VIII
Bunny was back at Southern Pacific. It was the line of least resistance; a nice, clean occupation, honorific and easy on the nerves. One who was good-looking and wealthy, and knew how to charm the professors, could get by with almost no work at all, and have abundant time to read Bolshevik propaganda, and watch strikes happen; also to sport about town with a moving picture star, to drive and dine and dance with her, and escort her to week-end parties of the Hollywood élite.
He might even have found time to visit the studio and watch her at work on her new picture; but she would not let him do this. She was too much in love with him, she could not concentrate with him looking on. Moreover, she said, her work was horrid, all pictures were horrid; Bunny wouldn’t like what she was doing. It was just a way she earned her living, and she had to do what other people told her; it was without any relation to life, and Bunny, who was serious and educated, would think it childish, or worse. She liked him to be serious, he was a dear and all that, and one of the few men who really could tell her something about the world; he must go on being like that, and not pay any attention to her pictures.
It struck Bunny as a little mysterious; she protested too much. And before long he discovered the reason—in some of the gossip about the screen world which filled pages upon pages of the newspapers. Vee Tracy was working on a picture about Russia! She was to be a beautiful princess of the old regime, caught in the storm of the revolution, falling into the hands of the Bolsheviks, and making one of her famous “get-aways” with the aid of a handsome young American secret service man! Vee had been working on this picture for the past six months; and right in the middle of it, she had gone and got herself a “parlor Bolshevik” for a lover, and now was afraid to let him know what she was doing!
Poor Bunny, he was making such earnest and devoted efforts to ride on two horses at once! And the horses kept getting farther and farther apart, until he was all but split in the middle! Here was this strike of the clothing workers, breaking in upon the peace of America’s premier “open shop” city. It was the climax of a series of disorders—first a walk-out of the street railwaymen, and then of the carpenters; it was evident that the program of the reds, “boring from within,” was having a terrifying success, and the thing had to be stopped, once for all. The city council passed an anti-picketing ordinance, which forbade anyone to even make an ugly face in front of a place where there was a strike. Since not all the clothing workers had faces of natural beauty, there was much infringement of this law, and very soon the papers were full of accounts of riots, valiantly put down by the police. A part of Bunny’s curriculum at the university consisted of having Rachel Menzies describe to him and the rest of the “red bunch” how girls who were doing nothing but walking up and down the street in pairs, were being seized by the police and having their arms twisted out of joint.
Then one morning Rachel did not show up in class; next day came a note for Bunny telling him that Jacob Menzies had been clubbed almost insensible on the picket-line. Jacob was the “right wing” brother, the pale, stoop-shouldered one who had been earning his education by pressing students’ pants; and Bunny had so far departed from the safe rule of dodging other people’s troubles that he felt it his duty to drive over to the Menzies’ home, and have his feelings harrowed by the sight of Jacob Menzies in bed, pale as the sheets, and with a Hindoo turban wound about his head. There was Mamma Menzies, with tears streaming down her cheeks, wailing over and over one Yiddish word that Bunny could understand—“Oi! Oi! Oi!” Chaim Menzies, the father, was nowhere to be seen, because he had torn his coat-tails loose from his wife’s fingers, and was over at strike headquarters, doing his duty.
The next afternoon, coming out from his classes, Bunny saw on a newsstand the familiar green color of the “Evening Booster,” and his eye was caught—as it was meant to be caught—by flaring headlines:
POLICE RAID RED CENTER
So Bunny purchased a paper—as it was meant that he should do—and read how that morning a squad from police headquarters had invaded the rooms of the clothing workers’ union, and taken off nearly a truck-load of documents which were expected to prove that the disturbance in the city’s industry was being directed and financed by the red revolutionists of Moscow. The officials of the union were under arrest, one of those apprehended being Chaim Menzies, “self-confessed socialistic agitator.”