This would certainly solve part of my financial problem, but I was
hungry and unreasonably more irritated by her refusal of food than her
unsociability. "I have to eat, even if you don't," I told her rudely.
"I'm going to stop at the next place I see." With the same left hand she
made a gesture of resignation.
I pulled up before the roadside cafe. "Won't you change your mind and
come in? At least for a cup of coffee?"
"No."
I went in angrily and ate. Who was she, to treat me like a hired
chauffeur? A mere pickup, I raged, a stray woman found on a street. By
God, she would have the courtesy at least to address me, her benefactor,
civilly or else I'd abandon her here on the highway and return to Los
Angeles. I finished my meal full of determination and strode back
purposefully toward the car. She was still sitting rigid, staring
through the windshield. I got in.
"You know--" I began.
She did not hear me. I turned on the ignition, pressed the
starterbutton, and drove ahead.
Soddeneyed with lack of sleep and outraged at her taciturnity, I
breakfasted alone on the soggiest wheatcakes and the muddiest coffee I
have ever demeaned my stomach with. The absence of my customary morning
paper added the final touch to my wretchedness. But one would have
thought to look at my companion that she had been refreshed by a lengthy
repose, had bathed at leisure, and eaten the most delicate of
continental breakfasts. There was not a smudge on her suede gloves nor a
speck upon her small hat and the mascara on her eyelashes might have
been renewed but a moment before.
The road curved through vast hummocks of sand, which for no good reason
reminded me of the grass in its early stages. Reminded, I wanted to know
what the latest news was, how far the weed had progressed in the night.
Thoughtlessly, without remembering her interdiction, I turned the knob.
"Kfkfkk," squeaked the radio.
"Please," she said, in anything but a pleading tone, and turned it off.
Well, I thought, this is certainly going too far. I opened my mouth to
voice the angry words but a look at her stopped me. I couldnt help but
feel her imperviousness was fragile, that harsh speech might shatter a
calm too taut to be anything but hysterical. I drove on without speaking
until the hummocks gave way again to smooth desert. "We'll soon be in
Yuma," I announced. "Arent you going to tell me your name?"
"It isnt important," she repeated.
"But it's important to me," I told her boldly. "I want to know who the
beautiful lady was whom I drove from Los Angeles to Yuma."
She shook her head irritably and we crossed the bridge into Arizona.
"All right, this is Yuma. Now where?"
"Here."
"Right here in the middle of the road?"
She nodded. I looked helplessly at her, but her gaze was still fixed
ahead. Resignedly I got out, took her bags from the turtle and set them
beside the road, opened the door. She descended, smoothed her gloves,
straightened the edge of her veil, brushed an immaterial speck from her
coat and, after the briefest of acknowledging nods, picked up her grips.
"But ... can't I carry them for you?"
She did not even answer this with her usual headshake, but began walking
resolutely back over the way we had come. Bewildered, I watched her a
moment and then got into the car and turned it around, trying to keep
her in sight in the rearview mirror as I did so. It was an awkward
procedure on a highway heavy with traffic. By the time I had reversed my
direction she was gone.
_27._ Due either to Le ffaçasé's perverse sense of humor or, what is
more likely, his excessive meanness with money, my collect telegram
asking for funds to return from Yuma received the following ridiculous
reply: KNOW NO SANGUINARY WEENER INTELLIGENCER NO ELEEMOSYNARY
INSTITUTION EAT CAKE. The meaning of the last two words escaped me and
it was possible they were added purely to make the requisite ten. At all
events Le ffaçasé's parsimony made a very inconvenient and unpleasant
trip back for me, milestoned by my few valuable possessions pawned with
suspicious and grasping servicestation owners.
When I left, a map of the downtown district would have resembled the
profile of a bowl. Now it was a bottle with only a narrow neck still
clear. The weed had flung itself upon Pasadena and was curving back
along Huntington Drive, while to the south the opposing pincer was
feeling its way along Soto Street into Boyle Heights. It was only with
the greatest difficulty that I passed through the police lines into the
doomed district.
If I had thought deserted Beverly Boulevard a sad sight only three days
before, what can I say about my impression of the city's nerve center in
its last hours? Abandoned automobiles stood in the streets at the spot
where they had run out of gas or some minor mechanical failure had
halted them. Dead streetcars, like big game stopped short by the
hunter's bullet, stayed where the failure of electricpower caught them.
The tall buildings reeked of desertion as if their emptying had dulled
some superficial gloss and made them dim and colorless.
But contrast the dying city with the wall of living green, north, west,
and south, towering ever higher and preparing to carry out the sentence
already passed, and the victim becomes insignificant in the presence of
the executioner. I was reminded of the well where Gootes died for here
except on one small side the grass rose like the inside of a stovepipe
to the sky; but I suffered neither the same despair nor the
unaccountable elation I had upon that hill, perhaps because the trough
was so much bigger or because the animate thing was not beneath my feet
to communicate those feelings directly.
There had evidently been some looting, not so much from greed as from
the natural impulse of human nature to steal and act lawlessly as soon
as police vigilance is relaxed. Here and there stores were opened
nakedly to the street, their contents spilled about. But such scenes
were surprisingly rare, the hopelessness of transporting stolen or any
other possessions acting as a greater deterrent than morality. One way
or another, as the saying has it, crime does not pay.
Few people were visible and these were divided sharply into two
categories: those clearly intent upon concluding some business, rushing
furiously, papers, briefcases or articles of worth in their hands; and
those obviously without purpose, dazed, listless, stumbling against the
curbstones as they shambled along, casting furtive glances toward the
green glacier in the background.
The newspaper office contained only people of the first type. Le ffaçasé
had come out of his sanctuary for the first time within memory of
anybody on the staff. Still collarless, snuffbox in hand, he
napoleonically directed the removal of those valuables without which the
newspaper could not continue. He was cool, efficient, seemed to have
eyes everywhere and know everything going on in the entire building. He
spent neither greetings nor reproaches on me, indeed was not looking in
my direction but somehow sensed my presence through his back, for he
said without turning round, "Weener, if you have concluded your
unaccountable peregrinations remove the two files marked E1925 and E1926
to Pomona. If you mislay one scrap of paper they contain--the bartering
of a thousand Weeners being an inadequate equivalent--your miserable
substance will be attached to four tractors headed in divergent
directions. Don't come back here, but attempt for once to palliate the
offense of your birth and go interview that Francis female. Interview
her, not yourself. Bring back a story, complete and terse, or commit the
first sensible act of your life with any weapon you choose and charge
the instrument to the _Intelligencer_."
"I havent the slightest idea where Miss Francis is to be found."
He took a pinch of snuff, issued orders to four or five other people and
continued calmly, "I am not conducting a school of journalism; if I were
I should have a special duncecap imported solely for your use. The
lowest copyboy knows better than to utter such an inanity. You will find
the Francis and interview her. I'm busy. Get the hell out of here and
handle those files carefully if you value that cadaver you probably
think of as the repository of your soul."
I am not a drayman and I resented the menial duty of sliding those heavy
filecases down four flights of stairs; but at a time like this, I
thought philosophically, a man has duties he cannot shirk; besides, Le
ffaçasé was old, I could afford to humor him even if it meant demeaning
myself.
With one of the cases in back, I sadly regarded the other one occupying
most of the front seat. If she had at least given me her name I would
have searched and searched until I found her. This train of thought
reminded me of Le ffaçasé's command to find Miss Francis and so I
concentrated my attention on getting away from the _Intelligencer_
office.
It was no light labor; the stalled streetcars and automobiles presented
grave hazards to the unwary. The air smelt of death, and nervously I
pressed the accelerator to get away quickly from this tomb. I crossed
the dry riverbed and made my way slowly to Pomona, delivered the files,
and reluctantly began seeking Miss Francis.
_28._ It was practically impossible to discover any one person among so
many scattered and disorganized people, but chance aided my native
intelligence and perseverance. Only the day before she had been involved
with an indignant group of the homeless who attributed their misfortunes
to her and overcoming their natural American chivalry toward the weaker
sex had tried to revenge themselves. I was therefore able to locate her,
not ten miles from the temporary headquarters of the _Daily
Intelligencer_.
Her laboratory was an abandoned chickenhouse which must have reminded
her constantly of her lost kitchen. She looked almost jaunty as she
greeted me, a cobweb from the roof of the decaying shed caught in her
hair. "I have no profitable secrets to market, Weener--youre wasting
your time with me."
"I am not here as a salesman, Miss Francis," I said. "The _Daily
Intelligencer_ would like to tell its readers how you are getting on
with your search for some cure for the grass."
"You talk as if _Cynodon dactylon_ were a disease. There is no cure for
life but death."
Since she was going to be so touchy about the grass--as if it were a
personal possession--(why, I thought, it's as much mine as hers)--I
substituted a more diplomatic form of words.
"Well, I have made an interesting discovery," she conceded grudgingly
and pointed to a row of flowerpots, her eyes lighting as she scanned the
single blades of grass perhaps an inch and a half high growing in each.
The sight meant nothing to me and she must have gathered as much from my
expression.
"_Cynodon dactylon_," she explained, "germinated from seeds borne by the
inoculated plant. Obviously the omnivorous capacity has not been
transmitted to offspring."
This was probably fascinating to her or a gardener or botanist, but I
couldnt see how it concerned me or the _Daily Intelligencer_.
"It could be a vitamin deficiency," she muttered incomprehensibly, "or
evasion of the laws regarding compulsory education. These plants
indicate the affected grass may propagate its abnormal condition only
through the extension of the already changed stolons or rhizomes. It
means that only the parent, which is presumably not immortal, is
aberrant. The offspring is no different from the weed householders have
been cursing ever since the Mission Fathers enslaved the Digger
Indians."
"Why, then," I exclaimed, suddenly enlightened, "all we have to do is
wait until the grass dies."
"Or until it meets some insuperable object," supplemented Miss Francis.
My faith in insuperable objects had been somewhat shaken. "How long do
you think it will be before the grass dies?" I asked her.
She regarded me gravely, as though I had been a child asking an absurd
question. "Possibly a thousand years."
My enthusiasm was dampened. But after leaving her I remembered how
certain types of people always look for the dark side of things. It
costs no more to be an optimist than a pessimist; it is sunshine grows
flowers, not clouds; and if Miss Francis chose to think the grass might
live a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die next
week. Thus heartened by this bit of homely philosophy, just as valid as
any of the stuff entombed in wordy books, I wrote up my interview,
careful to guide myself by all the stifling strictures and adjurations
impressed upon me by the tyrannically narrowminded editor. If I may
anticipate the order of events, it appeared next day in almost
recognizable form under the heading, ABNORMAL GRASS TO DIE SOON, SAYS
ORIGINATOR.
_29._ The small city of Pomona was swollen to boomtown size by the
excursion there of so many enterprises forced from Los Angeles. Ordinary
citizens without heavy responsibilities when uprooted thought only of
putting as much distance as possible between themselves and their
persecutor; but the officials, the industrialists, the businessmen, the
staffs of great newspapers hovered close by, like small boys near the
knothole in the ballpark fence from which theyd been banished by an
officious cop.
The _Intelligencer_ was lodged over the printshop of a local tributary
which had agreed to the ousting with the most hypocritical assurances of
joy at the honor done them and payment--in the smallest possible
type--by the addition to the great newspaper's masthead of the words,
"And Pomona _Post-Telegram_."
Packed into this inadequate space were the entire staff and files of the
metropolitan daily. No wonder the confusion obviated all possibility of
normal routine. In addition, the disruption of railroad schedules made
the delivery of mail a hazard rather than a certainty. Perhaps this was
why, weeks after they were due, it was only upon my return from
interviewing Miss Francis I received my checks from the _Weekly
Ruminant_ and the _Honeycomb_.
It may have been the boomtown atmosphere I have already mentioned or
because at the same time I got my weekly salary; at any event, moved by
an unaccountable impulse I took the two checks to a barbershop where,
perhaps incongruously, a wellknown firm of Los Angeles stockbrokers had
quartered themselves. I forced the checks upon a troubledlooking
individual--too taciturn to be mistaken for the barber--and mumbling,
"Buy me all the shares of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates
this will cover," hurried out before sober thought could cause me to
change my mind.
For certainly this was no investment my cool judgment would approve, but
the wildest hunch, causing me to embark on what was no less than a
speculation. I went back to the desk I shared with ten others, bitterly
regretting the things I might have bought with the money and berating
myself for my rashness. Only the abnormal pressure of events could have
made me yield to so irrational an impulse.
In the meantime things happened fast. Barely had the tardiest
_Intelligencer_ employees got away when the enveloping jaws of the weed
closed tight, catching millions of dollars' worth of property within.
The project to bomb the grass out of existence, dormant for some weeks,
could no longer be denied.
Even its most ardent advocates, however, now conceded reluctantly that
ordinary explosives would be futile--more than futile, an assistance to
the growth by scattering the propagating fragments. For the first time
people began talking openly of using the outlawed atomicbomb.
The instant response to this suggestion was an overwhelming opposition.
The President, Congress, the Army, Navy and public opinion generally
agreed that the weapon was too terrible to use in so comparatively
trivial a cause.
But the machinery for some type of bombing had been set in motion and
had to be used. The fuel was stored, the airfields jammed, all available
planes, new, old, obsolescent and obsolete assembled, and for three days
and nights the great fleets shuttled backandforth over the jungled area,
dropping thousands of tons of incendiary bombs. Following close behind,
still more planes dropped cargoes of fuel to feed the colossal bonfire.
Inverted lightning flashes leapt upward, and after them great, rolling
white, yellow, red and blue flames. The smoke, the smell of roasting
vegetation, the roar and crackle of the conflagration, and the heat
engendered were all noticeable as far away as Capistrano and Santa
Barbara.
Down from the sky, through the surface of the grass, the incendiaries
burned great patches clear to the earth. The weed, which had resisted
fire so contemptuously before, suddenly became inflammable and burned
like celluloid for days. Miles of twisted stems, cleaned of blade and
life, exposed tortured nakedness to aerial reconnoiter. Bald spots the
size of villages appeared, black and smoldering; the shape of the mass
was altered and altered again, but when, long after, the last spark
flickered out and the last ember grew dull, the grass itself, torn and
injured, but not defeated or even noticeably beaten back, remained. It
had been a brilliant performance--and an ineffective one.
The failure of the incendiary bombing not only produced ruefully
triumphant Itoldyousos from disgruntled and doubly outraged
propertyowners, but a new crop of bids for the _Intelligencer_'s reward
to the developer of a saving agent. From suggested emigrations to Mars
and giant magnifying glasses set up to wither the grass with the aid of
the sun, they ranged to projects for cutting a canal clear around the
weed from San Francisco Bay to the Colorado River and letting the
Pacific Ocean do the rest. Another solution envisaged shutting off all
light from the grass by means of innumerable radiobeams to interrupt the
sun's rays in the hope that with an inability to manufacture chlorophyll
an atrophy would set in. Several contestants urged inoculating other
grasses, such as bamboo, with the Metamorphizer, expecting the two
giants of vegetation, like the Kilkenny cats, would end by devouring
each other. This proposal received such wide popular support there is
reason to believe it got some serious consideration in official
quarters, but it was eventually abandoned on the ground that while it
gave only a single slim chance of success it certainly doubled the
potential growths to contend with. The analogy of a backfire in forest
conflagrations was deemed poetic but inapplicable.
More comparatively prosaic courses included walling in the grass with
concrete; the Great Wall of China was the only work of man visible from
the moon; were Americans to let backward China best them? A concrete
wall only a mile high and half a mile thick could be seen by any curious
astronomer on the planet Venus--assuming Venerians to be afflicted with
terrestrial vices--and would cost no more than a very small war, to say
nothing of employing thousands who would otherwise dissipate the
taxpayers' money on Relief. A variant of this plan was to smother the
weed with tons of dry cement and sand from airplanes; the rainy season,
due to begin in a few months, would add the necessary water and the
grass would then be encased in a presumably unbreakable tomb.
But the most popular suggestion embodied the use of salt, ordinary table
salt. From their own experience in backyard and garden, eager men and
women wrote in urging this common mineral be used to end the menace of
the grass. "It will Kill ennything," wrote an Imperial Valley farmer.
"Its lethal effect on plantlife is instantaneous," agreed a former
Beverly Hills resident. "I know there is not anything like Salt to
destroy Weeds" was part of a long and rambling letter on blueruled
tabletpaper, "In the June of 1926 or 7 I cannot remember exactly it may
have been 28 I accidentally dropped some Salt on a beautiful
Plumbago...."
It was proposed to spray the surface, to drive tunnels through the roots
to conduct brine, to bombard sectors with sixteeninch guns firing
shrapnel loaded with salt, to isolate by means of a wide saline band the
whole territory, both occupied and threatened. Salt enthusiasts argued
that nothing except a few million tons of an inexpensive mineral would
be wasted if an improbable failure occurred, but if successful in
stopping the advance the country could wait safely behind its rampart
till some weapon to regain the overrun area was found.
But the salt advocates didnt have everything their own way. There arose
a bitter antisalt faction taking pleasure at hurling sneers at these
optimistic predictions and delight in demolishing the arguments. Miss
Francis, they said, who ought to know more about it than anyone else,
claimed the grass would break down even the most stable compound and
take what it needed. Well, salt was a compound, wasnt it? If the prosalt
fanatics had their way they would just be offering food to a hungry
plant. The salt supporters asked what proof Miss Francis had ever
advanced that the plant absorbed everything or indeed that her
Metamorphizer had anything to do with metabolism and had not merely
induced some kind of botanical giantism? The antisalts, jeering at their
enemies as Salinists and Salinites, promptly threw away Miss Francis'
hypothetical support and relied instead on the proposition that if the
salt were to be efficacious--an unlikely contingency--it would have to
reach the roots and if crudeoil, poured on when the plant was young, had
not done so what possible hope could the prosalt cranks offer for their
panacea now the rampant grass was grown to its present proportions?
The salt argument cut society in half. Learned doctors battled in the
columns of scientific journals. Businessmen dictated sputtering letters
to their secretaries. Housewives wrote newspapers or argued heatedly in
the cornergrocery. Radiocommentators cautiously skirted the edge of
controversy and more than one enthusiast had to be warned by his
sponsor. Fistfights started in taverns over the question and judicious
bartenders served beer without offering the objectionable seasoning with
it.
The _Intelligencer_, at the start, was vehemently antisalt. "Is there an
American Cato," Le ffaçasé asked, "to call for the final ignominy
suffered by Carthage to be applied, not to the land of an enemy, but to
our own?" Shortly after this editorial, entitled "Carthage, California"
appeared, the _Intelligencer_ swung to the opposite side and Le ffaçasé
offered the prosalt argument under the heading "Lot's Wife."
The Daughters of the American Revolution declared themselves in favor of
salt and refused the use of Constitution Hall to an antisalt meeting.
Stung, the Central Executive Committee of the Communist party circulated
a manifesto declaring the use of salt was an attempt to encircle, not
the grass, for that was a mere subterfuge of imperialism, but the Soviet
Union; and called upon all its peripheral fringe to write their
congressmen and demonstrate against the saline project. From India the
aged Mohandas Gandhi asked in piping tones why such a valuable adjunct
was to be wasted in rich America while impoverished ryots paid a harsh
tax on this necessity of life? And the Council of Peoples' Commissars,
careless of the action of the American Stalinists, offered to sell the
United States all its surplus salt. The herringpicklers of Holland
struck in a body while the American salt refiners bid as one to produce
on a costplus basis.
This last was a clincher and the obscurantic antisalts received the
deathblow they richly deserved. The Communist party reversed themselves
swiftly. All respectable and patriotic people lined up behind salt. With
such popular unanimity apparent, the government could do no less than
take heed. A band twenty miles wide, stretching from Oceanside to the
Salton Sea, from the Salton Sea to the little town of Mojave and from
there to Ventura, was marked out on maps to be saltsown by the very same
bombercommand which had dropped the spectacular but futile incendiaries.
The triumph of the salt people was ungenerous in its enthusiasm; the
disgruntled antisalts, now a mere handful of diehards publishing an
esoteric press, muttered everyone would be sorry, wait and see.
_30._ The grass itself waited for nothing. It seemed to take new
strength from the indignities inflicted upon it and it increased, if
anything, its tempo of growth. It plunged into the ocean in a dozen
spots at once. It swarmed over sand which had never known anything but
cactus and the Sierra Madres became great humps of green against the
skyline. This last conquest shocked those who had thought the mountains
immune in their inhospitable heights. _Cynodon dactylon_, uninoculated,
had always shunned coldness, though it survived some degrees of frost.
The giant growth, however, seemed to be less subject to this inhibition,
though it too showed slower progress in the higher and colder regions.
The _Intelligencer_ planned to move from Pomona to San Bernardino and if
necessary to Victorville.
Daily Le ffaçasé became a sterner taskmaster, a more pettishly exacting
employer. By the living guts of William Lloyd Garrison, he raged, had no
one ever driven the simple elements of punctuation into my bloody head?
Had no schoolmaster in moments of heroic enthusiasm attempted to pound a
few rules of rhetoric through my incrassate skull? Had I never heard of
taste? Was the word "style" outside my macilent vocabulary? What the
devil did I mean by standing there with my mouth open, exposing my
unfortunate teeth for all the world to see? Was it possible for any
allegedly human to be as addlepated as I? And had I been thrust from my
mother's womb--I suppress his horrible adjectives--only to torment and
afflict his longsuffering editorial patience?
A hundred times I was tempted to sever my connection with this
journalistic autocrat. My column was widely read and two
publishinghouses had approached me with the idea of putting out a book,
any editorial revision and emendations to be taken care of by them
without disturbing me at all. I could have allied myself with almost any
paper in the country, undoubtedly at better than the meager stipend Le
ffaçasé doled out to me.
But I think loyalty is one of the most admirable of virtues and it was
not in my nature to desert the _Intelligencer_--certainly not till I
could secure a lengthy and ironclad contract, such as for some reason
other papers seemed unwilling to offer me. In accord with this innate
loyalty of mine--I take no credit for it, I was born that way--I did not
balk at the assignments given me though they ranged from the hazardous
to the absurd.
One of the more pleasant of these excursions thought up by Mr Le
ffaçasé was to fly over the grass and to Catalina, embark on a chartered
boat there and survey the parts of the coast now overrun. A fresh point
of observation. Accompanying me was the moviecameraman, Rafe Slafe, as
uncommunicative and earnest in his medications as before.
It was a sad sight to see neat rectangular patterns of roads and
highways, cultivated fields and orangegroves, checkered towns and
sprawling suburbs come to an abrupt stop where they were blotted out by
the regimented uniformity of the onrushing grass. For miles we flew
above its dazzling green until our eyes ached from the sameness and our
minds were dulled from the lack of variety below. On the sea far ahead a
frothing whitecap broke the monotony of color, a flyingfish jumped out
of the water to glisten for a moment in the sun, loose seaweed floated
on the surface, to change in some degree the intense blue. But here
below no alien touch lightened the unnatural homogeneity. No solitary
tree broke this endless pasture, now healed of the wounds inflicted by
the incendiary bombing, no saltlick, wandering stream or struggling bush
enlivened this prairie. There was not even an odd conformation, a higher
clump here or there, a dead patch to relieve the unimaginative symmetry.
I have read of men going mad in solitary confinement from looking at the
same unchanging walls; well, here was a solitary cell hundreds of miles
in area and its power to destroy the mind was that much magnified.
I got little consolation from the presence of the others, for the pilot
was engaged in navigation while Slafe was, as ever, singlemindedly
recording mile after mile of the verdant mat beneath, never pausing nor
speaking, though how he justified the use of so much film when one foot
was identical with what went before and the next, I could not
understand.
At last we cleared the awful cancer and flew over the sea. A thousand
variations I had never noticed before offered themselves to my suddenly
refreshed eyes. Not for one split second was the water the same.
Leaping, tossing, spiraling, foaming back upon itself, making its own
shadows and mirroring in an infinitely faceted glass the sunlight, it
changed so constantly it was impossible to grasp even a fraction of its
mutations. But Slafe evidently did not share my blessed relief, for he
turned his camera back to catch every last glimpse of the solid green I
was so happy to leave behind.
At the airport, on the way to the boat, on the little vessel itself, I
expected Slafe to relax, to indulge in a conversational word, to do
something to mark him as more than an automaton. But his actions were
confined to using the nasalsyringe, to exchanging one camera for
another, to quizzing the sun through that absurd lorgnette, and to
muttering over cans of film which he sorted and resorted, always to his
inevitable discontent.
While we waited to start, a perverse fog rolled between us and the
mainland. It made a dramatic curtain over the object of our visit and
emphasized the normality and untouchedness of Avalon behind us. As the
boat got under way, strain my eyes as I could eastward, not the faintest
suggestion of the ominous outline showed. We sped toward it, cutting the
purple sea into white foam. Slafe was in the bow, customarily taciturn,
the crew were busy. Alone on board I had no immediate occupation and so
I took out my copy of the _Intelligencer_ and after reading the column
which went under my name and noting the incredible bad taste which had
diluted when it had not excluded everything I had written, I turned as
for consolation to the marketquotations. The Dow-Jones average was down
again, as might be expected since the spread of the weed had unsettled
the delicate balance of the stockmarket. My eyes automatically ran down
the column and over to the corner where stocks were quoted in cents to
reassure my faith in Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates.
There it was, immovable through any storm or stress or injudicious
investment by Albert Weener, "CP&AC ... 1/16."
I must have raised my eyes from the newspaper just about the time the
fog lifted. Before us, like the smokewreath accompanying the discharge
of some giant cannon, the green mass volleyed into the sea. It did not
slope gently like a beach or offer a rugged shoulder to be gnawed away
as a rocky cliff, but thundered forward into the surging brine, yielding
but invincible, a landforce potent as the wave itself. Hundreds of feet
into the air it towered, falling abruptly in a sharp wall, its ends and
fringes merging with the surf and wallowing in happy freedom. The
breakers did not batter it for it offered them no enmity to rage and
boil upon, but giving way with each surge, smothered the eternal anger
of the ocean with its own placid surety.
The seagulls, the helldivers, pelicans, seapigeons had not been
affected. Resting briefly on the weed, they winged out for their food
and returned. It mattered no more to them that the manmade piers and
wharves, the seacoast towns, gypjoints, rollercoasters, whorehouses,
cottages, hotels, streets, gastanks, quarries, potterykilns, oilfields
and factories had been swallowed up than if some old wreck in the sand,
once offering them foothold, had been taken back by the sea. If I
thought the grass awesome from the land, monotonous from the air, it
seemed eternal from the water.
But impressive as it was from any angle, there were just so many things
I could say about it. My art, unlike Slafe's, not permitting of endless
repetition, I was glad to get back to the Pomona office, to pad what
little copy I had, retire into the small tent I shared with six other
sufferers from the housing shortage, and attempt some sleep.
_31._ The course mapped for the saltband caused almost as much
controversy, anguish and denunciation as the proposal itself. Cities and
towns fought to have the saltband laid between them and the approaching
grass, understandably ignoring larger calculations and considerations.
Cattle ranchers shot at surveying parties and individual farmers or
homeowners fought against having their particular piece of property
covered with salt. The original plan had contemplated straight lines;
eventually the band twisted and turned like a typewriter ribbon plagued
by a kitten, avoiding not only natural obstacles, but the domains of
those with proper influence.
Recovery plants worked three shifts a day to pile up great mounds of the
white crystals, which were hauled to the airfields by trains and trucks.
The laden trucks moved over the highways bumper to bumper; the
freighttrains' engines nosed the cabooses of those in front. All other
goods were shunted on sidings, perishables rotted, valuables went
undelivered; all transportation was reserved for the salt.
Not only was the undertaking unprecedented for its magnitude, but the
urgency and the breakdowns, bottlenecks, shortages and disruptions
caused by the grass itself added to the formidable accomplishment. But
the people were aroused and aware of danger, and they put almost the
same effort behind the saltsowing as they would have in turning out
instruments of war.
The sowing itself was in a way anticlimactic. By the whim of Le ffaçasé
I went in one of the planes on the first day of the task. My protests,
as always, proving futile, I spent a very boresome time flying
backandforth over the same patch of ground. That is, it would have been
boresome had it not been for the dangers involved, for in order to sow
the salt evenly and thickly it was necessary to fly low, to hedgehop,
the pilot called it. If the parachutejump had unnerved me, the flying at
terrific speed straight toward a tree, hill or electricpowerline and
then curving upward at the last second to miss them by a whisper must
have put gray in my hair and taken years from my life.
The rivers, washes and creeks on the inner edge had been roughly dammed
to lessen future erosion of the salt and inappropriately gay flags
marked the boundaries of the area. Owing to our speed the salt billowed
out behind us like powdery fumes, but beyond the evidence of this smoky
trail we might merely have been a group of madmen confusedly searching
for some object lost upon the ground.
In reporting for the _Intelligencer_ it was impossible to dramatize the
event; even the rewritemen were baffled, for under the enormous head
SALT SOWN they could not find enough copy to carry over from page one.
_32._ The sowing of the salt went on for weeks, and the grass leaped
forward as if to meet it. It raced southward through Long Beach, Seal
Beach and the deserted dunes to Newport and Balboa; it came east in a
fury through Puente and Monrovia, northeastward it moved into Lancaster,
Simi and Piru. Only in its course north did the weed show a slower pace;
by the time we had been forced to leave Pomona for San Bernardino it had
got no farther than Calabasas and Malibu.
The westward migration of the American people was abruptly reversed.
Those actually displaced by the grass infected others, through whose
homes they passed in their flight, with their own panic. Land values
west of the Rockies dropped to practically nothing and the rich farms of
the Great Plains were worth no more than they had been a hundred years
before. People had seen directly, heard over the radio, or read in
newspapers of the countless methods vainly used to stop the grass and
there was little confidence in the saltband's succeeding where other
devices had failed. True, there were hereandthere individuals or whole
families or even entire communities obstinate enough to scorn flight,
but in the opinion of most they were like pigheadedly trustful peasants
who cling, in the face of all warning, to homes on the slopes of an
active volcano.
It was generally thought the government itself, in creating the
saltband, was making no more than a gesture. Whatever the validity of
this pessimism, the work itself was impressive. Viewed from high in the
air only a month after the start it was already visible; after two
months it was a thick, glistening river winding over mountain, desert,
and what had been green fields, a white crystalline barrier behind which
the country waited nervously.
When the salt had been first proposed, batches had been dumped in
proximity to the grass, but the quantity had been too small to
demonstrate any conclusion and observers had been immediately driven
from the scene of the experiments by the grass.
Nevertheless, the very inclusiveness of these trials confirmed the
doubts of the waiting country as the narrow gap before the salt was
closed and the weed rolled to it near Capistrano. I would like to think
of the meeting as dramatic, heightened by inaudible drumrolls and
flashes of invisible lightning. Actually the conflict was pedestrian.
Manipulated once more by my tyrant, I was stationed, like other
reporters and radiomen, in a captive balloon. For the utmost in
discomfort and lack of dignity let me recommend this ludicrous
invention. Cramped, seasickened, inconvenienced--I don't like to mention
this, but provisions for answering the calls of nature were, to say the
least, inadequate--I swayed and rocked in that inconsiderable basket,
chilled, blinded by the dazzle of the salt, knocked about by gusts of
irresponsible wind, and generally disgusted by the uselessness of my
pursuit. A telescope to the eye and constant radioreports from shuttling
planes told of the approaching grass, but under the circumstances
weariness rather than excitement or anxiety was the prevailing emotion.
At last the collision came. The long runners, curiously flat from the
air, pushed their way ahead. The salt seemed no more to them than bare
ground, concrete, vegetation, or any of the hundred obstacles they had
traveled. Unstutteringly the vinelike stolons went forward. A foot, two,
six, ten. No recoil, no hesitation, no recognition they were traversing
a wall erected against them.
Behind these first outposts, the higher growth came on, and still
farther off the great bulk itself reared skyward, blotting out the
horizon behind, threatening, inexhaustible. It seemed to prod its
precursors, to demand hungrily ever more and more room to expand.
But the creeping of the runners over the first few feet of salt
dwindled to a stop. This caused experienced observers like myself no
elation; we had seen it happen many times before at the encountering of
any novel obstacle, and its only effect had been to make the weed change
its tactics in order to overcome the obstruction, as it did now. A
second rank moved forward on top of the halted first, a third upon the
second and so on till a living wall frowned down upon the salt, throwing
its shadow across it for hundreds of ominous yards. It towered erect and
then, repeating the tactic invariably successful, it toppled forward to
create a bridgehead from which to launch new assaults.
The next day new stolons emerged from the mass, but now for the first
time excitement seized us up in our bobbing post of observation. Not
only were the new runners visibly shorter in length but they crept
forward more slowly, haltingly, as though hurt. This impression was
generally discredited, people were surfeited with optimism; they felt
our reports were wishful thinking. Their pessimism seemed to be
confirmed when the weed repeated its action of the day before, falling
ahead of itself upon the salt; and few took stock in our excited
announcements that the grass had covered only half the previous
distance.
Again the probing fingers poked out, again the reserves piled up, again
the mass fell. But it fell far short of a normal leap. There could no
longer be any doubt about it; the advance had been slowed, almost
stopped. The salt was working.
Everywhere along the entire band the story was the same. The grass
rushed confidently in, bit off great chunks, then smaller, then smaller,
until its movement ceased entirely. That part which embedded itself in
the salt lost the dazzling green color so characteristic and turned
piebald, from dirty gray through brown and yellow, an appearance so
familiar in its normal counterpart on lawns and vacant lots.
The encircled area filled up and choked with the balked weed. Time after
time it essayed the deadly band, only to be thwarted. The glistening
fortification, hardly battered, stood triumphant, imprisoning the
invader within. Commentators in trembling voices broke the joyful news
over every receivingset and even the stodgiest newspapers brought out
their blackest type to announce GRASS STOPPED!
_33._ The President of the United States, as befitted a farmer knowing
something of grasses on his own account, issued a proclamation of
thanksgiving for the end of the peril which had beset the country. The
stockmarket recovered from funereal depths and jumped upward. In all the
great cities hysterical rapture so heated the blood of the people that
all restraints withered. In frantic joy women were raped in the streets,
dozens of banks were looted, thousands of plateglasswindows were smashed
while millions of celebrants wept tears of 86 proof ecstasy. Torn
tickertapes made Broadway impassable and the smallest whistlestops
spontaneously revived the old custom of uprooting outhouses and perching
them on the church steeple.
I had my own particular reason to rejoice coincident with the stoppage
of the grass. It was so unreal, so dreamlike, that for many days I had
trouble convincing myself of its actuality. It began with a series of
agitated telephone messages from a firm of stockbrokers asking for my
immediate presence, which because of my assignments, failed to reach me
for some time. So engrossed was I in the events surrounding the victory
over the grass I could not conceive why any broker would want to see me
and so put off my visit several times, till the urgency of the calls
began to pique my curiosity.
The man who greeted me was runcible, with little strands of sickly hair
twisted mopwise over his bald head. His striped suit was rumpled, the
collar of his shirt was wrinkled, and dots of perspiration stood out on
his upperlip and forehead. "Mr Weener?" he asked. "Oh, thank God, thank
God."
Completely at a loss, I followed him into his private office. "You
recall commissioning us--when we were located in Pomona--to purchase
some shares of Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates for your
account?"
To tell the truth, while I had not forgotten the event, I had been
sufficiently ashamed of my rashness to have pushed all recollection of
the transaction to the back of my mind. But I nodded confirmingly.
"No doubt you would be willing to sell at a handsome profit?"
Aha, I thought, the rise of the market has sent Consolidated Pemmican up
for once beyond its usual 1/8. I am probably a rich man and this fellow
wants to cheat me of the fruits of my foresight. "You bought the stock
outright?"
"Of course, Mr Weener," he affirmed in a hurt tone.
"Good. Then I will take immediate delivery."
He pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his lip and forehead with evident
inefficiency for the perspiration either remained or started afresh. "Mr
Weener," he said, "I am authorized to offer you six times--six times,"
he echoed impressively, "the amount of your original investment. This is
an amazing return."
If it was worth it to him, it was worth it to me. "I will take immediate
delivery," I repeated firmly.
"And no brokerage fees involved," he added, as one making an
unbelievable concession.