It Can't Happen Here (53 page)

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
so realistic in my art as to carry out this rôle too far! It just
happens to be the easiest disguise to win over the Corpo frontier
guards—if you’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
risk
of being flogged to death. She had come solely to say
farewell and bring him what might be his last budget of news.

Buck was in concentration camp—he was more feared and more guarded
than Doremus had been, and Linda had not been able to buy him out.
Julian, Karl, and John Pollikop were still alive, still imprisoned.
Father Perefixe was running the N.U. cell in Fort Beulah, but
slightly confused
because he wanted to approve of war with Mexico,
a nation which he detested for its treatment of Catholic priests.
Lorinda and he had, apparently, fought bloodily all one evening
about Catholic rule in Latin America. As is always typical of
Liberals, Lorinda managed to speak of Father Perefixe at once with
virtuous loathing and the greatest affection. Emma and David were
reported as well content
in Worcester, though there were murmurs
that Philip’s wife did not too thankfully receive her mother-in-law’s advice on cooking. Sissy was becoming a deft agitator who
still, remembering that she was a born architect, drew plans for
houses that Julian and she would some day adorn. She contrived
blissfully to combine assaults on all Capitalism with an entirely
capitalistic conception of the year-long
honeymoons Julian and she
were going to have.

Less surprising than any of this were the tidings that Francis
Tasbrough, very beautiful in repentance, had been let out of the
Corpo prison to which he had been sent for too much grafting and
was again a district commissioner, well thought of, and that his
housekeeper was now Mrs. Candy, whose daily reports on his most
secret arrangements were the
most neatly written and sternly
grammatical documents that came into Vermont N.U. headquarters.

Then Lorinda was looking up at him as he stood in the vestibule of
his Westbound 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… .
She turned away from him and raced down the station platform too
quickly. She
had lost all her confident pose of flip elegance.
Leaning out from the vestibule he saw her stop at the gate,
diffidently raise her hand as if to wave at the long anonymity of
the train windows, then shakily march away through the gates. And
he realized that she hadn’t even his address; that no one who loved
him would have any stable address for him now any more.

Mr. William Barton Dobbs, a
traveling man for harvesting machinery,
an erect little man with a small gray beard and a Vermont accent,
got out of bed in his hotel in a section in Minnesota which had so
many Bavarian-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
consumed grapefruit and porridge—but
without sugar: there was an
embargo on sugar. He looked down and inspected himself; he sighed,
“I’m getting too much of a pod, with all this outdoor work and
being so hungry; I’ve got to 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 had shut off coffee beans
and oranges.

He read, meantime, the Minneapolis
Daily Corporate. It announced a
Great Victory in Mexico—in the same place, he noted, in which
there had already been three Great Victories in the past two weeks.
Also, a “shameful rebellion” had been put down in Andalusia,
Alabama; it was reported that General Göring was coming over to be
the guest of President Haik; and the pretender Trowbridge was said
“by a reliable source” 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 looked as scared and soft and big-footed as a rout of rabbits.
They tried to pipe 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
looked sulkily down at their dragging
feet, and the crowd, which
once would have been yelping “Hail Haik!” was snickering “You
beggars ‘ll never get to 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 the
frightened 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
whom his 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
how he had “put it over on Sissy” by getting a Ford all his own—Doremus drove out of the village into stubble-lined prairie. The
meadow larks’ liquid ecstasy welcomed him from barbed-wire
fences.
If he missed the strong hills behind Fort Beulah, he was yet
exalted by the immensity of the sky, the openness of prairie that
promised he could go on forever, the gayety of small sloughs seen
through their fringes of willows and cottonwoods, 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,
but there was only an unpainted nothingness low down on the front
wall to show where the porch would be. To a farmer who was oiling
a tractor in the pig-littered farmyard he chirped, “Name’s William
Barton Dobbs—representing the Des Moines Combine and Up-to-Date
Implement Company.”

The farmer galloped up to shake hands, breathing, “By golly this is
a great honor, Mr. J—”

“Dobbs!”

“That’s right. ‘Scuse me.”

In an upper bedroom of the farmhouse, seven men were waiting,
perched on chair and table and edges of the bed, or just squatted
on the floor. Some of them were apparently farmers; some
unambitious shopkeepers. As Doremus bustled in, they rose and
bowed.

“Good-morning gentlemen. A little news,” he said. “Coon has
driven the Corpos
out of Yankton and Sioux Falls. Now I wonder if
you’re ready with your reports?”

To the agent whose difficulty in converting farm-owners had been
their dread of paying decent wages to farm hands, Doremus presented
for use the argument (as formalized yet passionate as the
observations of a life-insurance agent upon death by motor
accident) that poverty for one was poverty for all… . It
wasn’t
such a very new argument, nor so very logical, but it had
been a useful carrot for many human mules.

For the agent among the Finnish-American settlers, who were
insisting that Trowbridge was a Bolshevik and just as bad as the
Russians, Doremus had a mimeographed quotation from the Izvestia of
Moscow damning Trowbridge as a “social Fascist quack.” For the
Bavarian farmers down the other way,
who were still vaguely pro-Nazi, Doremus had a German émigré paper published in Prague,
proving (though without statistics or any considerable quotation
from official documents) that, by agreement with Hitler, President
Haik was, if he remained in power, going to ship back to the German
Army all German-Americans with so much as one grandparent 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 most
successful—agent.

“I wouldn’t mind! Maybe it wouldn’t be so unsuitable as you think.
But considering the loose morals and economics of most of you
comrades, perhaps it would be better if I closed with a new story
about Haik and Mae West that I heard, day before yesterday… .
Bless you all! Goodbye!”

As he drove to his next meeting, Doremus fretted, “I don’t believe
that Prague 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 to a Nazi, it would still be a lie. But just the
same I think I’ll quit using it… . Lorinda and me, that
thought we could get free of Puritanism! … Those cumulus
clouds are better
than a galleon. If they’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 suppose I’ll have
to order the attack on the M.M. post at Osakis now; they’re ready
for it… . I wonder if that shotgun charge yesterday
was
intended for me? … Didn’t really like Lorinda’s hair fixed up
in that New York style at all!”

He slept
that night in a cottage on the shore of a sandy-bottomed
lake ringed with bright birches. His host and his host’s wife,
worshipers of Trowbridge, had insisted on giving him their own
room, with the patchwork quilt and the hand-painted pitcher and
bowl.

He dreamed—as he still did dream, once or twice a week—that he
was back in his cell at Trianon. He knew again the stink, the
cramped and warty
bunk, the never relaxed fear that he might be
dragged out and flogged.

He heard magic trumpets. A soldier opened the door and invited out
all the prisoners. There, in the quadrangle, General Emmanuel Coon
(who, to Doremus’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 erect and daring men: Doremus, Dan Wilgus, Buck, Julian,
Mr. Falck, Henry Veeder, Karl Pascal, John Pollikop, Truman Webb.
They crept out of the quadrangle gates, through a double line of
soldiers standing rigidly at Present Arms yet weeping as they
watched the broken prisoners crawling
past.

And beyond the soldiers, Doremus saw the women and children. They
were waiting for him—the kind arms of Lorinda and Emma and Sissy
and Mary, with David behind them, clinging to his father’s hand,
and Father Perefixe. And Foolish was there, his tail a proud
plume, and from the dream-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
phone call. Corpo posse out after you.”

So Doremus rode out, saluted by the meadow larks, and onward all
day, to a hidden cabin in the Northern Woods where quiet men
awaited news of freedom.

And still Doremus goes on in the red sunrise, for a Doremus Jessup
can never die.