LITMIR.BIZ

      18

       Table of Contents

      In the little towns, ah, there is the abiding peace that I love, and that can never be disturbed by even the noisiest Smart Alecks from these haughty megalopolises like Washington, New York, & etc.

       Zero Hour, Berzelius Windrip.

      Doremus's policy of "wait and see," like most Fabian policies, had grown shaky. It seemed particularly shaky in June, 1937, when he drove to North Beulah for the fortieth graduation anniversary of his class in Isaiah College.

      As the custom was, the returned alumni wore comic costumes. His class had sailor suits, but they walked about, bald-headed and lugubrious, in these well-meant garments of joy, and there was a look of instability even in the eyes of the three members who were ardent Corpos (being local Corpo commissioners).

      After the first hour Doremus saw little of his classmates. He had looked up his familiar correspondent, Victor Loveland, teacher in the classical department who, a year ago, had informed him of President Owen J. Peaseley's ban on criticism of military training.

      At its best, Loveland's jerry-built imitation of an Anne Hathaway cottage had been no palace—Isaiah assistant professors did not customarily rent palaces. Now, with the pretentiously smart living room heaped with burlap-covered chairs and rolled rugs and boxes of books, it looked like a junkshop. Amid the wreckage sat Loveland, his wife, his three children, and one Dr. Arnold King, experimenter in chemistry.

      "What's all this?" said Doremus.

      "I've been fired. As too 'radical,'" growled Loveland.

      "Yes! And his most vicious attack has been on Glicknow's treatment of the use of the aorist in Hesiod!" wailed his wife.

      "Well, I deserve it—for not having been vicious about anything since A.D. 300! Only thing I'm ashamed of is that they're not firing me for having taught my students that the Corpos have taken most of their ideas from Tiberius, or maybe for having decently tried to assassinate District Commissioner Reek!" said Loveland.

      "Where you going?" inquired Doremus.

      "That's just it! We don't know! Oh, first to my dad's house—which is a six-room packing-box in Burlington—Dad's got diabetes. But teaching—President Peaseley kept putting off signing my new contract and just informed me ten days ago that I'm through—much too late to get a job for next year. Myself, I don't care a damn! Really I don't! I'm glad to have been made to admit that as a college prof I haven't been, as I so liked to convince myself, any Erasmus Junior, inspiring noble young souls to dream of chaste classic beauty—save the mark!—but just a plain hired man, another counter-jumper in the Marked-down Classics Goods Department, with students for bored customers, and as subject to being hired and fired as any janitor. Do you remember that in Imperial Rome, the teachers, even the tutors of the nobility, were slaves—allowed a lot of leeway, I suppose, in their theories about the anthropology of Crete, but just as likely to be strangled as the other slaves! I'm not kicking—"

      Dr. King, the chemist, interrupted with a whoop: "Sure you're kicking! Why the hell not? With three kids? Why not kick! Now me, I'm lucky! I'm half Jew—one of these sneaking, cunning Jews that Buzz Windrip and his boyfriend Hitler tell you about; so cunning I suspected what was going on months ago and so—I've also just been fired, Mr. Jessup—I arranged for a job with the Universal Electric Corporation. . . . They don't mind Jews there, as long as they sing at their work and find boondoggles worth a million a year to the company—at thirty-five hundred a year salary! A fond farewell to all my grubby studes! Though—" and Doremus thought he was, at heart, sadder than Loveland—"I do kind of hate to give up my research. Oh, hell with 'em!"

      The version of Owen J. Peaseley, M.A. (Oberlin), LL.D. (Conn. State), president of Isaiah College, was quite different.

      "Why no, Mr. Jessup! We believe absolutely in freedom of speech and thought, here at old Isaiah. The fact is that we are letting Loveland go only because the Classics Department is overstaffed—so little demand for Greek and Sanskrit and so on, you know, with all this modern interest in quantitative bio-physics and aeroplane-repairing and so on. But as to Dr. King—um—I'm afraid we did a little feel that he was riding for a fall, boasting about being a Jew and all, you know, and—But can't we talk of pleasanter subjects? You have probably learned that Secretary of Culture Macgoblin has now completed his plan for the appointment of a director of education in each province and district?—and that Professor Almeric Trout of Aumbry University is slated for Director in our Northeastern Province? Well, I have something very gratifying to add. Dr. Trout—and what a profound scholar, what an eloquent orator he is!—did you know that in Teutonic 'Almeric' means 'noble prince'?—and he's been so kind as to designate me as Director of Education for the Vermont-New Hampshire District! Isn't that thrilling! I wanted you to be one of the first to hear it, Mr. Jessup, because of course one of the chief jobs of the Director will be to work with and through the newspaper editors in the great task of spreading correct Corporate ideals and combating false theories—yes, oh yes."

      It seemed as though a large number of people were zealous to work with and through the editors these days, thought Doremus.

      He noticed that President Peaseley resembled a dummy made of faded gray flannel of a quality intended for petticoats in an orphan asylum.

      The Minute Men's organization was less favored in the staid villages than in the industrial centers, but all through the summer it was known that a company of M.M.'s had been formed in Fort Beulah and were drilling in the Armory under National Guard officers and County Commissioner Ledue, who was seen sitting up nights in his luxurious new room in Mrs. Ingot's boarding-house, reading a manual of arms. But Doremus declined to go look at them, and when his rustic but ambitious reporter, "Doc" (otherwise Otis) Itchitt, came in throbbing about the M.M.'s and wanted to run an illustrated account in the Saturday Informer, Doremus sniffed.

      It was not till their first public parade, in August, that Doremus saw them, and not gladly.

      The whole countryside had turned out; he could hear them laughing and shuffling beneath his office window; but he stubbornly stuck to editing an article on fertilizers for cherry orchards. (And he loved parades, childishly!) Not even the sound of a band pounding out "Boola, Boola" drew him to the window. Then he was plucked up by Dan Wilgus, the veteran job compositor and head of the Informer chapel, a man tall as a house and possessed of such a sweeping black mustache as had not otherwise been seen since the passing of the old-time bartender. "You got to take a look, Boss; great show!" implored Dan.

      Through the Chester-Arthur, red-brick prissiness of President Street, Doremus saw marching a surprisingly well-drilled company of young men in the uniforms of Civil War cavalrymen, and just as they were opposite the Informer office, the town band rollicked into "Marching through Georgia." The young men smiled, they stepped more quickly, and held up their banner with the steering wheel and M.M. upon it.

      When he was ten, Doremus had seen in this self-same street a Memorial Day parade of the G.A.R. The veterans were an average of under fifty then, and some of them only thirty-five; they had swung ahead lightly and gayly—and to the tune of "Marching through Georgia." So now in 1937 he was looking

Скачать книгу