Satan's Bushel (20 page)

“You will find me here like this. I shall hear you coming. The door will not be locked. Open it without knocking. You will think I had never stirred.”

What he did in the war I don’t know. I think it was the tank corps. Hating publicity, he enlisted by an assumed name, or I should have looked it up. He merely said he went in at a place where he could count on a prompt discharge when the show was over. Anyhow, he returned with a slight limp.

When he opened the door, with a sudden panic and faintness of heart, there she stood, exactly as he had seen her last, only a little more inclined toward him, her lips parted, a high light in her eyes. She was wholly present at that moment. Her spirit was there and touched him. She looked him once over with swift anxiety and threw her arms about his neck, at the same time exploring him for the silver locket which, when it was found, she took back.

His ecstasy in that phase was brief. Almost at once she changed again, her eyes once more had that look of far-seeing, and there was an air of impatience about her.

Now, two things remained to be done in order that a third might happen. The first thing was to arrange that Weaver’s money should be lost in the wheat pit, agreeably to his instructions. The next was to find the tree in which his spirit was supposed to be lingering Then it was only to abide the sequel.

There was a broker on the Board of Trade whom Dreadwind trusted as he would trust himself—even more. I do not know his name. He appears to have been a man in whose house gambling in wheat was neither prohibited nor encouraged. It took its place. His true interest lay rather in the handling of actual grain as a dealer. He was an ideal broker for the purpose, since no one would expect him to be handling an irrational gambling account in the phantom stuff of the pit, and his business in actual grain was more than large enough to conceal the other. Dreadwind went to this broker and gave him the strangest order that was ever placed on the Board of Trade. It was an order, you understand, to lose a million dollars in the pit. Only of course it was not said that way. Specifically, it was an order to buy July and September wheat in the pit, on the glut of the harvest, at the highest prices possible, until the money was all gone. When it was lost then the account was to close and Dreadwind was to be notified. The broker stared at him stupidly.

“I know,” said Dreadwind. “It’s perfectly mad. I can’t explain it and I can’t be here to do it myself. That’s why I bring it to you. Imagine it to be an affair of the conscience and let it go at that.”

“Pity to wallow that kind of conscience around in the wheat pit,” said the broker. However, he accepted the commission, and that was that. They thought it was. No one had the faintest doubt as to what would happen to the money. Weaver hadn’t; Dreadwind hadn’t; the broker hadn’t.

Well, now Cordelia and Dreadwind set out together. All they had to go on was her description of the tree. She had never seen one like it. Neither had Dreadwind. Yet neither of them doubted its existence; and Cordelia was sure she would know it at sight. She led the way. I mean it was her impulse always that guided them. And when at length they had found that kind of tree they were no nearer than when they started; for of the teak species there are millions scattered through the forests of Asia. Fancy the chance of finding one! Of finding a certain one with not the slightest physical notion of where it was! It seems often true in human experience that the sense of probability is suspended. Something else goes on working in its place. We cannot imagine what that is. There are those who prefer the supernatural explanation, which leaves it as it was. Others say there is a vast region of the human mind yet to be explored. It has faculties both vestigal and rudimentary which we use unawares. That may be so.

There were times when Cordelia lost all sense of direction and then they drifted in an aimless way, merely looking. Then by one impulse they would go a month’s journey in a straight line, looking neither right nor left, only to be disappointed again at the end. And yet a chart of their movements—Dreadwind had plotted one and showed it to me—clearly revealed a blind tendency from every angle to converge upon a certain point.

For some time Dreadwind had been silent, smoking slowly, his thoughts dwelling upon their travels, as I knew from now and then a wistful smile upon his face or an involuntary contraction of the grief muscles in his forehead.

“That’s all,” he said suddenly. “You passed us several times, you say. Therefore you know. It took us nearly three years to find it.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Nearly three years.”

“Then it wasn’t true?”

“What wasn’t true?”

“Weaver’s notion about his spirit. Three years, you say. Well? His spirit ought long ago to have departed. And if it had, or you thought it had, you would not continue here.”

“Oh! I see,” he said, his puzzled look breaking away. “You assume that the money has been lost. Of course. Anyone would think so. I haven’t told you. It sounds incredible. The money has not been lost. On the contrary, it has multiplied. I could show you the broker’s reports. The first year half of it was lost. The next year the surviving half increased itself threefold. And this year—I’ve just heard—it has doubled. It now amounts to about three million dollars.”

“And the tree meanwhile is flourishing,” I commented.

He looked at me steadily, nodding his head. “I don’t suppose anyone ever tried to lose money in the wheat pit,” he said. “It may be in the nature of chance that it’s as hard to lose as to win if that’s what you set out to do. Of course... I might... No, I couldn’t do that. We shall have to see.”

What it was he might do he did not say and I did not ask. One is permitted to guess.

It was strange that Weaver’s money had not been lost. But you see, in placing it Dreadwind had in mind not the losing of it primarily but the effect Weaver wished it to have in the pit, which was to support the price of wheat in the glut of the harvest; and it had been demonstrated to everyone’s amazement that money employed in that way need not be lost. It was the Joseph thing over again—buying grain when there was too much of it because there was too much, and, behold! it turned out to pay. Yes, but on the other side, if Dreadwind now wished more to lose the money than to prove Weaver’s theory he could very easily do so. Any experienced wheat gambler would know how to do that. Superstition aside, one could do it with certainty.

Dreadwind’s dilemma is clear. He was torn between an impulse to break the spell that enthralled them both and a powerful sentiment of veneration for the form and meaning of it. I have said once that I could not be sure that in his mind he believed it at all, and that yet he unconsciously did, for believing was implicit in his acts. Here it was. He would not change those first instructions to the broker in any way to place the money in greater jeopardy.

There he is. I leave him to you. A man living in a bamboo hut with the woman he loves and cannot possess, unable to destroy the invisible thing that keeps them apart

“A
NIGHT’S tale,” I said, looking around the table. “Dawn is breaking. So it was in Burma when Dreadwind finished.”

Sylvester and Selkirk looked first at the sky over the sea and then at their watches. Goran stretched. Moberly sat quite still. He was the first to speak.

“How long ago was that?” he asked. “When were you with Dreadwind, I mean?”

“Four months ago,” I said. “A little more. Four and a half.”

“They are there still?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Waiting for old Weaver’s money to be lost?”

“Yes.”

I noticed that he framed these questions carefully and I wondered, too, at their sincerity. I had not expected him to be the one most impressed.

Chairs were pushed back.

“Wait a minute,” said Goran. “I’ve a feeling you have left something out. Something about Cordelia. Didn’t you see her before you left?”

“Yes.”

“Alone?”

I hesitated for an answer and marveled at Goran’s subtle penetration.

“You did of course,” he said, not waiting. “And I have a feeling that she spoke with you to some purpose. That is what is missing.”

“I suspect you know too much about women,” I said.

“Only that they are unknowable,” he answered. “Can you tell us what she said?”

This was what she said. Goran apparently had already guessed it, not the words, but the sense. She had been with us for breakfast. It was nine o’clock when we were ready to start for the boat landing. She meant to go with us, and we were on the veranda waiting for Dreadwind. He called out that he would overtake us; he had a letter to finish that he wished me to post. So we walked on through the forest without him—Cordelia and I. As we passed the tree I noticed she did not look at it; and her not doing so was rather pointed, since she must have been aware that I was regarding it with deep curiosity.

“The day will be very hot,” she said. “I’m 0sorry to have kept you up all night. Mr. Dreadwind told you, did he not, it was I who wished you to know everything?”

“Yes,” I answered, “he told me that. And he seemed a little surprised,” I added.

She ignored the provocative part of my statement and was silent for several minutes.

“Are you familiar with the wheat pit?” she asked.

I said that I was.

“Is it so difficult to lose money there if that is one’s real intention?” she asked. As I did not reply at once she added: “You know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” I said. “No, I shouldn’t have thought it would be so difficult. But it’s hard to say. There is no experience, you see. Never before has anyone tried to lose money there.”

That was as far as I was willing at the time to satisfy Goran’s curiosity. There was more. And there was the sign. I did not tell him of that either. He was regarding me with a superior indulgent smile; and when he understood that I meant to tell no more he said: “Enough. Men are so stupid! They don’t deserve their luck, now do they? We never know what we want. Only the woman does.”

What else passed there on the forest path before Dreadwind overtook us is no longer inhibited, and may as well be set down at once. My reply as to the difficulty of losing money in the wheat pit left her dissatisfied, though she did not say so. She said nothing. After a little while I said: “Why did you so particularly wish me to know?” She did not answer, therefore I added: “I ask because I haven’t been told how I shall treat it. I mean, whether to treat it as if I had never heard it... or-----” I stopped, hardly knowing myself what I wished to say. I had only the intuition that somewhere in all this lay a veiled purpose; also the feeling that I was expected to sense it. And the assumption that I am a subtle person causes me always a little irritation, precisely because I am not.

“You are going back,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Directly back.”

It was then, as I said in the beginning, that she drew me. a little aside. We had come to the landing and Dreadwind was not yet in sight. She stood with her hands behind her, the sun in her face, her eyes wide open; and I saw for myself the expression that had so long baffled Dreadwind. When she spoke she was not as before. She was not quite herself. Her words were stilted. “In a far place,” she said, “by the water, you will be alone among many people. Four men will meet you as if by chance. They will take you to sup with them. Tell them, and tell no one else until then. Only be sure they are the right men. You will think of a sign.”

Then Dreadwind came with his letter and bade me good-bye.

None of this did I tell at the table.

We broke up. The others were for going to bed and spoke of meeting at lunch time; but Sylvester asked me to go for a walk. I went. We had taken a long turn down the boardwalk and were watching the sun rise out of the sea when he said, most abruptly:

“I am that broker.”

“What broker?” I asked, unable for an instant to make any connection of ideas.

“The one that has old Weaver’s money under Dreadwind’s instructions,” he said. “I thought all the time it was Dreadwind’s own. He told me only what he appears to have repeated to you—that he couldn’t explain it and I might regard it as an affair of conscience. All of that Weaver stuff was new to me.”

“How extraordinary!” I exclaimed.

“But what on earth prompted you to tell the story in that company?” he asked. His tone was disapproving.

“I was prompted. That’s all I can say,” I answered.

“Well, you’ve done it all right,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve turned the cards face up. That’s the end of Weaver’s money.”

“I begin to see,” I said; “but go on.”

“Didn’t you notice a change in Moberly’s face toward the end.”

“If I did,” I said, “I failed to construe it. What was it?”

“You might not have noticed it,” he said. “You were telling the story. Everyone else did.”

“But what was it?”

“It was that look any hunting animal has, man of beast, when the image of prey falls suddenly upon the eye. Look. Weaver’s three million dollars in the wheat pit. You have told Moberly the money is there. You have told him how it is played in July and September wheat—not only how it has been played but how it will continue to be played until it is lost. You have shown him all the cards. Now you see. He will get it. He will not rest until he does.”

“May you be right,” I said; which surprised him, for that was not his state of feeling. I understood what his reaction was. He had none of Goran’s sentimental insight. He was deeply shocked by the fact that a matter left secretly to his care and responsibility in terms of unlimited trust had been rudely exposed. Now he was helpless. The Weaver-Dreadwind account would be slaughtered in his hands and he could not save it. A broker would feel that way; a broker like Sylvester would.

“And Goran was right,” I answered. “A woman knows what she wants.”

That was too much. He regarded me with gloomy disfavor not at all concealed, and so we parted.

I did not see them again—not then. They went their way and I went mine. When I thought of it I devoutly wished that Sylvester’s foreboding should not be disappointed; also that he would be unable to communicate with Dreadwind, who might be tempted to protect the money. I learned afterward that he had tried to get word to Dreadwind, but it was too late.