had Doc Itchitt interview him today, when he arrived—he's the perfect gentleman-Fascist—Oswald Mosley style. Good family—whatever that means. Harvard graduate. Columbia Law School, year at Oxford. But went into finance in Boston. Investment banker. Major or something during the war. Plays polo and sailed in a yacht race to Bermuda. Itchitt says he's a big brute, with manners smoother than a butterscotch sundae and more language than a bishop."
"But I'll be glad to have a gentleman to explain things to, instead of Shad."
"A gentleman's blackjack hurts just as much as a mucker's!"
"Oh, you!" with irritated tenderness, running her forefinger along the line of his jaw.
Outside, a footstep.
She sprang up, sat down primly in the straight chair. The footsteps went by. She mused:
"All this trouble and the Corpos—They're going to do something to you and me. We'll become so roused up that—either we'll be desperate and really cling to each other and everybody else in the world can go to the devil or, what I'm afraid is more likely, we'll get so deep into rebellion against Windrip, we'll feel so terribly that we're standing for something, that we'll want to give up everything else for it, even give up you and me. So that no one can ever find out and criticize. We'll have to be beyond criticism."
"No! I won't listen. We will fight, but how can we ever get so involved—detached people like us—"
"You are going to publish that editorial tomorrow?"
"Yes."
"It's not too late to kill it?"
He looked at the clock over her desk—so ludicrously like a grade-school clock that it ought to have been flanked with portraits of George and Martha. "Well, yes, it is too late—almost eleven. Couldn't get to the office till 'way past."
"You're sure you won't worry about it when you go to bed tonight? Dear, I so don't want you to worry! You're sure you don't want to telephone and kill the editorial?"
"Sure. Absolute!"
"I'm glad! Me, I'd rather be shot than go sneaking around, crippled with fear. Bless you!"
She kissed him and hurried off to another hour or two of work, while he drove home, whistling vaingloriously.
But he did not sleep well, in his big black-walnut bed. He startled to the night noises of an old frame house—the easing walls, the step of bodiless assassins creeping across the wooden floors all night long.
19
An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary folks—it just confuses them—to try to make them swallow all the true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time of day.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
The Fort Beulah Informer had its own three-story-and basement building, on President Street between Elm and Maple, opposite the side entrance of the Hotel Wessex. On the top story was the composing room; on the second, the editorial and photographic departments and the bookkeeper; in the basement, the presses; and on the first or street floor, the circulation and advertising departments, and the front office, open to the pavement, where the public came to pay subscriptions and insert want-ads. The private room of the editor, Doremus Jessup, looked out on President Street through one not too dirty window. It was larger but little more showy than Lorinda Pike's office at the Tavern, but on the wall it did have historic treasures in the way of a water-stained surveyor's-map of Fort Beulah Township in 1891, a contemporary oleograph portrait of President McKinley, complete with eagles, flags, cannon, and the Ohio state flower, the scarlet carnation, a group photograph of the New England Editorial Association (in which Doremus was the third blur in a derby hat in the fourth row), and an entirely bogus copy of a newspaper announcing Lincoln's death. It was reasonably tidy—in the patent letter file, otherwise empty, there were only 2 1/2 pairs of winter mittens, and an 18-gauge shotgun shell.
Doremus was, by habit, extremely fond of his office. It was the only place aside from his study at home that was thoroughly his own. He would have hated to leave it or to share it with anyone—possibly excepting Buck and Lorinda—and every morning he came to it expectantly, from the ground floor, up the wide brown stairs, through the good smell of printer's ink.
He stood at the window of this room before eight, the morning when his editorial appeared, looking down at the people going to work in shops and warehouses. A few of them were in Minute Men uniforms. More and more even the part-time M.M.'s wore their uniforms when on civilian duties. There was a bustle among them. He saw them unfold copies of the Informer; he saw them look up, point up, at his window. Heads close, they irritably discussed the front page of the paper. R. C. Crowley went by, early as ever on his way to open the bank, and stopped to speak to a clerk from Ed Howland's grocery, both of them shaking their heads. Old Dr. Olmsted, Fowler's partner, and Louis Rotenstern halted on a corner. Doremus knew they were both friends of his, but they were dubious, perhaps frightened, as they looked at an Informer.
The passing of people became a gathering, the gathering a crowd, the crowd a mob, glaring up at his office, beginning to clamor. There were dozens of people there unknown to him: respectable farmers in town for shopping, unrespectables in town for a drink, laborers from the nearest work camp, and all of them eddying around M.M. uniforms. Probably many of them cared nothing about insults to the Corpo state, but had only the unprejudiced, impersonal pleasure in violence natural to most people.
Their mutter became louder, less human, more like the snap of burning rafters. Their glances joined in one. He was, frankly, scared.
He was half conscious of big Dan Wilgus, the head compositor, beside him, hand on his shoulder, but saying nothing, and of Doc Itchitt cackling, "My—my gracious—hope they don't—God, I hope they don't come up here!"
The mob acted then, swift and together, on no more of an incitement than an unknown M.M.'s shout: "Ought to burn the place, lynch the whole bunch of traitors!" They were running across the street, into the front office. He could hear a sound of smashing, and his fright was gone in protective fury. He galloped down the wide stairs, and from five steps above the front office looked on the mob, equipped with axes and brush hooks grabbed from in front of Pridewell's near-by hardware store, slashing at the counter facing the front door, breaking the glass case of souvenir postcards and stationery samples, and with obscene hands reaching across the counter to rip the blouse of the girl clerk.
Doremus cried, "Get out of this, all you bums!"
They were coming toward him, claws hideously opening and closing, but he did not await that coming. He clumped down the stairs, step by step, trembling not from fear but from insane anger. One large burgher seized his arm, began to bend it. The pain was atrocious. At that moment (Doremus almost smiled, so grotesquely was it like the nick-of-time rescue by the landing party of Marines) into the front office Commissioner Shad Ledue marched, at the head of twenty M.M.'s with unsheathed bayonets, and, lumpishly climbing up on the shattered counter, bellowed:
