LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

won't think I'm horrid and unwomanly, will you?—but I would like to see you hauling out one of those people, just once. Come on, tell a fellow! Who are you going to arrest next?"

      "Naughty, naughty! Mustn't try to kid papa! No, the womanly thing for you to do is a little love-making! Aw come on, let's have some fun, baby! You know you're crazy about me!" Now he really seized her, his hand across her breasts. She struggled, thoroughly frightened, no longer cynical and sophisticated. She shrieked, "Oh don't—don't!" She wept, real tears, more from anger than from modesty. He loosened his grip a little, and she had the inspiration to sob, "Oh, Shad, if you really want me to love you, you must give me time! You wouldn't want me to be a hussy that you could do anything you wanted to with—you, in your position? Oh, no, Shad, you couldn't do that!"

      "Well, maybe," said he, with the smugness of a carp.

      She had sprung up, dabbling at her eyes—and through the doorway, in the bedroom, on a flat-topped desk, she saw a bunch of two or three Yale keys. Keys to his office, to secret cupboards and drawers with Corpo plans! Undoubtedly! Her imagination in one second pictured her making a rubbing of the keys, getting John Pollikop, that omnifarious mechanic, to file substitute keys, herself and Julian somehow or other sneaking into Corpo headquarters at night, perilously creeping past the guards, rifling Shad's every dread file—

      She stammered, "Do you mind if I go in and wash my face? All teary—so silly! You don't happen to have any face powder in your bathroom?"

      "Say, what d'you think I am? A hick, or a monk, maybe? You bet your life I've got some face powder—right in the medicine cabinet—two kinds—how's that for service? Ladies taken care of by the day or hour!"

      It hurt, but she managed something like a giggle before she went in and shut the bedroom door, and locked it.

      She tore across to the keys. She snatched up a pad of yellow scratch-paper and a pencil, and tried to make a rubbing of a key as once she had made rubbings of coins, for use in the small grocery shop of C. JESSUp & J. falck groSHERS.

      The pencil blur showed only the general outline of the key; the tiny notches which were the trick would not come clear. In panic, she experimented with a sheet of carbon paper, then toilet paper, dry and wet. She could not get a mold. She pressed the key into a prop hotel candle in a china stick by Shad's bed. The candle was too hard. So was the bathroom soap. And Shad was now trying the knob of the door, remarking "Damn!" then bellowing, "Whayuh doin' in there? Gone to sleep?"

      "Be right out!" She replaced the keys, threw the yellow paper and the carbon paper out of the window, replaced the candle and soap, slapped her face with a dry towel, dashed on powder as though she were working against time at plastering a wall, and sauntered back into the parlor. Shad looked hopeful. In panic she saw that now, before he comfortably sat down to it and became passionate again, was her one time to escape. She snatched up hat and coat, said wistfully, "Another night, Shad—you must let me go now, dear!" and fled before he could open his red muzzle.

      Round the corner in the hotel corridor she found Julian.

      He was standing taut, trying to look like a watchdog, his right hand in his coat pocket as though it was holding a revolver.

      She hurled herself against his bosom and howled.

      "Good God! What did he do to you? I'll go in and kill him!"

      "Oh, I didn't get seduced. It isn't things like that that I'm bawling about! It's because I'm such a simply terribly awful spy!"

      But one thing came out of it.

      Her courage nerved Julian to something he had longed for and feared: to join the M.M.'s, put on uniform, "work from within," and supply Doremus with information.

      "I can get Leo Quinn—you know?—Dad's a conductor on the railroad?—used to play basketball in high school?—I can get him to drive Dr. Olmsted for me, and generally run errands for the N.U. He's got grit, and he hates the Corpos. But look, Sissy—look, Mr. Jessup—in order to get the M.M.'s to trust me, I've got to pretend to have a fierce bust-up with you and all our friends. Look! Sissy and I will walk up Elm Street tomorrow evening, giving an imitation of estranged lovers. How 'bout it, Sis?"

      "Fine!" glowed that incorrigible actress.

      She was to be, every evening at eleven, in a birch grove just up Pleasant Hill from the Jessups', where they had played house as children. Because the road curved, the rendezvous could be entered from four or five directions. There he was to hand on to her his reports of M.M. plans.

      But when he first crept into the grove at night and she nervously turned her pocket torch on him, she shrieked at seeing him in M.M. uniform, as an inspector. That blue tunic and slanting forage cap which, in the cinema and history books, had meant youth and hope, meant only death now. . . . She wondered if in 1864 it had not meant death more than moonlight and magnolias to most women. She sprang to him, holding him as if to protect him against his own uniform, and in the peril and uncertainty now of their love, Sissy began to grow up.

      29

       Table of Contents

      The propaganda throughout the country was not all to the New Underground; not even most of it; and though the pamphleteers for the N.U., at home and exiled abroad, included hundreds of the most capable professional journalists of America, they were cramped by a certain respect for facts which never enfeebled the press agents for Corpoism. And the Corpos had a notable staff. It included college presidents, some of the most renowned among the radio announcers who aforetime had crooned their affection for mouth washes and noninsomniac coffee, famous ex-war-correspondents, ex-governors, former vice-presidents of the American Federation of Labor, and no less an artist than the public relations counsel of a princely corporation of electrical-goods manufacturers.

      The newspapers everywhere might no longer be so wishily-washily liberal as to print the opinions of non-Corpos; they might give but little news from those old-fashioned and democratic countries, Great Britain, France, and the Scandinavian states; might indeed print almost no foreign news, except as regards the triumphs of Italy in giving Ethiopia good roads, trains on time, freedom from beggars and from men of honor, and all the other spiritual benefactions of Roman civilization. But, on the other hand, never had newspapers shown so many comic strips—the most popular was a very funny one about a preposterous New Underground crank, who wore mortuary black with a high hat decorated with crêpe and who was always being comically beaten up by M.M.'s. Never had there been, even in the days when Mr. Hearst was freeing Cuba, so many large red headlines. Never so many dramatic drawings of murders—the murderers were always notorious anti-Corpos. Never such a wealth of literature, worthy its twenty-four-hour immortality, as the articles proving, and proving by figures, that American wages were universally higher, commodities universally lower-priced, war budgets smaller but the army and its equipment much larger, than ever in history. Never such righteous polemics as the proofs that all non-Corpos were Communists.

      Almost daily, Windrip, Sarason, Dr. Macgoblin, Secretary of War Luthorne, or Vice-President Perley Beecroft humbly addressed their Masters, the great General Public, on the radio, and congratulated them on making a new world by their example of American solidarity—marching shoulder to shoulder under the Grand Old Flag, comrades in the blessings of peace and comrades in the joys of war to come.

      Much-heralded movies, subsidized by the government (and could there be any better proof of the attention paid by Dr. Macgoblin and the other Nazi leaders to the arts than the fact that movie actors who before the days of the Chief were receiving only fifteen hundred gold dollars a week were now getting five thousand?), showed the M.M.'s driving armored motors at eighty miles an hour, piloting a fleet of one thousand planes, and being very tender to a little girl with a kitten.

      Everyone, including Doremus Jessup, had said in 1935, "If there ever is a Fascist dictatorship here, American humor and pioneer independence are so marked that it will be absolutely different from anything in Europe."

      For almost

Скачать книгу