Greener Than You Think Part 29

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

It now extended from Alaska to Hudson Bay, covering all Manitoba and parts of Ontario. It had taken to itself Minnesota, the northern peninsula of Michigan, Wisconsin, a great chunk of Illinois, and stood baffled on the western bank of the Mississippi from Cairo to its mouth.

The northwestern, underpopulated half of Mexico was overrun, the Gra.s.s moving but sluggishly into the estados bordering the Gulf Coast.

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

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

The streets were no more safe at night than in sixteenth century London.

Even in the greatest cities the lighting was erratic and in the smaller ones it had been abandoned entirely. Holdups by individuals had been practically given up, perhaps because of the uncertainty of any footpad getting away with his loot before being hijacked by another, but small compact gangs made life and property unsafe at night. Tempers were extraordinarily short; a surprised housebreaker was likely to add battery, mayhem and arson to his crimes, and altercations which commonly would have terminated in nothing more violent than lurid epithets now frequently ended in murder.

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

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

One contingency the countrydweller prepared grimly against: roaming hordes of the hungry from the towns, driven to plunder by starvation which they were too shiftless to alleviate by purchasing concentrates, for sale everywhere. Shotguns were loaded, corncribs made tight, stock zealously guarded. But except rarely the danger had been overestimated.

The undernourished proletariat lacked the initiative to go out where the food came from. Generations had conditioned them to an instinctive belief that bread came from the bakery, meat from the butcher, b.u.t.ter from the grocer. Driven by desperation they broke into scantily supplied food depots, but seldom ventured beyond the familiar pavements. Famine took its victims in the streets; the farmers continued to eat.

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

Tension and hysteria made everyone volatile. The customs officials, careless of the position of those whom they dealt with, either inspected every cubic inch of luggage with boorish suspicion and resultant damage or else waved the proffered handbags airily aside with false geniality.

The highways, repeating a pattern I had cause to know so well, were nearly impa.s.sable with brokendown cars and other litter. The streets of Queens, cluttered with wreckage and refuse, were bounded by houses in a state of apathetic disrepair whose filthy windows refused to look upon the scene before them. The great bridges over the East River were not being properly maintained as an occasional snapped cable, hanging over the water like a drunken snake, showed; it was dangerous to cross them, but there was no other way. The ferryboats had long since broken down.

At the door of my hotel, where I had long been accustomed to just the right degree of courteous attention, a screaming mob of men and boys wrapped in careless rags to keep out the cold, their unwashed skins showing where the coverings had slipped, begged abjectly for the privilege of carrying my bags. The carpet in the lobby was wrinkled and soiled and in the great chandeliers half the bulbs were blackened.

Though the building was served by its own powerstation, the elevators no longer ran, and the hot water was rationed, as in a fifthrate French pension. The coverlet on the bed was far from fresh, the window was dusty and there was but one towel in the bathroom. I was glad I had not brought my man along for him to sneer silently at an American luxury hotel.

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

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

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

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

Despite strict instructions my planes had not been kept in proper condition and I had great difficulty getting mechanics to service them.

There were plenty of skilled men unemployed and though they were not eager to earn dollars they were willing to work for other rewards. But the pervading atmosphere of tension and anxiety made concentration difficult; they bungled out of impatience, committed stupidities they would normally be incapable of; they quit without cause, flew into rages at the machines, the tools, their fellows, fate, at or without the slightest provocation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Why, you G.o.ddam--"

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

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

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

"Not much air travel," I remarked idly.

"Yours is the first plane in a month."

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

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

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

_58._ How Miss Francis contrived to make every place she lived in, apartment, chickenhouse or cottage, look exactly alike was remarkable.

Nothing is more absurd than the notion that socalled intellectual workers are always alert--as Miss Francis demonstrated by her greeting to me.

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

It was inconceivable any literate person in the United States could be ignorant of my position. "It is neither," I returned with some dignity.

"I am here to do you a favor. To help you in your work." And I explained my proposition.

She squatted back on her heels and gave me that old, familiar, searching look. "So you have made a good thing out of the Metamorphizer afterall,"

she said irrelevantly and untruthfully. "Weener, you are a consistent character--a beautifully consistent character."

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

"No."

"No?"

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

I was exasperated at the softness of my impulse which had made me seek out this madwoman to do her a favor. I could not regret my charitable nature, but I mentally resolved to be more discriminating in future.

Besides, the thought of Miss Francis for the work had been sheer sentimentality, the sort of false reasoning which would make of every mother an obstetrician or every hen an oologist.

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

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

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