It Can't Happen Here (28 page)

Clatter and shouts at the door. Protests from the unseen
guards.
Dr. Fowler Greenhill pounding in, stopping with arms akimbo,
shouting as he strode down to the table, “What do you three comic
judges think you’re doing?”

“And who may our impetuous friend be? He annoys me, rather,” Swan
asked of Shad.

“Doc Fowler—Jessup’s son-in-law. And a bad actor! Why, couple
days ago I offered him charge of medical inspection for all the
M.M.’s in the county,
and he said—this red-headed smart aleck
here!—he said you and me and Commissioner Reek and Doc Staubmeyer
and all of us were a bunch of hoboes that ‘d be digging ditches in
a labor camp if we hadn’t stole some officers’ uniforms!”

“Ah, did he indeed?” purred Swan.

Fowler protested: “He’s a liar. I never mentioned you. I don’t
even know who you are.”

“My name, good sir, is Commander Effingham
Swan, M.J.!”

“Well, M. J., that still doesn’t enlighten me. Never heard of
you!”

Shad interrupted, “How the hell did you get past the guards,
Fowley?” (He who had never dared call that long-reaching, swift-moving redhead anything more familiar than “Doc.”)

“Oh, all your Minnie Mouses know me. I’ve treated most of your
brightest gunmen for unmentionable diseases. I just told them at
the
door that I was wanted in here professionally.”

Swan was at his silkiest: “Oh, and how we
did
want you, my dear
fellow—though we didn’t know it until this moment. So you are one
of these brave rustic Æsculapiuses?”

“I am! And if you were in the war—which I should doubt, from your
pansy way of talking—you may be interested to know that I am also
a member of the American Legion—quit Harvard
and joined up in 1918
and went back afterwards to finish. And I want to warn you three
half-baked Hitlers—”

“Ah! But my dear friend! A mil-i-tary man! How too
too
! Then we
shall have to treat you as a responsible person—responsible for
your idiocies—not just as the uncouth clodhopper that you appear!”

Fowler was leaning both fists on the table. “Now I’ve had enough!
I’m going to push in
your booful face—”

Shad had his fists up, was rounding the table, but Swan snapped,
“No! Let him finish! He may enjoy digging his own grave. You
know—people do have such quaint variant notions about sports.
Some laddies actually like to go fishing—all those slimy scales
and the shocking odor! By the way, Doctor, before it’s too late, I
would like to leave with you the thought for the day
that I was
also in the war to end wars—a major. But go on. I do so want to
listen to you yet a little.”

“Cut the cackle, will you, M. J.? I’ve just come here to tell you
that I’ve had enough—everybody’s had enough—of your kidnaping Mr.
Jessup—the most honest and useful man in the whole Beulah Valley!
Typical low-down sneaking kidnapers! If you think your phony
Rhodes-Scholar accent keeps
you from being just another cowardly,
murdering Public Enemy, in your toy-soldier uniform—”

Swan held up his hand in his most genteel Back Bay manner. “A
moment, Doctor, if you will be so good?” And to Shad: “I should
think we’d heard enough from the Comrade, wouldn’t you,
Commissioner? Just take the bastard out and shoot him.”

“O.K.! Swell!” Shad chuckled; and, to the guards at the half-open
door, “Get the corporal of the guard and a squad—six men—loaded
rifles—make it snappy, see?”

The guard were not far down the corridor, and their rifles were
already loaded. It was in less than a minute that Aras Dilley was
saluting from the door, and Shad was shouting, “Come here! Grab
this dirty crook!” He pointed at Fowler. “Take him along
outside.”

They did, for all of Fowler’s struggling.
Aras Dilley jabbed
Fowler’s right wrist with a bayonet. It spilled blood down on his
hand, so scrubbed for surgery, and like blood his red hair tumbled
over his forehead.

Shad marched out with them, pulling his automatic pistol from its
holster and looking at it happily.

Doremus was held, his mouth was clapped shut, by two guards as he
tried to reach Fowler. Emil Staubmeyer seemed a little
scared, but
Effingham Swan, suave and amused, leaned his elbows on the table
and tapped his teeth with a pencil.

From the courtyard, the sound of a rifle volley, a terrifying wail,
one single emphatic shot, and nothing after.

The real trouble with the Jews is that they are cruel. Anybody
with a knowledge of history knows how they tortured poor debtors in
secret catacombs, all through the Middle Ages. Whereas the Nordic
is distinguished by his gentleness and his kind-heartedness to
friends, children, dogs, and people of inferior races.

Zero Hour
, Berzelius Windrip.

The review in Dewey Haik’s provincial court
of Judge Swan’s
sentence on Greenhill was influenced by County Commissioner Ledue’s
testimony that after the execution he found in Greenhill’s house a
cache of the most seditious documents: copies of Trowbridge’s Lance
for Democracy, books by Marx and Trotzky, Communistic pamphlets
urging citizens to assassinate the Chief.

Mary, Mrs. Greenhill, insisted that her husband had never read such
things;
that, if anything, he had been too indifferent to politics.
Naturally, her word could not be taken against that of Commissioner
Ledue, Assistant Commissioner Staubmeyer (known everywhere as a
scholar and man of probity), and Military Judge Effingham Swan. It
was necessary to punish Mrs. Greenhill—or, rather, to give a
strong warning to other Mrs. Greenhills—by seizing all the
property and money
Greenhill had left her.

Anyway, Mary did not fight very vigorously. Perhaps she realized
her guilt. In two days she turned from the crispest, smartest,
most swift-spoken woman in Fort Beulah into a silent hag, dragging
about in shabby and unkempt black. Her son and she went to live
with her father, Doremus Jessup.

Some said that Jessup should have fought for her and her property.
But he was
not legally permitted to do so. He was on parole,
subject, at the will of the properly constituted authorities, to a
penitentiary sentence.

So Mary returned to the house and the overfurnished bedroom she had
left as a bride. She could not, she said, endure its memories.
She took the attic room that had never been quite “finished off.”
She sat up there all day, all evening, and her parents
never heard
a sound. But within a week her David was playing about the yard
most joyfully … playing that he was an M.M. officer.

The whole house seemed dead, and all that were in it seemed
frightened, nervous, forever waiting for something unknown—all
save David and, perhaps, Mrs. Candy, bustling in her kitchen.

Meals had been notoriously cheerful at the Jessups’; Doremus
chattered to an audience
of Mrs. Candy and Sissy, flustering Emma
with the most outrageous assertions—that he was planning to go to
Greenland; that President Windrip had taken to riding down
Pennsylvania Avenue on an elephant; and Mrs. Candy was as
unscrupulous as all good cooks in trying to render them speechlessly
drowsy after dinner and to encourage the stealthy expansion of
Doremus’s already rotund little belly, with
her mince pie, her
apple pie with enough shortening to make the eyes pop out in sweet
anguish, the fat corn fritters and candied potatoes with the
broiled chicken, the clam chowder made with cream.

Now, there was little talk among the adults at table and, though
Mary was not showily “brave,” but colorless as a glass of water,
they were nervously watching her. Everything they spoke of seemed
to point toward the murder and the Corpos; if you said, “It’s quite
a warm fall,” you felt that the table was thinking, “So the M.M.’s
can go on marching for a long time yet before snow flies,” and then
you choked and asked sharply for the gravy. Always Mary was there,
a stone statue chilling the warm and commonplace people packed in
beside her.

So it came about that David dominated the table
talk, for the first
delightful time in his nine years of experiment with life, and
David liked that very much indeed, and his grandfather liked it not
nearly so well.

He chattered, like an entire palm-ful of monkeys, about Foolish,
about his new playmates (children of Medary Cole, the miller),
about the apparent fact that crocodiles are rarely found in the
Beulah River, and the more moving fact
that the Rotenstern young
had driven with their father clear to Albany.

Now Doremus was fond of children; approved of them; felt with an
earnestness uncommon to parents and grandparents that they were
human beings and as likely as the next one to become editors. But
he hadn’t enough sap of the Christmas holly in his veins to enjoy
listening without cessation to the bright prattle of children.
Few
males have, outside of Louisa May Alcott. He thought (though he
wasn’t very dogmatic about it) that the talk of a Washington
correspondent about politics was likely to be more interesting than
Davy’s remarks on cornflakes and garter snakes, so he went on
loving the boy and wishing he would shut up. And escaped as soon
as possible from Mary’s gloom and Emma’s suffocating thoughtfulness,
wherein
you felt, every time Emma begged, “Oh, you
must
take just a
little
more of the nice chestnut dressing, Mary dearie,” that you
really ought to burst into tears.

Doremus suspected that Emma was, essentially, more appalled by his
having gone to jail than by the murder of her son-in-law. Jessups
simply didn’t go to jail. People who went to jail were
bad
, just
as barn-burners and men accused of
that fascinatingly obscure
amusement, a “statutory offense,” were bad; and as for bad people,
you might try to be forgiving and tender, but you didn’t sit down
to meals with them. It was all so irregular, and most upsetting to
the household routine!

So Emma loved him and worried about him till he wanted to go
fishing and actually did go so far as to get out his flies.

But Lorinda had said to
him, with eyes brilliant and unworried,
“And I thought you were just a cud-chewing Liberal that didn’t mind
being milked! I am so proud of you! You’ve encouraged me to fight
against—Listen, the minute I heard about your imprisonment I
chased Nipper out of my kitchen with a bread knife! … Well,
anyway, I thought about doing it!”

The office was deader than his home. The worst of it was that
it
wasn’t so very bad—that, he saw, he could slip into serving the
Corpo state with, eventually, no more sense of shame than was felt
by old colleagues of his who in pre-Corpo days had written
advertisements for fraudulent mouth washes or tasteless cigarettes,
or written for supposedly reputable magazines mechanical stories
about young love. In a waking nightmare after his imprisonment,
Doremus
had pictured Staubmeyer and Ledue in the
Informer
office
standing over him with whips, demanding that he turn out sickening
praise for the Corpos, yelling at him until he rose and killed and
was killed. Actually, Shad stayed away from the office, and
Doremus’s master, Staubmeyer, was ever so friendly and modest and
rather nauseatingly full of praise for his craftsmanship.
Staubmeyer seemed satisfied
when, instead of the “apology” demanded
by Swan, Doremus stated that “Henceforth this paper will cease all
criticisms of the present government.”

Doremus received from District Commissioner Reek a jolly telegram
thanking him for “gallantly deciding turn your great talent service
people and correcting errors doubtless made by us in effort set up
new more realistic state.” Ur! said Doremus and
did not chuck the
message at the clothes-basket waste-basket, but carefully walked
over and rammed it down amid the trash.

He was able, by remaining with the
Informer
in her prostitute days,
to keep Staubmeyer from discharging Dan Wilgus, who was sniffy to
the new boss and unnaturally respectful now to Doremus. And he
invented what he called the “Yow-yow editorial.” This was a dirty
device
of stating as strongly as he could an indictment of
Corpoism, then answering it as feebly as he could, as with a
whining “Yow-yow-yow—that’s what
you
say!” Neither Staubmeyer nor
Shad caught him at it, but Doremus hoped fearfully that the shrewd
Effingham Swan would never see the Yow-yows.

So week on week he got along not too badly—and there was not one
minute when he did not hate this filthy
slavery, when he did not
have to force himself to stay there, when he did not snarl at
himself, “Then why
do
you stay?”

His answers to that challenge came glibly and conventionally
enough: “He was too old to start in life again. And he had a wife
and family to support”—Emma, Sissy, and now Mary and David.

All these years he had heard responsible men who weren’t being
quite honest—radio announcers
who soft-soaped speakers who were
fools and wares that were trash, and who canaryishly chirped “Thank
you, Major Blister” when they would rather have kicked Major
Blister, preachers who did not believe the decayed doctrines they
dealt out, doctors who did not dare tell lady invalids that they
were sex-hungry exhibitionists, merchants who peddled brass for
gold—heard all of them complacently excuse
themselves by
explaining that they were too old to change and that they had “a
wife and family to support.”

Why not let the wife and family die of starvation or get out and
hustle for themselves, if by no other means the world could have
the chance of being freed from the most boresome, most dull, and
foulest disease of having always to be a little dishonest?

So he raged—and went on grinding
out a paper dull and a little
dishonest—but not forever. Otherwise the history of Doremus
Jessup would be too drearily common to be worth recording.