Greener Than You Think Part 35

Preblesham's voice came in a bodiless waver over the miles. "A W? Can you hear me? I can give you a tip. Just about three hours ahead of the radio and newspapers. Can you understand me? Our big compet.i.tor has bought the adjoining property. Do you get me, A W?"

I nodded at the receiver as though he could see me, my thoughts racing furiously ahead. I had understood him all right: the Gra.s.s had somehow jumped the salt.w.a.ter gap and was loose upon another continent.

_73._ I had about three hours in which to dispose of all my South American holdings before their value vanished. Telephone facilities in the Thario house, though adequate for the transaction of the general's daily business, were completely unequal to the emergency. Even if they had not been, Mama's occasional sallies from her fireplace fort, saber waving threateningly, frequently endangered half our communications and we suffered all the while from the idiosyncrasies of the continental operators who seem unable ever to make a clear connection, varying this annoyance by a habit of either dropping dead or visiting the nearest cafe at those crucial moments when they did not interrupt a tense interchange by polite inquiries as to whether msieu had been connected.

I must say that in this crisis Stuart Thario displayed all his soldierly qualities to the full. Sweeping aside his domestic concerns as he would at the order of mobilization, he became swift, decisive, vigorous. The first call he put through was to the Kristian IV Hotel, engaging every available empty room so that we might preempt as much of the switchboard as possible. Pressing Constance and Winifred into service as secretaries until his own officestaff could be summoned and leaving Pauline to deal with Mama, he had us established in the hotel less than threequarters of an hour from the time Preblesham phoned.

Even as the earliest calls were being put through a barely perceptible signal pa.s.sed from the general to Winifred and presently large parts of the Kristian IV bar were being arranged on a long table at the general's elbow. I had little time for observation since I had to exert all my powers of salesmans.h.i.+p on unseen financiers to persuade them by indirection that I was facing a financial crisis and they had a chance to snap up my South American holdings at fractions of their values; but out of the corner of my eye I admired the way Stuart Thario continuously sipped from his constantly refilled gla.s.s without hesitating in his duplicating endeavors.

I expected the news to break and end our efforts at any moment, but the quickness with which I had seized upon Preblesham's information confirmed the proverb about the early bird; the threehour reprieve stretched to five and by the time Havas flashed the news I had liquefied almost all of my now worthless a.s.sets--and to potential financial rivals. Needless to say I had not trusted solely to the honor of the men with whom I had conversed, but had the sale confirmed in each case by an agent on the spot who accepted a check, draft, or cash from the buyer.

Only on paper did I suffer the slightest loss; in actuality my position became three times as strong as before.

_74._ The world took the extension of the Gra.s.s to South America with a philosophic calm which can only be described as amazing. Even the Latins themselves seemed more concerned with how the Gra.s.s had jumped the gap than with the impending fate of their continent. The generally accepted theory was that it had somehow mysteriously come by way of the West Indies, although as yet the Gra.s.s had not appeared on any of those islands, and even Cuba, within sight of the submerged Florida Keys, was apparently safe behind her protective supercyclone fans. But the fact the Gra.s.s had appeared first at Medellin in Colombia rather than in the tiny bit of Panama remaining seemed to show it had not come directly from the daggerpointed ma.s.s poised above the continent.

_La Prensa_ of Buenos Aires said in a long editorial ent.i.tled "Does Humanity Betray Itself?": "When the Colossus of the North was evilly enchanted, many Americans (except possibly our friends across the River Plate) breathed more easily. Now it would seem their rejoicing was premature and the doom of the Yankee is also to be the doom of our older civilization. How did this verdant disease spread from one continent to another? That is the question which tortures every human heart from the Antarctic to the Caribbean.

"It is believed the cordon around North America has not been generally respected. Scientists with the n.o.blest motives, and adventurers urged on by the basest, are alike believed to have visited the forbidden continent. It may well be that on one of these trips the seeds of the gigantic _Cynodon dactylon_ were brought back. It is well known that the agents of a certain Yankee capitalist have been accustomed to taking off on mysterious journeys near the very spot now afflicted by the emerald plague."

It was a dastardly hint and the sort of thing I had long come to look upon as inseparable from my position. Of all peoples the Latinamericans have long been known as the most notoriously ungrateful for the work we did in developing their countries. Why, in some backward parts, the natives had been content to live by hunting and fis.h.i.+ng till we furnished them with employment and paid them enough so they could buy salt fish and canned meats. Fortunately _La Prensa_'s innuendo, so obviously inspired by envy, was not taken up, and attention soon turned from the insoluble problem of the bridging of the gap to the southward progress of the weed itself.

From the very first, everyone took for granted the victory of the Gra.s.s.

No concerted efforts were made either to confine or to destroy it. The World Congress to Combat the Gra.s.s, far from being inactive, worked heroically, but it got little cooperation from the peoples most closely affected. When at one time it seemed as though the congress had got hold of a possible weapon, the Venezuelans refused them the necessary sites and Brazil would not allow pa.s.sage of foreign soldiers over its soil.

Nationalism suddenly became rampant. "We will die as Ecuadorians, descendants of the Incas," exclaimed the leading newspaper of Quito.

_El Gaucho_ of Lima pointed out caustically that most of Ecuador's area really belonged to Peru and the Peruvians were the true descendants of the Incas anyway. "We shall all die as unashamed Peruvians!" thundered _El Gaucho_.

In vain the Church pointed out the difference between Christian resignation and sinful suicide. The reply of most South Americans, when they bothered to reply at all, was either that the coming of the Gra.s.s expressed G.o.d's will toward them or else to scorn the Church entirely.

Imitations of Brother Paul's movement flourished, with additions and refinements suited to the Latin temperament.

So the efforts of the World Congress were almost entirely limited to searching each s.h.i.+p, plane, and individual leaving the doomed continent to be sure none of the fatal seeds were transported. Even this precaution was resented as an infringement on national sovereignty, but the resentment was limited to bellicose p.r.o.nouncements in the newspapers; the republics looked on sullenly while their honor was systematically violated by phlegmatic inspectors.

_75._ The Gra.s.s grew to unheardof heights in the tropical valley of the Amazon. It washed the slopes of the Andes as it had the Cordilleras and the Rockies, leaving only the highest peaks free of its presence. It raced across the llanos, the savannas and the pampas and covered the high plateaus in a slow relentless growth.

The people ran from the Gra.s.s, not in a straight line from north to south, but by indirection, seeking first the seacoasts and then escape from the afflicted land. Those North Americans who had eluded the Gra.s.s once did not satisfy themselves with halfmeasures when their sanctuary was lost, but bought pa.s.sage on any bottom capable, however dubiously, of keeping out the sea and embarked for the farthest regions.

_76._ In point of time, I am now about halfway through my narrative. It is hard to believe that only eleven years have pa.s.sed since the Gra.s.s conquered South America; indeed, it is extraordinarily difficult for me to reconstruct these middle years at all. Not because they were hard or unpleasant--on the contrary, they carried me from one success to another--but because they have, in memory, the dreamlike quality of unreality, elusive, vague and tantalizing.

Like a dream, too, was the actual progress of the Gra.s.s. We were all, I think, impressed by the sense of repet.i.tion, of a scene enacted over and over again. It was this quality which gives my story, now that I look back upon it, a certain distortion, for no one, hearing it for the first time, and not as any reader of these words must be, thoroughly familiar with the events, could believe in the efforts made to combat the Gra.s.s.

These efforts existed; we did not yield without struggles; we fought for South America as we had fought for North America. But it was a nightmare fight; our endeavors seem retrospectively those of the paralyzed....

The Gra.s.s gripped the continent's great northern bulge, squeezed it into submission and worked its way southward to the slender tip, driving the inhabitants before it, duplicating previous acts by sending an influx from spa.r.s.ely to thickly settled areas, creating despair, terror, disruption and confusion; pestilence, hysteria and famine.

The drama was not played through in one act, but many; to a world waiting the conclusion it dragged on through interminable months and years, offering no change, no sudden twists of fortune, no elusive hopes. At last, mercifully, the tragedy ended; the green curtain came down and covered the continent to the Strait of Magellan. The Gra.s.s looked wistfully across at Tierra del Fuego, the land of ice and fire, but even its voracity balked, momentarily at any rate, at the inhospitable island and left it to whatever refugees chose its sh.o.r.es as a slower but still certain death.

South America finally gone, the rest of the globe breathed easier. It would be a slander on humanity to say there was actual rejoicing when the World Congress sealed off this continent too, but whatever sorrow was felt for its loss was balanced by the feeling that at long last the peril of the Gra.s.s was finally ended. No longer would speculative Germans, thoughtful Chinese or wakeful Englishmen wonder if the supercyclone fans were indeed an effective barrier; no longer would Cubans, Colombians or Venezuelans look northward apprehensively. Oceanic barriers now confined the peril and though the world was shrunken and hurt it was yet alive. More, it was free from fear for the first time since the mutated seeds had blown over the saltband.

I must not give the impression that a wiping off of the Gra.s.s from the accountbooks of humanity was universal and complete. The World Congress periodically considered proposals for countermeasures. On the top of Mount Whitney Miss Francis still labored. New a.s.sistants were flown to her as the old ones wandered down the great rockslide from the old stone weatherhouse off into the Gra.s.s during fits of despondency, went mad from the realization that, except for problematical survivors on the polar caps, they were alone in an abandoned hemisphere, or died of simple homesickness. In the researchlaboratories of Consolidated Pemmican formulas for utilizing the Gra.s.s were still tinkered with, and the death of almost every publicspirited man of fortune revealed a will containing bequests to aid those seeking means of controlling the weed.

_77._ It is not, afterall, a detached history of the past twentyone years I am writing. Contemporaries are only too well aware of the facts and posterity will find them dehydrated in textbooks. I started out to tell of my own personal part in the coming of the Gra.s.s, not to take an Olympian and aloof view of the pa.s.sion of man.

The very mention of a personal part brings to mind a subject which might be painful were I of a petty nature. There were people who, willfully blind to the facts, held me responsible, in the face of all reason, for the Gra.s.s itself. Although it is difficult to believe, there have been many occasions when I have been denounced by demagogues and my blood called for by vicious mobs.

But enough of morbid retrospection. I think I can say at this time there was, with the exception of certain Indian nabobs, hardly a wealthy man left in the world who did not owe in some way the retention of his riches to me. I controlled more than half the steel industry; I owned outright the majority stocks of the world oil cartel; coal, iron, copper, tin and other mines either belonged directly to me or to tributary companies in which I held large interests.

Along with the demagoguery of attributing the Gra.s.s to Albert Weener there was the agitation for socialism and the expropriation of all private property, the attempt to deprive men of the fruit of their endeavor and reduce everyone to a regimented, miserable level. It is hardly necessary to say that I spared no effort to combat the insidious agents of the Fourth International. Fortunately for the preservation of the free enterprise system, I had tools ready to hand.

The overrunning of the United States wiped out the gangs which operated so freely there, but remnants made their escape, taking with them to the older continents their philosophy of life and property. Gathering native recruits, they began following the familiar patterns and would in time no doubt have divided the world into countless minute baronies.

However, I was able to subsidize and reason with enough of their leaders to persuade them that their livelihood and very existence rested on a basis of private property and that their great danger came not from each other, but from the advocates of socialism. They saw the point, and though they did not cease from warring on each other, or mulcting the general public, they were ruthless in exterminating the socialists and they left the goods and adjuncts of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Industries scrupulously unmolested.

Strange as it sounds, it was not my part in protecting the world from the philosophy of equality, nor my ramified properties, which gave me my unique position. Unbelievably, because the change had occurred so gradually, industry, though still a vital factor, no longer played the dominant role in the world, but had given the position back to an earlier occupant. Food was once more paramount in global economy. Loss of the Americas had cut the supply in half without reducing the population correspondingly. The Socialist Union remained selfsufficient and uninterested, while Australia, New Zealand and the cultivated portions of Africa strove to feed the millions of Europeans and Asiatics whose lands could not grow enough for their own use. The slightest falling off of the harvest produced famine.

At this point Consolidated Pemmican practically took over the entire business of agriculture. Utilizing byproducts, and crops otherwise not worth gathering, waste materials, and growths inedible without processing, with plants strung out all over the four continents and with tremendously reduced s.h.i.+pping costs because of the small compa.s.s in which so much food could be contained, we were able to let our customers earn their daily concentrates by gathering the raw materials which went into them. I was not only the wealthiest, most powerful man in the world, but its savior and providence as well.

With the new feeling of security bathing the world, tension dissolved into somnolence and the tempo of daily life slackened until it scarcely seemed to move at all. The waves of anxiety, suspicion and distrust of an earlier decade calmed into peaceful ripples, hardly noticeable in a pondlike existence.

No longer beset by thoughts or fears of wars, nations relaxed their pride, armies were reduced to little more than palaceguards, bra.s.sbands and parade units; while navies were kept up--if periodic painting and retaining in commission a few obsolete cruisers and destroyers be so termed--only to patrol the Atlantic and Pacific sh.o.r.es of the lost hemisphere.

The struggle for existence almost disappeared; the wagescales set by Consolidated Pemmican were enough to sustain life, and in a world of limited horizons men became content with that. The bickering characteristic of industrial dispute vanished; along with it went the outmoded weapon of the tradesunion. It was a halcyon world and if, as cranks complained, illiteracy increased rapidly, it could only be because with everyman's livelihood a.s.sured his natural indolence took the upper hand and he not only lost refinements superficially acquired, but was uninterested in teaching them to his children.

_78._ I don't know how I can express the golden, sunlit quality of this period. It was not an heroic age, no great deeds were performed, no conflicts resolved, no fundamentshaking ideas broached. Quiet, peace, content--these were the keywords of the era. Preoccupation with politics and panaceas gave place to healthier interests: sports and pageants and giant fairs. Men became satisfied with their lot and if they to a great extent discarded speculation and disquieting philosophies they found a useful subst.i.tute in quiet meditation.

Until now I had never had the time to live in a manner befitting my station; but with my affairs running so smoothly that even Stuart Thario and Tony Preblesham found idle time, I began to turn my attention to the easier side of life. Of course I never considered making my permanent home anywhere but in England; for all its parochialism and oddities it was the nearest I could come to approximating my own country.

I bought a gentleman's park in Hamps.h.i.+re and had the outmoded house torn down. It had been built in Elizabethan times and was cold, drafty and uncomfortable, with not one modern convenience. For a time I considered preserving it intact as a sort of museumpiece and building another home for myself on the grounds, but when I was a.s.sured by experts that Tudor architecture was not considered to be of surpa.s.sing merit and I could find in addition no other advantageous site, I ordered its removal.

I called in the best architects for consultation, but my own artistic and practical sense, as they themselves were quick to acknowledge, furnished the basis for the beautiful mansion I put up. Moved by nostalgic memories of my lost Southland I built a great and ample bungalow of some sixty rooms--stucco, topped with asbestos tile. Since the Spanish motif natural to this form would have been out of place in England and therefore in bad taste, I had timbers set in the stucco, although of course they performed no function but that of decoration, the supports being framework which was not visible.

It was delightful and satisfying to come into the s.p.a.cious and cozy livingroom, filled with overstuffed easychairs and comfortable couches, warmed by the most efficient of centralheating systems or to use one of the perfectly appointed bathrooms whose every fixture was the best money could buy and recall the dank stone floors and walls leading up to a mammoth and--from a thermal point of view--perfectly useless fireplace flanked by the coatsofarms of deadandgone gentry who were content to shuffle out on inclement mornings to answer nature's calls in chilly outhouses.

So large and commodious an establishment required an enormous staff of servants, which in turn called for a housekeeper and a steward to supervise their activities, for as I have observed many times, the farther down one goes on the wagescale the more it is necessary to hire a highsalaried executive to see that the wage is earned.

I cannot say in general that I ever learned to distinguish between one retainer and another, except of course my personal manservant and Burlet, the headbutler whom I hired right from under the nose of the Marquis of Arpers--his lords.h.i.+p being unable to match my offer. But in spite of the confusion caused by such a multiplicity of menials, I one day noticed an undergardener whose face was tantalizingly familiar. He touched his cap respectfully as I approached, but I had the curious feeling that it was a taught gesture and not one which came naturally to him.

"Have you been here long, my good man?" I asked, still trying to place him.

"No, sir," he answered, "about two weeks."

"Funny. I'm almost certain Ive noticed you before."

He shook his head and made a tentative gesture with the hoe or rake or whatever the tool was in his hand, as though he would now, with my permission, resume his labors.

"What is your name?" I inquired, not believing it would jog my memory, but out of a natural politeness toward inferiors who always feel flattered by such attention.