California, Southern -- Fiction; Motion picture industry -- Fiction; Petroleum industry and trade -- Fiction; Political fiction
Bunny found Rachel quite altered from the drab, hardworking girl he had
known. She belonged to that oriental type which can pick fruit in the
sun for several weeks without worrying about complexions; she had sunset
in her cheeks and sunrise in her spirit, and for the first time it
occurred to Bunny that she was quite an interesting-looking girl. She
told about their adventures, which seemed to him extraordinarily
romantic. Most people, when they indulged in day-dreaming, would picture
themselves as the son and heir of a great oil magnate, with millions of
dollars pouring in upon them, and a sporty car to drive, and steel
widows and other sirens to make love to them. But Bunny’s idea of a
fairy-story was to go off with a bunch of youngsters in a rattle-trap
old Ford that broke down every now and then, and camp out in a tent that
the wind blew away, and get a job picking fruit along side of Mexicans
and Japanese and Hindoos, and send home a post-office order for ten or
twelve dollars every week!
Papa Menzies was a stocky, powerful-looking man with curly yellow hair
all over his head, and a deep chest—though most of it seemed to be in
back instead of in front, so much was he bent over by toil. There were
certain English letters he could never pronounce; he would say,
contemptuously, “Dis talk about de vorld revolution.” His son Jacob, the
Socialist one, Bunny knew as a stoop-shouldered, pale student, and found
him much improved by outdoor life. The other two boys, the young “left
wingers,” were talkative and egotistical, and repelled the fastidious
Bunny, who had not insight enough to guess that they were meeting a
young plutocrat for the first time in their lives, and this was their
uneasy effort to protect their working-class integrity. Nobody was going
to say that they had been overawed! In addition to this, they were
hardly on speaking terms with the rest of the family, because of the
bitter political dispute going on.
They went to the hall, which was crowded with people, mostly workers,
all tense with excitement. There had been a committee appointed to deal
with the policy of the “local,” and this committee brought in a report
in favor of expelling the “left wingers”; also there was a minority
report, in favor of expelling everybody else! So then the fat was in the
fire; and Bunny listened, and tried valiantly to keep from being
disillusioned with the radical movement. They were so noisy, and Bunny
had such a prejudice in favor of quiet! He wouldn’t expect working
people to have perfect manners, he told himself nor to use perfect
English; but did they need to shriek and shake their fists in the air?
Couldn’t they debate ideas, without calling each other “labor fakers”
and “yellow skunks” and so on? Bunny had chosen to call upon Local Angel
City of the Socialist party at a critical moment of its history; and
decidedly it was not putting on company manners for him!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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