It Can't Happen Here Page 26

  * * *

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

  With Lorinda, Doremus had but one free moment. . .in the old-fashioned guest-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 I could have maybe a month together, say in Monterey or Venice or the Yellowstone. I hate it when life doesn’t seem to stick together and get somewhere 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 come back, into danger.

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

  * * *

  Darkness, edged wind, wickedly deliberate snow, and in it Buck Titus boisterously cheerful in his veteran Nash, looking as farmer-like as he could, in sealskin cap with rubbed bare patches and an atrocious dogskin overcoat. Doremus thought of him again as a Captain Charles King cavalryman chasing the Sioux across blizzard-blinded prairies.

  They packed alarmingly into the car; Mary beside Buck, the driver; in the back, Doremus between Emma and Sissy; on the floor, David and Foolish and the toy aëroplane indistinguishably curled up together beneath a robe. Trunk rack and front fenders were heaped with tarpaulin-covered suitcases.

  “Lord, I wish I were going!” moaned Julian. “Look! Sis! Grand spy-story idea! But I mean seriously: Send souvenir postcards to my granddad—views of churches and so on—just sign ‘em ‘Jane’—and whatever you say about the church, I’ll know you really mean it about you and—— Oh, damn all mystery! I want you, Sissy!”

  Mrs. Candy whisked a bundle in among the already intolerable mess of baggage which promised to descend on Doremus’s knees and David’s head, and she snapped, “Well, if you folks must go flyin’ around the country——It’s a cocoanut layer cake.” Savagely: “Soon’s you get around the corner, throw the fool thing in the ditch if you want to!” She fled sobbing 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 through Fort Beulah by shadowy back-streets and started streaking northward.

  Sissy sang out cheerily, “Well, Christmas in Canada! Skittles and beer and lots of holly!”

  “Oh, do they have Santa Claus in Canada?” came David’s voice, wondering, childish, slightly muffled by lap robe and the furry ears of Foolish.

  “Of course they do, dearie!” Emma reassured him and, to the grown-ups, “Now wasn’t that the cutest thing!”

  To Doremus, Sissy whispered, “Darn well ought to be cute. Took me ten minutes to teach him to say it, this afternoon! Hold my hand. I hope Buck knows how to drive!”

  * * *

  Buck Titus knew every back-road from Fort Beulah to the border, preferably in filthy weather, like tonight. Beyond Trianon he pulled the car up deep-rutted roads, on which you would have to back if you were to pass anyone. Up grades on which the car knocked and panted, into lonely hills, by a zigzag of roads, they jerked toward Canada. Wet snow sheathed the windshield, then froze, and Buck had to drive with his head thrust out through the open window, and the blast came in and circled round their stiff necks.

  Doremus could see nothing save the back of Buck’s twisted, taut neck, and the icy windshield, most of the time. Just now and then a light far below the level of the road indicated that they were sliding along a shelf road, and if they skidded off, they would keep going a hundred feet, two hundred feet, downward—probably turning over and over. Once they did skid, and while they panted in an eternity of four seconds, Buck yanked the car up a bank beside the road, down to the left again, and finally straight—speeding on as if nothing had happened, while Doremus felt feeble in the knees.

  For a long while he kept going rigid with fear, but he sank into misery, too cold and deaf to feel anything except a slow desire to vomit as the car lurched. Probably he slept—at least, he awakened, and awakened to a sensation of pushing the car anxiously up hill, as she bucked and stuttered in the effort to make a slippery rise. Suppose the engine died—suppose the brakes would not hold and they slid back downhill, reeling, bursting off the road and down—— A great many suppositions tortured him, hour by hour.

  Then he tried being awake and bright and helpful. He noticed that the ice-lined windshield, illuminated from the light on the snow ahead, was a sheet of diamonds. He noticed it, but he couldn’t get himself to think much of diamonds, even in sheets.

  He tried conversation.

  “Cheer up. Breakfast at dawn—across the border!” he tried on Sissy.

  “Breakfast!” she said bitterly.

  And they crunched on, in that moving coffin with only the sheet of diamonds and Buck’s silhouette alive in the world.

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

  “Strouble?” said Doremus.

  “Stuck. No traction. Hit a drift of wet snow—drainage from a busted culvert, I sh’ think. Hell! Have to get out and take a look.”

  Outside the car, as Doremus crept down from the slippery running-board, it was cold in a vicious wind. He was so stiff he could scarcely stand.

  As people do, feeling important and advisory, Doremus looked at the drift with an electric torch, and Sissy looked at the drift with the torch, and Buck impatiently took the torch away from them and looked twice.

  “Get some——” and “Brush would help,” said Sissy and Buck together, while Doremus rubbed his chilly ears.

  They three trotted back and forth with fragments of brush, laying it in front of the wheels, while Mary politely asked from within, “Can I help?” and no one seemed particularly to have answered her.

  The headlights picked out an abandoned shack beside the road; an unpainted gray pine cabin with broken window glass and no door. Emma, sighing her way out of the car and stepping through the lumpy snow as delicately as a pacer at a horse show, said humbly, “That little house there—maybe I could go in and make some hot coffee on the alcohol stove—didn’t have room for a thermos. Hot coffee, Dormouse?”

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

  When the car did kick its way up on the pathway of twigs and stand panting safely beyond the drift, they had, in the sheltered shack, coffee with slabs of Mrs. Candy’s voluptuous cocoanut cake. Doremus pondered, “This is a nice place. I like this place. It doesn’t bounce or skid. I don’t want to leave this place.”

  He did. The secure immobility of the shack was behind them, dark miles behind, and they were again pitching and rolling and being sick and inescapably chilly. David was alternately crying and going back to sleep. Foolish woke up to cough inquiringly and returned to his dream of rabbiting. And Doremus was sleeping, his head swaying like a masthead in long rollers, his shoulder against Emma’s, his hand warm about Sissy’s, and his soul in nameless bliss.

  * * *

  He roused to a half-dawn filmy with snow. The car was standing in what seemed to be a crossroads hamlet, and Buck was examining a map by the light of the electric torch.

  “Got anywhere yet?” Doremus whispered.

  “Just a few miles to the border.”
/>   “Anybody stopped us?”

  “Nope. Oh, we’ll make it, all right, o’ man.”

  Out of East Berkshire, Buck took not the main road to the border but an old wood lane so little used that the ruts were twin snakes. Though Doremus said nothing, the others felt his intensity, his anxiety that was like listening for an enemy in the dark. David sat up, the blue motor robe about him. Foolish started, snorted, looked offended but, catching the spirit of the moment, comfortingly laid a paw on Doremus’s knee and insisted on shaking hands, over and over, as gravely as a Venetian senator or an undertaker.

  They dropped into the dimness of a tree-walled hollow. A searchlight darted, and rested hotly on them, so dazzling them that Buck almost ran off the road.

  “Confound it,” he said gently. No one else said anything.

  He crawled up to the light, which was mounted on a platform in front of a small shelter hut. Two Minute Men stood out in the road, dripping with radiance from the car. They were young and rural, but they had efficient repeating rifles.

  “Where you headed for?” demanded the elder, good-naturedly enough.

  “Montreal, where we live.” Buck showed his Canadian license. . .. Gasoline motor and electric light, yet Doremus saw the frontier guard as a sentry in 1864, studying a pass by lantern light, beside a farm wagon in which hid General Joe Johnston’s spies disguised as plantation hands.

  “I guess it’s all right. Seems in order. But we’ve had some trouble with refugees. You’ll have to wait till the Battalion-Leader comes—maybe ‘long about noon.”

  “But good Lord, Inspector, we can’t do that! My mother’s awful sick, in Montreal.”

  “Yuh, I’ve heard that one before! And maybe it’s true, this time. But afraid you’ll have to wait for the Bat. You folks can come in and set by the fire, if you want to.”

  “But we’ve got to——”

  “You heard what I said!” The M.M.’s were fingering their rifles.

  “All right. But tell you what we’ll do. We’ll go back to East Berkshire and get some breakfast and a wash and come back here. Noon, you said?”

  “Okay! And say, Brother, it does seem kind of funny, your taking this back road, when there’s a first-rate highway. S’long. Be good. . .. Just don’t try it again! The Bat might be here next time—and he ain’t a farmer like you or me!”

  The refugees, as they drove away, had an uncomfortable feeling that the guards were laughing at them.

  Three border posts they tried, and at three posts they were turned back.

  “Well?” said Buck.

  “Yes. I guess so. Back home. My turn to drive,” said Doremus wearily.

  The humiliation of retreat was the worse in that none of the guards had troubled to do more than laugh at them. They were trapped too tightly for the trappers to worry. Doremus’s only clear emotion as, tails between their legs, they back-tracked to Shad Ledue’s sneer and to Mrs. Candy’s “Well, I never!“ was regret that he had not shot one guard, at least, and he raged:

  “Now I know why men like John Brown became crazy killers!”

  24

  HE COULD NOT DECIDE whether Emil Staubmeyer, and through him Shad Ledue, knew that he had tried to escape. Did Staubmeyer really look more knowing, or did he just imagine it? What the deuce had Emil meant when he said, “I hear the roads aren’t so good up north—not so good!” Whether they knew or not, it was grinding that he should have to shiver lest an illiterate roustabout like Shad Ledue find out that he desired to go to Canada, while a rule-slapper like Staubmeyer, a Squeers with certificates in “pedagogy,” should now be able to cuff grown men instead of urchins and should be editor of the Informer! Doremus’s Informer! Staubmeyer! That human blackboard!

  Daily Doremus found it more cramping, more instantly stirring to fury, to write anything mentioning Windrip. His private office—the cheerfully rattling linotype room—the shouting pressroom with its smell of ink that to him hitherto had been like the smell of grease paint to an actor—they were hateful now, and choking. Not even Lorinda’s faith, not even Sissy’s jibes and Buck’s stories, could rouse him to hope.

  He rejoiced the more, therefore, when his son Philip telephoned him from Worcester: “Be home Sunday? Merilla’s in New York, gadding, and I’m all alone here. Thought I’d just drive up for the day and see how things are in your neck of the woods.”

  “Come on! Splendid! So long since we’ve seen you. I’ll have your mother start a pot of beans right away!”

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

  “Oh hush! Anyway, I’ll be delighted to see the boy! I’ll bet there isn’t a smarter young lawyer in Worcester. There’s one member of the family that’s a real success!”

  * * *

  He was a little shocked when Philip came, like a one-man procession, into the living room, late on Saturday afternoon. He had been forgetting how bald his upstanding young advocate was growing even at thirty-four. And it seemed to him that Philip was a little heavy and senatorial in speech and a bit too cordial.

  “By Jove, Dad, you don’t know how good it is to be back in the old digs. Mother and the girls upstairs? By Jove, sir, that was a horrible business, the killing of poor Fowler. Horrible! I was simply horrified. There must have been a mistake somewhere, because Judge Swan has a wonderful reputation for scrupulousness.”

  “There was no mistake. Swan is a fiend. Literally!” Doremus sounded less paternal than when he had first bounded up to shake hands with the beloved prodigal.

  “Really? We must talk it over. I’ll see if there can’t be a stricter investigation. Swan? Really! We’ll certainly go into the whole business. But first I must just skip upstairs and give Mammy a good smack, and Mary and Little Sis.”

  And that was the last time that Philip mentioned Effingham Swan or any “stricter investigation” of the acts thereof. All afternoon he was relentlessly filial and fraternal, and he smiled like an automobile salesman when Sissy griped at him, “What’s the idea of all the tender hand-dusting, Philco?”

  Doremus and he were not alone till nearly midnight.

  They sat upstairs in the sacred study. Philip lighted one of Doremus’s excellent cigars as though he were a cinema actor playing the role of a man lighting an excellent cigar, and breathed amiably:

  “Well, sir, this is an excellent cigar! It certainly is excellent!”

  “Why not?”

  “Oh, I just mean—I was just appreciating it——”

  “What is it, Phil? There’s something on your mind. Shoot! Not rowing with Merilla, are you?”

  “Certainly not! Most certainly not! Oh, I don’t approve of everything Merry does—she’s a little extravagant—but she’s got a heart of gold, and let me tell you, Pater, there isn’t a young society woman in Worcester that makes a nicer impression on everybody, especially at nice dinner parties.”

  “Well then? Let’s have it, Phil. Something serious?”

  “Ye-es, I’m afraid there is. Look, Dad. . .. Oh, do sit down and be comfortable!. . .I’ve been awfully perturbed to hear that you’ve, uh, that you’re in slightly bad odor with some of the authorities.”

  “You mean the Corpos?”

  “Naturally! Who else?”

  “Maybe I don’t recognize ‘em as authorities.”

  “Oh, listen, Pater, please don’t joke tonight! I’m serious. As a matter fact, I hear you’re more than just ‘slightly’ in wrong with them.”

  “And who may your informant be?”

  “O
h, just letters—old school friends. Now you aren’t really pro-Corpo, are you?”

  “How did you ever guess?”

  “Well, I’ve been—— I didn’t vote for Windrip, personally, but I begin to see where I was wrong. I can see now that he has not only great personal magnetism, but real constructive power—real sure-enough statesmanship. Some say it’s Lee Sarason’s doing, but don’t you believe it for a minute. Look at all Buzz did back in his home state, before he ever teamed up with Sarason! And some say Windrip is crude. Well, so were Lincoln and Jackson. Now what I think of Windrip——”

  “The only thing you ought to think of Windrip is that his gangsters murdered 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 abhors violence more than I do. Still, you can’t make an omelet without breaking 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 to justify every atrocity under every despotism, Fascist or Nazi or Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir, men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!”

  “Oh, sorry, sir. I guess maybe the phrase is a little shopworn! I just mean to say—I’m just trying to figure this situation out realistically!”

  “‘Realistically’! That’s another buttered bun to excuse murder!”

  “But honestly, you know—horrible things do happen, thanks to the imperfection of human nature, but you can forgive the means if the end is a rejuvenated nation that——”

  “I can do nothing of the kind! I can never forgive evil and lying and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use that for an excuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, a country that tolerates evil means—evil manners, standards of ethics—for a generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good end. I’m just curious, but do you know how perfectly you’re quoting every Bolshevik apologist that sneers at decency and kindness and truthfulness in daily dealings as ‘bourgeois morality’? I hadn’t understood that you’d gone quite so Marxo-materialistic!”