It Can't Happen Here (30 page)

All Corpo universities were to have the same curriculum, entirely
practical and modern, free of all snobbish tradition.

Entirely omitted were Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Biblical
study, archaeology, philology; all history before 1500—except for
one course which showed that, through the centuries, the key to
civilization
had been the defense of Anglo-Saxon purity against
barbarians. Philosophy and its history, psychology, economics,
anthropology were retained, but, to avoid the superstitious errors
in ordinary textbooks, they were to be conned only in new books
prepared by able young scholars under the direction of Dr.
Macgoblin.

Students were encouraged to read, speak, and try to write modern
languages, but
they were not to waste their time on the so-called
“literature”; reprints from recent newspapers were used instead of
antiquated fiction and sentimental poetry. As regards English,
some study of literature was permitted, to supply quotations for
political speeches, but the chief courses were in advertising,
party journalism, and business correspondence, and no authors
before 1800 might be mentioned,
except Shakespeare and Milton.

In the realm of so-called “pure science,” it was realized that only
too much and too confusing research had already been done, but no
pre-Corpo university had ever shown such a wealth of courses in
mining engineering, lakeshore-cottage architecture, modern
foremanship and production methods, exhibition gymnastics, the
higher accountancy, therapeutics of athlete’s
foot, canning and
fruit dehydration, kindergarten training, organization of chess,
checkers, and bridge tournaments, cultivation of will power, band
music for mass meetings, schnauzer-breeding, stainless-steel
formulæ, cement-road construction, and all other really useful
subjects for the formation of the new-world mind and character.
And no scholastic institution, even West Point, had ever so richly
recognized sport as not a subsidiary but a primary department of
scholarship. All the more familiar games were earnestly taught,
and to them were added the most absorbing speed contests in
infantry drill, aviation, bombing, and operation of tanks, armored
cars, and machine guns. All of these carried academic credits,
though students were urged not to elect sports for more than one
third
of their credits.

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.

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 nour 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 graft, 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 archæologist
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.