_Man Triumphant ... II_
_36._ Everything I had visualized in the broker's office turned out too
pessimistically accurate. Consolidated Pemmican and Allied Concentrates
was nothing but a mailing address in one of the most forlorn of
Manhattan buildings, long before jettisoned by the tide of commerce. The
factory, no bigger than a very small house, was a brokenwindowed affair
whose solid brick construction alone saved it from total demolition at
the playful hands of the local children. The roof had long since fallen
in and symbolical grass and weeds had pushed their way through cracks in
the floor to flourish in a sickly and surreptitious way.
The whole concern, until my stock purchase, had been the chattel and
creature of one Button Gwynnet Fles. In appearance he was such a genuine
Yankee, lean and sharp, with a slight stoop and prying eyes, that one
quite expected a straw to protrude from between his thin lips or have
him draw from his pocket a wooden nutmeg and offer it for sale. After
getting to know him I learned this apparent shrewdness was a pure
defense mechanism, that he was really an artless and ingenuous soul who
had been taught by other hands the swindle he practiced for many years
and had merely continued it because he knew no way of making an honest
living. He was, like myself, unattached, and disarmed whatever lingering
suspicions of him I might have by offering to share his quarters with me
until I should have found suitable accommodations.
The poor fellow was completely at my mercy and I not only forbore,
generously, to press my advantage, but made him vicepresident of the
newly reorganized concern, permitting him to buy back a portion of the
stock he had sold. The boom in the market having sent our shares up to
an abnormal 1/2, we flooded our brokers with selling offers, at the same
time spreading rumors--by no means exaggerated--of the firm's
instability, buying back control when Consolidated Pemmican reached its
norm of 1/16. We made no fortunes on this transaction, but I was enabled
to look ahead to a year on a more comfortable economic level than ever
before.
But it was by no means in my plans merely to continue to milk the
corporation. I am, I hope, not without vision, and I saw Consolidated
Pemmican under my direction turned into an active and flourishing
industry. Its very decrepitude, I reasoned, was my opportunity; starting
from scratch and working with nothing, I would build a substantial
structure.
One of the new businesses which had sprung up was that of personally
conducted tours of the grass. After the experience of Gootes and myself,
parachute landings had been ruled out as too hazardous, but someone
happily thought of the use of snowshoes and it was on these clumsy means
that tourists, at a high cost and at less than snail's pace, tramped
wonderingly over the tamed menace.
My thought then, as I explained to Fles, was to reactivate the factory
and sell my product to the sightseers. Food, high in calories and small
in bulk, was a necessity on their excursions and nourishing pemmican
high in protein quickly replaced the cloying and messy candybar. We made
no profit, but we suffered no loss and the factory was in actual
operation so that no snoopers could ever accuse us of selling stock in
an enterprise with a purely imaginary existence.
I liked New York; it accorded well with my temperament and I wondered
how I had ever endured those weary years far from the center of the
country's financial life, its theaters and its great human drama. Give
me the old Times Square and the East Fifties any day and you can keep
Death Valley and functional architecture. I was at home at last and I
foresaw a future of slow but sure progress toward a position of
eminence and respectability. The undignified days of Miss Francis and Le
ffaçasé faded from my mind and I was aware of the grass only as a cause
for selling our excellent pemmican.
I won't say I didnt read the occasional accounts of the weed appearing
in _Time_ or the newspapers, or watch films of it in the movies with
more than common interest, but it was no longer an engrossing factor in
my life. I was now taken up with larger concerns, working furiously to
expand my success and for a year after leaving the _Intelligencer_ I
doubt if I gave it more than a minute's thought a day.
_37._ The band of salt remained an impregnable bulwark. Where the winter
rains leached it, new tons of the mineral replaced those washed away.
Constant observation showed no advance; if anything the edge of the
grass impinging directly on the salt was sullenly retreating. The
central bulk remained, a vast, obstinate mass, but most people thought
it would somehow end by consuming itself, if indeed this doom were not
anticipated by fresh scatterings of salt striking at its vitals as soon
as the rains ceased.
No more than any other reader, then, was I disquieted by the following
small item in my morning paper: