Satan's Bushel (21 page)

The next August it occurred that I was passing through Chicago and the impulse came to me suddenly to stop and call on Sylvester. How easily one puts aside what is not one’s own. I at least am that kind of person. Although Dreadwind’s affair interested me enormously I had not thought of it for several weeks. I might have been half around the world before thinking of it again. And here I was, in the city of the wheat pit, where the sequel would be, if one there was.

Sylvester was too busy to see anyone, they told me at his office door; it was with much difficulty that I got my name to him. He sent out for me immediately.

I found him standing at the grain ticker in his private office. He looked at me as I came in and turned his eyes again to the tape. I stood for several minutes at his side, looking at it too. September wheat was 94
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and the quotations were coming fast.

“Rather active,” I said.

“Rather,” he replied, dryly.

The price was falling: 94?... 94
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/
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... 94?... then back to 94
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. I could imagine what was going on in the wheat pit—how wild and excited it was, how savage the uproar. In Sylvester’s office, however, there was no sound but the steady purr and gnash of the ticker.

“And the sellers seem to have it,” I said.

“Don’t you know what is happening?” he asked. “You ought to be interested. Moberly is shooting for Weaver’s money. He’s got the hide. There’s only a little of the tail left and he wants that too. See!” He crimped the tape at the last quotation for September wheat, which was 94?. “When the price touches 94, as it will, that will be tail and all. There!”

The very next quotation was 94. He flung the tape down and turned away.

“Well,” he said, facing me suddenly. “How do you like it?”

“I am delighted,” I said. “And don’t let it run in your head that I was a blundering idiot who brought a tale to the wrong place.”

Then to comfort him I told him why. He listened with a neutral air and at the end he grunted.

Two months passed. I took no steps to satisfy my curiosity, for by this time I had placed the Dreadwind romance in a field by itself, an irrational field, where the bit of superstition which survives in the most unbelieving of us might have its orgy out. The end would disclose itself, I said, in its own way. And so it did.

One evening in a London hotel, while I was dressing, a note was brought in. Compliments of Mr. and Mrs. Dreadwind, and would I be pleased to dine with them in their rooms? They were in the same hotel.

They greeted me as if I had rights in them—as shy children bursting with a secret that you must not suspect the existence of but stumble upon amazedly in the dark. It was no secret. Anyhow, it cannot be told. All the words about it are silly. You have to see it. I could hardly see anything else. And it was something a lone, selfish man ought not to be permitted to see. For his own sake he ought not to see it. It makes his world seem very empty for a while and it is never quite the same again, even when he thinks he has got well over it.

They pressed me with food and wordless attentions and laughed together at the little mishaps that came of their anxiety to include me in their happiness; which of course made me feel as one who sitteth outside the wall in gross darkness and hath no way of communion. They did speak of their plans. They were going to Kansas to buy a farm—a certain farm, one they had fastened their hearts upon—and make them a paradise.

“A large farm?” I asked. “Tell me about it?”

They were a little embarrassed and then smiled together. Of course. They knew nothing about this farm except that in the front yard was an apple tree with a bench around it, and that across and down the road was a wheat field where a mystical experience had befallen them one morning in the dawn.

When I had made sure there were no untouchable recollections I said: “I was with Sylvester the day the last of the money was lost,” and I was going on to describe the scene when suddenly a look of extreme surprise appeared on Dreadwind’s face. Cordelia was gazing at me pensively. I turned it off abruptly. There was a silence.

“Then you knew Sylvester?” Dreadwind asked.

“Very well,” I said.

“But I never told you he was the broker.”

That was a tight place for me. It was clear that Cordelia and I knew more than Dreadwind. She was still gazing at me, more with wondering what I should say than with any sign of uneasiness.

“No, you didn’t,” I said. “But you will recall that as you were telling me the story out there in the bamboo hut and came to the fact of the money having multiplied itself incredibly you spoke of showing me the broker’s reports, as though I might look at them if I cared to do so. Well, some of them were lying there open on the table. Naturally I glanced at them, and I couldn’t very well help seeing the broker’s name in large type at the top of every sheet.”

That passed. Cordelia smiled, not as one smiles whose anxiety is happily relieved but as if she were amused.

“What I meant to ask,” I said, “was how you knew when the end came?”

“We knew it at once,” said Dreadwind. “The same day.”

“How?”

“By the shadow,” he said simply. Then he added: “Sylvester sent a cable message, but it missed us on our way out. I first heard from him here in London only two weeks ago.”

They bought the farm in Kansas. I have seen them there many times. I hate to go because of what happens to my own world when I see them together; and yet I cannot resist it.

Only a few days ago I met Goran again.

“Have you found out yet what was in that silver locket?” he asked. He meant the locket Cordelia gave to Dreadwind when he went to war, with instructions to bring it back unopened. Goran had already asked, me this question three times.

“Wheat,” I said. “Two grains of wheat.”

“Don’t try to be stupid,” he said. “What two grains of wheat? I have guessed, but I want to know for sure.”

I told him.

Cordelia went back and got two grains of ripe wheat from the very stalk at which she, Dreadwind and Weaver knelt down in the dawn to witness one of Nature’s most beautiful acts. They were in the locket. And they were planted on the Dreadwind farm. I have myself eaten bread from them. It is served on wedding anniversaries.

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