It Can't Happen Here. Sinclair Lewis
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an appearance of free intellectual discussion, though only after the hours devoted to refusing credit to desperate farmers and storekeepers.
And not to be forgotten was Foolish the dog, who that thunderous morning had suspected his master's worry, followed him to the office, and all day long had growled at Haik and Sarason and Mrs. Gimmitch on the radio and showed an earnest conviction that he ought to chew up all flimsies reporting the convention.
Better than his own glacial white-paneled drawing room with its portraits of dead Vermont worthies, Doremus liked Father Perefixe's little study, and its combination of churchliness, of freedom from Commerce (at least ordinary Commerce), as displayed in a crucifix and a plaster statuette of the Virgin and a shrieking red-and-green Italian picture of the Pope, with practical affairs, as shown in the oak roll-top desk and steel filing-cabinet and well-worn portable typewriter. It was a pious hermit's cave with the advantages of leather chairs and excellent rye highballs.
The night passed as the eight of them (for Foolish too had his tipple of milk) all sipped and listened; the night passed as the convention balloted, furiously, unavailingly . . . that congress six hundred miles away, six hundred miles of befogged night, yet with every speech, every derisive yelp, coming into the priest's cabinet in the same second in which they were heard in the hall at Cleveland.
Father Perefixe's housekeeper (who was sixty-five years old to his thirty-nine, to the disappointment of all the scandal-loving local Protestants) came in with scrambled eggs, cold beer.
"When my dear wife was still among us, she used to send me to bed at midnight," 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 of living," crowed Buck Titus. "Celibates. We can go to bed with our pants on, or not go to bed at all," and Father Perefixe murmured, "But it's curious, Buck, what people find to boast of—you that you're free of God's tyranny and also that you can go to bed in your pants—Mr. Falck and Dr. Greenhill and I that God is so lenient with us that some nights He lets us off from sick-calls and we can go to bed with 'em off! And Louis because—Listen! Listen! Sounds like business!"
Colonel Dewey Haik, Buzz's proposer, was announcing that Senator Windrip felt it would be only modest of him to go to his hotel now, but he had left a letter which he, Haik, would read. And he did read it, inexorably.
Windrip stated that, just in case anyone did not completely understand his platform, he wanted to make it all ringingly clear.
Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World . . . and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly.
Each moment the brassy importunities of the radio seemed to Doremus the more offensive, while the hillside slept in the heavy summer night, and he thought about the mazurka of the fireflies, the rhythm of crickets like the rhythm of the revolving earth itself, the voluptuous breezes that bore away the stink of cigars and sweat and whisky breaths and mint chewing-gum that seemed to come to them from the convention over the sound waves, along with the oratory.
It was after dawn, and Father Perefixe (unclerically stripped to shirt-sleeves and slippers) had just brought them in a grateful tray of onion soup, with a gob of Hamburg steak for Foolish, when the opposition to Buzz collapsed and hastily, on the next ballot, Senator Berzelius Windrip was nominated as Democratic Candidate for President of the United States.
Doremus, Buck Titus, Perefixe, and Falck were for a time too gloomy for speech—so possibly was the dog Foolish, as well, for at the turning off of the radio he tail-thumped in only the most tentative way.
R. C. Crowley gloated, "Well, all my life I've voted Republican, but here's a man that—Well, I'm going to vote for Windrip!"
Father Perefixe said tartly, "And I've voted Democratic ever since I came from Canada and got naturalized, but this time I'm going to vote Republican. What about you fellows?"
Rotenstern was silent. He did not like Windrip's reference to Jews. The ones he knew best—no, they were Americans! Lincoln was his tribal god too, 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 a chance. I think I'll indulge in the luxury of being independent, for once, 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, remarkably enough, Shad Ledue, who was supposed to go to work at seven, was at work at seven. Normally he never left his bachelor shack in Lower Town till ten to eight, but this morning he was on the job, chopping kindling. (Oh yes, 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 he needed a shave. Foolish growled at him. Doremus suspected that at some time he had been kicking Foolish. He wanted to honor Shad for the sweaty shirt, the honest toil, and all the rugged virtues, but even as a Liberal American Humanitarian, Doremus found it hard always to keep up the Longfellow's-Village-Blacksmith-cum-Marx attitude consistently and not sometimes backslide into a belief that there must be some crooks and swine among the toilers as, notoriously, there were so shockingly many among persons with more than $3500 a year.
"Well—been sitting up listening to the radio," purred Doremus. "Did you know 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, leaning on his ax. Sometimes he could be quite pleasant and condescending, even to this little man who was so ignorant about coon-hunting and the games of craps and poker.
"I'm going to vote for Buzz Windrip. He's going to fix it so everybody will get four thousand bucks, immediate, and I'm going to start a chicken farm. I can make a bunch of money out of chickens! I'll show some of these guys that think they're so rich!"
"But, Shad, you didn't have so much luck with chickens when you tried to raise 'em in the shed back there. You, uh, I'm afraid you sort of let their water freeze up on 'em in winter, and they all died, you remember."
"Oh, them? So what! Heck! There was too few of 'em. I'm not going to waste my time foolin' with just a couple dozen chickens! When I get five-six thousand of 'em to make it worth my while, then I'll show you! 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 faint derisive:
"O.K., Chief!"
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,