Chapter IX: Part 9

_51._ But even without the newspapers George Thario would have kept me informed. "Piteous if not too comprehensive for small emotions," he wrote in a letter only a little more intelligible than the stuff in his notebooks. "Yesterday I stopped by a small farm or ranch as local grandiloquence everseeking purple justification has it here. Submarginal land the tabulating minds of governmentofficials (spectacles precise on nosebridge, daily ration of exlax safe in briefcase) would have labeled it, sitting in expectant unease on hilltops and the uncomfortable slopes between. Dryfarming; the place illegally acquired from cattlerange (more proper and more profitable) by nester grandsire; surviving drought and duststorm, locust, weevil, and straying herds; feeding rachitic kids, dull women and helpless men for halfacentury.

"The Farm Resettlement Administration would have moved them to fatter ground a hundred times, but blindly obstinate they held to what was theirs and yet not theirs. In the frontseat the man and wife and what remained of quick moments of dropjawed ecstasy, in back unwieldly chickencoop, slats patched with bits of applebox and wire, weathered gray; astonished cocks crowing out of time and hens heads down. Hitched behind, the family cow, stiffribbed and emptyuddered. The grass, deaf lover, had seized the shack, its fingers curled the solid door, body pressed forward for joyful rape. The nesters don't look back but pant ahead; the bumping of the car accommodates the cow.

"Ive had to leave the lodge of course and spend my nights in a thin house with a roof shaped like two playingcards, with the misleading sign, in punishment crippled, half fallen from its support, 'Tourists Accommodated' (if accommodation be empty spaces with mottoes and porcelain pisspots then punishment was unrighteous). I shall move on soon, perhaps for the worse since there is green now, beneath the blue.

"If I can ever come away I shall, but I'd not miss this gladiator show, this retiarii swing.

"Give my best to the Old Boy--tell him I'd write direct, but family feeling makes it hard. Joe."

I showed the letter to the general, expecting him perhaps to be annoyed by Joe's instability, but he merely said, "Boy shouldnt be wasting his talents ... put it in sound ... orchestrate it."

Just as Joe's enthusiasm covered only one aspect of the grass so his retreat from lodge to wayside hostel, to city hotel, embraced only a minute sector of the great advance. Neither moral nor brute force slowed the weed. It clutched the upper reaches of the Rio Grande and ran down its course to the Gulf of Mexico like quicksilver in a broken thermometer. It went through Colorado, Oklahoma and Kansas; it nibbled at the forks of the Platte; it left behind the Great Salt Lake like a chip diamond lost in an enormous setting.

There is no benefit to be derived from looking at the darker side of things and indeed it is a universal observation that there is no misfortune without its compensation. The loss of the great cattlegrazing areas of the West increased the demand for our concentrated foods by the hundredfold. We paid no duty on the products shipped in from our South American factories for they competed only with ourselves and we did the country the humanitarian service of preventing a famine by rushing carload after carload westward, rising above all thoughts of petty gain by making no increase whatever in our prices despite the expanding demand.

_52._ About this time it became indisputable that Button Gwynnet Fles was no longer of value to Consolidated Pemmican. His Yankee shrewdness and caution which enabled him to run the corporation when it was merely a name and a quotation on the stockmarket had the limits of its virtues. He was extraordinarily provincial in outlook and quite unable to see the concern on a world scale. In view of our vast expansion such narrowness had become an unbearable hindrance.

I had permitted him to hold a limited number of shares and to act nominally as secretary in order to comply with the regulations of the Security and Exchange Commission, but now it was expedient to add to our officers directors of other companies whose fields were complementary to ours. Besides, in General Thario I had a much abler assistant and so, perhaps reluctantly because of my oversensitivity, I displaced Fles and making the general president of the corporation I accepted the post of chairman of the board.

I must say he took a perfectly natural business move with unbecoming illgrace. "It was mine, Mr Weener, you know it was mine and I did not protest when you stole it; I worked loyally and unselfishly for you. It isnt the money, Mr Weener, really it isnt--it's the idea of being thrown out of my own business. At least let me stay on the Board of Directors; youll never have any trouble from me, I promise you that."

It distressed me to reject his abject plea, but my hands were tied by my devotion to the welfare of the company. Besides, he annoyed me by his palpably untrue reference to what had been a legitimate transaction, never giving a thought to my generosity in not exposing his chicanery, nor the fact that the dummy he manipulated bore no resemblance whatever to the firm I had brought by my own effort to its present size.

Leaving matters in the able hands of General Thario, after warning Joe he had better soon return to his father's assistance, I went abroad to arrange for wider European representation. There I found a curious eagerness to be of help to me and almost fawning servility antipathetic to my democratic American notions. Oddly enough, the Europeans looked upon the United States as a doomed country, thinking I, like some members of our wealthier classes, had come to escape disruption and dislocation at home. Only in England did I find the belief prevalent that the Americans would somehow muddle through because afterall theyre the same sort of chaps we are, you know.

After a highly successful trip I returned home the same day the Grass reached the headwaters of the Mississippi.

_53._ William Rufus Le ffaçasé astonished me, as well as every newspaperman in the country by resigning as editor of the _Daily Intelligencer_, a post he had held before many of its reporters were born. When I phoned him to come to my office and explain himself he refused, in tones and manner I had not heard from any man since the days when I had wasted my talents as a subordinate. Having none of the pettiness of pride which makes some men fearful of their position, since he would not come to my office, I went to his. There he shocked me for the third time: a high, glossy collar, a flowing and figured cravat concealed the famous diamond stud, while instead of the snuffbox his hands hovered over a package of cheap cigarettes.

"Weener," he rasped, jettisoning all those courtesies to which I had become accustomed, "I never thought I'd be glad to see your vapid face again, unless on a marble slab in some city morgue, but now youre here, moneybags slapping the insides of your thighs in place of the scrotum for which you could have no possible use, I am delighted to tell you in person to take my paper--my paper, sir, note that well, for all your dirty pawings could not make it anything but mine--and supposit it. I hope it frets you, Weener, for the sake of your sniveling but immortal soul, I sincerely hope it rasps you like a misplaced hairshirt. You will get some miserable lickspittle to take my place, some mangy bookkeeping pimp with a permanentwaved wife and three snottynosed brats, but the spirit and guts of the _Intelligencer_ depart with W R Le ffaçasé."

I disregarded both his illmanners and his bombast. "What's the matter, Bill?" I asked kindly, "Is it more money? You can write your own ticket, you know. Within reason, of course."

His fingers looked for the snuffbox, but found only the cigarettes which he inspected puzzledly. "Weener, no man could do you justice. You are the bloody prototype of all the arselickers, panders, arsonists, kidnapers, cutthroats, pickpockets, abortionists, pilferers, cheats, forgers, sneakthieves, sharpers and blackmailers since Jacob swindled his brother. Do not fawn upon me little man, I am too old to want women or money. The sands are running out and I shall never now read the immortable Hobbes, but I'll not die in your bloody harness. In me you do not see the man who picked up the torch of Franklin and Greeley and Dana where Henry Watterson dropped it. Loose of your gangrenous chains, you behold the freelance correspondent of the North American Newspaper Alliance, the man who will devote his declining years to reporting in the terse and vivid prose for which he is justly famous the progress of the grass which strangles the country as you have tried to strangle me."

Again I put personal feelings aside. "If your mind is really made up, we'll want your stuff for the _Intelligencer_, Bill."

"Sir, you may want. I hope the condition persists."

There being no profit in arguing with a madman, I made arrangements to replace him immediately. I reproduce here, not for selfjustification, which would be superfluous, but merely for what amusement it may afford, one of his accounts which appeared in the columns of so many third and fourth rate newspapers. I won't say it shows the decay of a once possibly great mind, but it certainly reveals that the _Intelligencer_ suffered no irreparable loss.

"Today at Dubuque, Iowa, the Mississippi was crossed. Not by redmen in canoes, nor white on logs or clumsy rafts, nor yet by multiwheeled locomotives gliding over steel bridges nor airplanes so high the wide stream was a thread below. Nature and devastation, hand in hand, for the moment one and the same, crossed it today as Quantrell or Kirby Smith or Nathan Bedford Forrest crossed it, sabers glittering, so many forgotten years ago. But if the men in gray and butternut raided a store or burned a tavern they thought it a mighty victory and went home rejoicing; the green invader is an occupier and colonizer, come to remain for all time, leaving no town, no road, no farm where it has passed.

"A few weeks ago Dubuque was still here, quiet, old and pleasant, the butt of affectionate jokes, the Grass still miles away, the population still hopeful of salvation. And then, because of the panic, the frantic scurry to save things once valuable and now only valued, no one noticed when a betraying wind blew seeds beyond the town, over the river, to find receptive soil on the Wisconsin side. The seeds germinated, the clump flourished. It cut the highway and reached down the banks into the Mississippi, waiting. And while it waited it built up greater bulk for itself, behind and beside. Each day it pushed a little farther toward midstream, drowning its own foremost runners so those behind might have solidity to advance upon.

"Meanwhile from the west the continent imposed upon a continent came closer. The other day Dubuque went, its weathered bricks and immature stucco alike obliterated. The Grass ran out like a bather on a cold morning, hastening to the water before timidity halts him. Although I was watching I could not tell you at what exact instant the gap was closed, at what moment the runners from one clump intertwined with those of the other. But such a moment did occur, and shedding water like a surfacing whale the united bodies rose from the riverbed to form a verdant bridge.

"You could not walk across it, at least no man I know would want to try, but it gives the illusion of permanency no work of man, stone or steel or concrete, has ever given and it is a dismaying thing to see man's trade taken over by nature in this fashion.

"The bridge is a dam also. All the debris from the upper reaches collects against it and soon there will be floods to add to the other distress the Grass has brought. More than half the country is gone now: the territories pillaged from Mexico, argued from Britain, bought from France, have all been lost. Only the original states and Florida remain. Shall we be more successful in defending our basic land than all the acquisitions of a century and a half?"

But why add any more? Dry, senile, without feeling, my only wonder was that his stuff was printed, even in the obscure media where it appeared.

_54._ With twothirds of the country absorbed and a hundred fifty million people squeezed into what was left, economic conditions became worse than ever. No European ghetto was as crowded as our cities and no overpopulated countryside farmed so intensively to so little purpose. An almost complete cessation of employment except in the remnant of the export trade, valueless money--English shillings and poundnotes illegally circulated being the prized medium of exchange--starvation only irritated rather than relieved by the doles of food seized from the farmers and grudgingly handed out to the urban dwellers.

Each election saw another party in power, the sole demand of the voters being for an administration capable of stopping the Grass. Since none was successful, the dissatisfaction and anger grew together with the panic and dislocation. Messiahs and fuehrers sprang up thickly. Riots in all cities were daily occurrences, rating no more than obscure paragraphs, while in many areas gangs of hoodlums actually maintained themselves in power for weeks at a time, ruling their possessions like feudal baronies and exacting tribute from all travelers through their domain.

Immigration had long ago been stopped, but now the government, in order to preserve what space was left for genuine Americans, canceled the naturalization of all foreignborn and ordered them immediately deported. All Jews who had been in the country less than three generations were shipped to Palestine and the others deprived of political rights in order to encourage them to leave also. The Negroes, who except for a period less than a decade in length had never had any political or civil rights, planned a mass migration to Africa, a project enthusiastically spurred by such elder statesmen as the learned Maybank and the judicious Rankin. This movement proved abortive when statisticians showed there were not enough liquid assets among the colored population to pay a profit on their transportation.

An attempt to oust all Catholics failed also, for the rather odd reason that many of the minor Protestant sects joined in a body to oppose it. The Latterday Saints--now busy building New Deseret in Central Australia--and the Church of Christ, Scientist, as well as the Episcopalians, Doweyites, Shakers, Christadelphians, and the congregation of the Chapel of the Former and Latter Rains presented a united front for tolerance and equity.

An astonishing byproduct of the national despair and turmoil was the feverish activity in all fields of creative endeavor. Novels streamed from the presses, volumes of poetry became substantial items on publishers' lists and those which failed to find a publisher were mimeographed and peddled to a receptive public, while painters working with Renascence enthusiasm turned out great canvases as fast as their brushes could spread the oils. We had suddenly become a nation madly devoted to the arts. When Orpheus Crisodd's Devilgrass Symphony was first played in Carnegie Hall an audience three times as great as that admitted had to be accommodated outside with loudspeakers and when the awesome crescendo of horns, drums, and broken crockery rubbed over slate surfaces announced the climax of the sixth movement, the crowds wept. Even for Mozart the hall was full, or practically full.

In the lively arts the impact of the Grass was more overt. On the comicpage, Superman daily pushed it back and there was great regret his activities were limited to a fourcolor process, while Terry Lee and Flash Gordon, everinspirited by the sharp outlines of mammaryglands, also saved the country. Even Lil Abner and Snuffy Smith battled the vegetation while no one but Jiggs remained absolutely impervious. The _Greengrass Blues_ was heard on every radio and came from every adolescent's phonograph until it was succeeded by _Itty Bitty Seed Made Awfoo Nasty Weed_.

Perhaps the most notable feature of this period was a preoccupation with permanency. Jerrybuilding, architectural mode since the first falsefront was erected over the first smalltown store, practically disappeared. The skyscrapers were no longer steel skeletons with thin facings of stone hung upon them like a slattern's apron, while the practice of daubing mud on chickenwire hastily laid over paper was discontinued. Everyone wanted to build for all time, even though the Grass might seize upon their effort next week. In New York the Cathedral of St John the Divine was finally completed and a new one dedicated to St George begun. The demand for enduring woods replaced the market for green pine and men planned homes to accommodate their greatgrandchildren and not to attract prospective buyers before the plaster cracked.

Naturally, forwardlooking men like Stuart Thario and myself, though we had every respect for culture, were not swamped by this sudden urge to encourage the effervescent side of life. Our feet were still upon the ground and though we knew symphonies and novels and cathedrals had their place, it was important not to lose sight of fundamentals; while we approved in principle the desire for permanency, we took reality into account. We had every faith in the future of the country, being certain a way would be found before long to stop the encroachments of the weed; nevertheless, as a proper precaution--a safeguarding counterbalance to our own enthusiastic patriotism--we invested our surplus funds in Consols and European bonds, while hastening our plans for new factories on other continents.

I'm sure George Thario must have been a great cross to his father although the general never spoke of him save in the most affectionate terms. Living like a tramp--he sent a snapshot once showing him with a long starveling beard, dressed in careless overalls, his arm over the shoulder of a slovenly looking girl--he stayed always on the edge of the advancing weed, moving eastward only when forced. He wrote from Galena:

"Eagle forgotten. The rejected accepted, for yesterday's eagle is today's, the hero is man and man his own hero. I was with him when he died and when he died again and a hundred miles to the south is another eagle forgotten and all the prairies, green once more, will be as they were before men insulted them. O eagle forgotten. O stained prairie, O gallows, thirsty mob, knife, torch, revolver. Contumely, parochialism, the shortvision forever gone; and the long vision too, the eagle forgotten is the national bird, the great merging with the greater, so gained too late a vision and saw the hope that was despair.

"I named the catalogue of states and the great syllables rolled from my tongue to echo silence. My sister, my bride. Gone and gone; the Conestoga wagons have no more faint ruts to follow, the Little Big Horn is a combination of letters, the marking sunflowers exist no more. We destroyed, we preempted; we are destroyed and we have been thrust out. Illinois admitted to the Union on suchandsuch a date, the Little Giant rubbed stubby fingers through pompous hair heavy with beargrease, the Honorable Abe in Springfield's most expensive broadcloth, necktie in the latest mode but pulled aside to free an eager adamsapple; the drunken tanner, punctual with the small man's virtues, betrayed and dying painfully with so much blood upon his hands; and the eagle himself, forgotten and now again forgotten.

"I move once more. Step by step I give it up, the land we took and the land we made. Each foot I resign leaves the rest more precious. O precious land, O dear and fruitful soil. Its clods are me, I eat them, give them back; the bond is indissoluble. Even the land gone is still mine, my bones rest in it, I have eaten of its fruits and laid my mark on it...."

All of which was a longwinded way of saying the Grass was overrunning Illinois. In contrast I cannot forbear to quote Le ffaçasé, though his faults, at the opposite end of the scale, were just as glaring: "It is in Kentucky now, birthstate of Abraham Lincoln, sixteenth president of the United States, a country which once stretched south of the Forty-ninth Parallel from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have been traveling extensively in what is left of Lincoln's nation. 'Dukes,' remarked Chesterton, 'don't emigrate.' This country was settled by the poor and thriftless and now few more than the poor and thriftless remain in it.

"Let me try to present an overall picture: What is left of the country has become a nineteenth century Ireland, with all economic power in the hands of absentees. It is not that everyone below the level of a millionaire is too stupid to foresee possibility of complete destruction; or the middle and lower classes virtuously imbued with such fanatical patriotism they are prepared for mass suicide rather than leave. Because dukes _are_ emigrating and sending the price of shippingspace into brackets which make the export of any commodity but diamonds or their own hides a dubious investment, even the pawning of all the family assets would not buy steerage passage for a year old baby. Besides there are not enough bottoms in the world to transport a hundred and fifty million people. If the Grass is not stopped, except for a negligible few, it will cover Americans when it covers America.

"No wonder a strange and conflicting spirit animates our people. Apathy? Yes, there is apathy; you can see it on the faces in a line of relief clients wondering how long an industrially stagnant country can continue their dole--even though now it consists of nothing but unpalatable chemicals--socalled 'Concentrates.' Despair? Certainly. The riots and lootings, especially the intensified ones recently in Cleveland and Pittsburgh, are symptoms of it. The overcrowded churches, the terrific increase in drugging and drinking, the sex orgies which have been taking place practically in the open in Baltimore and Philadelphia and Boston are stigmata of desperation.

"Hope? I suppose there is hope. Congress sits in uninterrupted session and senators lend their voices night and day to the destruction of the Grass. The Federal Disruptions Commission has published the eleventh volume of its report and is currently holding hearings to determine how closely the extinct buffalograss is related to _Cynodon dactylon_. Every research laboratory in the country, except those whose staffs and equipment have been moved with their proprietary industries, is expending its energies in seeking a salvation.

"Perhaps only in the Deep South, as yet protected by the width of the lower Mississippi, is there something approaching a genuine hope, although ironically that may be the product of ignorance. Here the overlords have gone and the poor whites, unsupported by an explicit kinship, have withdrawn into complete listlessness. Some black men have fled, but to most the Grass is a mere bogey, incapable of frightening those who have survived so much. Now, for the first time since 1877 the polls are open to all and there are again Negro governors, and black legislatures. And they are legislating as if forever. Farm tenancy has been abolished, the great plantations have been expropriated and made cooperative, the Homestead Act of 1862 has been applied in the South and every citizen is entitled to claim a quartersection. There is a great deal of laughter at this childish lawmaking, but it goes on, changing the face of the region, the lawmakers themselves not at all averse to the joke."

Everything Le ffaçasé wrote was not only dull, but biased and unjust as well. It was true capital was leaving the country rapidly, but what other course had it? To stay and attempt to carry on industry in the midst of the demoralization was obviously impractical. The plants remained and when a way was found to conquer the Grass we would be glad to reopen them, for this would be a practical course, just as the flight of capital was a practical course; standards of living were now so reduced in the United States it would be more profitable to employ cheap American labor than overpaid Latin or European.

_55._ I had now no fixed abode, dividing my time between Rio and Buenos Aires, Melbourne and Manchester. General Thario and his family lived in Copenhagen, overseeing our continental properties, now of equal importance with the South American holdings. Before leaving, and indeed on every trip back home, he visited his son--no easy thing to do, what with the young man's constant movement and the extreme difficulty of going from east to west against the torrent pouring in the opposite direction. Joe had married the female of the snapshot, or contracted some sort of permanent alliance with her--I never got it quite straight and the Tharios were deplorably careless about such details; and she proved as eccentric as he was. No appeal to selfinterest, no pleading he forgo his morbid preoccupation with the Grass for the sake of his family, could move them.

"A W--you have seen it, heard it, smelled it. Can't you explain--miraculously touched with the gift of lucidity for fact as you are for the fictions of production, overhead and dividends? Oh, not to Mama--either she understands better than I or not at all--but to the Old Man or Connie?

"As a child you learn for the first time of death: the heart is shuttered in a little cell, too cruel for breathing; the sun is gray. In an instant you forget; the sky is bright; the blood pounds. Years later the adolescent falls in love with death; primps his spirit for it; recalls in unpresumptuous brotherhood Shelley and Keats and Chatterton. Afterward the flush fades; we are reconciled to life, but the promise is still implicit. Now, however, it must be earned, awaited. Haste would destroy the savor. The award assured, pace becomes dignified.

"But death is not death; life is never mocked. The Grass is not death any more than it is evil. The Grass is the Grass. It is me and I am it; 'in my father's house there are many mansions, if it were not so I would not have told you.'

"No, I suppose not; yet it hurts my liver to offer the old boy incomprehensible reasons or verbiage like 'compulsion neurosis' when all he wants is to protect me from my own impulses as he protected me from the army. Florence and I delight in him--he comes again next week if possible--but we cannot convey to him the unthinkableness of leaving...."

I heard about this visit later from the general. Joe had scoured Chicago for the alcoholic commodities now practically unprocurable, and returned in triumph to the couple's furnished room. There they entertained him with two bottles of cointreau and a stone demijohn of cornwhisky. "Touched ... filial affection ... even drank the cointreau--fiddling stuff, no wonder it was still available in the drought ... better son a man never had....

"Girl's all right. Moved in circles ... perhaps not accustomed ... bit rough in speech, but heart of gold ... give you the shirt right off her back ... hum ... manner of speaking ... know what I mean...."

But she would not add her persuasions to those of the general. "Joe's got to stay. It's not something he sat down and thought up, the way you plan dinner or whether blue goes good with your new permanent. He's got to stay because he's got to stay. And of course, so do I. We couldnt be satisfied anywhere we couldnt see the Grass. Life's too dull away from it ... but of course that's only part--it's too big to explain...."

"But George--Joe as you call him ... highly talented ... sensitive ... shouldnt be allowed to decay," the general argued. "Fascination ... understand, but effort of will ... break the spell. Europe ... birthplace of culture ... reflection ... give him a proper perspective ... chance to do things...."

Even when the evening lengthened and he became more lucid under the stimulus of cornwhisky and cointreau he could not shake them. "Judicious retreat, especially in the face of overwhelming superiority, has always been a military weapon and no captain, no matter how valiant, has ever feared to use it."

"Pop," George Thario had retorted goodhumoredly, "you dragged in the metaphor, not I. Youve heard of the Alamo and Vicksburg and Corregidor? Well, this is them--all rolled into one."

_56._ The first snows of this ominous winter halted progress of the Grass. It went sluggish and then dormant first in the far north, where only the quick growingseason, once producing cabbages big as hogsheads, had allowed it to spread at a rate at all comparable to its progress farther south. But by now there could be no doubt left that _Cynodon dactylon_, once so sensitive to cold that it had covered itself, even in the indistinguishable Southern California winter, with a protective sheath, had become inured to frost and chill, hibernating throughout the severest cold and coming back vigorously in the spring.

It now extended from Alaska to Hudson Bay, covering all Manitoba and parts of Ontario. It had taken to itself Minnesota, the northern peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin, a great chunk of Illinois, and stood baffled on the western bank of the Mississippi from Cairo to its mouth. The northwestern, underpopulated half of Mexico was overrun, the Grass moving but sluggishly into the estados bordering the Gulf Coast.

I cannot say this delusive safety was enjoyed, for there was unbelievable hardship. In spite of the great bulk of the country's coalfields lying east of the Grass and the vast quantities of oil and natural gas from Texas, there was a fuel famine, due largely to the breakdown of the transportation system. People warmed themselves after a fashion by burning furniture and rubbish in improvised stoves. Of course this put an additional strain on firedepartments, themselves suffering from the same lack of new equipment, tires, and gasoline, afflicting the general public and great conflagrations swept through Akron, Buffalo and Hartford. Garbage collection systems broke down and no attempt was made to clear the streets of snow. Broken watermains, gaspipes and sewers were followed by typhus and typhoid and smallpox, flux, cholera and bubonic plague. The hundreds of thousands of deaths relieved only in small degree the overcrowding; for the epidemics displaced those refugees sheltered in the schoolhouses, long since closed, when these were made auxiliary to the inadequate hospitals.

The strangely inappropriate flowering of culture, so profuse the year before, no longer bloomed. A few invincible enthusiasts, mufflered and raincoated, still bore the icy chill of the concert hall, a quorum of painters besieged the artist supply stores for the precious remaining tubes of burntumber and scarletlake, while it was presumed that in traditionally unheated garrets orthodox poets nourished their muse on pencil erasers. But all enthusiasm was individual property, the reaction of single persons with excess adrenalin. No common interests united doctor and stockbroker, steelworker and truckdriver, laborer and laundryman, except common fear of the Grass, briefly dormant but ever in the background of all minds. The stream of novels, plays, and poems dried up; publishers, amazed that what had been profitable the year before was no longer so, were finally convinced and stopped printing anything remotely literate; even the newspapers limped along crippledly, their presses breaking down hourly, their circulation and coverage alike dubious.

The streets were no more safe at night than in sixteenth century London. Even in the greatest cities the lighting was erratic and in the smaller ones it had been abandoned entirely. Holdups by individuals had been practically given up, perhaps because of the uncertainty of any footpad getting away with his loot before being hijacked by another, but small compact gangs made life and property unsafe at night. Tempers were extraordinarily short; a surprised housebreaker was likely to add battery, mayhem and arson to his crimes, and altercations which commonly would have terminated in nothing more violent than lurid epithets now frequently ended in murder.

Since too many of the homeless took advantage of the law to commit petty offenses and so secure some kind of shelter for themselves, all law enforcement below the level of capital crimes went by default. Prisoners were tried quickly, often in batches, rarely acquitted; and sentences of death were executed before nightfall so as to conserve both prison space and rations.

In rural life the descent was neither so fast nor so far. There was no gasoline to run cars or tractors, but carefully husbanded storagebatteries still provided enough electricity to catch the news on the radio or allow the washingmachine to do the week's laundry. To a great extent the farmer gave up his dependence on manufactured goods, except when he could barter his surplus eggs or milk for them, and instead went back to the practices of his forefather, becoming for all intents and purposes practically selfsufficient. Soap from woodashes and leftover kitchen grease might scratch his skin and a jacket of rabbit or wolverine hide make him selfconscious, but he went neither cold nor hungry nor dirty while his urban counterpart, for the most part, did.

One contingency the countrydweller prepared grimly against: roaming hordes of the hungry from the towns, driven to plunder by starvation which they were too shiftless to alleviate by purchasing concentrates, for sale everywhere. Shotguns were loaded, corncribs made tight, stock zealously guarded. But except rarely the danger had been overestimated. The undernourished proletariat lacked the initiative to go out where the food came from. Generations had conditioned them to an instinctive belief that bread came from the bakery, meat from the butcher, butter from the grocer. Driven by desperation they broke into scantily supplied food depots, but seldom ventured beyond the familiar pavements. Famine took its victims in the streets; the farmers continued to eat.

I arrived in New York on the clipper from London in mid-January of this dreadful winter. I had boarded the plane at Croydon, only subconsciously aware of the drive from London through the traditionally neat hedgerows, of the completely placid and lawabiding England around me, the pleasant officials, the helpful yet not servile porters. Long Island shocked me by contrast. It had come to its present condition by slow degrees, but to the returning traveler the collapse was so woefully abrupt it seemed to have happened overnight.

Tension and hysteria made everyone volatile. The customs officials, careless of the position of those whom they dealt with, either inspected every cubic inch of luggage with boorish suspicion and resultant damage or else waved the proffered handbags airily aside with false geniality. The highways, repeating a pattern I had cause to know so well, were nearly impassable with brokendown cars and other litter. The streets of Queens, cluttered with wreckage and refuse, were bounded by houses in a state of apathetic disrepair whose filthy windows refused to look upon the scene before them. The great bridges over the East River were not being properly maintained as an occasional snapped cable, hanging over the water like a drunken snake, showed; it was dangerous to cross them, but there was no other way. The ferryboats had long since broken down.

At the door of my hotel, where I had long been accustomed to just the right degree of courteous attention, a screaming mob of men and boys wrapped in careless rags to keep out the cold, their unwashed skins showing where the coverings had slipped, begged abjectly for the privilege of carrying my bags. The carpet in the lobby was wrinkled and soiled and in the great chandeliers half the bulbs were blackened. Though the building was served by its own powerstation, the elevators no longer ran, and the hot water was rationed, as in a fifthrate French pension. The coverlet on the bed was far from fresh, the window was dusty and there was but one towel in the bathroom. I was glad I had not brought my man along for him to sneer silently at an American luxury hotel.

I picked up the telephone, but it was dead. I think nothing gave me the feeling that civilization as we knew it had ended so much as the blank silence coming from the dull black earpiece. This, even more than the automobile, had been the symbol of American life and activity, the essential means of communication which had promoted every business deal, every social function, every romance; it had been the first palliation of the sickbed and the last admission of the mourner. Without telephones we were not even in the horse and buggy days--we had returned to the oxcart. I replaced the receiver slowly in its cradle and looked at it a long minute before going back downstairs.

_57._ I had come home on a quixotic and more or less unbusinesslike mission. It had long been the belief of Consolidated Pemmican's chemists that the Grass might possibly furnish raw material for food concentrates and we had come to modify our opinion about the necessity for a processing plant in close proximity. However, at secondhand, no practicable formula had been evolved. Strict laws against the transportation of any specimens and even stricter ones barring them from every foreign country made experiment in our main research laboratories infeasible; but we still maintained a skeleton staff in our Jacksonville plant and I had come to arrange the collection of a large enough sample for them to get to work in earnest. It was a tricky business and I had no one beside myself whom I could trust to undertake it except General Thario, and he was fully occupied.

In addition to being illegal it also promised little profit, for while dislocation of the normal foodsupply made the United States our main market for concentrates, American currency had fallen so low--the franc stood at $5, the pound sterling at $250--it was hardly worthwhile to import our products. Of course, as a good citizen, I didnt send American money abroad, content to purchase Rembrandts, Botticellis, Titians or El Grecos; or when I couldnt find masterpieces holding a stable price on the world market, to change my dollars into some of the gold from Fort Knox, now only a useless bulk of heavy metal.

My first thought was Miss Francis. Though she had more or less dropped from public sight, my staff had ascertained she was living in a small South Carolina town. My telegrams remaining unanswered, there was nothing for me to do but undertake a trip there.

Despite strict instructions my planes had not been kept in proper condition and I had great difficulty getting mechanics to service them. There were plenty of skilled men unemployed and though they were not eager to earn dollars they were willing to work for other rewards. But the pervading atmosphere of tension and anxiety made concentration difficult; they bungled out of impatience, committed stupidities they would normally be incapable of; they quit without cause, flew into rages at the machines, the tools, their fellows, fate, at or without the slightest provocation.

My pilot was surly and hilarious by turn and I suspected him of drinking, which didnt add to my confidence in our safety. We flew low over railroadtracks stretching an empty length to the horizon, over smokeless factorychimneys, airports whose runways were broken and whose landinglights were dark. The land was green and rich, the industrial life imposed upon it till yesterday had vanished, leaving behind it the bleaching skeleton of its being.

The field upon which we came down seemed in slightly better repair than others we had sighted. The only other ship was an antique biplane which deserved housing in a museum. As I looked around the deserted landingstrip a tall Negro emerged leisurely from one of the buildings and walked toward us.

"Where are the airport officials?" I asked rather sharply, for I didnt relish being greeted by a janitor.

"I am the chief dispatcher. In fact, I am the entire personnel at the moment."

My pilot, standing behind me, broke in. "Boy, where're the white folks around here?"

The chief dispatcher looked at him steadily a long moment before answering. "I imagine you will find people of various shades all over town, including those allegedly white. Was there anyone in particular you were interested in or are you solely concerned with pigmentation?"

"Why, you goddam--"

I thought it advisable to prevent a possible altercation. I recalled Le ffaçasé's articles on the Black South which I had considered vastly overdrawn. Evidently they were not, for the chocolatecolored man spoke with all the ease and assurance of unquestioned authority. "I want to get to a Miss Francis at--" I consulted my notes and gave him the address. "Can you get me a taxi or car?"

He smiled gravely. "We are without such luxuries at present, I regret to say. But there will be a bus along in about twenty minutes."

It had been a long time since I suffered the wasted time and inconvenience of public transportation. However, there was no help for it and I resigned myself philosophically. I walked with the chief dispatcher into the airport waitingroom, dull with the listless air, not of unoccupancy, but disuse.

"Not much air travel," I remarked idly.

"Yours is the first plane in a month."

"I wonder you bother to keep the airport open at all."

"We do what we can to preserve the forms of civilization. The substance, unfortunately, cannot be affected by transportation, production, distribution, education or any other such niceties."

I smiled inwardly. What children these black people were, afterall. I was relieved from further ramblings by the arrival of the bus which was as laughable as the chief dispatcher's philosophizing. The dented and rusty vehicle had been disencumbered of its motor and was hitched to four mules who seemed less than enthusiastic over their lot. I got in and seated myself gingerly on one of the dilapidated seats, noting that the warning signs "For White" and "For Colored" had been smeared over with just enough paint to make the intent of obliteration clear without actually doing so.

_58._ How Miss Francis contrived to make every place she lived in, apartment, chickenhouse or cottage, look exactly alike was remarkable. Nothing is more absurd than the notion that socalled intellectual workers are always alert--as Miss Francis demonstrated by her greeting to me.

"Well, Weener, what is it this time? Selling on commission or an interview?"

It was inconceivable any literate person in the United States could be ignorant of my position. "It is neither," I returned with some dignity. "I am here to do you a favor. To help you in your work." And I explained my proposition.

She squatted back on her heels and gave me that old, familiar, searching look. "So you have made a good thing out of the Metamorphizer afterall," she said irrelevantly and untruthfully. "Weener, you are a consistent character--a beautifully consistent character."

"Please come to the point, Miss Francis. I am a busy man and I have come down here simply to see you. Will you accept?"

"No."

"No?"

"I doubt if I could combine my research with your attempt to process the inoculated _Cynodon dactylon_. However, that would not prevent me from taking you up and using you in order to further a good cause. But I am not yet ready--I shall not be ready for some time, to go directly to the Grass. That must come later. No, Weener."

I was exasperated at the softness of my impulse which had made me seek out this madwoman to do her a favor. I could not regret my charitable nature, but I mentally resolved to be more discriminating in future. Besides, the thought of Miss Francis for the work had been sheer sentimentality, the sort of false reasoning which would make of every mother an obstetrician or every hen an oologist.

As I sauntered through the drowsy streets, killing time till the driver of the ridiculous "bus" should decide to guide his mules back to the airport, I was struck by the lack of tension, of apprehension and anxiety, so apparent in New York. Evidently the Black South suffered little from the brooding fear and terror; I put it down to their childish thoughtlessness.

Walking thus reflectively, head down, I looked up suddenly--straight into the face of the Strange Lady I had driven from Los Angeles to Yuma.

I'm sure I opened my mouth, but no words came out. She was hurrying rapidly along, paying no attention either to me or to her surroundings, aloof and exquisite. I think I put out my hand, or made some other reflexive gesture to stop her, but either she failed to notice or misunderstood. When I finally recovered myself and set out after her, she had vanished.

I waited for the bus, wondering if I had been victim of an hallucination....

_59._ In spite of Miss Francis' blindness to her own interest I still had a prospective superintendent for the gathering and shipping of the grass: George Thario. Unless his obsession had sent him down into Mississippi or Louisiana, I expected to find him in Indianapolis.

The short journey west was tedious and uncomfortable, repeating the pattern of the one southward. At the end of it there was no garrulous chief dispatcher, for the airport was completely deserted, and I was thankful for an ample stock of gas for the return flight.

I had no difficulty locating Joe in an immense, highceilinged furnishedroom in one of the ugliest gray weatherboarded houses, of which the city, never celebrated for its architecture, could boast. The first thing to impress me was the room's warmth. For the first time since landing I did not shiver. A woodfire burned in an open grate and a kerosene heater smelled obstinately in an opposite corner. A grandpiano stood in front of the long narrow windows and on it slouched several thick piles of curlyedged paper.

He greeted me with something resembling affection. "The tycoon himself! Workers of the world--resume your chains. A W, it's a pleasure to see you. And looking so smooth and ordinary and unharassed too, at the moment everyone else is tearing himself with panic or anguish. How do you do it?"

"I look on the bright side of things, Joe," I answered. "Worry never helped anybody accomplish anything--and it takes fewer muscles to smile than to frown."

"You hear that, Florence?"

I had not noticed her when I came in, the original of the snapshot, sitting placidly in a corner darning socks. I must say the photograph had done her less than justice, for though she was undoubtedly commonlooking and sloppy, with heavy breasts and coarse red cheeks and unconcealedly dyed hair, there was yet about her an air of great vitality, kindness, and good nature. Parenthetically she acknowledged my presence with a pleasant smile.

"You hear that? Remind me the next time I am troubled by a transposition or a solopassage that it takes less muscles to smile than to frown. For I have got to work at last, A W; the loafing and inviting of my soul is past, my soul has responded to my invitation. You remember Crisodd's Devilgrass Symphony? A horrible misconception if ever there was one, a personal insult to anyone who ever saw the Grass; a dull, unintentional joke; bad Schoenberg--if that isnt a tautology--combined with faint memories of the most vulgar Wagner--if that isnt another tautology--threaded together on _Mighty Like a Rose_ and _Alexander's Ragtime Band_. But what am I saying, A W, to you who are so free from the virus of culture? What the hell interest have you in Crisodd's symphony or my symphony or anybody's symphony, except the polyphony of profits?"

"I hope no one thinks I'm a narrowminded man, Joe," I reproved him. "I venture to say I have as much interest in Art as the next person. Ive done a bit of writing myself, you know, and literature--"

"Oh sure. I didnt mean to hurt your feelings."

"You did not. But while I believe Music is a fine thing in its place, I came to discuss a different subject."

"If you mean taking Joe back to Europe with you, youre out of luck, Mr Weener," put in Florence placidly. "He's almost finished the first movement and we'll never leave the Grass till it's all done."

"You mistake me, Mrs Thario. I have a proposition for your husband, but far from taking him away from the Grass, it will bring him closer to it."

"Impossible," exclaimed Joe. "I am the Grass and the Grass is me; in mystical union we have become a single entity. I speak with its voice and in the great cadences which come from its heart you can hear Thario's first, transfigured and magnified a hundred thousand times."

I was sorry to note his speech, always so simple and unaffected in contrast to his letters, was infected with an unbecoming pomposity. Looking at him closely I saw he had lost weight. His flesh had shrunk closer to his big frame and the lines of his skull stood out sharply in his cheek and jaw. There was the faintest touch of gray in his hair and his fingers played nervously with the ragged and illadvised beard on his chin. He hardly looked the man who had evaded serious work in order to encourage a silly obsession, comfortably supported all the while by a sizable remittance from his father.

I outlined to them my plans for gathering samples of the weed. Florence tucked her stillthreaded needle between her teeth and inspected the current pair of socks critically. Joe walked over to the piano and struck several discordant notes.

"I understand there are several parties making expeditions onto the Grass," I said.

"Lots," confirmed Joe. "There's a group sent out by Brother Paul on some very mysterious mission. It's called the Sanctification of the Forerunner. God knows how many thousands he's made his suckers cough up, for theyre equipped with all the latest gadgets for polar exploration, skis and dogsleds, moompitcher cameras, radios and unheardof quantities of your very best pemmican. They started as soon as the snow was thick enough to bear their weight and if we have an untimely thaw theyll go to join the Russians.

"Then there's the government bunch, the Disruptions Commission having finally and reluctantly produced an idea, but exactly what it is they havent confided to an eager citizenry. Smaller groups too: scientists and nearscientists, enthusiasts who have got the notion somehow that animals or migratory game are roaming the snow on top of the grass--exactly how they got there is not explained--planning to photograph, hunt or trap; and just plain folk making the trip for the hell of it. We might have gone ourselves if it hadnt been for the symphony."

"Your symphony is concerned with the Grass?" I asked politely.

"It's concerned with combinations of sound." He looked at me sharply and banged out harsher discords. "With life, if you want to talk like a programnote."

"If you go on this expedition it will give you an opportunity to gather new material," I pointed out.

"If I look out the window or consult my navel or 'meditate while at stool' or cut my finger I will get new material with much less hardship. The last thing a composer or writer or painter needs is material; it is from excess of material he is the besotted creature he is. He may lack leisure or energy or ability or an active colon, but no masterpiece ever was or conceivably could be thwarted from lack of material."

"Yet you have tied yourself to the Grass."

"Not to prostitute it to whatever talents I have, but because it is the most magnificent thing on earth."

"Then of course youll go," I said.

"Why don't you go yourself, A W? Do you good to live out in the open."

"I can't afford the time, Joe; I have too many things that need my personal attention."

He struck a series of great thumping notes. "And so have I, A W, so have I. I'm afraid youll have to get somebody else."

I could neither understand nor shake his obstinacy and when I left them I had almost determined to abandon the whole project, for I could not think whom else trustworthy I could get. His idea of my own participation was fantastic; I had long since come to the point where it was necessary to delegate all such duties to subordinates.

_60._ Perhaps it was Joe's sly remark about it doing me good to be out in the open, or the difficulty of getting a conveyance, but I decided to walk to my hotel. Taxis of course disappeared with gasoline, but ingenious men, unwilling to be pauperized by accepting the dole, had devised rickshaws and bicycle carriages which were the only means of local transportation. The night was clear and cold, the stars gleaming in distant purity, but all around, the offensive smell of the disheveled city played on my disgusted nostrils.

"In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. Brother, are you saved?"

When the figure had come out from the shadow of a building to accost me my first thought had been of a holdup, but the odd salutation made this seem unlikely. "What do you want?" I asked.