The Reign of Brainwash: Dystopia Box Set. Эдгар Аллан По

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СКАЧАТЬ have room for a thermos. Hot coffee, Dormouse?"

      To Doremus she sounded, just now, not at all like a wife, but as sensible as Mrs. Candy.

      When the car did kick its way up on the pathway of twigs and stand panting safely beyond the drift, they had, in the sheltered shack, coffee with slabs of Mrs. Candy's voluptuous cocoanut cake. Doremus pondered, "This is a nice place. I like this place. It doesn't bounce or skid. I don't want to leave this place."

      He did. The secure immobility of the shack was behind them, dark miles behind, and they were again pitching and rolling and being sick and inescapably chilly. David was alternately crying and going back to sleep. Foolish woke up to cough inquiringly and returned to his dream of rabbiting. And Doremus was sleeping, his head swaying like a masthead in long rollers, his shoulder against Emma's, his hand warm about Sissy's, and his soul in nameless bliss.

      He roused to a half-dawn filmy with snow. The car was standing in what seemed to be a crossroads hamlet, and Buck was examining a map by the light of the electric torch.

      "Got anywhere yet?" Doremus whispered.

      "Just a few miles to the border."

      "Anybody stopped us?"

      "Nope. Oh, we'll make it, all right, o' man."

      Out of East Berkshire, Buck took not the main road to the border but an old wood lane so little used that the ruts were twin snakes. Though Doremus said nothing, the others felt his intensity, his anxiety that was like listening for an enemy in the dark. David sat up, the blue motor robe about him. Foolish started, snorted, looked offended but, catching the spirit of the moment, comfortingly laid a paw on Doremus's knee and insisted on shaking hands, over and over, as gravely as a Venetian senator or an undertaker.

      They dropped into the dimness of a tree-walled hollow. A searchlight darted, and rested hotly on them, so dazzling them that Buck almost ran off the road.

      "Confound it," he said gently. No one else said anything.

      He crawled up to the light, which was mounted on a platform in front of a small shelter hut. Two Minute Men stood out in the road, dripping with radiance from the car. They were young and rural, but they had efficient repeating rifles.

      "Where you headed for?" demanded the elder, good-naturedly enough.

      "Montreal, where we live." Buck showed his Canadian license. . . . Gasoline motor and electric light, yet Doremus saw the frontier guard as a sentry in 1864, studying a pass by lantern light, beside a farm wagon in which hid General Joe Johnston's spies disguised as plantation hands.

      "I guess it's all right. Seems in order. But we've had some trouble with refugees. You'll have to wait till the Battalion-Leader comes—maybe 'long about noon."

      "But good Lord, Inspector, we can't do that! My mother's awful sick, in Montreal."

      "Yuh, I've heard that one before! And maybe it's true, this time. But afraid you'll have to wait for the Bat. You folks can come in and set by the fire, if you want to."

      "But we've got to—"

      "You heard what I said!" The M.M.'s were fingering their rifles.

      "All right. But tell you what we'll do. We'll go back to East Berkshire and get some breakfast and a wash and come back here. Noon, you said?"

      "Okay! And say, Brother, it does seem kind of funny, your taking this back road, when there's a first-rate highway. S' long. Be good. . . . Just don't try it again! The Bat might be here next time—and he ain't a farmer like you or me!"

      The refugees, as they drove away, had an uncomfortable feeling that the guards were laughing at them.

      Three border posts they tried, and at three posts they were turned back.

      "Well?" said Buck.

      "Yes. I guess so. Back home. My turn to drive," said Doremus wearily.

      The humiliation of retreat was the worse in that none of the guards had troubled to do more than laugh at them. They were trapped too tightly for the trappers to worry. Doremus's only clear emotion as, tails between their legs, they back-tracked to Shad Ledue's sneer and to Mrs. Candy's "Well, I never!" was regret that he had not shot one guard, at least, and he raged:

      "Now I know why men like John Brown became crazy killers!"

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      He could not decide whether Emil Staubmeyer, and through him Shad Ledue, knew that he had tried to escape. Did Staubmeyer really look more knowing, or did he just imagine it? What the deuce had Emil meant when he said, "I hear the roads aren't so good up north—not so good!" Whether they knew or not, it was grinding that he should have to shiver lest an illiterate roustabout like Shad Ledue find out that he desired to go to Canada, while a ruler-slapper like Staubmeyer, a Squeers with certificates in "pedagogy," should now be able to cuff grown men instead of urchins and should be editor of the Informer! Doremus's Informer! Staubmeyer! That human blackboard!

      Daily Doremus found it more cramping, more instantly stirring to fury, to write anything mentioning Windrip. His private office—the cheerfully rattling linotype room—the shouting pressroom with its smell of ink that to him hitherto had been like the smell of grease paint to an actor—they were hateful now, and choking. Not even Lorinda's faith, not even Sissy's jibes and Buck's stories, could rouse him to hope.

      He rejoiced the more, therefore, when his son Philip telephoned him from Worcester: "Be home Sunday? Merilla's in New York, gadding, and I'm all alone here. Thought I'd just drive up for the day and see how things are in your neck of the woods."

      "Come on! Splendid! So long since we've seen you. I'll have your mother start a pot of beans right away!"

      Doremus was happy. Not for some time did his cursed two-way-mindedness come to weaken his joy, as he wondered whether it wasn't just a myth held over from boyhood that Philip really cared so much for Emma's beans and brown bread; and wondered just why it was that Up-to-Date Americans like Philip always used the long-distance telephone rather than undergo the dreadful toil of dictating a letter a day or two earlier. It didn't really seem so efficient, the old-fashioned village editor reflected, to spend seventy-five cents on a telephone call in order to save five cents' worth of time.

      "Oh hush! Anyway, I'll be delighted to see the boy! I'll bet there isn't a smarter young lawyer in Worcester. There's one member of the family that's a real success!"

      He was a little shocked when Philip came, like a one-man procession, into the living room, late on Saturday afternoon. He had been forgetting how bald this upstanding young advocate was growing even at thirty-four. And it seemed to him that Philip was a little heavy and senatorial in speech and a bit too cordial.

      "By Jove, Dad, you don't know how good it is to be back in the old digs. Mother and the girls upstairs? By Jove, sir, that was a horrible business, the killing of poor Fowler. Horrible! I was simply horrified. There must have been a mistake somewhere, because Judge Swan has a wonderful reputation for scrupulousness."

      "There was no mistake. Swan is a fiend. Literally!" Doremus sounded less paternal СКАЧАТЬ