The Death of Grass

THREE

The news of Phase 5 of the Chung-Li virus leaked out during the summer, and was followed by widespread rioting in those parts of the Far East that were nearest to the focus of infection. The Western world looked on with benevolent concern. Grain was shipped to the troubled areas, where armoured divisions were needed to protect it. Meanwhile, the efforts to destroy the virus continued in laboratories and field research stations all over the world.

Farmers were instructed to keep the closest possible watch for signs of the virus, with the carefully calculated prospects of heavy fines for failure to report, and good compensation for the destruction of virus-stricken crops. It had been established that Phase 5, like the original virus, travelled both by root contact and through the air. By a policy of destroying infected crops and clearing the ground for some distance around them, it was hoped to keep the spread of the virus in check until a means could be found of eradicating it entirely.

The policy was moderately successful. Phase 5, like its predecessors, reached across the world, but something like three-quarters of a normal harvest was gathered in the West. In the East, things went less well. By August, it was clear that India was faced with an overwhelming failure of crops, and a consequent famine. Burma and Japan were very little better off.

In the West, the question of relief for the stricken areas began to show a different aspect. World reserve stocks had already been drastically reduced in the attempt, in the spring, to succour China. Now, with the prospect of a poor harvest even in the least affected areas, what had been instinctive became a matter for argument.

At the beginning of September, the United States House of Representatives^{43} passed an amendment to a Presidential bill of food aid, calling for a Plimsoll line^{44} for food stocks for home use. A certain minimum tonnage of all foods was to be kept in reserve, to be used inside the United States only.

Ann could not keep her indignation at this to herself.

“Millions facing famine,” she said, “and those fat old men refuse them food.”

They were all having tea on the Buckleys’ lawn. The children had retired, with a supply of cakes, into the shrubbery, from which shrieks and giggles issued at intervals.

“As one who hopes to live to be a fat old man,” Roger said, “I’m not sure I ought not to resent that.”

“You must admit it has a callous ring to it,” John said.

“Any act of self-defence has. The trouble as far as the Americans are concerned is that their cards are always on the table. The other grain-producing countries will just sit on their stocks without saying anything.”

Ann said: “I can’t believe that.”

“Can’t you? Let me know when the Russians send their next grain ship east. I’ve got a couple of old hats that might as well be eaten.^{45}”

“Even so—there’s Canada, Australia, New Zealand.”

“Not if they pay any attention to the British Government.”

“Why should our government tell them not to send relief?”

“Because we may want it ourselves. We are earnestly—I might say, desperately—hoping that blood is thicker than the water which separates us. If the virus isn’t licked^{46} by next summer…”

“But these people are starving now!”

“They have our deepest sympathy.”

She stared at him, for once in undisguised dislike. “How can you!”

Roger stared back. “We once agreed about my being a throwback—remember? If I irritate the people round me, don’t forget they may irritate me occasionally. Woolly-mindedness does. I believe in self-preservation, and I’m not prepared to wait until the knife is at my throat before I start fighting. I don’t see the sense in giving the children’s last crust to a starving beggar.”

“Last crust…’ Ann looked at the table, covered with the remains of a lavish tea. “Is that what you call this?”

Roger said: “If I were giving the orders in this country, there wouldn’t have been any cake for the past three months, and precious little bread either. And I still wouldn’t have had any grain to spare for the Asiatics. Good God! Don’t you people ever look at the economic facts of this country?”

“If we stand by and let those millions starve without lifting a finger to help, then we deserve to have the same happen to us,” Ann said.

“Do we?” Roger asked. “Who are we? Should Mary and Davey and Steve die of starvation because I’m callous?”

Olivia said: “I really think it’s best not to talk about it. It isn’t as though there’s anything we can do about it—we ourselves, anyway. We must just hope things don’t turn out quite so badly.”

“According to the latest news,” John said, “they’ve got something which gives very good results against Phase 5.”

“Exactly!” Ann said. “And that being so, what justification can there possibly be for not sending help to the East? That we might have to be rationed next summer?”

“Very good results,” Roger said ironically. “Did you know they’ve uncovered three further phases, beyond 5? Personally, I can see only one hope—holding out till the virus dies on its own account, of old age. They do sometimes. Whether there will be a blade of grass left to re-start things with at that stage is another thing again.”

Olivia bent down, looking at the lawn on which their chairs rested.

“It’s hard to believe,” she said, “isn’t it—that it really does kill all the grass where it gets a foothold?”

Roger plucked a blade of grass, and held it between his fingers and thumb.

“I’ve been accused of having no imagination,” he said. “That’s not true, anyway. I can visualize the starving Indians, all right. But I can also visualize this land brown and bare, stripped and desert, and children here chewing the bark off trees.”

For a while they all sat silent; a silence of speech, but accompanied by distant bird-song and the excited happy cries of the children.

John said: “We’d better be getting back. I’ve got the car to go over. I’ve been putting it off too long as it is.” He called out for Mary and David. “It may never happen, Rodge, you know.”

Roger said: “I’m as slack as the rest of you. I should be getting into training by learning unarmed combat, and the best way to slice the human body into its constituent joints for roasting. As it is, I just sit around.”

On their way home, Ann said suddenly:

“It’s a beastly attitude to take up. Beastly!”

John nodded his head, warningly, towards the children.

Ann said: “Yes, all right. But it’s horrible.”

“He talks a lot,” John said. “It doesn’t mean anything, really.”

“I think it does.”

“Olivia was right, you know. There isn’t anything we can do individually. Just wait and see, and hope for the best.”

“Hope for the best? Don’t tell me you’ve started taking notice of his gloomy prophecies!”

Not answering immediately, John looked at the scattering autumn leaves and the neat suburban grass. The car travelled past a place where, for a space of ten or fifteen yards, the grass had been uprooted, leaving bare earth: another minor battlefield in the campaign against Phase 5.

“No, I don’t think so, really. It couldn’t happen, could it?”

As autumn settled into winter, the news from the East steadily worsened. First India, then Burma and Indo-China relapsed into famine and barbarism. Japan and the eastern states of the Soviet Union went shortly afterwards, and Pakistan erupted into a desperate wave of Western conquest which, composed though it was of starving and unarmed vagabonds, reached into Turkey before it was halted.

Those countries which were still relatively unaffected by the Chung-Li virus, stared at the scene with a barely credulous horror. The official news accentuated the size of this ocean of famine, in which any succour could be no more than a drop, but avoided the question of whether food could in fact be spared to help the victims. And those who agitated in favour of sending supplies were a minority, and a minority increasingly unpopular as the extent of the disaster penetrated more clearly, and its spread to the Western world was more clearly envisaged.

It was not until near Christmas that grain ships sailed for the East again. This followed the heartening news from the southern hemisphere that in Australia and New Zealand a vigilant system of inspection and destruction was keeping the virus under control. The summer being a particularly brilliant one, there were prospects of a harvest only a little below average.

With this news came a new wave of optimism. The disaster in the East, it was explained, had been due as much as anything to the kind of failure in thoroughness that might be expected of Asiatics. It might not be possible to keep the virus out of the fields altogether, but the Australians and New Zealanders had shown that it could be held in check there. With a similar vigilance, the West might survive indefinitely on no worse than short commons^{47}. Meanwhile, the laboratory fight against the virus was still on. Every day was one day nearer the moment of triumph over the invisible enemy. It was in this atmosphere of sober optimism that the Custances made their customary trip northwards, to spend Christmas in Blind Gill.

On their first morning, John walked out with his brother on the rounds of the farm.

They encountered the first bare patch less than a hundred yards from the farm-house. It was about ten feet across; the black frozen soil stared nakedly at the winter sky.

John went over it curiously, and David followed him.

“Have you had much of it up here?” John asked.

“Perhaps a dozen like this.”

The grass around the verges of the gash, although frost-crackled, was clearly sound enough.

“It looks as though you’re holding it all right.”

David shook his head. “Doesn’t mean anything. There’s a fair degree of evidence that the virus only spreads in the growing season, but nobody knows whether that means it can remain latent in the plant in the non-growing season, or not God knows what spring will bring. A good three-quarters of my own little plague spots were end-of-season ones.”

Then you aren’t impressed by the official optimism?”

David jerked his stick towards the bare earth. “I’m impressed by that.”

They’ll beat it They’re bound to.”

“There was an Order-in-Council^{48},” David said, “stating that all land previously cropped with grain should be turned over to potatoes.”

John nodded. “I heard of it.”

“It’s just been cancelled. On the News last night.”

They must be confident things are going to be all right.”

David said grimly: “They can be as confident as they like. Next spring I’m planting potatoes and beet.”

“No wheat, barley?”

“Not an acre.”

John said thoughtfully: “If the virus is beaten by then, grain’s going to fetch a high price.”

“Do you think a few other people haven’t thought of that? Why do you think the Order’s been rescinded^{49}?”

“It isn’t easy, is it?” John asked. “If they prohibit grain crops and the virus is beaten, this country will have to buy all its grain overseas, and at fancy prices.”

“It’s a pretty gamble,” David said, “—the life of the country against higher taxes.”

“The odds must be very good.”

David shook his head. “They’re not good enough for me. I’ll stick to potatoes.”

David returned to the subject on the afternoon of Christmas Day. Mary and young David had gone out into the frosty air to work off the effects of a massive Christmas dinner. The three adults, preferring a more placid mode of digestion, lay back in armchairs, half-heartedly listening to a Haydn^{50} symphony on gramophone records.

“How did your monstrosity go, John?” David asked. “Did you get it finished on time?”

John nodded. “I almost retched when I contemplated it in all its hideousness. But I think the one we’re on now will be able to give it a few points for really thoroughgoing ugliness.”

“Do you have to do it?”

“We must take our commissions where they lie. Even an architect has to accommodate himself to the whims of the man with the money to spend, and I’m only an engineer.”

“You’re not tied, though, are you—personally tied?”

“Only to the need for money.”

“If you wanted to take a sabbatical year, you could?”

“Of course. There’s just the odd problem of keeping the family out of the gutter.”

“I’d like you to come up here for a year.”

John sat up, startled. “What?”

“You would be doing me a favour. You needn’t worry about the financial side of things. There’s only three things a farmer can do with his ill-gotten gains—buy fresh land, spend them on riotous living, or hoard them. I’ve never wanted to have land outside the valley, and I’m a poor spender.”

John said slowly: “Is this because of the virus?”

“It may be silly,” David said, “but I don’t like the look of things. And I’ve seen those pictures of what happened in the East.”

John looked across at Ann. She said:

That was the East, though, wasn’t it? Even if things were to get short—this country’s more disciplined. We’ve been used to rationing and shortages. And at present there’s no sign of any real trouble. It’s asking rather a lot for John to throw things in and all of us to come and sponge on you for a year—just because things might go wrong.”

“Here we are,” David said, “sitting round the fire, at peace and with full bellies. I know it’s hard to imagine a future in which we shan’t be able to go on doing that. But I’m worried.”

“There’s never been a disease yet,” John said, “either of plant or animal, that hasn’t run itself out, leaving the species still alive and kicking. Look at the Black Death^{51}.”

David shook his head. “Guess-work. We don’t know. What killed the great reptiles? Ice-ages? Competition? It could have been a virus. And what happened to all the plants that have left fossil remains but no descendants? It’s dangerous to argue from the fact that we haven’t come across such a virus in our short period of observation. A man could live a long life without seeing a comet visible to the naked eye. It doesn’t mean there aren’t any comets.”

John said, with an air of finality: “It’s very good of you, Dave, but I couldn’t, you know. I may not care for its results, but I like my work well enough. How would you like to spend a year in Highgate, sitting on your behind?”

“I’d make a farmer out of you in a month.”

“Out of Davey, maybe.”

The clock that ticked somnolently on the wall had rested there, spring cleanings apart, for a hundred and fifty years. The notion of the virus winning, Ann thought, was even more unlikely here than it had seemed in London.

She said: “After all, I suppose we could come up here if things were to get bad. But there’s no sign of them doing so at present.”

“I’ve been brooding about it, I expect,” David said. “There was something Grandfather Beverley said to me, the first time we came to the valley—that when he had been outside, and came back through the gap, he always felt that he could shut the door behind him.”

“It is a bit like that,” Ann said.

“If things do turn out badly,” David went on, “there aren’t going to be many safe refuges in England. But this can be one of them.”

“Hence the potatoes and beet,” John observed.

David said: “And more.” He looked at them. “Did you see that stack of timber by the road, just this side of the gap?”

“New buildings?”

David stood up and walked across to look out of the window on the wintry landscape. Still looking out, he said:

“No. Not buildings. A stockade.”

Ann and John looked at each other. Ann repeated:

“A stockade?”

David swung round. “A fence, if you like. There’s going to be a gate on this valley—a gate that can be held by a few against a mob.”

“Are you serious?” John asked him.

He watched this elder brother who had always been so much less adventurous, less imaginative, than himself. His manner now was as stolid and unexcited as ever; he hardly seemed concerned about the implications of what he had just said.

“Quite serious,” David said.

Ann protested: “But if things turn out all right, after all…”

“The countryside,” David said, “is always happy to have something to laugh at Custance’s Folly. I’m taking a chance on looking a fool. I’ve got an uneasiness in my bones, and I’m concerned with quietening it Being a laughing-stock doesn’t count beside that.”

His quiet earnestness impressed them; they were conscious—Ann particularly—of an impulse to do as he had urged them: to join him here in the valley and fasten the gate on the jostling uncertain world outside. But the impulse could only be brief; there was all the business of life to remember. Ann said involuntarily:

“The children’s schools…”

David had followed the line of her thought; he showed neither surprise nor satisfaction. He said:

There’s the school at Lepeton. A year of that wouldn’t hurt them.”

She looked helplessly at her husband. John said:

“There are all sorts of things…’ The conviction communicated from David had already faded; the sort of thing he was imagining could not possibly happen. “After all, if things should get worse, we shall have plenty of warning. We could come up right away, if it looked grim.”

“Don’t leave it too late,” David said.

Ann gave a little shiver, and shook herself. “In a year’s time, all this will seem strange.”

“Yes,” David said, “may be it will.”