Evidently the plot was deeply laid; for when Bunny got back home, there was Dad, inquiring, “Did Verne say anything about what he wants me to do?”
“No, Dad, what’s that?”
“There’s a conference in New York that somebody’s got to attend, and he wanted to know if I could get away. I was wondering if it would break you up at the university if you were to take a bit of vacation.”
Bunny debated with himself. What could be accomplished by staying? In the first strike, he had managed to keep the workers in their homes, but he couldn’t do even that much now, for Verne would be in charge, and would not budge an inch. Annabelle’s simile of the spring lamb appeared to fit exactly the position of the oil workers’ union. The job of slaughtering might take weeks, or even months, but it would be done—and all that Bunny could do would be to torment his poor father.
And then Bertie was called into the conspiracy. Bertie wanted him to go. She was to visit the fashionable Woodbridge Riley’s, and after that to be on Thelma Norman’s yacht, and she didn’t want her brother getting mixed up in an oil strike and perhaps making another stink in the newspapers! Wouldn’t he think about Dad for once, and get the old man to take a rest? Bunny was tired of arguing, and said, all right.
V
The proposed trip brought up a curious problem. How did one travel with one’s mistress, in this “land of the pilgrim’s pride?” Bunny remembered vaguely having heard of people being put out of hotels, because of the lack of marriage certificates. Would he and Vee have to meet clandestinely? He asked her about it, assuming that her experience would cover the question; and it did. On the trains one took a compartment, and no questions were asked. As for hotels, you went to the most fashionable, and let them know who you were, and they made no objection to putting you in adjoining suites, with a connecting door. Look at Verne and Annabelle, said Vee; when it suited their convenience they stayed quite openly at the most high-toned of Angel City’s hotels, and there was never a peep from either the management or the newspapers. It had happened more than once that Mrs. Roscoe had been stopping at the same hotel, and the papers would report her doings on the society page, and Annabelle’s on the dramatic page, so there was never any clash.
In truth the land of the pilgrim’s pride no longer existed; in its place was the land of the millionaire’s glory. When a moving picture star went east, with or without a paramour, she always left by daylight, and her publicity man saw to it that the newspapers published the time and place. There would be shouting thousands, and policemen to hold them back, and cameras clicking, and armfuls of flowers to let everybody on the train know who was who. There would be crowds at every station, calling for a glimpse of their darling; and if she had an oil prince travelling in the same compartment, that was not a scandal, it was a romance.
And when they got to New York, there was another crowd, conjured into being by the efficient publicity machine of Schmolsky-Superba. At the hotel there were people waiting, and more armfuls of flowers, and a dozen reporters demanding interviews. And with all that free advertising for the hotel, was any officious clerk or house detective going to concern himself with the question of whether or not the connecting door between two suites was kept locked? And with a personage of such magnificent authority as J. Arnold Ross travelling along, and beaming his approval on the situation? Dad’s face was as good as a dozen marriage certificates at any hotel in the land!
For the old man this journey was just peaches and cream all the way; a vicarious jag, with no “hang-over” the next morning. He insisted upon paying all the bills; and he had his secretary along, so everything just happened by magic—train accommodations, hotel suites, taxicabs, flowers, candy, theatre tickets—you had only to hint a wish, and the thing was there. What more could there be to add to mortal bliss? Only that Vee would have liked to eat a square meal now and then; and to have spent the morning in bed, instead of having to keep an appointment to “reduce” at a gymnasium!