Free It Can't Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis Page B

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 Doremuswearily 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 theadvantages 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 forgottenwas 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, Doremusliked 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’scave 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
cabinetin 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.
    “Sodoes 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 hedid
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