Satan's Bushel (9 page)

“Good morning,” he said, as they were going by.

They stopped. The girl regarded him frankly but did not speak. A shade of annoyance crossed the old man’s face. It was no more than a shade. He was apparently in better humor.

“Good enough if it lasts,” he said.

“May I walk with you again?” Dreadwind said.

Weaver regarded him thoughtfully and did not reply directly. “I was rough last night,” he said. “I was made to think of it afterward. I was chided for it.”

Dreadwind glanced at Cordelia. She was looking away.

“We’re not walking,” Weaver added. “We’ve come to a wedding.”

“At dawn!” said Dreadwind. “A wedding at dawn?”

“Why not a wedding at dawn, sir?” said Weaver. “The time is perfect.” He hesitated. “It isn’t private. Anyone may come who knows how to see it. If you don’t know I’ll show you.”

Dreadwind rose and went with them. They crossed the road and entered the edge of a wheat field. There Weaver stopped and his hands began slowly to go apart in a gesture of benediction as he contemplated the wimpling wheat in the strained light of early morning. He spoke of it, or to it, in apostrophe. “Oh, lucid wheat!” he said. “Man’s friendly nourishment, multiplying to his want, proudly fawning at his feet.”

He stood for some time in this attitude with a rapt expression.

“It seems always to be running toward one,” said Dreadwind.

“Ha!” exclaimed the old man, looking at him quickly. “You see that?”

“I see it,” said Dreadwind, “and yet I do not understand it. I’ve been thinking it was an illusion.”

“I’ll tell you why,” said Weaver. “Wheat is tame. It does not fight. Man fights the battle for it, and what you see is gratitude.”

“I don’t quite see yet,” said Dreadwind.

“Reflect,” said Weaver. “What was wild wheat like? It was a scrawny grass. You would not know it for kin to this. It had to fight. Half its strength went out in strife. Then man made a bargain with it. If it would devote itself to him and multiply with all its strength according to his needs he would guard it from its enemies, fix it in security and peace, give it a private garden for its nuptials. Trusting man it put aside its weapons; and this is now so long ago it has probably forgotten how to fight. What if man’s protection failed? Would it not become a scrawny grass again or more likely perish altogether? Its life is in man’s keeping. And for the bread that stays him here man relies upon the ceremony we shall witness, so mysterious that no one understands it, so obscure that few have ever seen it.”

*    *   *

“I’ve seen it,” said Moberly. “He’s right, though. I don’t know a dozen men that have. It’s the flowering of the wheat.”

This wheat pit automaton! He knew. He had seen it. The recollection of it stirred him suddenly. My dislike for him remained constant as a quantity; only now it began to be balanced by another feeling. The others were as much astonished at him as I was. We eased ourselves around. Goran ordered up some refreshments, Selkirk more cigarettes, and I went on with the story.

*    *   *

Weaver’s last few words, I resumed, were spoken with divided attention. He had already begun to examine the wheat stalks, one here, another there, taking care not to hurt or trample them.

Dreadwind and the girl waited and watched him; and he was some distance from them when he fell on his knees, verified his discovery through a magnifying glass and called them to come. They also knelt, to bring their vision into the plane of his.

Can you see it? The three of them kneeling before a wheat stalk there in the dawn?—the male principle in its two aspects, one blindly pursuing, one defending what it could not possess, the maid between them, all kneeling to observe a microscopic drama in the wheat bud, unaware of the greater drama passing in themselves? Or which is greater? There is perhaps no scale to infinity. Less and greater may be tricks of the finite lens.

The old man offered the glass impersonally, holding it out behind him, without taking his eyes from the wheat stalk. Dreadwind made a gesture to mean that Cordelia should look first. At that she took the glass from her father’s hand and put it in his. In the act she looked at him, shaking her head. What her eyes said was: “I’ve seen it many times. You look.” She might as well have said it out loud. The old man was oblivious. However, she didn’t say it out loud. She said it the other way. And this slight business aside, between themselves, was amazing sweet to Dreadwind. It was a complete episode, miraculous, creative, with structural proportions, and yet more fragile than a cobweb, so that if one dared to challenge it, or to touch it, instantly it turned to nothingness.

Well, the old man never knew which one of them it was looked first, nor that Cordelia knelt there through forty minutes without moving, except to shake her head each time Dreadwind offered her the glass. She knelt there like a saint at vespers, her weight inclined slightly backward, her hands clasped in front of her, regarding the two aspects of the male principle with that eternal knowledge which is pure innocence.

Weaver was talking. On a spikelet of the wheat stem he indicated a small, greenish swelling.

“That is the church,” he said. “We are at the door of the conventicle. In a few minutes it will slowly open and three weary cupids will come out on the steps to rest.”

He chuckled.

“Why to rest?” Dreadwind asked.

“To rest,” the old man repeated. “You will understand when I tell you what is going on inside. At the very bottom of this little swelling lies the egg. The infinite concavity. The devouring mother principle. The egg is not yet the mother. Every mother is first a bride. This bride is very modest. Not shy, only modest. All that she reveals of herself are two lovely plumes, growing tall and straight inside the bud. Around these plumes and growing very much faster are the three cupids I speak of, whom you shall see when their prank is played. Each of these cupids bears aloft an innumerable number of bridegrooms—I don’t know how many—all blindfolded. Now there comes a moment—see! it is happening—the sign is when the door comes a little ajar—a moment when the plumes spread out, and the cupids, standing higher than the plumes, hurl the bridegrooms down. They fall upon those spreading plumes. The bridegrooms are the pollen grains—millions and millions of them. And out of all that number the bride will select one. She does not do this at once. There is first a struggle. She requires it. All those bridegrooms must seek her. They must grow down to her. It becomes a terrific drama. They alternately unite to perform prodigious engineering feats in order to reach her and then engage in combat each one for himself. One succeeds. One she receives. The rest? What becomes of those whom she rejects? It does not matter. They are wasted in Nature’s own way. It is so. In every piece of life it is so. Millions of surplus bridegrooms are created only to make sure that the bride in her leisure shall be able to choose one.... There!... See!”

The bud was slowly bursting. What had been at first an ovoid, greenish swelling now was opening into petals at the top; and out from between the petals as they opened came what Weaver called the cupids and what botanists call the anthers—one, then another, then another, looking, as the old man had predicted, very weary and perhaps a little bored, from the task of hurling millions of enterprising bridegrooms into the tentative, plumelike embrace of an invisible and fastidious bride who should in her own time choose one. They lay there, the three cupids, sort of hanging out, with their heads in their hands, saying plainly the ceremony was over.

“The honeymoon comes afterward,” said Weaver. “Nobody may see that.”

They all stood up. Dreadwind looked around and was surprised to see that the appearance of the wheat had wonderfully changed. Then he realized that what he had been watching on one stalk had been taking place everywhere at the same time. The whole field was in flower.

As they came back to the road Weaver’s manner of a sudden changed for the worse. Dreadwind walked at Cordelia’s side. That may have been it. Several attempts on Dreadwind’s part to make conversation the old man rebuffed either by silence or a sultry exclamation. When they came to the gate where father and daughter had turned in the night before they turned again in the same way, with this difference, that the old man did not speak and the girl looked back.

Dreadwind began to search the circumstances for some pretext on which to continue seeing them. Not them of course, but one of them. And the question was not whether he should see her again, or why; it was only how. The impulse that had brought him to the wheat fields was off the track, ditched, abandoned upside down. A different locomotive now was pulling his train. By the same road he had come he walked back to the town, and saw only as much of the landscape as his feet touched, and that dimly. What he did in the town was to buy an automobile out of a dealer’s window and spend the afternoon learning to drive it. Then he clothed himself to new purpose, drove in the evening to the house where they were, walked up the door and asked for them—for Weaver.

And they were gone. She was gone!

Their going, he was told, had nothing strange about it; that was their whimsical way. They would come with one wind and go with another. Nevertheless, it was sudden. Yes, a little more so than usual. No, they did not say where they were going. They never did say. Right after dinner, the midday meal in the country, they calmly departed. At first Dreadwind suspected that the woman who stood in the doorway telling him this was evasive. As he became convinced of her sincerity he was bewildered.

“Have you known them long?” the woman asked.

Dreadwind said he hadn’t, but did not disclose how very slight his acquaintance with them was.

“Then you wouldn’t know,” said the woman. “They appear and disappear that way, like migratory birds, as my mother said, only of course it’s strange—the two of them so. As long as we’ve lived here, it’s now going on eight years, they’ve come every year. They never stopped with us before. I don’t mean we wouldn’t be glad to have them again.”

“How do they live?” Dreadwind asked.

“By this and that and what the Lord provides,” said the woman. “Anyone is glad to have them, as I say, especially if it’s about harvest time. The girl helps indoors. Him? You’d have to ask the men what he does. I can’t exactly say. It’s what he knows, I reckon. Once I heard him preach a funeral. Naturally he would get something for that. He can cure animals, they say, and take spells off.”

She stopped and began to regard Dreadwind in a quizzical manner, with some slyness in it.

“I don’t think you’ll find them,” she said.

“Why not.”

“So many roads going every which way,” she said.

“That isn’t what you meant,” said Dreadwind. “Why do you think I won’t find them?”

“Well, maybe you can,” she said, of the first opinion still. “I’d certainly tell you how if I knew myself. He’s very suspicious.”

“Of whom?” asked Dreadwind.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the woman, pretending to be perfectly blank.

She knew the direction in which they had walked away. And that was all. Dreadwind thanked her and was halfway to the gate when the woman called to him as if she had forgotten something.

“Was she expecting you to ask for her?”

“I don’t know,” Dreadwind replied.

“Because you didn’t ask for her, did you?” the woman continued. “You asked for him. She said if anybody asked for her to give them this.”

She held out an envelope.

“Thank you,” said Dreadwind, taking it. The envelope was sealed, but had no writing on it. Afterward it occurred to him that his claim to it had not been proved, not even asserted more so than by the act of reaching for it, and he wondered why the woman had made not the slightest difficulty about giving it to him.

A mile from the house he broke it open, and out of it fell a wheat spikelet in flower. There was nothing else.

I
N the direction they had gone he drove to the first crossroad and turned right. After many miles in vain that way he came back to the point at which he had turned right, and turned left. Returning again he drove straight ahead to the next crossroad and went first right and then left. In this manner he searched the country methodically. Nobody had seen them. They had passed without trace if they passed at all.

Thus a fortnight had elapsed when one morning Dreadwind’s quest was almost rewarded and then immediately disappointed again in a very singular manner.

He had spent the latter part of the night in the automobile, a little off the road, in a space screened on three sides by a high wild hedge. He came awake as streaks of light began to show in the east. For several moments he lay motionless, observing the sky. Suddenly in a spectral manner a tall, lone figure appeared in the road. He recognized it instantly as Weaver; and even in that dim light he could see that the old man was in extreme trouble with his thoughts. He would start, stop, turn, walk up and down, and kept twisting his hands together. Then he seemed to have resolved it, for suddenly he left the road, leaped the ditch, and stood in the edge of a field of wheat. From Dreadwind’s angle of vision he was in silhouette above the wheat and so exaggerated in stature that he seemed supernaturally tall, touching the sky. The whole omen of him was evil. Dreadwind had a flash of phantasy. He though of Abraham about to sacrifice his son, and shuddered.

What happened next was mysterious. Out of the depths of an inner garment the old man produced as it were a pouch or small sack, opened it, dipped his fingers therein and appeared to be casting an impalpable substance on the air. There was a fresh breeze blowing against the wheat and that of course would account in a natural way for what Dreadwind at this moment observed with a superstitious feeling—namely, that the wheat seemed to be running
from
Weaver, not toward him. Although he took rational note of the obvious physical explanation, still he could do nothing with the fancy that it was running from the old man in terror.

After Weaver had several times repeated the act of sowing something on the air, Dreadwind’s curiosity moved him. He rose and approached. Weaver neither saw nor heard him. With only the ditch between them Dreadwind stopped and called his name.