Most of them had, among all the factors in the campaign, noticed only what they regarded as Windrip's humor, and three planks in his platform: Five, which promised to increase taxes on the rich; Ten, which condemned the Negroes—since nothing so elevates a dispossessed farmer or a factory worker on relief as to have some race, any race, on which he can look down; and, especially, Eleven, which announced, or seemed to announce, that the average toiler would immediately receive $5000 a year. (And ever-so-many railway-station debaters explained that it would really be $10,000. Why, they were going to have every cent offered by Dr. Townsend, plus everything planned by the late Huey Long, Upton Sinclair, and the Utopians, all put together!)
So beatifically did hundreds of old people in Beulah Valley believe this that they smilingly trotted into Raymond Pridewell's hardware store, to order new kitchen stoves and aluminum sauce pans and complete bathroom furnishings, to be paid for on the day after inauguration. Mr. Pridewell, a cobwebbed old Henry Cabot Lodge Republican, lost half his trade by chasing out these happy heirs to fabulous estates, but they went on dreaming, and Doremus, nagging at them, discovered that mere figures are defenseless against a dream . . . even a dream of new Plymouths and unlimited cans of sausages and motion-picture cameras and the prospect of never having to arise till 7:30 A.M.
Thus answered Alfred Tizra, "Snake" Tizra, friend to Doremus's handyman, Shad Ledue. Snake was a steel-tough truck-driver and taxi-owner who had served sentences for assault and for transporting bootleg liquor. He had once made a living catching rattlesnakes and copperheads in southern New England. Under President Windrip, Snake jeeringly assured Doremus, he would have enough money to start a chain of roadhouses in all the dry communities in Vermont.
Ed Howland, one of the lesser Fort Beulah grocers, and Charley Betts, furniture and undertaking, while they were dead against anyone getting groceries, furniture, or even undertaking on Windrip credit, were all for the population's having credit on other wares.
Aras Dilley, a squatter dairy farmer living with a toothless wife and seven slattern children in a tilted and unscrubbed cabin way up on Mount Terror, snarled at Doremus—who had often taken food baskets and boxes of shotgun shells and masses of cigarettes to Aras—"Well, want to tell you, when Mr. Windrip gets in, we farmers are going to fix our own prices on our crops, and not you smart city fellows!"
Doremus could not blame him. While Buck Titus, at fifty, looked thirty-odd, Aras, at thirty-four, looked fifty.
Lorinda Pike's singularly unpleasant partner in the Beulah Valley Tavern, one Mr. Nipper, whom she hoped soon to lose, combined boasting how rich he was with gloating how much more he was going to get under Windrip. "Professor" Staubmeyer quoted nice things Windrip had said about higher pay for teachers. Louis Rotenstern, to prove that his heart, at least, was not Jewish, became more lyric than any of them. And even Frank Tasbrough of the quarries, Medary Cole of the grist mill and real-estate holdings, R. C. Crowley of the bank, who presumably were not tickled by projects of higher income taxes, smiled pussy-cattishly and hinted that Windrip was a "lot sounder fellow" than people knew.
But no one in Fort Beulah was a more active crusader for Buzz Windrip than Shad Ledue.
Doremus had known that Shad possessed talent for argument and for display; that he had once persuaded old Mr. Pridewell to trust him for a .22 rifle, value twenty-three dollars; that, removed from the sphere of coal bins and grass-stained overalls, he had once sung "Rollicky Bill the Sailor" at a smoker of the Ancient and Independent Order of Rams; and that he had enough memory to be able to quote, as his own profound opinions, the editorials in the Hearst newspapers. Yet even knowing all this equipment for a political career, an equipment not much short of Buzz Windrip's, Doremus was surprised to find Shad soap-boxing for Windrip among the quarry-workers, then actually as chairman of a rally in Oddfellows' Hall. Shad spoke little, but with brutal taunting of the believers in Trowbridge and Roosevelt.
At meetings where he did not speak, Shad was an incomparable bouncer, and in that valued capacity he was summoned to Windrip rallies as far away as Burlington. It was he who, in a militia uniform, handsomely riding a large white plow-horse, led the final Windrip parade in Rutland . . . and substantial men of affairs, even dry-goods jobbers, fondly called him "Shad."
Doremus was amazed, felt a little apologetic over his failure to have appreciated this new-found paragon, as he sat in American Legion Hall and heard Shad bellowing: "I don't pretend to be anything but a plain working-stiff, but there's forty million workers like me, and we know that Senator Windrip is the first statesman in years that thinks of what guys like us need before he thinks one doggone thing about politics. Come on, you bozos! The swell folks tell you to not be selfish! Walt Trowbridge tells you to not be selfish! Well, be selfish, and vote for the one man that's willing to give you something—give you something!—and not just grab off every cent and every hour of work that he can get!"
Doremus groaned inwardly, "Oh, my Shad! And you're doing most of this on my time!"
Sissy Jessup sat on the running board of her coupe (hers by squatter's right), with Julian Falck, up from Amherst for the week-end, and Malcolm Tasbrough wedged in on either side of her.
"Oh nuts, let's quit talking politics. Windrip's going to be elected, so why waste time yodeling when we could drive down to the river and have a swim," complained Malcolm.
"He's not going to win without our putting up a tough scrap against him. I'm going to talk to the high-school alumni this evening—about how they got to tell their parents to vote for either Trowbridge or Roosevelt," snapped Julian Falck.
"Haa, haa, haa! And of course the parents will be tickled to death to do whatever you tell 'em, Yulian! You college men certainly are the goods! Besides—Want to be serious about this fool business?" Malcolm had the insolent self-assurance of beef, slick black hair, and a large car of his own; he was the perfect leader of Black Shirts, and he looked contemptuously on Julian who, though a year older, was pale and thinnish. "Matter of fact, it'll be a good thing to have Buzz. He'll put a damn quick stop to all this radicalism—all this free speech and libel of our most fundamental institutions—"
"Boston American; last Tuesday; page eight," murmured Sissy.
"—and no wonder you're scared of him, Yulian! He sure will drag some of your favorite Amherst anarchist profs off to the hoosegow, and maybe you too, Comrade!"
The two young men looked at each other with slow fury. Sissy quieted them by raging, "Freavensake! Will you two heels quit scrapping? . . . Oh, my dears, this beastly election! Beastly! Seems as if it's breaking up every town, every home. . . . My poor Dad! Doremus is just about all in!"
12
I shall not be content till this country can produce every single thing we need, even coffee, cocoa, and rubber, and so keep all our dollars at home. If we can do this and at the same time work up tourist traffic so that foreigners will come from every part of the world to see such remarkable wonders as the Grand Canyon, Glacier and Yellowstone etc. parks, the fine hotels of Chicago, & etc., thus leaving their money here, we shall have such a balance of trade as will go far to carry out my often-criticized yet completely sound idea of from $3000 to $5000 per year for every single family—that is, I mean every real American family. Such an aspiring Vision is what we want, and not all this nonsense of wasting our time at Geneva and talky-talk at Lugano, wherever that is.
Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.
Election day would fall on Tuesday, November third, and on Sunday evening of the first, Senator Windrip played the finale of his campaign at a mass meeting in Madison Square Garden, in New York. The Garden would hold, with seats and standing room, about 19,000, and a week before the meeting every ticket had been sold—at from fifty