Satan's Bushel (16 page)

With a glance at Dreadwind, Cordelia disappeared. He heard the same door open and close again. She was gone for perhaps fifteen minutes; and when she returned she made coffee and placed it before him in a yellow bowl, together with bread in the whole loaf and a large segment of cheese. He was to help himself. She did this all without speaking, as if she had done it before. Then she sat down at the end of the table and regarded him in a slow, musing manner, with no guise of defense or shyness.

“Will anything happen?” she asked.

“From what you heard us talking about just now?”

She nodded.

“No,” he answered. “I don’t think so. Do you remember I said I believed your father’s motive was better than mine had been? That was when you asked me, there by the wheat pit, if I did that too.”

“I remember,” she said.

“Well, I’m sure of it now,” he said. “Shall I tell you why?”

She shook her head. “A woman to her own understanding,” she said. “He taught me that,” she added with a sober smile.

“Your father is not looking so well,” said Dreadwind.

“He never does here,” she said. “And this time it’s worse with him. You see, always before he has lost—in the first week or ten days everything there was, only just enough to keep us through the winter. That made the winters very long for him. But this is different. Now he is winning. He doesn’t tell me. But I know it.”

“It doesn’t change your way of living,” said Dreadwind.

“No,” she said. “It isn’t that. We should not know how to live in any other way. He is different. I hardly know him.”

“How has he changed?” Dreadwind asked. “Does he talk of getting rich?”

“Rich?” she repeated. It was a strange word. “No,” she said, “I’m sure he never thinks of that. It’s something he will do to wheat. In the night he thinks he is still there—in that dreadful place—calling for wheat—buying it higher and higher——” She stopped her ears. “Then something happens. I don’t know what that is. He is breathless for a moment and then he cries, ‘Ten dollars a bushel for all you’ve got!’ Do you understand it?”

“It comes together,” he said. “Yes, I think I do.”

They talked like this for hours. The fact of themselves they took for granted in some extraordinary sense that neither of them paused to consider. They asked and answered questions in an artless, unreserved manner, exactly as if all these things had happened to them during a long separation.

She told him of her life with Weaver from the beginning, with apparently no thought of how preposterous the pattern of it was. Initio, that early winter night when she ran out of the door after him with her arctics flapping, a child of ten. He did not hear her; when she caught him by the coat, he picked her up, kissed her, set her down again and turned away, walking faster than before. She was puzzled for a moment and very desolate. She had made her choice. Everything in her little world she had cast away to follow him and apparently he did not want her.

She looked back at the house. Someone had closed the door. No one was calling. The light burned brightly in the kitchen window, as if nothing had happened. How often it had beckoned her home, saying, “Hurry! Hurry! Nothing will catch you, but do hurry!” And now it seemed not to know her. It had cut her off; and the house was strange. It did not occur to her to go back. She ran after her father again, a terror of loneliness clutching her heart. Overtaking him a second time she put her hand in his. He neither spoke nor looked at her; but she knew he wanted her; and thus they walked a long way without resting. For many days they walked when it was not too cold; when it was they lodged with strangers who treated them with aloof curiosity and called her little girl. Then they stopped for the winter at a place where he taught a country school.

In the spring they set out again, walking south to meet the harvest. This was the beginning of a tryst which they kept annually thereafter. In Texas they faced about and followed the sickle bar all the way to the Red River of the North. He worked as a harvest hand. She was too small to do anything. He took her education in hand. She could already read and write; but they had only two books. One was that volume of Paracelsus, the other was a small Bible; and these were of equal value. More had been luggage; and it was their way to live without impedimenta of any sort. There was never anything to carry. The clothes they wore and what they had in their pockets—that was all. At any moment they were free to rise and go.

He taught her in the rabbinical manner, through her ears. This method had notable merits. Classes had neither time nor place, no beginning and no end. They were continuous, opportune and always interesting. You got your Latin verbs with whatever it was you were doing, astronomy on starry nights, history on rainy days, literature to relieve the tedium of a day’s journey; botany, biology, chemistry and physics where and however the true phenomenon occurred in nature’s laboratory. Everything was explained as it happened and then related to all that was known before. And just as one began to think the garden of knowledge had been explored, then suddenly new vistas were opened, extending to the mysteries. He had been himself trained for the church and had, besides, a fine gift for teaching. Surely never before had a woman been so educated, and wholly to a man’s liking. Of the things women teach each other she knew very little, for she had few friendships and no intimacies among members of her own sex. And of the things a lover teaches she knew nothing at all.

So passed the three enchanted seasons—spring, summer, autumn—in a state of idyllic vagabondage. But the winter was a horrible nightmare. Then her world fell to pieces.

At first she did not understand why they came to the city in the wintertime. They lived in one room and she kept house on tiptoe. He would leave each morning shortly before nine and return at three; and if she was lonesome while he was absent, with no one to talk to and so much to be afraid of, it was even worse when he was there, though of course in another way. Their companionship ceased. He was gloomy, preoccupied, often ironic and irritable. She did not know what he did and could not bring herself to ask. She hardly dared, and besides, she dreaded to find out.

Still, one day she followed him to where he suddenly disappeared through a large doorway. She waited a long time and then, as he did not come out and as many people were continually passing both ways through the doorway, she thought perhaps it was some kind of thoroughfare and ventured far enough in to hear the wicked uproar that rises from the wheat pit—from any wheat pit, but especially from the one at the Open Board of Brokers.

She was terrified. Her first impulse was to rush in and find him and beg him to come away with her—back to their beautiful country where nothing like this could ever be. Instead, she ran all the way back to their room and crouched there until he returned. He noticed how strange she was and questioned her anxiously, but she avoided telling him what she had done.

That evening he was much more himself. The next morning he took her with him and left her with the woman at the tobacco stand just inside the door. Every day thereafter he took her with him. That was how it started; and now she went with him because he needed her. She would be afraid to let him go by himself, he was so unseeing, so unpresent among realities. She doubted whether he knew where they lived or could find his way home alone. He had long leaned upon her figuratively; now he was beginning to lean upon her actually, as they walked. That was only here, in the city, and more now than ever before. In the country he walked in his own strength.

And this for all these years had been the design of their lives together. The winters, ah, yes. They were not to be remembered. But always came spring again and with it the delightful wandering, with happiness running in their footsteps. They came to have a regular orbit. And as Weaver grew to be known among the people therein he worked less and less as a harvest hand until he ceased to do so at all, and became as one of the ancient magi, a man full of arts and knowledge, giving shrewd and profitable counsel to the wise, performing offices of sorcery for the superstitious, thus gradually assuming the character in which Dreadwind found him.

In a few years also Cordelia became helpful. She filled her apron in the harvest. Between them they gained a livelihood easily, and came each winter to Chicago with enough money to keep them in the way they were wont to subsist, and the moiety over that Weaver lost in the wheat pit.

“Last times make one a little sad,” she said. “Not that one would wish to go on and on forever. Only because it is the last time. I wonder why.”

“What was for the last time?” he asked.

“All the beautiful part,” she said. “That harvest was our last. Only the winter is left. I can’t see what will happen. Perhaps I don’t wish to see.”

“When did you begin to have this feeling?” he asked. “Suddenly, just now? Or has it been growing?”

“To everything we knew I said good-bye this year,” she answered.

“Places,” he said.

She nodded. “Places. Friendly things. Bits of scenery. Trees we had named and treated as people. A little church with a graveyard we came to one night in a dreadful storm. We saw it far off by the lightning and ran. The door was unlocked. We were there until morning. It was the first summer; and there he christened me Cordelia.”

“That was not the name you started with?”

“No. There in the church, with the thunder splitting itself on the steeple, he read King Lear to me. From memory, I mean. He knew it by heart. The church was dark. His voice filled it and echoed round. By the lightning flashes I could see him walking up and down the aisle. Then I knelt at the altar and he christened me Cordelia. Things like that,” she concluded.

“And a bench,” he wondered. “A certain round bench under an apple tree.”

She blushed; looking at him steadily. “That was not good-bye,” she said, “and Mrs. Purdy ought not to have told you.”

No more than that did they say of the affair of their hearts. I had almost said no nearer than that did they come to it. But it had no external relation. It existed like a third part of them. It was the fact implicit; explicit facts merely pertained to it. And so also with the fulfillment. That was to be long postponed and it did not matter. It was never their way to make words of their love.

Dreadwind was of Cordelia’s notion that Absalom Weaver’s orbit was broken. More than this, he had a sense of impending disaster. That was not surprising with the shape of facts in view. People thought Weaver was running on luck. Dreadwind knew better. The old man had got a gambling position in wheat that was fundamentally logical. He would undoubtedly push it to the last extreme. There was no foretelling the sequel. There was only the probability that it would be catastrophic. On reflection this seemed inevitable. There was no way of stopping him. Fear, self-interest, satiety, a sense of consequences to himself and others—such constraining modes of thought and feeling were lacking in him. He had a demonic end in view. He cared nothing for the temple. He denounced it. One could imagine that he wished to destroy it. To what might follow he was utterly indifferent.

The spectacle fascinated Dreadwind. With rapid strokes of imagination he gave it form and projection. It had an unpredictable dimension. In a game itself without limits a fanatic who knew no restraint had got the fatal hand. What if he should play it out? And there was no reason to suppose he would not. Only one of Dreadwind’s prescience would have sensed the possibilities. It is a fact that no one else did. How could the keepers of the great world wheat market have been attending properly to their business and watching at the same time for a mad comet to burst from the door of that mean little place across the street—the Open Board of Brokers—where nothing of primary importance could ever happen?

Afterward for a long time, you may remember, nobody quite believed it as it really was. Many thought Dreadwind was behind Weaver, had invested money in him, and was himself the daring principal. Circumstances gave some fictitious color to this belief, and as it was never denied by anyone who positively knew the truth it still persists in legend.

Dreadwind did of course stand by, for a reason that now comes clear. A romantic reason, you see. He could not avert the catastrophe. It would not have occurred to him to try. Cordelia was his true anxiety.

His way of standing by was literal. He took all the rooms across the hall, furnished them in one day, and moved in.

Weaver apparently was never consciously aware of this astonishing gesture. At least he never spoke of it. A good deal of the time he seemed insensible to his surroundings and what passed therein; or, waking to them suddenly, he either accepted them indifferently or treated them as having been long familiar.

In that way he accepted Dreadwind without question or curiosity. Cordelia got another wooden chair and made a third place at the end of the table. Weaver said nothing. Dreadwind came every evening and ate with them. Weaver sometimes spoke when the guest arrived and sometimes gave him no recognition other than to include him tacitly. Afterward he would sit under the gas jet, in his folding chair, with his dish of coffee on the floor, and read while Cordelia cleared the table, Dreadwind contentedly watching her. He would go on reading while they walked in the hall and sometimes he passed them silently on the way to his room.

Then one evening it pleased him to talk. A fly fell into his bowl of milk. He fished it out, dried its feet, sent it away, and a flood of discourse fell from him, beginning with the fly as a marvelous instance and dwelling at length upon the enigma of becoming and being in all things. He talked for an hour continuously. He was on his feet, looking at them, with a thought half out of his mind, when of a sudden his interest broke. He forgot what he had been saying, looked once or twice around, then turned abruptly and went to his room.

Not long after this Dreadwind one evening had dinner sent in from his rooms. Weaver sat perfectly still until the Japanese man had placed it on the table and was gone, under Dreadwind’s instructions not to remain to serve it.