It Can't Happen Here (42 page)

“Say! They’re watching us!” Doremus, Buck, and the priest
gathered round the black viking of a man. “Just now when I came in
I thought I heard something in the bushes, here in the yard, near
the house, and before I thought, I flashed my
torch on him, and by
golly if it wasn’t Aras Dilley, and not in uniform—and you know
how Aras loves his God—excuse me, Father—how he loves his
uniform. He was disguised! Sure! In overalls! Looked like a
jackass that’s gone under a clothes-line! Well, he’d been
rubbering at the house. Course these curtains are drawn, but I
don’t know what he saw and—”

The three large men looked to Doremus
for orders.

“We got to get all this stuff out of here! Quick! Take it and
hide it in Truman Webb’s attic. Stephen: get John Pollikop and
Mungo Kitterick and Pete Vutong on the phone—get ‘em here, quick—tell John to stop by and tell Julian to come as soon as he can.
Dan: start dismantling the press. Buck: bundle up all the
literature.” As he spoke, Doremus was wrapping type in scraps of
newspaper.
And at three next morning, before light, Pollikop was
driving toward Truman Webb’s farmhouse the entire equipment of the
New Underground printing establishment, in Buck’s old farm truck,
from which blatted, for the benefit of all ears that might be
concerned, two frightened calves.

Next day Julian ventured to invite his superior officers, Shad
Ledue and Emil Staubmeyer, to a poker session at
Buck’s. They
came, with alacrity. They found Buck, Doremus, Mungo Kitterick,
and Doc Itchitt—the last an entirely innocent participant in
certain deceptions.

They played in Buck’s parlor. But during the evening Buck
announced that anyone wanting beer instead of whisky would find it
in a tub of ice in the basement, and that anyone wishing to wash
his hands would find two bathrooms upstairs.

Shad hastily went for beer. Doc Itchitt even more hastily went to
wash his hands. Both of them were gone much longer than one would
have expected.

When the party broke up and Buck and Doremus were alone, Buck
shrieked with bucolic mirth: “I could scarcely keep a straight
face when I heard good old Shad opening the cupboards and taking a
fine long look-see for pamphlets down in the basement.
Well, Cap’n
Jessup, that about ends their suspicion of this place as a den of
traitors, I guess! God, but isn’t Shad dumb!”

This was at perhaps 3 A.M. on the morning of June thirtieth.

Doremus stayed home, writing sedition, all the afternoon and
evening of the thirtieth, hiding the sheets under pages of
newspaper in the Franklin stove in his study, so that he could
touch them off with a match
in case of a raid—a trick he had
learned from Karl Billinger’s anti-Nazi Fatherland.

This new opus was devoted to murders ordered by Commissioner
Effingham Swan.

On the first and second of July, when he sauntered uptown, he was
rather noticeably encountered by the same weighty drummer who had
picked him up in the Hotel Wessex lobby before, and who now
insisted on their having a drink together.
Doremus escaped, and
was conscious that he was being followed by an unknown young man,
flamboyant in an apricot-colored polo shirt and gray bags, whom he
recognized as having worn M.M. uniform at a parade in June. On
July third, rather panicky, Doremus drove to Truman Webb’s, taking
an hour of zigzagging to do it, and warned Truman not to permit any
more printing till he should have a release.

When Doremus went home, Sissy lightly informed him that Shad had
insisted she go out to an M.M. picnic with him on the next
afternoon, the Fourth, and that, information or no, she had
refused. She was afraid of him, surrounded by his ready playmates.

That night of the third, Doremus slept only in sick spasms. He was
reasonlessly convinced that he would be arrested before dawn. The
night was
overcast and electric and uneasy. The crickets sounded
as though they were piping under compulsion, in a rhythm of terror.
He lay throbbing to their sound. He wanted to flee—but how and
where, and how could he leave his threatened family? For the
first time in years he wished that he were sleeping beside the
unperturbable Emma, beside her small earthy hillock of body. He
laughed at himself.
What could Emma do to protect him against
Minute Men? Just scream! And what then? But he, who always slept
with his door shut, to protect his sacred aloneness, popped out of
bed to open the door, that he might have the comfort of hearing her
breathe, and the fiercer Mary stir in slumber, and Sissy’s
occasional young whimper.

He was awakened before dawn by early firecrackers. He heard the
tramping of feet. He lay taut. Then he awoke again, at seven-thirty, and was slightly angry that nothing happened.

The M.M.’s brought out their burnished helmets and all the rideable
horses in the neighborhood—some of them known as most superior
plow-horses—for the great celebration of the New Freedom on the
morning of Fourth of July. There was no post of the American
Legion in the jaunty
parade. That organization had been completely
suppressed, and a number of American Legion leaders had been shot.
Others had tactfully taken posts in the M.M. itself.

The troops, in hollow square, with the ordinary citizenry humbly
jammed in behind them and the Jessup family rather hoity-toity on
the outskirts, were addressed by Ex-Governor Isham Hubbard, a fine
ruddy old rooster who could say
“Cock-a-doodle-do” with more
profundity than any fowl since Æsop. He announced that the Chief
had extraordinary resemblances to Washington, Jefferson, and
William B. McKinley, and to Napoleon on his better days.

The trumpets blew, the M.M.’s gallantly marched off nowhere in
particular, and Doremus went home, feeling much better after his
laugh. Following noon dinner, since it was raining, he
proposed a
game of contract to Emma, Mary, and Sissy—with Mrs. Candy as
volunteer umpire.

But the thunder of the hill country disquieted him. Whenever he
was dummy, he ambled to a window. The rain ceased; the sun came
out for a false, hesitating moment, and the wet grass looked
unreal. Clouds with torn bottoms, like the hem of a ragged skirt,
were driven down the valley, cutting off the bulk
of Mount
Faithful; the sun went out as in a mammoth catastrophe; and
instantly the world was in unholy darkness, which poured into the
room.

“Why, it’s quite dark, isn’t it! Sissy, turn on the lights,” said
Emma.

The rain attacked again, in a crash, and to Doremus, looking out,
the whole knowable world seemed washed out. Through the deluge he
saw a huge car flash, the great wheels throwing
up fountains.
“Wonder what make of car that is? Must be a sixteen-cylinder
Cadillac, I guess,” reflected Doremus. The car swerved into his
own gateway, almost knocking down a gatepost, and stopped with a
jar at his porch. From it leaped five Minute Men, black waterproof
capes over their uniforms. Before he could quite get through the
reflection that he recognized none of them, they were there
in the
room. The leader, an ensign (and most certainly Doremus did not
recognize
him
) marched up to Doremus, looked at him casually, and
struck him full in the face.

Except for the one light pink of the bayonet when he had been
arrested before, except for an occasional toothache or headache, or
a smart when he had banged a fingernail, Doremus Jessup had not for
thirty years known authentic pain.
It was as incredible as it was
horrifying, this torture in his eyes and nose and crushed mouth.
He stood bent, gasping, and the Ensign again smashed his face, and
observed, “You are under arrest.”

Mary had launched herself on the Ensign, was hitting at him with a
china ash tray. Two M.M.’s dragged her off, threw her on the
couch, and one of them pinned her there. The other two guards were
bulking over the paralyzed Emma, the galvanized Sissy.

Doremus vomited suddenly and collapsed, as though he were dead
drunk.

He was conscious that the five M.M.’s were yanking the books from
the shelves and hurling them on the floor, so that the covers
split, and with their pistol butts smashing vases and lamp shades
and small occasional tables. One of them tattooed a rough M M on
the white
paneling above the fireplace with shots from his
automatic.

The Ensign said only, “Careful, Jim,” and kissed the hysterical
Sissy.

Doremus struggled to get up. An M.M. kicked him in the elbow. It
felt like death itself, and Doremus writhed on the floor. He heard
them tramping upstairs. He remembered then that his manuscript
about the murders by Provincial Commissioner Effingham Swan was
hidden in the Franklin stove in his study.

The sound of their smashing of furniture in the bedrooms on the
second floor was like that of a dozen wood-choppers gone mad.

In all his agony, Doremus struggled to get up—to set fire to the
papers in the stove before they should be found. He tried to look
at his women. He could make out Mary, tied to the couch. (When
had that ever happened?) But
his vision was too blurred, his mind
too bruised, to see anything clearly. Staggering, sometimes
creeping on his hands and knees, he did actually get past the men
in the bedrooms and up the stairs to the third floor and his study.

He was in time to see the Ensign throwing his best-beloved books
and his letter files, accumulated these twenty years, out of the
study window, to see him search the
papers in the Franklin stove,
look up with cheerful triumph and cackle, “Nice piece you’ve
written here, I guess, Jessup. Commissioner Swan will love to see
it!”

“I demand—see—Commissioner Ledue—Dist’ Commissioner Tasbrough—friends of mine,” stammered Doremus.

“Don’t know a thing about them. I’m running this show,” the Ensign
chuckled, and slapped Doremus, not very painfully, merely with a
shamefulness as great as Doremus’s when he realized that he had
been so cowardly as to appeal to Shad and Francis. He did not open
his mouth again, did not whimper nor even amuse the troopers by
vainly appealing on behalf of the women, as he was hustled down two
flights of stairs—they threw him down the lower flight and he
landed on his raw shoulder—and out to the big car.

The M.M. driver, who
had been waiting behind the wheel, already had
the engine running. The car whined away, threatening every instant
to skid. But the Doremus who had been queasy about skidding did
not notice. What could he do about it, anyway? He was helpless
between two troopers in the back seat, and his powerlessness to
make the driver slow up seemed part of all his powerlessness before
the dictator’s power
… he who had always so taken it for
granted that in his dignity and social security he was just
slightly superior to laws and judges and policemen, to all the
risks and pain of ordinary workers.

He was unloaded, like a balky mule, at the jail entrance of the
courthouse. He resolved that when he was led before Shad he would
so rebuke the scoundrel that he would not forget it. But Doremus
was
not taken into the courthouse. He was kicked toward a large,
black-painted, unlettered truck by the entrance—literally kicked,
while even in his bewildered anguish he speculated, “I wonder which
is worse?—the physical pain of being kicked, or the mental
humiliation of being turned into a slave? Hell! Don’t be
sophistical! It’s the pain in the behind that hurts most!”

He was hiked up a stepladder
into the back of the truck.

From the unlighted interior a moan, “My God, not you too,
Dormouse!” It was the voice of Buck Titus, and with him as
prisoners were Truman Webb and Dan Wilgus. Dan was in handcuffs,
because he had fought so.

The four men were too sore to talk much as they felt the truck
lurch away and they were thrown against one another. Once Doremus
spoke truthfully, “I don’t
know how to tell you how ghastly sorry I
am to have got you into this!” and once he lied, when Buck groaned,
“Did those ― ― hurt the girls?”

They must have ridden for three hours. Doremus was in such a coma
of suffering that even though his back winced as it bounced against
the rough floor and his face was all one neuralgia, he drowsed and
woke to terror, drowsed and woke, drowsed and woke
to his own
helpless wailing.

The truck stopped. The doors were opened on lights thick among
white brick buildings. He hazily saw that they were on the one-time Dartmouth campus—headquarters now of the Corpo District
Commissioner.

That commissioner was his old acquaintance Francis Tasbrough! He
would be released! They would be freed, all four!

The incredulity of his humiliation cleared away.
He came out of
his sick fear like a shipwrecked man sighting an approaching boat.

But he did not see Tasbrough. The M.M.’s, silent save for
mechanical cursing, drove him into a hallway, into a cell which had
once been part of a sedate classroom, left him with a final clout
on the head. He dropped on a wooden pallet with a straw pillow and
was instantly asleep. He was too dazed—he who usually
looked
recordingly at places—to note then or afterward what his cell was
like, except that it appeared to be filled with sulphuric fumes
from a locomotive engine.

When he came to, his face seemed frozen stiff. His coat was torn,
and foul with the smell of vomit. He felt degraded, as though he
had done something shameful.

His door was violently opened, a dirt-clotted bowl of feeble
coffee,
with a crust of bread faintly smeared with oleomargarine,
was thrust at him, and after he had given them up, nauseated, he
was marched out into the corridor, by two guards, just as he wanted
to go to the toilet. Even that he could forget in the paralysis of
fear. One guard seized him by the trim small beard and yanked it,
laughing very much. “Always did want to see whether a billygoat
whisker
would pull out or not!” snickered the guard. While he was
thus tormented, Doremus received a crack behind his ear from the
other man, and a scolding command, “Come on, goat! Want us to milk
you? You dirty little so-and-so! What you in for? You look like
a little Kike tailor, you little —“