It Can't Happen Here (40 page)

“Say, what d’you think I am? A hick, or a monk, maybe? You bet
your life I’ve got some face powder—right in the medicine cabinet—two kinds—how’s that for service? Ladies taken care of by the
day or hour!”

It hurt, but she managed something like a giggle before she went in
and shut the bedroom door, and locked it.

She tore across to the keys. She snatched up a pad of yellow
scratch-paper and
a pencil, and tried to make a rubbing of a key as
once she had made rubbings of coins, for use in the small grocery
shop of C. JESSUp & J. falck groSHERS.

The pencil blur showed only the general outline of the key; the
tiny notches which were the trick would not come clear. In panic,
she experimented with a sheet of carbon paper, then toilet paper,
dry and wet. She could not get a mold. She
pressed the key into a
prop hotel candle in a china stick by Shad’s bed. The candle was
too hard. So was the bathroom soap. And Shad was now trying the
knob of the door, remarking “Damn!” then bellowing, “Whayuh doin’
in there? Gone to sleep?”

“Be right out!” She replaced the keys, threw the yellow paper and
the carbon paper out of the window, replaced the candle and soap,
slapped her face
with a dry towel, dashed on powder as though she
were working against time at plastering a wall, and sauntered back
into the parlor. Shad looked hopeful. In panic she saw that now,
before he comfortably sat down to it and became passionate again,
was her one time to escape. She snatched up hat and coat, said
wistfully, “Another night, Shad—you must let me go now, dear!” and
fled before he could
open his red muzzle.

Round the corner in the hotel corridor she found Julian.

He was standing taut, trying to look like a watchdog, his right
hand in his coat pocket as though it was holding a revolver.

She hurled herself against his bosom and howled.

“Good God! What did he do to you? I’ll go in and kill him!”

“Oh, I didn’t get seduced. It isn’t things like that that I’m
bawling about!
It’s because I’m such a simply terribly awful spy!”

But one thing came out of it.

Her courage nerved Julian to something he had longed for and
feared: to join the M.M.’s, put on uniform, “work from within,” and
supply Doremus with information.

“I can get Leo Quinn—you know?—Dad’s a conductor on the
railroad?—used to play basketball in high school?—I can get him
to drive Dr. Olmsted for me,
and generally run errands for the N.U.
He’s got grit, and he hates the Corpos. But look, Sissy—look, Mr.
Jessup—in order to get the M.M.’s to trust me, I’ve got to pretend
to have a fierce bust-up with you and all our friends. Look!
Sissy and I will walk up Elm Street tomorrow evening, giving an
imitation of estranged lovers. How ‘bout it, Sis?”

“Fine!” glowed that incorrigible actress.

She was to be, every evening at eleven, in a birch grove just up
Pleasant Hill from the Jessups’, where they had played house as
children. Because the road curved, the rendezvous could be entered
from four or five directions. There he was to hand on to her his
reports of M.M. plans.

But when he first crept into the grove at night and she nervously
turned her pocket torch on him, she shrieked
at seeing him in M.M.
uniform, as an inspector. That blue tunic and slanting forage cap
which, in the cinema and history books, had meant youth and hope,
meant only death now… . She wondered if in 1864 it had not
meant death more than moonlight and magnolias to most women. She
sprang to him, holding him as if to protect him against his own
uniform, and in the peril and uncertainty now of their
love, Sissy
began to grow up.

The propaganda throughout the country was not all to the New
Underground; not even most of it; and though the pamphleteers for
the N.U., at home and exiled abroad, included hundreds of the most
capable professional journalists of America, they were cramped by a
certain respect for facts which never enfeebled the press agents
for Corpoism. And the Corpos had a notable staff. It included
college
presidents, some of the most renowned among the radio
announcers who aforetime had crooned their affection for mouth
washes and noninsomniac coffee, famous ex-war-correspondents, ex-governors, former vice-presidents of the American Federation of
Labor, and no less an artist than the public relations counsel of a
princely corporation of electrical-goods manufacturers.

The newspapers everywhere
might no longer be so wishily-washily
liberal as to print the opinions of non-Corpos; they might give but
little news from those old-fashioned and democratic countries,
Great Britain, France, and the Scandinavian states; might indeed
print almost no foreign news, except as regards the triumphs of
Italy in giving Ethiopia good roads, trains on time, freedom from
beggars and from men of honor, and
all the other spiritual
benefactions of Roman civilization. But, on the other hand, never
had newspapers shown so many comic strips—the most popular was a
very funny one about a preposterous New Underground crank, who wore
mortuary black with a high hat decorated with crêpe and who was
always being comically beaten up by M.M.’s. Never had there been,
even in the days when Mr. Hearst was freeing
Cuba, so many large
red headlines. Never so many dramatic drawings of murders—the
murderers were always notorious anti-Corpos. Never such a wealth
of literature, worthy its twenty-four-hour immortality, as the
articles proving, and proving by figures, that American wages were
universally higher, commodities universally lower-priced, war
budgets smaller but the army and its equipment much larger,
than
ever in history. Never such righteous polemics as the proofs that
all non-Corpos were Communists.

Almost daily, Windrip, Sarason, Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of War
Luthorne, or Vice-President Perley Beecroft humbly addressed their
Masters, the great General Public, on the radio, and congratulated
them on making a new world by their example of American solidarity—marching shoulder to shoulder
under the Grand Old Flag, comrades
in the blessings of peace and comrades in the joys of war to come.

Much-heralded movies, subsidized by the government (and could there
be any better proof of the attention paid by Dr. Macgoblin and the
other Nazi leaders to the arts than the fact that movie actors who
before the days of the Chief were receiving only fifteen hundred
gold dollars a week were now
getting five thousand?), showed the
M.M.’s driving armored motors at eighty miles an hour, piloting a
fleet of one thousand planes, and being very tender to a little
girl with a kitten.

Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, “If there
ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer
independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different
from anything in
Europe.”

For almost a year after Windrip came in, this seemed true. The
Chief was photographed playing poker, in shirtsleeves and with a
derby on the back of his head, with a newspaperman, a chauffeur,
and a pair of rugged steel-workers. Dr. Macgoblin in person led an
Elks’ brass band and dived in competition with the Atlantic City
bathing-beauties. It was reputably reported that M.M.’s apologized
to political prisoners for having to arrest them, and that the
prisoners joked amiably with the guards … at first.

All that was gone, within a year after the inauguration, and
surprised scientists discovered that whips and handcuffs hurt just
as sorely in the clear American air as in the miasmic fogs of
Prussia.

Doremus, reading the authors he had concealed in the horsehair
sofa—the gallant
Communist, Karl Billinger, the gallant anti-Communist, Tchernavin, and the gallant neutral, Lorant—began to
see something like a biology of dictatorships, all dictatorships.
The universal apprehension, the timorous denials of faith, the same
methods of arrest—sudden pounding on the door late at night, the
squad of police pushing in, the blows, the search, the obscene
oaths at the frightened women,
the third degree by young snipe of
officials, the accompanying blows and then the formal beatings,
when the prisoner is forced to count the strokes until he faints,
the leprous beds and the sour stew, guards jokingly shooting round
and round a prisoner who believes he is being executed, the waiting
in solitude to know what will happen, till men go mad and hang
themselves—Thus had things gone
in Germany, exactly thus in Soviet Russia, in
Italy and Hungary and Poland, Spain and Cuba and Japan and China.
Not very different had it been under the blessings of liberty and
fraternity in the French Revolution. All dictators followed the
same routine of torture, as if they had all read the same manual of
sadistic etiquette. And now, in the humorous, friendly, happy-go-lucky land of Mark
Twain, Doremus saw the homicidal maniacs having
just as good a time as they had had in central Europe.

America followed, too, the same ingenious finances as Europe.
Windrip had promised to make everybody richer, and had contrived to
make everybody, except for a few hundred bankers and industrialists
and soldiers, much poorer. He needed no higher mathematicians to
produce his financial statements:
any ordinary press agent could do
them. To show a 100 per cent economy in military expenditures,
while increasing the establishment 700 per cent, it had been
necessary only to charge up all expenditures for the Minute Men to
non-military departments, so that their training in the art of
bayonet-sticking was debited to the Department of Education. To
show an increase in average wages one did
tricks with “categories
of labor” and “required minimum wages,” and forgot to state how
many workers ever did become entitled to the “minimum,” and how
much was charged as wages, on the books, for food and shelter for
the millions in the labor camps.

It all made dazzling reading. There had never been more elegant
and romantic fiction.

Even loyal Corpos began to wonder why the armed forces,
army and
M.M.’s together, were being so increased. Was a frightened Windrip
getting ready to defend himself against a rising of the whole
nation? Did he plan to attack all of North and South America and
make himself an emperor? Or both? In any case, the forces were so
swollen that even with its despotic power of taxation, the Corpo
government never had enough. They began to force exports,
to
practice the “dumping” of wheat, corn, timber, copper, oil,
machinery. They increased production, forced it by fines and
threats, then stripped the farmer of all he had, for export at
depreciated prices. But at home the prices were not depreciated
but increased, so that the more we exported, the less the
industrial worker in America had to eat. And really zealous County
Commissioners took
from the farmer (after the patriotic manner of
many Mid-Western counties in 1918) even his seed grain, so that he
could grow no more, and on the very acres where once he had raised
superfluous wheat he now starved for bread. And while he was
starving, the Commissioners continued to try to make him pay for
the Corpo bonds which he had been made to buy on the instalment
plan.

But still, when he
did finally starve to death, none of these
things worried him.

There were bread lines now in Fort Beulah, once or twice a week.

The hardest phenomenon of dictatorship for a Doremus to understand,
even when he saw it daily in his own street, was the steady
diminution of gayety among the people.

America, like England and Scotland, had never really been a gay
nation. Rather it had been heavily
and noisily jocular, with a
substratum of worry and insecurity, in the image of its patron
saint, Lincoln of the rollicking stories and the tragic heart. But
at least there had been hearty greetings, man to man; there had
been clamorous jazz for dancing, and the lively, slangy catcalls of
young people, and the nervous blatting of tremendous traffic.

All that false cheerfulness lessened now,
day by day.

The Corpos found nothing more convenient to milk than public
pleasures. After the bread had molded, the circuses were closed.
There were taxes or increased taxes on motorcars, movies, theaters,
dances, and ice-cream sodas. There was a tax on playing a
phonograph or radio in any restaurant. Lee Sarason, himself a
bachelor, conceived of super-taxing bachelors and spinsters, and
contrariwise
of taxing all weddings at which more than five persons
were present.

Even the most reckless youngsters went less and less to public
entertainments, because no one not ostentatiously in uniform cared
to be noticed, these days. It was impossible to sit in a public
place without wondering which spies were watching you. So all the
world stayed home—and jumped anxiously at every passing footstep,
every telephone ring, every tap of an ivy sprig on the window.

The score of people definitely pledged to the New Underground were
the only persons to whom Doremus dared talk about anything more
incriminating than whether it was likely to rain, though he had
been the friendliest gossip in town. Always it had taken ten
minutes longer than was humanly possible for him to walk to the
Informer
office,
because he stopped on every corner to ask after
someone’s sick wife, politics, potato crop, opinions about Deism,
or luck at fishing.

As he read of rebels against the régime who worked in Rome, in
Berlin, he envied them. They had thousands of government agents,
unknown by sight and thus the more dangerous, to watch them; but
also they had thousands of comrades from whom to seek encouragement,
exciting personal tattle, shop talk, and the assurance that they
were not altogether idiotic to risk their lives for a mistress so
ungrateful as Revolution. Those secret flats in great cities—perhaps some of them really were filled with the rosy glow they had
in fiction. But the Fort Beulahs, anywhere in the world, were so
isolated, the conspirators so uninspiringly familiar one to another,
that only by inexplicable faith could one go on.