It Can't Happen Here (26 page)

“No!
I won’t listen. We will fight, but how can we ever get so
involved—detached people like us—”

“You
are
going to publish that editorial tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“It’s not too late to kill it?”

He looked at the clock over her desk—so ludicrously like a grade-school clock that it ought to have been flanked with portraits of
George and Martha. “Well, yes, it is too late—almost eleven.
Couldn’t get to
the office till ‘way past.”

“You’re sure you won’t worry about it when you go to bed tonight?
Dear, I so don’t want you to worry! You’re sure you don’t want to
telephone and kill the editorial?”

“Sure. Absolute!”

“I’m glad! Me, I’d rather be shot than go sneaking around,
crippled with fear. Bless you!”

She kissed him and hurried off to another hour or two of work,
while he drove home,
whistling vaingloriously.

But he did not sleep well, in his big black-walnut bed. He
startled to the night noises of an old frame house—the easing
walls, the step of bodiless assassins creeping across the wooden
floors all night long.

An honest propagandist for any Cause, that is, one who honestly
studies and figures out the most effective way of putting over his
Message, will learn fairly early that it is not fair to ordinary
folks—it just confuses them—to try to make them swallow all the
true facts that would be suitable to a higher class of people. And
one seemingly small but almighty important point he learns, if he
does much speechifying, is that you can win over folks to your
point of view much better in the evening, when they are tired out
from work and not so likely to resist you, than at any other time
of day.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

The
Fort Beulah Informer
had its own three-story-and basement
building, on President Street between Elm and Maple, opposite the
side entrance of the Hotel Wessex.
On the top story was the
composing room; on the second, the editorial and photographic
departments and the bookkeeper; in the basement, the presses; and
on the first or street floor, the circulation and advertising
departments, and the front office, open to the pavement, where the
public came to pay subscriptions and insert want-ads. The private
room of the editor, Doremus Jessup, looked out
on President Street
through one not too dirty window. It was larger but little more
showy than Lorinda Pike’s office at the Tavern, but on the wall it
did have historic treasures in the way of a water-stained
surveyor’s-map of Fort Beulah Township in 1891, a contemporary
oleograph portrait of President McKinley, complete with eagles,
flags, cannon, and the Ohio state flower, the scarlet carnation,
a
group photograph of the New England Editorial Association (in which
Doremus was the third blur in a derby hat in the fourth row), and
an entirely bogus copy of a newspaper announcing Lincoln’s death.
It was reasonably tidy—in the patent letter file, otherwise empty,
there were only 2 1/2 pairs of winter mittens, and an 18-gauge
shotgun shell.

Doremus was, by habit, extremely fond of his office.
It was the
only place aside from his study at home that was thoroughly his
own. He would have hated to leave it or to share it with anyone—possibly excepting Buck and Lorinda—and every morning he came to
it expectantly, from the ground floor, up the wide brown stairs,
through the good smell of printer’s ink.

He stood at the window of this room before eight, the morning when
his editorial appeared,
looking down at the people going to work in
shops and warehouses. A few of them were in Minute Men uniforms.
More and more even the part-time M.M.’s wore their uniforms when on
civilian duties. There was a bustle among them. He saw them
unfold copies of the
Informer
; he saw them look up, point up, at
his window. Heads close, they irritably discussed the front page
of the paper. R. C. Crowley
went by, early as ever on his way to
open the bank, and stopped to speak to a clerk from Ed Howland’s
grocery, both of them shaking their heads. Old Dr. Olmsted,
Fowler’s partner, and Louis Rotenstern halted on a corner. Doremus
knew they were both friends of his, but they were dubious, perhaps
frightened, as they looked at an
Informer
.

The passing of people became a gathering, the gathering
a crowd,
the crowd a mob, glaring up at his office, beginning to clamor.
There were dozens of people there unknown to him: respectable
farmers in town for shopping, unrespectables in town for a drink,
laborers from the nearest work camp, and all of them eddying around
M.M. uniforms. Probably many of them cared nothing about insults
to the Corpo state, but had only the unprejudiced, impersonal
pleasure in violence natural to most people.

Their mutter became louder, less human, more like the snap of
burning rafters. Their glances joined in one. He was, frankly,
scared.

He was half conscious of big Dan Wilgus, the head compositor,
beside him, hand on his shoulder, but saying nothing, and of Doc
Itchitt cackling, “My—my gracious—hope they don’t—God, I hope
they don’t come up here!”

The mob acted then, swift and together, on no more of an incitement
than an unknown M.M.’s shout: “Ought to burn the place, lynch the
whole bunch of traitors!” They were running across the street,
into the front office. He could hear a sound of smashing, and his
fright was gone in protective fury. He galloped down the wide
stairs, and from five steps above the front office looked on the
mob,
equipped with axes and brush hooks grabbed from in front of
Pridewell’s near-by hardware store, slashing at the counter facing
the front door, breaking the glass case of souvenir postcards and
stationery samples, and with obscene hands reaching across the
counter to rip the blouse of the girl clerk.

Doremus cried, “Get out of this, all you bums!”

They were coming toward him, claws hideously
opening and closing,
but he did not await that coming. He clumped down the stairs, step
by step, trembling not from fear but from insane anger. One large
burgher seized his arm, began to bend it. The pain was atrocious.
At that moment (Doremus almost smiled, so grotesquely was it like
the nick-of-time rescue by the landing party of Marines) into the
front office Commissioner Shad Ledue marched,
at the head of twenty
M.M.’s with unsheathed bayonets, and, lumpishly climbing up on the
shattered counter, bellowed:

“That’ll do from you guys! Lam out of this, the whole damn bunch
of you!”

Doremus’s assailant had dropped his arm. Was he actually, wondered
Doremus, to be warmly indebted to Commissioner Ledue, to Shad
Ledue? Such a powerful, dependable fellow—the dirty swine!

Shad roared
on: “We’re not going to bust up this place. Jessup
sure deserves lynching, but we got orders from Hanover—the Corpos
are going to take over this plant and use it. Beat it, you!”

A wild woman from the mountains—in another existence she had
knitted at the guillotine—had thrust through to the counter and
was howling up at Shad, “They’re traitors! Hang ‘em! We’ll hang
you
, if you stop us! I
want my five thousand dollars!”

Shad casually stooped down from the counter and slapped her.
Doremus felt his muscles tense with the effort to get at Shad, to
revenge the good lady who, after all, had as much right as Shad to
slaughter him, but he relaxed, impatiently gave up all desire for
mock heroism. The bayonets of the M.M.’s who were clearing out the
crowd were reality, not to be attacked
by hysteria.

Shad, from the counter, was blatting in a voice like a sawmill,
“Snap into it, Jessup! Take him along, men.”

And Doremus, with no volition whatever, was marching through
President Street, up Elm Street, and toward the courthouse and
county jail, surrounded by four armed Minute Men. The strangest
thing about it, he reflected was that a man could go off thus, on
an uncharted journey
which might take years, without fussing over
plans and tickets, without baggage, without even an extra clean
handkerchief, without letting Emma know where he was going, without
letting Lorinda—oh, Lorinda could take care of herself. But Emma
would worry.

He realized that the guard beside him, with the chevrons of a squad
leader, or corporal, was Aras Dilley, the slatternly farmer from up
on
Mount Terror whom he had often helped … or thought he had
helped.

“Ah, Aras!” said he.

“Huh!” said Aras.

“Come on! Shut up and keep moving!” said the M.M. behind Doremus,
and prodded him with the bayonet.

It did not, actually, hurt much, but Doremus spat with fury. So
long now he had unconsciously assumed that his dignity, his body,
were sacred. Ribald Death might touch him, but no more
vulgar
stranger.

Not till they had almost reached the courthouse could he realize
that people were looking at him—at Doremus Jessup!—as a prisoner
being taken to jail. He tried to be proud of being a political
prisoner. He couldn’t. Jail was jail.

The county lockup was at the back of the courthouse, now the center
of Ledue’s headquarters. Doremus had never been in that or any
other jail
except as a reporter, pityingly interviewing the
curious, inferior sort of people who did mysteriously get
themselves arrested.

To go into that shameful back door—he who had always stalked into
the front entrance of the courthouse, the editor, saluted by clerk
and sheriff and judge!

Shad was not in sight. Silently Doremus’s four guards conducted
him through a steel door, down a corridor, to
a small cell reeking
of chloride of lime and, still unspeaking, they left him there.
The cell had a cot with a damp straw mattress and damper straw
pillow, a stool, a wash basin with one tap for cold water, a pot,
two hooks for clothes, a small barred window, and nothing else
whatever except a jaunty sign ornamented with embossed forget-me-nots and a text from Deuteronomy, “He shall be free at home
one
year.”

“I hope so!” said Doremus, not very cordially.

It was before nine in the morning. He remained in that cell,
without speech, without food, with only tap water caught in his
doubled palm and with one cigarette an hour, until after midnight,
and in the unaccustomed stillness he saw how in prison men could
eventually go mad.

“Don’t whine, though. You here a few hours, and plenty of
poor
devils in solitary for years and years, put there by tyrants worse
than Windrip … yes, and sometimes put there by nice, good,
social-minded judges that I’ve played bridge with!”

But the reasonableness of the thought didn’t particularly cheer
him.

He could hear a distant babble from the bull pen, where the drunks
and vagrants, and the petty offenders among the M.M.’s, were
crowded in enviable
comradeship, but the sound was only a
background for the corroding stillness.

He sank into a twitching numbness. He felt that he was choking,
and gasped desperately. Only now and then did he think clearly—then only of the shame of imprisonment or, even more emphatically,
of how hard the wooden stool was on his ill-upholstered rump, and
how much pleasanter it was, even so, than the cot, whose
mattress
had the quality of crushed worms.

Once he felt that he saw the way clearly:

“The tyranny of this dictatorship isn’t primarily the fault of Big
Business, nor of the demagogues who do their dirty work. It’s the
fault of Doremus Jessup! Of all the conscientious, respectable,
lazy-minded Doremus Jessups who have let the demagogues wriggle in,
without fierce enough protest.

“A few months
ago I thought the slaughter of the Civil War, and the
agitation of the violent Abolitionists who helped bring it on, were
evil. But possibly they
had
to be violent, because easy-going
citizens like me couldn’t be stirred up otherwise. If our
grandfathers had had the alertness and courage to see the evils of
slavery and of a government conducted by gentlemen for gentlemen
only, there wouldn’t
have been any need of agitators and war and
blood.

“It’s my sort, the Responsible Citizens who’ve felt ourselves
superior because we’ve been well-to-do and what we thought was
‘educated,’ who brought on the Civil War, the French Revolution,
and now the Fascist Dictatorship. It’s I who murdered Rabbi de
Verez. It’s I who persecuted the Jews and the Negroes. I can
blame no Aras Dilley, no Shad
Ledue, no Buzz Windrip, but only my
own timid soul and drowsy mind. Forgive, O Lord!

“Is it too late?”

Once again, as darkness was coming into his cell like the
inescapable ooze of a flood, he thought furiously:

“And about Lorinda. Now that I’ve been kicked into reality—got to
be one thing or the other: Emma (who’s my bread) or Lorinda (my
wine) but I can’t have both.

“Oh, damn! What twaddle!
Why can’t a man have both bread and wine
and not prefer one before the other?

“Unless, maybe, we’re all coming into a day of battles when the
fighting will be too hot to let a man stop for anything save
bread … and maybe, even, too hot to let him stop for that!”

The waiting—the waiting in the smothering cell—the relentless
waiting while the filthy window glass turned from afternoon to a
bleak
darkness.

What was happening out there? What had happened to Emma, to
Lorinda, to the
Informer
office, to Dan Wilgus, to Buck and Sissy
and Mary and David?

Why, it was today that Lorinda was to answer the action against her
by Nipper! Today! (Surely all that must have been done with a
year ago!) What had happened? Had Military Judge Effingham Swan
treated her as she deserved?

But Doremus
slipped again from this living agitation into the
trance of waiting—waiting; and, catnapping on the hideously
uncomfortable little stool, he was dazed when at some unholily late
hour (it was just after midnight) he was aroused by the presence of
armed M.M.’s outside his barred cell door, and by the hill-billy
drawl of Squad Leader Aras Dilley: