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.
The 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 alone-ness, 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 sop. 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 water-proof 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 t
hose —— —— 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——”
“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 th
at 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:
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