Satan's Bushel (19 page)

At this confused and contending murmurs rose. Then voices began to ask: “What of the war?”

His answer was: “They who sell the phantom wheat, who conjure up a non-existing surplus, who say the price freely made at auction is what produces wheat, and now suddenly deny this, now stop the price and shut the pit to save themselves and name it patriotism—I say, let them feed the war. Be not deceived. This war of yours is the oldest war there is.”

He probably did not mean in any case to go on. His thought must have culminated in that apostrophe to the power of forgiveness. And this at the same time was his own cry, his own defence. Dreadwind was the only person present who could have so understood it. Kill the surplus! Kill it, as he had done, and the Lord forgive them all!

Until then his audience had been in a state of vague perplexity, inclined as a whole to be sympathetic, yet with its emotions divided in disorder. But suddenly he had gone too far. A change took place when the question was asked: “What about the war?” That touched a dangerous basic feeling. His answer grossly offended it. Instantly, therefore, it crystallized against him. His theme was swept away. In a far corner of the room a tiny, timorous hiss was heard. Then a loud one. With no more warning than that the audience raised itself as one many-headed adder and hurried him in hisses, imprecations breaking through.

One would think he must have known; that he had been deliberately heedless. But he was amazed and looked about him in a stricken manner, unable to comprehend it.

Cordelia was running up the aisle. She reached him just as he turned away with a weary sign of defeat. As far as the steps down from the platform he was all right. It was well that Dreadwind met them there, however, for the old man began to lurch. They supported him out and he did not decline their strength. He leaned heavily upon them, whispering: “Quickly, quickly!”

Here Dreadwind omitted the harrowing details. How they got him home he did not say. After having been silent several minutes he skipped all that and began again with what happened next day:

About two o’clock he was sitting with Cordelia in the kitchen. One hates to pass that simple statement. I can see what they were doing. They were at the table, leaning on it. Her hands were lying in his and her eyes were wide and dry. They had not spoken a word for some time. What were they thinking? Nothing. That would be true of the man, I am sure. He was probably tracing the pattern on the oilcloth, over and over, and a tune he had not remembered for years was running around in his head. Water was dripping in the black iron sink. A three-color poster lady in tights was looking down at them from the wall with an eye of skeptical wonder. It was very still.

So Dreadwind was sitting with Cordelia in the kitchen. There was a heavy knock at the door. He went to see; and was not astonished when he stood facing two men in uniform. One was a captain, the other a lieutenant, both new to this business. The captain spoke.

“Is Absalom Weaver here?”

“What is wanted of him?” Dreadwind asked.

“He is wanted.”

“By whom?”

The captain hesitated. “We are from the Military Intelligence Bureau,” he said.

This Dreadwind had already guessed. And he construed the rest. A man who had publicly proposed to the wheat growers that they should limit their output and destroy their surplus in time of war, with the Government exhorting them to produce more and more, was certain to be charged with disloyalty. It was possible, besides, that the crime of casting rust upon the wheat had at last been traced to him.

“This is where he lived, but he is not here,” said Dreadwind.

“We followed him here yesterday from the La Salle Hotel,” said the captain. “We have watched ever since. He has not been seen going out.”

“No. You wouldn’t have seen him go out,” said Dreadwind. “But he is not here.”

The captain glanced down the hallway. Several men in uniform were at the head of the stairs. “Shall we have to search the place?” he asked.

“That isn’t necessary,” said Dreadwind. “I’ll show you.”

He led the two officers down the hall to the door of

Weaver’s room, opened it, and stood a little aside. The officers came on the threshold and looked—at a long horizontal figure covered with a sheet. The captain went in. He turned down the sheet to uncover the face, put it back, and came out, his polished military boots with their silly spurs making a fatuous inept sound on the bare floor.

“Case closed,” he said, and abruptly departed with his men, whistling on a dry breath.

Thus ended the earthly phase of Absalom Weaver. Now the other begins. And whether the other was real in itself or existed fantastically in the minds of two human beings is a question I wish to leave as I found it. I have my own reluctant opinion; it is irrelevant. I cannot say for certain what Dreadwind’s opinion was. Sometimes I thought he believed it; then again I thought he didn’t. No. He must have believed it really. At every crucial point the faith of it lay in his conduct. It does not matter what he thought.

The old man’s faculties appear to have been clear to the end. I mean to say, clear so far as they could be, bent as they were to his fanatical purpose. First, he legally authorized Dreadwind to gather up his assets—that is to say his profits in the wheat market; and then he gave simple, explicit directions as to what should be done with the money.

“As far as it will go,” he said, “do with it as Joseph did in Egypt. In time of plenty he bought grain. Do you remember? He gathered grain as the sands of the sea. Stretch the money. Each year until it is lost buy wheat in the first glut of the harvest, the new wheat, in the months of July and September, as the farmers bring it wet to the auction and dump it.”

*    *   *

“Say that again,” said Moberly, breaking in.

“In the pit,” I said, “what you call July wheat is the first of the fall-sown crop. September wheat is the first of the spring-sown crop. Those are the two new wheat months in the pit. Three-quarters of the total wheat crop is rushed to market during the harvest period and sold for what it will bring as July or September wheat. It is the grower’s folly. There is a glut of wheat at this time. Everything overflows and the price is depressed.”

“Yes, yes,” said Moberly irritably. “We know all that. What did he mean about Joseph? That’s what I’m asking. Joseph made a corner in grain, didn’t he? Isn’t that what he did?”

“You Board of Trade people say it,” I answered. “Look at Joseph, you say. He was the first great grain speculator. He saved Egypt. So it was then; so it is now. Grain speculation is historically necessary. Well, maybe so. I wonder. The fact is that Joseph did a thing you never heard of one doing on the Board of Trade. If you heard of one doing it you would call in his credit and send for his heirs to have him examined in lunacy.”

“What is that?” Moberly asked.

“Joseph bought grain when there was too much of it, because there was too much of it. Then he sold it when there was famine. What does the modern grain speculator do when he thinks there is too much wheat? He sells it. What does he do when he thinks there isn’t enough? He buys it.”

“Rot,” said Moberly. “It works out.” “It wouldn’t have worked in Egypt,” I said. “If there had been a Board of Trade and no Joseph in Egypt what would have happened? During the seven fat years the price of wheat would have been so low, with all the speculators selling it because there was too much, that people would have had to stop growing it. Then when the seven lean years came the quotation for wheat on the Board of Trade might have been a thousand dollars a bushel because there wasn’t any and Egypt had perished.”

“Stop quarreling,” said Goran. “Who cares what Joseph did? Nobody knows. What happened to your precious lovers? I want to know that.”

*    *   *

There would be two versions of what Weaver’s death did to the lovers. One I can give. That is Dreadwind’s. The other—well, a woman never tells. You cannot be sure she could if she would or that she knows. She seems to have no verbal curiosity about her soul’s experience.

For Cordelia, whose life hitherto had been dedicated wholly to daughterhood, turning from the father of her being to embrace the miraculous stranger must have been a tremendous emotional act. Perhaps she had not achieved it perfectly and was keeping fire on two altars. There is the other possibility that she had overachieved it and was touched with remorse at not having waited when the end was so near. Or you may believe that the power of the father to command her spirit was even greater in death than it was in life.

What Dreadwind said very simply was that the part of her that was Weaver’s seemed to go with him. He said it with a kind of wonder and not at all as if he wished it otherwise. What he did not say, though I knew it to be true, was that the part of her that survived for him was less than he had before. It was and it was not. How shall it be said? She was changed. Her spirit was absent. She had but one compelling thought, which was to act on a revelation that occurred to her as Weaver’s life departed. This was irrational. Yet to all circumstances of reality she reacted passively in a rational way notwithstanding; and with Dreadwind she was both infinitely distant and exquisitely near, like someone you love asleep in your arms and dreaming.

Everything else now turns upon that revelation.

After having imparted to Dreadwind very clearly those extraordinary instructions as to how the money should be lost, Weaver said a weird thing. With the ebb of his strength he said that until the money was lost in the way he directed, all of it to the last dollar, his spirit could not leave the earth. It would abide here in suspense. It would dwell in a place he seemed to see and evidently meant to describe; the end was sudden and he failed to get it out.

But Cordelia saw it. She was holding his hand. He was already dead. They were standing at opposite sides of the bed—Dreadwind and Cordelia. She started, her brows contracted violently, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again they were very wide, her eyebrows were lifted, and she was looking far away.

“A tree!” she whispered.

“Where is it?” Dreadwind asked.

“A tree I” she said again. “What a strange tree!”

“Where?” asked Dreadwind anxiously, for it seemed to him very important to know.

His voice disturbed her. She closed her eyes again, then looked at him with a bothered expression.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, remembering his question.

The thought that instantly obsessed her was to find the tree. It was more than a thought. It had the force of a psychic compulsion. Dreadwind could imagine that if she had been alone she would have gone immediately forth into the wide world with that image in her eyes. Almost he could believe that alone, walking in a trance over the face of the earth, she would have found it some time.

But she was not alone. Her anxiety included him so implicitly that they never once spoke of it in question. It was not that she should go to the tree; it was that they should go and be with it, that the three of them should dwell together again in that other place to be discovered. How she should have known, if she did know, that it would be possible for Dreadwind to do this and at the same time carry out Weaver’s instructions, is immaterial. It was possible; and it may never have occurred to her to ask whether it was or not.

But there were certain frustrating facts. Dreadwind laid them before her.

First, was the fact that with the whole civilized world in a state of war it was not feasible for people to move about freely on an errand that could not be explained—and the tree, which she described minutely, was clearly a foreign tree. They would have to find it in a strange land.

Secondly, while the war continued it would not be possible to carry out Weaver’s instructions in the wheat market, for already the Government was taking steps to fix the price of wheat, thereby suspending speculation altogether.

Thirdly, there was something else. He wondered if she would understand. There was a certain thing men had to do in their own way, without women. It would be necessary on this account for him to leave her. It would not take long; but it was very pressing.

She did understand; at least she accepted his reasons gravely and without comment.

But when he said, therefore, they would be married at once and that she should take his apartment for her own and wait for him there where nothing could touch her, she listened with a tense, thoughtful expression and shook her head.

“Here,” she said. “I shall wait here. Wait for him as for the rain,” she added musingly.

“But we will be married at once,” he said.

Again she shook her head.

“I do not know what marriage is,” she said. “I only know that when we are married it shall be all of me.

He protested, argued, insisted. He would marry the tiniest fragment of her, the shadow, the memory and thought of her, and be satisfied. He represented it in a practical light, a romantic light, in the light of his need. She was pleased. He could see in her eyes that she was coming nearer, slowly nearer, as with a great effort of longing, but all the time she kept shaking her head. Then suddenly he lost her. She was snatched back.

“Would it were all of me now,” she said. Saying it she dropped her head on her arms and wept bitterly. When he would have touched her consolingly she gently repulsed him.

Thus the father prevailed in spite of them.

W
EAVER’S affairs were easy to settle. His estate consisted entirely in credit balances with Board of Trade members; and when the money was all gathered up and put in bank it amounted to nearly a million dollars. Dreadwind was surprised. He had no idea the salvage would be so large.

Then he bade Cordelia good-bye.

She took from around her neck a thin silver chain of very old workmanship, with a locket attached, and put it over his head, dropping the locket inside his collar.

“Bring it back to me unopened,” she said.

She stood with her back to the kitchen table, her hands grasping the edges of it, her body inclined a little toward him.