It Can't Happen Here (18 page)

“And yet we’re reasonably responsible people—”

“Of course. That’s why nobody suspects us, not even Emma. Thank
God she doesn’t, Doremus! I wouldn’t hurt her for anything, not
even for your kind-hearted favors!”

“Beast!”

“Oh, you might be suspected, all by yourself. It’s known that you
sometimes drink likker and play poker and tell ‘hot ones.’ But
who’d ever 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 known so many women agitators, all dressed
in Carrie Nation hatchets and modest sheets of statistics, that
have been ten times as passionate, intolerably passionate, as any
cream-faced plump little Kept Wife in chiffon step-ins!”

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

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
whenever 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 after
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.

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.