It Can't Happen Here (50 page)

“Rats! He has no attraction for them. He’s just an accurate
military bookkeeper,” said Sarason.

That night he had a party at which, for a novelty, rather shocking
to his intimates, he actually had girls present, performing certain
curious
dances. The next morning Haik rebuked him, and—Sarason
had a hangover—was stormed at. That night, just a month after
Sarason had usurped the Presidency, Haik struck.

There was no melodramatic dagger-and-uplifted-arm business about
it, this time—though Haik did traditionally come late, for all
Fascists, like all drunkards, seem to function most vigorously at
night. Haik marched into the White
House with his picked storm
troops, found President Sarason in violet silk pajamas among his
friends, shot Sarason and most of his companions dead, and
proclaimed himself President.

Hector Macgoblin fled by aeroplane to Cuba, then on. When last
seen, he was living high up in the mountains of Haiti, wearing only
a singlet, dirty white-drill trousers, grass sandals, and a long
tan beard; very
healthy and happy, occupying a one-room hut with a
lovely native girl, practicing modern medicine and studying ancient
voodoo.

When Dewey Haik became President, then America really did begin to
suffer a little, and to long for the good old democratic, liberal
days of Windrip.

Windrip and Sarason had not minded mirth and dancing in the street
so long as they could be suitably taxed. Haik disliked
such things
on principle. Except, perhaps, that he was an atheist in theology,
he was a strict orthodox Christian. He was the first to tell the
populace that they were not going to get any five thousand dollars
a year but, instead, “reap the profits of Discipline and of the
Scientific Totalitarian State not in mere paper figures but in vast
dividends of Pride, Patriotism, and Power.” He kicked
out of the
army all officers who could not endure marching and going thirsty;
and out of the civil branch all commissioners—including one
Francis Tasbrough—who had garnered riches too easily and too
obviously.

He treated the entire nation like a well-run plantation, on which
the slaves were better fed than formerly, less often cheated by
their overseers, and kept so busy that they had time only
for work
and for sleep, and thus fell rarely into the debilitating vices of
laughter, song (except war songs against Mexico), complaint, or
thinking. Under Haik there were less floggings in M.M. posts and
in concentration camps, for by his direction officers were not to
waste time in the sport of beating persons, men, women, or
children, who asserted that they didn’t care to be slaves on even
the best plantation, but just to shoot them out of hand.

Haik made such use of the clergy—Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, and
Liberal-Agnostic—as Windrip and Sarason never had. While there
were plenty of ministers who, like Mr. Falck and Father Stephen
Perefixe, like Cardinal Faulhaber and Pastor Niemoeller in Germany,
considered it some part of Christian duty to resent the enslavement
and torture
of their appointed flocks, there were also plenty of
reverend celebrities, particularly large-city pastors whose sermons
were reported in the newspapers every Monday morning, to whom
Corpoism had given a chance to be noisily and lucratively
patriotic. These were the chaplains-at-heart, who, if there was no
war in which they could humbly help to purify and comfort the poor
brave boys who were
fighting, were glad to help provide such a war.

These more practical shepherds, since like doctors and lawyers they
were able to steal secrets out of the heart, became valued spies
during the difficult months after February, 1939, when Haik was
working up war with Mexico. (Canada? Japan? Russia? They would
come later.) For even with an army of slaves, it was necessary to
persuade them that
they were freemen and fighters for the principle
of freedom, or otherwise the scoundrels might cross over and join
the enemy!

So reigned the good king Haik, and if there was anyone in all the
land who was discontented, you never heard him speak—not twice.

And in the White House, where under Sarason shameless youths had
danced, under the new reign of righteousness and the blackjack,
Mrs. Haik,
a lady with eyeglasses and a smile of resolute
cordiality, gave to the W.C.T.U., the Y.W.C.A., and the Ladies’
League against Red Radicalism, and their inherently incidental
husbands, a magnified and hand-colored Washington version of just
such parties as she had once given in the Haik bungalow in
Eglantine, Oregon.

The ban on information at the Trianon camp had been raised; Mrs.
Candy had come calling on Doremus—complete with cocoanut layer
cake—and he had heard of Mary’s death, the departure of Emma and
Sissy, the end of Windrip and Sarason. And none of it seemed in
the least real—not half so real and, except for the fact that he
would never see Mary again, not half so important as the increasing
number
of lice and rats in their cell.

During the ban, they had celebrated Christmas by laughing, not very
cheerfully, at the Christmas tree Karl Pascal had contrived out of
a spruce bough and tinfoil from cigarette packages. They had
hummed “Stille Nacht” softly in the darkness, and Doremus had
thought of all their comrades in political prisons in America,
Europe, Japan, India.

But Karl, apparently,
thought of comrades only if they were saved,
baptized Communists. And, forced together as they were in a cell,
the growing bitterness and orthodox piety of Karl became one of
Doremus’s most hateful woes; a tragedy to be blamed upon the
Corpos, or upon the principle of dictatorship in general, as
savagely as the deaths of Mary and Dan Wilgus and Henry Veeder.
Under persecution, Karl lost no ounce
of his courage and his
ingenuity in bamboozling the M.M. guards, but day by day he did
steadily lose all his humor, his patience, his tolerance, his easy
companionship, and everything else that made life endurable to men
packed in a cell. The Communism that had always been his King
Charles’s Head, sometimes amusing, became a religious bigotry as
hateful to Doremus as the old bigotries of the
Inquisition or the
Fundamentalist Protestants; that attitude of slaughtering to save
men’s souls from which the Jessup family had escaped during these
last three generations.

It was impossible to get away from Karl’s increasing zeal. He
chattered on at night for an hour after all the other five had
growled, “Oh, shut up! I want to sleep! You’ll be making a Corpo
out of me!”

Sometimes, in
his proselytizing, he conquered. When his cell mates
had long enough cursed the camp guards, Karl would rebuke them:
“You’re a lot too simple when you explain everything by saying that
the Corpos, especially the M.M.’s, are all fiends. Plenty of ‘em
are. But even the worst of ‘em, even the professional gunmen in
the M.M. ranks, don’t get as much satisfaction out of punishing us
heretics as the
honest, dumb Corpos who’ve been misled by their
leaders’ mouthing about Freedom, Order, Security, Discipline,
Strength! All those swell words that even before Windrip came in
the speculators started using to protect their profits! Especially
how they used the word ‘Liberty’! Liberty to steal the didies off
the babies! I tell you, an honest man gets sick when he hears the
word ‘Liberty’ today,
after what the Republicans did to it! And I
tell you that a lot of the M.M. guards right here at Trianon are
just as unfortunate as we are—lot of ‘em are just poor devils that
couldn’t get decent work, back in the Golden Age of Frank
Roosevelt—bookkeepers that had to dig ditches, auto agents that
couldn’t sell cars and went sour, ex-looeys in the Great War that
came back to find their jobs pinched
off ‘em and that followed
Windrip, quite honestly, because they thought, the saps, that when
he said Security he meant
Security
! They’ll learn!”

And having admirably discoursed for another hour on the perils of
self-righteousness among the Corpos, Comrade Pascal would change
the subject and discourse upon the glory of self-righteousness
among the Communists—particularly upon those sanctified
examples
of Communism who lived in bliss in the Holy City of Moscow, where,
Doremus judged, the streets were paved with undepreciable roubles.

The Holy City of Moscow! Karl looked upon it with exactly such
uncritical and slightly hysterical adoration as other sectarians
had in their day devoted to Jerusalem, Mecca, Rome, Canterbury, and
Benares. Fine, all right, thought Doremus. Let ‘em worship
their
sacred fonts—it was as good a game as any for the mentally
retarded. Only, why then should they object to his considering as
sacred Fort Beulah, or New York, or Oklahoma City?

Karl once fell into a froth because Doremus wondered if the iron
deposits in Russia were all they might be. Why certainly! Russia,
being Holy Russia, must, as a useful part of its holiness, have
sufficient iron,
and Karl needed no mineralogists’ reports but only
the blissful eye of faith to know it.

He did not mind Karl’s worshiping Holy Russia. But Karl did, using
the word “naïve,” which is the favorite word and just possibly the
only word known to Communist journalists, derisively mind when
Doremus had a mild notion of worshiping Holy America. Karl spoke
often of photographs in the Moscow News of
nearly naked girls on
Russian bathing-beaches as proving the triumph and joy of the
workers under Bolshevism, but he regarded precisely the same sort
of photographs of nearly naked girls on Long Island bathing-beaches
as proving the degeneration of the workers under Capitalism.

As a newspaper man, Doremus remembered that the only reporters who
misrepresented and concealed facts more unscrupulously
than the
Capitalists were the Communists.

He was afraid that the world struggle today was not of Communism
against Fascism, but of tolerance against the bigotry that was
preached equally by Communism and Fascism. But he saw too that in
America the struggle was befogged by the fact that the worst
Fascists were they who disowned the word “Fascism” and preached
enslavement to Capitalism under the
style of Constitutional and
Traditional Native American Liberty. For they were thieves not
only of wages but of honor. To their purpose they could quote not
only Scripture but Jefferson.

That Karl Pascal should be turning into a zealot, like most of his
chiefs in the Communist party, was grievous to Doremus because he
had once simple-heartedly hoped that in the mass strength of
Communism there
might be an escape from cynical dictatorship. But
he saw now that he must remain alone, a “Liberal,” scorned by all
the noisier prophets for refusing to be a willing cat for the busy
monkeys of either side. But at worst, the Liberals, the Tolerant,
might in the long run preserve some of the arts of civilization, no
matter which brand of tyranny should finally dominate the world.

“More and more,
as I think about history,” he pondered, “I am
convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been
accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the
preservation of this spirit is more important than any social
system whatsoever. But the men of ritual and the men of barbarism
are capable of shutting up the men of science and of silencing them
forever.”

Yes, this
was the worst thing the enemies of honor, the pirate
industrialists and then their suitable successors, the Corpos with
their blackjacks, had done: it had turned the brave, the generous,
the passionate and half-literate Karl Pascals into dangerous
fanatics. And how well they had done it! Doremus was uncomfortable
with Karl; he felt that his next turn in jail might be under the
wardenship of
none other than Karl himself, as he remembered how the
Bolsheviks, once in power, had most smugly imprisoned and persecuted
those great women, Spiridinova and Breshkovskaya and Ismailovitch,
who, by their conspiracies against the Czar, their willingness to
endure Siberian torture on behalf of “freedom for the masses,” had
most brought on the revolution by which the Bolsheviks were able to
take control—and
not only again forbid freedom to the masses, but
this time inform them that, anyway, freedom was just a damn silly
bourgeois superstition.

So Doremus, sleeping two-and-a-half feet above his old companion,
felt himself in a cell within a cell. Henry Veeder and Clarence
Little and Victor Loveland and Mr. Falck were gone now, and to
Julian, penned in solitary, he could not speak once a month.

He yearned for escape with a desire that was near to insanity;
awake and asleep it was his obsession; and he thought his heart had
stopped when Squad-Leader Aras Dilley muttered to him, as Doremus
was scrubbing a lavatory floor, “Say! Listen, Mr. Jessup! Mis’
Pike is fixin’ it up and I’m going to help you escape jus’ soon as
things is right!”

It was a question of the guards on sentry-go outside
the
quadrangle. As sweeper, Doremus was reasonably free to leave his
cell, and Aras had loosened the boards and barbed wire at the end
of one of the alleys leading from the quadrangle between buildings.
But outside, he was likely to be shot by a guard on sight.

For a week Aras watched. He knew that one of the night guards had
a habit of getting drunk, which was forgiven him because of his
excellence
in flogging troublemakers but which was regarded by the
more judicious as rather regrettable. And for that week Aras fed
the guard’s habit on Lorinda’s expense money, and was indeed so
devoted to his duties that he was himself twice carried to bed.
Snake Tizra grew interested—but Snake also, after the first couple
of drinks, liked to be democratic with his men and to sing “The Old
Spinning-Wheel.”

Aras confided to Doremus: “Mis’ Pike—she don’t dast send you a
note, less somebody get hold of it, but she says to me to tell you
not to tell anybody you’re going to take a sneak, or it’ll get
out.”