It Can't Happen Here (43 page)

“Him?” the other scoffed. “Naw! He’s some kind of a half-eared
hick newspaper editor—they’ll sure
shoot him—sedition—but I hope
they’ll beat hell out of him first for being such a bum editor.”

“Him? An editor? Say! Listen! I got a swell idea. Hey!
Fellas!” Four or five other M.M.’s, half dressed, looked out from
a room down the hall. “This-here is a writing-fellow! I’m going
to make him show us how he writes! Lookit!”

The guard dashed down the corridor to a door with the sign “Gents”
hung out in front of it, came back with paper, not clean, threw it
in front of Doremus, and yammered, “Come on, boss. Show us how you
write your pieces! Come on, write us a piece—with your nose!” He
was iron-strong. He pressed Doremus’s nose down against the filthy
paper and held it there, while his mates giggled. They were
interrupted by an officer, commanding, though leniently, “Come on,
boys, cut out the monkeyshines and take this ― to the bull pen.
Trial this morning.”

Doremus was led to a dirty room in which half-a-dozen prisoners
were waiting. One of them was Buck Titus. Over one eye Buck had a
slatternly bandage which had so loosened as to show that his
forehead was cut to the bone. Buck managed to wink jovially.
Doremus tried, vainly, to keep from sobbing.

He waited
an hour, standing, arms tight at his side, at the demands
of an ugly-faced guard, snapping a dog whip with which he twice
slashed Doremus when his hands fell lax.

Buck was led into the trial room just before him. The door was
closed. Doremus heard Buck cry out terribly, as though he had been
wounded to death. The cry faded into a choked gasping. When Buck
was led out of the inner room, his
face was as dirty and as pale as
his bandage, over which blood was now creeping. The man at the
door of the inner room jerked his thumb sharply at Doremus, and
snarled, “You’re
next
!”

Now he would face Tasbrough!

But in the small room into which he had been taken—and he was
confused, because somehow he had expected a large courtroom—there
was only the Ensign who had arrested him yesterday,
sitting at a
table, running through papers, while a stolid M.M. stood on either
side of him, rigid, hand on pistol holster.

The Ensign kept him waiting, then snapped with disheartening
suddenness, “Your name!”

“You know it!”

The two guards beside Doremus each hit him.

“Your name?”

“Doremus Jessup.”

“You’re a Communist!”

“No I’m not!”

“Twenty-five lashes—and the oil.”

Not believing, not
understanding, Doremus was rushed across the
room, into a cellar beyond. A long wooden table there was dark
with dry blood, stank with dry blood. The guards seized Doremus,
sharply jerked his head back, pried open his jaws, and poured in a
quart of castor oil. They tore off his garments above the belt,
flung them on the sticky floor. They threw him face downward on
the long table and began to
lash him with a one-piece steel fishing
rod. Each stroke cut into the flesh of his back, and they beat him
slowly, relishing it, to keep him from fainting too quickly. But
he was unconscious when, to the guards’ great diversion, the castor
oil took effect. Indeed he did not know it till he found himself
limp on a messy piece of gunnysacking on the floor of his cell.

They awakened him twice
during the night to demand, “You’re a
Communist, heh? You better admit it! We’re going to beat the
living tar out of you till you do!”

Though he was sicker than he had ever been in his life, yet he was
also angrier; too angry to admit anything whatever, even to save
his wrecked life. He simply snarled “No.” But on the third
beating he savagely wondered if “No” was now a truthful answer.
After
each questioning he was pounded again with fists, but not
lashed with the steel rod, because the headquarters doctor had
forbidden it.

He was a sporty-looking young doctor in plus-fours. He yawned at
the guards, in the blood-reeking cellar, “Better cut out the lashes
or this ― will pass out on you.”

Doremus raised his head from the table to gasp, “You call yourself
a doctor, and you associate
with these murderers?”

“Oh, shut up, you little ―! Dirty traitors like you deserve to
be beaten to death—and maybe you will be, but I think the boys
ought to save you for the trial!” The doctor showed his scientific
mettle by twisting Doremus’s ear till it felt as though it were
torn off, chuckled, “Go to it, boys,” and ambled away, ostentatiously
humming.

For three nights he was questioned
and lashed—once, late at night,
by guards who complained of the inhuman callousness of their
officers in making them work so late. They amused themselves by
using an old harness strap, with a buckle on it, to beat him.

He almost broke down when the examining Ensign declared that Buck
Titus had confessed their illegal propaganda, and narrated so many
details of the work that Doremus could almost
have believed in the
confession. He did not listen. He told himself, “No! Buck would
die before he’d confess anything. It’s all Aras Dilley’s spying.”

The Ensign cooed, “Now if you’ll just have the sense to copy your
friend Titus and tell us who’s in the conspiracy besides him and
you and Wilgus and Webb, we’ll let you go. We know, all right—oh,
we know the whole plot!—but we just want to
find out whether
you’ve finally come to your senses and been converted, my little
friend. Now who else was there? Just give us their names. We’ll
let you go. Or would you like the castor oil and the whip again?”

Doremus did not answer.

“Ten lashes,” said the Ensign.

He was chased out for half an hour’s walk on the campus every
afternoon—probably because he would have preferred lying on
his
hard cot, trying to keep still enough so that his heart would stop
its deathly hammering. Half a hundred prisoners marched there,
round and round senselessly. He passed Buck Titus. To salute him
would have meant a blow from the guards. They greeted each other
with quick eyelids, and when he saw those untroubled spaniel eyes,
Doremus knew that Buck had not squealed.

And in the exercise
yard he saw Dan Wilgus, but Dan was not walking
free; he was led out from the torture rooms by guards, and with his
crushed nose, his flattened ear, he looked as though he had been
pounded by a prizefighter. He seemed partly paralyzed. Doremus
tried to get information about Dan from a guard in his cell
corridor. The guard—a handsome, clear-cheeked young man, noted in
a valley of the White Mountains
as a local beau, and very kind to
his mother—laughed, “Oh, your friend Wilgus? That chump thinks he
can lick his weight in wildcats. I hear he always tries to soak
the guards. They’ll take that out of him, all right!”

Doremus thought, that night—he could not be sure, but he thought
he heard Dan wailing, half the night. Next morning he was told
that Dan, who had always been so disgusted when
he had had to set
up the news of a weakling’s suicide, had hanged himself in his
cell.

Then, unexpectedly, Doremus was taken into a room, this time
reasonably large, a former English classroom turned into a court,
for his trial.

But it was not District Commissioner Francis Tasbrough who was on
the bench, nor any Military Judge, but no less a Protector of the
People than the great new Provincial
Commissioner, Effingham Swan.

Swan was looking at Doremus’s article about him as Doremus was led
up to stand before the bench. He spoke—and this harsh, tired-looking man was no longer the airy Rhodes Scholar who had sported
with Doremus once like a boy pulling the wings off flies.

“Jessup, do you plead guilty to seditious activities?”

“Why—” Doremus looked helplessly about for something in
the way
of legal counsel.

“Commissioner Tasbrough!” called Swan.

So at last Doremus did see his boyhood playmate.

Tasbrough did nothing so commendable as to avoid Doremus’s eyes.
Indeed he looked at Doremus directly, and most affably, as he spoke
his piece:

“Your Excellency, it gives me great pain to have to expose this
man, Jessup, whom I have known all my life, and tried to help, but
he
always was a smart-aleck—he was a laughing-stock in Fort Beulah
for the way he tried to show off as a great political leader!—and
when the Chief was elected, he was angry because he didn’t get any
political office, and he went about everywhere trying to disaffect
people—I have heard him do so myself.”

“That’s enough. Thanks. County Commissioner Ledue … Captain
Ledue, is it or is it not true
that the man Jessup tried to
persuade you to join a violent plot against my person?”

But Shad did not look at Doremus as he mumbled, “It’s true.”

Swan crackled, “Gentlemen, I think that that, plus the evidence
contained in the prisoner’s own manuscript, which I hold here, is
sufficient testimony. Prisoner, if it weren’t for your age and
your damn silly senile weakness, I’d sentence you to a
hundred
lashes, as I do all the other Communists like you that threaten the
Corporate State. As it is, I sentence you to be held in
concentration camp, at the will of the Court, but with a minimum
sentence of seventeen years.” Doremus calculated rapidly. He was
sixty-two now. He would be seventy-nine
then
. He never would see
freedom again. “And, in the power of issuing emergency decrees,
conferred
upon me as Provincial Commissioner, I also sentence you
to death by shooting, but I suspend that sentence—though only
until such time as you may be caught trying to escape! And I hope
you’ll have just lots and lots of time in prison, Jessup, to think
about how clever you were in this entrancing article you wrote
about me! And to remember that any nasty cold morning they may
take you out in the
rain and shoot you.” He ended with a mild
suggestion to the guards: “And twenty lashes!”

Two minutes later they had forced castor oil down him; he lay
trying to bite at the stained wood of the whipping-table; and he
could hear the whish of the steel fishing rod as a guard playfully
tried it out in the air before bringing it down across the
crisscross wounds of his raw back.

As the open prison van approached the concentration camp at
Trianon, the last light of afternoon caressed the thick birch and
maples and poplars up the pyramid of Mount Faithful. But the
grayness swiftly climbed the slope, and all the valley was left in
cold shadow. In his seat the sick Doremus drooped again in
listlessness.

The prim Georgian buildings of the girls’ school which had been
turned into a concentration camp at Trianon, nine miles north of
Fort Beulah, had been worse used than Dartmouth, where whole
buildings were reserved for the luxuries of the Corpos and their
female cousins, all very snotty and parvenu. The Trianon school
seemed to have been gouged by a flood. Marble doorsteps had been
taken away. (One of them now graced the residence of the wife of
the Superintendent,
Mrs. Cowlick, a woman fat, irate, jeweled,
religious, and given to announcing that all opponents of the Chief
were Communists and ought to be shot offhand.) Windows were
smashed. “Hurrah for the Chief” had been chalked on brick walls
and other chalked words, each of four letters, had been rubbed out,
not very thoroughly. The lawns and hollyhock beds were a mess of
weeds.

The buildings stood
on three sides of a square; the fourth side and
the gaps between buildings were closed with unpainted pine fences
topped with strands of barbed wire.

Every room except the office of Captain Cowlick, the Superintendent
(he was as near nothing at all as any man can be who has attained
to such honors as being a captain in the Quartermaster Corps and
the head of a prison) was smeared with filth.
His office was
merely dreary, and scented with whisky, not, like the other rooms,
with ammonia.

Cowlick was not too ill-natured. He wished that the camp guards,
all M.M.’s, would not treat the prisoners viciously, except when
they tried to escape. But he was a mild man; much too mild to hurt
the feelings of the M.M.’s and perhaps set up inhibitions in their
psyches by interfering with their
methods of discipline. The poor
fellows probably meant well when they lashed noisy inmates for
insisting they had committed no crime. And the good Cowlick saved
Doremus’s life for a while; let him lie for a month in the stuffy
hospital and have actual beef in his daily beef stew. The prison
doctor, a decayed old drunkard who had had his medical training in
the late ‘eighties and who had been
somewhat close to trouble in
civil life for having performed too many abortions, was also good-natured enough, when sober, and at last he permitted Doremus to
have Dr. Marcus Olmsted in from Fort Beulah, and for the first time
in four weeks Doremus had news, any news whatsoever, of the world
beyond prison.

Where in normal life it would have been agony to wait for one hour
to know what might be
happening to his friends, his family, now for
one month he had not known whether they were alive or dead.

Dr. Olmsted—as guilty as Doremus himself of what the Corpos called
treason—dared speak to him only a moment, because the prison
doctor stayed in the hospital ward all the while, drooling over
whip-scarred patients and daubing iodine more or less near their
wounds. Olmsted sat on the edge
of his cot, with its foul
blankets, unwashed for months, and muttered rapidly:

“Quick! Listen! Don’t talk! Mrs. Jessup and your two girls are
all right—they’re scared, but no signs of their being arrested.
Hear Lorinda Pike is all right. Your grandson, David, looks fine—though I’m afraid he’ll grow up a Corpo, like all the youngsters.
Buck Titus is alive—at another concentration camp—the
one near
Woodstock. Our N.U. cell at Fort Beulah is doing what it can—no
publishing, but we forward information—get a lot from Julian
Falck—great joke: he’s been promoted, M.M. Squad-Leader now! Mary
and Sissy and Father Perefixe keep distributing pamphlets from
Boston; they help the Quinn boy (my driver) and me to forward
refugees to Canada… . Yes, we carry on… . About like an
oxygen tent for
a patient that’s dying of pneumonia! … It
hurts to see you looking like a ghost, Doremus. But you’ll pull
through. You’ve got pretty good nerves for a little cuss! That
aged-in-the-keg prison doctor is looking this way. Bye!”