Oil (filmed as There Will Be Blood) by Upton Sinclair Page B

butler at parties. Beside him on the front seat rode Sing, the Chinese cook, who was too precious to be trusted to motorbus or train. Nellie, the house-maid, could be more easily replaced, so she brought herself. A truck brought the trunks and miscellaneous belongings— Bunny's bicycle and Aunt Emma's hat-boxes, and grandmother's precious works of art. Old Mrs. Ross was seventy-five years of age, and her life had been that of a ranch-woman, in the days before automobiles and telephones and machinery. She had slaved in poverty, and raised a family, and seen one daughter die in child-birth, and a son of typhoid in the Spanish war, and another son as a drunkard; now "Jim" was all she had left, and he had made a fortune late in his life, and lifted her to leisure at the end of hers. You might have been a long time guessing what use she would make of it. Out of a clear sky she announced that she was going to be a painter! For sixty years, it appeared, she had cherished that dream, while washing dishes, and spanking babies, and drying apricots and muscat grapes. So now, wherever they lived, grandmother had a spare room for a "studio." A wandering artist had taught her the handling of crude and glaring colors. This artist had painted desert sunsets, and the mountains and rocky coasts of California; but old Mrs. Ross never painted anything she had ever seen. What she was interested in was gentility—parks, and lawns, and shady avenues with ladies in hoop-skirts, and gentlemen with wide-bottomed trousers. Her masterpiece was six feet by four, and always hung in the dining-room of the rented home; it showed in the background an extremely elegant two-story house, with two-storied porches having pillars on which you could see every curlicue. In front ran a circular drive, with a fountain in the middle, and water which was very plainly splashing. Around the drive rolled a victoria—or maybe it was a landau or a barouche—with a lady and a gentleman being driven by a Negro coachman. Behind the vehicle raced a little dog, and playing on the lawn were a boy, and a girl in wide skirts, having a hoop in her hand. Also there were iron deer on the lawn—you never got tired of looking at this picture, because you could always find something new in it; Dad would show it to visitors, and say: "Ma painted that, ain't she a wonder, for an old lady seventy-five?" Agents who had come with leasing propositions, or lawyers with papers to be gone over, or foremen coming for orders, would examine it carefully, and never disagreed with Dad's judgment. Aunt Emma was the widow of the son who had died a drunkard; and to her also prosperity had come late in life. Dad set no limits—the ladies charged anything they wanted, and even drew checks on Dad's account. So Aunt Emma went to the fanciest shops and got herself raiment, and went out to uphold the prestige of the Ross family in the town or city where they were staying. There were ladies' clubs, and Aunt Emma would attend their functions, and listen to impressive personalities who rose and said, "Madam Chairman," and read papers on the Feminine Element in Shakespeare's Plays, and the Therapeutic Value of Optimism, and What Shall We Do for Our Youth? Once every month the two ladies gave a tea-party, and Dad always managed to be "spudding in" a new well, or seeing to a difficult job of "cementing off" on that afternoon. Aunt Emma particularly patronized the drug-store counters where they sold cosmetics, and she knew by name the fashionable young ladies who presided there; also she knew the names of the latest products they handled, pronouncing these names in quite naive and shameless American—"Roodge finn dee Theeayter" and "Pooder der Reeze ah lah corbeel flurry"—which, it must be added, was the only way she could have got the sales-ladies to know what she meant. Her dressing-table was covered with rows of delicate little boxes and jars and bottles, containing paints and powders and perfumes and