It Can't Happen Here (36 page)

“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!”

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
eye shade 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
pre-historic 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.