There was a silence, while Bunny tried to face the appalling idea of opposing Dad, as Paul had opposed old Mr. Watkins. It had seemed so right in the one case, and seemed so impossible in the other!
At last Paul went on. “I know how it is, son. You won’t do it, you haven’t the nerve for it—you’re soft.” He waited, while those cruel words sank in. “Yes, that’s the word, soft. You’ve always had everything you wanted—you’ve had it handed to you on a silver tray, and it’s made you a weakling. You have a good heart, and you know what’s right, but you couldn’t bear to act, you’d be too afraid of hurting somebody.”
And that was the end of their talk. Paul had nothing more to say, and Bunny had no answer. Tears had come into his eyes—and that was weak, wasn’t it? He turned his head away, so that Paul might not see them.
“Well,” said the latter, “I’ve got a pile of work to do, so I’ll be off. This fight will be over some day, and your father will go on making money, and I hope it will bring you happiness, but I doubt it, really. Good-bye, son.”
“Good-bye,” said Bunny, feebly; and Paul turned on his heel and hurried away.
Bunny walked on, and there was a fever in his soul. He was enraged because of Paul’s lack of understanding, his cruel harshness; but all the time another voice inside him kept insisting, “He’s right! You’re soft, you’re soft—that’s the word for it!” Here, you see, was the thing in Bunny which made his sister Bertie so absolutely furious; that Bunny subjected himself to Paul, that he was willing to let Paul kick him, and to take it meekly. He was so utterly without sense of the dignity which his father’s millions conferred upon him!
IX
Bunny went back to school, and the oil workers took a hitch in their belts, hanging on by their eye teeth, as the saying is. Meantime, America was in the war, and Congress was passing a series of measures—one providing for a vast “liberty loan,” to pay the war costs, and another for the registering of all men of fighting age, and the drafting of a huge army.
And then began to come wild rumors of a truce with labor. It came first in connection with the railway men, many of whom were on strike for a living wage and better conditions. The railways were absolutely vital to the winning of the war, and so Congress must authorize the Government to intervene in disputes, and make terms with the unions, and see that everybody got a square deal. If such steps were taken for the railway men, they would surely have to be taken for others; the oil workers might get those rights of which the Employers’ Federation was endeavoring to deprive them! The labor press was full of talk about the new deal that was coming, and telegrams came from labor headquarters in Washington, bidding the men at Paradise stand firm.
It was like the “big scene” in the old “ten-twenty-thirty” melodrama that we used to see on the Bowery in our boyhood, in which the heroine is lashed to a log in the saw-mill, and being swiftly drawn to the place where she will be sliced down the middle; the hero comes galloping madly on horseback, and leaps from his steed, and smashes in the door with an axe, and springs to the lever and stops the machinery at exactly the critical instant. Or, if you want to be more high-brow and dignified, it was like the ancient Greek tragedies, in which, after the fates of all the characters have been tied into a hopeless knot, a god descends from the sky in a machine, and steps out, and resolves the perplexities, and virtue is triumphant and vice is cast down. You believe this, because it is in a Greek classic; but you will find it less easy to believe that the “open shop crowd” of California, the whole power of their industrial system, with all the millions of their banks, their political machine and their strike-breaking agencies, their spies and gunmen, and their state militiamen with machine guns and armored cars in the background—that all this terrific power felt its hand suddenly grasped by a stronger hand, and drawn back from the throat of its victim! Another god descended from a machine—a lean old Yankee divinity, with a white goatee and a suit made of red and white stripes with blue stars spangled over it; Uncle Sam himself stretched out his mighty hand, and declared that oil workers were human beings as well as citizens, and would be protected in their rights as both!