It Can't Happen Here (46 page)

It was he who was responsible for nearly half of them being there.

The prisoners whispered that he had been arrested on charges by
Francis Tasbrough; officially, for having grafted on shopkeepers;
unofficially, for having failed to share enough
of the graft with
Tasbrough. But such cloudy causes were less discussed than the
question of how they would murder Shad now they had him safe.

All Minute Men who were under discipline, except only such Reds as
Julian Falck, were privileged prisoners in the concentration camps;
they were safeguarded against the common, i.e., criminal, i.e.,
political inmates; and most of them, once reformed,
were returned
to the M.M. ranks, with a greatly improved knowledge of how to flog
malcontents. Shad was housed by himself in a single cell like a
not-too-bad hall-bedroom, and every evening he was permitted to
spend two hours in the officers’ mess room. The scum could not get
at him, because his exercise hour was at a time different from
theirs.

Doremus begged the plotters against Shad to restrain
themselves.

“Good Lord, Doremus, do you mean that after the sure-enough battles
we’ve gone through you’re still a bourgeois pacifist—that you
still believe in the sanctity of a lump of hog meat like Ledue?”
demanded Karl Pascal.

“Well, yes, I do—a little. I know that Shad came from a family of
twelve underfed brats up on Mount Terror. Not much chance.
But more important than that, I don’t
believe in individual
assassination as an effective means of fighting despotism. The
blood of the tyrants is the seed of the massacre and—”

“Are you taking a cue from me and quoting sound doctrine when it’s
the time for a little liquidation?” said Karl. “This one tyrant’s
going to lose a lot of blood!”

The Pascal whom Doremus had considered as, at his most violent,
only a gas bag, looked at
him with a stare in which all
friendliness was frozen. Karl demanded of his cell mates, a
different set now than at Doremus’s arrival, “Shall we get rid of
this typhus germ, Ledue?”

John Pollikop, Truman Webb, the surgeon, the carpenter, each of
them nodded, slowly, without feeling.

At exercise hour, the discipline of the men marching out to the
quadrangle was broken when one prisoner stumbled,
with a cry,
knocked over another man, and loudly apologized—just at the barred
entrance of Shad Ledue’s cell. The accident made a knot collect
before the cell. Doremus, on the edge of it, saw Shad looking out,
his wide face blank with fear.

Someone, somehow, had lighted and thrown into Shad’s cell a large
wad of waste, soaked with gasoline. It caught the thin wallboard
which divided Shad’s
cell from the next. The whole room looked
presently like the fire box of a furnace. Shad was screaming, as
he beat at his sleeves, his shoulders. Doremus remembered the
scream of a horse clawed by wolves in the Far North.

When they got Shad out, he was dead. He had no face at all.

Captain Cowlick was deposed as superintendent of the camp, and
vanished to the insignificance whence he had
come. He was
succeeded by Shad’s friend, the belligerent Snake Tizra, now a
battalion-leader. His first executive act was to have all the two
hundred inmates drawn up in the quadrangle and to announce, “I’m
not going to tell you guys anything about how I’m going to feed you
or sleep you till I’ve finished putting the fear of God into every
one of you murderers!”

There were offers of complete
pardon for anyone who would betray
the man who had thrown the burning waste into Shad’s cell. It was
followed by enthusiastic private offers from the prisoners that
anyone who did thus tattle would not live to get out. So, as
Doremus had guessed, they all suffered more than Shad’s death had
been worth—and to him, thinking of Sissy, thinking of Shad’s
testimony at Hanover, it had been worth a great
deal; it had been
very precious and lovely.

A court of special inquiry was convened, with Provincial
Commissioner Effingham Swan himself presiding (he was very busy
with all bad works; he used aeroplanes to be about them). Ten
prisoners, one out of every twenty in the camp, were chosen by lot
and shot summarily. Among them was Professor Victor Loveland, who,
for all his rags and scars, was
neatly academic to the last, with
his eyeglasses and his slick tow-colored hair parted in the middle
as he looked at the firing-squad.

Suspects like Julian Falck were beaten more often, kept longer in
those cells in which one could not stand, sit, nor lie.

Then, for two weeks in December, all visitors and all letters were
forbidden, and newly arrived prisoners were shut off by themselves;
and
the cell mates, like boys in a dormitory, would sit up till
midnight in whispered discussion as to whether this was more
vengeance by Snake Tizra, or whether something was happening in the
World Outside that was too disturbing for the prisoners to know.

When the Falcks and John Pollikop had been arrested and had joined
her father in prison, when such more timid rebels as Mungo
Kitterick and Harry Kindermann had been scared away from New
Underground activities, Mary Greenhill had to take over the control
of the Fort Beulah cell, with only Sissy, Father Perefixe, Dr.
Olmsted and his driver, and half-a-dozen other agents left, and
control it
she did, with angry devotion and not too much sense.
All she could do was to help in the escape of refugees and to
forward such minor anti-Corpo news items as she could discover,
with Julian gone.

The demon that had grown within her ever since her husband had been
executed now became a great tumor, and Mary was furious at
inaction. Quite gravely she talked about assassinations—and long
before
the day of Mary Greenhill, daughter of Doremus, gold-armored
tyrants in towers had trembled at the menace of young widows in
villages among the dark hills.

She wanted, first, to kill Shad Ledue who (she did not know, but
guessed) had probably done the actual shooting of her husband. But
in this small place it might hurt her family even more than they
had been hurt. She humorlessly suggested,
before Shad was arrested
and murdered, that it would be a pretty piece of espionage for
Sissy to go and live with him. The once flippant Sissy, so thin
and quiet ever since her Julian had been taken away, was certain
that Mary had gone mad, and at night was terrified… . She
remembered how Mary, in the days when she had been a crystal-hard,
crystal-bright sportswoman, had with her riding-crop beaten
a
farmer who had tortured a dog.

Mary was fed-up with the cautiousness of Dr. Olmsted and Father
Perefixe, men who rather liked a vague state called Freedom but did
not overmuch care for being lynched. She stormed at them. Call
themselves men? Why didn’t they go out and
do
something?

At home, she was irritated by her mother, who lamented hardly more
about Doremus’s jailing than she did about
the beloved little
tables that had been smashed during his arrest.

It was equally the blasts about the greatness of the new Provincial
Commissioner, Effingham Swan, in the Corpo press and memoranda in
the secret N.U. reports about his quick death verdicts against
prisoners that made her decide to kill this dignitary. Even more
than Shad (who had not yet been sent to Trianon), she blamed him
for Fowler’s fate. She thought it out quite calmly. That was the
sort of thinking that the Corpos were encouraging among decent
home-body women by their program for revitalizing national American
pride.

Except with babies accompanying mothers, two visitors together were
forbidden in the concentration camps. So, when Mary saw Doremus
and, in another camp, Buck Titus, in early October, she
could only
murmur, in almost the same words to each of them, “Listen! When I
leave you I’ll hold up David—but, heavens, what a husky lump he’s
become!—at the gate, so you can see him. If anything should ever
happen to me, if I should get sick or something, when you get out
you’ll take care of David—won’t you,
won’t
you?”

She was trying to be matter-of-fact, that they might not worry.
She was
not succeeding very well.

So she drew out, from the small fund which her father had
established for her after Fowler’s death, enough money for a couple
of months, executed a power of attorney by which either her mother
or her sister could draw the rest, casually kissed David and Emma
and Sissy good-bye, and—chatty and gay as she took the train—went
off to Albany, capital of the Northeastern Province.
The story was
that she needed a change and was going to stay near Albany with
Fowler’s married sister.

She did actually stay with her sister-in-law—long enough to get
her bearings. Two days after her arrival, she went to the new
Albany training-field of the Corpo Women’s Flying Corps and
enlisted for lessons in aviation and bombing.

When the inevitable war should come, when the government
should
decide whether it was Canada, Mexico, Russia, Cuba, Japan, or
perhaps Staten Island that was “menacing her borders,” and proceed
to defend itself outwards, then the best women flyers of the Corps
were to have Commissions in an official army auxiliary. The old-fashioned “rights” granted to women by the Liberals might (for
their own sakes) be taken from them, but never had they had more
right
to die in battle.

While she was learning, she wrote to her family reassuringly—mostly postcards to David, bidding him mind whatever his
grandmother said.

She lived in a lively boarding-house, filled with M.M. officers who
knew all about and talked a little about the frequent inspection
trips of Commissioner Swan, by aeroplane. She was complimented by
quite a number of insulting proposals there.

She had driven a car ever since she had been fifteen: in Boston
traffic, across the Quebec plains, on rocky hill roads in a
blizzard; she had made repairs at midnight; and she had an accurate
eye, nerves trained outdoors, and the resolute steadiness of a
madman evading notice while he plots death. After ten hours of
instruction, by an M.M. aviator who thought the air was as good a
place as any
to make love in and who could never understand why
Mary laughed at him, she made her first solo flight, with an
admirable landing. The instructor said (among other things less
apropos) that she had no fear; that the one thing she needed for
mastery was a little fear.

Meantime she was an obedient student in classes in bombing, a
branch of culture daily more propagated by the Corpos.

She was
particularly interested in the Mills hand grenade. You
pulled out the safety pin, holding the lever against the grenade
with your fingers, and tossed. Five seconds after the lever was
thus loosened, the grenade exploded and killed a lot of people. It
had never been used from planes, but it might be worth trying,
thought Mary. M.M. officers told her that Swan, when a mob of
steel-workers had been
kicked out of a plant and started rioting,
had taken command of the peace officers, and himself (they chuckled
with admiration of his readiness) hurled such a grenade. It had
killed two women and a baby.

Mary took her sixth solo flight on a November morning gray and
quiet under snow clouds. She had never been very talkative with
the ground crew but this morning she said it excited her to think
she could leave the ground “like a reg’lar angel” and shoot up and
hang around that unknown wilderness of clouds. She patted a strut
of her machine, a high-wing Leonard monoplane with open cockpit, a
new and very fast military machine, meant for both pursuit and
quick jobs of bombing … quick jobs of slaughtering a few
hundred troops in close formation.

At the field, as she had been informed
he would, District
Commissioner Effingham Swan was boarding his big official cabin
plane for a flight presumably into New England. He was tall; a
distinguished, military-looking, polo-suggesting dignitary in
masterfully simple blue serge with just a light flying-helmet.
A dozen yes-men buzzed about him—secretaries, bodyguards, a
chauffeur, a couple of county commissioners, educational directors,
labor directors—their hats in their hands, their smiles on their
faces, their souls wriggling with gratitude to him for permitting
them to exist. He snapped at them a good deal and bustled. As he
mounted the steps to the cabin (Mary thought of “Casey Jones” and
smiled), a messenger on a tremendous motorcycle blared up with the
last telegrams. There seemed to be half a hundred of the yellow
envelopes, Mary marveled. He tossed them to the secretary who was
humbly creeping after him. The door of the viceregal coach closed
on the Commissioner, the secretary, and two bodyguards lumpy with
guns.

It was said that in his plane Swan had a desk that had belonged to
Hitler, and before him to Marat.

To Mary, who had just lifted herself up into the cockpit, a
mechanic cried, admiringly pointing
after Swan’s plane as it
lurched forward, “Gee, what a grand guy that is—Boss Swan. I hear
where he’s flying down to Washington to chin with the Chief this
morning—gee, think of it, with the Chief!”

“Wouldn’t it be awful if somebody took a shot at Mr. Swan and the
Chief? Might change all history,” Mary shouted down.

“No chance of that! See those guards of his? Say, they could
stand off a
whole regiment—they could lick Walt Trowbridge and all
the other Communists put together!”

“I guess that’s so. Nothing but God shooting down from heaven
could reach Mr. Swan.”

“Ha, ha! That’s good! But couple days ago I heard where a fellow
was saying he figured out God had gone to sleep.”

“Maybe it’s time for Him to wake up!” said Mary, and raised her
hand.

Her plane had a top of two hundred
and eighty-five miles an hour—Swan’s golden chariot had but two hundred and thirty. She was
presently flying above and a little behind him. His cabin plane,
which had seemed huge as the Queen Mary when she had looked up at
its wing-spread on the ground, now seemed small as a white dove,
wavering above the patchy linoleum that was the ground.