Sinclair, Upton - Oil! by Sinclair Upton

Author:Sinclair, Upton [Sinclair, Upton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780848823917
Publisher: Amereon Ltd
Published: 2007-01-01T07:00:00+00:00

IV

Paul and Bunny talked, that Friday night, and a lot of Saturday and Sunday, and Paul explained the Russian revolution. There was an easy way for Bunny to understand it, Paul said; if there was anything that puzzled him, all he had to do was to remember their oil strike. “Ask yourself how it would have been at Paradise, and then you know everything about Russia and Siberia—yes, and Washington and New York and Angel City. The Petroleum Employers’ Federation, that fought our strike, they’re exactly the sort of men that sent our army into Siberia—often they’re the same individuals. I read in the paper yesterday how a syndicate of oil men in Angel City has got some concessions in Saghalien. I remember one name, Vernon Roscoe. He’s one of the big fellows, isn’t he?”

Paul said this seriously, and Bunny and Ruth exchanged a smile. Paul had been away so long, he had lost track of the oil-game entirely!

Said Paul, “The operators are the same, and so are the strikers. Do you remember that little Russian Jew, Mandel, a roughneck that was in our strike? Used to play the balalaika, and sing us songs about Russia—we wouldn’t let him make speeches, because he was a ‘red.’ Well, by jingo, I ran into him in Manila, on the way out. He’d been travelling steerage on a steamer, on the way to Russia, and they found he was a Bolshevik, and threw him ashore and took away everything he had, even his balalaika. I loaned him five dollars, and six months later he turned up at Irkutsk, in a ‘Y’ hut. Lying on a shelf there was a balalaika, and he said, ‘Why, that’s mine! How did it get here?’ They told him a soldier had brought it, but didn’t know how to use it. ‘You can have it if you can play it,’ they said, so he played it all right, sang us the Volga Boatman, and then the Internationale—only of course nobody knew what it was. A few days later there were orders to arrest him, but I helped him get away. Months after that we came on him out in the country, not far from Omsk; he had been a Soviet commissar, and the Kolchak people had captured him, and buried him alive, up to his nose, just so that he could breathe. When we found him the ants had eaten most of his eyes, but there was still some life in him, his forehead would wrinkle.”

It was while Paul was alone with Bunny that he told this; and the younger man sat, speechless with horror. “Oh, yes,” said Paul; “that’s the kind of thing we had to see—and know we were to blame for it. I could tell you things much worse—I’ve helped to bury a hundred bodies of people that had been killed, not in battle, just shot down in cold blood, men and women, children, even babies. I’ve seen a ‘white’ officer shoot women in the

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