It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis, from Project Gutenberg Canada (2025)

by Sinclair Lewis

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE

Chapter 1

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

Here in Vermont the affair was not so picturesque as it might have beenon the Western prairies. Oh, it had its points: there was a skit inwhich Medary Cole (grist mill & feed store) and Louis Rotenstern (customtailoring--pressing & cleaning) announced that they were those historicVermonters, Brigham Young and Joseph Smith, and with their jokes aboutimaginary plural wives they got in ever so many funny digs at the ladiespresent. But the occasion was essentially serious. All of America wasserious now, after the seven years of depression since 1929. It was justlong enough after the Great War of 1914-18 for the young people who hadbeen 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, atleast not obviously funny, for they were the patriotic addresses ofBrigadier General Herbert Y. Edgeways, U.S.A. (ret.), who dealt angrilywith the topic "Peace through Defense--Millions for Arms but Not OneCent for Tribute," and of Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch--she who was nomore renowned for her gallant anti-suffrage campaigning way back in 1919than she was for having, during the Great War, kept the Americansoldiers entirely out of French cafés by the clever trick of sendingthem ten thousand sets of dominoes.

Nor could any social-minded patriot sneeze at her recent somewhatunappreciated effort to maintain the purity of the American Home bybarring from the motion-picture industry all persons, actors ordirectors or cameramen, who had: (a) ever been divorced; (b) been bornin any foreign country--except Great Britain, since Mrs. Gimmitchthought very highly of Queen Mary, or (c) declined to take an oath torevere the Flag, the Constitution, the Bible, and all other peculiarlyAmerican institutions.

The Annual Ladies' Dinner was a most respectable gathering--the flowerof Fort Beulah. Most of the ladies and more than half of the gentlemenwore evening clothes, and it was rumored that before the feast the innercircle had had cocktails, privily served in Room 289 of the hotel. Thetables, arranged on three sides of a hollow square, were bright withcandles, cut-glass dishes of candy and slightly tough almonds, figurinesof Mickey Mouse, brass Rotary wheels, and small silk American flagsstuck 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-fruttiice-cream--was up to the highest standards of the Hotel Wessex.

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

"...for these U-nited States, a-lone among the great powers, have nodesire for foreign conquest. Our highest ambition is to be darned welllet alone! Our only gen-uine relationship to Europe is in our arduoustask of having to try and educate the crass and ignorant masses thatEurope has wished onto us up to something like a semblance of Americanculture and good manners. But, as I explained to you, we must beprepared to defend our shores against all the alien gangs ofinternational racketeers that call themselves 'governments,' and thatwith such feverish envy are always eyeing our inexhaustible mines, ourtowering forests, our titanic and luxurious cities, our fair andfar-flung fields.

"For the first time in all history, a great nation must go on armingitself more and more, not for conquest--not for jealousy--not forwar--but for peace! Pray God it may never be necessary, but if foreignnations don't sharply heed our warning, there will, as when theproverbial dragon's teeth were sowed, spring up an armed and fearlesswarrior upon every square foot of these United States, so arduouslycultivated and defended by our pioneer fathers, whose sword-girdedimages we must be... or we shall perish!"

The applause was cyclonic. "Professor" Emil Staubmeyer, thesuperintendent of schools, popped up to scream, "Three cheers for theGeneral--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 DoremusJessup, editor of the Fort Beulah Daily Informer, locally considered"a pretty smart fella but kind of a cynic," who whispered to his friendthe Reverend Mr. Falck, "Our pioneer fathers did rather of a skimpy jobin arduously cultivating some of the square feet in Arizona!"

**

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

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

In those good days women really had a chance. They were encouraged tosend their menfolks, or anybody else's menfolks, off to war. Mrs.Gimmitch addressed every soldier she met--and she saw to it that she metany 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 upfrom the ranks and who answered, "We own dear boys are certainly gettinga lot of mothers these days. Personally, I'd rather have a few moremistresses." And the fable continues that she did not stop her remarkson the occasion, except to cough, for one hour and seventeen minutes, bythe Colonel's wrist watch.

But her social services were not all confined to prehistoric eras. Itwas as recently as 1935 that she had taken up purifying the films, andbefore that she had first advocated and then fought Prohibition. She hadalso (since the vote had been forced on her) been a RepublicanCommitteewoman in 1932, and sent to President Hoover daily a lengthytelegram of advice.

And, though herself unfortunately childless, she was esteemed as alecturer and writer about Child Culture, and she was the author of avolume 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 ofthe American Revolution.

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

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

So, whether Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch was called in to inspiremilitary morale, or to persuade Lithuanian choral societies to begintheir program with "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean," always she was aD.A.R., and you could tell it as you listened to her with the FortBeulah Rotarians on this happy May evening.

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

Women, she pointed out, had done nothing with the vote. If the UnitedStates had only listened to her back in 1919 she could have saved themall this trouble. No. Certainly not. No votes. In fact, Woman mustresume 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 tohave six children."

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

One Lorinda Pike, widow of a notorious Unitarian preacher, was themanager of a country super-boarding-house that called itself "The BeulahValley Tavern." She was a deceptively Madonna-like, youngish woman, withcalm eyes, smooth chestnut hair parted in the middle, and a soft voiceoften colored with laughter. But on a public platform her voice becamebrassy, her eyes filled with embarrassing fury. She was the villagescold, the village crank. She was constantly poking into things thatwere none of her business, and at town meetings she criticized everysubstantial interest in the whole county: the electric company's rates,the salaries of the schoolteachers, the Ministerial Association'shigh-minded censorship of books for the public library. Now, at thismoment 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 campaignsagainst subversive Reds, trained to ridicule out of existence the cantof Socialist hecklers and turn the laugh against them, swung intogallant action:

"My dear good woman, if a gal, as you call it, has any real charm andwomanliness, she won't have to 'hook' a man--she'll find 'em lined upten 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 somany are selfish! Here's a hundred and twenty million people, withninety-five per cent of 'em only thinking of self, instead of turningto 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 unfortunateemployer, with all the responsibilities he has to bear!

"What this country needs is Discipline! Peace is a great dream, butmaybe sometimes it's only a pipe dream! I'm not so sure--now this willshock you, but I want you to listen to one woman who will tell you theunadulterated hard truth instead of a lot of sentimental taffy, and I'mnot sure but that we need to be in a real war again, in order to learnDiscipline! We don't want all this highbrow intellectuality, all thisbook-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 thisgreat land is going to go on maintaining its high position among theCongress 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 yourgreat experience, don't you honest, cross-your-heart, think thatperhaps--just maybe--when a country has gone money-mad, like all ourlabor unions and workmen, with their propaganda to hoist income taxes,so that the thrifty and industrious have to pay for the shiftlessne'er-do-weels, then maybe, to save their lazy souls and get some ironinto them, a war might be a good thing? Come on, now, tell your realmiddle name, Mong General!"

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

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

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

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

"I don't altogether admire everything Germany and Italy have done, butyou've got to hand it to 'em, they've been honest enough and realisticenough 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 divinequalities it's not only a right, it's a duty, to use 'em!' Nobody inGod's world ever loved a weakling--including that weakling himself!

"And I've got good news for you! This gospel of clean and aggressivestrength is spreading everywhere in this country among the finest typeof youth. Why today, in 1936, there's less than 7 per cent of collegiateinstitutions that do not have military training units under disciplineas rigorous as the Nazis, and where once it was forced upon them by theauthorities, now it is the strong young men and women who themselvesdemand the right to be trained in warlike virtues and skill--for, markyou, the girls, with their instruction in nursing and the manufacture ofgas masks and the like, are becoming every whit as zealous as theirbrothers. And all the really thinking type of professors are rightwith 'em!

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

**

As the General sat down, amid ecstasies of applause, the village troublemaker, Mrs. Lorinda Pike, leaped up and again interrupted the lovefeast:

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

She got no farther. Francis Tasbrough, the quarry owner, the mostsubstantial industrialist in Fort Beulah, stood grandly up, quietedLorinda with an outstretched arm, and rumbled in hisJerusalem-the-Golden basso, "A moment please, my dear lady! All of ushere locally have got used to your political principles. But aschairman, it is my unfortunate duty to remind you that General Edgewaysand Mrs. Gimmitch have been invited by the club to address us, whereasyou, if you will excuse my saying so, are not even related to anyRotarian but merely here as the guest of the Reverend Falck, than whomthere is no one whom we more honor. So, if you will be so good----Ah, Ithank 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 theArchbishop of Canterbury on the archiepiscopal throne.

And Doremus Jessup popped up to soothe them all, being an intimate ofLorinda, and having, since milkiest boyhood, chummed with and detestedFrancis Tasbrough.

This Doremus Jessup, publisher of the Daily Informer, for all that hewas a competent business man and a writer of editorials not without witand good New England earthiness, was yet considered the prime eccentricof Fort Beulah. He was on the school board, the library board, and heintroduced people like Oswald Garrison Villard, Norman Thomas, andAdmiral Byrd when they came to town lecturing.

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

"Well, all the birdies in their nest agree. My friend, Mrs. Pike, oughtto know that freedom of speech becomes mere license when it goes so faras to criticize the Army, differ with the D.A.R., and advocate therights of the Mob. So, Lorinda, I think you ought to apologize to theGeneral, to whom we should be grateful for explaining to us what theruling classes of the country really want. Come on now, my friend--jumpup 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 hadbeen known to. Yes--no--he must be wrong, for Mrs. Lorinda Pike was(without rising) caroling, "Oh yes! I do apologize, General! Thank youfor your revelatory speech!"

The General raised his plump hand (with a Masonic ring as well as a WestPoint ring on the sausage-shaped fingers); he bowed like Galahad or ahead-waiter; he shouted with parade-ground maleness: "Not at all, not atall, madame! We old campaigners never mind a healthy scrap. Glad whenanybody'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 withLouis Rotenstern's singing of a group of patriotic ditties: "Marchingthrough 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," acaste just below that of "real, old-fashioned gentleman." Doremus Jessupliked to go fishing with him, and partridge-hunting; and he consideredthat no Fifth Avenue tailor could do anything tastier in the way of aseersucker outfit. But Louis was a jingo. He explained, and ratheroften, that it was not he nor his father who had been born in the ghettoin Prussian Poland, but his grandfather (whose name, Doremus suspected,had been something less stylish and Nordic than Rotenstern). Louis'spocket heroes were Calvin Coolidge, Leonard Wood, Dwight L. Moody, andAdmiral Dewey (and Dewey was a born Vermonter, rejoiced Louis, whohimself had been born in Flatbush, Long Island).

He was not only 100 per cent American; he exacted 40 per cent ofchauvinistic interest on top of the principal. He was on every occasionheard 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 andChinks." Louis was altogether convinced that if the ignorant politicianswould keep their dirty hands off banking and the stock exchange andhours of labor for salesmen in department stores, then everyone in thecountry would profit, as beneficiaries of increased business, and all ofthem (including the retail clerks) be rich as Aga Khan.

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

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

"Oh, no, Dormouse, you did just right. I am fond of Lorinda Pike, butwhy does she have to show off and parade all her silly Socialistideas?"

"You old Tory!" said Doremus. "Don't you want to invite the Siameseelephant, 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 theirinnumerable motorcars, it was Frank Tasbrough who invited the choicermales, 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 GeneralEdgeways. 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 sixtyyears 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 wasbut little manufacturing: a small woolen mill, a sash-and-door factory,a pump works. The granite which was its chief produce came from quarriesfour miles away; in Fort Beulah itself were only the offices... allthe money... the meager shacks of most of the quarry workers. It wasa town of perhaps ten thousand souls, inhabiting about twenty thousandbodies--the proportion of soul-possession may be too high.

There was but one (comparative) skyscraper in town: the six-storyTasbrough Building, with the offices of the Tasbrough & Scarlett GraniteQuarries; the offices of Doremus's son-in-law, Fowler Greenhill, M.D.,and his partner, old Dr. Olmsted, of Lawyer Mungo Kitterick, of HarryKindermann, agent for maple syrup and dairying supplies, and of thirtyor 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, andto which May Day was not an occasion for labor parades but fordistributing 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, onPleasant Hill, which was a spur thrust like a reaching hand out from thedark rearing mass of Mount Terror. Upland meadows, moon-glistening, hecould see, among the wildernesses of spruce and maple and poplar on theridges far above him; and below, as his car climbed, was Ethan Creekflowing through the meadows. Deep woods--rearing mountain bulwarks--theair like spring-water--serene clapboarded houses that remembered the Warof 1812 and the boyhoods of those errant Vermonters, Stephen A. Douglas,the "Little Giant," and Hiram Powers and Thaddeus Stevens and BrighamYoung and President Chester Alan Arthur.

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

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

"But rats----These hills! Castle walls. And this air. They can keeptheir Cotswolds and Harz Mountains and Rockies! D. Jessup--topographicalpatriot. And I am a----"

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

**

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

**

Mr. Francis Tasbrough was the president, general manager, and chiefowner of the Tasbrough & Scarlett Granite Quarries, at West Beulah, fourmiles from "the Fort." He was rich, persuasive, and he had constantlabor troubles. He lived in a new Georgian brick house on Pleasant Hill,a little beyond Doremus Jessup's, and in that house he maintained aprivate barroom luxurious as that of a motor company's advertisingmanager at Grosse Point. It was no more the traditional New England thanwas the Catholic part of Boston; and Frank himself boasted that, thoughhis family had for six generations lived in New England, he was no tightYankee but in his Efficiency, his Salesmanship, the completePan-American Business Executive.

He was a tall man, Tasbrough, with a yellow mustache and a monotonouslyemphatic voice. He was fifty-four, six years younger than DoremusJessup, and when he had been four, Doremus had protected him from theresults of his singularly unpopular habit of hitting the other smallboys over the head with things--all kinds of things--sticks and toywagons 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--RoscoeConkling Crowley, the weightiest banker in Fort Beulah--and, rathersurprisingly, Tasbrough's pastor, the Episcopal minister, the Rev. Mr.Falck, his old hands as delicate as porcelain, his wilderness of hairsilk-soft and white, his unfleshly face betokening the Good Life. Mr.Falck came from a solid Knickerbocker family, and he had studied inEdinburgh and Oxford along with the General Theological Seminary of NewYork; and in all of the Beulah Valley there was, aside from Doremus, noone who more contentedly hid away in the shelter of the hills.

The barroom had been professionally interior-decorated by a young NewYork gentleman with the habit of standing with the back of his righthand against his hip. It had a stainless-steel bar, framed illustrationsfrom La Vie Parisienne, silvered metal tables, and chromium-platedaluminum chairs with scarlet leather cushions.

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

"And I wonder if Thad Stevens would of liked this, either?" consideredDoremus. "He'd of snarled. Old cornered catamount. But probably not atthe 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 aginthe government--kidding everybody--posing as such a Liberal that you'llstand for all these subversive elements. Time for you to quit playingtag with crazy ideas and come in and join the family. These are serioustimes--maybe twenty-eight million on relief, and beginning to getugly--thinking they've got a vested right now to be supported.

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

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

Said Doremus, "Hm. Yes, I agree it's a serious time. With all thediscontent there is in the country to wash him into office, SenatorWindrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, nextNovember, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us intosome war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world thatwe're the huskiest nation going. And then I, the Liberal, and you, thePlutocrat, 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 BuzzWindrip, Buzz will win. People will think they're electing him to createmore economic security. Then watch the Terror! God knows there's beenenough indication that we can have tyranny in America--the fix of theSouthern share-croppers, the working conditions of the miners andgarment-makers, and our keeping Mooney in prison so many years. But waittill Windrip shows us how to say it with machine guns! Democracy--hereand in Britain and France, it hasn't been so universal a snivelingslavery as Naziism in Germany, such an imagination-hating, pharisaicmaterialism as Russia--even if it has produced industrialists like you,Frank, and bankers like you, R. C., and given you altogether too muchpower and money. On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy'sgiven the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had. That may bemenaced now by Windrip--all the Windrips. All right! Maybe we'll have tofight paternal dictatorship with a little sound patricide--fight machineguns with machine guns. Wait till Buzz takes charge of us. A realFascist dictatorship!"

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

"The answer to that," suggested Doremus Jessup, "if Mr. Falck willforgive me, is 'the hell it can't!' Why, there's no country in the worldthat can get more hysterical--yes, or more obsequious!--than America.Look how Huey Long became absolute monarch over Louisiana, and how theRight Honorable Mr. Senator Berzelius Windrip owns his State. Listento Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin on the radio--divine oracles, tomillions. Remember how casually most Americans have accepted Tammanygrafting and Chicago gangs and the crookedness of so many of PresidentHarding's appointees? Could Hitler's bunch, or Windrip's, be worse?Remember the Kuklux Klan? Remember our war hysteria, when we calledsauerkraut 'Liberty cabbage' and somebody actually proposed callingGerman measles 'Liberty measles'? And wartime censorship of honestpapers? Bad as Russia! Remember our kissing the--well, the feet of BillySunday, the million-dollar evangelist, and of Aimée McPherson, who swamfrom the Pacific Ocean clear into the Arizona desert and got away withit? Remember Voliva and Mother Eddy?... Remember our Red scares andour Catholic scares, when all well-informed people knew that theO.G.P.U. were hiding out in Oskaloosa, and the Republicans campaigningagainst Al Smith told the Carolina mountaineers that if Al won the Popewould illegitimatize their children? Remember Tom Heflin and Tom Dixon?Remember when the hick legislators in certain states, in obedience toWilliam Jennings Bryan, who learned his biology from his pious oldgrandma, set up shop as scientific experts and made the whole worldlaugh itself sick by forbidding the teaching of evolution?...Remember the Kentucky night-riders? Remember how trainloads of peoplehave gone to enjoy lynchings? Not happen here? Prohibition--shootingdown people just because they might be transporting liquor--no, thatcouldn't happen in America! Why, where in all history has there everbeen a people so ripe for a dictatorship as ours! We're ready to starton a Children's Crusade--only of adults--right now, and the RightReverend Abbots Windrip and Prang are all ready to lead it!"

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

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

"Hm," said Doremus, as often Doremus did say it. "Cure the evils ofDemocracy by the evils of Fascism! Funny therapeutics. I've heard oftheir curing syphilis by giving the patient malaria, but I've neverheard of their curing malaria by giving the patient syphilis!"

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

Mr. Falck piped up, "I think it's quite nice language, and aninteresting 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 inthe 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 Bibleof the conservative Vermont farmers up and down the Beulah Valley, wasborn in Fort Beulah in 1876, only son of an impecunious Universalistpastor, 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 Bassof Mass should marry a minister prone to gas," and he would insist thatshe was all wrong ichthyologically--she should have been a cod, not abass. There was in the parsonage little meat but plenty of books, notall theological by any means, so that before he was twelve Doremus knewthe profane writings of Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Jane Austen,Tennyson, Byron, Keats, Shelley, Tolstoy, Balzac. He graduated fromIsaiah College--once a bold Unitarian venture but by 1894 aninter-denominational outfit with nebulous trinitarian yearnings, a smalland rustic stable of learning, in North Beulah, thirteen miles from "theFort."

But Isaiah College has come up in the world today--exceptingeducationally--for in 1931 it held the Dartmouth football team down to64 to 6.

During college, Doremus wrote a great deal of bad poetry and became anincurable book addict, but he was a fair track athlete. Naturally, hecorresponded for papers in Boston and Springfield, and after graduationhe was a reporter in Rutland and Worcester, with one glorious year inBoston, whose grimy beauty and shards of the past were to him whatLondon would be to a young Yorkshireman. He was excited by concerts, artgalleries, and bookshops; thrice a week he had a twenty-five-cent seatin the upper balcony of some theater; and for two months he roomed witha fellow reporter who had actually had a short story in The Centuryand who could talk about authors and technique like the very dickens.But Doremus was not particularly beefy or enduring, and the noise, thetraffic, the bustle of assignments, exhausted him, and in 1901, threeyears after his graduation from college, when his widowed father diedand left him $2980.00 and his library, Doremus went home to Fort Beulahand bought a quarter interest in the Informer, then a weekly.

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

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

He was a third cousin of Calvin Coolidge, who had considered him sounddomestically but loose politically. Doremus considered himself just theopposite.

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

Now, in 1936, of their three children, Philip (Dartmouth, and HarvardLaw School) was married and ambitiously practicing law in Worcester;Mary was the wife of Fowler Greenhill, M.D., of Fort Beulah, a gay andhustling medico, a choleric and red-headed young man, who was awonder-worker in typhoid, acute appendicitis, obstetrics, compoundfractures, 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 suchred-gold hair that his picture might well have been hung at a NationalAcademy show or even been reproduced on the cover of a Women's Magazinewith 2,500,000 circulation. The Greenhills' neighbors inevitably said ofthe boy, "My, Davy's got such an imagination, hasn't he! I guess he'llbe 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-twoand Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, turned thirty. She rejoiced the heart ofDoremus 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 miraculoussmall homes.

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

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

**

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

He cursed competently as, on the cement walk from the garage to thekitchen, he barked his shins on the lawnmower, left there by his hiredman, one Oscar Ledue, known always as "Shad," a large and red-faced, asulky and surly Irish-Canuck peasant. Shad always did things likeleaving lawnmowers about to snap at the shins of decent people. He wasentirely incompetent and vicious. He never edged-up the flower beds, hekept his stinking old cap on his head when he brought in logs for thefireplace, he did not scythe the dandelions in the meadow till they hadgone to seed, he delighted in failing to tell cook that the peas werenow ripe, and he was given to shooting cats, stray dogs, chipmunks, andhoney-voiced blackbirds. At least twice a day, Doremus resolved to firehim, but----Perhaps he was telling himself the truth when he insistedthat it was amusing to try to civilize this prize bull.

Doremus trotted into the kitchen, decided that he did not want some coldchicken and a glass of milk from the ice-box, nor even a wedge of thecelebrated 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 of1880, a square bulk with a mansard roof and, in front, a long porch withinsignificant square white pillars. Doremus declared that the house wasugly, "but ugly in a nice way."

His study, up there, was his one perfect refuge from annoyances andbustle. It was the only room in the house that Mrs. Candy (quiet, grimlycompetent, thoroughly literate, once a Vermont country schoolteacher)was never allowed to clean. It was an endearing mess of novels, copiesof the Congressional Record, of the New Yorker, Time, Nation,New Republic, New Masses, and Speculum (cloistral organ of theMedieval Society), treatises on taxation and monetary systems, roadmaps, volumes on exploration in Abyssinia and the Antarctic, chewedstubs of pencils, a shaky portable typewriter, fishing tackle, rumpledcarbon paper, two comfortable old leather chairs, a Windsor chair at hisdesk, the complete works of Thomas Jefferson, his chief hero, amicroscope and a collection of Vermont butterflies, Indian arrowheads,exiguous volumes of Vermont village poetry printed in local newspaperoffices, 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 shotgunand a .22 repeating rifle, an Isaiah College banner, faded, the completeOxford Dictionary, five fountain pens of which two would work, a vasefrom Crete dating from 327 B.C.--very ugly--the World Almanac for yearbefore last, with the cover suggesting that it had been chewed by a dog,odd pairs of horn-rimmed spectacles and of rimless eyeglasses, none ofwhich now suited his eyes, a fine, reputedly Tudor oak cabinet fromDevonshire, portraits of Ethan Allen and Thaddeus Stevens, rubberwading-boots, senile red morocco slippers, a poster issued by theVermont Mercury at Woodstock, on September 2, 1840, announcing aglorious Whig victory, twenty-four boxes of safety matches one by onestolen from the kitchen, assorted yellow scratch pads, seven books onRussia and Bolshevism--extraordinarily pro or extraordinarily con--asigned photograph of Theodore Roosevelt, six cigarette cartons, all halfempty (according to the tradition of journalistic eccentrics, Doremusshould have smoked a Good Old Pipe, but he detested the slimy ooze ofnicotine-soaked spittle), a rag carpet on the floor, a withered sprig ofholly with a silver Christmas ribbon, a case of seven unused genuineSheffield razors, dictionaries in French, German, Italian andSpanish--the first of which languages he really could read--a canary ina Bavarian gilded wicker cage, a worn linen-bound copy of OldHearthside Songs for Home and Picnic whose selections he was wont tocroon, holding the book on his knee, and an old cast-iron Franklinstove. Everything, indeed, that was proper for a hermit and improper forimpious domestic hands.

Before switching on the light he squinted through a dormer window at thebulk of mountains cutting the welter of stars. In the center were thelast lights of Fort Beulah, far below, and on the left, unseen, the softmeadows, 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, hemeditated, he loved it more every quiet year of his freedom from citytowers and city clamor.

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

It was from Victor Loveland, one of the younger, moreinternational-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 dearFrank, 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 anothereditorial 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 reliablecombination of English setter, Airedale, cocker spaniel, wistful doe,and rearing hyena. He gave one abrupt snort of welcome and nuzzled hisbrown satin head against Doremus's knee. His bark awakened the canary,under the absurd old blue sweater that covered its cage, and itautomatically caroled that it was noon, summer noon, among the peartrees in the green Harz hills, none of which was true. But the bird'strilling, the dependable presence of Foolish, comforted Doremus, mademilitary drill and belching politicians seem unimportant, and insecurity he dropped asleep in the worn brown leather chair.

Chapter 4

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

Now, six weeks before the 1936 national conventions, it was probablethat neither Franklin Roosevelt, Herbert Hoover, Senator Vandenberg,Ogden Mills, General Hugh Johnson, Colonel Frank Knox, nor Senator Borahwould be nominated for President by either party, and that theRepublican standard-bearer--meaning the one man who never has to lug alarge, bothersome, and somewhat ridiculous standard--would be that loyalyet strangely honest old-line Senator, Walt Trowbridge, a man with atouch of Lincoln in him, dashes of Will Rogers and George W. Norris, asuspected trace of Jim Farley, but all the rest plain, bulky, placidlydefiant 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 andbellowing voice, with his satanic secretary, Lee Sarason, as the brainbehind.

Senator Windrip's father was a small-town Western druggist, equallyambitious and unsuccessful, and had named him Berzelius after theSwedish chemist. Usually he was known as "Buzz." He had worked his waythrough a Southern Baptist college, of approximately the same academicstanding as a Jersey City business college, and through a Chicago lawschool, and settled down to practice in his native state and to enlivenlocal politics. He was a tireless traveler, a boisterous and humorousspeaker, an inspired guesser at what political doctrines the peoplewould like, a warm handshaker, and willing to lend money. He drankCoca-Cola with the Methodists, beer with the Lutherans, California whitewine with the Jewish village merchants--and, when they were safe fromobservation, white-mule corn whisky with all of them.

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

He was never governor; he had shrewdly seen that his reputation forresearch among planters-punch recipes, varieties of poker, and thepsychology of girl stenographers might cause his defeat by the churchpeople, so he had contented himself with coaxing to the gubernatorialshearing a trained baa-lamb of a country schoolmaster whom he had gaylyled on a wide blue ribbon. The state was certain that he had "given it agood administration," and they knew that it was Buzz Windrip who wasresponsible, not the Governor.

Windrip caused the building of impressive highroads and of consolidatedcountry schools; he made the state buy tractors and combines and lendthem to the farmers at cost. He was certain that some day America wouldhave vast business dealings with the Russians and, though he detestedall Slavs, he made the State University put in the first course in theRussian language that had been known in all that part of the West. Hismost original invention was quadrupling the state militia and rewardingthe best soldiers in it with training in agriculture, aviation, andradio and automobile engineering.

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

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

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

The Reverend Dr. Egerton Schlemil, dean of St. Agnes Cathedral, SanAntonio, Texas, stated (once in a sermon, once in the slightly variantmimeographed press handout on the sermon, and seven times in interviews)that Buzz's coming into power would be "like the Heaven-blest fall ofrevivifying rain upon a parched and thirsty land." Dr. Schlemil did notsay anything about what happened when the blest rain came and keptfalling steadily for four years.

No one, even among the Washington correspondents, seemed to knowprecisely how much of a part in Senator Windrip's career was taken byhis secretary, Lee Sarason. When Windrip had first seized power in hisstate, Sarason had been managing editor of the most widely circulatedpaper in all that part of the country. Sarason's genesis was andremained a mystery.

It was said that he had been born in Georgia, in Minnesota, on the EastSide of New York, in Syria; that he was pure Yankee, Jewish, CharlestonHuguenot. It was known that he had been a singularly reckless lieutenantof machine-gunners as a youngster during the Great War, and that he hadstayed over, ambling about Europe, for three or four years; that he hadworked on the Paris edition of the New York Herald; nibbled atpainting and at Black Magic in Florence and Munich; had a fewsociological months at the London School of Economics; associated withdecidedly curious people in arty Berlin night restaurants. Returnedhome, Sarason had become decidedly the "hard-boiled reporter" of theshirt-sleeved tradition, who asserted that he would rather be called aprostitute than anything so sissified as "journalist." But it wassuspected that nevertheless he still retained the ability to read.

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

Sarason was lanky and drooping, with thin flaxen hair, and thick lips ina bony face. His eyes were sparks at the bottoms of two dark wells. Inhis long hands there was bloodless strength. He used to surprise personswho were about to shake hands with him by suddenly bending their fingersback till they almost broke. Most people didn't much like it. As anewspaperman he was an expert of the highest grade. He could smell out ahusband-murder, the grafting of a politician--that is to say, of apolitician belonging to a gang opposed by his paper--the torture ofanimals or children, and this last sort of story he liked to writehimself, 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 ofFort Beulah was like a village parson compared with thetwenty-thousand-dollar minister of a twenty-story New York institutionaltabernacle with radio affiliations.

Senator Windrip had made Sarason, officially, his secretary, but he wasknown to be much more--bodyguard, ghost-writer, press-agent, economicadviser; and in Washington, Lee Sarason became the man most consultedand least liked by newspaper correspondents in the whole Senate OfficeBuilding.

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

Though he probably based it on notes dictated by Windrip--himself nofool in the matter of fictional imagination--Sarason had certainly donethe actual writing of Windrip's lone book, the Bible of his followers,part biography, part economic program, and part plain exhibitionisticboasting, called Zero Hour--Over the Top.

It was a salty book and contained more suggestions for remolding theworld 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, belovedby the provincial press because of its simple earthiness (as written byan 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 therelationship of the two leading parties. Old-Guard Republicanscomplained that their proud party was begging for office, hat in hand;veteran Democrats that their traditional Covered Wagons were jammed withcollege professors, city slickers, and yachtsmen.

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

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

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

Prang was more sentimental than Coughlin; he shouted more; he agonizedmore; he reviled more enemies by name, and rather scandalously; he toldmore funny stories, and ever so many more tragic stories about therepentant deathbeds of bankers, atheists, and Communists. His voice wasmore nasally native, and he was pure Middle West, with a New EnglandProtestant Scotch-English ancestry, where Coughlin was always a littlesuspect, in the Sears-Roebuck regions, as a Roman Catholic with anagreeable Irish accent.

No man in history has ever had such an audience as Bishop Prang, nor somuch apparent power. When he demanded that his auditors telegraph theircongressmen to vote on a bill as he, Prang, ex cathedra and alone,without any college of cardinals, had been inspired to believe theyought to vote, then fifty thousand people would telephone, or drivethrough back-hill mud, to the nearest telegraph office and in His namegive their commands to the government. Thus, by the magic ofelectricity, Prang made the position of any king in history look alittle absurd and tinseled.

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

Doremus Jessup, up in the provincial hills, could never quite figure outjust what political gospel it was that Bishop Prang thundered from hisSinai which, with its microphone and typed revelations timed to thesplit-second, was so much more snappy and efficient than the originalSinai. 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 consumergoods. But everybody was nibbling at those noble doctrines now, fromVirginia Senators to Minnesota Farmer-Laborites, with no one being socredulous as to expect any of them to be carried out.

There was a theory around some place that Prang was only the humblevoice of his vast organization, "The League of Forgotten Men." It wasuniversally believed to have (though no firm of chartered accountantshad yet examined its rolls) twenty-seven million members, along withproper assortments of national officers and state officers, and townofficers and hordes of committees with stately names like "NationalCommittee on the Compilation of Statistics on Unemployment and NormalEmployability in the Soy-Bean Industry." Hither and yon, Bishop Prang,not as the still small voice of God but in lofty person, addressedaudiences of twenty thousand persons at a time, in the larger cities allover the country, speaking in huge halls meant for prize-fighting, incinema palaces, in armories, in baseball parks, in circus tents, whileafter the meetings his brisk assistants accepted membership applicationsand dues for the League of Forgotten Men. When his timid detractorshinted that this was all very romantic, very jolly and picturesque, butnot particularly dignified, and Bishop Prang answered, "My Masterdelighted to speak in whatever vulgar assembly would listen to Him," noone dared answer him, "But you aren't your Master--not yet."

With all the flourish of the League and its mass meetings, there hadnever been a pretense that any tenet of the League, any pressure onCongress and the President to pass any particular bill, originated withanybody save Prang himself, with no collaboration from the committees orofficers of the League. All that the Prang who so often crooned aboutthe Humility and Modesty of the Saviour wanted was for one hundred andthirty million people to obey him, their Priest-King, implicitly ineverything concerning their private morals, their public asseverations,how they might earn their livings, and what relationships they mighthave to other wage-earners.

"And that," Doremus Jessup grumbled, relishing the shocked piety of hiswife Emma, "makes Brother Prang a worse tyrant than Caligula--a worseFascist than Napoleon. Mind you, I don't really believe all theserumors about Prang's grafting on membership dues and the sale ofpamphlets 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 Fascistmenace--he's so confoundedly humanitarian, in fact so Noble, that amajority of people are willing to let him boss everything, and with acountry this size, that's quite a job--quite a job, my beloved--even fora Methodist Bishop who gets enough gifts so that he can actually 'buyTime'!"

**

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

There was nothing exhilarating in such realism, so all this rainy weekin June, with the apple blossoms and the lilacs fading, Doremus Jessupwas 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 laydew-covered on the grass, robins were about their brisk business on thelawn. Doremus, by nature a late-lier and pilferer of naps after he hadbeen called at eight, was stirred to spring up and stretch his arms outfully 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 themountain 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 abedroom with any person living, because he was a night-mutterer, andliked to make a really good, uprearing, pillow-slapping job of turningover in bed without feeling that he was disturbing someone.

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

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

He was glad they were going to have Lorinda Pike--he was fond of thatsardonic 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 theDan'l Boone type of Old American, or, perhaps, an Indian-fightingcavalry captain, out of Charles King. He had graduated from Williams,with ten weeks in England and ten years in Montana, divided betweencattle-raising, prospecting, and a horse-breeding ranch. His father, arichish railroad contractor, had left him the great farm near WestBeulah, and Buck had come back home to grow apples, to breed Morganstallions, and to read Voltaire, Anatole France, Nietzsche, andDostoyefsky. He served in the war, as a private; detested his officers,refused a commission, and liked the Germans at Cologne. He was a usefulpolo 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 ofthe 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 afriendly Negro couple; a tidy place in which he sometimes entertainedladies 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 wascynical, he rarely smiled, and he was unwaveringly loyal to all theJessups. His coming to the picnic made Doremus as blithe as his grandsonDavid.

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

**

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

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

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

"No!"

"Yep. Mostly movie magazines, with nekked ladies and Wild Westernstories, but he also reads the papers. Told me he greatly admired BuzzWindrip; says Windrip will certainly be President, and theneverybody--by which, I'm afraid, Shad means only himself--will have fivethousand a year. Buzz certainly has a bunch of philanthropists forfollowers."

"Now listen, Dad. You don't understand Senator Windrip. Oh, he'ssomething of a demagogue--he shoots off his mouth a lot about how he'lljack up the income tax and grab the banks, but he won't--that's justmolasses for the cockroaches. What he will do, and maybe only he cando it, is to protect us from the murdering, thieving, lying Bolsheviksthat would--why, they'd like to stick all of us that are going on thispicnic, all the decent clean people that are accustomed to privacy, intohall bedrooms, and make us cook our cabbage soup on a Primus stuck on abed! Yes, or maybe 'liquidate' us entirely! No sir, Berzelius Windrip isthe fellow to balk the dirty sneaking Jew spies that pose as AmericanLiberals!"

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

**

The picnic ground was among a Stonehenge of gray and lichen-paintedrocks, fronting a birch grove high up on Mount Terror, on the uplandfarm of Doremus's cousin, Henry Veeder, a solid, reticent Vermonter ofthe old days. They looked through a distant mountain gap to the faintmercury of Lake Champlain and, across it, the bulwark of theAdirondacks.

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

But for the parked motorcars, the scene might have been New England in1885, and you could see the women in chip hats and tight-bodiced,high-necked frocks with bustles; the men in straw boaters with danglingribbons and adorned with side-whiskers--Doremus's beard not clipped, butflowing like a bridal veil. When Dr. Greenhill fetched down Cousin HenryVeeder, 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 affectionateVictorian 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 andneurotic, nothing savoring of Freud, Adler, Marx, Bertrand Russell, orany other divinity of the 1930's, when Mother Emma chattered to Mary andMerilla about her rose bushes that had "winter-killed," and the newyoung maples that the field mice had gnawed, and the difficulty ofgetting Shad Ledue to bring in enough fireplace wood, and how Shadgorged pork chops and fried potatoes and pie at lunch, which he ate atthe Jessups'.

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

David and Buck Titus were playing ship, now, on a rearing rock--it wasthe bridge, and David was Captain Popeye, with Buck his bosun; and evenDr. Greenhill, that impetuous crusader who was constantly infuriatingthe county board of health by reporting the slovenly state of the poorfarm and the stench in the county jail, was lazy in the sun and with thegreatest of concentration kept an unfortunate little ant running backand forth on a twig. His wife Mary--the golfer, the runner-up in statetennis tournaments, the giver of smart but not too bibulous cocktailparties at the country club, the wearer of smart brown tweeds with agreen scarf--seemed to have dropped gracefully back into the domesticityof her mother, and to consider as a very weighty thing a recipe forcelery-and-roquefort sandwiches on toasted soda crackers. She was thehandsome Older Jessup Girl again, back in the white house with themansard 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 toDoremus: "Certainly a lot of Messiahs pottin' at you from the bushesthese days--Buzz Windrip and Bishop Prang and Father Coughlin and Dr.Townsend (though he seems to have gone back to Nazareth) and UptonSinclair and Rev. Frank Buchman and Bernarr Macfadden and WillumRandolph Hearst and Governor Talmadge and Floyd Olson and----Say, Iswear 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 tenyears from now--he hands out the fried drumsticks and gizzard rightalong 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 theEpiscopal rector and living with the old man because his parents weredead, was in the eyes of Doremus the most nearly tolerable of Sissy'ssuitors. He was Swede-blond and wiry, with a neat, small face and cannyeyes. He called Doremus "sir," and he had, unlike most of theradio-and-motor-hypnotized eighteen-year-olds in the Fort, read a book,and voluntarily--read Thomas Wolfe and William Rollins, John Stracheyand Stuart Chase and Ortega. Whether Sissy preferred him to MalcolmTasbrough, her father did not know. Malcolm was taller and thicker thanJulian, and he drove his own streamline De Soto, while Julian could onlyborrow his grandfather's shocking old flivver.

Sissy and Julian bickered amiably about Alice Aylot's skill inbackgammon, 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'she learning to be--a crooner or a hockey-announcer?" Doremus wasadjusting the doubtful portable radio. Once he thought he was going tobe with them in the Home Sweet Home atmosphere, for he tuned in on aprogram 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 NellyGray." But when the announcer informed them that these ditties werebeing sponsored by Toily Oily, the Natural Home Cathartic, and that theywere being rendered by a sextette of young males horribly called "TheSmoothies," 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--ofthe weekly address of Bishop Paul Peter Prang.

Coming from an airless closet, smelling of sacerdotal woolen unionsuits, in Persepolis, Indiana, it leapt to the farthest stars; itcircled the world at 186,000 miles a second--a million miles while youstopped to scratch. It crashed into the cabin of a whaler on a darkpolar sea; into an office, paneled with linen-fold oak looted from aNottinghamshire castle, on the sixty-seventh story of a building on WallStreet; into the foreign office in Tokio; into the rocky hollow belowthe shining birches upon Mount Terror, in Vermont.

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

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

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

"So spake the Book, of old.... But it was spoken also to America, of1936!

"There is no Peace! For more than a year now, the League of ForgottenMen has warned the politicians, the whole government, that we are sickunto death of being the Dispossessed--and that, at last, we are morethan fifty million strong; no whimpering horde, but with the will, thevoices, the votes to enforce our sovereignty! We have in no uncertainway informed every politician that we demand--that we demand--certainmeasures, and that we will brook no delay. Again and again we havedemanded that both the control of credit and the power to issue money beunqualifiedly taken away from the private banks; that the soldiers notonly receive the bonus they with their blood and anguish so richlyearned in '17 and '18, but that the amount agreed upon be now doubled;that all swollen incomes be severely limited and inheritances cut tosuch small sums as may support the heirs only in youth and in old age;that labor and farmers' unions be not merely recognized as instrumentsfor joint bargaining but be made, like the syndicates in Italy, officialparts of the government, representing the toilers; and thatInternational Jewish Finance and, equally, International JewishCommunism and Anarchism and Atheism be, with all the stern solemnity andrigid inflexibility this great nation can show, barred from allactivity. Those of you who have listened to me before will understandthat I--or rather that the League of Forgotten Men--has no quarrel withindividual 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 offthe face of the earth.

"These demands we have made, and how long now, O Lord, how long, havethe politicians and the smirking representatives of Big Businesspretended to listen, to obey? 'Yes--yes--my masters of the League ofForgotten 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--thegiant bankers--the monarchs of steel and motors and electricity andcoal--the brokers and the holding-companies--they are all of them likethe Bourbon kings, of whom it was said that 'they forgot nothing andthey learned nothing.'

"But they died upon the guillotine!

"Perhaps we can be more merciful to our Bourbons. Perhaps--perhaps--wecan save them from the guillotine--the gallows--the swift firing-squad.Perhaps we shall, in our new régime, under our new Constitution, withour 'New Deal' that really will be a New Deal and not an arrogantexperiment--perhaps we shall merely make these big bugs of finance andpolitics sit on hard chairs, in dingy offices, toiling unending hourswith pen and typewriter as so many white-collar slaves for so many yearshave toiled for them!

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

"Listen! Listen! History being made!" Doremus cried at his heedlessfamily.

"--use the tremendous strength of the millions of League members tosecure the Democratic presidential nomination forSenator--Berzelius--Windrip--which means, flatly, that he will beelected--and that we of the League shall elect him--as President ofthese United States!

"His program and that of the League do not in all details agree. But hehas implicitly pledged himself to take our advice, and, at least untilelection, we shall back him, absolutely--with our money, with ourloyalty, with our votes... with our prayers. And may the Lord guidehim and us across the desert of iniquitous politics and swinishlygrasping finance into the golden glory of the Promised Land! God blessyou!"

**

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

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

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

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

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

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 andMary, Mrs. Fowler Greenhill--believed that Doremus was of fickle health;that any cold would surely turn into pneumonia; that he must wear hisrubbers, and eat his porridge, and smoke fewer cigarettes, and never"overdo." He raged at them; he knew that though he did get staggeringlytired after a crisis in the office, a night's sleep made him a littledynamo again, and he could "turn out copy" faster than his spryest youngreporter.

He concealed his dissipations from them like any small boy from hiselders; lied unscrupulously about how many cigarettes he smoked; keptconcealed a flask of Bourbon from which he regularly had one nip, onlyone, before he padded to bed; and when he had promised to go to sleepearly, he turned off his light till he was sure that Emma wasslumbering, then turned it on and happily read till two, curled underthe well-loved hand-woven blankets from a loom up on Mount Terror; hislegs twitching like a dreaming setter's what time the Chief Inspector ofthe 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 themorning and made himself coffee and washed up everything so that Emmaand Mrs. Candy would never know.... He thought they never knew!

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

Sometimes when Emma came to loaf beside him in bed on a Sunday morningand put her comfortable arm about his thin shoulder-blades, she was sickwith the realization that he was growing older and more frail. Hisshoulders, 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 offtwo hours and charged an item of two dollars to have the lawnmowersharpened, instead of filing it himself, even when Sissy and her gangplayed the piano downstairs till two on nights when he did not want tolie awake, Doremus was never irritable--except, usually, between arisingand the first life-saving cup of coffee.

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

After Bishop Prang had presented the crown to Senator Windrip, as thesummer hobbled nervously toward the national political conventions, Emmawas disturbed. For Doremus was silent before breakfast, and he hadrheumy eyes, as though he was worried, as though he had slept badly.Never was he cranky. She missed hearing him croaking, "Isn't thatconfounded idiot, Mrs. Candy, ever going to bring in the coffee? Isuppose she's sitting there reading her Testament! And will you be sokind as to tell me, my good woman, why Sissy never gets up forbreakfast, 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 tofire him, and right away, this morning!"

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

But he sat unspeaking, pale, opening his Daily Informer as though hewere afraid to see what news had come in since he had left the office atten.

**

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

He, who understood himself abnormally well, knew that far from being aleft-wing radical, he was at most a mild, rather indolent and somewhatsentimental Liberal, who disliked pomposity, the heavy humor of publicmen, and the itch for notoriety which made popular preachers andeloquent educators and amateur play-producers and rich lady reformersand rich lady sportswomen and almost every brand of rich lady comepreeningly in to see newspaper editors, with photographs under theirarms, and on their faces the simper of fake humility. But for allcruelty and intolerance, and for the contempt of the fortunate for theunfortunate, he had not mere dislike but testy hatred.

He had alarmed all his fellow editors in northern New England byasserting the innocence of Tom Mooney, questioning the guilt of Saccoand Vanzetti, condemning our intrusion in Haiti and Nicaragua,advocating an increased income tax, writing, in the 1932 campaign, afriendly account of the Socialist candidate, Norman Thomas (andafterwards, to tell the truth, voting for Franklin Roosevelt), andstirring up a little local and ineffective hell regarding the serfdom ofthe Southern share-croppers and the California fruit-pickers. He evensuggested editorially that when Russia had her factories and railroadsand giant farms really going--say, in 1945--she might conceivably be thepleasantest country in the world for the (mythical!) Average Man. Whenhe wrote that editorial, after a lunch at which he had been irritated bythe smug croaking of Frank Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, he really didget into trouble. He got named Bolshevik, and in two days his paper losta 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. Russiaforbade everything that made his toil worth enduring: privacy, the rightto think and to criticize as he freakishly pleased. To have his mindpoliced by peasants in uniform--rather than that he would live in anAlaska cabin, with beans and a hundred books and a new pair of pantsevery three years.

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

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

All day long Pascal and Pollikop yelpingly raided each other's trenchesin the battle between Social Democracy and Communism, and Doremus oftendropped 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-payingVermonters, 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 Isuspect you even have a sneaking fondness for Shad Ledue!) when youcould just associate with decent, prosperous people like Frank--it'sbeyond me! What they must think of you, sometimes! They don'tunderstand that you're really not a Socialist one bit, but really anice, 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 thatpicked out ugly scarps of the hills as though they were rocks thrown upin an explosion.

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

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

The Republican convention was over, with Walt Trowbridge as presidentialcandidate. The Democratic convention, meeting in Cleveland, with a gooddeal of gin, strawberry soda, and sweat, had finished the committeereports, the kind words said for the Flag, the assurances to the ghostof Jefferson that he would be delighted by what, if Chairman Jim Farleyconsented, would be done here this week. They had come to thenominations--Senator Windrip had been nominated by Colonel Dewey Haik,Congressman, and power in the American Legion. Gratifying applause andhasty elimination had greeted such Favorite Sons of the several statesas Al Smith, Carter Glass, William McAdoo, and Cordell Hull. Now, on thetwelfth ballot, there were four contestants left, and they, in order ofvotes, were Senator Windrip, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, SenatorRobinson of Arkansas, and Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

Great and dramatic shenanigans had happened, and Doremus Jessup'simagination had seen them all clearly as they were reported by thehysterical radio and by bulletins from the A.P. that fell redhot andsmoking upon his desk at the Informer office.

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

Windrip's own demonstration, scientifically worked up beforehand by hissecretary-press-agent-private-philosopher, Lee Sarason, yielded nothingto others'. For Sarason had read his Chesterton well enough to know thatthere is only one thing bigger than a very big thing, and that is athing so very small that it can be seen and understood.

When Colonel Dewey Haik put Buzz's name in nomination, the Colonel woundup by shouting, "One thing more! Listen! It is the special request ofSenator Windrip that you do not waste the time of this history-makingassembly by any cheering of his name--any cheering whatever. We of theLeague of Forgotten Men (yes--and Women!) don't want empty acclaim, buta solemn consideration of the desperate and immediate needs of 60 percent of the population of the United States. No cheers--but mayProvidence guide us in the most solemn thinking we have ever done!"

As he finished, down the center aisle came a private procession. Butthis was no parade of thousands. There were only thirty-one persons init, 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 littleold men, all over ninety, leaning one on another and glancing timidlyabout in the hope that no one would laugh at them.

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

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

Following the old men were twelve Legionnaires, wounded in1918--stumbling on wooden legs, dragging themselves between crutches;one in a wheel chair, yet so young-looking and gay; and one with a blackmask before what should have been a face. Of these, one carried anenormous flag, and another a placard demanding: "Our Starving FamiliesMust Have the Bonus--We Want Only Justice--We Want Buzz for President."

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

**

Following the soldiers were ten men and women, their toes through theirshoes, and wearing rags that were the more pitiful because they had beenwashed and rewashed till they had lost all color. With them totteredfour pallid children, their teeth rotted out, between them just managingto hold up a placard declaring, "We Are on Relief. We Want to BecomeHuman Beings Again. We Want Buzz!"

Twenty feet behind came one lone tall man. The delegates had beencraning around to see what would follow the relief victims. When theydid see, they rose, they bellowed, they clapped. For the lone man----Fewof the crowd had seen him in the flesh; all of them had seen him ahundred times in press pictures, photographed among litters of books inhis study--photographed in conference with President Roosevelt andSecretary Ickes--photographed shaking hands with SenatorWindrip--photographed before a microphone, his shrieking mouth a darkopen trap and his lean right arm thrown up in hysterical emphasis; allof them had heard his voice on the radio till they knew it as they knewthe voices of their own brothers; all of them recognized, coming throughthe wide main entrance, at the end of the Windrip parade, the apostle ofthe 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 bureaussent following the feverish first bulletins, one energetic Birminghamreporter pretty well proved that the Southern battle flag carried by theConfederate veteran had been lent by the museum in Richmond and theNorthern flag by a distinguished meat-packer of Chicago who was thegrandson of a Civil War general.

Lee Sarason never told anyone save Buzz Windrip that both flags had beenmanufactured on Hester Street, New York, in 1929, for the patrioticdrama, Morgan's Riding, and that both came from a theatricalwarehouse.

**

Before the cheering, as the Windrip parade neared the platform, theywere greeted by Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, the celebrated author,lecturer, and composer, who--suddenly conjured onto the platform as ifwhisked out of the air--sang to the tune of "Yankee Doodle" words whichshe 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 differentprima donnas before midnight, by some sixteen million less vocalAmericans within forty-eight hours, and by at least ninety millionfriends and scoffers in the struggle that was to come. All through thecampaign, Buzz Windrip was able to get lots of jolly humor out of punson going to Wash., and to wash. Walt Trowbridge, he jeered, wasn't goingto either of them!

Yet Lee Sarason knew that in addition to this comic masterpiece, thecause 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 thedelegates were again at their proper business of saving the nation andcutting one another's throats, Sarason had Mrs. Gimmitch sing a moreinspirational hymn, with words by Sarason himself, in collaboration witha quite remarkable surgeon, one Dr. Hector Macgoblin.

This Dr. Macgoblin, soon to become a national monument, was asaccomplished in syndicated medical journalism, in the reviewing of booksabout education and psychoanalysis, in preparing glosses upon thephilosophies of Hegel, Professor Guenther, Houston Stewart Chamberlain,and Lothrop Stoddard, in the rendition of Mozart on the violin, insemi-professional boxing, and in the composition of epic poetry, as hewas 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 theItalians, "The Horst Wessel Song" to the Nazis, "The International" toall 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 theradio 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 awayin institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughtercattle in uniforms. Hm."

The thunderstorm, which had mercifully lulled, burst again in wrathfulmenace.

**

All afternoon the convention balloted, over and over, with no change inthe order of votes for the presidential candidate. Toward six, MissPerkins's manager threw her votes to Roosevelt, who gained then onSenator Windrip. They seemed to have settled down to an all-nightstruggle, and at ten in the evening Doremus wearily left the office. Hedid not, tonight, want the sympathetic and extremely feminizedatmosphere of his home, and he dropped in at the rectory of his friendFather Perefixe. There he found a satisfyingly unfeminized, untalcumizedgroup. The Reverend Mr. Falck was there. Swart, sturdy young Perefixeand silvery old Falck often worked together, were fond of each other,and agreed upon the advantages of clerical celibacy and almost everyother doctrine except the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. With themwere Buck Titus, Louis Rotenstern, Dr. Fowler Greenhill, and BankerCrowley, a financier who liked to cultivate an appearance of freeintellectual discussion, though only after the hours devoted to refusingcredit to desperate farmers and storekeepers.

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

Better than his own glacial white-paneled drawing room with itsportraits of dead Vermont worthies, Doremus liked Father Perefixe'slittle study, and its combination of churchliness, of freedom fromCommerce (at least ordinary Commerce), as displayed in a crucifix and aplaster statuette of the Virgin and a shrieking red-and-green Italianpicture of the Pope, with practical affairs, as shown in the oakroll-top desk and steel filing-cabinet and well-worn portabletypewriter. It was a pious hermit's cave with the advantages of leatherchairs and excellent rye highballs.

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

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

"When my dear wife was still among us, she used to send me to bed atmidnight," 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 ofliving," crowed Buck Titus. "Celibates. We can go to bed with our pantson, or not go to bed at all," and Father Perefixe murmured, "But it'scurious, Buck, what people find to boast of--you that you're free ofGod's tyranny and also that you can go to bed in your pants--Mr. Falckand Dr. Greenhill and I that God is so lenient with us that some nightsHe lets us off from sick-calls and we can go to bed with 'em off! AndLouis because----Listen! Listen! Sounds like business!"

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

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

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

Each moment the brassy importunities of the radio seemed to Doremus themore offensive, while the hillside slept in the heavy summer night, andhe thought about the mazurka of the fireflies, the rhythm of cricketslike the rhythm of the revolving earth itself, the voluptuous breezesthat bore away the stink of cigars and sweat and whisky breaths and mintchewing-gum that seemed to come to them from the convention over thesound waves, along with the oratory.

**

It was after dawn, and Father Perefixe (unclerically stripped toshirt-sleeves and slippers) had just brought them in a grateful tray ofonion soup, with a gob of Hamburg steak for Foolish, when the oppositionto Buzz collapsed and hastily, on the next ballot, Senator BerzeliusWindrip was nominated as Democratic Candidate for President of theUnited States.

**

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

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

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

Rotenstern was silent. He did not like Windrip's reference to Jews. Theones he knew best--no, they were Americans! Lincoln was his tribal godtoo, 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 achance. I think I'll indulge in the luxury of being independent, foronce, 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, remarkablyenough, Shad Ledue, who was supposed to go to work at seven, was at workat seven. Normally he never left his bachelor shack in Lower Town tillten to eight, but this morning he was on the job, chopping kindling. (Ohyes, 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 heneeded a shave. Foolish growled at him. Doremus suspected that at sometime he had been kicking Foolish. He wanted to honor Shad for the sweatyshirt, the honest toil, and all the rugged virtues, but even as aLiberal American Humanitarian, Doremus found it hard always to keep upthe Longfellow's-Village-Blacksmith-cum-Marx attitude consistently andnot sometimes backslide into a belief that there must be some crooksand swine among the toilers as, notoriously, there were so shockinglymany among persons with more than $3500 a year.

"Well--been sitting up listening to the radio," purred Doremus. "Did youknow 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, leaningon his ax. Sometimes he could be quite pleasant and condescending, evento this little man who was so ignorant about coon-hunting and the gamesof craps and poker.

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

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

"Oh, them? So what! Heck! There was too few of 'em. I'm not going towaste my time foolin' with just a couple dozen chickens! When I getfive-six thousand of 'em to make it worth my while, then I'll showyou! 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 faintderisive:

"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 clarifiedhis philosophy by issuing his distinguished proclamation: "The FifteenPoints of Victory for the Forgotten Men." The fifteen planks, in his ownwords (or maybe in Lee Sarason's words, or Dewey Haik's words), werethese:

(1) All finance in the country, including banking, insurance, stocks andbonds and mortgages, shall be under the absolute control of a FederalCentral Bank, owned by the government and conducted by a Board appointedby the President, which Board shall, without need of recourse toCongress for legislative authorization, be empowered to make allregulations governing finance. Thereafter, as soon as may bepracticable, this said Board shall consider the nationalization andgovernment-ownership, for the Profit of the Whole People, of all mines,oilfields, water-power, public utilities, transportation, andcommunication.

(2) The President shall appoint a commission, equally divided betweenmanual workers, employers, and representatives of the Public, todetermine which Labor Unions are qualified to represent the Workers; andreport to the Executive, for legal action, all pretended labororganizations, whether "Company Unions," or "Red Unions," controlled byCommunists and the so-called "Third International." The duly recognizedUnions shall be constituted Bureaus of the Government, with power ofdecision in all labor disputes. Later, the same investigation andofficial recognition shall be extended to farm organizations. In thiselevation of the position of the Worker, it shall be emphasized that theLeague of Forgotten Men is the chief bulwark against the menace ofdestructive and un-American Radicalism.

(3) In contradistinction to the doctrines of Red Radicals, with theirfelonious expropriation of the arduously acquired possessions whichinsure to aged persons their security, this League and Party willguarantee Private Initiative and the Right to Private Property for alltime.

(4) Believing that only under God Almighty, to Whom we render allhomage, do we Americans hold our vast Power, we shall guarantee to allpersons absolute freedom of religious worship, provided, however, thatno atheist, agnostic, believer in Black Magic, nor any Jew who shallrefuse to swear allegiance to the New Testament, nor any person of anyfaith who refuses to take the Pledge to the Flag, shall be permitted tohold 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. Noaccumulated fortune may at any one time exceed $3,000,000 per person. Noone person shall, during his entire lifetime, be permitted to retain aninheritance or various inheritances in total exceeding $2,000,000. Allincomes or estates in excess of the sums named shall be seized by theFederal Government for use in Relief and in Administrative expenses.

(6) Profit shall be taken out of War by seizing all dividends over andabove 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, aswell as from food, textiles, and all other supplies furnished to theAmerican or to any allied army.

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

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

(9) We cannot too strongly condemn the un-Christian attitude of certainotherwise progressive nations in their discriminations against the Jews,who have been among the strongest supporters of the League, and who willcontinue to prosper and to be recognized as fully Americanized, thoughonly 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 ofgrammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums inexcess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in anyother manner receive. In order, however, to give the most sympatheticaid possible to all Negroes who comprehend their proper and valuableplace in society, all such colored persons, male or female, as can provethat they have devoted not less than forty-five years to such suitabletasks as domestic service, agricultural labor, and common labor inindustries, shall at the age of sixty-five be permitted to appear beforea special Board, composed entirely of white persons, and upon proof thatwhile employed they have never been idle except through sickness, theyshall be recommended for pensions not to exceed the sum of $500.00 perperson per year, nor to exceed $700.00 per family. Negroes shall, bydefinition, be persons with at least one sixteenth colored blood.

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

(12) All women now employed shall, as rapidly as possible, except insuch peculiarly feminine spheres of activity as nursing and beautyparlors, be assisted to return to their incomparably sacred duties ashome-makers and as mothers of strong, honorable future Citizens of theCommonwealth.

(13) Any person advocating Communism, Socialism, or Anarchism,advocating refusal to enlist in case of war, or advocating alliance withRussia in any war whatsoever, shall be subject to trial for hightreason, 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 whichthe judges may find convenient.

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

(15) Congress shall, immediately upon our inauguration, initiateamendments to the Constitution providing (a), that the President shallhave the authority to institute and execute all necessary measures forthe conduct of the government during this critical epoch; (b), thatCongress shall serve only in an advisory capacity, calling to theattention of the President and his aides and Cabinet any neededlegislation, but not acting upon same until authorized by the Presidentso to act; and (c), that the Supreme Court shall immediately haveremoved from its jurisdiction the power to negate, by ruling them to beunconstitutional or by any other judicial action, any or all acts of thePresident, his duly appointed aides, or Congress.

Addendum: It shall be strictly understood that, as the League ofForgotten Men and the Democratic Party, as now constituted, have nopurpose nor desire to carry out any measure that shall not unqualifiedlymeet with the desire of the majority of voters in these United States,the League and Party regard none of the above fifteen points asobligatory and unmodifiable except No. 15, and upon the others they willact or refrain from acting in accordance with the general desire of thePublic, who shall under the new régime be again granted an individualfreedom of which they have been deprived by the harsh and restrictiveeconomic measures of former administrations, both Republican andDemocratic.

**

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

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

"Six doesn't mean anything at all--munition firms with vertical trustswill be able to wangle one 6 per cent on manufacture, one ontransportation, and one on sales--at least. Seven means we'll get readyto follow all the European nations in trying to hog the whole world.Eight means that by inflation, big industrial companies will be able tobuy their outstanding bonds back at a cent on the dollar, and Nine thatall Jews who don't cough up plenty of money for the robber baron will bepunished, even including the Jews who haven't much to cough up. Ten,that all well-paying jobs and businesses held by Negroes will be grabbedby the Poor White Trash among Buzz's worshipers--and that instead ofbeing denounced they'll be universally praised as patriotic protectorsof Racial Purity. Eleven, that Buzz'll be able to pass the buck for notcreating any real relief for poverty. Twelve, that women will later losethe vote and the right to higher education and be foxed out of alldecent 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 calleda Communist and scragged for it. Why, under this clause, Hoover and AlSmith and Ogden Mills--yes, and you and me--will all be Communists.

"Fourteen, that Buzz thinks enough of the support of the veterans' voteto be willing to pay high for it--in other people's money. AndFifteen--well, that's the one lone clause that really does meansomething; and it means that Windrip and Lee Sarason and Bishop Prangand I guess maybe this Colonel Dewey Haik and this Dr. HectorMacgoblin--you know, this doctor that helps write the high-minded hymnsfor Buzz--they've realized that this country has gone so flabby that anygang daring enough and unscrupulous enough, and smart enough not toseem illegal, can grab hold of the entire government and have all thepower 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 atfirst, and Mussolini's, and Hitler's, and Kemal Pasha's, and Napoleon's!You'll see all the liberal preachers and modernist educators anddiscontented newspapermen and farm agitators--maybe they'll worry atfirst, but they'll get caught up in the web of propaganda, like we allwere in the Great War, and they'll all be convinced that, even if ourBuzzy maybe has got a few faults, he's on the side of the plainpeople, and against all the tight old political machines, and they'llrouse the country for him as the Great Liberator (and meanwhile BigBusiness will just wink and sit tight!) and then, by God, thiscrook--oh, I don't know whether he's more of a crook or an hystericalreligious fanatic--along with Sarason and Haik and Prang andMacgoblin--these five men will be able to set up a régime that'll remindyou of Henry Morgan the pirate capturing a merchant ship."

"But will Americans stand for it long?" whimpered Emma. "Oh, no, notpeople like us--the descendants of the pioneers!"

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

"Oh, you will be careful, won't you?" begged Emma. "Oh. Before I forgetit. How many times must I tell you, Dormouse, not to give Foolishchicken 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 youput it in the garage at night! I'm perfectly sure Shad Ledue orsomebody will steal it one of these nights!"

**

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

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

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

Sissy sounded not like a flirtatious girl but like a battling woman asshe snarled, "So the League of Forgotten Men is going to make us aLeague of Forgotten Women! Send us back to washing diapers and leachingout ashes for soap! Let us read Louisa May Alcott and Barrie--except onthe 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 BusyBerzelius for me that I'm going to England on the next boat!"

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

**

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

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 therewere so many published photographs--showing him popping into cars andout of aëroplanes, dedicating bridges, eating corn pone and side-meatwith Southerners and clam chowder and bran with Northerners, addressingthe American Legion, the Liberty League, the Y.M.H.A., the YoungPeople's Socialist League, the Elks, the Bartenders' and Waiters' Union,the Anti-Saloon League, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel inAfghanistan--showing him kissing lady centenarians and shaking handswith ladies called Madame, but never the opposite--showing him in SavileRow riding-clothes on Long Island and in overalls and a khaki shirt inthe Ozarks--this Buzz Windrip was almost a dwarf, yet with an enormoushead, a bloodhound head, of huge ears, pendulous cheeks, mournful eyes.He had a luminous, ungrudging smile which (declared the Washingtoncorrespondents) he turned on and off deliberately, like an electriclight, but which could make his ugliness more attractive than thesimpers of any pretty man.

His hair was so coarse and black and straight, and worn so long in theback, that it hinted of Indian blood. In the Senate he preferred clothesthat suggested the competent insurance salesman, but when farmerconstituents were in Washington he appeared in an historic ten-gallonhat with a mussy gray "cutaway" which somehow you erroneously rememberedas a black "Prince Albert."

In that costume, he looked like a sawed-off museum model of amedicine-show "doctor," and indeed it was rumored that during one lawschool vacation Buzz Windrip had played the banjo and done card tricksand handed down medicine bottles and managed the shell game for no lessscientific an expedition than Old Dr. Alagash's Traveling Laboratory,which specialized in the Choctaw Cancer Cure, the Chinook ConsumptionSoother, and the Oriental Remedy for Piles and Rheumatism Prepared froma World-old Secret Formula by the Gipsy Princess, Queen Peshawara. Thecompany, ardently assisted by Buzz, killed off quite a number of personswho, but for their confidence in Dr. Alagash's bottles of water,coloring matter, tobacco juice, and raw corn whisky, might have goneearly 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 boguseconomics, standing on an indoor platform under mercury-vapor lights infront 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 MickeyMouse."

**

Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windripfrom so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching largeaudiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liareasily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebratedpiety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yetmore celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.

Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of hisspeeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His politicalplatforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his presentcredo--derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, andprobably the revue Of Thee I Sing--little Buzz, back home, hadadvocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the countypoor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobsfor 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 youthought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could notremember anything he had said.

There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished thisprairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no moreoverwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in thepulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomitBiblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursingmother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldlyand almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts--figuresand facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they wereentirely incorrect.

But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to beauthentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and withhim. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor aFascist but a Democrat--a homespunJeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat--and (sansscenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitolagainst barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his ownwarm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semiticmadness of Europe.

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

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

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

**

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

Sarason had, as it was scientifically called, been "building up" SenatorWindrip for seven years before his nomination as President. Where otherSenators were encouraged by their secretaries and wives (no potentialdictator 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 theGreat World all of the clownishness which (along with considerable legalshrewdness and the endurance to make ten speeches a day) had endearedhim to his simple-hearted constituents in his native state.

Windrip danced a hornpipe before an alarmed academic audience when hegot his first honorary degree; he kissed Miss Flandreau at the SouthDakota beauty contest; he entertained the Senate, or at least the Senategalleries, with detailed accounts of how to catch catfish--from thebait-digging to the ultimate effects of the jug of corn whisky; hechallenged the venerable Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to a duelwith 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 stayedback home, raising spinach and chickens and telling the neighbors thatshe expected to go to Washington next year, the while Windrip wasinforming the press that his "Frau" was so edifyingly devoted to theirtwo small children and to Bible study that she simply could not becoaxed to come East.

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

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

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

In a fury, as he was at least every quarter hour, he would leap up, peeloff the overcoat (showing either a white boiled shirt and clerical blackbow, or a canary-yellow silk shirt with a scarlet tie), fling it on thefloor, and put it on again with slow dignity, while he bellowed hisanger like Jeremiah cursing Jerusalem, or like a sick cow mourning itskidnaped young.

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

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

Once, within twenty-seven minutes, he talked on the telephone fromChicago to Palo Alto, Washington, Buenos Aires, Wilmette, and OklahomaCity. Once, in half a day, he received sixteen calls from clergymenasking him to condemn the dirty burlesque show, and seven fromtheatrical promoters and real estate owners asking him to praise it. Hecalled the clergymen "Doctor" or "Brother" or both; he called thepromoters "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 leaderof the world orchestra. Lee Sarason insisted that Buzz look into a fewinternational fundamentals, such as the relationship of sterling to thelira, the proper way in which to address a baronet, the chances of theArchduke Otto, the London oyster bars and the brothels near theBoulevard de Sebastopol best to recommend to junketing Representatives.

But the actual cultivation of foreign diplomats resident in Washingtonhe left to Sarason, who entertained them on terrapin and canvasback duckwith black-currant jelly, in his apartment that was considerably moretapestried than Buzz's own ostentatiously simple Washington quarters....However, in Sarason's place, a room with a large silk-hung Empiredouble 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 millionsinto reading--and even thousands into buying--that Bible of EconomicJustice; Sarason who had perceived there was now such a spate of privatepolitical weeklies and monthlies that it was a distinction not topublish one; Sarason who had the inspiration for Buzz's emergency radioaddress at 3 A.M. upon the occasion of the Supreme Court's throttlingthe N.R.A., in May, 1935.... Though not many adherents, includingBuzz himself, were quite certain as to whether he was pleased ordisappointed; though not many actually heard the broadcast itself,everyone in the country except sheepherders and Professor AlbertEinstein heard about it and was impressed.

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

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

Nor could Sarason ever have convinced the wealthy that the more Buzzdenounced 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 disguisedas assessments on imaginary business partnerships.

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

**

And it was Buzz's, not Sarason's, master stroke that, as warmly as headvocated everyone's getting rich by just voting to be rich, hedenounced all "Fascism" and "Naziism," so that most of the Republicanswho were afraid of Democratic Fascism, and all the Democrats who wereafraid 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 threeyears 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 onthe electric washing machine.

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

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

The remnants of the Kuklux Klan, and such leaders of the AmericanFederation of Labor as felt they had been inadequately courted andbepromised by the old-line politicians, and the non-unionized commonlaborers who felt they had been inadequately courted by the same A.F. ofL.

Back-street and over-the-garage lawyers who had never yet wangledgovernmental 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, saidnothing at all in support of the Messiahs of Prohibition. These messiahshad not found professional morality profitable of late, with theRockefellers 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 hadbeen sorely checked by the fiendishness of the bankers in limiting theircredit.

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

**

Pushing in among this mob of camp followers who identified politicalvirtue with money for their rent came a flying squad who suffered notfrom hunger but from congested idealism: Intellectuals and Reformers andeven Rugged Individualists, who saw in Windrip, for all his clownishswindlerism, a free vigor which promised a rejuvenation of the crippledand 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'swhole-hearted prosecution of the Great War, foreseeing that it wouldunquestionably exterminate German militarism and thus forever end allwars. Most of the Morgan partners, though they may have shuddered alittle at association with Upton Sinclair, saw that, however much incomethey themselves might have to sacrifice, only Windrip could start theBusiness Recovery; while Bishop Manning of New York City pointed outthat Windrip always spoke reverently of the church and its shepherds,whereas Walt Trowbridge went horseback-riding every Sabbath morning andhad never been known to telegraph any female relative on Mother's Day.

On the other hand, the Saturday Evening Post enraged the smallshopkeepers by calling Windrip a demagogue, and the New York Times,once Independent Democrat, was anti-Windrip. But most of the religiousperiodicals 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 tointrude on American domestic politics but only to express personaladmiration 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 ofhis leadership of the flight from Italy to Chicago in 1933; a scholarwho, though he now lived in Germany and was an inspiration to allpatriotic leaders of German Recovery, yet had graduated from HarvardUniversity and had been the most popular piano-player in hisclass--namely, Dr. Ernst (Putzi) Hanfstängl; and Great Britain's lion ofdiplomacy, the Gladstone of the 1930's, the handsome and gracious LordLossiemouth 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 ofmanufacturers, and they persuaded many millionaires who, in therefinement of wealth, had considered Buzz vulgar, that actually he wasthe world's one hope of efficient international commerce.

**

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

**

Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch, who would surely have written to thefriends she had made at the Rotary Club Dinner in Fort Beulah if shecould only have remembered the name of the town, was a considerablefigure in the campaign. She explained to women voters how kind it was ofSenator 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 andfriend of labor and the farmers), and Colonel Osceola Luthorne, theeditor, though their prime task was reaching millions by radio, also, ina forty-day train trip, traveled over 27,000 miles, through every statein 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-minutehallos delivered to the crowds gathered at stations, to two-hourfulminations in auditoriums and fairgrounds. Buzz was present at everyspeech, usually starring, but sometimes so hoarse that he could onlywave his hand and croak, "Howdy, folks!" while he was spelled by Prang,Porkwood, Colonel Luthorne, or such volunteers from his regiment ofsecretaries, doctoral consulting specialists in history and economics,cooks, bartenders, and barbers, as could be lured away from playingcraps with the accompanying reporters, photographers, sound-recorders,and broadcasters. Tieffer of the United Press has estimated that Buzzthus appeared personally before more than two million persons.

Meanwhile, almost daily hurtling by aëroplane between Washington andBuzz's home, Lee Sarason supervised dozens of telephone girls and scoresof girl stenographers, who answered thousands of daily telephone callsand letters and telegrams and cables--and boxes containing poisonedcandy.... Buzz himself had made the rule that all these girls must bepretty, reasonable, thoroughly skilled, and related to people withpolitical influence.

For Sarason it must be said that in this bedlam of "public relations" henever once used contact as a transitive verb.

The Hon. Perley Beecroft, vice-presidential candidate, specialized onthe conventions of fraternal orders, religious denominations, insuranceagents, and traveling men.

Colonel Dewey Haik, who had nominated Buzz at Cleveland, had anassignment 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--andSarason and Haik saw to it that there were nimble chroniclers present toget 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 amile below the surface--while thirty-nine photographers snapped thenine; he spoke from a motorboat to a stilled fishing fleet during a fogin Gloucester harbor; he spoke from the steps of the Sub-Treasury atnoon on Wall Street; he spoke to the aviators and ground crew at ShushanAirport, New Orleans--and even the flyers were ribald only for the firstfive minutes, till he had described Buzz Windrip's gallant but ludicrousefforts to learn to fly; he spoke to state policemen, tostamp-collectors, players of chess in secret clubs, and steeplejacks atwork; he spoke in breweries, hospitals, magazine offices, cathedrals,crossroad churches forty-by-thirty, prisons, lunatic asylums, nightclubs--till the art editors began to send photographers the memo: "ForPete's sake, no more fotos Kunnel Haik spieling in sporting houses andhoosegow."

Yet went on using the pictures.

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

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

All this while, Hector Macgoblin, the cultured doctor and burly boxingfan, co-author with Sarason of the campaign anthem, "Bring Out theOld-time Musket," was specializing in the inspiration of collegeprofessors, associations of high school teachers, professional baseballteams, training-camps of pugilists, medical meetings, summer schools inwhich well-known authors taught the art of writing to earnest aspirantswho could never learn to write, golf tournaments, and all such culturalcongresses.

**

But the pugilistic Dr. Macgoblin came nearer to danger than any othercampaigner. During a meeting in Alabama, where he had satisfactorilyproved that no Negro with less than 25 per cent "white blood" can everrise to the cultural level of a patent-medicine salesman, the meetingwas raided, the costly residence section of the whites was raided, by aband of colored people headed by a Negro who had been a corporal on theWestern Front in 1918. Macgoblin and the town were saved by theeloquence of a colored clergyman.

**

Truly, as Bishop Prang said, the apostles of Senator Windrip were nowpreaching 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 heraldsPrang and Windrip and Haik and Dr. Macgoblin.

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

For the campaign the Communists had brightly brought out theirsacrificial candidates--in fact, all seven of the current Communistparties had. Since, if they all stuck together, they might entice900,000 votes, they had avoided such bourgeois grossness by enthusiasticschisms, and their creeds now included: The Party, the Majority Party,the Leftist Party, the Trotzky Party, the Christian Communist Party, theWorkers' Party, and, less baldly named, something called the AmericanNationalist Patriotic Coöperative Fabian Post-Marxian CommunistParty--it sounded like the names of royalty but was otherwisedissimilar.

But these radical excursions were not very significant compared with thenew 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 andhearts of genuine Democrats but by their temporarily crazed emotions."He would no more support Windrip because he claimed to be a Democratthan he would support Jimmy Walker.

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

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

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

**

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

He wanted to follow Roosevelt and the Jeffersonian Party--partly foradmiration of the man; partly for the pleasure of shocking the ingrownRepublicanism of Vermont. But he could not believe that theJeffersonians would have a chance; he did believe that, for all themothball odor of many of his associates, Walt Trowbridge was a valiantand competent man; and night and day Doremus bounced up and down BeulahValley campaigning for Trowbridge.

Out of his very confusion there came into his writing a desperatesureness which surprised accustomed readers of the Informer. For oncehe was not amused and tolerant. Though he never said anything worse ofthe Jeffersonian Party than that it was ahead of its times, in botheditorials and news stories he went after Buzz Windrip and his gang withwhips, 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 toodrearily easy a task in preaching Trowbridge. What he found was adismaying preference for the theoretically Democratic Buzz Windrip. Andthat preference, Doremus perceived, wasn't even a pathetic trust inWindrip's promises of Utopian bliss for everyone in general. It was atrust in increased cash for the voter himself, and for his family, verymuch in particular.

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

So beatifically did hundreds of old people in Beulah Valley believe thisthat they smilingly trotted into Raymond Pridewell's hardware store, toorder new kitchen stoves and aluminum sauce pans and complete bathroomfurnishings, to be paid for on the day after inauguration. Mr.Pridewell, a cobwebbed old Henry Cabot Lodge Republican, lost half histrade by chasing out these happy heirs to fabulous estates, but theywent on dreaming, and Doremus, nagging at them, discovered that merefigures are defenseless against a dream... even a dream of newPlymouths and unlimited cans of sausages and motion-picture cameras andthe 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 hadserved sentences for assault and for transporting bootleg liquor. He hadonce made a living catching rattlesnakes and copperheads in southern NewEngland. Under President Windrip, Snake jeeringly assured Doremus, hewould have enough money to start a chain of roadhouses in all the drycommunities in Vermont.

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

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

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

Lorinda Pike's singularly unpleasant partner in the Beulah ValleyTavern, one Mr. Nipper, whom she hoped soon to lose, combined boastinghow rich he was with gloating how much more he was going to get underWindrip. "Professor" Staubmeyer quoted nice things Windrip had saidabout higher pay for teachers. Louis Rotenstern, to prove that hisheart, at least, was not Jewish, became more lyric than any of them. Andeven Frank Tasbrough of the quarries, Medary Cole of the grist mill andreal estate holdings, R. C. Crowley of the bank, who presumably were nottickled by projects of higher income taxes, smiled pussy-cattishly andhinted that Windrip was a "lot sounder fellow" than people knew.

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

Doremus had known that Shad possessed talent for argument and fordisplay; that he had once persuaded old Mr. Pridewell to trust him for a.22 rifle, value twenty-three dollars; that, removed from the sphere ofcoal bins and grass-stained overalls, he had once sung "Rollicky Billthe 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 profoundopinions, the editorials in the Hearst newspapers. Yet even knowing allthis equipment for a political career, an equipment not much short ofBuzz Windrip's, Doremus was surprised to find Shad soapboxing forWindrip among the quarry-workers, then actually as chairman of a rallyin Oddfellows' Hall. Shad spoke little, but with brutal taunting of thebelievers 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 faraway as Burlington. It was he who, in a militia uniform, handsomelyriding a large white plow-horse, led the final Windrip parade inRutland... and substantial men of affairs, even dry-goods jobbers,fondly called him "Shad."

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

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

**

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

"Oh nuts, let's quit talking politics. Windrip's going to be elected, sowhy waste time yodeling when we could drive down to the river and have aswim," 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 theygot 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 dowhatever you tell 'em, Yulian! You college men certainly are the goods!Besides----Want to be serious about this fool business?" Malcolm had theinsolent self-assurance of beef, slick black hair, and a large car ofhis own; he was the perfect leader of Black Shirts, and he lookedcontemptuously on Julian who, though a year older, was pale andthinnish. "Matter of fact, it'll be a good thing to have Buzz. He'll puta damn quick stop to all this radicalism--all this free speech and libelof 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 ofyour favorite Amherst anarchist profs off to the hoosegow, and maybe youtoo, Comrade!"

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

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 Sundayevening of the first, Senator Windrip played the finale of his campaignat a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New York. The Gardenwould hold, with seats and standing room, about 19,000, and a weekbefore the meeting every ticket had been sold--at from fifty cents tofive dollars, and then by speculators resold and resold, at from onedollar to twenty.

Doremus had been able to get one single ticket from an acquaintance onone of the Hearst dailies--which, alone among the New York papers, weresupporting Windrip--and on the afternoon of November first he traveledthe 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 layto the earth so quietly, in unstained air, that the world seemed asilver-painted carnival, left to silence. Even on a moonless night, apale radiance came from the snow, from the earth itself, and the starswere drops of quicksilver.

But, following the redcap carrying his shabby Gladstone bag, Doremuscame out of the Grand Central, at six o'clock, into a gray trickle ofcold dishwater from heaven's kitchen sink. The renowned towers which heexpected to see on Forty-second Street were dead in their mummy clothsof ragged fog. And as to the mob that, with cruel disinterest, gallopedpast him, a new and heedless smear of faces every second, the man fromFort Beulah could think only that New York must be holding its countyfair in this clammy drizzle, or else that there was a big firesomewhere.

He had sensibly planned to save money by using the subway--thesubstantial village burgher is so poor in the city of the Babyloniangardens!--and he even remembered that there were still to be found inManhattan five-cent trolley cars, in which a rustic might divert himselfby looking at sailors and poets and shawled women from the steppes ofKazakstan. To the redcap he had piped with what he conceived to betraveled urbanity, "Guess'll take a trolley--jus' few blocks." Butdeafened and dizzied and elbow-jabbed by the crowd, soaked anddepressed, he took refuge in a taxi, then wished he hadn't, as he sawthe slippery rubber-colored pavement, and as his taxi got wedged amongother cars stinking of carbon-monoxide and frenziedly tooting forrelease from the jam--a huddle of robot sheep bleating their terror withmechanical lungs of a hundred horsepower.

He painfully hesitated before going out again from his small hotel inthe West Forties, and when he did, when he muddily crept among theshrill shopgirls, the weary chorus girls, the hard cigar-clampinggamblers, and the pretty young men on Broadway, he felt himself, withthe rubbers and umbrella which Emma had forced upon him, a very CasparMilquetoast.

He most noticed a number of stray imitation soldiers, without side-armsor 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 rubberoidfor what appeared to be the privates, and boots of sleek black leatherfor officers. Each of them had on the right side of his collar theletters "M.M." and on the left, a five-pointed star. There were so manyof them; they swaggered so brazenly, shouldering civilians out of theway; and upon insignificances like Doremus they looked with frigidinsolence.

He suddenly understood.

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

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

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

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

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

**

Doremus dined on Chinese food, his invariable self-indulgence when hewas in a large city without Emma, who stated that chow mein was nothingbut 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 peasantscrossing arched bridges, at a quartette of guests, two male and twofemale, who looked like Public Enemies and who all through dinnerquarreled with restrained viciousness.

When he headed toward Madison Square Garden and the culminating Windriprally, he was plunged into a maelstrom. A whole nation seemedquerulously to be headed the same way. He could not get a taxicab, andwalking through the dreary storm some fourteen blocks to Madison SquareGarden 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 ofhope. They filled the sidewalks, nearly filled the pavement, whileirritable motors squeezed tediously through them, and angry policemenwere pushed and whirled about and, if they tried to be haughty, gotjeered at by lively shopgirls.

Through the welter, before Doremus's eyes, jabbed a flying wedge ofMinute 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 werecheering, and singing "Berzelius Windrip went to Wash.," remindingDoremus of a slightly drunken knot of students from an inferior collegeafter a football victory. He was to remember them so afterward, monthsafterward, when the enemies of the M.M.'s all through the countryderisively called them "Mickey Mouses" and "Minnies."

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

The M.M.'s burst into hoodlum wrath. The cornet in command, a bruiseruglier even than Shad Ledue, hit the old man on the jaw, and he slopeddown, sickeningly. Then, from nowhere, facing the cornet, there was achief 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 thebelly; instantly the other eight M.M.'s were on the C.P.O., likesparrows after a hawk, and he crashed, his face, suddenly veal-white,laced with rivulets of blood. The eight kicked him in the head withtheir thick marching-shoes. They were still kicking him when Doremuswriggled 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 fallencornet and, whimpering, stroke that roustabout's roast-beef cheeks withshy gardenia-petal fingers.

**

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

A block from it some thirty M.M.'s, headed by abattalion-leader--something between a captain and a major--startedraiding a street meeting of Communists. A Jewish girl in khaki, her barehead soaked with rain, was beseeching from the elevation of awheelbarrow, "Fellow travelers! Don't just chew the rag and'sympathize'! Join us! Now! It's life and death!" Twenty feet from theCommunists, a middle-aged man who looked like a social worker wasexplaining the Jeffersonian Party, recalling the record of PresidentRoosevelt, and reviling the Communists next door as word-drunkun-American cranks. Half his audience were people who might be competentvoters; half of them--like half of any group on this evening of tragicfiesta--were cigarette-sniping boys in hand-me-downs.

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

Amazingly, then, the voice of the rival Jeffersonian leader spiraled upinto a scream: "Come on, you! Going to let those hellhounds attack ourCommunist friends--friends now, by God!" With which the mild bookwormleaped into the air, came down squarely upon a fat Mickey Mouse,capsized him, seized his blackjack, took time to kick another M.M.'sshins before arising from the wreck, sprang up, and waded into theraiders as, Doremus guessed, he would have waded into a table ofstatistics on the proportion of butter fat in loose milk in 97.7 percent of shops on Avenue B.

Till then, only half-a-dozen Communist Party members had been facing theM.M.'s, their backs to a garage wall. Fifty of their own, fiftyJeffersonians besides, now joined them, and with bricks and umbrellasand deadly volumes of sociology they drove off the enragedM.M.'s--partisans of Bela Kun side by side with the partisans ofProfessor John Dewey--until a riot squad of policemen battered their wayin to protect the M.M.'s by arresting the girl Communist speaker and theJeffersonian.

**

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

The mammoth building, as in exhaustion Doremus crawled up to it, wasentirely 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 inline, with their officers galloping about, whispering orders, andbearing uneasy rumors like scared calves in a dipping-pen.

These past weeks hungry miners, dispossessed farmers, Carolina millhands had greeted Senator Windrip with a flutter of worn hands beneathgasoline torches. Now he was to face, not the unemployed, for they couldnot afford fifty-cent tickets, but the small, scared side-street tradersof New York, who considered themselves altogether superior toclodhoppers and mine-creepers, yet were as desperate as they. Theswelling mass that Doremus saw, proud in seats or standing chin-to-napein the aisles, in a reek of dampened clothes, was not romantic; theywere 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-driventaxi, 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 andsuperintendents of small apartment houses, curiously fashionable inseventeen-dollar ready-made suits and feebly stitched foulard ties, whoboasted, "I don't know why all these bums go on relief. I may not besuch a wiz, but let me tell you, even since 1929, I've never made lessthan two thousand dollars a year!"

Manhattan peasants. Kind people, industrious people, generous to theiraged, eager to find any desperate cure for the sickness of worry overlosing the job.

Most facile material for any rabble-rouser.

**

The historic rally opened with extreme dullness. A regimental bandplayed the Tales from Hoffman barcarole with no apparent significanceand not much more liveliness. The Reverend Dr. Hendrik Van Lollop of St.Apologue's Lutheran Church offered prayer, but one felt that probably ithad not been accepted. Senator Porkwood provided a dissertation onSenator Windrip which was composed in equal parts of apostolic adorationof Buzz and of the uh-uh-uh's with which Hon. Porkwood alwaysinterspersed his words.

And Windrip wasn't yet even in sight.

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

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

The band hammered out "The Campbells Are Coming." A squadron of MinuteMen, smart as Horse Guards, carrying long lances with starred pennants,clicked into the gigantic bowl of the auditorium, and after them, shabbyin an old blue-serge suit, nervously twisting a sweat-stained slouchhat, stooped and tired, limped Berzelius Windrip. The audience leapedup, 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, soawkwardly did he lumber up the steps to the platform, across to thecenter of the stage. He stopped; stared owlishly. Then he quackedmonotonously:

"The first time I ever came to New York I was a green-horn--no, don'tlaugh, mebbe I still am! But I had already been elected a United StatesSenator, and back home, the way they'd serenaded me, I thought I wassome punkins. I thought my name was just about as familiar to everybodyas A1 Capone's or Camel Cigarettes or Castoria--Babies Cry For It. But Icome to New York on my way to Washington, and say, I sat in my hotellobby here for three days, and the only fellow ever spoke to me was thehotel detective! And when he did come up and address me, I was tickledto death--I thought he was going to tell me the whole burg was pleasedby my condescending to visit 'em. But all he wanted to know was, was I aguest of the hotel and did I have any right to be holding down a lobbychair permanently that way! And tonight, friends, I'm pretty near asscared of Old Gotham as I was then!"

The laughter, the hand-clapping, were fair enough, but the proudelectors 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 onlyin observing that Windrip misquoted his own figures regarding thelimitation of fortunes, in Point Five.

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

Doremus thought he was being bored, until he discovered that, at somemoment 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 thehighest-perched seat to the nearest, convinced them that he was talkingto each individual, directly and solely; that he wanted to take each ofthem into his heart; that he was telling them the truths, the imperiousand dangerous facts, that had been hidden from them.

"They say I want money--power! Say, I've turned down offers from lawfirms right here in New York of three times the money I'll get asPresident! And power--why, the President is the servant of every citizenin the country, and not just of the considerate folks, but also of everycrank that comes pestering him by telegram and phone and letter. Andyet, 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 yourpermission to smash the Jew financiers who've enslaved you, who'reworking you to death to pay the interest on their bonds; the graspingbankers--and not all of 'em Jews by a darn sight!--the crookedlabor-leaders just as much as the crooked bosses, and, most of all, thesneaking spies of Moscow that want you to lick the boots of theirself-appointed tyrants that rule not by love and loyalty, like I wantto, but by the horrible power of the whip, the dark cell, the automaticpistol!"

**

He pictured, then, a Paradise of democracy in which, with the oldpolitical machines destroyed, every humblest worker would be king andruler, dominating representatives elected from among his own kind ofpeople, and these representatives not growing indifferent, as hithertothey had done, once they were far off in Washington, but kept alert tothe 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 grotesquelywild. 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 themand 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 andacquaint with woe.

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

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

**

He was so convinced then that Windrip would win that, on Tuesdayevening, he did not remain at the Informer office until the returnswere 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 triumphantand reasonably drunken parade, carrying torches and bellowing to the airof "Yankee Doodle" new words revealed just that week by Mrs. AdelaideTarr 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 inventedby Dr. Hector Macgoblin, was to be extensively used by lady patriots asa term expressing such vicious disloyalty to the State as might call forthe 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 couldmake out Shad Ledue, Aras Dilley, that philoprogenitive squatter fromMount Terror, Charley Betts, the furniture dealer, and Tony Mogliani,the fruit-seller, most ardent expounder of Italian Fascism in centralVermont.

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

Next morning, at the Informer office, Doremus did not learn of so verymuch damage wrought by the triumphant Nordics--they had merely upset acouple of privies, torn down and burned the tailor shop sign of LouisRotenstern, and somewhat badly beaten Clifford Little, the jeweler, aslight, curly-headed young man whom Shad Ledue despised because heorganized theatricals and played the organ in Mr. Falck's church.

That night Doremus found, on his front porch, a notice in red chalk uponbutcher'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 soundAmerican variant of "the Leader" or "the Head of the Government," as apopular title for Mr. Windrip. It was soon to be made official.

Doremus burned the red warning without telling his family. But he oftenwoke 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 waslike the long-dreaded passing of a friend.

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

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 FatherPerefixe. 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, TheWay of All Flesh (not quite so youthful, there), Moby Dick, The EarthlyParadise, 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 inhis rather uncritical reverence toward any book he had heard of beforehe was thirty.... No American whose fathers have lived in the countryfor over two generations is so utterly different from any otherAmerican.

In one thing, Doremus's literary escapism failed him thoroughly. Hetried to relearn Latin, but he could not now, uncajoled by a master,believe that "Mensa, mensae, mensae, mensam, mensa"--all that idiotic Atable, of a table, to a table, toward a table, at in by or on atable--could bear him again as once it had to the honey-sweettranquillity 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 feltguilty at having sneaked away to an Ivory Tower at all. Too many yearshe had made a habit of social duty. He wanted to be "in" things, and hewas 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 amajority in Congress. "Inside dope" came to Doremus from Washington thatWindrip was trying to buy, to flatter, to blackmail opposingCongressmen. A President-Elect has unhallowed power, if he so wishes,and Windrip--no doubt with promises of abnormal favors in the way ofpatronage--won over a few. Five Jeffersonian Congressmen had theirelections challenged. One sensationally disappeared, and smoking afterhis galloping heels there was a devilish fume of embezzlements. And witheach such triumph of Windrip, all the well-meaning, cloistered Doremusesof the country were the more anxious.

**

All through the "Depression," ever since 1929, Doremus had felt theinsecurity, the confusion, the sense of futility in trying to doanything more permanent than shaving or eating breakfast, that wasgeneral to the country. He could no longer plan, for himself or for hisdependants, as the citizens of this once unsettled country had plannedsince 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 eternallybeing improved by the honest votes of Good Citizens.

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

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

But Doremus Jessup could not plan, "I'll have Sissy go to Smith beforeshe studies architecture," or "If Julian Falck and Sissy get married andstick 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 nicekids again!" No. Fifteen years from now, he sighed, Sissy might behustling hash for the sort of workers who called the waiter's art"hustling hash"; and Julian might be in a concentration camp--Fascistor Communist!

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

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

**

And for a newspaper editor--for one who must know, at least as well asthe Encyclopædia, everything about local and foreign history, geography,economics, politics, literature, and methods of playing football--it wasmaddening 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 acolloquial sneer to a sound general statement regarding almost anyeconomist. Once, modestly enough, Doremus had assumed that he had adecent knowledge of finance, taxation, the gold standard, agriculturalexports, and he had smilingly pontificated everywhere that LiberalCapitalism would pastorally lead into State Socialism, with governmentalownership of mines and railroads and water-power so settling allinequalities of income that every lion of a structural steel workerwould be willing to lie down with any lamb of a contractor, and all thejails and tuberculosis sanatoria would be clean empty.

Now he knew that he knew nothing fundamental and, like a lone monkstricken 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., andall the rest, had convinced Doremus that there were four sets of peoplewho did not clearly understand anything whatever about how thegovernment must be conducted: all the authorities in Washington; all ofthe citizenry who talked, or wrote profusely about politics; thebewildered untouchables who said nothing; and Doremus Jessup.

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

**

Julian Falck, now sophomore in Amherst, had come home for Christmasvacation, and he dropped in at the Informer office to beg from Doremusa 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, theseething Social Democrat, and were waited upon by Karl Pascal--sometimedonkey-engineman at Tasbrough's quarry, sometime strike-leader, sometimepolitical prisoner in the county jail on a thin charge of inciting toriot, and ever since then, a model of Communistic piety.

Pascal was a thin man, but sinewy; his gaunt and humorous face of a goodmechanic was so grease-darkened that the skin above and below his eyesseemed white as a fish-belly, and, in turn, that pallid rim made hiseyes, alert dark gipsy eyes, seem the larger.... A panther chained toa 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 saymuch about what we plan to do after January, when Buzz gets his hands onus. Lie low, eh?"

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

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

"Depressed? Why good Lord, Mr. Jessup, I thought you knew yourrevolutionary tactics better than that, way you supported us in thequarry strike--even if you are the perfect type of small capitalistbourgeois! Depressed? Why, can't you see, if the Communists had paid forit they couldn't have had anything more elegant for our purposes thanthe election of a pro-plutocrat, itching militarist dictator like BuzzWindrip! Look! He'll get everybody plenty dissatisfied. But they can'tdo anything, barehanded against the armed troops. Then he'll whoop it upfor a war, and so millions of people will have arms and food rations intheir hands--all ready for the revolution! Hurray for Buzz and JohnPrang the Baptist!"

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

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

"But you seem to like America, and you don't seem so fanatical, Karl. Iremember when I was a kid of about ten and you--I suppose you were abouttwenty-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 inGermany--my folks weren't Heinies, though--my dad was French and mymother a Hunkie from Serbia. (Guess that makes me a hundred per centAmerican, all right!) I think we've got the Old Country beat, lots ofways. 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 'HerrDoktor'! No, I like it here. There's symptoms of possible futuredemocracy. But--but--what burns me up--it isn't that old soap-boxer'schestnut about how one tenth of 1 per cent of the population at the tophave an aggregate income equal to 42 per cent at the bottom. Figureslike that are too astronomical. Don't mean a thing in the world to afellow with his eyes--and nose--down in a transmission box--fellow thatdoesn't see the stars except after 9 P.M. on odd Wednesdays. But whatburns me up is the fact that even before this Depression, in what youfolks called prosperous times, 7 per cent of all the families in thecountry earned $500 a year or less--remember, those weren't theunemployed, on relief; those were the guys that had the honor of stilldoing honest labor.

"Five hundred dollars a year is ten dollars a week--and that means onedirty little room for a family of four people! It means $5.00 a week forall their food--eighteen cents per day per person for food!--and eventhe lousiest prisons allow more than that. And the magnificent remainderof $2.50 a week, that means nine cents per day per person for clothes,insurance, carfares, doctors' bills, dentists' bills, and for God'ssake, amusements--amusements!--and all the rest of the nine cents a daythey can fritter away on their Fords and autogiros and, when they feelfagged, skipping across the pond on the Normandie! Seven per cent ofall the fortunate American families where the old man has got a job!"

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

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

"Haaa! That's all baloney! That's the old standard come-back at everyCommunist--just like once, twenty years ago, the muttonheads used tothink they'd crushed any Socialist when they snickered 'If all the moneywas divided up, inside five years the hustlers would have all of itagain.' Prob'ly there's some standard coup de grace like that inRussia, to crush anybody that defends America. Besides!" Karl Pascalglowed with nationalistic fervor. "We Americans aren't like those dumbRusski peasants! We'll do a whole lot better when we get Communism!"

And on that, his employer, the expansive John Pollikop, a woolly Scotchterrier of a man, returned to the garage. John was an excellent friendof Doremus; had, indeed, been his bootlegger all through Prohibition,personally running in his whisky from Canada. He had been known, even inthat singularly scrupulous profession, as one of its most trustworthypractitioners. 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 Violenceinstead of Evolution and Legality. Them--why say, if they hadn't been socrooked, if they'd joined me and Norman Thomas and the otherintelligent Socialists in a United Front with Roosevelt and theJeffersonians, 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 touse it in the Informer!)

Pascal protested, "Not that Buzzard's personal plans and ambitions havegot much to do with it. Altogether too easy to explain everything justblaming it on Windrip. Why don't you read your Marx, John, instead ofalways gassing about him? Why, Windrip's just something nasty that'sbeen vomited up. Plenty others still left fermenting in thestomach--quack economists with every sort of economic ptomain! No, Buzzisn't important--it's the sickness that made us throw him up that we'vegot to attend to--the sickness of more than 30 per cent permanentlyunemployed, and growing larger. Got to cure it!"

"Can you crazy Tovarishes cure it?" snapped Pollikop, and, "Do you thinkCommunism will cure it?" skeptically wondered Doremus, and, morepolitely, "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 wereremoving a flat tire together and quarreling bitterly, quite happily.

**

Doremus's attic study had been to him a refuge from the tendersolicitudes of Emma and Mrs. Candy and his daughters, and all theimpulsive hand-shaking strangers who wanted the local editor to startoff their campaigns for the sale of life-insurance or gas-savingcarburetors, for the Salvation Army or the Red Cross or the Orphans'Home or the Anti-cancer Crusade, or the assorted magazines which wouldenable to go through college young men who at all cost should be keptout of college.

It was a refuge now from the considerably less tender solicitudes ofsupporters of the President-Elect. On the pretense of work, Doremus tookto sneaking up there in mid-evening; and he sat not in an easy chair butstiffly, at his desk, making crosses and five-pointed stars andsix-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 ofanalysis. When I get to defending Democracy against Communism andFascism and what-not, I sound just like the Lothrop Stoddards--why, Isound almost like a Hearst editorial on how some college has got to kickout a Dangerous Red instructor in order to preserve our Democracy forthe ideals of Jefferson and Washington! Yet somehow, singing the samewords, I have a notion my tune is entirely different from Hearst's. Idon't think we've done very well with all the plowland and forest andminerals and husky human stock we've had. What makes me sick aboutHearst and the D.A.R. is that if they are against Communism, I have tobe for it, and I don't want to be!

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

"We can go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and goodmanners and tolerance is so thin! It would just take a few thousand bigshells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young men, and all thelibraries and historical archives and patent offices, all thelaboratories and art galleries, all the castles and Periclean templesand Gothic cathedrals, all the coöperative stores and motorfactories--every storehouse of learning. No inherent reason why Sissy'sgrandchildren--if anybody's grandchildren will survive at all--shouldn'tbe living in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts.

"And what's the solution of preventing this debacle? Plenty of 'em! TheCommunists have a patent Solution they know will work. So have theFascists, and the rigid American Constitutionalists--who callthemselves advocates of Democracy, without any notion what the wordought to mean; and the Monarchists--who are certain that if we couldjust resurrect the Kaiser and the Czar and King Alfonso, everybody wouldbe loyal and happy again, and the banks would simply force credit onsmall business men at 2 per cent. And all the preachers--they tell youthat they alone have the inspired Solution.

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

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

Doremus suspected that, with the most scientific state, it would beimpossible for iron deposits always to find themselves at exactly therate decided upon two years before by the National Technocratic MineralsCommission, no matter how elevated and fraternal and Utopian theprinciples of the commissioners.

His Solution, Doremus pointed out, was the only one that did not fleebefore the thought that a thousand years from now human beings wouldprobably continue to die of cancer and earthquake and such clownishmishaps as slipping in bathtubs. It presumed that mankind would continueto be burdened with eyes that grow weak, feet that grow tired, nosesthat itch, intestines vulnerable to bacilli, and generative organs thatare nervous until the age of virtue and senility. It seemed to himunidealistically probable, for all the "contemporary furniture" of the1930's, that most people would continue, at least for a few hundredyears, to sit in chairs, eat from dishes upon tables, read books--nomatter how many cunning phonographic substitutes might be invented, wearshoes or sandals, sleep in beds, write with some sort of pens, and ingeneral spend twenty or twenty-two hours a day much as they had spentthem in 1930, in 1630. He suspected that tornadoes, floods, droughts,lightning, and mosquitoes would remain, along with the homicidaltendency known in the best of citizens when their sweethearts go dancingoff with other men.

And, most fatally and abysmally, his Solution guessed that men ofsuperior cunning, of slyer foxiness, whether they might be calledComrades, Brethren, Commissars, Kings, Patriots, Little Brothers of thePoor, or any other rosy name, would continue to have more influence thanslower-witted men, however worthy.

**

All the warring Solutions--except his, Doremus chuckled--wereferociously 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 anddishonorable ancestry of prophets who had felt called upon to stir upthe masses to save the world, and save it in the prophets' own way, anddo it right now, and most violently: Peter the Hermit, the ragged, mad,and stinking monk who, to rescue the (unidentified) tomb of the Saviorfrom undefined "outrages by the pagans," led out on the Crusades somehundreds of thousands of European peasants, to die on the way ofstarvation, after burning, raping, and murdering fellow peasants inforeign villages all along the road.

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

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

Murat and Danton and Robespierre, who helped shift the control of Francefrom the moldy aristocrats to the stuffy, centime-pinching shopkeepers.Lenin and Trotzky who gave to the illiterate Russian peasants theprivileges of punching a time clock and of being as learned, gay, anddignified as the factory hands in Detroit; and Lenin's man, Borodin, whoextended this boon to China. And that William Randolph Hearst who in1898 was the Lenin of Cuba and switched the mastery of the golden islefrom the cruel Spaniards to the peaceful, unarmed, brotherly-lovingCuban 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 andencouraged by Mr. Dowie and by his even more spirited successor, Mr.Voliva--were that the holy denizens were deprived of oysters andcigarettes and cursing, and died without the aid of doctors instead ofwith it, and that the stretch of road through Zion City incessantlycaused the breakage of springs on the cars of citizens from Evanston,Wilmette, and Winnetka, which may or not have been a desirable GoodDeed.

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

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

All the leaders of Prohibition, so certain that their cause wasworld-regenerating that for it they were willing to shoot downviolators.

It seemed to Doremus that the only rabble-rouser to build permanentlyhad been Brigham Young, with his bearded Mormon captains, who not onlyturned 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 beliquidated--tortured--slaughtered! Good old murder, that since theslaying of Abel by Cain has always been the new device by which alloligarchies and dictators have, for all future ages to come, removedopposition!

**

In this acid mood Doremus doubted the efficacy of all revolutions; daredeven a little to doubt our two American revolutions--against England in1776, and the Civil War.

For a New England editor to contemplate even the smallest criticism ofthese wars was what it would have been for a Southern Baptistfundamentalist preacher to question Immortality, the Inspiration of theBible, and the ethical value of shouting Hallelujah. Yet had it, Doremusqueried nervously, been necessary to have four years of inconceivablymurderous Civil War, followed by twenty years of commercial oppressionof the South, in order to preserve the Union, free the slaves, andestablish the equality of Industry with Agriculture? Had it been just tothe Negroes themselves to throw them so suddenly, with so littlepreparation, into full citizenship, that the Southern states, in whatthey considered self-defense, disqualified them at the polls and lynchedthem and lashed them? Could they not, as Lincoln at first desired andplanned, have been freed without the vote, then gradually andcompetently educated, under federal guardianship, so that by 1890 theymight, without too much enmity, have been able to enter fully into allthe activities of the land?

A generation and a half (Doremus meditated) of the sturdiest and mostgallant killed or crippled in the Civil War or, perhaps worst of all,becoming garrulous professional heroes and satellites of the politicianswho in return for their solid vote made all lazy jobs safe for theG.A.R. The most valorous, it was they who suffered the most, for whilethe John D. Rockefellers, the J. P. Morgans, the Vanderbilts, Astors,Goulds, and all their nimble financial comrades of the South, did notenlist, but stayed in the warm, dry counting-house, drawing the fortuneof the country into their webs, it was Jeb Stuart, Stonewall Jackson,Nathaniel Lyon, Pat Cleburne, and the knightly James B. McPherson whowere killed... and with them Abraham Lincoln.

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

Slavery had been a cancer, and in that day was known no remedy savebloody cutting. There had been no X-rays of wisdom and tolerance. Yet tosentimentalize this cutting, to justify and rejoice in it, was analtogether evil thing, a national superstition that was later to lead toother Unavoidable Wars--wars to free Cubans, to free Filipinos whodidn'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 inburning the houses of lone women, nor particularly admire the calmnessof General Lee as he watched thousands writhe in the mud.

**

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

It is commonly asserted, Doremus remembered, that without completepolitical independence the United States could not have developed itsown peculiar virtues. Yet it was not apparent to him that America wasany more individual than Canada or Australia; that Pittsburgh and KansasCity were to be preferred before Montreal and Melbourne, Sydney andVancouver.

***

No questioning of the eventual wisdom of the "radicals" who had firstadvocated these two American revolutions, Doremus warned himself, shouldbe allowed to give any comfort to that eternal enemy: the conservativemanipulators of privilege who damn as "dangerous agitators" any man whomenaces their fortunes; who jump in their chairs at the sting of a gnatlike Debs, and blandly swallow a camel like Windrip.

Between the rabble-rousers--chiefly to be detected by desire for theirown personal power and notoriety--and the un-self-seeking fightersagainst tyranny, between William Walker or Danton, and John Howard orWilliam Lloyd Garrison, Doremus saw, there was the difference between anoisy gang of thieves and an honest man noisily defending himselfagainst thieves. He had been brought up to revere the Abolitionists:Lovejoy, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Harriet Beecher Stowe--though hisfather had considered John Brown insane and a menace, and had thrown slymud at the marble statues of Henry Ward Beecher, the apostle in thefancy vest. And Doremus could not do otherwise than revere theAbolitionists now, though he wondered a little if Stephen Douglas andThaddeus 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 boldestidealists have been the worst enemies of human progress instead of itsgreatest creators? Possible that plain men with the humble trait ofminding their own business will rank higher in the heavenly hierarchythan all the plumed souls who have shoved their way in among the massesand 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 andchildren to the Episcopal--a natural American transition. He had beenreared to admire Hosea Ballou, the Universalist St. Augustine who, fromhis tiny parsonage in Barnard, Vermont, had proclaimed his faith thateven the wickedest would have, after earthly death, another chance ofsalvation. But now, Doremus could scarce enter the Fort BeulahUniversalist Church. It had too many memories of his father, the pastor,and it was depressing to see how the old-time congregations, in whichtwo hundred thick beards would wag in the grained pine benches everySunday morning, and their womenfolks and children line up beside thepatriarchs, had dwindled to aged widows and farmers and a fewschoolteachers.

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

He found, on his one attendance at the Universalist church, a scatteringof thirty disciples, being addressed by a "supply," a theologicalstudent 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 hardand glistening green, unornamented, to avoid all the sinful trappings ofpapistry, 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 noton 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 ashock of anger he saw that that was exactly what he had been condemningjust a few days ago: the irrational dramatic power of the crusadingleader, clerical or political.

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

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

In the cozy Anglicanism of St. Crispin's P. E. Church, with itsimitation English memorial brasses and imitation Celtic font andbrass-eagle reading desk and dusty-smelling maroon carpet, Doremuslistened to Mr. Falck: "Almighty God, the Father of our Lord JesusChrist, who desireth not the death of a sinner, but rather that he mayturn from his wickedness, and live; and hath given power and commandmentto his Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, beingpenitent, the Absolution and Remission of their sins----"

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

The whole place smelled to Doremus of stale muffins. Mrs. R. C. Crowleywas wearing white gloves and on her bust--for a Mrs. Crowley, even in1936, did not yet have breasts--was a tight bouquet of tuberoses.Francis Tasbrough had a morning coat and striped trousers and on thelilac-colored pew cushion beside him was (unique in Fort Beulah) a silktop-hat. And even the wife of Doremus's bosom, or at least of hisbreakfast coffee, the good Emma, had a pedantic expression of superiorgoodness which irritated him.

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

**

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

Doremus thrust his way in, patting off the snow, puffing to recover fromthe shakiness caused by skidding all the way from Fort Beulah. Lorindanodded carelessly, dropped another stick on the fireplace, and went backto 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 ofsmiling for a bridge between them.

Lorinda reflected, "Well, my darling, it's going to be pretty bad. Iguess Windrip & Co. will put the woman's struggle right back in thesixteen-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 freespeech 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 toCanada before I get nabbed--right after Buzz's inauguration."

"No. You mustn't. We've got to keep all the newspapermen that'll go onfighting him, and not go sniffling up to the garbage pail. Besides! Whatwould 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'reright. I can't go till they put the skids under me. Then I'll have tovanish. 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 inchurch. He would go on trying to sweep back the ocean, just for his ownsatisfaction. It meant, however, that his hermitage in the Ivory Towerwas closed with slightly ludicrous speed. But he felt strong again, andhappy. 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 WaltTrowbridge's warning on the radio, last evening--did you listen in?--andshe says, 'Oh my, how dreadful!' and then forgets all about it andworries about the saucepan that got burnt! She's lucky! Oh well, sheprobably 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'mchump enough to wish you and I were together--uh--recognizedly together,all the time--and could fight together to keep some little light burningin this coming new glacial epoch. I do. All the time. I think that, atthis 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 everstop to think how curious it is, that with--everything between us--likethat night in the hotel at Montreal--we neither one of us seem to feelany guilt, any embarrassment--can sit and gossip like this?"

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

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

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

"Beast!"

"Oh, you might be suspected, all by yourself. It's known that yousometimes drink likker and play poker and tell 'hot ones.' But who'dever 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 knownso many women agitators, all dressed in Carrie Nation hatchets andmodest sheets of statistics, that have been ten times as passionate,intolerably passionate, as any cream-faced plump little Kept Wife inchiffon step-ins!"

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

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

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

"That's curious. Curiouser and curiouser. Standing back behind that bigbush, lilac bush I guess it is, across the road, there's a fellowwatching this place. I can see him in the headlights whenever a carcomes along. And I think it's my hired man, Oscar Ledue--Shad." Hestarted 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 supposedto be at my house right now, looking after the furnace--winters, he onlyworks for me couple of hours a day, works in the sash factory, rest ofthe 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, twentyyears older than you!--to be your lover!"

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

"Wot-oh, wot-oh, wot-oh! Toodle-oo! Good-morning, Jeeves! Mawnin', MissLindy. 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'syouthful spirits! My God, but it's cold! Tea, Linda, my goodwoman--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, inDoremus seethed all the agitated anger he had been concealing fromSissy. And part hidden behind bushes, leaning on his motorcycle, he didfind Shad Ledue.

Shad was startled; for once he looked less contemptuously masterful thana Fifth Avenue traffic policeman, as Doremus snapped, "What you doingthere?" and he stumbled in answering: "Oh I just--something happened tomy 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 inthe back of my car and drive it back." (Somehow, he had to talkprivately to Sissy, though he was not in the least certain what it washe 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 satisfiesme, and if you really feel she doesn't quite satisfy yourstandard----"

"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--motorcyclein 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 prettyslippery tonight."

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

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

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

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

**

"Beautiful, I know it's swell to drive carefully, but do you have toemulate 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 ifthere 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 theyoung Nazis and how they enjoy beating up the Communists. Look at almostany college class--the students disapproving of the instructor becausehe's iconoclastic and ridicules the sacred home-town ideas. Just thisafternoon, 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-hairedreformers--you and Lindy belong together. Why don't you--you know--kindof be lovers?"

"Good God Almighty! Cecilia! I've never heard a decent girl talk thatway 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 slightlyunusual for an apparently loyal daughter to suggest her father'sdeceiving her mother! Especially a fine lovely mother like yours!"

"Is it? Well, maybe. Unusual to suggest it--aloud. But I wonder if lotsof young females don't sometimes kind of think it, just the same, whenthey 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: yousimply must not be so froward--or forward, whichever it is; I always getthose two words balled up. This is serious business. I've never heard ofsuch a preposterous suggestion as Linda--Lorinda and I being lovers. Mydear 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. CourseI 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 couldhave your nice pie and she'd never miss one single slice. Mother'smental grooves aren't, uh, well, they aren't so very sex-conditioned, ifthat's how you say it--more sort of along the new-vacuum-cleanercomplex, if you know what I mean--page Freud! Oh, she's swell, but notso analytical and----"

"Are those your ethics, then?"

"Huh? Well for cat's sake, why not? Have a swell time that'll get youfull 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'retalking about, or think you're talking about? Of course--and perhaps weought to be ashamed of our cowardly negligence--but I, and I don'tsuppose your mother, have taught you so very much about 'sex' and----"

"Thank heaven! You spared me the dear little flower and its simplyshocking affair with that tough tomcat of a tiger lily in the nextbed--excuse me--I mean in the next plot. I'm so glad you did. Pete'ssake! 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 allweighty things----"

Penitently: "I know, Dad. I'm sorry. It's just--if you only knew howwretched 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 backinto you--you've got to take off the lace mitts and put on the brassknuckles--and I got kind of a hunch Lorinda might do that for you, andonly her. Heh! Her pretending to be so high-minded! (Remember that oldwheeze 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 ofthe sketch!) But anyway, our Lindy has a pretty moist and hungryeye----"

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

"Dad! Is that your idea of a question to----Oh, I guess I was asking forit. And the answer is: Yes. So far. But not promising one single thingabout the future. Let me tell you right now, if conditions in thiscountry do get as bad as you've been claiming they will, and JulianFalck is threatened with having to go to war or go to prison or somerotten thing like that, I'm most certainly not going to let any maidenlymodesty interfere between me and him, and you might just as well beprepared for that!"

"It is Julian then, not Malcolm?"

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

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

"Dear quaint old word! As if anything could be so awfully much morefamiliar than a good, capable, 10,000 h.p. kiss! But darling, just soyou 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 ona 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 theworld--I am being serious, now, Dad; plenty serious, God help usall!--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 thanthere is for a base-hospital nurse when they bring in the wounded. Niceyoung ladies--they're out! It's Lorinda and me that you men are goingto want to have around, isn't it--isn't it--now isn't it?"

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

They were coming into the Jessup driveway. Shad Ledue was just leavingthe 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 littledaughter, to be protected, adorned with pale blue ribbons, slyly laughedat when she tried to show off in grown-up ways. She was suddenly adependable 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 visitwith 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 thatwe're forming a second chapter of the League of Forgotten Men in theFort, and I'm to be the secretary. They don't pay much--only about twicewhat you pay me--pretty tight-fisted--but it'll mean something inpolitics. Good-night!"

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

**

When, as League secretary, a fortnight later, Shad wrote to himdemanding a donation of two hundred dollars to the League, and Doremusrefused, the Informer began to lose circulation within twenty-fourhours.

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 membersand 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, ofthe Minute Men, which organization was to be established permanently, asan innocent marching club.

Secretary of the Treasury: one Webster R. Skittle, president of theprosperous Fur & Hide National Bank of St. Louis--Mr. Skittle had oncebeen indicted on a charge of defrauding the government on his incometax, 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 BuzzWindrip as the Savior of the Forgotten Men.

Secretary of War: Colonel Osceola Luthorne, formerly editor of theTopeka (Kans.) Argus, and the Fancy Goods and Novelties Gazette;more recently high in real estate. His title came from his position onthe honorary staff of the Governor of Tennessee. He had long been afriend and fellow campaigner of Windrip.

It was a universal regret that Bishop Paul Peter Prang should haverefused the appointment as Secretary of War, with a letter in which hecalled Windrip "My dear Friend and Collaborator" and asserted that hehad actually meant it when he had said he desired no office. Later, itwas a similar regret when Father Coughlin refused the Ambassadorship toMexico, 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 PublicRelations, was created. Not for months would Congress investigate thelegality of such a creation, but meantime the new post was brilliantlyheld by Hector Macgoblin, M.D., Ph.D., Hon. Litt.D.

Senator Porkwood graced the position of Attorney General, and all theother offices were acceptably filled by men who, though they had roundlysupported Windrip's almost socialistic projects for the distribution ofexcessive fortunes, were yet known to be thoroughly sensible men, and nofanatics.

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

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

Mr. Milo Reno, insurance salesman and former president of the NationalFarm Holiday Association, whom all the French royalists compared to hisgreat predecessor, Benjamin Franklin, for forthrightness, became thegreatest social favorite in the international circles of Paris, theBasses-Pyrénées, and the Riviera, and was once photographed playingtennis 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 theGleichshaltung of Mississippi, about the cultural organization of thesomewhat backward natives of Tadjikistan, and so valuable did it provethat Excellency Bilbo was invited to review the Moscow militarycelebration, the following November seventh, in the same stand with thevery highest class of representatives of the classless state. It was atriumph for His Excellency. Generalissimo Voroshilov fainted after200,000 Soviet troops, 7000 tanks, and 9000 aëroplanes had passed by;Stalin had to be carried home after reviewing 317,000; but AmbassadorBilbo was there in the stand when the very last of the 626,000 soldiershad gone by, all of them saluting him under the quite erroneousimpression that he was the Chinese Ambassador; and he was stilltirelessly returning their salutes, fourteen to the minute, and softlysinging with them the "International."

He was less of a hit later, however, when to the unsmilingAnglo-American Association of Exiles to Soviet Russia from Imperialism,he sang to the tune of the "International" what he regarded as amusingprivate 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 thana post in the customs office in Nome, Alaska, though this was offered toher very urgently indeed. She had demanded that there be created,especially for her, the cabinet position of Secretaryess of DomesticScience, Child Welfare, and Anti-Vice. She threatened to turnJeffersonian, Republican, or Communistic, but in April she was heard ofin 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 appointedFranklin D. Roosevelt minister to Liberia. Mr. Roosevelt's opponentslaughed very much, and opposition newspapers did cartoons of him sittingunhappily in a grass hut with a sign on which "N.R.A." had been crossedout and "U.S.A." substituted. But Mr. Roosevelt declined with so amiablea smile that the joke seemed rather to have slipped.

**

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

The inauguration was turbulent. President Roosevelt declined to bepresent--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 ongardening and looking abnormally cheerful.

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

A motor company in Detroit had presented to Windrip a limousine witharmor plate, bulletproof glass, a hidden nickel-steel safe for papers, aconcealed private bar, and upholstery made from the Troissant tapestriesof 1670. But Buzz chose to drive from his home to the Capitol in his oldHupmobile sedan, and his driver was a youngster from his home town whosenotion 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 thatLee Sarason saw to it that the one hundred and thirty million plaincitizens learned, by radio, even while the inaugural parade was goingon, that he had borrowed the topper for this one sole occasion from aNew York Republican Representative who had ancestors.

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

Solemnly, for once looking a little awed, a little like a small-town boyon Broadway, Windrip took the oath, administered by the Chief Justice(who disliked him very much indeed) and, edging even closer to themicrophone, squawked, "My fellow citizens, as the President of theUnited States of America, I want to inform you that the real New Dealhas started right this minute, and we're all going to enjoy the manifoldliberties to which our history entitles us--and have a whale of a goodtime doing it! I thank you!"

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

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

Fourth coup was a special message, next morning, to Congress (in sessionsince January fourth, the third having been a Sunday), demanding theinstant passage of a bill embodying Point Fifteen of his electionplatform--that he should have complete control of legislation andexecution, and the Supreme Court be rendered incapable of blockinganything that it might amuse him to do.

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

To the veteran reporters it was strange to see the titular Secretary ofState, theoretically a person of such dignity and consequence that hecould deal with the representatives of foreign powers, acting aspress-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 noisilymutinous toward the Windrip for whom so many of them had voted. Amongthe mob buzzed hundreds of Negroes, armed with knives and old pistols,for one of the kidnaped Congressmen was a Negro from Georgia, the firstcolored Georgian to hold high office since carpetbagger days.

Surrounding the jail, behind machine guns, the rebels found a fewRegulars, many police, and a horde of Minute Men, but at these last theyjeered, calling them "Minnie Mouses" and "tin soldiers" and "mama'sboys." The M.M.'s looked nervously at their officers and at the Regularswho were making so professional a pretense of not being scared. The mobheaved bottles and dead fish. Half-a-dozen policemen with guns and nightsticks, trying to push back the van of the mob, were buried under ahuman surf and came up grotesquely battered and ununiformed--those whoever did come up again. There were two shots; and one Minute Man slumpedto the jail steps, another stood ludicrously holding a wrist thatspurted blood.

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

"I am addressing my own boys, the Minute Men, everywhere in America! Toyou and you only I look for help to make America a proud, rich landagain. 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 andget relief. They ordered you into lousy C.C.C. camps. They said you wereno good, because you were poor. I tell you that you are, ever sinceyesterday noon, the highest lords of the land--the aristocracy--themakers of the new America of freedom and justice. Boys! I need you! Helpme--help me to help you! Stand fast! Anybody tries to block you--givethe swine the point of your bayonet!"

A machine-gunner M.M., who had listened reverently, let loose. The mobbegan to drop, and into the backs of the wounded as they went staggeringaway the M.M. infantry, running, poked their bayonets. Such a juicysquash it made, and the fugitives looked so amazed, so funny, as theytumbled in grotesque heaps!

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

***

When the remnants of Congress ventured to the Capitol, they found itseeded with M.M.'s, while a regiment of Regulars, under Major GeneralMeinecke, 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 memberschose to dally in the district jail, enjoying themselves instead ofattending Congress, whose fault was that?) Both houses passed aresolution declaring Point Fifteen temporarily in effect, during the"crisis"--the legality of the passage was doubtful, but just who was tocontest it, even though the members of the Supreme Court had not beenplaced under protective arrest... merely confined each to his ownhouse by a squad of Minute Men!

**

Bishop Paul Peter Prang had (his friends said afterward) been dismayedby Windrip's stroke of state. Surely, he complained, Mr. Windrip hadn'tquite remembered to include Christian Amity in the program he had takenfrom the League of Forgotten Men. Though Mr. Prang had contentedly givenup broadcasting ever since the victory of Justice and Fraternity in theperson of Berzelius Windrip, he wanted to caution the public again, butwhen he telephoned to his familiar station, WLFM in Chicago, the managerinformed him that "just temporarily, all access to the air wasforbidden," except as it was especially licensed by the offices of LeeSarason. (Oh, that was only one of sixteen jobs that Lee and his sixhundred 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 forWashington, to reprove, perhaps even playfully to spank, his naughtydisciple, 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 notdiscover. At three in the afternoon Prang was seen to leave by a privateentrance to the executive offices and take a taxi. They noted that hewas pale and staggering.

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

Millions heard on their radios that evening the official announcementthat, to ward off mysterious plotters, probably Bolsheviks, Bishop Pranghad been safely shielded in the district jail. And with it a personalstatement from President Windrip that he was filled with joy at havingbeen 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 andrespect."

**

There was, as yet, no absolute censorship of the press; only a confusedimprisonment of journalists who offended the government or localofficers of the M.M.'s; and the papers chronically opposed to Windripcarried by no means flattering hints that Bishop Prang had rebuked thePresident 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 consideredhim a modern St. Francis gathering up the little fowls of the fields inhis handsome LaSalle car. There were neighbors who hinted that he was awindow-peeping snooper after bootleggers and obliging grass widows. Butproud of him, their best advertisement, they certainly were, and thePersepolis Chamber of Commerce had caused to be erected at the Easterngateway to Main Street the sign: "Home of Bishop Prang, Radio's GreatestStar."

So as one man Persepolis telegraphed to Washington, demanding Prang'srelease, but a messenger in the Executive Offices who was a Persepolisboy (he was, it is true, a colored man, but suddenly he became afavorite son, lovingly remembered by old schoolmates) tipped off theMayor that the telegrams were among the hundredweight of messages thatwere 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 theopposition press could use as a bomb under Windrip, and the train wasaccompanied 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 andsidetrackings it encountered--a company of Minute Men at Logansport,Indiana, rebelled against having to arrest a group of Catholic nuns whowere accused of having taught treasonably. High Marshal Sarason feltthat there must be a Lesson, early and impressive. A battalion ofM.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 poorBishop Prang had been so shocked by the treason of his fellow Indianansthat he had gone melancholy mad and they had tragically been compelledto 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 Presidenthimself, and an invitation to stay at the Willard, at governmentexpense. Only a dozen accepted; the rest took the first train back, notamiably; 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 placewas Major General Emmanuel Coon. Doremus and his like were disappointedby General Coon's acceptance, for they had always been informed, even bythe Nation, that Emmanuel Coon, though a professional army officer whodid 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 wasthe one quality that Buzz Windrip wasn't even expected to understand.Rumor said that Coon (as "Nordic" a Kentuckian as ever existed, adescendant of men who had fought beside Kit Carson and Commodore Perry)was particularly impatient with the puerility of anti-Semitism, and thatnothing so pleased him as, when he heard new acquaintances beingsuperior about the Jews, to snarl, "Did you by any chance happen tonotice that my name is Emmanuel Coon and that Coon might be a corruptionof 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 apretty piece of literature and of tenderness. He explained that powerfuland secret enemies of American principles--one rather gathered that theywere a combination of Wall Street and Soviet Russia--upon discovering,to their fury, that he, Berzelius, was going to be President, hadplanned their last charge. Everything would be tranquil in a few months,but meantime there was a Crisis, during which the country must "bearwith him."

He recalled the military dictatorship of Lincoln and Stanton during theCivil War, when civilian suspects were arrested without warrant. Hehinted how delightful everything was going to be--right away now--just amoment--just a moment's patience--when he had things in hand; and hewound up with a comparison of the Crisis to the urgency of a firemanrescuing a pretty girl from a "conflagration," and carrying her down aladder, for her own sake, whether she liked it or not, and no matter howappealingly 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 theboobyhatch, long as I get my five thousand bucks a year, like Windrippromised," said Shad Ledue to Charley Betts, the furniture man.

**

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

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 wasa fastidious housekeeper, and his mid-Victorian farmhouse fussily neat.It was also pleasantly bare: the living room a monastic hall of heavyoak chairs, tables free of dainty covers, numerous and rather solemnbooks of history and exploration, with the conventional "sets," and atremendous fireplace of rough stone. And the ash trays were solidpottery and pewter, able to cope with a whole evening ofcigarette-smoking. The whisky stood honestly on the oak buffet, withsiphons, and with cracked ice always ready in a thermos jug.

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

This hermitage, always grateful to Doremus, was sanctuary now, and onlywith Buck could he adequately damn Windrip & Co. and people like FrancisTasbrough, who in February was still saying, "Yes, things do look kindof hectic down there in Washington, but that's just because there's somany of these bullheaded politicians that still think they can buckWindrip. Besides, anyway, things like that couldn't ever happen here inNew England."

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

Constantly, in the Informer, he criticized the government but not tooacidly.

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

It was not that he was afraid of the authorities. He simply did notbelieve 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 dictatorseemingly so different from the fervent Hitlers and gesticulatingFascists and the Cæsars with laurels round bald domes; a dictator withsomething of the earthy American sense of humor of a Mark Twain, aGeorge Ade, a Will Rogers, an Artemus Ward. Windrip could be ever sofunny about solemn jaw-drooping opponents, and about the best method oftraining what he called "a Siamese flea hound." Did that, puzzledDoremus, 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 andwatch it shrink in the sun.

**

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

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

**

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

None of the changes was so publicized as the Presidential mandateabruptly ending the separate existence of the different states, anddividing the whole country into eight "provinces"--thus, assertedWindrip, economizing by reducing the number of governors and all otherstate officers and, asserted Windrip's enemies, better enabling him toconcentrate his private army and hold the country.

The new "Northeastern Province" included all of New York State north ofa line through Ossining, and all of New England except a strip ofConnecticut shore as far east as New Haven. This was, Doremus admitted,a natural and homogeneous division, and even more natural seemed theurban and industrial "Metropolitan Province," which included Greater NewYork, Westchester County up to Ossining, Long Island, the strip ofConnecticut 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 intolettered counties, each county into townships and cities, and only inthese last did the old names, with their traditional appeal, remain toendanger President Windrip by memories of honorable local history. Andit was gossiped that, next, the government would change even the townnames--that they were already thinking fondly of calling New York"Berzelian" and San Francisco "San Sarason." Probably that gossip wasfalse.

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

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

So Doremus was living, now, in Northeastern Province, District 3, CountyB, township of Beulah, and over him for his admiration and rejoicingwere a provincial commissioner, a district commissioner, a countycommissioner, an assistant county commissioner in charge of BeulahTownship, and all their appertaining M.M. guards and emergency militaryjudges.

**

Citizens who had lived in any one state for more than ten years seemedto resent more hotly the loss of that state's identity than they did thecastration of the Congress and Supreme Court of the UnitedStates--indeed, they resented it almost as much as the fact that, whilelate January, February, and most of March went by, they still were notreceiving their governmental gifts of $5000 (or perhaps it wouldbeautifully be $10,000) apiece; had indeed received nothing more thancheery bulletins from Washington to the effect that the "Capital LevyBoard," or C.L.B. was holding sessions.

Virginians whose grandfathers had fought beside Lee shouted that they'dbe damned if they'd give up the hallowed state name and form just onearbitrary section of an administrative unit containing eleven Southernstates; San Franciscans who had considered Los Angelinos even worse thandenizens of Miami now wailed with agony when California was sundered andthe northern portion lumped in with Oregon, Nevada, and others as the"Mountain and Pacific Province," while southern California was, withouther permission, assigned to the Southwestern Province, along withArizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, and Hawaii. As some hint of BuzzWindrip's vision for the future, it was interesting to read that thisSouthwestern Province was also to be permitted to claim "all portions ofMexico which the United States may from time to time find it necessaryto take over, as a protection against the notorious treachery of Mexicoand the Jewish plots there hatched."

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

**

As Provincial Commissioner of the Northeastern Province, comprisingUpper New York State and New England, was appointed Colonel Dewey Haik,that soldier-lawyer-politician-aviator who was the chilliest-blooded andmost arrogant of all the satellites of Windrip yet had so captivatedminers and fishermen during the campaign. He was a strong-flying eaglewho liked his meat bloody. As District Commissioner of District3--Vermont and New Hampshire--appeared, to Doremus's mingled derisionand fury, none other than John Sullivan Reek, that stuffiest of stuffedshirts, that most gaseous gas bag, that most amenable machine politicianof Northern New England; a Republican ex-governor who had, in thealembic of Windrip's patriotism, rosily turned Leaguer.

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

It was this Commissioner Reek who summoned all the editors in hisdistrict to meet him at his new viceregal lodge in Dartmouth Library andreceive the precious privileged information as to how much PresidentWindrip and his subordinate commissioners admired the gentlemen of thepress.

Before he left for the press conference in Hanover, Doremus receivedfrom Sissy a "poem"--at least she called it that--which Buck Titus,Lorinda Pike, Julian Falck, and she had painfully composed, late atnight, 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 allthese unsightly billboards off the highways--much better for the touristtrade," said all the old editors, even those who wondered if thePresident wasn't perhaps the least bit arbitrary.

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

On the long porch of the Hanover Inn, officers of the Minute Men werereclining 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 brokenlaboratory glassware, and in one stripped laboratory he could see asmall squad of M.M.'s drilling.

District Commissioner John Sullivan Reek affectionately received theeditors in a classroom.... Old men, used to being revered asprophets, sitting anxiously in trifling chairs, facing a fat man in theuniform of an M.M. commander, who smoked an unmilitary cigar as hispulpy hand waved greeting.

Reek took not more than an hour to relate what would have taken the mostintelligent man five or six hours--that is, five minutes of speech andthe rest of the five hours to recover from the nausea caused by havingto utter such shameless rot.... President Windrip, Secretary of StateSarason, Provincial Commissioner Haik, and himself, John Sullivan Reek,they were all being misrepresented by the Republicans, theJeffersonians, the Communists, England, the Nazis, and probably the juteand herring industries; and what the government wanted was for anyreporter to call on any member of this Administration, and especially onCommissioner 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 myselfthe privilege of introducing you to all four of the CountyCommissioners, who were just chosen yesterday. Probably each of you willknow personally the commissioner from your own county, but I want you tointimately and coöperatively know all four, because, whomever they maybe, they join with me in my unquenchable admiration of the press."

The four County Commissioners, as one by one they shambled into the roomand were introduced, seemed to Doremus an oddish lot: A moth-eatenlawyer known more for his quotations from Shakespeare and Robert W.Service than for his shrewdness before a jury. He was luminously baldexcept for a prickle of faded rusty hair, but you felt that, if he hadhis 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 tofind himself there. (He was replaced, a month later, by a popularosteopath with an interest in politics and vegetarianism.)

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

**

Mr. Reek called him "Captain" Ledue. Doremus remembered that Shad's onlymilitary 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 whosefiercest experience in battle had been licking a corporal when inliquor.

"Mr. Jessup," bubbled the Hon. Mr. Reek, "I imagine you must have metCaptain 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 aboutthe economics of our social Revolution. He's a Cho-vinis. But he isn'tsuch a bad old coot, and I'll let him ride as long as he behaveshimself!"

"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 ofBurlington, largest town in the state, Captain Shad Ledue fixed on FortBeulah as executive center of County B, which was made out of nineformer counties of northern Vermont. Doremus never decided whether thiswas, as Lorinda Pike asserted, because Shad was in partnership withBanker R. C. Crowley in the profits derived from the purchase of quiteuseless old dwellings as part of his headquarters, or for the evensounder purpose of showing himself off, in battalion-leader's uniformwith the letters "C.C." beneath the five-pointed star on his collar, tothe pals with whom he had once played pool and drunk applejack, and tothe "snobs" whose lawns he once had mowed.

Besides the condemned dwellings, Shad took over all of the formerScotland County courthouse and established his private office in thejudge's chambers, merely chucking out the law books and replacing themwith piles of magazines devoted to the movies and the detection ofcrime, hanging up portraits of Windrip, Sarason, Haik, and Reek,installing two deep chairs upholstered in poison-green plush (orderedfrom the store of the loyal Charley Betts but, to Betts's fury, chargedto the government, to be paid for if and when) and doubling the numberof judicial cuspidors.

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

County commissioners were allowed from one to a dozen assistantcommissioners, depending on the population. Doremus Jessup was alarmedwhen he discovered that Shad had had the shrewdness to choose asassistants men of some education and pretense to manners, with"Professor" Emil Staubmeyer as Assistant County Commissioner in chargeof 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. betterthrough seeing them faintly reflected in Shad and Staubmeyer than hewould have in the confusing glare of Washington; and understand thusthat a Buzz Windrip--a Bismarck--a Cæsar--a Pericles was like all therest of itching, indigesting, aspiring humanity except that each ofthese heroes had a higher degree of ambition and more willingness tokill.

**

By June, the enrollment of the Minute Men had increased to 562,000, andthe force was now able to accept as new members only such trustypatriots and pugilists as it preferred. The War Department was franklyallowing them not just "expense money" but payment ranging from tendollars a week for "inspectors" with a few hours of weekly duty indrilling, to $9700 a year for "brigadiers" on full time, and $16,000 forthe High Marshal, Lee Sarason... fortunately without interfering withthe 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 lieutenantcolonel; commander, or colonel; brigadier, or general; high marshal, orcommanding general. Cynics suggested that these honorable titles derivedmore from the Salvation Army than the fighting forces, but be that cheapsneer justified or no, the fact remains that an M.M. helot had ever somuch more pride in being called an "inspector," an awing designation inall police circles, than in being a "private."

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

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

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

It was said that one of the least of these erring children was the firstpatriot to name President Windrip "the Chief," meaning Führer, orImperial Wizard of the K.K.K., or Il Duce, or Imperial Potentate of theMystic Shrine, or Commodore, or University Coach, or anything elsesupremely noble and good-hearted. So, on the glorious anniversary ofJuly 4, 1937, more than five hundred thousand young uniformedvigilantes, scattered in towns from Guam to Bar Harbor, from PointBarrow to Key West, stood at parade rest and sang, like the choiringseraphim:

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 "Buzzand Buzz," now the official M.M. anthem, showed, in a certain roughness,the lack of Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch's fastidious hand. But nothing couldbe 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 daycame the blow.

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

Consternation was universal. From Sarason's office came sulphurousrebuke to the unknown idiot who had first made the mistake (generally hewas believed to be Lee Sarason) and the command that a new emblem besuggested 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 drawingtens of thousands of substitutes for the five-pointed star: circles intriangles, triangles in circles, pentagons, hexagons, alphas and omegas,eagles, aëroplanes, arrows, bombs bursting in air, bombs bursting inbushes, billy-goats, rhinoceri, and the Yosemite Valley. It wascirculated that a young ensign on High Marshal Sarason's staff had, inagony over the error, committed suicide. Everybody thought that thishara-kiri was a fine idea and showed sensibility on the part of thebetter M.M.'s; and they went on thinking so even after it proved thatthe Ensign had merely got drunk at the Buzz Backgammon Club and talkedabout 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 steeringwheel.

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

Sarason's proclamation also pointed out that it would not be toofar-fetched to declare that, with a little drafting treatment, the armsof 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 (whichreplaced 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 werebeing accomplished, the League of Forgotten Men (founded by one Rev. Mr.Prang, who was mentioned in the proclamation only as a person in pasthistory) was now terminated. So were all the older parties, Democratic,Republican, Farmer-Labor, or what not. There was to be only one: TheAmerican Corporate State and Patriotic Party--no! added the President,with something of his former good-humor: "there are two parties, theCorporate and those who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to usea common phrase, are just out of luck!"

The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary Sarason hadmore or less taken from Italy. All occupations were divided into sixclasses: agriculture, industry, commerce, transportation andcommunication, banking and insurance and investment, and a grab-bagclass including the arts, sciences, and teaching. The AmericanFederation of Labor, the Railway Brotherhoods, and all other labororganizations, along with the Federal Department of Labor, weresupplanted by local Syndicates composed of individual workers, abovewhich were Provincial Confederations, all under governmental guidance.Parallel to them in each occupation were Syndicates and Confederationsof employers. Finally, the six Confederations of workers and the sixConfederations of employers were combined in six joint federalCorporations, which elected the twenty-four members of the NationalCouncil of Corporations, which initiated or supervised all legislationrelating to labor or business.

There was a permanent chairman of this National Council, with a decidingvote and the power of regulating all debate as he saw fit, but he wasnot elected--he was appointed by the President; and the first to holdthe office (without interfering with his other duties) was Secretary ofState Lee Sarason. Just to safeguard the liberties of Labor, thischairman had the right to dismiss any unreasonable member of theNational Council.

All strikes and lockouts were forbidden under federal penalties, so thatworkmen listened to reasonable government representatives and not tounscrupulous 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 theywere not at all corpse-like. That description would more correctly, andincreasingly, have applied to their enemies.

**

Though the Corpos continued to promise a gift of at least $5000 to everyfamily, "as soon as funding of the required bond issue shall becompleted," the actual management of the poor, particularly of the moresurly 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 BerzeliusWindrip, almost disappeared. Almost all workless men were assembled inenormous labor camps, under M.M. officers. Their wives and childrenaccompanied them and took care of the cooking, cleaning, and repair ofclothes. The men did not merely work on state projects; they were alsohired out at the reasonable rate of one dollar a day to privateemployers. Of course, so selfish is human nature even in Utopia, thisdid cause most employers to discharge the men to whom they had beenpaying more than a dollar a day, but that took care of itself, becausethese overpaid malcontents in their turn were forced into the laborcamps.

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

There was a certain discontentment among people who had once ownedmotorcars and bathrooms and eaten meat twice daily, at having to walkten 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--andsleep in bunks, a hundred in a room. Yet there was less rebellion than amere rationalist like Walt Trowbridge, Windrip's ludicrously defeatedrival, would have expected, for every evening the loudspeaker brought tothe workers the precious voices of Windrip and Sarason, Vice-PresidentBeecroft, Secretary of War Luthorne, Secretary of Education andPropaganda Macgoblin, General Coon, or some other genius, and theseOlympians, talking to the dirtiest and tiredest mudsills as warm friendto friend, told them that they were the honored foundation stones of aNew Civilization, the advance guards of the conquest of the whole world.

They took it, too, like Napoleon's soldiers. And they had the Jews andthe 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 ofinquiry which was to decide how the $5000 per person could be wangled.It became easier to answer malcontents with a cuff from a Minute Manthan by repetitious statements from Washington.

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

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

Agriculture, which was most of all to have profited from inflation, onthe theory that the mercurial crop-prices would rise faster thananything else, actually suffered the most of all, because, after a firstflurry of foreign buying, importers of American products found itimpossible to deal in so skittish a market, and American foodexports--such of them as were left--ceased completely.

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

With the value of the dollar changing daily, the elaborate systems ofcost-marking and credit of Big Business were so confused that presidentsand sales-managers sat in their offices after midnight, with wet towels.But they got some comfort, because with the depreciated dollar they wereable to recall all bonded indebtedness and, paying it off at the oldface 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 theyought to get in wages, and labor unions eliminated, the largerindustrialists came through the inflation with perhaps double thewealth, in real values, that they had had in 1936.

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

**

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

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

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

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

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

**

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

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

A good many of the social workers indignantly said that this was askingthem to be spies, stool pigeons for the American Oh Gay Pay Oo. Thesewere, on various unimportant charges, sent to jail or, later, toconcentration camps--which were also jails, but the private jails of theM.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 congenitaltraitors and bellyachers as Jewish doctors, Jewish musicians, Negrojournalists, socialistic college professors, young men who preferredreading or chemical research to manly service with the M.M.'s, women whocomplained when their men had been taken away by the M.M.'s and haddisappeared, were increasingly beaten in the streets, or arrested oncharges that would not have been very familiar to pre-Corpo jurists.

And, increasingly, the bourgeois counter revolutionists began to escapeto Canada; just as once, by the "underground railroad" the Negro slaveshad 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 littlemagazines, accusing the Corpos of murderous terrorism--allegations thata band of six M.M.'s had beaten an aged rabbi and robbed him; that theeditor of a small labor paper in Paterson had been tied to hisprinting-press and left there while the M.M.'s burned the plant; thatthe pretty daughter of an ex-Farmer-Labor politician in Iowa had beenraped by giggling young men in masks.

To end this cowardly flight of the lying counter revolutionists (many ofwhom, once accepted as reputable preachers and lawyers and doctors andwriters and ex-congressmen and ex-army officers, were able to give awickedly false impression of Corpoism and the M.M.'s to the worldoutside America) the government quadrupled the guards who were haltingsuspects at every harbor and at even the minutest trails crossing theborder; and in one quick raid, it poured M.M. storm troopers into allairports, private or public, and all aëroplane factories, and thus, theyhoped, 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, waswatched night and day by a rotation of twelve M.M. guards. But thereseemed to be small danger that this opponent, who, after all, was acrank but not an intransigent maniac, would make himself ridiculous byfighting against the great Power which (per Bishop Prang) Heaven hadbeen pleased to send for the healing of distressed America.

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

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

On the Fourth of July, when the M.M's gave their glorious butunfortunate tribute to the Chief and the Five-pointed Star, Trowbridgegratified his cow-punchers by holding an unusually pyrotechniccelebration. All evening skyrockets flared up, and round the homepasture glowed pots of Roman fire. Far from cold-shouldering the M.M.guards, Trowbridge warmly invited them to help set off rockets and jointhe gang in beer and sausages. The lonely soldier boys off there on theprairie--they were so happy shooting rockets!

An aëroplane with a Canadian license, a large plane, flying withoutlights, sped toward the rocket-lighted area and, with engine shut off,so that the guards could not tell whether it had flown on, circled thepasture outlined by the Roman fire and swiftly landed.

The guards had felt sleepy after the last bottle of beer. Three of themwere napping on the short, rough grass.

They were rather disconcertingly surrounded by men in maskingflying-helmets, men carrying automatic pistols, who handcuffed theguards that were still awake, picked up the others, and stored alltwelve 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 Trowbridgeentered the pilots' compartment. High and swift and alone, the planeflew toward the premature Northern Lights.

Next morning, still in overalls, Trowbridge breakfasted at the FortGarry 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 werereproductions of four letters indicating that before he becamePresident, Berzelius Windrip had profited through personal gifts fromfinanciers to an amount of over $1,000,000. To Doremus Jessup, to somethousands of Doremus Jessups, were smuggled copies of the Lance,though possession of it was punishable (perhaps not legally, butcertainly effectively) by death.

But it was not till the winter, so carefully did his secret agents haveto work in America, that Trowbridge had in full operation theorganization 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 grownshaky. It seemed particularly shaky in June, 1937, when he drove toNorth Beulah for the fortieth graduation anniversary of his class inIsaiah College.

As the custom was, the returned alumni wore comic costumes. His classhad sailor suits, but they walked about, bald-headed and lugubrious, inthese well-meant garments of joy, and there was a look of instabilityeven in the eyes of the three members who were ardent Corpos (beinglocal Corpo commissioners).

After the first hour Doremus saw little of his classmates. He had lookedup his familiar correspondent, Victor Loveland, teacher in the classicaldepartment 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 Hathawaycottage had been no palace--Isaiah assistant professors did notcustomarily rent palaces. Now, with the pretentiously smart living roomheaped with burlap-covered chairs and rolled rugs and boxes of books, itlooked like a junkshop. Amid the wreckage sat Loveland, his wife, histhree 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 ofthe use of the aorist in Hesiod!" wailed his wife.

"Well, I deserve it--for not having been vicious about anything sinceA.D. 300! Only thing I'm ashamed of is that they're not firing me forhaving taught my students that the Corpos have taken most of their ideasfrom Tiberius, or maybe for having decently tried to assassinateDistrict 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 asix-room packing-box in Burlington--Dad's got diabetes. Butteaching----President Peaseley kept putting off signing my new contractand just informed me ten days ago that I'm through--much too late to geta job for next year. Myself, I don't care a damn! Really I don't! I'mglad 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 nobleyoung souls to dream of chaste classic beauty--save the mark!--but justa plain hired man, another counter-jumper in the Marked-down ClassicsGoods Department, with students for bored customers, and as subject tobeing hired and fired as any janitor. Do you remember that in ImperialRome, the teachers, even the tutors of the nobility, wereslaves--allowed a lot of leeway, I suppose, in their theories about theanthropology of Crete, but just as likely to be strangled as the otherslaves! 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 andhis boyfriend Hitler tell you about; so cunning I suspected what wasgoing on months ago and so--I've also just been fired, Mr. Jessup--Iarranged for a job with the Universal Electric Corporation.... Theydon't mind Jews there, as long as they sing at their work and findboondoggles worth a million a year to the company--at thirty-fivehundred a year salary! A fond farewell to all my grubby studes!Though--" and Doremus thought he was, at heart, sadder than Loveland--"Ido 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 andthought, here at old Isaiah. The fact is that we are letting Loveland goonly because the Classics Department is overstaffed--so little demandfor Greek and Sanskrit and so on, you know, with all this moderninterest 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 wasriding for a fall, boasting about being a Jew and all, you know,and----But can't we talk of pleasanter subjects? You have probablylearned that Secretary of Culture Macgoblin has now completed his planfor the appointment of a director of education in each province anddistrict?--and that Professor Almeric Trout of Aumbry University isslated for Director in our Northeastern Province? Well, I have somethingvery gratifying to add. Dr. Trout--and what a profound scholar, what aneloquent 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 ofEducation 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 ofcourse one of the chief jobs of the Director will be to work with andthrough the newspaper editors in the great task of spreading correctCorporate ideals and combating false theories--yes, oh yes."

It seemed as though a large number of people were zealous to work withand through the editors these days, thought Doremus.

He noticed that President Peaseley resembled a dummy made of faded grayflannel of a quality intended for petticoats in an orphan asylum.

**

The Minute Men's organization was less favored in the staid villagesthan in the industrial centers, but all through the summer it was knownthat a company of M.M.'s had been formed in Fort Beulah and weredrilling in the Armory under National Guard officers and CountyCommissioner Ledue, who was seen sitting up nights in his luxurious newroom in Mrs. Ingot's boarding-house, reading a manual of arms. ButDoremus declined to go look at them, and when his rustic but ambitiousreporter, "Doc" (otherwise Otis) Itchitt, came in throbbing about theM.M.'s and wanted to run an illustrated account in the SaturdayInformer, Doremus sniffed.

It was not till their first public parade, in August, that Doremus sawthem, and not gladly.

The whole countryside had turned out; he could hear them laughing andshuffling beneath his office window; but he stubbornly stuck to editingan 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, theveteran job compositor and head of the Informer chapel, a man tall asa house and possessed of such a sweeping black mustache as had nototherwise been seen since the passing of the old-time bartender. "Yougot 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 inthe uniforms of Civil War cavalrymen, and just as they were opposite theInformer office, the town band rollicked into "Marching throughGeorgia." The young men smiled, they stepped more quickly, and held uptheir banner with the steering wheel and M.M. upon it.

When he was ten, Doremus had seen in this self-same street a MemorialDay parade of the G.A.R. The veterans were an average of under fiftythen, and some of them only thirty-five; they had swung ahead lightlyand gayly--and to the tune of "Marching through Georgia." So now in 1937he was looking down again on the veterans of Gettysburg and MissionaryRidge. Oh--he could see them all--Uncle Tom Veeder, who had made him thewillow whistles; old Mr. Crowley with his cornflower eyes; JackGreenhill who played leapfrog with the kids and who was to die in EthanCreek----They found him with thick hair dripping. Doremus thrilled tothe M.M. flags, the music, the valiant young men, even while he hatedall they marched for, and hated the Shad Ledue whom he incredulouslyrecognized in the brawny horseman at the head of the procession.

He understood now why the young men marched to war. But "Oh yeh--youthink so!" he could hear Shad sneering through the music.

**

The unwieldy humor characteristic of American politicians persisted eventhrough the eruption. Doremus read about and sardonically "played up" inthe Informer a minstrel show given at the National Convention ofBoosters' Clubs at Atlantic City, late in August. As end-men andinterlocutor appeared no less distinguished persons than Secretary ofthe Treasury Webster R. Skittle, Secretary of War Luthorne, andSecretary of Education and Public Relations, Dr. Macgoblin. It was good,old-time Elks Club humor, uncorroded by any of the notions of dignityand of international obligations which, despite his great services, thatqueer stick Lee Sarason was suspected of trying to introduce. Why(marveled the Boosters) the Big Boys were so democratic that they evenkidded themselves and the Corpos, that's how unassuming they were!

"Who was this lady I seen you going down the street with?" demanded theplump Mr. Secretary Skittle (disguised as a colored wench inpolka-dotted cotton) of Mr. Secretary Luthorne (in black-face and largered 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 (severalmillions listened on the radio to the Boosters' Club show) closer totheir great-hearted masters.

But the high point of the show was Dr. Macgoblin's daring to tease hisown 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 theSecretary of Education. Then, in late September, he heard something notquite pleasant about Dr. Macgoblin. The story, as he got it, ran thus:

Hector Macgoblin, that great surgeon-boxer-poet-sailor, had alwayscontrived to have plenty of enemies, but after the beginning of hisinvestigation of schools, to purge them of any teachers he did nothappen to like, he made so unusually many that he was accompanied bybodyguards. At this time in September, he was in New York, findingquantities of "subversive elements" in Columbia University--against theprotests of President Nicholas Murray Butler, who insisted that he hadalready cleaned out all willful and dangerous thinkers, especially thepacifists in the medical school--and Macgoblin's bodyguards were twoformer instructors in philosophy who in their respective universitieshad been admired even by their deans for everything except the fact thatthey would get drunk and quarrelsome. One of them, in that state, alwaystook off one shoe and hit people over the head with the heel, if theyargued in defense of Jung.

With these two in uniforms as M.M. battalion leaders--his own was thatof a brigadier--after a day usefully spent in kicking out of Columbiaall teachers who had voted for Trowbridge, Dr. Macgoblin started offwith his brace of bodyguards to try out a wager that he could take adrink at every bar on Fifty-second Street and still not pass out.

He had done well when, at ten-thirty, being then affectionate andphilanthropic, he decided that it would be a splendid idea to telephonehis revered former teacher in Leland Stanford, the biologist Dr. WillySchmidt, once of Vienna, now in Rockefeller Institute. Macgoblin wasindignant when someone at Dr. Schmidt's apartment informed him that thedoctor was out. Furiously: "Out? Out? What d'you mean he's out? Old goatlike that got no right to be out! At midnight! Where is he? This is thePolice 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 waynothing of note happened except that when Macgoblin discussed the farewith the taxi-driver, he felt impelled to knock him out. The three, andthey were in the happiest, most boyish of spirits, burst joyfully intoDr. de Verez's primeval house in the Sixties. The entrance hall wasshabby enough, with a humble show of the good rabbi's umbrellas andstorm rubbers, and had the invaders seen the bedrooms they would havefound them Trappist cells. But the long living room, front-andback-parlor thrown together, was half museum, half lounge. Just becausehe himself liked such things and resented a stranger's possessing them,Macgoblin looked sniffily at a Beluchi prayer rug, a Jacobean courtcupboard, a small case of incunabula and of Arabic manuscripts in silverupon scarlet parchment.

"Swell joint! Hello, Doc! How's the Dutchman? How's the antibodyresearch going? These are Doc Nemo and Doc, uh, Doc Whoozis, the famousglue lifters. Great frenzh mine. Introduce us to your Jew friend."

Now it is more than possible that Rabbi de Verez had never heard ofSecretary of Education Macgoblin.

The houseman who had let in the intruders and who nervously hovered atthe living room door--he is the sole authority for most of thestory--said that Macgoblin staggered, slid on a rug, almost fell, thengiggled foolishly as he sat down, waving his plug-ugly friends to chairsand demanding, "Hey, Rabbi, how about some whisky? Lil Scotch and soda.I know you Geonim never lap up anything but snow-cooled nectar handedout by a maiden with a dulcimer, singing of Mount Abora, or maybe just alittle shot of Christian children's sacrificial blood--ha, ha, just ajoke, Rabbi; I know these 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are all thebunk, 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 hiswhite beard, silenced him and, with a wave of his fragile old hand,signaled the waiting houseman, who reluctantly brought in whisky andsiphons.

The three coördinators of culture almost filled their glasses beforethey poured in the soda.

"Look here, De Verez, why don't you kikes take a tumble to yourselvesand get out, beat it, exeunt bearing corpses, and start a real Zion, sayin South America?"

The Rabbi looked bewildered at the attack. Dr. Schmidt snorted, "Dr.Macgoblin--once a promising pupil of mine--is Secretary of Education anda 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 havelearned to ignore persecution. We have been so impudent as to adopt thetactics of your Early Christian Martyrs! Even if we were invited to yourCorporate feast--which, I understand, we most warmly are not!--I amafraid we should not be able to attend. You see, we believe in only oneDictator, God, and I am afraid we cannot see Mr. Windrip as a rival toJehovah!"

"Aah, that's all baloney!" murmured one of the learned gunmen, andMacgoblin shouted, "Oh, can the two-dollar words! There's just one thingwhere we agree with the dirty, Kike-loving Communists--that's inchucking 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 adoughnut mustache, a beer belly, and black button boots with soleshalf-an-inch thick) said, "Macgoblin, I suppose I may talk frank wit' anold student, there not being any reporters or loutspeakers arount. Doyou know why you are drinking like a pig? Because you are ashamt! Ashamtthat you, once a promising researcher, should have solt out tofreebooters with brains like decayed liver and----"

"That'll do from you, Prof!"

"Say, we oughtta tie those seditious sons of hounds up and beat thedaylight out of 'em!" whimpered one of the watchdogs.

Macgoblin shrieked, "You highbrows--you stinking intellectuals! You, youKike, with your lush-luzurious library, while Common People beenstarving--would be now if the Chief hadn't saved 'em! Your c'lectionbooks--stolen from the pennies of your poor, dumb, foot-kissingcongregation 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 wayin! Get out! Go! Get out!"

One of the accompanying dogs demanded of Macgoblin, "Going to stand forthese two Yiddles insulting us--insulting the whole by God Corpo stateand the M.M. uniform? Kill 'em!"

Now, to his already abundant priming, Macgoblin had added two hugewhiskies since he had come. He yanked out his automatic pistol, firedtwice. Dr. Schmidt toppled. Rabbi De Verez slid down in his chair, histemple throbbing out blood. The houseman trembled at the door, and oneof the guards shot at him, then chased him down the street, firing, andwhooping with the humor of the joke. This learned guard was killedinstantly, at a street crossing, by a traffic policeman.

Macgoblin and the other guard were arrested and brought before theCommissioner 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. Butthe Commissioner thought that in a case so closely touching the federalgovernment, it would not be seemly to postpone the trial.

Against the terrified evidence of the Rabbi's Russian-Polish housemanwere the earnest (and by now sober) accounts of the federal Secretary ofEducation, and of his surviving aide, formerly Assistant Professor ofPhilosophy in Pelouse University. It was proven that not only De Verezbut also Dr. Schmidt was a Jew--which, incidentally, he 100 per cent wasnot. It was almost proven that this sinister pair had been coaxinginnocent Corpos into De Verez's house and performing upon them what ascared little Jewish stool pigeon called "ritual murders."

Macgoblin and friend were acquitted on grounds of self-defense andhandsomely complimented by the Commissioner--and later in telegrams fromPresident Windrip and Secretary of State Sarason--for having defendedthe Commonwealth against human vampires and one of the most horrifyingplots known in history.

The policeman who had shot the other guard wasn't, so scrupulous wasCorpo justice, heavily punished--merely sent out to a dreary beat in theBronx. So everybody was happy.

**

But Doremus Jessup, on receiving a letter from a New York reporter whohad talked privately with the surviving guard, was not so happy. He wasnot in a very gracious temper, anyway. County Commissioner Shad Ledue,on grounds of humanitarianism, had made him discharge his delivery boysand employ M.M.'s to distribute (or cheerfully chuck into the river) theInformer.

"Last straw--plenty last," he raged.

He had read about Rabbi de Verez and seen pictures of him. He had onceheard Dr. Willy Schmidt speak, when the State Medical Association hadmet at Fort Beulah, and afterward had sat near him at dinner. If theywere murderous Jews, then he was a murderous Jew too, he swore, and itwas time to do something for His Own People.

That evening--it was late in September, 1937--he did not go home todinner at all but, with a paper container of coffee and a slab of pieuntouched 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 agedtypewriter, typing with his two forefingers.

**

Dan Wilgus, head of the composing room, looked and barked like an oldsergeant and, like an old sergeant, was only theoretically meek to hissuperior officer. He was shaking when he brought in this copy and,almost rubbing Doremus's nose in it, protested, "Say, boss, you don'thonest 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 thrownin the hoosegow and probably shot at dawn, if you like that kind ofsport, but we've held a meeting of the chapel, and we all say, damned ifwe'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 theM.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 hisname?--Ethan Frome or Benedict Arnold or whatever it was!--and more'nonce I've licked some galoot that was standing around a saloon tellingthe 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 effortto be humorous and coaxing broke, and he wailed, "God, boss, pleasedon't!"

"I know, Dan. Prob'ly our friend Shad Ledue will be annoyed. But I can'tgo on standing things like slaughtering old De Verez any moreand----Here! Gimme that copy!"

**

While compositors, pressmen, and the young devil stood alternatelyfretting and snickering at his clumsiness, Doremus ranged up before atype case, in his left hand the first composing-stick he had held in tenyears, and looked doubtfully at the case. It was like a labyrinth tohim. "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! Youdon'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 toDoc Itchitt, that enterprising though awkward reporter, and to JulianFalck, who was off now to Amherst but who had been working for theInformer all summer, combining unprintable articles on Adam Smith withextremely 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 sametime, 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 getfunny in New York and Washington, but you're too strong in the BeulahValley for Ledue and Staubmeyer to dare lift a hand!" brayed DocItchitt, while Doremus considered, "I wonder if this smart youngjournalistic Judas wouldn't like to see me in trouble and get hold ofthe Informer and turn it Corpo?"

He did not stay at the office till the paper with his editorial had goneto press. He went home early, and showed the proof to Emma and Sissy.While they were reading it, with yelps of disapproval, Julian Falckslipped in.

Emma protested, "Oh, you can't--you mustn't do it! What will become ofus all? Honestly, Dormouse, I'm not scared for myself, but what would Ido if they beat you or put you in prison or something? It would justbreak my heart to think of you in a cell! And without any cleanunderclothes! 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 forit," 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 sweethairy ears?"

"Why, Sis----"

Julian blurted, "I think it'd be fierce if somebody didn't try to stopthese fellows. I wish I could do it. But how could I?"

"You've probably answered the whole business," said Doremus. "If a manis going to assume the right to tell several thousand readers what'swhat--most agreeable, hitherto--he's got a kind of you might saypriestly obligation to tell the truth. 'O cursed spite.' Well! I thinkI'll drop into the office again. Home about midnight. Don't sit up,anybody--and Sissy, and you, Julian, that particularly goes for you twonight prowlers! As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord--and inVermont, 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 devotionmade 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 tothe Tavern and to Lorinda Pike.

But on the way he stopped in at the home of his son-in-law, bustlingyoung Dr. Fowler Greenhill; not to show him the proof but tohave--perhaps in prison?--another memory of the domestic life in whichhe had been rich. He stepped quietly into the front hall of theGreenhill house--a jaunty imitation of Mount Vernon; very prosperous andsecure, gay with the brass-knobbed walnut furniture and painted Russianboxes which Mary Greenhill affected. Doremus could hear David (butsurely it was past his bedtime?--what time did nine-year-old kids goto bed these degenerate days?) excitedly chattering with his father, andhis father's partner, old Dr. Marcus Olmsted, who was almost retired butwho kept up the obstetrics and eye-and-ear work for the firm.

Doremus peeped into the living room, with its bright curtains of yellowlinen. David's mother was writing letters, a crisp, fashionable figureat a maple desk complete with yellow quill pen, engraved notepaper, andsilver-backed blotter. Fowler and David were lounging on the two widearms 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 ofbeing taken seriously by grown-ups.

"Oh--oh--oh yes, I would like to. Oh, I think it'd be slick to be adoctor. 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 neverhas to worry about nothing!"

That moment, Fowler Greenhill saw his father-in-law making monkey facesat him from the door and admonished David, "Now, not always! Editorshave to work pretty hard sometimes--just think of when there's trainwrecks and floods and everything! I'll tell you. Did you know I havemagic 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 himcome flying through the air!"

"Aw, gee, you couldn't do that, Dad!"

"Oh, can't I!" Fowler stood solemnly, the overhead lights making softhis harsh red hair, and he windmilled his arms, hooting,"Presto--vesto--adsit--Granddad Jessup--voilà!"

And there, coming through the doorway, sure-enough was GranddadJessup!

**

Doremus remained only ten minutes, saying to himself, "Anyway, nothingbad can happen here, in this solid household." When Fowler saw him tothe door, Doremus sighed to him, "Wish Davy were right--just had to sitin the office and not worry. But I suppose some day I'll have a run-inwith the Corpos."

"I hope not. Nasty bunch. What do you think, Dad? That swine Shad Leduetold 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 wholebuilding."

"I'm not scared of Captain General Ledue or fifty like him! Hope hecalls me in for a bellyache some day! I'll give him a goodsedative--potassium of cyanide. Maybe I'll some day have the pleasure ofseeing that gent in his coffin. That's the advantage the doctor has, youknow! G'night, Dad! Sleep tight!"

**

A good many tourists were still coming up from New York to view thecolored autumn of Vermont, and when Doremus arrived at the Beulah ValleyTavern he had irritably to wait while Lorinda dug out extra towels andlooked up train schedules and was polite to old ladies who complainedthat there was too much--or not enough--sound from the Beulah RiverFalls at night. He could not talk to her apart until after ten. Therewas, meanwhile, a curious exalted luxury in watching each lost minutethreaten him with the approach of the final press time, as he sat in thetea room, imperturbably scratching through the leaves of the latestFortune.

Lorinda led him, at ten-fifteen, into her little office--just a roll-topdesk, a desk chair, one straight chair, and a table piled with heaps ofdefunct hotel-magazines. It was spinsterishly neat yet smelled still ofthe 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. Standup."

"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 andmurmured contentedly.

"Read this, Linda. For tomorrow's paper. I think I'm going to publishit, all right--got to decide finally before eleven--but ought I to? Iwas sure when I left the office, but Emma was scared----"

"Oh, Emma! Sit still. Let me see it." She read quickly. She alwaysdid. 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 abouttyphus 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, thoughI 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 thatif I would give lower rates to the M.M.'s--he sort of hinted it would benice of me to serve M.M. officers free--they would close their eyes tomy selling liquor here, without a license or anything! Why, he had theinconceivable nerve to tell me, and condescendingly! my dear--that heand his fine friends would be willing to hang out here a lot! EvenStaubmeyer--oh, our 'professor' is blossoming out as quite a sportingcharacter! 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 countycourt tomorrow--some complaint from my endearing partner, Mr.Nipper--seems he isn't satisfied with the division of our work here--andhonestly, my darling, he never does one blame thing but sit around andbore my best customers to death by telling what a swell hotel he used tohave in Florida. And Nipper has taken his things out of here and movedinto town. I'm afraid I'll have an unpleasant time, trying to keep fromtelling 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 graftand 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 seeeverything 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--Ihad Doc Itchitt interview him today, when he arrived--he's the perfectgentleman-Fascist--Oswald Mosley style. Good family--whatever thatmeans. Harvard graduate. Columbia Law School, year at Oxford. But wentinto finance in Boston. Investment banker. Major or something during thewar. Plays polo and sailed in a yacht race to Bermuda. Itchitt says he'sa big brute, with manners smoother than a butterscotch sundae and morelanguage than a bishop."

"But I'll be glad to have a gentleman to explain things to, instead ofShad."

"A gentleman's blackjack hurts just as much as a mucker's!"

"Oh, you!" with irritated tenderness, running her forefinger along theline of his jaw.

Outside, a footstep.

She sprang up, sat down primly in the straight chair. The footsteps wentby. She mused:

"All this trouble and the Corpos----They're going to do something to youand me. We'll become so roused up that--either we'll be desperate andreally cling to each other and everybody else in the world can go to thedevil or, what I'm afraid is more likely, we'll get so deep intorebellion against Windrip, we'll feel so terribly that we're standingfor something, that we'll want to give up everything else for it, evengive 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 soinvolved--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-schoolclock that it ought to have been flanked with portraits of George andMartha. "Well, yes, it is too late--almost eleven. Couldn't get to theoffice 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 telephoneand kill the editorial?"

"Sure. Absolute!"

"I'm glad! Me, I'd rather be shot than go sneaking around, crippled withfear. Bless you!"

She kissed him and hurried off to another hour or two of work, while hedrove home, whistling vaingloriously.

But he did not sleep well, in his big black-walnut bed. He startled tothe night noises of an old frame house--the easing walls, the step ofbodiless 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 basementbuilding, on President Street between Elm and Maple, opposite the sideentrance of the Hotel Wessex. On the top story was the composing room;on the second, the editorial and photographic departments and thebookkeeper; in the basement, the presses; and on the first or streetfloor, the circulation and advertising departments, and the frontoffice, open to the pavement, where the public came to pay subscriptionsand insert want-ads. The private room of the editor, Doremus Jessup,looked out on President Street through one not too dirty window. It waslarger 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 awater-stained surveyor's-map of Fort Beulah Township in 1891, acontemporary oleograph portrait of President McKinley, complete witheagles, flags, cannon, and the Ohio state flower, the scarlet carnation,a group photograph of the New England Editorial Association (in whichDoremus was the third blur in a derby hat in the fourth row), and anentirely bogus copy of a newspaper announcing Lincoln's death. It wasreasonably tidy--in the patent letter file, otherwise empty, there wereonly 2½ pairs of winter mittens, and an 18-gauge shotgun shell.

Doremus was, by habit, extremely fond of his office. It was the onlyplace aside from his study at home that was thoroughly his own. He wouldhave hated to leave it or to share it with anyone--possibly exceptingBuck and Lorinda--and every morning he came to it expectantly, from theground floor, up the wide brown stairs, through the good smell ofprinter's ink.

He stood at the window of this room before eight, the morning when hiseditorial appeared, looking down at the people going to work in shopsand warehouses. A few of them were in Minute Men uniforms. More and moreeven 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 theInformer; he saw them look up, point up, at his window. Heads close,they irritably discussed the front page of the paper. R. C. Crowley wentby, early as ever on his way to open the bank, and stopped to speak to aclerk from Ed Howland's grocery, both of them shaking their heads. OldDr. 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, thecrowd a mob, glaring up at his office, beginning to clamor. There weredozens of people there unknown to him: respectable farmers in town forshopping, unrespectables in town for a drink, laborers from the nearestwork camp, and all of them eddying around M.M. uniforms. Probably manyof them cared nothing about insults to the Corpo state, but had only theunprejudiced, impersonal pleasure in violence natural to most people.

Their mutter became louder, less human, more like the snap of burningrafters. Their glances joined in one. He was, frankly, scared.

He was half conscious of big Dan Wilgus, the head compositor, besidehim, hand on his shoulder, but saying nothing, and of Doc Itchittcackling, "My--my gracious--hope they don't--God, I hope they don't comeup here!"

The mob acted then, swift and together, on no more of an incitement thanan unknown M.M.'s shout: "Ought to burn the place, lynch the whole bunchof traitors!" They were running across the street, into the frontoffice. He could hear a sound of smashing, and his fright was gone inprotective fury. He galloped down the wide stairs, and from five stepsabove the front office looked on the mob, equipped with axes and brushhooks grabbed from in front of Pridewell's near-by hardware store,slashing at the counter facing the front door, breaking the glass caseof souvenir postcards and stationery samples, and with obscene handsreaching 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 hedid not await that coming. He clumped down the stairs, step by step,trembling not from fear but from insane anger. One large burgher seizedhis arm, began to bend it. The pain was atrocious. At that moment(Doremus almost smiled, so grotesquely was it like the nick-of-timerescue by the landing party of Marines) into the front officeCommissioner Shad Ledue marched, at the head of twenty M.M.'s withunsheathed bayonets, and, lumpishly climbing up on the shatteredcounter, bellowed:

"That'll do from you guys! Lam out of this, the whole damn bunch ofyou!"

Doremus's assailant had dropped his arm. Was he actually, wonderedDoremus, 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 suredeserves lynching, but we got orders from Hanover--the Corpos are goingto take over this plant and use it. Beat it, you!"

A wild woman from the mountains--in another existence she had knitted atthe guillotine--had thrust through to the counter and was howling up atShad, "They're traitors! Hang 'em! We'll hang you, if you stop us! Iwant my five thousand dollars!"

Shad casually stooped down from the counter and slapped her. Doremusfelt his muscles tense with the effort to get at Shad, to revenge thegood lady who, after all, had as much right as Shad to slaughter him,but he relaxed, impatiently gave up all desire for mock heroism. Thebayonets of the M.M.'s who were clearing out the crowd were reality, notto be attacked by hysteria.

Shad, from the counter, was blatting in a voice like a sawmill, "Snapinto it, Jessup! Take him along, men."

And Doremus, with no volition whatever, was marching through PresidentStreet, up Elm Street, and toward the courthouse and county jail,surrounded by four armed Minute Men. The strangest thing about it, hereflected, was that a man could go off thus, on an uncharted journeywhich might take years, without fussing over plans and tickets, withoutbaggage, without even an extra clean handkerchief, without letting Emmaknow where he was going, without letting Lorinda--oh, Lorinda could takecare of herself. But Emma would worry.

He realized that the guard beside him, with the chevrons of a squadleader, or corporal, was Aras Dilley, the slatternly farmer from up onMount 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, andprodded him with the bayonet.

It did not, actually, hurt much, but Doremus spat with fury. So long nowhe 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 thatpeople were looking at him--at Doremus Jessup!--as a prisoner beingtaken to jail. He tried to be proud of being a political prisoner. Hecouldn't. Jail was jail.

**

The county lockup was at the back of the courthouse, now the center ofLedue's headquarters. Doremus had never been in that or any other jailexcept as a reporter, pityingly interviewing the curious, inferior sortof people who did mysteriously get themselves arrested.

To go into that shameful back door--he who had always stalked into thefront entrance of the courthouse, the editor, saluted by clerk andsheriff and judge!

Shad was not in sight. Silently Doremus's four guards conducted himthrough a steel door, down a corridor, to a small cell reeking ofchloride of lime and, still unspeaking, they left him there. The cellhad a cot with a damp straw mattress and damper straw pillow, a stool, awash basin with one tap for cold water, a pot, two hooks for clothes, asmall barred window, and nothing else whatever except a jaunty signornamented with embossed forget-me-nots and a text from Deuteronomy, "Heshall 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, withoutspeech, without food, with only tap water caught in his doubled palm andwith one cigarette an hour, until after midnight, and in theunaccustomed 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 insolitary for years and years, put there by tyrants worse than Windrip...yes, and sometimes put there by nice, good, social-minded judges thatI'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 andvagrants, and the petty offenders among the M.M.'s, were crowded inenviable comradeship, but the sound was only a background for thecorroding stillness.

He sank into a twitching numbness. He felt that he was choking, andgasped desperately. Only now and then did he think clearly--then only ofthe shame of imprisonment or, even more emphatically, of how hard thewooden stool was on his ill-upholstered rump, and how much pleasanter itwas, even so, than the cot, whose mattress had the quality of crushedworms.

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 inescapableooze of a flood, he thought furiously:

"And about Lorinda. Now that I've been kicked into reality--got to beone thing or the other: Emma (who's my bread) or Lorinda (my wine) but Ican't have both.

"Oh, damn! What twaddle! Why can't a man have both bread and wine andnot prefer one before the other?

"Unless, maybe, we're all coming into a day of battles when the fightingwill be too hot to let a man stop for anything save bread... andmaybe, even, too hot to let him stop for that!"

**

The waiting--the waiting in the smothering cell--the relentless waitingwhile the filthy window glass turned from afternoon to a bleak darkness.

What was happening out there? What had happened to Emma, to Lorinda, tothe Informer office, to Dan Wilgus, to Buck and Sissy and Mary andDavid?

Why, it was today that Lorinda was to answer the action against her byNipper! Today! (Surely all that must have been done with a year ago!)What had happened? Had Military Judge Effingham Swan treated her as shedeserved?

But Doremus slipped again from this living agitation into the trance ofwaiting--waiting; and, catnapping on the hideously uncomfortable littlestool, he was dazed when at some unholily late hour (it was just aftermidnight) he was aroused by the presence of armed M.M.'s outside hisbarred cell door, and by the hill-billy drawl of Squad-Leader ArasDilley:

"Well, guess y' better git up now, better git up! Jedge wants to seeyou--jedge says he wants to see you. Heh! Guess y' didn't ever think I'dbe a squad leader, did yuh, Mist' Jessup!"

Doremus was escorted through angling corridors to the familiar sideentrance of the courtroom--the entrance where once he had seen ThadDilley, Aras's degenerate cousin, shamble in to receive sentence forclubbing his wife to death.... He could not keep from feeling thatThad and he were kin, now.

He was kept waiting--waiting!--for a quarter hour outside the closedcourtroom door. He had time to consider the three guards commanded bySquad-Leader Aras. He happened to know that one of them had served asentence at Windsor for robbery with assault; and one, a surly youngfarmer, had been rather doubtfully acquitted on a charge of barn-burningin 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? Andkeeping 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 HoraceGreeley.

Till now, Doremus had liked to think of that most famous of radicaleditors, who had been a printer in Vermont from 1825 to 1828, as hiscolleague and comrade. Now he felt colleague only to the revolutionaryKarl Pascals.

His legs, not too young, were trembling; his calves ached. Was he goingto 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 ashis family and he had dealt with their house on Mount Terror--once asturdy Vermont cottage with shining white clapboards, now mud-smearedand rotting. His cap was crushed in, his breeches spotted, his leggingsgaping, and one tunic button hung by a thread.

"I wouldn't particularly want to be dictator over an Aras, but I mostparticularly do not want him and his like to be dictators over me,whether they call them Fascists or Corpos or Communists or Monarchistsor Free Democratic Electors or anything else! If that makes me areactionary kulak, all right! I don't believe I ever really liked theshiftless brethren, for all my lying hand-shaking. Do you think the Lordcalls on us to love the cowbirds as much as the swallows? I don't! Oh, Iknow; Aras has had a hard time: mortgage and seven kids. But CousinHenry Veeder and Dan Wilgus--yes, and Pete Vutong, the Canuck, thatlives right across the road from Aras and has just exactly the same kindof 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 ifI'm going to give up the American-Wesleyan doctrine of Free Will and ofWill to Accomplishment entirely, even if it does get me read out of theLiberal 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 sheepishlytriumphant.

"Linda! Linda!" called Doremus, his hands out, ignoring the snickers ofthe curious guards, trying to move toward her. Aras pushed him back andat Lorinda sneered, "Go on--move on, there!" and she moved. She seemedtwisted and rusty as Doremus would have thought her bright steelinesscould 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 outof her partnership with Mr. Nipper--he's going to manage that Tavern oftheirn, and Sister Pike goes back to pot-walloping in the kitchen, likeshe'd ought to!--like maybe some of your womenfolks, that think they'reso almighty stylish and independent, will be having to, pretty soon!"

Again Doremus had sense enough to regard the bayonets; and a mightyvoice 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 rôleof ensign, and a third man, tall, rather handsome, rather tooface-massaged, with the letters "M.J." on the collar of his uniform ascommander, or pseudo-colonel. He was perhaps fifteen years younger thanDoremus.

This, Doremus knew, must be Military Judge Effingham Swan, sometime ofBoston.

The Minute Men marched him in front of the bench and retired, with onlytwo 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 hisoldest friend, cooed at Doremus, "My dear fellow, so sorry to have totrouble you. Just a routine query, you know. Do sit down. Gentlemen, inthe case of Mr. Doremus, surely we need not go through the farce offormal inquiry. Let's all sit about that damn big silly table downthere--place where they always stick the innocent defendants and theguilty attorneys, y' know--get down from this high altar--little toomystical 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, asportentous as their uniforms could make them, clumped down to the table.Swan followed them airily, and to Doremus, still standing, he gave histortoise-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 wavedhim to a chair--with something not quite so airy and affable in thesharpness 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 wasleaning back in his wooden armchair, powerful trim hands behind hisneck. "I'll tell you, my dear fellow. One's memory is so wretched, youknow. I'll just call you 'Doremus,' sans Mister. Then, d'you see, itmight apply to either the first (or Christian, as I believe one'swretched people in Back Bay insist on calling it)--either the Christianor 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 trustthey were not too importunate, as these parochial units sometimes doseem to be--but I ordered them to invite you here, really, just to getyour advice as a journalist. Does it seem to you that most of thepeasants here are coming to their senses and ready to accept the Corpofait accompli?"

Doremus grumbled, "But I understood I was dragged here--and if you wantto know, your squad was all of what you call 'importunate'!--because ofan editorial I wrote about President Windrip."

"Oh, was that you, Doremus? You see?--I was right--one does have such awretched memory! I do seem now to remember some minor incident of thesort--you know--mentioned in the agenda. Do have another cigarette, mydear fellow."

"Swan! I don't care much for this cat-and-mouse game--at least, notwhile I'm the mouse. What are your charges against me?"

"Charges? Oh, my only aunt! Just trifling things--criminal libel andconveying secret information to alien forces and high treason andhomicidal incitement to violence--you know, the usual boresome line. Andall so easily got rid of, my Doremus, if you'd just be persuaded--yousee how quite pitifully eager I am to be friendly with you, and to havethe inestimable aid of your experience here--if you'd just decide thatit might be the part of discretion--so suitable, y' know, to yourvenerable 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 nodoubt 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 yourresponsibilities to your family--it would be too sick-making ifanything happened to them, y' know!--you just can't afford to be toobrash! And all we desire is for you to play along with us in yourpaper--I would adore the chance of explaining some of the Corpos' andthe 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 endof his nose!"

"A moment, my dear Captain.... And also, Doremus, of course we shallurge you to help us by giving us a complete list of every person in thisvicinity that you know of who is secretly opposed to theAdministration."

"Spying? Me?"

"Quite!"

"If I'm accused of----I insist on having my lawyer, Mungo Kitterick, andon being tried, not all this bear-baiting----"

"Quaint name. Mungo Kitterick! Oh, my only aunt! Why does it give me soabsurd a picture of an explorer with a Greek grammar in his hand? Youdon't quite understand, my Doremus. Habeas corpus--due processes oflaw--too, too bad!--all those ancient sanctities, dating, no doubt, fromMagna Charta, been suspended--oh, but just temporarily, y' know--stateof 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--thatis, as long as the Corpos last."

"It could be!"

"Swan--Commander--you get that 'it could be' and 'my aunt' from theReggie 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 ayachtsman and horseman, Commander."

"Horsemun, yachtsmun, lit-er-ary man! Am I, Doremus, even in mysanctum sanctorum, having, as the lesser breeds would say, the pantskidded off me? Oh, my Doremus, that couldn't be! And just when one is sofeeble, after having been so, shall I say excoriated, by your so amiablefriend, Mrs. Lorinda Pike? No, no! How too unbefitting the majesty ofthe 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 wasreaching for Shad's throat across the table. Effingham Swan was on him,pushing him back into another chair. Doremus hiccuped with fury. Shadhad 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 spystuff 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 aboutit, did they! But what you didn't know was Lindy--and don't it beathell a long-nosed, skinny old-maid like her can have so much pep!--andshe's been cheating on you right along, sleeping with every doggone manboarder she's had at the Tavern, and of course with her little squirt ofa partner, Nipper!"

Swan's great hand--hand of an ape with a manicure--held Doremus in hischair. Shad snickered. Emil Staubmeyer, who had been sitting withfingertips together, laughed amiably. Swan patted Doremus's back.

He was less sunken by the insult to Lorinda than by the feeling ofhelpless loneliness. It was so late; the night so quiet. He would havebeen glad if even the M.M. guards had come in from the hall. Theirrustic innocence, however barnyardishly brutal, would have beencomforting after the easy viciousness of the three judges.

Swan was placidly resuming: "But I suppose we really must get down tobusiness--however agreeable, my dear clever literary detective, it wouldbe 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 legalgentleman, Mr. Monkey Kitteridge. I am quite authorized to conduct thistrial--for quaintly enough, Doremus, it is a trial, despite thedelightful St. Botolph's atmosphere! And as to testimony, I already haveall I need, both in the good Miss Lorinda's inadvertent admissions, inthe actual text of your editorial criticizing the Chief, and in thequite thorough reports of Captain Ledue and Dr. Staubmeyer. One reallyought to take you out and shoot you--and one is quite empowered to doso, oh quite!--but one has one's faults--one is really too merciful. Andperhaps we can find a better use for you than as fertilizer--you are,you know, rather too much on the skinny side to make adequatefertilizer.

"You are to be released on parole, to assist and coach Dr. Staubmeyerwho, by orders from Commissioner Reek, at Hanover, has just been madeeditor of the Informer, but who doubtless lacks certain points oftechnical training. You will help him--oh, gladly, I am sure!--until helearns. Then we'll see what we'll do with you!... You will writeeditorials, 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--youwill write an abject apology for your diatribe--oh yes, very much on theabject side! You know--you veteran journalists do these things soneatly--just admit you were a cockeyed liar and that sort ofthing--bright and bantering--you know! And next Monday you will, likemost of the other ditchwater-dull hick papers, begin the serialpublication 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 hestrode down to the table, "What do you three comic judges think you'redoing?"

"And who may our impetuous friend be? He annoys me, rather," Swan askedof Shad.

"Doc Fowler--Jessup's son-in-law. And a bad actor! Why, couple days agoI offered him charge of medical inspection for all the M.M.'s in thecounty, and he said--this red-headed smart-aleck here!--he said you andme and Commissioner Reek and Doc Staubmeyer and all of us were a bunchof hoboes that'd be digging ditches in a labor camp if we hadn't stolesome officers' uniforms!"

"Ah, did he indeed?" purred Swan.

Fowler protested: "He's a liar. I never mentioned you. I don't even knowwho 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 redheadanything more familiar than "Doc.")

"Oh, all your Minnie Mouses know me. I've treated most of your brightestgunmen for unmentionable diseases. I just told them at the door that Iwas wanted in here professionally."

Swan was at his silkiest: "Oh, and how we did want you, my dearfellow--though we didn't know it until this moment. So you are one ofthese brave rustic Æsculapiuses?"

"I am! And if you were in the war--which I should doubt, from your pansyway of talking--you may be interested to know that I am also a member ofthe American Legion--quit Harvard and joined up in 1918 and went backafterwards to finish. And I want to warn you three half-bakedHitlers----"

"Ah! But my dear friend! A mil-i-tary man! How too too! Then we shallhave to treat you as a responsible person--responsible for youridiocies--not just as the uncouth clodhopper that you appear!"

Fowler was leaning both fists on the table. "Now I've had enough! I'mgoing 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 dohave such quaint variant notions about sports. Some laddies actuallylike to go fishing--all those slimy scales and the shocking odor! By theway, Doctor, before it's too late, I would like to leave with you thethought for the day that I was also in the war to end wars--a major. Butgo 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 thatI'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 RhodesScholar accent keeps you from being just another cowardly, murderingPublic 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 heardenough from the Comrade, wouldn't you, Commissioner? Just take thebastard 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--makeit snappy, see?"

The guard were not far down the corridor, and their rifles were alreadyloaded. It was in less than a minute that Aras Dilley was saluting fromthe door, and Shad was shouting, "Come here! Grab this dirty crook!" Hepointed at Fowler. "Take him along outside."

They did, for all of Fowler's struggling. Aras Dilley jabbed Fowler'sright wrist with a bayonet. It spilled blood down on his hand, soscrubbed for surgery, and like blood his red hair tumbled over hisforehead.

Shad marched out with them, pulling his automatic pistol from itsholster and looking at it happily.

Doremus was held, his mouth was clapped shut, by two guards as he triedto reach Fowler. Emil Staubmeyer seemed a little scared, but EffinghamSwan, suave and amused, leaned his elbows on the table and tapped histeeth with a pencil.

From the courtyard, the sound of a rifle volley, a terrifying wail, onesingle 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 onGreenhill was influenced by County Commissioner Ledue's testimony thatafter the execution he found in Greenhill's house a cache of the mostseditious documents: copies of Trowbridge's Lance for Democracy, booksby Marx and Trotzky, Communistic pamphlets urging citizens toassassinate the Chief.

Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, insisted that her husband had never read suchthings; that, if anything, he had been too indifferent to politics.Naturally, her word could not be taken against that of CommissionerLedue, Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer (known everywhere as a scholarand man of probity), and Military Judge Effingham Swan. It was necessaryto punish Mrs. Greenhill--or, rather, to give a strong warning to otherMrs. Greenhills--by seizing all the property and money Greenhill hadleft her.

Anyway, Mary did not fight very vigorously. Perhaps she realized herguilt. In two days she turned from the crispest, smartest, mostswift-spoken woman in Fort Beulah into a silent hag, dragging about inshabby 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. Buthe was not legally permitted to do so. He was on parole, subject, at thewill of the properly constituted authorities, to a penitentiarysentence.

**

So Mary returned to the house and the overfurnished bedroom she had leftas a bride. She could not, she said, endure its memories. She took theattic room that had never been quite "finished off." She sat up thereall day, all evening, and her parents never heard a sound. But within aweek her David was playing about the yard most joyfully... playingthat 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 chatteredto an audience of Mrs. Candy and Sissy, flustering Emma with the mostoutrageous assertions--that he was planning to go to Greenland; thatPresident Windrip had taken to riding down Pennsylvania Avenue on anelephant; and Mrs. Candy was as unscrupulous as all good cooks in tryingto render them speechlessly drowsy after dinner and to encourage thestealthy expansion of Doremus's already rotund little belly, with hermince pie, her apple pie with enough shortening to make the eyes pop outin sweet anguish, the fat corn fritters and candied potatoes with thebroiled chicken, the clam chowder made with cream.

Now, there was little talk among the adults at table and, though Marywas not showily "brave," but colorless as a glass of water, they werenervously watching her. Everything they spoke of seemed to point towardthe murder and the Corpos; if you said, "It's quite a warm fall," youfelt that the table was thinking, "So the M.M.'s can go on marching fora long time yet before snow flies," and then you choked and askedsharply for the gravy. Always Mary was there, a stone statue chillingthe warm and commonplace people packed in beside her.

So it came about that David dominated the table talk, for the firstdelightful time in his nine years of experiment with life, and Davidliked that very much indeed, and his grandfather liked it not nearly sowell.

He chattered, like an entire palm-ful of monkeys, about Foolish, abouthis new playmates (children of Medary Cole, the miller), about theapparent fact that crocodiles are rarely found in the Beulah River, andthe more moving fact that the Rotenstern young had driven with theirfather clear to Albany.

Now Doremus was fond of children; approved of them; felt with anearnestness uncommon to parents and grandparents that they were humanbeings and as likely as the next one to become editors. But he hadn'tenough sap of the Christmas holly in his veins to enjoy listeningwithout cessation to the bright prattle of children. Few males have,outside of Louisa May Alcott. He thought (though he wasn't very dogmaticabout it) that the talk of a Washington correspondent about politics waslikely to be more interesting than Davy's remarks on cornflakes andgarter snakes, so he went on loving the boy and wishing he would shutup. And escaped as soon as possible from Mary's gloom and Emma'ssuffocating 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 hishaving gone to jail than by the murder of her son-in-law. Jessups simplydidn't go to jail. People who went to jail were bad, just asbarn-burners and men accused of that fascinatingly obscure amusement, a"statutory offense," were bad; and as for bad people, you might try tobe forgiving and tender, but you didn't sit down to meals with them. Itwas all so irregular, and most upsetting to the household routine!

So Emma loved him and worried about him till he wanted to go fishing andactually did go so far as to get out his flies.

But Lorinda had said to him, with eyes brilliant and unworried, "And Ithought you were just a cud-chewing Liberal that didn't mind beingmilked! I am so proud of you! You've encouraged me to fightagainst----Listen, the minute I heard about your imprisonment I chasedNipper out of my kitchen with a bread knife!... Well, anyway, Ithought about doing it!"

**

The office was deader than his home. The worst of it was that it wasn'tso very bad--that, he saw, he could slip into serving the Corpo statewith, eventually, no more sense of shame than was felt by old colleaguesof his who in pre-Corpo days had written advertisements for fraudulentmouth washes or tasteless cigarettes, or written for supposedlyreputable magazines mechanical stories about young love. In a wakingnightmare after his imprisonment, Doremus had pictured Staubmeyer andLedue in the Informer office standing over him with whips, demandingthat he turn out sickening praise for the Corpos, yelling at him untilhe rose and killed and was killed. Actually, Shad stayed away from theoffice, and Doremus's master, Staubmeyer, was ever so friendly andmodest and rather nauseatingly full of praise for his craftsmanship.Staubmeyer seemed satisfied when, instead of the "apology" demanded bySwan, Doremus stated that "Henceforth this paper will cease allcriticisms of the present government."

Doremus received from District Commissioner Reek a jolly telegramthanking him for "gallantly deciding turn your great talent servicepeople and correcting errors doubtless made by us in effort set up newmore realistic state." Ur! said Doremus and did not chuck the message atthe clothes-basket waste-basket, but carefully walked over and rammed itdown amid the trash.

He was able, by remaining with the Informer in her prostitute days, tokeep Staubmeyer from discharging Dan Wilgus, who was sniffy to the newboss and unnaturally respectful now to Doremus. And he invented what hecalled the "Yow-yow editorial." This was a dirty device of stating asstrongly as he could an indictment of Corpoism, then answering it asfeebly as he could, as with a whining "Yow-yow-yow--that's what yousay!" Neither Staubmeyer nor Shad caught him at it, but Doremus hopedfearfully 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 minutewhen he did not hate this filthy slavery, when he did not have to forcehimself to stay there, when he did not snarl at himself, "Then why doyou stay?"

His answers to that challenge came glibly and conventionally enough: "Hewas too old to start in life again. And he had a wife and family tosupport"--Emma, Sissy, and now Mary and David.

All these years he had heard responsible men who weren't being quitehonest--radio announcers who soft-soaped speakers who were fools andwares that were trash, and who canaryishly chirped "Thank you, MajorBlister" when they would rather have kicked Major Blister, preachers whodid not believe the decayed doctrines they dealt out, doctors who didnot dare tell lady invalids that they were sex-hungry exhibitionists,merchants who peddled brass for gold--heard all of them complacentlyexcuse themselves by explaining that they were too old to change andthat they had "a wife and family to support."

Why not let the wife and family die of starvation or get out and hustlefor themselves, if by no other means the world could have the chance ofbeing freed from the most boresome, most dull, and foulest disease ofhaving always to be a little dishonest?

So he raged--and went on grinding out a paper dull and a littledishonest--but not forever. Otherwise the history of Doremus Jessupwould be too drearily common to be worth recording.

**

Again and again, figuring it out on rough sheets of copy paper (adornedalso with concentric circles, squares, whorls, and the most improbablefish), he estimated that even without selling the Informer or hishouse, as under Corpo espionage he certainly could not if he fled toCanada, he could cash in about $20,000. Say enough to give him an incomeof a thousand a year--twenty dollars a week, provided he could smugglethe money out of the country, which the Corpos were daily making moredifficult.

Well, Emma and Sissy and Mary and he could live on that, in afour-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 LionFeuchtwanger and Romain Rolland, who in exile remained writers whoseevery word was in demand, about Professors Einstein or Salvemini, or,under Corpoism, about the recently exiled or self-exiled Americans, WaltTrowbridge, Mike Gold, William Allen White, John Dos Passos, H. L.Mencken, Rexford Tugwell, Oswald Villard. Nowhere in the world, exceptpossibly in Greenland or Germany, would such stars be unable to findwork and soothing respect. But what was an ordinary newspaper hack,especially if he was over forty-five, to do in a strange land--and moreespecially if he had a wife named Emma (or Carolina or Nancy or Griseldaor anything else) who didn't at all fancy going and living in a sod huton 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 adictatorship, who were aware enough to resent the tyranny, conscientiousenough not to take its bribes cynically, yet not so abnormallycourageous as to go willingly to exile or dungeon orchopping-block--particularly when they "had wives and families tosupport."

***

Doremus hinted once to Emil Staubmeyer that Emil was "getting onto theropes so well" that he thought of getting out, of quitting newspaperwork for good.

The hitherto friendly Mr. Staubmeyer said sharply, "What'd you do? Sneakoff to Canada and join the propagandists against the Chief? Nothingdoing! You'll stay right here and help me--help us!" And that afternoonCommissioner Shad Ledue shouldered in and grumbled, "Dr. Staubmeyertells me you're doing pretty fairly good work, Jessup, but I want towarn you to keep it up. Remember that Judge Swan only let you out onparole... 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 hadhated his father had been when he used that condescending phrase.

He saw that, for all the apparent prosaic calm of day after day on thepaper, he was equally in danger of slipping into acceptance of hisserfdom and of whips and bars if he didn't slip. And he continued to bejust as sick each time he wrote: "The crowd of fifty thousand people whogreeted President Windrip in the university stadium at Iowa City was animpressive sign of the constantly growing interest of all Americans inpolitical affairs," and Staubmeyer changed it to: "The vast andenthusiastic crowd of seventy thousand loyal admirers who wildlyapplauded and listened to the stirring address of the Chief in thehandsome university stadium in beautiful Iowa City, Iowa, is animpressive yet quite typical sign of the growing devotion of all trueAmericans to political study under the inspiration of the Corpogovernment."

Perhaps his worst irritations were that Staubmeyer had pushed a desk andhis sleek, sweaty person into Doremus's private office, once sacred tohis solitary grouches, and that Doc Itchitt, hitherto his worshipingdisciple, 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 andspeak and one quarter are killed and you die with them. But the blessedfinal quarter keep you alive.

When he was with Lorinda, gone was all the pleasant toying andsympathetic talk with which they had relieved boredom. She was fiercenow, and vibrant. She drew him close enough to her, but instantly shewould be thinking of him only as a comrade in plots to kill off theCorpos. (And it was pretty much a real killing-off that she meant; therewasn't left to view any great amount of her plausible pacifism.)

She was busy with good and perilous works. Partner Nipper had not beenable to keep her in the Tavern kitchen; she had so systematized the workthat she had many days and evenings free, and she had started acooking-class for farm girls and young farm wives who, caught betweenthe provincial and the industrial generations, had learned neither goodrural cooking with a wood fire, nor yet how to deal with canned goodsand electric grills--and who most certainly had not learned how tocombine so as to compel the tight-fisted little locally ownedpower-and-light companies to furnish electricity at tolerable rates.

"Heavensake, keep this quiet, but I'm getting acquainted with thesecountry gals--getting ready for the day when we begin to organizeagainst the Corpos. I depend on them, not the well-to-do women that usedto 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, hesaid, "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 aboutanxiously 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 fewmysterious strikes starting now and then, even though there can't beany 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 theSocialists and the Communists was that you believed in completeownership of all means of production, not just utilities; and that youadmitted the violent class war and the Socialists didn't. That'spoppycock! The real difference is that you Communists serve Russia. It'syour Holy Land. Well--Russia has all my prayers, right after the prayersfor my family and for the Chief, but what I'm interested in civilizingand protecting against its enemies isn't Russia but America. Is that sobanal to say? Well, it wouldn't be banal for a Russian comrade toobserve that he was for Russia! And America needs our propaganda moreevery day. Another thing: I'm a middle-class intellectual. I'd nevercall 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 interestedin. The proletarians are probably noble fellows, but I certainly do notthink that the interests of the middle-class intellectuals and theproletarians are the same. They want bread. We want--well, all right,say it, we want cake! And when you get a proletarian ambitious enough towant cake, too--why, in America, he becomes a middle-class intellectualjust as fast as he can--if he can!"

"Look here, when you think of 3 per cent of the people owning 90 percent of the wealth----"

"I don't think of it! It does not follow that because a good many ofthe intellectuals belong to the 97 per cent of the broke--that plenty ofactors and teachers and nurses and musicians don't get any better paidthan stage hands or electricians, therefore their interests are thesame. It isn't what you earn but how you spend it that fixes yourclass--whether you prefer bigger funeral services or more books. I'mtired 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 thepropaganda-aëroplane damn nonsense of Marx and Moscow!"

"Oh, you'll join us yet."

"Listen, Comrade Karl, Windrip and Hitler will join Stalin long beforethe descendants of Dan'l Webster. You see, we don't like murder as a wayof argument--that's what really marks the Liberal!"

**

About his future Father Perefixe was brief: "I'm going back to Canadawhere 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, fatlittle clark!"

**

The surprise among old acquaintances was Medary Cole, the miller.

A little younger than Francis Tasbrough and R. C. Crowley, lessintensely aristocratic than those noblemen, since only one generationseparated him from a chin-whiskered Yankee farmer and not two, as withthem, he had been their satellite at the Country Club and, as to solidvirtue, been president of the Rotary Club. He had always consideredDoremus a man who, without such excuse as being a Jew or a Hunky orpoor, was yet flippant about the sanctities of Main Street and WallStreet. They were neighbors, as Cole's "Cape Cod cottage" was just belowPleasant Hill, but they had not by habit been droppers-in.

Now, when Cole came bringing David home, or calling for his daughterAngela, David's new mate, toward supper time of a chilly fall evening,he stopped gratefully for a hot rum punch, and asked Doremus whether hereally thought inflation was "such a good thing."

He burst out, one evening, "Jessup, there isn't another person in thistown I'd dare say this to, not even my wife, but I'm getting awful sickof having these Minnie Mouses dictate where I have to buy my gunnysacksand what I can pay my men. I won't pretend I ever cared much for laborunions. But in those days, at least the union members did get some ofthe swag. Now it goes to support the M.M.'s. We pay them and pay thembig 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 ecstaticallyvoted for Mr. Windrip.

**

On a day in late October, suddenly striking in every city and villageand back-hill hideout, the Corpos ended all crime in America forever, sotitanic a feat that it was mentioned in the London Times. Seventythousand selected Minute Men, working in combination with town and statepolice officers, all under the chiefs of the government secret service,arrested every known or faintly suspected criminal in the country. Theywere tried under court-martial procedure; one in ten was shotimmediately, four in ten were given prison sentences, three in tenreleased as innocent... and two in ten taken into the M.M.'s asinspectors.

There were protests that at least six in ten had been innocent, but thiswas adequately answered by Windrip's courageous statement: "The way tostop crime is to stop it!"

The next day, Medary Cole crowed at Doremus, "Sometimes I've felt likecriticizing certain features of Corpo policy, but did you see what theChief did to the gangsters and racketeers? Wonderful! I've told youright along what this country's needed is a firm hand like Windrip's. Noshilly-shallying about that fellow! He saw that the way to stop crimewas to just go out and stop it!"

**

Then was revealed the New American Education, which, as Sarason sojustly said, was to be ever so much newer than the New Educations ofGermany, Italy, Poland, or even Turkey.

The authorities abruptly closed some scores of the smaller, moreindependent 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 yethaving entirely become machines. Few of the state universities wereclosed; they were merely to be absorbed by central Corpo universities,one in each of the eight provinces. But the government began with onlytwo. In the Metropolitan District, Windrip University took over theRockefeller Center and Empire State buildings, with most of Central Parkfor playground (excluding the general public from it entirely, for therest was an M.M. drill ground). The second was Macgoblin University, inChicago and vicinity, using the buildings of Chicago and Northwesternuniversities, and Jackson Park. President Hutchins of Chicago was ratherunpleasant about the whole thing and declined to stay on as an assistantprofessor, so the authorities had politely to exile him.

Tattle-mongers suggested that the naming of the Chicago plant afterMacgoblin instead of Sarason suggested a beginning coolness betweenSarason and Windrip, but the two leaders were able to quash such canardsby appearing together at the great reception given to Bishop Cannon bythe Woman's Christian Temperance Union and being photographed shakinghands.

Each of the two pioneer universities started with an enrollment of fiftythousand, making ridiculous the pre-Corpo schools, none of which, in1935, had had more than thirty thousand students. The enrollment wasprobably helped by the fact that anyone could enter upon presenting acertificate showing that he had completed two years in a high school orbusiness college, and a recommendation from a Corpo commissioner.

Dr. Macgoblin pointed out that this founding of entirely newuniversities showed the enormous cultural superiority of the Corpo stateto the Nazis, Bolsheviks, and Fascists. Where these amateurs inre-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 thepolitical bureaus, and the Nazis had merely added the sound measure ofdischarging Jews who dared attempt to teach medicine, the Americans werethe first to start new and completely orthodox institutions, free fromthe very first of any taint of "intellectualism."

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirelypractical 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 coursewhich showed that, through the centuries, the key to civilization hadbeen the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against barbarians. Philosophyand its history, psychology, economics, anthropology were retained, but,to avoid the superstitious errors in ordinary textbooks, they were to beconned only in new books prepared by able young scholars under thedirection of Dr. Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modernlanguages, but they were not to waste their time on the so-called"literature"; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead ofantiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English, somestudy of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for politicalspeeches, but the chief courses were in advertising, party journalism,and business correspondence, and no authors before 1800 might bementioned, except Shakespeare and Milton.

In the realm of so-called "pure science," it was realized that only toomuch and too confusing research had already been done, but no pre-Corpouniversity had ever shown such a wealth of courses in miningengineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern foremanship andproduction methods, exhibition gymnastics, the higher accountancy,therapeutics of athlete's foot, canning and fruit dehydration,kindergarten training, organization of chess, checkers, and bridgetournaments, 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-worldmind and character. And no scholastic institution, even West Point, hadever so richly recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primarydepartment of scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestlytaught, and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests ininfantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operation of tanks, armored cars,and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits, though studentswere urged not to elect sports for more than one third of their credits.

What really showed the difference from old-fogy inefficiency was thatwith the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities, any bright ladcould graduate in two years.

**

As he read the prospectuses for these Olympian, these Ringling-Barnumand Bailey universities, Doremus remembered that Victor Loveland, who ayear ago had taught Greek in a little college called Isaiah, was nowgrinding out reading and arithmetic in a Corpo labor camp in Maine. Ohwell, Isaiah itself had been closed, and its former president, Dr. OwenJ. Peaseley, District Director of Education, was to be right-hand man toProfessor Almeric Trout when they founded the University of theNortheastern Province, which was to supplant Harvard, Radcliffe, BostonUniversity, and Brown. He was already working on the university yell,and for that "project" had sent out letters to 167 of the more prominentpoets in America, asking for suggestions.

Chapter 21

It was not only the November sleet, setting up a forbidding curtainbefore the mountains, turning the roadways into slipperiness on which acar would swing around and crash into poles, that kept Doremusstubbornly at home that morning, sitting on his shoulder blades beforethe fireplace. It was the feeling that there was no point in going tothe office; no chance even of a picturesque fight. But he was notcontented before the fire. He could find no authentic news even in thepapers from Boston or New York, in both of which the morning papers hadbeen combined by the government into one sheet, rich in comic strips, insyndicated gossip from Hollywood, and, indeed, lacking only any news.

He cursed, threw down the New York Daily Corporate, and tried to reada new novel about a lady whose husband was indelicate in bed and who wastoo absorbed by the novels he wrote about lady novelists whose husbandswere too absorbed by the novels they wrote about lady novelists toappreciate the fine sensibilities of lady novelists who wrote aboutgentleman 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 bestway of making a chicken pie. They talked without relief; really, theywere not so much talking as thinking aloud. Doremus admitted that thenice making of a chicken pie was a thing of consequence, but the blur ofvoices irritated him. Then Sissy slammed into the room, and Sissy shouldan hour ago have been at high school, where she was a senior--tograduate next year and possibly go to some new and horrible provincialuniversity.

"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 thereany more. You have to repeat a new oath every morning: 'I pledge myselfto serve the Corporate State, the Chief, all Commissioners, the MysticWheel, and the troops of the Republic in every thought and deed.' Now Iask 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 Falckcame sheepishly in.

Sissy snapped, "Well, I'll be----What are you doing home? Why aren't youin Amherst?"

"Oh. That." He squatted beside her. He absently held her hand, and shedid not seem to notice it, either. "Amherst's got hers. Corpos closingit today. I got tipped off last Saturday and beat it. (They have a cuteway of rounding up the students when they close a college and arrestinga few of 'em, just to cheer up the profs.)" To Doremus: "Well, sir, Ithink you'll have to find a place for me on the Informer, wipingpresses. 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 positionI have!"

"Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I understand, of course. Well, I don't just knowwhat I am going to do. Remember back in '33 and '34 and '35 how manygood eggs there were--and some of them medics and law graduates andtrained engineers and so on--that simply couldn't get a job? Well, it'sworse now. I looked over Amherst, and had a try at Springfield, and I'vebeen here in town two days--I'd hoped to have something before I sawyou, Sis--why, I even asked Mrs. Pike if she didn't need somebody towash dishes at the Tavern, but so far there isn't a thing. 'Younggentleman, two years in college, ninety-nine-point-three pure andthorough knowledge Thirty-nine Articles, able drive car, teach tennisand 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 hadthought her.

"Thanks, Sis, but honest to God--I hope I'm not whining, but looks likeI'd either have to enlist in the lousy M.M.'s, or go to a labor camp. Ican't stay home and sponge on Granddad. The poor old Reverend hasn't gotenough 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 forYouth' things. Listen! Last summer there was a friend of Lindy Pike'sstaying with her and she was an interior decorator from Buffalo, and shesaid they have a hell of a----"

("Siss-sy!")

"--time getting real, genuine, old hand-hewn beams that everybody wantsso much now in these phony-Old-English suburban living rooms. Well,look! Round here there's ten million old barns with hand-adzed beamsjust falling down--farmers probably be glad to have you haul 'em off. Ikind of thought about it for myself--being an architect, you know--andJohn Pollikop said he'd sell me a swell, dirty-looking old five-tontruck for four hundred bucks--in pre-inflation real money, I mean--andon 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'sthe only one in this family that's got any business sense."

"I don't seem to hanker much after going out there in thisweather--nasty roads," Doremus puffed.

"Nonsense, Doremus! With Julian driving? He's a poor speller and hisback-hand is fierce, but as a driver, he's better than I am! Why, it's apleasure to skid with him! Come on! Hey, Mother! We'll be back in houror 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 upand crawling out into the sleet.

**

Lorinda Pike was in the Tavern kitchen, in a calico print with rolledsleeves, dipping doughnuts into a deep fat--a picture right out of theromantic days (which Buzz Windrip was trying to restore) when a femalewho had brought up eleven children and been midwife to dozens of cowswas 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 adoughnut? Good!" She led them from the kitchen with its attendant andeavesdropping horde of a Canuck kitchenmaid and two cats, and they satin the beautiful butler's-pantry, with its shelved rows of Italianmajolica plates and cups and saucers--entirely unsuitable to Vermont,attesting a certain artiness in Lorinda, yet by their cleanness andorder revealing her as a sound worker. Sissy sketched her plan--behindthe statistics there was an agreeable picture of herself and Julian,gipsies in khaki, on the seat of a gipsy truck, peddling silvery oldpine rafters.

"Nope. Not a chance," said Lorinda regretfully. "The expensivesuburban-villa business--oh, it isn't gone: there's a surprising numberof middlemen and professional men who are doing quite well out of havingtheir wealth taken away and distributed to the masses. But all thebuilding is in the hands of contractors who are in politics--good oldWindrip is so consistently American that he's kept up all ourtraditional graft, even if he has thrown out all our traditionalindependence. 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 sosimple that I thought women voters knew men too well to fall for noblewords 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 theDictator's brought in. You can march to military bands--or you can sithome--or you can go to prison. Primavera di Bellezza!"

"Yes.... Well, I'll find something to do.... Sissy, are you goingto marry me--soon as I get a job?"

(It was incredible, thought Doremus, how these latter-day unsentimentalsentimentalists 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 oldinstitutions is a rotten fake, the way Church and State and everythinghas laid down to the Corpos, and still expect us to think they're sohot! But for unformed minds like your grandfather and Doremus, I supposewe'll have to pretend to believe that the preachers who stand for BigChief Windrip are still so sanctified that they can sell God's licenseto love!"

("Sis-sy!")

"(Oh. I forgot you were there, Dad!) But anyway, we're not going to haveany kids. Oh, I like children! I'd like to have a dozen of the littledevils around. But if people have gone so soft and turned the world overto stuffed shirts and dictators, they needn't expect any decent woman tobring children into such an insane asylum! Why, the more you really dolove 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 anysuitor a hundred years ago, "Yes. But just the same, we'll be havingchildren."

"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 workof his sometime partner, Fowler Greenhill. He was not strong enough formuch winter driving, and so hotly now did he hate the murderers of hisfriend that he would not take on any youngster who was in the M.M.'s orwho had half acknowledged their authority by going to a labor camp. SoJulian was chosen to drive him, night and day, and presently to help himby giving anesthetic, bandaging hurt legs; and the Julian who had withinone week "decided that he wanted to be" an aviator, a music critic, anair-conditioning engineer, an archæologist excavating in Yucatan, wasdead-set on medicine and replaced for Doremus his dead doctorson-in-law. And Doremus heard Julian and Sissy boasting and squabblingand squeaking in the half-lighted parlor and from them--from them andfrom David and Lorinda and Buck Titus--got resolution enough to go on inthe Informer office without choking Staubmeyer to death.

Chapter 22

December tenth was the birthday of Berzelius Windrip, though in hisearlier days as a politician, before he fruitfully realized that liessometimes get printed and unjustly remembered against you, he had beenwont 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 NoelWeinacht Windrip.

His birthday in 1937 he commemorated by the historical "Order ofRegulation," which stated that though the Corporate government hadproved both its stability and its good-will, there were still certainstupid or vicious "elements" who, in their foul envy of Corpo success,wanted to destroy everything that was good. The kind-hearted governmentwas fed-up, and the country was informed that, from this day on, anyperson who by word or act sought to harm or discredit the State, wouldbe executed or interned. Inasmuch as the prisons were already too full,both for these slanderous criminals and for the persons whom thekind-hearted State had to guard by "protective arrest," there wereimmediately to be opened, all over the country, concentration camps.

Doremus guessed that the reason for the concentration camps was not onlythe provision of extra room for victims but, even more, the provision ofplaces where the livelier young M.M.'s could amuse themselves withoutinterference from old-time professional policemen and prison-keepers,most of whom regarded their charges not as enemies, to be tortured, butjust as cattle, to be kept safely.

On the eleventh, a concentration camp was enthusiastically opened, withband music, paper flowers, and speeches by District Commissioner Reekand Shad Ledue, at Trianon, nine miles north of Fort Beulah, in what hadbeen a modern experimental school for girls. (The girls and theirteachers, no sound material for Corpoism anyway, were simply sent abouttheir business.)

And on that day and every day afterward, Doremus got from journalistfriends all over the country secret news of Corpo terrorism and of thefirst bloody rebellions against the Corpos.

In Arkansas, a group of ninety-six former share-croppers, who had alwaysbellyached about their misfortunes yet seemed not a bit happier inwell-run, hygienic labor camps with free weekly band concerts, attackedthe superintendent's office at one camp and killed the superintendentand five assistants. They were rounded up by an M.M. regiment fromLittle Rock, stood up in a winter-ragged cornfield, told to run, andshot in the back with machine guns as they comically staggered away.

In San Francisco, dock-workers tried to start an absolutely illegalstrike, and their leaders, known to be Communists, were so treasonablein their speeches against the government that an M.M. commander hadthree of them tied up to a bale of rattan, which was soaked with oil andset afire. The Commander gave warning to all such malcontents byshooting 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 themup. He afterward went in search of Tom Mooney (released by the SupremeCourt of the United States, early in 1936), but that notoriousanti-Corpo agitator had had the fear of God put into him properly, andhad escaped on a schooner for Tahiti.

In Pawtucket, a man who ought to have been free from the rottenseditious notions of such so-called labor-leaders, in fact a man who wasa fashionable dentist and director in a bank, absurdly resented theattentions 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 acafé 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 notgive 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 thedentist 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 cellin which there was two feet of water in the bottom--but, ratherironically, none to drink. Unfortunately, the fellow died before havingthe opportunity to seek religious consolation.

In Scranton, the Catholic pastor of a working-class church was kidnapedand beaten.

In central Kansas, a man named George W. Smith pointlessly gathered acouple of hundred farmers armed with shotguns and sporting rifles and anabsurdly few automatic pistols, and led them in burning an M.M.barracks. M.M. tanks were called out, and the hick would-be rebels werenot, this time, used as warnings, but were overcome with mustard gas,then disposed of with hand grenades, which was an altogether intelligentmove, since there was nothing of the scoundrels left for sentimentalrelatives to bury and make propaganda over.

But in New York City the case was the opposite--instead of being thussurprised, the M.M.'s rounded up all suspected Communists in the formerboroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and all persons who were reportedto have been seen consorting with such Communists, and interned the lotof them in the nineteen concentration camps on Long Island.... Mostof them wailed that they were not Communists at all.

**

For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the WorldWar, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues. On thestreets, on trains, at theaters, men looked about to see who might belistening before they dared so much as say there was a drought in theWest, for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on theChief! They were particularly skittish about waiters, who were supposedto listen from the ambush which every waiter carries about with himanyway, and to report to the M.M.'s. People who could not resist talkingpolitics spoke of Windrip as "Colonel Robinson" or "Dr. Brown" and ofSarason as "Judge Jones" or "my cousin Kaspar," and you would heargossips hissing "Shhh!" at the seemingly innocent statement, "My cousindoesn't seem to be as keen on playing bridge with the Doctor as he usedto--I'll bet sometime they'll quit playing."

Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were asjumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplainedfootstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; andfor months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, incomplete sleep. And with the coming of fear went out their pride.

Daily--common now as weather reports--were the rumors of people who hadsuddenly been carried off "under protective arrest," and daily more ofthem were celebrities. At first the M.M.'s had, outside of the onestroke against Congress, dared to arrest only the unknown anddefenseless. Now, incredulously--for these leaders had seemedinvulnerable, above the ordinary law--you heard of judges, armyofficers, ex-state governors, bankers who had not played in with theCorpos, Jewish lawyers who had been ambassadors, being carted off to thecommon stink and mud of the cells.

To the journalist Doremus and his family it was not least interestingthat 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, GaretGarrett, Granville Hicks, Edwin James, Robert Morss Lovett--men whodiffered grotesquely except in their common dislike of being littledisciples of Sarason and Macgoblin.

Few writers for Hearst were arrested, however.

The plague came nearer to Doremus when unrenowned editors in Lowell andProvidence and Albany, who had done nothing more than fail to beenthusiastic about the Corpos, were taken away for "questioning," andnot 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 theCorporate State were gleefully being burned by the more scholarly MinuteMen. This form of safeguarding the State--so modern that it had scarcebeen known prior to A.D. 1300--was instituted by Secretary of CultureMacgoblin, but in each province the crusaders were allowed to have thefun of picking out their own paper-and-ink traitors. In the NortheasternProvince, Judge Effingham Swan and Dr. Owen J. Peaseley were appointedcensors by Commissioner Dewey Haik, and their index was lyricallypraised all through the country.

For Swan saw that it was not such obvious anarchists and soreheads asDarrow, Steffens, Norman Thomas, who were the real danger; likerattlesnakes, their noisiness betrayed their venom. The real enemieswere men whose sanctification by death had appallingly permitted them tosneak even into respectable school libraries--men so perverse that theyhad been traitors to the Corpo State years and years before there hadbeen any Corpo State; and Swan (with Peaseley chirping agreement) barredfrom 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 atheisticforeigners, dead or alive, as Wells, Marx, Shaw, the Mann brothers,Tolstoy, and P. G. Wodehouse with his unscrupulous propaganda againstthe aristocratic tradition. (Who could tell? Perhaps, some day, in acorporate empire, he might be Sir Effingham Swan, Bart.)

And in one item Swan showed blinding genius--he had the foresight to seethe peril of that cynical volume, The Collected Sayings of WillRogers.

**

Of the book-burnings in Syracuse and Schenectady and Hartford, Doremushad heard, but they seemed improbable as ghost stories.

The Jessup family were at dinner, just after seven, when on the porchthey heard the tramping they had half expected, altogether dreaded. Mrs.Candy--even the icicle, Mrs. Candy, held her breast in agitation beforeshe stalked out to open the door. Even David sat at table, spoonsuspended in air.

Shad's voice, "In the name of the Chief!" Harsh feet in the hall, andShad waddling into the dining room, cap on, hand on pistol, butgrinning, and with leering geniality bawling, "H' are yuh, folks! Searchfor bad books. Orders of the District Commissioner. Come on, Jessup!" Helooked at the fireplace to which he had once brought so many armfuls ofwood, 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 thebooks 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 amore sheepish Emil Staubmeyer, who whimpered, "Just orders--youknow--just orders."

Doremus safely said nothing; led them up to his study.

Now a week before he had removed every publication that any sane Corpocould consider radical: his Das Kapital and Veblen and all the Russiannovels and even Sumner's Folkways and Freud's Civilization and ItsDiscontents; Thoreau and the other hoary scoundrels banned by Swan; oldfiles of the Nation and New Republic and such copies as he had beenable to get of Walt Trowbridge's Lance for Democracy; had removed themand 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--hadthe privilege of putting up those storm windows you can see there, andof getting bawled out right here in this room. You won't remember thosetimes, Doc--when I used to mow your lawn, too, and you used to be sosnotty!" Staubmeyer blushed. "You bet I know my way around, and there'sa lot of, fool books downstairs, in the sittin' room."

Indeed in that apartment variously called the drawing room, the livingroom, the sittin' room, the Parlor and once, even, by a spinster whothought editors were romantic, the studio, there were two or threehundred volumes, mostly in "standard sets." Shad glumly stared at them,the while he rubbed the faded Brussels carpet with his spurs. He wasworried. He had to find something seditious!

He pointed at Doremus's dearest treasure, the thirty-four-volumeextra-illustrated edition of Dickens which had been his father's, andhis father's only insane extravagance. Shad demanded of Staubmeyer,"That guy Dickens--didn't he do a lot of complaining aboutconditions--about schools and the police and everything?"

Staubmeyer protested. "Yes, but Shad--but, Captain Ledue, that was ahundred 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 ofDickens from the shelves, dropping them on the floor, covers cracking.Doremus seized an M.M.'s arm; from the door Sissy shrieked. Shadlumbered up to him, enormous red fist at Doremus's nose, growling, "Wantto get the daylights beaten out of you now... instead of later?"

Doremus and Sissy, side by side on a couch, watched the books thrown ina heap. He grasped her hand, muttering to her, "Hush--hush!" Oh, Sissywas a pretty girl, and young, but a pretty girl schoolteacher had beenattacked, her clothes stripped off, and been left in the snow just southof town, two nights ago.

**

Doremus could not have stayed away from the book-burning. It was likeseeing for the last time the face of a dead friend.

Kindling, excelsior, and spruce logs had been heaped on the thin snow onthe Green. (Tomorrow there would be a fine patch burned in thehundred-year-old sward.) Round the pyre danced M.M.'s schoolboys,students from the rather ratty business college on Elm Street, andunknown farm lads, seizing books from the pile guarded by the broadlycheerful Shad and skimming them into the flames. Doremus saw his MartinChuzzlewit fly into air and land on the burning lid of an ancientcommode. It lay there open to a Phiz drawing of Sairey Gamp, whichwithered instantly. As a small boy he had always laughed over thatdrawing.

He saw the old rector, Mr. Falck, squeezing his hands together. WhenDoremus touched his shoulder, Mr. Falck mourned, "They took away my UrnBurial, my Imitatio Christi. I don't know why, I don't know why! Andthey're burning them there!"

Who owned them, Doremus did not know, nor why they had been seized, buthe saw Alice in Wonderland and Omar Khayyám and Shelley and The ManWho Was Thursday and A Farewell to Arms all burning together, to thegreater glory of the Dictator and the greater enlightenment of hispeople.

The fire was almost over when Karl Pascal pushed up to Shad Ledue andshouted, "I hear you stinkers--I've been out driving a guy, and I hearyou 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." Shadlaughed very much. "They're at the police station. We've just beenwaiting for you. It was awful nice to find all your little Communistbooks. Here! Take him along!"

So Karl Pascal was the first prisoner to go from Fort Beulah to theTrianon Concentration Camp--no; that's wrong; the second. The first, soinconspicuous that one almost forgets him, was an ordinary fellow, anelectrician who had never so much as spoken of politics. Brayden, hisname was. A Minute Man who stood well with Shad and Staubmeyer wantedBrayden's job. Brayden went to concentration camp. Brayden was floggedwhen he declared, under Shad's questioning, that he knew nothing aboutany plots against the Chief. Brayden died, alone in a dark cell, beforeJanuary.

**

An English globe-trotter who gave up two weeks of December to a thoroughstudy of "conditions" in America, wrote to his London paper, and latersaid on the wireless for the B.B.C.: "After a thorough glance at AmericaI find that, far from there being any discontent with the Corpoadministration among the people, they have never been so happy and soresolutely set on making a Brave New World. I asked a very prominentHebrew banker about the assertions that his people were being oppressed,and he assured me, 'When we hear about such silly rumors, we are highlyamused.'"

Chapter 23

Doremus was nervous. The Minute Men had come, not with Shad but withEmil and a strange battalion-leader from Hanover, to examine the privateletters in his study. They were polite enough, but alarmingly thorough.Then he knew, from the disorder in his desk at the Informer, thatsomeone had gone over his papers there. Emil avoided him at the office.Doremus was called to Shad's office and gruffly questioned aboutcorrespondence which some denouncer had reported his having with theagents of Walt Trowbridge.

So Doremus was nervous. So Doremus was certain that his time for goingto concentration camp was coming. He glanced back at every stranger whoseemed to be following him on the street. The fruitman, Tony Mogliani,flowery advocate of Windrip, of Mussolini, and of tobacco quid as a curefor cuts and burns, asked him too many questions about his plans for thetime when he should "get through on the paper"; and once a tramp triedto quiz Mrs. Candy, meantime peering at the pantry shelves, perhaps tosee if there was any sign of their being understocked, as if for closingthe house and fleeing.... But perhaps the tramp really was a tramp.

In the office, in mid-afternoon, Doremus had a telephone call from thatscholar-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 andyoung 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, forthe sight of Emma always did make her twitter a little, and in Lorindathere was no relief. Julian came in shyly, and there was no relief inJulian. Mrs. Candy brought in unsolicited tea with a dash of rum, and inher was some relief, but it was all a dullness of fidgety waiting tillBuck slammed in, ten minutes late and very snowy.

"Sorkeepwaiting but I've been telephoning. Here's some news you won'thave even in the office yet, Dormouse. The forest fire's getting nearer.This afternoon they arrested the editor of the Rutland Herald--nocharge laid against him yet--no publicity--I got it from a commissionmerchant I deal with in Rutland. You're next, Doremus. I reckon they'vejust been laying off you till Staubmeyer picked your brains. Or maybeLedue has some nice idea about torturing you by keeping you waiting.Anyway, you've got to get out. And tomorrow! To Canada! To stay! Byautomobile. No can do by plane any more--Canadian government's stoppedthat. You and Emma and Mary and Dave and Sis and the whole damnshooting-match--and maybe Foolish and Mrs. Candy and the canary!"

"Couldn't possibly! Take me weeks to realize on what investments I'vegot. 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 ineverything better than you can--stand in with the Corpos better--beenselling 'em horses and they think I'm the kind of loud-mouthed walkinggent that will join 'em! I've got fifteen hundred Canadian dollars foryou 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 platesready to put on my car--we'll take mine--less suspicious. I can looklike a real farmer--that's because I am one, I guess--I'm going to driveyou all, by the way. I got the plates smuggled in underneath the bottlesin a case of ale! So we're all set, and we'll start tomorrow night, ifthe 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 goingto let a bunch of lunatics and gunmen drive me out of the country that Iand my ancestors made!"

Emma choked with the effort to think of something convincing; Maryseemed without tears to be weeping; Sissy squeaked; Julian and Lorindastarted to speak and interrupted each other; and it was the uninvitedMrs. 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 lotof 'em. Course you just wouldn't stop and think how your womenfolks willfeel if you get took off and shot! You just stand in front of thelocomotive and claim that because you were on the section gang thatbuilt the track, you got more right there than the engine has, and thenwhen it's gone over you and gone away, you expect us all to think what ahero 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 meall 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 betternow from Canada than we can here--like Walt Trowbridge," besoughtLorinda. 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 makethe 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 gettingscared here." Sissy sounded scared, too; Sissy the unconquerable. "Thisafternoon Shad stopped me on the street and wanted me to go out withhim. He tickled my chin, the little darling! But honestly, the way hesmirked, 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 Iget my hands on----" cried Doremos, Julian, and Buck, all together, andglared at one another, then looked sheepish as Foolish barked at theracket, and Mrs. Candy, leaning like a frozen codfish against the doorjamb, snorted, "Some more locomotive-batters!"

Doremus laughed. For one only time in his life he showed genius, for heconsented: "All right. We'll go. But just imagine that I'm a man ofstrong will power and I'm taking all night to be convinced. We'll starttomorrow night."

What he did not say was that he planned, the moment he had his familysafe 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 atleast kill Shad before he got killed himself.

**

It was only a week before Christmas, a holiday always greeted with goodcheer and quantities of colored ribbons in the Jessup household; andthat wild day of preparing for flight had a queer Christmas joyfulness.To dodge suspicion, Doremus spent most of the time at the office, and ahundred times it seemed that Staubmeyer was glancing at him with justthe ruler-threatening hidden ire he had used on whisperers and likeyoung criminals in school. But he took off two hours at lunch time, andhe went home early in the afternoon, and his long depression was gone inthe prospect of Canada and freedom, in an excited inspection of clothesthat was like preparation for a fishing trip. They worked upstairs,behind drawn blinds, feeling like spies in an E. Phillips Oppenheimstory, beleagured in the dark and stone-floored ducal bedroom of anancient inn just beyond Grasse. Downstairs, Mrs. Candy was pretentiouslybusy looking normal--after their flight, she and the canary were toremain and she was to be surprised when the M.M.'s reported that theJessups seemed to have escaped.

Doremus had drawn five hundred from each of the local banks, late thatafternoon, telling them that he was thinking of taking an option on anapple orchard. He was too well-trained a domestic animal to be raucouslyamused, but he could not help observing that while he himself was takingon the flight to Egypt only all the money he could get hold of, pluscigarettes, six handkerchiefs, two extra pairs of socks, a comb, atoothbrush, and the first volume of Spengler's Decline of theWest--decidedly it was not his favorite book, but one he had beentrying to make himself read for years, on train journeys--while, infact, he took nothing that he could not stuff into his overcoat pockets,Sissy apparently had need of all her newest lingerie and of a largeframed picture of Julian, Emma of a Kodak album showing the threechildren from the ages of one to twenty, David of his new modelaëroplane, and Mary of her still, dark hatred that was heavier to carrythan many chests.

**

Julian and Lorinda were there to help them; Julian off in corners withSissy.

With Lorinda, Doremus had but one free moment... in the old-fashionedguest-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 Icould have maybe a month together, say in Monterey or Venice or theYellowstone. I hate it when life doesn't seem to stick together and getsomewhere 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 comeback, into danger.

Embracing beside an aged tin-lined bathtub with woodwork painted adreary brown, in a room which smelled slightly of gas from an oldhot-water heater--embracing in sunset-colored mist upon a mountain top.

***

Darkness, edged wind, wickedly deliberate snow, and in it Buck Titusboisterously cheerful in his veteran Nash, looking as farmer-like as hecould, in sealskin cap with rubbed bare patches and an atrocious dogskinovercoat. Doremus thought of him again as a Captain Charles Kingcavalryman chasing the Sioux across blizzard-blinded prairies.

They packed alarmingly into the car; Mary beside Buck, the driver; inthe back, Doremus between Emma and Sissy; on the floor, David andFoolish and the toy aëroplane indistinguishably curled up togetherbeneath a robe. Trunk rack and front fenders were heaped withtarpaulin-covered suitcases.

"Lord, I wish I were going!" moaned Julian. "Look! Sis! Grand spy-storyidea! But I mean seriously: Send souvenir postcards to mygranddad--views of churches and so on--just sign 'em 'Jane'--andwhatever you say about the church, I'll know you really mean it aboutyou and----Oh, damn all mystery! I want you, Sissy!"

Mrs. Candy whisked a bundle in among the already intolerable mess ofbaggage which promised to descend on Doremus's knees and David's head,and she snapped, "Well, if you folks must go flyin' around thecountry----It's a cocoanut layer cake." Savagely: "Soon's you get aroundthe corner, throw the fool thing in the ditch if you want to!" She fledsobbing 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 throughFort Beulah by shadowy back-streets and started streaking northward.

Sissy sang out cheerily, "Well, Christmas in Canada! Skittles and beerand 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 tenminutes to teach him to say it, this afternoon! Hold my hand. I hopeBuck 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 thecar up deep-rutted roads, on which you would have to back if you were topass anyone. Up grades on which the car knocked and panted, into lonelyhills, by a zigzag of roads, they jerked toward Canada. Wet snowsheathed the windshield, then froze, and Buck had to drive with his headthrust out through the open window, and the blast came in and circledround 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 farbelow the level of the road indicated that they were sliding along ashelf road, and if they skidded off, they would keep going a hundredfeet, two hundred feet, downward--probably turning over and over. Oncethey 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, whileDoremus 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 thecar lurched. Probably he slept--at least, he awakened, and awakened to asensation of pushing the car anxiously up hill, as she bucked andstuttered in the effort to make a slippery rise. Suppose the enginedied--suppose the brakes would not hold and they slid back downhill,reeling, bursting off the road and down----A great many suppositionstortured him, hour by hour.

Then he tried being awake and bright and helpful. He noticed that theice-lined windshield, illuminated from the light on the snow ahead, wasa sheet of diamonds. He noticed it, but he couldn't get himself to thinkmuch 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 ofdiamonds and Buck's silhouette alive in all the world.

After unnumbered hours the car reared and tumbled and reared again. Themotor raced; its sound rose to an intolerable roaring; yet the carseemed not to be moving. The motor stopped abruptly. Buck cursed, poppedhis head back into the car like a turtle, and the starter ground longand whiningly. The motor again roared, again stopped. They could hearstiff branches rattling, hear Foolish moaning in sleep. The car was astorm-menaced cabin in the wilderness. The silence seemed waiting, asthey were waiting.

"Strouble?" said Doremus.

"Stuck. No traction. Hit a drift of wet snow--drainage from a bustedculvert, 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 thedrift with an electric torch, and Sissy looked at the drift with thetorch, and Buck impatiently took the torch away from them and lookedtwice.

"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 infront of the wheels, while Mary politely asked from within, "Can Ihelp?" and no one seemed particularly to have answered her.

The headlights picked out an abandoned shack beside the road; anunpainted gray pine cabin with broken window glass and no door. Emma,sighing her way out of the car and stepping through the lumpy snow asdelicately as a pacer at a horse show, said humbly, "That little housethere--maybe I could go in and make some hot coffee on the alcoholstove--didn't have room for a thermos. Hot coffee, Dormouse?"

To Doremus she sounded, just now, not at all like a wife, but assensible as Mrs. Candy.

When the car did kick its way up on the pathway of twigs and standpanting safely beyond the drift, they had, in the sheltered shack,coffee with slabs of Mrs. Candy's voluptuous cocoanut cake. Doremuspondered, "This is a nice place. I like this place. It doesn't bounce orskid. I don't want to leave this place."

He did. The secure immobility of the shack was behind them, dark milesbehind, and they were again pitching and rolling and being sick andinescapably chilly. David was alternately crying and going back tosleep. Foolish woke up to cough inquiringly and returned to his dream ofrabbiting. And Doremus was sleeping, his head swaying like a masthead inlong 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 whatseemed to be a crossroads hamlet, and Buck was examining a map by thelight 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 anold wood lane so little used that the ruts were twin snakes. ThoughDoremus said nothing, the others felt his intensity, his anxiety thatwas like listening for an enemy in the dark. David sat up, the bluemotor robe about him. Foolish started, snorted, looked offended but,catching the spirit of the moment, comfortingly laid a paw on Doremus'sknee and insisted on shaking hands, over and over, as gravely as aVenetian senator or an undertaker.

They dropped into the dimness of a tree-walled hollow. A searchlightdarted, and rested hotly on them, so dazzling them that Buck almost ranoff 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 ofa small shelter hut. Two Minute Men stood out in the road, dripping withradiance from the car. They were young and rural, but they had efficientrepeating 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 asa sentry in 1864, studying a pass by lantern light, beside a farm wagonin 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 withrefugees. 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, inMontreal."

"Yuh, I've heard that one before! And maybe it's true, this time. Butafraid you'll have to wait for the Bat. You folks can come in and set bythe 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 Berkshireand 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 thisback-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 afarmer like you or me!"

The refugees, as they drove away, had an uncomfortable feeling that theguards 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 hadtroubled to do more than laugh at them. They were trapped too tightlyfor the trappers to worry. Doremus's only clear emotion as, tailsbetween 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, atleast, 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 moreknowing, or did he just imagine it? What the deuce had Emil meant whenhe 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 shiverlest an illiterate roustabout like Shad Ledue find out that he desiredto go to Canada, while a ruler-slapper like Staubmeyer, a Squeers withcertificates in "pedagogy," should now be able to cuff grown men insteadof 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 cheerfullyrattling linotype room--the shouting pressroom with its smell of inkthat to him hitherto had been like the smell of grease paint to anactor--they were hateful now, and choking. Not even Lorinda's faith, noteven Sissy's jibes and Buck's stories, could rouse him to hope.

He rejoiced the more, therefore, when his son Philip telephoned him fromWorcester: "Be home Sunday? Merilla's in New York, gadding, and I'm allalone here. Thought I'd just drive up for the day and see how things arein your neck of the woods."

"Come on! Splendid! So long since we've seen you. I'll have your motherstart a pot of beans right away!"

Doremus was happy. Not for some time did his cursed two-way-mindednesscome to weaken his joy, as he wondered whether it wasn't just a mythheld over from boyhood that Philip really cared so much for Emma's beansand brown bread; and wondered just why it was that Up-to-Date Americanslike Philip always used the long-distance telephone rather than undergothe dreadful toil of dictating a letter a day or two earlier. It didn'treally seem so efficient, the old-fashioned village editor reflected, tospend seventy-five cents on a telephone call in order to save fivecents' worth of time.

"Oh hush! Anyway, I'll be delighted to see the boy! I'll bet there isn'ta smarter young lawyer in Worcester. There's one member of the familythat'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 forgettinghow bald this upstanding young advocate was growing even at thirty-four.And it seemed to him that Philip was a little heavy and senatorial inspeech 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 horriblebusiness, the killing of poor Fowler. Horrible! I was simply horrified.There must have been a mistake somewhere, because Judge Swan has awonderful reputation for scrupulousness."

"There was no mistake. Swan is a fiend. Literally!" Doremus sounded lesspaternal than when he had first bounded up to shake hands with thebeloved prodigal.

"Really? We must talk it over. I'll see if there can't be a stricterinvestigation. Swan? Really! We'll certainly go into the whole business.But first I must just skip upstairs and give Mammy a good smack, andMary 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 wasrelentlessly filial and fraternal, and he smiled like an automobilesalesman when Sissy griped at him, "What's the idea of all the tenderhand-dusting, Philco?"

Doremus and he were not alone till nearly midnight.

They sat upstairs in the sacred study. Philip lighted one of Doremus'sexcellent cigars as though he were a cinema actor playing the rôle of aman 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 rowingwith Merilla, are you?"

"Certainly not! Most certainly not! Oh, I don't approve of everythingMerry 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 inWorcester that makes a nicer impression on everybody, especially at nicedinner parties."

"Well then? Let's have it, Phil. Something serious?"

"Ye-es, I'm afraid there is. Look, Dad.... Oh, do sit down and becomfortable!... 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 matterfact, 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 reallypro-Corpo, are you?"

"How did you ever guess?"

"Well, I've been----I didn't vote for Windrip, personally, but I beginto see where I was wrong. I can see now that he has not only greatpersonal magnetism, but real constructive power--real sure-enoughstatesmanship. Some say it's Lee Sarason's doing, but don't you believeit for a minute. Look at all Buzz did back in his home state, before heever teamed up with Sarason! And some say Windrip is crude. Well, sowere Lincoln and Jackson. Now what I think of Windrip----"

"The only thing you ought to think of Windrip is that his gangstersmurdered 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 abhorsviolence more than I do. Still, you can't make an omelet withoutbreaking 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 tojustify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi orCommunist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men's soulsand blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!"

"Oh, sorry, sir. I guess maybe the phrase is a little shopworn! I justmean to say--I'm just trying to figure this situation outrealistically!"

"'Realistically'! That's another buttered bun to excuse murder!"

"But honestly, you know--horrible things do happen, thanks to theimperfection of human nature, but you can forgive the means if the endis a rejuvenated nation that----"

"I can do nothing of the kind! I can never forgive evil and lying andcruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for anexcuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, a country that tolerates evilmeans--evil manners, standards of ethics--for a generation, will be sopoisoned that it never will have any good end. I'm just curious, but doyou know how perfectly you're quoting every Bolshevik apologist thatsneers at decency and kindness and truthfulness in daily dealings as'bourgeois morality'? I hadn't understood that you'd gone quite soMarxo-materialistic!"

"I! Marxian! Good God!" Doremus was pleased to see that he had stirredhis son out of his if-your-honor-please smugness. "Why, one of thethings I most admire about the Corpos is that, as I know, absolutely--Ihave reliable information from Washington--they have saved us from asimply ghastly invasion by red agents of Moscow--Communists pretendingto be decent labor-leaders!"

"Not really!" (Had the fool forgotten that his father was a newspapermanand not likely to be impressed by "reliable information fromWashington"?)

"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 beenwise, after all, to restrain himself from the domestic pleasure oflicking the brat?)

"The whole point is that Windrip, or anyway the Corpos, are here tostay, Pater, and we've got to base our future actions not on somedesired Utopia but on what we really and truly have. And think of whatthey've actually done! Just, for example, how they've removed theadvertising billboards from the highways, and ended unemployment, andtheir 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 materialbut spiritual."

"Eh?"

"Really! They've revitalized the whole country. Formerly we had gottenpretty sordid, just thinking about material possessions andcomforts--about electric refrigeration and television andair-conditioning. Kind of lost the sturdiness that characterized ourpioneer ancestors. Why, ever so many young men were refusing to takemilitary drill, and the discipline and will power and good-fellowshipthat you only get from military training----Oh, pardon me! I forgot youwere 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 ofYouth."

"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 herefrom Worcester just to see you?"

"God only knows!"

"I want to make myself clear. Before Windrip, we'd been lying down inAmerica, while Europe was throwing off all her bonds--both monarchy andthis antiquated parliamentary-democratic-liberal system that reallymeans rule by professional politicians and by egotistic 'intellectuals.'We've got to catch up to Europe again--got to expand--it's the rule oflife. 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, backbefore 1914!"

"Did you? Well, anyway----Got to expand! Why, what we ought to do is tograb all of Mexico, and maybe Central America, and a good big slice ofChina. Why, just on their own behalf we ought to do it, misgovernedthe 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 tomy 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 justdon't see why you haven't been more reasonable about this wholething--you with your quick mind!) After all, the time for selfishindividualism is gone. We've got to have mass action. One for all andall for one----"

"Philip, would you mind telling me what the deuce you're reallyheading toward? Cut the cackle!"

"Well, since you insist--to 'cut the cackle,' as you call it--not verypolitely, seems to me, seeing I've taken the trouble to come clear upfrom Worcester!--I have reliable information that you're going to getinto mighty serious trouble if you don't stop opposing--or at leastmarkedly 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 yourlife you might think of Mother and the girls, instead of always of yourown selfish 'ideas' that you're so proud of! In a crisis like this, itjust 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 assistantmilitary judgeship, but your attitude, as my father----"

"Philip, I think, I rather think, that I give you my parental curse notso much because you are a traitor as because you have become a stuffedshirt! Good-night."

Chapter 25

Holidays were invented by the devil, to coax people into the heresy thathappiness can be won by taking thought. What was planned as a racketyday for David's first Christmas with his grandparents was, they saw toowell, perhaps David's last Christmas with them. Mary had hidden herweeping, but the day before Christmas, when Shad Ledue tramped in todemand of Doremus whether Karl Pascal had ever spoken to him ofCommunism, Mary came on Shad in the hall, stared at him, raised her handlike a boxing cat, and said with dreadful quietness, "You murderer! Ishall 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 werevery 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 nodifferent at heart from despairing drunkenness in the city night.Doremus reflected that it might have been just as well for all of themto get drunk and let themselves go, elbows on slopped café tables, as totoil at this pretense of domestic bliss. He now had another thing forwhich to hate the Corpos--for stealing the secure affection ofChristmas.

For noon dinner, Louis Rotenstern was invited, because he was a lornbachelor and, still more, because he was a Jew, now insecure and snubbedand threatened in an insane dictatorship. (There is no greatercompliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of theirunpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty andsilliness of the régime under which they live, so that even acommercial-minded money-fondling heavily humorous Jew burgher likeRotenstern is still a sensitive meter of barbarism.) After dinner cameBuck Titus, David's most favorite person, bearing staggering amounts ofWoolworth tractors and fire engines and a real bow-and-arrow, and he wasraucously insisting that Mrs. Candy dance with him what he not veryprecisely called "the light fantastic," when the hammering sounded atthe door.

Aras Dilley tramped in with four men.

"Lookin' for Rotenstern. Oh, that you, Louie? Git your coat and comeon--orders."

"What's the idea? What d'you want of him? What's the charge?" demandedBuck, still standing with his arm about Mrs. Candy's embarrassed waist.

"Dunno's there be any charges. Just ordered to headquarters forquestioning. District Commissioner Reek in town. Just astin' few peoplea few questions. Come on, you!"

The hilarious celebrants did not, as they had planned, go out toLorinda's tavern for skiing. Next day they heard that Rotenstern hadbeen taken to the concentration camp at Trianon, along with that crabbedold Tory, Raymond Pridewell, the hardware dealer.

Both imprisonments were incredible. Rotenstern had been too meek. And ifPridewell had not ever been meek, if he had constantly and testily andloudly proclaimed that he had not cared for Ledue as a hired man and nowcared even less for him as a local governor, yet--why, Pridewell was asacred institution. As well think of dragging the brownstone BaptistChurch to prison.

Later, a friend of Shad Ledue took over Rotenstern's shop.

It can happen here, meditated Doremus. It could happen to him. Howsoon? Before he should be arrested, he must make amends to hisconscience by quitting the Informer.

**

Professor Victor Loveland, once a classicist of Isaiah College, havingbeen fired from a labor camp for incompetence in teaching arithmetic tolumberjacks, was in town, with wife and babies, on his way to a jobclerking in his uncle's slate quarry near Fair Haven. He called onDoremus and was hysterically cheerful. He called on ClarenceLittle--"dropped in to visit with him," Clarence would have said. Nowthat twitchy, intense jeweler, Clarence, who had been born on a Vermontfarm and had supported his mother till she died when he was thirty, hadlonged to go to college and, especially, to study Greek. Though Lovelandwas his own age, in the mid-thirties, he looked on him as a combinationof Keats and Liddell. His greatest moment had been hearing Loveland readHomer.

Loveland was leaning on the counter. "Gone ahead with your Latingrammar, Clarence?"

"Golly, Professor, it just doesn't seem worth while any more. I guessI'm kind of a weak sister, anyway, but I find that these days it's aboutall I can do to keep going."

"Me too! And don't call me 'Professor.' I'm a time-keeper in a slatequarry. What a life!"

They had not noticed the clumsy-looking man in plain clothes who hadjust come in. Presumably he was a customer. But he grumbled, "So you twopansies don't like the way things go nowadays! Don't suppose you likethe Corpos! Don't think much of the Chief!" He jabbed his thumb intoLoveland's ribs so painfully that Loveland yelped, "I don't think abouthim at all!"

"Oh, you don't, eh? Well, you two fairies can come along to thecourthouse 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 anddecorated his naked back with forty slashes of a steel ramrod. They hadfound that Clarence wore yellow silk underwear, and the M.M.'s fromfactory and plowland laughed--particularly one broad young inspector whowas rumored to have a passionate friendship with a battalion-leader fromNashua who was fat, eyeglassed, and high-pitched of voice.

Little had to be helped into the truck that took Loveland and him to theTrianon concentration camp. One eye was closed and so surrounded withbruised 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 threeprisoners on this trip were chained hand to hand. They lay on the floorof the truck. It was snowing.

The third prisoner was not much like Loveland or Little. His name wasBen Trippen. He had been a mill hand for Medary Cole. He cared no moreabout the Greek language than did a baboon, but he did care for his sixchildren. He had been arrested for trying to strike Cole and for cursingthe Corpo régime when Cole had reduced his wages from nine dollars aweek (in pre-Corpo currency) to seven-fifty.

As to Loveland's wife and babies, Lorinda took them in till she couldpass the hat and collect enough to send them back to Mrs. Loveland'sfamily on a rocky farm in Missouri. But then things went better. Mrs.Loveland was favored by the Greek proprietor of a lunch-room and gotwork washing dishes and otherwise pleasing the proprietor, whobrilliantined his mustache.

**

The county administration, in a proclamation signed by Emil Staubmeyer,announced that they were going to regulate the agriculture on thesubmarginal land high up on Mount Terror. As a starter, half-a-dozen ofthe poorer families were moved into the large, square, quiet, old houseof that large, square, quiet, old farmer, Henry Veeder, cousin ofDoremus Jessup. These poorer families had many children, a great many,so that there were four or five persons bedded on the floor in everyroom of the home where Henry and his wife had placidly lived alone sincetheir own children had grown. Henry did not like it, and said so, notvery tactfully, to the M.M.'s herding the refugees. What was worse, thedispossessed did not like it any better. "'Tain't much, but we got ahouse 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 otherfolks. Never did like that fool kind of yellow color Henry painted hisbarn, but guess that's his business."

So Henry and two of the regulated agriculturists were taken to theTrianon 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 toclear 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 teachhim."

"Staubmeyer? Oh! You mean Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer!"

"Chuck it, will you? We're not on parade, and we're not playingsoldiers. Mind if I sit down?"

"Don't look like you cared a hell of a lot whether I mind or not! But Ican tell you, right here and now, Jessup, without any monkey businessabout it, you're not going to leave your job. I guess I could findenough grounds for sending you to Trianon for about a million years,with ninety lashes, but--you've always been so stuck on yourself as suchan all-fired honest editor, it kind of tickles me to watch you kissingthe Chief's foot--and mine!"

"I'll do no more of it! That's certain! And I admit that I deserve yourscorn for ever having done it!"

"Well, isn't that elegant! But you'll do just what I tell you to, andlike it! Jessup, I suppose you think I had a swell time when I was yourhired man! Watching you and your old woman and the girls go off on apicnic 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 concentrationcamp in that laughter.

**

It was really Sissy who gave Doremus his lead.

He drove to Hanover to see Shad's superior, District Commissioner JohnSullivan Reek, that erstwhile jovial and red-faced politician. He wasadmitted after only half an hour's waiting. He was shocked to see howpale and hesitant and frightened Reek had become. But the Commissionertried 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 FortBeulah. As you probably know, I've been breaking in Emil Staubmeyer asmy successor. Well, he's quite competent to take hold now, and I want toquit. 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 'emfor so many years. You can appreciate that, can't you?"

"My God, can I appreciate it? And how! Well, I'll think it over. Youwouldn't mind writing little pieces for my own little sheet, at home? Iown part of a paper there."

"No! Sure! Delighted!"

("Does this mean that Reek believes the Corpo tyranny is going to blowup, in a revolution, so that he's beginning to trim? Or just that he'sfighting 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 rightnow."

**

Doremus made as little ceremony as possible of leaving the Informer,which had been his throne for thirty-seven years. Staubmeyer waspatronizing, Doc Itchitt looked quizzical, but the chapel, headed by DanWilgus, shook hands profusely. And so, at sixty-two, stronger and moreeager than he had been in all his life, Doremus had nothing to do moreimportant than eating breakfast and telling his grandson stories aboutthe elephant.

But that lasted less than a week. Avoiding suspicion from Emma and Sissyand even from Buck and Lorinda, he took Julian aside:

"Look here, boy. I think it's time now for me to begin doing a littlehigh treason. (Heaven's sake keep all of this under your hat--don't eventip off Sissy!) I guess you know, the Communists are too theocratic formy tastes. But looks to me as though they have more courage and devotionand smart strategy than anybody since the Early Christian Martyrs--whomthey also resemble in hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want toget in touch with 'em and see if there's any dirty work at thecrossroads I can do for 'em--say distributing a few Early Christiantracts by St. Lenin. But of course, theoretically, the Communists haveall been imprisoned. Could you get to Karl Pascal, in Trianon, and findout whom I could see?"

Said Julian, "I think I could. Dr. Olmsted gets called in theresometimes 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 inwhen one of their warders busts his wrist beating up some prisoner. I'lltry, sir."

Two days afterward Julian returned.

"My God, what a sewer that Trianon place is! I'd waited for Olmstedbefore, in the car, but I never had the nerve to butt inside. Thebuildings--they were nice buildings, quite pretty, when the girls'school had them. Now the fittings are all torn out, and they've put upwallboard partitions for cells, and the whole place stinks of carbolicacid and excrement, and the air--there isn't any--you feel as if youwere nailed up in a box--I don't know how anybody lives in one of thosecells for an hour--and yet there's six men bunked in a cell twelve feetby ten, with a ceiling only seven feet high, and no light except atwenty-five watt, I guess it is, bulb in the ceiling--you couldn't readby it. But they get out for exercise two hours a day--walk around andaround the courtyard--they're all so stooped, and they all look soashamed, as if they'd had the defiance just licked out of 'em--even Karla 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, Iwrote it down--and for God's sake, burn it up soon as you've memorizedit!"

"Was he--had they----?"

"Oh, yes, they've beaten him, all right. He wouldn't talk about it. Butthere was a scar right across his cheek, from his temple right down tohis chin. And I had just a glimpse of Henry Veeder. Remember how helooked--like an oak tree? Now he twitches all the time, and jumps andgasps when he hears a sudden sound. He didn't know me. I don't thinkhe'd know anybody."

**

Doremus announced to his family and told it loudly in Gath that he wasstill looking for an option on an apple orchard to which they mightretire, and he journeyed southward, with pajamas and a toothbrush andthe first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West in a briefcase.

The address given by Karl Pascal was that of a most gentlemanly dealerin altar cloths and priestly robes, who had his shop and office over atea room in Hartford, Connecticut. He talked about the cembalo and thespinetta di serenata and the music of Palestrina for an hour before hesent 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 senthim to northern Connecticut and to the Eastern headquarters of what wasleft 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 asquat New England farm cottage masked in wintry old lilac bushes andspiræa 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, thepassvorts und everyt'ing, but if any of the central committee getscaught----" He made a squirting sound and drew his scissors across histhroat.)

Doremus sat now in a tiny hall off a flight of stairs steep as the sideof a roof; a hall with sprigged wall paper and Currier & Ives prints,and black-painted wooden rocking chairs with calico cushions. There wasnothing to read but a Methodist hymnal and a desk dictionary. He knewthe former by heart, and anyway, he always loved readingdictionaries--often had one seduced him from editorial-writing. Happilyhe 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?" thoughtDoremus contentedly, before he realized that glowering from a verynarrow doorway was a very broad man with wild gray hair and a patch overone 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 inMoscow, and reputed now to be the secretary of the illegal CommunistParty.

"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 wasprobably mahogany underneath the scars and the clots of dirt, sat asquat man with kinky tow-colored hair and with deep wrinkles in thethick pale skin of his face, and a slender young elegant who suggestedPark Avenue.

"Howryuh?" said Mr. Bailey, in a Russian-Jewish accent. Of him Doremusknew nothing save that he was not named Bailey.

"Morning," snapped Mr. Cailey--whose name was Elphrey, if Doremusguessed rightly, and who was the son of a millionaire private banker,the brother of one explorer, one bishop's wife, and one countess, andhimself a former teacher of economics in the University of California.

Doremus tried to explain himself to these hard-eyed, quick-glancingplotters of ruin.

"Are you willing to become a Party member, in the extremely improbablecase that they accept you, and to take orders, any orders, withoutquestion?" 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'dhave to do would be much more difficult than the amusement of using atommy-gun. Would you be willing to forget you ever were a respectablenewspaper editor, giving orders, and walk through the snow, dressed likea bum, to distribute seditious pamphlets--even if, personally, youshould believe the pamphlets were of no slightest damn good to theCause?"

"Why, I--I don't know. Seems to me that as a newspaperman of quite alittle training----"

"Hell! Our only trouble is keeping out the 'trained newspapermen'!What we need is trained bill-posters that like the smell of flour-pasteand hate sleeping. And--but you're a little old for this--crazy fanaticsthat go out and start strikes, knowing they'll get beaten up and thrownin the bull pen."

"No, I guess I----Look here. I'm sure Walt Trowbridge will be joining upwith the Socialists and some of the left-wing radical ex-Senators andthe 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 ofthe capitalists and working for war against Soviet Russia without evenhaving sense enough to know they're doing it and to collect good pay fortheir crookedness!"

"I admire Trowbridge!" snarled Doremus.

"You would!"

Elphrey rose, almost cordial, and dismissed Doremus with, "Mr. Jessup, Iwas brought up in a sound bourgeois household myself, unlike these tworoughnecks, and I appreciate what you're trying to do, even if theydon't. I imagine that your rejection of us is even firmer than ourrejection of you!"

"Dot's right, Comrade Elphrey. Both you and dis fellow got ants in yourbourjui pants, like your Hugh Johnson vould say!" chuckled the RussianMr. Bailey.

"But I just wonder if Walt Trowbridge won't be chasing out Buzz Windripwhile you boys are still arguing about whether Comrade Trotzky was onceguilty of saying mass facing the north? Good-day!" said Doremus.

When he recounted it to Julian, two days later, and Julian puzzled, "Iwonder whether you won or they did?" Doremus asserted, "I don't thinkanybody won--except the ants! Anyway, now I know that man is not to besaved by black bread alone but by everything that proceedeth out of themouth of the Lord our God.... Communists, intense and narrow;Yankees, tolerant and shallow; no wonder a Dictator can keep us separateand all working for him!"

**

Even in the 1930's, when it was radiantly believed that movies and themotorcar and glossy magazines had ended the provinciality of all thelarger American villages, in such communities as Fort Beulah all theretired business men who could not afford to go to Europe or Florida orCalifornia, such as Doremus, were as aimless as an old dog on Sundayafternoon with the family away. They poked uptown to the shops, thehotel lobbies, the railway station, and at the barber shop were pleasedrather than irritated when they had to wait a quarter hour for thetri-weekly shave. There were no cafés as there would have been inContinental Europe, and no club save the country club, and that waschiefly a sanctuary for the younger people in the evening and lateafternoons.

The superior Doremus Jessup, the bookman, was almost as dreary inretirement as Banker Crowley would have been.

He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular pointin stopping a good walk to wallop small balls and, worse, the links werenow bright with M.M. uniforms. And he hadn't enough brass, as no doubtMedary Cole would have, to feel welcome hour on hour in the Hotel Wessexlobby.

He stayed in his third-story study and read as long as his eyes wouldendure it. But he irritably felt Emma's irritation and Mrs. Candy's ireat having a man around the house all day. Yes! He'd get what he couldfor the house and for what small share in Informer stock thegovernment had left him when they had taken it over, and go--well, justgo--the Rockies or anywhere that was new.

But he realized that Emma did not at all wish to go new places; andrealized that the Emma to whose billowy warmth it had been comforting tocome home after the office, bored him and was bored by him when he wasalways there. The only difference was that she did not seem capable ofadmitting that one might, without actual fiendishness or any signs ofhot-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, verylightly--because he very heavily wanted to know.

She laughed. "You? At your age? As if anybody thought you could be alover!"

Well, Lorinda thought so, he raged, and promptly he did "drive out andsee 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 wasthat sly bumpkin, Doc Itchitt, who didn't even rise at Doremus'sentrance nor listen when Doremus gave his opinion of the new make-up ofthe rural-correspondence pages.

That was an apostasy harder to endure than Shad Ledue's, for Shad hadalways been rustically certain that Doremus was a fool, almost as bad asreal "city folks," while Doc Itchitt had once appreciated the tightjoints and smooth surfaces and sturdy bases of Doremus's craftsmanship.

Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many people isnothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anythingbut contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its brother death,seem so contented.

**

For several days now, in late February, Doremus had noticed theinsurance man. He said he was a Mr. Dimick; a Mr. Dimick of Albany. Hewas a gray and tasteless man, in gray and dusty and wrinkled clothes,and his pop-eyes stared with meaningless fervor. All over town you methim, at the four drugstores, at the shoe-shine parlor, and he was alwaysdroning, "My name is Dimick--Mr. Dimick of Albany--Albany, New York. Iwonder if I can interest you in a wonnerful new form of life-insurancepolicy. Wonnerful!" But he didn't sound as though he himself thought itwas very wonnerful.

He was a pest.

He was always dragging himself into some unwelcoming shop, and yet heseemed to sell few policies, if any.

Not for two days did Doremus perceive that Mr. Dimick of Albany managedto meet him an astonishing number of times a day. As he came out of theWessex, he saw Mr. Dimick leaning against a lamppost, ostentatiously notlooking his way, yet three minutes later and two blocks away, Mr. Dimicktrailed after him into the Vert Mont Pool & Tobacco Headquarters, andlistened to Doremus's conversation with Tom Aiken about fish hatcheries.

Doremus was suddenly cold. He made it a point to sneak uptown thatevening and saw Mr. Dimick talking to the driver of a Beulah-Montpelierbus 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!" andput it away. He heard a ring as he did so, and went downstairs to findMr. 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 WaltTrowbridge. You probably guessed--I've been watching you all week,asking about you. You've got to be Trowbridge's and our representativehere. Secret war against the Corpos. The 'N.U.,' the 'New Underground,'we call it--like secret Underground that got the slaves into Canadabefore the Civil War. Four divisions: printing propaganda, distributingit, collecting and exchanging information about Corpo outrages,smuggling suspects into Canada or Mexico. Of course you don't know onething about me. I may be a Corpo spy. But look over these credentialsand telephone your friend Mr. Samson of the Burlington Paper Company.God's sake be careful! Wire may be tapped. Ask him about me on thegrounds you're interested in insurance. He's one of us. You're going tobe one of us! Now phone!"

Doremus telephoned to Samson: "Say, Ed, is a fellow named Dimick, kindof weedy-looking, pop-eyed fellow, all right? Shall I take his advice oninsurance?"

"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, forthe paper had to be distributed to villages forty miles away and did notissue a later city edition. Dan Wilgus, the foreman, remained after theothers had gone, setting a Minute Man poster which announced that therewould be a grand parade on March ninth, and incidentally that PresidentWindrip was defying the world.

Dan stopped, looked sharply about, and tramped into the storeroom. Inthe light from a dusty electric bulb the place was like a tomb of deadnews, with ancient red-and-black posters of Scotland county fairs andproofs of indecent limericks pasted on the walls. From a case ofeight-point, once used for the setting of pamphlets but superseded by amonotype machine, Dan picked out bits of type from each of severalcompartments, wrapped them in scraps of print paper, and stored them inthe 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 anydecent printer even if he were on strike. He filled them up with typenot from another eight-point case, but with old ten-point.

Daniel, the large and hairy, thriftily pinching the tiny types, wasabsurd as an elephant playing at being a hen.

He turned out the lights on the third floor and clumped downstairs. Heglanced in at the editorial rooms. No one was there save Doc Itchitt, ina small circle of light that through the visor of his eyeshade cast agreen tint on his unwholesome face. He was correcting an article by thetitular editor, Ensign Emil Staubmeyer, and he snickered as he carved itwith 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 theRexall 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 allthe 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 innewspaper work now, and not be held back by a bunch of snobs that thinkthey'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 ofBilly's Bar, in the middle of a block, and put his foot up on the hub ofa dirty old Ford, to tie his shoelace. As he tied it--after havinguntied it--he looked up and down the street, emptied the bundles in hispockets into a battered sap bucket on the front seat of the car, andmajestically moved on.

Out of the bar came Pete Vutong, a French-Canadian farmer who lived upon Mount Terror. Pete was obviously drunk. He was singing theprehistoric ditty "Hi lee, hi low" in what he conceived to be German,viz.: "By unz gays immer, yuh longer yuh slimmer." He was staggering sothat he had to pull himself into the car, and he steered in fancypatterns till he had turned the corner. Then he was amazingly andsuddenly sober; and amazing was the speed with which the Ford clatteredout 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 sapbucket in the Ford.

Pete passed the gate to Buck Titus's domain, slowed down, dropped thesap bucket into a ditch, and sped home.

Just at dawn, Buck Titus, out for a walk with his three Irishwolfhounds, kicked up the sap bucket and transferred the bundles to hisown pocket.

And next afternoon Dan Wilgus, in the basement of Buck's house, wassetting up, in eight-point, a pamphlet entitled "How Many People Havethe Corpos Murdered?" It was signed "Spartan," and Spartan was one ofseveral pen names of Mr. Doremus Jessup.

They were all--all the ringleaders of the local chapter of the NewUnderground--rather glad when once, on his way to Buck's, Dan wassearched by M.M.'s unfamiliar to him, and on him was found noprinting-material, nor any documents more incriminating than cigarettepapers.

**

The Corpos had made a regulation licensing all dealers in printingmachinery and paper and compelling them to keep lists of purchasers, sothat except by bootlegging it was impossible to get supplies for theissuance of treasonable literature. Dan Wilgus stole the type; Dan andDoremus and Julian and Buck together had stolen an entire old handprinting-press from the Informer basement; and the paper was smuggledfrom Canada by that veteran bootlegger, John Pollikop, who rejoiced atbeing back in the good old occupation of which repeal had robbed him.

It is doubtful whether Dan Wilgus would ever have joined anything sodivorced as this from the time clock and the office cuspidors out ofabstract indignation at Windrip or County Commissioner Ledue. He wasmoved to sedition partly by fondness for Doremus and partly byindignation at Doc Itchitt, who publicly rejoiced because all theprinters' unions had been sunk in the governmental confederations. Orperhaps because Doc jeered at him personally on the few occasions--notmore than once or twice a week--when there was tobacco juice on hisshirt front.

Dan grunted to Doremus, "All right, boss, I guess maybe I'll come inwith you. And say, when we get this man's revolution going, let me drivethe tumbril with Doc in it. Say, remember Tale of Two Cities? Goodbook. Say, how about getting out a humorous life of Windrip? You'd justhave to tell the facts!"

Buck Titus, pleased as a boy invited to go camping, offered his secludedhouse and, in especial, its huge basement for the headquarters of theNew Underground, and Buck, Dan, and Doremus made their most poisonousplots 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, acouple of weeks after Doremus had founded it, consisted of himself, hisdaughters, Buck, Dan, Lorinda, Julian Falck, Dr. Olmsted, John Pollikop,Father Perefixe (and he argued with the agnostic Dan, the atheistPollikop, more than ever he had with Buck), Mrs. Henry Veeder, whosefarmer husband was in Trianon Concentration Camp, Harry Kindermann, thedispossessed Jew, Mungo Kitterick, that most un-Jewish andun-Socialistic lawyer, Pete Vutong and Daniel Babcock, farmers, and somedozen others. The Reverend Mr. Falck, Emma Jessup, and Mrs. Candy, weremore or less unconscious tools of the N.U. But whoever they were, ofwhatever faith or station, Doremus found in all of them the religiouspassion he had missed in the churches; and if altars, if windows ofmany-colored glass, had never been peculiarly holy objects to him, heunderstood them now as he gloated over such sacred trash as scarred typeand a creaking hand press.

**

Once it was Mr. Dimick of Albany again; once, another insuranceagent--who guffawed at the accidental luck of insuring Shad Ledue's newLincoln; once it was an Armenian peddling rugs; once, Mr. Samson ofBurlington, looking for pine-slashing for paper pulp; but whoever itwas, Doremus heard from the New Underground every week. He was busy ashe had never been in newspaper days, and happy as on youth's adventurein Boston.

Humming and most cheerful, he ran the small press, with the heartybump-bump-bump of the foot treadle, admiring his own skill as he fed inthe sheets. Lorinda learned from Dan Wilgus to set type, with morefervor than accuracy about ei and ie. Emma and Sissy and Mary foldednews sheets and sewed up pamphlets by hand, all of them working in thehigh old brick-walled basement that smelled of sawdust and lime anddecaying apples.

Aside from pamphlets by Spartan, and by Anthony B. Susan--who wasLorinda, except on Fridays--their chief illicit publication was VermontVigilance, a four-page weekly which usually had only two pages and,such was Doremus's unfettered liveliness, came out about three times aweek. It was filled with reports smuggled to them from other N.U. cells,and with reprints from Walt Trowbridge's Lance for Democracy and fromCanadian, British, Swedish, and French papers, whose correspondents inAmerica got out, by long-distance telephone, news which Secretary ofEducation Macgoblin, head of the government press department, spent agood part of his time denying. An English correspondent sent news of themurder of the president of the University of Southern Illinois, a man ofseventy-two who was shot in the back "while trying to escape," out ofthe country by long-distance telephone to Mexico City, from which thestory was relayed to London.

Doremus discovered that neither he nor any other small citizen had beenhearing one hundredth of what was going on in America. Windrip & Co.had, like Hitler and Mussolini, discovered that a modern state can, bythe triple process of controlling every item in the press, breaking upat the start any association which might become dangerous, and keepingall the machine guns, artillery, armored automobiles, and aëroplanes inthe hands of the government, dominate the complex contemporarypopulation better than had ever been done in medieval days, whenrebellious peasantry were armed only with pitchforks and good-will, butthe State was not armed much better.

Dreadful, incredible information came in to Doremus, until he saw thathis own life, and Sissy's and Lorinda's and Buck's, were unimportantaccidents.

In North Dakota, two would-be leaders of the farmers were made to run infront of an M.M. automobile, through February drifts, till they droppedbreathless, were beaten with a tire pump till they staggered on, fellagain, then were shot in the head, their blood smearing the prairiesnow.

President Windrip, who was apparently becoming considerably more jumpythan in his old, brazen days, saw two of his personal bodyguardsnickering 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 thepistols of their fellow guards.

A crowd of young men, not wearing any sort of uniforms, tore the clothesfrom a nun on the station plaza in Kansas City and chased her, smackingher with bare hands. The police stopped them after a while. There wereno arrests.

In Utah a non-Mormon County Commissioner staked out a Mormon elder on abare rock where, since the altitude was high, the elder at once shiveredand felt the glare rather bothersome to his eyes--since the Commissionerhad thoughtfully cut off his eyelids first. The government pressreleases made much of the fact that the torturer was rebuked by theDistrict Commissioner and removed from his post. It did not mention thathe was reappointed in a county in Florida.

The heads of the reorganized Steel Cartel, a good many of whom had beenofficers of steel companies in the days before Windrip, entertainedSecretary of Education Macgoblin and Secretary of War Luthorne with anaquatic festival in Pittsburgh. The dining room of a large hotel wasturned into a tank of rose-scented water, and the celebrants floated ina gilded Roman barge. The waitresses were naked girls, who amusinglyswam to the barge holding up trays and, more often, wine buckets.

Secretary of State Lee Sarason was arrested in the basement of ahandsome boys' club in Washington on unspecified charges by a policemanwho apologized as soon as he recognized Sarason, and released him, andwho that night was shot in his bed by a mysterious burglar.

Albert Einstein, who had been exiled from Germany for his guiltydevotion to mathematics, world peace, and the violin, was now exiledfrom 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 apacifist sermon, was shot through the door and killed when she refusedto open to an M.M. raiding section looking for seditious literature.

In Rhode Island, the door of a small orthodox synagogue in a basementwas locked from the outside after thin glass containers ofcarbon-monoxide had been thrown in. The windows had been nailed shut,and anyway, the nineteen men in the congregation did not smell the gasuntil too late. They were all found slumped to the floor, beardssticking up. They were all over sixty.

Tom Krell--but his was a really nasty case, because he was actuallycaught with a copy of Lance for Democracy and credentials proving thathe was a New Underground messenger--strange thing, too, becauseeverybody had respected him as a good, decent, unimaginative baggage-manat a village railroad depot in New Hampshire--was dropped down a wellwith five feet of water in it, a smooth-sided cement well, and just leftthere.

Ex-Supreme Court Justice Hoblin of Montana was yanked out of bed late atnight and examined for sixty hours straight on a charge that he was incorrespondence with Trowbridge. It was said that the chief examiner wasa man whom, years before, Judge Hoblin had sentenced for robbery withassault.

In one day Doremus received reports that four several literary ordramatic societies--Finnish, Chinese, Iowan, and one belonging to amixed group of miners on the Mesaba Range, Minnesota--had been brokenup, their officers beaten, their clubrooms smashed up, and their oldpianos wrecked, on the charge that they possessed illegal arms, which,in each case, the members declared to be antiquated pistols used intheatricals. And in that week three people were arrested--in Alabama,Oklahoma, and New Jersey--for the possession of the following subversivebooks: The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, by Agatha Christie (and fairenough too, because the sister-in-law of a county commissioner inOklahoma was named Ackroyd); Waiting for Lefty, by Clifford Odets; andFebruary 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 thedelightfully illegal basement had he called Doremus anything save "Mr.Jessup.") "You never thought about them, because they was just routinenews, to stick in your paper. Things like the share-croppers and theScottsboro boys and the plots of the California wholesalers against theagricultural union and dictatorship in Cuba and the way phony deputiesin Kentucky shot striking miners. And believe me, Doremus, the samereactionary crowd that put over those crimes are just the big boys thatare chummy with Windrip. And what scares me is that if Walt Trowbridgeever does raise a kinda uprising and kick Buzz out, the same vultureswill get awful patriotic and democratic and parliamentarian along withWalt, and sit in on the spoils just the same."

"So Karl Pascal did convert you to Communism before he got sent toTrianon," 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 UnitedFront! W'y, that fellow Pascal--he was just a propagandist, and I tellyou--I tell you----"

**

Doremus's hardest job was the translation of items from the press inGermany, which was most favorable to the Corpos. Sweating, even in theMarch coolness in Buck's high basement, Doremus leaned over a kitchentable, ruffling through a German-English lexicon, grunting, tapping histeeth with a pencil, scratching the top of his head, looking like aschoolboy with a little false gray beard, and wailing to Lorinda, "Nowhow in the heck would you translate 'Er erhält noch immer einezweideutige Stellung den Juden gegenüber'?" She answered, "Why, darling,the only German I know is the phrase that Buck taught me for 'God blessyou'--'Verfluchter Schweinehund.'"

He translated word for word, from the Völkischer Beobachter, and laterturned into comprehensible English, this gratifying tribute to his Chiefand 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 theCommunists, at the risk of their lives, Doremus got many items aboutminers and factory workers who were near starvation and who wereimprisoned if they so much as criticized a straw boss.... But most ofthe New Masses, with a pious smugness unshaken by anything that hadhappened since 1935, was given over to the latest news about Marx, andto vilifying all agents of the New Underground, including those who hadbeen clubbed and jailed and killed, as "reactionary stool pigeons forFascism," and it was all nicely decorated with a Gropper cartoon showingWalt Trowbridge, in M.M. uniform, kissing the foot of Windrip.

**

The news bulletins came to Doremus in a dozen insane ways--carried bymessengers on the thinnest of flimsy tissue paper; mailed to Mrs. HenryVeeder 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'sdrugstore--one clerk there was an N.U. agent; dropped near Buck'smansion by a tough-looking and therefore innocent-looking driver of aninterstate furniture-moving truck. Come by so precariously, the news hadnone of the obviousness of his days in the office when, in one batch ofA.P. flimsies, were tidings of so many millions dead of starvation inChina, so many statesmen assassinated in central Europe, so many newchurches built by kind-hearted Mr. Andrew Mellon, that it was allroutine. Now, he was like an eighteenth-century missionary in northernCanada, waiting for the news that would take all spring to travel fromBristol and down Hudson Bay, wondering every instant whether France haddeclared war, whether Her Majesty had safely given birth.

Doremus realized that he was hearing, all at once, of the battle ofWaterloo, the Diaspora, the invention of the telegraph, the discovery ofbacilli, 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 envyhim, and consider that he had lived in the very crisis of history? Orwould they just smile at the flag-waving children of the 1930's playingat being national heroes? For he believed that these historians would beneither Communists nor Fascists nor bellicose American or EnglishNationalists but just the sort of smiling Liberals that the warringfanatics of today most cursed as weak waverers.

In all this secret tumult Doremus's most arduous task was to avoidsuspicions that might land him in concentration camp, and to giveappearance of being just the harmless old loafer he veritably had been,three weeks ago. Befogged with sleep because he had worked all night atheadquarters, he yawned all afternoon in the lobby of the Hotel Wessexand discussed fishing--the picture of a man too discouraged to be amenace.

**

He dropped now and then, on evenings when there was nothing to do atBuck's and he could loaf in his study at home and shamefully let himselfbe 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, whenhe had been a boy, had definitely startled him by evoking beauty, hereread 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 LordPeter Wimsey; the Piazza San Marco he saw, and immemorial towers ofBagdad that never were; with Don John of Austria he was going forth towar, and he took the golden road to Samarcand without a visa.

"But Dan Wilgus setting type on proclamations of rebellion, and BuckTitus distributing them at night on a motorcycle, may be as romantic asXanadu... living in a blooming epic, right now, but no Homer come upfrom the city room yet to write it down!"

**

Whit Bibby was an ancient and wordless fishmonger, and as ancientappeared his horse, though it was by no means silent, but given to avariety of embarrassing noises. For twenty years his familiar wagon,like the smallest of cabooses, had conveyed mackerel and cod and laketrout and tinned oysters to all the farmsteads in the Beulah Valley. Tohave suspected Whit Bibby of seditious practices would have been asabsurd as to have suspected the horse. Older men remembered that he hadonce been proud of his father, a captain in the Civil War--and afterwarda very drunken failure at farming--but the young fry had forgotten thatthere ever had been a Civil War.

Unconcealed in the sunshine of the late-March afternoon that touched theworn and ashen snow, Whit jogged up to the farmhouse of Truman Webb. Hehad left ten orders of fish, just fish, at farms along the way, but atWebb's he also left, not speaking of it, a bundle of pamphlets wrappedin very fishy newspaper.

By next morning these pamphlets had all been left in the post boxes offarmers beyond Keezmet, a dozen miles away.

Late the next night, Julian Falck drove Dr. Olmsted to the same TrumanWebb's. Now Mr. Webb had an ailing aunt. Up to a fortnight ago she hadnot needed the doctor often, but as all the countryside could, anddecidedly did, learn from listening in on the rural party telephoneline, 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 agood lookout."

Julian rapidly slid out, opened the rumble seat of the doctor's car, andthere was the astonishing appearance from the rumble of a tall man inurban morning coat and striped trousers, a broad felt hat under his arm,rising, rubbing himself, groaning with the pain of stretching hiscramped body. The doctor said:

"Truman, we've got a pretty important Eliza, with the bloodhounds rightafter him, tonight! Congressman Ingram--Comrade Webb."

"Huh! Never thought I'd live to be called one of these 'Comrades.' Butmighty pleased to see you, Congressman. We'll put you across the borderin Canada in two days--we've got some paths right through the woodsalong the border--and there's some good hot beans waiting for you rightnow."

The attic in which Mr. Ingram slept that night, an attic approached by aladder concealed behind a pile of trunks, was the "underground station"which, in the 1850's, when Truman's grandfather was agent, had shelteredseventy-two various black slaves escaping to Canada, and on the wallabove Ingram's weary threatened head was still to be seen, written incharcoal long ago, "Thou preparest a table for me in the presence ofmine enemies."

**

It was a little after six in the evening, near Tasbrough & Scarlett'squarries. John Pollikop, with his wrecker car, was towing Buck Titus, inhis automobile. They stopped now and then, and John looked at the motorin Buck's car very ostentatiously, in the sight of M.M. patrols, whoignored so obvious a companionship. They stopped once at the edge ofTasbrough's deepest pit. Buck strolled about, yawning, while John didsome more tinkering. "Right!" snapped Buck. Both of them leaped at theover-large toolbox in the back of John's car, lifted out each an armfulof copies of Vermont Vigilance and hurled them over the edge of thequarry. They scattered in the wind.

Many of them were gathered up and destroyed by Tasbrough's foremen, nextmorning, but at least a hundred, in the pockets of quarrymen, werestarted 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 havesomething good to send on to other agents. Listen! I've been quitechummy with Shad. No! Don't blow up! I know just how to yank his gun outof his holster if I should ever need to. And he got to boasting, and hetold me Frank Tasbrough and Shad and Commissioner Reek were all intogether on the racket, selling granite for public buildings, and hetold 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 thegraft in a little red notebook in his desk--of course old Franky wouldnever 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 awhile, 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 onlycomment our Candy makes is, 'That stove t' the Tasbroughs' don't drawwell. Couldn't bake a decent cake in a stove like that!'"

Chapter 27

Mary Greenhill, revenging the murdered Fowler, was the only one of theconspirators who seemed moved more by homicidal hate than by a certainincredulous feeling that it was all a good but slightly absurd game. Butto her, hate and the determination to kill were tonic. She soared upfrom the shadowed pit of grief, and her eyes lighted, her voice had atrembling gayety. She threw away her weeds and came out in defiantcolors--oh, they had to economize, these days, to put every availablepenny into the missionary fund of the New Underground, but Mary hadbecome 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 hisriskiest expeditions.

In mid-afternoon, Buck and Mary, looking very matrimonial, domesticallyaccompanied by David and the rather doubtful Foolish, ambled through thecenter of Burlington, where none of them were known--though a number ofdogs, city slickers and probably con-dogs, insisted to the rustic andembarrassed Foolish that they had met him somewhere.

It was Buck who muttered "Right!" from time to time, when they were freefrom being observed, but it was Mary who calmly, a yard or two fromM.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 ofher mink coat; one reaching from shoulder to waist. It had beenrecommended by John Pollikop, whose helpful lady had aforetime used justsuch a pocket for illicit booze. The crumpling had been done carefully.Seen from two yards away, the pamphlets looked like any waste paper, buteach was systematically so wadded up that the words, printed in bold redtype, "Haik himself kicked an old man to death" caught the eye. And,lying in corner trash baskets, in innocent toy wagons before hardwarestores, among oranges in a fruit store where they had gone to buy Davida bar of chocolate, they caught some hundreds of eyes in Burlington thatday.

On their way home, with David sitting in front beside Buck and Mary inthe back, she cried, "That will stir 'em up! But oh, when Daddy hasfinished 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 magazinecounter in Tyson's drugstore, she stole a dozen copies of the Readers'Digest and a dozen larger magazines. When she returned them, theylooked untouched, but each of the larger magazines contained a leaflet,"Get Ready to Join Walt Trowbridge," and each Digest had become thecover for a pamphlet: "Lies of the Corpo Press."

**

To serve as center of their plot, to be able to answer the telephone andreceive fugitives and put off suspicious snoopers twenty-four hours aday, when Buck and the rest might be gone, Lorinda chucked her smallremaining interest in the Beulah Valley Tavern and became Buck'shousekeeper, living in the place. There was scandal. But in a day whenit was increasingly hard to get enough bread and meat, the town folk hadlittle time to suck scandal like lollipops, and anyway, who could muchsuspect this nagging uplifter who so obviously preferred tuberculintests to toying with Corydon in the glade? And as Doremus was alwaysabout, as sometimes he stayed overnight, for the first time these timidlovers had space for passion.

It had never been their loyalty to the good Emma--since she was toocontented to be pitied, too sure of her necessary position in life to bejealous--so much as hatred of a shabby hole-and-corner intrigue whichhad made their love cautious and grudging. Neither of them was so simpleas to suppose that, even with quite decent people, love is always asmonogamic as bread and butter, yet neither of them liked sneaking.

Her room at Buck's, large and square and light, with old landscape papershowing an endlessness of little mandarins daintily stepping out ofsedan chairs beside pools laced with willows, with a four-poster, acolonial highboy, and a crazy-colored rag carpet, became in two days, sofast did one live now in time of revolution, the best-loved home Doremushad ever known. As eagerly as a young bridegroom he popped into and outof her room, and he was not overly particular about the state of hertoilet. And Buck knew all about it and just laughed.

Released now, Doremus saw her as physically more alluring. Withparochial superiority, he had noted, during vacations on Cape Cod, howoften the fluffy women of fashion when they stripped to bathing suitswere skinny, to him unwomanly, with thin shoulder blades and withbackbones as apparent as though they were chains fastened down theirbacks. They seemed passionate to him and a little devilish, with theirthin restless legs and avid lips, but he chuckled as he considered thatthe Lorinda whose prim gray suits and blouses seemed so much morevirginal than the gay, flaunting summer cottons of the Bright YoungThings was softer of skin to the touch, much richer in the curve fromshoulder to breast.

He rejoiced to know that she was always there in the house, that hecould interrupt the high seriousness of a tract on bond issues to dashout to the kitchen and brazenly let his arm slide round her waist.

She, the theoretically independent feminist, became flatteringlydemanding about every attention. Why hadn't he brought her some candyfrom town? Would he mind awfully calling up Julian for her? Why hadn'the remembered to bring her the book he had promised--well, would havepromised if she had only remembered to ask him for it? He trotted on hererrands, idiotically happy. Long ago Emma had reached the limit of herimagination in regard to demands. He was discovering that in love it isreally more blessed to give than to receive, a proverb about which, asan employer and as a steady fellow whom forgotten classmates regularlytried to touch for loans, he had been very suspicious.

**

He lay beside her, in the wide four-poster, at dawn, March dawn with theelm branches outside the window ugly and writhing in the wind, but withthe last coals still snapping in the fireplace, and he was utterlycontent. He glanced at Lorinda, who had on her sleeping face a frownthat made her look not older but schoolgirlish, a schoolgirl who wasfrowning comically over some small woe, and who defiantly clutched herold-fashioned lace-bordered pillow. He laughed. They were going to be soadventurous together! This little printing of pamphlets was only thebeginning of their revolutionary activities. They would penetrate intopress circles in Washington and get secret information (he was drowsilyvague about what information they were going to get and how they wouldever get it) which would explode the Corpo state. And with therevolution over, they would go to Bermuda, to Martinique--lovers onpurple peaks, by a purple sea--everything purple and grand. Or (and hesighed and became heroic as he exquisitely stretched and yawned in thewide warm bed) if they were defeated, if they were arrested andcondemned by the M.M.'s, they would die together, sneering at thefiring-squad, refusing to have their eyes bandaged, and their fame, likethat of Servetus and Matteotti and Professor Ferrer and the Haymarketmartyrs, would roll on forever, acclaimed by children waving littleflags----

"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 hiseyes and temples, and sturdily climbed out of bed, seeking her owncigarette.

"Doremus! It's been marvelous to have this companionship with you.But----" She looked a little timid, sitting cross-legged on therattan-topped stool before the old mahogany dressing table--no silver orlace or crystal was there, but only plain wooden hairbrush and scantluxury of small drugstore bottles. "But darling, this cause--oh, cursethat word 'cause'--can't I ever get free of it?--but anyway, this NewUnderground business seems to me so important, and I know you feel thatway too, but I've noticed that since we've settled down together, twoawful sentimentalists, you aren't so excited about writing your nicevenomous attacks, and I'm getting more cautious about going outdistributing tracts. I have a foolish idea I have to save my life, foryour sake. And I ought to be only thinking about saving my life for therevolution. 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 issimply a hold-over of your religious training. That you have a dutytoward the dull human race--which probably enjoys being bullied byWindrip and getting bread and circuses--except for the bread!"

"Of course it's religious, a revolutionary loyalty! Why not? It's one ofthe few real religious feelings. A rational, unsentimental Stalin isstill kind of a priest. No wonder most preachers hate the Reds andpreach 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 toBeecher Falls--you know, on the Canadian border--to take charge of theN.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. Hangit!"

"Linda!"

She would not look at him. She made much, too much, of grinding out hercigarette.

"Linda!"

"Yes?"

"You suggested this to Dimick! He never gave any orders till yousuggested 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 awayfrom you and get away from myself. The world's in chains, and I can't befree 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 awaytogether for one sweet year, when I was eighteen! Then I would havelived two whole lives. Well, nobody seems to be very lucky at turningthe clock back--almost twenty-five years back, too. I'm afraid Now is afact you can't dodge. And I've been getting so--just this last twoweeks, 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 ferretedout of Shad Ledue was drastically important to the N.U., but, likenecessary bits of a picture puzzle, when added to other details pickedup by Doremus and Buck and Mary and Father Perefixe, that trainedextractor of confessions, they showed up the rather simple schemes ofthis gang of Corpo racketeers who were so touchingly accepted by thePeople 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. Justthe two of us. Canoe and sleep in a pup tent. Oh, Sis, do you have tohave supper with Ledue and Staubmeyer tonight? I hate it. God, how Ihate 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 sothat tonight, when he chases good old Emil, and whatever foul femaleEmil may bring, out of the place, I'll get him to tell me somethingabout who they're planning to pinch next. I'm not scared of Shad, myJulian of jewelians."

He did not smile. He said, with a gravity that had been unknown to thelively college youth, "Do you realize, with your kidding yourself aboutbeing able to handle Comrade Shad so well, that he's husky as a gorillaand 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 in1914, anyone believes that kind of thing is more serious than busting anankle? 'A fate worse than death'! What nasty old side-whiskered deaconever invented that phrase? And how he must have rolled it on his chappedold lips! I can think of plenty worse fates--say, years of running anelevator. 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. (OhGod, darling, what a nasty swine that man is! I hate him fifty times asmuch as you do. Ugh!) But I'd be willing to have even that happen if Icould save one decent person from his bloody blackjack. I'm not theplaygirl of Pleasant Hill any more; I'm a frightened woman from MountTerror!"

**

It seemed, the whole thing, rather unreal to Sissy; a burlesqued versionof 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 tweedjacket, a kaleidoscopic Scotch sweater (from Minnesota), and white linenplus-fours, hadn't the absent-minded seductiveness that becomes a CitySlicker.

Ensign Emil Staubmeyer had showed up at Shad's new private suite at theStar Hotel with a grass widow who betrayed her gold teeth and who hadtried to repair the erosions in the fair field of her neck with overmuchtopsoil of brick-tinted powder. She was pretty dreadful. She was harderto tolerate than the rumbling Shad--a man for whom the chaplain mighteven have been a little sorry, after he was safely hanged. The syntheticwidow was always nudging herself at Emil and when, rather wearily, heobliged by poking her shoulder, she giggled, "Now you sssstop!"

Shad's suite was clean, and had some air. Beyond that there was nothingmuch to say. The "parlor" was firmly furnished in oak chairs and setteewith leather upholstery, and four pictures of marquises not doinganything interesting. The freshness of the linen spread on the brassbedstead in the other room fascinated Sissy uncomfortably.

Shad served them rye highballs with ginger ale from a quart bottle thathad first been opened at least a day ago, sandwiches with chicken andham that tasted of niter, and ice-cream with six colors but only twoflavors--both strawberry. Then he waited, not too patiently, looking asmuch like General Göring as possible, for Emil and his woman to get thedevil out of here, and for Sissy to acknowledge his virile charms. Heonly grunted at Emil's pedagogic little jokes, and the man of cultureabruptly 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, ashe flopped into the corner of the leather settee.

"Now I don't know whether I will or not!" It nauseated her a gooddeal, but she made herself as pertly provocative as she could. Sheminced to the settee, and sat just far enough from his hulking side forhim to reach over and draw her toward him. She observed him cynically,recalling her experience with most of the Boys... though not withJulian... well, not so much with Julian. They always, all of them,went through the same procedure, heavily pretending that there was nosystem in their manual proposals; and to a girl of spirit, the chiefdiversion in the whole business was watching their smirking pride intheir technique. The only variation, ever, was whether they started inat 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 ofan eel. She moved away with a maidenly alarm which mocked the rôle ofMata 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 aCounty Commissioner now! and a Battalion-Leader! and prob'ly pretty soonI'll be a Commander!" He spoke the sacred names with awe. It was thetwentieth 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 inkindling!"

"Oh, Shad dear! Why, I always think of you as being just about my oldestplaymate! The way I used to tag after you and ask you could I run thelawnmower! 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 wereashamed of having worked for us! Why, don't you know that, when he was aboy, Daddy used to work as a farm hand, and split wood and tend lawn forthe neighbors and all that, and he was awful glad to get the money?" Shereflected that this thumping and entirely impromptu lie wasbeautiful.... 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 raketoo! Never knew that! You know, he ain't such a bad old coot--just awfulstubborn."

"You do like him, don't you, Shad! Nobody knows how sweet he is--Imean, in these sort of complicated days, we've got to protect himagainst people that might not understand him, against outsiders, don'tyou think so, Shad? You will protect him!"

"Well, I'll do what I can," said the Battalion-Leader with such fatcomplacency that Sissy almost slapped him. "That is, as long as hebehaves himself, baby, and don't get mixed up with any of these Redrebels... and as long as you feel like being nice to a fella!" Hepulled her toward him as though he were hauling a bag of grain out of awagon.

"Oh! Shad! You frighten me! Oh, you must be gentle! A big, strong manlike you can afford to be gentle. It's only the sissies that have to getrough. And you're so strong!"

"Well, I guess I can still feed myself! Say, talking about sissies, whatdo you see in a light-waisted mollycoddle like Julian? You don't reallylike him, do you?"

"Oh, you know how it is," she said, trying without too much obviousnessto 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 withouttaking any of the risk, the amateur secret service operative, Sissy, hada slightly confused aim. She was going to get from Shad informationvaluable to the N.U. Rapidly rehearsing it in her imagination, the whileshe was supposed to be weakened by the charm of leaning against Shad'smeaty shoulder, she heard herself teasing him into giving her the nameof some citizen whom the M.M.'s were about to arrest, slickly freeingherself from him, dashing out to find Julian--oh, hang it, why hadn'tshe made an engagement with Julian for that night?--well, he'd either beat home or out driving Dr. Olmsted--Julian's melodramatically dashing tothe home of the destined victim and starting him for the Canadian borderbefore dawn.... And it might be a good idea for the refugee to tackon 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 ofhectic story-telling, neatly illustrated in color by her fancy, whileshe pretended that she had to blow her nose and thus had an excuse tosit straight. Edging another inch or two away, she purred, "But ofcourse it isn't just physical strength, Shad. You have so much powerpolitically. My! I imagine you could send almost anybody in Fort Beulahoff 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 outeverything he knows--and that's plenty, you can bet your sweet life onthat! Nothing doing, baby."

"Shad, I'd just--I'd just love to see an M.M. squad arresting somebodyonce. It must be dreadfully exciting!

"Oh, it's exciting enough, all right, all right! When the poor chumpstry to resist, and you throw their radio out of the window! Or when thefellow's wife gets fresh and shoots off her mouth too much, and so youjust teach her a little lesson by letting her look on while you trip himup on the floor and beat him up--maybe that sounds a little rough, butyou see, in the long run it's the best thing you can do for thesebeggars, because it teaches 'em to not get ugly."

"But--you won't think I'm horrid and unwomanly, will you?--but I wouldlike 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 foryou 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, hishand across her breasts. She struggled, thoroughly frightened, no longercynical and sophisticated. She shrieked, "Oh don't--don't!" She wept,real tears, more from anger than from modesty. He loosened his grip alittle, and she had the inspiration to sob, "Oh, Shad, if you reallywant me to love you, you must give me time! You wouldn't want me to be ahussy that you could do anything you wanted to with--you, in yourposition? 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 thebedroom, on a flat-topped desk, she saw a bunch of two or three Yalekeys. Keys to his office, to secret cupboards and drawers with Corpoplans! Undoubtedly! Her imagination in one second pictured her making arubbing of the keys, getting John Pollikop, that omnifarious mechanic,to file substitute keys, herself and Julian somehow or other sneakinginto 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--sosilly! 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 lifeI've got some face powder--right in the medicine cabinet--twokinds--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 andshut the bedroom door, and locked it.

She tore across to the keys. She snatched up a pad of yellowscratch-paper and a pencil, and tried to make a rubbing of a key as onceshe 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 tinynotches which were the trick would not come clear. In panic, sheexperimented with a sheet of carbon paper, then toilet paper, dry andwet. She could not get a mold. She pressed the key into a prop hotelcandle in a china stick by Shad's bed. The candle was too hard. So wasthe bathroom soap. And Shad was now trying the knob of the door,remarking "Damn!" then bellowing, "Whayuh doin' in there? Gone tosleep?"

"Be right out!" She replaced the keys, threw the yellow paper and thecarbon paper out of the window, replaced the candle and soap, slappedher face with a dry towel, dashed on powder as though she were workingagainst time at plastering a wall, and sauntered back into the parlor.Shad looked hopeful. In panic she saw that now, before he comfortablysat down to it and became passionate again, was her one time to escape.She snatched up hat and coat, said wistfully, "Another night, Shad--youmust 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 inhis 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 bawlingabout! 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: tojoin the M.M.'s, put on uniform, "work from within," and supply Doremuswith information.

"I can get Leo Quinn--you know?--Dad's a conductor on therailroad?--used to play basketball in high school?--I can get him todrive Dr. Olmsted for me, and generally run errands for the N.U. He'sgot grit, and he hates the Corpos. But look, Sissy--look, Mr. Jessup--inorder to get the M.M.'s to trust me, I've got to pretend to have afierce bust-up with you and all our friends. Look! Sissy and I will walkup 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 upPleasant Hill from the Jessups', where they had played house aschildren. Because the road curved, the rendezvous could be entered fromfour or five directions. There he was to hand on to her his reports ofM.M. plans.

But when he first crept into the grove at night and she nervously turnedher pocket torch on him, she shrieked at seeing him in M.M. uniform, asan inspector. That blue tunic and slanting forage cap which, in thecinema and history books, had meant youth and hope, meant only deathnow.... She wondered if in 1864 it had not meant death more thanmoonlight and magnolias to most women. She sprang to him, holding him asif to protect him against his own uniform, and in the peril anduncertainty now of their love, Sissy began to grow up.

Chapter 29

The propaganda throughout the country was not all to the NewUnderground; not even most of it; and though the pamphleteers for theN.U., at home and exiled abroad, included hundreds of the most capableprofessional journalists of America, they were cramped by a certainrespect for facts which never enfeebled the press-agents for Corpoism.And the Corpos had a notable staff. It included college presidents, someof the most renowned among the radio announcers who aforetime hadcrooned their affection for mouth washes and noninsomniac coffee, famousex-war-correspondents, ex-governors, former vice-presidents of theAmerican Federation of Labor, and no less an artist than the publicrelations counsel of a princely corporation of electrical-goodsmanufacturers.

The newspapers everywhere might no longer be so wishily-washily liberalas to print the opinions of non-Corpos; they might give but little newsfrom those old-fashioned and democratic countries, Great Britain,France, and the Scandinavian states; might indeed print almost noforeign news, except as regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopiagood roads, trains on time, freedom from beggars and from men of honor,and all the other spiritual benefactions of Roman civilization. But, onthe other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic strips--themost popular was a very funny one about a preposterous New Undergroundcrank, who wore mortuary black with a high hat decorated with crêpe andwho was always being comically beaten up by M.M.'s. Never had therebeen, even in the days when Mr. Hearst was freeing Cuba, so many largered headlines. Never so many dramatic drawings of murders--the murdererswere always notorious anti-Corpos. Never such a wealth of literature,worthy its twenty-four-hour immortality, as the articles proving, andproving by figures, that American wages were universally higher,commodities universally lower-priced, war budgets smaller but the armyand its equipment much larger, than ever in history. Never suchrighteous polemics as the proofs that all non-Corpos were Communists.

Almost daily, Windrip, Sarason, Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of WarLuthorne, or Vice-President Perley Beecroft humbly addressed theirMasters, the great General Public, on the radio, and congratulated themon making a new world by their example of American solidarity--marchingshoulder to shoulder under the Grand Old Flag, comrades in the blessingsof peace and comrades in the joys of war to come.

Much-heralded movies, subsidized by the government (and could there beany better proof of the attention paid by Dr. Macgoblin and the otherNazi leaders to the arts than the fact that movie actors who before thedays of the Chief were receiving only fifteen hundred gold dollars aweek were now getting five thousand?), showed the M.M.'s driving armoredmotors 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 isa Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence areso marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe."

For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The Chief wasphotographed playing poker, in shirt-sleeves and with a derby on theback of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur, and a pair of ruggedsteelworkers. Dr. Macgoblin in person led an Elks' brass band and divedin competition with the Atlantic City bathing-beauties. It was reputablyreported that M.M.'s apologized to political prisoners for having toarrest them, and that the prisoners joked amiably with the guards...at first.

All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and surprisedscientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just as sorely inthe clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of Prussia.

Doremus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair-sofa--thegallant Communist, Karl Billinger, the gallant anti-Communist,Tchernavin, and the gallant neutral, Lorant--began to see something likea biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships. The universalapprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same methods ofarrest--sudden pounding on the door late at night, the squad of policepushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene oaths at the frightenedwomen, the third degree by young snipe of officials, the accompanyingblows and then the formal beatings, when the prisoner is forced to countthe strokes until he faints, the leprous beds and the sour stew, guardsjokingly shooting round and round a prisoner who believes he is beingexecuted, the waiting in solitude to know what will happen, till men gomad and hang themselves----

Thus had things gone in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in Italyand Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China. Not verydifferent had it been under the blessings of liberty and fraternity inthe French Revolution. All dictators followed the same routine oftorture, 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 hadhad in central Europe.

**

America followed, too, the same ingenious finances as Europe. Windriphad promised to make everybody richer, and had contrived to makeeverybody, except for a few hundred bankers and industrialists andsoldiers, much poorer. He needed no higher mathematicians to produce hisfinancial statements: any ordinary press-agent could do them. To show a100 per cent economy in military expenditures, while increasing theestablishment 700 per cent, it had been necessary only to charge up allexpenditures for the Minute Men to non-military departments, so thattheir training in the art of bayonet-sticking was debited to theDepartment of Education. To show an increase in average wages one didtricks with "categories of labor" and "required minimum wages," andforgot to state how many workers ever did become entitled to the"minimum," and how much was charged as wages, on the books, for food andshelter for the millions in the labor camps.

It all made dazzling reading. There had never been more elegant andromantic fiction.

Even loyal Corpos began to wonder why the armed forces, army and M.M.'stogether, were being so increased. Was a frightened Windrip gettingready to defend himself against a rising of the whole nation? Did heplan to attack all of North and South America and make himself anemperor? Or both? In any case, the forces were so swollen that even withits 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 byfines and threats, then stripped the farmer of all he had, for export atdepreciated prices. But at home the prices were not depreciated butincreased, so that the more we exported, the less the industrial workerin America had to eat. And really zealous County Commissioners took fromthe farmer (after the patriotic manner of many Mid-Western counties in1918) even his seed grain, so that he could grow no more, and on thevery acres where once he had raised superfluous wheat he now starved forbread. And while he was starving, the Commissioners continued to try tomake him pay for the Corpo bonds which he had been made to buy on theinstalment plan.

But still, when he did finally starve to death, none of these thingsworried him.

There were bread lines now in Fort Beulah, once or twice a week.

The hardest phenomenon of dictatorship for a Doremus to understand, evenwhen he saw it daily in his own street, was the steady diminution ofgayety 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 ofworry and insecurity, in the image of its patron saint, Lincoln of therollicking stories and the tragic heart. But at least there had beenhearty greetings, man to man; there had been clamorous jazz for dancing,and the lively, slangy catcalls of young people, and the nervousblatting 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 taxesor increased taxes on motorcars, movies, theaters, dances, and ice-creamsodas. There was a tax on playing a phonograph or radio in anyrestaurant. Lee Sarason, himself a bachelor, conceived of super-taxingbachelors and spinsters, and contrariwise of taxing all weddings atwhich more than five persons were present.

Even the most reckless youngsters went less and less to publicentertainments, because no one not ostentatiously in uniform cared to benoticed, these days. It was impossible to sit in a public place withoutwondering which spies were watching you. So all the world stayedhome--and jumped anxiously at every passing footstep, every telephonering, every tap of an ivy sprig on the window.

**

The score of people definitely pledged to the New Underground were theonly persons to whom Doremus dared talk about anything moreincriminating than whether it was likely to rain, though he had been thefriendliest gossip in town. Always it had taken ten minutes longer thanwas humanly possible for him to walk to the Informer office, becausehe 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 bysight and thus the more dangerous, to watch them; but also they hadthousands of comrades from whom to seek encouragement, exciting personaltattle, shop talk, and the assurance that they were not altogetheridiotic to risk their lives for a mistress so ungrateful as Revolution.Those secret flats in great cities--perhaps some of them really werefilled with the rosy glow they had in fiction. But the Fort Beulahs,anywhere in the world, were so isolated, the conspirators souninspiringly familiar one to another, that only by inexplicable faithcould one go on.

Now that Lorinda was gone, there certainly was nothing very diverting insneaking round corners, trying to look like somebody else, merely tomeet Buck and Dan Wilgus and that good woman, Sissy!

Buck and he and the rest--they were such amateurs. They needed theguidance of veteran agitators like Mr. Ailey and Mr. Bailey and Mr.Cailey.

Their feeble pamphlets, their smearily printed newspaper, seemed futileagainst the enormous blare of Corpo propaganda. It seemed worse thanfutile, it seemed insane, to risk martyrdom in a world where Fascistspersecuted 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 andJews persecuted their debtors; where every statesman and clergymanpraised Peace and brightly asserted that the only way to get Peace wasto get ready for War.

What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after righteousnessin a world which so hated righteousness? Why do anything except eat andread and make love and provide for sleep that should be secure againstdisturbance 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 beencarrying on for some three months, Mr. Francis Tasbrough, the goldenquarryman, 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 acigar?"

"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 itin the Provincial University, at New York?"

"Oh, fine--fine. He says the athletics are grand. They're getting PrimoCamera over to coach in tennis next year--I think it's Camera--I thinkit'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 anewspaperman--or used to be, I mean, but----The fact is (and this isinside stuff; official), there's going to be some governmentalpromotions all along the line--this is confidential, and it comes to mestraight from the Provincial Commissioner, Colonel Haik. Luthorne isfinished as Secretary of War--he's a nice fellow, but he hasn't got asmuch publicity for the Corpos out of his office as the Chief expectedhim to. Haik is to have his job, and also take over the position of HighMarshal of the Minute Men from Lee Sarason--I suppose Sarason has toomuch to do. Well then, John Sullivan Reek is slated to be ProvincialCommissioner; that leaves the office of District Commissioner forVermont-New Hampshire empty, and I'm one of the people being seriouslyconsidered. I've done a lot of speaking for the Corpos, and I know DeweyHaik very well--I was able to advise him about erecting publicbuildings. Of course there's none of the County Commissioners aroundhere that measure up to a district commissionership--not even Dr.Staubmeyer--certainly not Shad Ledue. Now if you could see your wayclear to throw in with me, your influence would help----"

"Good heavens, Frank, the worst thing you could have happen, if you wantthe job, is to have me favor you! The Corpos don't like me. Oh, ofcourse they know I'm loyal, not one of these dirty, sneakinganti-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 theydon't like you, the Corpos respect you, and they know how long you'vebeen important in the State. We'd all be greatly pleased if you came outand joined us. Now just suppose you did so and let people know that itwas my influence that converted you to Corpoism. That might give mequite a leg-up. And between old friends like us, Remus, I can tell youthat this job of District Commissioner would be useful to me in thequarry business, aside from the social advantages. And if I got theposition, I can promise you that I'd either get the Informer takenaway from Staubmeyer and that dirty little stinker, Itchitt, and givenback to you to run absolutely as you pleased--providing, of course, youhad the sense to keep from criticizing the Chief and the State. Or, ifyou'd rather, I think I could probably wangle a job for you as militaryjudge (they don't necessarily have to be lawyers) or maybe PresidentPeaseley's job as District Director of Education--you'd have a lot offun out of that!--awfully amusing the way all the teachers kiss theDirector's foot! Come on, old man! Think of all the fun we used to havein the old days! Come to your senses and face the inevitable and join usand fix up some good publicity for me. How about it--huh huh?"

Doremus reflected that the worst trial of a revolutionary propagandistwas not risking his life, but having to be civil to people likeFuture-Commissioner Tasbrough.

He supposed that his voice was polite as he muttered, "Afraid I'm tooold to try it, Frank," but apparently Tasbrough was offended. He sprangup and tramped away grumbling, "Oh, very well then!"

"And I didn't give him a chance to say anything about being realistic orbreaking eggs to make an omelet," regretted Doremus.

The next day Malcolm Tasbrough, meeting Sissy on the street, made hisbeefy most of cutting her. At the time the Jessups thought that was veryamusing. They thought the occasion less amusing when Malcolm chasedlittle David out of the Tasbrough apple orchard, which he had been wontto use as the Great Western Forest where at any time one was rather morethan likely to meet Kit Carson, Robin Hood, and Colonel Lindberghhunting together.

Having only Frank's word for it, Doremus could do no more than hint inVermont Vigilance that Colonel Dewey Haik was to be made Secretary ofWar, and give Haik's actual military record, which included the factsthat as a first lieutenant in France in 1918, he had been under fire forless than fifteen minutes, and that his one real triumph had beencommanding state militia during a strike in Oregon, when eleven strikershad 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 waskeeping his mouth shut when, toward the end of June, a newspaperman atBattington, Vermont, was suddenly arrested as editor of VermontVigilance and author of all the pamphlets by Doremus and Lorinda. Hewent to concentration camp. Buck and Dan Wilgus and Sissy preventedDoremus from confessing, and from even going to call on the victim, andwhen, with Lorinda no longer there as confidante, Doremus tried toexplain it all to Emma, she said, Wasn't it lucky that the governmenthad blamed somebody else!

Emma had worked out the theory that the N.U. activity was some sort of anaughty game which kept her boy, Doremus, busy after his retirement. Hewas mildly nagging the Corpos. She wasn't sure that it was really niceto nag the legal authorities, but still, for a little fellow, herDoremus had always been surprisingly spunky--just like (she oftenconfided to Sissy) a spunky little Scotch terrier she had owned when shewas a girl--Mr. McNabbit its name had been, a little Scotch terrier, butmy! so spunky he acted like he was a regular lion!

She was rather glad that Lorinda was gone, though she liked Lorinda andworried about how well she might do with a tea room in a new town, atown where she had never lived. But she just couldn't help feeling (sheconfided not only to Sissy but to Mary and Buck) that Lorinda, with allher wild crazy ideas about women's rights, and workmen being just asgood as their employers, had a bad influence on Doremus's tendency toshow off and shock people. (She mildly wondered why Buck and Sissysnorted so. She hadn't meant to say anything particularly funny!)

For too many years she had been used to Doremus's irregular routine tohave her sleep disturbed by his returning from Buck's at the impropertime to which she referred as "at all hours," but she did wish he wouldbe "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 likeJohn Pollikop, Dan Wilgus, Daniel Babcock, and Pete Vutong--my! somepeople said Pete couldn't even read and write, and Doremus so educatedand all! Why didn't he see more of lovely people like Frank Tasbroughand Professor Staubmeyer and Mr. R. C. Crowley and this new friend ofhis, the Hon. John Sullivan Reek?

Why couldn't he keep out of politics? She'd always said they were nooccupation for a gentleman!

Like David, now ten years old (and like twenty or thirty million otherAmericans, from one to a hundred, but all of the same mental age), Emmathought the marching M.M.'s were a very fine show indeed, so much likemovies of the Civil War, really quite educational; and while of courseif Doremus didn't care for President Windrip, she was opposed to himalso, 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 hadpredicted. Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the NortheasternProvince, became Secretary of War and High Marshal of M.M.'s, while theformer secretary, Colonel Luthorne, retired to Kansas and the realestate business and was well spoken of by all business men for beingthus willing to give up the grandeur of Washington for duty towardpractical affairs and his family, who were throughout the press depictedas having frequently missed him. It was rumored in N.U. cells that Haikmight go higher even than Secretary of War; that Windrip was worried bythe forced growth of a certain effeminacy in Lee Sarason under the arclight of glory.

Francis Tasbrough was elevated to District Commissionership at Hanover.But Mr. Sullivan Reek did not in series go on to be ProvincialCommissioner. It was said that he had too many friends among just theold-line politicians whose jobs the Corpos were so enthusiasticallytaking. No, the new Provincial Commissioner, viceroy and general, wasMilitary Judge Effingham Swan, the one man whom Mary Jessup Greenhillhated 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 commissionersarrested, tried, and imprisoned, all within twenty-four hours, and aneighty-year-old woman, mother of a New Underground agent but nototherwise accused of wickedness, penned in a concentration camp for themore desperate traitors. It was in a disused quarry which was always afoot deep in water. After he had sentenced her, Swan was said to havebowed to her most courteously.

***

The New Underground sent out warning, from headquarters in Montreal, fora general tightening up of precautions against being caught distributingpropaganda. Agents were disappearing rather alarmingly.

Buck scoffed, but Doremus was nervous. He noticed that the same strangeman, ostensibly a drummer, a large man with unpleasant eyes, had twicegot into conversation with him in the Hotel Wessex lobby, and tooobviously hinted that he was anti-Corpo and would love to have Doremussay something nasty about the Chief and the M.M.'s.

Doremus became cautious about going out to Buck's. He parked his car inhalf-a-dozen different wood-roads and crept afoot to the secretbasement.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, 1938, he had a notion thathe was being followed, so closely did a car with red-tinted headlights,anxiously watched in his rear-view mirror, stick behind him as he tookthe Keezmet highway down to Buck's. He turned up a side road, downanother. The spy car followed. He stopped, in a driveway on theleft-hand side of the road, and angrily stepped out, in time to see theother car pass, with a man who looked like Shad Ledue driving. He swunground then and, without concealment, bolted for Buck's.

In the basement, Buck was contentedly tying up bundles of theVigilance, while Father Perefixe, in his shirt-sleeves, vest open andblack dickey swinging beneath his reversed collar, sat at a plain pinetable, writing a warning to New England Catholics that though the Corposhad, unlike the Nazis in Germany, been shrewd enough to flatterprelates, they had lowered the wages of French-Canadian Catholic millhands and imprisoned their leaders just as severely as in the case ofthe 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 becommitting a venial or a mortal sin by publishing this littlemasterpiece--the work of my favorite author--without the Bishop'simprimatur?"

"Stephen! Buck! I think they're on to us! Maybe we've got to fold upalready and get the press and type out of here!" He told of beingshadowed. He telephoned to Julian, at M.M. headquarters, and (sincethere were too many French-Canadian inspectors about for him to dare touse his brand of French) he telephoned in the fine new German he hadbeen learning by translation:

"Denks du ihr Freunds dere haben a Idee die letzt Tag von vot ve machhere?"

And the college-bred Julian had so much international culture as to beable 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 roundthe black viking of a man. "Just now when I came in I thought I heardsomething in the bushes, here in the yard, near the house, and before Ithought, I flashed my torch on him, and by golly if it wasn't ArasDilley, and not in uniform--and you know how Aras loves his God--excuseme, Father--how he loves his uniform. He was disguised! Sure! Inoveralls! 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 Idon'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 inTruman Webb's attic. Stephen: get John Pollikop and Mungo Kitterick andPete Vutong on the phone--get 'em here, quick--tell John to stop by andtell Julian to come as soon as he can. Dan: start dismantling the press.Buck: bundle up all the literature." As he spoke, Doremus was wrappingtype in scraps of newspaper. And at three next morning, before light,Pollikop was driving toward Truman Webb's farmhouse the entire equipmentof 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 andEmil Staubmeyer, to a poker session at Buck's. They came, with alacrity.They found Buck, Doremus, Mungo Kitterick, and Doc Itchitt--the last anentirely innocent participant in certain deceptions.

They played in Buck's parlor. But during the evening Buck announced thatanyone wanting beer instead of whisky would find it in a tub of ice inthe basement, and that anyone wishing to wash his hands would find twobathrooms upstairs.

Shad hastily went for beer. Doc Itchitt even more hastily went to washhis hands. Both of them were gone much longer than one would haveexpected.

When the party broke up and Buck and Doremus were alone, Buck shriekedwith bucolic mirth: "I could scarcely keep a straight face when I heardgood old Shad opening the cupboards and taking a fine long look-see forpamphlets down in the basement. Well, Cap'n Jessup, that about endstheir suspicion of this place as a den of traitors, I guess! God, butisn'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 ofthe thirtieth, hiding the sheets under pages of newspaper in theFranklin stove in his study, so that he could touch them off with amatch in case of a raid--a trick he had learned from Karl Billinger'santi-Nazi Fatherland.

This new opus was devoted to murders ordered by Commissioner EffinghamSwan.

On the first and second of July, when he sauntered uptown, he was rathernoticeably encountered by the same weighty drummer who had picked him upin the Hotel Wessex lobby before, and who now insisted on their having adrink together. Doremus escaped, and was conscious that he was beingfollowed by an unknown young man, flamboyant in an apricot-colored poloshirt and gray bags, whom he recognized as having worn M.M. uniform at aparade in June. On July third, rather panicky, Doremus drove to TrumanWebb's, taking an hour of zigzagging to do it, and warned Truman not topermit any more printing till he should have a release.

When Doremus went home, Sissy lightly informed him that Shad hadinsisted 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 afraidof him, surrounded by his ready playmates.

That night of the third, Doremus slept only in sick spasms. He wasreasonlessly convinced that he would be arrested before dawn. The nightwas overcast and electric and uneasy. The crickets sounded as thoughthey were piping under compulsion, in a rhythm of terror. He laythrobbing to their sound. He wanted to flee--but how and where, and howcould he leave his threatened family? For the first time in years hewished that he were sleeping beside the unperturbable Emma, beside hersmall earthy hillock of body. He laughed at himself. What could Emma doto 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 ofhearing her breathe, and the fiercer Mary stir in slumber, and Sissy'soccasional young whimper.

He was awakened before dawn by early firecrackers. He heard the trampingof feet. He lay taut. Then he awoke again, at seven-thirty, and wasslightly angry that nothing happened.

**

The M.M.'s brought out their burnished helmets and all the rideablehorses in the neighborhood--some of them known as most superiorplow-horses--for the great celebration of the New Freedom on the morningof Fourth of July. There was no post of the American Legion in thejaunty parade. That organization had been completely suppressed, and anumber of American Legion leaders had been shot. Others had tactfullytaken posts in the M.M. itself.

The troops, in hollow square, with the ordinary citizenry humbly jammedin behind them and the Jessup family rather hoity-toity on theoutskirts, were addressed by Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, a fine ruddy oldrooster who could say "Cock-a-doodle-do" with more profundity than anyfowl since Æsop. He announced that the Chief had extraordinaryresemblances to Washington, Jefferson, and William B. McKinley, and toNapoleon on his better days.

The trumpets blew, the M.M.'s gallantly marched off nowhere inparticular, and Doremus went home, feeling much better after his laugh.Following noon dinner, since it was raining, he proposed a game ofcontract to Emma, Mary, and Sissy--with Mrs. Candy as volunteer umpire.

But the thunder of the hill country disquieted him. Whenever he wasdummy, he ambled to a window. The rain ceased; the sun came out for afalse, hesitating moment, and the wet grass looked unreal. Clouds withtorn bottoms, like the hem of a ragged skirt, were driven down thevalley, cutting off the bulk of Mount Faithful; the sun went out as in amammoth 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, thewhole knowable world seemed washed out. Through the deluge he saw a hugecar flash, the great wheels throwing up fountains. "Wonder what make ofcar that is? Must be a sixteen-cylinder Cadillac, I guess," reflectedDoremus. The car swerved into his own gateway, almost knocking down agatepost, and stopped with a jar at his porch. From it leaped fiveMinute Men, black waterproof capes over their uniforms. Before he couldquite get through the reflection that he recognized none of them, theywere there in the room. The leader, an ensign (and most certainlyDoremus did not recognize him) marched up to Doremus, looked at himcasually, and struck him full in the face.

Except for the one light pink of the bayonet when he had been arrestedbefore, except for an occasional toothache or headache, or a smart whenhe had banged a fingernail, Doremus Jessup had not for thirty yearsknown authentic pain. It was as incredible as it was horrifying, thistorture in his eyes and nose and crushed mouth. He stood bent, gasping,and the Ensign again smashed his face, and observed, "You are underarrest."

Mary had launched herself on the Ensign, was hitting at him with a chinaash tray. Two M.M.'s dragged her off, threw her on the couch, and one ofthem pinned her there. The other two guards were bulking over theparalyzed 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 theshelves and hurling them on the floor, so that the covers split, andwith their pistol butts smashing vases and lamp shades and smalloccasional tables. One of them tattooed a rough M M on the whitepaneling 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 feltlike death itself, and Doremus writhed on the floor. He heard themtramping upstairs. He remembered then that his manuscript about themurders by Provincial Commissioner Effingham Swan was hidden in theFranklin stove in his study.

The sound of their smashing of furniture in the bedrooms on the secondfloor was like that of a dozen wood-choppers gone mad.

In all his agony, Doremus struggled to get up--to set fire to the papersin 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 everhappened?) But his vision was too blurred, his mind too bruised, to seeanything clearly. Staggering, sometimes creeping on his hands and knees,he did actually get past the men in the bedrooms and up the stairs tothe third floor and his study.

He was in time to see the Ensign throwing his best-beloved books and hisletter files, accumulated these twenty years, out of the study window,to see him search the papers in the Franklin stove, look up withcheerful 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' CommissionerTasbrough--friends of mine," stammered Doremus.

"Don't know a thing about them. I'm running this show," the Ensignchuckled, and slapped Doremus, not very painfully, merely with ashamefulness as great as Doremus's when he realized that he had been socowardly as to appeal to Shad and Francis. He did not open his mouthagain, did not whimper nor even amuse the troopers by vainly appealingon behalf of the women, as he was hustled down two flights ofstairs--they threw him down the lower flight and he landed on his rawshoulder--and out to the big car.

The M.M. driver, who had been waiting behind the wheel, already had theengine' running. The car whined away, threatening every instant to skid.But the Doremus who had been queasy about skidding did not notice. Whatcould he do about it, anyway? He was helpless between two troopers inthe back seat, and his powerlessness to make the driver slow up seemedpart of all his powerlessness before the dictator's power... he whohad always so taken it for granted that in his dignity and socialsecurity 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 thecourthouse. He resolved that when he was led before Shad he would sorebuke the scoundrel that he would not forget it. But Doremus was nottaken into the courthouse. He was kicked toward a large, black-painted,unlettered truck by the entrance--literally kicked, while even in hisbewildered anguish he speculated, "I wonder which is worse?--thephysical pain of being kicked, or the mental humiliation of being turnedinto a slave? Hell! Don't be sophistical! It's the pain in the behindthat 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!" Itwas the voice of Buck Titus, and with him as prisoners were Truman Webband 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 lurchaway and they were thrown against one another. Once Doremus spoketruthfully, "I don't know how to tell you how ghastly sorry I am to havegot 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 ofsuffering that even though his back winced as it bounced against therough floor and his face was all one neuralgia, he drowsed and woke toterror, drowsed and woke, drowsed and woke to his own helpless wailing.

The truck stopped. The doors were opened on lights thick among whitebrick buildings. He hazily saw that they were on the one-time Dartmouthcampus--headquarters now of the Corpo District Commissioner.

That commissioner was his old acquaintance Francis Tasbrough! He wouldbe released! They would be freed, all four!

The incredulity of his humiliation cleared away. He came out of his sickfear like a shipwrecked man sighting an approaching boat.

But he did not see Tasbrough. The M.M.'s, silent save for mechanicalcursing, drove him into a hallway, into a cell which had once been partof a sedate classroom, left him with a final clout on the head. Hedropped on a wooden pallet with a straw pillow and was instantly asleep.He was too dazed--he who usually looked recordingly at places--to notethen or afterward what his cell was like, except that it appeared to befilled with sulphuric fumes from a locomotive engine.

When he came to, his face seemed frozen stiff. His coat was torn, andfoul with the smell of vomit. He felt degraded, as though he had donesomething shameful.

His door was violently opened, a dirt-clotted bowl of feeble coffee,with a crust of bread faintly smeared with oleomargarine, was thrust athim, and after he had given them up, nauseated, he was marched out intothe corridor, by two guards, just as he wanted to go to the toilet. Eventhat he could forget in the paralysis of fear. One guard seized him bythe trim small beard and yanked it, laughing very much. "Always did wantto see whether a billygoat whisker would pull out or not!" snickered theguard. While he was thus tormented, Doremus received a crack behind hisear from the other man, and a scolding command, "Come on, goat! Want usto milk you? You dirty little so-and-so! What you in for? You look likea little Kike tailor, you little ----"

"Him?" the other scoffed. "Naw! He's some kind of a half-eared hicknewspaper editor--they'll sure shoot him--sedition--But I hope they'llbeat hell out of him first for being such a bum editor."

"Him? An editor? Say! Listen! I got a swell idea. Hey! Fellas!" Four orfive 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 hewrites! Lookit!"

The guard dashed down the corridor to a door with the sign "Gents" hungout in front of it, came back with paper, not clean, threw it in frontof Doremus, and yammered, "Come on, boss. Show us how you write yourpieces! 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 itthere, while his mates giggled. They were interrupted by an officer,commanding, though leniently, "Come on, boys, cut out the monkeyshinesand take this ---- to the bull pen. Trial this morning."

Doremus was led to a dirty room in which half-a-dozen prisoners werewaiting. One of them was Buck Titus. Over one eye Buck had a slatternlybandage which had so loosened as to show that his forehead was cut tothe bone. Buck managed to wink jovially. Doremus tried, vainly, to keepfrom sobbing.

He waited an hour, standing, arms tight at his side, at the demands ofan ugly-faced guard, snapping a dog whip with which he twice slashedDoremus 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 todeath. The cry faded into a choked gasping. When Buck was led out of theinner room, his face was as dirty and as pale as his bandage, over whichblood was now creeping. The man at the door of the inner room jerked histhumb 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 theEnsign who had arrested him yesterday, sitting at a table, runningthrough 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 headback, pried open his jaws, and poured in a quart of castor oil. Theytore 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 himwith a one-piece steel fishing rod. Each stroke cut into the flesh ofhis back, and they beat him slowly, relishing it, to keep him fromfainting too quickly. But he was unconscious when, to the guards' greatdiversion, the castor oil took effect. Indeed he did not know it till hefound himself limp on a messy piece of gunnysacking on the floor of hiscell.

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 youtill you do!"

Though he was sicker than he had ever been in his life, yet he was alsoangrier; too angry to admit anything whatever, even to save his wreckedlife. He simply snarled "No." But on the third beating he savagelywondered if "No" was now a truthful answer. After each questioning hewas pounded again with fists, but not lashed with the steel rod, becausethe headquarters doctor had forbidden it.

He was a sporty-looking young doctor in plus-fours. He yawned at theguards, 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 adoctor, and you associate with these murderers?"

"Oh, shut up, you little ----! Dirty traitors like you deserve to bebeaten to death--and maybe you will be, but I think the boys ought tosave you for the trial!" The doctor showed his scientific mettle bytwisting 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, byguards who complained of the inhuman callousness of their officers inmaking them work so late. They amused themselves by using an old harnessstrap, with a buckle on it, to beat him.

He almost broke down when the examining Ensign declared that Buck Titushad confessed their illegal propaganda, and narrated so many details ofthe work that Doremus could almost have believed in the confession. Hedid not listen. He told himself, "No! Buck would die before he'd confessanything. It's all Aras Dilley's spying."

The Ensign cooed, "Now if you'll just have the sense to copy your friendTitus and tell us who's in the conspiracy besides him and you and Wilgusand Webb, we'll let you go. We know, all right--oh, we know the wholeplot!--but we just want to find out whether you've finally come to yoursenses 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 castoroil 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 everyafternoon--probably because he would have preferred lying on his hardcot, trying to keep still enough so that his heart would stop itsdeathly hammering. Half a hundred prisoners marched there, round andround senselessly. He passed Buck Titus. To salute him would have meanta blow from the guards. They greeted each other with quick eyelids, andwhen he saw those untroubled spaniel eyes, Doremus knew that Buck hadnot squealed.

And in the exercise yard he saw Dan Wilgus, but Dan was not walkingfree; he was led out from the torture rooms by guards, and with hiscrushed nose, his flattened ear, he looked as though he had been poundedby a prize-fighter. He seemed partly paralyzed. Doremus tried to getinformation about Dan from a guard in his cell corridor. The guard--ahandsome, clear-cheeked young man, noted in a valley of the WhiteMountains as a local beau, and very kind to his mother--laughed, "Oh,your friend Wilgus? That chump thinks he can lick his weight inwildcats. I hear he always tries to soak the guards. They'll take thatout of him, all right!"

Doremus thought, that night--he could not be sure, but he thought heheard 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 aweakling's suicide, had hanged himself in his cell.

**

Then, unexpectedly, Doremus was taken into a room, this time reasonablylarge, a former English classroom turned into a court, for his trial.

But it was not District Commissioner Francis Tasbrough who was on thebench, nor any Military Judge, but no less a Protector of the Peoplethan the great new Provincial Commissioner, Effingham Swan.

Swan was looking at Doremus's article about him as Doremus was led up tostand before the bench. He spoke--and this harsh, tired-looking man wasno longer the airy Rhodes Scholar who had sported with Doremus once likea boy pulling the wings off flies.

"Jessup, do you plead guilty to seditious activities?"

"Why----" Doremus looked helplessly about for something in the way oflegal 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. Indeedhe 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 alwayswas a smart-aleck--he was a laughing-stock in Fort Beulah for the way hetried to show off as a great political leader!--and when the Chief waselected, he was angry because he didn't get any political office, and hewent about everywhere trying to disaffect people--I have heard him do somyself."

"That's enough. Thanks. County Commissioner Ledue... Captain Ledue,is it or is it not true that the man Jessup tried to persuade you tojoin 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 evidencecontained in the prisoner's own manuscript, which I hold here, issufficient testimony. Prisoner, if it weren't for your age and your damnsilly senile weakness, I'd sentence you to a hundred lashes, as I do allthe other Communists like you that threaten the Corporate State. As itis, I sentence you to be held in concentration camp, at the will of theCourt, but with a minimum sentence of seventeen years." Doremuscalculated rapidly. He was sixty-two now. He would be seventy-ninethen. He never would see freedom again. "And, in the power of issuingemergency decrees, conferred upon me as Provincial Commissioner, I alsosentence you to death by shooting, but I suspend that sentence--thoughonly until such time as you may be caught trying to escape! And I hopeyou'll have just lots and lots of time in prison, Jessup, to think abouthow clever you were in this entrancing article you wrote about me! Andto remember that any nasty cold morning they may take you out in therain and shoot you." He ended with a mild suggestion to the guards: "Andtwenty lashes!"

Two minutes later they had forced castor oil down him; he lay trying tobite at the stained wood of the whipping-table; and he could hear thewhish of the steel fishing rod as a guard playfully tried it out in theair before bringing it down across the crisscross wounds of his rawback.

Chapter 31

As the open prison van approached the concentration camp at Trianon, thelast light of afternoon caressed the thick birch and maples and poplarsup the pyramid of Mount Faithful. But the grayness swiftly climbed theslope, and all the valley was left in cold shadow. In his seat the sickDoremus drooped again in listlessness.

**

The prim Georgian buildings of the girls' school which had been turnedinto a concentration camp at Trianon, nine miles north of Fort Beulah,had been worse used than Dartmouth, where whole buildings were reservedfor the luxuries of the Corpos and their female cousins, all very snottyand parvenu. The Trianon school seemed to have been gouged by a flood.Marble doorsteps had been taken away. (One of them now graced theresidence of the wife of the Superintendent, Mrs. Cowlick, a woman fat,irate, jeweled, religious, and given to announcing that all opponents ofthe Chief were Communists and ought to be shot offhand.) Windows weresmashed. "Hurrah for the Chief" had been chalked on brick walls andother chalked words, each of four letters, had been rubbed out, not verythoroughly. The lawns and hollyhock beds were a mess of weeds.

The buildings stood on three sides of a square; the fourth side and thegaps between buildings were closed with unpainted pine fences toppedwith strands of barbed wire.

Every room except the office of Captain Cowlick, the Superintendent (hewas as near nothing at all as any man can be who has attained to suchhonors as being a captain in the Quartermaster Corps and the head of aprison) was smeared with filth. His office was merely dreary, andscented with whisky, not, like the other rooms, with ammonia.

Cowlick was not too ill-natured. He wished that the camp guards, allM.M.'s, would not treat the prisoners viciously, except when they triedto escape. But he was a mild man; much too mild to hurt the feelings ofthe M.M.'s and perhaps set up inhibitions in their psyches byinterfering with their methods of discipline. The poor fellows probablymeant well when they lashed noisy inmates for insisting they hadcommitted no crime. And the good Cowlick saved Doremus's life for awhile; let him lie for a month in the stuffy hospital and have actualbeef in his daily beef stew. The prison doctor, a decayed old drunkardwho had had his medical training in the late 'eighties and who had beensomewhat close to trouble in civil life for having performed too manyabortions, was also good-natured enough, when sober, and at last hepermitted Doremus to have Dr. Marcus Olmsted in from Fort Beulah, andfor 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 toknow what might be happening to his friends, his family, now for onemonth he had not known whether they were alive or dead.

Dr. Olmsted--as guilty as Doremus himself of what the Corpos calledtreason--dared speak to him only a moment, because the prison doctorstayed in the hospital ward all the while, drooling over whip-scarredpatients and daubing iodine more or less near their wounds. Olmsted saton the edge of his cot, with its foul blankets, unwashed for months, andmuttered rapidly:

"Quick! Listen! Don't talk! Mrs. Jessup and your two girls are allright--they're scared, but no signs of their being arrested. HearLorinda Pike is all right. Your grandson, David, looks fine--though I'mafraid he'll grow up a Corpo, like all the youngsters. Buck Titus isalive--at another concentration camp--the one near Woodstock. Our N.U.cell at Fort Beulah is doing what it can--no publishing, but we forwardinformation--get a lot from Julian Falck--great joke: he's beenpromoted, M.M. Squad-Leader now! Mary and Sissy and Father Perefixe keepdistributing 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 pullthrough. You've got pretty good nerves for a little cuss! Thataged-in-the-keg prison doctor is looking this way. Bye!"

**

He was not permitted to see Dr. Olmsted again, but it was probablyOlmsted's influence that got him, when he was dismissed from thehospital, still shaky but well enough to stumble about, a vastlydesirable job as sweeper of cells and corridors, cleaner of lavatoriesand scrubber of toilets, instead of working in the woods gang, up MountFaithful, where old men who sank under the weight of logs were said tobe hammered to death by guards under the sadistic Ensign Stoyt, whenCaptain Cowlick wasn't looking. It was better, too, than the undesirableidleness of being disciplined in the "dog house" where you lay naked, indarkness, and where "bad cases" were reformed by being kept awake forforty-eight or even ninety-six hours. Doremus was a conscientioustoilet-cleaner. He didn't like the work very much, but he had pride inbeing able to scrub as skillfully as any professional pearl-diver in aGreek lunch-room, and satisfaction in lessening a little thewretchedness of his imprisoned comrades by giving them clean floors.

For, he told himself, they were his comrades. He saw that he, who hadthought of himself as a capitalist because he could hire and fire, andbecause theoretically he "owned his business," had been as helpless asthe most itinerant janitor, once it seemed worth while to the BigBusiness which Corpoism represented to get rid of him. Yet he still toldhimself stoutly that he did not believe in a dictatorship of theproletariat any more than he believed in a dictatorship of the bankersand utility-owners; he still insisted that any doctor or preacher,though economically he might be as insecure as the humblest of hisflock, who did not feel that he was a little better than they, andprivileged to enjoy working a little harder, was a rotten doctor or apreacher without grace. He felt that he himself had been a better andmore honorable reporter than Doc Itchitt, and a thundering sight betterstudent of politics than most of his shopkeeper and farmer and factoryworker readers.

Yet bourgeois pride was so gone out of him that he was flattered, alittle thrilled, when he was universally called "Doremus" and not "Mr.Jessup" by farmer and workman and truck-driver and plain hobo; when theythought enough of his courage under beating and his good-temper underbeing crowded with others in a narrow cell to regard him as almost asgood as their own virile selves.

Karl Pascal mocked him. "I told you so, Doremus! You'll be a Communistyet!"

"Yes, maybe I will, Karl--after you Communists kick out all your falseprophets and bellyachers and power drunkards, and all your press-agentsfor the Moscow subway."

"Well, all right, why don't you join Max Eastman? I hear he's escaped toMexico and has a whole big pure Trotzkyite Communist party of seventeenmembers 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 maysome day rise to the standards of Kit Carson!"

**

As sweeper and scrubber, Doremus had unusual chances for gossip withother prisoners. He chuckled when he thought of how many of his fellowcriminals were acquaintances: Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, his own cousin,Louis Rotenstern, who looked now like a corpse, unforgettingly woundedin his old pride of having become a "real American," Clif Little, thejeweler, who was dying of consumption, Ben Tripper, who had been thejolliest workman in Medary Cole's grist mill, Professor Victor Loveland,of the defunct Isaiah College, and Raymond Pridewell, that old Tory whowas still so contemptuous of flattery, so clean amid dirt, so hawk-eyed,that the guards were uncomfortable when they beat him.... Pascal, theCommunist, Pridewell, the squirearchy Republican, and Henry Veeder, whohad never cared a hang about politics, and who had recovered from thefirst shocks of imprisonment, these three had become intimates, becausethey 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 tenand eight feet high, which a finishing-school girl had once consideredoutrageously confined for one lone young woman. Here they slept, in twotiers of three bunks each; here they ate, washed, played cards, read,and enjoyed the leisurely contemplation which, as Captain Cowlickpreached to them every Sunday morning, was to reform their black soulsand turn them into loyal Corpos.

None of them, certainly not Doremus, complained much. They got used tosleeping in a jelly of tobacco smoke and human stench, to eating stewsthat always left them nervously hungry, to having no more dignity orfreedom than monkeys in a cage, as a man gets used to the indignity ofhaving to endure cancer. Only it left in them a murderous hatred oftheir oppressors so that they, men of peace all of them, would gladlyhave hanged every Corpo, mild or vicious. Doremus understood John Brownmuch better.

His cell mates were Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, and three men whom he hadnot known: a Boston architect, a farm hand, and a dope fiend who hadonce kept questionable restaurants. They had good talk--especially fromthe dope fiend, who placidly defended crime in a world where the onlyreal 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 andreal as Bread or Water. How long would he be in? How long would he bein? Night and day, asleep and waking, he worried it, and by his bunk sawwaiting the figure of Waiting, a gray, foul ghost.

It was like waiting in a filthy station for a late train, not for hoursbut for months.

Would Swan amuse himself by having Doremus taken out and shot? He couldnot care much, now; he could not picture it, any more than he couldpicture kissing Lorinda, walking through the woods with Buck, playingwith David and Foolish, or anything less sensual than the ever derisivevisions of roast beef with gravy, of a hot bath, last and richest ofluxuries where their only way of washing, except for a fortnightlyshower, was with a dirty shirt dipped in the one basin of cold water forsix men.

Besides Waiting, one other ghost hung about them--the notion ofEscaping. It was of that (far more than of the beastliness and idiocy ofthe 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 withthe woods gang? By some magic to cut through the bars on their cellwindow and drop out and blessedly not be seen by the patrols? To manageto hang on underneath one of the prison trucks and be driven away? (Achildish fantasy!) They longed for escape as hysterically and as oftenas 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'sbetraying his companions, and he did not believe it till, two monthsafter Doremus had gone to concentration camp, Clifford Little betrayedto the guards Henry Veeder's plan to escape in a hay wagon. Henry wasproperly dealt with. Little was released. And Doremus, it may be,suffered over it nearly as much as either of them, sturdily though hetried to argue that Little had tuberculosis and that the often beatingshad 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 standingtwo feet away, listening, and Doremus had from them nothing more than afluttering, "We're all fine--we hear Buck is all right--we hear Lorindais doing fine in her new tea room--Philip writes he is all right." Andonce came Philip himself, his pompous son, more pompous than ever now asa Corpo judge, and very hurt about his father's insaneradicalism--considerably more hurt when Doremus tartly observed that hewould much rather have had the dog Foolish for visitor.

And there were letters--all censored--worse than useless to a man whohad been so glad to hear the living voices of his friends.

In the long run, these frustrate visits, these empty letters, made hiswaiting the more dismal, because they suggested that perhaps he waswrong in his nightly visions; perhaps the world outside was not soloving and eager and adventurous as he remembered it, but only dreary ashis cell.

**

He had little known Karl Pascal, yet now the argumentative Marxian washis nearest friend, his one amusing consolation. Karl could and didprove that the trouble with leaky valves, sour cow pastures, theteaching of calculus, and all novels was their failure to be guided bythe writings of Lenin.

In his new friendship, Doremus was old-maidishly agitated lest Karl betaken out and shot, the recognition usually given to Communists. Hediscovered that he need not worry. Karl had been in jail before. He wasthe trained agitator for whom Doremus had longed in New Undergrounddays. He had ferreted out so many scandals about the financial andsexual shenanigans of every one of the guards that they were afraid thateven while he was being shot, he might tattle to the firing-squad. Theywere much more anxious for his good opinion than for that of CaptainCowlick, and they timidly brought him little presents of chewing tobaccoand Canadian newspapers, as though they were schoolchildren honeying upto teacher.

When Aras Dilley was transferred from night patrols in Fort Beulah tothe position of guard at Trianon--a reward for having given to ShadLedue certain information about R. C. Crowley which cost that bankerhundreds of dollars--Aras, that slinker, that able snooper, jumped atthe sight of Karl and began to look pious and kind. He had known Karlbefore!

**

Despite the presence of Stoyt, Ensign of guards, an ex-cashier who hadonce enjoyed shooting dogs and who now, in the blessed escape ofCorpoism, enjoyed lashing human beings, the camp at Trianon was not socruel as the district prison at Hanover. But from the dirty window ofhis cell Doremus saw horrors enough.

One mid-morning, a radiant September morning with the air alreadysavoring the peace of autumn, he saw the firing-squad marching out hiscousin, Henry Veeder, who had recently tried to escape. Henry had been agranite monolith of a man. He had walked like a soldier. He had, in hiscell, been proud of shaving every morning, as once he had done, with atin basin of water heated on the stove, in the kitchen of his old whitehouse up on Mount Terror. Now he stooped, and toward death he walkedwith dragging feet. His face of a Roman senator was smeared from the cowdung 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 kickedhim 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 atwisted clay figure with vacant open eyes. Then Doremus cried aloud. Asthe bearers slanted the stretcher, the figure rolled to the ground.

But one thing worse he was to see through the accursed window. Theguards drove in, as new prisoners, Julian Falck, in torn uniform, andJulian's grandfather, so fragile, so silvery, so bewildered andterrified in his muddied clericals.

He saw them kicked across the quadrangle into a building once devoted toinstruction in dancing and the more delicate airs for the piano; devotednow 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 itwas for!" Julian had passed on. But Doremus had had time to see that hiseyes were hopeless, and that his neat, smallish, clerical face wasblue-black with bruises.

The administration (or so Doremus guessed) decided that Julian, thefirst spy among the M.M.'s who had been caught in the Fort Beulahregion, 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 himacross the quadrangle to the whipping room and imagined that he couldhear Julian's shrieks afterward. He wasn't even kept in a punishmentcell, but in an open barred den on an ordinary corridor, so that passinginmates could peep in and see him, welts across his naked back, huddledon the floor, whimpering like a beaten dog.

And Doremus had sight of Julian's grandfather sneaking across thequadrangle, stealing a soggy hunk of bread from a garbage can, andfiercely chewing at it.

All through September Doremus worried lest Sissy, with Julian now gonefrom Fort Beulah, be raped by Shad Ledue.... Shad would leer thewhile, and gloat over his ascent from hired man to irresistible master.

**

Despite his anguish over the Falcks and Henry Veeder and everyuncouthest comrade in prison, Doremus was almost recovered from hisbeatings by late September. He began delightedly to believe that hewould live for another ten years; was slightly ashamed of his delight,in the presence of so much agony, but he felt like a young manand----And straightway Ensign Stoyt was there (two or three o'clock atnight it must have been), yanking Doremus out of his bunk, pulling himto his feet, knocking him down again with so violent a crack in hismouth that Doremus instantly sank again into all his trembling fear, allhis inhuman groveling.

He was dragged into Captain Cowlick's office.

The Captain was courtly:

"Mr. Jessup, we have information that you were connected withSquad-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, nodanger whatever, of further punishment, if you will just help us. But wereally must make a warning of young Mr. Falck, and so if you will tellus all you know about the boy's shocking infidelity to the colors, weshall hold it in your favor. How would you like to have a nice bedroomto sleep in, all by yourself?"

A quarter hour later Doremus was still swearing that he knew nothingwhatever of any "subversive activities" on the part of Julian.

Captain Cowlick said, rather testily, "Well, since you refuse to respondto 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 speakwith gentleness, which was a surprise to Doremus, because in the roomwere two of the guards to whom Stoyt liked to show off:

"Jessup, you're a man of intelligence. No use your trying to protectthis 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 abouthis 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'sgrandfather who wavered into the room. In the camp quadrangle Doremushad often seen him trying to preserve the dignity of his frock coat byrubbing at the spots with a wet rag, but in the cells there were nohooks for clothes, and the priestly garment--Mr. Falck was a poor manand it had not been very expensive at best--was grotesquely wrinklednow. He was blinking with sleepiness, and his silver hair was a hurrah'snest.

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 intoyour 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 thatthe other was a traitor?"

"What?" marveled Doremus.

"Sure! Old Falck here says you carried his grandson's pieces to theVermont Vigilance. Come on, now, if you'll tell us who published thatrag----"

"I have confessed nothing. I have nothing to confess," said Mr. Falck.

Stoyt screamed, "Will you shut up? You old hypocrite!" Stoyt knocked himto the floor, and as Mr. Falck weaved dizzily on hands and knees, kickedhim in the side with a heavy boot. The other two guards were holdingback the sputtering Doremus. Stoyt jeered at Mr. Falck, "Well, you oldbastard, 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 suchsweetness in his voice as Doremus had once heard in it when men werehuman, he cried, "Father, Thou hast forgiven so long! Forgive them notbut curse them, for they know what they do!" He tumbled forward, andDoremus knew that he would never hear that voice again.

***

In La Voix littéraire of Paris, the celebrated and genial professor ofbelles-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 possiblyhelped a refugee to escape, arrived in the Trianon camp, and the firstwords between him and his friend Karl Pascal were no inquiries abouthealth, but a derisive interchange, as though they were continuing aconversation broken only half an hour before:

"Well, you old Bolshevik, I told you so! If you Communists had joinedwith me and Norman Thomas to back Frank Roosevelt, we wouldn't be herenow!"

"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 thatFoolish probably had more constructive economic wisdom than JohnPollikop, Karl Pascal, Herbert Hoover, Buzz Windrip, Lee Sarason, andhimself put together; or if not, Foolish had the sense to conceal hislack of wisdom by pretending that he could not speak English.

**

Shad Ledue, back in his hotel suite, reflected that he was getting adirty deal. He had been responsible for sending more traitors toconcentration 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 Tasbroughin honor of Provincial Commissioner Swan and a board consisting of JudgePhilip Jessup, Director of Education Owen J. Peaseley, and BrigadierKippersly, who were investigating the ability of Vermont to pay moretaxes.

Shad felt discontented. All those damned snobs trying to show off!Talking at dinner about this bum show in New York--this first Corporevue, Callin' Stalin, written by Lee Sarason and Hector Macgoblin.How those nuts had put on the agony about "Corpo art," and "drama freedfrom 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 storyabout the stuck-up preacher in Fort Beulah, one Falck, who had been sojealous because the M.M.'s drilled on Sunday morning instead of going tohis gospel shop that he had tried to get his grandson to make up liesabout the M.M.'s, and whom Shad had amusingly arrested right in his ownchurch! Not paid one bit of attention to him, even though he hadcarefully 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 tostick 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, seemedfrightened of him, now, and the dirty snobs like Tasbrough still ignoredhim.

He was lonely for Sissy Jessup.

Since her dad had been sent to Trianon, Shad didn't seem able to get herto come around to his rooms, even though he was the County Commissionerand 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, ifhe couldn't get her any other way! But when he had hinted as much--oralmost 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 funin being rich and famous. He didn't feel one bit different than he hadthen! Funny!

Chapter 32

Dr. Lionel Adams, B.A. of Yale, Ph.D. of Chicago, Negro, had been ajournalist, American consul in Africa and, at the time of BerzeliusWindrip's election, professor of anthropology in Howard University. Aswith all his colleagues, his professorship was taken over by a mostworthy and needy white man, whose training in anthropology had been asphotographer on one expedition to Yucatan. In the dissension between theBooker Washington school of Negroes who counseled patience in the newsubjection of the Negroes to slavery, and the radicals who demanded thatthey 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 Utopianfantasy but on the inescapable basis of the ban against them.

Near Burlington, Vermont, there is a small colony of Negroes, truckfarmers, 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 whosufficiently loved the land of their forcible adoption to return toAmerica after the war. From the colony had gone to the great citiesyoung colored people who (before the Corpo emancipation) had beennurses, doctors, merchants, officials.

This colony Professor Adams addressed, bidding the young colored rebelsto seek improvement within their own souls rather than in mere socialsuperiority.

As he was in person unknown to this Burlington colony, Captain OscarLedue, nicknamed "Shad," was summoned to censor the lecture. He sathulked down in a chair at the back of the hall. Aside from addresses byM.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'tthink much of it. He was irritated that this stuck-up nigger didn'tspiel like the characters of Octavus Roy Cohen, one of Shad's favoriteauthors, but had the nerve to try to sling English just as good as Shadhimself. It was more irritating that the loud-mouthed pup should look somuch like a bronze statue, and finally, it was simply more than a guycould stand that the big bum should be wearing a Tuxedo!

So when Adams, as he called himself, claimed that there were good poetsand teachers and even doctors and engineers among the niggers, which wasplainly 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'mgoing to shut your big mouth for you, for keeps!"

Dr. Adams was taken to the Trianon concentration camp. Ensign Stoytthought it would be a good joke on those fresh beggars (almostCommunists, you might say) Jessup and Pascal to lodge the nigger rightin 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 himin a solitary cell, where he could think over his crime in having bittenthe hand that had fed him.

**

The greatest single shock that ever came to the Trianon camp was inNovember, 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 FrancisTasbrough; officially, for having grafted on shopkeepers; unofficially,for having failed to share enough of the graft with Tasbrough. But suchcloudy causes were less discussed than the question of how they wouldmurder Shad now they had him safe.

**

All Minute Men who were under discipline, except only such Reds asJulian Falck, were privileged prisoners in the concentration camps; theywere safeguarded against the common, i.e., criminal, i.e., politicalinmates; 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-badhall-bedroom, and every evening he was permitted to spend two hours inthe officers' mess room. The scum could not get at him, because hisexercise 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 battleswe've gone through you're still a bourgeois pacifist--that you stillbelieve in the sanctity of a lump of hog meat like Ledue?" demanded KarlPascal.

"Well, yes, I do--a little. I know that Shad came from a family oftwelve underfed brats up on Mount Terror. Not much chance. But moreimportant than that, I don't believe in individual assassination as aneffective means of fighting despotism. The blood of the tyrants is theseed of the massacre and----"

"Are you taking a cue from me and quoting sound doctrine when it's thetime for a little liquidation?" said Karl. "This one tyrant's going tolose a lot of blood!"

The Pascal whom Doremus had considered as, at his most violent, only agas bag, looked at him with a stare in which all friendliness wasfrozen. Karl demanded of his cell mates, a different set now than atDoremus's arrival, "Shall we get rid of this typhus germ, Ledue?"

John Pollikop, Truman Webb, the surgeon, the carpenter, each of themnodded, slowly, without feeling.

**

At exercise hour, the discipline of the men marching out to thequadrangle was broken when one prisoner stumbled, with a cry, knockedover another man, and loudly apologized--just at the barred entrance ofShad 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 blankwith fear.

Someone, somehow, had lighted and thrown into Shad's cell a large wad ofwaste, soaked with gasoline. It caught the thin wallboard which dividedShad's cell from the next. The whole room looked presently like the firebox of a furnace. Shad was screaming, as he beat at his sleeves, hisshoulders. Doremus remembered the scream of a horse clawed by wolves inthe 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 vanishedto the insignificance whence he had come. He was succeeded by Shad'sfriend, the belligerent Snake Tizra, now a battalion-leader. His firstexecutive act was to have all the two hundred inmates drawn up in thequadrangle and to announce, "I'm not going to tell you guys anythingabout how I'm going to feed you or sleep you till I've finished puttingthe fear of God into every one of you murderers!"

There were offers of complete pardon for anyone who would betray the manwho had thrown the burning waste into Shad's cell. It was followed byenthusiastic private offers from the prisoners that anyone who did thustattle would not live to get out. So, as Doremus had guessed, they allsuffered more than Shad's death had been worth--and to him, thinking ofSissy, thinking of Shad's testimony at Hanover, it had been worth agreat deal; it had been very precious and lovely.

A court of special inquiry was convened, with Provincial CommissionerEffingham Swan himself presiding (he was very busy with all bad works;he used aëroplanes to be about them). Ten prisoners, one out of everytwenty in the camp, were chosen by lot and shot summarily. Among themwas Professor Victor Loveland, who, for all his rags and scars, wasneatly academic to the last, with his eyeglasses and his slicktow-colored hair parted in the middle as he looked at the firing-squad.

Suspects like Julian Falck were beaten more often, kept longer in thosecells in which one could not stand, sit, nor lie.

Then, for two weeks in December, all visitors and all letters wereforbidden, and newly arrived prisoners were shut off by themselves; andthe cell mates, like boys in a dormitory, would sit up till midnight inwhispered discussion as to whether this was more vengeance by SnakeTizra, or whether something was happening in the World Outside that wastoo disturbing for the prisoners to know.

Chapter 33

When the Falcks and John Pollikop had been arrested and had joined herfather in prison, when such more timid rebels as Mungo Kitterick andHarry 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, andhalf-a-dozen other agents left, and control it she did, with angrydevotion and not too much sense. All she could do was to help in theescape of refugees and to forward such minor anti-Corpo news items asshe could discover, with Julian gone.

The demon that had grown within her ever since her husband had beenexecuted now became a great tumor, and Mary was furious at inaction.Quite gravely she talked about assassinations--and long before the dayof Mary Greenhill, daughter of Doremus, gold-armored tyrants in towershad trembled at the menace of young widows in villages among the darkhills.

She wanted, first, to kill Shad Ledue who (she did not know, butguessed) had probably done the actual shooting of her husband. But inthis small place it might hurt her family even more than they had beenhurt. She humorlessly suggested, before Shad was arrested and murdered,that it would be a pretty piece of espionage for Sissy to go and livewith him. The once flippant Sissy, so thin and quiet ever since herJulian had been taken away, was certain that Mary had gone mad, and atnight was terrified.... She remembered how Mary, in the days when shehad been a crystal-hard, crystal-bright sportswoman, had with herriding-crop beaten a farmer who had tortured a dog.

Mary was fed-up with the cautiousness of Dr. Olmsted and FatherPerefixe, men who rather liked a vague state called Freedom but did notovermuch care for being lynched. She stormed at them. Call themselvesmen? Why didn't they go out and do something?

At home, she was irritated by her mother, who lamented hardly more aboutDoremus's jailing than she did about the beloved little tables that hadbeen smashed during his arrest.

It was equally the blasts about the greatness of the new ProvincialCommissioner, Effingham Swan, in the Corpo press and memoranda in thesecret N.U. reports about his quick death verdicts against prisonersthat made her decide to kill this dignitary. Even more than Shad (whohad not yet been sent to Trianon), she blamed him for Fowler's fate. Shethought it out quite calmly. That was the sort of thinking that theCorpos were encouraging among decent home-body women by their programfor revitalizing national American pride.

**

Except with babies accompanying mothers, two visitors together wereforbidden in the concentration camps. So, when Mary saw Doremus and, inanother camp, Buck Titus, in early October, she could only murmur, inalmost the same words to each of them, "Listen! When I leave you I'llhold up David--but, heavens, what a husky lump he's become!--at thegate, so you can see him. If anything should ever happen to me, if Ishould get sick or something, when you get out you'll take care ofDavid--won't you, won't you?"

She was trying to be matter-of-fact, that they might not worry. She wasnot succeeding very well.

So she drew out, from the small fund which her father had establishedfor her after Fowler's death, enough money for a couple of months,executed a power of attorney by which either her mother or her sistercould 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, capitalof the Northeastern Province. The story was that she needed a change andwas going to stay near Albany with Fowler's married sister.

She did actually stay with her sister-in-law--long enough to get herbearings. Two days after her arrival, she went to the new Albanytraining-field of the Corpo Women's Flying Corps and enlisted forlessons in aviation and bombing.

When the inevitable war should come, when the government should decidewhether it was Canada, Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Japan, or perhaps StatenIsland that was "menacing her borders," and proceed to defend itselfoutwards, then the best women flyers of the Corps were to haveCommissions in an official army auxiliary. The old-fashioned "rights"granted to women by the Liberals might (for their own sakes) be takenfrom them, but never had they had more right to die in battle.

While she was learning, she wrote to her family reassuringly--mostlypostcards to David, bidding him mind whatever his grandmother said.

She lived in a lively boarding-house, filled with M.M. officers who knewall about and talked a little about the frequent inspection trips ofCommissioner Swan, by aëroplane. She was complimented by quite a numberof 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 hadmade repairs at midnight; and she had an accurate eye, nerves trainedoutdoors, and the resolute steadiness of a madman evading notice whilehe plots death. After ten hours of instruction, by an M.M. aviator whothought the air was as good a place as any to make love in and who couldnever understand why Mary laughed at him, she made her first soloflight, with an admirable landing. The instructor said (among otherthings less apropos) that she had no fear; that the one thing she neededfor mastery was a little fear.

Meantime she was an obedient student in classes in bombing, a branch ofculture daily more propagated by the Corpos.

She was particularly interested in the Mills hand grenade. You pulledout the safety pin, holding the lever against the grenade with yourfingers, and tossed. Five seconds after the lever was thus loosened, thegrenade exploded and killed a lot of people. It had never been used fromplanes, but it might be worth trying, thought Mary. M.M. officers toldher that Swan, when a mob of steelworkers had been kicked out of a plantand started rioting, had taken command of the peace officers, andhimself (they chuckled with admiration of his readiness) hurled such agrenade. It had killed two women and a baby.

Mary took her sixth solo flight on a November morning gray and quietunder snow clouds. She had never been very talkative with the groundcrew but this morning she said it excited her to think she could leavethe ground "like a reg'lar angel" and shoot up and hang around thatunknown wilderness of clouds. She patted a strut of her machine, ahigh-wing Leonard monoplane with open cockpit, a new and very fastmilitary 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 CommissionerEffingham Swan was boarding his big official cabin plane for a flightpresumably into New England. He was tall; a distinguished,military-looking, polo-suggesting dignitary in masterfully simpleblue-serge with just a light flying-helmet. A dozen yes-men buzzed abouthim--secretaries, bodyguards, a chauffeur, a couple of countycommissioners, educational directors, labor directors--their hats intheir hands, their smiles on their faces, their souls wriggling withgratitude to him for permitting them to exist. He snapped at them a gooddeal and bustled. As he mounted the steps to the cabin (Mary thought of"Casey Jones" and smiled), a messenger on a tremendous motorcycle blaredup with the last telegrams. There seemed to be half a hundred of theyellow envelopes, Mary marveled. He tossed them to the secretary who washumbly creeping after him. The door of the viceregal coach closed on theCommissioner, the secretary, and two bodyguards lumpy with guns.

It was said that in his plane Swan had a desk that had belonged toHitler, and before him to Marat.

To Mary, who had just lifted herself up into the cockpit, a mechaniccried, 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 downto 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 awhole regiment--they could lick Walt Trowbridge and all the otherCommunists put together!"

"I guess that's so. Nothing but God shooting down from heaven couldreach Mr. Swan."

"Ha, ha! That's good! But couple days ago I heard where a fellow wassaying 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'sgolden chariot had but two hundred and thirty. She was presently flyingabove and a little behind him. His cabin plane, which had seemed huge asthe Queen Mary when she had looked up at its wingspread on the ground,now seemed small as a white dove, wavering above the patchy linoleumthat was the ground.

She drew from the pockets of her flying-jacket the three Mills handgrenades she had managed to steal from the school yesterday afternoon.She had not been able to get away with any heavier bomb. As she lookedat them, for the first time she shuddered; she became a thing of warmerblood than a mere attachment to the plane, mechanical as the engine.

"Better get it over before I go ladylike," she sighed, and dived at thecabin plane.

No doubt her coming was unwelcome. Neither Death nor Mary Greenhill hadmade a formal engagement with Effingham Swan that morning; neither hadtelephoned, nor bargained with irritable Secretaries, nor been neatlytyped down on the great lord's schedule for his last day of life. In hisdozen offices, in his marble home, in council hall and royalreviewing-stand, his most precious excellence was guarded with steel. Hecould not be approached by vulgarians like Mary Greenhill--save in theair, where emperor and vulgarian alike are upheld only by toy wings andby the grace of God.

Three times Mary maneuvered above his plane and dropped a grenade. Eachtime it missed. The cabin plane was descending, to land, and the guardswere 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 thezinc washboard which, as a girl, she had seen used by Mrs. Candy'spredecessor--now what was her name?--Mamie or something. And she wishedshe had spent more time with David the last few months. And she noticedthat the cabin plane seemed rather rushing up at her than she down atit.

The crash was appalling. It came just as she was patting her parachuteand rising to leap out--too late. All she saw was an insane whirligig ofsmashed wings and huge engines that seemed to have been hurled up intoher face.

Chapter 34

Speaking of Julian before he was arrested, probably the New Undergroundheadquarters 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. Hehad had to assist in several floggings. He trembled so that the otherslaughed 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 abeautiful plan of going to that old family friend, Commissioner FrancisTasbrough, declaring that he wanted by his own noble qualities to makeup to the divine government for his father's disloyalty, and of gettinghimself made Tasbrough's secretary. If he could just peep at Tasbrough'sprivate files! Then there would be something juicy for Montreal!

Sissy and he discussed it exultantly in their leafy rendezvous. For awhole half hour she was able to forget her father and Buck in prison,and what seemed to her something like madness in Mary's increasingrestlessness.

Just at the end of September she saw Julian suddenly arrested.

She was watching a review of M.M.'s on the Green. She mighttheoretically detest the blue M.M. uniform as being all that WaltTrowbridge (frequently) called it, "The old-time emblem of heroism andthe battle for freedom, sacrilegiously turned by Windrip and his ganginto a symbol of everything that is cruel, tyrannical, and false," butit did not dampen her pride in Julian to see him trim and shiny, andofficially set apart as a squad leader commanding his minor army of ten.

While the company stood at rest, County Commissioner Shad Ledue dashedup in a large car, sprang up, strode to Julian, bellowed, "Thisguy--this man is a traitor!" tore the M.M. steering wheel from Julian'scollar, struck him in the face, and turned him over to his privategunmen, while Julian's mates groaned, guffawed, hissed, and yelped.

**

She was not allowed to see Julian at Trianon. She could learn nothingsave that he had not yet been executed.

When Mary was killed, and buried as a military heroine, Philip camebumbling up from his Massachusetts judicial circuit. He shook his head agreat deal and pursed his lips.

"I swear," he said to Emma and Sissy--though actually he did nothing sowholesome 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 touchof madness in them. There must be, terrible though it is to say it, butwe 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 amcertainly sane! even if that may have caused the Pater to think I wasnothing but mediocre! And of course you are entirely free from it,Mater. It's you that must watch yourself, Cecilia." (Sissy jumpedslightly; not at anything so grateful as being called crazy by Philip,but at being called "Cecilia." After all, she admitted, that probablywas her name.) "I hate to say it, Cecilia, but I've often thought youhad a dangerous tendency to be thoughtless and selfish. Now Mater: asyou know, I'm a very busy man, and I simply can't take a lot of timearguing and discussing, but it seems best to me, and I think I canalmost say that it seems wise to Merilla, also, that, now that Mary haspassed on, you should just close up this big house, or much better, tryto rent it, as long as the poor Pater is--uh--as long as he's away. Idon't pretend to have as big a place as this, but it's ever so much moremodern, with gas furnace and up-to-date plumbing and all, and I have oneof the first television sets in Rose Lane. I hope it won't hurt yourfeelings, and as you know, whatever people may say about me, certainlyI'm one of the first to believe in keeping up the old traditions, justas poor dear old Eff Swan was, but at the same time, it seems to me thatthe old home here is a little on the dreary and old-fashioned side--ofcourse 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 youare entirely welcome, but perhaps you would prefer to do somethinglivelier, such as joining the Women's Corpo Auxiliary----"

He was, Sissy raged, so damned kind to everybody! She couldn't evenstir herself to insult him much. She earnestly desired to, when shefound that he had brought David an M.M. uniform, and when David put iton 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 tellPhilip that she was going to help Lorinda in the tea room. Emma andDavid went off to Worcester--at the last moment, at the station, Emmadecided to be pretty teary about it, though David begged her to rememberthat they had Uncle Philip's word for it that Worcester was just thesame as Boston, London, Hollywood, and a Wild West Ranch put together.Sissy stayed to get the house rented. Mrs. Candy, who was going to openher bakery now and who never did inform the impractical Sissy whether orno she was being paid for these last weeks, made for Sissy all theforeign dishes that only Sissy and Doremus cared for, and they notuncheerfully dined together, in the kitchen.

So it was Shad's time to swoop.

He came blusteringly calling on her, in November. Never had she hatedhim quite so much, yet never so much feared him, because of what hemight do to her father and Julian and Buck and the others inconcentration camps.

He grunted, "Well, your boyfriend Jule, that thought he was so cute, thepoor 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 onthe piano?"

"Sure. Shoot. I always did like high-class music," said the refinedCommissioner, lolling on a couch, putting his heels up on a damaskchair, in the room where once he had cleaned the fireplace. If it washis serious purpose to discourage Sissy in regard to that anti-Corpoinstitution, the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, he was succeeding evenbetter than Judge Philip Jessup. Sir William Gilbert would have said ofShad that he was so very, very prolet-ari-an.

She had played for but five minutes when he forgot that he was nowrefined, and bawled, "Oh, cut out the highbrow stuff and come on and sitdown!"

She stayed on the piano stool. Just what would she do if Shad becameviolent? There was no Julian to appear melodramatically at thenick-of-time and rescue her. Then she remembered Mrs. Candy, in thekitchen, 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 tokill Swan? Would They be harder on Julian and her father if she killedShad? Incidentally, did it hurt much to get hanged?)

He was yawning, "Well, Sis, ole kid, how about you and me taking alittle trip to New York in a couple weeks? See some high life. I'll getyou the best soot in the best hotel in town, and we'll take in someshows--I hear this Callin' Stalin is a hot number--real Corpo art--andI'll buy you some honest-to-God champagne wine! And then if we find welike 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 coursethe 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 miserablecounty commissioner's salary the rest of my life! Believe me, I'm goingto be a millionaire before very long!"

Then he told her: told her precisely the sort of discreditable secretfor which she had so long fished in vain. Perhaps it was because he wassober. Shad, when drunk, reversed all the rules and became morepeasant-like and cautious with each drink.

He had a plan. That plan was as brutal and as infeasible as any plan ofShad Ledue for making large money would be. Its essence was that heshould avoid manual labor and should make as many persons miserable aspossible. It was like his plan, when he was still a hired man, to becomewealthy by breeding dogs--first stealing the dogs and, preferably, thekennels.

As County Commissioner he had not merely, as was the Corpo custom, beenbribed by the shopkeepers and professional men for protection againstthe M.M.'s. He had actually gone into partnership with them, promisingthem larger M.M. orders, and, he boasted, he had secret contracts withthese merchants all written down and signed and tucked away in hisoffice safe.

Sissy got rid of him that evening by being difficult, while letting himassume that the conquest of her would not take more than three or fourmore days. She cried furiously after he had gone--in the comfortingpresence 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 FrancisTasbrough about the interesting documents Shad had in his safe. She didnot ever see Shad Ledue again.

She was very sick about his being killed. She was very sick about allkilling. She found no heroism but only barbaric bestiality in having tokill so that one might so far live as to be halfway honest and kind andsecure. But she knew that she would be willing to do it again.

The Jessup house was magniloquently rented by that noble Roman, thatpolitical belch, Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, who, being tired of againtrying to make a living by peddling real estate and criminal law, waspleased 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 hadsaid daily since Buzz Windrip had been inaugurated, that he was fed-upwith the whole business and was immediately going back to Canada. Infact, 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, beingfattened and sobbed over and brightly sent to bed. Mrs. Candy had doneonly too much of that. And Philip had given her all the parental adviceshe could endure for a while. It was a relief when Lorinda received heras an adult, as one too sensible to insult by pity--received her, infact, 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 nowempty of guests for the winter except for the constant infestation ofwhimpering refugees, Lorinda, knitting, made her first mention of thedead 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 bigmilitary funeral."

"Well, of course, they don't much care to have assassinations talkedabout and maybe sort of become a general habit. I agree with yourfather. I think that, in many cases, assassinations are really ratherunfortunate--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 asbusiness-like as ordering eggs.

"Yes. I tried everything. I went to see Tasbrough, and that educationalfellow, Peaseley. Nothing doing. They want to keep Doremus in. But thatrat, Aras Dilley, is at Trianon as guard now. I'm bribing him to helpyour father escape. We'll have the man here for Christmas, only kind oflate, and sneak him into Canada."

"Oh!" said Sissy.

**

A few days afterward, reading a coded New Underground telegram whichapparently dealt with the delivery of furniture, Lorinda shrieked,"Sissy! All you-know-what has busted loose! In Washington! Lee Sarasonhas deposed Buzz Windrip and grabbed the dictatorship!"

"Oh!" said Sissy.

Chapter 35

In his two years of dictatorship, Berzelius Windrip daily became more amiser of power. He continued to tell himself that his main ambition wasto make all citizens healthy, in purse and mind, and that if he wasbrutal it was only toward fools and reactionaries who wanted the oldclumsy systems. But after eighteen months of Presidency he was angrythat Mexico and Canada and South America (obviously his own property, bymanifest destiny) should curtly answer his curt diplomatic notes andshow no helpfulness about becoming part of his inevitable empire.

And daily he wanted louder, more convincing Yeses from everybody abouthim. How could he carry on his heartbreaking labor if nobody everencouraged him? he demanded. Anyone, from Sarason to inter-officemessenger, who did not play valet to his ego he suspected of plottingagainst him. He constantly increased his bodyguard, and as constantlydistrusted all his guards and discharged them, and once took a shot at acouple of them, so that in all the world he had no companion save hisold aide Lee Sarason, and perhaps Hector Macgoblin, to whom he couldtalk easily.

He felt lonely in the hours when he wanted to shuck off the duties ofdespotism along with his shoes and his fine new coat. He no longer wentout racketing. His cabinet begged him not to clown in barrooms and lodgeentertainments; it was not dignified, and it was dangerous to be toonear to strangers.

So he played poker with his bodyguard, late at night, and at such timesdrank too much, and he cursed them and glared with bulging eyes wheneverhe lost, which, for all the good-will of his guards about letting himwin, had to be often, because he pinched their salaries badly and lockedup the spoons. He had become as unbouncing and unbuzzing a Buzz as mightbe, and he did not know it.

All the while he loved the People just as much as he feared and detestedPersons, and he planned to do something historic. Certainly! He wouldgive each family that five thousand dollars a year just as soon now ashe could arrange it.

**

And Lee Sarason, forever making his careful lists, as patient at hisdesk as he was pleasure-hungry on the couch at midnight parties, wasbeguiling officials to consider him their real lord and the master ofCorpoism. He kept his promises to them, while Windrip always forgot. Hisoffice door became the door of ambition. In Washington, the reportersprivily spoke of this assistant secretary and that general as "Sarasonmen." His clique was not a government within a government; it was thegovernment itself, minus the megaphones. He had the Secretary ofCorporations (a former vice-president of the American Federation ofLabor) coming to him secretly every evening, to report on labor politicsand in especial on such proletarian leaders as were dissatisfied withWindrip as Chief--i.e., with their own share in the swag. He had fromthe Secretary of the Treasury (though this functionary, one WebsterSkittle, was not a lieutenant of Sarason but merely friendly)confidential reports on the affairs of those large employers who, sinceunder Corpoism it was usually possible for a millionaire to persuade thejudges in the labor-arbitration courts to look at things reasonably,rejoiced that with strikes outlawed and employers regarded as stateofficials, they would now be in secure power forever.

Sarason knew the quiet ways in which these reinforced industrial baronsused arrests by the M.M.'s to get rid of "trouble-makers," particularlyof Jewish radicals--a Jewish radical being a Jew with nobody working forhim. (Some of the barons were themselves Jews; it is not to be expectedthat race-loyalty should be carried so insanely far as to weaken thepocketbook.)

The allegiance of all such Negroes as had the sense to be content withsafety and good pay instead of ridiculous yearnings for personalintegrity Sarason got by being photographed shaking hands with thecelebrated Negro Fundamentalist clergyman, the Reverend Dr. AlexanderNibbs, and through the highly publicized Sarason Prizes for the Negroeswith the largest families, the fastest time in floor-scrubbing, and thelongest periods of work without taking a vacation.

"No danger of our good friends, the Negroes, turning Red when they'reencouraged like that," Sarason announced to the newspapers.

It was a satisfaction to Sarason that in Germany, all military bandswere now playing his national song, "Buzz and Buzz" along with the HorstWessel hymn, for, though he had not exactly written the music as well asthe words, the music was now being attributed to him abroad.

***

As a bank clerk might, quite rationally, worry equally over thewhereabouts of a hundred million dollars' worth of the bank's bonds, andof ten cents of his own lunch money, so Buzz Windrip worried equallyover the welfare--that is, the obedience to himself--of a hundred andthirty-odd million American citizens and the small matter of the moodsof Lee Sarason, whose approval of him was the one real fame. (His wifeWindrip did not see oftener than once a week, and anyway, what thatrustic wench thought was unimportant.)

The diabolic Hector Macgoblin frightened him; Secretary of War Luthorneand Vice-President Perley Beecroft he liked well enough, but they boredhim; they smacked too much of his own small-town boyhood, to escapewhich he was willing to take the responsibilities of a nation. It wasthe incalculable Lee Sarason on whom he depended, and the Lee with whomhe had gone fishing and boozing and once, even, murdering, who hadseemed his own self made more sure and articulate, had thoughts nowwhich 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 whenBuzz replaced the amiable but clumsy Colonel Luthorne as Secretary ofWar by Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the Northeastern Province(Buzz's characteristic comment was that Luthorne was not "pulling hisweight"), he also gave to Haik the position of High Marshal of theM.M.'s, which Lee had held along with a dozen other offices. From Lee heexpected an explosion, then repentance and a new friendship. But Leeonly 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 himagain? wistfully wondered the man who now and then planned to be emperorof the world.

He gave Lee a thousand-dollar television set. Even more coldly did Leethank him, and never spoke afterward of how well he might be receivingthe still shaky television broadcasts on his beautiful new set.

As Dewey Haik took hold, doubling efficiency in both the regular armyand the Minute Men (he was a demon for all-night practice marches inheavy order, and the files could not complain, because he set theexample), Buzz began to wonder whether Haik might not be his newconfidant.... He really would hate to throw Lee into prison, butstill, Lee was so thoughtless about hurting his feelings, when he'd goneand done so much for him and all!

Buzz was confused. He was the more confused when Perley Beecroft came inand briefly said that he was sick of all this bloodshed and was goinghome to the farmland as for his lofty Vice-Presidential office, Buzzknew what he could do with it.

Were these vast national dissensions no different from squabbles in hisfather's drugstore? fretted Buzz. He couldn't very well have Beecroftshot: it might cause criticism. But it was indecent, it was sacrilegiousto annoy an emperor, and in his irritation he had an ex-Senator andtwelve workmen who were in concentration camps taken out and shot on thecharge that they had told irreverent stories about him.

**

Secretary of State Sarason was saying good-night to President Windrip inthe hotel suite where Windrip really lived.

No newspaper had dared mention it, but Buzz was both bothered by thestateliness of the White House and frightened by the number of Reds andcranks and anti-Corpos who, with the most commendable patience andingenuity, tried to sneak into that historic mansion and murder him.Buzz merely left his wife there, for show, and, except at greatreceptions, never entered any part of the White House save the officeannex.

He liked this hotel suite; he was a sensible man, who preferred straightbourbon, codfish cakes, and deep leather chairs to Burgundy, troutbleu, and Louis Quinze. In this twelve-room apartment, occupying theentire tenth floor of a small unnotorious hotel, he had for himself onlya plain bedroom, a huge living room which looked like a combination ofoffice and hotel lobby, a large liquor closet, another closet withthirty-seven suits of clothes, and a bathroom with jars and jars of thepine-flavored bath salts which were his only cosmetic luxury. Buzz mightcome home in a suit dazzling as a horse blanket, one considered inAlfalfa Center a triumph of London tailoring, but, once safe, he likedto put on his red morocco slippers that were down at the heel anddisplay his red suspenders and baby-blue sleeve garters. To feel correctin those decorations, he preferred the hotel atmosphere that, for somany years before he had ever seen the White House, had been as familiarto him as his ancestral corn cribs and Main Streets.

The other ten rooms of the suite, entirely shutting his own off from thecorridors and elevators, were filled night and day with guards. To getthrough to Buzz in this intimate place of his own was very much likevisiting a police station for the purpose of seeing a homicidalprisoner.

**

"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 HighMarshal 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 Sarasonever could look.

"Why, uh--I supposed you knew it. Luthorne was liquidated in the purgeten 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 thenewspaper clippings are predigested, by God, before I see 'em!"

"It's thought better not to bother you with minor details, boss. Youknow that! Of course, if you feel I haven't organized your staffcorrectly----"

"Aw now, don't fly off the handle, Lee! I just meant----Of course I knowhow hard you've tried to protect me so I could give all my brains to thehigher problems of State. But Luthorne----I kind of liked him. He alwayshad 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 differedfrom Buzz's only in being smaller. To forget it he bawled, verybrightly, "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 ofit! Why, we may be able to pull off a North American kingdom!" Buzz halfmeant it seriously--or perhaps quarter meant it. "How'd you like to beDuke of Georgia--or Grand Duke, or whatever they call a Grand ExaltedRuler of the Elks in this peerage business? And then how about an Empireof 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 samething 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 atleast imprison, Perley Beecroft, too. He's still technicallyVice-President of the United States, and if the lousy traitor managedsome skullduggery so as to get you killed or deposed, he might beregarded by some narrow-minded literalists as President!"

"No, no, no! He's my friend, no matter what he says about me... thedirty dog!" wailed Buzz.

"All right. You're the boss. G'night," said Lee, and returned from thisplumber's dream of paradise to his own gold-and-black and apricot-silkbower 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 BuzzWindrip. He was either angry with his young friends, and then he whippedthem, or he was in a paroxysm of apology to them, and caressed theirwounds. Newspapermen who had once seemed to be his friends said that hehad traded the green eyeshade for a wreath of violets.

**

At cabinet meeting, late in 1938, Secretary of State Sarason revealed tothe heads of the government disturbing news. Vice-PresidentBeecroft--and had he not told them the man should have been shot?--hadfled to Canada, renounced Corpoism, and joined Walt Trowbridge inplotting. There were bubbles from an almost boiling rebellion in theMiddle West and Northwest, especially in Minnesota and the Dakotas,where agitators, some of them formerly of political influence, weredemanding that their states secede from the Corpo Union and form acoöperative (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 keptup on everything that goes on, Lee! You forget that I myself,personally, made a special radio address to that particular section ofthe country last week! And I got a wonderful reaction. The MiddleWesterners are absolutely loyal to me. They appreciate what I've beentrying to do!"

Not answering him at all, Sarason demanded that, in order to bring andhold all elements in the country together by that useful Patriotismwhich always appears upon threat of an outside attack, the governmentimmediately arrange to be insulted and menaced in a well-planned seriesof deplorable "incidents" on the Mexican border, and declare war onMexico as soon as America showed that it was getting hot and patrioticenough.

Secretary of the Treasury Skittle and Attorney General Porkwood shooktheir heads, but Secretary of War Haik and Secretary of EducationMacgoblin agreed with Sarason high-mindedly. Once, pointed out thelearned Macgoblin, governments had merely let themselves slide into awar, thanking Providence for having provided a conflict as a febrifugeagainst internal discontent, but of course, in this age of deliberate,planned propaganda, a really modern government like theirs must figureout what brand of war they had to sell and plan the selling-campaignconsciously. Now, as for him, he would be willing to leave the wholeset-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 andChristianize it. But I'm scared that your darn scheme might work justopposite to what you say. You put arms into the hands of too manyirresponsible folks, and they might use 'em and turn against you andstart a revolution and throw the whole dern gang of us out! No, no! I'veoften wondered if the whole Minute Men business, with their arms andtraining, may not be a mistake. That was your idea, Lee, not mine!"

Sarason spoke evenly: "My dear Buzz, one day you thank me fororiginating that 'great crusade of citizen soldiers defending theirhomes'--as you love to call it on the radio--and the next day you almostruin your clothes, you're so scared of them. Make up your mind one wayor the other!"

Sarason walked out of the room, not bowing.

Windrip complained, "I'm not going to stand for Lee's talking to me likethat! 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 hethinks jobs like that grow on every tree! Maybe he'd like to be a bankpresident or something--I mean, maybe he'd like to be Emperor ofEngland!"

**

President Windrip, in his hotel bedroom, was awakened late at night bythe voice of a guard in the outer room: "Yuh, sure, let him pass--he'sthe Secretary of State." Nervously the President clicked on his bedsidelamp.... He had needed it lately, to read himself to sleep.

In that limited glow he saw Lee Sarason, Dewey Haik, and Dr. HectorMacgoblin march to the side of his bed. Lee's thin sharp face was likeflour. His deep-buried eyes were those of a sleepwalker. His skinnyright hand held a bowie knife which, as his hand deliberately rose, waslost in the dimness. Windrip swiftly thought: Sure would be hard to knowwhere to buy a dagger, in Washington; and Windrip thought: All this isthe doggonedest foolishness--just like a movie or one of these oldhistory books when you were a kid; and Windrip thought, all in that sameflash: 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 Presidentreally awoke: "Lee! Do you remember the time when your old mother was sosick, and I gave you my last cent and loaned you my flivver so you couldgo 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 sneakoff to France or England.... The lousy coward seems afraid todie.... Of course, we'll kill him if he ever does dare to come backto the States. Take him out and phone the Secretary of the Navy for aboat 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, hadoccupied all of Washington.

Ten days later Buzz Windrip was landed in Havre and went sighingly toParis. It was his first view of Europe except for one twenty-one-dayCook'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 oftragedy, like the ex-King of Greece, Kerensky, the Russian Grand Dukes,Jimmy Walker, and a few ex-presidents from South America and Cuba, whois delighted to accept invitations to drawing rooms where the champagneis good enough and one may have a chance of finding people, now andthen, who will listen to one's story and say "sir."

At that, though, Buzz chuckled, he had kinda put it over on thosecrooks, for during his two sweet years of despotism he had sent fourmillion dollars abroad, to secret, safe accounts. And so Buzz Windrippassed into wabbly paragraphs in recollections by ex-diplomaticgentlemen with monocles. In what remained of Ex-President Windrip'slife, everything was ex. He was even so far forgotten that only fouror five American students tried to shoot him.

**

The more dulcetly they had once advised and flattered Buzz, the moreardently did most of his former followers, Macgoblin and SenatorPorkwood and Dr. Almeric Trout and the rest, turn in loud allegiance tothe new President, the Hon. Lee Sarason.

He issued a proclamation that he had discovered that Windrip had beenembezzling the people's money and plotting with Mexico to avoid war withthat guilty country; and that he, Sarason, in quite alarming grief andreluctance, since he more than anyone else had been deceived by hissupposed friend, Windrip, had yielded to the urging of the Cabinet andtaken over the Presidency, instead of Vice-President Beecroft, theexiled traitor.

President Sarason immediately began appointing the fancier of his youngofficer friends to the most responsible offices in State and army. Itamused 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 notsemi-divine, like a Roman emperor? Could he not defy all the muddy mobthat he (once a Socialist) had, for its weak shiftlessness, come todespise?

"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 RutherfordBirchard Hayes he had orgies (an old name for "parties") with weavinglimbs and garlands and wine in pretty fair imitations of Roman beakers.

**

It was hard for imprisoned men like Doremus Jessup to believe it, butthere were some tens of thousands of Corpos, in the M.M.'s, incivil-service, in the army, and just in private ways, to whom Sarason'sflippant 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 asthe most probable saviors of the country from, on one hand, dominationby Moscow and, on the other hand, the slack indolence, the lack ofdecent pride of half the American youth, whose world (these idealistsasserted) was composed of shiftless distaste for work and refusal tolearn anything thoroughly, of blatting dance music on the radio, maniacautomobiles, slobbering sexuality, the humor and art of comic strips--ofa slave psychology which was making America a land for sterner men toloot.

General Emmanuel Coon was one of the Corpo Idealists.

Such men did not condone the murders under the Corpo régime. But theyinsisted, "This is a revolution, and after all, when in all history hasthere 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 andclean Spartan strength and the semi-divinity of the all-protectingFather, President Windrip. They believed, they made themselves believe,that in Windrip had come alive again the virtues of Andy Jackson andFarragut and Jeb Stuart, in place of the mob cheapness of theprofessional athletes who had been the only heroes of 1935.

They planned, these idealists, to correct, as quickly as might be, theerrors of brutality and crookedness among officials. They saw arising aCorpo art, a Corpo learning, profound and real, divested of thetraditional snobbishness of the old-time universities, valiant withyouth, and only the more beautiful in that it was "useful." They wereconvinced that Corpoism was Communism cleansed of foreign domination andthe violence and indignity of mob dictatorship; Monarchism with thechosen hero of the people for monarch; Fascism without grasping andselfish leaders; freedom with order and discipline; Traditional Americawithout its waste and provincial cockiness.

Like all religious zealots, they had blessed capacity for blindness, andthey were presently convinced that (since the only newspapers they everread certainly said nothing about it) there were no more ofblood-smeared cruelties in court and concentration camp; no restrictionsof speech or thought. They believed that they never criticized the Corporégime not because they were censored, but because "that sort of thingwas, like obscenity, such awfully bad form."

And these idealists were as shocked and bewildered by Sarason's coupd'état against Windrip as was Mr. Berzelius Windrip himself.

**

The grim Secretary of War, Haik, scolded at President Sarason for hisinfluence on the nation, particularly on the troops. Lee laughed at him,but once he was sufficiently flattered by Haik's tribute to his artisticpowers to write a poem for him. It was a poem which was later to be sungby millions; it was, in fact, the most popular of the soldiers' balladswhich were to spring automatically from anonymous soldier bards duringthe war between the United States and Mexico. Only, being as pious abeliever in Modern Advertising as Sarason himself, the efficient Haikwanted to encourage the spontaneous generation of these patriotic folkballads by providing the automatic springing and the anonymous bard. Hehad as much foresight, as much "prophetic engineering," as a motorcarmanufacturer.

Sarason was as eager for war with Mexico (or Ethiopia or Siam orGreenland or any other country that would provide his pet young painterswith a chance to portray Sarason being heroic amid curious vegetation)as Haik; not only to give malcontents something outside the country tobe cross about, but also to give himself a chance to be picturesque. Heanswered Haik's request by writing a rollicking military chorus at atime while the country was still theoretically entirely friendly withMexico. It went to the tune of "Mademoiselle from Armentières"--or"Armenteers." If the Spanish in it was a little shaky, still, millionswere later to understand that "Habla oo?" stood for "¿Habla usted?"signifying "Parlez-vous?" It ran thus, as it came from Sarason's purplebut 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 soduring his part in the scientific preparation for war which consisted inrehearsing M.M. choruses in trolling out this ditty with well-trainedspontaneity.

His friend Hector Macgoblin, now Secretary of State, told Sarason thatthis manly chorus was one of his greatest creations. Macgoblin, thoughpersonally he did not join in Sarason's somewhat unusual midnightdiversions, was amused by them, and he often told Sarason that he wasthe only original creative genius among this whole bunch of stuffedshirts, including Haik.

"You want to watch that cuss Haik, Lee," said Macgoblin. "He'sambitious, he's a gorilla, and he's a pious Puritan, and that's a triplecombination I'm scared of. The troops like him."

"Rats! He has no attraction for them. He's just an accurate militarybookkeeper," said Sarason.

That night he had a party at which, for a novelty, rather shocking tohis intimates, he actually had girls present, performing certain curiousdances. The next morning Haik rebuked him, and--Sarason had ahangover--was stormed at. That night, just a month after Sarason hadusurped 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. Haikmarched into the White House with his picked storm troops, foundPresident Sarason in violet silk pajamas among his friends, shot Sarasonand most of his companions dead, and proclaimed himself President.

Hector Macgoblin fled by aëroplane to Cuba, then on. When last seen, hewas living high up in the mountains of Haiti, wearing only a singlet,dirty white-drill trousers, grass sandals, and a long tan beard; veryhealthy 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 tosuffer a little, and to long for the good old democratic, liberal daysof Windrip.

Windrip and Sarason had not minded mirth and dancing in the street solong as they could be suitably taxed. Haik disliked such things onprinciple. Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology, he was astrict orthodox Christian. He was the first to tell the populace thatthey were not going to get any five thousand dollars a year but,instead, "reap the profits of Discipline and of the ScientificTotalitarian State not in mere paper figures but in vast dividends ofPride, Patriotism, and Power." He kicked out of the army all officerswho could not endure marching and going thirsty; and out of the civilbranch all commissioners--including one Francis Tasbrough--who hadgarnered riches too easily and too obviously.

He treated the entire nation like a well-run plantation, on which theslaves were better fed than formerly, less often cheated by theiroverseers, and kept so busy that they had time only for work and forsleep, and thus fell rarely into the debilitating vices of laughter,song (except war songs against Mexico), complaint, or thinking. UnderHaik 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 ofbeating persons, men, women, or children, who asserted that they didn'tcare to be slaves on even the best plantation, but just to shoot themout of hand.

Haik made such use of the clergy--Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, andLiberal-Agnostic--as Windrip and Sarason never had. While there wereplenty of ministers who, like Mr. Falck and Father Stephen Perefixe,like Cardinal Faulhaber and Pastor Niemoeller in Germany, considered itsome part of Christian duty to resent the enslavement and torture oftheir appointed flocks, there were also plenty of reverend celebrities,particularly large-city pastors whose sermons were reported in thenewspapers every Monday morning, to whom Corpoism had given a chance tobe noisily and lucratively patriotic. These were the chaplains-at-heart,who, if there was no war in which they could humbly help to purify andcomfort the poor brave boys who were fighting, were glad to help providesuch a war.

These more practical shepherds, since like doctors and lawyers they wereable to steal secrets out of the heart, became valued spies during thedifficult months after February, 1939, when Haik was working up war withMexico. (Canada? Japan? Russia? They would come later.) For even with anarmy of slaves, it was necessary to persuade them that they were freemenand fighters for the principle of freedom, or otherwise the scoundrelsmight cross over and join the enemy!

So reigned the good king Haik, and if there was anyone in all the landwho 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, alady with eyeglasses and a smile of resolute cordiality, gave to theW.C.T.U., the Y.W.C.A., and the Ladies' League against Red Radicalism,and their inherently incidental husbands, a magnified and hand-coloredWashington version of just such parties as she had once given in theHaik bungalow in Eglantine, Oregon.

Chapter 36

The ban on information at the Trianon camp had been raised; Mrs. Candyhad come calling on Doremus--complete with cocoanut layer cake--and hehad heard of Mary's death, the departure of Emma and Sissy, the end ofWindrip and Sarason. And none of it seemed in the least real--not halfso real and, except for the fact that he would never see Mary again, nothalf so important as the increasing number of lice and rats in theircell.

During the ban, they had celebrated Christmas by laughing, not verycheerfully, at the Christmas tree Karl Pascal had contrived out of aspruce bough and tinfoil from cigarette packages. They had hummed"Stille Nacht" softly in the darkness, and Doremus had thought of alltheir 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, thegrowing bitterness and orthodox piety of Karl became one of Doremus'smost hateful woes; a tragedy to be blamed upon the Corpos, or upon theprinciple of dictatorship in general, as savagely as the deaths of Maryand Dan Wilgus and Henry Veeder. Under persecution, Karl lost no ounceof his courage and his ingenuity in bamboozling the M.M. guards, but dayby day he did steadily lose all his humor, his patience, his tolerance,his easy companionship, and everything else that made life endurable tomen packed in a cell. The Communism that had always been his KingCharles's Head, sometimes amusing, became a religious bigotry as hatefulto Doremus as the old bigotries of the Inquisition or the FundamentalistProtestants; that attitude of slaughtering to save men's souls fromwhich the Jessup family had escaped during these last three generations.

It was impossible to get away from Karl's increasing zeal. He chatteredon at night for an hour after all the other five had growled, "Oh, shutup! I want to sleep! You'll be making a Corpo out of me!"

Sometimes, in his proselytizing, he conquered. When his cell mates hadlong enough cursed the camp guards, Karl would rebuke them: "You're alot 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 theworst of 'em, even the professional gunmen in the M.M. ranks, don't getas much satisfaction out of punishing us heretics as the honest, dumbCorpos who've been misled by their leaders' mouthing about Freedom,Order, Security, Discipline, Strength! All those swell words that evenbefore Windrip came in the speculators started using to protect theirprofits! Especially how they used the word 'Liberty'! Liberty to stealthe didies off the babies! I tell you, an honest man gets sick when hehears 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 arejust as unfortunate as we are--lot of 'em are just poor devils thatcouldn't get decent work, back in the Golden Age of FrankRoosevelt--bookkeepers that had to dig ditches, auto agents thatcouldn't sell cars and went sour, ex-looeys in the Great War that cameback to find their jobs pinched off 'em and that followed Windrip, quitehonestly, because they thought, the saps, that when he said Security hemeant Security! They'll learn!"

And having admirably discoursed for another hour on the perils ofself-righteousness among the Corpos, Comrade Pascal would change thesubject and discourse upon the glory of self-righteousness among theCommunists--particularly upon those sanctified examples of Communism wholived in bliss in the Holy City of Moscow, where, Doremus judged, thestreets were paved with undepreciable roubles.

The Holy City of Moscow! Karl looked upon it with exactly suchuncritical and slightly hysterical adoration as other sectarians had intheir day devoted to Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, Canterbury, and Benares.Fine, all right, thought Doremus. Let 'em worship their sacred fonts--itwas as good a game as any for the mentally retarded. Only, why thenshould they object to his considering as sacred Fort Beulah, or NewYork, or Oklahoma City?

Karl once fell into a froth because Doremus wondered if the irondeposits in Russia were all they might be. Why certainly! Russia, beingHoly Russia, must, as a useful part of its holiness, have sufficientiron, and Karl needed no mineralogists' reports but only the blissfuleye of faith to know it.

He did not mind Karl's worshiping Holy Russia. But Karl did, using theword "naïve," which is the favorite word and just possibly the only wordknown to Communist journalists, derisively mind when Doremus had a mildnotion of worshiping Holy America. Karl spoke often of photographs inthe Moscow News of nearly naked girls on Russian bathing-beaches asproving the triumph and joy of the workers under Bolshevism, but heregarded precisely the same sort of photographs of nearly naked girls onLong Island bathing-beaches as proving the degeneration of the workersunder Capitalism.

As a newspaperman, Doremus remembered that the only reporters whomisrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously than theCapitalists were the Communists.

He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism againstFascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was preached equallyby Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in America the strugglewas befogged by the fact that the worst Fascists were they who disownedthe word "Fascism" and preached enslavement to Capitalism under thestyle of Constitutional and Traditional Native American Liberty. Forthey were thieves not only of wages but of honor. To their purpose theycould quote not only Scripture but Jefferson.

That Karl Pascal should be turning into a zealot, like most of hischiefs in the Communist party, was grievous to Doremus because he hadonce simple-heartedly hoped that in the mass strength of Communism theremight be an escape from cynical dictatorship. But he saw now that hemust remain alone, a "Liberal," scorned by all the noisier prophets forrefusing to be a willing cat for the busy monkeys of either side. But atworst, the Liberals, the Tolerant, might in the long run preserve someof the arts of civilization, no matter which brand of tyranny shouldfinally dominate the world.

"More and more, as I think about history," he pondered, "I am convincedthat everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplishedby the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation ofthis spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever. But themen of ritual and the men of barbarism are capable of shutting up themen of science and of silencing them forever."

**

Yes, this was the worst thing the enemies of honor, the pirateindustrialists and then their suitable successors, the Corpos with theirblackjacks, had done: it had turned the brave, the generous, thepassionate and half-literate Karl Pascals into dangerous fanatics. Andhow well they had done it! Doremus was uncomfortable with Karl; he feltthat his next turn in jail might be under the wardenship of none otherthan Karl himself, as he remembered how the Bolsheviks, once in power,had most smugly imprisoned and persecuted those great women, Spiridinovaand Breshkovskaya and Ismailovitch, who, by their conspiracies againstthe Czar, their willingness to endure Siberian torture on behalf of"freedom for the masses," had most brought on the revolution by whichthe Bolsheviks were able to take control--and not only again forbidfreedom to the masses, but this time inform them that, anyway, freedomwas just a damn silly bourgeois superstition.

So Doremus, sleeping two-and-a-half feet above his old companion, felthimself in a cell within a cell. Henry Veeder and Clarence Little andVictor Loveland and Mr. Falck were gone now, and to Julian, penned insolitary, he could not speak once a month.

He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity; awake andasleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart had stopped whenSquad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as Doremus was scrubbing alavatory floor, "Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup! Mis' Pike is fixin' it up andI'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. Assweeper, Doremus was reasonably free to leave his cell, and Aras hadloosened the boards and barbed wire at the end of one of the alleysleading from the quadrangle between buildings. But outside, he waslikely to be shot by a guard on sight.

For a week Aras watched. He knew that one of the night guards had ahabit of getting drunk, which was forgiven him because of his excellencein flogging trouble-makers but which was regarded by the more judiciousas rather regrettable. And for that week Aras fed the guard's habit onLorinda's expense money, and was indeed so devoted to his duties that hewas himself twice carried to bed. Snake Tizra grew interested--but Snakealso, after the first couple of drinks, liked to be democratic with hismen 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 tellanybody 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, thenrasped, surly-seeming, "Here you, Jessup--you left one of the cans alldirty!" Doremus looked mildly at the cell that had been his home andstudy and tabernacle for six months, glanced at Karl Pascal reading inhis bunk--slowly waving a shoeless foot in a sock with the end of itgone, at Truman Webb darning the seat of his pants, noted the gray smokein 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 barbedwire at the end of the small alley and carelessly stepped out, along theroad. The only guard in sight was at a distance, and he was wavering inhis gait. A block away, a furniture van was jacked up while the driverand 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 samehard-faced long-distance cruiser who had carried bundles of tracts forthe New Underground.

The driver grunted, "Get in--hustle!" Doremus crouched between a bureauand a wing chair inside.

Instantly he felt the tilted body of the van dropping, as the driverpulled 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 andrespectable fellows from escaping. They figure that most of you are tooscary to try out anything, once you're away from your offices and frontporches 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 upeasy afterwards, because you ain't onto hiding out, like a regularfellow that's been out of work sometimes and maybe gone on the bum. Butdon't worry. We'll get you through. I tell you, there's nobody gotfriends like a revolutionist.... And enemies!"

Then first did it come to Doremus that, by sentence of the late lamentedEffingham Swan, he was subject to the death penalty for escaping. But"Oh, what the hell!" he grunted, like Karl Pascal, and he stretched inthe 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 highon a hill; and once he slept overnight on top of a coffin in theestablishment of an undertaker. He walked secret paths; he rode in theback of an itinerant medicine-peddler's car and, concealed in fur capand high-collared fur coat, in the sidecar of an Underground workerserving as an M.M. squad leader. From this he dismounted, at thedriver's command, in front of an obviously untenanted farmhouse on asnaky back-road between Monadnock Mountain and the Averill lakes--a veryslattern of an old unpainted farmhouse, with sinking roof and snow up tothe frowsy windows.

It seemed a mistake.

Doremus knocked, as the motorcycle snarled away, and the door opened onLorinda 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 livingroom, a room with peeling wall paper, and altogether bare except for acot, two chairs, a table, the two moaning women saw a small man, hisface dirty, pasty, and sunken as by tuberculosis, his once fussilytrimmed beard and mustache ragged as wisps of hay, his overlong hair arustic 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, asit seemed, in heaven, looking at the two principal angels, but he hadbeen so often fooled so cruelly in his visions these dreary months! Hesobbed, and they comforted him with softly stroking hands and not tooconfoundedly much babble.

"I've got a hot bath for you! And I'll scrub your back! And then somehot chicken soup and ice-cream!"

As though one should say: The Lord God awaits you on His throne and allwhom you bless shall be blessed, and all your enemies brought to theirknees!

Those sainted women had actually had a long tin tub fetched to thekitchen of the old house, filled it with water heated in kettle anddishpan on the stove, and provided brushes, soap, a vast sponge, andsuch a long caressing bath towel as Doremus had forgotten existed. Andsomehow, from Fort Beulah, Sissy had brought plenty of his own shoes andshirts 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 thesame underclothes, and for two (in clammy winter) no socks whatever!

If the presence of Lorinda and Sissy was token of heaven, to slide inchby slow ecstatic inch into the tub was its proof, and he lay soaking inglory.

When he was half dressed, the two came in, and there was about as muchthought of modesty, or need for it, as though he were the two-year-oldbabe he somewhat resembled. They were laughing at him, but laughterbecame sharp whimpers of horror when they saw the gridironed meat of hisback. 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 camphad been singularly devoid of any mothering. Lorinda salved his back andpowdered it. She cut his hair, not too unskillfully. She cooked for himall 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 atBeecher Falls; already M.M.'s had been there, snooping after him. ButSissy and she had, for such refugees as they might be forwarding for theNew Underground, provided this dingy farmhouse with half-a-dozen cots,and rich stores of canned goods and beautiful bottles (Doremusconsidered them) of honey and marmalade and bar-le-duc. The actual finalcrossing of the border into Canada was easier than it had been when BuckTitus had tried to smuggle the Jessup family over. It had become asystem, as in the piratical days of bootlegging; with new forest paths,bribery of frontier guards, and forged passports. He was safe. Yet justto make safety safer, Lorinda and Sissy, rubbing their chins as theylooked Doremus over, still discussing him as brazenly as though he werea baby who could not understand them, decided to turn him into a youngman.

"Dye his hair and mustache black and shave the beard, I think. I wish wehad 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 kindof a chin I'll have when it's naked?"

"Why, the man still thinks he's a newspaper proprietor and one of FortBeulah's social favorites!" marveled Sissy as they ruthlessly set towork.

"Only real reason for these damn wars and revolutions anyway is that thewomenfolks get a chance--ouch! be careful!--to be dear little AmateurMothers to every male they can get in their clutches. Hair dye!" saidDoremus 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 Sissywas sent back to Beecher Falls to keep the tea room alive, and for threedays Lorinda and he gobbled steaks and ale, and played pinochle, and laytalking infinitely of all they had thought about each other in the sixdesert months that might have been sixty years. He was to remember thesloping farmhouse bedroom and a shred of rag carpet and a couple ofrickety chairs and Lorinda snuggled under the old red comforter on thecot, not as winter poverty but as youth and adventurous love.

Then, in a forest clearing, with snow along the spruce boughs, a fewfeet 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 exilefrom the America to which, already, he was looking back with the longpain of nostalgia.

Chapter 37

His beard had grown again--he and his beard had been friends for manyyears, and he had missed it of late. His hair and mustache had againassumed a respectable gray in place of the purple dye that underelectric lights had looked so bogus. He was no longer impassioned at thesight of a lamb chop or a cake of soap. But he had not yet got over thepleasure and slight amazement at being able to talk as freely as hewould, as emphatically as might please him, and in public.

He sat with his two closest friends in Montreal, two fellow executivesin 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 beena prize agent of the Communist Party in America till he had been kickedout of that almost imperceptible body for having made a "united front"with Socialists, Democrats, and even choir-singers when organizing ananti-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 wasdictatorship by the livelier representatives of the toiling masses,strict and if need be violent, but (this was his new heresy) notgoverned by Moscow. Beecroft was gaseously asserting that "all weneeded" was a return to precisely the political parties, the drumming upof votes, and the oratorical legislating by Congress, of the contenteddays of William B. McKinley.

But as for Doremus, he leaned back not vastly caring what nonsense theothers might talk so long as it was permitted them to talk at allwithout finding that the waiters were M.M. spies; and content to knowthat, whatever happened, Trowbridge and the other authentic leaderswould never go back to satisfaction in government of the profits, by theprofits, for the profits. He thought comfortably of the fact that justyesterday (he had this from the chairman's secretary), Walt Trowbridgehad dismissed Wilson J. Shale, the ducal oil man, who had come,apparently with sincerity, to offer his fortune and his executiveexperience to Trowbridge and the cause.

"Nope. Sorry, Will. But we can't use you. Whatever happens--even if Haikmarches over and slaughters all of us along with all our Canadianhosts--you and your kind of clever pirates are finished. Whateverhappens, whatever details of a new system of government may be decidedon, whether we call it a 'Coöperative Commonwealth' or 'State Socialism'or 'Communism' or 'Revived Traditional Democracy,' there's got to be anew feeling--that government is not a game for a few smart, resoluteathletes like you, Will, but a universal partnership, in which the Statemust own all resources so large that they affect all members of theState, and in which the one worst crime won't be murder or kidnaping buttaking advantage of the State--in which the seller of fraudulentmedicine, or the liar in Congress, will be punished a whole lot worsethan the fellow who takes an ax to the man who's grabbed off hisgirl.... Eh? What's going to happen to magnates like you, Will? Godknows! 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; almostas savagely he longed for the not exorbitant pleasure of being withLorinda, Buck, Emma, Sissy, Steve Perefixe.

None of them save Emma could join him in Canada, and she would not. Herletters suggested fear of the un-Worcesterian wildernesses of Montreal.She wrote that Philip and she hoped they might be able to get Doremusforgiven by the Corpos! So he was left to associate only with his fellowrefugees from Corpoism, and he knew a life that had been familiar, fartoo familiar, to political exiles ever since the first revolt in Egyptsent the rebels sneaking off into Assyria.

It was no particularly indecent egotism in Doremus that made himsuppose, when he arrived in Canada, that everyone would thrill to histale of imprisonment, torture, and escape. But he found that tenthousand spirited tellers of woe had come there before him, and that theCanadians, however attentive and generous hosts they might be, wereactively sick of pumping up new sympathy. They felt that their quota ofmartyrs was completely filled, and as to the exiles who came inpenniless, and that was a majority of them, the Canadians becamedistinctly weary of depriving their own families on behalf of unknownrefugees, and they couldn't even keep up forever a gratification in thepresence of celebrated American authors, politicians, scientists, whenthey became common as mosquitoes.

It was doubtful if a lecture on Deplorable Conditions in America byHerbert Hoover and General Pershing together would have attracted fortypeople. Ex-governors and judges were glad to get jobs washing dishes,and ex-managing-editors were hoeing turnips. And reports said thatMexico and London and France were growing alike apologetically bored.

So Doremus, meagerly living on his twenty-dollar-a-week salary from theN.U., met no one save his own fellow exiles, in just such salons ofunfortunate political escapists as the White Russians, the RedSpaniards, the Blue Bulgarians, and all the other polychromaticinsurrectionists frequented in Paris. They crowded together, twenty ofthem in a parlor twelve by twelve, very like the concentration campcells in area, inhabitants, and eventual smell, from 8 P.M. tillmidnight, and made up for lack of dinner with coffee and doughnuts andexiguous sandwiches, and talked without cessation about the Corpos. Theytold as "actual facts" stories about President Haik which had formerlybeen applied to Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini--the one about the man whowas alarmed to find he had saved Haik from drowning and begged him notto tell.

In the cafés they seized the newspapers from home. Men who had had aneye gouged out on behalf of freedom, with the rheumy remaining onepeered to see who had won the Missouri Avenue Bridge Club Prize.

They were brave and romantic, tragic and distinguished, and Doremusbecame a little sick of them all and of the final brutality of fact thatno normal man can very long endure another's tragedy, and that friendlyweeping will some day turn to irritated kicking.

He was stirred when, in a hastily built American inter-denominationalchapel, he heard a starveling who had once been a pompous bishop readfrom the pine pulpit:

"By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when weremembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midstthereof.... How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land? If Iforget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning. If I donot remember thee, let my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth; if Iprefer not Jerusalem above my chief joy."

Here in Canada the Americans had their Weeping Wall, and daily criedwith false, gallant hope, "Next year in Jerusalem!"

Sometimes Doremus was vexed by the ceaseless demanding wails of refugeeswho had lost everything, sons and wives and property and self-respect,vexed that they believed they alone had seen such horrors; and sometimeshe spent all his spare hours raising a dollar and a little wearyfriendliness for these sick souls; and sometimes he saw as fragments ofParadise every aspect of America--such oddly assorted glimpses as Meadeat Gettysburg and the massed blue petunias in Emma's lost garden, thefresh shine of rails as seen from a train on an April morning andRockefeller Center. But whatever his mood, he refused to sit down withhis harp by any foreign waters whatever and enjoy the importance ofbeing a celebrated beggar.

He'd get back to America and chance another prison. Meantime he neatlysent packages of literary dynamite out from the N.U. offices all daylong, and efficiently directed a hundred envelope-addressers who oncehad been professors and pastrycooks.

He had asked his superior, Perley Beecroft, for assignment in moreactive and more dangerous work, as secret agent in America--out West,where he was not known. But headquarters had suffered a good deal fromamateur agents who babbled to strangers, or who could not be trusted tokeep their mouths shut while they were being flogged to death. Thingshad changed since 1929. The N.U. believed that the highest honor a mancould earn was not to have a million dollars but to be permitted to riskhis life for truth, without pay or praise.

Doremus knew that his chiefs did not consider him young enough or strongenough, but also that they were studying him. Twice he had the honor ofinterviews with Trowbridge about nothing in particular--surely it musthave been an honor, though it was hard to remember it, becauseTrowbridge was the simplest and friendliest man in the whole portentousspy machine. Cheerfully Doremus hoped for a chance to help make thepoor, overworked, worried Corpo officials even more miserable than theynormally were, now that war with Mexico and revolts against Corpoismwere jingling side by side.

**

In July, 1939, when Doremus had been in Montreal a little over fivemonths, and a year after his sentence to concentration camp, theAmerican newspapers which arrived at N.U. headquarters were full ofresentment 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 inTexas--fortunately all the women and children were away on aSunday-school picnic, that afternoon. A Mexican Patriot (aforetime hehad also worked as an Ethiopian Patriot, a Chinese Patriot, and aHaitian Patriot) came across, to the tent of an M.M. brigadier, andconfessed that while it hurt him to tattle on his own beloved country,conscience compelled him to reveal that his Mexican superiors wereplanning to fly over and bomb Laredo, San Antonio, Bisbee, and probablyTacoma, and Bangor, Maine.

This excited the Corpo newspapers very much indeed, and in New York andChicago they published photographs of the conscientious traitor half anhour after he had appeared at the Brigadier's tent... where, at thatmoment, forty-six reporters happened to be sitting about on neighboringcactuses.

America rose to defend her hearthstones, including all the hearthstoneson Park Avenue, New York, against false and treacherous Mexico, with itsappalling army of 67,000 men, with thirty-nine military aëroplanes.Women in Cedar Rapids hid under the bed; elderly gentlemen inCattaraugus County, New York, concealed their money in elm-tree boles;and the wife of a chicken-raiser seven miles N.E. of Estelline, SouthDakota, 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 awar and never started an unjust one, rose as one man, as the ChicagoDaily Evening Corporate put it. It was planned to invade Mexico assoon as it should be cool enough, or even earlier, if the refrigerationand air-conditioning could be arranged. In one month, five million menwere drafted for the invasion, and started training.

**

Thus--perhaps too flippantly--did Joe Cailey and Doremus discuss thedeclaration of war against Mexico. If they found the whole crusadeabsurd, it may be stated in their defense that they regarded all warsalways as absurd; in the baldness of the lying by both sides about thecauses; in the spectacle of grown-up men engaged in the infantilediversions of dressing-up in fancy clothes and marching to primitivemusic. The only thing not absurd about wars, said Doremus and Cailey,was that along with their skittishness they did kill a good manymillions of people. Ten thousand starving babies seemed too high a pricefor a Sam Browne belt for even the sweetest, touchingest younglieutenant.

Yet both Doremus and Cailey swiftly recanted their assertion that allwars were absurd and abominable; both of them made exception of thepeople's wars against tyranny, as suddenly America's agreeableanticipation of stealing Mexico was checked by a popular rebellionagainst the whole Corpo régime.

**

The revolting section was, roughly, bounded by Sault Ste. Marie,Detroit, Cincinnati, Wichita, San Francisco, and Seattle, though in thatterritory large patches remained loyal to President Haik, and outside ofit, other large patches joined the rebels. It was the part of Americawhich had always been most "radical"--that indefinite word, whichprobably means "most critical of piracy." It was the land of thePopulists, the Non-Partisan League, the Farmer-Labor Party, and the LaFollettes--a family so vast as to form a considerable party in itself.

Whatever might happen, exulted Doremus, the revolt proved that belief inAmerica and hope for America were not dead.

These rebels had most of them, before his election, believed in BuzzWindrip's fifteen points; believed that when he said he wanted to returnthe 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 bankersand industrialists to the people. As month by month they saw that theyhad been cheated with marked cards again, they were indignant; but theywere busy with cornfield and sawmill and dairy and motor factory, and ittook the impertinent idiocy of demanding that they march down into thedesert and help steal a friendly country to jab them into awakening andinto discovering that, while they had been asleep, they had beenkidnaped 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 Californiaand the radical Ex-Governor of Minnesota found themselves in the samefaction.

At first it was a rather comic outbreak--comic as the ill-trained,un-uniformed, confusedly thinking revolutionists of Massachusetts in1776. President General Haik publicly jeered at them as a "ridiculousrag-tag rebellion of hoboes too lazy to work." And at first they wereunable to do anything more than scold like a flock of crows, throwbricks at detachments of M.M.'s and policemen, wreck troop trains, anddestroy the property of such honest private citizens as owned Corponewspapers.

It was in August that the shock came, when General Emmanuel Coon, Chiefof Staff of the regulars, flew from Washington to St. Paul, took commandof Fort Snelling, and declared for Walt Trowbridge as TemporaryPresident of the United States, to hold office until there should be anew, universal, and uncontrolled presidential election.

Trowbridge proclaimed acceptance--with the proviso that he should not bea 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 Churchis less Puritanical and always more esthetic than the Protestant; andthat professional soldiers hate war more than do congressmen and oldmaids.) But there were enough regulars who were fed up with theexactions of greedy, mouth-dripping Corpo commissioners and who threw inwith General Coon so that immediately after his army of regulars andhastily trained Minnesota farmers had won the battle of Mankato, theforces at Leavenworth took control of Kansas City, and planned to marchon St. Louis and Omaha; while in New York, Governor's Island and FortWadsworth looked on, neutral, as unmilitary-looking and mostly Jewishguerrillas seized the subways, power stations, and railway terminals.

But there the revolt halted, because in the America, which had so warmlypraised itself for its "widespread popular free education," there hadbeen so very little education, widespread, popular, free, or anythingelse, that most people did not know what they wanted--indeed knew aboutso few things to want at all.

There had been plenty of schoolrooms; there had been lacking onlyliterate teachers and eager pupils and school boards who regardedteaching as a profession worthy of as much honor and pay asinsurance-selling or embalming or waiting on table. Most Americans hadlearned in school that God had supplanted the Jews as chosen people bythe Americans, and this time done the job much better, so that we werethe richest, kindest, and cleverest nation living; that depressions werebut passing headaches and that labor unions must not concern themselveswith anything except higher wages and shorter hours and, above all, mustnot set up an ugly class struggle by combining politically; that, thoughforeigners tried to make a bogus mystery of them, politics were reallyso simple that any village attorney or any clerk in the office of ametropolitan sheriff was quite adequately trained for them; and that ifJohn D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford had set his mind to it, he could havebecome the most distinguished statesman, composer, physicist, or poet inthe land.

Even two-and-half years of despotism had not yet taught most electorshumility, nor taught them much of anything except that it was unpleasantto 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 formulatea clear, sure theory of self-government, or irresistibly resolve toengage in the sore labor of fitting themselves for freedom.... Evenyet, after Windrip, most of the easy-going descendants of thewisecracking Benjamin Franklin had not learned that Patrick Henry's"Give me liberty or give me death" meant anything more than a highschool yell or a cigarette slogan.

The followers of Trowbridge and General Coon--"The American CoöperativeCommonwealth" they began to call themselves--did not lose any of theterritory they had seized; they held it, driving out all Corpo agents,and now and then added a county or two. But mostly their rule, andequally 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 calledinto Trowbridge's office, to hear from the chairman:

"I guess the time's come when we need Underground agents in the Stateswith sense as well as guts. Report to General Barnes for serviceproselytizing in Minnesota. Good luck, Brother Jessup! Try to persuadethe orators that are still holding out for Discipline and clubs thatthey 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 aspy and professional hero without even any funny passwords to make thegame romantic.

Chapter 38

His packing was done. It had been very simple, since his kit consistedonly of toilet things, one change of clothes, and the first volume ofSpengler's Decline of the West. He was waiting in his hotel lobby fortime to take the train to Winnipeg. He was interested by the entrance ofa lady more decorative than the females customarily seen in this modestinn: a hand-tooled presentation copy of a lady, in crushed levant andsatin doublure; a lady with mascara'd eyelashes, a permanent wave, and acobweb frock. She ambled through the lobby and leaned against afake-marble pillar, wielding a long cigarette-holder and staring atDoremus. 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 sorealistic in my art as to carry out this rôle too far! It just happensto be the easiest disguise to win over the Corpo frontier guards--ifyou'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 riskof being flogged to death. She had come solely to say farewell and bringhim what might be his last budget of news.

Buck was in concentration camp--he was more feared and more guarded thanDoremus had been, and Linda had not been able to buy him out. Julian,Karl, and John Pollikop were still alive, still imprisoned. FatherPerefixe was running the N.U. cell in Fort Beulah, but slightly confusedbecause he wanted to approve of war with Mexico, a nation which hedetested for its treatment of Catholic priests. Lorinda and he had,apparently, fought bloodily all one evening about Catholic rule in LatinAmerica. As is always typical of Liberals, Lorinda managed to speak ofFather Perefixe at once with virtuous loathing and the greatestaffection. Emma and David were reported as well content in Worcester,though there were murmurs that Philip's wife did not too thankfullyreceive her mother-in-law's advice on cooking. Sissy was becoming a deftagitator who still, remembering that she was a born architect, drewplans for houses that Julian and she would some day adorn. She contrivedblissfully to combine assaults on all Capitalism with an entirelycapitalistic conception of the year-long honeymoons Julian and she weregoing to have.

Less surprising than any of this were the tidings that FrancisTasbrough, very beautiful in repentance, had been let out of the Corpoprison to which he had been sent for too much grafting and was again adistrict commissioner, well thought of, and that his housekeeper was nowMrs. Candy, whose daily reports on his most secret arrangements were themost neatly written and sternly grammatical documents that came intoVermont N.U. headquarters.

Then Lorinda was looking up at him as he stood in the vestibule of hisWestbound 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.... Sheturned away from him and raced down the station platform too quickly.She had lost all her confident pose of flip elegance. Leaning out fromthe vestibule he saw her stop at the gate, diffidently raise her hand asif to wave at the long anonymity of the train windows, then shakilymarch away through the gates. And he realized that she hadn't even hisaddress; that no one who loved him would have any stable address for himnow any more.

**

Mr. William Barton Dobbs, a traveling man for harvesting machinery, anerect little man with a small gray beard and a Vermont accent, got outof bed in his hotel in a section in Minnesota which had so manyBavarian-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 consumedgrapefruit and porridge--but without sugar: there was an embargo onsugar. He looked down and inspected himself; he sighed, "I'm getting toomuch of a pod, with all this outdoor work and being so hungry; I've gotto 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 hadshut off coffee beans and oranges.

He read, meantime, the Minneapolis Daily Corporate. It announced aGreat Victory in Mexico in the same place, he noted, in which there hadalready been three Great Victories in the past two weeks. Also, a"shameful rebellion" had been put down in Andalusia, Alabama; it wasreported that General Göring was coming over to be the guest ofPresident Haik; and the pretender Trowbridge was said "by a reliablesource" 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 lookedas scared and soft and big-footed as a rout of rabbits. They tried topipe 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 lookedsulkily down at their dragging feet, and the crowd, which once wouldhave been yelping "Hail Haik!" was snickering "You beggars'll never getto 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 thefrightened 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 whomhis 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 howhe had "put it over on Sissy" by getting a Ford all his own--Doremusdrove out of the village into stubble-lined prairie. The meadow larks'liquid ecstasy welcomed him from barbed wire fences. If he missed thestrong hills behind Fort Beulah, he was yet exalted by the immensity ofthe sky, the openness of prairie that promised he could go on forever,the gayety of small sloughs seen through their fringes of willows andcottonwoods, 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, butthere was only an unpainted nothingness low down on the front wall toshow where the porch would be. To a farmer who was oiling a tractor inthe pig-littered farmyard he chirped, "Name's William BartonDobbs--representing the Des Moines Combine and Up-to-Date ImplementCompany."

The farmer galloped up to shake hands, breathing, "By golly this is agreat honor, Mr. J----"

"Dobbs!"

"That's right. 'Scuse me."

In an upper bedroom of the farmhouse, seven men were waiting, perched onchair and table and edges of the bed, or just squatted on the floor.Some of them were apparently farmers; some unambitious shopkeepers. AsDoremus bustled in, they rose and bowed.

"Good-morning gentlemen. A little news," he said. "Coon has driven theCorpos out of Yankton and Sioux Falls. Now I wonder if you're ready withyour reports?"

To the agent whose difficulty in converting farm-owners had been theirdread of paying decent wages to farm hands, Doremus presented for usethe argument (as formalized yet passionate as the observations of alife-insurance agent upon death by motor accident) that poverty for onewas poverty for all.... It wasn't such a very new argument, nor sovery logical, but it had been a useful carrot for many human mules.

For the agent among the Finnish-American settlers, who were insistingthat Trowbridge was a Bolshevik and just as bad as the Russians, Doremushad a mimeographed quotation from the Izvestia of Moscow damningTrowbridge as a "social Fascist quack." For the Bavarian farmers downthe other way, who were still vaguely pro-Nazi, Doremus had a Germanémigré paper published in Prague, proving (though without statistics orany considerable quotation from official documents) that, by agreementwith Hitler, President Haik was, if he remained in power, going to shipback to the German Army all German-Americans with so much as onegrandparent 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 mostsuccessful--agent.

"I wouldn't mind! Maybe it wouldn't be so unsuitable as you think. Butconsidering the loose morals and economics of most of you comrades,perhaps it would be better if I closed with a new story about Haik andMae 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 thatPrague 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 toa Nazi, it would still be a lie. But just the same I think I'll quitusing it.... Lorinda and me, that thought we could get free ofPuritanism!... Those cumulus clouds are better than a galleon. Ifthey'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 supposeI'll have to order the attack on the M.M. post at Osakis now; they'reready for it.... I wonder if that shotgun charge yesterday wasintended for me?... Didn't really like Lorinda's hair fixed up inthat New York style at all!"

He slept that night in a cottage on the shore of a sandy-bottomed lakeringed with bright birches. His host and his host's wife, worshipers ofTrowbridge, had insisted on giving him their own room, with thepatchwork quilt and the hand-painted pitcher and bowl.

He dreamed--as he still did dream, once or twice a week--that he wasback in his cell at Trianon. He knew again the stink, the cramped andwarty bunk, the never relaxed fear that he might be dragged out andflogged.

He heard magic trumpets. A soldier opened the door and invited out allthe prisoners. There, in the quadrangle, General Emmanuel Coon (who, toDoremus'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 erectand daring men: Doremus, Dan Wilgus, Buck, Julian, Mr. Falck, HenryVeeder, Karl Pascal, John Pollikop, Truman Webb. They crept out of thequadrangle gates, through a double line of soldiers standing rigidly atPresent Arms yet weeping as they watched the broken prisoners crawlingpast.

And beyond the soldiers, Doremus saw the women and children. They werewaiting for him--the kind arms of Lorinda and Emma and Sissy and Mary,with David behind them, clinging to his father's hand, and FatherPerefixe. And Foolish was there, his tail a proud plume, and from thedream-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 phonecall. Corpo posse out after you."

So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all day, toa hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men awaited news offreedom.