It Can't Happen Here (45 page)

The Captain was courtly:

“Mr. Jessup, we have information that you were connected with
Squad-Leader Julian Falck’s treachery. He has, uh, well, to be
frank, he’s broken down and confessed. Now you yourself are in no
danger, no danger whatever, of further punishment, if you will just
help us. But we really must make a warning of young Mr. Falck,
and
so if you will tell us all you know about the boy’s shocking
infidelity to the colors, we shall hold it in your favor. How
would you like to have a nice bedroom to sleep in, all by
yourself?”

A quarter hour later Doremus was still swearing that he knew
nothing whatever of any “subversive activities” on the part of
Julian.

Captain Cowlick said, rather testily, “Well, since you refuse to
respond to our generosity, I must leave you to Ensign Stoyt, I’m
afraid… . Be gentle with him, Ensign.”

“Yessr,” said the Ensign.

The Captain wearily trotted out of the room and Stoyt did indeed
speak with gentleness, which was a surprise to Doremus, because in
the room were two of the guards to whom Stoyt liked to show off:

“Jessup, you’re a man of intelligence. No use your trying to
protect
this boy, Falck, because we’ve got enough on him to execute
him anyway. So it won’t be hurting him any if you give us a few
more details about his treason. And you’ll be doing yourself a
good turn.”

Doremus said nothing.

“Going to talk?”

Doremus shook his head.

“All right, then… . Tillett!”

“Yessr.”

“Bring in the guy that squealed on Jessup!”

Doremus expected the guard to fetch Julian,
but it was Julian’s
grandfather who wavered into the room. In the camp quadrangle
Doremus had often seen him trying to preserve the dignity of his
frock coat by rubbing at the spots with a wet rag, but in the cells
there were no hooks for clothes, and the priestly garment—Mr.
Falck was a poor man and it had not been very expensive at best—was grotesquely wrinkled now. He was blinking with sleepiness,
and
his silver hair was a hurrah’s nest.

Stoyt (he was thirty or so) said cheerfully to the two elders,
“Well, now, you boys better stop being naughty and try to get some
sense into your mildewed old brains, and then we can all have some
decent sleep. Why don’t you two try to be honest, now that you’ve
each confessed that the other was a traitor?”

“What?” marveled Doremus.

“Sure! Old Falck
here says you carried his grandson’s pieces to
the Vermont Vigilance. Come on, now, if you’ll tell us who
published that rag—”

“I have confessed nothing. I have nothing to confess,” said Mr.
Falck.

Stoyt screamed, “Will you shut up? You old hypocrite!” Stoyt
knocked him to the floor, and as Mr. Falck weaved dizzily on hands
and knees, kicked him in the side with a heavy boot. The other
two
guards were holding back the sputtering Doremus. Stoyt jeered at
Mr. Falck, “Well, you old bastard, you’re on your knees, so let’s
hear you pray!”

“I shall!”

In agony Mr. Falck raised his head, dust-smeared from the floor,
straightened his shoulders, held up trembling hands, and with such
sweetness in his voice as Doremus had once heard in it when men
were human, he cried, “Father, Thou
hast forgiven so long! Forgive
them not but curse them, for they know what they do!” He tumbled
forward, and Doremus knew that he would never hear that voice
again.

In
La Voix littéraire
of Paris, the celebrated and genial professor
of belles-lettres, Guillaume Semit, wrote with his accustomed
sympathy:

I do not pretend to any knowledge of politics, and probably what I
saw on my fourth journey
to the States United this summer of 1938
was mostly on the surface and cannot be considered a profound
analysis of the effects of Corpoism, but I assure you that I have
never before seen that nation so great, our young and gigantic
cousin in the West, in such bounding health and good spirits. I
leave it to my economic confrères to explain such dull phenomena as
wage-scales, and tell only what
I saw, which is that the
innumerable parades and vast athletic conferences of the Minute Men
and the lads and lassies of the Corpo Youth Movement exhibited such
rosy, contented faces, such undeviating enthusiasm for their hero,
the Chief, M. Windrip, that involuntarily I exclaimed, “Here is a
whole nation dipped in the River of Youth.”

Everywhere in the country was such feverish rebuilding of
public
edifices and apartment houses for the poor as has never hitherto
been known. In Washington, my old colleague, M. le Secretary
Macgoblin, was so good as to cry, in that virile yet cultivated
manner of his which is so well known, “Our enemies maintain that
our labor camps are virtual slavery. Come, my old one! You shall
see for yourself.” He conducted me by one of the marvelously
speedy
American automobiles to such a camp, near Washington, and
having the workers assembled, he put to them frankly: “Are you low
in the heart?” As one man they chorused, “No,” with a spirit like
our own brave soldiers on the ramparts of Verdun.

During the full hour we spent there, I was permitted to roam at
will, asking such questions as I cared to, through the offices of
the interpreter kindly
furnished by His Excellency, M. le Dr.
Macgoblin, and every worker whom I thus approached assured me that
never has he been so well fed, so tenderly treated, and so assisted
to find an almost poetic interest in his chosen work as in this
labor camp—this scientific cooperation for the well-being of all.

With a certain temerity I ventured to demand of M. Macgoblin what
truth was there in the reports
so shamefully circulated
(especially, alas, in our beloved France) that in the concentration
camps the opponents of Corpoism are ill fed and harshly treated.
M. Macgoblin explained to me that there are no such things as
“concentration camps,” if that term is to carry any penological
significance. They are, actually, schools, in which adults who
have unfortunately been misled by the glib prophets
of that milk-and-water religion, “Liberalism,” are reconditioned to comprehend
the new day of authoritative economic control. In such camps, he
assured me, there are actually no guards, but only patient
teachers, and men who were once utterly uncomprehending of
Corpoism, and therefore opposed to it, are now daily going forth as
the most enthusiastic disciples of the Chief.

Alas that France and
Great Britain should still be thrashing about
in the slough of Parliamentarianism and so-called Democracy, daily
sinking deeper into debt and paralysis of industry, because of the
cowardice and traditionalism of our Liberal leaders, feeble and
outmoded men who are afraid to plump for either Fascism or
Communism; who dare not—or who are too power hungry—to cast off
outmoded techniques, like the
Germans, Americans, Italians, Turks,
and other really courageous peoples, and place the sane and
scientific control of the all-powerful Totalitarian State in the
hands of Men of Resolution!

In October, John Pollikop, arrested on suspicion of having just
possibly helped a refugee to escape, arrived in the Trianon camp,
and the first words between him and his friend Karl Pascal were no
inquiries
about health, but a derisive interchange, as though they
were continuing a conversation broken only half an hour before:

“Well, you old Bolshevik, I told you so! If you Communists had
joined with me and Norman Thomas to back Frank Roosevelt, we
wouldn’t be here now!”

“Rats! Why, it’s Thomas and Roosevelt that started Fascism! I ask
you! Now shut up, John, and listen: What was the New Deal
but
pure Fascism? Whadthey do to the worker? Look here! No, wait
now, listen—”

Doremus felt at home again, and comforted—though he did also feel
that Foolish probably had more constructive economic wisdom than
John Pollikop, Karl Pascal, Herbert Hoover, Buzz Windrip, Lee
Sarason, and himself put together; or if not, Foolish had the sense
to conceal his lack of wisdom by pretending that he
could not speak
English.

Shad Ledue, back in his hotel suite, reflected that he was getting
a dirty deal. He had been responsible for sending more traitors to
concentration camps than any other county commissioner in the
province, yet he had not been promoted.

It was late; he was just back from a dinner given by Francis
Tasbrough in honor of Provincial Commissioner Swan and a board
consisting
of Judge Philip Jessup, Director of Education Owen J.
Peaseley, and Brigadier Kippersly, who were investigating the
ability of Vermont to pay more taxes.

Shad felt discontented. All those damned snobs trying to show off!
Talking at dinner about this bum show in New York—this first Corpo
revue,
Callin’ Stalin
, written by Lee Sarason and Hector Macgoblin.
How those nuts had put on the agony about
“Corpo art,” and “drama
freed from Jewish suggestiveness” and “the pure line of Anglo-Saxon
sculpture” and even, by God, about “Corporate physics”! Simply
trying to show off! And they had paid no attention to Shad when he
had told his funny story about the stuck-up preacher in Fort
Beulah, one Falck, who had been so jealous because the M.M.’s
drilled on Sunday morning instead of going to his
gospel shop that
he had tried to get his grandson to make up lies about the M.M.’s,
and whom Shad had amusingly arrested right in his own church! Not
paid one bit of attention to him, even though he had carefully read
all through the Chief’s
Zero Hour
so he could quote it, and though
he had been careful to be refined in his table manners and to stick
out his little finger when he drank from a
glass.

He was lonely.

The fellows he had once best known, in pool room and barber shop,
seemed frightened of him, now, and the dirty snobs like Tasbrough
still ignored him.

He was lonely for Sissy Jessup.

Since her dad had been sent to Trianon, Shad didn’t seem able to
get her to come around to his rooms, even though he was the County
Commissioner and she was nothing now but the busted daughter
of a
criminal.

And he was crazy about her. Why, he’d be almost willing to marry
her, if he couldn’t get her any other way! But when he had hinted
as much—or almost as much—she had just laughed at him, the dirty
little snob!

He had thought, when he was a hired man, that there was a lot more
fun in being rich and famous. He didn’t feel one bit different
than he had then! Funny!

Dr. Lionel Adams, B.A. of Yale, Ph.D. of Chicago, Negro, had been a
journalist, American consul in Africa and, at the time of Berzelius
Windrip’s election, professor of anthropology in Howard University.
As with all his colleagues, his professorship was taken over by a
most worthy and needy white man, whose training in anthropology had
been as photographer on one expedition to Yucatan. In
the
dissension between the Booker Washington school of Negroes who
counseled patience in the new subjection of the Negroes to slavery,
and the radicals who demanded that they join the Communists and
struggle for the economic freedom of all, white or black, Professor
Adams took the mild, Fabian former position.

He went over the country preaching to his people that they must be
“realistic,” and
make what future they could; not in some Utopian
fantasy but on the inescapable basis of the ban against them.

Near Burlington, Vermont, there is a small colony of Negroes, truck
farmers, gardeners, houseworkers, mostly descended from slaves who,
before the Civil War, escaped to Canada by the “Underground
Railway” conducted by such zealots as Truman Webb’s grandfather,
but who sufficiently loved
the land of their forcible adoption to
return to America after the war. From the colony had gone to
the great cities young colored people who (before the Corpo
emancipation) had been nurses, doctors, merchants, officials.

This colony Professor Adams addressed, bidding the young colored
rebels to seek improvement within their own souls rather than in
mere social superiority.

As he was in person
unknown to this Burlington colony, Captain
Oscar Ledue, nicknamed “Shad,” was summoned to censor the lecture.
He sat hulked down in a chair at the back of the hall. Aside from
addresses by M.M. officers, and moral inspiration by his teachers
in grammar school, it was the first lecture he had ever heard in
his life, and he didn’t think much of it. He was irritated that
this stuck-up nigger didn’t
spiel like the characters of Octavus
Roy Cohen, one of Shad’s favorite authors, but had the nerve to try
to sling English just as good as Shad himself. It was more
irritating that the loud-mouthed pup should look so much like a
bronze statue, and finally, it was simply more than a guy could
stand that the big bum should be wearing a Tuxedo!

So when Adams, as he called himself, claimed that there
were good
poets and teachers and even doctors and engineers among the
niggers, which was plainly an effort to incite folks to rebellion
against the government, Shad signaled his squad and arrested Adams
in the midst of his lecture, addressing him, “You God-damn dirty,
ignorant, stinking nigger! I’m going to shut your big mouth for
you, for keeps!”

Dr. Adams was taken to the Trianon concentration
camp. Ensign
Stoyt thought it would be a good joke on those fresh beggars
(almost Communists, you might say) Jessup and Pascal to lodge the
nigger right in the same cell with them. But they actually seemed
to like Adams; talked to him as though he were white and educated!
So Stoyt placed him in a solitary cell, where he could think over
his crime in having bitten the hand that had fed him.

The greatest single shock that ever came to the Trianon camp was in
November, 1938, when there appeared among them, as the newest
prisoner, Shad Ledue.