It Can't Happen Here (35 page)

As to Loveland’s wife and babies, Lorinda took them in till she
could
pass the hat and collect enough to send them back to Mrs.
Loveland’s family on a rocky farm in Missouri. But then things
went better. Mrs. Loveland was favored by the Greek proprietor of
a lunch-room and got work washing dishes and otherwise pleasing the
proprietor, who brilliantined his mustache.

The county administration, in a proclamation signed by Emil
Staubmeyer, announced that they were
going to regulate the
agriculture on the submarginal land high up on Mount Terror. As a
starter, half-a-dozen of the poorer families were moved into the
large, square, quiet, old house of that large, square, quiet, old
farmer, Henry Veeder, cousin of Doremus Jessup. These poorer
families had many children, a great many, so that there were four
or five persons bedded on the floor in every room
of the home where
Henry and his wife had placidly lived alone since their own
children had grown. Henry did not like it, and said so, not very
tactfully, to the M.M.’s herding the refugees. What was worse, the
dispossessed did not like it any better. “‘Tain’t much, but we got
a house of our own. Dunno why we should git shoved in on Henry,”
said one. “Don’t expect other folks to bother me, and
don’t expect
to bother other folks. Never did like that fool kind of yellow
color Henry painted his barn, but guess that’s his business.”

So Henry and two of the regulated agriculturists were taken to the
Trianon concentration camp, and the rest remained in Henry’s house,
doing nothing but finish up Henry’s large larder and wait for
orders.

“And before I’m sent to join Henry and Karl and Loveland,
I’m going
to clear my skirts,” Doremus vowed, along in late January.

He marched in to see County Commissioner Ledue.

“I want to quit the
Informer
. Staubmeyer has learned all I can
teach him.”

“Staubmeyer? Oh! You mean Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer!”

“Chuck it, will you? We’re not on parade, and we’re not playing
soldiers. Mind if I sit down?”

“Don’t look like you cared a hell of
a lot whether I mind or not!
But I can tell you, right here and now, Jessup, without any monkey
business about it, you’re not going to leave your job. I guess I
could find enough grounds for sending you to Trianon for about a
million years, with ninety lashes, but—you’ve always been so stuck
on yourself as such an all-fired honest editor, it kind of tickles
me to watch you kissing the Chief’s foot—and
mine!”

“I’ll do no more of it! That’s certain! And I admit that I
deserve your scorn for ever having done it!”

“Well, isn’t that elegant! But you’ll do just what I tell you to,
and like it! Jessup, I suppose you think I had a swell time when I
was your hired man! Watching you and your old woman and the girls
go off on a picnic while I—oh, I was just your hired man, with
dirt in my ears,
your dirt! I could stay home and clean up the
basement!”

“Maybe we didn’t want you along, Shad! Good-morning!”

Shad laughed. There was a sound of the gates of Trianon
concentration camp in that laughter.

It was really Sissy who gave Doremus his lead.

He drove to Hanover to see Shad’s superior, District Commissioner
John Sullivan Reek, that erstwhile jovial and red-faced politician.
He
was admitted after only half an hour’s waiting. He was shocked
to see how pale and hesitant and frightened Reek had become. But
the Commissioner tried to be authoritative.

“Well, Jessup, what can I do for you?”

“May I be frank?”

“What? What? Why, certainly! Frankness has always been my middle
name!”

“I hope so. Governor, I find I’m of no use on the
Informer
, at
Fort Beulah. As you probably
know, I’ve been breaking in Emil
Staubmeyer as my successor. Well, he’s quite competent to take
hold now, and I want to quit. I’m really just in his way.”

“Why don’t you stick around and see what you can still do to help
him? There’ll be little jobs cropping up from time to time.”

“Because it’s got on my nerves to take orders where I used to give
‘em for so many years. You can appreciate
that, can’t you?”

“My God, can I appreciate it? And how! Well, I’ll think it over.
You wouldn’t mind writing little pieces for my own little sheet, at
home? I own part of a paper there.”

“No! Sure! Delighted!”

(“Does this mean that Reek believes the Corpo tyranny is going to
blow up, in a revolution, so that he’s beginning to trim? Or just
that he’s fighting to keep from being thrown
out?”)

“Yes, I can see how you might feel, Brother Jessup.”

“Thanks! Would you mind giving me a note to County Commissioner
Ledue, telling him to let me out, without prejudice?—making it
pretty strong?”

“No. Not a bit. Just wait a minute, ole fellow; I’ll write it
right now.”

Doremus made as little ceremony as possible of leaving the
Informer
, which had been his throne for thirty-seven
years.
Staubmeyer was patronizing, Doc Itchitt looked quizzical, but the
chapel, headed by Dan Wilgus, shook hands profusely. And so, at
sixty-two, stronger and more eager than he had been in all his
life, Doremus had nothing to do more important than eating
breakfast and telling his grandson stories about the elephant.

But that lasted less than a week. Avoiding suspicion from Emma and
Sissy
and even from Buck and Lorinda, he took Julian aside:

“Look here, boy. I think it’s time now for me to begin doing a
little high treason. (Heaven’s sake keep all of this under your
hat—don’t even tip off Sissy!) I guess you know, the Communists
are too theocratic for my tastes. But looks to me as though they
have more courage and devotion and smart strategy than anybody
since the Early Christian
Martyrs—whom they also resemble in
hairiness and a fondness for catacombs. I want to get in touch
with ‘em and see if there’s any dirty work at the crossroads I can
do for ‘em—say distributing a few Early Christian tracts by St.
Lenin. But of course, theoretically, the Communists have all been
imprisoned. Could you get to Karl Pascal, in Trianon, and find out
whom I could see?”

Said Julian,
“I think I could. Dr. Olmsted gets called in there
sometimes on cases—they hate him, because he hates them, but
still, their camp doctor is a drunken bum, and they have to have a
real doc in when one of their warders busts his wrist beating up
some prisoner. I’ll try, sir.”

Two days afterward Julian returned.

“My God, what a sewer that Trianon place is! I’d waited for
Olmsted before, in the
car, but I never had the nerve to butt
inside. The buildings—they were nice buildings, quite pretty,
when the girls’ school had them. Now the fittings are all torn
out, and they’ve put up wallboard partitions for cells, and the
whole place stinks of carbolic acid and excrement, and the air—there isn’t any—you feel as if you were nailed up in a box—I
don’t know how anybody lives in one of those
cells for an hour—and
yet there’s six men bunked in a cell twelve feet by ten, with a
ceiling only seven feet high, and no light except a twenty-five
watt, I guess it is, bulb in the ceiling—you couldn’t read by it.
But they get out for exercise two hours a day—walk around and
around the courtyard—they’re all so stooped, and they all look so
ashamed, as if they’d had the defiance just licked out
of ‘em—even
Karl a little, and you remember how proud and sort of sardonic he
was. Well, I got to see him, and he says to get in touch with this
man—here, I wrote it down—and for God’s sake, burn it up soon as
you’ve memorized it!”

“Was he—had they—?”

“Oh, yes, they’ve beaten him, all right. He wouldn’t talk about
it. But there was a scar right across his cheek, from his temple
right down
to his chin. And I had just a glimpse of Henry Veeder.
Remember how he looked—like an oak tree? Now he twitches all the
time, and jumps and gasps when he hears a sudden sound. He didn’t
know me. I don’t think he’d know anybody.”

Doremus announced to his family and told it loudly in Gath that he
was still looking for an option on an apple orchard to which they
might retire, and he journeyed
southward, with pajamas and a
toothbrush and the first volume of Spengler’s Decline of the West
in a briefcase.

The address given by Karl Pascal was that of a most gentlemanly
dealer in altar cloths and priestly robes, who had his shop and
office over a tea room in Hartford, Connecticut. He talked about
the cembalo and the spinetta di serenata and the music of
Palestrina for an hour before he
sent Doremus on to a busy engineer
constructing a dam in New Hampshire, who sent him to a tailor in a
side-street shop in Lynn, who at last sent him to northern
Connecticut and to the Eastern headquarters of what was left of the
Communists in America.

Still carrying his little briefcase he walked up a greasy hill,
impassable to any motorcar, and knocked at the faded green door of
a squat New
England farm cottage masked in wintry old lilac bushes
and spiræa shrubs. A stringy farm wife opened and looked hostile.

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Ailey, Mr. Bailey, or Mr. Cailey.”

“None of ‘em home. You’ll have to come again.”

“Then I’ll wait. What else should one do, these days?”

“All right. Cmin.”

“Thanks. Give them this letter.”

(The tailor had warned him, “It vill all sount very
foolish, the
passvorts und everyt’ing, but if any of the central committee gets
caught—” He made a squirting sound and drew his scissors across
his throat.)

Doremus sat now in a tiny hall off a flight of stairs steep as the
side of a roof; a hall with sprigged wall paper and Currier & Ives
prints, and black-painted wooden rocking chairs with calico
cushions. There was nothing to read but a
Methodist hymnal and a
desk dictionary. He knew the former by heart, and anyway, he
always loved reading dictionaries—often had one seduced him from
editorial-writing. Happily he sat conning:

Phenyl.
n., Chem.
The univalent radical C
₆
H
₅
, regarded as the
basis of numerous benzene derivatives; as, phenyl hydroxid C
₆
H
₅
OH.

Pherecratean.
n.
A choriambic trimeter catalectic, or catalectic
glyconic; composed of a spondee, a choriambus, and a catalectic
syllable.

“Well! I never knew any of
that
before! I wonder if I do now?”
thought Doremus contentedly, before he realized that glowering from
a very narrow doorway was a very broad man with wild gray hair and
a patch over one eye. Doremus recognized him from pictures. He
was Bill Atterbury, miner, longshoreman, veteran I.W.W.
leader, old
A. F. of L. strike-leader, five years in San Quentin and five
honored years in Moscow, and reputed now to be the secretary of the
illegal Communist Party.

“I’m Mr. Ailey. What can I do for you?” Bill demanded.

He led Doremus into a musty back room where, at a table which was
probably mahogany underneath the scars and the clots of dirt, sat a
squat man with kinky tow-colored hair
and with deep wrinkles in the
thick pale skin of his face, and a slender young elegant who
suggested Park Avenue.

“Howryuh?” said Mr. Bailey, in a Russian-Jewish accent. Of him
Doremus knew nothing save that he was not named Bailey.

“Morning,” snapped Mr. Cailey—whose name was Elphrey, if Doremus
guessed rightly, and who was the son of a millionaire private
banker, the brother of one explorer,
one bishop’s wife, and one
countess, and himself a former teacher of economics in the
University of California.

Doremus tried to explain himself to these hard-eyed, quick-glancing
plotters of ruin.

“Are you willing to become a Party member, in the extremely
improbable case that they accept you, and to take orders, any
orders, without question?” asked Elphrey, so suavely.

“Do you mean, Am I
willing to kill and steal?”

“You’ve been reading detective stories about the ‘Reds’! No. What
you’d have to do would be much more difficult than the amusement of
using a tommy-gun. Would you be willing to forget you ever were a
respectable newspaper editor, giving orders, and walk through the
snow, dressed like a bum, to distribute seditious pamphlets—even
if, personally, you should believe
the pamphlets were of no
slightest damn good to the Cause?”

“Why, I—I don’t know. Seems to me that as a newspaperman of quite
a little training—”

“Hell! Our only trouble is keeping
out
the ‘trained newspapermen’!
What we need is trained bill-posters that like the smell of flour
paste and hate sleeping. And—but you’re a little old for this—crazy fanatics that go out and start strikes, knowing
they’ll get
beaten up and thrown in the bull pen.”

“No, I guess I—Look here. I’m sure Walt Trowbridge will be
joining up with the Socialists and some of the left-wing radical
ex-Senators and the Farmer-Laborites and so on—”

Bill Atterbury guffawed. It was a tremendous, somehow terrifying
blast. “Yes, I’m sure they’ll join up—
all
the dirty, sneaking,
half-headed, reformist Social Fascists
like Trowbridge, that are
doing the work of the capitalists and working for war against
Soviet Russia without even having sense enough to know they’re
doing it and to collect good pay for their crookedness!”

“I admire Trowbridge!” snarled Doremus.

“You would!”

Elphrey rose, almost cordial, and dismissed Doremus with, “Mr.
Jessup, I was brought up in a sound bourgeois household myself,
unlike
these two roughnecks, and I appreciate what you’re trying to
do, even if they don’t. I imagine that your rejection of us is
even firmer than our rejection of you!”