Greener Than You Think, Ward Moore [ebook reader computer txt] 📗

General Thario was far different from the one which had hired his son. I now had fourteen factories, stretching like a string of lustrous pearls from Quebec down to Montevideo, and I was negotiating to open new branches in Europe and the Far East. I had been elected to the directorship of several important corporations and my material possessions were enough to constitute a nuisance—for I have always remained a simple, literary sort of fellow at heart—requiring secretaries and stewards to look after them.

It is a depressing sidelight on human nature that the achievement of eminence brings with it the malice and spite of petty minds and no one of prominence can avoid becoming[203] the target of stupid and unscrupulous attack. It would be pointless now to go into those carping and unjust accusations directed at me by irresponsible newspaper columnists. Another man might have ignored these mean assaults, but I am naturally sensitive, and while it was beneath my dignity to reply personally I thought it perhaps one of the best investments I could make to add a newspaper to my other properties.

Now I am certainly not the sort of capitalist portrayed by cartoonists in the early part of the century who would subvert the freedom of the press by handpicking an editor and telling him what to say. I think the proof of this as well as of my broadmindedness is to be found in the fact that the paper I chose to buy was the Daily Intelligencer and the editor I retained was William Rufus Le ffaçasé. The Intelligencer had lost both circulation and money since it had, so to speak, no home base. But moved perhaps by sentiment, I was not deterred from buying it for this reason, and anyway it was purchasable at a more reasonable figure on this account.

Small circulation or no, it—or rather Le ffaçasé himself—still possessed that intangible thing called prestige and I was satisfied with my bargain. Le ffaçasé showed no reluctance—as why indeed should he?—to continue as managingeditor and acted toward me as though there had never been any previous association, but I did not object to this harmless eccentricity as a smallerminded person might have.

As publisher I named General Thario. I never knew exactly what purpose a publisher serves, but it seemed necessary for every newspaper to have one. Whatever the duties of the office, it left the general plenty of time to attend to the concerns of Consolidated Pemmican. I fed the paper judiciously with money and it was not long before it regained most of the circulation it had lost.[204]

47. There was no doubt the grass, our ally to such good purpose in the war, had definitely slowed down; now it was looked upon as a fixture, a part of the American heritage, a natural phenomenon which had outlived its sensational period and come to be taken for granted. Botanists pointed out that Cynodon dactylon, despite its ability to sheathe itself against a chill, had never flourished in cold areas and there was no reason to suppose the inoculated grass, even with its abnormal metabolism, could withstand climates foreign to its habit. It was true it had touched, in one place, the arctic tundra, but it was confidently expected this excursion would soon cease. The high peaks of the Rockies with the heavy winter snowdrifts lying between them promised no permanent hospitality, and what seeds blew through the passes and lighted on the Great Plains were generally isolated by saltbands, and since they were confined to comparatively small clumps they were easily wiped out by salt or fire. To all appearance the grass was satiated and content to remain crouching over what it had won.

Only a minority argued that in its new form it might be infinitely adaptable. Before, when stopped, it had produced seeds capable of bearing the parent strain. So now, they argued, it would in time acclimate itself to more rigorous temperatures. Among these pessimists, Miss Francis, emerging from welldeserved obscurity, hysterically ranged herself. She prophesied new sudden and sweeping advances and demanded money and effort equal to that expended in the late war be turned to combating the grass. As if taxes were not already outrageously high.

Those in authority, with a little judicious advice from persons of standing, quite properly disregarded her querulous importunities. The whole matter of dealing with the weed was by now in the hands of a permanent body, the Federal Disruptions Commission. This group had spent the first six months of its existence exactly defining and asserting its jurisdiction, which seemed to spread just as the vegetation calling it[205] into being did; and the second six months wrangling with the Federal Trade Commission over certain "Cease and Desist" orders issued to firms using allusions to the grass on the labels of their products, thereby implying they were as vigorous, or of as wide application, as the representation. The Disruptions Commission had no objection in principle to this castigation; they merely thought it should have come from their regulatory hands.

But with the end of the war a new spirit animated the honorable members of the commission and as a token of revived energy they issued a stern directive that no two groups engaged in antigraminous research were to pool their knowledge; for competition, the commission argued in the sixtyseven page order, spurred enthusiasm and the rivalry between workers would the sooner produce a solution. Having settled this basically important issue they turned their attention to investigating the slower progress of the grass to determine whether it was permanent or temporary and whether its present sluggishness could be turned to good account. As a sort of side project—perhaps to show the wideness of their scope—they undertook as well to study the reasons for the failure of the wartime inoculation of the steppes as contrasted with the original too successful California one. They planned a compilation of their findings, tentatively scheduled to cover a hundred and fortyseven foliovolumes which would remain the basic work for all approaching the problem of attacking the grass; and as an important public figure who had some firsthand knowledge of the subject they requested me to visit, at my own expense, the newest outposts of the weed and favor them with my observations. I was not averse to the suggestion, for the authority of the commission would admit me to areas closed to ordinary citizens and I was toying with the idea it might be possible in some way to use the devilgrass as an ingredient in our food products.[206]

48. George Thario having shown in many ways he was growing stale on the job and in need of a vacation, I decided to take him with me. Besides, if the thought of using the weed as a source of cheap rawmaterial came to anything, the engagement of his interest at an early stage would increase his usefulness. Before setting out for the field I read reports of investigators on the spot and was disquieted to note a unanimous mention of new stirrings on the edges of the green glacier. I decided to lose no time and we set out at once in my personal plane for a mountain lodge kindly offered by a business acquaintance. Here, for the next few weeks, keeping in touch with my manifold affairs only by telephone, Joe and I devoted ourselves to observing the grass.

Or rather I did. George Thario's idea of gathering data differed radically from mine—I feel safe to say, as well as from that of almost any other intelligent man. In a way he reminded me of the cameraman Slafe in his brooding obliviousness to everything except the grass; but Slafe had been doing a job for which he was being paid, whereas Joe was only yielding to his own mood. For hours he lay flat on his belly, staring through binoculars; at other times he wandered about the edge, looking at, feeling, and smelling it and once I saw him bend down and nibble at it like a sheep.

"You know, A W," he observed enthusiastically—he always called me "A W" with just enough of a curious intonation to make it doubtful whether the use of the initials was respectful or satirical—"you know, A W, I understand those fellows who went and chucked themselves into the grass. It's sublime; it has never happened in nature before. Ive read newspaper and magazine accounts and either the writers have no eyes or else they lie for the hell of it. They talk about the 'dirty brown' of the flowers, but A W, Ive seen the flowers myself and theyre a vivid glorious purple. Have you noticed the iridescent sparkle when the wind ripples the blades? All the colors of the spectrum against the background of that marvelous green."

"There's nothing marvelous about it," I told him a little[207] irritably. "It used to be really green, a bright, even color, but up here where it's high and cold it doesnt look much different from ordinary devilgrass—dirty and ugly." I thought his enthusiasm distinctly out of place in the circumstances.

He did not seem to hear me, but went on dreamily, "And the sounds it makes! My God, A W, a composer'd give half the years of his life to reproduce those sounds. High and piercing; soft and muted; creating tonepoems and études there in its lonely grandeur."

I have spoken before of the noise produced by the weed, a thunderous crackling and snapping attributable to its extraordinary rate of growth. During its dormancy the sound had ceased and, in the mountains at least, was replaced by different notes and combinations of notes as the wind blew through its culms and scraped the tough stems against each other. Occasionally these ululations produced reflections extremely pleasing, more often it hurt the ears with a shrieking discordance; but even at its best it fell far short, to my mind—and I suppose I may say I'm as sensitive to beauty as anybody—of meriting Joe's extravagant rhapsodies.

But he was entranced beyond the soberness of commonsense. He filled notebooks, those thick pulppapered volumes which children are supposed to use in school but never do, with his reactions. In idle moments when he was away, I glanced through them, but for the most part they were incoherent. Meterless poems, lists of adjectives, strained interpretations of the actions of the grass, and many musical notations which seemed to get no farther than a repetitive and faltering start.

I reproduce a few pages of the less chaotic material for what it is worth: "The iceage drove the Cromagnon from the caves which prophesied Cnossus and Pithom and the Temple of Athena in the Acropolis. This grass, twentiethcentury ice, drives magnates from their twentyroom villas to their twentyroom duplexes. The loss was yesterday's. Walt Whitman.

"For it is the animals. Cows and pigs, horses, goats, sheep and rabbits abandoned by the husbandman, startled, puzzled;[208] the clock with the broken mainspring running backward. The small game: deer, antlered, striped, and spotted; wildsheep, ovis poli, TeddyRooseveltshot and Audubonprinted, mountaingoats leaping in terror to hazardous safety on babel's top, upward to the pinpoint where no angels dance. But not alone.

"Meat and meateater, food and feeder, predator and prey; foxes, lynx, coyotes, wolves, wildcats, mountainlion (the passengerpigeon's gone, the dung they pecked from herds thick as man born and man yet to be born lies no more on the plains, night and day we traveled, but the birds overhead gave cover from the sun and the buffalo before us stretched from the river to the hills), driven by the ice not ice, but living green, up and up. Pause here upon this little shelf to nibble bark, to mate and bear; to snarl and claw and rend and suck hot blood from moving jugularvein; and then move again upward with docile hoof or else retreat with lashing tail and snarling fang. Biter and bitten transfused with fear, the timberline behind, the snow alone welcoming, ironically the glacier meets another glacier and only glacier gives refuge to glacier's hunted.

"Here little islands on the peaks. Vegetation's sea is death creeping upward to end at the beginning. The carnivores, whippedtailed, seek the top, ambition's pinnacle, surveying nothing. Tomorrow is for man, the lower mind is reasonable and ponders food and dung and lust, so obstinate the padclaw prowls higher till nothing's left but pedestal and would then wing, but being not yet man can only turn again.

"The ruminants, resigned, nibble at the edges of their death, converting death to life, chewing, swallowing, digesting, regurgitating and digesting again inescapable fate. Reluctant sustenance. Emptybellied, the pointed teeth descend again to take their food at secondhand, to go back sated, brown blood upon the snow and bits of hide and hair, gnawedat bones, while fellows, forgetting fear, remaining stoic, eat, stamp and stamp without impatience and eat again of that which has condemned them.

"Learned doctor, your addingmachine gives you the answer: so many carnivores, so many herbivores, the parallel[209] dashes introduce extinction. Confusedly the savor of Abel's sacrifice was sweet to His nostrils, not