It Can't Happen Here

by Sinclair Lewis

  “Was he—had they——?”

  “Oh, yes, they’ve beaten him, all right. He wouldn’t talk about it. But there was a scar right across his cheek, from his temple right down to his chin. And I had just a glimpse of Henry Veeder. Remember how he looked—like an oak tree? Now he twitches all the time, and jumps and gasps when he hears a sudden sound. He didn’t know me. I don’t think he’d know anybody.”

  * * *

  Doremus announced to his family and told it loudly in Gath that he was still looking for an option on an apple orchard to which they might retire, and he journeyed southward, with pajamas and a toothbrush and the first volume of Spengler’s Decline of the West in a briefcase.

  The address given by Karl Pascal was that of a most gentlemanly dealer in altar cloths and priestly robes, who had his shop and office over a tea room in Hartford, Connecticut. He talked about the cembalo and the spinetta di serenata and the music of Palestrina for an hour before he sent Doremus on to a busy engineer constructing a dam in New Hampshire, who sent him to a tailor in a side-street shop in Lynn, who at last sent him to northern Connecticut and to the Eastern headquarters of what was left of the Communists in America.

  Still carrying his little briefcase he walked up a greasy hill, impassable to any motorcar, and knocked at the faded green door of a squat New England farm cottage masked in wintry old lilac bushes and spir½a shrubs. A stringy farm wife opened and looked hostile.

  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Ailey, Mr. Bailey, or Mr. Cailey.”

  “None of ‘em home. You’ll have to come again.”

  “Then I’ll wait. What else should one do, these days?”

  “All right. Cmin.”

  “Thanks. Give them this letter.”

  (The tailor had warned him, “It vill all sount very foolish, the passvorts und everyt’ing, but if any of the central committee gets caught——” He made a squirting sound and drew his scissors across his throat.)

  Doremus sat now in a tiny hall off a flight of stairs steep as the side of a roof; a hall with sprigged wall paper and Currier & Ives prints, and black-painted wooden rocking chairs with calico cushions. There was nothing to read but a Methodist hymnal and a desk dictionary. He knew the former by heart, and anyway, he always loved reading dictionaries—often had one seduced him from editorial-writing. Happily he sat conÃ

  ning:

  * * *

  Phenyl, n., Chem. The univalent radical C6 H5, regarded as the basis of numerous benzene derivatives; as, phenyl hydroxid C6 H5 OH.

  Pherecratean, n. A choriambic trimeter catalectic, or catalectic glyconic; composed of a spondee, a choriambus, and a catalectic syllable.

  “Well! I never knew any of that before! I wonder if I do now?” thought Doremus contentedly, before he realized that glowering from a very narrow doorway was a very broad man with wild gray hair and a patch over one eye. Doremus recognized him from pictures. He was Bill Atterbury, miner, longshoreman, veteran I.W.W. leader, old A. F. of L. strike-leader, five years in San Quentin and five honored years in Moscow, and reputed now to be the secretary of the illegal Communist Party.

  “I’m Mr. Ailey. What can I do for you?” Bill demanded.

  He led Doremus into a musty back room where, at a table which was probably mahogany underneath the scars and the clots of dirt, sat a squat man with kinky tow-colored hair and with deep wrinkles in the thick pale skin of his face, and a slender young elegant who suggested Park Avenue.

  “Howryuh?” said Mr. Bailey, in a Russian-Jewish accent. Of him Doremus knew nothing save that he was not named Bailey.

  “Morning,” snapped Mr. Cailey—whose name was Elphrey, if Doremus guessed rightly, and who was the son of a millionaire private banker, the brother of one explorer, one bishop’s wife, and one countess, and himself a former teacher of economics in the University of California.

  Doremus tried to explain himself to these hard-eyed, quick-glancing plotters of ruin.

  “Are you willing to become a Party member, in the extremely improbable case that they accept you, and to take orders, any orders, without question?” asked Elphrey, so suavely.

  “Do you mean, Am I willing to kill and steal?”

  “You’ve been reading detective stories about the ‘Reds’! No. What you’d have to do would be much more difficult than the amusement of using a tommy-gun. Would you be willing to forget you ever were a respectable newspaper editor, giving orders, and walk through the snow, dressed like a bum, to distribute seditious pamphlets—even if, personally, you should believe the pamphlets were of no slightest damn good to the Cause?”

  “Why, I—I don’t know. Seems to me that as a newspaperman of quite a little training——”

  “Hell! Our only trouble is keeping out the ‘trained newspapermen’! What we need is trained bill-posters that like the smell of flour paste and hate sleeping. And—but you’re a little old for this—crazy fanatics that go out and start strikes, knowing they’ll get beaten up and thrown in the bull pen.”

  “No, I guess I—— Look here. I’m sure Walt Trowbridge will be joining up with the Socialists and some of the left-wing radical ex-Senators and the Farmer-Laborites and so on——”

  Bill Atterbury guffawed. It was a tremendous, somehow terrifying blast. “Yes, I’m sure they’ll join up—all the dirty, sneaking, half-headed, reformist Social Fascists like Trowbridge, that are doing the work of the capitalists and working for war against Soviet Russia without even having sense enough to know they’re doing it and to collect good pay for their crookedness!”

  “I admire Trowbridge!” snarled Doremus.

  “You would!”

  Elphrey rose, almost cordial, and dismissed Doremus with, “Mr. Jessup, I was brought up in a sound bourgeois household myself, unlike these two roughnecks, and I appreciate what you’re trying to do, even if they don’t. I imagine that your rejection of us is even firmer than our rejection of you!”

  “Dot’s right, Comrade Elphrey. Both you and dis fellow got ants in your bourjui pants, like your Hugh Johnson vould say!” chuckled the Russian Mr. Bailey.

  “But I just wonder if Walt Trowbridge won’t be chasing out Buzz Windrip while you boys are still arguing about whether Comrade Trotzky was once guilty of saying mass facing the north? Good-day!” said Doremus.

  When he recounted it to Julian, two days later, and Julian puzzled, “I wonder whether you won or they did?” Doremus asserted, “I don’t think anybody won—except the ants! Anyway, now I know that man is not to be saved by black bread alone but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord our God. . .. Communists, intense and narrow; Yankees, tolerant and shallow; no wonder a Dictator can keep us separate and all working for him!”

  * * *

  Even in the 1930’s, when it was radiantly believed that movies and the motorcar and glossy magazines had ended the provinciality of all the larger American villages, in such communities as Fort Beulah all the retired business men who could not afford to go to Europe or Florida or California, such as Doremus, were as aimless as an old dog on Sunday afternoon with the family away. They poked uptown to the shops, the hotel lobbies, the railway station, and at the barber shop were pleased rather than irritated when they had to wait a quarter-hour for the tri-weekly shave. There were no cafés as there would have been in Continental Europe, and no club save the country club, and that was chiefly a sanctuary for the younger people in the evening and late afternoons.

  The superior Doremus Jessup, the bookman, was almost as dreary in retirement as Banker Crowley would have been.

  He did pretend to play golf, but he could not see any particular point in stopping a good walk to wallop small balls and, worse, the links were now bright with M.M. uniforms. And he hadn’t enough brass, as no doubt Medary Cole would have, to feel welcome hour on hour in the Hotel Wessex lobby.

  He stayed in his third-story study and read as long as his eyes would endure it. But he irritably felt Emma’s irritation and Mrs. Candy’s ire at having a man arou
nd the house all day. Yes! He’d get what he could for the house and for what small share in Informer stock the government had left him when they had taken it over, and go—well, just go—the Rockies or anywhere that was new.

  But he realized that Emma did not at all wish to go new places; and realized that the Emma to whose billowy warmth it had been comforting to come home after the office, bored him and was bored by him when he was always there. The only difference was that she did not seem capable of admitting that one might, without actual fiendishness or any signs of hot-footing it for Reno, be bored by one’s faithful spouse.

  “Why don’t you drive out and see Buck or Lorinda?” she suggested.

  “Don’t you ever get a little jealous of my girl, Linda?” he said, very lightly—because he very heavily wanted to know.

  She laughed. “You? At your age? As if anybody thought you could be a lover!”

  Well, Lorinda thought so, he raged, and promptly he did “drive out and see her,” a little easier in mind about his divided loyalties.

  Only once did he go back to the Informer office.

  Staubmeyer was not in sight, and it was evident that the real editor was that sly bumpkin, Doc Itchitt, who didn’t even rise at Doremus’s entrance nor listen when Doremus gave his opinion of the new make-up of the rural-correspondence pages.

  That was an apostasy harder to endure than Shad Ledue’s, for Shad had always been rustically certain that Doremus was a fool, almost as bad as real “city folks,” while Doc Itchitt had once appreciated the tight joints and smooth surfaces and sturdy bases of Doremus’s craftsmanship.

  Day on day he waited. So much of a revolution for so many people is nothing but waiting. That is one reason why tourists rarely see anything but contentment in a crushed population. Waiting, and its brother death, seem so contented.

  * * *

  For several days now, in late February, Doremus had noticed the insurance man. He said he was a Mr. Dimick; a Mr. Dimick of Albany. He was a gray and tasteless man, in gray and dusty and wrinkled clothes, and his pop-eyes stared with meaningless fervor. All over town you met him, at the four drugstores, at the shoe-shine parlor, and he was always droning, “My name is Dimick—Mr. Dimick of Albany—Albany, New York. I wonder if I can interest you in a wonnerful new form of life-insurance policy. Wonnerful!” But he didn’t sound as though he himself thought it was very wonnerful.

  He was a pest.

  He was always dragging himself into some unwelcoming shop, and yet he seemed to sell few policies, if any.

  Not for two days did Doremus perceive that Mr. Dimick of Albany managed to meet him an astonishing number of times a day. As he came out of the Wessex, he saw Mr. Dimick leaning against a lamppost, ostentatiously not looking his way, yet three minutes later and two blocks away, Mr. Dimick trailed after him into the Vert Mont Pool & Tobacco Headquarters, and listened to Doremus’s conversation with Tom Aiken about fish hatcheries.

  Doremus was suddenly cold. He made it a point to sneak uptown that evening and saw Mr. Dimick talking to the driver of a Beulah-Montpelier bus with an intensity that wasn’t in the least gray. Doremus glared. Mr. Dimick looked at him with watery eyes, croaked, “Devenin’, Mr. D’remus; like t’ talk t’ you about insurance some time when you got the time,” and shuffled away.

  Later, Doremus took out and cleaned his revolver, said, “Oh, rats!” and put it away. He heard a ring as he did so, and went downstairs to find Mr. Dimick sitting on the oak hat rack in the hall, rubbing his hat.

  “I’d like to talk to you, if y’ain’t too busy,” whined Mr. Dimick.

  “All right. Go in there. Sit down.”

  “Anybody hear us?”

  “No! What of it?”

  Mr. Dimick’s grayness and lassitude fell away. His voice was sharp:

  “I think your local Corpos are on to me. Got to hustle. I’m from Walt Trowbridge. You probably guessed—I’ve been watching you all week, asking about you. You’ve got to be Trowbridge’s and our representative here. Secret war against the Corpos. The ‘N.U.,’ the ‘New Underground,’ we call it—like secret Underground that got the slaves into Canada before the Civil War. Four divisions: printing propaganda, distributing it, collecting and exchanging information about Corpo outrages, smuggling suspects into Canada or Mexico. Of course you don’t know one thing about me. I may be a Corpo spy. But look over these credentials and telephone your friend Mr. Samson of the Burlington Paper Company. God’s sake be careful! Wire may be tapped. Ask him about me on the grounds you’re interested in insurance. He’s one of us. You’re going to be one of us! Now phone!”

  Doremus telephoned to Samson: “Say, Ed, is a fellow named Dimick, kind of weedy-looking, pop-eyed fellow, all right? Shall I take his advice on insurance?”

  “Yes. Works for Walbridge. Sure. You can ride along with him.”

  “I’m riding!”

  26

  THE Informer composing room closed down at eleven in the evening, for the paper had to be distributed to villages forty miles away and did not issue a later city edition. Dan Wilgus, the foreman, remained after the others had gone, setting a Minute Man poster which announced that there would be a grand parade on March ninth, and incidentally that President Windrip was defying the world.

  Dan stopped, looked sharply about, and tramped into the storeroom. In the light from a dusty electric bulb the place was like a tomb of dead news, with ancient red-and-black posters of Scotland county fairs and proofs of indecent limericks pasted on the walls. From a case of eight-point, once used for the setting of pamphlets but superseded by a monotype machine, Dan picked out bits of type from each of several compartments, wrapped them in scraps of print paper, and stored them in the pocket of his jacket. The raped type boxes looked only half filled, and to make up for it he did something that should have shocked any decent printer even if he were on strike. He filled them up with type not from another eight-point case, but with old ten-point.

  Daniel, the large and hairy, thriftily pinching the tiny types, was absurd as an elephant playing at being a hen.

  He turned out the lights on the third floor and clumped downstairs. He glanced in at the editorial rooms. No one was there save Doc Itchitt, in a small circle of light that through the visor of his eye shade cast a green tint on his unwholesome face. He was correcting an article by the titular editor, Ensign Emil Staubmeyer, and he snickered as he carved it with a large black pencil. He raised his head, startled.

  “Hello, Doc.”

  “Hello, Dan. Staying late?”

  “Yuh. Just finished some job work. G’night.”

  “Say, Dan, do you ever see old Jessup, these days?”

  “Don’t know when I’ve seen him, Doc. Oh yes, I ran into him at the Rexall store, couple days ago.”

  “Still as sour as ever about the régime?”

  “Oh, he didn’t say anything. Darned old fool! Even if he don’t like all the brave boys in uniform, he ought to see the Chief is here for keeps, by golly!”

  “Certainly ought to! And it’s a swell régime. Fellow can get ahead in newspaper work now, and not be held back by a bunch of snobs that think they’re so doggone educated just because they went to college!”

  “That’s right. Well, hell with Jessup and all the old stiffs. G’night, Doc!”

  Dan and Brother Itchitt unsmilingly gave the M.M. salute, arms held out. Dan thumped down to the street and homeward. He stopped in front of Billy’s Bar, in the middle of a block, and put his foot up on the hub of a dirty old Ford, to tie his shoelace. As he tied it—after having untied it—he looked up and down the street, emptied the bundles in his pockets into a battered sap bucket on the front seat of the car, and majestically moved on.

  Out of the bar came Pete Vutong, a French-Canadian farmer who lived up on Mount Terror. Pete was obviously drunk. He was singing the pre-historic ditty “Hi lee, hi low” in what he conceived to be German, viz.: “By unz gays immer, yuh longer yuh slimmer.” He was staggering so that he had to pull himse
lf into the car, and he steered in fancy patterns till he had turned the corner. Then he was amazingly and suddenly sober; and amazing was the speed with which the Ford clattered out of town.

  Pete Vutong wasn’t a very good Secret Agent. He was a little obvious. But then, Pete had been a spy for only one week.

  In that week Dan Wilgus had four times dropped heavy packages into a sap bucket in the Ford.

  Pete passed the gate to Buck Titus’s domain, slowed down, dropped the sap bucket into a ditch, and sped home.

  Just at dawn, Buck Titus, out for a walk with his three Irish wolfhounds, kicked up the sap bucket and transferred the bundles to his own pocket.

  And next afternoon Dan Wilgus, in the basement of Buck’s house, was setting up, in eight-point, a pamphlet entitled “How Many People Have the Corpos Murdered?” It was signed “Spartan,” and Spartan was one of several pen names of Mr. Doremus Jessup.

  They were all—all the ringleaders of the local chapter of the New Underground—rather glad when once, on his way to Buck’s, Dan was searched by M.M.’s unfamiliar to him, and on him was found no printing-material, nor any documents more incriminating than cigarette papers.

  * * *