’ll know what they’re doing, but it won’t be from newspaper stories made up by the allied diplomats and the exiled grand dukes.”
That made Dad rather warm, because he had been reading this news for three or four months, and believing every word of it. He wanted to know if Paul didn’t believe there had been any killing of the rich classes in Russia. Paul said he didn’t doubt there had been some, because he had read about the French revolution. What you had to remember was the way the Russian people had been treated by their ruling classes, and the kind of government they were used to; you had to judge their revolution by their standards and not by ours. Paul smiled and added that it was a mistake for an American employer who had tried to give his men a square deal, to identify himself with those masters in Russia who had beaten their men with knouts, and turned them over to the Cossacks if they attempted any protest.
That pacified Dad a little, but he said the way it seemed to him, these Bolshevikis were jist so many German agents. He told about the train that had carried Lenin—Dad called him Lee-nyne—through Germany. But Paul asked whether he had watched the news that had come from the peace negotiations; the Germans had apparently been as much afraid of the Russians as we were. These Bolsheviks were fighting the ruling classes of both sides, and the Germans might find the peace they had made more dangerous to them than the fighting; the revolutionary propaganda might spread in their armies, and even to the Western front.
There was no use expecting Dad to see anything so complicated as that. He declared that if the Russians had really wanted to help the cause of peace and justice, they should have stood by the allies until the Kaiser was put out of business. Then Paul asked whether Mr. Ross had read the secret treaties of the allies, and Dad was obliged to confess that he had never even heard of them. Paul explained how the Soviets, after demanding that the allies should make known their war aims, and having no attention paid to the request, had revealed to the world all the secret agreements which the allies had made with the Tsar, for dividing up the territories they meant to take from the Germans and Austrians and Turks. Paul declared that the text of these treaties, the most important news of the day, had been suppressed by the American newspapers. If we were going into this war blindfolded, to help Great Britain and France and Italy and Japan in their imperialist aims, then our people were being deceived, and some day they would have a bitter awakening.
Dad’s answer to that was simple: Paul might rest assured, those secret treaties would turn out to be Bolshevik forgeries. Had not our government already given out a lot of
