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Title: It Can't Happen Here
Author: Lewis, Sinclair [Harry Sinclair] (1885-1951)
Date of first publication: 1935
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1935
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 20 January 2018
Date last updated: 20 January 2018
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1498

This ebook was produced by
Marcia Brooks, Cindy Beyer, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Canada Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net


PUBLISHER'S NOTE

Italics in the original printed edition are indicated _thus_.

Obvious typographical errors have been silently corrected.

As part of the conversion of the book to its new digital
format, we have made certain minor adjustments in its layout.

Chapter 25 has two chemical formulas, C6H5 and C6H5OH.
The numbers within these formulas should be read as subscripts,
which we have been unable for technical reasons to reproduce
from the printed edition.






IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE

by Sinclair Lewis




CHAPTER 1


The handsome dining room of the Hotel Wessex, with its gilded plaster
shields and the mural depicting the Green Mountains, had been reserved
for the Ladies' Night Dinner of the Fort Beulah Rotary Club.

Here in Vermont the affair was not so picturesque as it might have been
on the Western prairies. Oh, it had its points: there was a skit in
which Medary Cole (grist mill & feed store) and Louis Rotenstern (custom
tailoring--pressing & cleaning) announced that they were those historic
Vermonters, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and with their jokes about
imaginary plural wives they got in ever so many funny digs at the ladies
present. But the occasion was essentially serious. All of America was
serious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It was just
long enough after the Great War of 1914-18 for the young people who had
been born in 1917 to be ready to go to college... or to another war,
almost any old war that might be handy.

The features of this night among the Rotarians were nothing funny, at
least not obviously funny, for they were the patriotic addresses of
Brigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.), who dealt angrily
with the topic "Peace through Defense--Millions for Arms but Not One
Cent for Tribute," and of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch--she who was no
more renowned for her gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919
than she was for having, during the Great War, kept the American
soldiers entirely out of French cafés by the clever trick of sending
them ten thousand sets of dominoes.

Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhat
unappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home by
barring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors or
directors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been born
in any foreign country--except Great Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitch
thought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined to take an oath to
revere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarly
American institutions.

The Annual Ladies' Dinner was a most respectable gathering--the flower
of Fort Beulah. Most of the ladies and more than half of the gentlemen
wore evening clothes, and it was rumored that before the feast the inner
circle had had cocktails, privily served in Room 289 of the hotel. The
tables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square, were bright with
candles, cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurines
of Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels, and small silk American flags
stuck in gilded hard-boiled eggs. On the wall was a banner lettered
"Service Before Self," and the menu--the celery, cream of tomato soup,
broiled haddock, chicken croquettes, peas, and tutti-frutti
ice-cream--was up to the highest standards of the Hotel Wessex.

They were all listening, agape. General Edgeways was completing his
manly yet mystical rhapsody on nationalism:

"...for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great powers, have no
desire for foreign conquest. Our highest ambition is to be darned well
let alone! Our only gen-uine relationship to Europe is in our arduous
task of having to try and educate the crass and ignorant masses that
Europe has wished onto us up to something like a semblance of American
culture and good manners. But, as I explained to you, we must be
prepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs of
international racketeers that call themselves 'governments,' and that
with such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, our
towering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair and
far-flung fields.

"For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on arming
itself more and more, not for conquest--not for jealousy--not for
war--but for _peace_! Pray God it may never be necessary, but if foreign
nations don't sharply heed our warning, there will, as when the
proverbial dragon's teeth were sowed, spring up an armed and fearless
warrior upon every square foot of these United States, so arduously
cultivated and defended by our pioneer fathers, whose sword-girded
images we must be... or we shall perish!"

The applause was cyclonic. "Professor" Emil Staubmeyer, the
superintendent of schools, popped up to scream, "Three cheers for the
General--hip, hip, hooray!"

All the audience made their faces to shine upon the General and Mr.
Staubmeyer--all save a couple of crank pacifist women, and one Doremus
Jessup, editor of the Fort Beulah _Daily Informer_, locally considered
"a pretty smart fella but kind of a cynic," who whispered to his friend
the Reverend Mr. Falck, "Our pioneer fathers did rather of a skimpy job
in arduously cultivating some of the square feet in Arizona!"

****

The culminating glory of the dinner was the address of Mrs. Adelaide
Tarr Gimmitch, known throughout the country as "the Unkies' Girl,"
because during the Great War she had advocated calling our boys in the
A.E.F. "the Unkies." She hadn't merely given them dominoes; indeed her
first notion had been far more imaginative. She wanted to send to every
soldier at the Front a canary in a cage. Think what it would have meant
to them in the way of companionship and inducing memories of home and
mother! A dear little canary! And who knows--maybe you could train 'em
to hunt cooties!

Seething with the notion, she got herself clear into the office of the
Quartermaster General, but that stuffy machine-minded official refused
her (or, really, refused the poor lads, so lonely there in the mud),
muttering in a cowardly way some foolishness about lack of transport for
canaries. It is said that her eyes flashed real fire, and that she faced
the Jack-in-office like Joan of Arc with eyeglasses while she "gave him
a piece of her mind that _he_ never forgot!"

In those good days women really had a chance. They were encouraged to
send their menfolks, or anybody else's menfolks, off to war. Mrs.
Gimmitch addressed every soldier she met--and she saw to it that she met
any of them who ventured within two blocks of her--as "My own dear boy."
It is fabled that she thus saluted a colonel of marines who had come up
from the ranks and who answered, "We own dear boys are certainly getting
a lot of mothers these days. Personally, I'd rather have a few more
mistresses." And the fable continues that she did not stop her remarks
on the occasion, except to cough, for one hour and seventeen minutes, by
the Colonel's wrist watch.

But her social services were not all confined to prehistoric eras. It
was as recently as 1935 that she had taken up purifying the films, and
before that she had first advocated and then fought Prohibition. She had
also (since the vote had been forced on her) been a Republican
Committeewoman in 1932, and sent to President Hoover daily a lengthy
telegram of advice.

And, though herself unfortunately childless, she was esteemed as a
lecturer and writer about Child Culture, and she was the author of a
volume of nursery lyrics, including the immortal couplet:

    _All of the Roundies are resting in rows,_
    _With roundy-roundies around their toes._

But always, 1917 or 1936, she was a raging member of the Daughters of
the American Revolution.

The D.A.R. (reflected the cynic, Doremus Jessup, that evening) is a
somewhat confusing organization--as confusing as Theosophy, Relativity,
or the Hindu Vanishing Boy Trick, all three of which it resembles. It is
composed of females who spend one half their waking hours boasting of
being descended from the seditious American colonists of 1776, and the
other and more ardent half in attacking all contemporaries who believe
in precisely the principles for which those ancestors struggled.

The D.A.R. (reflected Doremus) has become as sacrosanct, as beyond
criticism, as even the Catholic Church or the Salvation Army. And there
is this to be said: it has provided hearty and innocent laughter for the
judicious, since it has contrived to be just as ridiculous as the
unhappily defunct Kuklux Klan, without any need of wearing, like the
K.K.K., high dunces' caps and public nightshirts.

So, whether Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch was called in to inspire
military morale, or to persuade Lithuanian choral societies to begin
their program with "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," always she was a
D.A.R., and you could tell it as you listened to her with the Fort
Beulah Rotarians on this happy May evening.

She was short, plump, and pert of nose. Her luxuriant gray hair (she was
sixty now, just the age of the sarcastic editor, Doremus Jessup) could
be seen below her youthful, floppy Leghorn hat; she wore a silk print
dress with an enormous string of crystal beads, and pinned above her
ripe bosom was an orchid among lilies of the valley. She was full of
friendliness toward all the men present: she wriggled at them, she
cuddled at them, as in a voice full of flute sounds and chocolate sauce
she poured out her oration on "How You Boys Can Help Us Girls."

Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the United
States had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved them
all this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes. In fact, Woman must
resume her place in the Home and: "As that great author and scientist,
Mr. Arthur Brisbane, has pointed out, what every woman ought to do is to
have six children."

At this second there was a shocking, an appalling interruption.

One Lorinda Pike, widow of a notorious Unitarian preacher, was the
manager of a country super-boarding-house that called itself "The Beulah
Valley Tavern." She was a deceptively Madonna-like, youngish woman, with
calm eyes, smooth chestnut hair parted in the middle, and a soft voice
often colored with laughter. But on a public platform her voice became
brassy, her eyes filled with embarrassing fury. She was the village
scold, the village crank. She was constantly poking into things that
were none of her business, and at town meetings she criticized every
substantial interest in the whole county: the electric company's rates,
the salaries of the schoolteachers, the Ministerial Association's
high-minded censorship of books for the public library. Now, at this
moment when everything should have been all Service and Sunshine, Mrs.
Lorinda Pike cracked the spell by jeering:

"Three cheers for Brisbane! But what if a poor gal can't hook a man?
Have her six kids out of wedlock?"

Then the good old war horse, Gimmitch, veteran of a hundred campaigns
against subversive Reds, trained to ridicule out of existence the cant
of Socialist hecklers and turn the laugh against them, swung into
gallant action:

"My dear good woman, if a gal, as you call it, has any real charm and
womanliness, she won't have to 'hook' a man--she'll find 'em lined up
ten deep on her doorstep!" (Laughter and applause.)

The lady hoodlum had merely stirred Mrs. Gimmitch into noble passion.
She did not cuddle at them now. She tore into it:

"I tell you, my friends, the trouble with this whole country is that so
many are _selfish_! Here's a hundred and twenty million people, with
ninety-five per cent of 'em only thinking of _self_, instead of turning
to and helping the responsible business men to bring back prosperity!
All these corrupt and self-seeking labor unions! Money grubbers!
Thinking only of how much wages they can extort out of their unfortunate
employer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!

"What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, but
maybe sometimes it's only a pipe dream! I'm not so sure--now this will
shock you, but I want you to listen to one woman who will tell you the
unadulterated hard truth instead of a lot of sentimental taffy, and I'm
not sure but that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learn
Discipline! We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all this
book-learning. That's good enough in its way, but isn't it, after all,
just a nice toy for grown-ups? No, what we all of us must have, if this
great land is going to go on maintaining its high position among the
Congress of Nations, is Discipline--Will Power--Character!"

She turned prettily then toward General Edgeways and laughed:

"You've been telling us about how to secure peace, but come on, now,
General--just among us Rotarians and Rotary Anns--'fess up! With your
great experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think that
perhaps--just maybe--when a country has gone money-mad, like all our
labor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes,
so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftless
ne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some iron
into them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your real
middle name, Mong General!"

Dramatically she sat down, and the sound of clapping filled the room
like a cloud of downy feathers. The crowd bellowed, "Come on, General!
Stand up!" and "She's called your bluff--what you got?" or just a
tolerant, "Attaboy, Gen!"

The General was short and globular, and his red face was smooth as a
baby's bottom and adorned with white-gold-framed spectacles. But he had
the military snort and a virile chuckle.

"Well, sir!" he guffawed, on his feet, shaking a chummy forefinger at
Mrs. Gimmitch, "since you folks are bound and determined to drag the
secrets out of a poor soldier, I better confess that while I do abhor
war, yet there are worse things. Ah, my friends, far worse! A state of
so-called peace, in which labor organizations are riddled, as by plague
germs, with insane notions out of anarchistic Red Russia! A state in
which college professors, newspapermen, and notorious authors are
secretly promulgating these same seditious attacks on the grand old
Constitution! A state in which, as a result of being fed with these
mental drugs, the People are flabby, cowardly, grasping, and lacking in
the fierce pride of the warrior! No, such a state is far worse than war
at its most monstrous!

"I guess maybe some of the things I said in my former speech were kind
of a little bit obvious and what we used to call 'old hat' when my
brigade was quartered in England. About the United States only wanting
peace, and freedom from all foreign entanglements. No! What I'd really
like us to do would be to come out and tell the whole world: 'Now you
boys never mind about the moral side of this. We have power, and power
is its own excuse!'

"I don't altogether admire everything Germany and Italy have done, but
you've got to hand it to 'em, they've been honest enough and realistic
enough to say to the other nations, 'Just tend to your own business,
will you? We've got strength and will, and for whomever has those divine
qualities it's not only a right, it's a _duty_, to use 'em!' Nobody in
God's world ever loved a weakling--including that weakling himself!

"And I've got good news for you! This gospel of clean and aggressive
strength is spreading everywhere in this country among the finest type
of youth. Why today, in 1936, there's less than 7 per cent of collegiate
institutions that do not have military training units under discipline
as rigorous as the Nazis, and where once it was forced upon them by the
authorities, now it is the strong young men and women who themselves
demand the _right_ to be trained in warlike virtues and skill--for, mark
you, the girls, with their instruction in nursing and the manufacture of
gas masks and the like, are becoming every whit as zealous as their
brothers. And all the really _thinking_ type of professors are right
with 'em!

"Why, here, as recently as three years ago, a sickeningly big percentage
of students were blatant pacifists, wanting to knife their own native
land in the dark. But now, when the shameless fools and the advocates of
Communism try to hold pacifist meetings--why, my friends, in the past
five months, since January first, no less than seventy-six such
exhibitionistic orgies have been raided by their fellow students, and no
less than fifty-nine disloyal Red students have received their just
deserts by being beaten up so severely that never again will they raise
in this free country the bloodstained banner of anarchism! That, my
friends, is NEWS!"

****

As the General sat down, amid ecstasies of applause, the village trouble
maker, Mrs. Lorinda Pike, leaped up and again interrupted the love
feast:

"Look here, Mr. Edgeways, if you think you can get away with this
sadistic nonsense without----"

She got no farther. Francis Tasbrough, the quarry owner, the most
substantial industrialist in Fort Beulah, stood grandly up, quieted
Lorinda with an outstretched arm, and rumbled in his
Jerusalem-the-Golden basso, "A moment please, my dear lady! All of us
here locally have got used to your political principles. But as
chairman, it is my unfortunate duty to remind you that General Edgeways
and Mrs. Gimmitch have been invited by the club to address us, whereas
you, if you will excuse my saying so, are not even related to any
Rotarian but merely here as the guest of the Reverend Falck, than whom
there is no one whom we more honor. So, if you will be so good----Ah, I
thank you, madame!"

Lorinda Pike had slumped into her chair with her fuse still burning. Mr.
Francis Tasbrough (it rhymed with "low") did not slump; he sat like the
Archbishop of Canterbury on the archiepiscopal throne.

And Doremus Jessup popped up to soothe them all, being an intimate of
Lorinda, and having, since milkiest boyhood, chummed with and detested
Francis Tasbrough.

This Doremus Jessup, publisher of the _Daily Informer_, for all that he
was a competent business man and a writer of editorials not without wit
and good New England earthiness, was yet considered the prime eccentric
of Fort Beulah. He was on the school board, the library board, and he
introduced people like Oswald Garrison Villard, Norman Thomas, and
Admiral Byrd when they came to town lecturing.

Jessup was a littlish man, skinny, smiling, well tanned, with a small
gray mustache, a small and well-trimmed gray beard--in a community where
to sport a beard was to confess one's self a farmer, a Civil War
veteran, or a Seventh Day Adventist. Doremus's detractors said that he
maintained the beard just to be "highbrow" and "different," to try to
appear "artistic." Possibly they were right. Anyway, he skipped up now
and murmured:

"Well, all the birdies in their nest agree. My friend, Mrs. Pike, ought
to know that freedom of speech becomes mere license when it goes so far
as to criticize the Army, differ with the D.A.R., and advocate the
rights of the Mob. So, Lorinda, I think you ought to apologize to the
General, to whom we should be grateful for explaining to us what the
ruling classes of the country really want. Come on now, my friend--jump
up and make your excuses."

He was looking down on Lorinda with sternness, yet Medary Cole,
president of Rotary, wondered if Doremus wasn't "kidding" them. He had
been known to. Yes--no--he must be wrong, for Mrs. Lorinda Pike was
(without rising) caroling, "Oh yes! I do apologize, General! Thank you
for your revelatory speech!"

The General raised his plump hand (with a Masonic ring as well as a West
Point ring on the sausage-shaped fingers); he bowed like Galahad or a
head-waiter; he shouted with parade-ground maleness: "Not at all, not at
all, madame! We old campaigners never mind a healthy scrap. Glad when
anybody's enough interested in our fool ideas to go and get sore at us,
huh, huh, huh!"

And everybody laughed and sweetness reigned. The program wound up with
Louis Rotenstern's singing of a group of patriotic ditties: "Marching
through Georgia" and "Tenting on the Old Campground" and "Dixie" and
"Old Black Joe" and "I'm Only a Poor Cowboy and I Know I Done Wrong."

Louis Rotenstern was by all of Fort Beulah classed as a "good fellow," a
caste just below that of "real, old-fashioned gentleman." Doremus Jessup
liked to go fishing with him, and partridge-hunting; and he considered
that no Fifth Avenue tailor could do anything tastier in the way of a
seersucker outfit. But Louis was a jingo. He explained, and rather
often, that it was not he nor his father who had been born in the ghetto
in Prussian Poland, but his grandfather (whose name, Doremus suspected,
had been something less stylish and Nordic than Rotenstern). Louis's
pocket heroes were Calvin Coolidge, Leonard Wood, Dwight L. Moody, and
Admiral Dewey (and Dewey was a born Vermonter, rejoiced Louis, who
himself had been born in Flatbush, Long Island).

He was not only 100 per cent American; he exacted 40 per cent of
chauvinistic interest on top of the principal. He was on every occasion
heard to say, "We ought to keep all these foreigners out of the country,
and what I mean, the Kikes just as much as the Wops and Hunkies and
Chinks." Louis was altogether convinced that if the ignorant politicians
would keep their dirty hands off banking and the stock exchange and
hours of labor for salesmen in department stores, then everyone in the
country would profit, as beneficiaries of increased business, and all of
them (including the retail clerks) be rich as Aga Khan.

So Louis put into his melodies not only his burning voice of a Bydgoszcz
cantor but all his nationalistic fervor, so that every one joined in the
choruses, particularly Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, with her celebrated
train-caller's contralto.

The dinner broke up in cataract-like sounds of happy adieux, and Doremus
Jessup muttered to his goodwife Emma, a solid, kindly, worried soul, who
liked knitting, solitaire, and the novels of Kathleen Norris: "Was I
terrible, butting in that way?"

"Oh, no, Dormouse, you did just right. I _am_ fond of Lorinda Pike, but
why _does_ she have to show off and parade all her silly Socialist
ideas?"

"You old Tory!" said Doremus. "Don't you want to invite the Siamese
elephant, the Gimmitch, to drop in and have a drink?"

"I do not!" said Emma Jessup.

And in the end, as the Rotarians shuffled and dealt themselves and their
innumerable motorcars, it was Frank Tasbrough who invited the choicer
males, including Doremus, home for an after-party.




CHAPTER 2


As he took his wife home and drove up Pleasant Hill to Tasbrough's,
Doremus Jessup meditated upon the epidemic patriotism of General
Edgeways. But he broke it off to let himself be absorbed in the hills,
as it had been his habit for the fifty-three years, out of his sixty
years of life, that he had spent in Fort Beulah, Vermont.

Legally a city, Fort Beulah was a comfortable village of old red brick,
old granite workshops, and houses of white clapboards or gray shingles,
with a few smug little modern bungalows, yellow or seal brown. There was
but little manufacturing: a small woolen mill, a sash-and-door factory,
a pump works. The granite which was its chief produce came from quarries
four miles away; in Fort Beulah itself were only the offices... all
the money... the meager shacks of most of the quarry workers. It was
a town of perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousand
bodies--the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.

There was but one (comparative) skyscraper in town: the six-story
Tasbrough Building, with the offices of the Tasbrough & Scarlett Granite
Quarries; the offices of Doremus's son-in-law, Fowler Greenhill, M.D.,
and his partner, old Dr. Olmsted, of Lawyer Mungo Kitterick, of Harry
Kindermann, agent for maple syrup and dairying supplies, and of thirty
or forty other village samurai.

It was a downy town, a drowsy town, a town of security and tradition,
which still believed in Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, Memorial Day, and
to which May Day was not an occasion for labor parades but for
distributing small baskets of flowers.

It was a May night--late in May of 1936--with a three-quarter moon.
Doremus's house was a mile from the business-center of Fort Beulah, on
Pleasant Hill, which was a spur thrust like a reaching hand out from the
dark rearing mass of Mount Terror. Upland meadows, moon-glistening, he
could see, among the wildernesses of spruce and maple and poplar on the
ridges far above him; and below, as his car climbed, was Ethan Creek
flowing through the meadows. Deep woods--rearing mountain bulwarks--the
air like spring-water--serene clapboarded houses that remembered the War
of 1812 and the boyhoods of those errant Vermonters, Stephen A. Douglas,
the "Little Giant," and Hiram Powers and Thaddeus Stevens and Brigham
Young and President Chester Alan Arthur.

"No--Powers and Arthur--they were weak sisters," pondered Doremus. "But
Douglas and Thad Stevens and Brigham, the old stallion--I wonder if
we're breeding up any paladins like those stout, grouchy old devils?--if
we're producing 'em anywhere in New England?--anywhere in
America?--anywhere in the world? They had guts. Independence. Did what
they wanted to and thought what they liked, and everybody could go to
hell. The youngsters today----Oh, the aviators have plenty of nerve. The
physicists, these twenty-five-year-old Ph.D.'s that violate the
inviolable atom, they're pioneers. But most of the wishy-washy young
people today----Going seventy miles an hour but not going anywhere--not
enough imagination to _want_ to go anywhere! Getting their music by
turning a dial. Getting their phrases from the comic strips instead of
from Shakespeare and the Bible and Veblen and Old Bill Sumner. Pap-fed
flabs! Like this smug pup Malcolm Tasbrough, hanging around Sissy! Aah!

"Wouldn't it be hell if that stuffed shirt, Edgeways, and that political
Mae West, Gimmitch, were right, and we need all these military
monkeyshines and maybe a fool war (to conquer some sticky-hot country we
don't want on a bet!) to put some starch and git into these marionettes
we call our children? Aah!

"But rats----These hills! Castle walls. And this air. They can keep
their Cotswolds and Harz Mountains and Rockies! D. Jessup--topographical
patriot. And I _am_ a----"

"Dormouse, would you mind driving on the right-hand side of the road--on
curves, anyway?" said his wife peaceably.

****

An upland hollow and mist beneath the moon--a veil of mist over apple
blossoms and the heavy bloom of an ancient lilac bush beside the ruin of
a farmhouse burned these sixty years and more.

****

Mr. Francis Tasbrough was the president, general manager, and chief
owner of the Tasbrough & Scarlett Granite Quarries, at West Beulah, four
miles from "the Fort." He was rich, persuasive, and he had constant
labor troubles. He lived in a new Georgian brick house on Pleasant Hill,
a little beyond Doremus Jessup's, and in that house he maintained a
private barroom luxurious as that of a motor company's advertising
manager at Grosse Point. It was no more the traditional New England than
was the Catholic part of Boston; and Frank himself boasted that, though
his family had for six generations lived in New England, he was no tight
Yankee but in his Efficiency, his Salesmanship, the complete
Pan-American Business Executive.

He was a tall man, Tasbrough, with a yellow mustache and a monotonously
emphatic voice. He was fifty-four, six years younger than Doremus
Jessup, and when he had been four, Doremus had protected him from the
results of his singularly unpopular habit of hitting the other small
boys over the head with things--all kinds of things--sticks and toy
wagons and lunch boxes and dry cow flops.

Assembled in his private barroom tonight, after the Rotarian Dinner,
were Frank himself, Doremus Jessup, Medary Cole, the miller,
Superintendent of Schools Emil Staubmeyer, R. C. Crowley--Roscoe
Conkling Crowley, the weightiest banker in Fort Beulah--and, rather
surprisingly, Tasbrough's pastor, the Episcopal minister, the Rev. Mr.
Falck, his old hands as delicate as porcelain, his wilderness of hair
silk-soft and white, his unfleshly face betokening the Good Life. Mr.
Falck came from a solid Knickerbocker family, and he had studied in
Edinburgh and Oxford along with the General Theological Seminary of New
York; and in all of the Beulah Valley there was, aside from Doremus, no
one who more contentedly hid away in the shelter of the hills.

The barroom had been professionally interior-decorated by a young New
York gentleman with the habit of standing with the back of his right
hand against his hip. It had a stainless-steel bar, framed illustrations
from _La Vie Parisienne_, silvered metal tables, and chromium-plated
aluminum chairs with scarlet leather cushions.

All of them except Tasbrough, Medary Cole (a social climber to whom the
favors of Frank Tasbrough were as honey and fresh ripened figs), and
"Professor" Emil Staubmeyer were uncomfortable in this parrot-cage
elegance, but none of them, including Mr. Falck, seemed to dislike
Frank's soda and excellent Scotch or the sardine sandwiches.

"And I wonder if Thad Stevens would of liked this, either?" considered
Doremus. "He'd of snarled. Old cornered catamount. But probably not at
the whisky!"

****

"Doremus," demanded Tasbrough, "why don't you take a tumble to yourself?
All these years you've had a lot of fun criticizing--always being agin
the government--kidding everybody--posing as such a Liberal that you'll
stand for all these subversive elements. Time for you to quit playing
tag with crazy ideas and come in and join the family. These are serious
times--maybe twenty-eight million on relief, and beginning to get
ugly--thinking they've got a vested right now to be supported.

"And the Jew Communists and Jew financiers plotting together to control
the country. I can understand how, as a younger fellow, you could pump
up a little sympathy for the unions and even for the Jews--though, as
you know, I'll never get over being sore at you for taking the side of
the strikers when those thugs were trying to ruin my whole
business--burn down my polishing and cutting shops--why, you were even
friendly with that alien murderer Karl Pascal, who started the whole
strike--maybe I didn't enjoy firing _him_ when it was all over!

"But anyway, these labor racketeers are getting together now, with
Communist leaders, and determined to run the country--to tell men like
_me_ how to run our business!--and just like General Edgeways said,
they'll refuse to serve their country if we should happen to get dragged
into some war. Yessir, a mighty serious hour, and it's time for you to
cut the cackle and join the really responsible citizens."

Said Doremus, "Hm. Yes, I agree it's a serious time. With all the
discontent there is in the country to wash him into office, Senator
Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next
November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into
some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that
we're the huskiest nation going. And then I, the Liberal, and you, the
Plutocrat, the bogus Tory, will be led out and shot at 3 A.M. Serious?
Huh!"

"Rats! You're exaggerating!" said R. C. Crowley.

Doremus went on: "If Bishop Prang, our Savonarola in a Cadillac 16,
swings his radio audience and his League of Forgotten Men to Buzz
Windrip, Buzz will win. People will think they're electing him to create
more economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there's been
enough indication that we _can_ have tyranny in America--the fix of the
Southern share-croppers, the working conditions of the miners and
garment-makers, and our keeping Mooney in prison so many years. But wait
till Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns! Democracy--here
and in Britain and France, it hasn't been so universal a sniveling
slavery as Naziism in Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaic
materialism as Russia--even if it has produced industrialists like you,
Frank, and bankers like you, R. C., and given you altogether too much
power and money. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy's
given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had. That may be
menaced now by Windrip--all the Windrips. All right! Maybe we'll have to
fight paternal dictatorship with a little sound patricide--fight machine
guns with machine guns. Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A real
Fascist dictatorship!"

"Nonsense! Nonsense!" snorted Tasbrough. "That couldn't happen here in
America, not possibly! We're a country of freemen."

"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck will
forgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the world
that can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America.
Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how the
Right Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns _his_ State. Listen
to Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, to
millions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammany
grafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of President
Harding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse?
Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we called
sauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed calling
German measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honest
papers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of Billy
Sunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swam
from the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away with
it? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares and
our Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that the
O.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigning
against Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Pope
would illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon?
Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience to
William Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious old
grandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole world
laugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?...
Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of people
have gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition--shooting
down people just because they _might_ be transporting liquor--no, that
couldn't happen in _America_! Why, where in all history has there ever
been a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to start
on a Children's Crusade--only of adults--right now, and the Right
Reverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

"Well, what if they are?" protested R. C. Crowley. "It might not be so
bad. I don't like all these irresponsible attacks on us bankers all the
time. Of course, Senator Windrip has to pretend publicly to bawl the
banks out, but once he gets into power he'll give the banks their proper
influence in the administration and take our expert financial advice.
Yes. Why are you so afraid of the word 'Fascism,' Doremus? Just a
word--just a word! And might not be so bad, with all the lazy bums we
got panhandling relief nowadays, and living on my income tax and
yours--not so worse to have a real Strong Man, like Hitler or
Mussolini--like Napoleon or Bismarck in the good old days--and have 'em
really _run_ the country and make it efficient and prosperous again.
'Nother words, have a doctor who won't take any back-chat, but really
boss the patient and make him get well whether he likes it or not!"

"Yes!" said Emil Staubmeyer. "Didn't Hitler save Germany from the Red
Plague of Marxism? I got cousins there. I _know_!"

"Hm," said Doremus, as often Doremus did say it. "Cure the evils of
Democracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics. I've heard of
their curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've never
heard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis!"

"Think that's nice language to use in the presence of the Reverend
Falck?" raged Tasbrough.

Mr. Falck piped up, "I think it's quite nice language, and an
interesting suggestion, Brother Jessup!"

"Besides," said Tasbrough, "this chewing the rag is all nonsense,
anyway. As Crowley says, might be a good thing to have a strong man in
the saddle, but--it just can't happen here in America."

And it seemed to Doremus that the softly moving lips of the Reverend Mr.
Falck were framing, "The hell it can't!"




CHAPTER 3


Doremus Jessup, editor and proprietor of the _Daily Informer_, the Bible
of the conservative Vermont farmers up and down the Beulah Valley, was
born in Fort Beulah in 1876, only son of an impecunious Universalist
pastor, the Reverend Loren Jessup. His mother was no less than a Bass,
of Massachusetts. The Reverend Loren, a bookish man and fond of flowers,
merry but not noticeably witty, used to chant "Alas, alas, that a Bass
of Mass should marry a minister prone to gas," and he would insist that
she was all wrong ichthyologically--she should have been a cod, not a
bass. There was in the parsonage little meat but plenty of books, not
all theological by any means, so that before he was twelve Doremus knew
the profane writings of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen,
Tennyson, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tolstoy, Balzac. He graduated from
Isaiah College--once a bold Unitarian venture but by 1894 an
inter-denominational outfit with nebulous trinitarian yearnings, a small
and rustic stable of learning, in North Beulah, thirteen miles from "the
Fort."

But Isaiah College has come up in the world today--excepting
educationally--for in 1931 it held the Dartmouth football team down to
64 to 6.

During college, Doremus wrote a great deal of bad poetry and became an
incurable book addict, but he was a fair track athlete. Naturally, he
corresponded for papers in Boston and Springfield, and after graduation
he was a reporter in Rutland and Worcester, with one glorious year in
Boston, whose grimy beauty and shards of the past were to him what
London would be to a young Yorkshireman. He was excited by concerts, art
galleries, and bookshops; thrice a week he had a twenty-five-cent seat
in the upper balcony of some theater; and for two months he roomed with
a fellow reporter who had actually had a short story in _The Century_
and who could talk about authors and technique like the very dickens.
But Doremus was not particularly beefy or enduring, and the noise, the
traffic, the bustle of assignments, exhausted him, and in 1901, three
years after his graduation from college, when his widowed father died
and left him $2980.00 and his library, Doremus went home to Fort Beulah
and bought a quarter interest in the _Informer_, then a weekly.

By 1936 it was a daily, and he owned all of it... with a perceptible
mortgage.

He was an equable and sympathetic boss; an imaginative news detective;
he was, even in this ironbound Republican state, independent in
politics; and in his editorials against graft and injustice, though they
were not fanatically chronic, he could slash like a dog whip.

He was a third cousin of Calvin Coolidge, who had considered him sound
domestically but loose politically. Doremus considered himself just the
opposite.

He had married his wife, Emma, out of Fort Beulah. She was the daughter
of a wagon manufacturer, a placid, prettyish, broad-shouldered girl with
whom he had gone to high school.

Now, in 1936, of their three children, Philip (Dartmouth, and Harvard
Law School) was married and ambitiously practicing law in Worcester;
Mary was the wife of Fowler Greenhill, M.D., of Fort Beulah, a gay and
hustling medico, a choleric and red-headed young man, who was a
wonder-worker in typhoid, acute appendicitis, obstetrics, compound
fractures, and diets for anemic children. Fowler and Mary had one son,
Doremus's only grandchild, the bonny David, who at eight was a timid,
inventive, affectionate child with such mourning hound-dog eyes and such
red-gold hair that his picture might well have been hung at a National
Academy show or even been reproduced on the cover of a Women's Magazine
with 2,500,000 circulation. The Greenhills' neighbors inevitably said of
the boy, "My, Davy's got such an imagination, hasn't he! I guess he'll
be a Writer, just like his Grampa!"

Third of Doremus's children was the gay, the pert, the dancing Cecilia,
known as "Sissy," aged eighteen, where her brother Philip was thirty-two
and Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, turned thirty. She rejoiced the heart of
Doremus by consenting to stay home while she was finishing high school,
though she talked vigorously of going off to study architecture and
"simply make _millions_, my dear," by planning and erecting miraculous
small homes.

Mrs. Jessup was lavishly (and quite erroneously) certain that her Philip
was the spit and image of the Prince of Wales; Philip's wife, Merilla
(the fair daughter of Worcester, Massachusetts), curiously like the
Princess Marina; that Mary would by any stranger be taken for Katharine
Hepburn; that Sissy was a dryad and David a medieval page; and that
Doremus (though she knew him better than she did those changelings, her
children) amazingly resembled that naval hero, Winfield Scott Schley, as
he looked in 1898.

She was a loyal woman, Emma Jessup, warmly generous, a cordon bleu at
making lemon-meringue pie, a parochial Tory, an orthodox Episcopalian,
and completely innocent of any humor. Doremus was perpetually tickled by
her kind solemnity, and it was to be chalked down to him as a singular
act of grace that he refrained from pretending that he had become a
working Communist and was thinking of leaving for Moscow immediately.

****

Doremus looked depressed, looked old, when he lifted himself, as from an
invalid's chair, out of the Chrysler, in his hideous garage of cement
and galvanized iron. (But it was a proud two-car garage; besides the
four-year-old Chrysler, they had a new Ford convertible coupé, which
Doremus hoped to drive some day when Sissy wasn't using it.)

He cursed competently as, on the cement walk from the garage to the
kitchen, he barked his shins on the lawnmower, left there by his hired
man, one Oscar Ledue, known always as "Shad," a large and red-faced, a
sulky and surly Irish-Canuck peasant. Shad always did things like
leaving lawnmowers about to snap at the shins of decent people. He was
entirely incompetent and vicious. He never edged-up the flower beds, he
kept his stinking old cap on his head when he brought in logs for the
fireplace, he did not scythe the dandelions in the meadow till they had
gone to seed, he delighted in failing to tell cook that the peas were
now ripe, and he was given to shooting cats, stray dogs, chipmunks, and
honey-voiced blackbirds. At least twice a day, Doremus resolved to fire
him, but----Perhaps he was telling himself the truth when he insisted
that it was amusing to try to civilize this prize bull.

Doremus trotted into the kitchen, decided that he did not want some cold
chicken and a glass of milk from the ice-box, nor even a wedge of the
celebrated cocoanut layer cake made by their cook-general, Mrs. Candy,
and mounted to his "study," on the third, the attic floor.

His house was an ample, white, clapboarded structure of the vintage of
1880, a square bulk with a mansard roof and, in front, a long porch with
insignificant square white pillars. Doremus declared that the house was
ugly, "but ugly in a nice way."

His study, up there, was his one perfect refuge from annoyances and
bustle. It was the only room in the house that Mrs. Candy (quiet, grimly
competent, thoroughly literate, once a Vermont country schoolteacher)
was never allowed to clean. It was an endearing mess of novels, copies
of the _Congressional Record_, of the _New Yorker_, _Time_, _Nation_,
_New Republic_, _New Masses_, and _Speculum_ (cloistral organ of the
Medieval Society), treatises on taxation and monetary systems, road
maps, volumes on exploration in Abyssinia and the Antarctic, chewed
stubs of pencils, a shaky portable typewriter, fishing tackle, rumpled
carbon paper, two comfortable old leather chairs, a Windsor chair at his
desk, the complete works of Thomas Jefferson, his chief hero, a
microscope and a collection of Vermont butterflies, Indian arrowheads,
exiguous volumes of Vermont village poetry printed in local newspaper
offices, the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon, Science and Health,
Selections from the Mahabharata, the poetry of Sandburg, Frost, Masters,
Jeffers, Ogden Nash, Edgar Guest, Omar Khayyám, and Milton, a shotgun
and a .22 repeating rifle, an Isaiah College banner, faded, the complete
Oxford Dictionary, five fountain pens of which two would work, a vase
from Crete dating from 327 B.C.--very ugly--the World Almanac for year
before last, with the cover suggesting that it had been chewed by a dog,
odd pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles and of rimless eyeglasses, none of
which now suited his eyes, a fine, reputedly Tudor oak cabinet from
Devonshire, portraits of Ethan Allen and Thaddeus Stevens, rubber
wading-boots, senile red morocco slippers, a poster issued by the
_Vermont Mercury_ at Woodstock, on September 2, 1840, announcing a
glorious Whig victory, twenty-four boxes of safety matches one by one
stolen from the kitchen, assorted yellow scratch pads, seven books on
Russia and Bolshevism--extraordinarily pro or extraordinarily con--a
signed photograph of Theodore Roosevelt, six cigarette cartons, all half
empty (according to the tradition of journalistic eccentrics, Doremus
should have smoked a Good Old Pipe, but he detested the slimy ooze of
nicotine-soaked spittle), a rag carpet on the floor, a withered sprig of
holly with a silver Christmas ribbon, a case of seven unused genuine
Sheffield razors, dictionaries in French, German, Italian and
Spanish--the first of which languages he really could read--a canary in
a Bavarian gilded wicker cage, a worn linen-bound copy of _Old
Hearthside Songs for Home and Picnic_ whose selections he was wont to
croon, holding the book on his knee, and an old cast-iron Franklin
stove. Everything, indeed, that was proper for a hermit and improper for
impious domestic hands.

Before switching on the light he squinted through a dormer window at the
bulk of mountains cutting the welter of stars. In the center were the
last lights of Fort Beulah, far below, and on the left, unseen, the soft
meadows, the old farmhouses, the great dairy barns of the Ethan Mowing.
It was a kind country, cool and clear as a shaft of light and, he
meditated, he loved it more every quiet year of his freedom from city
towers and city clamor.

One of the few times when Mrs. Candy, their housekeeper, was permitted
to enter his hermit's cell was to leave there, on the long table, his
mail. He picked it up and started to read briskly, standing by the
table. (Time to go to bed! Too much chatter and bellyaching, this
evening! Good Lord! Past midnight!) He sighed then, and sat in his
Windsor chair, leaning his elbows on the table and studiously reading
the first letter over again.

It was from Victor Loveland, one of the younger, more
international-minded teachers in Doremus's old school, Isaiah College.

    DEAR DR. JESSUP:

    ("Hm. 'Dr. Jessup.' Not me, m'lad. The only honorary degree I'll
    ever get'll be Master in Veterinary Surgery or Laureate in
    Embalming.")

    _A very dangerous situation has arisen here at Isaiah and those
    of us who are trying to advocate something like integrity and
    modernity are seriously worried--not, probably, that we need to
    be long, as we shall probably all get fired. Where two years ago
    most of our students just laughed at any idea of military
    drilling, they have gone warlike in a big way, with undergrads
    drilling with rifles, machine guns, and cute little blueprints
    of tanks and planes all over the place. Two of them,
    voluntarily, are going down to Rutland every week to take
    training in flying, avowedly to get ready for wartime aviation.
    When I cautiously ask them what the dickens war they are
    preparing for they just scratch and indicate they don't care
    much, so long as they can get a chance to show what virile proud
    gents they are._

    _Well, we've got used to that. But just this afternoon--the
    newspapers haven't got this yet--the Board of Trustees,
    including Mr. Francis Tasbrough and our president, Dr. Owen
    Peaseley, met and voted a resolution that--now listen to this,
    will you, Dr. Jessup--"Any member of the faculty or student body
    of Isaiah who shall in any way, publicly or privately, in print,
    writing, or by the spoken word, adversely criticize military
    training at or by Isaiah College, or in any other institution of
    learning in the United States, or by the state militias, federal
    forces, or other officially recognized military organizations in
    this country, shall be liable to immediate dismissal from this
    college, and any student who shall, with full and proper proof,
    bring to the attention of the President or any Trustee of the
    college such malign criticism by any person whatever connected
    in any way with the institution shall receive extra credits in
    his course in military training, such credits to apply to the
    number of credits necessary for graduation."_

    _What can we do with such fast exploding Fascism?_

                                                   VICTOR LOVELAND.

And Loveland, teacher of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit (two lone students)
had never till now meddled in any politics of more recent date than A.D.
180.

****

"So Frank was there at Trustees' meeting, and didn't dare tell me,"
Doremus sighed. "Encouraging them to become spies. Gestapo. Oh, my dear
Frank, this a serious time! You, my good bonehead, for once you said it!
President Owen J. Peaseley, the bagged-faced, pious, racketeering,
damned hedge-schoolmaster! But what can I do? Oh--write another
editorial viewing-with-alarm, I suppose!"

He plumped into a deep chair and sat fidgeting, like a bright-eyed,
apprehensive little bird.

On the door was a tearing sound, imperious, demanding.

He opened to admit Foolish, the family dog. Foolish was a reliable
combination of English setter, Airedale, cocker spaniel, wistful doe,
and rearing hyena. He gave one abrupt snort of welcome and nuzzled his
brown satin head against Doremus's knee. His bark awakened the canary,
under the absurd old blue sweater that covered its cage, and it
automatically caroled that it was noon, summer noon, among the pear
trees in the green Harz hills, none of which was true. But the bird's
trilling, the dependable presence of Foolish, comforted Doremus, made
military drill and belching politicians seem unimportant, and in
security he dropped asleep in the worn brown leather chair.




CHAPTER 4


All this June week, Doremus was waiting for 2 P.M. on Saturday, the
divinely appointed hour of the weekly prophetic broadcast by Bishop Paul
Peter Prang.

Now, six weeks before the 1936 national conventions, it was probable
that neither Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Senator Vandenberg,
Ogden Mills, General Hugh Johnson, Colonel Frank Knox, nor Senator Borah
would be nominated for President by either party, and that the
Republican standard-bearer--meaning the one man who never has to lug a
large, bothersome, and somewhat ridiculous standard--would be that loyal
yet strangely honest old-line Senator, Walt Trowbridge, a man with a
touch of Lincoln in him, dashes of Will Rogers and George W. Norris, a
suspected trace of Jim Farley, but all the rest plain, bulky, placidly
defiant Walt Trowbridge.

Few men doubted that the Democratic candidate would be that sky-rocket,
Senator Berzelius Windrip--that is to say, Windrip as the mask and
bellowing voice, with his satanic secretary, Lee Sarason, as the brain
behind.

Senator Windrip's father was a small-town Western druggist, equally
ambitious and unsuccessful, and had named him Berzelius after the
Swedish chemist. Usually he was known as "Buzz." He had worked his way
through a Southern Baptist college, of approximately the same academic
standing as a Jersey City business college, and through a Chicago law
school, and settled down to practice in his native state and to enliven
local politics. He was a tireless traveler, a boisterous and humorous
speaker, an inspired guesser at what political doctrines the people
would like, a warm handshaker, and willing to lend money. He drank
Coca-Cola with the Methodists, beer with the Lutherans, California white
wine with the Jewish village merchants--and, when they were safe from
observation, white-mule corn whisky with all of them.

Within twenty years he was as absolute a ruler of his state as ever a
sultan was of Turkey.

He was never governor; he had shrewdly seen that his reputation for
research among planters-punch recipes, varieties of poker, and the
psychology of girl stenographers might cause his defeat by the church
people, so he had contented himself with coaxing to the gubernatorial
shearing a trained baa-lamb of a country schoolmaster whom he had gayly
led on a wide blue ribbon. The state was certain that he had "given it a
good administration," and they knew that it was Buzz Windrip who was
responsible, not the Governor.

Windrip caused the building of impressive highroads and of consolidated
country schools; he made the state buy tractors and combines and lend
them to the farmers at cost. He was certain that some day America would
have vast business dealings with the Russians and, though he detested
all Slavs, he made the State University put in the first course in the
Russian language that had been known in all that part of the West. His
most original invention was quadrupling the state militia and rewarding
the best soldiers in it with training in agriculture, aviation, and
radio and automobile engineering.

The militiamen considered him their general and their god, and when the
state attorney general announced that he was going to have Windrip
indicted for having grafted $200,000 of tax money, the militia rose to
Buzz Windrip's orders as though they were his private army and,
occupying the legislative chambers and all the state offices, and
covering the streets leading to the Capitol with machine guns, they
herded Buzz's enemies out of town.

He took the United States Senatorship as though it were his manorial
right, and for six years, his only rival as the most bouncing and
feverish man in the Senate had been the late Huey Long of Louisiana.

He preached the comforting gospel of so redistributing wealth that every
person in the country would have several thousand dollars a year
(monthly Buzz changed his prediction as to how many thousand), while all
the rich men were nevertheless to be allowed enough to get along, on a
maximum of $500,000 a year. So everybody was happy in the prospect of
Windrip's becoming president.

The Reverend Dr. Egerton Schlemil, dean of St. Agnes Cathedral, San
Antonio, Texas, stated (once in a sermon, once in the slightly variant
mimeographed press handout on the sermon, and seven times in interviews)
that Buzz's coming into power would be "like the Heaven-blest fall of
revivifying rain upon a parched and thirsty land." Dr. Schlemil did not
say anything about what happened when the blest rain came and kept
falling steadily for four years.

No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to know
precisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip's career was taken by
his secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power in his
state, Sarason had been managing editor of the most widely circulated
paper in all that part of the country. Sarason's genesis was and
remained a mystery.

It was said that he had been born in Georgia, in Minnesota, on the East
Side of New York, in Syria; that he was pure Yankee, Jewish, Charleston
Huguenot. It was known that he had been a singularly reckless lieutenant
of machine-gunners as a youngster during the Great War, and that he had
stayed over, ambling about Europe, for three or four years; that he had
worked on the Paris edition of the New York _Herald_; nibbled at
painting and at Black Magic in Florence and Munich; had a few
sociological months at the London School of Economics; associated with
decidedly curious people in arty Berlin night restaurants. Returned
home, Sarason had become decidedly the "hard-boiled reporter" of the
shirt-sleeved tradition, who asserted that he would rather be called a
prostitute than anything so sissified as "journalist." But it was
suspected that nevertheless he still retained the ability to read.

He had been variously a Socialist and an anarchist. Even in 1936 there
were rich people who asserted that Sarason was "too radical," but
actually he had lost his trust (if any) in the masses during the hoggish
nationalism after the war; and he believed now only in resolute control
by a small oligarchy. In this he was a Hitler, a Mussolini.

Sarason was lanky and drooping, with thin flaxen hair, and thick lips in
a bony face. His eyes were sparks at the bottoms of two dark wells. In
his long hands there was bloodless strength. He used to surprise persons
who were about to shake hands with him by suddenly bending their fingers
back till they almost broke. Most people didn't much like it. As a
newspaperman he was an expert of the highest grade. He could smell out a
husband-murder, the grafting of a politician--that is to say, of a
politician belonging to a gang opposed by his paper--the torture of
animals or children, and this last sort of story he liked to write
himself, rather than hand it to a reporter, and when he did write it,
you saw the moldy cellar, heard the whip, felt the slimy blood.

Compared with Lee Sarason as a newspaperman, little Doremus Jessup of
Fort Beulah was like a village parson compared with the
twenty-thousand-dollar minister of a twenty-story New York institutional
tabernacle with radio affiliations.

Senator Windrip had made Sarason, officially, his secretary, but he was
known to be much more--bodyguard, ghost-writer, press-agent, economic
adviser; and in Washington, Lee Sarason became the man most consulted
and least liked by newspaper correspondents in the whole Senate Office
Building.

Windrip was a young forty-eight in 1936; Sarason an aged and
sagging-cheeked forty-one.

Though he probably based it on notes dictated by Windrip--himself no
fool in the matter of fictional imagination--Sarason had certainly done
the actual writing of Windrip's lone book, the Bible of his followers,
part biography, part economic program, and part plain exhibitionistic
boasting, called _Zero Hour--Over the Top_.

It was a salty book and contained more suggestions for remolding the
world than the three volumes of Karl Marx and all the novels of H. G.
Wells put together.

Perhaps the most familiar, most quoted paragraph of _Zero Hour_, beloved
by the provincial press because of its simple earthiness (as written by
an initiate in Rosicrucian lore, named Sarason) was:

    "When I was a little shaver back in the corn fields, we kids
    used to just wear one-strap suspenders on our pants, and we
    called them the Galluses on our Britches, but they held them up
    and saved our modesty just as much as if we had put on a
    high-toned Limey accent and talked about Braces and Trousers.
    That's how the whole world of what they call 'scientific
    economics' is like. The Marxians think that by writing of
    Galluses as Braces, they've got something that knocks the
    stuffings out of the old-fashioned ideas of Washington and
    Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Well and all, I sure believe
    in using every new economic discovery, like they have been
    worked out in the so-called Fascist countries, like Italy and
    Germany and Hungary and Poland--yes, by thunder, and even in
    Japan--we probably will have to lick those Little Yellow Men
    some day, to keep them from pinching our vested and rightful
    interests in China, but don't let that keep us from grabbing off
    any smart ideas that those cute little beggars have worked out!

    "I want to stand up on my hind legs and not just admit but
    frankly holler right out that we've got to change our system a
    lot, maybe even change the whole Constitution (but change it
    legally, and not by violence) to bring it up from the
    horseback-and-corduroy-road epoch to the
    automobile-and-cement-highway period of today. The Executive has
    got to have a freer hand and be able to move quick in an
    emergency, and not be tied down by a lot of dumb shyster-lawyer
    congressmen taking months to shoot off their mouths in debates.
    BUT--and it's a But as big as Deacon Checkerboard's hay-barn
    back home--these new economic changes are only a means to an
    End, and that End is and must be, fundamentally, the same
    principles of Liberty, Equality, and Justice that were advocated
    by the Founding Fathers of this great land back in 1776!"

The most confusing thing about the whole campaign of 1936 was the
relationship of the two leading parties. Old-Guard Republicans
complained that their proud party was begging for office, hat in hand;
veteran Democrats that their traditional Covered Wagons were jammed with
college professors, city slickers, and yachtsmen.

The rival to Senator Windrip in public reverence was a political titan
who seemed to have no itch for office--the Reverend Paul Peter Prang, of
Persepolis, Indiana, Bishop of the Methodist Episcopal Church, a man
perhaps ten years older than Windrip. His weekly radio address, at 2
P.M. every Saturday, was to millions the very oracle of God. So
supernatural was this voice from the air that for it men delayed their
golf, and women even postponed their Saturday afternoon contract bridge.

It was Father Charles Coughlin, of Detroit, who had first thought out
the device of freeing himself from any censorship of his political
sermons on the Mount by "buying his own time on the air"--it being only
in the twentieth century that mankind has been able to buy Time as it
buys soap and gasoline. This invention was almost equal, in its effect
on all American life and thought, to Henry Ford's early conception of
selling cars cheap to millions of people, instead of selling a few as
luxuries.

But to the pioneer Father Coughlin, Bishop Paul Peter Prang was as the
Ford V-8 to the Model A.

Prang was more sentimental than Coughlin; he shouted more; he agonized
more; he reviled more enemies by name, and rather scandalously; he told
more funny stories, and ever so many more tragic stories about the
repentant deathbeds of bankers, atheists, and Communists. His voice was
more nasally native, and he was pure Middle West, with a New England
Protestant Scotch-English ancestry, where Coughlin was always a little
suspect, in the Sears-Roebuck regions, as a Roman Catholic with an
agreeable Irish accent.

No man in history has ever had such an audience as Bishop Prang, nor so
much apparent power. When he demanded that his auditors telegraph their
congressmen to vote on a bill as he, Prang, _ex cathedra_ and alone,
without any college of cardinals, had been inspired to believe they
ought to vote, then fifty thousand people would telephone, or drive
through back-hill mud, to the nearest telegraph office and in His name
give their commands to the government. Thus, by the magic of
electricity, Prang made the position of any king in history look a
little absurd and tinseled.

To millions of League members he sent mimeographed letters with
facsimile signature, and with the salutation so craftily typed in that
they rejoiced in a personal greeting from the Founder.

Doremus Jessup, up in the provincial hills, could never quite figure out
just what political gospel it was that Bishop Prang thundered from his
Sinai which, with its microphone and typed revelations timed to the
split-second, was so much more snappy and efficient than the original
Sinai. In detail, he preached nationalization of the banks, mines,
water-power, and transportation; limitation of incomes; increased wages,
strengthening of the labor unions, more fluid distribution of consumer
goods. But everybody was nibbling at those noble doctrines now, from
Virginia Senators to Minnesota Farmer-Laborites, with no one being so
credulous as to expect any of them to be carried out.

There was a theory around some place that Prang was only the humble
voice of his vast organization, "The League of Forgotten Men." It was
universally believed to have (though no firm of chartered accountants
had yet examined its rolls) twenty-seven million members, along with
proper assortments of national officers and state officers, and town
officers and hordes of committees with stately names like "National
Committee on the Compilation of Statistics on Unemployment and Normal
Employability in the Soy-Bean Industry." Hither and yon, Bishop Prang,
not as the still small voice of God but in lofty person, addressed
audiences of twenty thousand persons at a time, in the larger cities all
over the country, speaking in huge halls meant for prize-fighting, in
cinema palaces, in armories, in baseball parks, in circus tents, while
after the meetings his brisk assistants accepted membership applications
and dues for the League of Forgotten Men. When his timid detractors
hinted that this was all very romantic, very jolly and picturesque, but
not particularly dignified, and Bishop Prang answered, "My Master
delighted to speak in whatever vulgar assembly would listen to Him," no
one dared answer him, "But you aren't your Master--not yet."

With all the flourish of the League and its mass meetings, there had
never been a pretense that any tenet of the League, any pressure on
Congress and the President to pass any particular bill, originated with
anybody save Prang himself, with no collaboration from the committees or
officers of the League. All that the Prang who so often crooned about
the Humility and Modesty of the Saviour wanted was for one hundred and
thirty million people to obey him, their Priest-King, implicitly in
everything concerning their private morals, their public asseverations,
how they might earn their livings, and what relationships they might
have to other wage-earners.

"And that," Doremus Jessup grumbled, relishing the shocked piety of his
wife Emma, "makes Brother Prang a worse tyrant than Caligula--a worse
Fascist than Napoleon. Mind you, I don't _really_ believe all these
rumors about Prang's grafting on membership dues and the sale of
pamphlets and donations to pay for the radio. It's much worse than that.
I'm afraid he's an honest fanatic! That's why he's such a real Fascist
menace--he's so confoundedly humanitarian, in fact so Noble, that a
majority of people are willing to let him boss everything, and with a
country this size, that's quite a job--quite a job, my beloved--even for
a Methodist Bishop who gets enough gifts so that he can actually 'buy
Time'!"

****

All the while, Walt Trowbridge, possible Republican candidate for
President, suffering from the deficiency of being honest and disinclined
to promise that he could work miracles, was insisting that we live in
the United States of America and not on a golden highway to Utopia.

There was nothing exhilarating in such realism, so all this rainy week
in June, with the apple blossoms and the lilacs fading, Doremus Jessup
was awaiting the next encyclical of Pope Paul Peter Prang.




CHAPTER 5


    I know the Press only too well. Almost all editors hide away in
    spider-dens, men without thought of Family or Public Interest or
    the humble delights of jaunts out-of-doors, plotting how they
    can put over their lies, and advance their own positions and
    fill their greedy pocketbooks by calumniating Statesmen who have
    given their all for the common good and who are vulnerable
    because they stand out in the fierce Light that beats around the
    Throne.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

The June morning shone, the last petals of the wild-cherry blossoms lay
dew-covered on the grass, robins were about their brisk business on the
lawn. Doremus, by nature a late-lier and pilferer of naps after he had
been called at eight, was stirred to spring up and stretch his arms out
fully five or six times in Swedish exercises, in front of his window,
looking out across the Beulah River Valley to dark masses of pine on the
mountain slopes three miles away.

Doremus and Emma had had each their own bedroom, these fifteen years,
not altogether to her pleasure. He asserted that he couldn't share a
bedroom with any person living, because he was a night-mutterer, and
liked to make a really good, uprearing, pillow-slapping job of turning
over in bed without feeling that he was disturbing someone.

It was Saturday, the day of the Prang revelation, but on this crystal
morning, after days of rain, he did not think of Prang at all, but of
the fact that Philip, his son, with wife, had popped up from Worcester
for the week-end, and that the whole crew of them, along with Lorinda
Pike and Buck Titus, were going to have a "real, old-fashioned, family
picnic."

They had all demanded it, even the fashionable Sissy, a woman who, at
eighteen, had much concern with tennis-teas, golf, and mysterious,
appallingly rapid motor trips with Malcolm Tasbrough (just graduating
from high school), or with the Episcopal parson's grandson, Julian Falck
(freshman in Amherst). Doremus had scolded that he _couldn't_ go to any
blame picnic; it was his _job_, as editor, to stay home and listen to
Bishop Prang's broadcast at two; but they had laughed at him and rumpled
his hair and miscalled him until he had promised.... They didn't know
it, but he had slyly borrowed a portable radio from his friend, the
local R. C. priest, Father Stephen Perefixe, and he was going to hear
Prang whether or no.

He was glad they were going to have Lorinda Pike--he was fond of that
sardonic saint--and Buck Titus, who was perhaps his closest intimate.

James Buck Titus, who was fifty but looked thirty-eight, straight,
broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, long-mustached, swarthy--Buck was the
Dan'l Boone type of Old American, or, perhaps, an Indian-fighting
cavalry captain, out of Charles King. He had graduated from Williams,
with ten weeks in England and ten years in Montana, divided between
cattle-raising, prospecting, and a horse-breeding ranch. His father, a
richish railroad contractor, had left him the great farm near West
Beulah, and Buck had come back home to grow apples, to breed Morgan
stallions, and to read Voltaire, Anatole France, Nietzsche, and
Dostoyefsky. He served in the war, as a private; detested his officers,
refused a commission, and liked the Germans at Cologne. He was a useful
polo player, but regarded riding to the hounds as childish. In politics,
he did not so much yearn over the wrongs of Labor as feel scornful of
the tight-fisted exploiters who denned in office and stinking factory.
He was as near to the English country squire as one may find in America.
He was a bachelor, with a big mid-Victorian house, well kept by a
friendly Negro couple; a tidy place in which he sometimes entertained
ladies who were not quite so tidy. He called himself an "agnostic"
instead of an "atheist" only because he detested the street-bawling,
tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional atheists. He was
cynical, he rarely smiled, and he was unwaveringly loyal to all the
Jessups. His coming to the picnic made Doremus as blithe as his grandson
David.

"Perhaps, even under Fascism, the 'Church clock will stand at ten to
three, and there will be honey still for tea,'" Doremus hoped, as he put
on his rather dandified country tweeds.

****

The only stain on the preparations for the picnic was the grouchiness of
the hired man, Shad Ledue. When he was asked to turn the ice-cream
freezer he growled, "Why the heck don't you folks get an electric
freezer?" He grumbled, most audibly, at the weight of the picnic
baskets, and when he was asked to clean up the basement during their
absence, he retorted only with a glare of silent fury.

"You ought to get rid of that fellow, Ledue," urged Doremus's son
Philip, the lawyer.

"Oh, I don't know," considered Doremus. "Probably just shiftlessness on
my part. But I tell myself I'm doing a social experiment--trying to
train him to be as gracious as the average Neanderthal man. Or perhaps
I'm scared of him--he's the kind of vindictive peasant that sets fire to
barns.... Did you know that he actually reads, Phil?"

"No!"

"Yep. Mostly movie magazines, with nekked ladies and Wild Western
stories, but he also reads the papers. Told me he greatly admired Buzz
Windrip; says Windrip will certainly be President, and then
everybody--by which, I'm afraid, Shad means only himself--will have five
thousand a year. Buzz certainly has a bunch of philanthropists for
followers."

"Now listen, Dad. You don't understand Senator Windrip. Oh, he's
something of a demagogue--he shoots off his mouth a lot about how he'll
jack up the income tax and grab the banks, but he won't--that's just
molasses for the cockroaches. What he will do, and maybe only he _can_
do it, is to protect us from the murdering, thieving, lying Bolsheviks
that would--why, they'd like to stick all of us that are going on this
picnic, all the decent clean people that are accustomed to privacy, into
hall bedrooms, and make us cook our cabbage soup on a Primus stuck on a
bed! Yes, or maybe 'liquidate' us entirely! No sir, Berzelius Windrip is
the fellow to balk the dirty sneaking Jew spies that pose as American
Liberals!"

"The face is the face of my reasonably competent son, Philip, but the
voice is the voice of the Jew-baiter, Julius Streicher," sighed Doremus.

****

The picnic ground was among a Stonehenge of gray and lichen-painted
rocks, fronting a birch grove high up on Mount Terror, on the upland
farm of Doremus's cousin, Henry Veeder, a solid, reticent Vermonter of
the old days. They looked through a distant mountain gap to the faint
mercury of Lake Champlain and, across it, the bulwark of the
Adirondacks.

Davy Greenhill and his hero, Buck Titus, wrestled in the hardy pasture
grass. Philip and Dr. Fowler Greenhill, Doremus's son-in-law (Phil plump
and half bald at thirty-two; Fowler belligerently red-headed and
red-mustached) argued about the merits of the autogiro. Doremus lay with
his head against a rock, his cap over his eyes, gazing down into the
paradise of Beulah Valley--he could not have sworn to it, but he rather
thought he saw an angel floating in the radiant upper air above the
valley. The women, Emma and Mary Greenhill, Sissy and Philip's wife and
Lorinda Pike, were setting out the picnic lunch--a pot of beans with
crisp salt pork, fried chicken, potatoes warmed-over with croutons, tea
biscuits, crab-apple jelly, salad, raisin pie--on a red-and-white
tablecloth spread on a flat rock.

But for the parked motorcars, the scene might have been New England in
1885, and you could see the women in chip hats and tight-bodiced,
high-necked frocks with bustles; the men in straw boaters with dangling
ribbons and adorned with side-whiskers--Doremus's beard not clipped, but
flowing like a bridal veil. When Dr. Greenhill fetched down Cousin Henry
Veeder, a bulky yet shy enough pre-Ford farmer in clean, faded overalls,
then was Time again unbought, secure, serene.

And the conversation had a comfortable triviality, an affectionate
Victorian dullness. However Doremus might fret about "conditions,"
however skittishly Sissy might long for the presence of her beaux,
Julian Falck and Malcolm Tasbrough, there was nothing modern and
neurotic, nothing savoring of Freud, Adler, Marx, Bertrand Russell, or
any other divinity of the 1930's, when Mother Emma chattered to Mary and
Merilla about her rose bushes that had "winter-killed," and the new
young maples that the field mice had gnawed, and the difficulty of
getting Shad Ledue to bring in enough fireplace wood, and how Shad
gorged pork chops and fried potatoes and pie at lunch, which he ate at
the Jessups'.

And the View. The women talked about the View as honeymooners once
talked at Niagara Falls.

David and Buck Titus were playing ship, now, on a rearing rock--it was
the bridge, and David was Captain Popeye, with Buck his bosun; and even
Dr. Greenhill, that impetuous crusader who was constantly infuriating
the county board of health by reporting the slovenly state of the poor
farm and the stench in the county jail, was lazy in the sun and with the
greatest of concentration kept an unfortunate little ant running back
and forth on a twig. His wife Mary--the golfer, the runner-up in state
tennis tournaments, the giver of smart but not too bibulous cocktail
parties at the country club, the wearer of smart brown tweeds with a
green scarf--seemed to have dropped gracefully back into the domesticity
of her mother, and to consider as a very weighty thing a recipe for
celery-and-roquefort sandwiches on toasted soda crackers. She was the
handsome Older Jessup Girl again, back in the white house with the
mansard roof.

And Foolish, lying on his back with his four paws idiotically flopping,
was the most pastorally old-fashioned of them all.

The only serious flare of conversation was when Buck Titus snarled to
Doremus: "Certainly a lot of Messiahs pottin' at you from the bushes
these days--Buzz Windrip and Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin and Dr.
Townsend (though he seems to have gone back to Nazareth) and Upton
Sinclair and Rev. Frank Buchman and Bernarr Macfadden and Willum
Randolph Hearst and Governor Talmadge and Floyd Olson and----Say, I
swear the best Messiah in the whole show is this darky, Father Divine.
He doesn't just promise he's going to feed the Under-privileged ten
years from now--he hands out the fried drumsticks and gizzard right
along with the Salvation. How about _him_ for President?"

****

Out of nowhere appeared Julian Falck.

This young man, freshman in Amherst the past year, grandson of the
Episcopal rector and living with the old man because his parents were
dead, was in the eyes of Doremus the most nearly tolerable of Sissy's
suitors. He was Swede-blond and wiry, with a neat, small face and canny
eyes. He called Doremus "sir," and he had, unlike most of the
radio-and-motor-hypnotized eighteen-year-olds in the Fort, read a book,
and voluntarily--read Thomas Wolfe and William Rollins, John Strachey
and Stuart Chase and Ortega. Whether Sissy preferred him to Malcolm
Tasbrough, her father did not know. Malcolm was taller and thicker than
Julian, and he drove his own streamline De Soto, while Julian could only
borrow his grandfather's shocking old flivver.

Sissy and Julian bickered amiably about Alice Aylot's skill in
backgammon, and Foolish scratched himself in the sun.

But Doremus was not being pastoral. He was being anxious and scientific.
While the others jeered, "When does Dad take his audition?" and "What's
he learning to be--a crooner or a hockey-announcer?" Doremus was
adjusting the doubtful portable radio. Once he thought he was going to
be with them in the Home Sweet Home atmosphere, for he tuned in on a
program of old songs, and all of them, including Cousin Henry Veeder,
who had a hidden passion for fiddlers and barn dances and parlor organs,
hummed "Gaily the Troubadour" and "Maid of Athens" and "Darling Nelly
Gray." But when the announcer informed them that these ditties were
being sponsored by Toily Oily, the Natural Home Cathartic, and that they
were being rendered by a sextette of young males horribly called "The
Smoothies," Doremus abruptly shut them off.

"Why, what's the matter, Dad?" cried Sissy.

"'Smoothies'! God! This country deserves what it's going to get!"
snapped Doremus. "Maybe we need a Buzz Windrip!"

The moment, then--it should have been announced by cathedral chimes--of
the weekly address of Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Coming from an airless closet, smelling of sacerdotal woolen union
suits, in Persepolis, Indiana, it leapt to the farthest stars; it
circled the world at 186,000 miles a second--a million miles while you
stopped to scratch. It crashed into the cabin of a whaler on a dark
polar sea; into an office, paneled with linen-fold oak looted from a
Nottinghamshire castle, on the sixty-seventh story of a building on Wall
Street; into the foreign office in Tokio; into the rocky hollow below
the shining birches upon Mount Terror, in Vermont.

Bishop Prang spoke, as he usually did, with a grave kindliness, a virile
resonance, which made his self, magically coming to them on the unseen
aërial pathway, at once dominating and touched with charm; and whatever
his purposes might be, his words were on the side of the Angels:

"My friends of the radio audience, I shall have but six more weekly
petitions to make you before the national conventions, which will decide
the fate of this distraught nation, and the time has come now to act--to
act! Enough of words! Let me put together certain separated phrases out
of the sixth chapter of Jeremiah, which seem to have been prophetically
written for this hour of desperate crisis in America:

"'Oh ye children of Benjamin, gather yourselves together to flee out of
the midst of Jerusalem.... Prepare ye war... arise and let us go
up at noon. Woe unto us! for the day goeth away, for the shadows of the
evening are stretched out. Arise, and let us go by night and let us
destroy her palaces.... I am full of the fury of the Lord; I am weary
with holding it in; I will pour it out upon the children abroad, and
upon the assembly of young men together; for even the husband with the
wife shall be taken, the aged with him that is full of days.... I
will stretch out my hand upon the inhabitants of this land, saith the
Lord. For from the least of them even unto the greatest, every one is
given to covetousness; and from the prophet even unto the priest, every
one dealeth falsely... saying Peace, Peace, when there is no Peace!'

"So spake the Book, of old.... But it was spoken also to America, of
1936!

"There is no Peace! For more than a year now, the League of Forgotten
Men has warned the politicians, the whole government, that we are sick
unto death of being the Dispossessed--and that, at last, we are more
than fifty million strong; no whimpering horde, but with the will, the
voices, the _votes_ to enforce our sovereignty! We have in no uncertain
way informed every politician that we demand--that we _demand_--certain
measures, and that we will brook no delay. Again and again we have
demanded that both the control of credit and the power to issue money be
unqualifiedly taken away from the private banks; that the soldiers not
only receive the bonus they with their blood and anguish so richly
earned in '17 and '18, but that the amount agreed upon be now doubled;
that all swollen incomes be severely limited and inheritances cut to
such small sums as may support the heirs only in youth and in old age;
that labor and farmers' unions be not merely recognized as instruments
for joint bargaining but be made, like the syndicates in Italy, official
parts of the government, representing the toilers; and that
International Jewish Finance and, equally, International Jewish
Communism and Anarchism and Atheism be, with all the stern solemnity and
rigid inflexibility this great nation can show, barred from all
activity. Those of you who have listened to me before will understand
that I--or rather that the League of Forgotten Men--has no quarrel with
individual Jews; that we are proud to have Rabbis among our directors;
but those subversive international organizations which, unfortunately,
are so largely Jewish, must be driven with whips and scorpions from off
the face of the earth.

"These demands we have made, and how long now, O Lord, how long, have
the politicians and the smirking representatives of Big Business
pretended to listen, to obey? 'Yes--yes--my masters of the League of
Forgotten Men--yes, we understand--just give us time!'

"There is no more time! Their time is over and all their unholy power!

"The conservative Senators--the United States Chamber of Commerce--the
giant bankers--the monarchs of steel and motors and electricity and
coal--the brokers and the holding-companies--they are all of them like
the Bourbon kings, of whom it was said that 'they forgot nothing and
they learned nothing.'

"But they died upon the guillotine!

"Perhaps we can be more merciful to our Bourbons. Perhaps--_perhaps_--we
can save them from the guillotine--the gallows--the swift firing-squad.
Perhaps we shall, in our new régime, under our new Constitution, with
our 'New Deal' that really _will_ be a New Deal and not an arrogant
experiment--perhaps we shall merely make these big bugs of finance and
politics sit on hard chairs, in dingy offices, toiling unending hours
with pen and typewriter as so many white-collar slaves for so many years
have toiled for _them_!

"It is, as Senator Berzelius Windrip puts it, 'the zero hour,' now, this
second. We have stopped bombarding the heedless ears of these false
masters. We're 'going over the top.' At last, after months and months of
taking counsel together, the directors of the League of Forgotten Men,
and I myself, announce that in the coming Democratic national convention
we shall, without one smallest reservation----"

"Listen! Listen! History being made!" Doremus cried at his heedless
family.

"--use the tremendous strength of the millions of League members to
secure the Democratic presidential nomination for
_Senator--Berzelius--Windrip_--which means, flatly, that he will be
elected--and that we of the League shall elect him--as President of
these United States!

"His program and that of the League do not in all details agree. But he
has implicitly pledged himself to take our advice, and, at least until
election, we shall back him, absolutely--with our money, with our
loyalty, with our votes... with our prayers. And may the Lord guide
him and us across the desert of iniquitous politics and swinishly
grasping finance into the golden glory of the Promised Land! God bless
you!"

****

Mrs. Jessup said cheerily, "Why, Dormouse, that bishop isn't a Fascist
at all--he's a regular Red Radical. But does this announcement of his
mean anything, really?"

Oh, well, Doremus reflected, he had lived with Emma for thirty-four
years, and not oftener than once or twice a year had he wanted to murder
her. Blandly he said, "Why, nothing much except that in a couple of
years now, on the ground of protecting us, the Buzz Windrip dictatorship
will be regimenting everything, from where we may pray to what detective
stories we may read."

"Sure he will! Sometimes I'm tempted to turn Communist! Funny--me with
my fat-headed old Hudson-River-Valley Dutch ancestors!" marveled Julian
Falck.

"Fine idea! Out of the frying pan of Windrip and Hitler into the fire of
the New York _Daily Worker_ and Stalin and automatics! And the Five-Year
Plan--I suppose they'd tell me that it's been decided by the Commissar
that each of my mares is to bear six colts a year now!" snorted Buck
Titus; while Dr. Fowler Greenhill jeered:

"Aw, shoot, Dad--and you too, Julian, you young paranoiac--you're
monomaniacs! Dictatorship? Better come into the office and let me
examine your heads! Why, America's the only free nation on earth.
Besides! Country's too big for a revolution. No, no! Couldn't happen
here!"




CHAPTER 6


    I'd rather follow a wild-eyed anarchist like Em Goldman, if
    they'd bring more johnnycake and beans and spuds into the humble
    cabin of the Common Man, than a twenty-four-carat,
    college-graduate, ex-cabinet-member statesman that was just
    interested in our turning out more limousines. Call me a
    socialist or any blame thing you want to, as long as you grab
    hold of the other end of the cross-cut saw with me and help
    slash the big logs of Poverty and Intolerance to pieces.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

His family--at least his wife and the cook, Mrs. Candy, and Sissy and
Mary, Mrs. Fowler Greenhill--believed that Doremus was of fickle health;
that any cold would surely turn into pneumonia; that he must wear his
rubbers, and eat his porridge, and smoke fewer cigarettes, and never
"overdo." He raged at them; he knew that though he did get staggeringly
tired after a crisis in the office, a night's sleep made him a little
dynamo again, and he could "turn out copy" faster than his spryest young
reporter.

He concealed his dissipations from them like any small boy from his
elders; lied unscrupulously about how many cigarettes he smoked; kept
concealed a flask of Bourbon from which he regularly had one nip, only
one, before he padded to bed; and when he had promised to go to sleep
early, he turned off his light till he was sure that Emma was
slumbering, then turned it on and happily read till two, curled under
the well-loved hand-woven blankets from a loom up on Mount Terror; his
legs twitching like a dreaming setter's what time the Chief Inspector of
the C.I.D., alone and unarmed, walked into the counterfeiters' hideout.
And once a month or so he sneaked down to the kitchen at three in the
morning and made himself coffee and washed up everything so that Emma
and Mrs. Candy would never know.... He thought they never knew!

These small deceptions gave him the ripest satisfaction in a life
otherwise devoted to public service, to trying to make Shad Ledue
edge-up the flower beds, to feverishly writing editorials that would
excite 3 per cent of his readers from breakfast time till noon and by 6
P.M. be eternally forgotten.

Sometimes when Emma came to loaf beside him in bed on a Sunday morning
and put her comfortable arm about his thin shoulder-blades, she was sick
with the realization that he was growing older and more frail. His
shoulders, she thought, were pathetic as those of an anemic baby....
That sadness of hers Doremus never guessed.

****

Even just before the paper went to press, even when Shad Ledue took off
two hours and charged an item of two dollars to have the lawnmower
sharpened, instead of filing it himself, even when Sissy and her gang
played the piano downstairs till two on nights when he did not want to
lie awake, Doremus was never irritable--except, usually, between arising
and the first life-saving cup of coffee.

The wise Emma was happy when he was snappish before breakfast. It meant
that he was energetic and popping with satisfactory ideas.

After Bishop Prang had presented the crown to Senator Windrip, as the
summer hobbled nervously toward the national political conventions, Emma
was disturbed. For Doremus was silent before breakfast, and he had
rheumy eyes, as though he was worried, as though he had slept badly.
Never was he cranky. She missed hearing him croaking, "Isn't that
confounded idiot, Mrs. Candy, _ever_ going to bring in the coffee? I
suppose she's sitting there reading her Testament! And will you be so
kind as to tell me, my good woman, why Sissy _never_ gets up for
breakfast, even after the rare nights when she goes to bed at 1 A.M.?
And--and will you look out at that walk! Covered with dead blossoms.
That swine Shad hasn't swept it for a week. I swear, I _am_ going to
fire him, and right away, this morning!"

Emma would have been happy to hear these familiar animal sounds, and to
cluck in answer, "Oh, why, that's terrible! I'll go tell Mrs. Candy to
hustle in the coffee right away!"

But he sat unspeaking, pale, opening his _Daily Informer_ as though he
were afraid to see what news had come in since he had left the office at
ten.

****

When Doremus, back in the 1920's, had advocated the recognition of
Russia, Fort Beulah had fretted that he was turning out-and-out
Communist.

He, who understood himself abnormally well, knew that far from being a
left-wing radical, he was at most a mild, rather indolent and somewhat
sentimental Liberal, who disliked pomposity, the heavy humor of public
men, and the itch for notoriety which made popular preachers and
eloquent educators and amateur play-producers and rich lady reformers
and rich lady sportswomen and almost every brand of rich lady come
preeningly in to see newspaper editors, with photographs under their
arms, and on their faces the simper of fake humility. But for all
cruelty and intolerance, and for the contempt of the fortunate for the
unfortunate, he had not mere dislike but testy hatred.

He had alarmed all his fellow editors in northern New England by
asserting the innocence of Tom Mooney, questioning the guilt of Sacco
and Vanzetti, condemning our intrusion in Haiti and Nicaragua,
advocating an increased income tax, writing, in the 1932 campaign, a
friendly account of the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas (and
afterwards, to tell the truth, voting for Franklin Roosevelt), and
stirring up a little local and ineffective hell regarding the serfdom of
the Southern share-croppers and the California fruit-pickers. He even
suggested editorially that when Russia had her factories and railroads
and giant farms really going--say, in 1945--she might conceivably be the
pleasantest country in the world for the (mythical!) Average Man. When
he wrote that editorial, after a lunch at which he had been irritated by
the smug croaking of Frank Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, he really did
get into trouble. He got named Bolshevik, and in two days his paper lost
a hundred and fifty out of its five thousand circulation.

Yet he was as little of a Bolshevik as Herbert Hoover.

He was, and he knew it, a small-town bourgeois Intellectual. Russia
forbade everything that made his toil worth enduring: privacy, the right
to think and to criticize as he freakishly pleased. To have his mind
policed by peasants in uniform--rather than that he would live in an
Alaska cabin, with beans and a hundred books and a new pair of pants
every three years.

Once, on a motor trip with Emma, he stopped in at a summer camp of
Communists. Most of them were City College Jews or neat Bronx dentists,
spectacled, and smooth-shaven except for foppish small mustaches. They
were hot to welcome these New England peasants and to explain the
Marxian gospel (on which, however, they furiously differed). Over
macaroni and cheese in an unpainted dining shack, they longed for the
black bread of Moscow. Later, Doremus chuckled to find how much they
resembled the Y.M.C.A. campers twenty miles down the highway--equally
Puritanical, hortatory, and futile, and equally given to silly games
with rubber balls.

Once only had he been dangerously active. He had supported the strike
for union recognition against the quarry company of Francis Tasbrough.
Men whom Doremus had known for years, solid cits like Superintendent of
Schools Emil Staubmeyer, and Charley Betts of the furniture store, had
muttered about "riding him out of town on a rail." Tasbrough reviled
him--even now, eight years later. After all this, the strike had been
lost, and the strike-leader, an avowed Communist named Karl Pascal, had
gone to prison for "inciting to violence." When Pascal, best of
mechanics, came out, he went to work in a littered little Fort Beulah
garage owned by a friendly, loquacious, belligerent Polish Socialist
named John Pollikop.

All day long Pascal and Pollikop yelpingly raided each other's trenches
in the battle between Social Democracy and Communism, and Doremus often
dropped in to stir them up. That was hard for Tasbrough, Staubmeyer,
Banker Crowley, and Lawyer Kitterick to bear.

If Doremus had not come from three generations of debt-paying
Vermonters, he would by now have been a penniless wandering printer...
and possibly less detached about the Sorrows of the Dispossessed.

The conservative Emma complained: "How you can tease people this way,
pretending you really _like_ greasy mechanics like this Pascal (and I
suspect you even have a sneaking fondness for Shad Ledue!) when you
could just associate with decent, prosperous people like Frank--it's
beyond me! What they must _think_ of you, sometimes! They don't
understand that you're really not a Socialist one bit, but really a
nice, kind-hearted, responsible man. Oh, I ought to smack you,
Dormouse!"

Not that he liked being called "Dormouse."

But then, no one did so except Emma and, in rare slips of the tongue,
Buck Titus. So it was endurable.




CHAPTER 7


    When I am protestingly dragged from my study and the family
    hearthside into the public meetings that I so much detest, I try
    to make my speech as simple and direct as those of the Child
    Jesus talking to the Doctors in the Temple.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Thunder in the mountains, clouds marching down the Beulah Valley,
unnatural darkness covering the world like black fog, and lightning that
picked out ugly scarps of the hills as though they were rocks thrown up
in an explosion.

To such fury of the enraged heavens, Doremus awakened on that morning of
late July.

As abruptly as one who, in the death cell, startles out of sleep to the
realization, "Today they'll hang me!" he sat up, bewildered, as he
reflected that today Senator Berzelius Windrip would probably be
nominated for President.

The Republican convention was over, with Walt Trowbridge as presidential
candidate. The Democratic convention, meeting in Cleveland, with a good
deal of gin, strawberry soda, and sweat, had finished the committee
reports, the kind words said for the Flag, the assurances to the ghost
of Jefferson that he would be delighted by what, if Chairman Jim Farley
consented, would be done here this week. They had come to the
nominations--Senator Windrip had been nominated by Colonel Dewey Haik,
Congressman, and power in the American Legion. Gratifying applause and
hasty elimination had greeted such Favorite Sons of the several states
as Al Smith, Carter Glass, William McAdoo, and Cordell Hull. Now, on the
twelfth ballot, there were four contestants left, and they, in order of
votes, were Senator Windrip, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Senator
Robinson of Arkansas, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

Great and dramatic shenanigans had happened, and Doremus Jessup's
imagination had seen them all clearly as they were reported by the
hysterical radio and by bulletins from the A.P. that fell redhot and
smoking upon his desk at the _Informer_ office.

In honor of Senator Robinson, the University of Arkansas brass band
marched in behind a leader riding in an old horse-drawn buggy which was
plastered with great placards proclaiming "Save the Constitution" and
"Robinson for Sanity." The name of Miss Perkins had been cheered for two
hours, while the delegates marched with their state banners, and
President Roosevelt's name had been cheered for three--cheered
affectionately and quite homicidally, since every delegate knew that Mr.
Roosevelt and Miss Perkins were far too lacking in circus tinsel and
general clownishness to succeed at this critical hour of the nation's
hysteria, when the electorate wanted a ringmaster-revolutionist like
Senator Windrip.

Windrip's own demonstration, scientifically worked up beforehand by his
secretary-press-agent-private-philosopher, Lee Sarason, yielded nothing
to others'. For Sarason had read his Chesterton well enough to know that
there is only one thing bigger than a very big thing, and that is a
thing so very small that it can be seen and understood.

When Colonel Dewey Haik put Buzz's name in nomination, the Colonel wound
up by shouting, "One thing more! Listen! It is the special request of
Senator Windrip that you do _not_ waste the time of this history-making
assembly by any cheering of his name--any cheering whatever. We of the
League of Forgotten Men (yes--and Women!) don't want empty acclaim, but
a solemn consideration of the desperate and immediate needs of 60 per
cent of the population of the United States. No cheers--but may
Providence guide us in the most solemn thinking we have ever done!"

As he finished, down the center aisle came a private procession. But
this was no parade of thousands. There were only thirty-one persons in
it, and the only banners were three flags and two large placards.

Leading it, in old blue uniforms, were two G.A.R. veterans, and between,
arm-in-arm with them, a Confederate in gray. They were such very little
old men, all over ninety, leaning one on another and glancing timidly
about in the hope that no one would laugh at them.

The Confederate carried a Virginia regimental banner, torn as by
shrapnel; and one of the Union veterans lifted high a slashed flag of
the First Minnesota.

The dutiful applause which the convention had given to the
demonstrations of other candidates had been but rain-patter compared
with the tempest which greeted the three shaky, shuffling old men. On
the platform the band played, inaudibly, "Dixie," then "When Johnny
Comes Marching Home Again," and, standing on his chair midway of the
auditorium, as a plain member of his state delegation, Buzz Windrip
bowed--bowed--bowed and tried to smile, while tears started from his
eyes and he sobbed helplessly, and the audience began to sob with him.

Following the old men were twelve Legionnaires, wounded in
1918--stumbling on wooden legs, dragging themselves between crutches;
one in a wheel chair, yet so young-looking and gay; and one with a black
mask before what should have been a face. Of these, one carried an
enormous flag, and another a placard demanding: "Our Starving Families
Must Have the Bonus--We Want Only Justice--We Want Buzz for President."

And leading them, not wounded, but upright and strong and resolute, was
Major General Hermann Meinecke, United States Army. Not in all the
memory of the older reporters had a soldier on active service ever
appeared as a public political agitator. The press whispered one to
another, "That general'll get canned, unless Buzz is elected--then he'd
probably be made Duke of Hoboken."

****

Following the soldiers were ten men and women, their toes through their
shoes, and wearing rags that were the more pitiful because they had been
washed and rewashed till they had lost all color. With them tottered
four pallid children, their teeth rotted out, between them just managing
to hold up a placard declaring, "We Are on Relief. We Want to Become
Human Beings Again. We Want Buzz!"

Twenty feet behind came one lone tall man. The delegates had been
craning around to see what would follow the relief victims. When they
did see, they rose, they bellowed, they clapped. For the lone man----Few
of the crowd had seen him in the flesh; all of them had seen him a
hundred times in press pictures, photographed among litters of books in
his study--photographed in conference with President Roosevelt and
Secretary Ickes--photographed shaking hands with Senator
Windrip--photographed before a microphone, his shrieking mouth a dark
open trap and his lean right arm thrown up in hysterical emphasis; all
of them had heard his voice on the radio till they knew it as they knew
the voices of their own brothers; all of them recognized, coming through
the wide main entrance, at the end of the Windrip parade, the apostle of
the Forgotten Men, Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Then the convention cheered Buzz Windrip for four unbroken hours.

****

In the detailed descriptions of the convention which the news bureaus
sent following the feverish first bulletins, one energetic Birmingham
reporter pretty well proved that the Southern battle flag carried by the
Confederate veteran had been lent by the museum in Richmond and the
Northern flag by a distinguished meat-packer of Chicago who was the
grandson of a Civil War general.

Lee Sarason never told anyone save Buzz Windrip that both flags had been
manufactured on Hester Street, New York, in 1929, for the patriotic
drama, _Morgan's Riding_, and that both came from a theatrical
warehouse.

****

Before the cheering, as the Windrip parade neared the platform, they
were greeted by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, the celebrated author,
lecturer, and composer, who--suddenly conjured onto the platform as if
whisked out of the air--sang to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" words which
she herself had written:

    _Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.,_
    _A riding on a hobby--_
    _To throw Big Business out, by Gosh,_
    _And be the People's Lobby!_

      _Chorus:_

      _Buzz and buzz and keep it up,_
      _Our cares and needs he's toting,_
      _You are a most ungrateful pup,_
      _Unless for Buzz you're voting!_

    _The League of the Forgotten Men_
    _Don't like to be forgotten,_
    _They went to Washington and then_
    _They sang, "There's something rotten!"_

That joyous battle song was sung on the radio by nineteen different
prima donnas before midnight, by some sixteen million less vocal
Americans within forty-eight hours, and by at least ninety million
friends and scoffers in the struggle that was to come. All through the
campaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get lots of jolly humor out of puns
on going to Wash., and to wash. Walt Trowbridge, he jeered, wasn't going
to either of them!

Yet Lee Sarason knew that in addition to this comic masterpiece, the
cause of Windrip required an anthem more elevated in thought and spirit,
befitting the seriousness of crusading Americans.

Long after the convention's cheering for Windrip had ended and the
delegates were again at their proper business of saving the nation and
cutting one another's throats, Sarason had Mrs. Gimmitch sing a more
inspirational hymn, with words by Sarason himself, in collaboration with
a quite remarkable surgeon, one Dr. Hector Macgoblin.

This Dr. Macgoblin, soon to become a national monument, was as
accomplished in syndicated medical journalism, in the reviewing of books
about education and psychoanalysis, in preparing glosses upon the
philosophies of Hegel, Professor Guenther, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,
and Lothrop Stoddard, in the rendition of Mozart on the violin, in
semi-professional boxing, and in the composition of epic poetry, as he
was in the practice of medicine.

Dr. Macgoblin! What a man!

The Sarason-Macgoblin ode, entitled "Bring Out the Old-time Musket,"
became to Buzz Windrip's band of liberators what "Giovanezza" was to the
Italians, "The Horst Wessel Song" to the Nazis, "The International" to
all Marxians. Along with the convention, the radio millions heard Mrs.
Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch's contralto, rich as peat, chanting:

         _BRING OUT THE OLD-TIME MUSKET_

    _Dear Lord, we have sinned, we have slumbered,_
    _And our flag lies stained in the dust,_
    _And the souls of the Past are calling, calling,_
    _"Arise from your sloth--you must!"_
    _Lead us, O soul of Lincoln,_
    _Inspire us, spirit of Lee,_
    _To rule all the world for righteousness,_
          _To fight for the right,_
          _To awe with our might,_
    _As we did in 'sixty-three._

          _Chorus:_

          _See, youth with desire hot glowing,_
          _See, maiden, with fearless eye,_
              _Leading our ranks_
              _Thunder the tanks,_
          _Aëroplanes cloud the sky._

          _Bring out the old-time musket,_
          _Rouse up the old-time fire!_
          _See, all the world is crumbling,_
          _Dreadful and dark and dire._
          _America! Rise and conquer_
          _The world to our heart's desire!_

"Great showmanship. P. T. Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better,"
mused Doremus, as he studied the A.P. flimsies, as he listened to the
radio he had had temporarily installed in his office. And, much later:
"When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers.
That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away
in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter
cattle in uniforms. Hm."

The thunderstorm, which had mercifully lulled, burst again in wrathful
menace.

****

All afternoon the convention balloted, over and over, with no change in
the order of votes for the presidential candidate. Toward six, Miss
Perkins's manager threw her votes to Roosevelt, who gained then on
Senator Windrip. They seemed to have settled down to an all-night
struggle, and at ten in the evening Doremus wearily left the office. He
did not, tonight, want the sympathetic and extremely feminized
atmosphere of his home, and he dropped in at the rectory of his friend
Father Perefixe. There he found a satisfyingly unfeminized, untalcumized
group. The Reverend Mr. Falck was there. Swart, sturdy young Perefixe
and silvery old Falck often worked together, were fond of each other,
and agreed upon the advantages of clerical celibacy and almost every
other doctrine except the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. With them
were Buck Titus, Louis Rotenstern, Dr. Fowler Greenhill, and Banker
Crowley, a financier who liked to cultivate an appearance of free
intellectual discussion, though only after the hours devoted to refusing
credit to desperate farmers and storekeepers.

And not to be forgotten was Foolish the dog, who that thunderous morning
had suspected his master's worry, followed him to the office, and all
day long had growled at Haik and Sarason and Mrs. Gimmitch on the radio
and showed an earnest conviction that he ought to chew up all flimsies
reporting the convention.

Better than his own glacial white-paneled drawing room with its
portraits of dead Vermont worthies, Doremus liked Father Perefixe's
little study, and its combination of churchliness, of freedom from
Commerce (at least ordinary Commerce), as displayed in a crucifix and a
plaster statuette of the Virgin and a shrieking red-and-green Italian
picture of the Pope, with practical affairs, as shown in the oak
roll-top desk and steel filing-cabinet and well-worn portable
typewriter. It was a pious hermit's cave with the advantages of leather
chairs and excellent rye highballs.

The night passed as the eight of them (for Foolish too had his tipple of
milk) all sipped and listened; the night passed as the convention
balloted, furiously, unavailingly... that congress six hundred miles
away, six hundred miles of befogged night, yet with every speech, every
derisive yelp, coming into the priest's cabinet in the same second in
which they were heard in the hall at Cleveland.

Father Perefixe's housekeeper (who was sixty-five years old to his
thirty-nine, to the disappointment of all the scandal-loving local
Protestants) came in with scrambled eggs, cold beer.

"When my dear wife was still among us, she used to send me to bed at
midnight," sighed Dr. Falck.

"My wife does now!" said Doremus.

"So does mine--and her a New York girl!" said Louis Rotenstern.

"Father Steve, here, and I are the only guys with a sensible way of
living," crowed Buck Titus. "Celibates. We can go to bed with our pants
on, or not go to bed at all," and Father Perefixe murmured, "But it's
curious, Buck, what people find to boast of--you that you're free of
God's tyranny and also that you can go to bed in your pants--Mr. Falck
and Dr. Greenhill and I that God is so lenient with us that some nights
He lets us off from sick-calls and we can go to bed with 'em off! And
Louis because----Listen! Listen! Sounds like business!"

Colonel Dewey Haik, Buzz's proposer, was announcing that Senator Windrip
felt it would be only modest of him to go to his hotel now, but he had
left a letter which he, Haik, would read. And he did read it,
inexorably.

Windrip stated that, just in case anyone did not completely understand
his platform, he wanted to make it all ringingly clear.

Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but
all for the bankers--except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven
out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified)
plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced
by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for
Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of
the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own
coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them,
that it could defy the World... and maybe, if that World was so
impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to
take it over and run it properly.

Each moment the brassy importunities of the radio seemed to Doremus the
more offensive, while the hillside slept in the heavy summer night, and
he thought about the mazurka of the fireflies, the rhythm of crickets
like the rhythm of the revolving earth itself, the voluptuous breezes
that bore away the stink of cigars and sweat and whisky breaths and mint
chewing-gum that seemed to come to them from the convention over the
sound waves, along with the oratory.

****

It was after dawn, and Father Perefixe (unclerically stripped to
shirt-sleeves and slippers) had just brought them in a grateful tray of
onion soup, with a gob of Hamburg steak for Foolish, when the opposition
to Buzz collapsed and hastily, on the next ballot, Senator Berzelius
Windrip was nominated as Democratic Candidate for President of the
United States.

****

Doremus, Buck Titus, Perefixe, and Falck were for a time too gloomy for
speech--so possibly was the dog Foolish, as well, for at the turning off
of the radio he tail-thumped in only the most tentative way.

R. C. Crowley gloated, "Well, all my life I've voted Republican, but
here's a man that----Well, I'm going to vote for Windrip!"

Father Perefixe said tartly, "And I've voted Democratic ever since I
came from Canada and got naturalized, but this time I'm going to vote
Republican. What about you fellows?"

Rotenstern was silent. He did not like Windrip's reference to Jews. The
ones he knew best--no, they were Americans! Lincoln was his tribal god
too, he vowed.

"Me? I'll vote for Walt Trowbridge, of course," growled Buck.

"So will I," said Doremus. "No! I won't either! Trowbridge won't have a
chance. I think I'll indulge in the luxury of being independent, for
once, and vote Prohibition or the Battle-Creek bran-and-spinach ticket,
or anything that makes some sense!"

****

It was after seven that morning when Doremus came home, and, remarkably
enough, Shad Ledue, who was supposed to go to work at seven, was at work
at seven. Normally he never left his bachelor shack in Lower Town till
ten to eight, but this morning he was on the job, chopping kindling. (Oh
yes, reflected Doremus--that probably explained it. Kindling-chopping,
if practised early enough, would wake up everyone in the house.)

Shad was tall and hulking; his shirt was sweat-stained; and as usual he
needed a shave. Foolish growled at him. Doremus suspected that at some
time he had been kicking Foolish. He wanted to honor Shad for the sweaty
shirt, the honest toil, and all the rugged virtues, but even as a
Liberal American Humanitarian, Doremus found it hard always to keep up
the Longfellow's-Village-Blacksmith-cum-Marx attitude consistently and
not sometimes backslide into a belief that there must be _some_ crooks
and swine among the toilers as, notoriously, there were so shockingly
many among persons with more than $3500 a year.

"Well--been sitting up listening to the radio," purred Doremus. "Did you
know the Democrats have nominated Senator Windrip?"

"That so?" Shad growled.

"Yes. Just now. How you planning to vote?"

"Well now, I'll tell you, Mr. Jessup." Shad struck an attitude, leaning
on his ax. Sometimes he could be quite pleasant and condescending, even
to this little man who was so ignorant about coon-hunting and the games
of craps and poker.

"I'm going to vote for Buzz Windrip. He's going to fix it so everybody
will get four thousand bucks, immediate, and I'm going to start a
chicken farm. I can make a bunch of money out of chickens! I'll show
some of these guys that think they're so rich!"

"But, Shad, you didn't have so much luck with chickens when you tried to
raise 'em in the shed back there. You, uh, I'm afraid you sort of let
their water freeze up on 'em in winter, and they all died, you
remember."

"Oh, them? So what! Heck! There was too few of 'em. I'm not going to
waste _my_ time foolin' with just a couple dozen chickens! When I get
five-six thousand of 'em to make it worth my while, _then_ I'll show
you! You bet." And, most patronizingly: "Buzz Windrip is O.K."

"I'm glad he has your _imprimatur_."

"Huh?" said Shad, and scowled.

But as Doremus plodded up on the back porch he heard from Shad a faint
derisive:

"O.K., Chief!"




CHAPTER 8


    I don't pretend to be a very educated man, except maybe educated
    in the heart, and in being able to feel for the sorrows and fear
    of every ornery fellow human being. Still and all, I've read the
    Bible through, from kiver to kiver, like my wife's folks say
    down in Arkansas, some eleven times; I've read all the law books
    they've printed; and as to contemporaries, I don't guess I've
    missed much of all the grand literature produced by Bruce
    Barton, Edgar Guest, Arthur Brisbane, Elizabeth Dilling, Walter
    Pitkin, and William Dudley Pelley.

    This last gentleman I honor not only for his rattling good
    yarns, and his serious work in investigating life beyond the
    grave and absolutely proving that only a blind fool could fail
    to believe in Personal Immortality, but, finally, for his
    public-spirited and self-sacrificing work in founding the Silver
    Shirts. These true knights, even if they did not attain quite
    all the success they deserved, were one of our most noble and
    Galahad-like attempts to combat the sneaking, snaky, sinister,
    surreptitious, seditious plots of the Red Radicals and other
    sour brands of Bolsheviks that incessantly threaten the American
    standards of Liberty, High Wages, and Universal Security.

    These fellows have Messages, and we haven't got time for
    anything in literature except a straight, hard-hitting,
    heart-throbbing Message!

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

During the very first week of his campaign, Senator Windrip clarified
his philosophy by issuing his distinguished proclamation: "The Fifteen
Points of Victory for the Forgotten Men." The fifteen planks, in his own
words (or maybe in Lee Sarason's words, or Dewey Haik's words), were
these:

(1) All finance in the country, including banking, insurance, stocks and
bonds and mortgages, shall be under the absolute control of a Federal
Central Bank, owned by the government and conducted by a Board appointed
by the President, which Board shall, without need of recourse to
Congress for legislative authorization, be empowered to make all
regulations governing finance. Thereafter, as soon as may be
practicable, this said Board shall consider the nationalization and
government-ownership, for the Profit of the Whole People, of all mines,
oilfields, water-power, public utilities, transportation, and
communication.

(2) The President shall appoint a commission, equally divided between
manual workers, employers, and representatives of the Public, to
determine which Labor Unions are qualified to represent the Workers; and
report to the Executive, for legal action, all pretended labor
organizations, whether "Company Unions," or "Red Unions," controlled by
Communists and the so-called "Third International." The duly recognized
Unions shall be constituted Bureaus of the Government, with power of
decision in all labor disputes. Later, the same investigation and
official recognition shall be extended to farm organizations. In this
elevation of the position of the Worker, it shall be emphasized that the
League of Forgotten Men is the chief bulwark against the menace of
destructive and un-American Radicalism.

(3) In contradistinction to the doctrines of Red Radicals, with their
felonious expropriation of the arduously acquired possessions which
insure to aged persons their security, this League and Party will
guarantee Private Initiative and the Right to Private Property for all
time.

(4) Believing that only under God Almighty, to Whom we render all
homage, do we Americans hold our vast Power, we shall guarantee to all
persons absolute freedom of religious worship, provided, however, that
no atheist, agnostic, believer in Black Magic, nor any Jew who shall
refuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament, nor any person of any
faith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted to
hold any public office or to practice as a teacher, professor, lawyer,
judge, or as a physician, except in the category of Obstetrics.

(5) Annual net income per person shall be limited to $500,000. No
accumulated fortune may at any one time exceed $3,000,000 per person. No
one person shall, during his entire lifetime, be permitted to retain an
inheritance or various inheritances in total exceeding $2,000,000. All
incomes or estates in excess of the sums named shall be seized by the
Federal Government for use in Relief and in Administrative expenses.

(6) Profit shall be taken out of War by seizing all dividends over and
above 6 per cent that shall be received from the manufacture,
distribution, or sale, during Wartime, of all arms, munitions, aircraft,
ships, tanks, and all other things directly applicable to warfare, as
well as from food, textiles, and all other supplies furnished to the
American or to any allied army.

(7) Our armaments and the size of our military and naval establishments
shall be consistently enlarged until they shall equal, but--since this
country has no desire for foreign conquest of any kind--not surpass, in
every branch of the forces of defense, the martial strength of any other
single country or empire in the world. Upon inauguration, this League
and Party shall make this its first obligation, together with the
issuance of a firm proclamation to all nations of the world that our
armed forces are to be maintained solely for the purpose of insuring
world peace and amity.

(8) Congress shall have the sole right to issue money and immediately
upon our inauguration it shall at least double the present supply of
money, in order to facilitate the fluidity of credit.

(9) We cannot too strongly condemn the un-Christian attitude of certain
otherwise progressive nations in their discriminations against the Jews,
who have been among the strongest supporters of the League, and who will
continue to prosper and to be recognized as fully Americanized, though
only so long as they continue to support our ideals.

(10) All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office,
practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of
grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in
excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any
other manner receive. In order, however, to give the most sympathetic
aid possible to all Negroes who comprehend their proper and valuable
place in society, all such colored persons, male or female, as can prove
that they have devoted not less than forty-five years to such suitable
tasks as domestic service, agricultural labor, and common labor in
industries, shall at the age of sixty-five be permitted to appear before
a special Board, composed entirely of white persons, and upon proof that
while employed they have never been idle except through sickness, they
shall be recommended for pensions not to exceed the sum of $500.00 per
person per year, nor to exceed $700.00 per family. Negroes shall, by
definition, be persons with at least one sixteenth colored blood.

(11) Far from opposing such high-minded and economically sound methods
of the relief of poverty, unemployment, and old age as the EPIC plan of
the Hon. Upton Sinclair, the "Share the Wealth" and "Every Man a King"
proposals of the late Hon. Huey Long to assure every family $5000 a
year, the Townsend plan, the Utopian plan, Technocracy, and all
competent schemes of unemployment insurance, a Commission shall
immediately be appointed by the New Administration to study, reconcile,
and recommend for immediate adoption the best features in these several
plans for Social Security, and the Hon. Messrs. Sinclair, Townsend,
Eugene Reed, and Howard Scott are herewith invited to in every way
advise and collaborate with that Commission.

(12) All women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible, except in
such peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing and beauty
parlors, be assisted to return to their incomparably sacred duties as
home-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable future Citizens of the
Commonwealth.

(13) Any person advocating Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism,
advocating refusal to enlist in case of war, or advocating alliance with
Russia in any war whatsoever, shall be subject to trial for high
treason, with a minimum penalty of twenty years at hard labor in prison,
and a maximum of death on the gallows, or other form of execution which
the judges may find convenient.

(14) All bonuses promised to former soldiers of any war in which America
has ever engaged shall be immediately paid in full, in cash, and in all
cases of veterans with incomes of less than $5,000.00 a year, the
formerly promised sums shall be doubled.

(15) Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiate
amendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shall
have the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures for
the conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b), that
Congress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to the
attention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any needed
legislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the President
so to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately have
removed from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to be
unconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of the
President, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.

_Addendum_: It shall be strictly understood that, as the League of
Forgotten Men and the Democratic Party, as now constituted, have no
purpose nor desire to carry out any measure that shall not unqualifiedly
meet with the desire of the majority of voters in these United States,
the League and Party regard none of the above fifteen points as
obligatory and unmodifiable except No. 15, and upon the others they will
act or refrain from acting in accordance with the general desire of the
Public, who shall under the new régime be again granted an individual
freedom of which they have been deprived by the harsh and restrictive
economic measures of former administrations, both Republican and
Democratic.

****

"But what does it mean?" marveled Mrs. Jessup, when her husband had read
the platform to her. "It's so inconsistent. Sounds like a combination of
Norman Thomas and Calvin Coolidge. I don't seem to understand it. I
wonder if Mr. Windrip understands it himself?"

"Sure. You bet he does. It mustn't be supposed that because Windrip gets
that intellectual dressmaker Sarason to prettify his ideas up for him he
doesn't recognize 'em and clasp 'em to his bosom when they're dolled up
in two-dollar words. I'll tell you just what it all means: Articles One
and Five mean that if the financiers and transportation kings and so on
don't come through heavily with support for Buzz they may be threatened
with bigger income taxes and some control of their businesses. But they
are coming through, I hear, handsomely--they're paying for Buzz's radio
and his parades. Two, that by controlling their unions directly, Buzz's
gang can kidnap all Labor into slavery. Three backs up the security for
Big Capital and Four brings the preachers into line as scared and unpaid
press-agents for Buzz.

"Six doesn't mean anything at all--munition firms with vertical trusts
will be able to wangle one 6 per cent on manufacture, one on
transportation, and one on sales--at least. Seven means we'll get ready
to follow all the European nations in trying to hog the whole world.
Eight means that by inflation, big industrial companies will be able to
buy their outstanding bonds back at a cent on the dollar, and Nine that
all Jews who don't cough up plenty of money for the robber baron will be
punished, even including the Jews who haven't much to cough up. Ten,
that all well-paying jobs and businesses held by Negroes will be grabbed
by the Poor White Trash among Buzz's worshipers--and that instead of
being denounced they'll be universally praised as patriotic protectors
of Racial Purity. Eleven, that Buzz'll be able to pass the buck for not
creating any real relief for poverty. Twelve, that women will later lose
the vote and the right to higher education and be foxed out of all
decent jobs and urged to rear soldiers to be killed in foreign wars.
Thirteen, that anybody who opposes Buzz in any way at all can be called
a Communist and scragged for it. Why, under this clause, Hoover and Al
Smith and Ogden Mills--yes, and you and me--will all be Communists.

"Fourteen, that Buzz thinks enough of the support of the veterans' vote
to be willing to pay high for it--in other people's money. And
Fifteen--well, that's the one lone clause that really does mean
something; and it means that Windrip and Lee Sarason and Bishop Prang
and I guess maybe this Colonel Dewey Haik and this Dr. Hector
Macgoblin--you know, this doctor that helps write the high-minded hymns
for Buzz--they've realized that this country has gone so flabby that any
gang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not to
_seem_ illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all the
power and applause and salutes, all the money and palaces and willin'
women they want.

"They're only a handful, but just think how small Lenin's gang was at
first, and Mussolini's, and Hitler's, and Kemal Pasha's, and Napoleon's!
You'll see all the liberal preachers and modernist educators and
discontented newspapermen and farm agitators--maybe they'll worry at
first, but they'll get caught up in the web of propaganda, like we all
were in the Great War, and they'll all be convinced that, even if our
Buzzy maybe _has_ got a few faults, he's on the side of the plain
people, and against all the tight old political machines, and they'll
rouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile Big
Business will just wink and sit tight!) and then, by God, this
crook--oh, I don't know whether he's more of a crook or an hysterical
religious fanatic--along with Sarason and Haik and Prang and
Macgoblin--these five men will be able to set up a régime that'll remind
you of Henry Morgan the pirate capturing a merchant ship."

"But will Americans stand for it long?" whimpered Emma. "Oh, no, not
people like us--the descendants of the pioneers!"

"Dunno. I'm going to try help see that they don't.... Of course you
understand that you and I and Sissy and Fowler and Mary will probably be
shot if I do try to do anything.... Hm! I sound brave enough now, but
probably I'll be scared to death when I hear Buzz's private troops go
marching by!"

"Oh, you will be careful, won't you?" begged Emma. "Oh. Before I forget
it. How many times must I tell you, Dormouse, not to give Foolish
chicken bones--they'll stick in his poor throat and choke him to death.
And you just _never_ remember to take the keys out of the car when you
put it in the garage at night! I'm perfectly _sure_ Shad Ledue or
somebody will steal it one of these nights!"

****

Father Stephen Perefixe, when he read the Fifteen Points, was
considerably angrier than Doremus.

He snorted, "What? Negroes, Jews, women--they all banned and they leave
us Catholics out, this time? Hitler didn't neglect us. _He's_ persecuted
us. Must be that Charley Coughlin. He's made us too respectable!"

Sissy, who was eager to go to a school of architecture and become a
creator of new styles in houses of glass and steel; Lorinda Pike, who
had plans for a Carlsbad-Vichy-Saratoga in Vermont; Mrs. Candy, who
aspired to a home bakery of her own when she should be too old for
domestic labor--they were all of them angrier than either Doremus or
Father Perefixe.

Sissy sounded not like a flirtatious girl but like a battling woman as
she snarled, "So the League of Forgotten Men is going to make us a
League of Forgotten Women! Send us back to washing diapers and leaching
out ashes for soap! Let us read Louisa May Alcott and Barrie--except on
the Sabbath, of course! Let us sleep in humble gratitude with men----"

"_Sissy_!" wailed her mother.

"--like Shad Ledue! Well, Dad, you can sit right down and write Busy
Berzelius for me that I'm going to England on the next boat!"

Mrs. Candy stopped drying the water glasses (with the soft dishtowels
which she scrupulously washed out daily) long enough to croak, "What
nasty men! I do hope they get shot soon," which for Mrs. Candy was a
startlingly long and humanitarian statement.

****

"Yes. Nasty enough. But what I've got to keep remembering is that
Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn't plot all
this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart
politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy--oh, if it hadn't been
one Windrip, it'd been another.... We had it coming, we
Respectables.... But that isn't going to make us like it!" thought
Doremus.




CHAPTER 9


    Those who have never been on the inside in the Councils of State
    can never realize that with really high-class Statesmen, their
    chief quality is not political canniness, but a big, rich,
    overflowing Love for all sorts and conditions of people and for
    the whole land. That Love and that Patriotism have been my sole
    guiding principles in Politics. My one ambition is to get all
    Americans to realize that they are, and must continue to be, the
    greatest Race on the face of this old Earth, and second, to
    realize that whatever apparent Differences there may be among
    us, in wealth, knowledge, skill, ancestry or strength--though,
    of course, all this does not apply to people who are _racially_
    different from us--we are all brothers, bound together in the
    great and wonderful bond of National Unity, for which we should
    all be very glad. And I think we ought to for this be willing to
    sacrifice any individual gains at all.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Berzelius Windrip, of whom in late summer and early autumn of 1936 there
were so many published photographs--showing him popping into cars and
out of aëroplanes, dedicating bridges, eating corn pone and side-meat
with Southerners and clam chowder and bran with Northerners, addressing
the American Legion, the Liberty League, the Y.M.H.A., the Young
People's Socialist League, the Elks, the Bartenders' and Waiters' Union,
the Anti-Saloon League, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in
Afghanistan--showing him kissing lady centenarians and shaking hands
with ladies called Madame, but never the opposite--showing him in Savile
Row riding-clothes on Long Island and in overalls and a khaki shirt in
the Ozarks--this Buzz Windrip was almost a dwarf, yet with an enormous
head, a bloodhound head, of huge ears, pendulous cheeks, mournful eyes.
He had a luminous, ungrudging smile which (declared the Washington
correspondents) he turned on and off deliberately, like an electric
light, but which could make his ugliness more attractive than the
simpers of any pretty man.

His hair was so coarse and black and straight, and worn so long in the
back, that it hinted of Indian blood. In the Senate he preferred clothes
that suggested the competent insurance salesman, but when farmer
constituents were in Washington he appeared in an historic ten-gallon
hat with a mussy gray "cutaway" which somehow you erroneously remembered
as a black "Prince Albert."

In that costume, he looked like a sawed-off museum model of a
medicine-show "doctor," and indeed it was rumored that during one law
school vacation Buzz Windrip had played the banjo and done card tricks
and handed down medicine bottles and managed the shell game for no less
scientific an expedition than Old Dr. Alagash's Traveling Laboratory,
which specialized in the Choctaw Cancer Cure, the Chinook Consumption
Soother, and the Oriental Remedy for Piles and Rheumatism Prepared from
a World-old Secret Formula by the Gipsy Princess, Queen Peshawara. The
company, ardently assisted by Buzz, killed off quite a number of persons
who, but for their confidence in Dr. Alagash's bottles of water,
coloring matter, tobacco juice, and raw corn whisky, might have gone
early enough to doctors. But since then, Windrip had redeemed himself,
no doubt, by ascending from the vulgar fraud of selling bogus medicine,
standing in front of a megaphone, to the dignity of selling bogus
economics, standing on an indoor platform under mercury-vapor lights in
front of a microphone.

He was in stature but a small man, yet remember that so were Napoleon,
Lord Beaverbrook, Stephen A. Douglas, Frederick the Great, and the Dr.
Goebbels who is privily known throughout Germany as "Wotan's Mickey
Mouse."

****

Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip
from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large
audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar
easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated
piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet
more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his
speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political
platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present
credo--derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and
probably the revue _Of Thee I Sing_--little Buzz, back home, had
advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county
poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs
for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.

Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory,
but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you
thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not
remember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this
prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more
overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the
pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit
Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing
mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly
and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts--figures
and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were
entirely incorrect.

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be
authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with
him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a
Fascist but a Democrat--a homespun
Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat--and (sans
scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol
against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own
warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic
madness of Europe.

Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common
Man.

Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every
American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the
sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in
rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the
especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman,
in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in
Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr.
Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of
anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking
sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in
newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as
degenerate.

But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that
while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was
exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and
they raised hands to him in worship.

****

In the greatest of all native American arts (next to the talkies, and
those Spirituals in which Negroes express their desire to go to heaven,
to St. Louis, or almost any place distant from the romantic old
plantations), namely, in the art of Publicity, Lee Sarason was in no way
inferior even to such acknowledged masters as Edward Bernays, the late
Theodore Roosevelt, Jack Dempsey, and Upton Sinclair.

Sarason had, as it was scientifically called, been "building up" Senator
Windrip for seven years before his nomination as President. Where other
Senators were encouraged by their secretaries and wives (no potential
dictator ought ever to have a visible wife, and none ever has had,
except Napoleon) to expand from village back-slapping to noble, rotund,
Ciceronian gestures, Sarason had encouraged Windrip to keep up in the
Great World all of the clownishness which (along with considerable legal
shrewdness and the endurance to make ten speeches a day) had endeared
him to his simple-hearted constituents in his native state.

Windrip danced a hornpipe before an alarmed academic audience when he
got his first honorary degree; he kissed Miss Flandreau at the South
Dakota beauty contest; he entertained the Senate, or at least the Senate
galleries, with detailed accounts of how to catch catfish--from the
bait-digging to the ultimate effects of the jug of corn whisky; he
challenged the venerable Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to a duel
with sling-shots.

Though she was not visible, Windrip did have a wife--Sarason had none,
nor was likely to; and Walt Trowbridge was a widower. Buzz's lady stayed
back home, raising spinach and chickens and telling the neighbors that
she expected to go to Washington _next_ year, the while Windrip was
informing the press that his "Frau" was so edifyingly devoted to their
two small children and to Bible study that she simply could not be
coaxed to come East.

But when it came to assembling a political machine, Windrip had no need
of counsel from Lee Sarason.

Where Buzz was, there were the vultures also. His hotel suite, in the
capital city of his home state, in Washington, in New York, or in Kansas
City, was like--well, Frank Sullivan once suggested that it resembled
the office of a tabloid newspaper upon the impossible occasion of Bishop
Cannon's setting fire to St. Patrick's Cathedral, kidnaping the Dionne
quintuplets, and eloping with Greta Garbo in a stolen tank.

In the "parlor" of any of these suites, Buzz Windrip sat in the middle
of the room, a telephone on the floor beside him, and for hours he
shrieked at the instrument, "Hello--yuh--speaking," or at the door,
"Come in--come in!" and "Sit down 'n' take a load off your feet!" All
day, all night till dawn, he would be bellowing, "Tell him he can take
his bill and go climb a tree," or "Why certainly, old man--tickled to
death to support it--utility corporations cer'nly been getting a raw
deal," and "You tell the Governor I want Kippy elected sheriff and I
want the indictment against him quashed and I want it damn quick!"
Usually, squatted there cross-legged, he would be wearing a smart belted
camel's-hair coat with an atrocious checked cap.

In a fury, as he was at least every quarter hour, he would leap up, peel
off the overcoat (showing either a white boiled shirt and clerical black
bow, or a canary-yellow silk shirt with a scarlet tie), fling it on the
floor, and put it on again with slow dignity, while he bellowed his
anger like Jeremiah cursing Jerusalem, or like a sick cow mourning its
kidnaped young.

There came to him stockbrokers, labor-leaders, distillers,
anti-vivisectionists, vegetarians, disbarred shyster lawyers,
missionaries to China, lobbyists for oil and electricity, advocates of
war and of war against war. "Gaw! Every guy in the country with a bad
case of the gimmes comes to see me!" he growled to Sarason. He promised
to further their causes, to get an appointment to West Point for the
nephew who had just lost his job in the creamery. He promised fellow
politicians to support their bills if they would support his. He gave
interviews upon subsistence farming, backless bathing suits, and the
secret strategy of the Ethiopian army. He grinned and knee-patted and
back-slapped; and few of his visitors, once they had talked with him,
failed to look upon him as their Little Father and to support him
forever.... The few who did fail, most of them newspapermen, disliked
the smell of him more than before they had met him.... Even they, by
the unusual spiritedness and color of their attacks upon him, kept his
name alive in every column.... By the time he had been a Senator for
one year, his machine was as complete and smooth-running--and as hidden
away from ordinary passengers--as the engines of a liner.

On the beds in any of his suites there would, at the same time, repose
three top-hats, two clerical hats, a green object with a feather, a
brown derby, a taxi-driver's cap, and nine ordinary, Christian brown
felts.

Once, within twenty-seven minutes, he talked on the telephone from
Chicago to Palo Alto, Washington, Buenos Aires, Wilmette, and Oklahoma
City. Once, in half a day, he received sixteen calls from clergymen
asking him to condemn the dirty burlesque show, and seven from
theatrical promoters and real estate owners asking him to praise it. He
called the clergymen "Doctor" or "Brother" or both; he called the
promoters "Buddy" and "Pal"; he gave equally ringing promises to both;
and for both he loyally did nothing whatever.

Normally, he would not have thought of cultivating foreign alliances,
though he never doubted that some day, as President, he would be leader
of the world orchestra. Lee Sarason insisted that Buzz look into a few
international fundamentals, such as the relationship of sterling to the
lira, the proper way in which to address a baronet, the chances of the
Archduke Otto, the London oyster bars and the brothels near the
Boulevard de Sebastopol best to recommend to junketing Representatives.

But the actual cultivation of foreign diplomats resident in Washington
he left to Sarason, who entertained them on terrapin and canvasback duck
with black-currant jelly, in his apartment that was considerably more
tapestried than Buzz's own ostentatiously simple Washington quarters....
However, in Sarason's place, a room with a large silk-hung Empire
double bed was reserved for Buzz.

It was Sarason who had persuaded Windrip to let him write _Zero Hour_,
based on Windrip's own dictated notes, and who had beguiled millions
into reading--and even thousands into buying--that Bible of Economic
Justice; Sarason who had perceived there was now such a spate of private
political weeklies and monthlies that it was a distinction not to
publish one; Sarason who had the inspiration for Buzz's emergency radio
address at 3 A.M. upon the occasion of the Supreme Court's throttling
the N.R.A., in May, 1935.... Though not many adherents, including
Buzz himself, were quite certain as to whether he was pleased or
disappointed; though not many actually heard the broadcast itself,
everyone in the country except sheepherders and Professor Albert
Einstein heard about it and was impressed.

Yet it was Buzz who all by himself thought of first offending the Duke
of York by refusing to appear at the Embassy dinner for him in December,
1935, thus gaining, in all farm kitchens and parsonages and barrooms, a
splendid reputation for Homespun Democracy; and of later mollifying His
Highness by calling on him with a touching little home bouquet of
geraniums (from the hot-house of the Japanese ambassador), which
endeared him, if not necessarily to Royalty yet certainly to the D.A.R.,
the English-Speaking Union, and all motherly hearts who thought the
pudgy little bunch of geraniums too sweet for anything.

By the newspapermen Buzz was credited with having insisted on the
nomination of Perley Beecroft for vice-president at the Democratic
convention, after Doremus Jessup had frenetically ceased listening.
Beecroft was a Southern tobacco-planter and storekeeper, an ex-Governor
of his state, married to an ex-schoolteacher from Maine who was
sufficiently scented with salt spray and potato blossoms to win any
Yankee. But it was not his geographical superiority which made Mr.
Beecroft the perfect running mate for Buzz Windrip but that he was
malaria-yellowed and laxly mustached, where Buzz's horsey face was ruddy
and smooth; while Beecroft's oratory had a vacuity, a profundity of
slowly enunciated nonsense, which beguiled such solemn deacons as were
irritated by Buzz's cataract of slang.

Nor could Sarason ever have convinced the wealthy that the more Buzz
denounced them and promised to distribute their millions to the poor,
the more they could trust his "common sense" and finance his campaign.
But with a hint, a grin, a wink, a handshake, Buzz could convince them,
and their contributions came in by the hundred thousand, often disguised
as assessments on imaginary business partnerships.

It had been the peculiar genius of Berzelius Windrip not to wait until
he should be nominated for this office or that to begin shanghaiing his
band of buccaneers. He had been coaxing in supporters ever since the day
when, at the age of four, he had captivated a neighborhood comrade by
giving him an ammonia pistol which later he thriftily stole back from
the comrade's pocket. Buzz might not have learned, perhaps could not
have learned, much from sociologists Charles Beard and John Dewey, but
they could have learned a great deal from Buzz.

****

And it was Buzz's, not Sarason's, master stroke that, as warmly as he
advocated everyone's getting rich by just voting to be rich, he
denounced all "Fascism" and "Naziism," so that most of the Republicans
who were afraid of Democratic Fascism, and all the Democrats who were
afraid of Republican Fascism, were ready to vote for him.




CHAPTER 10


    While I hate befogging my pages with scientific technicalities
    and even neologies, I feel constrained to say here that the most
    elementary perusal of the Economy of Abundance would convince
    any intelligent student that the Cassandras who miscall the
    much-needed increase in the fluidity of our currential
    circulation "Inflation," erroneously basing their parallel upon
    the inflationary misfortunes of certain European nations in the
    era 1919-1923, fallaciously and perhaps inexcusably fail to
    comprehend the different monetary status in America inherent in
    our vastly greater reservoir of Natural Resources.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Most of the mortgaged farmers.

Most of the white-collar workers who had been unemployed these three
years and four and five.

Most of the people on relief rolls who wanted more relief.

Most of the suburbanites who could not meet the installment payments on
the electric washing machine.

Such large sections of the American Legion as believed that only Senator
Windrip would secure for them, and perhaps increase, the bonus.

Such popular Myrtle Boulevard or Elm Avenue preachers as, spurred by the
examples of Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin, believed they could get
useful publicity out of supporting a slightly queer program that
promised prosperity without anyone's having to work for it.

The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the American
Federation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted and
bepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized common
laborers who felt they had been inadequately courted by the same A.F. of
L.

Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangled
governmental jobs.

The Lost Legion of the Anti-Saloon League--since it was known that,
though he drank a lot, Senator Windrip also praised teetotalism a lot,
while his rival, Walt Trowbridge, though he drank but little, said
nothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition. These messiahs
had not found professional morality profitable of late, with the
Rockefellers and Wanamakers no longer praying with them nor paying.

Besides these necessitous petitioners, a goodish number of burghers who,
while they were millionaires, yet maintained that their prosperity had
been sorely checked by the fiendishness of the bankers in limiting their
credit.

These were the supporters who looked to Berzelius Windrip to play the
divine raven and feed them handsomely when he should become President,
and from such came most of the fervid elocutionists who campaigned for
him through September and October.

****

Pushing in among this mob of camp followers who identified political
virtue with money for their rent came a flying squad who suffered not
from hunger but from congested idealism: Intellectuals and Reformers and
even Rugged Individualists, who saw in Windrip, for all his clownish
swindlerism, a free vigor which promised a rejuvenation of the crippled
and senile capitalistic system.

Upton Sinclair wrote about Buzz and spoke for him just as in 1917,
unyielding pacifist though he was, Mr. Sinclair had advocated America's
whole-hearted prosecution of the Great War, foreseeing that it would
unquestionably exterminate German militarism and thus forever end all
wars. Most of the Morgan partners, though they may have shuddered a
little at association with Upton Sinclair, saw that, however much income
they themselves might have to sacrifice, only Windrip could start the
Business Recovery; while Bishop Manning of New York City pointed out
that Windrip always spoke reverently of the church and its shepherds,
whereas Walt Trowbridge went horseback-riding every Sabbath morning and
had never been known to telegraph any female relative on Mother's Day.

On the other hand, the _Saturday Evening Post_ enraged the small
shopkeepers by calling Windrip a demagogue, and the New York _Times_,
once Independent Democrat, was anti-Windrip. But most of the religious
periodicals announced that with a saint like Bishop Prang for backer,
Windrip must have been called of God.

Even Europe joined in.

With the most modest friendliness, explaining that they wished not to
intrude on American domestic politics but only to express personal
admiration for that great Western advocate of peace and prosperity,
Berzelius Windrip, there came representatives of certain foreign powers,
lecturing throughout the land: General Balbo, so popular here because of
his leadership of the flight from Italy to Chicago in 1933; a scholar
who, though he now lived in Germany and was an inspiration to all
patriotic leaders of German Recovery, yet had graduated from Harvard
University and had been the most popular piano-player in his
class--namely, Dr. Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstängl; and Great Britain's lion of
diplomacy, the Gladstone of the 1930's, the handsome and gracious Lord
Lossiemouth who, as Prime Minister, had been known as the Rt. Hon.
Ramsay MacDonald, P.C.

All three of them were expensively entertained by the wives of
manufacturers, and they persuaded many millionaires who, in the
refinement of wealth, had considered Buzz vulgar, that actually he was
the world's one hope of efficient international commerce.

****

Father Coughlin took one look at all the candidates and indignantly
retired to his cell.

****

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, who would surely have written to the
friends she had made at the Rotary Club Dinner in Fort Beulah if she
could only have remembered the name of the town, was a considerable
figure in the campaign. She explained to women voters how kind it was of
Senator Windrip to let them go on voting, so far; and she sang
"Berzelius Windrip's gone to Wash." an average of eleven times a day.

Buzz himself, Bishop Prang, Senator Porkwood (the fearless Liberal and
friend of labor and the farmers), and Colonel Osceola Luthorne, the
editor, though their prime task was reaching millions by radio, also, in
a forty-day train trip, traveled over 27,000 miles, through every state
in the Union, on the scarlet-and-silver, ebony-paneled,
silk-upholstered, streamlined, Diesel-engined, rubber-padded,
air-conditioned, aluminum Forgotten Men Special.

It had a private bar that was forgotten by none save the Bishop.

The train fares were the generous gift of the combined railways.

Over six hundred speeches were discharged, ranging from eight-minute
hallos delivered to the crowds gathered at stations, to two-hour
fulminations in auditoriums and fairgrounds. Buzz was present at every
speech, usually starring, but sometimes so hoarse that he could only
wave his hand and croak, "Howdy, folks!" while he was spelled by Prang,
Porkwood, Colonel Luthorne, or such volunteers from his regiment of
secretaries, doctoral consulting specialists in history and economics,
cooks, bartenders, and barbers, as could be lured away from playing
craps with the accompanying reporters, photographers, sound-recorders,
and broadcasters. Tieffer of the United Press has estimated that Buzz
thus appeared personally before more than two million persons.

Meanwhile, almost daily hurtling by aëroplane between Washington and
Buzz's home, Lee Sarason supervised dozens of telephone girls and scores
of girl stenographers, who answered thousands of daily telephone calls
and letters and telegrams and cables--and boxes containing poisoned
candy.... Buzz himself had made the rule that all these girls must be
pretty, reasonable, thoroughly skilled, and related to people with
political influence.

For Sarason it must be said that in this bedlam of "public relations" he
never once used _contact_ as a transitive verb.

The Hon. Perley Beecroft, vice-presidential candidate, specialized on
the conventions of fraternal orders, religious denominations, insurance
agents, and traveling men.

Colonel Dewey Haik, who had nominated Buzz at Cleveland, had an
assignment unique in campaigning--one of Sarason's slickest inventions.
Haik spoke for Windrip not in the most frequented, most obvious places,
but at places so unusual that his appearance there made news--and
Sarason and Haik saw to it that there were nimble chroniclers present to
get that news. Flying in his own plane, covering a thousand miles a day,
he spoke to nine astonished miners whom he caught in a copper mine a
mile below the surface--while thirty-nine photographers snapped the
nine; he spoke from a motorboat to a stilled fishing fleet during a fog
in Gloucester harbor; he spoke from the steps of the Sub-Treasury at
noon on Wall Street; he spoke to the aviators and ground crew at Shushan
Airport, New Orleans--and even the flyers were ribald only for the first
five minutes, till he had described Buzz Windrip's gallant but ludicrous
efforts to learn to fly; he spoke to state policemen, to
stamp-collectors, players of chess in secret clubs, and steeplejacks at
work; he spoke in breweries, hospitals, magazine offices, cathedrals,
crossroad churches forty-by-thirty, prisons, lunatic asylums, night
clubs--till the art editors began to send photographers the memo: "For
Pete's sake, no more fotos Kunnel Haik spieling in sporting houses and
hoosegow."

Yet went on using the pictures.

For Colonel Dewey Haik was a figure as sharp-lighted, almost, as Buzz
Windrip himself. Son of a decayed Tennessee family, with one Confederate
general grandfather and one a Dewey of Vermont, he had picked cotton,
become a youthful telegraph operator, worked his way through the
University of Arkansas and the University of Missouri law school,
settled as a lawyer in a Wyoming village and then in Oregon, and during
the war (he was in 1936 but forty-four years old) served in France as
captain of infantry, with credit. Returned to America, he had been
elected to Congress, and become a colonel in the militia. He studied
military history; he learned to fly, to box, to fence; he was a
ramrod-like figure yet had a fairly amiable smile; he was liked equally
by disciplinary army officers of high rank, and by such roughnecks as
Mr. Shad Ledue, the Caliban of Doremus Jessup.

Haik brought to Buzz's fold the very picaroons who had most snickered at
Bishop Prang's solemnity.

All this while, Hector Macgoblin, the cultured doctor and burly boxing
fan, co-author with Sarason of the campaign anthem, "Bring Out the
Old-time Musket," was specializing in the inspiration of college
professors, associations of high school teachers, professional baseball
teams, training-camps of pugilists, medical meetings, summer schools in
which well-known authors taught the art of writing to earnest aspirants
who could never learn to write, golf tournaments, and all such cultural
congresses.

****

But the pugilistic Dr. Macgoblin came nearer to danger than any other
campaigner. During a meeting in Alabama, where he had satisfactorily
proved that no Negro with less than 25 per cent "white blood" can ever
rise to the cultural level of a patent-medicine salesman, the meeting
was raided, the costly residence section of the whites was raided, by a
band of colored people headed by a Negro who had been a corporal on the
Western Front in 1918. Macgoblin and the town were saved by the
eloquence of a colored clergyman.

****

Truly, as Bishop Prang said, the apostles of Senator Windrip were now
preaching his Message unto all manner of men, even unto the Heathen.

But what Doremus Jessup said, to Buck Titus and Father Perefixe, was:

"This is Revolution in terms of Rotary."




CHAPTER 11


    When I was a kid, one time I had an old-maid teacher that used
    to tell me, "Buzz, you're the thickest-headed dunce in school."
    But I noticed that she told me this a whole lot oftener than she
    used to tell the other kids how smart they were, and I came to
    be the most talked-about scholar in the whole township. The
    United States Senate isn't so different, and I want to thank a
    lot of stuffed shirts for their remarks about Yours Truly.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

But there were certain of the Heathen who did not heed those heralds
Prang and Windrip and Haik and Dr. Macgoblin.

Walt Trowbridge conducted his campaign as placidly as though he were
certain to win. He did not spare himself, but he did not moan over the
Forgotten Men (he'd been one himself, as a youngster, and didn't think
it was so bad!) nor become hysterical at a private bar in a
scarlet-and-silver special train. Quietly, steadfastly, speaking on the
radio and in a few great halls, he explained that he did advocate an
enormously improved distribution of wealth, but that it must be achieved
by steady digging and not by dynamite that would destroy more than it
excavated. He wasn't particularly thrilling. Economics rarely are,
except when they have been dramatized by a Bishop, staged and lighted by
a Sarason, and passionately played by a Buzz Windrip with rapier and
blue satin tights.

For the campaign the Communists had brightly brought out their
sacrificial candidates--in fact, all seven of the current Communist
parties had. Since, if they all stuck together, they might entice
900,000 votes, they had avoided such bourgeois grossness by enthusiastic
schisms, and their creeds now included: _The_ Party, the Majority Party,
the Leftist Party, the Trotzky Party, the Christian Communist Party, the
Workers' Party, and, less baldly named, something called the American
Nationalist Patriotic Coöperative Fabian Post-Marxian Communist
Party--it sounded like the names of royalty but was otherwise
dissimilar.

But these radical excursions were not very significant compared with the
new Jeffersonian Party, suddenly fathered by Franklin D. Roosevelt.

****

Forty-eight hours after the nomination of Windrip at Cleveland,
President Roosevelt had issued his defiance.

Senator Windrip, he asserted, had been chosen "not by the brains and
hearts of genuine Democrats but by their temporarily crazed emotions."
He would no more support Windrip because he claimed to be a Democrat
than he would support Jimmy Walker.

Yet, he said, he could not vote for the Republican Party, the "party of
intrenched special privilege," however much, in the past three years, he
had appreciated the loyalty, the honesty, the intelligence of Senator
Walt Trowbridge.

Roosevelt made it clear that his Jeffersonian or True Democratic faction
was not a "third party" in the sense that it was to be permanent. It was
to vanish as soon as honest and coolly thinking men got control again of
the old organization. Buzz Windrip aroused mirth by dubbing it the "Bull
Mouse Party," but President Roosevelt was joined by almost all the
liberal members of Congress, Democratic or Republican, who had not
followed Walt Trowbridge; by Norman Thomas and the Socialists who had
not turned Communist; by Governors Floyd Olson and Olin Johnston; and by
Mayor La Guardia.

The conspicuous fault of the Jeffersonian Party, like the personal fault
of Senator Trowbridge, was that it represented integrity and reason, in
a year when the electorate hungered for frisky emotions, for the peppery
sensations associated, usually, not with monetary systems and taxation
rates but with baptism by immersion in the creek, young love under the
elms, straight whisky, angelic orchestras heard soaring down from the
full moon, fear of death when an automobile teeters above a canyon,
thirst in a desert and quenching it with spring-water--all the primitive
sensations which they thought they found in the screaming of Buzz
Windrip.

****

Far from the hot-lighted ballrooms where all these crimson-tuniced
bandmasters shrillsquabbled as to which should lead for the moment the
tremendous spiritual jazz, far off in the cool hills a little man named
Doremus Jessup, who wasn't even a bass drummer but only a citizen
editor, wondered in confusion what he should do to be saved.

He wanted to follow Roosevelt and the Jeffersonian Party--partly for
admiration of the man; partly for the pleasure of shocking the ingrown
Republicanism of Vermont. But he could not believe that the
Jeffersonians would have a chance; he did believe that, for all the
mothball odor of many of his associates, Walt Trowbridge was a valiant
and competent man; and night and day Doremus bounced up and down Beulah
Valley campaigning for Trowbridge.

Out of his very confusion there came into his writing a desperate
sureness which surprised accustomed readers of the _Informer_. For once
he was not amused and tolerant. Though he never said anything worse of
the Jeffersonian Party than that it was ahead of its times, in both
editorials and news stories he went after Buzz Windrip and his gang with
whips, turpentine, and scandal.

In person, he was into and out of shops and houses all morning long,
arguing with voters, getting miniature interviews.

He had expected that traditionally Republican Vermont would give him too
drearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was a
dismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. And
that preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust in
Windrip's promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was a
trust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, very
much in particular.

Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only
what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform:
Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned
the Negroes--since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a
factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can
look down; and, especially, Eleven, which announced, or seemed to
announce, that the average toiler would immediately receive $5000 a
year. (And ever-so-many railway station debaters explained that it would
really be $10,000. Why, they were going to have every cent offered by
Dr. Townsend, plus everything planned by the late Huey Long, Upton
Sinclair, and the Utopians, all put together!)

So beatifically did hundreds of old people in Beulah Valley believe this
that they smilingly trotted into Raymond Pridewell's hardware store, to
order new kitchen stoves and aluminum sauce pans and complete bathroom
furnishings, to be paid for on the day after inauguration. Mr.
Pridewell, a cobwebbed old Henry Cabot Lodge Republican, lost half his
trade by chasing out these happy heirs to fabulous estates, but they
went on dreaming, and Doremus, nagging at them, discovered that mere
figures are defenseless against a dream... even a dream of new
Plymouths and unlimited cans of sausages and motion-picture cameras and
the prospect of never having to arise till 7:30 A.M.

Thus answered Alfred Tizra, "Snake" Tizra, friend to Doremus's handyman,
Shad Ledue. Snake was a steel-tough truck-driver and taxi-owner who had
served sentences for assault and for transporting bootleg liquor. He had
once made a living catching rattlesnakes and copperheads in southern New
England. Under President Windrip, Snake jeeringly assured Doremus, he
would have enough money to start a chain of roadhouses in all the dry
communities in Vermont.

Ed Howland, one of the lesser Fort Beulah grocers, and Charley Betts,
furniture and undertaking, while they were dead against anyone getting
groceries, furniture, or even undertaking on Windrip credit, were all
for the population's having credit on other wares.

Aras Dilley, a squatter dairy farmer living with a toothless wife and
seven slattern children in a tilted and unscrubbed cabin way up on Mount
Terror, snarled at Doremus--who had often taken food baskets and boxes
of shotgun shells and masses of cigarettes to Aras--"Well, want to tell
you, when Mr. Windrip gets in, we farmers are going to fix our own
prices on our crops, and not you smart city fellows!"

Doremus could not blame him. While Buck Titus, at fifty, looked
thirty-odd, Aras, at thirty-four, looked fifty.

Lorinda Pike's singularly unpleasant partner in the Beulah Valley
Tavern, one Mr. Nipper, whom she hoped soon to lose, combined boasting
how rich he was with gloating how much more he was going to get under
Windrip. "Professor" Staubmeyer quoted nice things Windrip had said
about higher pay for teachers. Louis Rotenstern, to prove that his
heart, at least, was not Jewish, became more lyric than any of them. And
even Frank Tasbrough of the quarries, Medary Cole of the grist mill and
real estate holdings, R. C. Crowley of the bank, who presumably were not
tickled by projects of higher income taxes, smiled pussy-cattishly and
hinted that Windrip was a "lot sounder fellow" than people knew.

But no one in Fort Beulah was a more active crusader for Buzz Windrip
than Shad Ledue.

Doremus had known that Shad possessed talent for argument and for
display; that he had once persuaded old Mr. Pridewell to trust him for a
.22 rifle, value twenty-three dollars; that, removed from the sphere of
coal bins and grass-stained overalls, he had once sung "Rollicky Bill
the Sailor" at a smoker of the Ancient and Independent Order of Rams;
and that he had enough memory to be able to quote, as his own profound
opinions, the editorials in the Hearst newspapers. Yet even knowing all
this equipment for a political career, an equipment not much short of
Buzz Windrip's, Doremus was surprised to find Shad soapboxing for
Windrip among the quarry-workers, then actually as chairman of a rally
in Oddfellows' Hall. Shad spoke little, but with brutal taunting of the
believers in Trowbridge and Roosevelt.

At meetings where he did not speak, Shad was an incomparable bouncer,
and in that valued capacity he was summoned to Windrip rallies as far
away as Burlington. It was he who, in a militia uniform, handsomely
riding a large white plow-horse, led the final Windrip parade in
Rutland... and substantial men of affairs, even dry-goods jobbers,
fondly called him "Shad."

Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have
appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American Legion Hall
and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain
working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know
that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what
guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics.
Come on, you bozos! The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt
Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, _be_ selfish, and vote for
the one man that's willing to _give_ you something--give _you_
something!--and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that
he can get!"

Doremus groaned inwardly, "Oh, my Shad! And you're doing most of this on
my time!"

****

Sissy Jessup sat on the running-board of her coupé (hers by squatter's
right), with Julian Falck, up from Amherst for the week-end, and Malcolm
Tasbrough wedged in on either side of her.

"Oh nuts, let's quit talking politics. Windrip's going to be elected, so
why waste time yodeling when we could drive down to the river and have a
swim," complained Malcolm.

"He's not going to win without our putting up a tough scrap against him.
I'm going to talk to the high school alumni this evening--about how they
got to tell their parents to vote for either Trowbridge or Roosevelt,"
snapped Julian Falck.

"Haa, haa, haa! And of course the parents will be tickled to death to do
whatever you tell 'em, Yulian! You college men certainly are the goods!
Besides----Want to be serious about this fool business?" Malcolm had the
insolent self-assurance of beef, slick black hair, and a large car of
his own; he was the perfect leader of Black Shirts, and he looked
contemptuously on Julian who, though a year older, was pale and
thinnish. "Matter of fact, it'll be a good thing to have Buzz. He'll put
a damn quick stop to all this radicalism--all this free speech and libel
of our most fundamental institutions----"

"Boston _American_; last Tuesday; page eight," murmured Sissy.

"--and no wonder you're scared of him, Yulian! He sure will drag some of
your favorite Amherst anarchist profs off to the hoosegow, and maybe you
too, Comrade!"

The two young men looked at each other with slow fury. Sissy quieted
them by raging, "Freavensake! Will you two heels quit scrapping?...
Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly! Seems as if it's breaking
up every town, every home.... My poor Dad! Doremus is just about all
in!"




CHAPTER 12


    I shall not be content till this country can produce every
    single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so
    keep all our dollars at home. If we can do this and at the same
    time work up tourist traffic so that foreigners will come from
    every part of the world to see such remarkable wonders as the
    Grand Canyon, Glacier and Yellowstone etc. parks, the fine
    hotels of Chicago, & etc., thus leaving their money here, we
    shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out
    my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to
    $5000 per year for every single family--that is, I mean every
    real American family. Such an aspiring Vision is what we want,
    and not all this nonsense of wasting our time at Geneva and
    talky-talk at Lugano, wherever that is.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

ELECTION DAY WOULD FALL on Tuesday, November third, and on Sunday
evening of the first, Senator Windrip played the finale of his campaign
at a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New York. The Garden
would hold, with seats and standing room, about 19,000, and a week
before the meeting every ticket had been sold--at from fifty cents to
five dollars, and then by speculators resold and resold, at from one
dollar to twenty.

Doremus had been able to get one single ticket from an acquaintance on
one of the Hearst dailies--which, alone among the New York papers, were
supporting Windrip--and on the afternoon of November first he traveled
the three hundred miles to New York for his first visit in three years.

It had been cold in Vermont, with early snow, but the white drifts lay
to the earth so quietly, in unstained air, that the world seemed a
silver-painted carnival, left to silence. Even on a moonless night, a
pale radiance came from the snow, from the earth itself, and the stars
were drops of quicksilver.

But, following the redcap carrying his shabby Gladstone bag, Doremus
came out of the Grand Central, at six o'clock, into a gray trickle of
cold dishwater from heaven's kitchen sink. The renowned towers which he
expected to see on Forty-second Street were dead in their mummy cloths
of ragged fog. And as to the mob that, with cruel disinterest, galloped
past him, a new and heedless smear of faces every second, the man from
Fort Beulah could think only that New York must be holding its county
fair in this clammy drizzle, or else that there was a big fire
somewhere.

He had sensibly planned to save money by using the subway--the
substantial village burgher is so poor in the city of the Babylonian
gardens!--and he even remembered that there were still to be found in
Manhattan five-cent trolley cars, in which a rustic might divert himself
by looking at sailors and poets and shawled women from the steppes of
Kazakstan. To the redcap he had piped with what he conceived to be
traveled urbanity, "Guess'll take a trolley--jus' few blocks." But
deafened and dizzied and elbow-jabbed by the crowd, soaked and
depressed, he took refuge in a taxi, then wished he hadn't, as he saw
the slippery rubber-colored pavement, and as his taxi got wedged among
other cars stinking of carbon-monoxide and frenziedly tooting for
release from the jam--a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror with
mechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower.

He painfully hesitated before going out again from his small hotel in
the West Forties, and when he did, when he muddily crept among the
shrill shopgirls, the weary chorus girls, the hard cigar-clamping
gamblers, and the pretty young men on Broadway, he felt himself, with
the rubbers and umbrella which Emma had forced upon him, a very Caspar
Milquetoast.

He most noticed a number of stray imitation soldiers, without side-arms
or rifles, but in a uniform like that of an American cavalryman in 1870:
slant-topped blue forage caps, dark-blue tunics, light blue trousers,
with yellow stripes at the seam, tucked into leggings of black rubberoid
for what appeared to be the privates, and boots of sleek black leather
for officers. Each of them had on the right side of his collar the
letters "M.M." and on the left, a five-pointed star. There were so many
of them; they swaggered so brazenly, shouldering civilians out of the
way; and upon insignificances like Doremus they looked with frigid
insolence.

He suddenly understood.

These young condottieri were the "Minute Men": the private troops of
Berzelius Windrip, about which Doremus had been publishing uneasy news
reports. He was thrilled and a little dismayed to see them now--the
printed words made brutal flesh.

Three weeks ago Windrip had announced that Colonel Dewey Haik had
founded, just for the campaign, a nationwide league of Windrip
marching-clubs, to be called the Minute Men. It was probable that they
had been in formation for months, since already they had three or four
hundred thousand members. Doremus was afraid the M.M.'s might become a
permanent organization, more menacing than the Kuklux Klan.

Their uniform suggested the pioneer America of Cold Harbor and of the
Indian fighters under Miles and Custer. Their emblem, their swastika
(here Doremus saw the cunning and mysticism of Lee Sarason), was a
five-pointed star, because the star on the American flag was
five-pointed, whereas the stars of both the Soviet banner and the
Jews--the seal of Solomon--were six-pointed.

The fact that the Soviet star, actually, was also five-pointed, no one
noticed, during these excited days of re-generation. Anyway, it was a
nice idea to have this star simultaneously challenge the Jews and the
Bolsheviks--the M.M.'s had good intentions, even if their symbolism did
slip a little.

Yet the craftiest thing about the M.M.'s was that they wore no colored
shirts, but only plain white when on parade, and light khaki when on
outpost duty, so that Buzz Windrip could thunder, and frequently, "Black
shirts? Brown shirts? Red shirts? Yes, and maybe cow-brindle shirts! All
these degenerate European uniforms of tyranny! No sir! The Minute Men
are not Fascist or Communist or anything at all but plain
Democratic--the knight-champions of the rights of the Forgotten Men--the
shock troops of Freedom!"

****

Doremus dined on Chinese food, his invariable self-indulgence when he
was in a large city without Emma, who stated that chow mein was nothing
but fried excelsior with flour-paste gravy. He forgot the leering M.M.
troopers a little; he was happy in glancing at the gilded wood-carvings,
at the octagonal lanterns painted with doll-like Chinese peasants
crossing arched bridges, at a quartette of guests, two male and two
female, who looked like Public Enemies and who all through dinner
quarreled with restrained viciousness.

When he headed toward Madison Square Garden and the culminating Windrip
rally, he was plunged into a maelstrom. A whole nation seemed
querulously to be headed the same way. He could not get a taxicab, and
walking through the dreary storm some fourteen blocks to Madison Square
Garden he was aware of the murderous temper of the crowd.

Eighth Avenue, lined with cheapjack shops, was packed with drab,
discouraged people who yet, tonight, were tipsy with the hashish of
hope. They filled the sidewalks, nearly filled the pavement, while
irritable motors squeezed tediously through them, and angry policemen
were pushed and whirled about and, if they tried to be haughty, got
jeered at by lively shopgirls.

Through the welter, before Doremus's eyes, jabbed a flying wedge of
Minute Men, led by what he was later to recognize as a cornet of M.M.'s.
They were not on duty, and they were not belligerent; they were
cheering, and singing "Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.," reminding
Doremus of a slightly drunken knot of students from an inferior college
after a football victory. He was to remember them so afterward, months
afterward, when the enemies of the M.M.'s all through the country
derisively called them "Mickey Mouses" and "Minnies."

An old man, shabbily neat, stood blocking them and yelled, "To hell with
Buzz! Three cheers for F.D.R.!"

The M.M.'s burst into hoodlum wrath. The cornet in command, a bruiser
uglier even than Shad Ledue, hit the old man on the jaw, and he sloped
down, sickeningly. Then, from nowhere, facing the cornet, there was a
chief petty officer of the navy, big, smiling, reckless. The C.P.O.
bellowed, in a voice tuned to hurricanes, "Swell bunch o' tin soldiers!
Nine o' yuh to one grandpappy! Just about even----"

The cornet socked him; he laid out the cornet with one foul to the
belly; instantly the other eight M.M.'s were on the C.P.O., like
sparrows after a hawk, and he crashed, his face, suddenly veal-white,
laced with rivulets of blood. The eight kicked him in the head with
their thick marching-shoes. They were still kicking him when Doremus
wriggled away, very sick, altogether helpless.

He had not turned away quickly enough to avoid seeing an M.M. trooper,
girlish-faced, crimson-lipped, fawn-eyed, throw himself on the fallen
cornet and, whimpering, stroke that roustabout's roast-beef cheeks with
shy gardenia-petal fingers.

****

There were many arguments, a few private fist fights, and one more
battle, before Doremus reached the auditorium.

A block from it some thirty M.M.'s, headed by a
battalion-leader--something between a captain and a major--started
raiding a street meeting of Communists. A Jewish girl in khaki, her bare
head soaked with rain, was beseeching from the elevation of a
wheelbarrow, "Fellow travelers! Don't just chew the rag and
'sympathize'! Join us! Now! It's life and death!" Twenty feet from the
Communists, a middle-aged man who looked like a social worker was
explaining the Jeffersonian Party, recalling the record of President
Roosevelt, and reviling the Communists next door as word-drunk
un-American cranks. Half his audience were people who might be competent
voters; half of them--like half of any group on this evening of tragic
fiesta--were cigarette-sniping boys in hand-me-downs.

The thirty M.M.'s cheerfully smashed into the Communists. The
battalion-leader reached up, slapped the girl speaker, dragged her down
from the wheelbarrow. His followers casually waded in with fists and
blackjacks. Doremus, more nauseated, feeling more helpless than ever,
heard the smack of a blackjack on the temple of a scrawny Jewish
intellectual.

Amazingly, then, the voice of the rival Jeffersonian leader spiraled up
into a scream: "Come on, _you_! Going to let those hellhounds attack our
Communist friends--friends _now_, by God!" With which the mild bookworm
leaped into the air, came down squarely upon a fat Mickey Mouse,
capsized him, seized his blackjack, took time to kick another M.M.'s
shins before arising from the wreck, sprang up, and waded into the
raiders as, Doremus guessed, he would have waded into a table of
statistics on the proportion of butter fat in loose milk in 97.7 per
cent of shops on Avenue B.

Till then, only half-a-dozen Communist Party members had been facing the
M.M.'s, their backs to a garage wall. Fifty of their own, fifty
Jeffersonians besides, now joined them, and with bricks and umbrellas
and deadly volumes of sociology they drove off the enraged
M.M.'s--partisans of Bela Kun side by side with the partisans of
Professor John Dewey--until a riot squad of policemen battered their way
in to protect the M.M.'s by arresting the girl Communist speaker and the
Jeffersonian.

****

Doremus had often "headed up" sports stories about "Madison Square
Garden Prize Fights," but he did know that the place had nothing to do
with Madison Square, from which it was a day's journey by bus, that it
was decidedly not a garden, that the fighters there did not fight for
"prizes" but for fixed partnership shares in the business, and that a
good many of them did not fight at all.

The mammoth building, as in exhaustion Doremus crawled up to it, was
entirely ringed with M.M.'s, elbow to elbow, all carrying heavy canes,
and at every entrance, along every aisle, the M.M.'s were rigidly in
line, with their officers galloping about, whispering orders, and
bearing uneasy rumors like scared calves in a dipping-pen.

These past weeks hungry miners, dispossessed farmers, Carolina mill
hands had greeted Senator Windrip with a flutter of worn hands beneath
gasoline torches. Now he was to face, not the unemployed, for they could
not afford fifty-cent tickets, but the small, scared side-street traders
of New York, who considered themselves altogether superior to
clodhoppers and mine-creepers, yet were as desperate as they. The
swelling mass that Doremus saw, proud in seats or standing chin-to-nape
in the aisles, in a reek of dampened clothes, was not romantic; they
were people concerned with the tailor's goose, the tray of potato salad,
the card of hooks-and-eyes, the leech-like mortgage on the owner-driven
taxi, with, at home, the baby's diapers, the dull safety-razor blade,
the awful rise in the cost of rump steak and kosher chicken. And a few,
and very proud, civil-service clerks and letter carriers and
superintendents of small apartment houses, curiously fashionable in
seventeen-dollar ready-made suits and feebly stitched foulard ties, who
boasted, "I don't know why all these bums go on relief. I may not be
such a wiz, but let me tell you, even since 1929, I've never made less
than _two thousand dollars a year_!"

Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to their
aged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry over
losing the job.

Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.

****

The historic rally opened with extreme dullness. A regimental band
played the _Tales from Hoffman_ barcarole with no apparent significance
and not much more liveliness. The Reverend Dr. Hendrik Van Lollop of St.
Apologue's Lutheran Church offered prayer, but one felt that probably it
had not been accepted. Senator Porkwood provided a dissertation on
Senator Windrip which was composed in equal parts of apostolic adoration
of Buzz and of the uh-uh-uh's with which Hon. Porkwood always
interspersed his words.

And Windrip wasn't yet even in sight.

Colonel Dewey Haik, nominator of Buzz at the Cleveland convention, was
considerably better. He told three jokes, and an anecdote about a
faithful carrier pigeon in the Great War which had seemed to understand,
really better than many of the human soldiers, just why it was that the
Americans were over there fighting for France against Germany. The
connection of this ornithological hero with the virtues of Senator
Windrip did not seem evident, but, after having sat under Senator
Porkwood, the audience enjoyed the note of military gallantry.

Doremus felt that Colonel Haik was not merely rambling but pounding on
toward something definite. His voice became more insistent. He began to
talk about Windrip: "my friend--the one man who dares beard the monetary
lion--the man who in his great and simple heart cherishes the woe of
every common man as once did the brooding tenderness of Abraham
Lincoln." Then, wildly waving toward a side entrance, he shrieked, "And
here he comes! My friends--Buzz Windrip!"

The band hammered out "The Campbells Are Coming." A squadron of Minute
Men, smart as Horse Guards, carrying long lances with starred pennants,
clicked into the gigantic bowl of the auditorium, and after them, shabby
in an old blue-serge suit, nervously twisting a sweat-stained slouch
hat, stooped and tired, limped Berzelius Windrip. The audience leaped
up, thrusting one another aside to have a look at the deliverer,
cheering like artillery at dawn.

Windrip started prosaically enough. You felt rather sorry for him, so
awkwardly did he lumber up the steps to the platform, across to the
center of the stage. He stopped; stared owlishly. Then he quacked
monotonously:

"The first time I ever came to New York I was a green-horn--no, don't
laugh, mebbe I still am! But I had already been elected a United States
Senator, and back home, the way they'd serenaded me, I thought I was
some punkins. I thought my name was just about as familiar to everybody
as A1 Capone's or Camel Cigarettes or Castoria--Babies Cry For It. But I
come to New York on my way to Washington, and say, I sat in my hotel
lobby here for three days, and the only fellow ever spoke to me was the
hotel detective! And when he did come up and address me, I was tickled
to death--I thought he was going to tell me the whole burg was pleased
by my condescending to visit 'em. But all he wanted to know was, was I a
guest of the hotel and did I have any right to be holding down a lobby
chair permanently that way! And tonight, friends, I'm pretty near as
scared of Old Gotham as I was then!"

The laughter, the hand-clapping, were fair enough, but the proud
electors were disappointed by his drawl, his weary humility.

Doremus quivered hopefully, "Maybe he isn't going to get elected!"

Windrip outlined his too-familiar platform--Doremus was interested only
in observing that Windrip misquoted his own figures regarding the
limitation of fortunes, in Point Five.

He slid into a rhapsody of general ideas--a mishmash of polite regards
to Justice, Freedom, Equality, Order, Prosperity, Patriotism, and any
number of other noble but slippery abstractions.

Doremus thought he was being bored, until he discovered that, at some
moment which he had not noticed, he had become absorbed and excited.

Something in the intensity with which Windrip looked at his audience,
looked at all of them, his glance slowly taking them in from the
highest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talking
to each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each of
them into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperious
and dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.

"They say I want money--power! Say, I've turned down offers from law
firms right here in New York of three times the money I'll get as
President! And power--why, the President is the servant of every citizen
in the country, and not just of the considerate folks, but also of every
crank that comes pestering him by telegram and phone and letter. And
yet, it's true, it's absolutely true I do want power, great, big,
imperial power--but not for myself--no--for _you_!--the power of your
permission to smash the Jew financiers who've enslaved you, who're
working you to death to pay the interest on their bonds; the grasping
bankers--and not all of 'em Jews by a darn sight!--the crooked
labor-leaders just as much as the crooked bosses, and, most of all, the
sneaking spies of Moscow that want you to lick the boots of their
self-appointed tyrants that rule not by love and loyalty, like I want
to, but by the horrible power of the whip, the dark cell, the automatic
pistol!"

****

He pictured, then, a Paradise of democracy in which, with the old
political machines destroyed, every humblest worker would be king and
ruler, dominating representatives elected from among his own kind of
people, and these representatives not growing indifferent, as hitherto
they had done, once they were far off in Washington, but kept alert to
the public interest by the supervision of a strengthened Executive.

It sounded almost reasonable, for a while.

The supreme actor, Buzz Windrip, was passionate yet never grotesquely
wild. He did not gesture too extravagantly; only, like Gene Debs of old,
he reached out a bony forefinger which seemed to jab into each of them
and hook out each heart. It was his mad eyes, big staring tragic eyes,
that startled them, and his voice, now thundering, now humbly pleading,
that soothed them.

He was so obviously an honest and merciful leader; a man of sorrows and
acquaint with woe.

Doremus marveled, "I'll be hanged! Why, he's a darn good sort when you
come to meet him! And warm-hearted. He makes me feel as if I'd been
having a good evening with Buck and Steve Perefixe. What if Buzz is
right? What if--in spite of all the demagogic pap that, I suppose, he
has got to feed out to the boobs--he's right in claiming that it's only
he, and not Trowbridge or Roosevelt, that can break the hold of the
absentee owners? And these Minute Men, his followers--oh, they were
pretty nasty, what I saw out on the street, but still, most of 'em are
mighty nice, clean-cut young fellows. Seeing Buzz and then listening to
what he actually says does kind of surprise you--kind of make you
think!"

But what Mr. Windrip actually _had_ said, Doremus could not remember an
hour later, when he had come out of the trance.

****

He was so convinced then that Windrip would win that, on Tuesday
evening, he did not remain at the _Informer_ office until the returns
were all in. But if he did not stay for the evidences of the election,
they came to him.

Past his house, after midnight, through muddy snow tramped a triumphant
and reasonably drunken parade, carrying torches and bellowing to the air
of "Yankee Doodle" new words revealed just that week by Mrs. Adelaide
Tarr Gimmitch:

    "_The snakes disloyal to our Buzz_
    _We're riding on a rail,_
    _They'll wish to God they never was,_
    _When we get them in jail!_

        _Chorus:_

        "_Buzz and buzz and keep it up_
        _To victory he's floated._
        _You were a most ungrateful pup,_
        _Unless for Buzz you voted._

    "_Every M.M. gets a whip_
    _To use upon some traitor,_
    _And every Antibuzz we skip_
    _Today, we'll tend to later._"

                           *     *     *

"Antibuzz," a word credited to Mrs. Gimmitch but more probably invented
by Dr. Hector Macgoblin, was to be extensively used by lady patriots as
a term expressing such vicious disloyalty to the State as might call for
the firing squad. Yet, like Mrs. Gimmitch's splendid synthesis "Unkies,"
for soldiers of the A.E.F., it never really caught on.

****

Among the winter-coated paraders Doremus and Sissy thought they could
make out Shad Ledue, Aras Dilley, that philoprogenitive squatter from
Mount Terror, Charley Betts, the furniture dealer, and Tony Mogliani,
the fruit-seller, most ardent expounder of Italian Fascism in central
Vermont.

And, though he could not be sure of it in the dimness behind the
torches, Doremus rather thought that the lone large motorcar following
the procession was that of his neighbor, Francis Tasbrough.

Next morning, at the _Informer_ office, Doremus did not learn of so very
much damage wrought by the triumphant Nordics--they had merely upset a
couple of privies, torn down and burned the tailor shop sign of Louis
Rotenstern, and somewhat badly beaten Clifford Little, the jeweler, a
slight, curly-headed young man whom Shad Ledue despised because he
organized theatricals and played the organ in Mr. Falck's church.

That night Doremus found, on his front porch, a notice in red chalk upon
butcher's paper:

    _You will get yrs Dorey sweethart unles you get rite down on yr
    belly and crawl in front of the MM and the League and the Chief
    and I_

                                                         _A friend_
                           *     *     *

It was the first time that Doremus had heard of "the Chief," a sound
American variant of "the Leader" or "the Head of the Government," as a
popular title for Mr. Windrip. It was soon to be made official.

Doremus burned the red warning without telling his family. But he often
woke to remember it, not very laughingly.




CHAPTER 13


    And when I get ready to retire I'm going to build me an
    up-to-date bungalow in some lovely resort, not in Como or any
    other of the proverbial Grecian isles you may be sure, but in
    somewheres like Florida, California, Santa Fe, & etc., and
    devote myself just to reading the classics, like Longfellow,
    James Whitcomb Riley, Lord Macaulay, Henry Van Dyke, Elbert
    Hubbard, Plato, Hiawatha, & etc. Some of my friends laugh at me
    for it, but I have always cultivated a taste for the finest in
    literature. I got it from my Mother as I did everything that
    some people have been so good as to admire in me.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Certain though Doremus had been of Windrip's election, the event was
like the long-dreaded passing of a friend.

"All right. Hell with this country, if it's like that. All these years
I've worked--and I never did want to be on all these committees and
boards and charity drives!--and don't _they_ look silly now! What I
always wanted to do was to sneak off to an ivory tower--or anyway,
celluloid, imitation ivory--and read everything I've been too busy to
read."

Thus Doremus, in late November.

And he did actually attempt it, and for a few days reveled in it,
avoiding everyone save his family and Lorinda, Buck Titus, and Father
Perefixe. Mostly, though, he found that he did not relish the "classics"
he had so far missed, but those familiar to his youth: Ivanhoe,
Huckleberry Finn, Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, L'Allegro, The
Way of All Flesh (not quite so youthful, there), Moby Dick, The Earthly
Paradise, St. Agnes' Eve, The Idylls of the King, most of Swinburne,
Pride and Prejudice, Religio Medici, Vanity Fair.

Probably he was not so very different from President-Elect Windrip in
his rather uncritical reverence toward any book he had heard of before
he was thirty.... No American whose fathers have lived in the country
for over two generations is so utterly different from any other
American.

In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him thoroughly. He
tried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a master,
believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa"--all that idiotic A
table, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in by or on a
table--could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweet
tranquillity of Vergil and the Sabine Farm.

Then he saw that in everything his quest failed him.

The reading was good enough, toothsome, satisfying, except that he felt
guilty at having sneaked away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too many years
he had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be "in" things, and he
was daily more irritable as Windrip began, even before his inauguration,
to dictate to the country.

Buzz's party, with the desertions to the Jeffersonians, had less than a
majority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus from Washington that
Windrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail opposing
Congressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if he so wishes,
and Windrip--no doubt with promises of abnormal favors in the way of
patronage--won over a few. Five Jeffersonian Congressmen had their
elections challenged. One sensationally disappeared, and smoking after
his galloping heels there was a devilish fume of embezzlements. And with
each such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremuses
of the country were the more anxious.

****

All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had felt the
insecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to do
anything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that was
general to the country. He could no longer plan, for himself or for his
dependants, as the citizens of this once unsettled country had planned
since 1620.

Why, their whole lives had been predicated on the privilege of planning.
Depressions had been only cyclic storms, certain to end in sunshine;
Capitalism and parliamentary government were eternal, and eternally
being improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.

Doremus's grandfather, Calvin, Civil War veteran and ill-paid, illiberal
Congregational minister, had yet planned, "My son, Loren, shall have a
theological education, and I think we shall be able to build a fine new
house in fifteen or twenty years." That had given him a reason for
working, and a goal.

His father, Loren, had vowed, "Even if I have to economize on books a
little, and perhaps give up this extravagance of eating meat four times
a week--very bad for the digestion, anyway--my son, Doremus, shall have
a college education, and when, as he desires, he becomes a publicist, I
think perhaps I shall be able to help him for a year or two. And then I
hope--oh, in a mere five or six years more--to buy that complete Dickens
with all the illustrations--oh, an extravagance, but a thing to leave to
my grandchildren to treasure forever!"

But Doremus Jessup could not plan, "I'll have Sissy go to Smith before
she studies architecture," or "If Julian Falck and Sissy get married and
stick here in the Fort, I'll give 'em the southwest lot and some day,
maybe fifteen years from now, the whole place will be filled with nice
kids again!" No. Fifteen years from now, he sighed, Sissy might be
hustling hash for the sort of workers who called the waiter's art
"hustling hash"; and Julian might be in a concentration camp--Fascist
_or_ Communist!

The Horatio Alger tradition, from rags to Rockefellers, was clean gone
out of the America it had dominated.

It seemed faintly silly to hope, to try to prophesy, to give up sleep on
a good mattress for toil on a typewriter, and as for saving
money--idiotic!

****

And for a newspaper editor--for one who must know, at least as well as
the Encyclopædia, everything about local and foreign history, geography,
economics, politics, literature, and methods of playing football--it was
maddening that it seemed impossible now to know anything surely.

"He don't know what it's all about" had in a year or two changed from a
colloquial sneer to a sound general statement regarding almost any
economist. Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had a
decent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold standard, agricultural
exports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that Liberal
Capitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmental
ownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling all
inequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel worker
would be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all the
jails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.

Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone monk
stricken with a conviction of sin, he mourned, "If I only knew more!...
Yes, and if I could only remember statistics!"

The coming and the going of the N.R.A., the F.E.R.A., the P.W.A., and
all the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were four sets of people
who did not clearly understand anything whatever about how the
government must be conducted: all the authorities in Washington; all of
the citizenry who talked, or wrote profusely about politics; the
bewildered untouchables who said nothing; and Doremus Jessup.

"But," said he, "now, after Buzz's inauguration, everything is going to
be completely simple and comprehensible again--the country is going to
be run as his private domain!"

****

Julian Falck, now sophomore in Amherst, had come home for Christmas
vacation, and he dropped in at the _Informer_ office to beg from Doremus
a ride home before dinner.

He called Doremus "sir" and did not seem to think he was a comic fossil.
Doremus liked it.

On the way they stopped for gasoline at the garage of John Pollikop, the
seething Social Democrat, and were waited upon by Karl Pascal--sometime
donkey-engineman at Tasbrough's quarry, sometime strike-leader, sometime
political prisoner in the county jail on a thin charge of inciting to
riot, and ever since then, a model of Communistic piety.

Pascal was a thin man, but sinewy; his gaunt and humorous face of a good
mechanic was so grease-darkened that the skin above and below his eyes
seemed white as a fish-belly, and, in turn, that pallid rim made his
eyes, alert dark gipsy eyes, seem the larger.... A panther chained to
a coal cart.

"Well, what you going to do after this election?" said Doremus. "Oh!
That's a fool question! I guess none of us chronic kickers want to say
much about what we plan to do after January, when Buzz gets his hands on
us. Lie low, eh?"

"I'm going to lie the lowest lie that I ever did. You bet! But maybe
there'll be a few Communist cells around here now, when Fascism begins
to get into people's hair. Never did have much success with my
propaganda before, but now, you watch!" exulted Pascal.

"You don't seem so depressed by the election," marveled Doremus, while
Julian offered, "No--you seem quite cheerful about it!"

"Depressed? Why good Lord, Mr. Jessup, I thought you knew your
revolutionary tactics better than that, way you supported us in the
quarry strike--even if you _are_ the perfect type of small capitalist
bourgeois! Depressed? Why, can't you see, if the Communists had paid for
it they couldn't have had anything more elegant for our purposes than
the election of a pro-plutocrat, itching militarist dictator like Buzz
Windrip! Look! He'll get everybody plenty dissatisfied. But they can't
do anything, barehanded against the armed troops. Then he'll whoop it up
for a war, and so millions of people will have arms and food rations in
their hands--all ready for the revolution! Hurray for Buzz and John
Prang the Baptist!"

"Karl, it's funny about you. I honestly believe you believe in
Communism!" marveled young Julian. "Don't you?"

"Why don't you go and ask your friend Father Perefixe if he believes in
the Virgin?"

"But you seem to like America, and you don't seem so fanatical, Karl. I
remember when I was a kid of about ten and you--I suppose you were about
twenty-five or -six then--you used to slide with us and whoop like hell,
and you made me a ski-stick."

"Sure I like America. Came here when I was two years old--I was born in
Germany--my folks weren't Heinies, though--my dad was French and my
mother a Hunkie from Serbia. (Guess that makes me a hundred per cent
American, all right!) I think we've got the Old Country beat, lots of
ways. Why, say, Julian, over there I'd have to call you 'Mein Herr' or
'Your Excellency,' or some fool thing, and you'd call me, 'I say-uh,
Pascal!' and Mr. Jessup here, my Lord, he'd be 'Commendatore' or 'Herr
Doktor'! No, I like it here. There's symptoms of possible future
democracy. But--but--what burns me up--it isn't that old soap-boxer's
chestnut about how one tenth of 1 per cent of the population at the top
have an aggregate income equal to 42 per cent at the bottom. Figures
like that are too astronomical. Don't mean a thing in the world to a
fellow with his eyes--and nose--down in a transmission box--fellow that
doesn't see the stars except after 9 P.M. on odd Wednesdays. But what
burns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what you
folks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families in the
country earned $500 a year or less--remember, those weren't the
unemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of still
doing honest labor.

"Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week--and that means one
dirty little room for a family of four people! It means $5.00 a week for
all their food--eighteen cents per day per person for food!--and even
the lousiest prisons allow more than that. And the magnificent remainder
of $2.50 a week, that means nine cents per day per person for clothes,
insurance, carfares, doctors' bills, dentists' bills, and for God's
sake, amusements--amusements!--and all the rest of the nine cents a day
they can fritter away on their Fords and autogiros and, when they feel
fagged, skipping across the pond on the _Normandie_! Seven per cent of
all the fortunate American families where the old man _has_ got a job!"

Julian was silent; then whispered, "You know--fellow gets discussing
economics in college--theoretically sympathetic--but to see your own
kids living on eighteen cents a day for grub--I guess that would make a
man pretty extremist!"

Doremus fretted, "But what percentage of forced labor in your Russian
lumber camps and Siberian prison mines are getting more than that?"

"Haaa! That's all baloney! That's the old standard come-back at every
Communist--just like once, twenty years ago, the muttonheads used to
think they'd crushed any Socialist when they snickered 'If all the money
was divided up, inside five years the hustlers would have all of it
again.' Prob'ly there's some standard _coup de grace_ like that in
Russia, to crush anybody that defends America. Besides!" Karl Pascal
glowed with nationalistic fervor. "We Americans aren't like those dumb
Russki peasants! We'll do a whole lot better when _we_ get Communism!"

And on that, his employer, the expansive John Pollikop, a woolly Scotch
terrier of a man, returned to the garage. John was an excellent friend
of Doremus; had, indeed, been his bootlegger all through Prohibition,
personally running in his whisky from Canada. He had been known, even in
that singularly scrupulous profession, as one of its most trustworthy
practitioners. Now he flowered into mid-European dialectics:

"Evenin', Mist' Jessup, evenin', Julian! Karl fill up y' tank for you?
You want t' watch that guy--he's likely to hold out a gallon on you.
He's one of these crazy dogs of Communists--they all believe in Violence
instead of Evolution and Legality. Them--why say, if they hadn't been so
crooked, if they'd joined me and Norman Thomas and the other
_intelligent_ Socialists in a United Front with Roosevelt and the
Jeffersonians, why say, we'd of licked the pants off Buzzard Windrip!
Windrip and his plans!"

("Buzzard" Windrip. That was good, Doremus reflected. He'd be able to
use it in the _Informer_!)

Pascal protested, "Not that Buzzard's personal plans and ambitions have
got much to do with it. Altogether too easy to explain everything just
blaming it on Windrip. Why don't you _read_ your Marx, John, instead of
always gassing about him? Why, Windrip's just something nasty that's
been vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in the
stomach--quack economists with every sort of economic ptomain! No, Buzz
isn't important--it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we've
got to attend to--the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanently
unemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!"

"Can you crazy Tovarishes cure it?" snapped Pollikop, and, "Do you think
Communism will cure it?" skeptically wondered Doremus, and, more
politely, "Do you really think Karl Marx had the dope?" worried Julian,
all three at once.

"You bet your life we can!" said Pascal vaingloriously.

As Doremus, driving away, looked back at them, Pascal and Pollikop were
removing a flat tire together and quarreling bitterly, quite happily.

****

Doremus's attic study had been to him a refuge from the tender
solicitudes of Emma and Mrs. Candy and his daughters, and all the
impulsive hand-shaking strangers who wanted the local editor to start
off their campaigns for the sale of life-insurance or gas-saving
carburetors, for the Salvation Army or the Red Cross or the Orphans'
Home or the Anti-cancer Crusade, or the assorted magazines which would
enable to go through college young men who at all cost should be kept
out of college.

It was a refuge now from the considerably less tender solicitudes of
supporters of the President-Elect. On the pretense of work, Doremus took
to sneaking up there in mid-evening; and he sat not in an easy chair but
stiffly, at his desk, making crosses and five-pointed stars and
six-pointed stars and fancy delete signs on sheets of yellow copy paper,
while he sorely meditated.

Thus, this evening, after the demands of Karl Pascal and John Pollikop:

"'The Revolt against Civilization!'

"But there's the worst trouble of this whole cursed business of
analysis. When I get to defending Democracy against Communism and
Fascism and what-not, I sound just like the Lothrop Stoddards--why, I
sound almost like a Hearst editorial on how some college has got to kick
out a Dangerous Red instructor in order to preserve our Democracy for
the ideals of Jefferson and Washington! Yet somehow, singing the same
words, I have a notion my tune is entirely different from Hearst's. I
_don't_ think we've done very well with all the plowland and forest and
minerals and husky human stock we've had. What makes me sick about
Hearst and the D.A.R. is that if _they_ are against Communism, I have to
be for it, and I don't want to be!

"Wastage of resources, so they're about gone--that's been the American
share in the revolt against Civilization.

"We _can_ go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and good
manners and tolerance is so thin! It would just take a few thousand big
shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young men, and all the
libraries and historical archives and patent offices, all the
laboratories and art galleries, all the castles and Periclean temples
and Gothic cathedrals, all the coöperative stores and motor
factories--every storehouse of learning. No inherent reason why Sissy's
grandchildren--if anybody's grandchildren will survive at all--shouldn't
be living in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts.

"And what's the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of 'em! The
Communists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have the
Fascists, and the rigid American Constitutionalists--who _call_
themselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the word
ought to mean; and the Monarchists--who are certain that if we could
just resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody would
be loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit on
small business men at 2 per cent. And all the preachers--they tell you
that they alone have the inspired Solution.

"Well, gentlemen, I have listened to all your Solutions, and I now
inform you that I, and I alone, except perhaps for Walt Trowbridge and
the ghost of Pareto, have the perfect, the inevitable, the only
Solution, and that is: There is no Solution! There will never be a state
of society anything like perfect!

"There never will be a time when there won't be a large proportion of
people who feel poor no matter how much they have, and envy their
neighbors who know how to wear cheap clothes showily, and envy neighbors
who can dance or make love or digest better."

Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would be
impossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly the
rate decided upon two years before by the National Technocratic Minerals
Commission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian the
principles of the commissioners.

His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not flee
before the thought that a thousand years from now human beings would
probably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownish
mishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continue
to be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, noses
that itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs that
are nervous until the age of virtue and senility. It seemed to him
unidealistically probable, for all the "contemporary furniture" of the
1930's, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundred
years, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books--no
matter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wear
shoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and in
general spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spent
them in 1930, in 1630. He suspected that tornadoes, floods, droughts,
lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidal
tendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancing
off with other men.

And, most fatally and abysmally, his Solution guessed that men of
superior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be called
Comrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of the
Poor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence than
slower-witted men, however worthy.

****

All the warring Solutions--except his, Doremus chuckled--were
ferociously propagated by the Fanatics, the "Nuts."

He recalled an article in which Neil Carothers asserted that the
"rabble-rousers" of America in the mid-'thirties had a long and
dishonorable ancestry of prophets who had felt called upon to stir up
the masses to save the world, and save it in the prophets' own way, and
do it right now, and most violently: Peter the Hermit, the ragged, mad,
and stinking monk who, to rescue the (unidentified) tomb of the Savior
from undefined "outrages by the pagans," led out on the Crusades some
hundreds of thousands of European peasants, to die on the way of
starvation, after burning, raping, and murdering fellow peasants in
foreign villages all along the road.

There was John Ball who "in 1381 was a share-the-wealth advocate; he
preached equality of wealth, the abolition of class distinctions, and
what would now be called communism," and whose follower, Wat Tyler,
looted London, with the final gratifying result that afterward Labor was
by the frightened government more oppressed than ever. And nearly three
hundred years later, Cromwell's methods of expounding the sweet
winsomeness of Purity and Liberty were shooting, slashing, clubbing,
starving, and burning people, and after him the workers paid for the
spree of bloody righteousness with blood.

Brooding about it, fishing in the muddy slew of recollection which most
Americans have in place of a clear pool of history, Doremus was able to
add other names of well-meaning rabble-rousers:

Murat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control of France
from the moldy aristocrats to the stuffy, centime-pinching shopkeepers.
Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate Russian peasants the
privileges of punching a time clock and of being as learned, gay, and
dignified as the factory hands in Detroit; and Lenin's man, Borodin, who
extended this boon to China. And that William Randolph Hearst who in
1898 was the Lenin of Cuba and switched the mastery of the golden isle
from the cruel Spaniards to the peaceful, unarmed, brotherly-loving
Cuban politicians of today.

The American Moses, Dowie, and his theocracy at Zion City, Illinois,
where the only results of the direct leadership of God--as directed and
encouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more spirited successor, Mr.
Voliva--were that the holy denizens were deprived of oysters and
cigarettes and cursing, and died without the aid of doctors instead of
with it, and that the stretch of road through Zion City incessantly
caused the breakage of springs on the cars of citizens from Evanston,
Wilmette, and Winnetka, which may or not have been a desirable Good
Deed.

Cecil Rhodes, his vision of making South Africa a British paradise, and
the actuality of making it a graveyard for British soldiers.

All the Utopias--Brook Farm, Robert Owen's sanctuary of chatter, Upton
Sinclair's Helicon Hall--and their regulation end in scandal, feuds,
poverty, griminess, disillusion.

All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause was
world-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot down
violators.

It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build permanently
had been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon captains, who not only
turned the Utah desert into an Eden but made it pay and kept it up.

Pondered Doremus: Blessed be they who are not Patriots and Idealists,
and who do not feel they must dash right in and Do Something About It,
something so immediately important that all doubters must be
liquidated--tortured--slaughtered! Good old murder, that since the
slaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which all
oligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removed
opposition!

****

In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions; dared
even a little to doubt our two American revolutions--against England in
1776, and the Civil War.

For a New England editor to contemplate even the smallest criticism of
these wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptist
fundamentalist preacher to question Immortality, the Inspiration of the
Bible, and the ethical value of shouting Hallelujah. Yet had it, Doremus
queried nervously, been necessary to have four years of inconceivably
murderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of commercial oppression
of the South, in order to preserve the Union, free the slaves, and
establish the equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just to
the Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so little
preparation, into full citizenship, that the Southern states, in what
they considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynched
them and lashed them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired and
planned, have been freed without the vote, then gradually and
competently educated, under federal guardianship, so that by 1890 they
might, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully into all
the activities of the land?

A generation and a half (Doremus meditated) of the sturdiest and most
gallant killed or crippled in the Civil War or, perhaps worst of all,
becoming garrulous professional heroes and satellites of the politicians
who in return for their solid vote made all lazy jobs safe for the
G.A.R. The most valorous, it was they who suffered the most, for while
the John D. Rockefellers, the J. P. Morgans, the Vanderbilts, Astors,
Goulds, and all their nimble financial comrades of the South, did not
enlist, but stayed in the warm, dry counting-house, drawing the fortune
of the country into their webs, it was Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson,
Nathaniel Lyon, Pat Cleburne, and the knightly James B. McPherson who
were killed... and with them Abraham Lincoln.

So, with the hundreds of thousands who should have been the progenitors
of new American generations drained away, we could show the world, which
from 1780 to 1860 had so admired men like Franklin, Jefferson,
Washington, Hamilton, the Adamses, Webster, only such salvages as
McKinley, Benjamin Harrison, William Jennings Bryan, Harding... and
Senator Berzelius Windrip and his rivals.

Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy save
bloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and tolerance. Yet to
sentimentalize this cutting, to justify and rejoice in it, was an
altogether evil thing, a national superstition that was later to lead to
other Unavoidable Wars--wars to free Cubans, to free Filipinos who
didn't want our brand of freedom, to End All Wars.

Let us, thought Doremus, not throb again to the bugles of the Civil War,
nor find diverting the gallantry of Sherman's dashing Yankee boys in
burning the houses of lone women, nor particularly admire the calmness
of General Lee as he watched thousands writhe in the mud.

****

He even wondered if, necessarily, it had been such a desirable thing for
the Thirteen Colonies to have cut themselves off from Great Britain. Had
the United States remained in the British Empire, possibly there would
have evolved a confederation that could have enforced World Peace,
instead of talking about it. Boys and girls from Western ranches and
Southern plantations and Northern maple groves might have added Oxford
and York Minster and Devonshire villages to their own domain.
Englishmen, and even virtuous Englishwomen, might have learned that
persons who lack the accent of a Kentish rectory or of a Yorkshire
textile village may yet in many ways be literate; and that astonishing
numbers of persons in the world cannot be persuaded that their chief aim
in life ought to be to increase British exports on behalf of the
stock-holdings of the Better Classes.

It is commonly asserted, Doremus remembered, that without complete
political independence the United States could not have developed its
own peculiar virtues. Yet it was not apparent to him that America was
any more individual than Canada or Australia; that Pittsburgh and Kansas
City were to be preferred before Montreal and Melbourne, Sydney and
Vancouver.

                           *     *     *

No questioning of the eventual wisdom of the "radicals" who had first
advocated these two American revolutions, Doremus warned himself, should
be allowed to give any comfort to that eternal enemy: the conservative
manipulators of privilege who damn as "dangerous agitators" any man who
menaces their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnat
like Debs, and blandly swallow a camel like Windrip.

Between the rabble-rousers--chiefly to be detected by desire for their
own personal power and notoriety--and the un-self-seeking fighters
against tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and John Howard or
William Lloyd Garrison, Doremus saw, there was the difference between a
noisy gang of thieves and an honest man noisily defending himself
against thieves. He had been brought up to revere the Abolitionists:
Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe--though his
father had considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown sly
mud at the marble statues of Henry Ward Beecher, the apostle in the
fancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere the
Abolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas and
Thaddeus Stephens and Lincoln, more cautious and less romantic men,
might not have done the job better.

"Is it just possible," he sighed, "that the most vigorous and boldest
idealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of its
greatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait of
minding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchy
than all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the masses
and insisted on saving them?"




CHAPTER 14


    I joined the Christian, or as some call it, the Campbellite
    Church as a mere boy, not yet dry behind the ears. But I wished
    then and I wish now that it were possible for me to belong to
    the whole glorious brotherhood; to be one in Communion at the
    same time with the brave Presbyterians that fight the
    pusillanimous, mendacious, destructive, tom-fool Higher Critics,
    so-called; and with the Methodists who so strongly oppose war
    yet in wartime can always be counted upon for Patriotism to the
    limit; and with the splendidly tolerant Baptists, the earnest
    Seventh-Day Adventists, and I guess I could even say a kind word
    for the Unitarians, as that great executive William Howard Taft
    belonged to them, also his wife.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Officially, Doremus belonged to the Universalist Church, his wife and
children to the Episcopal--a natural American transition. He had been
reared to admire Hosea Ballou, the Universalist St. Augustine who, from
his tiny parsonage in Barnard, Vermont, had proclaimed his faith that
even the wickedest would have, after earthly death, another chance of
salvation. But now, Doremus could scarce enter the Fort Beulah
Universalist Church. It had too many memories of his father, the pastor,
and it was depressing to see how the old-time congregations, in which
two hundred thick beards would wag in the grained pine benches every
Sunday morning, and their womenfolks and children line up beside the
patriarchs, had dwindled to aged widows and farmers and a few
schoolteachers.

But in this time of seeking, Doremus did venture there. The church was a
squat and gloomy building of granite, not particularly enlivened by the
arches of colored slate above the windows, yet as a boy Doremus had
thought it and its sawed-off tower the superior of Chartres. He had
loved it as in Isaiah College he had loved the Library which, for all
its appearance of being a crouching red-brick toad, had meant to him
freedom for spiritual discovery--still cavern of a reading room where
for hours one could forget the world and never be nagged away to supper.

He found, on his one attendance at the Universalist church, a scattering
of thirty disciples, being addressed by a "supply," a theological
student from Boston, monotonously shouting his well-meant, frightened,
and slightly plagiaristic eloquence in regard to the sickness of Abijah,
the son of Jeroboam. Doremus looked at the church walls, painted a hard
and glistening green, unornamented, to avoid all the sinful trappings of
papistry, while he listened to the preacher's hesitant droning:

"Now, uh, now what so many of us fail to realize is how, uh, how sin,
how any sin that we, uh, we ourselves may commit, any sin reflects not
on ourselves but on those that we, uh, that we hold near and dear----"

He would have given anything, Doremus yearned, for a sermon which,
however irrational, would passionately lift him to renewed courage,
which would bathe him in consolation these beleagured months. But with a
shock of anger he saw that that was exactly what he had been condemning
just a few days ago: the irrational dramatic power of the crusading
leader, clerical or political.

Very well then--sadly. He'd just have to get along without the spiritual
consolation of the church that he had known in college days.

No, first he'd try the ritual of his friend Mr. Falck--the Padre, Buck
Titus sometimes called him.

In the cozy Anglicanism of St. Crispin's P. E. Church, with its
imitation English memorial brasses and imitation Celtic font and
brass-eagle reading desk and dusty-smelling maroon carpet, Doremus
listened to Mr. Falck: "Almighty God, the Father of our Lord Jesus
Christ, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he may
turn from his wickedness, and live; and hath given power and commandment
to his Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, being
penitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins----"

Doremus glanced at the placidly pious façade of his wife, Emma. The
lovely, familiar old ritual seemed meaningless to him now, with no more
pertinence to a life menaced by Buzz Windrip and his Minute Men, no more
comfort for having lost his old deep pride in being an American, than a
stage revival of an equally lovely and familiar Elizabethan play. He
looked about nervously. However exalted Mr. Falck himself might be, most
of the congregation were Yorkshire pudding. The Anglican Church was, to
them, not the aspiring humility of Newman nor the humanity of Bishop
Brown (both of whom left it!) but the sign and proof of prosperity--an
ecclesiastical version of owning a twelve-cylinder Cadillac--or even
more, of knowing that one's grandfather owned his own surrey and a
respectable old family horse.

The whole place smelled to Doremus of stale muffins. Mrs. R. C. Crowley
was wearing white gloves and on her bust--for a Mrs. Crowley, even in
1936, did not yet have breasts--was a tight bouquet of tuberoses.
Francis Tasbrough had a morning coat and striped trousers and on the
lilac-colored pew cushion beside him was (unique in Fort Beulah) a silk
top-hat. And even the wife of Doremus's bosom, or at least of his
breakfast coffee, the good Emma, had a pedantic expression of superior
goodness which irritated him.

"Whole outfit stifles me!" he snapped. "Rather be at a yelling, jumping
Holy Roller orgy--no--that's Buzz Windrip's kind of jungle hysterics. I
want a church, if there can possibly be one, that's advanced beyond the
jungle and beyond the chaplains of King Henry the Eighth. I know why,
even though she's painfully conscientious, Lorinda never goes to
church."

****

Lorinda Pike, on that sleety December afternoon, was darning a tea cloth
in the lounge of her Beulah Valley Tavern, five miles up the river from
the Fort. It wasn't, of course, a tavern: it was a super-boarding-house
as regards its twelve guest bedrooms, and a slightly too arty tea room
in its dining facilities. Despite his long affection for Lorinda,
Doremus was always annoyed by the Singhalese brass finger bowls, the
North Carolina table mats, and the Italian ash trays displayed for sale
on wabbly card tables in the dining room. But he had to admit that the
tea was excellent, the scones light, the Stilton sound, Lorinda's
private rum punches admirable, and that Lorinda herself was intelligent
yet adorable--particularly when, as on this gray afternoon, she was
bothered neither by other guests nor by the presence of that worm, her
partner, Mr. Nipper, whose pleasing notion it was that because he had
invested a few thousand in the Tavern he should have none of the work or
responsibility and half the profits.

Doremus thrust his way in, patting off the snow, puffing to recover from
the shakiness caused by skidding all the way from Fort Beulah. Lorinda
nodded carelessly, dropped another stick on the fireplace, and went back
to her darning with nothing more intimate than "Hullo. Nasty out."

"Yuh--fierce."

But as they sat on either side the hearth their eyes had no need of
smiling for a bridge between them.

Lorinda reflected, "Well, my darling, it's going to be pretty bad. I
guess Windrip & Co. will put the woman's struggle right back in the
sixteen-hundreds, with Anne Hutchinson and the Antinomians."

"Sure. Back to the kitchen."

"Even if you haven't got one!"

"Any worse than us men? Notice that Windrip never _mentioned_ free
speech and the freedom of the press in his articles of faith? Oh,
he'd've come out for 'em strong and hearty if he'd even thought of 'em!"

"That's so. Tea, darling?"

"No. Linda, damn it, I feel like taking the family and sneaking off to
Canada _before_ I get nabbed--right after Buzz's inauguration."

"No. You mustn't. We've got to keep all the newspapermen that'll go on
fighting him, and not go sniffling up to the garbage pail. Besides! What
would I do without you?" For the first time Lorinda sounded importunate.

"You'll be a lot less suspect if I'm not around. But I guess you're
right. I can't go till they put the skids under me. Then I'll have to
vanish. I'm too old to stand jail."

"Not too old to make love, I hope! That _would_ be hard on a girl!"

"Nobody ever is, except the kind that used to be too young to make love!
Anyway, I'll stay--for a while."

He had, suddenly, from Lorinda, the resoluteness he had sought in
church. He would go on trying to sweep back the ocean, just for his own
satisfaction. It meant, however, that his hermitage in the Ivory Tower
was closed with slightly ludicrous speed. But he felt strong again, and
happy. His brooding was interrupted by Lorinda's curt:

"How's Emma taking the political situation?"

"Doesn't know there is one! Hears me croaking, and she heard Walt
Trowbridge's warning on the radio, last evening--did you listen in?--and
she says, 'Oh my, how dreadful!' and then forgets all about it and
worries about the saucepan that got burnt! She's lucky! Oh well, she
probably calms me down and keeps me from becoming a _complete_ neurote!
Probably that's why I'm so darned everlastingly fond of her. And yet I'm
chump enough to wish you and I were together--uh--recognizedly together,
all the time--and could fight together to keep some little light burning
in this coming new glacial epoch. I do. All the time. I think that, at
this moment, all things considered, I should like to kiss you."

"Is that so unusual a celebration?"

"Yes. Always. Always it's the first time again! Look, Linda, do you ever
stop to think how curious it is, that with--everything between us--like
that night in the hotel at Montreal--we neither one of us seem to feel
any guilt, any embarrassment--can sit and gossip like this?"

"No, dear.... Darling!... It doesn't seem a bit curious. It was
all so natural. So good!"

"And yet we're reasonably responsible people----"

"Of course. That's why nobody suspects us, not even Emma. Thank God she
doesn't, Doremus! I wouldn't hurt her for anything, not even for your
kind-hearted favors!"

"Beast!"

"Oh, you might be suspected, all by yourself. It's known that you
sometimes drink likker and play poker and tell 'hot ones.' But who'd
ever suspect that the local female crank, the suffragist, the pacifist,
the anti-censorshipist, the friend of Jane Addams and Mother Bloor,
could be a libertine! Highbrows! Bloodless reformers! Oh, and I've known
so many women agitators, all dressed in Carrie Nation hatchets and
modest sheets of statistics, that have been ten times as passionate,
intolerably passionate, as any cream-faced plump little Kept Wife in
chiffon step-ins!"

For a moment their embracing eyes were not merely friendly and
accustomed and careless.

He fretted, "Oh I think of you all the time and want you and yet I think
of Emma too--and I don't even have the fine novelistic egotism of
feeling guilty and intolerably caught in complexities. Yes, it does all
seem so natural. Dear Linda!"

He stalked restlessly to the casement window, looking back at her every
second step. It was dusk now, and the roads smoking. He stared out
inattentively--then very attentively indeed.

"That's curious. Curiouser and curiouser. Standing back behind that big
bush, lilac bush I guess it is, across the road, there's a fellow
watching this place. I can see him in the headlights whenever a car
comes along. And I think it's my hired man, Oscar Ledue--Shad." He
started to draw the cheerful red-and-white curtains.

"No! No! Don't draw them! He'll get suspicious."

"That's right. Funny, his watching there--if it _is_ him. He's supposed
to be at my house right now, looking after the furnace--winters, he only
works for me couple of hours a day, works in the sash factory, rest of
the time, but he ought to----A little light blackmail, I suppose. Well,
he can publish everything he saw today, wherever he wants to!"

"Only what he saw today?"

"Anything! Any day! I'm awfully proud--old dish rag like me, twenty
years older than you!--to be your lover!"

And he was proud, yet all the while he was remembering the warning in
red chalk that he had found on his front porch after the election.
Before he had time to become very complicated about it, the door
vociferously banged open, and his daughter, Sissy, sailed in.

"Wot-oh, wot-oh, wot-oh! Toodle-oo! Good-morning, Jeeves! Mawnin', Miss
Lindy. How's all de folks on de ole plantation everywhere I roam? Hello,
Dad. No, it isn't cocktails--least, just one very small cocktail--it's
youthful spirits! My God, but it's cold! Tea, Linda, my good
woman--tea!"

They had tea. A thoroughly domestic circle.

"Race you home, Dad," said Sissy, when they were ready to go.

"Yes--no--wait a second! Lorinda: lend me a flashlight."

As he marched out of the door, marched belligerently across the road, in
Doremus seethed all the agitated anger he had been concealing from
Sissy. And part hidden behind bushes, leaning on his motorcycle, he did
find Shad Ledue.

Shad was startled; for once he looked less contemptuously masterful than
a Fifth Avenue traffic policeman, as Doremus snapped, "What you doing
there?" and he stumbled in answering: "Oh I just--something happened to
my motor-bike."

"So! You ought to be home tending the furnace, Shad."

"Well, I guess I got my machine fixed now. I'll hike along."

"No. My daughter is to drive me home, so you can put your motorcycle in
the back of my car and drive it back." (Somehow, he had to talk
privately to Sissy, though he was not in the least certain what it was
he had to say.)

"Her? Rats! Sissy can't drive for sour apples! Crazy's a loon!"

"Ledue! Miss Sissy is a highly competent driver. At least she satisfies
me, and if you really feel she doesn't quite satisfy _your_
standard----"

"Her driving don't make a damn bit of difference to me one way or th'
other! G'night!"

Recrossing the road, Doremus rebuked himself, "That was childish of me.
Trying to talk to him like a gent! But how I would enjoy murdering him!"

He informed Sissy, at the door, "Shad happened to come along--motorcycle
in bad shape--let him take my Chrysler--I'll drive with you."

"Fine! Only six boys have had their hair turn gray, driving with me,
this week."

"And I--I meant to say, I think I'd better do the driving. It's pretty
slippery tonight."

"Wouldn't that destroy you! Why, my dear idiot parent, I'm the best
driver in----"

"You can't drive for sour apples! Crazy, that's all! Get in! I'm
driving, d'you hear? Night, Lorinda."

"All right, dearest Father," said Sissy with an impishness which reduced
his knees to feebleness.

He assured himself, though, that this flip manner of Sissy,
characteristic of even the provincial boys and girls who had been nursed
on gasoline, was only an imitation of the nicer New York harlots and
would not last more than another year or two. Perhaps this
rattle-tongued generation needed a Buzz Windrip Revolution and all its
pain.

****

"Beautiful, I know it's swell to drive carefully, but do you have to
emulate the prudent snail?" said Sissy.

"Snails don't skid."

"No, they get run' over. Rather skid!"

"So your father's a fossil!"

"Oh, I wouldn't----"

"Well, maybe he is, at that. There's advantages. Anyway: I wonder if
there isn't a lot of bunk about Age being so cautious and conservative,
and Youth always being so adventurous and bold and original? Look at the
young Nazis and how they enjoy beating up the Communists. Look at almost
any college class--the students disapproving of the instructor because
he's iconoclastic and ridicules the sacred home-town ideas. Just this
afternoon, I was thinking, driving out here----"

"Listen, Dad, do you go to Lindy's often?"

"Why--why, not especially. Why?"

"Why don't you----What are you two so scared of? You two wild-haired
reformers--you and Lindy belong together. Why don't you--you know--kind
of be lovers?"

"Good God Almighty! Cecilia! I've never heard a _decent_ girl talk that
way in all my life!"

"Tst! Tst! Haven't you? Dear, dear! So sorry!"

"Well, my Lord----At least you've got to admit that it's slightly
unusual for an apparently loyal daughter to suggest her father's
deceiving her mother! Especially a fine lovely mother like yours!"

"Is it? Well, maybe. Unusual to suggest it--aloud. But I wonder if lots
of young females don't sometimes kind of _think_ it, just the same, when
they see the Venerable Parent going stale!"

"Sissy----"

"Hey, watch that telephone pole!"

"Hang it, I didn't go anywheres near it! Now you look here, Sissy: you
simply must not be so froward--or forward, whichever it is; I always get
those two words balled up. This is serious business. I've never heard of
such a preposterous suggestion as Linda--Lorinda and I being lovers. My
dear child, you simply _can't_ be flip about such final things as that!"

"Oh, _can't_ I! Oh, sorry, Dad. I just mean----About Mother Emma. Course
I wouldn't have anybody hurt her, not even Lindy and you. But, why,
bless you, Venerable, she'd never even dream of such a thing. You could
have your nice pie and she'd never miss one single slice. Mother's
mental grooves aren't, uh, well, they aren't so very sex-conditioned, if
that's how you say it--more sort of along the new-vacuum-cleaner
complex, if you know what I mean--page Freud! Oh, she's swell, but not
so analytical and----"

"Are those your ethics, then?"

"Huh? Well for cat's sake, why not? Have a swell time that'll get you
full of beans again and yet not hurt anybody's feelings? Why, say,
that's the entire second chapter in my book on ethics!"

"Sissy! Have you, by any chance, any vaguest notion of what you're
talking about, or think you're talking about? Of course--and perhaps we
ought to be ashamed of our cowardly negligence--but I, and I don't
suppose your mother, have taught you so very much about 'sex' and----"

"Thank heaven! You spared me the dear little flower and its simply
shocking affair with that tough tomcat of a tiger lily in the next
bed--excuse me--I mean in the next plot. I'm so glad you did. Pete's
sake! I'd certainly hate to blush every time I looked at a garden!"

"Sissy! Child! Please! You mustn't be so beastly _cute_! These are all
weighty things----"

Penitently: "I know, Dad. I'm sorry. It's just--if you only knew how
wretched I feel when I see you so wretched and so quiet and everything.
This horrible Windrip, League of Forgodsakers business has got you down,
hasn't it! If you're going to fight 'em, you've got to get some pep back
into you--you've got to take off the lace mitts and put on the brass
knuckles--and I got kind of a hunch Lorinda might do that for you, and
only her. Heh! Her pretending to be so high-minded! (Remember that old
wheeze Buck Titus used to love so--'If you're saving the fallen women,
save me one'? Oh, not so good. I guess we'll take that line right out of
the sketch!) But anyway, our Lindy has a pretty moist and hungry
eye----"

"Impossible! Impossible! By the way, Sissy! What do you know about all
of this? Are you a virgin?"

"Dad! Is that your idea of a question to----Oh, I guess I was asking for
it. And the answer is: Yes. So far. But not promising one single thing
about the future. Let me tell you right now, if conditions in this
country do get as bad as you've been claiming they will, and Julian
Falck is threatened with having to go to war or go to prison or some
rotten thing like that, I'm most certainly not going to let any maidenly
modesty interfere between me and him, and you might just as well be
prepared for that!"

"It _is_ Julian then, not Malcolm?"

"Oh, I think so. Malcolm gives me a pain in the neck. He's getting all
ready to take his proper place as a colonel or something with Windrip's
wooden soldiers. And I am so fond of Julian! Even if he is the
doggonedest, most impractical soul--like his grandfather--or you! He's a
sweet thing. We sat up purring pretty nothings till about two, last
night, I guess."

"Sissy! But you haven't----Oh, my little girl! Julian is probably decent
enough--not a bad sort--but you----You haven't let Julian take any
familiarities with you?"

"Dear quaint old word! As if anything could be so awfully much more
familiar than a good, capable, 10,000 h.p. kiss! But darling, just so
you won't worry--no. The few times, late nights, in our sitting room,
when I've slept with Julian--well, we've _slept_!"

"I'm glad, but----Your apparent--probably only apparent--information on
a variety of delicate subjects slightly embarrasses me."

"Now you listen to me! And this is something you ought to be telling me,
not me you, Mr. Jessup! Looks as if this country, and most of the
world--I _am_ being serious, now, Dad; plenty serious, God help us
all!--it looks as if we're headed right back into barbarism. It's war!
There's not going to be much time for coyness and modesty, any more than
there is for a base-hospital nurse when they bring in the wounded. Nice
young ladies--they're _out_! It's Lorinda and me that you men are going
to want to have around, isn't it--isn't it--now isn't it?"

"Maybe--perhaps," Doremus sighed, depressed at seeing a little more of
his familiar world slide from under his feet as the flood rose.

They were coming into the Jessup driveway. Shad Ledue was just leaving
the garage.

"Skip in the house, quick, will you!" said Doremus to his girl.

"Sure. But do be careful, hon!" She no longer sounded like his little
daughter, to be protected, adorned with pale blue ribbons, slyly laughed
at when she tried to show off in grown-up ways. She was suddenly a
dependable comrade, like Lorinda.

Doremus slipped resolutely out of his car and said calmly:

"Shad!"

"Yuh?"

"D'you take the car keys into the kitchen?"

"Huh? No. I guess I left 'em in the car."

"I've told you a hundred times they belong inside."

"Yuh? Well, how'd you like _Miss Cecilia's_ driving? Have a good visit
with old Mrs. Pike?"

He was derisive now, beyond concealment.

"Ledue, I rather think you're fired--right now!"

"Well! Just feature that! O.K., Chief! I was just going to tell you that
we're forming a second chapter of the League of Forgotten Men in the
Fort, and I'm to be the secretary. They don't pay much--only about twice
what you pay me--pretty tight-fisted--but it'll mean something in
politics. Good-night!"

Afterward, Doremus was sorry to remember that, for all his longshoreman
clumsiness, Shad had learned a precise script in his red Vermont
schoolhouse, and enough mastery of figures so that probably he would be
able to keep this rather bogus secretaryship. Too bad!

****

When, as League secretary, a fortnight later, Shad wrote to him
demanding a donation of two hundred dollars to the League, and Doremus
refused, the _Informer_ began to lose circulation within twenty-four
hours.




CHAPTER 15


    Usually I'm pretty mild, in fact many of my friends are kind
    enough to call it "Folksy," when I'm writing or speechifying. My
    ambition is to "live by the side of the road and be a friend to
    man." But I hope that none of the gentlemen who have honored me
    with their enmity think for one single moment that when I run
    into a gross enough public evil or a persistent enough
    detractor, I can't get up on my hind legs and make a sound like
    a two-tailed grizzly in April. So right at the start of this
    account of my ten-year fight with them, as private citizen,
    State Senator, and U. S. Senator, let me say that the Sangfrey
    River Light, Power, and Fuel Corporation are--and I invite a
    suit for libel--the meanest, lowest, cowardliest gang of
    yellow-livered, back-slapping, hypocritical gun-toters,
    bomb-throwers, ballot-stealers, ledger-fakers, givers of bribes,
    suborners of perjury, scab-hirers, and general lowdown crooks,
    liars, and swindlers that ever tried to do an honest servant of
    the People out of an election--not but what I have always
    succeeded in licking them, so that my indignation at these
    homicidal kleptomaniacs is not personal but entirely on behalf
    of the general public.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

On Wednesday, January 6, 1937, just a fortnight before his inauguration,
President-Elect Windrip announced his appointments of cabinet members
and of diplomats.

Secretary of State: his former secretary and press-agent, Lee Sarason,
who also took the position of High Marshal, or Commander-in-Chief, of
the Minute Men, which organization was to be established permanently, as
an innocent marching club.

Secretary of the Treasury: one Webster R. Skittle, president of the
prosperous Fur & Hide National Bank of St. Louis--Mr. Skittle had once
been indicted on a charge of defrauding the government on his income
tax, but he had been acquitted, more or less, and during the campaign,
he was said to have taken a convincing way of showing his faith in Buzz
Windrip as the Savior of the Forgotten Men.

Secretary of War: Colonel Osceola Luthorne, formerly editor of the
Topeka (Kans.) _Argus_, and the _Fancy Goods and Novelties Gazette_;
more recently high in real estate. His title came from his position on
the honorary staff of the Governor of Tennessee. He had long been a
friend and fellow campaigner of Windrip.

It was a universal regret that Bishop Paul Peter Prang should have
refused the appointment as Secretary of War, with a letter in which he
called Windrip "My dear Friend and Collaborator" and asserted that he
had actually meant it when he had said he desired no office. Later, it
was a similar regret when Father Coughlin refused the Ambassadorship to
Mexico, with no letter at all but only a telegram cryptically stating,
"Just six months too late."

A new cabinet position, that of Secretary of Education and Public
Relations, was created. Not for months would Congress investigate the
legality of such a creation, but meantime the new post was brilliantly
held by Hector Macgoblin, M.D., Ph.D., Hon. Litt.D.

Senator Porkwood graced the position of Attorney General, and all the
other offices were acceptably filled by men who, though they had roundly
supported Windrip's almost socialistic projects for the distribution of
excessive fortunes, were yet known to be thoroughly sensible men, and no
fanatics.

It was said, though Doremus Jessup could never prove it, that Windrip
learned from Lee Sarason the Spanish custom of getting rid of
embarrassing friends and enemies by appointing them to posts abroad,
preferably quite far abroad. Anyway, as Ambassador to Brazil, Windrip
appointed Herbert Hoover, who not very enthusiastically accepted; as
Ambassador to Germany, Senator Borah; as Governor of the Philippines,
Senator Robert La Follette, who refused; and as Ambassadors to the Court
of St. James's, France, and Russia, none other than Upton Sinclair, Milo
Reno, and Senator Bilbo of Mississippi.

These three had a fine time. Mr. Sinclair pleased the British by taking
so friendly an interest in their politics that he openly campaigned for
the Independent Labor Party and issued a lively brochure called "I,
Upton Sinclair, Prove That Prime Minister Walter Elliot, Foreign
Secretary Anthony Eden, and First Lord of the Admiralty Nancy Astor Are
All Liars and Have Refused to Accept My Freely Offered Advice." Mr.
Sinclair also aroused considerable interest in British domestic circles
by advocating an act of Parliament forbidding the wearing of evening
clothes and all hunting of foxes except with shotguns; and on the
occasion of his official reception at Buckingham Palace, he warmly
invited King George and Queen Mary to come and live in California.

Mr. Milo Reno, insurance salesman and former president of the National
Farm Holiday Association, whom all the French royalists compared to his
great predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, for forthrightness, became the
greatest social favorite in the international circles of Paris, the
Basses-Pyrénées, and the Riviera, and was once photographed playing
tennis at Antibes with the Duc de Tropez, Lord Rothermere, and Dr.
Rudolph Hess.

Senator Bilbo had, possibly, the best time of all.

Stalin asked his advice, as based on his ripe experience in the
_Gleichshaltung_ of Mississippi, about the cultural organization of the
somewhat backward natives of Tadjikistan, and so valuable did it prove
that Excellency Bilbo was invited to review the Moscow military
celebration, the following November seventh, in the same stand with the
very highest class of representatives of the classless state. It was a
triumph for His Excellency. Generalissimo Voroshilov fainted after
200,000 Soviet troops, 7000 tanks, and 9000 aëroplanes had passed by;
Stalin had to be carried home after reviewing 317,000; but Ambassador
Bilbo was there in the stand when the very last of the 626,000 soldiers
had gone by, all of them saluting him under the quite erroneous
impression that he was the Chinese Ambassador; and he was still
tirelessly returning their salutes, fourteen to the minute, and softly
singing with them the "International."

He was less of a hit later, however, when to the unsmiling
Anglo-American Association of Exiles to Soviet Russia from Imperialism,
he sang to the tune of the "International" what he regarded as amusing
private words of his own:

    "_Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,_
      _From Russia make your getaway._
    _They all are rich in Bilbo's nation._
      _God bless the U. S. A.!_"

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, after her spirited campaign for Mr.
Windrip, was publicly angry that she was offered no position higher than
a post in the customs office in Nome, Alaska, though this was offered to
her very urgently indeed. She had demanded that there be created,
especially for her, the cabinet position of Secretaryess of Domestic
Science, Child Welfare, and Anti-Vice. She threatened to turn
Jeffersonian, Republican, or Communistic, but in April she was heard of
in Hollywood, writing the scenario for a giant picture to be called,
_They Did It in Greece_.

As an insult and boy-from-home joke, the President-Elect appointed
Franklin D. Roosevelt minister to Liberia. Mr. Roosevelt's opponents
laughed very much, and opposition newspapers did cartoons of him sitting
unhappily in a grass hut with a sign on which "N.R.A." had been crossed
out and "U.S.A." substituted. But Mr. Roosevelt declined with so amiable
a smile that the joke seemed rather to have slipped.

****

The followers of President Windrip trumpeted that it was significant
that he should be the first president inaugurated not on March fourth,
but on January twentieth, according to the provision of the new
Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution. It was a sign straight from
Heaven (though, actually, Heaven had not been the author of the
amendment, but Senator George W. Norris of Nebraska), and proved that
Windrip was starting a new paradise on earth.

The inauguration was turbulent. President Roosevelt declined to be
present--he politely suggested that he was about half ill unto death,
but that same noon he was seen in a New York shop, buying books on
gardening and looking abnormally cheerful.

More than a thousand reporters, photographers, and radio men covered the
inauguration. Twenty-seven constituents of Senator Porkwood, of all
sexes, had to sleep on the floor of the Senator's office, and a
hall-bedroom in the suburb of Bladensburg rented for thirty dollars for
two nights. The presidents of Brazil, the Argentine, and Chile flew to
the inauguration in a Pan-American aëroplane, and Japan sent seven
hundred students on a special train from Seattle.

A motor company in Detroit had presented to Windrip a limousine with
armor plate, bulletproof glass, a hidden nickel-steel safe for papers, a
concealed private bar, and upholstery made from the Troissant tapestries
of 1670. But Buzz chose to drive from his home to the Capitol in his old
Hupmobile sedan, and his driver was a youngster from his home town whose
notion of a uniform for state occasions was a blue-serge suit, red tie,
and derby hat. Windrip himself did wear a topper, but he saw to it that
Lee Sarason saw to it that the one hundred and thirty million plain
citizens learned, by radio, even while the inaugural parade was going
on, that he had borrowed the topper for this one sole occasion from a
New York Republican Representative who had ancestors.

But following Windrip was an un-Jacksonian escort of soldiers: the
American Legion and, immensely grander than the others, the Minute Men,
wearing trench helmets of polished silver and led by Colonel Dewey Haik
in scarlet tunic and yellow riding-breeches and helmet with golden
plumes.

Solemnly, for once looking a little awed, a little like a small-town boy
on Broadway, Windrip took the oath, administered by the Chief Justice
(who disliked him very much indeed) and, edging even closer to the
microphone, squawked, "My fellow citizens, as the President of the
United States of America, I want to inform you that the _real_ New Deal
has started right this minute, and we're all going to enjoy the manifold
liberties to which our history entitles us--and have a whale of a good
time doing it! I thank you!"

That was his first act as President. His second was to take up residence
in the White House, where he sat down in the East Room in his stocking
feet and shouted at Lee Sarason, "This is what I've been planning to do
now for six years! I bet this is what Lincoln used to do! Now let 'em
assassinate me!"

His third, in his rôle as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, was to order
that the Minute Men be recognized as an unpaid but official auxiliary of
the Regular Army, subject only to their own officers, to Buzz, and to
High Marshal Sarason; and that rifles, bayonets, automatic pistols, and
machine guns be instantly issued to them by government arsenals. That
was at 4 P.M. Since 3 P.M., all over the country, bands of M.M.'s had
been sitting gloating over pistols and guns, twitching with desire to
seize them.

Fourth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress (in session
since January fourth, the third having been a Sunday), demanding the
instant passage of a bill embodying Point Fifteen of his election
platform--that he should have complete control of legislation and
execution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blocking
anything that it might amuse him to do.

By Joint Resolution, with less than half an hour of debate, both houses
of Congress rejected that demand before 3 P.M., on January twenty-first.
Before six, the President had proclaimed that a state of martial law
existed during the "present crisis," and more than a hundred Congressmen
had been arrested by Minute Men, on direct orders from the President.
The Congressmen who were hot-headed enough to resist were cynically
charged with "inciting to riot"; they who went quietly were not charged
at all. It was blandly explained to the agitated press by Lee Sarason
that these latter quiet lads had been so threatened by "irresponsible
and seditious elements" that they were merely being safeguarded. Sarason
did not use the phrase "protective arrest," which might have suggested
things.

To the veteran reporters it was strange to see the titular Secretary of
State, theoretically a person of such dignity and consequence that he
could deal with the representatives of foreign powers, acting as
press-agent and yes-man for even the President.

There were riots, instantly, all over Washington, all over America.

The recalcitrant Congressmen had been penned in the District Jail.
Toward it, in the winter evening, marched a mob that was noisily
mutinous toward the Windrip for whom so many of them had voted. Among
the mob buzzed hundreds of Negroes, armed with knives and old pistols,
for one of the kidnaped Congressmen was a Negro from Georgia, the first
colored Georgian to hold high office since carpetbagger days.

Surrounding the jail, behind machine guns, the rebels found a few
Regulars, many police, and a horde of Minute Men, but at these last they
jeered, calling them "Minnie Mouses" and "tin soldiers" and "mama's
boys." The M.M.'s looked nervously at their officers and at the Regulars
who were making so professional a pretense of not being scared. The mob
heaved bottles and dead fish. Half-a-dozen policemen with guns and night
sticks, trying to push back the van of the mob, were buried under a
human surf and came up grotesquely battered and ununiformed--those who
ever did come up again. There were two shots; and one Minute Man slumped
to the jail steps, another stood ludicrously holding a wrist that
spurted blood.

The Minute Men--why, they said to themselves, they'd never meant to be
soldiers anyway--just wanted to have some fun marching! They began to
sneak into the edges of the mob, hiding their uniform caps. That
instant, from a powerful loudspeaker in a lower window of the jail
brayed the voice of President Berzelius Windrip:

"I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in America! To
you and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich land
again. You have been scorned. They thought you were the 'lower classes.'
They wouldn't give you jobs. They told you to sneak off like bums and
get relief. They ordered you into lousy C.C.C. camps. They said you were
no good, because you were poor. _I_ tell you that you are, ever since
yesterday noon, the highest lords of the land--the aristocracy--the
makers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Help
me--help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you--give
the swine the point of your bayonet!"

A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose. The mob
began to drop, and into the backs of the wounded as they went staggering
away the M.M. infantry, running, poked their bayonets. Such a juicy
squash it made, and the fugitives looked so amazed, so funny, as they
tumbled in grotesque heaps!

The M.M.'s hadn't, in dreary hours of bayonet drill, known this would be
such sport. They'd have more of it now--and hadn't the President of the
United States himself told each of them, personally, that he needed
their aid?

                           *     *     *

When the remnants of Congress ventured to the Capitol, they found it
seeded with M.M.'s, while a regiment of Regulars, under Major General
Meinecke, paraded the grounds.

The Speaker of the House, and the Hon. Mr. Perley Beecroft,
Vice-President of the United States and Presiding Officer of the Senate,
had the power to declare that quorums were present. (If a lot of members
chose to dally in the district jail, enjoying themselves instead of
attending Congress, whose fault was that?) Both houses passed a
resolution declaring Point Fifteen temporarily in effect, during the
"crisis"--the legality of the passage was doubtful, but just who was to
contest it, even though the members of the Supreme Court had not been
placed under protective arrest... merely confined each to his own
house by a squad of Minute Men!

****

Bishop Paul Peter Prang had (his friends said afterward) been dismayed
by Windrip's stroke of state. Surely, he complained, Mr. Windrip hadn't
quite remembered to include Christian Amity in the program he had taken
from the League of Forgotten Men. Though Mr. Prang had contentedly given
up broadcasting ever since the victory of Justice and Fraternity in the
person of Berzelius Windrip, he wanted to caution the public again, but
when he telephoned to his familiar station, WLFM in Chicago, the manager
informed him that "just temporarily, all access to the air was
forbidden," except as it was especially licensed by the offices of Lee
Sarason. (Oh, that was only one of sixteen jobs that Lee and his six
hundred new assistants had taken on in the past week.)

Rather timorously, Bishop Prang motored from his home in Persepolis,
Indiana, to the Indianapolis airport and took a night plane for
Washington, to reprove, perhaps even playfully to spank, his naughty
disciple, Buzz.

He had little trouble in being admitted to see the President. In fact,
he was, the press feverishly reported, at the White House for six hours,
though whether he was with the President all that time they could not
discover. At three in the afternoon Prang was seen to leave by a private
entrance to the executive offices and take a taxi. They noted that he
was pale and staggering.

In front of his hotel he was elbowed by a mob who in curiously
unmenacing and mechanical tones yelped, "Lynch um--downutha enemies
Windrip!" A dozen M.M.'s pierced the crowd and surrounded the Bishop.
The Ensign commanding them bellowed to the crowd, so that all might
hear, "You cowards leave the Bishop alone! Bishop, come with us, and
we'll see you're safe!"

Millions heard on their radios that evening the official announcement
that, to ward off mysterious plotters, probably Bolsheviks, Bishop Prang
had been safely shielded in the district jail. And with it a personal
statement from President Windrip that he was filled with joy at having
been able to "rescue from the foul agitators my friend and mentor,
Bishop P. P. Prang, than whom there is no man living who I so admire and
respect."

****

There was, as yet, no absolute censorship of the press; only a confused
imprisonment of journalists who offended the government or local
officers of the M.M.'s; and the papers chronically opposed to Windrip
carried by no means flattering hints that Bishop Prang had rebuked the
President and been plain jailed, with no nonsense about a "rescue."
These mutters reached Persepolis.

Not all the Persepolitans ached with love for the Bishop or considered
him a modern St. Francis gathering up the little fowls of the fields in
his handsome LaSalle car. There were neighbors who hinted that he was a
window-peeping snooper after bootleggers and obliging grass widows. But
proud of him, their best advertisement, they certainly were, and the
Persepolis Chamber of Commerce had caused to be erected at the Eastern
gateway to Main Street the sign: "Home of Bishop Prang, Radio's Greatest
Star."

So as one man Persepolis telegraphed to Washington, demanding Prang's
release, but a messenger in the Executive Offices who was a Persepolis
boy (he was, it is true, a colored man, but suddenly he became a
favorite son, lovingly remembered by old schoolmates) tipped off the
Mayor that the telegrams were among the hundredweight of messages that
were daily hauled away from the White House unanswered.

Then a quarter of the citizenry of Persepolis mounted a special train to
"march" on Washington. It was one of those small incidents which the
opposition press could use as a bomb under Windrip, and the train was
accompanied by a score of high-ranking reporters from Chicago and,
later, from Pittsburgh, Baltimore, and New York.

While the train was on its way--and it was curious what delays and
sidetrackings it encountered--a company of Minute Men at Logansport,
Indiana, rebelled against having to arrest a group of Catholic nuns who
were accused of having taught treasonably. High Marshal Sarason felt
that there must be a Lesson, early and impressive. A battalion of
M.M.'s, sent from Chicago in fast trucks, arrested the mutinous company,
and shot every third man.

When the Persepolitans reached Washington, they were tearfully informed,
by a brigadier of M.M.'s who met them at the Union Station, that poor
Bishop Prang had been so shocked by the treason of his fellow Indianans
that he had gone melancholy mad and they had tragically been compelled
to shut him up in St. Elizabeth's government insane asylum.

No one willing to carry news about him ever saw Bishop Prang again.

The Brigadier brought greetings to the Persepolitans from the President
himself, and an invitation to stay at the Willard, at government
expense. Only a dozen accepted; the rest took the first train back, not
amiably; and from then on there was one town in America in which no M.M.
ever dared to appear in his ducky forage cap and dark-blue tunic.

****

The Chief of Staff of the Regular Army had been deposed; in his place
was Major General Emmanuel Coon. Doremus and his like were disappointed
by General Coon's acceptance, for they had always been informed, even by
the _Nation_, that Emmanuel Coon, though a professional army officer who
did enjoy a fight, preferred that that fight be on the side of the Lord;
that he was generous, literate, just, and a man of honor--and honor was
the one quality that Buzz Windrip wasn't even expected to understand.
Rumor said that Coon (as "Nordic" a Kentuckian as ever existed, a
descendant of men who had fought beside Kit Carson and Commodore Perry)
was particularly impatient with the puerility of anti-Semitism, and that
nothing so pleased him as, when he heard new acquaintances being
superior about the Jews, to snarl, "Did you by any chance happen to
notice that my name is Emmanuel Coon and that Coon might be a corruption
of some name rather familiar on the East Side of New York?"

"Oh well, I suppose even General Coon feels, 'Orders are Orders,'"
sighed Doremus.

****

President Windrip's first extended proclamation to the country was a
pretty piece of literature and of tenderness. He explained that powerful
and secret enemies of American principles--one rather gathered that they
were a combination of Wall Street and Soviet Russia--upon discovering,
to their fury, that he, Berzelius, was going to be President, had
planned their last charge. Everything would be tranquil in a few months,
but meantime there was a Crisis, during which the country must "bear
with him."

He recalled the military dictatorship of Lincoln and Stanton during the
Civil War, when civilian suspects were arrested without warrant. He
hinted how delightful everything was going to be--right away now--just a
moment--just a moment's patience--when he had things in hand; and he
wound up with a comparison of the Crisis to the urgency of a fireman
rescuing a pretty girl from a "conflagration," and carrying her down a
ladder, for her own sake, whether she liked it or not, and no matter how
appealingly she might kick her pretty ankles.

The whole country laughed.

"Great card, that Buzz, but mighty competent guy," said the electorate.

"I should worry whether Bish Prang or any other nut is in the
boobyhatch, long as I get my five thousand bucks a year, like Windrip
promised," said Shad Ledue to Charley Betts, the furniture man.

****

It had all happened within the eight days following Windrip's
inauguration.




CHAPTER 16


    I have no desire to be President. I would much rather do my
    humble best as a supporter of Bishop Prang, Ted Bilbo, Gene
    Talmadge or any other broad-gauged but peppy Liberal. My only
    longing is to Serve.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Like many bachelors given to vigorous hunting and riding, Buck Titus was
a fastidious housekeeper, and his mid-Victorian farmhouse fussily neat.
It was also pleasantly bare: the living room a monastic hall of heavy
oak chairs, tables free of dainty covers, numerous and rather solemn
books of history and exploration, with the conventional "sets," and a
tremendous fireplace of rough stone. And the ash trays were solid
pottery and pewter, able to cope with a whole evening of
cigarette-smoking. The whisky stood honestly on the oak buffet, with
siphons, and with cracked ice always ready in a thermos jug.

It would, however, have been too much to expect Buck Titus not to have
red-and-black imitation English hunting-prints.

This hermitage, always grateful to Doremus, was sanctuary now, and only
with Buck could he adequately damn Windrip & Co. and people like Francis
Tasbrough, who in February was still saying, "Yes, things do look kind
of hectic down there in Washington, but that's just because there's so
many of these bullheaded politicians that still think they can buck
Windrip. Besides, anyway, things like that couldn't ever happen here in
New England."

And, indeed, as Doremus went on his lawful occasions past the red-brick
Georgian houses, the slender spires of old white churches facing the
Green, as he heard the lazy irony of familiar greetings from his
acquaintances, men as enduring as their Vermont hills, it seemed to him
that the madness in the capital was as alien and distant and unimportant
as an earthquake in Tibet.

Constantly, in the _Informer_, he criticized the government but not too
acidly.

The hysteria can't last; be patient, and wait and see, he counseled his
readers.

It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did not
believe that this comic tyranny could endure. _It can't happen here_,
said even Doremus--even now.

The one thing that most perplexed him was that there could be a dictator
seemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and gesticulating
Fascists and the Cæsars with laurels round bald domes; a dictator with
something of the earthy American sense of humor of a Mark Twain, a
George Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus Ward. Windrip could be ever so
funny about solemn jaw-drooping opponents, and about the best method of
training what he called "a Siamese flea hound." Did that, puzzled
Doremus, make him less or more dangerous?

Then he remembered the most cruel-mad of all pirates, Sir Henry Morgan,
who had thought it ever so funny to sew a victim up in wet rawhide and
watch it shrink in the sun.

****

From the perseverance with which they bickered, you could tell that Buck
Titus and Lorinda were much fonder of each other than they would admit.
Being a person who read little and therefore took what he did read
seriously, Buck was distressed by the normally studious Lorinda's
vacation liking for novels about distressed princesses, and when she
airily insisted that they were better guides to conduct than Anthony
Trollope or Thomas Hardy, Buck roared at her and, in the feebleness of
baited strength, nervously filled pipes and knocked them out against the
stone mantel. But he approved of the relationship between Doremus and
Lorinda, which only he (and Shad Ledue!) had guessed, and over Doremus,
ten years his senior, this shaggy-headed woodsman fussed like a thwarted
spinster.

To both Doremus and Lorinda, Buck's overgrown shack became their refuge.
And they needed it, late in February, five weeks or thereabouts after
Windrip's election.

****

Despite strikes and riots all over the country, bloodily put down by the
Minute Men, Windrip's power in Washington was maintained. The most
liberal four members of the Supreme Court resigned and were replaced by
surprisingly unknown lawyers who called President Windrip by his first
name. A number of Congressmen were still being "protected" in the
District of Columbia jail; others had seen the blinding light forever
shed by the goddess Reason and happily returned to the Capitol. The
Minute Men were increasingly loyal--they were still unpaid volunteers,
but provided with "expense accounts" considerably larger than the pay of
the regular troops. Never in American history had the adherents of a
President been so well satisfied; they were not only appointed to
whatever political jobs there were but to ever so many that really were
not; and with such annoyances as Congressional Investigations hushed,
the official awarders of contracts were on the merriest of terms with
all contractors.... One veteran lobbyist for steel corporations
complained that there was no more sport in his hunting--you were not
only allowed but expected to shoot all government purchasing-agents
sitting.

None of the changes was so publicized as the Presidential mandate
abruptly ending the separate existence of the different states, and
dividing the whole country into eight "provinces"--thus, asserted
Windrip, economizing by reducing the number of governors and all other
state officers and, asserted Windrip's enemies, better enabling him to
concentrate his private army and hold the country.

The new "Northeastern Province" included all of New York State north of
a line through Ossining, and all of New England except a strip of
Connecticut shore as far east as New Haven. This was, Doremus admitted,
a natural and homogeneous division, and even more natural seemed the
urban and industrial "Metropolitan Province," which included Greater New
York, Westchester County up to Ossining, Long Island, the strip of
Connecticut dependent on New York City, New Jersey, northern Delaware,
and Pennsylvania as far as Reading and Scranton.

Each province was divided into numbered districts, each district into
lettered counties, each county into townships and cities, and only in
these last did the old names, with their traditional appeal, remain to
endanger President Windrip by memories of honorable local history. And
it was gossiped that, next, the government would change even the town
names--that they were already thinking fondly of calling New York
"Berzelian" and San Francisco "San Sarason." Probably that gossip was
false.

The Northeastern Province's six districts were: 1, Upper New York State
west of and including Syracuse; 2, New York east of it; 3, Vermont and
New Hampshire; 4, Maine; 5, Massachusetts; 6, Rhode Island and the
unraped portion of Connecticut.

District 3, Doremus Jessup's district, was divided into the four
"counties" of southern and northern Vermont, and southern and northern
New Hampshire, with Hanover for capital--the District Commissioner
merely chased the Dartmouth students out and took over the college
buildings for his offices, to the considerable approval of Amherst,
Williams, and Yale.

So Doremus was living, now, in Northeastern Province, District 3, County
B, township of Beulah, and over him for his admiration and rejoicing
were a provincial commissioner, a district commissioner, a county
commissioner, an assistant county commissioner in charge of Beulah
Township, and all their appertaining M.M. guards and emergency military
judges.

****

Citizens who had lived in any one state for more than ten years seemed
to resent more hotly the loss of that state's identity than they did the
castration of the Congress and Supreme Court of the United
States--indeed, they resented it almost as much as the fact that, while
late January, February, and most of March went by, they still were not
receiving their governmental gifts of $5000 (or perhaps it would
beautifully be $10,000) apiece; had indeed received nothing more than
cheery bulletins from Washington to the effect that the "Capital Levy
Board," or C.L.B. was holding sessions.

Virginians whose grandfathers had fought beside Lee shouted that they'd
be damned if they'd give up the hallowed state name and form just one
arbitrary section of an administrative unit containing eleven Southern
states; San Franciscans who had considered Los Angelinos even worse than
denizens of Miami now wailed with agony when California was sundered and
the northern portion lumped in with Oregon, Nevada, and others as the
"Mountain and Pacific Province," while southern California was, without
her permission, assigned to the Southwestern Province, along with
Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. As some hint of Buzz
Windrip's vision for the future, it was interesting to read that this
Southwestern Province was also to be permitted to claim "all portions of
Mexico which the United States may from time to time find it necessary
to take over, as a protection against the notorious treachery of Mexico
and the Jewish plots there hatched."

"Lee Sarason is even more generous than Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg in
protecting the future of other countries," sighed Doremus.

****

As Provincial Commissioner of the Northeastern Province, comprising
Upper New York State and New England, was appointed Colonel Dewey Haik,
that soldier-lawyer-politician-aviator who was the chilliest-blooded and
most arrogant of all the satellites of Windrip yet had so captivated
miners and fishermen during the campaign. He was a strong-flying eagle
who liked his meat bloody. As District Commissioner of District
3--Vermont and New Hampshire--appeared, to Doremus's mingled derision
and fury, none other than John Sullivan Reek, that stuffiest of stuffed
shirts, that most gaseous gas bag, that most amenable machine politician
of Northern New England; a Republican ex-governor who had, in the
alembic of Windrip's patriotism, rosily turned Leaguer.

No one had ever troubled to be obsequious to the Hon. J. S. Reek, even
when he had been Governor. The weediest back-country Representative had
called him "Johnny," in the gubernatorial mansion (twelve rooms and a
leaky roof); and the youngest reporter had bawled, "Well, what bull you
handing out today, Ex?"

It was this Commissioner Reek who summoned all the editors in his
district to meet him at his new viceregal lodge in Dartmouth Library and
receive the precious privileged information as to how much President
Windrip and his subordinate commissioners admired the gentlemen of the
press.

Before he left for the press conference in Hanover, Doremus received
from Sissy a "poem"--at least she called it that--which Buck Titus,
Lorinda Pike, Julian Falck, and she had painfully composed, late at
night, in Buck's fortified manor house:

    _Be meek with Reek,_
    _Go fake with Haik._
    _One rhymes with sneak,_
    _And t' other with snake._
    _Haik, with his beak,_
    _Is on the make,_
    _But Sullivan Reek--_
          _Oh God!_

                           *     *     *

"Well, anyway, Windrip's put everybody to work. And he's driven all
these unsightly billboards off the highways--much better for the tourist
trade," said all the old editors, even those who wondered if the
President wasn't perhaps the least bit arbitrary.

As he drove to Hanover, Doremus saw hundreds of huge billboards by the
road. But they bore only Windrip propaganda and underneath, "with the
compliments of a loyal firm" and--very large--"Montgomery Cigarettes" or
"Jonquil Foot Soap." On the short walk from a parking-space to the
former Dartmouth campus, three several men muttered to him, "Give us a
nickel for cuppa coffee, Boss--a Minnie Mouse has got my job and the
Mouses won't take me--they say I'm too old." But that may have been
propaganda from Moscow.

On the long porch of the Hanover Inn, officers of the Minute Men were
reclining in deck chairs, their spurred boots (in all the M.M.
organization there was no cavalry) up on the railing.

Doremus passed a science building in front of which was a pile of broken
laboratory glassware, and in one stripped laboratory he could see a
small squad of M.M.'s drilling.

District Commissioner John Sullivan Reek affectionately received the
editors in a classroom.... Old men, used to being revered as
prophets, sitting anxiously in trifling chairs, facing a fat man in the
uniform of an M.M. commander, who smoked an unmilitary cigar as his
pulpy hand waved greeting.

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would have taken the most
intelligent man five or six hours--that is, five minutes of speech and
the rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by having
to utter such shameless rot.... President Windrip, Secretary of State
Sarason, Provincial Commissioner Haik, and himself, John Sullivan Reek,
they were all being misrepresented by the Republicans, the
Jeffersonians, the Communists, England, the Nazis, and probably the jute
and herring industries; and what the government wanted was for any
reporter to call on any member of this Administration, and especially on
Commissioner Reek, at any time--except perhaps between 3 and 7 A.M.--and
"get the real low-down."

Excellency Reek announced, then: "And now, gentlemen, I am giving myself
the privilege of introducing you to all four of the County
Commissioners, who were just chosen yesterday. Probably each of you will
know personally the commissioner from your own county, but I want you to
intimately and coöperatively know all four, because, whomever they may
be, they join with me in my unquenchable admiration of the press."

The four County Commissioners, as one by one they shambled into the room
and were introduced, seemed to Doremus an oddish lot: A moth-eaten
lawyer known more for his quotations from Shakespeare and Robert W.
Service than for his shrewdness before a jury. He was luminously bald
except for a prickle of faded rusty hair, but you felt that, if he had
his rights, he would have the floating locks of a tragedian of 1890.

A battling clergyman famed for raiding roadhouses.

A rather shy workman, an authentic proletarian, who seemed surprised to
find himself there. (He was replaced, a month later, by a popular
osteopath with an interest in politics and vegetarianism.)

The fourth dignitary to come in and affectionately bow to the editors, a
bulky man, formidable-looking in his uniform as a battalion-leader of
Minute Men, introduced as the Commissioner for northern Vermont, Doremus
Jessup's county, was Mr. Oscar Ledue, formerly known as "Shad."

****

Mr. Reek called him "Captain" Ledue. Doremus remembered that Shad's only
military service, prior to Windrip's election, had been as an A.E.F.
private who had never got beyond a training-camp in America and whose
fiercest experience in battle had been licking a corporal when in
liquor.

"Mr. Jessup," bubbled the Hon. Mr. Reek, "I imagine you must have met
Captain Ledue--comes from your charming city."

"Uh-uh-ur," said Doremus.

"Sure," said Captain Ledue. "I've met old Jessup, all right, all right!
He don't know what it's all about. He don't know the first thing about
the economics of our social Revolution. He's a Cho-vinis. But he isn't
such a bad old coot, and I'll let him ride as long as he behaves
himself!"

"Splendid!" said the Hon. Mr. Reek.




CHAPTER 17


    Like beefsteak and potatoes stick to your ribs even if you're
    working your head off, so the words of the Good Book stick by
    you in perplexity and tribulation. If I ever held a high
    position over my people, I hope that my ministers would be
    quoting, from II Kings, 18; 31 & 32: "Come out to me, and then
    eat ye every man of his own vine, and every one of his fig tree,
    and drink ye every one the waters of his cistern, until I come
    and take you away to a land of corn and wine, a land of bread
    and vineyards, a land of olive oil and honey, that ye may live
    and not die."

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Despite the claims of Montpelier, the former capital of Vermont, and of
Burlington, largest town in the state, Captain Shad Ledue fixed on Fort
Beulah as executive center of County B, which was made out of nine
former counties of northern Vermont. Doremus never decided whether this
was, as Lorinda Pike asserted, because Shad was in partnership with
Banker R. C. Crowley in the profits derived from the purchase of quite
useless old dwellings as part of his headquarters, or for the even
sounder purpose of showing himself off, in battalion-leader's uniform
with the letters "C.C." beneath the five-pointed star on his collar, to
the pals with whom he had once played pool and drunk applejack, and to
the "snobs" whose lawns he once had mowed.

Besides the condemned dwellings, Shad took over all of the former
Scotland County courthouse and established his private office in the
judge's chambers, merely chucking out the law books and replacing them
with piles of magazines devoted to the movies and the detection of
crime, hanging up portraits of Windrip, Sarason, Haik, and Reek,
installing two deep chairs upholstered in poison-green plush (ordered
from the store of the loyal Charley Betts but, to Betts's fury, charged
to the government, to be paid for if and when) and doubling the number
of judicial cuspidors.

In the top center drawer of his desk Shad kept a photograph from a
nudist camp, a flask of Benedictine, a .44 revolver, and a dog whip.

County commissioners were allowed from one to a dozen assistant
commissioners, depending on the population. Doremus Jessup was alarmed
when he discovered that Shad had had the shrewdness to choose as
assistants men of some education and pretense to manners, with
"Professor" Emil Staubmeyer as Assistant County Commissioner in charge
of the Township of Beulah, which included the villages of Fort Beulah,
West and North Beulah, Beulah Center, Trianon, Hosea, and Keezmet.

As Shad had, without benefit of bayonets, become a captain, so Mr.
Staubmeyer (author of _Hitler and Other Poems of Passion_--unpublished)
automatically became a doctor.

Perhaps, thought Doremus, he would understand Windrip & Co. better
through seeing them faintly reflected in Shad and Staubmeyer than he
would have in the confusing glare of Washington; and understand thus
that a Buzz Windrip--a Bismarck--a Cæsar--a Pericles was like all the
rest of itching, indigesting, aspiring humanity except that each of
these heroes had a higher degree of ambition and more willingness to
kill.

****

By June, the enrollment of the Minute Men had increased to 562,000, and
the force was now able to accept as new members only such trusty
patriots and pugilists as it preferred. The War Department was frankly
allowing them not just "expense money" but payment ranging from ten
dollars a week for "inspectors" with a few hours of weekly duty in
drilling, to $9700 a year for "brigadiers" on full time, and $16,000 for
the High Marshal, Lee Sarason... fortunately without interfering with
the salaries from his other onerous duties.

The M.M. ranks were: inspector, more or less corresponding to private;
squad leader, or corporal; cornet, or sergeant; ensign, or lieutenant;
battalion-leader, a combination of captain, major, and lieutenant
colonel; commander, or colonel; brigadier, or general; high marshal, or
commanding general. Cynics suggested that these honorable titles derived
more from the Salvation Army than the fighting forces, but be that cheap
sneer justified or no, the fact remains that an M.M. helot had ever so
much more pride in being called an "inspector," an awing designation in
all police circles, than in being a "private."

Since all members of the National Guard were not only allowed but
encouraged to become members of the Minute Men also, since all veterans
of the Great War were given special privileges, and since "Colonel"
Osceola Luthorne, the Secretary of War, was generous about lending
regular army officers to Secretary of State Sarason for use as drill
masters in the M.M.'s, there was a surprising proportion of trained men
for so newly born an army.

Lee Sarason had proven to President Windrip by statistics from the Great
War that college education, and even the study of the horrors of other
conflicts, did not weaken the masculinity of the students, but actually
made them more patriotic, flag-waving, and skillful in the direction of
slaughter than the average youth, and nearly every college in the
country was to have, this coming autumn, its own battalion of M.M.'s,
with drill counting as credit toward graduation. The collegians were to
be schooled as officers. Another splendid source of M.M. officers were
the gymnasiums and the classes in Business Administration of the
Y.M.C.A.

Most of the rank and file, however, were young farmers delighted by the
chance to go to town and to drive automobiles as fast as they wanted to;
young factory employees who preferred uniforms and the authority to kick
elderly citizens above overalls and stooping over machines; and rather a
large number of former criminals, ex-bootleggers, ex-burglars, ex-labor
racketeers, who, for their skill with guns and leather life-preservers,
and for their assurances that the majesty of the Five-Pointed Star had
completely reformed them, were forgiven their earlier blunders in ethics
and were warmly accepted in the M.M. Storm Troops.

It was said that one of the least of these erring children was the first
patriot to name President Windrip "the Chief," meaning Führer, or
Imperial Wizard of the K.K.K., or Il Duce, or Imperial Potentate of the
Mystic Shrine, or Commodore, or University Coach, or anything else
supremely noble and good-hearted. So, on the glorious anniversary of
July 4, 1937, more than five hundred thousand young uniformed
vigilantes, scattered in towns from Guam to Bar Harbor, from Point
Barrow to Key West, stood at parade rest and sang, like the choiring
seraphim:

    "_Buzz and buzz and hail the Chief,_
      _And his five-pointed sta-ar,_
    _The U.S. ne'er can come to grief_
      _With us prepared for wa-ar._"

Certain critical spirits felt that this version of the chorus of "Buzz
and Buzz," now the official M.M. anthem, showed, in a certain roughness,
the lack of Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch's fastidious hand. But nothing could
be done about it. She was said to be in China, organizing chain letters.
And even while that uneasiness was over the M.M., upon the very next day
came the blow.

Someone on High Marshal Sarason's staff noticed that the U.S.S.R.'s
emblem was not a six-pointed star, but a five-pointed one, even like
America's, so that we were not insulting the Soviets at all.

Consternation was universal. From Sarason's office came sulphurous
rebuke to the unknown idiot who had first made the mistake (generally he
was believed to be Lee Sarason) and the command that a new emblem be
suggested by every member of the M.M. Day and night for three days, M.M.
barracks were hectic with telegrams, telephone calls, letters, placards,
and thousands of young men sat with pencils and rulers earnestly drawing
tens of thousands of substitutes for the five-pointed star: circles in
triangles, triangles in circles, pentagons, hexagons, alphas and omegas,
eagles, aëroplanes, arrows, bombs bursting in air, bombs bursting in
bushes, billy-goats, rhinoceri, and the Yosemite Valley. It was
circulated that a young ensign on High Marshal Sarason's staff had, in
agony over the error, committed suicide. Everybody thought that this
hara-kiri was a fine idea and showed sensibility on the part of the
better M.M.'s; and they went on thinking so even after it proved that
the Ensign had merely got drunk at the Buzz Backgammon Club and talked
about suicide.

In the end, despite his uncounted competitors, it was the great mystic,
Lee Sarason himself, who found the perfect new emblem--a ship's steering
wheel.

It symbolized, he pointed out, not only the Ship of State but also the
wheels of American industry, the wheels and the steering wheel of
motorcars, the wheel diagram which Father Coughlin had suggested two
years before as symbolizing the program of the National Union for Social
Justice, and, particularly, the wheel emblem of the Rotary Club.

Sarason's proclamation also pointed out that it would not be too
far-fetched to declare that, with a little drafting treatment, the arms
of the Swastika could be seen as unquestionably related to the circle,
and how about the K.K.K. of the Kuklux Klan? Three K's made a triangle,
didn't they? and everybody knew that a triangle was related to a circle.

So it was that in September, at the demonstrations on Loyalty Day (which
replaced Labor Day), the same wide-flung seraphim sang:

    "_Buzz and buzz and hail the Chief,_
      _And th' mystic steering whee-el,_
    _The U.S. ne'er can come to grief_
      _While we defend its we-al._"

In mid-August, President Windrip announced that, since all its aims were
being accomplished, the League of Forgotten Men (founded by one Rev. Mr.
Prang, who was mentioned in the proclamation only as a person in past
history) was now terminated. So were all the older parties, Democratic,
Republican, Farmer-Labor, or what not. There was to be only one: The
American Corporate State and Patriotic Party--no! added the President,
with something of his former good-humor: "there are two parties, the
Corporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use
a common phrase, are just out of luck!"

The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary Sarason had
more or less taken from Italy. All occupations were divided into six
classes: agriculture, industry, commerce, transportation and
communication, banking and insurance and investment, and a grab-bag
class including the arts, sciences, and teaching. The American
Federation of Labor, the Railway Brotherhoods, and all other labor
organizations, along with the Federal Department of Labor, were
supplanted by local Syndicates composed of individual workers, above
which were Provincial Confederations, all under governmental guidance.
Parallel to them in each occupation were Syndicates and Confederations
of employers. Finally, the six Confederations of workers and the six
Confederations of employers were combined in six joint federal
Corporations, which elected the twenty-four members of the National
Council of Corporations, which initiated or supervised all legislation
relating to labor or business.

There was a permanent chairman of this National Council, with a deciding
vote and the power of regulating all debate as he saw fit, but he was
not elected--he was appointed by the President; and the first to hold
the office (without interfering with his other duties) was Secretary of
State Lee Sarason. Just to safeguard the liberties of Labor, this
chairman had the right to dismiss any unreasonable member of the
National Council.

All strikes and lockouts were forbidden under federal penalties, so that
workmen listened to reasonable government representatives and not to
unscrupulous agitators.

Windrip's partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly,
the "Corpos," which nickname was generally used.

By ill-natured people the Corpos were called "the Corpses." But they
were not at all corpse-like. That description would more correctly, and
increasingly, have applied to their enemies.

****

Though the Corpos continued to promise a gift of at least $5000 to every
family, "as soon as funding of the required bond issue shall be
completed," the actual management of the poor, particularly of the more
surly and dissatisfied poor, was undertaken by the Minute Men.

It could now be published to the world, and decidedly it was published,
that unemployment had, under the benign reign of President Berzelius
Windrip, almost disappeared. Almost all workless men were assembled in
enormous labor camps, under M.M. officers. Their wives and children
accompanied them and took care of the cooking, cleaning, and repair of
clothes. The men did not merely work on state projects; they were also
hired out at the reasonable rate of one dollar a day to private
employers. Of course, so selfish is human nature even in Utopia, this
did cause most employers to discharge the men to whom they had been
paying more than a dollar a day, but that took care of itself, because
these overpaid malcontents in their turn were forced into the labor
camps.

Out of their dollar a day, the workers in the camps had to pay from
seventy to ninety cents a day for board and lodging.

There was a certain discontentment among people who had once owned
motorcars and bathrooms and eaten meat twice daily, at having to walk
ten or twenty miles a day, bathe once a week, along with fifty others,
in a long trough, get meat only twice a week--when they got it--and
sleep in bunks, a hundred in a room. Yet there was less rebellion than a
mere rationalist like Walt Trowbridge, Windrip's ludicrously defeated
rival, would have expected, for every evening the loudspeaker brought to
the workers the precious voices of Windrip and Sarason, Vice-President
Beecroft, Secretary of War Luthorne, Secretary of Education and
Propaganda Macgoblin, General Coon, or some other genius, and these
Olympians, talking to the dirtiest and tiredest mudsills as warm friend
to friend, told them that they were the honored foundation stones of a
New Civilization, the advance guards of the conquest of the whole world.

They took it, too, like Napoleon's soldiers. And they had the Jews and
the Negroes to look down on, more and more. The M.M.'s saw to that.
Every man is a king so long as he has someone to look down on.

****

Each week the government said less about the findings of the board of
inquiry which was to decide how the $5000 per person could be wangled.
It became easier to answer malcontents with a cuff from a Minute Man
than by repetitious statements from Washington.

But most of the planks in Windrip's platform really were carried
out--according to a sane interpretation of them. For example, inflation.

In America of this period, inflation did not even compare with the
German inflation of the 1920's, but it was sufficient. The wage in the
labor camps had to be raised from a dollar a day to three, with which
the workers were receiving an equivalent of sixty cents a day in 1914
values. Everybody delightfully profited, except the very poor, the
common workmen, the skilled workmen, the small business men, the
professional men, and old couples living on annuities or their
savings--these last did really suffer a little, as their incomes were
cut in three. The workers, with apparently tripled wages, saw the cost
of everything in the shops much more than triple.

Agriculture, which was most of all to have profited from inflation, on
the theory that the mercurial crop-prices would rise faster than
anything else, actually suffered the most of all, because, after a first
flurry of foreign buying, importers of American products found it
impossible to deal in so skittish a market, and American food
exports--such of them as were left--ceased completely.

It was Big Business, that ancient dragon which Bishop Prang and Senator
Windrip had gone forth to slay, that had the interesting time.

With the value of the dollar changing daily, the elaborate systems of
cost-marking and credit of Big Business were so confused that presidents
and sales-managers sat in their offices after midnight, with wet towels.
But they got some comfort, because with the depreciated dollar they were
able to recall all bonded indebtedness and, paying it off at the old
face values, get rid of it at thirty cents on the hundred. With this,
and the currency so wavering that employees did not know just what they
ought to get in wages, and labor unions eliminated, the larger
industrialists came through the inflation with perhaps double the
wealth, in real values, that they had had in 1936.

And two other planks in Windrip's encyclical vigorously respected were
those eliminating the Negroes and patronizing the Jews.

****

The former race took it the less agreeably. There were horrible
instances in which whole Southern counties with a majority of Negro
population were overrun by the blacks and all property seized. True,
their leaders alleged that this followed massacres of Negroes by Minute
Men. But as Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of Culture, so well said, this
whole subject was unpleasant and therefore not helpful to discuss.

All over the country, the true spirit of Windrip's Plank Nine, regarding
the Jews, was faithfully carried out. It was understood that the Jews
were no longer to be barred from fashionable hotels, as in the hideous
earlier day of race prejudice, but merely to be charged double rates. It
was understood that Jews were never to be discouraged from trading but
were merely to pay higher graft to commissioners and inspectors and to
accept without debate all regulations, wage rates, and price lists
decided upon by the stainless Anglo-Saxons of the various merchants'
associations. And that all Jews of all conditions were frequently to
sound their ecstasy in having found in America a sanctuary, after their
deplorable experiences among the prejudices of Europe.

In Fort Beulah, Louis Rotenstern, since he had always been the first to
stand up for the older official national anthems, "The Star-Spangled
Banner" or "Dixie," and now for "Buzz and Buzz," since he had of old
been considered almost an authentic friend by Francis Tasbrough and R.
C. Crowley, and since he had often good-naturedly pressed the
unrecognized Shad Ledue's Sunday pants without charge, was permitted to
retain his tailor shop, though it was understood that he was to charge
members of the M.M. prices that were only nominal, or quarter nominal.

But one Harry Kindermann, a Jew who had profiteered enough as agent for
maple-sugar and dairy machinery so that in 1936 he had been paying the
last installment on his new bungalow and on his Buick, had always been
what Shad Ledue called "a fresh Kike." He had laughed at the flag, the
Church, and even Rotary. Now he found the manufacturers canceling his
agencies, without explanation.

By the middle of 1937 he was selling frankfurters by the road, and his
wife, who had been so proud of the piano and the old American pine
cupboard in their bungalow, was dead, from pneumonia caught in the
one-room tar-paper shack into which they had moved.

****

At the time of Windrip's election, there had been more than 80,000
relief administrators employed by the federal and local governments in
America. With the labor camps absorbing most people on relief, this army
of social workers, both amateurs and long-trained professional
uplifters, was stranded.

The Minute Men controlling the labor camps were generous: they offered
the charitarians the same dollar a day that the proletarians received,
with special low rates for board and lodging. But the cleverer social
workers received a much better offer: to help list every family and
every unmarried person in the country, with his or her finances,
professional ability, military training and, most important and most
tactfully to be ascertained, his or her secret opinion of the M.M.'s and
of the Corpos in general.

A good many of the social workers indignantly said that this was asking
them to be spies, stool pigeons for the American Oh Gay Pay Oo. These
were, on various unimportant charges, sent to jail or, later, to
concentration camps--which were also jails, but the private jails of the
M.M.'s, unshackled by any old-fashioned, nonsensical prison regulations.

****

In the confusion of the summer and early autumn of 1937, local M.M.
officers had a splendid time making their own laws, and such congenital
traitors and bellyachers as Jewish doctors, Jewish musicians, Negro
journalists, socialistic college professors, young men who preferred
reading or chemical research to manly service with the M.M.'s, women who
complained when their men had been taken away by the M.M.'s and had
disappeared, were increasingly beaten in the streets, or arrested on
charges that would not have been very familiar to pre-Corpo jurists.

And, increasingly, the bourgeois counter revolutionists began to escape
to Canada; just as once, by the "underground railroad" the Negro slaves
had escaped into that free Northern air.

****

In Canada, as well as in Mexico, Bermuda, Jamaica, Cuba, and Europe,
these lying Red propagandists began to publish the vilest little
magazines, accusing the Corpos of murderous terrorism--allegations that
a band of six M.M.'s had beaten an aged rabbi and robbed him; that the
editor of a small labor paper in Paterson had been tied to his
printing-press and left there while the M.M.'s burned the plant; that
the pretty daughter of an ex-Farmer-Labor politician in Iowa had been
raped by giggling young men in masks.

To end this cowardly flight of the lying counter revolutionists (many of
whom, once accepted as reputable preachers and lawyers and doctors and
writers and ex-congressmen and ex-army officers, were able to give a
wickedly false impression of Corpoism and the M.M.'s to the world
outside America) the government quadrupled the guards who were halting
suspects at every harbor and at even the minutest trails crossing the
border; and in one quick raid, it poured M.M. storm troopers into all
airports, private or public, and all aëroplane factories, and thus, they
hoped, closed the air lanes to skulking traitors.

****

As one of the most poisonous counter revolutionists in the country,
Ex-Senator Walt Trowbridge, Windrip's rival in the election of 1936, was
watched night and day by a rotation of twelve M.M. guards. But there
seemed to be small danger that this opponent, who, after all, was a
crank but not an intransigent maniac, would make himself ridiculous by
fighting against the great Power which (per Bishop Prang) Heaven had
been pleased to send for the healing of distressed America.

Trowbridge remained prosaically on a ranch he owned in South Dakota, and
the government agent commanding the M.M.'s (a skilled man, trained in
breaking strikes) reported that on his tapped telephone wire and in his
steamed-open letters, Trowbridge communicated nothing more seditious
than reports on growing alfalfa. He had with him no one but ranch hands
and, in the house, an innocent aged couple.

Washington hoped that Trowbridge was beginning to see the light. Maybe
they would make him Ambassador to Britain, vice Sinclair.

On the Fourth of July, when the M.M's gave their glorious but
unfortunate tribute to the Chief and the Five-pointed Star, Trowbridge
gratified his cow-punchers by holding an unusually pyrotechnic
celebration. All evening skyrockets flared up, and round the home
pasture glowed pots of Roman fire. Far from cold-shouldering the M.M.
guards, Trowbridge warmly invited them to help set off rockets and join
the gang in beer and sausages. The lonely soldier boys off there on the
prairie--they were so happy shooting rockets!

An aëroplane with a Canadian license, a large plane, flying without
lights, sped toward the rocket-lighted area and, with engine shut off,
so that the guards could not tell whether it had flown on, circled the
pasture outlined by the Roman fire and swiftly landed.

The guards had felt sleepy after the last bottle of beer. Three of them
were napping on the short, rough grass.

They were rather disconcertingly surrounded by men in masking
flying-helmets, men carrying automatic pistols, who handcuffed the
guards that were still awake, picked up the others, and stored all
twelve of them in the barred baggage compartment of the plane.

The raiders' leader, a military-looking man, said to Walt Trowbridge,
"Ready, sir?"

"Yep. Just take those four boxes, will you, please, Colonel?"

The boxes contained photostats of letters and documents.

Unregally clad in overalls and a huge straw hat, Senator Trowbridge
entered the pilots' compartment. High and swift and alone, the plane
flew toward the premature Northern Lights.

Next morning, still in overalls, Trowbridge breakfasted at the Fort
Garry Hotel with the Mayor of Winnipeg.

A fortnight later, in Toronto, he began the republication of his weekly,
_A Lance for Democracy_, and on the cover of the first number were
reproductions of four letters indicating that before he became
President, Berzelius Windrip had profited through personal gifts from
financiers to an amount of over $1,000,000. To Doremus Jessup, to some
thousands of Doremus Jessups, were smuggled copies of the _Lance_,
though possession of it was punishable (perhaps not legally, but
certainly effectively) by death.

But it was not till the winter, so carefully did his secret agents have
to work in America, that Trowbridge had in full operation the
organization called by its operatives the "New Underground," the "N.U.,"
which aided thousands of counter revolutionists to escape into Canada.




CHAPTER 18


    In the little towns, ah, there is the abiding peace that I love,
    and that can never be disturbed by even the noisiest Smart
    Alecks from these haughty megalopolises like Washington, New
    York, & etc.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

Doremus's policy of "wait and see", like most Fabian policies, had grown
shaky. It seemed particularly shaky in June, 1937, when he drove to
North Beulah for the fortieth graduation anniversary of his class in
Isaiah College.

As the custom was, the returned alumni wore comic costumes. His class
had sailor suits, but they walked about, bald-headed and lugubrious, in
these well-meant garments of joy, and there was a look of instability
even in the eyes of the three members who were ardent Corpos (being
local Corpo commissioners).

After the first hour Doremus saw little of his classmates. He had looked
up his familiar correspondent, Victor Loveland, teacher in the classical
department who, a year ago, had informed him of President Owen J.
Peaseley's ban on criticism of military training.

At its best, Loveland's jerry-built imitation of an Anne Hathaway
cottage had been no palace--Isaiah assistant professors did not
customarily rent palaces. Now, with the pretentiously smart living room
heaped with burlap-covered chairs and rolled rugs and boxes of books, it
looked like a junkshop. Amid the wreckage sat Loveland, his wife, his
three children, and one Dr. Arnold King, experimenter in chemistry.

"What's all this?" said Doremus.

"I've been fired. As too 'radical,'" growled Loveland.

"Yes! And his most vicious attack has been on Glicknow's treatment of
the use of the aorist in Hesiod!" wailed his wife.

"Well, I deserve it--for not having been vicious about anything since
A.D. 300! Only thing I'm ashamed of is that they're not firing me for
having taught my students that the Corpos have taken most of their ideas
from Tiberius, or maybe for having decently tried to assassinate
District Commissioner Reek!" said Loveland.

"Where you going?" inquired Doremus.

"That's just it! We don't know! Oh, first to my dad's house--which is a
six-room packing-box in Burlington--Dad's got diabetes. But
teaching----President Peaseley kept putting off signing my new contract
and just informed me ten days ago that I'm through--much too late to get
a job for next year. Myself, I don't care a damn! Really I don't! I'm
glad to have been made to admit that as a college prof I haven't been,
as I so liked to convince myself, any Erasmus Junior, inspiring noble
young souls to dream of chaste classic beauty--save the mark!--but just
a plain hired man, another counter-jumper in the Marked-down Classics
Goods Department, with students for bored customers, and as subject to
being hired and fired as any janitor. Do you remember that in Imperial
Rome, the teachers, even the tutors of the nobility, were
slaves--allowed a lot of leeway, I suppose, in their theories about the
anthropology of Crete, but just as likely to be strangled as the other
slaves! I'm not kicking----"

Dr. King, the chemist, interrupted with a whoop: "Sure you're kicking!
Why the hell not? With three kids? Why _not_ kick! Now me, I'm lucky!
I'm half Jew--one of these sneaking, cunning Jews that Buzz Windrip and
his boyfriend Hitler tell you about; so cunning I suspected what was
going on months ago and so--I've also just been fired, Mr. Jessup--I
arranged for a job with the Universal Electric Corporation.... They
don't mind Jews there, as long as they sing at their work and find
boondoggles worth a million a year to the company--at thirty-five
hundred a year salary! A fond farewell to all my grubby studes!
Though--" and Doremus thought he was, at heart, sadder than Loveland--"I
do kind of hate to give up my research. Oh, hell with 'em!"

****

The version of Owen J. Peaseley, M.A. (Oberlin), LL.D. (Conn. State),
president of Isaiah College, was quite different.

"Why no, Mr. Jessup! We believe absolutely in freedom of speech and
thought, here at old Isaiah. The fact is that we are letting Loveland go
only because the Classics Department is overstaffed--so little demand
for Greek and Sanskrit and so on, you know, with all this modern
interest in quantitative bio-physics and aëroplane-repairing and so on.
But as to Dr. King--um--I'm afraid we did a little feel that he was
riding for a fall, boasting about being a Jew and all, you know,
and----But can't we talk of pleasanter subjects? You have probably
learned that Secretary of Culture Macgoblin has now completed his plan
for the appointment of a director of education in each province and
district?--and that Professor Almeric Trout of Aumbry University is
slated for Director in our Northeastern Province? Well, I have something
very gratifying to add. Dr. Trout--and what a profound scholar, what an
eloquent orator he is!--did you know that in Teutonic 'Almeric' means
'noble prince'?--and he's been so kind as to designate me as Director of
Education for the Vermont-New Hampshire District! Isn't that thrilling!
I wanted you to be one of the first to hear it, Mr. Jessup, because of
course one of the chief jobs of the Director will be to work with and
through the newspaper editors in the great task of spreading correct
Corporate ideals and combating false theories--yes, oh yes."

It seemed as though a large number of people were zealous to work with
and through the editors these days, thought Doremus.

He noticed that President Peaseley resembled a dummy made of faded gray
flannel of a quality intended for petticoats in an orphan asylum.

****

The Minute Men's organization was less favored in the staid villages
than in the industrial centers, but all through the summer it was known
that a company of M.M.'s had been formed in Fort Beulah and were
drilling in the Armory under National Guard officers and County
Commissioner Ledue, who was seen sitting up nights in his luxurious new
room in Mrs. Ingot's boarding-house, reading a manual of arms. But
Doremus declined to go look at them, and when his rustic but ambitious
reporter, "Doc" (otherwise Otis) Itchitt, came in throbbing about the
M.M.'s and wanted to run an illustrated account in the Saturday
_Informer_, Doremus sniffed.

It was not till their first public parade, in August, that Doremus saw
them, and not gladly.

The whole countryside had turned out; he could hear them laughing and
shuffling beneath his office window; but he stubbornly stuck to editing
an article on fertilizers for cherry orchards. (And he loved parades,
childishly!) Not even the sound of a band pounding out "Boola, Boola"
drew him to the window. Then he was plucked up by Dan Wilgus, the
veteran job compositor and head of the _Informer_ chapel, a man tall as
a house and possessed of such a sweeping black mustache as had not
otherwise been seen since the passing of the old-time bartender. "You
got to take a look, Boss; great show!" implored Dan.

Through the Chester-Arthur, red-brick prissiness of President Street,
Doremus saw marching a surprisingly well-drilled company of young men in
the uniforms of Civil War cavalrymen, and just as they were opposite the
_Informer_ office, the town band rollicked into "Marching through
Georgia." The young men smiled, they stepped more quickly, and held up
their banner with the steering wheel and M.M. upon it.

When he was ten, Doremus had seen in this self-same street a Memorial
Day parade of the G.A.R. The veterans were an average of under fifty
then, and some of them only thirty-five; they had swung ahead lightly
and gayly--and to the tune of "Marching through Georgia." So now in 1937
he was looking down again on the veterans of Gettysburg and Missionary
Ridge. Oh--he could see them all--Uncle Tom Veeder, who had made him the
willow whistles; old Mr. Crowley with his cornflower eyes; Jack
Greenhill who played leapfrog with the kids and who was to die in Ethan
Creek----They found him with thick hair dripping. Doremus thrilled to
the M.M. flags, the music, the valiant young men, even while he hated
all they marched for, and hated the Shad Ledue whom he incredulously
recognized in the brawny horseman at the head of the procession.

He understood now why the young men marched to war. But "Oh yeh--you
_think_ so!" he could hear Shad sneering through the music.

****

The unwieldy humor characteristic of American politicians persisted even
through the eruption. Doremus read about and sardonically "played up" in
the _Informer_ a minstrel show given at the National Convention of
Boosters' Clubs at Atlantic City, late in August. As end-men and
interlocutor appeared no less distinguished persons than Secretary of
the Treasury Webster R. Skittle, Secretary of War Luthorne, and
Secretary of Education and Public Relations, Dr. Macgoblin. It was good,
old-time Elks Club humor, uncorroded by any of the notions of dignity
and of international obligations which, despite his great services, that
queer stick Lee Sarason was suspected of trying to introduce. Why
(marveled the Boosters) the Big Boys were so democratic that they even
kidded themselves and the Corpos, that's how unassuming they were!

"Who was this lady I seen you going down the street with?" demanded the
plump Mr. Secretary Skittle (disguised as a colored wench in
polka-dotted cotton) of Mr. Secretary Luthorne (in black-face and large
red gloves).

"That wasn't no lady, that was Walt Trowbridge's paper."

"Ah don't think Ah cognosticates youse, Mist' Bones."

"Why--you know--'A Nance for Plutocracy.'"

Clean fun, not too confusingly subtle, drawing the people (several
millions listened on the radio to the Boosters' Club show) closer to
their great-hearted masters.

But the high point of the show was Dr. Macgoblin's daring to tease his
own faction by singing:

    _Buzz and booze and biz, what fun!_
    _This job gets drearier and drearier,_
    _When I get out of Washington,_
    _I'm going to Siberia!_

It seemed to Doremus that he was hearing a great deal about the
Secretary of Education. Then, in late September, he heard something not
quite pleasant about Dr. Macgoblin. The story, as he got it, ran thus:

Hector Macgoblin, that great surgeon-boxer-poet-sailor, had always
contrived to have plenty of enemies, but after the beginning of his
investigation of schools, to purge them of any teachers he did not
happen to like, he made so unusually many that he was accompanied by
bodyguards. At this time in September, he was in New York, finding
quantities of "subversive elements" in Columbia University--against the
protests of President Nicholas Murray Butler, who insisted that he had
already cleaned out all willful and dangerous thinkers, especially the
pacifists in the medical school--and Macgoblin's bodyguards were two
former instructors in philosophy who in their respective universities
had been admired even by their deans for everything except the fact that
they would get drunk and quarrelsome. One of them, in that state, always
took off one shoe and hit people over the head with the heel, if they
argued in defense of Jung.

With these two in uniforms as M.M. battalion leaders--his own was that
of a brigadier--after a day usefully spent in kicking out of Columbia
all teachers who had voted for Trowbridge, Dr. Macgoblin started off
with his brace of bodyguards to try out a wager that he could take a
drink at every bar on Fifty-second Street and still not pass out.

He had done well when, at ten-thirty, being then affectionate and
philanthropic, he decided that it would be a splendid idea to telephone
his revered former teacher in Leland Stanford, the biologist Dr. Willy
Schmidt, once of Vienna, now in Rockefeller Institute. Macgoblin was
indignant when someone at Dr. Schmidt's apartment informed him that the
doctor was out. Furiously: "Out? Out? What d'you mean he's out? Old goat
like that got no right to be out! At midnight! Where is he? This is the
Police Department speaking! Where is he?"

Dr. Schmidt was spending the evening with that gentle scholar, Rabbi Dr.
Vincent de Verez.

Macgoblin and his learned gorillas went to call on De Verez. On the way
nothing of note happened except that when Macgoblin discussed the fare
with the taxi-driver, he felt impelled to knock him out. The three, and
they were in the happiest, most boyish of spirits, burst joyfully into
Dr. de Verez's primeval house in the Sixties. The entrance hall was
shabby enough, with a humble show of the good rabbi's umbrellas and
storm rubbers, and had the invaders seen the bedrooms they would have
found them Trappist cells. But the long living room, front-and
back-parlor thrown together, was half museum, half lounge. Just because
he himself liked such things and resented a stranger's possessing them,
Macgoblin looked sniffily at a Beluchi prayer rug, a Jacobean court
cupboard, a small case of incunabula and of Arabic manuscripts in silver
upon scarlet parchment.

"Swell joint! Hello, Doc! How's the Dutchman? How's the antibody
research going? These are Doc Nemo and Doc, uh, Doc Whoozis, the famous
glue lifters. Great frenzh mine. Introduce us to your Jew friend."

Now it is more than possible that Rabbi de Verez had never heard of
Secretary of Education Macgoblin.

The houseman who had let in the intruders and who nervously hovered at
the living room door--he is the sole authority for most of the
story--said that Macgoblin staggered, slid on a rug, almost fell, then
giggled foolishly as he sat down, waving his plug-ugly friends to chairs
and demanding, "Hey, Rabbi, how about some whisky? Lil Scotch and soda.
I know you Geonim never lap up anything but snow-cooled nectar handed
out by a maiden with a dulcimer, singing of Mount Abora, or maybe just a
little shot of Christian children's sacrificial blood--ha, ha, just a
joke, Rabbi; I know these 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are all the
bunk, but awful handy in propaganda, just the same and----But I mean,
for plain Goyim like us, a little real hootch! _Hear me?_"

Dr. Schmidt started to protest. The Rabbi, who had been carding his
white beard, silenced him and, with a wave of his fragile old hand,
signaled the waiting houseman, who reluctantly brought in whisky and
siphons.

The three coördinators of culture almost filled their glasses before
they poured in the soda.

"Look here, De Verez, why don't you kikes take a tumble to yourselves
and get out, beat it, exeunt bearing corpses, and start a real Zion, say
in South America?"

The Rabbi looked bewildered at the attack. Dr. Schmidt snorted, "Dr.
Macgoblin--once a promising pupil of mine--is Secretary of Education and
a lot of t'ings--I don't know vot!--at Washington. Corpo!"

"Oh!" The Rabbi sighed. "I have heard of that cult, but my people have
learned to ignore persecution. We have been so impudent as to adopt the
tactics of your Early Christian Martyrs! Even if we were invited to your
Corporate feast--which, I understand, we most warmly are not!--I am
afraid we should not be able to attend. You see, we believe in only one
Dictator, God, and I am afraid we cannot see Mr. Windrip as a rival to
Jehovah!"

"Aah, that's all baloney!" murmured one of the learned gunmen, and
Macgoblin shouted, "Oh, can the two-dollar words! There's just one thing
where we agree with the dirty, Kike-loving Communists--that's in
chucking the whole bunch of divinities, Jehovah and all the rest of 'em,
that've been on relief so long!"

The Rabbi was unable even to answer, but little Dr. Schmidt (he had a
doughnut mustache, a beer belly, and black button boots with soles
half-an-inch thick) said, "Macgoblin, I suppose I may talk frank wit' an
old student, there not being any reporters or loutspeakers arount. Do
you know why you are drinking like a pig? Because you are ashamt! Ashamt
that you, once a promising researcher, should have solt out to
freebooters with brains like decayed liver and----"

"That'll do from you, Prof!"

"Say, we oughtta tie those seditious sons of hounds up and beat the
daylight out of 'em!" whimpered one of the watchdogs.

Macgoblin shrieked, "You highbrows--you stinking intellectuals! You, you
Kike, with your lush-luzurious library, while Common People been
starving--would be now if the Chief hadn't saved 'em! Your c'lection
books--stolen from the pennies of your poor, dumb, foot-kissing
congregation of pushcart peddlers!"

The Rabbi sat bespelled, fingering his beard, but Dr. Schmidt leaped up,
crying, "You three scoundrels were not invited here! You pushed your way
in! Get out! Go! Get out!"

One of the accompanying dogs demanded of Macgoblin, "Going to stand for
these two Yiddles insulting us--insulting the whole by God Corpo state
and the M.M. uniform? Kill 'em!"

Now, to his already abundant priming, Macgoblin had added two huge
whiskies since he had come. He yanked out his automatic pistol, fired
twice. Dr. Schmidt toppled. Rabbi De Verez slid down in his chair, his
temple throbbing out blood. The houseman trembled at the door, and one
of the guards shot at him, then chased him down the street, firing, and
whooping with the humor of the joke. This learned guard was killed
instantly, at a street crossing, by a traffic policeman.

Macgoblin and the other guard were arrested and brought before the
Commissioner of the Metropolitan District, the great Corpo viceroy,
whose power was that of three or four state governors put together.

Dr. de Verez, though he was not yet dead, was too sunken to testify. But
the Commissioner thought that in a case so closely touching the federal
government, it would not be seemly to postpone the trial.

Against the terrified evidence of the Rabbi's Russian-Polish houseman
were the earnest (and by now sober) accounts of the federal Secretary of
Education, and of his surviving aide, formerly Assistant Professor of
Philosophy in Pelouse University. It was proven that not only De Verez
but also Dr. Schmidt was a Jew--which, incidentally, he 100 per cent was
not. It was almost proven that this sinister pair had been coaxing
innocent Corpos into De Verez's house and performing upon them what a
scared little Jewish stool pigeon called "ritual murders."

Macgoblin and friend were acquitted on grounds of self-defense and
handsomely complimented by the Commissioner--and later in telegrams from
President Windrip and Secretary of State Sarason--for having defended
the Commonwealth against human vampires and one of the most horrifying
plots known in history.

The policeman who had shot the other guard wasn't, so scrupulous was
Corpo justice, heavily punished--merely sent out to a dreary beat in the
Bronx. So everybody was happy.

****

But Doremus Jessup, on receiving a letter from a New York reporter who
had talked privately with the surviving guard, was not so happy. He was
not in a very gracious temper, anyway. County Commissioner Shad Ledue,
on grounds of humanitarianism, had made him discharge his delivery boys
and employ M.M.'s to distribute (or cheerfully chuck into the river) the
_Informer_.

"Last straw--plenty last," he raged.

He had read about Rabbi de Verez and seen pictures of him. He had once
heard Dr. Willy Schmidt speak, when the State Medical Association had
met at Fort Beulah, and afterward had sat near him at dinner. If they
were murderous Jews, then he was a murderous Jew too, he swore, and it
was time to do something for His Own People.

That evening--it was late in September, 1937--he did not go home to
dinner at all but, with a paper container of coffee and a slab of pie
untouched before him, he stooped at his desk in the _Informer_ office,
writing an editorial which, when he had finished it, he marked: "Must.
12-pt bold face--box top front p."

The beginning of the editorial, to appear the following morning was:

    Believing that the inefficiency and crimes of the Corpo
    administration were due to the difficulties attending a new form
    of government, we have waited patiently for their end. We
    apologize to our readers for that patience.

    It is easy to see now, in the revolting crime of a drunken
    cabinet member against two innocent and valuable old men like
    Dr. Schmidt and the Rev. Dr. de Verez, that we may expect
    nothing but murderous extirpation of all honest opponents of the
    tyranny of Windrip and his Corpo gang.

    Not that all of them are as vicious as Macgoblin. Some are
    merely incompetent--like our friends Ledue, Reek, and Haik. But
    their ludicrous incapability permits the homicidal cruelty of
    their chieftains to go on without check.

    Buzzard Windrip, the "Chief," and his pirate gang----

A smallish, neat, gray-bearded man, furiously rattling an aged
typewriter, typing with his two forefingers.

****

Dan Wilgus, head of the composing room, looked and barked like an old
sergeant and, like an old sergeant, was only theoretically meek to his
superior officer. He was shaking when he brought in this copy and,
almost rubbing Doremus's nose in it, protested, "Say, boss, you don't
honest t' God think we're going to set this up, do you?"

"I certainly do!"

"Well, I don't! Rattlesnake poison! It's all right _your_ getting thrown
in the hoosegow and probably shot at dawn, if you like that kind of
sport, but we've held a meeting of the chapel, and we all say, damned if
we'll risk our necks too!"

"All right, you yellow pup! All right, Dan, I'll set it myself!"

"Aw, don't! Gosh, I don't want to have to go to your funeral after the
M.M.'s get through with you, and say, 'Don't he look unnatural!'"

"After working for me for twenty years, Dan! Traitor!"

"Look here! I'm no Enoch Arden or--oh, what the hell was his
name?--Ethan Frome or Benedict Arnold or whatever it was!--and more'n
once I've licked some galoot that was standing around a saloon telling
the world you were the lousiest highbrow editor in Vermont, and at that,
I guess maybe he was telling the truth, but same time----" Dan's effort
to be humorous and coaxing broke, and he wailed, "God, boss, please
don't!"

"I know, Dan. Prob'ly our friend Shad Ledue will be annoyed. But I can't
go on standing things like slaughtering old De Verez any more
and----Here! Gimme that copy!"

****

While compositors, pressmen, and the young devil stood alternately
fretting and snickering at his clumsiness, Doremus ranged up before a
type case, in his left hand the first composing-stick he had held in ten
years, and looked doubtfully at the case. It was like a labyrinth to
him. "Forgot how it's arranged. Can't find anything except the e-box!"
he complained.

"Hell! I'll do it! All you pussyfooters get the hell out of this! You
don't know one doggone thing about who set this up!" Dan Wilgus roared,
and the other printers vanished!--as far as the toilet door.

****

In the editorial office, Doremus showed proofs of his indiscretion to
Doc Itchitt, that enterprising though awkward reporter, and to Julian
Falck, who was off now to Amherst but who had been working for the
_Informer_ all summer, combining unprintable articles on Adam Smith with
extremely printable accounts of golf and dances at the country club.

"Gee, I hope you will have the nerve to go on and print it--and same
time, I hope you don't! They'll get you!" worried Julian.

"Naw! Gwan and print it! They won't dare to do a thing! They may get
funny in New York and Washington, but you're too strong in the Beulah
Valley for Ledue and Staubmeyer to dare lift a hand!" brayed Doc
Itchitt, while Doremus considered, "I wonder if this smart young
journalistic Judas wouldn't like to see me in trouble and get hold of
the _Informer_ and turn it Corpo?"

He did not stay at the office till the paper with his editorial had gone
to press. He went home early, and showed the proof to Emma and Sissy.
While they were reading it, with yelps of disapproval, Julian Falck
slipped in.

Emma protested, "Oh, you can't--you mustn't do it! What will become of
us all? Honestly, Dormouse, I'm not scared for myself, but what would I
do if they beat you or put you in prison or something? It would just
break my heart to think of you in a cell! And without any clean
underclothes! It isn't too late to stop it, is it?"

"No. As a matter of fact the paper doesn't go to bed till eleven....
Sissy, what do you think?"

"I don't know what to think! Oh damn!"

"Why Sis-sy," from Emma, quite mechanically.

"It used to be, you did what was right and got a nice stick of candy for
it," said Sissy. "Now, it seems as if whatever's right is wrong.
Julian--funny-face--what do you think of Pop's kicking Shad in his sweet
hairy ears?"

"Why, Sis----"

Julian blurted, "I think it'd be fierce if somebody didn't try to stop
these fellows. I wish I could do it. But how could I?"

"You've probably answered the whole business," said Doremus. "If a man
is going to assume the right to tell several thousand readers what's
what--most agreeable, hitherto--he's got a kind of you might say
priestly obligation to tell the truth. 'O cursed spite.' Well! I think
I'll drop into the office again. Home about midnight. Don't sit up,
anybody--and Sissy, and you, Julian, that particularly goes for you two
night prowlers! As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord--and in
Vermont, that means going to bed."

"And alone!" murmured Sissy.

"_Why--Cecilia--Jessup!_"

As Doremus trotted out, Foolish, who had sat adoring him, jumped up,
hoping for a run.

Somehow, more than all of Emma's imploring, the dog's familiar devotion
made Doremus feel what it might be to go to prison.

****

He had lied. He did not return to the office. He drove up the valley to
the Tavern and to Lorinda Pike.

But on the way he stopped in at the home of his son-in-law, bustling
young Dr. Fowler Greenhill; not to show him the proof but to
have--perhaps in prison?--another memory of the domestic life in which
he had been rich. He stepped quietly into the front hall of the
Greenhill house--a jaunty imitation of Mount Vernon; very prosperous and
secure, gay with the brass-knobbed walnut furniture and painted Russian
boxes which Mary Greenhill affected. Doremus could hear David (but
surely it was past his bedtime?--what time _did_ nine-year-old kids go
to bed these degenerate days?) excitedly chattering with his father, and
his father's partner, old Dr. Marcus Olmsted, who was almost retired but
who kept up the obstetrics and eye-and-ear work for the firm.

Doremus peeped into the living room, with its bright curtains of yellow
linen. David's mother was writing letters, a crisp, fashionable figure
at a maple desk complete with yellow quill pen, engraved notepaper, and
silver-backed blotter. Fowler and David were lounging on the two wide
arms of Dr. Olmsted's chair.

"So you don't think you'll be a doctor, like your dad and me?" Dr.
Olmsted was quizzing.

David's soft hair fluttered as he bobbed his head in the agitation of
being taken seriously by grown-ups.

"Oh--oh--oh yes, I would like to. Oh, I think it'd be slick to be a
doctor. But I want to be a newspaper, like Granddad. That'd be a wow!
You said it!"

("Da-vid! Where you ever pick up such language!")

"You see, Uncle-Doctor, a doctor, oh gee, he has to stay up all night,
but an editor, he just sits in his office and takes it easy and never
has to worry about nothing!"

That moment, Fowler Greenhill saw his father-in-law making monkey faces
at him from the door and admonished David, "Now, not always! Editors
have to work pretty hard sometimes--just think of when there's train
wrecks and floods and everything! I'll tell you. Did you know I have
magic power?"

"What's 'magic power,' Daddy?"

"I'll show you. I'll summon your granddad here from misty deeps----"

("But will he come?" grunted Dr. Olmsted.)

"--and have him tell you all the troubles an editor has. Just make him
come flying through the air!"

"Aw, gee, you couldn't do _that_, Dad!"

"Oh, can't I!" Fowler stood solemnly, the overhead lights making soft
his harsh red hair, and he windmilled his arms, hooting,
"Presto--vesto--adsit--Granddad Jessup--voilà!"

And there, coming through the doorway, sure-enough _was_ Granddad
Jessup!

****

Doremus remained only ten minutes, saying to himself, "Anyway, nothing
bad can happen here, in this solid household." When Fowler saw him to
the door, Doremus sighed to him, "Wish Davy were right--just had to sit
in the office and not worry. But I suppose some day I'll have a run-in
with the Corpos."

"I hope not. Nasty bunch. What do you think, Dad? That swine Shad Ledue
told me yesterday they wanted me to join the M.M.'s as medical officer.
Fat chance! I told him so."

"Watch out for Shad, Fowler. He's vindictive. Made us rewire our whole
building."

"I'm not scared of Captain General Ledue or fifty like him! Hope he
calls me in for a bellyache some day! I'll give him a good
sedative--potassium of cyanide. Maybe I'll some day have the pleasure of
seeing that gent in his coffin. That's the advantage the doctor has, you
know! G'night, Dad! Sleep tight!"

****

A good many tourists were still coming up from New York to view the
colored autumn of Vermont, and when Doremus arrived at the Beulah Valley
Tavern he had irritably to wait while Lorinda dug out extra towels and
looked up train schedules and was polite to old ladies who complained
that there was too much--or not enough--sound from the Beulah River
Falls at night. He could not talk to her apart until after ten. There
was, meanwhile, a curious exalted luxury in watching each lost minute
threaten him with the approach of the final press time, as he sat in the
tea room, imperturbably scratching through the leaves of the latest
_Fortune_.

Lorinda led him, at ten-fifteen, into her little office--just a roll-top
desk, a desk chair, one straight chair, and a table piled with heaps of
defunct hotel-magazines. It was spinsterishly neat yet smelled still of
the cigar smoke and old letter files of proprietors long since gone.

"Let's hurry, Dor. I'm having a little dust-up with that snipe Nipper."
She plumped down at the desk.

"Linda, read this proof. For tomorrow's paper.... No. Wait. Stand
up."

"Eh?"

He himself took the desk chair and pulled her down on his knees. "Oh,
_you_!" she snorted, but she nuzzled her cheek against his shoulder and
murmured contentedly.

"Read this, Linda. For tomorrow's paper. I think I'm going to publish
it, all right--got to decide finally before eleven--but ought I to? I
was sure when I left the office, but Emma was scared----"

"Oh, _Emma_! Sit still. Let me see it." She read quickly. She always
did. At the end she said emotionlessly, "Yes. You must run it. Doremus!
They've actually come to us here--the Corpos--it's like reading about
typhus in China and suddenly finding it in your own house!"

She rubbed his shoulder with her cheek again, and raged, "Think of it!
That Shad Ledue--and I taught him for a year in district school, though
I was only two years older than he was--and what a nasty bully he was,
too! He came to me a few days ago, and he had the nerve to propose that
if I would give lower rates to the M.M.'s--he sort of hinted it would be
nice of me to serve M.M. officers free--they would close their eyes to
my selling liquor here, without a license or anything! Why, he had the
inconceivable nerve to tell me, and _condescendingly_! my dear--that he
and his fine friends would be willing to hang out here a lot! Even
Staubmeyer--oh, our 'professor' is blossoming out as quite a sporting
character! And when I chased Ledue out, with a flea in his ear----Well,
just this morning I got a notice that I have to appear in the county
court tomorrow--some complaint from my endearing partner, Mr.
Nipper--seems he isn't satisfied with the division of our work here--and
honestly, my darling, he never does one blame thing but sit around and
bore my best customers to death by telling what a swell hotel he used to
have in Florida. And Nipper has taken his things out of here and moved
into town. I'm afraid I'll have an unpleasant time, trying to keep from
telling him what I think of him, in court."

"Good Lord! Look, sweet, have you got a lawyer for it?"

"Lawyer? Heavens no! Just a misunderstanding--on little Nipper's part."

"You'd better. The Corpos are using the courts for all sorts of graft
and for accusations of sedition. Get Mungo Kitterick, my lawyer."

"He's dumb. Ice water in his veins."

"I know, but he's a tidier-up, like so many lawyers. Likes to see
everything all neat in pigeonholes. He may not care a damn for justice,
but he'll be awfully pained by any irregularities. Please get him,
Lindy, because they've got Effingham Swan presiding at court tomorrow."

"Who?"

"Swan--the Military Judge for District Three--that's a new Corpo office.
Kind of circuit judge with court-martial powers. This Effingham Swan--I
had Doc Itchitt interview him today, when he arrived--he's the perfect
gentleman-Fascist--Oswald Mosley style. Good family--whatever that
means. Harvard graduate. Columbia Law School, year at Oxford. But went
into finance in Boston. Investment banker. Major or something during the
war. Plays polo and sailed in a yacht race to Bermuda. Itchitt says he's
a big brute, with manners smoother than a butterscotch sundae and more
language than a bishop."

"But I'll be glad to have a _gentleman_ to explain things to, instead of
Shad."

"A gentleman's blackjack hurts just as much as a mucker's!"

"Oh, _you_!" with irritated tenderness, running her forefinger along the
line of his jaw.

Outside, a footstep.

She sprang up, sat down primly in the straight chair. The footsteps went
by. She mused:

"All this trouble and the Corpos----They're going to do something to you
and me. We'll become so roused up that--either we'll be desperate and
really cling to each other and everybody else in the world can go to the
devil or, what I'm afraid is more likely, we'll get so deep into
rebellion against Windrip, we'll feel so terribly that we're standing
for something, that we'll want to give up everything else for it, even
give up you and me. So that no one can ever find out and criticize.
We'll have to be beyond criticism."

"No! I won't listen. We will fight, but how can we ever get so
involved--detached people like us----"

"You _are_ going to publish that editorial tomorrow?"

"Yes."

"It's not too late to kill it?"

He looked at the clock over her desk--so ludicrously like a grade-school
clock that it ought to have been flanked with portraits of George and
Martha. "Well, yes, it is too late--almost eleven. Couldn't get to the
office till 'way past."

"You're sure you won't worry about it when you go to bed tonight? Dear,
I so don't want you to worry! You're sure you don't want to telephone
and kill the editorial?"

"Sure. Absolute!"

"I'm glad! Me, I'd rather be shot than go sneaking around, crippled with
fear. Bless you!"

She kissed him and hurried off to another hour or two of work, while he
drove home, whistling vaingloriously.

But he did not sleep well, in his big black-walnut bed. He startled to
the night noises of an old frame house--the easing walls, the step of
bodiless assassins creeping across the wooden floors all night long.




CHAPTER 19


    An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly
    studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over
    his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to
    ordinary folks--it just confuses them--to try to make them
    swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher
    class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important
    point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can
    win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening,
    when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist
    you, than at any other time of day.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

The Fort Beulah _Informer_ had its own three-story-and basement
building, on President Street between Elm and Maple, opposite the side
entrance of the Hotel Wessex. On the top story was the composing room;
on the second, the editorial and photographic departments and the
bookkeeper; in the basement, the presses; and on the first or street
floor, the circulation and advertising departments, and the front
office, open to the pavement, where the public came to pay subscriptions
and insert want-ads. The private room of the editor, Doremus Jessup,
looked out on President Street through one not too dirty window. It was
larger but little more showy than Lorinda Pike's office at the Tavern,
but on the wall it did have historic treasures in the way of a
water-stained surveyor's-map of Fort Beulah Township in 1891, a
contemporary oleograph portrait of President McKinley, complete with
eagles, flags, cannon, and the Ohio state flower, the scarlet carnation,
a group photograph of the New England Editorial Association (in which
Doremus was the third blur in a derby hat in the fourth row), and an
entirely bogus copy of a newspaper announcing Lincoln's death. It was
reasonably tidy--in the patent letter file, otherwise empty, there were
only 2½ pairs of winter mittens, and an 18-gauge shotgun shell.

Doremus was, by habit, extremely fond of his office. It was the only
place aside from his study at home that was thoroughly his own. He would
have hated to leave it or to share it with anyone--possibly excepting
Buck and Lorinda--and every morning he came to it expectantly, from the
ground floor, up the wide brown stairs, through the good smell of
printer's ink.

He stood at the window of this room before eight, the morning when his
editorial appeared, looking down at the people going to work in shops
and warehouses. A few of them were in Minute Men uniforms. More and more
even the part-time M.M.'s wore their uniforms when on civilian duties.
There was a bustle among them. He saw them unfold copies of the
_Informer_; he saw them look up, point up, at his window. Heads close,
they irritably discussed the front page of the paper. R. C. Crowley went
by, early as ever on his way to open the bank, and stopped to speak to a
clerk from Ed Howland's grocery, both of them shaking their heads. Old
Dr. Olmsted, Fowler's partner, and Louis Rotenstern halted on a corner.
Doremus knew they were both friends of his, but they were dubious,
perhaps frightened, as they looked at an _Informer_.

The passing of people became a gathering, the gathering a crowd, the
crowd a mob, glaring up at his office, beginning to clamor. There were
dozens of people there unknown to him: respectable farmers in town for
shopping, unrespectables in town for a drink, laborers from the nearest
work camp, and all of them eddying around M.M. uniforms. Probably many
of them cared nothing about insults to the Corpo state, but had only the
unprejudiced, impersonal pleasure in violence natural to most people.

Their mutter became louder, less human, more like the snap of burning
rafters. Their glances joined in one. He was, frankly, scared.

He was half conscious of big Dan Wilgus, the head compositor, beside
him, hand on his shoulder, but saying nothing, and of Doc Itchitt
cackling, "My--my gracious--hope they don't--God, I hope they don't come
up here!"

The mob acted then, swift and together, on no more of an incitement than
an unknown M.M.'s shout: "Ought to burn the place, lynch the whole bunch
of traitors!" They were running across the street, into the front
office. He could hear a sound of smashing, and his fright was gone in
protective fury. He galloped down the wide stairs, and from five steps
above the front office looked on the mob, equipped with axes and brush
hooks grabbed from in front of Pridewell's near-by hardware store,
slashing at the counter facing the front door, breaking the glass case
of souvenir postcards and stationery samples, and with obscene hands
reaching across the counter to rip the blouse of the girl clerk.

Doremus cried, "Get out of this, all you bums!"

They were coming toward him, claws hideously opening and closing, but he
did not await that coming. He clumped down the stairs, step by step,
trembling not from fear but from insane anger. One large burgher seized
his arm, began to bend it. The pain was atrocious. At that moment
(Doremus almost smiled, so grotesquely was it like the nick-of-time
rescue by the landing party of Marines) into the front office
Commissioner Shad Ledue marched, at the head of twenty M.M.'s with
unsheathed bayonets, and, lumpishly climbing up on the shattered
counter, bellowed:

"That'll do from you guys! Lam out of this, the whole damn bunch of
you!"

Doremus's assailant had dropped his arm. Was he actually, wondered
Doremus, to be warmly indebted to Commissioner Ledue, to Shad Ledue?
Such a powerful, dependable fellow--the dirty swine!

Shad roared on: "We're not going to bust up this place. Jessup sure
deserves lynching, but we got orders from Hanover--the Corpos are going
to take over this plant and use it. Beat it, you!"

A wild woman from the mountains--in another existence she had knitted at
the guillotine--had thrust through to the counter and was howling up at
Shad, "They're traitors! Hang 'em! We'll hang _you_, if you stop us! I
want my five thousand dollars!"

Shad casually stooped down from the counter and slapped her. Doremus
felt his muscles tense with the effort to get at Shad, to revenge the
good lady who, after all, had as much right as Shad to slaughter him,
but he relaxed, impatiently gave up all desire for mock heroism. The
bayonets of the M.M.'s who were clearing out the crowd were reality, not
to be attacked by hysteria.

Shad, from the counter, was blatting in a voice like a sawmill, "Snap
into it, Jessup! Take him along, men."

And Doremus, with no volition whatever, was marching through President
Street, up Elm Street, and toward the courthouse and county jail,
surrounded by four armed Minute Men. The strangest thing about it, he
reflected, was that a man could go off thus, on an uncharted journey
which might take years, without fussing over plans and tickets, without
baggage, without even an extra clean handkerchief, without letting Emma
know where he was going, without letting Lorinda--oh, Lorinda could take
care of herself. But Emma would worry.

He realized that the guard beside him, with the chevrons of a squad
leader, or corporal, was Aras Dilley, the slatternly farmer from up on
Mount Terror whom he had often helped... or thought he had helped.

"Ah, Aras!" said he.

"Huh!" said Aras.

"Come on! Shut up and keep moving!" said the M.M. behind Doremus, and
prodded him with the bayonet.

It did not, actually, hurt much, but Doremus spat with fury. So long now
he had unconsciously assumed that his dignity, his body, were sacred.
Ribald Death might touch him, but no more vulgar stranger.

Not till they had almost reached the courthouse could he realize that
people were looking at him--at Doremus Jessup!--as a prisoner being
taken to jail. He tried to be proud of being a political prisoner. He
couldn't. Jail was jail.

****

The county lockup was at the back of the courthouse, now the center of
Ledue's headquarters. Doremus had never been in that or any other jail
except as a reporter, pityingly interviewing the curious, inferior sort
of people who did mysteriously get themselves arrested.

To go into that shameful back door--he who had always stalked into the
front entrance of the courthouse, the editor, saluted by clerk and
sheriff and judge!

Shad was not in sight. Silently Doremus's four guards conducted him
through a steel door, down a corridor, to a small cell reeking of
chloride of lime and, still unspeaking, they left him there. The cell
had a cot with a damp straw mattress and damper straw pillow, a stool, a
wash basin with one tap for cold water, a pot, two hooks for clothes, a
small barred window, and nothing else whatever except a jaunty sign
ornamented with embossed forget-me-nots and a text from Deuteronomy, "He
shall be free at home one year."

"I hope so!" said Doremus, not very cordially.

It was before nine in the morning. He remained in that cell, without
speech, without food, with only tap water caught in his doubled palm and
with one cigarette an hour, until after midnight, and in the
unaccustomed stillness he saw how in prison men could eventually go mad.

"Don't whine, though. You here a few hours, and plenty of poor devils in
solitary for years and years, put there by tyrants worse than Windrip...
yes, and sometimes put there by nice, good, social-minded judges that
I've played bridge with!"

But the reasonableness of the thought didn't particularly cheer him.

He could hear a distant babble from the bull pen, where the drunks and
vagrants, and the petty offenders among the M.M.'s, were crowded in
enviable comradeship, but the sound was only a background for the
corroding stillness.

He sank into a twitching numbness. He felt that he was choking, and
gasped desperately. Only now and then did he think clearly--then only of
the shame of imprisonment or, even more emphatically, of how hard the
wooden stool was on his ill-upholstered rump, and how much pleasanter it
was, even so, than the cot, whose mattress had the quality of crushed
worms.

Once he felt that he saw the way clearly:

    "The tyranny of this dictatorship isn't primarily the fault of
    Big Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work.
    It's the fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious,
    respectable, lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the
    demagogues wriggle in, without fierce enough protest.

    "A few months ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and
    the agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it
    on, were evil. But possibly they _had_ to be violent, because
    easy-going citizens like me couldn't be stirred up otherwise. If
    our grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the
    evils of slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for
    gentlemen only, there wouldn't have been any need of agitators
    and war and blood.

    "It's my sort, the Responsible Citizens who've felt ourselves
    superior because we've been well-to-do and what we thought was
    'educated,' who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution,
    and now the Fascist Dictatorship. It's I who murdered Rabbi de
    Verez. It's I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can
    blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only
    my own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord!

    "Is it too late?"

Once again, as darkness was coming into his cell like the inescapable
ooze of a flood, he thought furiously:

"And about Lorinda. Now that I've been kicked into reality--got to be
one thing or the other: Emma (who's my bread) or Lorinda (my wine) but I
can't have both.

"Oh, damn! What twaddle! Why can't a man have both bread and wine and
not prefer one before the other?

"Unless, maybe, we're all coming into a day of battles when the fighting
will be too hot to let a man stop for anything save bread... and
maybe, even, too hot to let him stop for that!"

****

The waiting--the waiting in the smothering cell--the relentless waiting
while the filthy window glass turned from afternoon to a bleak darkness.

What was happening out there? What had happened to Emma, to Lorinda, to
the _Informer_ office, to Dan Wilgus, to Buck and Sissy and Mary and
David?

Why, it was today that Lorinda was to answer the action against her by
Nipper! Today! (Surely all that must have been done with a year ago!)
What had happened? Had Military Judge Effingham Swan treated her as she
deserved?

But Doremus slipped again from this living agitation into the trance of
waiting--waiting; and, catnapping on the hideously uncomfortable little
stool, he was dazed when at some unholily late hour (it was just after
midnight) he was aroused by the presence of armed M.M.'s outside his
barred cell door, and by the hill-billy drawl of Squad-Leader Aras
Dilley:

"Well, guess y' better git up now, better git up! Jedge wants to see
you--jedge says he wants to see you. Heh! Guess y' didn't ever think I'd
be a squad leader, _did_ yuh, Mist' Jessup!"

Doremus was escorted through angling corridors to the familiar side
entrance of the courtroom--the entrance where once he had seen Thad
Dilley, Aras's degenerate cousin, shamble in to receive sentence for
clubbing his wife to death.... He could not keep from feeling that
Thad and he were kin, now.

He was kept waiting--waiting!--for a quarter hour outside the closed
courtroom door. He had time to consider the three guards commanded by
Squad-Leader Aras. He happened to know that one of them had served a
sentence at Windsor for robbery with assault; and one, a surly young
farmer, had been rather doubtfully acquitted on a charge of barn-burning
in revenge against a neighbor.

He leaned against the slightly dirty gray plaster wall of the corridor.

"Stand straight there, you! What the hell do you think this is? And
keeping us up late like this!" said the rejuvenated, the redeemed Aras,
waggling his bayonet and shining with desire to use it on the bourjui.

Doremus stood straight.

He stood very straight, he stood rigid, beneath a portrait of Horace
Greeley.

Till now, Doremus had liked to think of that most famous of radical
editors, who had been a printer in Vermont from 1825 to 1828, as his
colleague and comrade. Now he felt colleague only to the revolutionary
Karl Pascals.

His legs, not too young, were trembling; his calves ached. Was he going
to faint? What was happening in there, in the courtroom?

To save himself from the disgrace of collapsing, he studied Aras Dilley.
Though his uniform was fairly new, Aras had managed to deal with it as
his family and he had dealt with their house on Mount Terror--once a
sturdy Vermont cottage with shining white clapboards, now mud-smeared
and rotting. His cap was crushed in, his breeches spotted, his leggings
gaping, and one tunic button hung by a thread.

"I wouldn't particularly want to be dictator over an Aras, but I most
particularly do not want him and his like to be dictators over me,
whether they call them Fascists or Corpos or Communists or Monarchists
or Free Democratic Electors or anything else! If that makes me a
reactionary kulak, all right! I don't believe I ever really liked the
shiftless brethren, for all my lying hand-shaking. Do you think the Lord
calls on us to love the cowbirds as much as the swallows? I don't! Oh, I
know; Aras has had a hard time: mortgage and seven kids. But Cousin
Henry Veeder and Dan Wilgus--yes, and Pete Vutong, the Canuck, that
lives right across the road from Aras and has just exactly the same kind
of land--they were all born poor, and they've lived decently enough.
They can wash their ears and their door sills, at least. I'm cursed if
I'm going to give up the American-Wesleyan doctrine of Free Will and of
Will to Accomplishment entirely, even if it does get me read out of the
Liberal Communion!"

Aras had peeped into the courtroom, and he stood giggling.

Then Lorinda came out--after midnight!

Her partner, the wart Nipper, was following her, looking sheepishly
triumphant.

"Linda! Linda!" called Doremus, his hands out, ignoring the snickers of
the curious guards, trying to move toward her. Aras pushed him back and
at Lorinda sneered, "Go on--move on, there!" and she moved. She seemed
twisted and rusty as Doremus would have thought her bright steeliness
could never have been.

Aras cackled, "Haa, haa, haa! Your friend, Sister Pike----"

"My wife's friend!"

"All' right, boss. Have it your way! Your wife's friend, Sister Pike,
got hers for trying to be fresh with Judge Swan! She's been kicked out
of her partnership with Mr. Nipper--he's going to manage that Tavern of
theirn, and Sister Pike goes back to pot-walloping in the kitchen, like
she'd ought to!--like maybe some of your womenfolks, that think they're
so almighty stylish and independent, will be having to, pretty soon!"

Again Doremus had sense enough to regard the bayonets; and a mighty
voice from inside the courtroom trumpeted: "Next case! D. Jessup!"

****

On the judges' bench were Shad Ledue in uniform as an M.M.
battalion-leader, ex-superintendent Emil Staubmeyer presenting the rôle
of ensign, and a third man, tall, rather handsome, rather too
face-massaged, with the letters "M.J." on the collar of his uniform as
commander, or pseudo-colonel. He was perhaps fifteen years younger than
Doremus.

This, Doremus knew, must be Military Judge Effingham Swan, sometime of
Boston.

The Minute Men marched him in front of the bench and retired, with only
two of them, a milky-faced farm boy and a former gas-station attendant,
remaining on guard inside the double doors of the side entrance...
the entrance for criminals.

Commander Swan loafed to his feet and, as though he were greeting his
oldest friend, cooed at Doremus, "My dear fellow, so sorry to have to
trouble you. Just a routine query, you know. Do sit down. Gentlemen, in
the case of Mr. Doremus, surely we need not go through the farce of
formal inquiry. Let's all sit about that damn big silly table down
there--place where they always stick the innocent defendants and the
guilty attorneys, y' know--get down from this high altar--little too
mystical for the taste of a vulgar bucket-shop gambler like myself.
After you, Professor; after you, my dear Captain." And, to the guards,
"Just wait outside in the hall, will you? Close the doors."

Staubmeyer and Shad looking, despite Effingham Swan's frivolity, as
portentous as their uniforms could make them, clumped down to the table.
Swan followed them airily, and to Doremus, still standing, he gave his
tortoise-shell cigarette case, caroling, "Do have a smoke, Mr. Doremus.
Must we all be so painfully formal?"

Doremus reluctantly took a cigarette, reluctantly sat down as Swan waved
him to a chair--with something not quite so airy and affable in the
sharpness of the gesture.

"My name is Jessup, Commander. Doremus is my first name."

"Ah, I see. It could be. Quite so. Very New England. Doremus." Swan was
leaning back in his wooden armchair, powerful trim hands behind his
neck. "I'll tell you, my dear fellow. One's memory is so wretched, you
know. I'll just call you 'Doremus,' _sans_ Mister. Then, d'you see, it
might apply to either the first (or Christian, as I believe one's
wretched people in Back Bay insist on calling it)--either the Christian
or the surname. Then we shall feel all friendly and secure. Now,
Doremus, my dear fellow, I begged my friends in the M.M.--I do trust
they were not too importunate, as these parochial units sometimes do
seem to be--but I ordered them to invite you here, really, just to get
your advice as a journalist. Does it seem to you that most of the
peasants here are coming to their senses and ready to accept the Corpo
_fait accompli_?"

Doremus grumbled, "But I understood I was dragged here--and if you want
to know, your squad was all of what you call 'importunate'!--because of
an editorial I wrote about President Windrip."

"Oh, was that you, Doremus? You see?--I was right--one does have such a
wretched memory! I do seem now to remember some minor incident of the
sort--you know--mentioned in the agenda. Do have another cigarette, my
dear fellow."

"Swan! I don't care much for this cat-and-mouse game--at least, not
while I'm the mouse. What are your charges against me?"

"Charges? Oh, my only aunt! Just trifling things--criminal libel and
conveying secret information to alien forces and high treason and
homicidal incitement to violence--you know, the usual boresome line. And
all so easily got rid of, my Doremus, if you'd just be persuaded--you
see how quite pitifully eager I am to be friendly with you, and to have
the inestimable aid of your experience here--if you'd just decide that
it might be the part of discretion--so suitable, y' know, to your
venerable years----"

"Damn it, I'm not venerable, nor anything like it. Only sixty.
Sixty-one, I should say."

"Matter of ratio, my dear fellow. I'm forty-seven m'self, and I have no
doubt the young pups already call _me_ venerable! But as I was saying,
Doremus----"

(Why was it he winced with fury every time Swan called him that?)

"--with your position as one of the Council of Elders, and with your
responsibilities to your family--it would be _too_ sick-making if
anything happened to _them_, y' know!--you just can't afford to be too
brash! And all we desire is for you to play along with us in your
paper--I would adore the chance of explaining some of the Corpos' and
the Chief's still unrevealed plans to you. You'd see such a new light!"

Shad grunted, "Him? Jessup couldn't see a new light if it was on the end
of his nose!"

"A moment, my dear Captain.... And also, Doremus, of course we shall
urge you to help us by giving us a complete list of every person in this
vicinity that you know of who is secretly opposed to the
Administration."

"Spying? Me?"

"Quite!"

"If I'm accused of----I insist on having my lawyer, Mungo Kitterick, and
on being tried, not all this bear-baiting----"

"Quaint name. Mungo Kitterick! Oh, my only aunt! Why does it give me so
absurd a picture of an explorer with a Greek grammar in his hand? You
don't quite understand, my Doremus. _Habeas corpus_--due processes of
law--too, too bad!--all those ancient sanctities, dating, no doubt, from
Magna Charta, been suspended--oh, but just temporarily, y' know--state
of crisis--unfortunate necessity martial law----"

"Damn it, Swan----"

"Commander, my dear fellow--ridiculous matter of military discipline, y'
know--_such_ rot!"

"You know mighty well and good it isn't temporary! It's permanent--that
is, as long as the Corpos last."

"It could be!"

"Swan--Commander--you get that 'it could be' and 'my aunt' from the
Reggie Fortune stories, don't you?"

"Now there _is_ a fellow detective-story fanatic! But how too bogus!"

"And that's Evelyn Waugh! You're quite a literary man for so famous a
yachtsman and horseman, Commander."

"Horsemun, yachtsmun, _lit_-er-ary man! Am I, Doremus, even in my
_sanctum sanctorum_, having, as the lesser breeds would say, the pants
kidded off me? Oh, my Doremus, that couldn't be! And just when one is so
feeble, after having been so, shall I say excoriated, by your so amiable
friend, Mrs. Lorinda Pike? No, no! How too unbefitting the majesty of
the law!"

Shad interrupted again, "Yeh, we had a swell time with your girl-friend,
Jessup. But I already had the dope about you and her before."

Doremus sprang up, his chair crashing backward on the floor. He was
reaching for Shad's throat across the table. Effingham Swan was on him,
pushing him back into another chair. Doremus hiccuped with fury. Shad
had not even troubled to rise, and he was going on contemptuously:

"Yuh, you two'll have quite some trouble if you try to pull any spy
stuff on the Corpos. My, my, Doremus, ain't we had fun, Lindy and you,
playing footie-footie these last couple years! Didn't nobody know about
it, did they! But what _you_ didn't know was Lindy--and don't it beat
hell a long-nosed, skinny old-maid like her can have so much pep!--and
she's been cheating on you right along, sleeping with every doggone man
boarder she's had at the Tavern, and of course with her little squirt of
a partner, Nipper!"

Swan's great hand--hand of an ape with a manicure--held Doremus in his
chair. Shad snickered. Emil Staubmeyer, who had been sitting with
fingertips together, laughed amiably. Swan patted Doremus's back.

He was less sunken by the insult to Lorinda than by the feeling of
helpless loneliness. It was so late; the night so quiet. He would have
been glad if even the M.M. guards had come in from the hall. Their
rustic innocence, however barnyardishly brutal, would have been
comforting after the easy viciousness of the three judges.

Swan was placidly resuming: "But I suppose we really must get down to
business--however agreeable, my dear clever literary detective, it would
be to discuss Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers and Norman Klein.
Perhaps we can some day, when the Chief puts us both in the same prison!
There's really, my dear Doremus, no need of your troubling your legal
gentleman, Mr. Monkey Kitteridge. I am quite authorized to conduct this
trial--for quaintly enough, Doremus, it _is_ a trial, despite the
delightful St. Botolph's atmosphere! And as to testimony, I already have
all I need, both in the good Miss Lorinda's inadvertent admissions, in
the actual text of your editorial criticizing the Chief, and in the
quite thorough reports of Captain Ledue and Dr. Staubmeyer. One really
ought to take you out and shoot you--and one is quite empowered to do
so, oh quite!--but one has one's faults--one is really too merciful. And
perhaps we can find a better use for you than as fertilizer--you are,
you know, rather too much on the skinny side to make adequate
fertilizer.

"You are to be released on parole, to assist and coach Dr. Staubmeyer
who, by orders from Commissioner Reek, at Hanover, has just been made
editor of the _Informer_, but who doubtless lacks certain points of
technical training. You will help him--oh, gladly, I am sure!--until he
learns. Then we'll see what we'll do with you!... You will write
editorials, with all your accustomed brilliance--oh, I assure you,
people constantly stop on Boston Common to discuss your masterpieces;
have done for years! But you'll write only as Dr. Staubmeyer tells you.
_Understand?_ Oh. Today--since 'tis already past the witching hour--you
will write an abject apology for your diatribe--oh yes, very much on the
abject side! You know--you veteran journalists do these things so
neatly--just admit you were a cockeyed liar and that sort of
thing--bright and bantering--_you_ know! And next Monday you will, like
most of the other ditchwater-dull hick papers, begin the serial
publication of the Chief's _Zero Hour_. You'll enjoy that!"

Clatter and shouts at the door. Protests from the unseen guards. Dr.
Fowler Greenhill pounding in, stopping with arms akimbo, shouting as he
strode down to the table, "What do you three comic judges think you're
doing?"

"And who may our impetuous friend be? He annoys me, rather," Swan asked
of Shad.

"Doc Fowler--Jessup's son-in-law. And a bad actor! Why, couple days ago
I offered him charge of medical inspection for all the M.M.'s in the
county, and he said--this red-headed smart-aleck here!--he said you and
me and Commissioner Reek and Doc Staubmeyer and all of us were a bunch
of hoboes that'd be digging ditches in a labor camp if we hadn't stole
some officers' uniforms!"

"Ah, did he indeed?" purred Swan.

Fowler protested: "He's a liar. I never mentioned you. I don't even know
who you are."

"My name, good sir, is Commander Effingham Swan, M.J.!"

"Well, M.J., that still doesn't enlighten me. Never heard of you!"

Shad interrupted, "How the hell did you get past the guards, Fowley?"
(He who had never dared call that long-reaching, swift-moving redhead
anything more familiar than "Doc.")

"Oh, all your Minnie Mouses know me. I've treated most of your brightest
gunmen for unmentionable diseases. I just told them at the door that I
was wanted in here professionally."

Swan was at his silkiest: "Oh, and how we _did_ want you, my dear
fellow--though we didn't know it until this moment. So you are one of
these brave rustic Æsculapiuses?"

"I am! And if you were in the war--which I should doubt, from your pansy
way of talking--you may be interested to know that I am also a member of
the American Legion--quit Harvard and joined up in 1918 and went back
afterwards to finish. And I want to warn you three half-baked
Hitlers----"

"Ah! But my dear friend! A mil-i-tary man! How too _too_! Then we shall
have to treat you as a responsible person--responsible for your
idiocies--not just as the uncouth clodhopper that you appear!"

Fowler was leaning both fists on the table. "Now I've had enough! I'm
going to push in your booful face----"

Shad had his fists up, was rounding the table, but Swan snapped, "No!
Let him finish! He may enjoy digging his own grave. You know--people do
have such quaint variant notions about sports. Some laddies actually
like to go fishing--all those slimy scales and the shocking odor! By the
way, Doctor, before it's too late, I would like to leave with you the
thought for the day that I was also in the war to end wars--a major. But
go on. I do so want to listen to you yet a little."

"Cut the cackle, will you, M. J.? I've just come here to tell you that
I've had enough--everybody's had enough--of your kidnaping Mr.
Jessup--the most honest and useful man in the whole Beulah Valley!
Typical lowdown sneaking kidnapers! If you think your phony Rhodes
Scholar accent keeps you from being just another cowardly, murdering
Public Enemy, in your toy-soldier uniform----"

Swan held up his hand in his most genteel Back Bay manner. "A moment,
Doctor, if you will be so good?" And to Shad: "I should think we'd heard
enough from the Comrade, wouldn't you, Commissioner? Just take the
bastard out and shoot him."

"O.K.! Swell!" Shad chuckled; and, to the guards at the half-open door,
"Get the corporal of the guard and a squad--six men--loaded rifles--make
it snappy, see?"

The guard were not far down the corridor, and their rifles were already
loaded. It was in less than a minute that Aras Dilley was saluting from
the door, and Shad was shouting, "Come here! Grab this dirty crook!" He
pointed at Fowler. "Take him along outside."

They did, for all of Fowler's struggling. Aras Dilley jabbed Fowler's
right wrist with a bayonet. It spilled blood down on his hand, so
scrubbed for surgery, and like blood his red hair tumbled over his
forehead.

Shad marched out with them, pulling his automatic pistol from its
holster and looking at it happily.

Doremus was held, his mouth was clapped shut, by two guards as he tried
to reach Fowler. Emil Staubmeyer seemed a little scared, but Effingham
Swan, suave and amused, leaned his elbows on the table and tapped his
teeth with a pencil.

From the courtyard, the sound of a rifle volley, a terrifying wail, one
single emphatic shot, and nothing after.




CHAPTER 20


    The real trouble with the Jews is that they are cruel. Anybody
    with a knowledge of history knows how they tortured poor debtors
    in secret catacombs, all through the Middle Ages. Whereas the
    Nordic is distinguished by his gentleness and his
    kind-heartedness to friends, children, dogs, and people of
    inferior races.

                                    _Zero Hour_, Berzelius Windrip.

The review in Dewey Haik's provincial court of Judge Swan's sentence on
Greenhill was influenced by County Commissioner Ledue's testimony that
after the execution he found in Greenhill's house a cache of the most
seditious documents: copies of Trowbridge's _Lance for Democracy_, books
by Marx and Trotzky, Communistic pamphlets urging citizens to
assassinate the Chief.

Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, insisted that her husband had never read such
things; that, if anything, he had been too indifferent to politics.
Naturally, her word could not be taken against that of Commissioner
Ledue, Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer (known everywhere as a scholar
and man of probity), and Military Judge Effingham Swan. It was necessary
to punish Mrs. Greenhill--or, rather, to give a strong warning to other
Mrs. Greenhills--by seizing all the property and money Greenhill had
left her.

Anyway, Mary did not fight very vigorously. Perhaps she realized her
guilt. In two days she turned from the crispest, smartest, most
swift-spoken woman in Fort Beulah into a silent hag, dragging about in
shabby and unkempt black. Her son and she went to live with her father,
Doremus Jessup.

Some said that Jessup should have fought for her and her property. But
he was not legally permitted to do so. He was on parole, subject, at the
will of the properly constituted authorities, to a penitentiary
sentence.

****

So Mary returned to the house and the overfurnished bedroom she had left
as a bride. She could not, she said, endure its memories. She took the
attic room that had never been quite "finished off." She sat up there
all day, all evening, and her parents never heard a sound. But within a
week her David was playing about the yard most joyfully... playing
that he was an M.M. officer.

The whole house seemed dead, and all that were in it seemed frightened,
nervous, forever waiting for something unknown--all save David and,
perhaps, Mrs. Candy, bustling in her kitchen.

Meals had been notoriously cheerful at the Jessups'; Doremus chattered
to an audience of Mrs. Candy and Sissy, flustering Emma with the most
outrageous assertions--that he was planning to go to Greenland; that
President Windrip had taken to riding down Pennsylvania Avenue on an
elephant; and Mrs. Candy was as unscrupulous as all good cooks in trying
to render them speechlessly drowsy after dinner and to encourage the
stealthy expansion of Doremus's already rotund little belly, with her
mince pie, her apple pie with enough shortening to make the eyes pop out
in sweet anguish, the fat corn fritters and candied potatoes with the
broiled chicken, the clam chowder made with cream.

Now, there was little talk among the adults at table and, though Mary
was not showily "brave," but colorless as a glass of water, they were
nervously watching her. Everything they spoke of seemed to point toward
the murder and the Corpos; if you said, "It's quite a warm fall," you
felt that the table was thinking, "So the M.M.'s can go on marching for
a long time yet before snow flies," and then you choked and asked
sharply for the gravy. Always Mary was there, a stone statue chilling
the warm and commonplace people packed in beside her.

So it came about that David dominated the table talk, for the first
delightful time in his nine years of experiment with life, and David
liked that very much indeed, and his grandfather liked it not nearly so
well.

He chattered, like an entire palm-ful of monkeys, about Foolish, about
his new playmates (children of Medary Cole, the miller), about the
apparent fact that crocodiles are rarely found in the Beulah River, and
the more moving fact that the Rotenstern young had driven with their
father clear to Albany.

Now Doremus was fond of children; approved of them; felt with an
earnestness uncommon to parents and grandparents that they were human
beings and as likely as the next one to become editors. But he hadn't
enough sap of the Christmas holly in his veins to enjoy listening
without cessation to the bright prattle of children. Few males have,
outside of Louisa May Alcott. He thought (though he wasn't very dogmatic
about it) that the talk of a Washington correspondent about politics was
likely to be more interesting than Davy's remarks on cornflakes and
garter snakes, so he went on loving the boy and wishing he would shut
up. And escaped as soon as possible from Mary's gloom and Emma's
suffocating thoughtfulness, wherein you felt, every time Emma begged,
"Oh, you _must_ take just a _little_ more of the nice chestnut dressing,
Mary dearie," that you really ought to burst into tears.

Doremus suspected that Emma was, essentially, more appalled by his
having gone to jail than by the murder of her son-in-law. Jessups simply
didn't go to jail. People who went to jail were _bad_, just as
barn-burners and men accused of that fascinatingly obscure amusement, a
"statutory offense," were bad; and as for bad people, you might try to
be forgiving and tender, but you didn't sit down to meals with them. It
was all so irregular, and most upsetting to the household routine!

So Emma loved him and worried about him till he wanted to go fishing and
actually did go so far as to get out his flies.

But Lorinda had said to him, with eyes brilliant and unworried, "And I
thought you were just a cud-chewing Liberal that didn't mind being
milked! I am so proud of you! You've encouraged me to fight
against----Listen, the minute I heard about your imprisonment I chased
Nipper out of my kitchen with a bread knife!... Well, anyway, I
thought about doing it!"

****

The office was deader than his home. The worst of it was that it wasn't
so very bad--that, he saw, he could slip into serving the Corpo state
with, eventually, no more sense of shame than was felt by old colleagues
of his who in pre-Corpo days had written advertisements for fraudulent
mouth washes or tasteless cigarettes, or written for supposedly
reputable magazines mechanical stories about young love. In a waking
nightmare after his imprisonment, Doremus had pictured Staubmeyer and
Ledue in the _Informer_ office standing over him with whips, demanding
that he turn out sickening praise for the Corpos, yelling at him until
he rose and killed and was killed. Actually, Shad stayed away from the
office, and Doremus's master, Staubmeyer, was ever so friendly and
modest and rather nauseatingly full of praise for his craftsmanship.
Staubmeyer seemed satisfied when, instead of the "apology" demanded by
Swan, Doremus stated that "Henceforth this paper will cease all
criticisms of the present government."

Doremus received from District Commissioner Reek a jolly telegram
thanking him for "gallantly deciding turn your great talent service
people and correcting errors doubtless made by us in effort set up new
more realistic state." Ur! said Doremus and did not chuck the message at
the clothes-basket waste-basket, but carefully walked over and rammed it
down amid the trash.

He was able, by remaining with the _Informer_ in her prostitute days, to
keep Staubmeyer from discharging Dan Wilgus, who was sniffy to the new
boss and unnaturally respectful now to Doremus. And he invented what he
called the "Yow-yow editorial." This was a dirty device of stating as
strongly as he could an indictment of Corpoism, then answering it as
feebly as he could, as with a whining "Yow-yow-yow--that's what _you_
say!" Neither Staubmeyer nor Shad caught him at it, but Doremus hoped
fearfully that the shrewd Effingham Swan would never see the Yow-yows.

So week on week he got along not too badly--and there was not one minute
when he did not hate this filthy slavery, when he did not have to force
himself to stay there, when he did not snarl at himself, "Then why _do_
you stay?"

His answers to that challenge came glibly and conventionally enough: "He
was too old to start in life again. And he had a wife and family to
support"--Emma, Sissy, and now Mary and David.

All these years he had heard responsible men who weren't being quite
honest--radio announcers who soft-soaped speakers who were fools and
wares that were trash, and who canaryishly chirped "Thank you, Major
Blister" when they would rather have kicked Major Blister, preachers who
did not believe the decayed doctrines they dealt out, doctors who did
not dare tell lady invalids that they were sex-hungry exhibitionists,
merchants who peddled brass for gold--heard all of them complacently
excuse themselves by explaining that they were too old to change and
that they had "a wife and family to support."

Why not let the wife and family die of starvation or get out and hustle
for themselves, if by no other means the world could have the chance of
being freed from the most boresome, most dull, and foulest disease of
having always to be a little dishonest?

So he raged--and went on grinding out a paper dull and a little
dishonest--but not forever. Otherwise the history of Doremus Jessup
would be too drearily common to be worth recording.

****

Again and again, figuring it out on rough sheets of copy paper (adorned
also with concentric circles, squares, whorls, and the most improbable
fish), he estimated that even without selling the _Informer_ or his
house, as under Corpo espionage he certainly could not if he fled to
Canada, he could cash in about $20,000. Say enough to give him an income
of a thousand a year--twenty dollars a week, provided he could smuggle
the money out of the country, which the Corpos were daily making more
difficult.

Well, Emma and Sissy and Mary and he _could_ live on that, in a
four-room cottage, and perhaps Sissy and Mary could find work.

But as for himself----

It was all very well to talk about men like Thomas Mann and Lion
Feuchtwanger and Romain Rolland, who in exile remained writers whose
every word was in demand, about Professors Einstein or Salvemini, or,
under Corpoism, about the recently exiled or self-exiled Americans, Walt
Trowbridge, Mike Gold, William Allen White, John Dos Passos, H. L.
Mencken, Rexford Tugwell, Oswald Villard. Nowhere in the world, except
possibly in Greenland or Germany, would such stars be unable to find
work and soothing respect. But what was an ordinary newspaper hack,
especially if he was over forty-five, to do in a strange land--and more
especially if he had a wife named Emma (or Carolina or Nancy or Griselda
or anything else) who didn't at all fancy going and living in a sod hut
on behalf of honesty and freedom?

So debated Doremus, like some hundreds of thousands of other craftsmen,
teachers, lawyers, what-not, in some dozens of countries under a
dictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientious
enough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormally
courageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon or
chopping-block--particularly when they "had wives and families to
support."

                           *     *     *

Doremus hinted once to Emil Staubmeyer that Emil was "getting onto the
ropes so well" that he thought of getting out, of quitting newspaper
work for good.

The hitherto friendly Mr. Staubmeyer said sharply, "What'd you do? Sneak
off to Canada and join the propagandists against the Chief? Nothing
doing! You'll stay right here and help me--help us!" And that afternoon
Commissioner Shad Ledue shouldered in and grumbled, "Dr. Staubmeyer
tells me you're doing pretty fairly good work, Jessup, but I want to
warn you to keep it up. Remember that Judge Swan only let you out on
parole... to me! You can do fine if you just set your mind to it!"

"If you just set your mind to it!" The one time when the boy Doremus had
hated his father had been when he used that condescending phrase.

He saw that, for all the apparent prosaic calm of day after day on the
paper, he was equally in danger of slipping into acceptance of his
serfdom and of whips and bars if he didn't slip. And he continued to be
just as sick each time he wrote: "The crowd of fifty thousand people who
greeted President Windrip in the university stadium at Iowa City was an
impressive sign of the constantly growing interest of all Americans in
political affairs," and Staubmeyer changed it to: "The vast and
enthusiastic crowd of seventy thousand loyal admirers who wildly
applauded and listened to the stirring address of the Chief in the
handsome university stadium in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa, is an
impressive yet quite typical sign of the growing devotion of all true
Americans to political study under the inspiration of the Corpo
government."

Perhaps his worst irritations were that Staubmeyer had pushed a desk and
his sleek, sweaty person into Doremus's private office, once sacred to
his solitary grouches, and that Doc Itchitt, hitherto his worshiping
disciple, seemed always to be secretly laughing at him.

****

Under a tyranny, most friends are a liability. One quarter of them turn
"reasonable" and become your enemies, one quarter are afraid to stop and
speak and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessed
final quarter keep you alive.

When he was with Lorinda, gone was all the pleasant toying and
sympathetic talk with which they had relieved boredom. She was fierce
now, and vibrant. She drew him close enough to her, but instantly she
would be thinking of him only as a comrade in plots to kill off the
Corpos. (And it was pretty much a real killing-off that she meant; there
wasn't left to view any great amount of her plausible pacifism.)

She was busy with good and perilous works. Partner Nipper had not been
able to keep her in the Tavern kitchen; she had so systematized the work
that she had many days and evenings free, and she had started a
cooking-class for farm girls and young farm wives who, caught between
the provincial and the industrial generations, had learned neither good
rural cooking with a wood fire, nor yet how to deal with canned goods
and electric grills--and who most certainly had not learned how to
combine so as to compel the tight-fisted little locally owned
power-and-light companies to furnish electricity at tolerable rates.

"Heavensake, keep this quiet, but I'm getting acquainted with these
country gals--getting ready for the day when we begin to organize
against the Corpos. I depend on them, not the well-to-do women that used
to want suffrage but that can't endure the thought of revolution,"
Lorinda whispered to him. "We've got to _do_ something."

"All right, Lorinda B. Anthony," he sighed.

****

And Karl Pascal stuck.

At Pollikop's garage, when he first saw Doremus after the jailing, he
said, "God, I was sorry to hear about their pinching you, Mr. Jessup!
But say, aren't you ready to join us Communists now?" (He looked about
anxiously as he said it.)

"I thought there weren't any more Bolos."

"Oh, we're supposed to be wiped out. But I guess you'll notice a few
mysterious strikes starting now and then, even though there _can't_ be
any more strikes! Why aren't you joining us? There's where you belong,
c-comrade!"

"Look here, Karl: you've always said the difference between the
Socialists and the Communists was that you believed in complete
ownership of all means of production, not just utilities; and that you
admitted the violent class war and the Socialists didn't. That's
poppycock! The real difference is that you Communists serve Russia. It's
your Holy Land. Well--Russia has all my prayers, right after the prayers
for my family and for the Chief, but what I'm interested in civilizing
and protecting against its enemies isn't Russia but America. Is that so
banal to say? Well, it wouldn't be banal for a Russian comrade to
observe that he was for Russia! And America needs our propaganda more
every day. Another thing: I'm a middle-class intellectual. I'd never
call myself any such a damn silly thing, but since you Reds coined it,
I'll have to accept it. That's my class, and that's what I'm interested
in. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do not
think that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and the
proletarians are the same. They want bread. We want--well, all right,
say it, we want cake! And when you get a proletarian ambitious enough to
want cake, too--why, in America, he becomes a middle-class intellectual
just as fast as he can--_if_ he can!"

"Look here, when you think of 3 per cent of the people owning 90 per
cent of the wealth----"

"I don't think of it! It does _not_ follow that because a good many of
the intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke--that plenty of
actors and teachers and nurses and musicians don't get any better paid
than stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are the
same. It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes your
class--whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'm
tired of apologizing for not having a dirty neck!"

"Honestly, Mr. Jessup, that's damn nonsense, and you know it!"

"Is it? Well, it's my American covered-wagon damn nonsense, and not the
propaganda-aëroplane damn nonsense of Marx and Moscow!"

"Oh, you'll join us yet."

"Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip and Hitler will join Stalin long before
the descendants of Dan'l Webster. You see, we don't like murder as a way
of argument--that's what really marks the Liberal!"

****

About _his_ future Father Perefixe was brief: "I'm going back to Canada
where I belong--away to the freedom of the King. Hate to give up,
Doremus, but I'm no Thomas à Becket, but just a plain, scared, fat
little clark!"

****

The surprise among old acquaintances was Medary Cole, the miller.

A little younger than Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, less
intensely aristocratic than those noblemen, since only one generation
separated him from a chin-whiskered Yankee farmer and not two, as with
them, he had been their satellite at the Country Club and, as to solid
virtue, been president of the Rotary Club. He had always considered
Doremus a man who, without such excuse as being a Jew or a Hunky or
poor, was yet flippant about the sanctities of Main Street and Wall
Street. They were neighbors, as Cole's "Cape Cod cottage" was just below
Pleasant Hill, but they had not by habit been droppers-in.

Now, when Cole came bringing David home, or calling for his daughter
Angela, David's new mate, toward supper time of a chilly fall evening,
he stopped gratefully for a hot rum punch, and asked Doremus whether he
really thought inflation was "such a good thing."

He burst out, one evening, "Jessup, there isn't another person in this
town I'd dare say this to, not even my wife, but I'm getting awful sick
of having these Minnie Mouses dictate where I have to buy my gunnysacks
and what I can pay my men. I won't pretend I ever cared much for labor
unions. But in those days, at least the union members did get some of
the swag. Now it goes to support the M.M.'s. We pay them and pay them
big to bully us. It don't look so reasonable as it did in 1936. But,
golly, don't tell anybody I said that!"

And Cole went off shaking his head, bewildered--he who had ecstatically
voted for Mr. Windrip.

****

On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and village
and back-hill hideout, the Corpos ended all crime in America forever, so
titanic a feat that it was mentioned in the London _Times_. Seventy
thousand selected Minute Men, working in combination with town and state
police officers, all under the chiefs of the government secret service,
arrested every known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. They
were tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shot
immediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in ten
released as innocent... and two in ten taken into the M.M.'s as
inspectors.

There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but this
was adequately answered by Windrip's courageous statement: "The way to
stop crime is to stop it!"

The next day, Medary Cole crowed at Doremus, "Sometimes I've felt like
criticizing certain features of Corpo policy, but did you see what the
Chief did to the gangsters and racketeers? Wonderful! I've told you
right along what this country's needed is a firm hand like Windrip's. No
shilly-shallying about that fellow! He saw that the way to stop crime
was to just go out and stop it!"

****

Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason so
justly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations of
Germany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey.

The authorities abruptly closed some scores of the smaller, more
independent colleges such as Williams, Bowdoin, Oberlin, Georgetown,
Antioch, Carleton, Lewis Institute, Commonwealth, Princeton, Swarthmore,
Kenyon, all vastly different one from another but alike in not yet
having entirely become machines. Few of the state universities were
closed; they were merely to be absorbed by central Corpo universities,
one in each of the eight provinces. But the government began with only
two. In the Metropolitan District, Windrip University took over the
Rockefeller Center and Empire State buildings, with most of Central Park
for playground (excluding the general public from it entirely, for the
rest was an M.M. drill ground). The second was Macgoblin University, in
Chicago and vicinity, using the buildings of Chicago and Northwestern
universities, and Jackson Park. President Hutchins of Chicago was rather
unpleasant about the whole thing and declined to stay on as an assistant
professor, so the authorities had politely to exile him.

Tattle-mongers suggested that the naming of the Chicago plant after
Macgoblin instead of Sarason suggested a beginning coolness between
Sarason and Windrip, but the two leaders were able to quash such canards
by appearing together at the great reception given to Bishop Cannon by
the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and being photographed shaking
hands.

Each of the two pioneer universities started with an enrollment of fifty
thousand, making ridiculous the pre-Corpo schools, none of which, in
1935, had had more than thirty thousand students. The enrollment was
probably helped by the fact that anyone could enter upon presenting a
certificate showing that he had completed two years in a high school or
business college, and a recommendation from a Corpo commissioner.

Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely new
universities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the Corpo state
to the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs in
re-civilization had merely kicked out all treacherous so-called
"intellectual" teachers who mulishly declined to teach physics, cookery,
and geography according to the principles and facts laid down by the
political bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure of
discharging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans were
the first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free from
the very first of any taint of "intellectualism."

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely
practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.

Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical study,
archæology, philology; all history before 1500--except for one course
which showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization had
been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophy
and its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained, but,
to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to be
conned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under the
direction of Dr. Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern
languages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called
"literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of
antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, some
study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for political
speeches, but the chief courses were in advertising, party journalism,
and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might be
mentioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.

In the realm of so-called "pure science," it was realized that only too
much and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpo
university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in mining
engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship and
production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy,
therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning and fruit dehydration,
kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridge
tournaments, cultivation of will power, band music for mass meetings,
schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel formulæ, cement-road construction,
and all other really useful subjects for the formation of the new-world
mind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had
ever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary
department of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly
taught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in
infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operation of tanks, armored cars,
and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, though students
were urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.

What really showed the difference from old-fogy inefficiency was that
with the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities, any bright lad
could graduate in two years.

****

As he read the prospectuses for these Olympian, these Ringling-Barnum
and Bailey universities, Doremus remembered that Victor Loveland, who a
year ago had taught Greek in a little college called Isaiah, was now
grinding out reading and arithmetic in a Corpo labor camp in Maine. Oh
well, Isaiah itself had been closed, and its former president, Dr. Owen
J. Peaseley, District Director of Education, was to be right-hand man to
Professor Almeric Trout when they founded the University of the
Northeastern Province, which was to supplant Harvard, Radcliffe, Boston
University, and Brown. He was already working on the university yell,
and for that "project" had sent out letters to 167 of the more prominent
poets in America, asking for suggestions.




CHAPTER 21


It was not only the November sleet, setting up a forbidding curtain
before the mountains, turning the roadways into slipperiness on which a
car would swing around and crash into poles, that kept Doremus
stubbornly at home that morning, sitting on his shoulder blades before
the fireplace. It was the feeling that there was no point in going to
the office; no chance even of a picturesque fight. But he was not
contented before the fire. He could find no authentic news even in the
papers from Boston or New York, in both of which the morning papers had
been combined by the government into one sheet, rich in comic strips, in
syndicated gossip from Hollywood, and, indeed, lacking only any news.

He cursed, threw down the New York _Daily Corporate_, and tried to read
a new novel about a lady whose husband was indelicate in bed and who was
too absorbed by the novels he wrote about lady novelists whose husbands
were too absorbed by the novels they wrote about lady novelists to
appreciate the fine sensibilities of lady novelists who wrote about
gentleman novelists----Anyway, he chucked the book after the newspaper.
The lady's woes didn't seem very important now, in a burning world.

He could hear Emma in the kitchen discussing with Mrs. Candy the best
way of making a chicken pie. They talked without relief; really, they
were not so much talking as thinking aloud. Doremus admitted that the
nice making of a chicken pie was a thing of consequence, but the blur of
voices irritated him. Then Sissy slammed into the room, and Sissy should
an hour ago have been at high school, where she was a senior--to
graduate next year and possibly go to some new and horrible provincial
university.

"What ho! What are you doing home? Why aren't you in school?"

"Oh. _That._" She squatted on the padded fender seat, chin in hands,
looking up at him, not seeing him. "I don't know's I'll ever go there
any more. You have to repeat a new oath every morning: 'I pledge myself
to serve the Corporate State, the Chief, all Commissioners, the Mystic
Wheel, and the troops of the Republic in every thought and deed.' Now I
ask you! Is _that_ tripe!"

"How you going to get into the university?"

"Huh! Smile at Prof Staubmeyer--if it doesn't gag me!"

"Oh, well----Well----" He could not think of anything meatier to say.

The doorbell, a shuffling in the hall as of snowy feet, and Julian Falck
came sheepishly in.

Sissy snapped, "Well, I'll be----What are you doing home? Why aren't you
in Amherst?"

"Oh. _That._" He squatted beside her. He absently held her hand, and she
did not seem to notice it, either. "Amherst's got hers. Corpos closing
it today. I got tipped off last Saturday and beat it. (They have a cute
way of rounding up the students when they close a college and arresting
a few of 'em, just to cheer up the profs.)" To Doremus: "Well, sir, I
think you'll have to find a place for me on the _Informer_, wiping
presses. Could you?"

"Afraid not, boy. Give anything if I could. But I'm a prisoner there.
God! Just having to say that makes me appreciate what a rotten position
I have!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I understand, of course. Well, I don't just know
what I am going to do. Remember back in '33 and '34 and '35 how many
good eggs there were--and some of them medics and law graduates and
trained engineers and so on--that simply couldn't get a job? Well, it's
worse now. I looked over Amherst, and had a try at Springfield, and I've
been here in town two days--I'd hoped to have something before I saw
you, Sis--why, I even asked Mrs. Pike if she didn't need somebody to
wash dishes at the Tavern, but so far there isn't a thing. 'Young
gentleman, two years in college, ninety-nine-point-three pure and
thorough knowledge Thirty-nine Articles, able drive car, teach tennis
and contract, amiable disposition, desires position--digging ditches.'"

"You _will_ get something! I'll see you do, my poppet!" insisted Sissy.
She was less modernistic and cold with Julian now than Doremus had
thought her.

"Thanks, Sis, but honest to God--I hope I'm not whining, but looks like
I'd either have to enlist in the lousy M.M.'s, or go to a labor camp. I
can't stay home and sponge on Granddad. The poor old Reverend hasn't got
enough to keep a pussycat in face powder."

"Lookit! Lookit!" Sissy clinched with Julian and bussed him, unabashed.
"I've got an idea--a new stunt. You know, one of these 'New Careers for
Youth' things. Listen! Last summer there was a friend of Lindy Pike's
staying with her and she was an interior decorator from Buffalo, and she
said they have a hell of a----"

("Siss-sy!")

"--time getting real, genuine, old hand-hewn beams that everybody wants
so much now in these phony-Old-English suburban living rooms. Well,
look! Round here there's ten million old barns with hand-adzed beams
just falling down--farmers probably be glad to have you haul 'em off. I
kind of thought about it for myself--being an architect, you know--and
John Pollikop said he'd sell me a swell, dirty-looking old five-ton
truck for four hundred bucks--in pre-inflation _real_ money, I mean--and
on time. Let's you and me try a load of assorted fancy beams."

"Swell!" said Julian.

"Well----" said Doremus.

"Come on!" Sissy leaped up. "Let's go ask Lindy what she thinks. She's
the only one in this family that's got any business sense."

"I don't seem to hanker much after going out there in this
weather--nasty roads," Doremus puffed.

"Nonsense, Doremus! With Julian driving? He's a poor speller and his
back-hand is fierce, but as a driver, he's better than I am! Why, it's a
pleasure to skid with him! Come on! Hey, Mother! We'll be back in hour
or two."

If Emma ever got beyond her distant, "Why, I thought you were in school,
already," none of the three musketeers heard it. They were bundling up
and crawling out into the sleet.

****

Lorinda Pike was in the Tavern kitchen, in a calico print with rolled
sleeves, dipping doughnuts into a deep fat--a picture right out of the
romantic days (which Buzz Windrip was trying to restore) when a female
who had brought up eleven children and been midwife to dozens of cows
was regarded as too fragile to vote. She was ruddy-faced from the stove,
but she cocked a lively eye at them, and her greeting was "Have a
doughnut? Good!" She led them from the kitchen with its attendant and
eavesdropping horde of a Canuck kitchenmaid and two cats, and they sat
in the beautiful butler's-pantry, with its shelved rows of Italian
majolica plates and cups and saucers--entirely unsuitable to Vermont,
attesting a certain artiness in Lorinda, yet by their cleanness and
order revealing her as a sound worker. Sissy sketched her plan--behind
the statistics there was an agreeable picture of herself and Julian,
gipsies in khaki, on the seat of a gipsy truck, peddling silvery old
pine rafters.

"Nope. Not a chance," said Lorinda regretfully. "The expensive
suburban-villa business--oh, it isn't gone: there's a surprising number
of middlemen and professional men who are doing quite well out of having
their wealth taken away and distributed to the masses. But all the
building is in the hands of contractors who are in politics--good old
Windrip is so consistently American that he's kept up all our
traditional graft, even if he has thrown out all our traditional
independence. They wouldn't leave you one cent profit."

"She's probably right," said Doremus.

"Be the first time I ever was, then!" sniffed Lorinda. "Why, I was so
simple that I thought women voters knew men too well to fall for noble
words on the radio!"

****

They sat in the sedan, outside the Tavern; Julian and Sissy in front,
Doremus in the back seat, dignified and miserable in mummy swathings.

"That's that," said Sissy. "Swell period for young dreamers the
Dictator's brought in. You can march to military bands--or you can sit
home--or you can go to prison. _Primavera di Bellezza!_"

"Yes.... Well, I'll find something to do.... Sissy, are you going
to marry me--soon as I get a job?"

(It was incredible, thought Doremus, how these latter-day unsentimental
sentimentalists could ignore him.... Like animals.)

"Before, if you want to. Though marriage seems to me absolute rot now,
Julian. They can't go and let us see that every doggone one of our old
institutions is a rotten fake, the way Church and State and everything
has laid down to the Corpos, and still expect us to think they're so
hot! But for unformed minds like your grandfather and Doremus, I suppose
we'll have to pretend to believe that the preachers who stand for Big
Chief Windrip are still so sanctified that they can sell God's license
to love!"

("Sis-sy!")

"(Oh. I forgot you were there, Dad!) But anyway, we're not going to have
any kids. Oh, I like children! I'd like to have a dozen of the little
devils around. But if people have gone so soft and turned the world over
to stuffed shirts and dictators, they needn't expect any decent woman to
bring children into such an insane asylum! Why, the more you really _do_
love children, the more you'll want 'em not to be born, now!"

Julian boasted, in a manner quite as lover-like and naïve as that of any
suitor a hundred years ago, "Yes. But just the same, we'll be having
children."

"Hell! I suppose so!" said the golden girl.

****

It was the unconsidered Doremus who found a job for Julian.

Old Dr. Marcus Olmsted was trying to steel himself to carry on the work
of his sometime partner, Fowler Greenhill. He was not strong enough for
much winter driving, and so hotly now did he hate the murderers of his
friend that he would not take on any youngster who was in the M.M.'s or
who had half acknowledged their authority by going to a labor camp. So
Julian was chosen to drive him, night and day, and presently to help him
by giving anesthetic, bandaging hurt legs; and the Julian who had within
one week "decided that he wanted to be" an aviator, a music critic, an
air-conditioning engineer, an archæologist excavating in Yucatan, was
dead-set on medicine and replaced for Doremus his dead doctor
son-in-law. And Doremus heard Julian and Sissy boasting and squabbling
and squeaking in the half-lighted parlor and from them--from them and
from David and Lorinda and Buck Titus--got resolution enough to go on in
the _Informer_ office without choking Staubmeyer to death.




CHAPTER 22


December tenth was the birthday of Berzelius Windrip, though in his
earlier days as a politician, before he fruitfully realized that lies
sometimes get printed and unjustly remembered against you, he had been
wont to tell the world that his birthday was on December twenty-fifth,
like one whom he admitted to be an even greater leader, and to shout,
with real tears in his eyes, that his complete name was Berzelius Noel
Weinacht Windrip.

His birthday in 1937 he commemorated by the historical "Order of
Regulation," which stated that though the Corporate government had
proved both its stability and its good-will, there were still certain
stupid or vicious "elements" who, in their foul envy of Corpo success,
wanted to destroy everything that was good. The kind-hearted government
was fed-up, and the country was informed that, from this day on, any
person who by word or act sought to harm or discredit the State, would
be executed or interned. Inasmuch as the prisons were already too full,
both for these slanderous criminals and for the persons whom the
kind-hearted State had to guard by "protective arrest," there were
immediately to be opened, all over the country, concentration camps.

Doremus guessed that the reason for the concentration camps was not only
the provision of extra room for victims but, even more, the provision of
places where the livelier young M.M.'s could amuse themselves without
interference from old-time professional policemen and prison-keepers,
most of whom regarded their charges not as enemies, to be tortured, but
just as cattle, to be kept safely.

On the eleventh, a concentration camp was enthusiastically opened, with
band music, paper flowers, and speeches by District Commissioner Reek
and Shad Ledue, at Trianon, nine miles north of Fort Beulah, in what had
been a modern experimental school for girls. (The girls and their
teachers, no sound material for Corpoism anyway, were simply sent about
their business.)

And on that day and every day afterward, Doremus got from journalist
friends all over the country secret news of Corpo terrorism and of the
first bloody rebellions against the Corpos.

In Arkansas, a group of ninety-six former share-croppers, who had always
bellyached about their misfortunes yet seemed not a bit happier in
well-run, hygienic labor camps with free weekly band concerts, attacked
the superintendent's office at one camp and killed the superintendent
and five assistants. They were rounded up by an M.M. regiment from
Little Rock, stood up in a winter-ragged cornfield, told to run, and
shot in the back with machine guns as they comically staggered away.

In San Francisco, dock-workers tried to start an absolutely illegal
strike, and their leaders, known to be Communists, were so treasonable
in their speeches against the government that an M.M. commander had
three of them tied up to a bale of rattan, which was soaked with oil and
set afire. The Commander gave warning to all such malcontents by
shooting off the criminals' fingers and ears while they were burning,
and so skilled a marksman was he, so much credit to the efficient M.M.
training, that he did not kill one single man while thus trimming them
up. He afterward went in search of Tom Mooney (released by the Supreme
Court of the United States, early in 1936), but that notorious
anti-Corpo agitator had had the fear of God put into him properly, and
had escaped on a schooner for Tahiti.

In Pawtucket, a man who ought to have been free from the rotten
seditious notions of such so-called labor-leaders, in fact a man who was
a fashionable dentist and director in a bank, absurdly resented the
attentions which half-a-dozen uniformed M.M.'s--they were all on leave,
and merely full of youthful spirits, anyway--bestowed upon his wife at a
café and, in the confusion, shot and killed three of them. Ordinarily,
since it was none of the public's business anyway, the M.M.'s did not
give out details of their disciplining of rebels, but in this case,
where the fool of a dentist had shown himself to be a homicidal maniac,
the local M.M. commander permitted the papers to print the fact that the
dentist had been given sixty-nine lashes with a flexible steel rod,
then, when he came to, left to think over his murderous idiocy in a cell
in which there was two feet of water in the bottom--but, rather
ironically, none to drink. Unfortunately, the fellow died before having
the opportunity to seek religious consolation.

In Scranton, the Catholic pastor of a working-class church was kidnaped
and beaten.

In central Kansas, a man named George W. Smith pointlessly gathered a
couple of hundred farmers armed with shotguns and sporting rifles and an
absurdly few automatic pistols, and led them in burning an M.M.
barracks. M.M. tanks were called out, and the hick would-be rebels were
not, this time, used as warnings, but were overcome with mustard gas,
then disposed of with hand grenades, which was an altogether intelligent
move, since there was nothing of the scoundrels left for sentimental
relatives to bury and make propaganda over.

But in New York City the case was the opposite--instead of being thus
surprised, the M.M.'s rounded up all suspected Communists in the former
boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and all persons who were reported
to have been seen consorting with such Communists, and interned the lot
of them in the nineteen concentration camps on Long Island.... Most
of them wailed that they were not Communists at all.

****

For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World
War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues. On the
streets, on trains, at theaters, men looked about to see who might be
listening before they dared so much as say there was a drought in the
West, for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on the
Chief! They were particularly skittish about waiters, who were supposed
to listen from the ambush which every waiter carries about with him
anyway, and to report to the M.M.'s. People who could not resist talking
politics spoke of Windrip as "Colonel Robinson" or "Dr. Brown" and of
Sarason as "Judge Jones" or "my cousin Kaspar," and you would hear
gossips hissing "Shhh!" at the seemingly innocent statement, "My cousin
doesn't seem to be as keen on playing bridge with the Doctor as he used
to--I'll bet sometime they'll quit playing."

Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were as
jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained
footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; and
for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in
complete sleep. And with the coming of fear went out their pride.

Daily--common now as weather reports--were the rumors of people who had
suddenly been carried off "under protective arrest," and daily more of
them were celebrities. At first the M.M.'s had, outside of the one
stroke against Congress, dared to arrest only the unknown and
defenseless. Now, incredulously--for these leaders had seemed
invulnerable, above the ordinary law--you heard of judges, army
officers, ex-state governors, bankers who had not played in with the
Corpos, Jewish lawyers who had been ambassadors, being carted off to the
common stink and mud of the cells.

To the journalist Doremus and his family it was not least interesting
that among these imprisoned celebrities were so many journalists:
Raymond Moley, Frank Simonds, Frank Kent, Heywood Broun, Mark Sullivan,
Earl Browder, Franklin P. Adams, George Seldes, Frazier Hunt, Garet
Garrett, Granville Hicks, Edwin James, Robert Morss Lovett--men who
differed grotesquely except in their common dislike of being little
disciples of Sarason and Macgoblin.

Few writers for Hearst were arrested, however.

The plague came nearer to Doremus when unrenowned editors in Lowell and
Providence and Albany, who had done nothing more than fail to be
enthusiastic about the Corpos, were taken away for "questioning," and
not released for weeks--months.

It came much nearer at the time of the book-burning.

                           *     *     *

All over the country, books that might threaten the Pax Romana of the
Corporate State were gleefully being burned by the more scholarly Minute
Men. This form of safeguarding the State--so modern that it had scarce
been known prior to A.D. 1300--was instituted by Secretary of Culture
Macgoblin, but in each province the crusaders were allowed to have the
fun of picking out their own paper-and-ink traitors. In the Northeastern
Province, Judge Effingham Swan and Dr. Owen J. Peaseley were appointed
censors by Commissioner Dewey Haik, and their index was lyrically
praised all through the country.

For Swan saw that it was not such obvious anarchists and soreheads as
Darrow, Steffens, Norman Thomas, who were the real danger; like
rattlesnakes, their noisiness betrayed their venom. The real enemies
were men whose sanctification by death had appallingly permitted them to
sneak even into respectable school libraries--men so perverse that they
had been traitors to the Corpo State years and years before there had
been any Corpo State; and Swan (with Peaseley chirping agreement) barred
from all sale or possession the books of Thoreau, Emerson, Whittier,
Whitman, Mark Twain, Howells, and _The New Freedom_, by Woodrow Wilson,
for though in later life Wilson became a sound manipulative politician,
he had earlier been troubled with itching ideals.

It goes without saying that Swan denounced all such atheistic
foreigners, dead or alive, as Wells, Marx, Shaw, the Mann brothers,
Tolstoy, and P. G. Wodehouse with his unscrupulous propaganda against
the aristocratic tradition. (Who could tell? Perhaps, some day, in a
corporate empire, he might be Sir Effingham Swan, Bart.)

And in one item Swan showed blinding genius--he had the foresight to see
the peril of that cynical volume, _The Collected Sayings of Will
Rogers_.

****

Of the book-burnings in Syracuse and Schenectady and Hartford, Doremus
had heard, but they seemed improbable as ghost stories.

The Jessup family were at dinner, just after seven, when on the porch
they heard the tramping they had half expected, altogether dreaded. Mrs.
Candy--even the icicle, Mrs. Candy, held her breast in agitation before
she stalked out to open the door. Even David sat at table, spoon
suspended in air.

Shad's voice, "In the name of the Chief!" Harsh feet in the hall, and
Shad waddling into the dining room, cap on, hand on pistol, but
grinning, and with leering geniality bawling, "H' are yuh, folks! Search
for bad books. Orders of the District Commissioner. Come on, Jessup!" He
looked at the fireplace to which he had once brought so many armfuls of
wood, and snickered.

"If you'll just sit down in the other room----"

"I will like hell 'just sit down in the other room'! We're burning the
books tonight! Snap to it, Jessup!" Shad looked at the exasperated Emma;
he looked at Sissy; he winked with heavy deliberation and chuckled, "H'
are you, Mis' Jessup. Hello, Sis. How's the kid?"

But at Mary Greenhill he did not look, nor she at him.

In the hall, Doremus found Shad's entourage, four sheepish M.M.'s and a
more sheepish Emil Staubmeyer, who whimpered, "Just orders--you
know--just orders."

Doremus safely said nothing; led them up to his study.

Now a week before he had removed every publication that any sane Corpo
could consider radical: his _Das Kapital_ and Veblen and all the Russian
novels and even Sumner's _Folkways_ and Freud's _Civilization and Its
Discontents_; Thoreau and the other hoary scoundrels banned by Swan; old
files of the _Nation_ and New _Republic_ and such copies as he had been
able to get of Walt Trowbridge's _Lance for Democracy_; had removed them
and hidden them inside an old horsehair-sofa in the upper hall.

"I told you there was nothing," said Staubmeyer, after the search.
"Let's go."

Said Shad, "Huh! I know this house, Ensign. I used to work, here--had
the privilege of putting up those storm windows you can see there, and
of getting bawled out right here in this room. You won't remember those
times, Doc--when I used to mow your lawn, too, and you used to be so
snotty!" Staubmeyer blushed. "You bet I know my way around, and there's
a lot of, fool books downstairs, in the sittin' room."

Indeed in that apartment variously called the drawing room, the living
room, the sittin' room, the Parlor and once, even, by a spinster who
thought editors were romantic, the studio, there were two or three
hundred volumes, mostly in "standard sets." Shad glumly stared at them,
the while he rubbed the faded Brussels carpet with his spurs. He was
worried. He _had_ to find something seditious!

He pointed at Doremus's dearest treasure, the thirty-four-volume
extra-illustrated edition of Dickens which had been his father's, and
his father's only insane extravagance. Shad demanded of Staubmeyer,
"That guy Dickens--didn't he do a lot of complaining about
conditions--about schools and the police and everything?"

Staubmeyer protested. "Yes, but Shad--but, Captain Ledue, that was a
hundred years ago----"

"Makes no difference. Dead skunk stinks worse'n a live one."

Doremus cried, "Yes, but not for a hundred years! Besides----"

The M.M.'s, obeying Shad's gesture, were already yanking the volumes of
Dickens from the shelves, dropping them on the floor, covers cracking.
Doremus seized an M.M.'s arm; from the door Sissy shrieked. Shad
lumbered up to him, enormous red fist at Doremus's nose, growling, "Want
to get the daylights beaten out of you now... instead of later?"

Doremus and Sissy, side by side on a couch, watched the books thrown in
a heap. He grasped her hand, muttering to her, "Hush--hush!" Oh, Sissy
was a pretty girl, and young, but a pretty girl schoolteacher had been
attacked, her clothes stripped off, and been left in the snow just south
of town, two nights ago.

****

Doremus could not have stayed away from the book-burning. It was like
seeing for the last time the face of a dead friend.

Kindling, excelsior, and spruce logs had been heaped on the thin snow on
the Green. (Tomorrow there would be a fine patch burned in the
hundred-year-old sward.) Round the pyre danced M.M.'s schoolboys,
students from the rather ratty business college on Elm Street, and
unknown farm lads, seizing books from the pile guarded by the broadly
cheerful Shad and skimming them into the flames. Doremus saw his _Martin
Chuzzlewit_ fly into air and land on the burning lid of an ancient
commode. It lay there open to a Phiz drawing of Sairey Gamp, which
withered instantly. As a small boy he had always laughed over that
drawing.

He saw the old rector, Mr. Falck, squeezing his hands together. When
Doremus touched his shoulder, Mr. Falck mourned, "They took away my _Urn
Burial_, my _Imitatio Christi_. I don't know why, I don't know why! And
they're burning them there!"

Who owned them, Doremus did not know, nor why they had been seized, but
he saw _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Omar Khayyám_ and Shelley and _The Man
Who Was Thursday_ and _A Farewell to Arms_ all burning together, to the
greater glory of the Dictator and the greater enlightenment of his
people.

The fire was almost over when Karl Pascal pushed up to Shad Ledue and
shouted, "I hear you stinkers--I've been out driving a guy, and I hear
you raided my room and took off my books while I was away!"

"You bet we did, Comrade!"

"And you're burning them--burning my----"

"Oh no, Comrade! Not burning 'em. Worth too blame much, Comrade." Shad
laughed very much. "They're at the police station. We've just been
waiting for you. It was awful nice to find all your little Communist
books. Here! _Take him along!_"

So Karl Pascal was the first prisoner to go from Fort Beulah to the
Trianon Concentration Camp--no; that's wrong; the second. The first, so
inconspicuous that one almost forgets him, was an ordinary fellow, an
electrician who had never so much as spoken of politics. Brayden, his
name was. A Minute Man who stood well with Shad and Staubmeyer wanted
Brayden's job. Brayden went to concentration camp. Brayden was flogged
when he declared, under Shad's questioning, that he knew nothing about
any plots against the Chief. Brayden died, alone in a dark cell, before
January.

****

An English globe-trotter who gave up two weeks of December to a thorough
study of "conditions" in America, wrote to his London paper, and later
said on the wireless for the B.B.C.: "After a thorough glance at America
I find that, far from there being any discontent with the Corpo
administration among the people, they have never been so happy and so
resolutely set on making a Brave New World. I asked a very prominent
Hebrew banker about the assertions that his people were being oppressed,
and he assured me, 'When we hear about such silly rumors, we are highly
amused.'"




CHAPTER 23


Doremus was nervous. The Minute Men had come, not with Shad but with
Emil and a strange battalion-leader from Hanover, to examine the private
letters in his study. They were polite enough, but alarmingly thorough.
Then he knew, from the disorder in his desk at the _Informer_, that
someone had gone over his papers there. Emil avoided him at the office.
Doremus was called to Shad's office and gruffly questioned about
correspondence which some denouncer had reported his having with the
agents of Walt Trowbridge.

So Doremus was nervous. So Doremus was certain that his time for going
to concentration camp was coming. He glanced back at every stranger who
seemed to be following him on the street. The fruitman, Tony Mogliani,
flowery advocate of Windrip, of Mussolini, and of tobacco quid as a cure
for cuts and burns, asked him too many questions about his plans for the
time when he should "get through on the paper"; and once a tramp tried
to quiz Mrs. Candy, meantime peering at the pantry shelves, perhaps to
see if there was any sign of their being understocked, as if for closing
the house and fleeing.... But perhaps the tramp really was a tramp.

In the office, in mid-afternoon, Doremus had a telephone call from that
scholar-farmer, Buck Titus:

"Going to be home this evening, about nine? Good! Got to see you.
Important! Say, see if you can have all your family and Linda Pike and
young Falck there, too, will you? Got an idea. Important!"

As important ideas, just now, usually concerned being imprisoned,
Doremus and his women waited jumpily. Lorinda came in twittering, for
the sight of Emma always did make her twitter a little, and in Lorinda
there was no relief. Julian came in shyly, and there was no relief in
Julian. Mrs. Candy brought in unsolicited tea with a dash of rum, and in
her was some relief, but it was all a dullness of fidgety waiting till
Buck slammed in, ten minutes late and very snowy.

"Sorkeepwaiting but I've been telephoning. Here's some news you won't
have even in the office yet, Dormouse. The forest fire's getting nearer.
This afternoon they arrested the editor of the Rutland _Herald_--no
charge laid against him yet--no publicity--I got it from a commission
merchant I deal with in Rutland. You're next, Doremus. I reckon they've
just been laying off you till Staubmeyer picked your brains. Or maybe
Ledue has some nice idea about torturing you by keeping you waiting.
Anyway, you've got to get out. And tomorrow! To Canada! To stay! By
automobile. No can do by plane any more--Canadian government's stopped
that. You and Emma and Mary and Dave and Sis and the whole damn
shooting-match--and maybe Foolish and Mrs. Candy and the canary!"

"Couldn't possibly! Take me weeks to realize on what investments I've
got. Guess I could raise twenty thousand, but it'd take weeks."

"Sign 'em over to me, if you trust me--and you better! I can cash in
everything better than you can--stand in with the Corpos better--been
selling 'em horses and they think I'm the kind of loud-mouthed walking
gent that will join 'em! I've got fifteen hundred Canadian dollars for
you right here in my pocket, for a starter."

"We'd never get across the border. The M.M.'s are watching every inch,
just looking for suspects like me."

"I've got a Canadian driver's license, and Canadian registration plates
ready to put on my car--we'll take mine--less suspicious. I can look
like a real farmer--that's because I am one, I guess--I'm going to drive
you all, by the way. I got the plates smuggled in underneath the bottles
in a case of ale! So we're all set, and we'll start tomorrow night, if
the weather isn't too clear--hope there'll be snow."

"But Buck! Good Lord! I'm not going to flee. I'm not guilty of anything.
I haven't anything to flee for!"

"Just your life, my boy, just your life!"

"I'm not afraid of 'em."

"Oh yes you are!"

"Oh--well--if you look at it that way, probably I am! But I'm not going
to let a bunch of lunatics and gunmen drive me out of the country that I
and my ancestors made!"

Emma choked with the effort to think of something convincing; Mary
seemed without tears to be weeping; Sissy squeaked; Julian and Lorinda
started to speak and interrupted each other; and it was the uninvited
Mrs. Candy who, from the doorway, led off: "Now isn't that like a man!
Stubborn as mules. All of 'em. Every one. And show-offs, the whole lot
of 'em. Course you just wouldn't stop and think how your womenfolks will
feel if you get took off and shot! You just stand in front of the
locomotive and claim that because you were on the section gang that
built the track, you got more right there than the engine has, and then
when it's gone over you and gone away, you expect us all to think what a
hero you were! Well, maybe _some_ call it being a hero, but----"

"Well, confound it all, all of you picking on me and trying to get me
all mixed up and not carry out my duty to the State as I see it----"

"You're over sixty, Doremus. Maybe a lot of us can do our duty better
now from Canada than we can here--like Walt Trowbridge," besought
Lorinda. Emma looked at her friend Lorinda with no particular affection.

"But to let the Corpos steal the country and nobody protest! No!"

"That's the kind of argument that sent a few million out to die, to make
the world safe for democracy and a cinch for Fascism!" scoffed Buck.

"Dad! Come with us. Because we can't go without you. And I'm getting
scared here." Sissy sounded scared, too; Sissy the unconquerable. "This
afternoon Shad stopped me on the street and wanted me to go out with
him. He tickled my chin, the little darling! But honestly, the way he
smirked, as if he was so sure of me--I got scared!"

"I'll get a shotgun and----" "Why, I'll kill the dirty----" "Wait'll I
get my hands on----" cried Doremos, Julian, and Buck, all together, and
glared at one another, then looked sheepish as Foolish barked at the
racket, and Mrs. Candy, leaning like a frozen codfish against the door
jamb, snorted, "Some more locomotive-batters!"

Doremus laughed. For one only time in his life he showed genius, for he
consented: "All right. We'll go. But just imagine that I'm a man of
strong will power and I'm taking all night to be convinced. We'll start
tomorrow night."

What he did not say was that he planned, the moment he had his family
safe in Canada, with money in the bank and perhaps a job to amuse Sissy,
to run away from them and come back to his proper fight. He would at
least kill Shad before he got killed himself.

****

It was only a week before Christmas, a holiday always greeted with good
cheer and quantities of colored ribbons in the Jessup household; and
that wild day of preparing for flight had a queer Christmas joyfulness.
To dodge suspicion, Doremus spent most of the time at the office, and a
hundred times it seemed that Staubmeyer was glancing at him with just
the ruler-threatening hidden ire he had used on whisperers and like
young criminals in school. But he took off two hours at lunch time, and
he went home early in the afternoon, and his long depression was gone in
the prospect of Canada and freedom, in an excited inspection of clothes
that was like preparation for a fishing trip. They worked upstairs,
behind drawn blinds, feeling like spies in an E. Phillips Oppenheim
story, beleagured in the dark and stone-floored ducal bedroom of an
ancient inn just beyond Grasse. Downstairs, Mrs. Candy was pretentiously
busy looking normal--after their flight, she and the canary were to
remain and she was to be surprised when the M.M.'s reported that the
Jessups seemed to have escaped.

Doremus had drawn five hundred from each of the local banks, late that
afternoon, telling them that he was thinking of taking an option on an
apple orchard. He was too well-trained a domestic animal to be raucously
amused, but he could not help observing that while he himself was taking
on the flight to Egypt only all the money he could get hold of, plus
cigarettes, six handkerchiefs, two extra pairs of socks, a comb, a
toothbrush, and the first volume of Spengler's _Decline of the
West_--decidedly it was not his favorite book, but one he had been
trying to make himself read for years, on train journeys--while, in
fact, he took nothing that he could not stuff into his overcoat pockets,
Sissy apparently had need of all her newest lingerie and of a large
framed picture of Julian, Emma of a Kodak album showing the three
children from the ages of one to twenty, David of his new model
aëroplane, and Mary of her still, dark hatred that was heavier to carry
than many chests.

****

Julian and Lorinda were there to help them; Julian off in corners with
Sissy.

With Lorinda, Doremus had but one free moment... in the old-fashioned
guest-bathroom.

"Linda. Oh, Lord!"

"We'll come through! In Canada you'll have time to catch your breath.
Join Trowbridge!"

"Yes, but to leave you----I'd hoped somehow, by some miracle, you and I
could have maybe a month together, say in Monterey or Venice or the
Yellowstone. I hate it when life doesn't seem to stick together and get
somewhere and have some plan and meaning."

"It's had meaning! No dictator can completely smother us now! Come!"

"Good-bye, my Linda!"

Not even now did he alarm her by confessing that he planned to come
back, into danger.

Embracing beside an aged tin-lined bathtub with woodwork painted a
dreary brown, in a room which smelled slightly of gas from an old
hot-water heater--embracing in sunset-colored mist upon a mountain top.

                           *     *     *

Darkness, edged wind, wickedly deliberate snow, and in it Buck Titus
boisterously cheerful in his veteran Nash, looking as farmer-like as he
could, in sealskin cap with rubbed bare patches and an atrocious dogskin
overcoat. Doremus thought of him again as a Captain Charles King
cavalryman chasing the Sioux across blizzard-blinded prairies.

They packed alarmingly into the car; Mary beside Buck, the driver; in
the back, Doremus between Emma and Sissy; on the floor, David and
Foolish and the toy aëroplane indistinguishably curled up together
beneath a robe. Trunk rack and front fenders were heaped with
tarpaulin-covered suitcases.

"Lord, I wish I were going!" moaned Julian. "Look! Sis! Grand spy-story
idea! But I mean seriously: Send souvenir postcards to my
granddad--views of churches and so on--just sign 'em 'Jane'--and
whatever you say about the church, I'll know you really mean it about
you and----Oh, damn all mystery! I want _you_, Sissy!"

Mrs. Candy whisked a bundle in among the already intolerable mess of
baggage which promised to descend on Doremus's knees and David's head,
and she snapped, "Well, if you folks _must_ go flyin' around the
country----It's a cocoanut layer cake." Savagely: "Soon's you get around
the corner, throw the fool thing in the ditch if you want to!" She fled
sobbing into the kitchen, where Lorinda stood in the lighted doorway,
silent, her trembling hands out to them.

****

The car was already lurching in the snow before they had sneaked through
Fort Beulah by shadowy back-streets and started streaking northward.

Sissy sang out cheerily, "Well, Christmas in Canada! Skittles and beer
and lots of holly!"

"Oh, do they have Santa Claus in Canada?" came David's voice, wondering,
childish, slightly muffled by lap robe and the furry ears of Foolish.

"Of _course_ they do, dearie!" Emma reassured him and, to the grown-ups,
"Now wasn't that the cutest thing!"

To Doremus, Sissy whispered, "Darn well ought to be cute. Took me ten
minutes to teach him to say it, this afternoon! Hold my hand. I hope
Buck knows how to drive!"

****

Buck Titus knew every back-road from Fort Beulah to the border,
preferably in filthy weather, like tonight. Beyond Trianon he pulled the
car up deep-rutted roads, on which you would have to back if you were to
pass anyone. Up grades on which the car knocked and panted, into lonely
hills, by a zigzag of roads, they jerked toward Canada. Wet snow
sheathed the windshield, then froze, and Buck had to drive with his head
thrust out through the open window, and the blast came in and circled
round their stiff necks.

Doremus could see nothing save the back of Buck's twisted, taut neck,
and the icy windshield, most of the time. Just now and then a light far
below the level of the road indicated that they were sliding along a
shelf road, and if they skidded off, they would keep going a hundred
feet, two hundred feet, downward--probably turning over and over. Once
they did skid, and while they panted in an eternity of four seconds,
Buck yanked the car up a bank beside the road, down to the left again,
and finally straight--speeding on as if nothing had happened, while
Doremus felt feeble in the knees.

For a long while he kept going rigid with fear, but he sank into misery,
too cold and deaf to feel anything except a slow desire to vomit as the
car lurched. Probably he slept--at least, he awakened, and awakened to a
sensation of pushing the car anxiously up hill, as she bucked and
stuttered in the effort to make a slippery rise. Suppose the engine
died--suppose the brakes would not hold and they slid back downhill,
reeling, bursting off the road and down----A great many suppositions
tortured him, hour by hour.

Then he tried being awake and bright and helpful. He noticed that the
ice-lined windshield, illuminated from the light on the snow ahead, was
a sheet of diamonds. He noticed it, but he couldn't get himself to think
much of diamonds, even in sheets.

He tried conversation.

"Cheer up. Breakfast at dawn--across the border!" he tried on Sissy.

"Breakfast!" she said bitterly.

And they crunched on, in that moving coffin with only the sheet of
diamonds and Buck's silhouette alive in all the world.

After unnumbered hours the car reared and tumbled and reared again. The
motor raced; its sound rose to an intolerable roaring; yet the car
seemed not to be moving. The motor stopped abruptly. Buck cursed, popped
his head back into the car like a turtle, and the starter ground long
and whiningly. The motor again roared, again stopped. They could hear
stiff branches rattling, hear Foolish moaning in sleep. The car was a
storm-menaced cabin in the wilderness. The silence seemed waiting, as
they were waiting.

"Strouble?" said Doremus.

"Stuck. No traction. Hit a drift of wet snow--drainage from a busted
culvert, I sh' think. Hell! Have to get out and take a look."

Outside the car, as Doremus crept down from the slippery running-board,
it was cold in a vicious wind. He was so stiff he could scarcely stand.

As people do, feeling important and advisory, Doremus looked at the
drift with an electric torch, and Sissy looked at the drift with the
torch, and Buck impatiently took the torch away from them and looked
twice.

"Get some----" and "Brush would help," said Sissy and Buck together,
while Doremus rubbed his chilly ears.

They three trotted back and forth with fragments of brush, laying it in
front of the wheels, while Mary politely asked from within, "Can I
help?" and no one seemed particularly to have answered her.

The headlights picked out an abandoned shack beside the road; an
unpainted gray pine cabin with broken window glass and no door. Emma,
sighing her way out of the car and stepping through the lumpy snow as
delicately as a pacer at a horse show, said humbly, "That little house
there--maybe I could go in and make some hot coffee on the alcohol
stove--didn't have room for a thermos. Hot coffee, Dormouse?"

To Doremus she sounded, just now, not at all like a wife, but as
sensible as Mrs. Candy.

When the car did kick its way up on the pathway of twigs and stand
panting safely beyond the drift, they had, in the sheltered shack,
coffee with slabs of Mrs. Candy's voluptuous cocoanut cake. Doremus
pondered, "This is a nice place. I like this place. It doesn't bounce or
skid. I don't want to leave this place."

He did. The secure immobility of the shack was behind them, dark miles
behind, and they were again pitching and rolling and being sick and
inescapably chilly. David was alternately crying and going back to
sleep. Foolish woke up to cough inquiringly and returned to his dream of
rabbiting. And Doremus was sleeping, his head swaying like a masthead in
long rollers, his shoulder against Emma's, his hand warm about Sissy's,
and his soul in nameless bliss.

****

He roused to a half-dawn filmy with snow. The car was standing in what
seemed to be a crossroads hamlet, and Buck was examining a map by the
light of the electric torch.

"Got anywhere yet?" Doremus whispered.

"Just a few miles to the border."

"Anybody stopped us?"

"Nope. Oh, we'll make it, all right, o' man."

Out of East Berkshire, Buck took not the main road to the border but an
old wood lane so little used that the ruts were twin snakes. Though
Doremus said nothing, the others felt his intensity, his anxiety that
was like listening for an enemy in the dark. David sat up, the blue
motor robe about him. Foolish started, snorted, looked offended but,
catching the spirit of the moment, comfortingly laid a paw on Doremus's
knee and insisted on shaking hands, over and over, as gravely as a
Venetian senator or an undertaker.

They dropped into the dimness of a tree-walled hollow. A searchlight
darted, and rested hotly on them, so dazzling them that Buck almost ran
off the road.

"Confound it," he said gently. No one else said anything.

He crawled up to the light, which was mounted on a platform in front of
a small shelter hut. Two Minute Men stood out in the road, dripping with
radiance from the car. They were young and rural, but they had efficient
repeating rifles.

"Where you headed for?" demanded the elder, good-naturedly enough.

"Montreal, where we live." Buck showed his Canadian license....
Gasoline motor and electric light, yet Doremus saw the frontier guard as
a sentry in 1864, studying a pass by lantern light, beside a farm wagon
in which hid General Joe Johnston's spies disguised as plantation hands.

"I guess it's all right. Seems in order. But we've had some trouble with
refugees. You'll have to wait till the Battalion-Leader comes--maybe
'long about noon."

"But good Lord, Inspector, we can't do that! My mother's awful sick, in
Montreal."

"Yuh, I've heard that one before! And maybe it's true, this time. But
afraid you'll have to wait for the Bat. You folks can come in and set by
the fire if you want to."

"But we've got to----"

"You heard what I said!" The M.M.'s were fingering their rifles.

"All right. But tell you what we'll do. We'll go back to East Berkshire
and get some breakfast and a wash and come back here. Noon, you said?"

"Okay! And say, Brother, it does seem kind of funny, your taking this
back-road, when there's a first-rate highway. S'long. Be good....
just don't try it again! The Bat might be here next time--and he ain't a
farmer like you or me!"

The refugees, as they drove away, had an uncomfortable feeling that the
guards were laughing at them.

Three border posts they tried, and at three posts they were turned back.

"Well?" said Buck.

"Yes. I guess so. Back home. My turn to drive," said Doremus wearily.

The humiliation of retreat was the worse in that none of the guards had
troubled to do more than laugh at them. They were trapped too tightly
for the trappers to worry. Doremus's only clear emotion as, tails
between their legs, they back-tracked to Shad Ledue's sneer and to Mrs.
Candy's "Well, I _never_!" was regret that he had not shot one guard, at
least, and he raged:

"Now I know why men like John Brown became crazy killers!"




CHAPTER 24


He could not decide whether Emil Staubmeyer, and through him Shad Ledue,
knew that he had tried to escape. Did Staubmeyer really look more
knowing, or did he just imagine it? What the deuce had Emil meant when
he said, "I hear the roads aren't so good up north--not so good!"
Whether they knew or not, it was grinding that he should have to shiver
lest an illiterate roustabout like Shad Ledue find out that he desired
to go to Canada, while a ruler-slapper like Staubmeyer, a Squeers with
certificates in "pedagogy," should now be able to cuff grown men instead
of urchins and should be editor of the _Informer_! Doremus's _Informer_!
Staubmeyer! _That_ human blackboard!

Daily Doremus found it more cramping, more instantly stirring to fury,
to write anything mentioning Windrip. His private office--the cheerfully
rattling linotype room--the shouting pressroom with its smell of ink
that to him hitherto had been like the smell of grease paint to an
actor--they were hateful now, and choking. Not even Lorinda's faith, not
even Sissy's jibes and Buck's stories, could rouse him to hope.

He rejoiced the more, therefore, when his son Philip telephoned him from
Worcester: "Be home Sunday? Merilla's in New York, gadding, and I'm all
alone here. Thought I'd just drive up for the day and see how things are
in your neck of the woods."

"Come on! Splendid! So long since we've seen you. I'll have your mother
start a pot of beans right away!"

Doremus was happy. Not for some time did his cursed two-way-mindedness
come to weaken his joy, as he wondered whether it wasn't just a myth
held over from boyhood that Philip really cared so much for Emma's beans
and brown bread; and wondered just why it was that Up-to-Date Americans
like Philip always used the long-distance telephone rather than undergo
the dreadful toil of dictating a letter a day or two earlier. It didn't
really seem so efficient, the old-fashioned village editor reflected, to
spend seventy-five cents on a telephone call in order to save five
cents' worth of time.

"Oh hush! Anyway, I'll be delighted to see the boy! I'll bet there isn't
a smarter young lawyer in Worcester. There's one member of the family
that's a real success!"

****

He was a little shocked when Philip came, like a one-man procession,
into the living room, late on Saturday afternoon. He had been forgetting
how bald this upstanding young advocate was growing even at thirty-four.
And it seemed to him that Philip was a little heavy and senatorial in
speech and a bit too cordial.

"By Jove, Dad, you don't know how good it is to be back in the old digs.
Mother and the girls upstairs? By Jove, sir, that was a horrible
business, the killing of poor Fowler. Horrible! I was simply horrified.
There must have been a mistake somewhere, because Judge Swan has a
wonderful reputation for scrupulousness."

"There was no mistake. Swan is a fiend. Literally!" Doremus sounded less
paternal than when he had first bounded up to shake hands with the
beloved prodigal.

"Really? We must talk it over. I'll see if there can't be a stricter
investigation. Swan? Really! We'll certainly go into the whole business.
But first I must just skip upstairs and give Mammy a good smack, and
Mary and Little Sis."

And that was the last time that Philip mentioned Effingham Swan or any
"stricter investigation" of the acts thereof. All afternoon he was
relentlessly filial and fraternal, and he smiled like an automobile
salesman when Sissy griped at him, "What's the idea of all the tender
hand-dusting, Philco?"

Doremus and he were not alone till nearly midnight.

They sat upstairs in the sacred study. Philip lighted one of Doremus's
excellent cigars as though he were a cinema actor playing the rôle of a
man lighting an excellent cigar, and breathed amiably:

"Well, sir, this is an excellent cigar! It certainly is excellent!"

"Why not?"

"Oh, I just mean--I was just appreciating it----"

"What is it, Phil? There's something on your mind. Shoot! Not rowing
with Merilla, are you?"

"Certainly not! Most certainly not! Oh, I don't approve of everything
Merry does--she's a little extravagant--but she's got a heart of gold,
and let me tell you, Pater, there isn't a young society woman in
Worcester that makes a nicer impression on everybody, especially at nice
dinner parties."

"Well then? Let's have it, Phil. Something serious?"

"Ye-es, I'm afraid there is. Look, Dad.... Oh, do sit down and be
comfortable!... I've been awfully perturbed to hear that you've, uh,
that you're in slightly bad odor with some of the authorities."

"You mean the Corpos?"

"Naturally! Who else?"

"Maybe I don't recognize 'em as authorities."

"Oh, listen, Pater, please don't joke tonight! I'm serious. As a matter
fact, I hear you're more than just 'slightly' in wrong with them."

"And who may your informant be?"

"Oh, just letters--old school friends. Now you _aren't_ really
pro-Corpo, _are_ you?"

"How did you ever guess?"

"Well, I've been----I didn't vote for Windrip, personally, but I begin
to see where I was wrong. I can see now that he has not only great
personal magnetism, but real constructive power--real sure-enough
statesmanship. Some say it's Lee Sarason's doing, but don't you believe
it for a minute. Look at all Buzz did back in his home state, before he
ever teamed up with Sarason! And some say Windrip is crude. Well, so
were Lincoln and Jackson. Now what I think of Windrip----"

"The only thing you ought to think of Windrip is that his gangsters
murdered your fine brother-in-law! And plenty of other men just as good.
Do you condone such murders?"

"No! Certainly not! How can you suggest such a thing, Dad! No one abhors
violence more than I do. Still, you can't make an omelet without
breaking eggs----"

"Hell and damnation!"

"Why, Pater!"

"Don't call me 'Pater'! If I ever hear that 'can't make an omelet'
phrase again, I'll start doing a little murder myself! It's used to
justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi or
Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men's souls
and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!"

"Oh, sorry, sir. I guess maybe the phrase is a little shopworn! I just
mean to say--I'm just trying to figure this situation out
realistically!"

"'Realistically'! That's another buttered bun to excuse murder!"

"But honestly, you know--horrible things do happen, thanks to the
imperfection of human nature, but you can forgive the means if the end
is a rejuvenated nation that----"

"I can do nothing of the kind! I can never forgive evil and lying and
cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for an
excuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, a country that tolerates evil
means--evil manners, standards of ethics--for a generation, will be so
poisoned that it never will have any good end. I'm just curious, but do
you know how perfectly you're quoting every Bolshevik apologist that
sneers at decency and kindness and truthfulness in daily dealings as
'bourgeois morality'? I hadn't understood that you'd gone quite so
Marxo-materialistic!"

"I! Marxian! Good God!" Doremus was pleased to see that he had stirred
his son out of his if-your-honor-please smugness. "Why, one of the
things I most admire about the Corpos is that, as I know, absolutely--I
have reliable information from Washington--they have saved us from a
simply ghastly invasion by red agents of Moscow--Communists pretending
to be decent labor-leaders!"

"Not really!" (Had the fool forgotten that his father was a newspaperman
and not likely to be impressed by "reliable information from
Washington"?)

"Really! And to be realistic--sorry, sir, if you don't like the word,
but to be--to be----"

"In fact, to be realistic!"

"Well, yes, then!"

(Doremus recalled such tempers in Philip from years ago. Had he been
wise, after all, to restrain himself from the domestic pleasure of
licking the brat?)

"The whole point is that Windrip, or anyway the Corpos, are here to
_stay_, Pater, and we've got to base our future actions not on some
desired Utopia but on what we really and truly have. And think of what
they've actually done! Just, for example, how they've removed the
advertising billboards from the highways, and ended unemployment, and
their simply stupendous feat in getting rid of all crime!"

"Good God!"

"Pardon me--what y' say, Dad?"

"Nothing! Nothing! Go on!"

"But I begin to see now that the Corpo gains haven't been just material
but spiritual."

"Eh?"

"Really! They've revitalized the whole country. Formerly we had gotten
pretty sordid, just thinking about material possessions and
comforts--about electric refrigeration and television and
air-conditioning. Kind of lost the sturdiness that characterized our
pioneer ancestors. Why, ever so many young men were refusing to take
military drill, and the discipline and will power and good-fellowship
that you only get from military training----Oh, pardon me! I forgot you
were a pacifist."

Doremus grimly muttered, "Not any more!"

"Of course there must be any number of things we can't agree on, Dad.
But after all, as a publicist you ought to listen to the Voice of
Youth."

"You? Youth? You're not youth. You're two thousand years old, mentally.
You date just about 100 B.C. in your fine new imperialistic theories!"

"No, but you must listen, Dad! Why do you suppose I came clear up here
from Worcester just to see you?"

"God only knows!"

"I want to make myself clear. Before Windrip, we'd been lying down in
America, while Europe was throwing off all her bonds--both monarchy and
this antiquated parliamentary-democratic-liberal system that really
means rule by professional politicians and by egotistic 'intellectuals.'
We've got to catch up to Europe again--got to expand--it's the rule of
life. A nation, like a man, has to go ahead or go backward. Always!"

"I know, Phil. I used to write that same thing in those same words, back
before 1914!"

"Did you? Well, anyway----Got to expand! Why, what we ought to do is to
grab all of Mexico, and maybe Central America, and a good big slice of
China. Why, just on their _own_ behalf we ought to do it, misgoverned
the way they are! Maybe I'm wrong but----"

"Impossible!"

"--Windrip and Sarason and Dewey Haik and Macgoblin, all those fellows,
they're _big_--they're making me stop and think! And now to come down to
my errand here----"

"You think I ought to run the _Informer_ according to Corpo theology!"

"Why--why yes! That was approximately what I was going to say. (I just
don't see why you haven't been more reasonable about this whole
thing--you with your quick mind!) After all, the time for selfish
individualism is gone. We've got to have mass action. One for all and
all for one----"

"Philip, would you mind telling me what the deuce you're _really_
heading toward? Cut the cackle!"

"Well, since you insist--to 'cut the cackle,' as you call it--not very
politely, seems to me, seeing I've taken the trouble to come clear up
from Worcester!--I have reliable information that you're going to get
into mighty serious trouble if you don't stop opposing--or at least
markedly failing to support--the government."

"All right. What of it? It's _my_ serious trouble!"

"That's just the point! It isn't! I do think that just for once in your
life you might think of Mother and the girls, instead of always of your
own selfish 'ideas' that you're so proud of! In a crisis like this, it
just isn't funny any longer to pose as a quaint 'liberal.'"

Doremus's voice was like a firecracker. "Cut the cackle, I told you!
What you after? What's the Corpo gang to you?"

"I have been approached in regard to the very high honor of an assistant
military judgeship, but your attitude, as my father----"

"Philip, I think, I rather think, that I give you my parental curse not
so much because you are a traitor as because you have become a stuffed
shirt! Good-night."




CHAPTER 25


Holidays were invented by the devil, to coax people into the heresy that
happiness can be won by taking thought. What was planned as a rackety
day for David's first Christmas with his grandparents was, they saw too
well, perhaps David's last Christmas with them. Mary had hidden her
weeping, but the day before Christmas, when Shad Ledue tramped in to
demand of Doremus whether Karl Pascal had ever spoken to him of
Communism, Mary came on Shad in the hall, stared at him, raised her hand
like a boxing cat, and said with dreadful quietness, "You murderer! I
shall kill you and kill Swan!"

For once Shad did not look amused.

To make the holiday as good an imitation of mirth as possible, they were
very noisy, but their holly, their tinsel stars on a tall pine tree,
their family devotion in a serene old house in a little town, was no
different at heart from despairing drunkenness in the city night.
Doremus reflected that it might have been just as well for all of them
to get drunk and let themselves go, elbows on slopped café tables, as to
toil at this pretense of domestic bliss. He now had another thing for
which to hate the Corpos--for stealing the secure affection of
Christmas.

For noon dinner, Louis Rotenstern was invited, because he was a lorn
bachelor and, still more, because he was a Jew, now insecure and snubbed
and threatened in an insane dictatorship. (There is no greater
compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of their
unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty and
silliness of the régime under which they live, so that even a
commercial-minded money-fondling heavily humorous Jew burgher like
Rotenstern is still a sensitive meter of barbarism.) After dinner came
Buck Titus, David's most favorite person, bearing staggering amounts of
Woolworth tractors and fire engines and a real bow-and-arrow, and he was
raucously insisting that Mrs. Candy dance with him what he not very
precisely called "the light fantastic," when the hammering sounded at
the door.

Aras Dilley tramped in with four men.

"Lookin' for Rotenstern. Oh, that you, Louie? Git your coat and come
on--orders."

"What's the idea? What d'you want of him? What's the charge?" demanded
Buck, still standing with his arm about Mrs. Candy's embarrassed waist.

"Dunno's there be any charges. Just ordered to headquarters for
questioning. District Commissioner Reek in town. Just astin' few people
a few questions. Come on, _you_!"

The hilarious celebrants did not, as they had planned, go out to
Lorinda's tavern for skiing. Next day they heard that Rotenstern had
been taken to the concentration camp at Trianon, along with that crabbed
old Tory, Raymond Pridewell, the hardware dealer.

Both imprisonments were incredible. Rotenstern had been too meek. And if
Pridewell had not ever been meek, if he had constantly and testily and
loudly proclaimed that he had not cared for Ledue as a hired man and now
cared even less for him as a local governor, yet--why, Pridewell was a
sacred institution. As well think of dragging the brownstone Baptist
Church to prison.

Later, a friend of Shad Ledue took over Rotenstern's shop.

It _can_ happen here, meditated Doremus. It could happen to him. How
soon? Before he should be arrested, he must make amends to his
conscience by quitting the _Informer_.

****

Professor Victor Loveland, once a classicist of Isaiah College, having
been fired from a labor camp for incompetence in teaching arithmetic to
lumberjacks, was in town, with wife and babies, on his way to a job
clerking in his uncle's slate quarry near Fair Haven. He called on
Doremus and was hysterically cheerful. He called on Clarence
Little--"dropped in to visit with him," Clarence would have said. Now
that twitchy, intense jeweler, Clarence, who had been born on a Vermont
farm and had supported his mother till she died when he was thirty, had
longed to go to college and, especially, to study Greek. Though Loveland
was his own age, in the mid-thirties, he looked on him as a combination
of Keats and Liddell. His greatest moment had been hearing Loveland read
Homer.

Loveland was leaning on the counter. "Gone ahead with your Latin
grammar, Clarence?"

"Golly, Professor, it just doesn't seem worth while any more. I guess
I'm kind of a weak sister, anyway, but I find that these days it's about
all I can do to keep going."

"Me too! And don't call me 'Professor.' I'm a time-keeper in a slate
quarry. What a life!"

They had not noticed the clumsy-looking man in plain clothes who had
just come in. Presumably he was a customer. But he grumbled, "So you two
pansies don't like the way things go nowadays! Don't suppose you like
the Corpos! Don't think much of the Chief!" He jabbed his thumb into
Loveland's ribs so painfully that Loveland yelped, "I don't think about
him at all!"

"Oh, you don't, eh? Well, you two fairies can come along to the
courthouse with me!"

"And who may you be?"

"Oh, just an ensign in the M.M.'s, that's all!"

He had an automatic pistol.

Loveland was not beaten much, because he managed to keep his mouth shut.
But Little was so hysterical that they laid him on a kitchen table and
decorated his naked back with forty slashes of a steel ramrod. They had
found that Clarence wore yellow silk underwear, and the M.M.'s from
factory and plowland laughed--particularly one broad young inspector who
was rumored to have a passionate friendship with a battalion-leader from
Nashua who was fat, eyeglassed, and high-pitched of voice.

Little had to be helped into the truck that took Loveland and him to the
Trianon concentration camp. One eye was closed and so surrounded with
bruised flesh that the M.M. driver said it looked like a Spanish omelet.

The truck had an open body, but they could not escape, because the three
prisoners on this trip were chained hand to hand. They lay on the floor
of the truck. It was snowing.

The third prisoner was not much like Loveland or Little. His name was
Ben Trippen. He had been a mill hand for Medary Cole. He cared no more
about the Greek language than did a baboon, but he did care for his six
children. He had been arrested for trying to strike Cole and for cursing
the Corpo régime when Cole had reduced his wages from nine dollars a
week (in pre-Corpo currency) to seven-fifty.

As to Loveland's wife and babies, Lorinda took them in till she could
pass the hat and collect enough to send them back to Mrs. Loveland's
family on a rocky farm in Missouri. But then things went better. Mrs.
Loveland was favored by the Greek proprietor of a lunch-room and got
work washing dishes and otherwise pleasing the proprietor, who
brilliantined his mustache.

****

The county administration, in a proclamation signed by Emil Staubmeyer,
announced that they were going to regulate the agriculture on the
submarginal land high up on Mount Terror. As a starter, half-a-dozen of
the poorer families were moved into the large, square, quiet, old house
of that large, square, quiet, old farmer, Henry Veeder, cousin of
Doremus Jessup. These poorer families had many children, a great many,
so that there were four or five persons bedded on the floor in every
room of the home where Henry and his wife had placidly lived alone since
their own children had grown. Henry did not like it, and said so, not
very tactfully, to the M.M.'s herding the refugees. What was worse, the
dispossessed did not like it any better. "'Tain't much, but we got a
house of our own. Dunno why we should git shoved in on Henry," said one.
"Don't expect other folks to bother me, and don't expect to bother other
folks. Never did like that fool kind of yellow color Henry painted his
barn, but guess that's his business."

So Henry and two of the regulated agriculturists were taken to the
Trianon concentration camp, and the rest remained in Henry's house,
doing nothing but finish up Henry's large larder and wait for orders.

                           *     *     *

"And before I'm sent to join Henry and Karl and Loveland, I'm going to
clear my skirts," Doremus vowed, along in late January.

He marched in to see County Commissioner Ledue.

"I want to quit the _Informer_. Staubmeyer has learned all I can teach
him."

"Staubmeyer? Oh! You mean Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer!"

"Chuck it, will you? We're not on parade, and we're not playing
soldiers. Mind if I sit down?"

"Don't look like you cared a hell of a lot whether I mind or not! But I
can tell you, right here and now, Jessup, without any monkey business
about it, you're not going to leave your job. I guess I could find
enough grounds for sending you to Trianon for about a million years,
with ninety lashes, but--you've always been so stuck on yourself as such
an all-fired honest editor, it kind of tickles me to watch you kissing
the Chief's foot--and mine!"

"I'll do no more of it! That's certain! And I admit that I deserve your
scorn for ever having done it!"

"Well, isn't that elegant! But you'll do just what I tell you to, and
like it! Jessup, I suppose you think I had a swell time when I was your
hired man! Watching you and your old woman and the girls go off on a
picnic while I--oh, I was just your hired man, with dirt in my ears,
your dirt! I could stay home and clean up the basement!"

"Maybe we didn't want you along, Shad! Good-morning!"

Shad laughed. There was a sound of the gates of Trianon concentration
camp in that laughter.

****

It was really Sissy who gave Doremus his lead.

He drove to Hanover to see Shad's superior, District Commissioner John
Sullivan Reek, that erstwhile jovial and red-faced politician. He was
admitted after only half an hour's waiting. He was shocked to see how
pale and hesitant and frightened Reek had become. But the Commissioner
tried to be authoritative.

"Well, Jessup, what can I do for you?"

"May I be frank?"

"What? What? Why, certainly! Frankness has always been my middle name!"

"I hope so. Governor, I find I'm of no use on the _Informer_, at Fort
Beulah. As you probably know, I've been breaking in Emil Staubmeyer as
my successor. Well, he's quite competent to take hold now, and I want to
quit. I'm really just in his way."

"Why don't you stick around and see what you can still do to help him?
There'll be little jobs cropping up from time to time."

"Because it's got on my nerves to take orders where I used to give 'em
for so many years. You can appreciate that, can't you?"

"My God, can I appreciate it? And how! Well, I'll think it over. You
wouldn't mind writing little pieces for my own little sheet, at home? I
own part of a paper there."

"No! Sure! Delighted!"

("Does this mean that Reek believes the Corpo tyranny is going to blow
up, in a revolution, so that he's beginning to trim? Or just that he's
fighting to keep from being thrown out?")

"Yes, I can see how you might feel, Brother Jessup."

"Thanks! Would you mind giving me a note to County Commissioner Ledue,
telling him to let me out, without prejudice?--making it pretty strong?"

"No. Not a bit. Just wait a minute, ole fellow; I'll write it right
now."

****

Doremus made as little ceremony as possible of leaving the _Informer_,
which had been his throne for thirty-seven years. Staubmeyer was
patronizing, Doc Itchitt looked quizzical, but the chapel, headed by Dan
Wilgus, shook hands profusely. And so, at sixty-two, stronger and more
eager than he had been in all his life, Doremus had nothing to do more
important than eating breakfast and telling his grandson stories about
the elephant.

But that lasted less than a week. Avoiding suspicion from Emma and Sissy
and even from Buck and Lorinda, he took Julian aside:

"Look here, boy. I think it's time now for me to begin doing a little
high treason. (Heaven's sake keep all of this under your hat--don't even
tip off Sissy!) I guess you know, the Communists are too theocratic for
my tastes. But looks to me as though they have more courage and devotion
and smart strategy than anybody since the Early Christian Martyrs--whom
they also resemble in hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want to
get in touch with 'em and see if there's any dirty work at the
crossroads I can do for 'em--say distributing a few Early Christian
tracts by St. Lenin. But of course, theoretically, the Communists have
all been imprisoned. Could you get to Karl Pascal, in Trianon, and find
out whom I could see?"

Said Julian, "I think I could. Dr. Olmsted gets called in there
sometimes on cases--they hate him, because he hates them, but still,
their camp doctor is a drunken bum, and they have to have a real doc in
when one of their warders busts his wrist beating up some prisoner. I'll
try, sir."

Two days afterward Julian returned.

"My God, what a sewer that Trianon place is! I'd waited for Olmsted
before, in the car, but I never had the nerve to butt inside. The
buildings--they were nice buildings, quite pretty, when the girls'
school had them. Now the fittings are all torn out, and they've put up
wallboard partitions for cells, and the whole place stinks of carbolic
acid and excrement, and the air--there isn't any--you feel as if you
were nailed up in a box--I don't know how anybody lives in one of those
cells for an hour--and yet there's six men bunked in a cell twelve feet
by ten, with a ceiling only seven feet high, and no light except a
twenty-five watt, I guess it is, bulb in the ceiling--you couldn't read
by it. But they get out for exercise two hours a day--walk around and
around the courtyard--they're all so stooped, and they all look so
ashamed, as if they'd had the defiance just licked out of 'em--even Karl
a little, and you remember how proud and sort of sardonic he was. Well,
I got to see him, and he says to get in touch with this man--here, I
wrote it down--and for God's sake, burn it up soon as you've memorized
it!"

"Was he--had they----?"

"Oh, yes, they've beaten him, all right. He wouldn't talk about it. But
there was a scar right across his cheek, from his temple right down to
his chin. And I had just a glimpse of Henry Veeder. Remember how he
looked--like an oak tree? Now he twitches all the time, and jumps and
gasps when he hears a sudden sound. He didn't know me. I don't think
he'd know anybody."

****

Doremus announced to his family and told it loudly in Gath that he was
still looking for an option on an apple orchard to which they might
retire, and he journeyed southward, with pajamas and a toothbrush and
the first volume of Spengler's _Decline of the West_ in a briefcase.

The address given by Karl Pascal was that of a most gentlemanly dealer
in altar cloths and priestly robes, who had his shop and office over a
tea room in Hartford, Connecticut. He talked about the cembalo and the
spinetta di serenata and the music of Palestrina for an hour before he
sent Doremus on to a busy engineer constructing a dam in New Hampshire,
who sent him to a tailor in a side-street shop in Lynn, who at last sent
him to northern Connecticut and to the Eastern headquarters of what was
left of the Communists in America.

Still carrying his little briefcase he walked up a greasy hill,
impassable to any motorcar, and knocked at the faded green door of a
squat New England farm cottage masked in wintry old lilac bushes and
spiræa shrubs. A stringy farm wife opened and looked hostile.

"I'd like to speak to Mr. Ailey, Mr. Bailey, or Mr. Cailey."

"None of 'em home. You'll have to come again."

"Then I'll wait. What else should one do, these days?"

"All right. Cmin."

"Thanks. Give them this letter."

(The tailor had warned him, "It vill all sount very foolish, the
passvorts und everyt'ing, but if any of the central committee gets
caught----" He made a squirting sound and drew his scissors across his
throat.)

Doremus sat now in a tiny hall off a flight of stairs steep as the side
of a roof; a hall with sprigged wall paper and Currier & Ives prints,
and black-painted wooden rocking chairs with calico cushions. There was
nothing to read but a Methodist hymnal and a desk dictionary. He knew
the former by heart, and anyway, he always loved reading
dictionaries--often had one seduced him from editorial-writing. Happily
he sat conning:

    Phenyl, _n._, _Chem._ The univalent radical C6H5,
    regarded as the basis of numerous benzene derivatives;
    as, phenyl hydroxid C6H5OH.

    Pherecratean. _n._ A choriambic trimeter catalectic, or
    catalectic glyconic; composed of a spondee, a choriambus, and a
    catalectic syllable.

"Well! I never knew any of _that_ before! I wonder if I do now?" thought
Doremus contentedly, before he realized that glowering from a very
narrow doorway was a very broad man with wild gray hair and a patch over
one eye. Doremus recognized him from pictures. He was Bill Atterbury,
miner, longshoreman, veteran I.W.W. leader, old A. F. of L.
strike-leader, five years in San Quentin and five honored years in
Moscow, and reputed now to be the secretary of the illegal Communist
Party.

"I'm Mr. Ailey. What can I do for you?" Bill demanded.

He led Doremus into a musty back room where, at a table which was
probably mahogany underneath the scars and the clots of dirt, sat a
squat man with kinky tow-colored hair and with deep wrinkles in the
thick pale skin of his face, and a slender young elegant who suggested
Park Avenue.

"Howryuh?" said Mr. Bailey, in a Russian-Jewish accent. Of him Doremus
knew nothing save that he was not named Bailey.

"Morning," snapped Mr. Cailey--whose name was Elphrey, if Doremus
guessed rightly, and who was the son of a millionaire private banker,
the brother of one explorer, one bishop's wife, and one countess, and
himself a former teacher of economics in the University of California.

Doremus tried to explain himself to these hard-eyed, quick-glancing
plotters of ruin.

"Are you willing to become a Party member, in the extremely improbable
case that they accept you, and to take orders, any orders, without
question?" asked Elphrey, so suavely.

"Do you mean, Am I willing to kill and steal?"

"You've been reading detective stories about the 'Reds'! No. What you'd
have to do would be much more difficult than the amusement of using a
tommy-gun. Would you be willing to forget you ever were a respectable
newspaper editor, giving orders, and walk through the snow, dressed like
a bum, to distribute seditious pamphlets--even if, personally, you
should believe the pamphlets were of no slightest damn good to the
Cause?"

"Why, I--I don't know. Seems to me that as a newspaperman of quite a
little training----"

"Hell! Our only trouble is keeping _out_ the 'trained newspapermen'!
What we need is trained bill-posters that like the smell of flour-paste
and hate sleeping. And--but you're a little old for this--crazy fanatics
that go out and start strikes, knowing they'll get beaten up and thrown
in the bull pen."

"No, I guess I----Look here. I'm sure Walt Trowbridge will be joining up
with the Socialists and some of the left-wing radical ex-Senators and
the Farmer-Laborites and so on----"

Bill Atterbury guffawed. It was a tremendous, somehow terrifying blast.
"Yes, I'm sure they'll join up--_all_ the dirty, sneaking, half-headed,
reformist Social Fascists like Trowbridge, that are doing the work of
the capitalists and working for war against Soviet Russia without even
having sense enough to know they're doing it and to collect good pay for
their crookedness!"

"I admire Trowbridge!" snarled Doremus.

"You would!"

Elphrey rose, almost cordial, and dismissed Doremus with, "Mr. Jessup, I
was brought up in a sound bourgeois household myself, unlike these two
roughnecks, and I appreciate what you're trying to do, even if they
don't. I imagine that your rejection of us is even firmer than our
rejection of you!"

"Dot's right, Comrade Elphrey. Both you and dis fellow got ants in your
bourjui pants, like your Hugh Johnson vould say!" chuckled the Russian
Mr. Bailey.

"But I just wonder if Walt Trowbridge won't be chasing out Buzz Windrip
while you boys are still arguing about whether Comrade Trotzky was once
guilty of saying mass facing the north? Good-day!" said Doremus.

When he recounted it to Julian, two days later, and Julian puzzled, "I
wonder whether you won or they did?" Doremus asserted, "I don't think
anybody won--except the ants! Anyway, now I know that man is not to be
saved by black bread alone but by everything that proceedeth out of the
mouth of the Lord our God.... Communists, intense and narrow;
Yankees, tolerant and shallow; no wonder a Dictator can keep us separate
and all working for him!"

****

Even in the 1930's, when it was radiantly believed that movies and the
motorcar and glossy magazines had ended the provinciality of all the
larger American villages, in such communities as Fort Beulah all the
retired business men who could not afford to go to Europe or Florida or
California, such as Doremus, were as aimless as an old dog on Sunday
afternoon with the family away. They poked uptown to the shops, the
hotel lobbies, the railway station, and at the barber shop were pleased
rather than irritated when they had to wait a quarter hour for the
tri-weekly shave. There were no cafés as there would have been in
Continental Europe, and no club save the country club, and that was
chiefly a sanctuary for the younger people in the evening and late
afternoons.

The superior Doremus Jessup, the bookman, was almost as dreary in
retirement as Banker Crowley would have been.

He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point
in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls and, worse, the links were
now bright with M.M. uniforms. And he hadn't enough brass, as no doubt
Medary Cole would have, to feel welcome hour on hour in the Hotel Wessex
lobby.

He stayed in his third-story study and read as long as his eyes would
endure it. But he irritably felt Emma's irritation and Mrs. Candy's ire
at having a man around the house all day. Yes! He'd get what he could
for the house and for what small share in _Informer_ stock the
government had left him when they had taken it over, and go--well, just
go--the Rockies or anywhere that was new.

But he realized that Emma did not at all wish to go new places; and
realized that the Emma to whose billowy warmth it had been comforting to
come home after the office, bored him and was bored by him when he was
always there. The only difference was that she did not seem capable of
admitting that one might, without actual fiendishness or any signs of
hot-footing it for Reno, be bored by one's faithful spouse.

"Why don't you drive out and see Buck or Lorinda?" she suggested.

"Don't you ever get a little jealous of my girl, Linda?" he said, very
lightly--because he very heavily wanted to know.

She laughed. "You? At your age? As if anybody thought _you_ could be a
lover!"

Well, Lorinda thought so, he raged, and promptly he did "drive out and
see her," a little easier in mind about his divided loyalties.

Only once did he go back to the _Informer_ office.

Staubmeyer was not in sight, and it was evident that the real editor was
that sly bumpkin, Doc Itchitt, who didn't even rise at Doremus's
entrance nor listen when Doremus gave his opinion of the new make-up of
the rural-correspondence pages.

That was an apostasy harder to endure than Shad Ledue's, for Shad had
always been rustically certain that Doremus was a fool, almost as bad as
real "city folks," while Doc Itchitt had once appreciated the tight
joints and smooth surfaces and sturdy bases of Doremus's craftsmanship.

Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many people is
nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything
but contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its brother death,
seem so contented.

****

For several days now, in late February, Doremus had noticed the
insurance man. He said he was a Mr. Dimick; a Mr. Dimick of Albany. He
was a gray and tasteless man, in gray and dusty and wrinkled clothes,
and his pop-eyes stared with meaningless fervor. All over town you met
him, at the four drugstores, at the shoe-shine parlor, and he was always
droning, "My name is Dimick--Mr. Dimick of Albany--Albany, New York. I
wonder if I can interest you in a wonnerful new form of life-insurance
policy. Wonnerful!" But he didn't sound as though he himself thought it
was very wonnerful.

He was a pest.

He was always dragging himself into some unwelcoming shop, and yet he
seemed to sell few policies, if any.

Not for two days did Doremus perceive that Mr. Dimick of Albany managed
to meet him an astonishing number of times a day. As he came out of the
Wessex, he saw Mr. Dimick leaning against a lamppost, ostentatiously not
looking his way, yet three minutes later and two blocks away, Mr. Dimick
trailed after him into the Vert Mont Pool & Tobacco Headquarters, and
listened to Doremus's conversation with Tom Aiken about fish hatcheries.

Doremus was suddenly cold. He made it a point to sneak uptown that
evening and saw Mr. Dimick talking to the driver of a Beulah-Montpelier
bus with an intensity that wasn't in the least gray. Doremus glared. Mr.
Dimick looked at him with watery eyes, croaked, "Devenin', Mr. D'remus;
like t' talk t' you about insurance some time when you got the time,"
and shuffled away.

Later, Doremus took out and cleaned his revolver, said, "Oh, rats!" and
put it away. He heard a ring as he did so, and went downstairs to find
Mr. Dimick sitting on the oak hat rack in the hall, rubbing his hat.

"I'd like to talk to you, if y'ain't too busy," whined Mr. Dimick.

"All right. Go in there. Sit down."

"Anybody hear us?"

"No! What of it?"

Mr. Dimick's grayness and lassitude fell away. His voice was sharp:

"I think your local Corpos are on to me. Got to hustle. I'm from Walt
Trowbridge. You probably guessed--I've been watching you all week,
asking about you. You've got to be Trowbridge's and our representative
here. Secret war against the Corpos. The 'N.U.,' the 'New Underground,'
we call it--like secret Underground that got the slaves into Canada
before the Civil War. Four divisions: printing propaganda, distributing
it, collecting and exchanging information about Corpo outrages,
smuggling suspects into Canada or Mexico. Of course you don't know one
thing about me. I may be a Corpo spy. But look over these credentials
and telephone your friend Mr. Samson of the Burlington Paper Company.
God's sake be careful! Wire may be tapped. Ask him about me on the
grounds you're interested in insurance. He's one of us. You're going to
be one of us! Now _phone_!"

Doremus telephoned to Samson: "Say, Ed, is a fellow named Dimick, kind
of weedy-looking, pop-eyed fellow, all right? Shall I take his advice on
insurance?"

"Yes. Works for Walbridge. Sure. You can ride along with him."

"I'm riding!"




CHAPTER 26


The _Informer_ composing room closed down at eleven in the evening, for
the paper had to be distributed to villages forty miles away and did not
issue a later city edition. Dan Wilgus, the foreman, remained after the
others had gone, setting a Minute Man poster which announced that there
would be a grand parade on March ninth, and incidentally that President
Windrip was defying the world.

Dan stopped, looked sharply about, and tramped into the storeroom. In
the light from a dusty electric bulb the place was like a tomb of dead
news, with ancient red-and-black posters of Scotland county fairs and
proofs of indecent limericks pasted on the walls. From a case of
eight-point, once used for the setting of pamphlets but superseded by a
monotype machine, Dan picked out bits of type from each of several
compartments, wrapped them in scraps of print paper, and stored them in
the pocket of his jacket. The raped type boxes looked only half filled,
and to make up for it he did something that should have shocked any
decent printer even if he were on strike. He filled them up with type
not from another eight-point case, but with old ten-point.

Daniel, the large and hairy, thriftily pinching the tiny types, was
absurd as an elephant playing at being a hen.

He turned out the lights on the third floor and clumped downstairs. He
glanced in at the editorial rooms. No one was there save Doc Itchitt, in
a small circle of light that through the visor of his eyeshade cast a
green tint on his unwholesome face. He was correcting an article by the
titular editor, Ensign Emil Staubmeyer, and he snickered as he carved it
with a large black pencil. He raised his head, startled.

"Hello, Doc."

"Hello, Dan. Staying late?"

"Yuh. Just finished some job work. G'night."

"Say, Dan, do you ever see old Jessup, these days?"

"Don't know when I've seen him, Doc. Oh yes, I ran into him at the
Rexall store, couple days ago."

"Still as sour as ever about the régime?"

"Oh, he didn't say anything. Darned old fool! Even if he don't like all
the brave boys in uniform, he ought to see the Chief is here for keeps,
by golly!"

"Certainly ought to! And it's a swell régime. Fellow can get ahead in
newspaper work now, and not be held back by a bunch of snobs that think
they're so doggone educated just because they went to college!"

"That's right. Well, hell with Jessup and all the old stiffs. G'night,
Doc!"

Dan and Brother Itchitt unsmilingly gave the M.M. salute, arms held out.
Dan thumped down to the street and homeward. He stopped in front of
Billy's Bar, in the middle of a block, and put his foot up on the hub of
a dirty old Ford, to tie his shoelace. As he tied it--after having
untied it--he looked up and down the street, emptied the bundles in his
pockets into a battered sap bucket on the front seat of the car, and
majestically moved on.

Out of the bar came Pete Vutong, a French-Canadian farmer who lived up
on Mount Terror. Pete was obviously drunk. He was singing the
prehistoric ditty "Hi lee, hi low" in what he conceived to be German,
viz.: "By unz gays immer, yuh longer yuh slimmer." He was staggering so
that he had to pull himself into the car, and he steered in fancy
patterns till he had turned the corner. Then he was amazingly and
suddenly sober; and amazing was the speed with which the Ford clattered
out of town.

Pete Vutong wasn't a very good Secret Agent. He was a little obvious.
But then, Pete had been a spy for only one week.

In that week Dan Wilgus had four times dropped heavy packages into a sap
bucket in the Ford.

Pete passed the gate to Buck Titus's domain, slowed down, dropped the
sap bucket into a ditch, and sped home.

Just at dawn, Buck Titus, out for a walk with his three Irish
wolfhounds, kicked up the sap bucket and transferred the bundles to his
own pocket.

And next afternoon Dan Wilgus, in the basement of Buck's house, was
setting up, in eight-point, a pamphlet entitled "How Many People Have
the Corpos Murdered?" It was signed "Spartan," and Spartan was one of
several pen names of Mr. Doremus Jessup.

They were all--all the ringleaders of the local chapter of the New
Underground--rather glad when once, on his way to Buck's, Dan was
searched by M.M.'s unfamiliar to him, and on him was found no
printing-material, nor any documents more incriminating than cigarette
papers.

****

The Corpos had made a regulation licensing all dealers in printing
machinery and paper and compelling them to keep lists of purchasers, so
that except by bootlegging it was impossible to get supplies for the
issuance of treasonable literature. Dan Wilgus stole the type; Dan and
Doremus and Julian and Buck together had stolen an entire old hand
printing-press from the _Informer_ basement; and the paper was smuggled
from Canada by that veteran bootlegger, John Pollikop, who rejoiced at
being back in the good old occupation of which repeal had robbed him.

It is doubtful whether Dan Wilgus would ever have joined anything so
divorced as this from the time clock and the office cuspidors out of
abstract indignation at Windrip or County Commissioner Ledue. He was
moved to sedition partly by fondness for Doremus and partly by
indignation at Doc Itchitt, who publicly rejoiced because all the
printers' unions had been sunk in the governmental confederations. Or
perhaps because Doc jeered at him personally on the few occasions--not
more than once or twice a week--when there was tobacco juice on his
shirt front.

Dan grunted to Doremus, "All right, boss, I guess maybe I'll come in
with you. And say, when we get this man's revolution going, let me drive
the tumbril with Doc in it. Say, remember _Tale of Two Cities_? Good
book. Say, how about getting out a humorous life of Windrip? You'd just
have to tell the facts!"

Buck Titus, pleased as a boy invited to go camping, offered his secluded
house and, in especial, its huge basement for the headquarters of the
New Underground, and Buck, Dan, and Doremus made their most poisonous
plots with the assistance of hot rum punches at Buck's fireplace.

The Fort Beulah cell of the N.U., as it was composed in mid-March, a
couple of weeks after Doremus had founded it, consisted of himself, his
daughters, Buck, Dan, Lorinda, Julian Falck, Dr. Olmsted, John Pollikop,
Father Perefixe (and he argued with the agnostic Dan, the atheist
Pollikop, more than ever he had with Buck), Mrs. Henry Veeder, whose
farmer husband was in Trianon Concentration Camp, Harry Kindermann, the
dispossessed Jew, Mungo Kitterick, that most un-Jewish and
un-Socialistic lawyer, Pete Vutong and Daniel Babcock, farmers, and some
dozen others. The Reverend Mr. Falck, Emma Jessup, and Mrs. Candy, were
more or less unconscious tools of the N.U. But whoever they were, of
whatever faith or station, Doremus found in all of them the religious
passion he had missed in the churches; and if altars, if windows of
many-colored glass, had never been peculiarly holy objects to him, he
understood them now as he gloated over such sacred trash as scarred type
and a creaking hand press.

****

Once it was Mr. Dimick of Albany again; once, another insurance
agent--who guffawed at the accidental luck of insuring Shad Ledue's new
Lincoln; once it was an Armenian peddling rugs; once, Mr. Samson of
Burlington, looking for pine-slashing for paper pulp; but whoever it
was, Doremus heard from the New Underground every week. He was busy as
he had never been in newspaper days, and happy as on youth's adventure
in Boston.

Humming and most cheerful, he ran the small press, with the hearty
bump-bump-bump of the foot treadle, admiring his own skill as he fed in
the sheets. Lorinda learned from Dan Wilgus to set type, with more
fervor than accuracy about _ei_ and _ie_. Emma and Sissy and Mary folded
news sheets and sewed up pamphlets by hand, all of them working in the
high old brick-walled basement that smelled of sawdust and lime and
decaying apples.

Aside from pamphlets by Spartan, and by Anthony B. Susan--who was
Lorinda, except on Fridays--their chief illicit publication was _Vermont
Vigilance_, a four-page weekly which usually had only two pages and,
such was Doremus's unfettered liveliness, came out about three times a
week. It was filled with reports smuggled to them from other N.U. cells,
and with reprints from Walt Trowbridge's _Lance for Democracy_ and from
Canadian, British, Swedish, and French papers, whose correspondents in
America got out, by long-distance telephone, news which Secretary of
Education Macgoblin, head of the government press department, spent a
good part of his time denying. An English correspondent sent news of the
murder of the president of the University of Southern Illinois, a man of
seventy-two who was shot in the back "while trying to escape," out of
the country by long-distance telephone to Mexico City, from which the
story was relayed to London.

Doremus discovered that neither he nor any other small citizen had been
hearing one hundredth of what was going on in America. Windrip & Co.
had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that a modern state can, by
the triple process of controlling every item in the press, breaking up
at the start any association which might become dangerous, and keeping
all the machine guns, artillery, armored automobiles, and aëroplanes in
the hands of the government, dominate the complex contemporary
population better than had ever been done in medieval days, when
rebellious peasantry were armed only with pitchforks and good-will, but
the State was not armed much better.

Dreadful, incredible information came in to Doremus, until he saw that
his own life, and Sissy's and Lorinda's and Buck's, were unimportant
accidents.

In North Dakota, two would-be leaders of the farmers were made to run in
front of an M.M. automobile, through February drifts, till they dropped
breathless, were beaten with a tire pump till they staggered on, fell
again, then were shot in the head, their blood smearing the prairie
snow.

President Windrip, who was apparently becoming considerably more jumpy
than in his old, brazen days, saw two of his personal bodyguard
snickering together in the anteroom of his office and, shrieking,
snatching an automatic pistol from his desk, started shooting at them.
He was a bad marksman. The suspects had to be finished off by the
pistols of their fellow guards.

A crowd of young men, not wearing any sort of uniforms, tore the clothes
from a nun on the station plaza in Kansas City and chased her, smacking
her with bare hands. The police stopped them after a while. There were
no arrests.

In Utah a non-Mormon County Commissioner staked out a Mormon elder on a
bare rock where, since the altitude was high, the elder at once shivered
and felt the glare rather bothersome to his eyes--since the Commissioner
had thoughtfully cut off his eyelids first. The government press
releases made much of the fact that the torturer was rebuked by the
District Commissioner and removed from his post. It did not mention that
he was reappointed in a county in Florida.

The heads of the reorganized Steel Cartel, a good many of whom had been
officers of steel companies in the days before Windrip, entertained
Secretary of Education Macgoblin and Secretary of War Luthorne with an
aquatic festival in Pittsburgh. The dining room of a large hotel was
turned into a tank of rose-scented water, and the celebrants floated in
a gilded Roman barge. The waitresses were naked girls, who amusingly
swam to the barge holding up trays and, more often, wine buckets.

Secretary of State Lee Sarason was arrested in the basement of a
handsome boys' club in Washington on unspecified charges by a policeman
who apologized as soon as he recognized Sarason, and released him, and
who that night was shot in his bed by a mysterious burglar.

Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guilty
devotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiled
from America for the same crimes.

Mrs. Leonard Nimmet, wife of a Congregational pastor in Lincoln,
Nebraska, whose husband had been sent to concentration camp for a
pacifist sermon, was shot through the door and killed when she refused
to open to an M.M. raiding section looking for seditious literature.

In Rhode Island, the door of a small orthodox synagogue in a basement
was locked from the outside after thin glass containers of
carbon-monoxide had been thrown in. The windows had been nailed shut,
and anyway, the nineteen men in the congregation did not smell the gas
until too late. They were all found slumped to the floor, beards
sticking up. They were all over sixty.

Tom Krell--but his was a really nasty case, because he was actually
caught with a copy of _Lance for Democracy_ and credentials proving that
he was a New Underground messenger--strange thing, too, because
everybody had respected him as a good, decent, unimaginative baggage-man
at a village railroad depot in New Hampshire--was dropped down a well
with five feet of water in it, a smooth-sided cement well, and just left
there.

Ex-Supreme Court Justice Hoblin of Montana was yanked out of bed late at
night and examined for sixty hours straight on a charge that he was in
correspondence with Trowbridge. It was said that the chief examiner was
a man whom, years before, Judge Hoblin had sentenced for robbery with
assault.

In one day Doremus received reports that four several literary or
dramatic societies--Finnish, Chinese, Iowan, and one belonging to a
mixed group of miners on the Mesaba Range, Minnesota--had been broken
up, their officers beaten, their clubrooms smashed up, and their old
pianos wrecked, on the charge that they possessed illegal arms, which,
in each case, the members declared to be antiquated pistols used in
theatricals. And in that week three people were arrested--in Alabama,
Oklahoma, and New Jersey--for the possession of the following subversive
books: _The Murder of Roger Ackroyd_, by Agatha Christie (and fair
enough too, because the sister-in-law of a county commissioner in
Oklahoma was named Ackroyd); _Waiting for Lefty_, by Clifford Odets; and
_February Hill_, by Victoria Lincoln.

****

"But plenty things like this happened before Buzz Windrip ever came in,
Doremus," insisted John Pollikop. (Never till they had met in the
delightfully illegal basement had he called Doremus anything save "Mr.
Jessup.") "You never thought about them, because they was just routine
news, to stick in your paper. Things like the share-croppers and the
Scottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against the
agricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputies
in Kentucky shot striking miners. And believe me, Doremus, the same
reactionary crowd that put over those crimes are just the big boys that
are chummy with Windrip. And what scares me is that if Walt Trowbridge
ever does raise a kinda uprising and kick Buzz out, the same vultures
will get awful patriotic and democratic and parliamentarian along with
Walt, and sit in on the spoils just the same."

"So Karl Pascal did convert you to Communism before he got sent to
Trianon," jeered Doremus.

John Pollikop jumped four straight feet up in the air, or so it looked,
and came down screaming, "Communism! Never get 'em to make a United
Front! W'y, that fellow Pascal--he was just a propagandist, and I tell
you--I tell you----"

****

Doremus's hardest job was the translation of items from the press in
Germany, which was most favorable to the Corpos. Sweating, even in the
March coolness in Buck's high basement, Doremus leaned over a kitchen
table, ruffling through a German-English lexicon, grunting, tapping his
teeth with a pencil, scratching the top of his head, looking like a
schoolboy with a little false gray beard, and wailing to Lorinda, "Now
how in the heck would you translate 'Er erhält noch immer eine
zweideutige Stellung den Juden gegenüber'?" She answered, "Why, darling,
the only German I know is the phrase that Buck taught me for 'God bless
you'--'Verfluchter Schweinehund.'"

He translated word for word, from the _Völkischer Beobachter_, and later
turned into comprehensible English, this gratifying tribute to his Chief
and Inspirer:

    America has a brilliant beginning begun. No one congratulates
    President Windrip with greater sincerity than we Germans. The
    tendency points as goal to the founding of a Folkish state.
    Unfortunately is the President not yet prepared with the liberal
    tradition to break. He holds still ever a two-meaning attitude
    the Jews vis a vis. We can but presume that logically this
    attitude change must as the movement forced is the complete
    consequences of its philosophy to draw. Ahasaver the Wandering
    Jew will always the enemy of a free self-conscious people be,
    and America will also learn that one even so much with Jewry
    compromise can as with the Bubonic plague.

                           *     *     *

From the _New Masses_, still published surreptitiously by the
Communists, at the risk of their lives, Doremus got many items about
miners and factory workers who were near starvation and who were
imprisoned if they so much as criticized a straw boss.... But most of
the _New Masses_, with a pious smugness unshaken by anything that had
happened since 1935, was given over to the latest news about Marx, and
to vilifying all agents of the New Underground, including those who had
been clubbed and jailed and killed, as "reactionary stool pigeons for
Fascism," and it was all nicely decorated with a Gropper cartoon showing
Walt Trowbridge, in M.M. uniform, kissing the foot of Windrip.

****

The news bulletins came to Doremus in a dozen insane ways--carried by
messengers on the thinnest of flimsy tissue paper; mailed to Mrs. Henry
Veeder and to Daniel Babcock between the pages of catalogues, by an N.U.
operative who was a clerk in the mail-order house of Middlebury & Roe;
shipped in cartons of toothpaste and cigarettes to Earl Tyson's
drugstore--one clerk there was an N.U. agent; dropped near Buck's
mansion by a tough-looking and therefore innocent-looking driver of an
interstate furniture-moving truck. Come by so precariously, the news had
none of the obviousness of his days in the office when, in one batch of
A.P. flimsies, were tidings of so many millions dead of starvation in
China, so many statesmen assassinated in central Europe, so many new
churches built by kind-hearted Mr. Andrew Mellon, that it was all
routine. Now, he was like an eighteenth-century missionary in northern
Canada, waiting for the news that would take all spring to travel from
Bristol and down Hudson Bay, wondering every instant whether France had
declared war, whether Her Majesty had safely given birth.

Doremus realized that he was hearing, all at once, of the battle of
Waterloo, the Diaspora, the invention of the telegraph, the discovery of
bacilli, and the Crusades, and if it took him ten days to get the news,
it would take historians ten decades to appraise it. Would they not envy
him, and consider that he had lived in the very crisis of history? Or
would they just smile at the flag-waving children of the 1930's playing
at being national heroes? For he believed that these historians would be
neither Communists nor Fascists nor bellicose American or English
Nationalists but just the sort of smiling Liberals that the warring
fanatics of today most cursed as weak waverers.

In all this secret tumult Doremus's most arduous task was to avoid
suspicions that might land him in concentration camp, and to give
appearance of being just the harmless old loafer he veritably had been,
three weeks ago. Befogged with sleep because he had worked all night at
headquarters, he yawned all afternoon in the lobby of the Hotel Wessex
and discussed fishing--the picture of a man too discouraged to be a
menace.

****

He dropped now and then, on evenings when there was nothing to do at
Buck's and he could loaf in his study at home and shamefully let himself
be quiet and civilized, into renewed longing for the Ivory Tower. Often,
not because it was a great poem but because it was the first that, when
he had been a boy, had definitely startled him by evoking beauty, he
reread Tennyson's "Arabian Nights":

    _A realm of pleasance, many a mound_
    _And many a shadow-chequered lawn_
    _Full of the city's stilly sound,_
    _And deep myrrh-thickets blowing round_
    _And stately cedar, tamarisks,_
    _Thick rosaries of scented thorn,_
    _Tall orient shrubs, and obelisks_
      _Graven with emblems of the time,_
      _In honor of the golden prime_
        _Of good Haroun Alraschid._

Awhile then he could wander with Romeo and Jurgen, with Ivanhoe and Lord
Peter Wimsey; the Piazza San Marco he saw, and immemorial towers of
Bagdad that never were; with Don John of Austria he was going forth to
war, and he took the golden road to Samarcand without a visa.

"But Dan Wilgus setting type on proclamations of rebellion, and Buck
Titus distributing them at night on a motorcycle, may be as romantic as
Xanadu... living in a blooming epic, right now, but no Homer come up
from the city room yet to write it down!"

****

Whit Bibby was an ancient and wordless fishmonger, and as ancient
appeared his horse, though it was by no means silent, but given to a
variety of embarrassing noises. For twenty years his familiar wagon,
like the smallest of cabooses, had conveyed mackerel and cod and lake
trout and tinned oysters to all the farmsteads in the Beulah Valley. To
have suspected Whit Bibby of seditious practices would have been as
absurd as to have suspected the horse. Older men remembered that he had
once been proud of his father, a captain in the Civil War--and afterward
a very drunken failure at farming--but the young fry had forgotten that
there ever had been a Civil War.

Unconcealed in the sunshine of the late-March afternoon that touched the
worn and ashen snow, Whit jogged up to the farmhouse of Truman Webb. He
had left ten orders of fish, just fish, at farms along the way, but at
Webb's he also left, not speaking of it, a bundle of pamphlets wrapped
in very fishy newspaper.

By next morning these pamphlets had all been left in the post boxes of
farmers beyond Keezmet, a dozen miles away.

Late the next night, Julian Falck drove Dr. Olmsted to the same Truman
Webb's. Now Mr. Webb had an ailing aunt. Up to a fortnight ago she had
not needed the doctor often, but as all the countryside could, and
decidedly did, learn from listening in on the rural party telephone
line, the doctor had to come every three or four days now.

"Well, Truman, how's the old lady?" Dr. Olmsted called cheerily.

From the front stoop Webb answered softly, "Safe! Shoot! I've kept a
good lookout."

Julian rapidly slid out, opened the rumble seat of the doctor's car, and
there was the astonishing appearance from the rumble of a tall man in
urban morning coat and striped trousers, a broad felt hat under his arm,
rising, rubbing himself, groaning with the pain of stretching his
cramped body. The doctor said:

"Truman, we've got a pretty important Eliza, with the bloodhounds right
after him, tonight! Congressman Ingram--Comrade Webb."

"Huh! Never thought I'd live to be called one of these 'Comrades.' But
mighty pleased to see you, Congressman. We'll put you across the border
in Canada in two days--we've got some paths right through the woods
along the border--and there's some good hot beans waiting for you right
now."

The attic in which Mr. Ingram slept that night, an attic approached by a
ladder concealed behind a pile of trunks, was the "underground station"
which, in the 1850's, when Truman's grandfather was agent, had sheltered
seventy-two various black slaves escaping to Canada, and on the wall
above Ingram's weary threatened head was still to be seen, written in
charcoal long ago, "Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of
mine enemies."

****

It was a little after six in the evening, near Tasbrough & Scarlett's
quarries. John Pollikop, with his wrecker car, was towing Buck Titus, in
his automobile. They stopped now and then, and John looked at the motor
in Buck's car very ostentatiously, in the sight of M.M. patrols, who
ignored so obvious a companionship. They stopped once at the edge of
Tasbrough's deepest pit. Buck strolled about, yawning, while John did
some more tinkering. "Right!" snapped Buck. Both of them leaped at the
over-large toolbox in the back of John's car, lifted out each an armful
of copies of _Vermont Vigilance_ and hurled them over the edge of the
quarry. They scattered in the wind.

Many of them were gathered up and destroyed by Tasbrough's foremen, next
morning, but at least a hundred, in the pockets of quarrymen, were
started on their journey through the world of Fort Beulah workmen.

****

Sissy came into the Jessup dining room wearily rubbing her forehead.
"I've got the story, Dad. Sister Candy helped me. Now we'll have
something good to send on to other agents. Listen! I've been quite
chummy with Shad. No! Don't blow up! I know just how to yank his gun out
of his holster if I should ever need to. And he got to boasting, and he
told me Frank Tasbrough and Shad and Commissioner Reek were all in
together on the racket, selling granite for public buildings, and he
told me--you see, he was sort of boasting about how chummy he and Mr.
Tasbrough have become--how Mr. Tasbrough keeps all the figures on the
graft in a little red notebook in his desk--of course old Franky would
never expect anybody to search the house of as loyal a Corpo as him!
Well, you know Mrs. Candy's cousin is working for the Tasbroughs for a
while, and damn if----"

("Sis-sy!")

"--these two old gals didn't pinch the lil red notebook this afternoon,
and I photographed every page and had 'em stick it back! And the only
comment our Candy makes is, 'That stove t' the Tasbroughs' don't draw
well. Couldn't bake a decent cake in a stove like _that_!'"




CHAPTER 27


Mary Greenhill, revenging the murdered Fowler, was the only one of the
conspirators who seemed moved more by homicidal hate than by a certain
incredulous feeling that it was all a good but slightly absurd game. But
to her, hate and the determination to kill were tonic. She soared up
from the shadowed pit of grief, and her eyes lighted, her voice had a
trembling gayety. She threw away her weeds and came out in defiant
colors--oh, they had to economize, these days, to put every available
penny into the missionary fund of the New Underground, but Mary had
become so fine-drawn that she could wear Sissy's giddiest old frocks.

She had more daring than Julian, or even Buck--indeed led Buck into his
riskiest expeditions.

In mid-afternoon, Buck and Mary, looking very matrimonial, domestically
accompanied by David and the rather doubtful Foolish, ambled through the
center of Burlington, where none of them were known--though a number of
dogs, city slickers and probably con-dogs, insisted to the rustic and
embarrassed Foolish that they had met him somewhere.

It was Buck who muttered "Right!" from time to time, when they were free
from being observed, but it was Mary who calmly, a yard or two from
M.M.'s or policemen, distributed crumpled-up copies of:

                     A Little Sunday-school Life of
                           JOHN SULLIVAN REEK

                    Second-class Political Crook, &
                    Certain Entertaining Pictures
                    of Col. Dewey Haik, Torturer.

These crumpled pamphlets she took from a specially made inside pocket of
her mink coat; one reaching from shoulder to waist. It had been
recommended by John Pollikop, whose helpful lady had aforetime used just
such a pocket for illicit booze. The crumpling had been done carefully.
Seen from two yards away, the pamphlets looked like any waste paper, but
each was systematically so wadded up that the words, printed in bold red
type, "Haik himself kicked an old man to death" caught the eye. And,
lying in corner trash baskets, in innocent toy wagons before hardware
stores, among oranges in a fruit store where they had gone to buy David
a bar of chocolate, they caught some hundreds of eyes in Burlington that
day.

On their way home, with David sitting in front beside Buck and Mary in
the back, she cried, "That will stir 'em up! But oh, when Daddy has
finished his booklet on Swan----God!"

David peeped back at her. She sat with eyes closed, with hands clenched.

He whispered to Buck, "I wish Mother wouldn't get so excited."

"She's the finest woman living, Dave."

"I know it, but----She scares me so!"

One scheme Mary devised and carried out by herself. From the magazine
counter in Tyson's drugstore, she stole a dozen copies of the _Readers'
Digest_ and a dozen larger magazines. When she returned them, they
looked untouched, but each of the larger magazines contained a leaflet,
"Get Ready to Join Walt Trowbridge," and each _Digest_ had become the
cover for a pamphlet: "Lies of the Corpo Press."

****

To serve as center of their plot, to be able to answer the telephone and
receive fugitives and put off suspicious snoopers twenty-four hours a
day, when Buck and the rest might be gone, Lorinda chucked her small
remaining interest in the Beulah Valley Tavern and became Buck's
housekeeper, living in the place. There was scandal. But in a day when
it was increasingly hard to get enough bread and meat, the town folk had
little time to suck scandal like lollipops, and anyway, who could much
suspect this nagging uplifter who so obviously preferred tuberculin
tests to toying with Corydon in the glade? And as Doremus was always
about, as sometimes he stayed overnight, for the first time these timid
lovers had space for passion.

It had never been their loyalty to the good Emma--since she was too
contented to be pitied, too sure of her necessary position in life to be
jealous--so much as hatred of a shabby hole-and-corner intrigue which
had made their love cautious and grudging. Neither of them was so simple
as to suppose that, even with quite decent people, love is always as
monogamic as bread and butter, yet neither of them liked sneaking.

Her room at Buck's, large and square and light, with old landscape paper
showing an endlessness of little mandarins daintily stepping out of
sedan chairs beside pools laced with willows, with a four-poster, a
colonial highboy, and a crazy-colored rag carpet, became in two days, so
fast did one live now in time of revolution, the best-loved home Doremus
had ever known. As eagerly as a young bridegroom he popped into and out
of her room, and he was not overly particular about the state of her
toilet. And Buck knew all about it and just laughed.

Released now, Doremus saw her as physically more alluring. With
parochial superiority, he had noted, during vacations on Cape Cod, how
often the fluffy women of fashion when they stripped to bathing suits
were skinny, to him unwomanly, with thin shoulder blades and with
backbones as apparent as though they were chains fastened down their
backs. They seemed passionate to him and a little devilish, with their
thin restless legs and avid lips, but he chuckled as he considered that
the Lorinda whose prim gray suits and blouses seemed so much more
virginal than the gay, flaunting summer cottons of the Bright Young
Things was softer of skin to the touch, much richer in the curve from
shoulder to breast.

He rejoiced to know that she was always there in the house, that he
could interrupt the high seriousness of a tract on bond issues to dash
out to the kitchen and brazenly let his arm slide round her waist.

She, the theoretically independent feminist, became flatteringly
demanding about every attention. Why hadn't he brought her some candy
from town? Would he mind awfully calling up Julian for her? Why hadn't
he remembered to bring her the book he had promised--well, would have
promised if she had only remembered to ask him for it? He trotted on her
errands, idiotically happy. Long ago Emma had reached the limit of her
imagination in regard to demands. He was discovering that in love it is
really more blessed to give than to receive, a proverb about which, as
an employer and as a steady fellow whom forgotten classmates regularly
tried to touch for loans, he had been very suspicious.

****

He lay beside her, in the wide four-poster, at dawn, March dawn with the
elm branches outside the window ugly and writhing in the wind, but with
the last coals still snapping in the fireplace, and he was utterly
content. He glanced at Lorinda, who had on her sleeping face a frown
that made her look not older but schoolgirlish, a schoolgirl who was
frowning comically over some small woe, and who defiantly clutched her
old-fashioned lace-bordered pillow. He laughed. They were going to be so
adventurous together! This little printing of pamphlets was only the
beginning of their revolutionary activities. They would penetrate into
press circles in Washington and get secret information (he was drowsily
vague about what information they were going to get and how they would
ever get it) which would explode the Corpo state. And with the
revolution over, they would go to Bermuda, to Martinique--lovers on
purple peaks, by a purple sea--everything purple and grand. Or (and he
sighed and became heroic as he exquisitely stretched and yawned in the
wide warm bed) if they were defeated, if they were arrested and
condemned by the M.M.'s, they would die together, sneering at the
firing-squad, refusing to have their eyes bandaged, and their fame, like
that of Servetus and Matteotti and Professor Ferrer and the Haymarket
martyrs, would roll on forever, acclaimed by children waving little
flags----

"Gimme a cigarette, darling!"

Lorinda was regarding him with a beady and skeptical eye.

"You oughtn't to smoke so much!"

"You oughtn't to boss so much! Oh, my darling!" She sat up, kissed his
eyes and temples, and sturdily climbed out of bed, seeking her own
cigarette.

"Doremus! It's been marvelous to have this companionship with you.
But----" She looked a little timid, sitting cross-legged on the
rattan-topped stool before the old mahogany dressing table--no silver or
lace or crystal was there, but only plain wooden hairbrush and scant
luxury of small drugstore bottles. "But darling, this cause--oh, curse
that word 'cause'--can't I ever get free of it?--but anyway, this New
Underground business seems to me so important, and I know you feel that
way too, but I've noticed that since we've settled down together, two
awful sentimentalists, you aren't so excited about writing your nice
venomous attacks, and I'm getting more cautious about going out
distributing tracts. I have a foolish idea I have to save my life, for
your sake. And I ought to be only thinking about saving my life for the
revolution. Don't you feel that way? Don't you? Don't you?"

Doremus swung his legs out of bed, also lighted an unhygienic cigarette,
and said grumpily, "Oh, I suppose so! But--tracts! Your attitude is
simply a hold-over of your religious training. That you have a _duty_
toward the dull human race--which probably enjoys being bullied by
Windrip and getting bread and circuses--except for the bread!"

"Of course it's religious, a revolutionary loyalty! Why not? It's one of
the few real religious feelings. A rational, unsentimental Stalin is
still kind of a priest. No wonder most preachers hate the Reds and
preach against 'em! They're jealous of their religious power. But----Oh,
we can't unfold the world, this morning, even over breakfast coffee,
Doremus! When Mr. Dimick came back here yesterday, he ordered me to
Beecher Falls--you know, on the Canadian border--to take charge of the
N.U. cell there--ostensibly to open up a tea room for this summer. So,
hang it, I've got to leave you, and leave Buck and Sis, and go. Hang
it!"

"Linda!"

She would not look at him. She made much, too much, of grinding out her
cigarette.

"Linda!"

"Yes?"

"You suggested this to Dimick! He never gave any orders till you
suggested it!"

"Well----"

"Linda! Linda! Do you want to get away from me so much? You--my life!"

She came slowly to the bed, slowly sat down beside him. "Yes. Get away
from you and get away from myself. The world's in chains, and I can't be
free to love till I help tear them off."

"It will never be out of chains!"

"Then I shall never be free to love! Oh, if we could only have run away
together for one sweet year, when I was eighteen! Then I would have
lived two whole lives. Well, nobody seems to be very lucky at turning
the clock back--almost twenty-five years back, too. I'm afraid Now is a
fact you can't dodge. And I've been getting so--just this last two
weeks, with April coming in--that I can't think of anything but you.
Kiss me. I'm going. Today."




CHAPTER 28


As usually happens in secret service, no one detail that Sissy ferreted
out of Shad Ledue was drastically important to the N.U., but, like
necessary bits of a picture puzzle, when added to other details picked
up by Doremus and Buck and Mary and Father Perefixe, that trained
extractor of confessions, they showed up the rather simple schemes of
this gang of Corpo racketeers who were so touchingly accepted by the
People as patriotic shepherds.

Sissy lounged with Julian on the porch, on a deceptively mild April day.

"Golly, like to take you off camping, couple months from now, Sis. Just
the two of us. Canoe and sleep in a pup tent. Oh, Sis, do you _have_ to
have supper with Ledue and Staubmeyer tonight? I hate it. God, how I
hate it! I warn you, I'll kill Shad! I mean it!"

"Yes, I do have to, dear. I think I've got Shad crazy enough about me so
that tonight, when he chases good old Emil, and whatever foul female
Emil may bring, out of the place, I'll get him to tell me something
about who they're planning to pinch next. I'm not scared of Shad, my
Julian of jewelians."

He did not smile. He said, with a gravity that had been unknown to the
lively college youth, "Do you realize, with your kidding yourself about
being able to handle Comrade Shad so well, that he's husky as a gorilla
and just about as primitive? One of these nights--God! think of it!
maybe tonight!--he'll go right off the deep end and grab you and--bing!"

She was as grave. "Julian, just what do you think could happen to me?
The worst that could happen would be that I'd get raped."

"Good Lord----"

"Do you honestly suppose that since the New Civilization began, say in
1914, anyone believes that kind of thing is more serious than busting an
ankle? 'A fate worse than death'! What nasty old side-whiskered deacon
ever invented that phrase? And how he must have rolled it on his chapped
old lips! I can think of plenty worse fates--say, years of running an
elevator. No--wait! I'm not really flippant. I haven't any desire,
beyond maybe a slight curiosity, to be raped--at least, not by Shad;
he's a little too strong on the Bodily Odor when he gets excited. (Oh
God, darling, what a nasty swine that man is! I hate him fifty times as
much as you do. Ugh!) But I'd be willing to have even that happen if I
could save one decent person from his bloody blackjack. I'm not the
playgirl of Pleasant Hill any more; I'm a frightened woman from Mount
Terror!"

****

It seemed, the whole thing, rather unreal to Sissy; a burlesqued version
of the old melodramas in which the City Villain tries to ruin Our Nell,
apropos of a bottle of Champagne Wine. Shad, even in a belted tweed
jacket, a kaleidoscopic Scotch sweater (from Minnesota), and white linen
plus-fours, hadn't the absent-minded seductiveness that becomes a City
Slicker.

Ensign Emil Staubmeyer had showed up at Shad's new private suite at the
Star Hotel with a grass widow who betrayed her gold teeth and who had
tried to repair the erosions in the fair field of her neck with overmuch
topsoil of brick-tinted powder. She was pretty dreadful. She was harder
to tolerate than the rumbling Shad--a man for whom the chaplain might
even have been a little sorry, after he was safely hanged. The synthetic
widow was always nudging herself at Emil and when, rather wearily, he
obliged by poking her shoulder, she giggled, "Now you _sssstop_!"

Shad's suite was clean, and had some air. Beyond that there was nothing
much to say. The "parlor" was firmly furnished in oak chairs and settee
with leather upholstery, and four pictures of marquises not doing
anything interesting. The freshness of the linen spread on the brass
bedstead in the other room fascinated Sissy uncomfortably.

Shad served them rye highballs with ginger ale from a quart bottle that
had first been opened at least a day ago, sandwiches with chicken and
ham that tasted of niter, and ice-cream with six colors but only two
flavors--both strawberry. Then he waited, not too patiently, looking as
much like General Göring as possible, for Emil and his woman to get the
devil out of here, and for Sissy to acknowledge his virile charms. He
only grunted at Emil's pedagogic little jokes, and the man of culture
abruptly got up and removed his lady, whinnying in farewell, "Now,
Captain, don't you and your girl-friend do anything Papa wouldn't do!"

****

"Come on now, baby--come over here and give us a kiss," Shad roared, as
he flopped into the corner of the leather settee.

"Now I don't know whether I _will_ or not!" It nauseated her a good
deal, but she made herself as pertly provocative as she could. She
minced to the settee, and sat just far enough from his hulking side for
him to reach over and draw her toward him. She observed him cynically,
recalling her experience with most of the Boys... though not with
Julian... well, not so much with Julian. They always, all of them,
went through the same procedure, heavily pretending that there was no
system in their manual proposals; and to a girl of spirit, the chief
diversion in the whole business was watching their smirking pride in
their technique. The only variation, ever, was whether they started in
at the top or the bottom.

Yes. She thought so. Shad, not being so delicately fanciful as, say,
Malcolm Tasbrough, started with an apparently careless hand on her knee.

She shivered. His sinewy paw was to her like the slime and writhing of
an eel. She moved away with a maidenly alarm which mocked the rôle of
Mata Hari she had felt herself to be gracing.

"Like me?" he demanded.

"Oh--well--sort of."

"Oh, shucks! You think I'm still just a hired man! Even though I am a
County Commissioner now! and a Battalion-Leader! and prob'ly pretty soon
I'll be a Commander!" He spoke the sacred names with awe. It was the
twentieth time he had made the same plaint to her in the same words.
"And you still think I ain't good for anything except lugging in
kindling!"

"Oh, Shad dear! Why, I always think of you as being just about my oldest
playmate! The way I used to tag after you and ask you could I run the
lawnmower! My! I always remember that!"

"Do you, honest?" He yearned at her like a lumpish farm dog.

"Of course! And honest, it makes me tired, your acting as if you were
ashamed of having worked for us! Why, don't you know that, when he was a
boy, Daddy used to work as a farm hand, and split wood and tend lawn for
the neighbors and all that, and he was awful glad to get the money?" She
reflected that this thumping and entirely impromptu lie was
beautiful.... That it happened not to be a lie, she did not know.

"That a fact? Well! Honest? Well! So the old man used to hustle the rake
too! Never knew that! You know, he ain't such a bad old coot--just awful
stubborn."

"You _do_ like him, _don't_ you, Shad! Nobody knows how sweet he is--I
mean, in these sort of complicated days, we've got to protect him
against people that might not understand him, against outsiders, don't
you think so, Shad? You _will_ protect him!"

"Well, I'll do what I can," said the Battalion-Leader with such fat
complacency that Sissy almost slapped him. "That is, as long as he
behaves himself, baby, and don't get mixed up with any of these Red
rebels... and as long as you feel like being nice to a fella!" He
pulled her toward him as though he were hauling a bag of grain out of a
wagon.

"Oh! Shad! You frighten me! Oh, you must be gentle! A big, strong man
like you can afford to be gentle. It's only the sissies that have to get
rough. And you're so strong!"

"Well, I guess I can still feed myself! Say, talking about sissies, what
do you see in a light-waisted mollycoddle like Julian? You don't really
like him, do you?"

"Oh, you know how it is," she said, trying without too much obviousness
to ease her head away from his shoulder. "We've always been playmates,
since we were kids."

"Well, you just said I was, too!"

"Yes, that's so."

Now in her effort to give all the famous pleasures of seduction without
taking any of the risk, the amateur secret service operative, Sissy, had
a slightly confused aim. She was going to get from Shad information
valuable to the N.U. Rapidly rehearsing it in her imagination, the while
she was supposed to be weakened by the charm of leaning against Shad's
meaty shoulder, she heard herself teasing him into giving her the name
of some citizen whom the M.M.'s were about to arrest, slickly freeing
herself from him, dashing out to find Julian--oh, hang it, why hadn't
she made an engagement with Julian for that night?--well, he'd either be
at home or out driving Dr. Olmsted--Julian's melodramatically dashing to
the home of the destined victim and starting him for the Canadian border
before dawn.... And it might be a good idea for the refugee to tack
on his door a note dated two days ago, saying that he was off on a trip,
so that Shad would never suspect her.... All this in a second of
hectic story-telling, neatly illustrated in color by her fancy, while
she pretended that she had to blow her nose and thus had an excuse to
sit straight. Edging another inch or two away, she purred, "But of
course it isn't just physical strength, Shad. You have so much power
politically. My! I imagine you could send almost anybody in Fort Beulah
off to concentration camp, if you wanted to."

"Well, I could put a few of 'em away, if they got funny!"

"I'll bet you could--and will, too! Who you going to arrest next, Shad?"

"Huh?"

"Oh come on! Don't be so tightwad with all your secrets!"

"What are you trying to do, baby? Pump me?"

"Why no, of course not, I just----"

"Sure! You'd like to get the poor old fathead going, and find out
everything he knows--and that's plenty, you can bet your sweet life on
that! Nothing doing, baby."

"Shad, I'd just--I'd just love to see an M.M. squad arresting somebody
once. It must be dreadfully exciting!

"Oh, it's exciting enough, all right, all right! When the poor chumps
try to resist, and you throw their radio out of the window! Or when the
fellow's wife gets fresh and shoots off her mouth too much, and so you
just teach her a little lesson by letting her look on while you trip him
up on the floor and beat him up--maybe that sounds a little rough, but
you see, in the long run it's the best thing you can do for these
beggars, because it teaches 'em to not get ugly."

"But--you won't think I'm horrid and unwomanly, will you?--but I would
like to see you hauling out one of those people, just once. Come on,
tell a fellow! Who are you going to arrest next?"

"Naughty, naughty! Mustn't try to kid papa! No, the womanly thing for
you to do is a little love-making! Aw come on, let's have some fun,
baby! You know you're crazy about me!" Now he really seized her, his
hand across her breasts. She struggled, thoroughly frightened, no longer
cynical and sophisticated. She shrieked, "Oh don't--don't!" She wept,
real tears, more from anger than from modesty. He loosened his grip a
little, and she had the inspiration to sob, "Oh, Shad, if you really
want me to love you, you must give me time! You wouldn't want me to be a
hussy that you could do anything you wanted to with--you, in your
position? Oh, no, Shad, you couldn't do that!"

"Well, maybe," said he, with the smugness of a carp.

She had sprung up, dabbling at her eyes--and through the doorway, in the
bedroom, on a flat-topped desk, she saw a bunch of two or three Yale
keys. Keys to his office, to secret cupboards and drawers with Corpo
plans! Undoubtedly! Her imagination in one second pictured her making a
rubbing of the keys, getting John Pollikop, that omnifarious mechanic,
to file substitute keys, herself and Julian somehow or other sneaking
into Corpo headquarters at night, perilously creeping past the guards,
rifling Shad's every dread file----

She stammered, "Do you mind if I go in and wash my face? All teary--so
silly! You don't happen to have any face powder in your bathroom?"

"Say, what d'you think I am? A hick, or a monk, maybe? You bet your life
I've got some face powder--right in the medicine cabinet--two
kinds--how's that for service? Ladies taken care of by the day or hour!"

It hurt, but she managed something like a giggle before she went in and
shut the bedroom door, and locked it.

She tore across to the keys. She snatched up a pad of yellow
scratch-paper and a pencil, and tried to make a rubbing of a key as once
she had made rubbings of coins, for use in the small grocery shop of C.
JESSUp & J. falck groSHERS.

The pencil blur showed only the general outline of the key; the tiny
notches which were the trick would not come clear. In panic, she
experimented with a sheet of carbon paper, then toilet paper, dry and
wet. She could not get a mold. She pressed the key into a prop hotel
candle in a china stick by Shad's bed. The candle was too hard. So was
the bathroom soap. And Shad was now trying the knob of the door,
remarking "Damn!" then bellowing, "Whayuh doin' in there? Gone to
sleep?"

"Be right out!" She replaced the keys, threw the yellow paper and the
carbon paper out of the window, replaced the candle and soap, slapped
her face with a dry towel, dashed on powder as though she were working
against time at plastering a wall, and sauntered back into the parlor.
Shad looked hopeful. In panic she saw that now, before he comfortably
sat down to it and became passionate again, was her one time to escape.
She snatched up hat and coat, said wistfully, "Another night, Shad--you
must let me go now, dear!" and fled before he could open his red muzzle.

Round the corner in the hotel corridor she found Julian.

He was standing taut, trying to look like a watchdog, his right hand in
his coat pocket as though it was holding a revolver.

She hurled herself against his bosom and howled.

"Good God! What did he do to you? I'll go in and kill him!"

"Oh, I didn't get seduced. It isn't things like that that I'm bawling
about! It's because I'm such a simply terribly awful spy!"

****

But one thing came out of it.

Her courage nerved Julian to something he had longed for and feared: to
join the M.M.'s, put on uniform, "work from within," and supply Doremus
with information.

"I can get Leo Quinn--you know?--Dad's a conductor on the
railroad?--used to play basketball in high school?--I can get him to
drive Dr. Olmsted for me, and generally run errands for the N.U. He's
got grit, and he hates the Corpos. But look, Sissy--look, Mr. Jessup--in
order to get the M.M.'s to trust me, I've got to pretend to have a
fierce bust-up with you and all our friends. Look! Sissy and I will walk
up Elm Street tomorrow evening, giving an imitation of estranged lovers.
How 'bout it, Sis?"

"Fine!" glowed that incorrigible actress.

She was to be, every evening at eleven, in a birch grove just up
Pleasant Hill from the Jessups', where they had played house as
children. Because the road curved, the rendezvous could be entered from
four or five directions. There he was to hand on to her his reports of
M.M. plans.

But when he first crept into the grove at night and she nervously turned
her pocket torch on him, she shrieked at seeing him in M.M. uniform, as
an inspector. That blue tunic and slanting forage cap which, in the
cinema and history books, had meant youth and hope, meant only death
now.... She wondered if in 1864 it had not meant death more than
moonlight and magnolias to most women. She sprang to him, holding him as
if to protect him against his own uniform, and in the peril and
uncertainty now of their love, Sissy began to grow up.




CHAPTER 29


The propaganda throughout the country was not all to the New
Underground; not even most of it; and though the pamphleteers for the
N.U., at home and exiled abroad, included hundreds of the most capable
professional journalists of America, they were cramped by a certain
respect for facts which never enfeebled the press-agents for Corpoism.
And the Corpos had a notable staff. It included college presidents, some
of the most renowned among the radio announcers who aforetime had
crooned their affection for mouth washes and noninsomniac coffee, famous
ex-war-correspondents, ex-governors, former vice-presidents of the
American Federation of Labor, and no less an artist than the public
relations counsel of a princely corporation of electrical-goods
manufacturers.

The newspapers everywhere might no longer be so wishily-washily liberal
as to print the opinions of non-Corpos; they might give but little news
from those old-fashioned and democratic countries, Great Britain,
France, and the Scandinavian states; might indeed print almost no
foreign news, except as regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopia
good roads, trains on time, freedom from beggars and from men of honor,
and all the other spiritual benefactions of Roman civilization. But, on
the other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic strips--the
most popular was a very funny one about a preposterous New Underground
crank, who wore mortuary black with a high hat decorated with crêpe and
who was always being comically beaten up by M.M.'s. Never had there
been, even in the days when Mr. Hearst was freeing Cuba, so many large
red headlines. Never so many dramatic drawings of murders--the murderers
were always notorious anti-Corpos. Never such a wealth of literature,
worthy its twenty-four-hour immortality, as the articles proving, and
proving by figures, that American wages were universally higher,
commodities universally lower-priced, war budgets smaller but the army
and its equipment much larger, than ever in history. Never such
righteous polemics as the proofs that all non-Corpos were Communists.

Almost daily, Windrip, Sarason, Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of War
Luthorne, or Vice-President Perley Beecroft humbly addressed their
Masters, the great General Public, on the radio, and congratulated them
on making a new world by their example of American solidarity--marching
shoulder to shoulder under the Grand Old Flag, comrades in the blessings
of peace and comrades in the joys of war to come.

Much-heralded movies, subsidized by the government (and could there be
any better proof of the attention paid by Dr. Macgoblin and the other
Nazi leaders to the arts than the fact that movie actors who before the
days of the Chief were receiving only fifteen hundred gold dollars a
week were now getting five thousand?), showed the M.M.'s driving armored
motors at eighty miles an hour, piloting a fleet of one thousand planes,
and being very tender to a little girl with a kitten.

Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, "If there ever is
a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are
so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe."

For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The Chief was
photographed playing poker, in shirt-sleeves and with a derby on the
back of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur, and a pair of rugged
steelworkers. Dr. Macgoblin in person led an Elks' brass band and dived
in competition with the Atlantic City bathing-beauties. It was reputably
reported that M.M.'s apologized to political prisoners for having to
arrest them, and that the prisoners joked amiably with the guards...
at first.

All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprised
scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just as sorely in
the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of Prussia.

Doremus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair-sofa--the
gallant Communist, Karl Billinger, the gallant anti-Communist,
Tchernavin, and the gallant neutral, Lorant--began to see something like
a biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships. The universal
apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods of
arrest--sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of police
pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightened
women, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanying
blows and then the formal beatings, when the prisoner is forced to count
the strokes until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour stew, guards
jokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is being
executed, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men go
mad and hang themselves----

Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italy
and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not very
different had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity in
the French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine of
torture, as if they had all read the same manual of sadistic etiquette.
And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark Twain,
Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having just as good a time as they had
had in central Europe.

****

America followed, too, the same ingenious finances as Europe. Windrip
had promised to make everybody richer, and had contrived to make
everybody, except for a few hundred bankers and industrialists and
soldiers, much poorer. He needed no higher mathematicians to produce his
financial statements: any ordinary press-agent could do them. To show a
100 per cent economy in military expenditures, while increasing the
establishment 700 per cent, it had been necessary only to charge up all
expenditures for the Minute Men to non-military departments, so that
their training in the art of bayonet-sticking was debited to the
Department of Education. To show an increase in average wages one did
tricks with "categories of labor" and "required minimum wages," and
forgot to state how many workers ever did become entitled to the
"minimum," and how much was charged as wages, on the books, for food and
shelter for the millions in the labor camps.

It all made dazzling reading. There had never been more elegant and
romantic fiction.

Even loyal Corpos began to wonder why the armed forces, army and M.M.'s
together, were being so increased. Was a frightened Windrip getting
ready to defend himself against a rising of the whole nation? Did he
plan to attack all of North and South America and make himself an
emperor? Or both? In any case, the forces were so swollen that even with
its despotic power of taxation, the Corpo government never had enough.
They began to force exports, to practice the "dumping" of wheat, corn,
timber, copper, oil, machinery. They increased production, forced it by
fines and threats, then stripped the farmer of all he had, for export at
depreciated prices. But at home the prices were not depreciated but
increased, so that the more we exported, the less the industrial worker
in America had to eat. And really zealous County Commissioners took from
the farmer (after the patriotic manner of many Mid-Western counties in
1918) even his seed grain, so that he could grow no more, and on the
very acres where once he had raised superfluous wheat he now starved for
bread. And while he was starving, the Commissioners continued to try to
make him pay for the Corpo bonds which he had been made to buy on the
instalment plan.

But still, when he did finally starve to death, none of these things
worried him.

There were bread lines now in Fort Beulah, once or twice a week.

The hardest phenomenon of dictatorship for a Doremus to understand, even
when he saw it daily in his own street, was the steady diminution of
gayety among the people.

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay nation.
Rather it had been heavily and noisily jocular, with a substratum of
worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of the
rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had been
hearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing,
and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervous
blatting of tremendous traffic.

All that false cheerfulness lessened now, day by day.

The Corpos found nothing more convenient to milk than public pleasures.
After the bread had molded, the circuses were closed. There were taxes
or increased taxes on motorcars, movies, theaters, dances, and ice-cream
sodas. There was a tax on playing a phonograph or radio in any
restaurant. Lee Sarason, himself a bachelor, conceived of super-taxing
bachelors and spinsters, and contrariwise of taxing all weddings at
which more than five persons were present.

Even the most reckless youngsters went less and less to public
entertainments, because no one not ostentatiously in uniform cared to be
noticed, these days. It was impossible to sit in a public place without
wondering which spies were watching you. So all the world stayed
home--and jumped anxiously at every passing footstep, every telephone
ring, every tap of an ivy sprig on the window.

****

The score of people definitely pledged to the New Underground were the
only persons to whom Doremus dared talk about anything more
incriminating than whether it was likely to rain, though he had been the
friendliest gossip in town. Always it had taken ten minutes longer than
was humanly possible for him to walk to the _Informer_ office, because
he stopped on every corner to ask after someone's sick wife, politics,
potato crop, opinions about Deism, or luck at fishing.

As he read of rebels against the régime who worked in Rome, in Berlin,
he envied them. They had thousands of government agents, unknown by
sight and thus the more dangerous, to watch them; but also they had
thousands of comrades from whom to seek encouragement, exciting personal
tattle, shop talk, and the assurance that they were not altogether
idiotic to risk their lives for a mistress so ungrateful as Revolution.
Those secret flats in great cities--perhaps some of them really were
filled with the rosy glow they had in fiction. But the Fort Beulahs,
anywhere in the world, were so isolated, the conspirators so
uninspiringly familiar one to another, that only by inexplicable faith
could one go on.

Now that Lorinda was gone, there certainly was nothing very diverting in
sneaking round corners, trying to look like somebody else, merely to
meet Buck and Dan Wilgus and that good woman, Sissy!

Buck and he and the rest--they were such amateurs. They needed the
guidance of veteran agitators like Mr. Ailey and Mr. Bailey and Mr.
Cailey.

Their feeble pamphlets, their smearily printed newspaper, seemed futile
against the enormous blare of Corpo propaganda. It seemed worse than
futile, it seemed insane, to risk martyrdom in a world where Fascists
persecuted Communists, Communists persecuted Social-Democrats,
Social-Democrats persecuted everybody who would stand for it; where
"Aryans" who looked like Jews persecuted Jews who looked like Aryans and
Jews persecuted their debtors; where every statesman and clergyman
praised Peace and brightly asserted that the only way to get Peace was
to get ready for War.

What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousness
in a world which so hated righteousness? Why do anything except eat and
read and make love and provide for sleep that should be secure against
disturbance by armed policemen?

He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went on

****

In June, when the Fort Beulah cell of the New Underground had been
carrying on for some three months, Mr. Francis Tasbrough, the golden
quarryman, called on his neighbor, Doremus.

"How are you, Frank?"

"Fine, Remus. How's the old carping critic?"

"Fine, Frank. Still carping. Fine carping weather, at that. Have a
cigar?"

"Thanks. Got a match? Thanks. Saw Sissy yesterday. She looks fine."

"Yes, she's fine. I saw Malcolm driving by yesterday. How did he like it
in the Provincial University, at New York?"

"Oh, fine--fine. He says the athletics are grand. They're getting Primo
Camera over to coach in tennis next year--I think it's Camera--I think
it's tennis--but anyway, the athletics are fine there, Malcolm says.
Say, uh, Remus, there's something I been meaning to ask you. I,
uh----The fact is I want you to be sure and not repeat this to anybody.
I know you can be trusted with a secret, even if you are a
newspaperman--or used to be, I mean, but----The fact is (and this is
inside stuff; official), there's going to be some governmental
promotions all along the line--this is confidential, and it comes to me
straight from the Provincial Commissioner, Colonel Haik. Luthorne is
finished as Secretary of War--he's a nice fellow, but he hasn't got as
much publicity for the Corpos out of his office as the Chief expected
him to. Haik is to have his job, and also take over the position of High
Marshal of the Minute Men from Lee Sarason--I suppose Sarason has too
much to do. Well then, John Sullivan Reek is slated to be Provincial
Commissioner; that leaves the office of District Commissioner for
Vermont-New Hampshire empty, and I'm one of the people being seriously
considered. I've done a lot of speaking for the Corpos, and I know Dewey
Haik very well--I was able to advise him about erecting public
buildings. Of course there's none of the County Commissioners around
here that measure up to a district commissionership--not even Dr.
Staubmeyer--certainly not Shad Ledue. Now if you could see your way
clear to throw in with me, your influence would help----"

"Good heavens, Frank, the worst thing you could have happen, if you want
the job, is to have me favor you! The Corpos don't like me. Oh, of
course they know I'm loyal, not one of these dirty, sneaking
anti-Corpos, but I never made enough noise in the paper to please 'em."

"That's just it, Remus! I've got a really striking idea. Even if they
don't like you, the Corpos respect you, and they know how long you've
been important in the State. We'd all be greatly pleased if you came out
and joined us. Now just suppose you did so and let people know that it
was my influence that converted you to Corpoism. That might give me
quite a leg-up. And between old friends like us, Remus, I can tell you
that this job of District Commissioner would be useful to me in the
quarry business, aside from the social advantages. And if I got the
position, I can promise you that I'd either get the _Informer_ taken
away from Staubmeyer and that dirty little stinker, Itchitt, and given
back to you to run absolutely as you pleased--providing, of course, you
had the sense to keep from criticizing the Chief and the State. Or, if
you'd rather, I think I could probably wangle a job for you as military
judge (they don't necessarily have to be lawyers) or maybe President
Peaseley's job as District Director of Education--you'd have a lot of
fun out of that!--awfully amusing the way all the teachers kiss the
Director's foot! Come on, old man! Think of all the fun we used to have
in the old days! Come to your senses and face the inevitable and join us
and fix up some good publicity for me. How about it--huh huh?"

Doremus reflected that the worst trial of a revolutionary propagandist
was not risking his life, but having to be civil to people like
Future-Commissioner Tasbrough.

He supposed that his voice was polite as he muttered, "Afraid I'm too
old to try it, Frank," but apparently Tasbrough was offended. He sprang
up and tramped away grumbling, "Oh, very well then!"

"And I didn't give him a chance to say anything about being realistic or
breaking eggs to make an omelet," regretted Doremus.

The next day Malcolm Tasbrough, meeting Sissy on the street, made his
beefy most of cutting her. At the time the Jessups thought that was very
amusing. They thought the occasion less amusing when Malcolm chased
little David out of the Tasbrough apple orchard, which he had been wont
to use as the Great Western Forest where at any time one was rather more
than likely to meet Kit Carson, Robin Hood, and Colonel Lindbergh
hunting together.

Having only Frank's word for it, Doremus could do no more than hint in
_Vermont Vigilance_ that Colonel Dewey Haik was to be made Secretary of
War, and give Haik's actual military record, which included the facts
that as a first lieutenant in France in 1918, he had been under fire for
less than fifteen minutes, and that his one real triumph had been
commanding state militia during a strike in Oregon, when eleven strikers
had been shot down, five of them in the back.

Then Doremus forgot Tasbrough completely and happily.




CHAPTER 30


But worse than having to be civil to the fatuous Mr. Tasbrough was
keeping his mouth shut when, toward the end of June, a newspaperman at
Battington, Vermont, was suddenly arrested as editor of _Vermont
Vigilance_ and author of all the pamphlets by Doremus and Lorinda. He
went to concentration camp. Buck and Dan Wilgus and Sissy prevented
Doremus from confessing, and from even going to call on the victim, and
when, with Lorinda no longer there as confidante, Doremus tried to
explain it all to Emma, she said, Wasn't it lucky that the government
had blamed somebody else!

Emma had worked out the theory that the N.U. activity was some sort of a
naughty game which kept her boy, Doremus, busy after his retirement. He
was mildly nagging the Corpos. She wasn't sure that it was really nice
to nag the legal authorities, but still, for a little fellow, her
Doremus had always been surprisingly spunky--just like (she often
confided to Sissy) a spunky little Scotch terrier she had owned when she
was a girl--Mr. McNabbit its name had been, a little Scotch terrier, but
my! so spunky he acted like he was a regular lion!

She was rather glad that Lorinda was gone, though she liked Lorinda and
worried about how well she might do with a tea room in a new town, a
town where she had never lived. But she just couldn't help feeling (she
confided not only to Sissy but to Mary and Buck) that Lorinda, with all
her wild crazy ideas about women's rights, and workmen being just as
good as their employers, had a bad influence on Doremus's tendency to
show off and shock people. (She mildly wondered why Buck and Sissy
snorted so. She hadn't meant to say anything particularly funny!)

For too many years she had been used to Doremus's irregular routine to
have her sleep disturbed by his returning from Buck's at the improper
time to which she referred as "at all hours," but she did wish he would
be "more on time for his meals," and she gave up the question of why,
these days, he seemed to like to associate with Ordinary People like
John Pollikop, Dan Wilgus, Daniel Babcock, and Pete Vutong--my! some
people said Pete couldn't even read and write, and Doremus so educated
and all! Why didn't he see more of lovely people like Frank Tasbrough
and Professor Staubmeyer and Mr. R. C. Crowley and this new friend of
his, the Hon. John Sullivan Reek?

Why couldn't he keep out of politics? She'd always _said_ they were no
occupation for a gentleman!

Like David, now ten years old (and like twenty or thirty million other
Americans, from one to a hundred, but all of the same mental age), Emma
thought the marching M.M.'s were a very fine show indeed, so much like
movies of the Civil War, really quite educational; and while of course
if Doremus didn't care for President Windrip, she was opposed to him
also, yet didn't Mr. Windrip speak beautifully about pure language,
church attendance, low taxation, and the American flag?

                           *     *     *

The realists, the makers of omelets, did climb, as Tasbrough had
predicted. Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the Northeastern
Province, became Secretary of War and High Marshal of M.M.'s, while the
former secretary, Colonel Luthorne, retired to Kansas and the real
estate business and was well spoken of by all business men for being
thus willing to give up the grandeur of Washington for duty toward
practical affairs and his family, who were throughout the press depicted
as having frequently missed him. It was rumored in N.U. cells that Haik
might go higher even than Secretary of War; that Windrip was worried by
the forced growth of a certain effeminacy in Lee Sarason under the arc
light of glory.

Francis Tasbrough was elevated to District Commissionership at Hanover.
But Mr. Sullivan Reek did not in series go on to be Provincial
Commissioner. It was said that he had too many friends among just the
old-line politicians whose jobs the Corpos were so enthusiastically
taking. No, the new Provincial Commissioner, viceroy and general, was
Military Judge Effingham Swan, the one man whom Mary Jessup Greenhill
hated more than she did Shad Ledue.

Swan was a splendid commissioner. Within three days after taking office,
he had John Sullivan Reek and seven assistant district commissioners
arrested, tried, and imprisoned, all within twenty-four hours, and an
eighty-year-old woman, mother of a New Underground agent but not
otherwise accused of wickedness, penned in a concentration camp for the
more desperate traitors. It was in a disused quarry which was always a
foot deep in water. After he had sentenced her, Swan was said to have
bowed to her most courteously.

                           *     *     *

The New Underground sent out warning, from headquarters in Montreal, for
a general tightening up of precautions against being caught distributing
propaganda. Agents were disappearing rather alarmingly.

Buck scoffed, but Doremus was nervous. He noticed that the same strange
man, ostensibly a drummer, a large man with unpleasant eyes, had twice
got into conversation with him in the Hotel Wessex lobby, and too
obviously hinted that he was anti-Corpo and would love to have Doremus
say something nasty about the Chief and the M.M.'s.

Doremus became cautious about going out to Buck's. He parked his car in
half-a-dozen different wood-roads and crept afoot to the secret
basement.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, 1938, he had a notion that
he was being followed, so closely did a car with red-tinted headlights,
anxiously watched in his rear-view mirror, stick behind him as he took
the Keezmet highway down to Buck's. He turned up a side road, down
another. The spy car followed. He stopped, in a driveway on the
left-hand side of the road, and angrily stepped out, in time to see the
other car pass, with a man who looked like Shad Ledue driving. He swung
round then and, without concealment, bolted for Buck's.

In the basement, Buck was contentedly tying up bundles of the
_Vigilance_, while Father Perefixe, in his shirt-sleeves, vest open and
black dickey swinging beneath his reversed collar, sat at a plain pine
table, writing a warning to New England Catholics that though the Corpos
had, unlike the Nazis in Germany, been shrewd enough to flatter
prelates, they had lowered the wages of French-Canadian Catholic mill
hands and imprisoned their leaders just as severely as in the case of
the avowedly wicked Protestants.

Perefixe smiled up at Doremus, stretched, lighted a pipe, and chuckled,
"As a great ecclesiast, Doremus, is it your opinion that I shall be
committing a venial or a mortal sin by publishing this little
masterpiece--the work of my favorite author--without the Bishop's
imprimatur?"

"Stephen! Buck! I think they're on to us! Maybe we've got to fold up
already and get the press and type out of here!" He told of being
shadowed. He telephoned to Julian, at M.M. headquarters, and (since
there were too many French-Canadian inspectors about for him to dare to
use his brand of French) he telephoned in the fine new German he had
been learning by translation:

"Denks du ihr Freunds dere haben a Idee die letzt Tag von vot ve mach
here?"

And the college-bred Julian had so much international culture as to be
able to answer: "Ja, Ich mein ihr vos sachen morning free. Look owid!"

How could they move? Where?

Dan Wilgus arrived, in panic, an hour after.

"Say! They're watching us!" Doremus, Buck, and the priest gathered round
the black viking of a man. "Just now when I came in I thought I heard
something in the bushes, here in the yard, near the house, and before I
thought, I flashed my torch on him, and by golly if it wasn't Aras
Dilley, and not in uniform--and you know how Aras loves his God--excuse
me, Father--how he loves his uniform. He was disguised! Sure! In
overalls! Looked like a jackass that's gone under a clothes-line! Well,
he'd been rubbering at the house. Course these curtains are drawn, but I
don't know what he saw and----"

The three large men looked to Doremus for orders.

"We got to get all this stuff out of here! Quick! Take it and hide it in
Truman Webb's attic. Stephen: get John Pollikop and Mungo Kitterick and
Pete Vutong on the phone--get 'em here, quick--tell John to stop by and
tell Julian to come as soon as he can. Dan: start dismantling the press.
Buck: bundle up all the literature." As he spoke, Doremus was wrapping
type in scraps of newspaper. And at three next morning, before light,
Pollikop was driving toward Truman Webb's farmhouse the entire equipment
of the New Underground printing establishment, in Buck's old farm truck,
from which blatted, for the benefit of all ears that might be concerned,
two frightened calves.

Next day Julian ventured to invite his superior officers, Shad Ledue and
Emil Staubmeyer, to a poker session at Buck's. They came, with alacrity.
They found Buck, Doremus, Mungo Kitterick, and Doc Itchitt--the last an
entirely innocent participant in certain deceptions.

They played in Buck's parlor. But during the evening Buck announced that
anyone wanting beer instead of whisky would find it in a tub of ice in
the basement, and that anyone wishing to wash his hands would find two
bathrooms upstairs.

Shad hastily went for beer. Doc Itchitt even more hastily went to wash
his hands. Both of them were gone much longer than one would have
expected.

When the party broke up and Buck and Doremus were alone, Buck shrieked
with bucolic mirth: "I could scarcely keep a straight face when I heard
good old Shad opening the cupboards and taking a fine long look-see for
pamphlets down in the basement. Well, Cap'n Jessup, that about ends
their suspicion of this place as a den of traitors, I guess! God, but
isn't Shad dumb!"

                           *     *     *

This was at perhaps 3 A.M. on the morning of June thirtieth.

Doremus stayed home, writing sedition, all the afternoon and evening of
the thirtieth, hiding the sheets under pages of newspaper in the
Franklin stove in his study, so that he could touch them off with a
match in case of a raid--a trick he had learned from Karl Billinger's
anti-Nazi _Fatherland_.

This new opus was devoted to murders ordered by Commissioner Effingham
Swan.

On the first and second of July, when he sauntered uptown, he was rather
noticeably encountered by the same weighty drummer who had picked him up
in the Hotel Wessex lobby before, and who now insisted on their having a
drink together. Doremus escaped, and was conscious that he was being
followed by an unknown young man, flamboyant in an apricot-colored polo
shirt and gray bags, whom he recognized as having worn M.M. uniform at a
parade in June. On July third, rather panicky, Doremus drove to Truman
Webb's, taking an hour of zigzagging to do it, and warned Truman not to
permit any more printing till he should have a release.

When Doremus went home, Sissy lightly informed him that Shad had
insisted she go out to an M.M. picnic with him on the next afternoon,
the Fourth, and that, information or no, she had refused. She was afraid
of him, surrounded by his ready playmates.

That night of the third, Doremus slept only in sick spasms. He was
reasonlessly convinced that he would be arrested before dawn. The night
was overcast and electric and uneasy. The crickets sounded as though
they were piping under compulsion, in a rhythm of terror. He lay
throbbing to their sound. He wanted to flee--but how and where, and how
could he leave his threatened family? For the first time in years he
wished that he were sleeping beside the unperturbable Emma, beside her
small earthy hillock of body. He laughed at himself. What could Emma do
to protect him against Minute Men? Just scream! And what then? But he,
who always slept with his door shut, to protect his sacred alone-ness,
popped out of bed to open the door, that he might have the comfort of
hearing her breathe, and the fiercer Mary stir in slumber, and Sissy's
occasional young whimper.

He was awakened before dawn by early firecrackers. He heard the tramping
of feet. He lay taut. Then he awoke again, at seven-thirty, and was
slightly angry that nothing happened.

****

The M.M.'s brought out their burnished helmets and all the rideable
horses in the neighborhood--some of them known as most superior
plow-horses--for the great celebration of the New Freedom on the morning
of Fourth of July. There was no post of the American Legion in the
jaunty parade. That organization had been completely suppressed, and a
number of American Legion leaders had been shot. Others had tactfully
taken posts in the M.M. itself.

The troops, in hollow square, with the ordinary citizenry humbly jammed
in behind them and the Jessup family rather hoity-toity on the
outskirts, were addressed by Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, a fine ruddy old
rooster who could say "Cock-a-doodle-do" with more profundity than any
fowl since Æsop. He announced that the Chief had extraordinary
resemblances to Washington, Jefferson, and William B. McKinley, and to
Napoleon on his better days.

The trumpets blew, the M.M.'s gallantly marched off nowhere in
particular, and Doremus went home, feeling much better after his laugh.
Following noon dinner, since it was raining, he proposed a game of
contract to Emma, Mary, and Sissy--with Mrs. Candy as volunteer umpire.

But the thunder of the hill country disquieted him. Whenever he was
dummy, he ambled to a window. The rain ceased; the sun came out for a
false, hesitating moment, and the wet grass looked unreal. Clouds with
torn bottoms, like the hem of a ragged skirt, were driven down the
valley, cutting off the bulk of Mount Faithful; the sun went out as in a
mammoth catastrophe; and instantly the world was in unholy darkness,
which poured into the room.

"Why, it's quite dark, isn't it! Sissy, turn on the lights," said Emma.

The rain attacked again, in a crash, and to Doremus, looking out, the
whole knowable world seemed washed out. Through the deluge he saw a huge
car flash, the great wheels throwing up fountains. "Wonder what make of
car that is? Must be a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, I guess," reflected
Doremus. The car swerved into his own gateway, almost knocking down a
gatepost, and stopped with a jar at his porch. From it leaped five
Minute Men, black waterproof capes over their uniforms. Before he could
quite get through the reflection that he recognized none of them, they
were there in the room. The leader, an ensign (and most certainly
Doremus did not recognize _him_) marched up to Doremus, looked at him
casually, and struck him full in the face.

Except for the one light pink of the bayonet when he had been arrested
before, except for an occasional toothache or headache, or a smart when
he had banged a fingernail, Doremus Jessup had not for thirty years
known authentic pain. It was as incredible as it was horrifying, this
torture in his eyes and nose and crushed mouth. He stood bent, gasping,
and the Ensign again smashed his face, and observed, "You are under
arrest."

Mary had launched herself on the Ensign, was hitting at him with a china
ash tray. Two M.M.'s dragged her off, threw her on the couch, and one of
them pinned her there. The other two guards were bulking over the
paralyzed Emma, the galvanized Sissy.

Doremus vomited suddenly and collapsed, as though he were dead drunk.

He was conscious that the five M.M.'s were yanking the books from the
shelves and hurling them on the floor, so that the covers split, and
with their pistol butts smashing vases and lamp shades and small
occasional tables. One of them tattooed a rough M M on the white
paneling above the fireplace with shots from his automatic.

The Ensign said only, "Careful, Jim," and kissed the hysterical Sissy.

Doremus struggled to get up. An M.M. kicked him in the elbow. It felt
like death itself, and Doremus writhed on the floor. He heard them
tramping upstairs. He remembered then that his manuscript about the
murders by Provincial Commissioner Effingham Swan was hidden in the
Franklin stove in his study.

The sound of their smashing of furniture in the bedrooms on the second
floor was like that of a dozen wood-choppers gone mad.

In all his agony, Doremus struggled to get up--to set fire to the papers
in the stove before they should be found. He tried to look at his women.
He could make out Mary, tied to the couch. (When had that ever
happened?) But his vision was too blurred, his mind too bruised, to see
anything clearly. Staggering, sometimes creeping on his hands and knees,
he did actually get past the men in the bedrooms and up the stairs to
the third floor and his study.

He was in time to see the Ensign throwing his best-beloved books and his
letter files, accumulated these twenty years, out of the study window,
to see him search the papers in the Franklin stove, look up with
cheerful triumph and cackle, "Nice piece you've written here, I guess,
Jessup. Commissioner Swan will love to see it!"

"I demand--see--Commissioner Ledue--Dist' Commissioner
Tasbrough--friends of mine," stammered Doremus.

"Don't know a thing about them. I'm running this show," the Ensign
chuckled, and slapped Doremus, not very painfully, merely with a
shamefulness as great as Doremus's when he realized that he had been so
cowardly as to appeal to Shad and Francis. He did not open his mouth
again, did not whimper nor even amuse the troopers by vainly appealing
on behalf of the women, as he was hustled down two flights of
stairs--they threw him down the lower flight and he landed on his raw
shoulder--and out to the big car.

The M.M. driver, who had been waiting behind the wheel, already had the
engine' running. The car whined away, threatening every instant to skid.
But the Doremus who had been queasy about skidding did not notice. What
could he do about it, anyway? He was helpless between two troopers in
the back seat, and his powerlessness to make the driver slow up seemed
part of all his powerlessness before the dictator's power... he who
had always so taken it for granted that in his dignity and social
security he was just slightly superior to laws and judges and policemen,
to all the risks and pain of ordinary workers.

He was unloaded, like a balky mule, at the jail entrance of the
courthouse. He resolved that when he was led before Shad he would so
rebuke the scoundrel that he would not forget it. But Doremus was not
taken into the courthouse. He was kicked toward a large, black-painted,
unlettered truck by the entrance--literally kicked, while even in his
bewildered anguish he speculated, "I wonder which is worse?--the
physical pain of being kicked, or the mental humiliation of being turned
into a slave? Hell! Don't be sophistical! It's the pain in the behind
that hurts most!"

He was hiked up a stepladder into the back of the truck.

From the unlighted interior a moan, "My God, not you too, Dormouse!" It
was the voice of Buck Titus, and with him as prisoners were Truman Webb
and Dan Wilgus. Dan was in handcuffs, because he had fought so.

The four men were too sore to talk much as they felt the truck lurch
away and they were thrown against one another. Once Doremus spoke
truthfully, "I don't know how to tell you how ghastly sorry I am to have
got you into this!" and once he lied, when Buck groaned, "Did those ----
---- hurt the girls?"

They must have ridden for three hours. Doremus was in such a coma of
suffering that even though his back winced as it bounced against the
rough floor and his face was all one neuralgia, he drowsed and woke to
terror, drowsed and woke, drowsed and woke to his own helpless wailing.

The truck stopped. The doors were opened on lights thick among white
brick buildings. He hazily saw that they were on the one-time Dartmouth
campus--headquarters now of the Corpo District Commissioner.

That commissioner was his old acquaintance Francis Tasbrough! He would
be released! They would be freed, all four!

The incredulity of his humiliation cleared away. He came out of his sick
fear like a shipwrecked man sighting an approaching boat.

But he did not see Tasbrough. The M.M.'s, silent save for mechanical
cursing, drove him into a hallway, into a cell which had once been part
of a sedate classroom, left him with a final clout on the head. He
dropped on a wooden pallet with a straw pillow and was instantly asleep.
He was too dazed--he who usually looked recordingly at places--to note
then or afterward what his cell was like, except that it appeared to be
filled with sulphuric fumes from a locomotive engine.

When he came to, his face seemed frozen stiff. His coat was torn, and
foul with the smell of vomit. He felt degraded, as though he had done
something shameful.

His door was violently opened, a dirt-clotted bowl of feeble coffee,
with a crust of bread faintly smeared with oleomargarine, was thrust at
him, and after he had given them up, nauseated, he was marched out into
the corridor, by two guards, just as he wanted to go to the toilet. Even
that he could forget in the paralysis of fear. One guard seized him by
the trim small beard and yanked it, laughing very much. "Always did want
to see whether a billygoat whisker would pull out or not!" snickered the
guard. While he was thus tormented, Doremus received a crack behind his
ear from the other man, and a scolding command, "Come on, goat! Want us
to milk you? You dirty little so-and-so! What you in for? You look like
a little Kike tailor, you little ----"

"Him?" the other scoffed. "Naw! He's some kind of a half-eared hick
newspaper editor--they'll sure shoot him--sedition--But I hope they'll
beat hell out of him first for being such a bum editor."

"Him? An editor? Say! Listen! I got a swell idea. Hey! Fellas!" Four or
five other M.M.'s, half dressed, looked out from a room down the hall.
"This-here is a writing-fellow! I'm going to make him show us how he
writes! Lookit!"

The guard dashed down the corridor to a door with the sign "Gents" hung
out in front of it, came back with paper, not clean, threw it in front
of Doremus, and yammered, "Come on, boss. Show us how you write your
pieces! Come on, write us a piece--with your nose!" He was iron-strong.
He pressed Doremus's nose down against the filthy paper and held it
there, while his mates giggled. They were interrupted by an officer,
commanding, though leniently, "Come on, boys, cut out the monkeyshines
and take this ---- to the bull pen. Trial this morning."

Doremus was led to a dirty room in which half-a-dozen prisoners were
waiting. One of them was Buck Titus. Over one eye Buck had a slatternly
bandage which had so loosened as to show that his forehead was cut to
the bone. Buck managed to wink jovially. Doremus tried, vainly, to keep
from sobbing.

He waited an hour, standing, arms tight at his side, at the demands of
an ugly-faced guard, snapping a dog whip with which he twice slashed
Doremus when his hands fell lax.

Buck was led into the trial room just before him. The door was closed.
Doremus heard Buck cry out terribly, as though he had been wounded to
death. The cry faded into a choked gasping. When Buck was led out of the
inner room, his face was as dirty and as pale as his bandage, over which
blood was now creeping. The man at the door of the inner room jerked his
thumb sharply at Doremus, and snarled, "You're _next_!"

Now he would face Tasbrough!

But in the small room into which he had been taken--and he was confused,
because somehow he had expected a large courtroom--there was only the
Ensign who had arrested him yesterday, sitting at a table, running
through papers, while a stolid M.M. stood on either side of him, rigid,
hand on pistol holster.

The Ensign kept him waiting, then snapped with disheartening suddenness,
"Your name!"

"You know it!"

The two guards beside Doremus each hit him.

"Your name?"

"Doremus Jessup."

"You're a Communist!"

"No I'm not!"

"Twenty-five lashes--and the oil."

Not believing, not understanding, Doremus was rushed across the room,
into a cellar beyond. A long wooden table there was dark with dry blood,
stank with dry blood. The guards seized Doremus, sharply jerked his head
back, pried open his jaws, and poured in a quart of castor oil. They
tore off his garments above the belt, flung them on the sticky floor.
They threw him face downward on the long table and began to lash him
with a one-piece steel fishing rod. Each stroke cut into the flesh of
his back, and they beat him slowly, relishing it, to keep him from
fainting too quickly. But he was unconscious when, to the guards' great
diversion, the castor oil took effect. Indeed he did not know it till he
found himself limp on a messy piece of gunnysacking on the floor of his
cell.

They awakened him twice during the night to demand, "You're a Communist,
heh? You better admit it! We're going to beat the living tar out of you
till you do!"

Though he was sicker than he had ever been in his life, yet he was also
angrier; too angry to admit anything whatever, even to save his wrecked
life. He simply snarled "No." But on the third beating he savagely
wondered if "No" was now a truthful answer. After each questioning he
was pounded again with fists, but not lashed with the steel rod, because
the headquarters doctor had forbidden it.

He was a sporty-looking young doctor in plus-fours. He yawned at the
guards, in the blood-reeking cellar, "Better cut out the lashes or this
---- will pass out on you."

Doremus raised his head from the table to gasp, "You call yourself a
doctor, and you associate with these murderers?"

"Oh, shut up, you little ----! Dirty traitors like you deserve to be
beaten to death--and maybe you will be, but I think the boys ought to
save you for the trial!" The doctor showed his scientific mettle by
twisting Doremus's ear till it felt as though it were torn off,
chuckled, "Go to it, boys," and ambled away, ostentatiously humming.

For three nights he was questioned and lashed--once, late at night, by
guards who complained of the inhuman callousness of their officers in
making them work so late. They amused themselves by using an old harness
strap, with a buckle on it, to beat him.

He almost broke down when the examining Ensign declared that Buck Titus
had confessed their illegal propaganda, and narrated so many details of
the work that Doremus could almost have believed in the confession. He
did not listen. He told himself, "No! Buck would die before he'd confess
anything. It's all Aras Dilley's spying."

The Ensign cooed, "Now if you'll just have the sense to copy your friend
Titus and tell us who's in the conspiracy besides him and you and Wilgus
and Webb, we'll let you go. We know, all right--oh, we know the whole
plot!--but we just want to find out whether you've finally come to your
senses and been converted, my little friend. Now who else was there?
Just give us their names. We'll let you go. Or would you like the castor
oil and the whip again?"

Doremus did not answer.

"Ten lashes," said the Ensign.

****

He was chased out for half an hour's walk on the campus every
afternoon--probably because he would have preferred lying on his hard
cot, trying to keep still enough so that his heart would stop its
deathly hammering. Half a hundred prisoners marched there, round and
round senselessly. He passed Buck Titus. To salute him would have meant
a blow from the guards. They greeted each other with quick eyelids, and
when he saw those untroubled spaniel eyes, Doremus knew that Buck had
not squealed.

And in the exercise yard he saw Dan Wilgus, but Dan was not walking
free; he was led out from the torture rooms by guards, and with his
crushed nose, his flattened ear, he looked as though he had been pounded
by a prize-fighter. He seemed partly paralyzed. Doremus tried to get
information about Dan from a guard in his cell corridor. The guard--a
handsome, clear-cheeked young man, noted in a valley of the White
Mountains as a local beau, and very kind to his mother--laughed, "Oh,
your friend Wilgus? That chump thinks he can lick his weight in
wildcats. I hear he always tries to soak the guards. They'll take that
out of him, all right!"

Doremus thought, that night--he could not be sure, but he thought he
heard Dan wailing, half the night. Next morning he was told that Dan,
who had always been so disgusted when he had had to set up the news of a
weakling's suicide, had hanged himself in his cell.

****

Then, unexpectedly, Doremus was taken into a room, this time reasonably
large, a former English classroom turned into a court, for his trial.

But it was not District Commissioner Francis Tasbrough who was on the
bench, nor any Military Judge, but no less a Protector of the People
than the great new Provincial Commissioner, Effingham Swan.

Swan was looking at Doremus's article about him as Doremus was led up to
stand before the bench. He spoke--and this harsh, tired-looking man was
no longer the airy Rhodes Scholar who had sported with Doremus once like
a boy pulling the wings off flies.

"Jessup, do you plead guilty to seditious activities?"

"Why----" Doremus looked helplessly about for something in the way of
legal counsel.

"Commissioner Tasbrough!" called Swan.

So at last Doremus did see his boyhood playmate.

Tasbrough did nothing so commendable as to avoid Doremus's eyes. Indeed
he looked at Doremus directly, and most affably, as he spoke his piece:

"Your Excellency, it gives me great pain to have to expose this man,
Jessup, whom I have known all my life, and tried to help, but he always
was a smart-aleck--he was a laughing-stock in Fort Beulah for the way he
tried to show off as a great political leader!--and when the Chief was
elected, he was angry because he didn't get any political office, and he
went about everywhere trying to disaffect people--I have heard him do so
myself."

"That's enough. Thanks. County Commissioner Ledue... Captain Ledue,
is it or is it not true that the man Jessup tried to persuade you to
join a violent plot against my person?"

But Shad did not look at Doremus as he mumbled, "It's true."

Swan crackled, "Gentlemen, I think that that, plus the evidence
contained in the prisoner's own manuscript, which I hold here, is
sufficient testimony. Prisoner, if it weren't for your age and your damn
silly senile weakness, I'd sentence you to a hundred lashes, as I do all
the other Communists like you that threaten the Corporate State. As it
is, I sentence you to be held in concentration camp, at the will of the
Court, but with a minimum sentence of seventeen years." Doremus
calculated rapidly. He was sixty-two now. He would be seventy-nine
_then_. He never would see freedom again. "And, in the power of issuing
emergency decrees, conferred upon me as Provincial Commissioner, I also
sentence you to death by shooting, but I suspend that sentence--though
only until such time as you may be caught trying to escape! And I hope
you'll have just lots and lots of time in prison, Jessup, to think about
how clever you were in this entrancing article you wrote about me! And
to remember that any nasty cold morning they may take you out in the
rain and shoot you." He ended with a mild suggestion to the guards: "And
twenty lashes!"

Two minutes later they had forced castor oil down him; he lay trying to
bite at the stained wood of the whipping-table; and he could hear the
whish of the steel fishing rod as a guard playfully tried it out in the
air before bringing it down across the crisscross wounds of his raw
back.




CHAPTER 31


As the open prison van approached the concentration camp at Trianon, the
last light of afternoon caressed the thick birch and maples and poplars
up the pyramid of Mount Faithful. But the grayness swiftly climbed the
slope, and all the valley was left in cold shadow. In his seat the sick
Doremus drooped again in listlessness.

****

The prim Georgian buildings of the girls' school which had been turned
into a concentration camp at Trianon, nine miles north of Fort Beulah,
had been worse used than Dartmouth, where whole buildings were reserved
for the luxuries of the Corpos and their female cousins, all very snotty
and parvenu. The Trianon school seemed to have been gouged by a flood.
Marble doorsteps had been taken away. (One of them now graced the
residence of the wife of the Superintendent, Mrs. Cowlick, a woman fat,
irate, jeweled, religious, and given to announcing that all opponents of
the Chief were Communists and ought to be shot offhand.) Windows were
smashed. "Hurrah for the Chief" had been chalked on brick walls and
other chalked words, each of four letters, had been rubbed out, not very
thoroughly. The lawns and hollyhock beds were a mess of weeds.

The buildings stood on three sides of a square; the fourth side and the
gaps between buildings were closed with unpainted pine fences topped
with strands of barbed wire.

Every room except the office of Captain Cowlick, the Superintendent (he
was as near nothing at all as any man can be who has attained to such
honors as being a captain in the Quartermaster Corps and the head of a
prison) was smeared with filth. His office was merely dreary, and
scented with whisky, not, like the other rooms, with ammonia.

Cowlick was not too ill-natured. He wished that the camp guards, all
M.M.'s, would not treat the prisoners viciously, except when they tried
to escape. But he was a mild man; much too mild to hurt the feelings of
the M.M.'s and perhaps set up inhibitions in their psyches by
interfering with their methods of discipline. The poor fellows probably
meant well when they lashed noisy inmates for insisting they had
committed no crime. And the good Cowlick saved Doremus's life for a
while; let him lie for a month in the stuffy hospital and have actual
beef in his daily beef stew. The prison doctor, a decayed old drunkard
who had had his medical training in the late 'eighties and who had been
somewhat close to trouble in civil life for having performed too many
abortions, was also good-natured enough, when sober, and at last he
permitted Doremus to have Dr. Marcus Olmsted in from Fort Beulah, and
for the first time in four weeks Doremus had news, any news whatsoever,
of the world beyond prison.

Where in normal life it would have been agony to wait for one hour to
know what might be happening to his friends, his family, now for one
month he had not known whether they were alive or dead.

Dr. Olmsted--as guilty as Doremus himself of what the Corpos called
treason--dared speak to him only a moment, because the prison doctor
stayed in the hospital ward all the while, drooling over whip-scarred
patients and daubing iodine more or less near their wounds. Olmsted sat
on the edge of his cot, with its foul blankets, unwashed for months, and
muttered rapidly:

"Quick! Listen! Don't talk! Mrs. Jessup and your two girls are all
right--they're scared, but no signs of their being arrested. Hear
Lorinda Pike is all right. Your grandson, David, looks fine--though I'm
afraid he'll grow up a Corpo, like all the youngsters. Buck Titus is
alive--at another concentration camp--the one near Woodstock. Our N.U.
cell at Fort Beulah is doing what it can--no publishing, but we forward
information--get a lot from Julian Falck--great joke: he's been
promoted, M.M. Squad-Leader now! Mary and Sissy and Father Perefixe keep
distributing pamphlets from Boston; they help the Quinn boy (my driver)
and me to forward refugees to Canada.... Yes, we carry on....
About like an oxygen tent for a patient that's dying of pneumonia!...
It hurts to see you looking like a ghost, Doremus. But you'll pull
through. You've got pretty good nerves for a little cuss! That
aged-in-the-keg prison doctor is looking this way. Bye!"

****

He was not permitted to see Dr. Olmsted again, but it was probably
Olmsted's influence that got him, when he was dismissed from the
hospital, still shaky but well enough to stumble about, a vastly
desirable job as sweeper of cells and corridors, cleaner of lavatories
and scrubber of toilets, instead of working in the woods gang, up Mount
Faithful, where old men who sank under the weight of logs were said to
be hammered to death by guards under the sadistic Ensign Stoyt, when
Captain Cowlick wasn't looking. It was better, too, than the undesirable
idleness of being disciplined in the "dog house" where you lay naked, in
darkness, and where "bad cases" were reformed by being kept awake for
forty-eight or even ninety-six hours. Doremus was a conscientious
toilet-cleaner. He didn't like the work very much, but he had pride in
being able to scrub as skillfully as any professional pearl-diver in a
Greek lunch-room, and satisfaction in lessening a little the
wretchedness of his imprisoned comrades by giving them clean floors.

For, he told himself, they were his comrades. He saw that he, who had
thought of himself as a capitalist because he could hire and fire, and
because theoretically he "owned his business," had been as helpless as
the most itinerant janitor, once it seemed worth while to the Big
Business which Corpoism represented to get rid of him. Yet he still told
himself stoutly that he did not believe in a dictatorship of the
proletariat any more than he believed in a dictatorship of the bankers
and utility-owners; he still insisted that any doctor or preacher,
though economically he might be as insecure as the humblest of his
flock, who did not feel that he was a little better than they, and
privileged to enjoy working a little harder, was a rotten doctor or a
preacher without grace. He felt that he himself had been a better and
more honorable reporter than Doc Itchitt, and a thundering sight better
student of politics than most of his shopkeeper and farmer and factory
worker readers.

Yet bourgeois pride was so gone out of him that he was flattered, a
little thrilled, when he was universally called "Doremus" and not "Mr.
Jessup" by farmer and workman and truck-driver and plain hobo; when they
thought enough of his courage under beating and his good-temper under
being crowded with others in a narrow cell to regard him as almost as
good as their own virile selves.

Karl Pascal mocked him. "I told you so, Doremus! You'll be a Communist
yet!"

"Yes, maybe I will, Karl--after you Communists kick out all your false
prophets and bellyachers and power drunkards, and all your press-agents
for the Moscow subway."

"Well, all right, why don't you join Max Eastman? I hear he's escaped to
Mexico and has a whole big pure Trotzkyite Communist party of seventeen
members there!"

"Seventeen? Too many. What I want is mass action by just one member,
alone on a hilltop. I'm a great optimist, Karl. I still hope America may
some day rise to the standards of Kit Carson!"

****

As sweeper and scrubber, Doremus had unusual chances for gossip with
other prisoners. He chuckled when he thought of how many of his fellow
criminals were acquaintances: Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, his own cousin,
Louis Rotenstern, who looked now like a corpse, unforgettingly wounded
in his old pride of having become a "real American," Clif Little, the
jeweler, who was dying of consumption, Ben Tripper, who had been the
jolliest workman in Medary Cole's grist mill, Professor Victor Loveland,
of the defunct Isaiah College, and Raymond Pridewell, that old Tory who
was still so contemptuous of flattery, so clean amid dirt, so hawk-eyed,
that the guards were uncomfortable when they beat him.... Pascal, the
Communist, Pridewell, the squirearchy Republican, and Henry Veeder, who
had never cared a hang about politics, and who had recovered from the
first shocks of imprisonment, these three had become intimates, because
they had more arrogance of utter courage than anyone else in the prison.

****

For home Doremus shared with five other men a cell twelve feet by ten
and eight feet high, which a finishing-school girl had once considered
outrageously confined for one lone young woman. Here they slept, in two
tiers of three bunks each; here they ate, washed, played cards, read,
and enjoyed the leisurely contemplation which, as Captain Cowlick
preached to them every Sunday morning, was to reform their black souls
and turn them into loyal Corpos.

None of them, certainly not Doremus, complained much. They got used to
sleeping in a jelly of tobacco smoke and human stench, to eating stews
that always left them nervously hungry, to having no more dignity or
freedom than monkeys in a cage, as a man gets used to the indignity of
having to endure cancer. Only it left in them a murderous hatred of
their oppressors so that they, men of peace all of them, would gladly
have hanged every Corpo, mild or vicious. Doremus understood John Brown
much better.

His cell mates were Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, and three men whom he had
not known: a Boston architect, a farm hand, and a dope fiend who had
once kept questionable restaurants. They had good talk--especially from
the dope fiend, who placidly defended crime in a world where the only
real crime had been poverty.

****

The worst torture to Doremus, aside from the agony of actual floggings,
was the waiting.

The Waiting. It became a distinct, tangible thing, as individual and
real as Bread or Water. How long would he be in? How long would he be
in? Night and day, asleep and waking, he worried it, and by his bunk saw
waiting the figure of Waiting, a gray, foul ghost.

It was like waiting in a filthy station for a late train, not for hours
but for months.

Would Swan amuse himself by having Doremus taken out and shot? He could
not care much, now; he could not picture it, any more than he could
picture kissing Lorinda, walking through the woods with Buck, playing
with David and Foolish, or anything less sensual than the ever derisive
visions of roast beef with gravy, of a hot bath, last and richest of
luxuries where their only way of washing, except for a fortnightly
shower, was with a dirty shirt dipped in the one basin of cold water for
six men.

Besides Waiting, one other ghost hung about them--the notion of
Escaping. It was of that (far more than of the beastliness and idiocy of
the Corpos) that they whispered in the cell at night. When to escape.
How to escape. To sneak off through the bushes when they were out with
the woods gang? By some magic to cut through the bars on their cell
window and drop out and blessedly not be seen by the patrols? To manage
to hang on underneath one of the prison trucks and be driven away? (A
childish fantasy!) They longed for escape as hysterically and as often
as a politician longs for votes. But they had to discuss it cautiously,
for there were stool pigeons all over the prison.

This was hard for Doremus to believe. He could not understand a man's
betraying his companions, and he did not believe it till, two months
after Doremus had gone to concentration camp, Clifford Little betrayed
to the guards Henry Veeder's plan to escape in a hay wagon. Henry was
properly dealt with. Little was released. And Doremus, it may be,
suffered over it nearly as much as either of them, sturdily though he
tried to argue that Little had tuberculosis and that the often beatings
had bled out his soul.

****

Each prisoner was permitted one visitor a fortnight and, in sequence,
Doremus saw Emma, Mary, Sissy, David. But always an M.M. was standing
two feet away, listening, and Doremus had from them nothing more than a
fluttering, "We're all fine--we hear Buck is all right--we hear Lorinda
is doing fine in her new tea room--Philip writes he is all right." And
once came Philip himself, his pompous son, more pompous than ever now as
a Corpo judge, and very hurt about his father's insane
radicalism--considerably more hurt when Doremus tartly observed that he
would much rather have had the dog Foolish for visitor.

And there were letters--all censored--worse than useless to a man who
had been so glad to hear the living voices of his friends.

In the long run, these frustrate visits, these empty letters, made his
waiting the more dismal, because they suggested that perhaps he was
wrong in his nightly visions; perhaps the world outside was not so
loving and eager and adventurous as he remembered it, but only dreary as
his cell.

****

He had little known Karl Pascal, yet now the argumentative Marxian was
his nearest friend, his one amusing consolation. Karl could and did
prove that the trouble with leaky valves, sour cow pastures, the
teaching of calculus, and all novels was their failure to be guided by
the writings of Lenin.

In his new friendship, Doremus was old-maidishly agitated lest Karl be
taken out and shot, the recognition usually given to Communists. He
discovered that he need not worry. Karl had been in jail before. He was
the trained agitator for whom Doremus had longed in New Underground
days. He had ferreted out so many scandals about the financial and
sexual shenanigans of every one of the guards that they were afraid that
even while he was being shot, he might tattle to the firing-squad. They
were much more anxious for his good opinion than for that of Captain
Cowlick, and they timidly brought him little presents of chewing tobacco
and Canadian newspapers, as though they were schoolchildren honeying up
to teacher.

When Aras Dilley was transferred from night patrols in Fort Beulah to
the position of guard at Trianon--a reward for having given to Shad
Ledue certain information about R. C. Crowley which cost that banker
hundreds of dollars--Aras, that slinker, that able snooper, jumped at
the sight of Karl and began to look pious and kind. He had known Karl
before!

****

Despite the presence of Stoyt, Ensign of guards, an ex-cashier who had
once enjoyed shooting dogs and who now, in the blessed escape of
Corpoism, enjoyed lashing human beings, the camp at Trianon was not so
cruel as the district prison at Hanover. But from the dirty window of
his cell Doremus saw horrors enough.

One mid-morning, a radiant September morning with the air already
savoring the peace of autumn, he saw the firing-squad marching out his
cousin, Henry Veeder, who had recently tried to escape. Henry had been a
granite monolith of a man. He had walked like a soldier. He had, in his
cell, been proud of shaving every morning, as once he had done, with a
tin basin of water heated on the stove, in the kitchen of his old white
house up on Mount Terror. Now he stooped, and toward death he walked
with dragging feet. His face of a Roman senator was smeared from the cow
dung into which they had flung him for his last slumber.

As they tramped out through the quadrangle gate, Ensign Stoyt,
commanding the squad, halted Henry, laughed at him, and calmly kicked
him in the groin.

They lifted him up. Three minutes later Doremus heard a ripple of shots.
Three minutes after that the squad came back bearing on an old door a
twisted clay figure with vacant open eyes. Then Doremus cried aloud. As
the bearers slanted the stretcher, the figure rolled to the ground.

But one thing worse he was to see through the accursed window. The
guards drove in, as new prisoners, Julian Falck, in torn uniform, and
Julian's grandfather, so fragile, so silvery, so bewildered and
terrified in his muddied clericals.

He saw them kicked across the quadrangle into a building once devoted to
instruction in dancing and the more delicate airs for the piano; devoted
now to the torture room and the solitary cells.

Not for two weeks, two weeks of waiting that was like ceaseless ache,
did he have a chance, at exercise hour, to speak for a moment to Julian,
who muttered, "They caught me writing some inside dope about M.M. graft.
It was to have gone to Sissy. Thank God, nothing on it to show who it
was for!" Julian had passed on. But Doremus had had time to see that his
eyes were hopeless, and that his neat, smallish, clerical face was
blue-black with bruises.

The administration (or so Doremus guessed) decided that Julian, the
first spy among the M.M.'s who had been caught in the Fort Beulah
region, was too good a subject of sport to be wastefully shot at once.
He should be kept for an example. Often Doremus saw the guards kick him
across the quadrangle to the whipping room and imagined that he could
hear Julian's shrieks afterward. He wasn't even kept in a punishment
cell, but in an open barred den on an ordinary corridor, so that passing
inmates could peep in and see him, welts across his naked back, huddled
on the floor, whimpering like a beaten dog.

And Doremus had sight of Julian's grandfather sneaking across the
quadrangle, stealing a soggy hunk of bread from a garbage can, and
fiercely chewing at it.

All through September Doremus worried lest Sissy, with Julian now gone
from Fort Beulah, be raped by Shad Ledue.... Shad would leer the
while, and gloat over his ascent from hired man to irresistible master.

****

Despite his anguish over the Falcks and Henry Veeder and every
uncouthest comrade in prison, Doremus was almost recovered from his
beatings by late September. He began delightedly to believe that he
would live for another ten years; was slightly ashamed of his delight,
in the presence of so much agony, but he felt like a young man
and----And straightway Ensign Stoyt was there (two or three o'clock at
night it must have been), yanking Doremus out of his bunk, pulling him
to his feet, knocking him down again with so violent a crack in his
mouth that Doremus instantly sank again into all his trembling fear, all
his inhuman groveling.

He was dragged into Captain Cowlick's office.

The Captain was courtly:

"Mr. Jessup, we have information that you were connected with
Squad-Leader Julian Falck's treachery. He has, uh, well, to be frank,
he's broken down and confessed. Now you yourself are in no danger, no
danger whatever, of further punishment, if you will just help us. But we
really must make a warning of young Mr. Falck, and so if you will tell
us all you know about the boy's shocking infidelity to the colors, we
shall hold it in your favor. How would you like to have a nice bedroom
to sleep in, all by yourself?"

A quarter hour later Doremus was still swearing that he knew nothing
whatever of any "subversive activities" on the part of Julian.

Captain Cowlick said, rather testily, "Well, since you refuse to respond
to our generosity, I must leave you to Ensign Stoyt, I'm afraid....
Be gentle with him, Ensign."

"Yessr," said the Ensign.

The Captain wearily trotted out of the room and Stoyt did indeed speak
with gentleness, which was a surprise to Doremus, because in the room
were two of the guards to whom Stoyt liked to show off:

"Jessup, you're a man of intelligence. No use your trying to protect
this boy, Falck, because we've got enough on him to execute him anyway.
So it won't be hurting him any if you give us a few more details about
his treason. And you'll be doing yourself a good turn."

Doremus said nothing.

"Going to talk?"

Doremus shook his head.

"All right, then.... Tillett!"

"Yessr."

"Bring in the guy that squealed on Jessup!"

Doremus expected the guard to fetch Julian, but it was Julian's
grandfather who wavered into the room. In the camp quadrangle Doremus
had often seen him trying to preserve the dignity of his frock coat by
rubbing at the spots with a wet rag, but in the cells there were no
hooks for clothes, and the priestly garment--Mr. Falck was a poor man
and it had not been very expensive at best--was grotesquely wrinkled
now. He was blinking with sleepiness, and his silver hair was a hurrah's
nest.

Stoyt (he was thirty or so) said cheerfully to the two elders, "Well,
now, you boys better stop being naughty and try to get some sense into
your mildewed old brains, and then we can all have some decent sleep.
Why don't you two try to be honest, now that you've each confessed that
the other was a traitor?"

"What?" marveled Doremus.

"Sure! Old Falck here says you carried his grandson's pieces to the
_Vermont Vigilance_. Come on, now, if you'll tell us who published that
rag----"

"I have confessed nothing. I have nothing to confess," said Mr. Falck.

Stoyt screamed, "Will you shut up? You old hypocrite!" Stoyt knocked him
to the floor, and as Mr. Falck weaved dizzily on hands and knees, kicked
him in the side with a heavy boot. The other two guards were holding
back the sputtering Doremus. Stoyt jeered at Mr. Falck, "Well, you old
bastard, you're on your knees, so let's hear you pray!"

"I shall!"

In agony Mr. Falck raised his head, dust-smeared from the floor,
straightened his shoulders, held up trembling hands, and with such
sweetness in his voice as Doremus had once heard in it when men were
human, he cried, "Father, Thou hast forgiven so long! Forgive them not
but curse them, for they know what they do!" He tumbled forward, and
Doremus knew that he would never hear that voice again.

                           *     *     *

In _La Voix littéraire_ of Paris, the celebrated and genial professor of
belles-lettres, Guillaume Semit, wrote with his accustomed sympathy:

    I do not pretend to any knowledge of politics, and probably what
    I saw on my fourth journey to the States United this summer of
    1938 was mostly on the surface and cannot be considered a
    profound analysis of the effects of Corpoism, but I assure you
    that I have never before seen that nation so great, our young
    and gigantic cousin in the West, in such bounding health and
    good spirits. I leave it to my economic confrères to explain
    such dull phenomena as wage-scales, and tell only what I saw,
    which is that the innumerable parades and vast athletic
    conferences of the Minute Men and the lads and lassies of the
    Corpo Youth Movement exhibited such rosy, contented faces, such
    undeviating enthusiasm for their hero, the Chief, M. Windrip,
    that involuntarily I exclaimed, "Here is a whole nation dipped
    in the River of Youth."

    Everywhere in the country was such feverish rebuilding of public
    edifices and apartment houses for the poor as has never hitherto
    been known. In Washington, my old colleague, M. le Secretary
    Macgoblin, was so good as to cry, in that virile yet cultivated
    manner of his which is so well known, "Our enemies maintain that
    our labor camps are virtual slavery. Come, my old one! You shall
    see for yourself." He conducted me by one of the marvelously
    speedy American automobiles to such a camp, near Washington, and
    having the workers assembled, he put to them frankly: "Are you
    low in the heart?" As one man they chorused, "No," with a spirit
    like our own brave soldiers on the ramparts of Verdun.

    During the full hour we spent there, I was permitted to roam at
    will, asking such questions as I cared to, through the offices
    of the interpreter kindly furnished by His Excellency, M. le Dr.
    Macgoblin, and every worker whom I thus approached assured me
    that never has he been so well fed, so tenderly treated, and so
    assisted to find an almost poetic interest in his chosen work as
    in this labor camp--this scientific coöperation for the
    well-being of all.

    With a certain temerity I ventured to demand of M. Macgoblin
    what truth was there in the reports so shamefully circulated
    (especially, alas, in our beloved France) that in the
    concentration camps the opponents of Corpoism are ill fed and
    harshly treated. M. Macgoblin explained to me that there are no
    such things as "concentration camps," if that term is to carry
    any penological significance. They are, actually, schools, in
    which adults who have unfortunately been misled by the glib
    prophets of that milk-and-water religion, "Liberalism," are
    reconditioned to comprehend the new day of authoritative
    economic control. In such camps, he assured me, there are
    actually no guards, but only patient teachers, and men who were
    once utterly uncomprehending of Corpoism, and therefore opposed
    to it, are now daily going forth as the most enthusiastic
    disciples of the Chief.

    Alas that France and Great Britain should still be thrashing
    about in the slough of Parliamentarianism and so-called
    Democracy, daily sinking deeper into debt and paralysis of
    industry, because of the cowardice and traditionalism of our
    Liberal leaders, feeble and outmoded men who are afraid to plump
    for either Fascism or Communism; who dare not--or who are too
    power hungry--to cast off outmoded techniques, like the Germans,
    Americans, Italians, Turks, and other really courageous peoples,
    and place the sane and scientific control of the all-powerful
    Totalitarian State in the hands of Men of Resolution!

In October, John Pollikop, arrested on suspicion of having just possibly
helped a refugee to escape, arrived in the Trianon camp, and the first
words between him and his friend Karl Pascal were no inquiries about
health, but a derisive interchange, as though they were continuing a
conversation broken only half an hour before:

"Well, you old Bolshevik, I told you so! If you Communists had joined
with me and Norman Thomas to back Frank Roosevelt, we wouldn't be here
now!"

"Rats! Why, it's Thomas and Roosevelt that started Fascism! I ask you!
Now shut up, John, and listen: What was the New Deal but pure Fascism?
Whadthey do to the worker? Look here! No, wait now, listen----"

Doremus felt at home again, and comforted--though he did also feel that
Foolish probably had more constructive economic wisdom than John
Pollikop, Karl Pascal, Herbert Hoover, Buzz Windrip, Lee Sarason, and
himself put together; or if not, Foolish had the sense to conceal his
lack of wisdom by pretending that he could not speak English.

****

Shad Ledue, back in his hotel suite, reflected that he was getting a
dirty deal. He had been responsible for sending more traitors to
concentration camps than any other county commissioner in the province,
yet he had not been promoted.

It was late; he was just back from a dinner given by Francis Tasbrough
in honor of Provincial Commissioner Swan and a board consisting of Judge
Philip Jessup, Director of Education Owen J. Peaseley, and Brigadier
Kippersly, who were investigating the ability of Vermont to pay more
taxes.

Shad felt discontented. All those damned snobs trying to show off!
Talking at dinner about this bum show in New York--this first Corpo
revue, _Callin' Stalin_, written by Lee Sarason and Hector Macgoblin.
How those nuts had put on the agony about "Corpo art," and "drama freed
from Jewish suggestiveness" and "the pure line of Anglo-Saxon sculpture"
and even, by God, about "Corporate physics"! Simply trying to show off!
And they had paid no attention to Shad when he had told his funny story
about the stuck-up preacher in Fort Beulah, one Falck, who had been so
jealous because the M.M.'s drilled on Sunday morning instead of going to
his gospel shop that he had tried to get his grandson to make up lies
about the M.M.'s, and whom Shad had amusingly arrested right in his own
church! Not paid one bit of attention to him, even though he had
carefully read all through the Chief's _Zero Hour_ so he could quote it,
and though he had been careful to be refined in his table manners and to
stick out his little finger when he drank from a glass.

He was lonely.

The fellows he had once best known, in pool room and barber shop, seemed
frightened of him, now, and the dirty snobs like Tasbrough still ignored
him.

He was lonely for Sissy Jessup.

Since her dad had been sent to Trianon, Shad didn't seem able to get her
to come around to his rooms, even though he was the County Commissioner
and she was nothing now but the busted daughter of a criminal.

And he was crazy about her. Why, he'd be almost willing to marry her, if
he couldn't get her any other way! But when he had hinted as much--or
almost as much--she had just laughed at him, the dirty little snob!

He had thought, when he was a hired man, that there was a lot more fun
in being rich and famous. He didn't feel one bit different than he had
then! Funny!




CHAPTER 32


Dr. Lionel Adams, B.A. of Yale, Ph.D. of Chicago, Negro, had been a
journalist, American consul in Africa and, at the time of Berzelius
Windrip's election, professor of anthropology in Howard University. As
with all his colleagues, his professorship was taken over by a most
worthy and needy white man, whose training in anthropology had been as
photographer on one expedition to Yucatan. In the dissension between the
Booker Washington school of Negroes who counseled patience in the new
subjection of the Negroes to slavery, and the radicals who demanded that
they join the Communists and struggle for the economic freedom of all,
white or black, Professor Adams took the mild, Fabian former position.

He went over the country preaching to his people that they must be
"realistic," and make what future they could; not in some Utopian
fantasy but on the inescapable basis of the ban against them.

Near Burlington, Vermont, there is a small colony of Negroes, truck
farmers, gardeners, houseworkers, mostly descended from slaves who,
before the Civil War, escaped to Canada by the "Underground Railway"
conducted by such zealots as Truman Webb's grandfather, but who
sufficiently loved the land of their forcible adoption to return to
America after the war. From the colony had gone to the great cities
young colored people who (before the Corpo emancipation) had been
nurses, doctors, merchants, officials.

This colony Professor Adams addressed, bidding the young colored rebels
to seek improvement within their own souls rather than in mere social
superiority.

As he was in person unknown to this Burlington colony, Captain Oscar
Ledue, nicknamed "Shad," was summoned to censor the lecture. He sat
hulked down in a chair at the back of the hall. Aside from addresses by
M.M. officers, and moral inspiration by his teachers in grammar school,
it was the first lecture he had ever heard in his life, and he didn't
think much of it. He was irritated that this stuck-up nigger didn't
spiel like the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen, one of Shad's favorite
authors, but had the nerve to try to sling English just as good as Shad
himself. It was more irritating that the loud-mouthed pup should look so
much like a bronze statue, and finally, it was simply more than a guy
could stand that the big bum should be wearing a Tuxedo!

So when Adams, as he called himself, claimed that there were good poets
and teachers and even doctors and engineers among the niggers, which was
plainly an effort to incite folks to rebellion against the government,
Shad signaled his squad and arrested Adams in the midst of his lecture,
addressing him, "You God-damn dirty, ignorant, stinking nigger! I'm
going to shut your big mouth for you, for keeps!"

Dr. Adams was taken to the Trianon concentration camp. Ensign Stoyt
thought it would be a good joke on those fresh beggars (almost
Communists, you might say) Jessup and Pascal to lodge the nigger right
in the same cell with them. But they actually seemed to like Adams;
talked to him as though he were white and educated! So Stoyt placed him
in a solitary cell, where he could think over his crime in having bitten
the hand that had fed him.

****

The greatest single shock that ever came to the Trianon camp was in
November, 1938, when there appeared among them, as the newest prisoner,
Shad Ledue.

It was he who was responsible for nearly half of them being there.

The prisoners whispered that he had been arrested on charges by Francis
Tasbrough; officially, for having grafted on shopkeepers; unofficially,
for having failed to share enough of the graft with Tasbrough. But such
cloudy causes were less discussed than the question of how they would
murder Shad now they had him safe.

****

All Minute Men who were under discipline, except only such Reds as
Julian Falck, were privileged prisoners in the concentration camps; they
were safeguarded against the common, i.e., criminal, i.e., political
inmates; and most of them, once reformed, were returned to the M.M.
ranks, with a greatly improved knowledge of how to flog malcontents.
Shad was housed by himself in a single cell like a not-too-bad
hall-bedroom, and every evening he was permitted to spend two hours in
the officers' mess room. The scum could not get at him, because his
exercise hour was at a time different from theirs.

Doremus begged the plotters against Shad to restrain themselves.

"Good Lord, Doremus, do you mean that after the sure-enough battles
we've gone through you're still a bourgeois pacifist--that you still
believe in the sanctity of a lump of hog meat like Ledue?" demanded Karl
Pascal.

"Well, yes, I do--a little. I know that Shad came from a family of
twelve underfed brats up on Mount Terror. Not much chance. But more
important than that, I don't believe in individual assassination as an
effective means of fighting despotism. The blood of the tyrants is the
seed of the massacre and----"

"Are you taking a cue from me and quoting sound doctrine when it's the
time for a little liquidation?" said Karl. "This one tyrant's going to
lose a lot of blood!"

The Pascal whom Doremus had considered as, at his most violent, only a
gas bag, looked at him with a stare in which all friendliness was
frozen. Karl demanded of his cell mates, a different set now than at
Doremus's arrival, "Shall we get rid of this typhus germ, Ledue?"

John Pollikop, Truman Webb, the surgeon, the carpenter, each of them
nodded, slowly, without feeling.

****

At exercise hour, the discipline of the men marching out to the
quadrangle was broken when one prisoner stumbled, with a cry, knocked
over another man, and loudly apologized--just at the barred entrance of
Shad Ledue's cell. The accident made a knot collect before the cell.
Doremus, on the edge of it, saw Shad looking out, his wide face blank
with fear.

Someone, somehow, had lighted and thrown into Shad's cell a large wad of
waste, soaked with gasoline. It caught the thin wallboard which divided
Shad's cell from the next. The whole room looked presently like the fire
box of a furnace. Shad was screaming, as he beat at his sleeves, his
shoulders. Doremus remembered the scream of a horse clawed by wolves in
the Far North.

When they got Shad out, he was dead. He had no face at all.

****

Captain Cowlick was deposed as superintendent of the camp, and vanished
to the insignificance whence he had come. He was succeeded by Shad's
friend, the belligerent Snake Tizra, now a battalion-leader. His first
executive act was to have all the two hundred inmates drawn up in the
quadrangle and to announce, "I'm not going to tell you guys anything
about how I'm going to feed you or sleep you till I've finished putting
the fear of God into every one of you murderers!"

There were offers of complete pardon for anyone who would betray the man
who had thrown the burning waste into Shad's cell. It was followed by
enthusiastic private offers from the prisoners that anyone who did thus
tattle would not live to get out. So, as Doremus had guessed, they all
suffered more than Shad's death had been worth--and to him, thinking of
Sissy, thinking of Shad's testimony at Hanover, it had been worth a
great deal; it had been very precious and lovely.

A court of special inquiry was convened, with Provincial Commissioner
Effingham Swan himself presiding (he was very busy with all bad works;
he used aëroplanes to be about them). Ten prisoners, one out of every
twenty in the camp, were chosen by lot and shot summarily. Among them
was Professor Victor Loveland, who, for all his rags and scars, was
neatly academic to the last, with his eyeglasses and his slick
tow-colored hair parted in the middle as he looked at the firing-squad.

Suspects like Julian Falck were beaten more often, kept longer in those
cells in which one could not stand, sit, nor lie.

Then, for two weeks in December, all visitors and all letters were
forbidden, and newly arrived prisoners were shut off by themselves; and
the cell mates, like boys in a dormitory, would sit up till midnight in
whispered discussion as to whether this was more vengeance by Snake
Tizra, or whether something was happening in the World Outside that was
too disturbing for the prisoners to know.




CHAPTER 33


When the Falcks and John Pollikop had been arrested and had joined her
father in prison, when such more timid rebels as Mungo Kitterick and
Harry Kindermann had been scared away from New Underground activities,
Mary Greenhill had to take over the control of the Fort Beulah cell,
with only Sissy, Father Perefixe, Dr. Olmsted and his driver, and
half-a-dozen other agents left, and control it she did, with angry
devotion and not too much sense. All she could do was to help in the
escape of refugees and to forward such minor anti-Corpo news items as
she could discover, with Julian gone.

The demon that had grown within her ever since her husband had been
executed now became a great tumor, and Mary was furious at inaction.
Quite gravely she talked about assassinations--and long before the day
of Mary Greenhill, daughter of Doremus, gold-armored tyrants in towers
had trembled at the menace of young widows in villages among the dark
hills.

She wanted, first, to kill Shad Ledue who (she did not know, but
guessed) had probably done the actual shooting of her husband. But in
this small place it might hurt her family even more than they had been
hurt. She humorlessly suggested, before Shad was arrested and murdered,
that it would be a pretty piece of espionage for Sissy to go and live
with him. The once flippant Sissy, so thin and quiet ever since her
Julian had been taken away, was certain that Mary had gone mad, and at
night was terrified.... She remembered how Mary, in the days when she
had been a crystal-hard, crystal-bright sportswoman, had with her
riding-crop beaten a farmer who had tortured a dog.

Mary was fed-up with the cautiousness of Dr. Olmsted and Father
Perefixe, men who rather liked a vague state called Freedom but did not
overmuch care for being lynched. She stormed at them. Call themselves
men? Why didn't they go out and _do_ something?

At home, she was irritated by her mother, who lamented hardly more about
Doremus's jailing than she did about the beloved little tables that had
been smashed during his arrest.

It was equally the blasts about the greatness of the new Provincial
Commissioner, Effingham Swan, in the Corpo press and memoranda in the
secret N.U. reports about his quick death verdicts against prisoners
that made her decide to kill this dignitary. Even more than Shad (who
had not yet been sent to Trianon), she blamed him for Fowler's fate. She
thought it out quite calmly. That was the sort of thinking that the
Corpos were encouraging among decent home-body women by their program
for revitalizing national American pride.

****

Except with babies accompanying mothers, two visitors together were
forbidden in the concentration camps. So, when Mary saw Doremus and, in
another camp, Buck Titus, in early October, she could only murmur, in
almost the same words to each of them, "Listen! When I leave you I'll
hold up David--but, heavens, what a husky lump he's become!--at the
gate, so you can see him. If anything should ever happen to me, if I
should get sick or something, when you get out you'll take care of
David--won't you, _won't_ you?"

She was trying to be matter-of-fact, that they might not worry. She was
not succeeding very well.

So she drew out, from the small fund which her father had established
for her after Fowler's death, enough money for a couple of months,
executed a power of attorney by which either her mother or her sister
could draw the rest, casually kissed David and Emma and Sissy good-bye,
and--chatty and gay as she took the train--went off to Albany, capital
of the Northeastern Province. The story was that she needed a change and
was going to stay near Albany with Fowler's married sister.

She did actually stay with her sister-in-law--long enough to get her
bearings. Two days after her arrival, she went to the new Albany
training-field of the Corpo Women's Flying Corps and enlisted for
lessons in aviation and bombing.

When the inevitable war should come, when the government should decide
whether it was Canada, Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Japan, or perhaps Staten
Island that was "menacing her borders," and proceed to defend itself
outwards, then the best women flyers of the Corps were to have
Commissions in an official army auxiliary. The old-fashioned "rights"
granted to women by the Liberals might (for their own sakes) be taken
from them, but never had they had more right to die in battle.

While she was learning, she wrote to her family reassuringly--mostly
postcards to David, bidding him mind whatever his grandmother said.

She lived in a lively boarding-house, filled with M.M. officers who knew
all about and talked a little about the frequent inspection trips of
Commissioner Swan, by aëroplane. She was complimented by quite a number
of insulting proposals there.

She had driven a car ever since she had been fifteen: in Boston traffic,
across the Quebec plains, on rocky hill roads in a blizzard; she had
made repairs at midnight; and she had an accurate eye, nerves trained
outdoors, and the resolute steadiness of a madman evading notice while
he plots death. After ten hours of instruction, by an M.M. aviator who
thought the air was as good a place as any to make love in and who could
never understand why Mary laughed at him, she made her first solo
flight, with an admirable landing. The instructor said (among other
things less apropos) that she had no fear; that the one thing she needed
for mastery was a little fear.

Meantime she was an obedient student in classes in bombing, a branch of
culture daily more propagated by the Corpos.

She was particularly interested in the Mills hand grenade. You pulled
out the safety pin, holding the lever against the grenade with your
fingers, and tossed. Five seconds after the lever was thus loosened, the
grenade exploded and killed a lot of people. It had never been used from
planes, but it might be worth trying, thought Mary. M.M. officers told
her that Swan, when a mob of steelworkers had been kicked out of a plant
and started rioting, had taken command of the peace officers, and
himself (they chuckled with admiration of his readiness) hurled such a
grenade. It had killed two women and a baby.

Mary took her sixth solo flight on a November morning gray and quiet
under snow clouds. She had never been very talkative with the ground
crew but this morning she said it excited her to think she could leave
the ground "like a reg'lar angel" and shoot up and hang around that
unknown wilderness of clouds. She patted a strut of her machine, a
high-wing Leonard monoplane with open cockpit, a new and very fast
military machine, meant for both pursuit and quick jobs of bombing...
quick jobs of slaughtering a few hundred troops in close formation.

At the field, as she had been informed he would, District Commissioner
Effingham Swan was boarding his big official cabin plane for a flight
presumably into New England. He was tall; a distinguished,
military-looking, polo-suggesting dignitary in masterfully simple
blue-serge with just a light flying-helmet. A dozen yes-men buzzed about
him--secretaries, bodyguards, a chauffeur, a couple of county
commissioners, educational directors, labor directors--their hats in
their hands, their smiles on their faces, their souls wriggling with
gratitude to him for permitting them to exist. He snapped at them a good
deal and bustled. As he mounted the steps to the cabin (Mary thought of
"Casey Jones" and smiled), a messenger on a tremendous motorcycle blared
up with the last telegrams. There seemed to be half a hundred of the
yellow envelopes, Mary marveled. He tossed them to the secretary who was
humbly creeping after him. The door of the viceregal coach closed on the
Commissioner, the secretary, and two bodyguards lumpy with guns.

It was said that in his plane Swan had a desk that had belonged to
Hitler, and before him to Marat.

To Mary, who had just lifted herself up into the cockpit, a mechanic
cried, admiringly pointing after Swan's plane as it lurched forward,
"Gee, what a grand guy that is--Boss Swan. I hear where he's flying down
to Washington to chin with the Chief this morning--gee, think of it,
with the Chief!"

"Wouldn't it be awful if somebody took a shot at Mr. Swan and the Chief?
Might change all history," Mary shouted down.

"No chance of that! See those guards of his? Say, they could stand off a
whole regiment--they could lick Walt Trowbridge and all the other
Communists put together!"

"I guess that's so. Nothing but God shooting down from heaven could
reach Mr. Swan."

"Ha, ha! That's good! But couple days ago I heard where a fellow was
saying he figured out God had gone to sleep."

"Maybe it's time for Him to wake up!" said Mary, and raised her hand.

Her plane had a top of two hundred and eighty-five miles an hour--Swan's
golden chariot had but two hundred and thirty. She was presently flying
above and a little behind him. His cabin plane, which had seemed huge as
the _Queen Mary_ when she had looked up at its wingspread on the ground,
now seemed small as a white dove, wavering above the patchy linoleum
that was the ground.

She drew from the pockets of her flying-jacket the three Mills hand
grenades she had managed to steal from the school yesterday afternoon.
She had not been able to get away with any heavier bomb. As she looked
at them, for the first time she shuddered; she became a thing of warmer
blood than a mere attachment to the plane, mechanical as the engine.

"Better get it over before I go ladylike," she sighed, and dived at the
cabin plane.

No doubt her coming was unwelcome. Neither Death nor Mary Greenhill had
made a formal engagement with Effingham Swan that morning; neither had
telephoned, nor bargained with irritable Secretaries, nor been neatly
typed down on the great lord's schedule for his last day of life. In his
dozen offices, in his marble home, in council hall and royal
reviewing-stand, his most precious excellence was guarded with steel. He
could not be approached by vulgarians like Mary Greenhill--save in the
air, where emperor and vulgarian alike are upheld only by toy wings and
by the grace of God.

Three times Mary maneuvered above his plane and dropped a grenade. Each
time it missed. The cabin plane was descending, to land, and the guards
were shooting up at her.

"Oh well!" she said, and dived bluntly at a bright metal wing.

In her last ten seconds she thought how much the wing looked like the
zinc washboard which, as a girl, she had seen used by Mrs. Candy's
predecessor--now what was her name?--Mamie or something. And she wished
she had spent more time with David the last few months. And she noticed
that the cabin plane seemed rather rushing up at her than she down at
it.

The crash was appalling. It came just as she was patting her parachute
and rising to leap out--too late. All she saw was an insane whirligig of
smashed wings and huge engines that seemed to have been hurled up into
her face.




CHAPTER 34


Speaking of Julian before he was arrested, probably the New Underground
headquarters in Montreal found no unusual value in his reports on M.M.
grafting and cruelty and plans for apprehending N.U. agitators. Still,
he had been able to warn four or five suspects to escape to Canada. He
had had to assist in several floggings. He trembled so that the others
laughed at him; and he made his blows suspiciously light.

He was set on being promoted to M.M. district headquarters in Hanover,
and for it he studied typing and shorthand in his free time. He had a
beautiful plan of going to that old family friend, Commissioner Francis
Tasbrough, declaring that he wanted by his own noble qualities to make
up to the divine government for his father's disloyalty, and of getting
himself made Tasbrough's secretary. If he could just peep at Tasbrough's
private files! Then there would be something juicy for Montreal!

Sissy and he discussed it exultantly in their leafy rendezvous. For a
whole half hour she was able to forget her father and Buck in prison,
and what seemed to her something like madness in Mary's increasing
restlessness.

Just at the end of September she saw Julian suddenly arrested.

She was watching a review of M.M.'s on the Green. She might
theoretically detest the blue M.M. uniform as being all that Walt
Trowbridge (frequently) called it, "The old-time emblem of heroism and
the battle for freedom, sacrilegiously turned by Windrip and his gang
into a symbol of everything that is cruel, tyrannical, and false," but
it did not dampen her pride in Julian to see him trim and shiny, and
officially set apart as a squad leader commanding his minor army of ten.

While the company stood at rest, County Commissioner Shad Ledue dashed
up in a large car, sprang up, strode to Julian, bellowed, "This
guy--this man is a traitor!" tore the M.M. steering wheel from Julian's
collar, struck him in the face, and turned him over to his private
gunmen, while Julian's mates groaned, guffawed, hissed, and yelped.

****

She was not allowed to see Julian at Trianon. She could learn nothing
save that he had not yet been executed.

When Mary was killed, and buried as a military heroine, Philip came
bumbling up from his Massachusetts judicial circuit. He shook his head a
great deal and pursed his lips.

"I swear," he said to Emma and Sissy--though actually he did nothing so
wholesome and natural as to swear--"I swear I'm almost tempted to think,
sometimes, that both Father and Mary have, or shall I say had, a touch
of madness in them. There must be, terrible though it is to say it, but
we must face facts in these troublous days, but I honestly think,
sometimes, there must be a strain of madness somewhere in our family.
Thank God I have escaped it!--if I have no other virtues, at least I am
certainly sane! even if that may have caused the Pater to think I was
nothing but mediocre! And of course you are entirely free from it,
Mater. It's you that must watch yourself, Cecilia." (Sissy jumped
slightly; not at anything so grateful as being called crazy by Philip,
but at being called "Cecilia." After all, she admitted, that probably
was her name.) "I hate to say it, Cecilia, but I've often thought you
had a dangerous tendency to be thoughtless and selfish. Now Mater: as
you know, I'm a very busy man, and I simply can't take a lot of time
arguing and discussing, but it seems best to me, and I think I can
almost say that it seems wise to Merilla, also, that, now that Mary has
passed on, you should just close up this big house, or much better, try
to rent it, as long as the poor Pater is--uh--as long as he's away. I
don't pretend to have as big a place as this, but it's ever so much more
modern, with gas furnace and up-to-date plumbing and all, and I have one
of the first television sets in Rose Lane. I hope it won't hurt your
feelings, and as you know, whatever people may say about me, certainly
I'm one of the first to believe in keeping up the old traditions, just
as poor dear old Eff Swan was, but at the same time, it seems to me that
the old home here is a little on the dreary and old-fashioned side--of
course I never _could_ persuade the Pater to bring it up to date,
but----Anyway, I want Davy and you to come live with us in Worcester,
immediately. As for you, Sissy, you will of course understand that you
are entirely welcome, but perhaps you would prefer to do something
livelier, such as joining the Women's Corpo Auxiliary----"

He was, Sissy raged, so damned _kind_ to everybody! She couldn't even
stir herself to insult him much. She earnestly desired to, when she
found that he had brought David an M.M. uniform, and when David put it
on and paraded about shouting, like most of the boys he played with,
"Hail Windrip!"

She telephoned to Lorinda Pike at Beecher Falls and was able to tell
Philip that she was going to help Lorinda in the tea room. Emma and
David went off to Worcester--at the last moment, at the station, Emma
decided to be pretty teary about it, though David begged her to remember
that they had Uncle Philip's word for it that Worcester was just the
same as Boston, London, Hollywood, and a Wild West Ranch put together.
Sissy stayed to get the house rented. Mrs. Candy, who was going to open
her bakery now and who never did inform the impractical Sissy whether or
no she was being paid for these last weeks, made for Sissy all the
foreign dishes that only Sissy and Doremus cared for, and they not
uncheerfully dined together, in the kitchen.

So it was Shad's time to swoop.

He came blusteringly calling on her, in November. Never had she hated
him quite so much, yet never so much feared him, because of what he
might do to her father and Julian and Buck and the others in
concentration camps.

He grunted, "Well, your boyfriend Jule, that thought he was so cute, the
poor heel, we got all the dope on his double-crossing us, all right!
_He'll_ never bother you again!"

"He's not so bad. Let's forget him.... Shall I play you something on
the piano?"

"Sure. Shoot. I always did like high-class music," said the refined
Commissioner, lolling on a couch, putting his heels up on a damask
chair, in the room where once he had cleaned the fireplace. If it was
his serious purpose to discourage Sissy in regard to that anti-Corpo
institution, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, he was succeeding even
better than Judge Philip Jessup. Sir William Gilbert would have said of
Shad that he was so very, very prolet-ari-an.

She had played for but five minutes when he forgot that he was now
refined, and bawled, "Oh, cut out the highbrow stuff and come on and sit
down!"

She stayed on the piano stool. Just what would she do if Shad became
violent? There was no Julian to appear melodramatically at the
nick-of-time and rescue her. Then she remembered Mrs. Candy, in the
kitchen, and was content.

"What the heck you snickerin' at?" said Shad.

"Oh--oh I was just thinking about that story you told me about how Mr.
Falck bleated when you arrested him!"

"Yeh, that was comical. Old Reverend certainly blatted like a goat!"

(Could she kill him? Would it be wise to kill him? Had Mary meant to
kill Swan? Would They be harder on Julian and her father if she killed
Shad? Incidentally, did it hurt much to get hanged?)

He was yawning, "Well, Sis, ole kid, how about you and me taking a
little trip to New York in a couple weeks? See some high life. I'll get
you the best soot in the best hotel in town, and we'll take in some
shows--I hear this _Callin' Stalin_ is a hot number--real Corpo art--and
I'll buy you some honest-to-God champagne wine! And then if we find we
like each other enough, I'm willing for us, if you are, to get hitched!"

"But, Shad! We could never live on your salary. I mean--I mean of course
the Corpos ought to pay you better--mean, even better than they do."

"Listen, baby! I ain't going to have to get along on any miserable
county commissioner's salary the rest of my life! Believe me, I'm going
to be a millionaire before very long!"

Then he told her: told her precisely the sort of discreditable secret
for which she had so long fished in vain. Perhaps it was because he was
sober. Shad, when drunk, reversed all the rules and became more
peasant-like and cautious with each drink.

He had a plan. That plan was as brutal and as infeasible as any plan of
Shad Ledue for making large money would be. Its essence was that he
should avoid manual labor and should make as many persons miserable as
possible. It was like his plan, when he was still a hired man, to become
wealthy by breeding dogs--first stealing the dogs and, preferably, the
kennels.

As County Commissioner he had not merely, as was the Corpo custom, been
bribed by the shopkeepers and professional men for protection against
the M.M.'s. He had actually gone into partnership with them, promising
them larger M.M. orders, and, he boasted, he had secret contracts with
these merchants all written down and signed and tucked away in his
office safe.

Sissy got rid of him that evening by being difficult, while letting him
assume that the conquest of her would not take more than three or four
more days. She cried furiously after he had gone--in the comforting
presence of Mrs. Candy, who first put away a butcher knife with which,
Sissy suspected, she had been standing ready all evening.

Next morning Sissy drove to Hanover and shamelessly tattled to Francis
Tasbrough about the interesting documents Shad had in his safe. She did
not ever see Shad Ledue again.

She was very sick about his being killed. She was very sick about all
killing. She found no heroism but only barbaric bestiality in having to
kill so that one might so far live as to be halfway honest and kind and
secure. But she knew that she would be willing to do it again.

The Jessup house was magniloquently rented by that noble Roman, that
political belch, Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, who, being tired of again
trying to make a living by peddling real estate and criminal law, was
pleased to accept the appointment as successor to Shad Ledue.

Sissy hastened to Beecher Falls and to Lorinda Pike.

Father Perefixe took charge of the N.U. cell, merely saying, as he had
said daily since Buzz Windrip had been inaugurated, that he was fed-up
with the whole business and was immediately going back to Canada. In
fact, on his desk he had a Canadian time-table.

It was now two years old.

****

Sissy was in too snappish a state to stand being mothered, being
fattened and sobbed over and brightly sent to bed. Mrs. Candy had done
only too much of that. And Philip had given her all the parental advice
she could endure for a while. It was a relief when Lorinda received her
as an adult, as one too sensible to insult by pity--received her, in
fact, with as much respect as if she were an enemy and not a friend.

After dinner, in Lorinda's new tea room, in an aged house which was now
empty of guests for the winter except for the constant infestation of
whimpering refugees, Lorinda, knitting, made her first mention of the
dead Mary.

"I suppose your sister did intend to kill Swan, eh?"

"I don't know. The Corpos didn't seem to think so. They gave her a big
military funeral."

"Well, of course, they don't much care to have assassinations talked
about and maybe sort of become a general habit. I agree with your
father. I think that, in many cases, assassinations are really rather
unfortunate--a mistake in tactics. No. Not good. Oh, by the way, Sissy,
I think I'm going to get your father out of concentration camp."

"What?"

Lorinda had none of the matrimonial moans of Emma; she was as
business-like as ordering eggs.

"Yes. I tried everything. I went to see Tasbrough, and that educational
fellow, Peaseley. Nothing doing. They want to keep Doremus in. But that
rat, Aras Dilley, is at Trianon as guard now. I'm bribing him to help
your father escape. We'll have the man here for Christmas, only kind of
late, and sneak him into Canada."

"Oh!" said Sissy.

****

A few days afterward, reading a coded New Underground telegram which
apparently dealt with the delivery of furniture, Lorinda shrieked,
"Sissy! All you-know-what has busted loose! In Washington! Lee Sarason
has deposed Buzz Windrip and grabbed the dictatorship!"

"_Oh!_" said Sissy.




CHAPTER 35


In his two years of dictatorship, Berzelius Windrip daily became more a
miser of power. He continued to tell himself that his main ambition was
to make all citizens healthy, in purse and mind, and that if he was
brutal it was only toward fools and reactionaries who wanted the old
clumsy systems. But after eighteen months of Presidency he was angry
that Mexico and Canada and South America (obviously his own property, by
manifest destiny) should curtly answer his curt diplomatic notes and
show no helpfulness about becoming part of his inevitable empire.

And daily he wanted louder, more convincing Yeses from everybody about
him. How could he carry on his heartbreaking labor if nobody ever
encouraged him? he demanded. Anyone, from Sarason to inter-office
messenger, who did not play valet to his ego he suspected of plotting
against him. He constantly increased his bodyguard, and as constantly
distrusted all his guards and discharged them, and once took a shot at a
couple of them, so that in all the world he had no companion save his
old aide Lee Sarason, and perhaps Hector Macgoblin, to whom he could
talk easily.

He felt lonely in the hours when he wanted to shuck off the duties of
despotism along with his shoes and his fine new coat. He no longer went
out racketing. His cabinet begged him not to clown in barrooms and lodge
entertainments; it was not dignified, and it was dangerous to be too
near to strangers.

So he played poker with his bodyguard, late at night, and at such times
drank too much, and he cursed them and glared with bulging eyes whenever
he lost, which, for all the good-will of his guards about letting him
win, had to be often, because he pinched their salaries badly and locked
up the spoons. He had become as unbouncing and unbuzzing a Buzz as might
be, and he did not know it.

All the while he loved the People just as much as he feared and detested
Persons, and he planned to do something historic. Certainly! He would
give each family that five thousand dollars a year just as soon now as
he could arrange it.

****

And Lee Sarason, forever making his careful lists, as patient at his
desk as he was pleasure-hungry on the couch at midnight parties, was
beguiling officials to consider him their real lord and the master of
Corpoism. He kept his promises to them, while Windrip always forgot. His
office door became the door of ambition. In Washington, the reporters
privily spoke of this assistant secretary and that general as "Sarason
men." His clique was not a government within a government; it was the
government itself, minus the megaphones. He had the Secretary of
Corporations (a former vice-president of the American Federation of
Labor) coming to him secretly every evening, to report on labor politics
and in especial on such proletarian leaders as were dissatisfied with
Windrip as Chief--i.e., with their own share in the swag. He had from
the Secretary of the Treasury (though this functionary, one Webster
Skittle, was not a lieutenant of Sarason but merely friendly)
confidential reports on the affairs of those large employers who, since
under Corpoism it was usually possible for a millionaire to persuade the
judges in the labor-arbitration courts to look at things reasonably,
rejoiced that with strikes outlawed and employers regarded as state
officials, they would now be in secure power forever.

Sarason knew the quiet ways in which these reinforced industrial barons
used arrests by the M.M.'s to get rid of "trouble-makers," particularly
of Jewish radicals--a Jewish radical being a Jew with nobody working for
him. (Some of the barons were themselves Jews; it is not to be expected
that race-loyalty should be carried so insanely far as to weaken the
pocketbook.)

The allegiance of all such Negroes as had the sense to be content with
safety and good pay instead of ridiculous yearnings for personal
integrity Sarason got by being photographed shaking hands with the
celebrated Negro Fundamentalist clergyman, the Reverend Dr. Alexander
Nibbs, and through the highly publicized Sarason Prizes for the Negroes
with the largest families, the fastest time in floor-scrubbing, and the
longest periods of work without taking a vacation.

"No danger of our good friends, the Negroes, turning Red when they're
encouraged like that," Sarason announced to the newspapers.

It was a satisfaction to Sarason that in Germany, all military bands
were now playing his national song, "Buzz and Buzz" along with the Horst
Wessel hymn, for, though he had not exactly written the music as well as
the words, the music was now being attributed to him abroad.

                           *     *     *

As a bank clerk might, quite rationally, worry equally over the
whereabouts of a hundred million dollars' worth of the bank's bonds, and
of ten cents of his own lunch money, so Buzz Windrip worried equally
over the welfare--that is, the obedience to himself--of a hundred and
thirty-odd million American citizens and the small matter of the moods
of Lee Sarason, whose approval of him was the one real fame. (His wife
Windrip did not see oftener than once a week, and anyway, what that
rustic wench thought was unimportant.)

The diabolic Hector Macgoblin frightened him; Secretary of War Luthorne
and Vice-President Perley Beecroft he liked well enough, but they bored
him; they smacked too much of his own small-town boyhood, to escape
which he was willing to take the responsibilities of a nation. It was
the incalculable Lee Sarason on whom he depended, and the Lee with whom
he had gone fishing and boozing and once, even, murdering, who had
seemed his own self made more sure and articulate, had thoughts now
which he could not penetrate. Lee's smile was a veil, not a revelation.

It was to discipline Lee, with the hope of bringing him back, that when
Buzz replaced the amiable but clumsy Colonel Luthorne as Secretary of
War by Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the Northeastern Province
(Buzz's characteristic comment was that Luthorne was not "pulling his
weight"), he also gave to Haik the position of High Marshal of the
M.M.'s, which Lee had held along with a dozen other offices. From Lee he
expected an explosion, then repentance and a new friendship. But Lee
only said, "Very well, if you wish," and said it coldly.

Just how _could_ he get Lee to be a good boy and come play with him
again? wistfully wondered the man who now and then planned to be emperor
of the world.

He gave Lee a thousand-dollar television set. Even more coldly did Lee
thank him, and never spoke afterward of how well he might be receiving
the still shaky television broadcasts on his beautiful new set.

As Dewey Haik took hold, doubling efficiency in both the regular army
and the Minute Men (he was a demon for all-night practice marches in
heavy order, and the files could not complain, because he set the
example), Buzz began to wonder whether Haik might not be his new
confidant.... He really would hate to throw Lee into prison, but
still, Lee was so thoughtless about hurting his feelings, when he'd gone
and done so much for him and all!

Buzz was confused. He was the more confused when Perley Beecroft came in
and briefly said that he was sick of all this bloodshed and was going
home to the farmland as for his lofty Vice-Presidential office, Buzz
knew what he could do with it.

Were these vast national dissensions no different from squabbles in his
father's drugstore? fretted Buzz. He couldn't very well have Beecroft
shot: it might cause criticism. But it was indecent, it was sacrilegious
to annoy an emperor, and in his irritation he had an ex-Senator and
twelve workmen who were in concentration camps taken out and shot on the
charge that they had told irreverent stories about him.

****

Secretary of State Sarason was saying good-night to President Windrip in
the hotel suite where Windrip really lived.

No newspaper had dared mention it, but Buzz was both bothered by the
stateliness of the White House and frightened by the number of Reds and
cranks and anti-Corpos who, with the most commendable patience and
ingenuity, tried to sneak into that historic mansion and murder him.
Buzz merely left his wife there, for show, and, except at great
receptions, never entered any part of the White House save the office
annex.

He liked this hotel suite; he was a sensible man, who preferred straight
bourbon, codfish cakes, and deep leather chairs to Burgundy, trout
_bleu_, and Louis Quinze. In this twelve-room apartment, occupying the
entire tenth floor of a small unnotorious hotel, he had for himself only
a plain bedroom, a huge living room which looked like a combination of
office and hotel lobby, a large liquor closet, another closet with
thirty-seven suits of clothes, and a bathroom with jars and jars of the
pine-flavored bath salts which were his only cosmetic luxury. Buzz might
come home in a suit dazzling as a horse blanket, one considered in
Alfalfa Center a triumph of London tailoring, but, once safe, he liked
to put on his red morocco slippers that were down at the heel and
display his red suspenders and baby-blue sleeve garters. To feel correct
in those decorations, he preferred the hotel atmosphere that, for so
many years before he had ever seen the White House, had been as familiar
to him as his ancestral corn cribs and Main Streets.

The other ten rooms of the suite, entirely shutting his own off from the
corridors and elevators, were filled night and day with guards. To get
through to Buzz in this intimate place of his own was very much like
visiting a police station for the purpose of seeing a homicidal
prisoner.

****

"Haik seems to me to be doing a fine job in the War Department, Lee,"
said the President. "Of course you know if you ever want the job of High
Marshal back----"

"I'm quite satisfied," said the great Secretary of State.

"What do you think of having Colonel Luthorne back to help Haik out?
He's pretty good on fool details."

Sarason looked as nearly embarrassed as the self-satisfied Lee Sarason
ever could look.

"Why, uh--I supposed you knew it. Luthorne was liquidated in the purge
ten days ago."

"Good God! Luthorne killed? Why didn't I know it?"

"It was thought better to keep it quiet. He was a pretty popular man.
But dangerous. Always talking about Abraham Lincoln!"

"So I just never know anything about what's going on! Why, even the
newspaper clippings are predigested, by God, before I see 'em!"

"It's thought better not to bother you with minor details, boss. You
know that! Of course, if you feel I haven't organized your staff
correctly----"

"Aw now, don't fly off the handle, Lee! I just meant----Of course I know
how hard you've tried to protect me so I could give all my brains to the
higher problems of State. But Luthorne----I kind of liked him. He always
had quite a funny line when we played poker." Buzz Windrip felt lonely,
as once a certain Shad Ledue had felt, in a hotel suite that differed
from Buzz's only in being smaller. To forget it he bawled, very
brightly, "Lee, do you ever wonder what'll happen in the future?"

"Why, I think you and I may have mentioned it."

"But golly, just think of what might happen in the future, Lee! Think of
it! Why, we may be able to pull off a North American kingdom!" Buzz half
meant it seriously--or perhaps quarter meant it. "How'd you like to be
Duke of Georgia--or Grand Duke, or whatever they call a Grand Exalted
Ruler of the Elks in this peerage business? And then how about an Empire
of North and South America after that? I might make you a king under me,
then--say something like King of Mexico. Howjuh like that?"

"Be very amusing," said Lee mechanically--as Lee always did say the same
thing mechanically whenever Buzz repeated this same nonsense.

"But you got to stick by me and not forget all I've done for you, Lee,
don't forget that."

"I never forget anything!... By the way, we ought to liquidate, or at
least imprison, Perley Beecroft, too. He's still technically
Vice-President of the United States, and if the lousy traitor managed
some skullduggery so as to get you killed or deposed, he might be
regarded by some narrow-minded literalists as President!"

"No, no, no! He's my friend, no matter what he says about me... the
dirty dog!" wailed Buzz.

"All right. You're the boss. G'night," said Lee, and returned from this
plumber's dream of paradise to his own gold-and-black and apricot-silk
bower in Georgetown, which he shared with several handsome young M.M.
officers. They were savage soldiers, yet apt at music and at poetry.
With them, he was not in the least passionless, as he seemed now to Buzz
Windrip. He was either angry with his young friends, and then he whipped
them, or he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed their
wounds. Newspapermen who had once seemed to be his friends said that he
had traded the green eyeshade for a wreath of violets.

****

At cabinet meeting, late in 1938, Secretary of State Sarason revealed to
the heads of the government disturbing news. Vice-President
Beecroft--and had he not told them the man should have been shot?--had
fled to Canada, renounced Corpoism, and joined Walt Trowbridge in
plotting. There were bubbles from an almost boiling rebellion in the
Middle West and Northwest, especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas,
where agitators, some of them formerly of political influence, were
demanding that their states secede from the Corpo Union and form a
coöperative (indeed almost Socialistic) commonwealth of their own.

"Rats! Just a lot of irresponsible wind bags!" jeered President Windrip.
"Why! I thought you were supposed to be the camera-eyed gink that kept
up on everything that goes on, Lee! You forget that I myself,
personally, made a special radio address to that particular section of
the country last week! And I got a wonderful reaction. The Middle
Westerners are absolutely loyal to me. They appreciate what I've been
trying to do!"

Not answering him at all, Sarason demanded that, in order to bring and
hold all elements in the country together by that useful Patriotism
which always appears upon threat of an outside attack, the government
immediately arrange to be insulted and menaced in a well-planned series
of deplorable "incidents" on the Mexican border, and declare war on
Mexico as soon as America showed that it was getting hot and patriotic
enough.

Secretary of the Treasury Skittle and Attorney General Porkwood shook
their heads, but Secretary of War Haik and Secretary of Education
Macgoblin agreed with Sarason high-mindedly. Once, pointed out the
learned Macgoblin, governments had merely let themselves slide into a
war, thanking Providence for having provided a conflict as a febrifuge
against internal discontent, but of course, in this age of deliberate,
planned propaganda, a really modern government like theirs must figure
out what brand of war they had to sell and plan the selling-campaign
consciously. Now, as for him, he would be willing to leave the whole
set-up to the advertising genius of Brother Sarason.

"No, no, no!" cried Windrip. "We're not ready for a war! Of course,
we'll take Mexico some day. It's our destiny to control it and
Christianize it. But I'm scared that your darn scheme might work just
opposite to what you say. You put arms into the hands of too many
irresponsible folks, and they might use 'em and turn against you and
start a revolution and throw the whole dern gang of us out! No, no! I've
often wondered if the whole Minute Men business, with their arms and
training, may not be a mistake. That was your idea, Lee, not mine!"

Sarason spoke evenly: "My dear Buzz, one day you thank me for
originating that 'great crusade of citizen soldiers defending their
homes'--as you love to call it on the radio--and the next day you almost
ruin your clothes, you're so scared of them. Make up your mind one way
or the other!"

Sarason walked out of the room, not bowing.

Windrip complained, "I'm not going to stand for Lee's talking to me like
that! Why, the dirty double-crosser, I made him! One of these days,
he'll find a new secretary of state around this joint! I s'pose he
thinks jobs like that grow on every tree! Maybe he'd like to be a bank
president or something--I mean, maybe he'd like to be Emperor of
England!"

****

President Windrip, in his hotel bedroom, was awakened late at night by
the voice of a guard in the outer room: "Yuh, sure, let him pass--he's
the Secretary of State." Nervously the President clicked on his bedside
lamp.... He had needed it lately, to read himself to sleep.

In that limited glow he saw Lee Sarason, Dewey Haik, and Dr. Hector
Macgoblin march to the side of his bed. Lee's thin sharp face was like
flour. His deep-buried eyes were those of a sleepwalker. His skinny
right hand held a bowie knife which, as his hand deliberately rose, was
lost in the dimness. Windrip swiftly thought: Sure would be hard to know
where to buy a dagger, in Washington; and Windrip thought: All this is
the doggonedest foolishness--just like a movie or one of these old
history books when you were a kid; and Windrip thought, all in that same
flash: Good God, I'm going to be killed!

He cried out, "Lee! You couldn't do _that_ to me!"

Lee grunted, like one who has detected a bad smell.

Then the Berzelius Windrip who could, incredibly, become President
really awoke: "Lee! Do you remember the time when your old mother was so
sick, and I gave you my last cent and loaned you my flivver so you could
go see her, and I hitch-hiked to my next meeting? Lee!"

"Hell. I suppose so. General."

"Yes?" answered Dewey Haik, not very pleasantly.

"I think we'll stick him on a destroyer or something and let him sneak
off to France or England.... The lousy coward seems afraid to
die.... Of course, we'll kill him if he ever does dare to come back
to the States. Take him out and phone the Secretary of the Navy for a
boat and get him on it, will you?"

"Very well, sir," said Haik, even less pleasantly.

It had been easy. The troops, who obeyed Haik, as Secretary of War, had
occupied all of Washington.

Ten days later Buzz Windrip was landed in Havre and went sighingly to
Paris. It was his first view of Europe except for one twenty-one-day
Cook's Tour. He was profoundly homesick for Chesterfield cigarettes,
flapjacks, Moon Mullins, and the sound of some real human being saying
"Yuh, what's bitin' you?" instead of this perpetual sappy "oui?"

In Paris he remained, though he became the sort of minor hero of
tragedy, like the ex-King of Greece, Kerensky, the Russian Grand Dukes,
Jimmy Walker, and a few ex-presidents from South America and Cuba, who
is delighted to accept invitations to drawing rooms where the champagne
is good enough and one may have a chance of finding people, now and
then, who will listen to one's story and say "sir."

At that, though, Buzz chuckled, he had kinda put it over on those
crooks, for during his two sweet years of despotism he had sent four
million dollars abroad, to secret, safe accounts. And so Buzz Windrip
passed into wabbly paragraphs in recollections by ex-diplomatic
gentlemen with monocles. In what remained of Ex-President Windrip's
life, everything was _ex_. He was even so far forgotten that only four
or five American students tried to shoot him.

****

The more dulcetly they had once advised and flattered Buzz, the more
ardently did most of his former followers, Macgoblin and Senator
Porkwood and Dr. Almeric Trout and the rest, turn in loud allegiance to
the new President, the Hon. Lee Sarason.

He issued a proclamation that he had discovered that Windrip had been
embezzling the people's money and plotting with Mexico to avoid war with
that guilty country; and that he, Sarason, in quite alarming grief and
reluctance, since he more than anyone else had been deceived by his
supposed friend, Windrip, had yielded to the urging of the Cabinet and
taken over the Presidency, instead of Vice-President Beecroft, the
exiled traitor.

President Sarason immediately began appointing the fancier of his young
officer friends to the most responsible offices in State and army. It
amused him, seemingly, to shock people by making a pink-cheeked,
moist-eyed boy of twenty-five Commissioner of the Federal District,
which included Washington and Maryland. Was he not supreme, was he not
semi-divine, like a Roman emperor? Could he not defy all the muddy mob
that he (once a Socialist) had, for its weak shiftlessness, come to
despise?

"Would that the American people had just one neck!" he plagiarized,
among his laughing boys.

In the decorous White House of Coolidge and Harrison and Rutherford
Birchard Hayes he had orgies (an old name for "parties") with weaving
limbs and garlands and wine in pretty fair imitations of Roman beakers.

****

It was hard for imprisoned men like Doremus Jessup to believe it, but
there were some tens of thousands of Corpos, in the M.M.'s, in
civil-service, in the army, and just in private ways, to whom Sarason's
flippant régime was tragic.

They were the Idealists of Corpoism, and there were plenty of them,
along with the bullies and swindlers; they were the men and women who,
in 1935 and 1936, had turned to Windrip & Co., not as perfect, but as
the most probable saviors of the country from, on one hand, domination
by Moscow and, on the other hand, the slack indolence, the lack of
decent pride of half the American youth, whose world (these idealists
asserted) was composed of shiftless distaste for work and refusal to
learn anything thoroughly, of blatting dance music on the radio, maniac
automobiles, slobbering sexuality, the humor and art of comic strips--of
a slave psychology which was making America a land for sterner men to
loot.

General Emmanuel Coon was one of the Corpo Idealists.

Such men did not condone the murders under the Corpo régime. But they
insisted, "This is a revolution, and after all, when in all history has
there been a revolution with so little bloodshed?"

They were aroused by the pageantry of Corpoism: enormous demonstrations,
with the red-and-black flags a flaunting magnificence like storm clouds.
They were proud of new Corpo roads, hospitals, television stations,
aëroplane lines; they were touched by processions of the Corpo Youth,
whose faces were exalted with pride in the myths of Corpo heroism and
clean Spartan strength and the semi-divinity of the all-protecting
Father, President Windrip. They believed, they made themselves believe,
that in Windrip had come alive again the virtues of Andy Jackson and
Farragut and Jeb Stuart, in place of the mob cheapness of the
professional athletes who had been the only heroes of 1935.

They planned, these idealists, to correct, as quickly as might be, the
errors of brutality and crookedness among officials. They saw arising a
Corpo art, a Corpo learning, profound and real, divested of the
traditional snobbishness of the old-time universities, valiant with
youth, and only the more beautiful in that it was "useful." They were
convinced that Corpoism was Communism cleansed of foreign domination and
the violence and indignity of mob dictatorship; Monarchism with the
chosen hero of the people for monarch; Fascism without grasping and
selfish leaders; freedom with order and discipline; Traditional America
without its waste and provincial cockiness.

Like all religious zealots, they had blessed capacity for blindness, and
they were presently convinced that (since the only newspapers they ever
read certainly said nothing about it) there were no more of
blood-smeared cruelties in court and concentration camp; no restrictions
of speech or thought. They believed that they never criticized the Corpo
régime not because they were censored, but because "that sort of thing
was, like obscenity, such awfully bad form."

And these idealists were as shocked and bewildered by Sarason's coup
d'état against Windrip as was Mr. Berzelius Windrip himself.

****

The grim Secretary of War, Haik, scolded at President Sarason for his
influence on the nation, particularly on the troops. Lee laughed at him,
but once he was sufficiently flattered by Haik's tribute to his artistic
powers to write a poem for him. It was a poem which was later to be sung
by millions; it was, in fact, the most popular of the soldiers' ballads
which were to spring automatically from anonymous soldier bards during
the war between the United States and Mexico. Only, being as pious a
believer in Modern Advertising as Sarason himself, the efficient Haik
wanted to encourage the spontaneous generation of these patriotic folk
ballads by providing the automatic springing and the anonymous bard. He
had as much foresight, as much "prophetic engineering," as a motorcar
manufacturer.

Sarason was as eager for war with Mexico (or Ethiopia or Siam or
Greenland or any other country that would provide his pet young painters
with a chance to portray Sarason being heroic amid curious vegetation)
as Haik; not only to give malcontents something outside the country to
be cross about, but also to give himself a chance to be picturesque. He
answered Haik's request by writing a rollicking military chorus at a
time while the country was still theoretically entirely friendly with
Mexico. It went to the tune of "Mademoiselle from Armentières"--or
"Armenteers." If the Spanish in it was a little shaky, still, millions
were later to understand that "Habla oo?" stood for "¿Habla usted?"
signifying "Parlez-vous?" It ran thus, as it came from Sarason's purple
but smoking typewriter:

    _Señorita from Guadalupe,_
              _Qui usted?_
    _Señorita go roll your hoop,_
              _Or come to bed!_
    _Señorita from Guadalupe_
    _If Padre sees us we're in the soup,_
              _Hinky, dinky, habla oo?_

    _Señorita from Monterey,_
              _Savvy Yank?_
    _Señorita what's that you say?_
              _You're Swede, Ay tank!_
    _But Señorita from Monterey,_
    _You won't hablar when we hit the hay,_
              _Hinky, dinky, habla oo?_

    _Señorita from Mazatlán,_
              _Once we've met,_
    _You'll smile all over your khaki pan,_
              _You won't forget!_
    _For days you'll holler, "Oh, what a man!"_
    _And you'll never marry a Mexican._
              _Hinky, dinky, habla oo?_

If at times President Sarason seemed flippant, he was not at all so
during his part in the scientific preparation for war which consisted in
rehearsing M.M. choruses in trolling out this ditty with well-trained
spontaneity.

His friend Hector Macgoblin, now Secretary of State, told Sarason that
this manly chorus was one of his greatest creations. Macgoblin, though
personally he did not join in Sarason's somewhat unusual midnight
diversions, was amused by them, and he often told Sarason that he was
the only original creative genius among this whole bunch of stuffed
shirts, including Haik.

"You want to watch that cuss Haik, Lee," said Macgoblin. "He's
ambitious, he's a gorilla, and he's a pious Puritan, and that's a triple
combination I'm scared of. The troops like him."

"Rats! He has no attraction for them. He's just an accurate military
bookkeeper," said Sarason.

That night he had a party at which, for a novelty, rather shocking to
his intimates, he actually had girls present, performing certain curious
dances. The next morning Haik rebuked him, and--Sarason had a
hangover--was stormed at. That night, just a month after Sarason had
usurped the Presidency, Haik struck.

There was no melodramatic dagger-and-uplifted-arm business about it,
this time--though Haik did traditionally come late, for all Fascists,
like all drunkards, seem to function most vigorously at night. Haik
marched into the White House with his picked storm troops, found
President Sarason in violet silk pajamas among his friends, shot Sarason
and most of his companions dead, and proclaimed himself President.

Hector Macgoblin fled by aëroplane to Cuba, then on. When last seen, he
was living high up in the mountains of Haiti, wearing only a singlet,
dirty white-drill trousers, grass sandals, and a long tan beard; very
healthy and happy, occupying a one-room hut with a lovely native girl,
practicing modern medicine and studying ancient voodoo.

****

When Dewey Haik became President, then America really did begin to
suffer a little, and to long for the good old democratic, liberal days
of Windrip.

Windrip and Sarason had not minded mirth and dancing in the street so
long as they could be suitably taxed. Haik disliked such things on
principle. Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology, he was a
strict orthodox Christian. He was the first to tell the populace that
they were not going to get any five thousand dollars a year but,
instead, "reap the profits of Discipline and of the Scientific
Totalitarian State not in mere paper figures but in vast dividends of
Pride, Patriotism, and Power." He kicked out of the army all officers
who could not endure marching and going thirsty; and out of the civil
branch all commissioners--including one Francis Tasbrough--who had
garnered riches too easily and too obviously.

He treated the entire nation like a well-run plantation, on which the
slaves were better fed than formerly, less often cheated by their
overseers, and kept so busy that they had time only for work and for
sleep, and thus fell rarely into the debilitating vices of laughter,
song (except war songs against Mexico), complaint, or thinking. Under
Haik there were less floggings in M.M. posts and in concentration camps,
for by his direction officers were not to waste time in the sport of
beating persons, men, women, or children, who asserted that they didn't
care to be slaves on even the best plantation, but just to shoot them
out of hand.

Haik made such use of the clergy--Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and
Liberal-Agnostic--as Windrip and Sarason never had. While there were
plenty of ministers who, like Mr. Falck and Father Stephen Perefixe,
like Cardinal Faulhaber and Pastor Niemoeller in Germany, considered it
some part of Christian duty to resent the enslavement and torture of
their appointed flocks, there were also plenty of reverend celebrities,
particularly large-city pastors whose sermons were reported in the
newspapers every Monday morning, to whom Corpoism had given a chance to
be noisily and lucratively patriotic. These were the chaplains-at-heart,
who, if there was no war in which they could humbly help to purify and
comfort the poor brave boys who were fighting, were glad to help provide
such a war.

These more practical shepherds, since like doctors and lawyers they were
able to steal secrets out of the heart, became valued spies during the
difficult months after February, 1939, when Haik was working up war with
Mexico. (Canada? Japan? Russia? They would come later.) For even with an
army of slaves, it was necessary to persuade them that they were freemen
and fighters for the principle of freedom, or otherwise the scoundrels
might cross over and join the enemy!

So reigned the good king Haik, and if there was anyone in all the land
who was discontented, you never heard him speak--not twice.

And in the White House, where under Sarason shameless youths had danced,
under the new reign of righteousness and the blackjack, Mrs. Haik, a
lady with eyeglasses and a smile of resolute cordiality, gave to the
W.C.T.U., the Y.W.C.A., and the Ladies' League against Red Radicalism,
and their inherently incidental husbands, a magnified and hand-colored
Washington version of just such parties as she had once given in the
Haik bungalow in Eglantine, Oregon.




CHAPTER 36


The ban on information at the Trianon camp had been raised; Mrs. Candy
had come calling on Doremus--complete with cocoanut layer cake--and he
had heard of Mary's death, the departure of Emma and Sissy, the end of
Windrip and Sarason. And none of it seemed in the least real--not half
so real and, except for the fact that he would never see Mary again, not
half so important as the increasing number of lice and rats in their
cell.

During the ban, they had celebrated Christmas by laughing, not very
cheerfully, at the Christmas tree Karl Pascal had contrived out of a
spruce bough and tinfoil from cigarette packages. They had hummed
"Stille Nacht" softly in the darkness, and Doremus had thought of all
their comrades in political prisons in America, Europe, Japan, India.

But Karl, apparently, thought of comrades only if they were saved,
baptized Communists. And, forced together as they were in a cell, the
growing bitterness and orthodox piety of Karl became one of Doremus's
most hateful woes; a tragedy to be blamed upon the Corpos, or upon the
principle of dictatorship in general, as savagely as the deaths of Mary
and Dan Wilgus and Henry Veeder. Under persecution, Karl lost no ounce
of his courage and his ingenuity in bamboozling the M.M. guards, but day
by day he did steadily lose all his humor, his patience, his tolerance,
his easy companionship, and everything else that made life endurable to
men packed in a cell. The Communism that had always been his King
Charles's Head, sometimes amusing, became a religious bigotry as hateful
to Doremus as the old bigotries of the Inquisition or the Fundamentalist
Protestants; that attitude of slaughtering to save men's souls from
which the Jessup family had escaped during these last three generations.

It was impossible to get away from Karl's increasing zeal. He chattered
on at night for an hour after all the other five had growled, "Oh, shut
up! I want to sleep! You'll be making a Corpo out of me!"

Sometimes, in his proselytizing, he conquered. When his cell mates had
long enough cursed the camp guards, Karl would rebuke them: "You're a
lot too simple when you explain everything by saying that the Corpos,
especially the M.M.'s, are all fiends. Plenty of 'em are. But even the
worst of 'em, even the professional gunmen in the M.M. ranks, don't get
as much satisfaction out of punishing us heretics as the honest, dumb
Corpos who've been misled by their leaders' mouthing about Freedom,
Order, Security, Discipline, Strength! All those swell words that even
before Windrip came in the speculators started using to protect their
profits! Especially how they used the word 'Liberty'! Liberty to steal
the didies off the babies! I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he
hears the word 'Liberty' today, after what the Republicans did to it!
And I tell you that a lot of the M.M. guards right here at Trianon are
just as unfortunate as we are--lot of 'em are just poor devils that
couldn't get decent work, back in the Golden Age of Frank
Roosevelt--bookkeepers that had to dig ditches, auto agents that
couldn't sell cars and went sour, ex-looeys in the Great War that came
back to find their jobs pinched off 'em and that followed Windrip, quite
honestly, because they thought, the saps, that when he said Security he
meant _Security_! They'll learn!"

And having admirably discoursed for another hour on the perils of
self-righteousness among the Corpos, Comrade Pascal would change the
subject and discourse upon the glory of self-righteousness among the
Communists--particularly upon those sanctified examples of Communism who
lived in bliss in the Holy City of Moscow, where, Doremus judged, the
streets were paved with undepreciable roubles.

The Holy City of Moscow! Karl looked upon it with exactly such
uncritical and slightly hysterical adoration as other sectarians had in
their day devoted to Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, Canterbury, and Benares.
Fine, all right, thought Doremus. Let 'em worship their sacred fonts--it
was as good a game as any for the mentally retarded. Only, why then
should they object to his considering as sacred Fort Beulah, or New
York, or Oklahoma City?

Karl once fell into a froth because Doremus wondered if the iron
deposits in Russia were all they might be. Why certainly! Russia, being
Holy Russia, must, as a useful part of its holiness, have sufficient
iron, and Karl needed no mineralogists' reports but only the blissful
eye of faith to know it.

He did not mind Karl's worshiping Holy Russia. But Karl did, using the
word "naïve," which is the favorite word and just possibly the only word
known to Communist journalists, derisively mind when Doremus had a mild
notion of worshiping Holy America. Karl spoke often of photographs in
the Moscow _News_ of nearly naked girls on Russian bathing-beaches as
proving the triumph and joy of the workers under Bolshevism, but he
regarded precisely the same sort of photographs of nearly naked girls on
Long Island bathing-beaches as proving the degeneration of the workers
under Capitalism.

As a newspaperman, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who
misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than the
Capitalists were the Communists.

He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism against
Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equally
by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the struggle
was befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disowned
the word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under the
style of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. For
they were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they
could quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.

That Karl Pascal should be turning into a zealot, like most of his
chiefs in the Communist party, was grievous to Doremus because he had
once simple-heartedly hoped that in the mass strength of Communism there
might be an escape from cynical dictatorship. But he saw now that he
must remain alone, a "Liberal," scorned by all the noisier prophets for
refusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either side. But at
worst, the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve some
of the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny should
finally dominate the world.

"More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am convinced
that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished
by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of
this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But the
men of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up the
men of science and of silencing them forever."

****

Yes, this was the worst thing the enemies of honor, the pirate
industrialists and then their suitable successors, the Corpos with their
blackjacks, had done: it had turned the brave, the generous, the
passionate and half-literate Karl Pascals into dangerous fanatics. And
how well they had done it! Doremus was uncomfortable with Karl; he felt
that his next turn in jail might be under the wardenship of none other
than Karl himself, as he remembered how the Bolsheviks, once in power,
had most smugly imprisoned and persecuted those great women, Spiridinova
and Breshkovskaya and Ismailovitch, who, by their conspiracies against
the Czar, their willingness to endure Siberian torture on behalf of
"freedom for the masses," had most brought on the revolution by which
the Bolsheviks were able to take control--and not only again forbid
freedom to the masses, but this time inform them that, anyway, freedom
was just a damn silly bourgeois superstition.

So Doremus, sleeping two-and-a-half feet above his old companion, felt
himself in a cell within a cell. Henry Veeder and Clarence Little and
Victor Loveland and Mr. Falck were gone now, and to Julian, penned in
solitary, he could not speak once a month.

He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity; awake and
asleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart had stopped when
Squad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as Doremus was scrubbing a
lavatory floor, "Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup! Mis' Pike is fixin' it up and
I'm going to help you escape jus' soon as things is right!"

****

It was a question of the guards on sentry-go outside the quadrangle. As
sweeper, Doremus was reasonably free to leave his cell, and Aras had
loosened the boards and barbed wire at the end of one of the alleys
leading from the quadrangle between buildings. But outside, he was
likely to be shot by a guard on sight.

For a week Aras watched. He knew that one of the night guards had a
habit of getting drunk, which was forgiven him because of his excellence
in flogging trouble-makers but which was regarded by the more judicious
as rather regrettable. And for that week Aras fed the guard's habit on
Lorinda's expense money, and was indeed so devoted to his duties that he
was himself twice carried to bed. Snake Tizra grew interested--but Snake
also, after the first couple of drinks, liked to be democratic with his
men and to sing "The Old Spinning-Wheel."

Aras confided to Doremus: "Mis' Pike--she don't dast send you a note,
less somebody get hold of it, but she says to me to tell you not to tell
anybody you're going to take a sneak, or it'll get out."

So on the evening when Aras jerked a head at him from the corridor, then
rasped, surly-seeming, "Here you, Jessup--you left one of the cans all
dirty!" Doremus looked mildly at the cell that had been his home and
study and tabernacle for six months, glanced at Karl Pascal reading in
his bunk--slowly waving a shoeless foot in a sock with the end of it
gone, at Truman Webb darning the seat of his pants, noted the gray smoke
in filmy tilting layers about the small electric bulb in the ceiling,
and silently stepped out into the corridor.

The late-January night was foggy.

Aras handed him a worn M.M. overcoat, whispered, "Third alley on right;
moving-van on corner opposite the church," and was gone.

On hands and knees Doremus briskly crawled under the loosened barbed
wire at the end of the small alley and carelessly stepped out, along the
road. The only guard in sight was at a distance, and he was wavering in
his gait. A block away, a furniture van was jacked up while the driver
and his helper painfully prepared to change one of the tremendous tires.
In the light of a corner arc, Doremus saw that the driver was that same
hard-faced long-distance cruiser who had carried bundles of tracts for
the New Underground.

The driver grunted, "Get in--hustle!" Doremus crouched between a bureau
and a wing chair inside.

Instantly he felt the tilted body of the van dropping, as the driver
pulled out the jack, and from the seat he heard, "All right! We're off.
Crawl up behind me here and listen, Mr. Jessup.... Can you hear me?...
The M.M.'s don't take so much trouble to prevent you gents and
respectable fellows from escaping. They figure that most of you are too
scary to try out anything, once you're away from your offices and front
porches and sedans. But I guess you may be different, some ways, Mr.
Jessup. Besides, they figure that if you do escape, they can pick you up
easy afterwards, because you ain't onto hiding out, like a regular
fellow that's been out of work sometimes and maybe gone on the bum. But
don't worry. We'll get you through. I tell you, there's nobody got
friends like a revolutionist.... _And_ enemies!"

Then first did it come to Doremus that, by sentence of the late lamented
Effingham Swan, he was subject to the death penalty for escaping. But
"Oh, what the hell!" he grunted, like Karl Pascal, and he stretched in
the luxury of mobility, in that galloping furniture truck.

He was free! He saw the lights of villages going by!

****

Once, he was hidden beneath hay in a barn; again, in a spruce grove high
on a hill; and once he slept overnight on top of a coffin in the
establishment of an undertaker. He walked secret paths; he rode in the
back of an itinerant medicine-peddler's car and, concealed in fur cap
and high-collared fur coat, in the sidecar of an Underground worker
serving as an M.M. squad leader. From this he dismounted, at the
driver's command, in front of an obviously untenanted farmhouse on a
snaky back-road between Monadnock Mountain and the Averill lakes--a very
slattern of an old unpainted farmhouse, with sinking roof and snow up to
the frowsy windows.

It seemed a mistake.

Doremus knocked, as the motorcycle snarled away, and the door opened on
Lorinda Pike and Sissy, crying together, "Oh, my dear!"

He could only mutter, "Well!"

****

When they had made him strip off his fur coat in the farmhouse living
room, a room with peeling wall paper, and altogether bare except for a
cot, two chairs, a table, the two moaning women saw a small man, his
face dirty, pasty, and sunken as by tuberculosis, his once fussily
trimmed beard and mustache ragged as wisps of hay, his overlong hair a
rustic jag at the back, his clothes ripped and filthy--an old, sick,
discouraged tramp. He dropped on a straight chair and stared at them.
Maybe they were genuine--maybe they really were there--maybe he was, as
it seemed, in heaven, looking at the two principal angels, but he had
been so often fooled so cruelly in his visions these dreary months! He
sobbed, and they comforted him with softly stroking hands and not too
confoundedly much babble.

"I've got a hot bath for you! And I'll scrub your back! And then some
hot chicken soup and ice-cream!"

As though one should say: The Lord God awaits you on His throne and all
whom you bless shall be blessed, and all your enemies brought to their
knees!

Those sainted women had actually had a long tin tub fetched to the
kitchen of the old house, filled it with water heated in kettle and
dishpan on the stove, and provided brushes, soap, a vast sponge, and
such a long caressing bath towel as Doremus had forgotten existed. And
somehow, from Fort Beulah, Sissy had brought plenty of his own shoes and
shirts and three suits that now seemed to him fit for royalty.

He who had not had a hot bath for six months, and for three had worn the
same underclothes, and for two (in clammy winter) no socks whatever!

If the presence of Lorinda and Sissy was token of heaven, to slide inch
by slow ecstatic inch into the tub was its proof, and he lay soaking in
glory.

When he was half dressed, the two came in, and there was about as much
thought of modesty, or need for it, as though he were the two-year-old
babe he somewhat resembled. They were laughing at him, but laughter
became sharp whimpers of horror when they saw the gridironed meat of his
back. But nothing more demanding than "Oh, my dear!" did Lorinda say,
even then.

****

Though Sissy had once been glad that Lorinda spared her any mothering,
Doremus rejoiced in it. Snake Tizra and the Trianon concentration camp
had been singularly devoid of any mothering. Lorinda salved his back and
powdered it. She cut his hair, not too unskillfully. She cooked for him
all the heavy, earthy dishes of which he had dreamed, hungry in a cell:
hamburg steak with onions, corn pudding, buckwheat cakes with sausages,
apple dumplings with hard and soft sauce, and cream of mushroom soup!

It had not been safe to take him to the comforts of her tea room at
Beecher Falls; already M.M.'s had been there, snooping after him. But
Sissy and she had, for such refugees as they might be forwarding for the
New Underground, provided this dingy farmhouse with half-a-dozen cots,
and rich stores of canned goods and beautiful bottles (Doremus
considered them) of honey and marmalade and bar-le-duc. The actual final
crossing of the border into Canada was easier than it had been when Buck
Titus had tried to smuggle the Jessup family over. It had become a
system, as in the piratical days of bootlegging; with new forest paths,
bribery of frontier guards, and forged passports. He was safe. Yet just
to make safety safer, Lorinda and Sissy, rubbing their chins as they
looked Doremus over, still discussing him as brazenly as though he were
a baby who could not understand them, decided to turn him into a young
man.

"Dye his hair and mustache black and shave the beard, I think. I wish we
had time to give him a nice Florida tan with an Alpine lamp, too,"
considered Lorinda.

"Yes, I think he'll look sweet that way," said Sissy.

"I will not have my beard off!" he protested. "How do I know what kind
of a chin I'll have when it's naked?"

"Why, the man still thinks he's a newspaper proprietor and one of Fort
Beulah's social favorites!" marveled Sissy as they ruthlessly set to
work.

"Only real reason for these damn wars and revolutions anyway is that the
womenfolks get a chance--ouch! be careful!--to be dear little Amateur
Mothers to every male they can get in their clutches. _Hair dye!_" said
Doremus bitterly.

But he was shamelessly proud of his youthful face when it was denuded,
and he discovered that he had a quite tolerably stubborn chin, and Sissy
was sent back to Beecher Falls to keep the tea room alive, and for three
days Lorinda and he gobbled steaks and ale, and played pinochle, and lay
talking infinitely of all they had thought about each other in the six
desert months that might have been sixty years. He was to remember the
sloping farmhouse bedroom and a shred of rag carpet and a couple of
rickety chairs and Lorinda snuggled under the old red comforter on the
cot, not as winter poverty but as youth and adventurous love.

Then, in a forest clearing, with snow along the spruce boughs, a few
feet across into Canada, he was peering into the eyes of his two women,
curtly saying good-bye, and trudging off into the new prison of exile
from the America to which, already, he was looking back with the long
pain of nostalgia.




CHAPTER 37


His beard had grown again--he and his beard had been friends for many
years, and he had missed it of late. His hair and mustache had again
assumed a respectable gray in place of the purple dye that under
electric lights had looked so bogus. He was no longer impassioned at the
sight of a lamb chop or a cake of soap. But he had not yet got over the
pleasure and slight amazement at being able to talk as freely as he
would, as emphatically as might please him, and in public.

He sat with his two closest friends in Montreal, two fellow executives
in the Department of Propaganda and Publications of the New Underground
(Walt Trowbridge, General Chairman), and these two friends were the Hon.
Perley Beecroft, who presumably was the President of the United States,
and Joe Elphrey, an ornamental young man who, as "Mr. Cailey," had been
a prize agent of the Communist Party in America till he had been kicked
out of that almost imperceptible body for having made a "united front"
with Socialists, Democrats, and even choir-singers when organizing an
anti-Corpo revolt in Texas.

Over their ale, in this café, Beecroft and Elphrey were at it as usual:
Elphrey insisting that the only "solution" of American distress was
dictatorship by the livelier representatives of the toiling masses,
strict and if need be violent, but (this was his new heresy) not
governed by Moscow. Beecroft was gaseously asserting that "all we
needed" was a return to precisely the political parties, the drumming up
of votes, and the oratorical legislating by Congress, of the contented
days of William B. McKinley.

But as for Doremus, he leaned back not vastly caring what nonsense the
others might talk so long as it was permitted them to talk at all
without finding that the waiters were M.M. spies; and content to know
that, whatever happened, Trowbridge and the other authentic leaders
would never go back to satisfaction in government of the profits, by the
profits, for the profits. He thought comfortably of the fact that just
yesterday (he had this from the chairman's secretary), Walt Trowbridge
had dismissed Wilson J. Shale, the ducal oil man, who had come,
apparently with sincerity, to offer his fortune and his executive
experience to Trowbridge and the cause.

"Nope. Sorry, Will. But we can't use you. Whatever happens--even if Haik
marches over and slaughters all of us along with all our Canadian
hosts--you and your kind of clever pirates are finished. Whatever
happens, whatever details of a new system of government may be decided
on, whether we call it a 'Coöperative Commonwealth' or 'State Socialism'
or 'Communism' or 'Revived Traditional Democracy,' there's got to be a
new feeling--that government is not a game for a few smart, resolute
athletes like you, Will, but a universal partnership, in which the State
must own all resources so large that they affect all members of the
State, and in which the one worst crime won't be murder or kidnaping but
taking advantage of the State--in which the seller of fraudulent
medicine, or the liar in Congress, will be punished a whole lot worse
than the fellow who takes an ax to the man who's grabbed off his
girl.... Eh? What's going to happen to magnates like you, Will? God
knows! What happened to the dinosaurs?"

So was Doremus in his service well content.

****

Yet socially he was almost as lonely as in his cell at Trianon; almost
as savagely he longed for the not exorbitant pleasure of being with
Lorinda, Buck, Emma, Sissy, Steve Perefixe.

None of them save Emma could join him in Canada, and she would not. Her
letters suggested fear of the un-Worcesterian wildernesses of Montreal.
She wrote that Philip and she hoped they might be able to get Doremus
forgiven by the Corpos! So he was left to associate only with his fellow
refugees from Corpoism, and he knew a life that had been familiar, far
too familiar, to political exiles ever since the first revolt in Egypt
sent the rebels sneaking off into Assyria.

It was no particularly indecent egotism in Doremus that made him
suppose, when he arrived in Canada, that everyone would thrill to his
tale of imprisonment, torture, and escape. But he found that ten
thousand spirited tellers of woe had come there before him, and that the
Canadians, however attentive and generous hosts they might be, were
actively sick of pumping up new sympathy. They felt that their quota of
martyrs was completely filled, and as to the exiles who came in
penniless, and that was a majority of them, the Canadians became
distinctly weary of depriving their own families on behalf of unknown
refugees, and they couldn't even keep up forever a gratification in the
presence of celebrated American authors, politicians, scientists, when
they became common as mosquitoes.

It was doubtful if a lecture on Deplorable Conditions in America by
Herbert Hoover and General Pershing together would have attracted forty
people. Ex-governors and judges were glad to get jobs washing dishes,
and ex-managing-editors were hoeing turnips. And reports said that
Mexico and London and France were growing alike apologetically bored.

So Doremus, meagerly living on his twenty-dollar-a-week salary from the
N.U., met no one save his own fellow exiles, in just such salons of
unfortunate political escapists as the White Russians, the Red
Spaniards, the Blue Bulgarians, and all the other polychromatic
insurrectionists frequented in Paris. They crowded together, twenty of
them in a parlor twelve by twelve, very like the concentration camp
cells in area, inhabitants, and eventual smell, from 8 P.M. till
midnight, and made up for lack of dinner with coffee and doughnuts and
exiguous sandwiches, and talked without cessation about the Corpos. They
told as "actual facts" stories about President Haik which had formerly
been applied to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini--the one about the man who
was alarmed to find he had saved Haik from drowning and begged him not
to tell.

In the cafés they seized the newspapers from home. Men who had had an
eye gouged out on behalf of freedom, with the rheumy remaining one
peered to see who had won the Missouri Avenue Bridge Club Prize.

They were brave and romantic, tragic and distinguished, and Doremus
became a little sick of them all and of the final brutality of fact that
no normal man can very long endure another's tragedy, and that friendly
weeping will some day turn to irritated kicking.

He was stirred when, in a hastily built American inter-denominational
chapel, he heard a starveling who had once been a pompous bishop read
from the pine pulpit:

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we
remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst
thereof.... How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If I
forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I do
not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if I
prefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy."

Here in Canada the Americans had their Weeping Wall, and daily cried
with false, gallant hope, "Next year in Jerusalem!"

Sometimes Doremus was vexed by the ceaseless demanding wails of refugees
who had lost everything, sons and wives and property and self-respect,
vexed that they believed they alone had seen such horrors; and sometimes
he spent all his spare hours raising a dollar and a little weary
friendliness for these sick souls; and sometimes he saw as fragments of
Paradise every aspect of America--such oddly assorted glimpses as Meade
at Gettysburg and the massed blue petunias in Emma's lost garden, the
fresh shine of rails as seen from a train on an April morning and
Rockefeller Center. But whatever his mood, he refused to sit down with
his harp by any foreign waters whatever and enjoy the importance of
being a celebrated beggar.

He'd get back to America and chance another prison. Meantime he neatly
sent packages of literary dynamite out from the N.U. offices all day
long, and efficiently directed a hundred envelope-addressers who once
had been professors and pastrycooks.

He had asked his superior, Perley Beecroft, for assignment in more
active and more dangerous work, as secret agent in America--out West,
where he was not known. But headquarters had suffered a good deal from
amateur agents who babbled to strangers, or who could not be trusted to
keep their mouths shut while they were being flogged to death. Things
had changed since 1929. The N.U. believed that the highest honor a man
could earn was not to have a million dollars but to be permitted to risk
his life for truth, without pay or praise.

Doremus knew that his chiefs did not consider him young enough or strong
enough, but also that they were studying him. Twice he had the honor of
interviews with Trowbridge about nothing in particular--surely it must
have been an honor, though it was hard to remember it, because
Trowbridge was the simplest and friendliest man in the whole portentous
spy machine. Cheerfully Doremus hoped for a chance to help make the
poor, overworked, worried Corpo officials even more miserable than they
normally were, now that war with Mexico and revolts against Corpoism
were jingling side by side.

****

In July, 1939, when Doremus had been in Montreal a little over five
months, and a year after his sentence to concentration camp, the
American newspapers which arrived at N.U. headquarters were full of
resentment against Mexico.

Bands of Mexicans had raided across into the United States--always,
curiously enough, when our troops were off in the desert,
practice-marching or perhaps gathering sea shells. They burned a town in
Texas--fortunately all the women and children were away on a
Sunday-school picnic, that afternoon. A Mexican Patriot (aforetime he
had also worked as an Ethiopian Patriot, a Chinese Patriot, and a
Haitian Patriot) came across, to the tent of an M.M. brigadier, and
confessed that while it hurt him to tattle on his own beloved country,
conscience compelled him to reveal that his Mexican superiors were
planning to fly over and bomb Laredo, San Antonio, Bisbee, and probably
Tacoma, and Bangor, Maine.

This excited the Corpo newspapers very much indeed, and in New York and
Chicago they published photographs of the conscientious traitor half an
hour after he had appeared at the Brigadier's tent... where, at that
moment, forty-six reporters happened to be sitting about on neighboring
cactuses.

America rose to defend her hearthstones, including all the hearthstones
on Park Avenue, New York, against false and treacherous Mexico, with its
appalling army of 67,000 men, with thirty-nine military aëroplanes.
Women in Cedar Rapids hid under the bed; elderly gentlemen in
Cattaraugus County, New York, concealed their money in elm-tree boles;
and the wife of a chicken-raiser seven miles N.E. of Estelline, South
Dakota, a woman widely known as a good cook and a trained observer,
distinctly saw a file of ninety-two Mexican soldiers pass her cabin,
starting at 3:17 A.M. on July 27, 1939.

To answer this threat, America, the one country that had never lost a
war and never started an unjust one, rose as one man, as the Chicago
_Daily Evening Corporate_ put it. It was planned to invade Mexico as
soon as it should be cool enough, or even earlier, if the refrigeration
and air-conditioning could be arranged. In one month, five million men
were drafted for the invasion, and started training.

****

Thus--perhaps too flippantly--did Joe Cailey and Doremus discuss the
declaration of war against Mexico. If they found the whole crusade
absurd, it may be stated in their defense that they regarded all wars
always as absurd; in the baldness of the lying by both sides about the
causes; in the spectacle of grown-up men engaged in the infantile
diversions of dressing-up in fancy clothes and marching to primitive
music. The only thing not absurd about wars, said Doremus and Cailey,
was that along with their skittishness they did kill a good many
millions of people. Ten thousand starving babies seemed too high a price
for a Sam Browne belt for even the sweetest, touchingest young
lieutenant.

Yet both Doremus and Cailey swiftly recanted their assertion that all
wars were absurd and abominable; both of them made exception of the
people's wars against tyranny, as suddenly America's agreeable
anticipation of stealing Mexico was checked by a popular rebellion
against the whole Corpo régime.

****

The revolting section was, roughly, bounded by Sault Ste. Marie,
Detroit, Cincinnati, Wichita, San Francisco, and Seattle, though in that
territory large patches remained loyal to President Haik, and outside of
it, other large patches joined the rebels. It was the part of America
which had always been most "radical"--that indefinite word, which
probably means "most critical of piracy." It was the land of the
Populists, the Non-Partisan League, the Farmer-Labor Party, and the La
Follettes--a family so vast as to form a considerable party in itself.

Whatever might happen, exulted Doremus, the revolt proved that belief in
America and hope for America were not dead.

These rebels had most of them, before his election, believed in Buzz
Windrip's fifteen points; believed that when he said he wanted to return
the power pilfered by the bankers and the industrialists to the people,
he more or less meant that he wanted to return the power of the bankers
and industrialists to the people. As month by month they saw that they
had been cheated with marked cards again, they were indignant; but they
were busy with cornfield and sawmill and dairy and motor factory, and it
took the impertinent idiocy of demanding that they march down into the
desert and help steal a friendly country to jab them into awakening and
into discovering that, while they had been asleep, they had been
kidnaped by a small gang of criminals armed with high ideals,
well-buttered words, and a lot of machine guns.

So profound was the revolt that the Catholic Archbishop of California
and the radical Ex-Governor of Minnesota found themselves in the same
faction.

At first it was a rather comic outbreak--comic as the ill-trained,
un-uniformed, confusedly thinking revolutionists of Massachusetts in
1776. President General Haik publicly jeered at them as a "ridiculous
rag-tag rebellion of hoboes too lazy to work." And at first they were
unable to do anything more than scold like a flock of crows, throw
bricks at detachments of M.M.'s and policemen, wreck troop trains, and
destroy the property of such honest private citizens as owned Corpo
newspapers.

It was in August that the shock came, when General Emmanuel Coon, Chief
of Staff of the regulars, flew from Washington to St. Paul, took command
of Fort Snelling, and declared for Walt Trowbridge as Temporary
President of the United States, to hold office until there should be a
new, universal, and uncontrolled presidential election.

Trowbridge proclaimed acceptance--with the proviso that he should not be
a candidate for permanent President.

****

By no means all of the regulars joined Coon's revolutionary troops.
(There are two sturdy myths among the Liberals: that the Catholic Church
is less Puritanical and always more esthetic than the Protestant; and
that professional soldiers hate war more than do congressmen and old
maids.) But there were enough regulars who were fed up with the
exactions of greedy, mouth-dripping Corpo commissioners and who threw in
with General Coon so that immediately after his army of regulars and
hastily trained Minnesota farmers had won the battle of Mankato, the
forces at Leavenworth took control of Kansas City, and planned to march
on St. Louis and Omaha; while in New York, Governor's Island and Fort
Wadsworth looked on, neutral, as unmilitary-looking and mostly Jewish
guerrillas seized the subways, power stations, and railway terminals.

But there the revolt halted, because in the America, which had so warmly
praised itself for its "widespread popular free education," there had
been so very little education, widespread, popular, free, or anything
else, that most people did not know what they wanted--indeed knew about
so few things to want at all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking only
literate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who regarded
teaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay as
insurance-selling or embalming or waiting on table. Most Americans had
learned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen people by
the Americans, and this time done the job much better, so that we were
the richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living; that depressions were
but passing headaches and that labor unions must not concern themselves
with anything except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, must
not set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that, though
foreigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics were really
so simple that any village attorney or any clerk in the office of a
metropolitan sheriff was quite adequately trained for them; and that if
John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford had set his mind to it, he could have
become the most distinguished statesman, composer, physicist, or poet in
the land.

Even two-and-half years of despotism had not yet taught most electors
humility, nor taught them much of anything except that it was unpleasant
to be arrested too often.

So, after the first gay eruption of rioting, the revolt slowed up.
Neither the Corpos nor many of their opponents knew enough to formulate
a clear, sure theory of self-government, or irresistibly resolve to
engage in the sore labor of fitting themselves for freedom.... Even
yet, after Windrip, most of the easy-going descendants of the
wisecracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry's
"Give me liberty or give me death" meant anything more than a high
school yell or a cigarette slogan.

The followers of Trowbridge and General Coon--"The American Coöperative
Commonwealth" they began to call themselves--did not lose any of the
territory they had seized; they held it, driving out all Corpo agents,
and now and then added a county or two. But mostly their rule, and
equally the Corpos' rule, was as unstable as politics in Ireland.

So the task of Walt Trowbridge, which in August had seemed finished,
before October seemed merely to have begun. Doremus Jessup was called
into Trowbridge's office, to hear from the chairman:

"I guess the time's come when we need Underground agents in the States
with sense as well as guts. Report to General Barnes for service
proselytizing in Minnesota. Good luck, Brother Jessup! Try to persuade
the orators that are still holding out for Discipline and clubs that
they ain't so much stalwart as funny!"

And all that Doremus thought was, "Kind of a nice fellow, Trowbridge.
Glad to be working with him," as he set off on his new task of being a
spy and professional hero without even any funny passwords to make the
game romantic.




CHAPTER 38


His packing was done. It had been very simple, since his kit consisted
only of toilet things, one change of clothes, and the first volume of
Spengler's _Decline of the West_. He was waiting in his hotel lobby for
time to take the train to Winnipeg. He was interested by the entrance of
a lady more decorative than the females customarily seen in this modest
inn: a hand-tooled presentation copy of a lady, in crushed levant and
satin doublure; a lady with mascara'd eyelashes, a permanent wave, and a
cobweb frock. She ambled through the lobby and leaned against a
fake-marble pillar, wielding a long cigarette-holder and staring at
Doremus. She seemed amused by him, for no clear reason.

Could she be some sort of Corpo spy?

She lounged toward him, and he realized that she was Lorinda Pike.

While he was still gasping, she chuckled, "Oh, no, darling, I'm not so
realistic in my art as to carry out this rôle too far! It just happens
to be the easiest disguise to win over the Corpo frontier guards--if
you'll agree it really is a disguise!"

He kissed her with a fury which shocked the respectable hostelry.

                           *     *     *

She knew, from N.U. agents, that he was going out into a very fair risk
of being flogged to death. She had come solely to say farewell and bring
him what might be his last budget of news.

Buck was in concentration camp--he was more feared and more guarded than
Doremus had been, and Linda had not been able to buy him out. Julian,
Karl, and John Pollikop were still alive, still imprisoned. Father
Perefixe was running the N.U. cell in Fort Beulah, but slightly confused
because he wanted to approve of war with Mexico, a nation which he
detested for its treatment of Catholic priests. Lorinda and he had,
apparently, fought bloodily all one evening about Catholic rule in Latin
America. As is always typical of Liberals, Lorinda managed to speak of
Father Perefixe at once with virtuous loathing and the greatest
affection. Emma and David were reported as well content in Worcester,
though there were murmurs that Philip's wife did not too thankfully
receive her mother-in-law's advice on cooking. Sissy was becoming a deft
agitator who still, remembering that she was a born architect, drew
plans for houses that Julian and she would some day adorn. She contrived
blissfully to combine assaults on all Capitalism with an entirely
capitalistic conception of the year-long honeymoons Julian and she were
going to have.

Less surprising than any of this were the tidings that Francis
Tasbrough, very beautiful in repentance, had been let out of the Corpo
prison to which he had been sent for too much grafting and was again a
district commissioner, well thought of, and that his housekeeper was now
Mrs. Candy, whose daily reports on his most secret arrangements were the
most neatly written and sternly grammatical documents that came into
Vermont N.U. headquarters.

Then Lorinda was looking up at him as he stood in the vestibule of his
Westbound train and crying, "You look so well again! Are you happy? Oh,
be happy!"

Even now he did not see this defeminized radical woman crying.... She
turned away from him and raced down the station platform too quickly.
She had lost all her confident pose of flip elegance. Leaning out from
the vestibule he saw her stop at the gate, diffidently raise her hand as
if to wave at the long anonymity of the train windows, then shakily
march away through the gates. And he realized that she hadn't even his
address; that no one who loved him would have any stable address for him
now any more.

****

Mr. William Barton Dobbs, a traveling man for harvesting machinery, an
erect little man with a small gray beard and a Vermont accent, got out
of bed in his hotel in a section in Minnesota which had so many
Bavarian-American and Yankee-descended farmers, and so few "radical"
Scandinavians, that it was still loyal to President Haik.

He went down to breakfast, cheerfully rubbing his hands. He consumed
grapefruit and porridge--but without sugar: there was an embargo on
sugar. He looked down and inspected himself; he sighed, "I'm getting too
much of a pod, with all this outdoor work and being so hungry; I've got
to cut down on the grub"; and then he consumed fried eggs, bacon, toast,
coffee made of acorns, and marmalade made of carrots--Coon's troops had
shut off coffee beans and oranges.

He read, meantime, the Minneapolis _Daily Corporate_. It announced a
Great Victory in Mexico in the same place, he noted, in which there had
already been three Great Victories in the past two weeks. Also, a
"shameful rebellion" had been put down in Andalusia, Alabama; it was
reported that General Göring was coming over to be the guest of
President Haik; and the pretender Trowbridge was said "by a reliable
source" to have been assassinated, kidnaped, and compelled to resign.

"No news this morning," regretted Mr. William Barton Dobbs.

As he came out of the hotel, a squad of Minute Men were marching by.
They were farm boys, newly recruited for service in Mexico; they looked
as scared and soft and big-footed as a rout of rabbits. They tried to
pipe up the newest-oldest war song, in the manner of the Civil War ditty
"When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again":

    _When Johnny comes home from Greaser Land,_
            _Hurray, hurraw,_
    _His ears will be full of desert sand,_
            _Hurray, hurraw,_
    _But he'll speaka de Spiggoty pretty sweet_
    _And he'll bring us a gun and a señorit',_
    _And we'll all get stewed when_
            _Johnny comes marching home!_

Their voices wavered. They peeped at the crowd along the walk, or looked
sulkily down at their dragging feet, and the crowd, which once would
have been yelping "Hail Haik!" was snickering "You beggars'll never get
to Greaser Land!" and even, from the safety of a second-story window,
"Hurray, hurraw for Trowbridge!"

"Poor devils!" thought Mr. William Barton Dobbs, as he watched the
frightened toy soldiers... not too toy-like to keep them from dying.

Yet it is a fact that he could see in the crowd numerous persons whom
his arguments, and those of the sixty-odd N.U. secret agents under him,
had converted from fear of the M.M.'s to jeering.

****

In his open Ford convertible--he never started it but he thought of how
he had "put it over on Sissy" by getting a Ford all his own--Doremus
drove out of the village into stubble-lined prairie. The meadow larks'
liquid ecstasy welcomed him from barbed wire fences. If he missed the
strong hills behind Fort Beulah, he was yet exalted by the immensity of
the sky, the openness of prairie that promised he could go on forever,
the gayety of small sloughs seen through their fringes of willows and
cottonwoods, and once, aspiring overhead, an early flight of mallards.

He whistled boisterously as he bounced on along the section-line road.

He reached a gaunt yellow farmhouse--it was to have had a porch, but
there was only an unpainted nothingness low down on the front wall to
show where the porch would be. To a farmer who was oiling a tractor in
the pig-littered farmyard he chirped, "Name's William Barton
Dobbs--representing the Des Moines Combine and Up-to-Date Implement
Company."

The farmer galloped up to shake hands, breathing, "By golly this is a
great honor, Mr. J----"

"Dobbs!"

"That's right. 'Scuse me."

In an upper bedroom of the farmhouse, seven men were waiting, perched on
chair and table and edges of the bed, or just squatted on the floor.
Some of them were apparently farmers; some unambitious shopkeepers. As
Doremus bustled in, they rose and bowed.

"Good-morning gentlemen. A little news," he said. "Coon has driven the
Corpos out of Yankton and Sioux Falls. Now I wonder if you're ready with
your reports?"

To the agent whose difficulty in converting farm-owners had been their
dread of paying decent wages to farm hands, Doremus presented for use
the argument (as formalized yet passionate as the observations of a
life-insurance agent upon death by motor accident) that poverty for one
was poverty for all.... It wasn't such a very new argument, nor so
very logical, but it had been a useful carrot for many human mules.

For the agent among the Finnish-American settlers, who were insisting
that Trowbridge was a Bolshevik and just as bad as the Russians, Doremus
had a mimeographed quotation from the _Izvestia_ of Moscow damning
Trowbridge as a "social Fascist quack." For the Bavarian farmers down
the other way, who were still vaguely pro-Nazi, Doremus had a German
émigré paper published in Prague, proving (though without statistics or
any considerable quotation from official documents) that, by agreement
with Hitler, President Haik was, if he remained in power, going to ship
back to the German Army all German-Americans with so much as one
grandparent born in the Fatherland.

"Do we close with a cheerful hymn and the benediction, Mr. Dobbs?"
demanded the youngest and most flippant--and quite the most
successful--agent.

"I wouldn't mind! Maybe it wouldn't be so unsuitable as you think. But
considering the loose morals and economics of most of you comrades,
perhaps it would be better if I closed with a new story about Haik and
Mae West that I heard, day before yesterday.... Bless you all!
Good-bye!"

****

As he drove to his next meeting, Doremus fretted, "I don't believe that
Prague story about Haik and Hitler is true. I think I'll quit using it.
Oh, I know--I know, Mr. Dobbs; as you say, if you did tell the truth to
a Nazi, it would still be a lie. But just the same I think I'll quit
using it.... Lorinda and me, that thought we could get free of
Puritanism!... Those cumulus clouds are better than a galleon. If
they'd just move Mount Terror and Fort Beulah and Lorinda and Buck here,
this would be Paradise.... Oh, Lord, I don't want to, but I suppose
I'll have to order the attack on the M.M. post at Osakis now; they're
ready for it.... I wonder if that shotgun charge yesterday was
intended for me?... Didn't really like Lorinda's hair fixed up in
that New York style at all!"

He slept that night in a cottage on the shore of a sandy-bottomed lake
ringed with bright birches. His host and his host's wife, worshipers of
Trowbridge, had insisted on giving him their own room, with the
patchwork quilt and the hand-painted pitcher and bowl.

He dreamed--as he still did dream, once or twice a week--that he was
back in his cell at Trianon. He knew again the stink, the cramped and
warty bunk, the never relaxed fear that he might be dragged out and
flogged.

He heard magic trumpets. A soldier opened the door and invited out all
the prisoners. There, in the quadrangle, General Emmanuel Coon (who, to
Doremus's dreaming fancy, looked exactly like Sherman) addressed them:

"Gentlemen, the Commonwealth army has conquered! Haik has been captured!
You are free!"

So they marched out, the prisoners, the bent and scarred and crippled,
the vacant-eyed and slobbering, who had come into this place as erect
and daring men: Doremus, Dan Wilgus, Buck, Julian, Mr. Falck, Henry
Veeder, Karl Pascal, John Pollikop, Truman Webb. They crept out of the
quadrangle gates, through a double line of soldiers standing rigidly at
Present Arms yet weeping as they watched the broken prisoners crawling
past.

And beyond the soldiers, Doremus saw the women and children. They were
waiting for him--the kind arms of Lorinda and Emma and Sissy and Mary,
with David behind them, clinging to his father's hand, and Father
Perefixe. And Foolish was there, his tail a proud plume, and from the
dream-blurred crowd came Mrs. Candy, holding out to him a cocoanut cake.

Then all of them were fleeing, frightened by Shad Ledue----

His host was slapping Doremus's shoulder, muttering, "Just had a phone
call. Corpo posse out after you."

So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, to
a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news of
freedom.

And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup can
never die.





[End of It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis]