Satan's Bushel (5 page)

“Been up to your farm, ain’t you, Joe?”

“Yes,” said the man in the little gray hat, his feathers beginning to rise.

“How’s rye look?”

“Fine,” said the other, biting the word.

In two more moves the blue-nosed man lost the checker game. Then he rose, stalked across the floor to the little pit where rye and barley are bought and sold for future delivery. There he stopped and began to wave his arms. The man in the little gray hat turned to Dreadwind.

“Do you see him?—what he’s doing?”

“What?”

“He’s selling rye. Selling it! You heard him. He asked me how rye was looking. Rye is looking fine, I told him. Now he’s over there selling it.”

“Isn’t that the thing to do?” Dreadwind asked.

“That’s the very thing to do,” came the answer from under the little gray hat. “That’s about all we do do. I know him. He’s off. He’s well started. The price of rye is what? Ninety cents. He won’t let it come up for air, not if he can help it, until it’s sixty. In a few minutes inquiries will be coming in over all the wires. What’s the matter with rye? There’s nothing the matter with rye except I said it was looking fine and he’s over there selling its head off. What will go out on the wires? What will be printed in every newspaper tomorrow morning? There’s a strong bear movement in rye. The speculative position of rye is very weak. There’s going to be too much rye. There’s no demand for rye. Rye is sick. And what happens? Thousands of little speculators all over the country begin to shout sell it—
sell it! sell it!
Six weeks from now the farmers who produce rye, who plow and sow and pray and sweat for rye, they will have the real rye to sell and the price will be sixty cents. The farmer has got to sell it. He can’t afford to wait. Who will buy it at sixty cents? The same gamblers who are selling it now at ninety cents. And when they are all through the price will go back to what rye is worth—eightyfive, ninety cents again. The farmer has a hell of a chance.”

“I don’t see yet,” said Dreadwind.

“Nobody sees yet,” said the little gray hat. “The farmers don’t see yet. I don’t see yet. What I don’t see is what right a man who never worked a day in his life, who produces nothing, who doesn’t know whether rye grows on a bush or with the peanuts—what right he has to get up from a game of checkers and sell in five minutes more rye than a hundred farmers can grow in a year?”

“You own a farm?” Dreadwind asked.

“Yes, I own a farm.”

“You are a farmer?”

“No, sir. I’m not a farmer. I know better. I own a farm because I like it, and it costs me money.”

“What do you call yourself, then?”

“I’m a cash grain dealer. I’ve been a cash grain dealer for thirty-three years and I say what I damn please about you gamblers.”

And as that was all he damn pleased to say just then he pulled his hat farther down in front and walked away.

Dreadwind was astonished. If a member of the Board of Trade could talk in that manner against speculation, and with impunity, then there was much about this institution for him to learn. He looked around him as one may for whom the aspect of familiar things has been suddenly altered, made unfamiliar, by the light of a new idea. The blue-nosed man was still waving his arms, and the price of rye, as Dreadwind could see from where he stood, was already down a cent and a half a bushel. And somewhere farmers were producing the grain that this man was selling. The moldy broker, who had heard it all, got up from the checker board, yawned, stretched and turned toward the wheat pit, looking very bored.

“Who was that man in the gray hat talking to me?” Dreadwind asked him.

“He’s one of the lunatics we keep in this asylum,” said the broker. “‘J’u’ never meet him before? He’s over there at the cash tables.”

The cash tables. Dreadwind knew there were tables—three rows of marble-topped tables—at one side of the great room. Vaguely he knew also that the men at those tables were grain dealers, not gamblers or speculators. They were buyers and sellers of the grain itself for cash, hence the term, cash tables. But he had never been interested in that function of the grain market; he had never once been on that side of the room where the tables were.

Walking to a point from which he could view the exchange floor as a whole he stood for some time looking at it. The panorama was quite new to him.

On the right were the telegraph and cable stations, each one’s premises indicated by an illuminated glass sign as if it were on a public street. He recognized these stations as ganglia from which nerve fibers radiated to every part of the world.

On the left were the cash tables, needing about as much room as the wire stations.

Between them, occupying most of the enormous floor space, were the nits—those hectagonal hollow rostrums with three steps up and three steps down; one for wheat, one for corn, one for oats, one for rye and barley and one for lard and pork.

And how much less man is excited by what he can see and touch than by what he imagines!

From the telegraph and cable stations came the sound of clicking insects swarming. From the cash tables came no audible sound at all. Men moved placidly among them, peering into one-quart sample bags, sniffing the grain, feeling it, judging it, writing down their bargains on little cards, with no fuss or whobub.

But from the pits, out of the bodies of frantic men, came that ceaseless, fluctuating roar so unlike any other system of vibrations audible in the world that natural sounds, even that of the human voice at conversational pitch or the ring of a coin falling on the floor, might be heard through it or in spite of it—every tone in the range of the male voice from falsetto to bass; each tone produced egotistically in strife to be heard; no two tones mingling, for if they did the identity of both would be lost in a chord; no rhythm, no predictable repetition, nothing for the ear to rest upon—a monstrous cacophony to stretch the nerves. The worse the cacophony the more the nerves are stretched and the more they are stretched the worse the sound, until men are a little crazed. And the sound is as absurd as that of the lion, who roars not to frighten the jungle but to move himself. It is unnecessary, that is to say, because business in the pit is not transacted vocally. Buying and selling is by signals of the hand. If man were not an animal excited by the sound of his own voice the pit might be as silent as the tomb.

“Voice of the world bargaining for the great primal necessity—food,” writes the Board of Trade publicity agent in a lyric moment. But what passes in the pit is a mythical commodity, not food; millions,
billions,
of bushels of grain that have no existence whatever. An imaginary world with an imaginary stomach clamoring for imaginary food.

Dreadwind was thinking. In a week he had gone through the motions of buying and selling ten million bushels of wheat. That wheat had no reality. The whole ten million bushels would not fill a pint measure. It could go into one’s eye and not be felt. There was in all that buying and selling only the idea of wheat. Simply, he had been gambling in the price of it. Suddenly it occurred to him that he would not know wheat if he saw it. What was it like?

He walked toward the cash tables. Passing from the area of the pits to that of the tables was like changing one’s world. What he noticed at first was the difference in men. Here were men who worked in ponderable stuff. Their way was a way with substance; their eyes were quiet, not restless and glittering. There were men who went from the tables to the pit and others who went from the pit to the tables, back and forth like emissaries; but there were men in the pit like Dreadwind who had never any business at the tables and men at the tables who knew not their way to the pit; and these were two distinct worlds. The tops of the tables were crowded with little paper bags, each one containing a certified sample of a carload of grain—wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, and so on. Dreadwind could not tell one from the other. He read first the labels and then compared the grains. The day’s cash business was nearly finished. Most of the samples were abandoned. They were to be swept away. A number of bags had been overturned.

Dreadwind began to touch the grain. Running it through his fingers gave him a voluptuous sensation. He was seized with a longing, a tactile hunger, to plunge his bare arms into a mass of grain, even to bathe in it. But here were only these quart-bags full. He thrust his fingers into them, then poured the grain over his wrists, and the thrill he got from its cool, clean, caressing contact was inexpressible. Its fragrance stirred cells of hidden knowledge.

I am trying to tell you what it was that occurred to him then and there. It was very important. He could not explain it. Neither can I. It was an emotional experience. Knowledge was a word he found after much groping; it seemed to say what he felt.

*    *   *

“I know what he meant,” said Moberly. “Grain does that to you.”

“Can you describe what it does to you?” I asked.

“No,” he answered, meditating. Then he said: “It tells you something—something you already know and can’t remember.”

We stared at him. He had never been suspected of that kind of feeling about grain—of any feeling about it whatever. And he did know. For that was saying in another way what Dreadwind said.

*    *   *

It was characteristic of Dreadwind that he set out immediately to track wheat to its source. His curiosity, once moved, isolated its object and pursued it with a single eye. Thirty-six hours later he was in Western Kansas, on the Sante Fe Railroad, lying in a Pullman berth with his nose pressed against the window screen. His senses were weary and staggering under a load of new impressions. And he could not sleep. His tentative destination was farther on. It would be reached about breakfast time.

Riding by railway through the wheat fields on a very warm May evening is an exquisite experience if you give yourself to it. All sounds are muted. Those that are naturally harsh become pleasing and satiny. I suppose this is from the fact that the grassy ocean absorbs them, somewhat as snow does. The shriek of the locomotive at road crossings is like an echo. The wheels on the rails sound like a lathe tool cutting soft iron. You would think the train was stealing its way on tiptoe for fear of waking something. And all the time the air is vibrant and musical with the rhythm of phantom castanets playing just on and under the lowest pitch audible to the human ear. And that aromatic pungency of the growing wheat! The smell of the sea, so fresh and clean, is a fabricated, purified smell. This is a living untainted essence, originally sweet—flavor of sunlight trapped in the dew.

The train stopped. All Dreadwind could see of the place was a cross of light formed on the wire screen of the car window by a country street lamp in the distance. A medley of voices spread suddenly on the night air—hotel bus drivers calling for fares, trainmen and station agents disputing in haste, a woman insisting on what was wrong with corporate management—and above all that vocal commotion in the human pond could be heard the scolding of frogs and the titter of crickets.

Of a sudden Dreadwind decided to alight at this place. He astonished the porter by appearing on the car platform with his bag in one hand, his collar and tie in the other, just as the train was starting. A moment later he stood on the cinders watching the red and green tail lights of the train disappear down the right of way. Then he tied his shoes, put on his collar, and looked around. He had been in the last coach. The station was a hundred yards away. He turned his head and when he looked again the station had vanished. The lights were out. A motor of the waggletail species made the familiar sound of a buzz saw tearing its way through a knot and coming suddenly into soft stuff. After that a cool stillness descended upon the place, pierced by the hum of the telegraph wires and the hymn of insect life.

Dreadwind was alone in the country for the first time in his life.

He walked toward the station; its mass came into outline through the darkness. A voice within responded to his knock. What did he want?

“Where is the town?” he asked.

“Up the road about a mile,” said the voice.

There seemed but one way. It was the way the motor had gone. But that was the wrong way, and presently Dreadwind was walking on a smooth dirt road that wound its way through the wheat like a path in a dark green sea, gently, ceaselessly rippling.

That dulcet agitation of the air was now a vast, multitudinous harmony. It is so nearly inaudible that if one strains the sense of hearing it is lost; when the sense is relaxed then it may be heard again. There is a faint bass drone, never changing, never ceasing; over that, sometimes very distinct, is a shrill antiphonal effect, swelling and falling in two beats. In and out play the little melodies. Some of them you can hear clearly; others perhaps you only imagine because they ought to be there to complete the symmetry. You cannot hear the rush of the world through space because mercifully that sound is so pitched that it cannot register in our ears. But it is there. You know it is there; and you can somewhat imagine it. And below the range of human hearing is another world of sound, wonderfully orchestrated; here and there musical fragments break faintly through. And more of this majestic, submerged composition is audible on a May night amid the adolescent wheat than at any other time or place on earth.

You must remember that all of this was to Dreadwind a new and mystical experience. He had the advantage of touching it for the first time as one whose sensibilities and imagination are fully developed. One whose acquaintance with nature begins in childhood may never feel this total wonder. Too much of it is already familiar before the curiosity of intellect is added to that of the senses.

“Wheat!” he was saying to himself; “Wheat!” as if it were a new word, one that he had never pronounced before. There flashed upon his mind a picture of the wheat pit; he remembered its smell and sound and atmosphere; and turning again to the wheat he felt—here I use his word—he felt there was something he must acknowledge. What it was he did not know. But it would be abject—that again is his word—some form of abject acknowledgment.