It Can't Happen Here (41 page)

Now that Lorinda was gone, there certainly was nothing very
diverting in sneaking round corners, trying to look like somebody
else, merely to meet Buck and Dan Wilgus and that good woman,
Sissy!

Buck and he and the rest—they were such amateurs. They needed the
guidance of veteran agitators like Mr. Ailey and Mr. Bailey and Mr.
Cailey.

Their
feeble pamphlets, their smearily printed newspaper, seemed
futile against the enormous blare of Corpo propaganda. It seemed
worse than futile, it seemed insane, to risk martyrdom in a world
where Fascists persecuted Communists, Communists persecuted Social-Democrats, Social-Democrats persecuted everybody who would stand
for it; where “Aryans” who looked like Jews persecuted Jews who
looked like
Aryans and Jews persecuted their debtors; where every
statesman and clergyman praised Peace and brightly asserted that
the only way to get Peace was to get ready for War.

What conceivable reason could one have for seeking after
righteousness in a world which so hated righteousness? Why do
anything except eat and read and make love and provide for sleep
that should be secure against disturbance
by armed policemen?

He never did find any particularly good reason. He simply went on.

In June, when the Fort Beulah cell of the New Underground had been
carrying on for some three months, Mr. Francis Tasbrough, the
golden quarryman, called on his neighbor, Doremus.

“How are you, Frank?”

“Fine, Remus. How’s the old carping critic?”

“Fine, Frank. Still carping. Fine carping weather, at
that. Have
a cigar?”

“Thanks. Got a match? Thanks. Saw Sissy yesterday. She looks
fine.”

“Yes, she’s fine. I saw Malcolm driving by yesterday. How did he
like it in the Provincial University, at New York?”

“Oh, fine—fine. He says the athletics are grand. They’re getting
Primo Carnera over to coach in tennis next year—I think it’s
Carnera—I think it’s tennis—but anyway, the athletics
are fine
there, Malcolm says. Say, uh, Remus, there’s something I been
meaning to ask you. I, uh—The fact is—I want you to be sure and
not repeat this to anybody. I know you can be trusted with a
secret, even if you are a newspaperman—or used to be, I mean, but—The fact is (and this is inside stuff; official), there’s going to
be some governmental promotions all along the line—this is
confidential,
and it comes to me straight from the Provincial
Commissioner, Colonel Haik. Luthorne is finished as Secretary of
War—he’s a nice fellow, but he hasn’t got as much publicity for
the Corpos out of his office as the Chief expected him to. Haik is
to have his job, and also take over the position of High Marshal of
the Minute Men from Lee Sarason—I suppose Sarason has too much to
do. Well then,
John Sullivan Reek is slated to be Provincial
Commissioner; that leaves the office of District Commissioner for
Vermont-New Hampshire empty, and I’m one of the people being
seriously considered. I’ve done a lot of speaking for the Corpos,
and I know Dewey Haik very well—I was able to advise him about
erecting public buildings. Of course there’s none of the County
Commissioners around here that
measure up to a district
commissionership—not even Dr. Staubmeyer—certainly not Shad
Ledue. Now if you could see your way clear to throw in with me,
your influence would help—”

“Good heavens, Frank, the worst thing you could have happen, if you
want the job, is to have me favor you! The Corpos don’t like me.
Oh, of course they know I’m loyal, not one of these dirty, sneaking
anti-Corpos, but
I never made enough noise in the paper to please
‘em.”

“That’s just it, Remus! I’ve got a really striking idea. Even if
they don’t like you, the Corpos respect you, and they know how long
you’ve been important in the State. We’d all be greatly pleased if
you came out and joined us. Now just suppose you did so and let
people know that it was my influence that converted you to
Corpoism. That
might give me quite a leg-up. And between old
friends like us, Remus, I can tell you that this job of District
Commissioner would be useful to me in the quarry business, aside
from the social advantages. And if I got the position, I can
promise you that I’d either get the
Informer
taken away from
Staubmeyer and that dirty little stinker, Itchitt, and given back
to you to run absolutely as you
pleased—providing, of course, you
had the sense to keep from criticizing the Chief and the State.
Or, if you’d rather, I think I could probably wangle a job for you
as military judge (they don’t necessarily have to be lawyers) or
maybe President Peaseley’s job as District Director of Education—you’d have a lot of fun out of that!—awfully amusing the way all
the teachers kiss the Director’s foot!
Come on, old man! Think of
all the fun we used to have in the old days! Come to your senses
and face the inevitable and join us and fix up some good publicity
for me. How about it—huh, huh?”

Doremus reflected that the worst trial of a revolutionary
propagandist was not risking his life, but having to be civil to
people like Future-Commissioner Tasbrough.

He supposed that his voice was polite
as he muttered, “Afraid I’m
too old to try it, Frank,” but apparently Tasbrough was offended.
He sprang up and tramped away grumbling, “Oh, very well then!”

“And I didn’t give him a chance to say anything about being
realistic or breaking eggs to make an omelet,” regretted Doremus.

The next day Malcolm Tasbrough, meeting Sissy on the street, made
his beefy most of cutting her. At the time the
Jessups thought
that was very amusing. They thought the occasion less amusing when
Malcolm chased little David out of the Tasbrough apple orchard,
which he had been wont to use as the Great Western Forest where at
any time one was rather more than likely to meet Kit Carson, Robin
Hood, and Colonel Lindbergh hunting together.

Having only Frank’s word for it, Doremus could do no more than hint
in Vermont Vigilance that Colonel Dewey Haik was to be made
Secretary of War, and give Haik’s actual military record, which
included the facts that as a first lieutenant in France in 1918, he
had been under fire for less than fifteen minutes, and that his one
real triumph had been commanding state militia during a strike in
Oregon, when eleven strikers had been shot down, five of them in
the back.

Then Doremus forgot Tasbrough completely and happily.

But worse than having to be civil to the fatuous Mr. Tasbrough was
keeping his mouth shut when, toward the end of June, a newspaperman
at Battington, Vermont, was suddenly arrested as editor of Vermont
Vigilance and author of all the pamphlets by Doremus and Lorinda.
He went to concentration camp. Buck and Dan Wilgus and Sissy
prevented Doremus from confessing, and from even going to call
on
the victim, and when, with Lorinda no longer there as confidante,
Doremus tried to explain it all to Emma, she said, Wasn’t it lucky
that the government had blamed somebody else!

Emma had worked out the theory that the N.U. activity was some sort
of a naughty game which kept her boy, Doremus, busy after his
retirement. He was mildly nagging the Corpos. She wasn’t sure
that it was really
nice to nag the legal authorities, but still,
for a little fellow, her Doremus had always been surprisingly
spunky—just like (she often confided to Sissy) a spunky little
Scotch terrier she had owned when she was a girl—Mr. McNabbit its
name had been, a little Scotch terrier, but my! so spunky he acted
like he was a regular lion!

She was rather glad that Lorinda was gone, though she liked Lorinda
and worried about how well she might do with a tea room in a new
town, a town where she had never lived. But she just couldn’t help
feeling (she confided not only to Sissy but to Mary and Buck) that
Lorinda, with all her wild crazy ideas about women’s rights, and
workmen being just as good as their employers, had a bad influence
on Doremus’s tendency to show off and shock people. (She mildly
wondered why Buck and Sissy snorted so. She hadn’t meant to say
anything particularly funny!)

For too many years she had been used to Doremus’s irregular routine
to have her sleep disturbed by his returning from Buck’s at the
improper time to which she referred as “at all hours,” but she did
wish he would be “more on time for his meals,” and she gave up the
question of why, these days, he seemed
to like to associate with
Ordinary People like John Pollikop, Dan Wilgus, Daniel Babcock, and
Pete Vutong—my! some people said Pete couldn’t even read and
write, and Doremus so educated and all! Why didn’t he see more of
lovely people like Frank Tasbrough and Professor Staubmeyer and Mr.
R. C. Crowley and this new friend of his, the Hon. John Sullivan
Reek?

Why couldn’t he keep out of politics?
She’d always
said
they were
no occupation for a gentleman!

Like David, now ten years old (and like twenty or thirty million
other Americans, from one to a hundred, but all of the same mental
age), Emma thought the marching M.M.’s were a very fine show
indeed, so much like movies of the Civil War, really quite
educational; and while of course if Doremus didn’t care for
President Windrip, she
was opposed to him also, yet didn’t Mr.
Windrip speak beautifully about pure language, church attendance,
low taxation, and the American flag?

The realists, the makers of omelets, did climb, as Tasbrough had
predicted. Colonel Dewey Haik, Commissioner of the Northeastern
Province, became Secretary of War and High Marshal of M.M.’s, while
the former secretary, Colonel Luthorne, retired to Kansas
and the
real-estate business and was well spoken of by all business men for
being thus willing to give up the grandeur of Washington for duty
toward practical affairs and his family, who were throughout the
press depicted as having frequently missed him. It was rumored in
N.U. cells that Haik might go higher even than Secretary of War;
that Windrip was worried by the forced growth of a certain
effeminacy in Lee Sarason under the arc light of glory.

Francis Tasbrough was elevated to District Commissionership at
Hanover. But Mr. Sullivan Reek did not in series go on to be
Provincial Commissioner. It was said that he had too many friends
among just the old-line politicians whose jobs the Corpos were so
enthusiastically taking. No, the new Provincial Commissioner,
viceroy and general,
was Military Judge Effingham Swan, the one man
whom Mary Jessup Greenhill hated more than she did Shad Ledue.

Swan was a splendid commissioner. Within three days after taking
office, he had John Sullivan Reek and seven assistant district
commissioners arrested, tried, and imprisoned, all within twenty-four hours, and an eighty-year-old woman, mother of a New
Underground agent but not otherwise
accused of wickedness, penned
in a concentration camp for the more desperate traitors. It was in
a disused quarry which was always a foot deep in water. After he
had sentenced her, Swan was said to have bowed to her most
courteously.

The New Underground sent out warning, from headquarters in
Montreal, for a general tightening up of precautions against being
caught distributing propaganda.
Agents were disappearing rather
alarmingly.

Buck scoffed, but Doremus was nervous. He noticed that the same
strange man, ostensibly a drummer, a large man with unpleasant
eyes, had twice got into conversation with him in the Hotel Wessex
lobby, and too obviously hinted that he was anti-Corpo and would
love to have Doremus say something nasty about the Chief and the
M.M.’s.

Doremus became cautious
about going out to Buck’s. He parked his
car in half-a-dozen different wood-roads and crept afoot to the
secret basement.

On the evening of the twenty-eighth of June, 1938, he had a notion
that he was being followed, so closely did a car with red-tinted
headlights, anxiously watched in his rear-view mirror, stick behind
him as he took the Keezmet highway down to Buck’s. He turned up a
side
road, down another. The spy car followed. He stopped, in a
driveway on the left-hand side of the road, and angrily stepped
out, in time to see the other car pass, with a man who looked like
Shad Ledue driving. He swung round then and, without concealment,
bolted for Buck’s.

In the basement, Buck was contentedly tying up bundles of the
Vigilance, while Father Perefixe, in his shirtsleeves,
vest open
and black dickey swinging beneath his reversed collar, sat at a
plain pine table, writing a warning to New England Catholics that
though the Corpos had, unlike the Nazis in Germany, been shrewd
enough to flatter prelates, they had lowered the wages of French-Canadian Catholic mill hands and imprisoned their leaders just as
severely as in the case of the avowedly wicked Protestants.

Perefixe smiled up at Doremus, stretched, lighted a pipe, and
chuckled, “As a great ecclesiast, Doremus, is it your opinion that
I shall be committing a venial or a mortal sin by publishing this
little masterpiece—the work of my favorite author—without the
Bishop’s imprimatur?”

“Stephen! Buck! I think they’re on to us! Maybe we’ve got to
fold up already and get the press and type out of here!”
He told
of being shadowed. He telephoned to Julian, at M.M. headquarters,
and (since there were too many French-Canadian inspectors about for
him to dare to use his brand of French) he telephoned in the fine
new German he had been learning by translation:

“Denks du ihr Freunds dere haben a Idee die letzt Tag von vot ve
mach here?”

And the college-bred Julian had so much international culture
as to
be able to answer: “Ja, Ich mein ihr vos sachen morning free.
Look owid!”

How could they move? Where?

Dan Wilgus arrived, in panic, an hour after.