It Can't Happen Here (44 page)

He was not permitted to see Dr. Olmsted again, but it was probably
Olmsted’s influence that got him, when he was dismissed from the
hospital, still shaky but well
enough to stumble about, a vastly
desirable job as sweeper of cells and corridors, cleaner of
lavatories and scrubber of toilets, instead of working in the woods
gang, up Mount Faithful, where old men who sank under the weight of
logs were said to be hammered to death by guards under the sadistic
Ensign Stoyt, when Captain Cowlick wasn’t looking. It was better,
too, than the undesirable idleness
of being disciplined in the “dog
house” where you lay naked, in darkness, and where “bad cases” were
reformed by being kept awake for forty-eight or even ninety-six
hours. Doremus was a conscientious toilet-cleaner. He didn’t like
the work very much, but he had pride in being able to scrub as
skillfully as any professional pearl-diver in a Greek lunch room,
and satisfaction in lessening a little
the wretchedness of his
imprisoned comrades by giving them clean floors.

For, he told himself, they were his comrades. He saw that he, who
had thought of himself as a capitalist because he could hire and
fire, and because theoretically he “owned his business,” had been
as helpless as the most itinerant janitor, once it seemed worth
while to the Big Business which Corpoism represented to get
rid of
him. Yet he still told himself stoutly that he did not believe in
a dictatorship of the proletariat any more than he believed in a
dictatorship of the bankers and utility-owners; he still insisted
that any doctor or preacher, though economically he might be as
insecure as the humblest of his flock, who did not feel that he was
a little better than they, and privileged to enjoy working a little
harder, was a rotten doctor or a preacher without grace. He felt
that he himself had been a better and more honorable reporter than
Doc Itchitt, and a thundering sight better student of politics than
most of his shopkeeper and farmer and factory-worker readers.

Yet bourgeois pride was so gone out of him that he was flattered, a
little thrilled, when he was universally called “Doremus” and not
“Mr. Jessup” by farmer and workman and truck-driver and plain hobo;
when they thought enough of his courage under beating and his good-temper under being crowded with others in a narrow cell to regard
him as almost as good as their own virile selves.

Karl Pascal mocked him. “I told you so, Doremus! You’ll be a
Communist yet!”

“Yes, maybe I will, Karl—after you Communists kick out all your
false prophets and bellyachers and power drunkards, and all your
press-agents for the Moscow subway.”

“Well, all right, why don’t you join Max Eastman? I hear he’s
escaped to Mexico and has a whole big pure Trotzkyite Communist
party of seventeen members there!”

“Seventeen? Too many. What I want is mass action by just one
member, alone on a hilltop. I’m a great optimist, Karl. I still
hope
America may some day rise to the standards of Kit Carson!”

As sweeper and scrubber, Doremus had unusual chances for gossip
with other prisoners. He chuckled when he thought of how many of
his fellow criminals were acquaintances: Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder,
his own cousin, Louis Rotenstern, who looked now like a corpse,
unforgettingly wounded in his old pride of having become a “real
American,”
Clif Little, the jeweler, who was dying of consumption,
Ben Tripper, who had been the jolliest workman in Medary Cole’s
gristmill, Professor Victor Loveland, of the defunct Isaiah
College, and Raymond Pridewell, that old Tory who was still so
contemptuous of flattery, so clean amid dirt, so hawk-eyed, that
the guards were uncomfortable when they beat him… . Pascal, the
Communist, Pridewell, the
squirearchy Republican, and Henry Veeder,
who had never cared a hang about politics, and who had recovered
from the first shocks of imprisonment, these three had become
intimates, because they had more arrogance of utter courage than
anyone else in the prison.

For home Doremus shared with five other men a cell twelve feet by
ten and eight feet high, which a finishing-school girl had once
considered
outrageously confined for one lone young woman. Here
they slept, in two tiers of three bunks each; here they ate,
washed, played cards, read, and enjoyed the leisurely contemplation
which, as Captain Cowlick preached to them every Sunday morning,
was to reform their black souls and turn them into loyal Corpos.

None of them, certainly not Doremus, complained much. They got
used to sleeping in
a jelly of tobacco smoke and human stench, to
eating stews that always left them nervously hungry, to having no
more dignity or freedom than monkeys in a cage, as a man gets used
to the indignity of having to endure cancer. Only it left in them
a murderous hatred of their oppressors so that they, men of peace
all of them, would gladly have hanged every Corpo, mild or vicious.
Doremus understood
John Brown much better.

His cell mates were Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, and three men whom
he had not known: a Boston architect, a farm hand, and a dope fiend
who had once kept questionable restaurants. They had good talk—especially from the dope fiend, who placidly defended crime in a
world where the only real crime had been poverty.

The worst torture to Doremus, aside from the agony of actual
floggings, was the waiting.

The Waiting. It became a distinct, tangible thing, as individual
and real as Bread or Water. How long would he be in? How long
would he be in? Night and day, asleep and waking, he worried it,
and by his bunk saw waiting the figure of Waiting, a gray, foul
ghost.

It was like waiting in a filthy station for a late train, not for
hours but for months.

Would Swan
amuse himself by having Doremus taken out and shot? He
could not care much, now; he could not picture it, any more than he
could picture kissing Lorinda, walking through the woods with Buck,
playing with David and Foolish, or anything less sensual than the
ever derisive visions of roast beef with gravy, of a hot bath, last
and richest of luxuries where their only way of washing, except for
a fortnightly
shower, was with a dirty shirt dipped in the one
basin of cold water for six men.

Besides Waiting, one other ghost hung about them—the notion of
Escaping. It was of that (far more than of the beastliness and
idiocy of the Corpos) that they whispered in the cell at night.
When to escape. How to escape. To sneak off through the bushes
when they were out with the woods gang? By some magic to
cut
through the bars on their cell window and drop out and blessedly
not be seen by the patrols? To manage to hang on underneath one of
the prison trucks and be driven away? (A childish fantasy!) They
longed for escape as hysterically and as often as a politician
longs for votes. But they had to discuss it cautiously, for there
were stool pigeons all over the prison.

This was hard for Doremus
to believe. He could not understand a
man’s betraying his companions, and he did not believe it till, two
months after Doremus had gone to concentration camp, Clifford
Little betrayed to the guards Henry Veeder’s plan to escape in a
hay wagon. Henry was properly dealt with. Little was released.
And Doremus, it may be, suffered over it nearly as much as either
of them, sturdily though he tried
to argue that Little had
tuberculosis and that the often beatings had bled out his soul.

Each prisoner was permitted one visitor a fortnight and, in
sequence, Doremus saw Emma, Mary, Sissy, David. But always an M.M.
was standing two feet away, listening, and Doremus had from them
nothing more than a fluttering, “We’re all fine—we hear Buck is
all right—we hear Lorinda is doing fine in her new
tea room—Philip writes he is all right.” And once came Philip himself, his
pompous son, more pompous than ever now as a Corpo judge, and very
hurt about his father’s insane radicalism—considerably more hurt
when Doremus tartly observed that he would much rather have had the
dog Foolish for visitor.

And there were letters—all censored—worse than useless to a man
who had been so glad to hear the
living voices of his friends.

In the long run, these frustrate visits, these empty letters, made
his waiting the more dismal, because they suggested that perhaps he
was wrong in his nightly visions; perhaps the world outside was not
so loving and eager and adventurous as he remembered it, but only
dreary as his cell.

He had little known Karl Pascal, yet now the argumentative Marxian
was his
nearest friend, his one amusing consolation. Karl could
and did prove that the trouble with leaky valves, sour cow
pastures, the teaching of calculus, and all novels was their
failure to be guided by the writings of Lenin.

In his new friendship, Doremus was old-maidishly agitated lest Karl
be taken out and shot, the recognition usually given to Communists.
He discovered that he need not worry.
Karl had been in jail
before. He was the trained agitator for whom Doremus had longed in
New Underground days. He had ferreted out so many scandals about
the financial and sexual shenanigans of every one of the guards
that they were afraid that even while he was being shot, he might
tattle to the firing-squad. They were much more anxious for his
good opinion than for that of Captain Cowlick,
and they timidly
brought him little presents of chewing tobacco and Canadian
newspapers, as though they were schoolchildren honeying up to
teacher.

When Aras Dilley was transferred from night patrols in Fort Beulah
to the position of guard at Trianon—a reward for having given to
Shad Ledue certain information about R. C. Crowley which cost that
banker hundreds of dollars—Aras, that slinker, that
able snooper,
jumped at the sight of Karl and began to look pious and kind. He
had known Karl before!

Despite the presence of Stoyt, Ensign of guards, an ex-cashier who
had once enjoyed shooting dogs and who now, in the blessed escape
of Corpoism, enjoyed lashing human beings, the camp at Trianon was
not so cruel as the district prison at Hanover. But from the dirty
window of his cell Doremus
saw horrors enough.

One mid-morning, a radiant September morning with the air already
savoring the peace of autumn, he saw the firing-squad marching out
his cousin, Henry Veeder, who had recently tried to escape. Henry
had been a granite monolith of a man. He had walked like a
soldier. He had, in his cell, been proud of shaving every morning,
as once he had done, with a tin basin of water
heated on the stove,
in the kitchen of his old white house up on Mount Terror. Now he
stooped, and toward death he walked with dragging feet. His face
of a Roman senator was smeared from the cow dung into which they
had flung him for his last slumber.

As they tramped out through the quadrangle gate, Ensign Stoyt,
commanding the squad, halted Henry, laughed at him, and calmly
kicked him in the
groin.

They lifted him up. Three minutes later Doremus heard a ripple of
shots. Three minutes after that the squad came back bearing on an
old door a twisted clay figure with vacant open eyes. Then Doremus
cried aloud. As the bearers slanted the stretcher, the figure
rolled to the ground.

But one thing worse he was to see through the accursed window. The
guards drove in, as new prisoners,
Julian Falck, in torn uniform,
and Julian’s grandfather, so fragile, so silvery, so bewildered and
terrified in his muddied clericals.

He saw them kicked across the quadrangle into a building once
devoted to instruction in dancing and the more delicate airs for
the piano; devoted now to the torture room and the solitary cells.

Not for two weeks, two weeks of waiting that was like ceaseless
ache,
did he have a chance, at exercise hour, to speak for a moment
to Julian, who muttered, “They caught me writing some inside dope
about M.M. graft. It was to have gone to Sissy. Thank God,
nothing on it to show who it was for!” Julian had passed on. But
Doremus had had time to see that his eyes were hopeless, and that
his neat, smallish, clerical face was blue-black with bruises.

The administration
(or so Doremus guessed) decided that Julian, the
first spy among the M.M.’s who had been caught in the Fort Beulah
region, was too good a subject of sport to be wastefully shot at
once. He should be kept for an example. Often Doremus saw the
guards kick him across the quadrangle to the whipping room and
imagined that he could hear Julian’s shrieks afterward. He wasn’t
even kept in a punishment
cell, but in an open barred den on an
ordinary corridor, so that passing inmates could peep in and see
him, welts across his naked back, huddled on the floor, whimpering
like a beaten dog.

And Doremus had sight of Julian’s grandfather sneaking across the
quadrangle, stealing a soggy hunk of bread from a garbage can, and
fiercely chewing at it.

All through September Doremus worried lest Sissy,
with Julian now
gone from Fort Beulah, be raped by Shad Ledue… . Shad would
leer the while, and gloat over his ascent from hired man to
irresistible master.

Despite his anguish over the Falcks and Henry Veeder and every
uncouthest comrade in prison, Doremus was almost recovered from his
beatings by late September. He began delightedly to believe that
he would live for another ten years; was
slightly ashamed of his
delight, in the presence of so much agony, but he felt like a young
man and—And straightway Ensign Stoyt was there (two or three
o’clock at night it must have been), yanking Doremus out of his
bunk, pulling him to his feet, knocking him down again with so
violent a crack in his mouth that Doremus instantly sank again into
all his trembling fear, all his inhuman groveling.

He was dragged into Captain Cowlick’s office.