It Can't Happen Here (51 page)

So on the evening when Aras jerked a head at him from the corridor,
then rasped, surly-seeming, “Here you, Jessup—you left one of the
cans all dirty!” Doremus looked mildly at the cell that had been
his home and study and tabernacle for six months, glanced at Karl
Pascal reading in his bunk—slowly waving a shoeless foot in a sock
with the end of it gone, at Truman Webb darning the seat of his
pants, noted the gray smoke in filmy tilting layers about the small
electric bulb in the ceiling, and silently stepped out into the
corridor.

The late-January night was foggy.

Aras handed him a worn
M.M. overcoat, whispered, “Third alley on
right; moving-van on corner opposite the church,” and was gone.

On hands and knees Doremus briskly crawled under the loosened
barbed wire at the end of the small alley and carelessly stepped
out, along the road. The only guard in sight was at a distance,
and he was wavering in his gait. A block away, a furniture van was
jacked up while the driver and
his helper painfully prepared to
change one of the tremendous tires. In the light of a corner arc,
Doremus saw that the driver was that same hard-faced long-distance
cruiser who had carried bundles of tracts for the New Underground.

The driver grunted, “Get in—hustle!” Doremus crouched between a
bureau and a wing chair inside.

Instantly he felt the tilted body of the van dropping, as the
driver
pulled out the jack, and from the seat he heard, “All right!
We’re off. Crawl up behind me here and listen, Mr. Jessup… .
Can you hear me? … The M.M.’s don’t take so much trouble to
prevent you gents and respectable fellows from escaping. They
figure that most of you are too scary to try out anything, once
you’re away from your offices and front porches and sedans. But I
guess you may be different,
some ways, Mr. Jessup. Besides, they
figure that if you do escape, they can pick you up easy afterwards,
because you ain’t onto hiding out, like a regular fellow that’s
been out of work sometimes and maybe gone on the bum. But don’t
worry. We’ll get you through. I tell you, there’s nobody got
friends like a revolutionist… .
And
enemies!”

Then first did it come to Doremus that, by sentence
of the late
lamented Effingham Swan, he was subject to the death penalty for
escaping. But “Oh, what the hell!” he grunted, like Karl Pascal,
and he stretched in the luxury of mobility, in that galloping
furniture truck.

He was free! He saw the lights of villages going by!

Once, he was hidden beneath hay in a barn; again, in a spruce grove
high on a hill; and once he slept overnight on top
of a coffin in
the establishment of an undertaker. He walked secret paths; he
rode in the back of an itinerant medicine-peddler’s car and,
concealed in fur cap and high-collared fur coat, in the sidecar of
an Underground worker serving as an M.M. squad-leader. From this
he dismounted, at the driver’s command, in front of an obviously
untenanted farmhouse on a snaky back-road between Monadnock
Mountain and the Averill lakes—a very slattern of an old unpainted
farmhouse, with sinking roof and snow up to the frowsy windows.

It seemed a mistake.

Doremus knocked, as the motorcycle snarled away, and the door
opened on Lorinda Pike and Sissy, crying together, “Oh, my dear!”

He could only mutter, “Well!”

When they had made him strip off his fur coat in the farmhouse
living room, a room
with peeling wall paper, and altogether bare
except for a cot, two chairs, a table, the two moaning women saw a
small man, his face dirty, pasty, and sunken as by tuberculosis,
his once fussily trimmed beard and mustache ragged as wisps of hay,
his overlong hair a rustic jag at the back, his clothes ripped and
filthy—an old, sick, discouraged tramp. He dropped on a straight
chair and stared at
them. Maybe they were genuine—maybe they
really were there—maybe he was, as it seemed, in heaven, looking
at the two principal angels, but he had been so often fooled so
cruelly in his visions these dreary months! He sobbed, and they
comforted him with softly stroking hands and not too confoundedly
much babble.

“I’ve got a hot bath for you! And I’ll scrub your back! And then
some hot chicken
soup and ice cream!”

As though one should say: The Lord God awaits you on His throne
and all whom you bless shall be blessed, and all your enemies
brought to their knees!

Those sainted women had actually had a long tin tub fetched to the
kitchen of the old house, filled it with water heated in kettle and
dishpan on the stove, and provided brushes, soap, a vast sponge,
and such a long caressing
bath towel as Doremus had forgotten
existed. And somehow, from Fort Beulah, Sissy had brought plenty
of his own shoes and shirts and three suits that now seemed to him
fit for royalty.

He who had not had a hot bath for six months, and for three had
worn the same underclothes, and for two (in clammy winter) no socks
whatever!

If the presence of Lorinda and Sissy was token of heaven, to slide
inch by slow ecstatic inch into the tub was its proof, and he lay
soaking in glory.

When he was half dressed, the two came in, and there was about as
much thought of modesty, or need for it, as though he were the two-year-old babe he somewhat resembled. They were laughing at him,
but laughter became sharp whimpers of horror when they saw the
gridironed meat of his back. But nothing more demanding
than “Oh,
my dear!” did Lorinda say, even then.

Though Sissy had once been glad that Lorinda spared her any
mothering, Doremus rejoiced in it. Snake Tizra and the Trianon
concentration camp had been singularly devoid of any mothering.
Lorinda salved his back and powdered it. She cut his hair, not too
unskillfully. She cooked for him all the heavy, earthy dishes of
which he had dreamed, hungry
in a cell: hamburg steak with onions,
corn pudding, buckwheat cakes with sausages, apple dumplings with
hard and soft sauce, and cream of mushroom soup!

It had not been safe to take him to the comforts of her tea room at
Beecher Falls; already M.M.’s had been there, snooping after him.
But Sissy and she had, for such refugees as they might be
forwarding for the New Underground, provided this
dingy farmhouse
with half-a-dozen cots, and rich stores of canned goods and
beautiful bottles (Doremus considered them) of honey and marmalade
and bar-le-duc. The actual final crossing of the border into
Canada was easier than it had been when Buck Titus had tried to
smuggle the Jessup family over. It had become a system, as in the
piratical days of bootlegging; with new forest paths, bribery
of
frontier guards, and forged passports. He was safe. Yet just to
make safety safer, Lorinda and Sissy, rubbing their chins as they
looked Doremus over, still discussing him as brazenly as though he
were a baby who could not understand them, decided to turn him into
a young man.

“Dye his hair and mustache black and shave the beard, I think. I
wish we had time to give him a nice Florida tan
with an Alpine
lamp, too,” considered Lorinda.

“Yes, I think he’ll look sweet that way,” said Sissy.

“I will not have my beard off!” he protested. “How do I know what
kind of a chin I’ll have when it’s naked?”

“Why, the man still thinks he’s a newspaper proprietor and one of
Fort Beulah’s social favorites!” marveled Sissy as they ruthlessly
set to work.

“Only real reason for these damn wars
and revolutions anyway is
that the womenfolks get a chance—ouch! be careful!—to be dear
little Amateur Mothers to every male they can get in their
clutches.
Hair dye!
” said Doremus bitterly.

But he was shamelessly proud of his youthful face when it was
denuded, and he discovered that he had a quite tolerably stubborn
chin, and Sissy was sent back to Beecher Falls to keep the tea room
alive,
and for three days Lorinda and he gobbled steaks and ale,
and played pinochle, and lay talking infinitely of all they had
thought about each other in the six desert months that might have
been sixty years. He was to remember the sloping farmhouse bedroom
and a shred of rag carpet and a couple of rickety chairs and
Lorinda snuggled under the old red comforter on the cot, not as
winter poverty
but as youth and adventurous love.

Then, in a forest clearing, with snow along the spruce boughs, a
few feet across into Canada, he was peering into the eyes of his
two women, curtly saying good-bye, and trudging off into the new
prison of exile from the America to which, already, he was looking
back with the long pain of nostalgia.

His beard had grown again—he and his beard had been friends for
many years, and he had missed it of late. His hair and mustache
had again assumed a respectable gray in place of the purple dye
that under electric lights had looked so bogus. He was no longer
impassioned at the sight of a lamb chop or a cake of soap. But he
had not yet got over the pleasure and slight amazement at being
able
to talk as freely as he would, as emphatically as might please
him, and in public.

He sat with his two closest friends in Montreal, two fellow
executives in the Department of Propaganda and Publications of the
New Underground (Walt Trowbridge, General Chairman), and these two
friends were the Hon. Perley Beecroft, who presumably was the
President of the United States, and Joe Elphrey, an ornamental
young man who, as “Mr. Cailey,” had been a prize agent of the
Communist Party in America till he had been kicked out of that
almost imperceptible body for having made a “united front” with
Socialists, Democrats, and even choir-singers when organizing an
anti-Corpo revolt in Texas.

Over their ale, in this café, Beecroft and Elphrey were at it as
usual: Elphrey insisting that the only “solution”
of American
distress was dictatorship by the livelier representatives of the
toiling masses, strict and if need be violent, but (this was his
new heresy) not governed by Moscow. Beecroft was gaseously
asserting that “all we needed” was a return to precisely the
political parties, the drumming up of votes, and the oratorical
legislating by Congress, of the contented days of William B.
McKinley.

But as for Doremus, he leaned back not vastly caring what nonsense
the others might talk so long as it was permitted them to talk at
all without finding that the waiters were M.M. spies; and content
to know that, whatever happened, Trowbridge and the other authentic
leaders would never go back to satisfaction in government of the
profits, by the profits, for the profits. He thought comfortably
of the fact that just yesterday (he had this from the chairman’s
secretary), Walt Trowbridge had dismissed Wilson J. Shale, the
ducal oil man, who had come, apparently with sincerity, to offer
his fortune and his executive experience to Trowbridge and the
cause.

“Nope. Sorry, Will. But we can’t use you. Whatever happens—even
if Haik marches over and slaughters all of us along with all our
Canadian hosts—you and your kind of clever pirates are finished.
Whatever happens, whatever details of a new system of government
may be decided on, whether we call it a ‘Cooperative Commonwealth’
or ‘State Socialism’ or ‘Communism’ or ‘Revived Traditional
Democracy,’ there’s got to be a new feeling—that government is not
a game for a few smart, resolute athletes like you, Will, but a
universal partnership,
in which the State must own all resources so
large that they affect all members of the State, and in which the
one worst crime won’t be murder or kidnaping but taking advantage
of the State—in which the seller of fraudulent medicine, or the
liar in Congress, will be punished a whole lot worse than the
fellow who takes an ax to the man who’s grabbed off his girl… .
Eh? What’s going
to happen to magnates like you, Will? God knows!
What happened to the dinosaurs?”

So was Doremus in his service well content.

Yet socially he was almost as lonely as in his cell at Trianon;
almost as savagely he longed for the not exorbitant pleasure of
being with Lorinda, Buck, Emma, Sissy, Steve Perefixe.

None of them save Emma could join him in Canada, and she would not.
Her letters suggested
fear of the un-Worcesterian wildernesses of
Montreal. She wrote that Philip and she hoped they might be able
to get Doremus forgiven by the Corpos! So he was left to associate
only with his fellow refugees from Corpoism, and he knew a life
that had been familiar, far too familiar, to political exiles ever
since the first revolt in Egypt sent the rebels sneaking off into
Assyria.

It was no particularly
indecent egotism in Doremus that made him
suppose, when he arrived in Canada, that everyone would thrill to
his tale of imprisonment, torture, and escape. But he found that
ten thousand spirited tellers of woe had come there before him, and
that the Canadians, however attentive and generous hosts they might
be, were actively sick of pumping up new sympathy. They felt that
their quota
of martyrs was completely filled, and as to the exiles
who came in penniless, and that was a majority of them, the
Canadians became distinctly weary of depriving their own families
on behalf of unknown refugees, and they couldn’t even keep up
forever a gratification in the presence of celebrated American
authors, politicians, scientists, when they became common as
mosquitoes.

It was doubtful
if a lecture on Deplorable Conditions in America by
Herbert Hoover and General Pershing together would have attracted
forty people. Ex-governors and judges were glad to get jobs
washing dishes, and ex-managing-editors were hoeing turnips. And
reports said that Mexico and London and France were growing alike
apologetically bored.

So Doremus, meagerly living on his twenty-dollar-a-week salary
from
the N.U., met no one save his own fellow exiles, in just such
salons of unfortunate political escapists as the White Russians,
the Red Spaniards, the Blue Bulgarians, and all the other
polychromatic insurrectionists frequented in Paris. They crowded
together, twenty of them in a parlor twelve by twelve, very like
the concentration-camp cells in area, inhabitants, and eventual
smell, from
8 P.M. till midnight, and made up for lack of dinner
with coffee and doughnuts and exiguous sandwiches, and talked
without cessation about the Corpos. They told as “actual facts”
stories about President Haik which had formerly been applied to
Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini—the one about the man who was
alarmed to find he had saved Haik from drowning and begged him not
to tell.