It Can't Happen Here Page 24
What really showed the difference from old-fogy inefficiency was that with the educational speed-up of the Corpo universities, any bright lad could graduate in two years.
* * *
As he read the prospectuses for these Olympian, these Ringling-Barnum and Bailey universities, Doremus remembered that Victor Loveland, who a year ago had taught Greek in a little college called Isaiah, was now grinding out reading and arithmetic in a Corpo labor camp in Maine. Oh well, Isaiah itself had been closed, and its former president, Dr. Owen J. Peaseley, District Director of Education, was to be right-hand man to Professor Almeric Trout when they founded the University of the Northeastern Province, which was to supplant Harvard, Radcliffe, Boston University, and Brown. He was already working on the university yell, and for that “project” had sent out letters to 167 of the more prominent poets in America, asking for suggestions.
21
IT WAS NOT ONLY the November sleet, setting up a forbidding curtain before the mountains, turning the roadways into slipperiness on which a car would swing around and crash into poles, that kept Doremus stubbornly at home that morning, sitting on his shoulder blades before the fireplace. It was the feeling that there was no point in going to the office; no chance even of a picturesque fight. But he was not contented before the fire. He could find no authentic news even in the papers from Boston or New York, in both of which the morning papers had been combined by the government into one sheet, rich in comic strips, in syndicated gossip from Hollywood, and, indeed, lacking only any news.
He cursed, threw down the New York Daily Corporate, and tried to read a new novel about a lady whose husband was indelicate in bed and who was too absorbed by the novels he wrote about lady novelists whose husbands were too absorbed by the novels they wrote about lady novelists to appreciate the fine sensibilities of lady novelists who wrote about gentleman novelists—— Anyway, he chucked the book after the newspaper. The lady’s woes didn’t seem very important now, in a burning world.
He could hear Emma in the kitchen discussing with Mrs. Candy the best way of making a chicken pie. They talked without relief; really, they were not so much talking as thinking aloud. Doremus admitted that the nice making of a chicken pie was a thing of consequence, but the blur of voices irritated him. Then Sissy slammed into the room, and Sissy should an hour ago have been at high school, where she was a senior—to graduate next year and possibly go to some new and horrible provincial university.
“What ho! What are you doing home? Why aren’t you in school?”
“Oh. That.“ She squatted on the padded fender seat, chin in hands, looking up at him, not seeing him. “I don’t know’s I’ll ever go there any more. You have to repeat a new oath every morning: ‘I pledge myself to serve the Corporate State, the Chief, all Commissioners, the Mystic Wheel, and the troops of the Republic in every thought and deed.’ Now I ask you! Is that tripe!”
“How you going to get into the university?”
“Huh! Smile at Prof Staubmeyer—if it doesn’t gag me!”
“Oh, well—— Well——” He could not think of anything meatier to say.
The doorbell, a shuffling in the hall as of snowy feet, and Julian Falck came sheepishly in.
Sissy snapped, “Well, I’ll be—— What are you doing home? Why aren’t you in Amherst?”
“Oh. That.“ He squatted beside her. He absently held her hand, and she did not seem to notice it, either. “Amherst’s got hers. Corpos closing it today. I got tipped off last Saturday and beat it. (They have a cute way of rounding up the students when they close a college and arresting a few of ‘em just to cheer up the profs.)” To Doremus: “Well, sir, I think you’ll have to find a place for me on the Informer, wiping presses. Could you?”
“Afraid not, boy. Give anything if I could. But I’m a prisoner there. God! Just having to say that makes me appreciate what a rotten position I have!”
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir. I understand, of course. Well, I don’t just know what I am going to do. Remember back in ‘33 and ‘34 and ‘35 how many good eggs there were—and some of them medics and law graduates and trained engineers and so on—that simply couldn’t get a job? Well, it’s worse now. I looked over Amherst, and had a try at Springfield, and I’ve been here in town two days—I’d hoped to have something before I saw you, Sis—why, I even asked Mrs. Pike if she didn’t need somebody to wash dishes at the Tavern, but so far there isn’t a thing. ‘Young gentleman, two years in college, ninety-nine-point-three pure and thorough knowledge Thirty-nine Articles, able drive car, teach tennis and contract, amiable disposition, desires position—digging ditches.’ ”
“You will get something! I’ll see you do, my poppet!” insisted Sissy. She was less modernistic and cold with Julian now than Doremus had thought her.
“Thanks, Sis, but honest to God—I hope I’m not whining, but looks like I’d either have to enlist in the lousy M.M.’s, or go to a labor camp. I can’t stay home and sponge on Granddad. The poor old Reverend hasn’t got enough to keep a pussycat in face powder.”
“Lookit! Lookit!” Sissy clinched with Julian and bussed him, unabashed. “I’ve got an idea—a new stunt. You know, one of these ‘New Careers for Youth’ things. Listen! Last summer there was a friend of Lindy Pike’s staying with her and she was an interior decorator from Buffalo, and she said they have a hell of a——”
(“Siss-sy!”)
“—time getting real, genuine, old hand-hewn beams that everybody wants so much now in these phony-Old-English suburban living rooms. Well, look! Round here there’s ten million old barns with hand-adzed beams just falling down—farmers probably be glad to have you haul ‘em off. I kind of thought about it for myself—being an architect, you know—and John Pollikop said he’d sell me a swell, dirty-looking old five-ton truck for four hundred bucks—in pre-inflation real money, I mean—and on time. Let’s you and me try a load of assorted fancy beams.”
“Swell!” said Julian.
“Well——” said Doremus.
“Come on!” Sissy leaped up. “Let’s go ask Lindy what she thinks. She’s the only one in this family that’s got any business sense.”
“I don’t seem to hanker much after going out there in this weather—nasty roads,” Doremus puffed.
“Nonsense, Doremus! With Julian driving? He’s a poor speller and his back-hand is fierce, but as a driver, he’s better than I am! Why, it’s a pleasure to skid with him! Come on! Hey, Mother! We’ll be back in an hour or two.”
If Emma ever got beyond her distant, “Why, I thought you were in school, already,” none of the three musketeers heard it. They were bundling up and crawling out into the sleet.
* * *
Lorinda Pike was in the Tavern kitchen, in a calico print with rolled sleeves, dipping doughnuts into deep fat—a picture right out of the romantic days (which Buzz Windrip was trying to restore) when a female who had brought up eleven children and been midwife to dozens of cows was regarded as too fragile to vote. She was ruddy-faced from the stove, but she cocked a lively eye at them, and her greeting was “Have a doughnut? Good!” She led them from the kitchen with its attendant and eavesdropping horde of a Canuck kitchenmaid and two cats, and they sat in the beautiful butler’s-pantry, with its shelved rows of Italian majolica plates and cups and saucers—entirely unsuitable to Vermont, attesting a certain artiness in Lorinda, yet by their cleanness and order revealing her as a sound worker. Sissy sketched her plan—behind the statistics there was an agreeable picture of herself and Julian, gipsies in khaki, on the seat of a gipsy truck, peddling silvery old pine rafters.
“Nope. Not a chance,” said Lorinda regretfully. “The expensive suburban-villa business—oh, it isn’t gone: there’s a surprising number of middlemen and professional men who are doing quite well out of having their wealth taken away and distributed to the masses. But all the building is in the hands of contractors who are in politics—good old Windrip is so consistently American that he’s kept up all our traditional gra
ft, even if he has thrown out all our traditional independence. They wouldn’t leave you one cent profit.”
“She’s probably right,” said Doremus.
“Be the first time I ever was, then!” sniffed Lorinda. “Why, I was so simple that I thought women voters knew men too well to fall for noble words on the radio!”
* * *
They sat in the sedan, outside the Tavern; Julian and Sissy in front, Doremus in the back seat, dignified and miserable in mummy swathings.
“That’s that,” said Sissy. “Swell period for young dreamers the Dictator’s brought in. You can march to military bands—or you can sit home—or you can go to prison. Primavera di Bellezza!”
“Yes. . .. Well, I’ll find something to do. . .. Sissy, are you going to marry me—soon as I get a job?”
(It was incredible, thought Doremus, how these latter-day unsentimental sentimentalists could ignore him. . .. Like animals.)
“Before, if you want to. Though marriage seems to me absolute rot now, Julian. They can’t go and let us see that every doggone one of our old institutions is a rotten fake, the way Church and State and everything has laid down to the Corpos, and still expect us to think they’re so hot! But for unformed minds like your grandfather and Doremus, I suppose we’ll have to pretend to believe that the preachers who stand for Big Chief Windrip are still so sanctified that they can sell God’s license to love!”
(“Sis-sy!”)
“(Oh. I forgot you were there, Dad!) But anyway, we’re not going to have any kids. Oh, I like children! I’d like to have a dozen of the little devils around. But if people have gone so soft and turned the world over to stuffed shirts and dictators, they needn’t expect any decent woman to bring children into such an insane asylum! Why, the more you really do love children, the more you’ll want ‘em not to be born, now!”
Julian boasted, in a manner quite as lover-like and naïve as that of any suitor a hundred years ago, “Yes. But just the same, we’ll be having children.”
“Hell! I suppose so!” said the golden girl.
* * *
It was the unconsidered Doremus who found a job for Julian.
Old Dr. Marcus Olmsted was trying to steel himself to carry on the work of his sometime partner, Fowler Greenhill. He was not strong enough for much winter driving, and so hotly now did he hate the murderers of his friend that he would not take on any youngster who was in the M.M.’s or who had half acknowledged their authority by going to a labor camp. So Julian was chosen to drive him, night and day, and presently to help him by giving anesthetic, bandaging hurt legs; and the Julian who had within one week “decided that he wanted to be” an aviator, a music critic, an air-conditioning engineer, an arch½ologist excavating in Yucatan, was dead-set on medicine and replaced for Doremus his dead doctor son-in-law. And Doremus heard Julian and Sissy boasting and squabbling and squeaking in the half-lighted parlor and from them—from them and from David and Lorinda and Buck Titus—got resolution enough to go on in the Informer office without choking Staubmeyer to death.
22
DECEMBER TENTH was the birthday of Berzelius Windrip, though in his earlier days as a politician, before he fruitfully realized that lies sometimes get printed and unjustly remembered against you, he had been wont to tell the world that his birthday was on December twenty-fifth, like one whom he admitted to be an even greater leader, and to shout, with real tears in his eyes, that his complete name was Berzelius Noel Weinacht Windrip.
His birthday in 1937 he commemorated by the historical “Order of Regulation,” which stated that though the Corporate government had proved both its stability and its good-will, there were still certain stupid or vicious “elements” who, in their foul envy of Corpo success, wanted to destroy everything that was good. The kind-hearted government was fed-up, and the country was informed that, from this day on, any person who by word or act sought to harm or discredit the State, would be executed or interned. Inasmuch as the prisons were already too full, both for these slanderous criminals and for the persons whom the kind-hearted State had to guard by “protective arrest,” there were immediately to be opened, all over the country, concentration camps.
Doremus guessed that the reason for the concentration camps was not only the provision of extra room for victims but, even more, the provision of places where the livelier young M.M.’s could amuse themselves without interference from old-time professional policemen and prison-keepers, most of whom regarded their charges not as enemies, to be tortured, but just as cattle, to be kept safely.
On the eleventh, a concentration camp was enthusiastically opened, with band music, paper flowers, and speeches by District Commissioner Reek and Shad Ledue, at Trianon, nine miles north of Fort Beulah, in what had been a modern experimental school for girls. (The girls and their teachers, no sound material for Corpoism anyway, were simply sent about their business.)
And on that day and every day afterward, Doremus got from journalist friends all over the country secret news of Corpo terrorism and of the first bloody rebellions against the Corpos.
In Arkansas, a group of ninety-six former sharecroppers, who had always bellyached about their misfortunes yet seemed not a bit happier in well-run, hygienic labor camps with free weekly band concerts, attacked the superintendent’s office at one camp and killed the superintendent and five assistants. They were rounded up by an M.M. regiment from Little Rock, stood up in a winter-ragged cornfield, told to run, and shot in the back with machine guns as they comically staggered away.
In San Francisco, dock-workers tried to start an absolutely illegal strike, and their leaders, known to be Communists, were so treasonable in their speeches against the government that an M.M. commander had three of them tied up to a bale of rattan, which was soaked with oil and set afire. The Commander gave warning to all such malcontents by shooting off the criminals’ fingers and ears while they were burning, and so skilled a marksman was he, so much credit to the efficient M.M. training, that he did not kill one single man while thus trimming them up. He afterward went in search of Tom Mooney (released by the Supreme Court of the United States, early in 1936), but that notorious anti-Corpo agitator had had the fear of God put into him properly, and had escaped on a schooner for Tahiti.
In Pawtucket, a man who ought to have been free from the rotten seditious notions of such so-called labor-leaders, in fact a man who was a fashionable dentist and director in a bank, absurdly, resented the attentions which half-a-dozen uniformed M.M.’s—they were all on leave, and merely full of youthful spirits, anyway—bestowed upon his wife at a café and, in the confusion, shot and killed three of them. Ordinarily, since it was none of the public’s business anyway, the M.M.’s did not give out details of their disciplining of rebels, but in this case, where the fool of a dentist had shown himself to be a homicidal maniac, the local M.M. commander permitted the papers to print the fact that the dentist had been given sixty-nine lashes with a flexible steel rod, then, when he came to, left to think over his murderous idiocy in a cell in which there was two feet of water in the bottom—but, rather ironically, none to drink. Unfortunately, the fellow died before having the opportunity to seek religious consolation.
In Scranton, the Catholic pastor of a working-class church was kidnaped and beaten.
In central Kansas, a man named George W. Smith pointlessly gathered a couple of hundred farmers armed with shotguns and sporting rifles and an absurdly few automatic pistols, and led them in burning an M.M. barracks. M.M. tanks were called out, and the hick would-be rebels were not, this time, used as warnings, but were overcome with mustard gas, then disposed of with hand grenades, which was an altogether intelligent move, since there was nothing of the scoundrels left for sentimental relatives to bury and make propaganda over.
But in New York City the case was the opposite—instead of being thus surprised, the M.M.’s rounded up all suspected Communists in the former boroughs of Manhattan and the Bronx, and all persons who were reported to have been seen c
onsorting with such Communists, and interned the lot of them in the nineteen concentration camps on Long Island. . .. Most of them wailed that they were not Communists at all.
* * *
For the first time in America, except during the Civil War and the World War, people were afraid to say whatever came to their tongues. On the streets, on trains, at theaters, men looked about to see who might be listening before they dared so much as say there was a drought in the West, for someone might suppose they were blaming the drought on the Chief! They were particularly skittish about waiters, who were supposed to listen from the ambush which every waiter carries about with him anyway, and to report to the M.M.’s. People who could not resist talking politics spoke of Windrip as “Colonel Robinson” or “Dr. Brown” and of Sarason as “Judge Jones” or “my cousin Kaspar,” and you would hear gossips hissing “Shhh!” at the seemingly innocent statement, “My cousin doesn’t seem to be as keen on playing bridge with the Doctor as he used to—I’ll bet sometime they’ll quit playing.”
Every moment everyone felt fear, nameless and omnipresent. They were as jumpy as men in a plague district. Any sudden sound, any unexplained footstep, any unfamiliar script on an envelope, made them startle; and for months they never felt secure enough to let themselves go, in complete sleep. And with the coming of fear went out their pride.
Daily—common now as weather reports—were the rumors of people who had suddenly been carried off “under protective arrest,” and daily more of them were celebrities. At first the M.M.’s had, outside of the one stroke against Congress, dared to arrest only the unknown and defenseless. Now, incredulously—for these leaders had seemed invulnerable, above the ordinary law—you heard of judges, army officers, ex-state governors, bankers who had not played in with the Corpos, Jewish lawyers who had been ambassadors, being carted off to the common stink and mud of the cells.