It Can't Happen Here (33 page)

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!”

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 role 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.”