He understood now why the young men marched to war. But "Oh yeh—you think so!" he could hear Shad sneering through the music.
The unwieldy humor characteristic of American politicians persisted even through the eruption. Doremus read about and sardonically "played up" in the Informer a minstrel show given at the National Convention of Boosters' Clubs at Atlantic City, late in August. As end-men and interlocutor appeared no less distinguished persons than Secretary of the Treasury Webster R. Skittle, Secretary of War Luthorne, and Secretary of Education and Public Relations, Dr. Macgoblin. It was good, old-time Elks Club humor, uncorroded by any of the notions of dignity and of international obligations which, despite his great services, that queer stick Lee Sarason was suspected of trying to introduce. Why (marveled the Boosters) the Big Boys were so democratic that they even kidded themselves and the Corpos, that's how unassuming they were!
"Who was this lady I seen you going down the street with?" demanded the plump Mr. Secretary Skittle (disguised as a colored wench in polka-dotted cotton) of Mr. Secretary Luthorne (in black-face and large red gloves).
"That wasn't no lady, that was Walt Trowbridge's paper."
"Ah don't think Ah cognosticates youse, Mist' Bones."
"Why—you know—'A Nance for Plutocracy.'"
Clean fun, not too confusingly subtle, drawing the people (several millions listened on the radio to the Boosters' Club show) closer to their great-hearted masters.
But the high point of the show was Dr. Macgoblin's daring to tease his own faction by singing:
Buzz and booze and biz, what fun! This job gets drearier and drearier, When I get out of Washington, I'm going to Siberia!
It seemed to Doremus that he was hearing a great deal about the Secretary of Education. Then, in late September, he heard something not quite pleasant about Dr. Macgoblin. The story, as he got it, ran thus:
Hector Macgoblin, that great surgeon-boxer-poet-sailor, had always contrived to have plenty of enemies, but after the beginning of his investigation of schools, to purge them of any teachers he did not happen to like, he made so unusually many that he was accompanied by bodyguards. At this time in September, he was in New York, finding quantities of "subversive elements" in Columbia University—against the protests of President Nicholas Murray Butler, who insisted that he had already cleaned out all willful and dangerous thinkers, especially the pacifists in the medical school—and Macgoblin's bodyguards were two former instructors in philosophy who in their respective universities had been admired even by their deans for everything except the fact that they would get drunk and quarrelsome. One of them, in that state, always took off one shoe and hit people over the head with the heel, if they argued in defense of Jung.
With these two in uniforms as M.M. battalion leaders—his own was that of a brigadier—after a day usefully spent in kicking out of Columbia all teachers who had voted for Trowbridge, Dr. Macgoblin started off with his brace of bodyguards to try out a wager that he could take a drink at every bar on Fifty-second Street and still not pass out.
He had done well when, at ten-thirty, being then affectionate and philanthropic, he decided that it would be a splendid idea to telephone his revered former teacher in Leland Stanford, the biologist Dr. Willy Schmidt, once of Vienna, now in Rockefeller Institute. Macgoblin was indignant when someone at Dr. Schmidt's apartment informed him that the doctor was out. Furiously: "Out? Out? What d'you mean he's out? Old goat like that got no right to be out! At midnight! Where is he? This is the Police Department speaking! Where is he?"
Dr. Schmidt was spending the evening with that gentle scholar, Rabbi Dr. Vincent de Verez.
Macgoblin and his learned gorillas went to call on De Verez. On the way nothing of note happened except that when Macgoblin discussed the fare with the taxi-driver, he felt impelled to knock him out. The three, and they were in the happiest, most boyish of spirits, burst joyfully into Dr. de Verez's primeval house in the Sixties. The entrance hall was shabby enough, with a humble show of the good rabbi's umbrellas and storm rubbers, and had the invaders seen the bedrooms they would have found them Trappist cells. But the long living room, front- and back-parlor thrown together, was half museum, half lounge. Just because he himself liked such things and resented a stranger's possessing them, Macgoblin looked sniffily at a Beluchi prayer rug, a Jacobean court cupboard, a small case of incunabula and of Arabic manuscripts in silver upon scarlet parchment.
"Swell joint! Hello, Doc! How's the Dutchman? How's the antibody research going? These are Doc Nemo and Doc, uh, Doc Whoozis, the famous glue lifters. Great frenzh mine. Introduce us to your Jew friend."
Now it is more than possible that Rabbi de Verez had never heard of Secretary of Education Macgoblin.
The houseman who had let in the intruders and who nervously hovered at the living-room door—he is the sole authority for most of the story—said that Macgoblin staggered, slid on a rug, almost fell, then giggled foolishly as he sat down, waving his plug-ugly friends to chairs and demanding, "Hey, Rabbi, how about some whisky? Lil Scotch and soda. I know you Geonim never lap up anything but snow-cooled nectar handed out by a maiden with a dulcimer, singing of Mount Abora, or maybe just a little shot of Christian children's sacrificial blood—ha, ha, just a joke, Rabbi; I know these 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' are all the bunk, but awful handy in propaganda, just the same and—But I mean, for plain Goyim like us, a little real hootch! Hear me?"
Dr. Schmidt started to protest. The Rabbi, who had been carding his white beard, silenced him and, with a wave of his fragile old hand, signaled the waiting houseman, who reluctantly brought in whisky and siphons.
The three coordinators of culture almost filled their glasses before they poured in the soda.
"Look here, De Verez, why don't you kikes take a tumble to yourselves and get out, beat it, exeunt bearing corpses, and start a real Zion, say in South America?"
The Rabbi looked bewildered at the attack. Dr. Schmidt snorted, "Dr. Macgoblin—once a promising pupil of mine—is Secretary of Education and a lot of t'ings—I don't know vot!—at Washington. Corpo!"
"Oh!" The Rabbi sighed. "I have heard of that cult, but my people have learned to ignore persecution. We have been so impudent as to adopt the tactics of your Early Christian Martyrs! Even if we were invited to your Corporate feast—which, I understand, we most warmly are not!—I am afraid we should not be able to attend. You see, we believe in only one Dictator, God, and I am afraid we cannot see Mr. Windrip as a rival to Jehovah!"
"Aah, that's all baloney!" murmured one of the learned gunmen, and Macgoblin shouted, "Oh, can the two-dollar words! There's just one thing where we agree with the dirty, Kike-loving Communists—that's in chucking the whole bunch of divinities, Jehovah and all the rest of 'em, that've been on relief so long!"
The Rabbi was unable even to answer, but little Dr. Schmidt (he had a doughnut mustache, a beer belly, and black button boots with soles half-an-inch thick) said, "Macgoblin, I suppose I may talk frank wit' an old student, there not being any reporters or loutspeakers arount. Do you know why you are drinking like a pig? Because you are ashamt! Ashamt that you, once a promising researcher, should have solt out to freebooters with brains like decayed liver and—"
"That'll do from you, Prof!"
"Say, we oughtta tie those seditious sons of hounds up and beat the daylight out of 'em!" whimpered one of the watchdogs.
Macgoblin shrieked, "You highbrows—you stinking intellectuals! You, you Kike, with your lush-luzurious library, while Common People been starving—would be now if the Chief hadn't saved 'em! Your c'lection books—stolen from the pennies of your poor, dumb, foot-kissing