It Can't Happen Here Page 15

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

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

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

  “No! No! Don’t draw them! He’ll get suspicious.”

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

  “Only what he saw today?”

  “Anything! Any day! I’m awfully proud—old dish rag like me, twenty years older than you!—to be your lover!”

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

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

  They had tea. A thoroughly domestic circle.

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

  “Yes—no—wait a second! Lorinda: lend me a flashlight.”

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

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

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

  “Well, I guess I got my machine fixed now. I’ll hike along.”

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

  “Her? Rats! Sissy can’t drive for sour apples! Crazy’s a loon!”

  “Ledue! Miss Sissy is a highly competent driver. At least she satisfies me, and if you really feel she doesn’t quite satisfy your standard——”

  “Her driving don’t make a damn bit of difference to me one way or th’ other! G’-night!”

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

  He informed Sissy, at the door, “Shad happened to come along—motorcycle in bad shape—let him take my Chrysler—I’ll drive with you.”

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

  “And I—I meant to say, I think I’d better do the driving. It’s pretty slippery tonight.”

  “Wouldn’t that destroy you! Why, my dear idiot parent, I’m the best driver in——”

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

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

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

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

  “Snails don’t skid.”

  “No, they get run over. Rather skid!”

  “So your father’s a fossil!”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t——”

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

  “Listen, Dad, do you go to Lindy’s often?”

  “Why—why, not especially. Why?”

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

  “Good God Almighty! Cecilia! I’ve never heard a decent girl talk that way in all my life!”

  “Tst! Tst! Haven’t you? Dear, dear! So sorry!”

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

  “Is it? Well, maybe. Unusual to suggest it—aloud. But I wonder if lots of young females don’t sometimes kind of think it, just the same, when they see the Venerable Parent going stale!”

  “Sissy——”

  “Hey, watch that telephone pole!”

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

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

  “Are those your ethics, then?”

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

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

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

  “Sissy! Child! Please! You mustn’t be so beastly cute! These are all weighty things——”

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

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

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

  “It is Julian then, not Malcolm?”

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

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

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

  “I’m glad, but—— Your apparent—probably only apparent—information on a variety of delicate subjects slightly embarrasses me.”

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

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

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

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

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

  Doremus slipped resolutely out of his car and said calmly:

  “Shad!”

  “Yuh?”

  “D’you take the car keys into the kitchen?”

  “Huh? No. I guess I left ‘em in the car.”

  “I’ve told you a hundred times they belong inside.”

  “Yuh? Well, how’d you like Miss Cecilia’s driving? Have a good visit with old Mrs. Pike?”

  He was derisive now, beyond concealment.

  “Ledue, I rather think you’re fired—right now!”

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

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

  * * *

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

  15

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

  Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

  * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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