The Reign of Brainwash: Dystopia Box Set. Эдгар Аллан По

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СКАЧАТЬ to the Corpo State years and years before there had been any Corpo State; and Swan (with Peaseley chirping agreement) barred from all sale or possession the books of Thoreau, Emerson, Whittier, Whitman, Mark Twain, Howells, and The New Freedom, by Woodrow Wilson, for though in later life Wilson became a sound manipulative politician, he had earlier been troubled with itching ideals.

      It goes without saying that Swan denounced all such atheistic foreigners, dead or alive, as Wells, Marx, Shaw, the Mann brothers, Tolstoy, and P. G. Wodehouse with his unscrupulous propaganda against the aristocratic tradition. (Who could tell? Perhaps, some day, in a corporate empire, he might be Sir Effingham Swan, Bart.)

      And in one item Swan showed blinding genius—he had the foresight to see the peril of that cynical volume, The Collected Sayings of Will Rogers.

      Of the book-burnings in Syracuse and Schenectady and Hartford, Doremus had heard, but they seemed improbable as ghost stories.

      The Jessup family were at dinner, just after seven, when on the porch they heard the tramping they had half expected, altogether dreaded. Mrs. Candy—even the icicle, Mrs. Candy, held her breast in agitation before she stalked out to open the door. Even David sat at table, spoon suspended in air.

      Shad's voice, "In the name of the Chief!" Harsh feet in the hall, and Shad waddling into the dining room, cap on, hand on pistol, but grinning, and with leering geniality bawling, "H' are yuh, folks! Search for bad books. Orders of the District Commissioner. Come on, Jessup!" He looked at the fireplace to which he had once brought so many armfuls of wood, and snickered.

      "If you'll just sit down in the other room—"

      "I will like hell 'just sit down in the other room'! We're burning the books tonight! Snap to it, Jessup!" Shad looked at the exasperated Emma; he looked at Sissy; he winked with heavy deliberation and chuckled, "H' are you, Mis' Jessup. Hello, Sis. How's the kid?"

      But at Mary Greenhill he did not look, nor she at him.

      In the hall, Doremus found Shad's entourage, four sheepish M.M.'s and a more sheepish Emil Staubmeyer, who whimpered, "Just orders—you know—just orders."

      Doremus safely said nothing; led them up to his study.

      Now a week before he had removed every publication that any sane Corpo could consider radical: his Das Kapital and Veblen and all the Russian novels and even Sumner's Folkways and Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents; Thoreau and the other hoary scoundrels banned by Swan; old files of the Nation and New Republic and such copies as he had been able to get of Walt Trowbridge's Lance for Democracy; had removed them and hidden them inside an old horsehair sofa in the upper hall.

      "I told you there was nothing," said Staubmeyer, after the search. "Let's go."

      Said Shad, "Huh! I know this house, Ensign. I used to work here—had the privilege of putting up those storm windows you can see there, and of getting bawled out right here in this room. You won't remember those times, Doc—when I used to mow your lawn, too, and you used to be so snotty!" Staubmeyer blushed. "You bet. I know my way around, and there's a lot of fool books downstairs in the sittin' room."

      Indeed in that apartment variously called the drawing room, the living room, the sittin' room, the Parlor and once, even, by a spinster who thought editors were romantic, the studio, there were two or three hundred volumes, mostly in "standard sets." Shad glumly stared at them, the while he rubbed the faded Brussels carpet with his spurs. He was worried. He had to find something seditious!

      He pointed at Doremus's dearest treasure, the thirty-four-volume extra-illustrated edition of Dickens which had been his father's, and his father's only insane extravagance. Shad demanded of Staubmeyer, "That guy Dickens—didn't he do a lot of complaining about conditions—about schools and the police and everything?"

      Staubmeyer protested, "Yes, but Shad—but, Captain Ledue, that was a hundred years ago—"

      "Makes no difference. Dead skunk stinks worse 'n a live one."

      Doremus cried, "Yes, but not for a hundred years! Besides—"

      The M.M.'s, obeying Shad's gesture, were already yanking the volumes of Dickens from the shelves, dropping them on the floor, covers cracking. Doremus seized an M.M.'s arm; from the door Sissy shrieked. Shad lumbered up to him, enormous red fist at Doremus's nose, growling, "Want to get the daylights beaten out of you now . . . instead of later?"

      Doremus and Sissy, side by side on a couch, watched the books thrown in a heap. He grasped her hand, muttering to her, "Hush—hush!" Oh, Sissy was a pretty girl, and young, but a pretty girl schoolteacher had been attacked, her clothes stripped off, and been left in the snow just south of town, two nights ago.

      Doremus could not have stayed away from the book-burning. It was like seeing for the last time the face of a dead friend.

      Kindling, excelsior, and spruce logs had been heaped on the thin snow on the Green. (Tomorrow there would be a fine patch burned in the hundred-year-old sward.) Round the pyre danced M.M.'s schoolboys, students from the rather ratty business college on Elm Street, and unknown farm lads, seizing books from the pile guarded by the broadly cheerful Shad and skimming them into the flames. Doremus saw his Martin Chuzzlewit fly into air and land on the burning lid of an ancient commode. It lay there open to a Phiz drawing of Sairey Gamp, which withered instantly. As a small boy he had always laughed over that drawing.

      He saw the old rector, Mr. Falck, squeezing his hands together. When Doremus touched his shoulder, Mr. Falck mourned, "They took away my Urn Burial, my Imitatio Christi. I don't know why, I don't know why! And they're burning them there!"

      Who owned them, Doremus did not know, nor why they had been seized, but he saw Alice in Wonderland and Omar Khayyám and Shelley and The Man Who Was Thursday and A Farewell to Arms all burning together, to the greater glory of the Dictator and the greater enlightenment of his people.

      The fire was almost over when Karl Pascal pushed up to Shad Ledue and shouted, "I hear you stinkers—I've been out driving a guy, and I hear you raided my room and took off my books while I was away!"

      "You bet we did, Comrade!"

      "And you're burning them—burning my—"

      "Oh no, Comrade! Not burning 'em. Worth too blame much, Comrade." Shad laughed very much. "They're at the police station. We've just been waiting for you. It was awful nice to find all your little Communist books. Here! Take him along!"

      So Karl Pascal was the first prisoner to go from Fort Beulah to the Trianon Concentration Camp—no; that's wrong; the second. The first, so inconspicuous that one almost forgets him, was an ordinary fellow, an electrician who had never so much as spoken of politics. Brayden, his name was. A Minute Man who stood well with Shad and Staubmeyer wanted Brayden's job. Brayden went to concentration camp. Brayden was flogged when he declared, under Shad's questioning, that he knew nothing about any plots against the Chief. Brayden died, alone in a dark cell, before January.

      An English globe-trotter who gave up two weeks of December to a thorough study of "conditions" in America, wrote to his London paper, and later said on the wireless for the B.B.C.: "After a thorough glance at America I find that, far from there being any discontent with the Corpo administration among the people, they have never been so happy and so resolutely set on making a Brave New World. I asked a very prominent Hebrew banker about the assertions that his people were being oppressed, and he assured me, 'When we hear about such silly rumors, СКАЧАТЬ