Satan's Bushel (14 page)

This was at the beginning of the third year of the World War. With that faculty of swift, unerring imagination which may be mistaken for an occult power and is no more rare than a free mind having nothing preconceived, he saw two things clearly.

The war would go on for a long time yet, and the price of wheat, which seemed already very high, would continue to rise. It would rise to any fabulous price. There was no, telling. All that one had to do to win was to buy it. He was so sure of this that he never examined the conclusion. He could see it taking place.

Now looking back we may wonder why it was not obvious to everyone. We almost forget that it was not. We know for a fact that the wheat pit was divided. Speculators were continually in a panic lest the war should end overnight. Many stood obstinately for a fall in wheat on the chance that it would. Anyhow, they said, wheat was already much too high to buy for speculation. Which only shows, as Dreadwind said, that the opportunity was such as gamblers dream of and cannot imagine really. When it comes they will not believe it. They are fettered by a sense of probability, whereas the great chance always presents itself in the guise of extreme improbability. Their imaginations were overwhelmed.

But think of it! At that time, though wheat seemed very high, one who had started buying it and had bought it steadily, blindly, without stopping to reflect, might have won a nabob’s fortune. Capital was not necessary; only the vision to see and the nerve to go on, against every sense of probability. A mere shoestring of capital, as little as fifty dollars, had been enough for one who knew how to parlay his bets—that is, to double progressively upon winnings. I stress this case a bit because it concerns also Weaver, as will appear. Weaver much more than Dreadwind.

Directly, in fact, it concerned Dreadwind little. Day after day he watched the price of wheat rise and never touched it. He had not the faintest inclination to do so. But it was a spectacle worth watching. He watched it with his mind, thoughtfully, attentively; his emotions were not involved. They were preoccupied in a way of their own. He was waiting. You may guess for what. For Cordelia, for spring, for the time when he should place himself across their path at that point of its annual beginning which he had located in tracing them backward.

Knowing the impetuosity of his nature you would think he fumed and rattled the calendar and stretched himself with idiotic anxieties. Not at all. Sitting there on the end of his spine with his feet in the window, idly regarding the tape as it passed through his fingers, he was serene and contented, in like manner with him who, having found the one pearl of great price, sold all that he had and bought it. That he did not physically possess the pearl was circumstantial. It existed. He had found it. He had surrendered everything to it. No violent lover’s antics, which are never what they seem, but gestures of doubt, fear and irresolution. The form of his extravagance was tranquillity.

What we know at this time about the object is next to nothing. Put it all together. A glance or two from the woman across the hostility of a jealous father, a silent episode in the wheat field, a looking back, and then a token—the spikelet of wheat in flower—to be delivered to someone who might ask for her at the house from which she vanished. I’m sure he told it all, at least all that lay within the reach of words. It seems very little on which to found an ecstasy.

You may suppose the source of this ecstasy was the revelation of nature through which he had passed and that Cordelia was of this experience the passive symbol. Or you may suppose that the emotion of love is egoistic, having the subject within itself, requiring only that the object shall exist, wherefore the thought of it may be more exciting, more creative, than the reality. This would cause it to seem a thing not external to the man, not achieved in collaboration with him, but an edifice of his own imagination, corresponding to his power of abstract idealization. The object in that case is a myth.

But is there not always the possibility of a perfect instance? Is not the combined event of two coessential human beings the one great expectation? It may never yet have happened that we know of. Grant that it never has. Yet whence arises this expectation if the thing itself may not occur? I say no more. I merely add that if it happened accidentally, and yet of course in a predetermined way, there would be no intellectual understanding of it. Once it had recognized itself nothing could alter it. It would be as final as the fact of one’s birth. Neither time nor space could touch it. Never could it be less or more, nor could it ever be as if it had not been. A separation of its two principles would be as impossible as self-division. In that case—I say, in that case, Dreadwind would not have worried about when and how he should see Cordelia again. He had found her once for all. And though he should never see her again, still it would be the same—almost the same.

However, be the case what it was, he sat for days on end, running into winter, in a kind of waking dream, while a tale went up and down La Salle Street about an old wheat gambler who had gone mad with the rise. The scene of his operations was the Open Board of Brokers, and that institution was like a rickety net, set close inshore for small and crippled fish, now about to be wrecked by a whale.

The thing had been going on for some time before anybody heard of it because nothing that happens on the Open Board is properly noticeable. The place itself is supposed to be invisible. Yet no one can help seeing it. There it has stood for many years, with its sign up, across the street from the great Chicago Board of Trade. It is one of the sights, only no one who is respectable ever shows it to you or lets you go there if he can help it.

If in passing with a member of the reputable Board of Trade you ask what that is, he says, without looking at it, “Oh, that’s the Open Board.” Then if you ask him what the Open Board is, he says, “It’s something we can’t get rid of.” He may, if you press him, tell you how hard they did try to get rid of it. They couldn’t because it was too deeply encysted in the community. So at last it was accepted, like the tainted relation it was, under an ambiguous treaty, which was that the Board of Trade would stop fighting it and blink at its existence if on its part it would undertake never to be seen or heard and to walk circumspectly in the twilight.

This treaty has been strictly observed. All the same, curiosity is stronger than respectability; and this was a very curious thing that had been going on. An old wheat gambler gone mad, one who never in his life had been right before and now apparently couldn’t be wrong. Success is generally a positive test of sanity. This is different. There is no success in gambling really. There are only heights and depths. One who sets himself against chance, who defies it, who, so to say, wrings it by the beard and commands it to humor him, is a reckless fool. His moments of grandeur are in his mind and his belly will be kept with sops. But one who does this and wins—wins steadily, progressively, offensively—he must be mad. He is at least possessed. The gods are pleased to be ironic. They are mocking him. And such pleasantries have always some ghastly sequel. Other gamblers regard him with awe and fear. And such a thing will make talk whereever it happens.

Dreadwind first saw a paragraph about it in a newspaper column of wheat-pit gossip. Then an acquaintance whom he met in the street spoke of it lightly. This occurred a second and a third time, which was not strange, since everyone was beginning to wonder at it; and he asked for particulars. They were briefly stated. An old man who had been known for years on the Open Board as the unluckiest of bettors had all at once hit it right. Then it seemed he couldn’t go wrong. Already he had run a few dollars into a fortune and was still going. It wasn’t the amount of money people were thinking of; relatively that was not large, though of course—who knew?—it might at this rate, if his luck continued, exhaust all the gold in La Salle Street’s bank vaults. No. What made the episode so humanly and irresistibly interesting was the setting. On the Open Board—that place!—among all those cripples and lepers of unluck, for one of them to rise like this, to be singled out for the great favor—well, it stirred the sentimental imagination of all that grim and haunted neighborhood.

“How does he trade?” Dreadwind asked.

“That’s it,” his informant answered. “He’s been doing one thing all the time. He’s been buying wheat. Nothing else. He’s buying it still, as if he couldn’t stop.”

“Huh!” said Dreadwind. “A man needn’t have been mad to do that.”

Alone in his office, Dreadwind’s thoughts kept returning to the subject. Someone had seen what he saw—that wheat was bound to go a great deal higher because the war would go on—and everyone thought him mad. An old derelict wheat gambler with a streak of clear vision at last and the courage to pursue it! He wondered what kind of old man that would be. He wondered also why he went on thinking about him.

He wasn’t really interested beyond the simple fact. Still, there was all the time a feeling of effort in the back of his mind, as if it were trying to establish some very improbable association of ideas. Whatever that was, nothing came of it; instead, he was seized with an impulse to visit the Open Board and have a look for himself at the madman who had got his luck by the tail, as people thought, but who, as Dreadwind knew, had but the imagination to see an obvious thing.

He had passed the place often but he had never looked in.

It is a very large room, the size of a small theatre, on the street level. You walk right in, all the way in, and nobody asks you what you want or so much as gives you a look. I suppose that is why they call it the Open Board of Brokers. At the Board of Trade, as at the Stock Exchange, only members may go on the floor. Visitors are confined to the gallery. There is no gallery here. Brokers, customers and visitors are all together. It is a democratic arrangement, truly and naturally so, as everything is on the bottom plane. Nearly everyone here has already fallen and cannot fall any lower. The rest are such as cannot expect to rise. It was their plane to begin with.

On the Board of Trade the minimum quantity of phantom wheat one may buy or sell—the unit of trade—is five thousand bushels. Here one may trade in a hatful. It is petty gambling with the one merit of pretending to be nothing else. There are no cash tabies, no samples of actual grain, no millers or millers’ agents, nothing but prices to bet on; and these are not its own. They are received by wire from the big grain pits across the street.

At one end of the room, reaching to the ceiling, is a great blackboard, lighted from the top by an overhanging row of electric lamps. A kind of trestle board, six or seven feet from the floor, runs the whole length of the blackboard; and up and down this trestle board walks a man with a telephone receiver on a long cord fixed to his head, a bit of chalk in one hand and a piece of rag in the other. He receives in his ear the prices that originate on the Board of Trade across the way and chalks them up. When a column is full to the bottom he clears it with the rag and begins again at the top.

Under the blackboard is the trading pit—the round, hollow rostrum, twenty feet across, three steps up and three steps down. It is fiercely lighted by a circle of electric lamps hanging low from the ceiling. In the foreground facing it are some rows of wooden chairs such as you find in cheap theatres, screwed to the floor. A government weather map hanging to a post, a news ticker, telephone booths and sand boxes to spit in complete the equipment.

People are what you see. This cluster of humanity, in a place that would be dark as midnight at high noon if not for the artificial illumination, is in a state of constant working, not in the sense of performing labor but as a mass of separate organisms all entangled, apparently unaware of their contacts and mutual pressure, now one or two moving convulsively, then two or three more while those others are still, suddenly a violent spasm through the whole mass for no reason you can understand, then again a period of total inertia, with here and there a straggler prowling about. It makes one think of a body of worms—worms at the roots of the wheat—only that worms work silently. At least we cannot hear them. It is quite possible that they hear themselves and that what they hear is not unlike this low, raging sound to which the emotions of greed, envy, malice, disappointment and gloating contribute each its dissonance and which expresses the whole low motive. There is no uglier sound in the world. And it is inarticulate—that is to say, wordless. No intelligible words are heard. There are only shrieks, groans, jeers and jungle cries.

You will observe that these men have an affliction of the sight. They look at you, at each other, at moving objects, without seeing. Their gaze is inward except when it turns to the blackboard. What is written there they see, and almost nothing else.

How strange the gambling passion is! And how it levels men by making them oblivious of one another! Here you see one who might be a blacksmith, another who smells of the stockyards, men who keep their dignity in soiled linen, men whose wives are out washing, men who walk like rats, a few clean, well-kept old men for whom you feel a special distaste, and nearly everyone with some funny little tic or nervous habit—a way of pulling the nose or picking the fingers or stepping over cracks on the floor. A great proportion of them are very old and long ago lost.

This was the scene on which Dreadwind entered. With one glance he took it in. He understood it instantly in all institutional aspects. Yet he stood as one petrified with astonishment.

There in the center of the pit, vividly marked out in the light, stood Absalom Weaver. He stood alone with a scornful, invincible air and had his back to the blackboard. He did not need to see the prices. He could tell how they changed by the reactions of those who stood on the steps of the pit in a closed ring, facing him. They kept their eyes fixed upon him; he gazed at the floor reflectively and moved his head slowly from side to side with an air of listening. Just at that moment had come a lull in proceedings. The room was still, everything having fallen into an eddy of silence as may occur in the midst of a storm. The price of wheat had not changed for some seconds, the chalk writer on the trestle board was motionless, and minds were in a state of tension.