Satan's Bushel (13 page)

Thus speculation in phantom wheat is fomented. That is the main thing. Why else should Board of Trade houses hire experts to estimate the wheat crop?

Those clients who sit in rows before the blackboards are like leaden lumps if you let them alone. They cannot make up their own minds. Act upon them with suggestion and they become golden geese. They neither sow in righteousness nor reap in mercy. Few of them would know a field of wheat from a patch of alfalfa. Yet in the course of a year they will buy and sell twenty bushels of phantom wheat for each bushel of real wheat produced by the labor of two and a half millions of farmers. In order that they shall do this they must be supplied with suggestions. Hence these private crop experts, hired by the proprietors of the blackboards, to keep the speculative mind in a state of futile anxiety.

The Department of Agriculture also estimates the crop. But its reports are issued once a month. That is not often enough. What would speculation do between times? Besides, the private experts always disagree with the government experts, and this adds zest to the blackboard betting.

A more painstaking and very secretive type of expert was new to Dreadwind. He represented neither private speculators in the wheat pit nor the proprietors of blackboards with their little pens of golden geese. His employer was the hard-minded miller; and it was his extraordinary business to know what was in the wheat—in the kernels of the wheat.

The chemical content of wheat varies with soil and local weather. In an area where growing conditions have been exceptionally favorable—where, for example, there has been by chance just the right amount of rainfall, the precious gluten content may be higher than in wheat on similar soil in the next neighborhood, though it all looks precisely alike. The difference is invisible and yet very important. The miller’s expert works intensively. He marks those areas where for special reasons the gluten content is likely to run high and watches them tenderly. When threshing begins he takes from each area a little sample and rushes it off to a laboratory to be analyzed.

If the chemical examination confirms his expectations the miller is informed that wheat in this particular place contains a premium percentage of gluten. Does the miller then instruct his agent to buy that wheat at a premium price? No, indeed. He enters the fact on his working record. He knows what the wheat contains and to what elevators the farmers who grew it will bring it for sale and storage. In due time he needs such wheat to mix with other wheat, and when he does he orders a few carloads from the local elevator in one of those high-gluten areas—orders just the common grade at the common price and nobody knows the difference. Thus the millers, thanks to the work of their experts, are able to fish premium wheat out of the great No. 2 stream and pay only the average price.

*    *   *

“And what’s the matter with that?” said Moberly with a snort. “How will a miller know where the gluten is unless he finds it for himself? The farmer might analyze his own wheat. But he won’t. And when the miller has found it it has already cost him enough.”

“I’ve nothing to argue,” I said. “I’m telling you, as he told me, how Dreadwind saw the harvest.”

“Meanwhile the needle is lost in the straw,” said Goran, groaning. “We’ve got to learn all about straw before we can find the lovely object. If I didn’t know it had been found by the way the story started I’d go to bed now. How? That’s what I want to hear.”

“You’d better hear what happened to Dreadwind,” I said; “how he saw more than appears in the harvest and what construction he put upon it. Otherwise you cannot understand the change in him. I remember he said just at this point that all his life in the city he had been asking himself a certain question. It arose from the theatrical spectacle of spending. Everywhere this spending—silly, wasteful, competitive, imitative spending, until many were bored with it, wanting nothing and spending more. Shops more magnificent than ancient temples, all dedicated to this worship. Miles of lighted streets frantically jammed with spenders. Where did they get it? That was the question. Somebody had to pay for all this spending. He never could see who the payers were. He was a spender, you see. He produced nothing and yet he could spend. How and by what right? Perhaps the question arose really not from the spectacle as he thought; he had got to wondering about himself. Well, now he began to see. The farmer was one who paid. There might be others also. The farmer certainly paid. Everyone who touched him made him pay. The whole modern affair was organized against him. What he sold he sold on the buyer’s terms. What he bought he bought on the seller’s terms. That was all you needed to know about him, Dreadwind said. One in that situation was bound to be exploited. People could not help exploiting him. It was not a conspiracy. It was a condition. Imagine trusting human nature not to take advantage of the seller who asks, ‘How much will you give?’ Imagine trusting it not to take advantage of the buyer who asks, ‘How much will you take?’ “

“Rotten nonsense,” said Moberly. “A farmer’s a farmer. That’s all you need to know about him. He doesn’t know any better. If he did he wouldn’t be a farmer.”

“Yes, he said that, too,” I answered; “almost in those words—that the farmer was what was left. The talent he wants is attracted away in the gristle and trained on the other side to be used against him. He spoke of you, Moberly. He said you were the most skillful grain manipulator in the world. You were born on a farm. Did you remain there? No. Instead of developing your extraordinary skill of trade in the farmer’s behalf you went over to the other side—to the buyer’s side.”

Moberly snorted. “What do you mean by the buyer’s side?” he demanded.

“I don’t mean anything. Are you asking me what Dreadwind meant?”

“What does anybody mean by that?” he asked. “One side or another. There is no one side. Grain is handled in a two-sided market place like any other merchandise, or like securities on the Stock Exchange. There is buying, and there is selling, neither without the other. A trader must work on both sides.”

“Obviously,” I answered. “Only Dreadwind called my attention to a fact I had never thought of before. The Stock Exchange, for example, is a seller’s market. It is organized and conducted from the seller’s point of view—in the interest of those who create securities for sale. Therefore the paramount effort is to keep prices as high as possible against the buyer. But the Board of Trade is a buyer’s market. Its machinery was designed and is controlled in the buyer’s interest—that is, in the interest of those who buy and consume grain. Therefore the dominant motive is to keep prices as low as possible, to the seller’s disadvantage.”

“It isn’t so,” said Moberly, speaking without reflection.

“But it is,” said Selkirk, who had not spoken before. “It is so,” he added, exquisitively tapping the ashes from the end of his cigarette. “I shall never forget it”

“Is this a tale at all?” sighed Goran. “Did your reflective hero, this Mr. Dreadwind, now living with a haunted tree in Burma—did he—?”

“No. He did not.”

* * *

T
HAT wave of green-gold color breaks in Canada. There the harvest ends. The reapers disappear.

One September day Dreadwind parked a worn-out car by a little railroad station in the province of Alberta and bought a ticket for Chicago.

His office was one little room in a high corner of the Eyrie Building. With the act of inserting the key he remembered having closed the door. It had not turned on its hinges since. Everything would be as he left it; and yet nothing would be the same. He was vaguely aware of some fundamental change. Closing the door had been like the careless farewell which turns out to have been the parting forever; and opening it again was the sudden discovery.

Nearly four months had elapsed. All that had happened in that time flashed across his inner vision in one momentous picture. He was one of those rare persons whose memory restores the scene itself in full color so that it seems actually to be viewed again. Most of us are able to retrace only the faintest outline of things in black and white. He saw himself as an actor in that picture, sitting with Cordelia in those first moments under the apple tree on the lantern-lighted lawn, then kneeling with her in the wheat field at dawn, then pursuing her.

There was a nonexistent moment in which he almost saw her where he had not seen her, clairvoyantly. So he believed.

What really occurred to him in that imaginary interval on the threshold of his office was much more thrilling than any mental presentment of her image. I am telling you this. He could not say it. There came to him in that instant an aching physical sense of her existence, as of something that had never been realized before, originally wonderful. With that experience came also the clear and astonishing perception of another reality. A very singular fact this was. When he closed the door he had been alone in the world, a free and solitary person, preferring that state above any other. Now that was no longer so. He was not alone, nor did he wish to be.

The hour of day was one o’clock. He pushed the door open. On the floor were some letters. He stirred them with his foot and did not pick them up. The ticker by the window was running without tape. All this time it had been running without tape, producing a phantom record of a phantom thing. How appropriate! He wondered where the dust came from—how it could get into a closed room—and began absently to trace a pattern in it on the flat surface of his desk. The pattern was—CCCCC. Then seeing what he did he smiled and with his handkerchief wiped the top of the desk.

He shook the handkerchief in the air and used it again to rough-clean the little wooden object he had picked up with the other hand. This was a rudely carved bear, about four inches high, with an absurd and friendly leer. Its history is worth knowing. As a lonesome boy in Wall Street he used to pass it night and morning in a curio dealer’s window and gradually invested it with a superstitious phantasy. With the proceeds of his first tiny gambling transaction in the bucket shop where he worked he went and bought it for two dollars and it became, I believe, his only permanent possession. It was both a luck idol and the symbol of his practice as a speculator.

Now, having dusted it off, with a kind of abusive affection, he put it down again in the middle of the desk and stood for a long time gazing alternately at it and then around the room. Nothing else in the room seemed in any way personal. Everything else had first to be remembered, like the things one sees on coming awake in strange surroundings. The past has to be recreated, up to the moment of having gone to sleep.

Dreadwind’s past came back to him slowly. It was not merely that a certain experience discontinuous with his past and perhaps incompatible therewith had befallen him. Here was another kind of fact. What he had been he no longer was and could not be again. This was not a decision, not a matter of resolve, not a conclusion arrived at by reflection. It was simply so. How it came to be so he did not know. There in front of him lay the memorandum in his own handwriting of his last transactions in the pit. He had been a wheat gambler. Yes. But he knew that he should never make another bet in the wheat pit. Why? He did not know why. And it was not until he had dusted off the little bear and sat there communing with it that he knew it at all. There was no moralizing about it. There was only the finality.

*    *   *

“How extraordinary!” said Selkirk, in a tone of soliloquy.

“In what aspect?” I asked.

He replied slowly: “That a man’s luck idol should tell him when to quit.”

Of course, gambling is full of these concealed superstitions. It would be so. There is no way of accounting for luck beyond the simple rule of three. In its runs and wanton freaks it is totally mysterious; and its votaries may believe anything, not because what they believe is of itself probable, but because the mind cannot rest in a state of disbelief. It is necessary to believe that one believes something. Every successful gambler walks with the dread that his luck will turn, or, worse still, that it will leave him without warning. He will think it is only willful, prankish, that it is teasing him, when in fact it has turned its back, and this he is seldom aware of until it is too late.

Some will imagine that Dreadwind’s funny little idol warned him to quit. Others will suppose that he had some intuition about it. That has happened—a man having all of a sudden the very definite feeling his touch is gone, without being able either to analyze the feeling or say what it is he has lost. The feeling is a fact, and though the rest of it were wholly imaginary it would be dangerous, even fatal, for that man to go on. The feeling of having lost his way with chance would wreck his play. These are matters of dark subtlety. We really know nothing about them. What Dreadwind himself thought would be of no importance. The subject himself is always one who has never rationalized his own acts. He never can tell how his mind works. He finds himself here or there and cannot say how he came. His mental processes are unconscious. Conclusions occur to him, complete and final, charged with impulse. They demand to be translated forthwith into action; and they are.

However, it seems to be true that he thought nothing about it. It was as if a mechanism inside of him had clicked—and that instant his career as a gambler was ended. This happened to him there in his room. He had no premonition of its being imminent and not enough curiosity to explore the fact afterward. That he had a fortune aside may or may not be a relevant consideration. It almost never happens that a gambler forsakes his passion because he has money enough. Money is not the thing.

My own opinion is that what clicked was his emotional apparatus. I mean that what had really occurred was a change of feeling toward the thing he had been doing. Whether he thought it right or wrong, he had come suddenly to dislike it. His heart could not be in it. In his remote self he was, and is, I think, a pagan, with a kind of animistic religion that awakened in him at his first contact with nature. Or perhaps it was from Weaver he had got the idea that all things are animated by a universal spirit.