It Can't Happen Here (38 page)

“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
!’”

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 fire-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?”