LITMIR.BIZ

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Macgoblin! What a man!

      The Sarason-Macgoblin ode, entitled "Bring Out the Old-time Musket," became to Buzz Windrip's band of liberators what "Giovanezza" was to the Italians, "The Horst Wessel Song" to the Nazis, "The International" to all Marxians. Along with the convention, the radio millions heard Mrs. Adelaide Tarr Gimmitch's contralto, rich as peat, chanting:

       BRING OUT THE OLD-TIME MUSKET

       Dear Lord, we have sinned, we have slumbered, And our flag lies stained in the dust, And the souls of the Past are calling, calling, "Arise from your sloth—you must!" Lead us, O soul of Lincoln, Inspire us, spirit of Lee, To rule all the world for righteousness, To fight for the right, To awe with our might, As we did in 'sixty-three.

       Chorus See, youth with desire hot glowing, See, maiden, with fearless eye, Leading our ranks Thunder the tanks, Aeroplanes cloud the sky.

       Bring out the old-time musket, Rouse up the old-time fire! See, all the world is crumbling, Dreadful and dark and dire. America! Rise and conquer The world to our heart's desire!

      "Great showmanship. P. T. Barnum or Flo Ziegfeld never put on a better," mused Doremus, as he studied the A.P. flimsies, as he listened to the radio he had had temporarily installed in his office. And, much later: "When Buzz gets in, he won't be having any parade of wounded soldiers. That'll be bad Fascist psychology. All those poor devils he'll hide away in institutions, and just bring out the lively young human slaughter cattle in uniforms. Hm."

      The thunderstorm, which had mercifully lulled, burst again in wrathful menace.

      All afternoon the convention balloted, over and over, with no change in the order of votes for the presidential candidate. Toward six, Miss Perkins's manager threw her votes to Roosevelt, who gained then on Senator Windrip. They seemed to have settled down to an all-night struggle, and at ten in the evening Doremus wearily left the office. He did not, tonight, want the sympathetic and extremely feminized atmosphere of his home, and he dropped in at the rectory of his friend Father Perefixe. There he found a satisfyingly unfeminized, untalcumized group. The Reverend Mr. Falck was there. Swart, sturdy young Perefixe and silvery old Falck often worked together, were fond of each other, and agreed upon the advantages of clerical celibacy and almost every other doctrine except the supremacy of the Bishop of Rome. With them were Buck Titus, Louis Rotenstern, Dr. Fowler Greenhill, and Banker Crowley, a financier who liked to cultivate an appearance of free intellectual discussion, though only after the hours devoted to refusing credit to desperate farmers and storekeepers.

      And not to be forgotten was Foolish the dog, who that thunderous morning had suspected his master's worry, followed him to the office, and all day long had growled at Haik and Sarason and Mrs. Gimmitch on the radio and showed an earnest conviction that he ought to chew up all flimsies reporting the convention.

      Better than his own glacial white-paneled drawing room with its portraits of dead Vermont worthies, Doremus liked Father Perefixe's little study, and its combination of churchliness, of freedom from Commerce (at least ordinary Commerce), as displayed in a crucifix and a plaster statuette of the Virgin and a shrieking red-and-green Italian picture of the Pope, with practical affairs, as shown in the oak roll-top desk and steel filing-cabinet and well-worn portable typewriter. It was a pious hermit's cave with the advantages of leather chairs and excellent rye highballs.

      The night passed as the eight of them (for Foolish too had his tipple of milk) all sipped and listened; the night passed as the convention balloted, furiously, unavailingly . . . that congress six hundred miles away, six hundred miles of befogged night, yet with every speech, every derisive yelp, coming into the priest's cabinet in the same second in which they were heard in the hall at Cleveland.

      Father Perefixe's housekeeper (who was sixty-five years old to his thirty-nine, to the disappointment of all the scandal-loving local Protestants) came in with scrambled eggs, cold beer.

      "When my dear wife was still among us, she used to send me to bed at midnight," sighed Dr. Falck.

      "My wife does now!" said Doremus.

      "So does mine—and her a New York girl!" said Louis Rotenstern.

      "Father Steve, here, and I are the only guys with a sensible way of living," crowed Buck Titus. "Celibates. We can go to bed with our pants on, or not go to bed at all," and Father Perefixe murmured, "But it's curious, Buck, what people find to boast of—you that you're free of God's tyranny and also that you can go to bed in your pants—Mr. Falck and Dr. Greenhill and I that God is so lenient with us that some nights He lets us off from sick-calls and we can go to bed with 'em off! And Louis because—Listen! Listen! Sounds like business!"

      Colonel Dewey Haik, Buzz's proposer, was announcing that Senator Windrip felt it would be only modest of him to go to his hotel now, but he had left a letter which he, Haik, would read. And he did read it, inexorably.

      Windrip stated that, just in case anyone did not completely understand his platform, he wanted to make it all ringingly clear.

      Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World . . . and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly.

      Each moment the brassy importunities of the radio seemed to Doremus the more offensive, while the hillside slept in the heavy summer night, and he thought about the mazurka of the fireflies, the rhythm of crickets like the rhythm of the revolving earth itself, the voluptuous breezes that bore away the stink of cigars and sweat and whisky breaths and mint chewing-gum that seemed to come to them from the convention over the sound waves, along with the oratory.

      It was after dawn, and Father Perefixe (unclerically stripped to shirt-sleeves and slippers) had just brought them in a grateful tray of onion soup, with a gob of Hamburg steak for Foolish, when the opposition to Buzz collapsed and hastily, on the next ballot, Senator Berzelius Windrip was nominated as Democratic Candidate for President of the United States.

      Doremus, Buck Titus, Perefixe, and Falck were for a time too gloomy for speech—so possibly was the dog Foolish, as well, for at the turning off of the radio he tail-thumped in only the most tentative way.

      R. C. Crowley gloated, "Well, all my life I've voted Republican, but here's a man that—Well, I'm going to vote for Windrip!"

      Father Perefixe said tartly, "And I've voted Democratic ever since I came from Canada and got naturalized, but this time I'm going to vote Republican. What about you fellows?"

      Rotenstern was silent. He did not like Windrip's reference to Jews. The ones he knew best—no, they were Americans! Lincoln was his tribal god too, he vowed.

      "Me? I'll vote for Walt Trowbridge, of course," growled Buck.

      "So will I," said Doremus. "No! I won't either! Trowbridge won't have a chance. I think I'll indulge in the luxury of being independent, for once, and vote Prohibition or the Battle-Creek bran-and-spinach ticket, or anything that makes some sense!"

      It was after seven that morning when Doremus came home, and, remarkably enough, Shad Ledue, who was supposed to go to work at seven, was at work at seven. Normally he never left his bachelor shack in Lower Town till ten to eight, but this morning he was on the job, chopping kindling. (Oh yes, reflected Doremus—that probably explained it. Kindling-chopping, if practised early enough, would wake up everyone in the house.)

      Shad was tall and hulking; his shirt was sweat-stained; and as usual he needed a shave. Foolish growled at him. Doremus suspected that at some time he had been kicking Foolish.

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