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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ a drunken bum, and they have to have a real doc in when one of their warders busts his wrist beating up some prisoner. I'll try, sir."

      Two days afterward Julian returned.

      "My God, what a sewer that Trianon place is! I'd waited for Olmsted before, in the car, but I never had the nerve to butt inside. The buildings—they were nice buildings, quite pretty, when the girls' school had them. Now the fittings are all torn out, and they've put up wallboard partitions for cells, and the whole place stinks of carbolic acid and excrement, and the air—there isn't any—you feel as if you were nailed up in a box—I don't know how anybody lives in one of those cells for an hour—and yet there's six men bunked in a cell twelve feet by ten, with a ceiling only seven feet high, and no light except a twenty-five watt, I guess it is, bulb in the ceiling—you couldn't read by it. But they get out for exercise two hours a day—walk around and around the courtyard—they're all so stooped, and they all look so ashamed, as if they'd had the defiance just licked out of 'em—even Karl a little, and you remember how proud and sort of sardonic he was. Well, I got to see him, and he says to get in touch with this man—here, I wrote it down—and for God's sake, burn it up soon as you've memorized it!"

      "Was he—had they—?"

      "Oh, yes, they've beaten him, all right. He wouldn't talk about it. But there was a scar right across his cheek, from his temple right down to his chin. And I had just a glimpse of Henry Veeder. Remember how he looked—like an oak tree? Now he twitches all the time, and jumps and gasps when he hears a sudden sound. He didn't know me. I don't think he'd know anybody."

      Doremus announced to his family and told it loudly in Gath that he was still looking for an option on an apple orchard to which they might retire, and he journeyed southward, with pajamas and a toothbrush and the first volume of Spengler's Decline of the West in a briefcase.

      The address given by Karl Pascal was that of a most gentlemanly dealer in altar cloths and priestly robes, who had his shop and office over a tea room in Hartford, Connecticut. He talked about the cembalo and the spinetta di serenata and the music of Palestrina for an hour before he sent Doremus on to a busy engineer constructing a dam in New Hampshire, who sent him to a tailor in a side-street shop in Lynn, who at last sent him to northern Connecticut and to the Eastern headquarters of what was left of the Communists in America.

      Still carrying his little briefcase he walked up a greasy hill, impassable to any motorcar, and knocked at the faded green door of a squat New England farm cottage masked in wintry old lilac bushes and spiræa shrubs. A stringy farm wife opened and looked hostile.

      "I'd like to speak to Mr. Ailey, Mr. Bailey, or Mr. Cailey."

      "None of 'em home. You'll have to come again."

      "Then I'll wait. What else should one do, these days?"

      "All right. Cmin."

      "Thanks. Give them this letter."

      (The tailor had warned him, "It vill all sount very foolish, the passvorts und everyt'ing, but if any of the central committee gets caught—" He made a squirting sound and drew his scissors across his throat.)

      Doremus sat now in a tiny hall off a flight of stairs steep as the side of a roof; a hall with sprigged wall paper and Currier & Ives prints, and black-painted wooden rocking chairs with calico cushions. There was nothing to read but a Methodist hymnal and a desk dictionary. He knew the former by heart, and anyway, he always loved reading dictionaries—often had one seduced him from editorial-writing. Happily he sat conning:

      Phenyl. n., Chem. The univalent radical C₆ H₅, regarded as the basis of numerous benzene derivatives; as, phenyl hydroxid C₆ H₅ OH.

      Pherecratean. n. A choriambic trimeter catalectic, or catalectic glyconic; composed of a spondee, a choriambus, and a catalectic syllable.

      "Well! I never knew any of that before! I wonder if I do now?" thought Doremus contentedly, before he realized that glowering from a very narrow doorway was a very broad man with wild gray hair and a patch over one eye. Doremus recognized him from pictures. He was Bill Atterbury, miner, longshoreman, veteran I.W.W. leader, old A. F. of L. strike-leader, five years in San Quentin and five honored years in Moscow, and reputed now to be the secretary of the illegal Communist Party.

      "I'm Mr. Ailey. What can I do for you?" Bill demanded.

      He led Doremus into a musty back room where, at a table which was probably mahogany underneath the scars and the clots of dirt, sat a squat man with kinky tow-colored hair and with deep wrinkles in the thick pale skin of his face, and a slender young elegant who suggested Park Avenue.

      "Howryuh?" said Mr. Bailey, in a Russian-Jewish accent. Of him Doremus knew nothing save that he was not named Bailey.

      "Morning," snapped Mr. Cailey—whose name was Elphrey, if Doremus guessed rightly, and who was the son of a millionaire private banker, the brother of one explorer, one bishop's wife, and one countess, and himself a former teacher of economics in the University of California.

      Doremus tried to explain himself to these hard-eyed, quick-glancing plotters of ruin.

      "Are you willing to become a Party member, in the extremely improbable case that they accept you, and to take orders, any orders, without question?" asked Elphrey, so suavely.

      "Do you mean, Am I willing to kill and steal?"

      "You've been reading detective stories about the 'Reds'! No. What you'd have to do would be much more difficult than the amusement of using a tommy-gun. Would you be willing to forget you ever were a respectable newspaper editor, giving orders, and walk through the snow, dressed like a bum, to distribute seditious pamphlets—even if, personally, you should believe the pamphlets were of no slightest damn good to the Cause?"

      "Why, I—I don't know. Seems to me that as a newspaperman of quite a little training—"

      "Hell! Our only trouble is keeping out the 'trained newspapermen'! What we need is trained bill-posters that like the smell of flour paste and hate sleeping. And—but you're a little old for this—crazy fanatics that go out and start strikes, knowing they'll get beaten up and thrown in the bull pen."

      "No, I guess I—Look here. I'm sure Walt Trowbridge will be joining up with the Socialists and some of the left-wing radical ex-Senators and the Farmer-Laborites and so on—"

      Bill Atterbury guffawed. It was a tremendous, somehow terrifying blast. "Yes, I'm sure they'll join up—all the dirty, sneaking, half-headed, reformist Social Fascists like Trowbridge, that are doing the work of the capitalists and working for war against Soviet Russia without even having sense enough to know they're doing it and to collect good pay for their crookedness!"

      "I admire Trowbridge!" snarled Doremus.

      "You would!"

      Elphrey rose, almost cordial, and dismissed Doremus with, "Mr. Jessup, I was brought up in a sound bourgeois household myself, unlike these two roughnecks, and I appreciate what you're trying to do, even if they don't. I imagine that your rejection of us is even firmer than our rejection of you!"

      "Dot's right, Comrade Elphrey. Both you and dis fellow got ants in your bourjui pants, like your Hugh Johnson vould say!" chuckled the Russian Mr. Bailey.

      "But I just wonder if Walt Trowbridge won't be chasing out Buzz Windrip while you boys are still arguing about whether Comrade СКАЧАТЬ