It Can't Happen Here (34 page)

“And who may your informant be?”

“Oh, just letters—old school friends. Now you
arent’t
really pro-Corpo,
are
you?”

“How did you ever guess?”

“Well, I’ve been—I didn’t vote for Windrip, personally, but I
begin to see where I was wrong. I can see now that he has not only
great personal magnetism, but real constructive power—real sure-enough statesmanship.
Some say it’s Lee Sarason’s doing, but don’t
you believe it for a minute. Look at all Buzz did back in his home
state, before he ever teamed up with Sarason! And some say Windrip
is crude. Well, so were Lincoln and Jackson. Now what I think of
Windrip—”

“The only thing you ought to think of Windrip is that his gangsters
murdered your fine brother-in-law! And plenty of other men just as
good. Do you condone such murders?”

“No! Certainly not! How can you suggest such a thing, Dad! No
one abhors violence more than I do. Still, you can’t make an
omelet without breaking eggs—”

“Hell and damnation!”

“Why, Pater!”

“Don’t call me ‘Pater’! If I ever hear that ‘can’t make an omelet’
phrase again, I’ll start doing a little murder myself! It’s used
to justify every atrocity under
every despotism, Fascist or Nazi or
Communist or American labor war. Omelet! Eggs! By God, sir,
men’s souls and blood are not eggshells for tyrants to break!”

“Oh, sorry, sir. I guess maybe the phrase is a little shopworn! I
just mean to say—I’m just trying to figure this situation out
realistically!”

“‘Realistically’! That’s another buttered bun to excuse murder!”

“But honestly, you
know—horrible things do happen, thanks to the
imperfection of human nature, but you can forgive the means if the
end is a rejuvenated nation that—”

“I can do nothing of the kind! I can never forgive evil and lying
and cruel means, and still less can I forgive fanatics that use
that for an excuse! If I may imitate Romain Rolland, a country
that tolerates evil means—evil manners, standards of
ethics—for a
generation, will be so poisoned that it never will have any good
end. I’m just curious, but do you know how perfectly you’re
quoting every Bolshevik apologist that sneers at decency and
kindness and truthfulness in daily dealings as ‘bourgeois
morality’? I hadn’t understood that you’d gone quite so Marxo-materialistic!”

“I! Marxian! Good God!” Doremus was pleased to see that
he had
stirred his son out of his if-your-honor-please smugness. “Why,
one of the things I most admire about the Corpos is that, as I
know, absolutely—I have reliable information from Washington—they
have saved us from a simply ghastly invasion by red agents of
Moscow—Communists pretending to be decent labor-leaders!”

“Not really!” (Had the fool forgotten that his father was a
newspaperman
and not likely to be impressed by “reliable
information from Washington”?)

“Really! And to be realistic—sorry, sir, if you don’t like the
word, but to be—to be—”

“In fact, to be realistic!”

“Well, yes, then!”

(Doremus recalled such tempers in Philip from years ago. Had he
been wise, after all, to restrain himself from the domestic
pleasure of licking the brat?)

“The whole point is that
Windrip, or anyway the Corpos, are here to
stay
, Pater, and we’ve got to base our future actions not on some
desired Utopia but on what we really and truly have. And think of
what they’ve actually done! Just, for example, how they’ve removed
the advertising billboards from the highways, and ended
unemployment, and their simply stupendous feat in getting rid of
all crime!”

“Good God!”

“Pardon
me—what y’ say, Dad?”

“Nothing! Nothing! Go on!”

“But I begin to see now that the Corpo gains haven’t been just
material but spiritual.”

“Eh?”

“Really! They’ve revitalized the whole country. Formerly we had
gotten pretty sordid, just thinking about material possessions and
comforts—about electric refrigeration and television and air-conditioning. Kind of lost the sturdiness that characterized
our
pioneer ancestors. Why, ever so many young men were refusing to
take military drill, and the discipline and will power and good-fellowship that you only get from military training—Oh, pardon me!
I forgot you were a pacifist.”

Doremus grimly muttered, “Not any more!”

“Of course there must be any number of things we can’t agree on,
Dad. But after all, as a publicist you ought to listen to
the
Voice of Youth.”

“You? Youth? You’re not youth. You’re two thousand years old,
mentally. You date just about 100 B.C. in your fine new
imperialistic theories!”

“No, but you must listen, Dad! Why do you suppose I came clear up
here from Worcester just to see you?”

“God only knows!”

“I want to make myself clear. Before Windrip, we’d been lying down
in America, while Europe was throwing
off all her bonds—both
monarchy and this antiquated parliamentary-democratic-liberal
system that really means rule by professional politicians and by
egotistic ‘intellectuals.’ We’ve got to catch up to Europe again—got to expand—it’s the rule of life. A nation, like a man, has to
go ahead or go backward. Always!”

“I know, Phil. I used to write that same thing in those same
words, back before
1914!”

“Did you? Well, anyway—Got to expand! Why, what we ought to do
is to grab all of Mexico, and maybe Central America, and a good big
slice of China. Why, just on their
own
behalf we ought to do it,
misgoverned the way they are! Maybe I’m wrong but—”

“Impossible!”

“—Windrip and Sarason and Dewey Haik and Macgoblin, all those
fellows, they’re
big
—they’re making me stop and think! And
now to
come down to my errand here—”

“You think I ought to run the
Informer
according to Corpo theology!”

“Why—why yes! That was approximately what I was going to say. (I
just don’t see why you haven’t been more reasonable about this
whole thing—you with your quick mind!) After all, the time for
selfish individualism is gone. We’ve got to have mass action. One
for all and all for one—”

“Philip, would you mind telling me what the deuce you’re
really
heading toward? Cut the cackle!”

“Well, since you insist—to ‘cut the cackle,’ as you call it—not
very politely, seems to me, seeing I’ve taken the trouble to come
clear up from Worcester!—I have reliable information that you’re
going to get into mighty serious trouble if you don’t stop
opposing—or at least markedly failing to support—the
government.”

“All right. What of it? It’s
my
serious trouble!”

“That’s just the point! It isn’t! I do think that just for once
in your life you might think of Mother and the girls, instead of
always of your own selfish ‘ideas’ that you’re so proud of! In a
crisis like this, it just isn’t funny any longer to pose as a
quaint ‘liberal.’”

Doremus’s voice was like a firecracker. “Cut the
cackle, I told
you! What you after? What’s the Corpo gang to you?”

“I have been approached in regard to the very high honor of an
assistant military judgeship, but your attitude, as my father—”

“Philip, I think, I rather think, that I give you my parental curse
not so much because you are a traitor as because you have become a
stuffed shirt! Good-night.”

Holidays were invented by the devil, to coax people into the heresy
that happiness can be won by taking thought. What was planned as a
rackety day for David’s first Christmas with his grandparents was,
they saw too well, perhaps David’s last Christmas with them. Mary
had hidden her weeping, but the day before Christmas, when Shad
Ledue tramped in to demand of Doremus whether Karl Pascal had
ever
spoken to him of Communism, Mary came on Shad in the hall, stared
at him, raised her hand like a boxing cat, and said with dreadful
quietness, “You murderer! I shall kill you and kill Swan!”

For once Shad did not look amused.

To make the holiday as good an imitation of mirth as possible, they
were very noisy, but their holly, their tinsel stars on a tall pine
tree, their family devotion
in a serene old house in a little town,
was no different at heart from despairing drunkenness in the city
night. Doremus reflected that it might have been just as well for
all of them to get drunk and let themselves go, elbows on slopped
café tables, as to toil at this pretense of domestic bliss. He now
had another thing for which to hate the Corpos—for stealing the
secure affection of Christmas.

For noon dinner, Louis Rotenstern was invited, because he was a
lorn bachelor and, still more, because he was a Jew, now insecure
and snubbed and threatened in an insane dictatorship. (There is no
greater compliment to the Jews than the fact that the degree of
their unpopularity is always the scientific measure of the cruelty
and silliness of the régime under which they live, so that even a
commercial-minded
money-fondling heavily humorous Jew burgher like
Rotenstern is still a sensitive meter of barbarism.) After dinner
came Buck Titus, David’s most favorite person, bearing staggering
amounts of Woolworth tractors and fire engines and a real bow-and-arrow, and he was raucously insisting that Mrs. Candy dance with
him what he not very precisely called “the light fantastic,” when
the hammering sounded
at the door.

Aras Dilley tramped in with four men.

“Lookin’ for Rotenstern. Oh, that you, Louie? Git your coat and
come on—orders.”

“What’s the idea? What d’you want of him? What’s the charge?”
demanded Buck, still standing with his arm about Mrs. Candy’s
embarrassed waist.

“Dunno’s there be any charges. Just ordered to headquarters for
questioning. District Commissioner Reek in town.
Just astin’ few
people a few questions. Come on,
you
!”

The hilarious celebrants did not, as they had planned, go out to
Lorinda’s tavern for skiing. Next day they heard that Rotenstern
had been taken to the concentration camp at Trianon, along with
that crabbed old Tory, Raymond Pridewell, the hardware dealer.

Both imprisonments were incredible. Rotenstern had been too meek.
And if Pridewell
had not ever been meek, if he had constantly and
testily and loudly proclaimed that he had not cared for Ledue as a
hired man and now cared even less for him as a local governor, yet—why, Pridewell was a sacred institution. As well think of
dragging the brownstone Baptist Church to prison.

Later, a friend of Shad Ledue took over Rotenstern’s shop.

It
can
happen here, meditated Doremus. It
could happen to him.
How soon? Before he should be arrested, he must make amends to his
conscience by quitting the
Informer
.

Professor Victor Loveland, once a classicist of Isaiah College,
having been fired from a labor camp for incompetence in teaching
arithmetic to lumberjacks, was in town, with wife and babies, on
his way to a job clerking in his uncle’s slate quarry near Fair
Haven. He
called on Doremus and was hysterically cheerful. He
called on Clarence Little—”dropped in to visit with him,” Clarence
would have said. Now that twitchy, intense jeweler, Clarence, who
had been born on a Vermont farm and had supported his mother till
she died when he was thirty, had longed to go to college and,
especially, to study Greek. Though Loveland was his own age, in
the mid-thirties,
he looked on him as a combination of Keats and
Liddell. His greatest moment had been hearing Loveland read Homer.

Loveland was leaning on the counter. “Gone ahead with your Latin
grammar, Clarence?”

“Golly, Professor, it just doesn’t seem worth while any more. I
guess I’m kind of a weak sister, anyway, but I find that these days
it’s about all I can do to keep going.”

“Me too! And don’t
call me ‘Professor.’ I’m a timekeeper in a
slate quarry. What a life!”

They had not noticed the clumsy-looking man in plain clothes who
had just come in. Presumably he was a customer. But he grumbled,
“So you two pansies don’t like the way things go nowadays! Don’t
suppose you like the Corpos! Don’t think much of the Chief!” He
jabbed his thumb into Loveland’s ribs so painfully that Loveland
yelped, “I don’t think about him at all!”

“Oh, you don’t, eh? Well, you two fairies can come along to the
courthouse with me!”

“And who may you be?”

“Oh, just an ensign in the M.M.’s, that’s all!”

He had an automatic pistol.

Loveland was not beaten much, because he managed to keep his mouth
shut. But Little was so hysterical that they laid him on a kitchen
table and decorated his naked
back with forty slashes of a steel
ramrod. They had found that Clarence wore yellow silk underwear,
and the M.M.’s from factory and plowland laughed—particularly one
broad young inspector who was rumored to have a passionate
friendship with a battalion-leader from Nashua who was fat,
eyeglassed, and high-pitched of voice.

Little had to be helped into the truck that took Loveland and him
to the
Trianon concentration camp. One eye was closed and so
surrounded with bruised flesh that the M.M. driver said it looked
like a Spanish omelet.

The truck had an open body, but they could not escape, because the
three prisoners on this trip were chained hand to hand. They lay
on the floor of the truck. It was snowing.

The third prisoner was not much like Loveland or Little. His name
was Ben
Trippen. He had been a mill hand for Medary Cole. He
cared no more about the Greek language than did a baboon, but he
did care for his six children. He had been arrested for trying to
strike Cole and for cursing the Corpo régime when Cole had reduced
his wages from nine dollars a week (in pre-Corpo currency) to
seven-fifty.