VI
Not all the oil money in the world could make the winter passage to England other than cold and stormy. Dad proved to be a poor sailor, and so he was a forlorn object when he got to Vernon Roscoe’s hotel in London. But Verne cheered him up; yes, truly, Dad began to revive with the first thump upon the back and the first boom of Verne’s voice in the hotel lobby. “By Jees, the old skeezicks! I believe the reds have got his nerve!”
Nobody had got Verne’s nerve, you bet; he was sitting on the top of the world! That investigation—shucks, that was a circus stunt to entertain the yokels. It would blow over and be forgotten in a few months—Verne quoted a chieftain of Tammany Hall who had been up against the same kind of racket, and said, “Dis is a nine day town. If yez kin stand de gaff fer nine days, ye’re all right.” No, by Jees—and Verne gave his partner another thump—they were getting the oil out of Sunnyside, and the money was going into their bank accounts, and not into anybody’s else, and they were going to have one hell of a lark spending it. What was more, they were going to turn the tables on those blankety-blank red senators—just let Dad wait a few days, and he’d see some stuff that would get on the front pages of the papers, even here in England!
Jim Junior got his due share of back-slapping. The boy Bolsheviki must take his old man around and show him some of the sights of London; hadn’t he learned about ’em in the history books—the places where men had had their heads chopped off five hundred years ago, and such cheerful spectacles? After the old man had got rested up, then Verne would show him some oil propositions that would make his eyes pop open. Verne hadn’t been losing any time—not he! He had put five million into a project that was to reopen a great oil field in Roumania that had been burned during the German invasion, and it was a deal that would beat Sunnyside, and Verne had got fifty-one percent and full control, and was going to bring over a complete American outfit, and show those gypsies or whatever they were what a real oil job looked like. And now he was fighting with some of the British oil men over the Persian situation, and Verne and the state department between them were waking old John Bull from a long sweet dream.
It was a curious situation that was unveiled to Bunny here. Vernon Roscoe was a fugitive from the oil investigating committee of the Senate, but at the same time he was master of the foreign policy of the United States government concerning oil, and the ambassadors abroad and the secretary of state at home behaved as his office boys. Of course there were other oil men; Excelsior Pete and Victor and the rest of the Big Five all had their agents, hundreds of them, abroad; but Verne was so active, and had so much the best word in Washington, that the rest had come to follow his lead. President Harding might be dead, but his spirit lived on, and Verne and his crowd had bought and paid for it.
The American magnate came among these Britishers with as much tact and grace as one of his long-horned steers from the southwestern plains. He wasn’t going to put on any society flummery, he was an old cattle-puncher from Oklahoma, and if “Old Spats and Monocle,” as he called Great Britain’s leading oil magnate, didn’t like him, by Jees he could lump him! Bunny attended a banquet at which a group of the rivals sat down together, and it seemed to Bunny that Verne was more noisy and more slangy than even at his own dinner-table at the Monastery. There was method in it, the younger man suspected; Verne frightened these strangers with his wild western airs, and that was the proper mood for negotiations! They had needed our navy damn bad a few years ago, and had got it free of charge, but they weren’t going to get it that way again, and Verne was the feller to tell them so. The next time, it would be the oil crowd’s say about the battleships—and the same with the dollars, by Jees.
There was a new deal in American diplomacy since the war. The state department had taken charge of foreign investments made by our bankers, and told them where to go and where to stay away from. The bankers had to obey, because they never knew when they might need the help of the marines to collect their interest. What it meant in practice was that a few fighting men like Vernon Roscoe could go to foreign business men and say, let me in on this and give me a share of that, or you can whistle for the next loan from Wall Street. The procedure is known to all cattle men, they call it “horning in”; and after a few of the Britishers had been “horned in on,” they learned what the little fellows had learned back home—who were the real masters of America!