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 café 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 passed 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 salesmanship 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 glass 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 assets—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 Grass to South America with a philosophic calm which can only be described as amazing. Even the Latins themselves seemed more concerned with how the Grass 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 Grass 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 Grass 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 mass poised above the continent.
La Prensa of Buenos Aires said in a long editorial entitled "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 noblest 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 fishing 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 Grass. No concerted efforts were made either to confine or to destroy it. The World Congress to Combat the Grass, 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 passage 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 Grass expressed God'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.