Greener Than You Think Part 28

_53._ William Rufus Le ffacase 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 s.c.r.o.t.u.m 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 hairs.h.i.+rt. 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 ffacase."

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 b.l.o.o.d.y prototype of all the a.r.s.elickers, 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 gra.s.s 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 amus.e.m.e.nt 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 b.u.t.ternut 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 pa.s.sed.

"A few weeks ago Dubuque was still here, quiet, old and pleasant, the b.u.t.t of affectionate jokes, the Gra.s.s 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 Gra.s.s 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 fas.h.i.+on.

"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 Gra.s.s 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 Gra.s.s. 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.h.i.+pped 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 ma.s.s 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 a.s.sets 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 Devilgra.s.s 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 Gra.s.s 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 _Greengra.s.s 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 skysc.r.a.pers were no longer steel skeletons with thin facings of stone hung upon them like a slattern's ap.r.o.n, while the practice of daubing mud on chickenwire hastily laid over paper was discontinued. Everyone wanted to build for all time, even though the Gra.s.s 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 Gra.s.s was overrunning Illinois. In contrast I cannot forbear to quote Le ffacase, 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 cla.s.ses virtuously imbued with such fanatical patriotism they are prepared for ma.s.s suicide rather than leave. Because dukes _are_ emigrating and sending the price of s.h.i.+ppings.p.a.ce into brackets which make the export of any commodity but diamonds or their own hides a dubious investment, even the p.a.w.ning of all the family a.s.sets would not buy steerage pa.s.sage for a year old baby. Besides there are not enough bottoms in the world to transport a hundred and fifty million people. If the Gra.s.s 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 s.e.x 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 Gra.s.s. The Federal Disruptions Commission has published the eleventh volume of its report and is currently holding hearings to determine how closely the extinct buffalogra.s.s 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 kins.h.i.+p, have withdrawn into complete listlessness. Some black men have fled, but to most the Gra.s.s 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 ent.i.tled 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 ffacase 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 Gra.s.s 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 Gra.s.s 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 Sh.e.l.ley 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 a.s.sured, pace becomes dignified.

"But death is not death; life is never mocked. The Gra.s.s is not death any more than it is evil. The Gra.s.s is the Gra.s.s. 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 s.h.i.+rt 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 Gra.s.s. 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."