It Can't Happen Here (32 page)

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 Christi. 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! Not 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.’”

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!”

“I’ll get a shotgun and—” “Why, I’ll kill the dirty—” “Wait’ll I
get my hands on—” 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; and 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 aeroplane, and Mary of her still,
dark hatred that was heavier to carry than many chests.

Julian and Lorinda were there to help them; Julian off in corners
with Sissy.

With Lorinda, Doremus had but one free moment … in the old-fashioned guest-bathroom.

“Linda. Oh, Lord!”

“We’ll come through! In Canada you’ll have time to catch your
breath. Join Trowbridge!”

“Yes, but to leave you—I’d hoped somehow, by some miracle, you and
I could have maybe a month together, say in Monterey or Venice or
the Yellowstone. I hate it when life doesn’t seem to stick
together and get somewhere and have some plan and meaning.”

“It’s had meaning! No dictator
can completely smother us now!
Come!”

“Good-bye, my Linda!”

Not even now did he alarm her by confessing that he planned to come
back, into danger.

Embracing beside an aged tin-lined bathtub with woodwork painted a
dreary brown, in a room which smelled slightly of gas from an old
hot-water heater—embracing in sunset-colored mist upon a mountain
top.

Darkness, edged wind, wickedly deliberate
snow, and in it Buck
Titus boisterously cheerful in his veteran Nash, looking as farmer-like as he could, in sealskin cap with rubbed bare patches and an
atrocious dogskin overcoat. Doremus thought of him again as a
Captain Charles King cavalryman chasing the Sioux across blizzard-blinded prairies.

They packed alarmingly into the car; Mary beside Buck, the driver;
in the back, Doremus between
Emma and Sissy; on the floor, David
and Foolish and the toy aeroplane indistinguishably curled up
together beneath a robe. Trunk rack and front fenders were heaped
with tarpaulin-covered suitcases.

“Lord, I wish I were going!” moaned Julian. “Look! Sis! Grand
spy-story idea! But I mean seriously: Send souvenir postcards to
my granddad—views of churches and so on—just sign ‘em ‘Jane’—and
whatever you say about the church, I’ll know you really mean it
about you and—Oh, damn all mystery! I want
you
, Sissy!”

Mrs. Candy whisked a bundle in among the already intolerable mess
of baggage which promised to descend on Doremus’s knees and David’s
head, and she snapped, “Well, if you folks
must
go flyin’ around
the country—It’s a cocoanut layer cake.” Savagely: “Soon’s you
get around
the corner, throw the fool thing in the ditch if you
want to!” She fled sobbing into the kitchen, where Lorinda stood
in the lighted doorway, silent, her trembling hands out to them.