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

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ comrades by giving them clean floors.

      For, he told himself, they were his comrades. He saw that he, who had thought of himself as a capitalist because he could hire and fire, and because theoretically he "owned his business," had been as helpless as the most itinerant janitor, once it seemed worth while to the Big Business which Corpoism represented to get rid of him. Yet he still told himself stoutly that he did not believe in a dictatorship of the proletariat any more than he believed in a dictatorship of the bankers and utility-owners; he still insisted that any doctor or preacher, though economically he might be as insecure as the humblest of his flock, who did not feel that he was a little better than they, and privileged to enjoy working a little harder, was a rotten doctor or a preacher without grace. He felt that he himself had been a better and more honorable reporter than Doc Itchitt, and a thundering sight better student of politics than most of his shopkeeper and farmer and factory-worker readers.

      Yet bourgeois pride was so gone out of him that he was flattered, a little thrilled, when he was universally called "Doremus" and not "Mr. Jessup" by farmer and workman and truck-driver and plain hobo; when they thought enough of his courage under beating and his good-temper under being crowded with others in a narrow cell to regard him as almost as good as their own virile selves.

      Karl Pascal mocked him. "I told you so, Doremus! You'll be a Communist yet!"

      "Yes, maybe I will, Karl—after you Communists kick out all your false prophets and bellyachers and power drunkards, and all your press-agents for the Moscow subway."

      "Well, all right, why don't you join Max Eastman? I hear he's escaped to Mexico and has a whole big pure Trotzkyite Communist party of seventeen members there!"

      "Seventeen? Too many. What I want is mass action by just one member, alone on a hilltop. I'm a great optimist, Karl. I still hope America may some day rise to the standards of Kit Carson!"

      As sweeper and scrubber, Doremus had unusual chances for gossip with other prisoners. He chuckled when he thought of how many of his fellow criminals were acquaintances: Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, his own cousin, Louis Rotenstern, who looked now like a corpse, unforgettingly wounded in his old pride of having become a "real American," Clif Little, the jeweler, who was dying of consumption, Ben Tripper, who had been the jolliest workman in Medary Cole's gristmill, Professor Victor Loveland, of the defunct Isaiah College, and Raymond Pridewell, that old Tory who was still so contemptuous of flattery, so clean amid dirt, so hawk-eyed, that the guards were uncomfortable when they beat him. . . . Pascal, the Communist, Pridewell, the squirearchy Republican, and Henry Veeder, who had never cared a hang about politics, and who had recovered from the first shocks of imprisonment, these three had become intimates, because they had more arrogance of utter courage than anyone else in the prison.

      For home Doremus shared with five other men a cell twelve feet by ten and eight feet high, which a finishing-school girl had once considered outrageously confined for one lone young woman. Here they slept, in two tiers of three bunks each; here they ate, washed, played cards, read, and enjoyed the leisurely contemplation which, as Captain Cowlick preached to them every Sunday morning, was to reform their black souls and turn them into loyal Corpos.

      None of them, certainly not Doremus, complained much. They got used to sleeping in a jelly of tobacco smoke and human stench, to eating stews that always left them nervously hungry, to having no more dignity or freedom than monkeys in a cage, as a man gets used to the indignity of having to endure cancer. Only it left in them a murderous hatred of their oppressors so that they, men of peace all of them, would gladly have hanged every Corpo, mild or vicious. Doremus understood John Brown much better.

      His cell mates were Karl Pascal, Henry Veeder, and three men whom he had not known: a Boston architect, a farm hand, and a dope fiend who had once kept questionable restaurants. They had good talk—especially from the dope fiend, who placidly defended crime in a world where the only real crime had been poverty.

      The worst torture to Doremus, aside from the agony of actual floggings, was the waiting.

      The Waiting. It became a distinct, tangible thing, as individual and real as Bread or Water. How long would he be in? How long would he be in? Night and day, asleep and waking, he worried it, and by his bunk saw waiting the figure of Waiting, a gray, foul ghost.

      It was like waiting in a filthy station for a late train, not for hours but for months.

      Would Swan amuse himself by having Doremus taken out and shot? He could not care much, now; he could not picture it, any more than he could picture kissing Lorinda, walking through the woods with Buck, playing with David and Foolish, or anything less sensual than the ever derisive visions of roast beef with gravy, of a hot bath, last and richest of luxuries where their only way of washing, except for a fortnightly shower, was with a dirty shirt dipped in the one basin of cold water for six men.

      Besides Waiting, one other ghost hung about them—the notion of Escaping. It was of that (far more than of the beastliness and idiocy of the Corpos) that they whispered in the cell at night. When to escape. How to escape. To sneak off through the bushes when they were out with the woods gang? By some magic to cut through the bars on their cell window and drop out and blessedly not be seen by the patrols? To manage to hang on underneath one of the prison trucks and be driven away? (A childish fantasy!) They longed for escape as hysterically and as often as a politician longs for votes. But they had to discuss it cautiously, for there were stool pigeons all over the prison.

      This was hard for Doremus to believe. He could not understand a man's betraying his companions, and he did not believe it till, two months after Doremus had gone to concentration camp, Clifford Little betrayed to the guards Henry Veeder's plan to escape in a hay wagon. Henry was properly dealt with. Little was released. And Doremus, it may be, suffered over it nearly as much as either of them, sturdily though he tried to argue that Little had tuberculosis and that the often beatings had bled out his soul.

      Each prisoner was permitted one visitor a fortnight and, in sequence, Doremus saw Emma, Mary, Sissy, David. But always an M.M. was standing two feet away, listening, and Doremus had from them nothing more than a fluttering, "We're all fine—we hear Buck is all right—we hear Lorinda is doing fine in her new tea room—Philip writes he is all right." And once came Philip himself, his pompous son, more pompous than ever now as a Corpo judge, and very hurt about his father's insane radicalism—considerably more hurt when Doremus tartly observed that he would much rather have had the dog Foolish for visitor.

      And there were letters—all censored—worse than useless to a man who had been so glad to hear the living voices of his friends.

      In the long run, these frustrate visits, these empty letters, made his waiting the more dismal, because they suggested that perhaps he was wrong in his nightly visions; perhaps the world outside was not so loving and eager and adventurous as he remembered it, but only dreary as his cell.

      He had little known Karl Pascal, yet now the argumentative Marxian was his nearest friend, his one amusing consolation. Karl could and did prove that the trouble with leaky valves, sour cow pastures, the teaching of calculus, and all novels was their failure to be guided by the writings of Lenin.

      In his new friendship, Doremus was old-maidishly agitated lest Karl be taken out and shot, the recognition usually given to Communists. He discovered that he need not worry. Karl had been in jail before. He was the trained agitator for whom Doremus had longed in New Underground days. He had ferreted out so many scandals about the financial and sexual shenanigans of every one of the guards that they were afraid that even while he was being shot, he might tattle to the firing-squad. They were much more anxious for his good opinion than for that of Captain Cowlick, and they timidly brought him little presents of chewing tobacco and Canadian newspapers, as though they were schoolchildren honeying up to teacher.

СКАЧАТЬ