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 spiræa 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 conning:
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 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