It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Read Free Book Online Page A

have given their
all for the common good and who are vulnerable because they standout in the fierce Light that beats around the Throne.
    Zero Hour , Berzelius Windrip.
    The June morning shone, the last petals of the wild-cherry blossoms
lay dew-covered on the grass, robins were about their brisk
business on the lawn. Doremus, by nature a late-lier and pilferer
of naps after he had been called at eight, was stirred to spring up
and stretch his arms out fully five or six timesin Swedish
exercises, in front of his window, looking out across the Beulah
River Valley to dark masses of pine on the mountain slopes three
miles away.
    Doremus and Emma had had each their own bedroom, these fifteen
years, not altogether to her pleasure. He asserted that he
couldn’t share a bedroom with any person living, because he was a
night-mutterer, and liked to make a really good, uprearing,pillow-slapping job of turning over in bed without feeling that he was
disturbing someone.
    It was Saturday, the day of the Prang revelation, but on this
crystal morning, after days of rain, he did not think of Prang at
all, but of the fact that Philip, his son, with wife, had popped up
from Worcester for the week-end, and that the whole crew of them,
along with Lorinda Pike and Buck Titus, weregoing to have a “real,
old-fashioned, family picnic.”
    They had all demanded it, even the fashionable Sissy, a woman who,
at eighteen, had much concern with tennis-teas, golf, and
mysterious, appallingly rapid motor trips with Malcolm Tasbrough
(just graduating from high school), or with the Episcopal parson’s
grandson, Julian Falck (freshman in Amherst). Doremus had scolded
that he
could’t
go to any blame picnic; it was his
job
, as editor,
to stay home and listen to Bishop Prang’s broadcast at two; but
they had laughed at him and rumpled his hair and miscalled him
until he had promised… . They didn’t know it, but he had slyly
borrowed a portable radio from his friend, the local R. C. priest,
Father Stephen Perefixe, and he was going to hear Prang whether or
no.
    He was glad theywere going to have Lorinda Pike—he was fond of
that sardonic saint—and Buck Titus, who was perhaps his closest
intimate.
    James Buck Titus, who was fifty but looked thirty-eight, straight,
broad-shouldered, slim-waisted, long-mustached, swarthy—Buck was
the Dan’l Boone type of Old American, or, perhaps, an Indian-fighting cavalry captain, out of Charles King. He had graduated
from Williams, withten weeks in England and ten years in Montana,
divided between cattle-raising, prospecting, and a horse-breeding
ranch. His father, a richish railroad contractor, had left him the
great farm near West Beulah, and Buck had come back home to grow
apples, to breed Morgan stallions, and to read Voltaire, Anatole
France, Nietzsche, and Dostoyefsky. He served in the war, as a
private; detested hisofficers, refused a commission, and liked the
Germans at Cologne. He was a useful polo player, but regarded
riding to the hounds as childish. In politics, he did not so much
yearn over the wrongs of Labor as feel scornful of the tight-fisted
exploiters who denned in office and stinking factory. He was as
near to the English country squire as one may find in America. He
was a bachelor, with abig mid-Victorian house, well kept by a
friendly Negro couple; a tidy place in which he sometimes
entertained ladies who were not quite so tidy. He called himself
an “agnostic” instead of an “atheist” only because he detested the
street-bawling, tract-peddling evangelicism of the professional
atheists. He was cynical, he rarely smiled, and he was
unwaveringly loyal to all the Jessups. His comingto the picnic
made Doremus as blithe as his grandson David.
    “Perhaps, even under Fascism, the ‘Church clock will stand at ten
to three, and there will be honey still for tea,’” Doremus hoped,
as he put on his rather dandified country tweeds.
----
    The only stain on the preparations for the picnic was