It Can't Happen Here Page 25
To the journalist Doremus and his family it was not least interesting that among these imprisoned celebrities were so many journalists: Raymond Moley, Frank Simonds, Frank Kent, Heywood Broun, Mark Sullivan, Earl Browder, Franklin P. Adams, George Seldes, Frazier Hunt, Garet Garrett, Granville Hicks, Edwin James, Robert Morss Lovett—men who differed grotesquely except in their common dislike of being little disciples of Sarason and Macgoblin.
Few writers for Hearst were arrested, however.
The plague came nearer to Doremus when unrenowned editors in Lowell and Providence and Albany, who had done nothing more than fail to be enthusiastic about the Corpos, were taken away for “questioning,” and not released for weeks—months.
It came much nearer at the time of the book-burning.
* * *
All over the country, books that might threaten the Pax Romana of the Corporate State were gleefully being burned by the more scholarly Minute Men. This form of safeguarding the State—so modern that it had scarce been known prior to A.D. 1300—was instituted by Secretary of Culture Macgoblin, but in each province the crusaders were allowed to have the fun of picking out their own paper-and-ink traitors. In the Northeastern Province, Judge Effingham Swan and Dr. Owen J. Peaseley were appointed censors by Commissioner Dewey Haik, and their index was lyrically praised all through the country.
For Swan saw that it was not such obvious anarchists and soreheads as Darrow, Steffens, Norman Thomas, who were the real danger; like rattlesnakes, their noisiness betrayed their venom. The real enemies were men whose sanctification by death had appallingly permitted them to sneak even into respectable school libraries—men so perverse that they had been traitors to the Corpo State years and years before there had been any Corpo State; and Swan (with Peaseley chirping agreement) barred from all sale or possession the books of Thoreau, Emerson, Whittier, Whitman, Mark Twain, Howells, and The New Freedom, by Woodrow Wilson, for though in later life Wilson became a sound manipulative politician, he had earlier been troubled with itching ideals.
It goes without saying that Swan denounced all such atheistic foreigners, dead or alive, as Wells, Marx, Shaw, the Mann brothers, Tolstoy, and P. G. Wodehouse with his unscrupulous propaganda against the aristocratic tradition. (Who could tell? Perhaps, some day, in a corporate empire, he might be Sir Effingham Swan, Bart.)
And in one item Swan showed blinding genius—he had the foresight to see the peril of that cynical volume, The Collected Sayings of Will Rogers.
* * *
Of the book-burnings in Syracuse and Schenectady and Hartford, Doremus had heard, but they seemed improbable as ghost stories.
The Jessup family were at dinner, just after seven, when on the porch they heard the tramping they had half expected, altogether dreaded. Mrs. Candy—even the icicle, Mrs. Candy, held her breast in agitation before she stalked out to open the door. Even David sat at table, spoon suspended in air.
Shad’s voice, “In the name of the Chief!” Harsh feet in the hall, and Shad waddling into the dining room, cap on, hand on pistol, but grinning, and with leering geniality bawling, “H’ are yuh, folks! Search for bad books. Orders of the District Commissioner. Come on, Jessup!” He looked at the fireplace to which he had once brought so many armfuls of wood, and snickered.
“If you’ll just sit down in the other room—”
“I will like hell ‘just sit down in the other room’! We’re burning the books tonight! Snap to it, Jessup!” Shad looked at the exasperated Emma; he looked at Sissy; he winked with heavy deliberation and chuckled, “H’ are you, Mis’ Jessup. Hello, Sis. How’s the kid?”
But at Mary Greenhill he did not look, nor she at him.
In the hall, Doremus found Shad’s entourage, four sheepish M.M.’s and a more sheepish Emil Staubmeyer, who whimpered, “Just orders—you know—just orders.”
Doremus safely said nothing; led them up to his study.
Now a week before he had removed every publication that any sane Corpo could consider radical: his Das Kapital and Veblen and all the Russian novels and even Sumner’s Folkways and Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents; Thoreau and the other hoary scoundrels banned by Swan; old files of the Nation and New Republic and such copies as he had been able to get of Walt Trowbridge’s Lance for Democracy; had removed them and hidden them inside an old horsehair sofa in the upper hall.
“I told you there was nothing,” said Staubmeyer, after the search. “Let’s go.”
Said Shad, “Huh! I know this house, Ensign. I used to work here—had the privilege of putting up those storm windows you can see there, and of getting bawled out right here in this room. You won’t remember those times, Doc—when I used to mow your lawn, too, and you used to be so snotty!” Staubmeyer blushed. “You bet. I know my way around, and there’s a lot of fool books downstairs in the sittin’ room.”
Indeed in that apartment variously called the drawing room, the living room, the sittin’ room, the Parlor and once, even, by a spinster who thought editors were romantic, the studio, there were two or three hundred volumes, mostly in “standard sets.” Shad glumly stared at them, the while he rubbed the faded Brussels carpet with his spurs. He was worried. He had to find something seditious!
He pointed at Doremus’s dearest treasure, the thirty-four-volume extra-illustrated edition of Dickens which had been his father’s, and his father’s only insane extravagance. Shad demanded of Staubmeyer, “That guy Dickens—didn’t he do a lot of complaining about conditions—about schools and the police and everything?”
Staubmeyer protested, “Yes, but Shad—but, Captain Ledue, that was a hundred years ago——”
“Makes no difference. Dead skunk stinks worse’n a live one.”
Doremus cried, “Yes, but not for a hundred years! Besides——”
The M.M.’s, obeying Shad’s gesture, were already yanking the volumes of Dickens from the shelves, dropping them on the floor, covers cracking. Doremus seized an M.M.’s arm; from the door Sissy shrieked. Shad lumbered up to him, enormous red fist at Doremus’s nose, growling, “Want to get the daylights beaten out of you now. . .instead of later?”
Doremus and Sissy, side by side on a couch, watched the books thrown in a heap. He grasped her hand, muttering to her, “Hush—hush!” Oh, Sissy was a pretty girl, and young, but a pretty girl schoolteacher had been attacked, her clothes stripped off, and been left in the snow just south of town, two nights ago.
* * *
Doremus could not have stayed away from the book-burning. It was like seeing for the last time the face of a dead friend.
Kindling, excelsior, and spruce logs had been heaped on the thin snow on the Green. (Tomorrow there would be a fine patch burned in the hundred-year-old sward.) Round the pyre danced M.M.’s, schoolboys, students from the rather ratty business college on Elm Street, and unknown farm lads, seizing books from the pile guarded by the broadly cheerful Shad and skimming them into the flames. Doremus saw his Martin Chuzzlewit fly into air and land on the burning lid of an ancient commode. It lay there open to a Phiz drawing of Sairey Gamp, which withered instantly. As a small boy he had always laughed over that drawing.
He saw the old rector, Mr. Falck, squeezing his hands together. When Doremus touched his shoulder, Mr. Falck mourned, “They took away my Urn Burial, my Imitatio Christ. I don’t know why, I don’t know why! And they’re burning them there!”
Who owned them, Doremus did not know, nor why they had been seized, but he saw Alice in Wonderland and Omar Khayyám and Shelley and The Man Who Was Thursday and A Farewell to Arms all burning together, to the greater glory of the Dictator and the greater enlightenment of his people.
The fire was almost over when Karl Pascal pushed up to Shad Ledue and shouted, “I hear you stinkers—I’ve been out driving a guy, and I hear you raided my room and took off my books while I was away!”
“You bet we did, Comrade!”
“And you’re burning them—burning my——”
“Oh no, Comrade! N
ot burning ‘em. Worth too blame much, Comrade.” Shad laughed very much. “They’re at the police station. We’ve just been waiting for you. It was awful nice to find all your little Communist books. Here! Take him along!”
So Karl Pascal was the first prisoner to go from Fort Beulah to the Trianon Concentration Camp—no; that’s wrong; the second. The first, so inconspicuous that one almost forgets him, was an ordinary fellow, an electrician who had never so much as spoken of politics. Brayden, his name was. A Minute Man who stood well with Shad and Staubmeyer wanted Brayden’s job. Brayden went to concentration camp. Brayden was flogged when he declared, under Shad’s questioning, that he knew nothing about any plots against the Chief. Brayden died, alone in a dark cell, before January.
* * *
An English globe-trotter who gave up two weeks of December to a thorough study of “conditions” in America, wrote to his London paper, and later said on the wireless for the B.B.C.: “After a thorough glance at America I find that, far from there being any discontent with the Corpo administration among the people, they have never been so happy and so resolutely set on making a Brave New World. I asked a very prominent Hebrew banker about the assertions that his people were being oppressed, and he assured me, ‘When we hear about such silly rumors, we are highly amused.’ ”
23
DOREMUS WAS NERVOUS. The Minute Men had come, not with Shad but with Emil and a strange battalion-leader from Hanover, to examine the private letters in his study. They were polite enough, but alarmingly thorough. Then he knew, from the disorder in his desk at the Informer, that someone had gone over his papers there. Emil avoided him at the office. Doremus was called to Shad’s office and gruffly questioned about correspondence which some denouncer had reported his having with the agents of Walt Trowbridge.
So Doremus was nervous. So Doremus was certain that his time for going to concentration camp was coming. He glanced back at every stranger who seemed to be following him on the street. The fruitman, Tony Mogliani, flowery advocate of Windrip, of Mussolini, and of tobacco quid as a cure for cuts and burns, asked him too many questions about his plans for the time when he should “get through on the paper”; and once a tramp tried to quiz Mrs. Candy, meantime peering at the pantry shelves, perhaps to see if there was any sign of their being understocked, as if for closing the house and fleeing. . .. But perhaps the tramp really was a tramp.
In the office, in mid-afternoon, Doremus had a telephone call from that scholar-farmer, Buck Titus:
“Going to be home this evening, about nine? Good! Got to see you. Important! Say, see if you can have all your family and Linda Pike and young Falck there, too, will you? Got an idea. Important!”
As important ideas, just now, usually concerned being imprisoned, Doremus and his women waited jumpily. Lorinda came in twittering, for the sight of Emma always did make her twitter a little, and in Lorinda there was no relief. Julian came in shyly, and there was no relief in Julian. Mrs. Candy brought in unsolicited tea with a dash of rum, and in her was some relief, but it was all a dullness of fidgety waiting till Buck slammed in, ten minutes late and very snowy.
“Sorkeepwaiting but I’ve been telephoning. Here’s some news you won’t have even in the office yet, Dormouse. The forest fire’s getting nearer. This afternoon they arrested the editor of the Rutland Herald—no charge laid against him yet—no publicity—I got it from a commission merchant I deal with in Rutland. You’re next, Doremus. I reckon they’ve just been laying off you till Staubmeyer picked your brains. Or maybe Ledue has some nice idea about torturing you by keeping you waiting. Anyway, you’ve got to get out. And tomorrow! To Canada! To stay! By automobile. No can do by plane any more—Canadian government’s stopped that. You and Emma and Mary and Dave and Sis and the whole damn shooting-match—and maybe Foolish and Mrs. Candy and the canary!”
“Couldn’t possibly! Take me weeks to realize on what investments I’ve got. Guess I could raise twenty thousand, but it’d take weeks.”
“Sign ‘em over to me, if you trust me—and you better! I can cash in everything better than you can—stand in with the Corpos better—been selling ‘em horses and they think I’m the kind of loud-mouthed walking gent that will join ‘em! I’ve got fifteen hundred Canadian dollars for you right here in my pocket, for a starter.”
“We’d never get across the border. The M.M.’s are watching every inch, just looking for suspects like me.”
“I’ve got a Canadian driver’s license, and Canadian registration plates ready to put on my car—we’ll take mine—less suspicious. I can look like a real farmer—that’s because I am one, I guess—I’m going to drive you all, by the way. I got the plates smuggled in underneath the bottles in a case of ale! So we’re all set, and we’ll start tomorrow night, if the weather isn’t too clear—hope there’ll be snow.”
“But Buck! Good Lord! I’m not going to flee. I’m not guilty of anything. I haven’t anything to flee for!”
“Just your life, my boy, just your life!”
“I’m not afraid of ‘em.”
“Oh yes you are!”
“Oh—well—if you look at it that way, probably I am! But I’m not going to let a bunch of lunatics and gunmen drive me out of the country that I and my ancestors made!”
Emma choked with the effort to think of something convincing; Mary seemed without tears to be weeping; Sissy squeaked; Julian and Lorinda started to speak and interrupted each other; and it was the uninvited Mrs. Candy who, from the doorway, led off: “Now isn’t that like a man! Stubborn as mules. All of ‘em. Every one. And show-offs, the whole lot of ‘em. Course you just wouldn’t stop and think how your womenfolks will feel if you get took off and shot! You just stand in front of the locomotive and claim that because you were on the section gang that built the track, you got more right there than the engine has, and then when it’s gone over you and gone away, you expect us all to think what a hero you were! Well, maybe some call it being a hero but——”
“Well, confound it all all of you picking on me and trying to get me all mixed up and not carry out my duty to the State as I see it——”
“You’re over sixty, Doremus. Maybe a lot of us can do our duty better now from Canada than we can here—like Walt Trowbridge,” besought Lorinda. Emma looked at her friend Lorinda with no particular affection.
“But to let the Corpos steal the country and nobody protest! No!”
“That’s the kind of argument that sent a few million out to die, to make the world safe for democracy and a cinch for Fascism!” scoffed Buck.
“Dad! Come with us. Because we can’t go without you. And I’m getting scared here.” Sissy sounded scared, too; Sissy the unconquerable. “This afternoon Shad stopped me on the street and wanted me to go out with him. He tickled my chin, the little darling! But honestly, the way he smirked, as if he was so sure of me—I got scared!”
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“I’ll get a shotgun andÜlh.5,2p2Ý”
“Why, I’ll kill the dirtyÜlh.5,2p2Ý”
“Wait’ll I get my hands onÜlh.5,2p2Ý”
cried Doremus,
Julian, and Buck,
{all together, and
glared at one another, then looked sheepish as Foolish barked at the racket, and Mrs. Candy, leaning like a frozen codfish against the door jamb, snorted, “Some more locomotive-batters!”
Doremus laughed. For one only time in his life he showed genius, for he consented: “All right. We’ll go. But just imagine that I’m a man of strong will power and I’m taking all night to be convinced. We’ll start tomorrow night.”
What he did not say was that he planned, the moment he had his family safe in Canada, with money in the bank and perhaps a job to amuse Sissy, to run away from them and come back to his proper fight. He would at least kill Shad before he got killed himself.
* * *
It was only a week before Christmas, a holiday always greeted with good cheer and quantities of colored ribbons in the Jessup household; a
nd that wild day of preparing for flight had a queer Christmas joyfulness. To dodge suspicion, Doremus spent most of the time at the office, and a hundred times it seemed that Staubmeyer was glancing at him with just the ruler—threatening hidden ire he had used on whisperers and like young criminals in school. But he took off two hours at lunch time, and he went home early in the afternoon, and his long depression was gone in the prospect of Canada and freedom, in an excited inspection of clothes that was like preparation for a fishing trip. They worked upstairs, behind drawn blinds, feeling like spies in an E. Phillips Oppenheim story, beleagured in the dark and stone-floored ducal bedroom of an ancient inn just beyond Grasse. Downstairs, Mrs. Candy was pretentiously busy looking normal—after their flight, she and the canary were to remain and she was to be surprised when the M.M.’s reported that the Jessups seemed to have escaped.
Doremus had drawn five hundred from each of the local banks, late that afternoon, telling them that he was thinking of taking an option on an apple orchard. He was too well-trained a domestic animal to be raucously amused, but he could not help observing that while he himself was taking on the flight to Egypt only all the money he could get hold of, plus cigarettes, six handkerchiefs, two extra pairs of socks, a comb, a toothbrush, and the first volume of Spengler’s Decline of the West—decidedly it was not his favorite book, but one he had been trying to make himself read for years, on train journeys—while, in fact, he took nothing that he could not stuff into his overcoat pockets, Sissy apparently had need of all her newest lingerie and of a large framed picture of Julian, Emma of a Kodak album showing the three children from the ages of one to twenty, David of his new model aëroplane, and Mary of her still, dark hatred that was heavier to carry than many chests.