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 around 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
