Satan's Bushel (12 page)

Then she looked at him, relented a little more, and they shook hands. She followed him slowly toward the door. On the threshold he looked back. She was gazing at him.

“They follow the harvest,” she said. “That’s all I can tell you.”

“Why do you look at me as if—as if—I had forgotten something?” he asked.

“You haven’t forgotten anything and I’m not looking at you,” she said. “I’m only thinking.”

“What are you thinking of?”

“Of what happens to women,” she said, and turned away. The last he heard of her was a clangor of stove lids.

They followed the wheat. Well, then—there was nothing else for him to do.

And now you have him, to the eye, an aimless vagabond, wandering up and down the wheat country, sometimes sauntering, sometimes in haste, making inquiries so guardedly that almost nobody would have guessed he had a purpose at all, much less that impatience consumed him. It had occurred to him on reflection that hitherto his search had been too undisguished. Weaver might have heard of it.

By intuition he followed that magical wave of greengold color the first sheen of which is seen by early June in Texas. Thence, adding mass and weight and glory to itself, it travels by two movements. One is whimsical and zigzag, determined by the local weather and where the captured sunlight comes here a little sooner ripe than there. The other one is stately and momentous, tending always north.

Dreadwind noticed that as the wheat changed color from green to golden opalescence, change was everywhere in everything—the sky, the light, the insect hymn, even in the ways of people. Men became distraught and anxious.

It is a time of crisis. There is gladness in the sight of plenty, yet this is strangely tinged with melancholy. Why is that? Why were people always sad about a harvest, therefore having recourse to festivals and merry-making? Perhaps because finalities are sad. What was soft and lithe and lovely now is dry and brittle, fixed in momentary splendor. The steel is whetted. The hand that raised it up must also cut it down. Life contains death and will not accept the fact. The wheat complains. Its whispering voice is now grown old, petulant and querulous. The heads are heavy and seem to toss about in pain.

Dreadwind must have made a very strange figure against that background. But whereas at first he had been much noticed and stared after, now his appearance, sometimes in most unexpected circumstances, excited no surprise. This was another change. Partly it was owing to the nervous tension peculiar to the atmosphere of ripening wheat. The farmer at this time becomes absent-minded. His thoughts are on the wheat and he does not know what he is thinking. He has an amazed impersonal attitude toward the event, as if a field of grain crying:

Cut me, cut me;
I am brittle.
Cut me, cut me;
Hurt me little,

were not his own, not a thing a man had done, but a revealed episode, natural because it recurs and none the less mysterious for that reason. His last act at night is to look at it again. At daybreak he will be seen walking in it. Here and there he plucks a head, breaks it open, examines it, smells it, tries the kernel with his finger nail and then with his teeth. All the time his eye is anxiously watching the weather. It may come on to rain or to blow or to do both. Nothing is certain. If he is religious he will pray and make vows. If he is superstitious he will look for signs and omens and secretly perform little rites of propitiation. As who would not?

The great task of modern civility is to create and sustain an artificial environment expressly designed to eliminate the savage uncertainties of natural existence. Within that artificial environment, besides security, there is foretelling. Nothing is left to chance; nothing is miraculous. Industry no longer relies upon wind and rainfall—that is, upon the whims of nature for the power to turn its wheels. When the ironmaster pours ore, fuel, limestone and chemicals into the top of a blast furnace he need not pray for a good run of metal. He knows precisely what the iron will be because its qualities are predetermined by scientific chemistry. He hath dispensed with the Lord. So with every physical process in all that world of machines and laboratories from which mischievous, meddlesome deities have been cast out.

But the farmer who feeds this world has no artificial environment. He stands alone facing the elemental rhythms. They are uncontrollable, unpredictable. He may know plant biology, he may know the chemistries of soil and vegetation, he may be as scientific as the Department of Agriculture could wish him to be, and yet the wind will blow when and how it listeth, the rain will fall by a law of its own, the sun hath no preoccupation with the weal of mankind. In all nature there is no forethought for civilization.

The cities are either ignorant or contemptuous of this fact. They are walled about, not with walls of stone as before, but with the barriers of the applied sciences. They know not how their food is produced nor whence it comes. Somewhere in the world the sun will shine; somewhere the rain will fall. They have ships and railroads to bring their food from any distance and the gold wherewith to pay for it. One’s dinner in New York may represent Canadian sunlight converted into wheat and South American sunlight changed into beef, and one may not only never know it; one never even thinks of it.

Thus in modern circumstances it is the farmer alone who carries on the struggle in a natural environment, subject to the hazards of season, weather, sunspots, mysterious cycles of injurious life. He belongs to a race apart. We have forgotten the language in which he thinks.

Well, another reason why Dreadwind in his going about began to be less noticed was that his figure was swallowed up in that tide of human miscellany which rises each year in Oklahoma and follows the sickle bar north to the end of the harvest.

The annual migration of reapers is one of the oldest proceedings in the world. In romantic times it occurred over limited areas in a naïve, spontaneous manner. Ruth came out of the land of Moab to Bethlehem in the beginning of the barley harvest. That was a great way to walk and really no distance at all. Now with railroads and steamships it may be organized massively on economic lines, and sometimes is, as when shiploads of Italians go each year from Italy’s winter to South America’s summer and return when the Argentine crop is by. Every month in the year is harvest time somewhere in the world. Italian grain ripens in June; Argentine wheat is ripe in December.

There are places where the migration can still be picturesque. But with us the spirit is almost forgotten. Nowhere else is the harvest horde so accidental, so unfestive, so ephemeral in structure, so dissimilar in its elements. It has no common character, no place of origin, no existence before or after; and when you think what would happen if it did not appear like a self-evolved phenomenon at the appointed time and place you wonder again how people in the cities can take their food for granted. And yet it has never quite failed. It were a pity if it did.

The life is nomadic and free, the wages are clear, humanity is level and the work is a series of sudden exploits. Nor is this tale of inducements the full persuasion. The call of the harvest is something you feel. It reaches down to the earth sense in men, to bloodand-tissue memories of exciting primeval festivals, myth rites, ancient forms of nature worship; to memories of the feast of Pentecost, of sacrificing to Ceres, of how the fearsome Druids celebrated the ingathering, of the reapers’ kern baby, of cutting the mare, of the maiden sheaf, of the Roman saturnalia at the end of the vintage when amid universal rejoicing and license even the slaves were free and ate at the master’s table.

Long after people began to gather in cities the response to this great ground call was universal and served two needs. One was the instinctive human need for contact with the earth. The other was the need of agriculture for extra hands when the grain is ripe and must be taken quickly. Thus for a great while the city performed an ideal function. It absorbed the surplus labor of the country at other times and released it for the harvest. But on the rise of modern industrialism, with its fixity of special tasks, all this use and custom fell. Hence new social problems in the city from a thwarting of the ground instinct; hence also the resort of agriculture to labor-saving power machinery.

The call has never changed. Only now so many live amid the ceaseless din of wheels and tools that millions never hear it. They would not know it if they did. Those who do respond are the unreconciled. Actually the number is large. Relatively it is small—that is to say, small and diminishing in relation to the vaster growing number in whom the instinct is frustrate; small again in relation to the magnitude of the work performed. In all the cities of the world two or three hundred years ago there would not have been labor enough to harvest by hand in our time one North American wheat crop. Machinery does it. The shapeless, self-mobilized body of men that appears each year where and when the sheen of green-gold color begins to show, that fastens upon it, that devours it utterly so that nothing is left but a dead pale stubble, is really symbolic. What does it symbolize? The vestige of a custom we have perhaps done very ill to part with. A blind triumph of machine power. A transition completed. A problem unsolved. And we treat it as a casual economic fact! Harvest labor, we say, governed by the law of supply and demand. It comes when it is wanted, perhaps not because it is wanted but for another reason, and disperses itself. When the harvest is ended it will vanish away.

To an eye above this economic fact might resemble a multiple animal, headless and eyeless, with some power of peristaltic locomotion, an unerring instinct for the color on which it feeds, one common belly and myriad mouths, each mouth equipped with a highly destructive mechanism. These innumerable mouth mechanisms, one on each tentacle of the animal, are what produce that droning, ominous sound. If the mind behind the eye above were given to reflection it might deduce from what it sees a perfect theory of evolution. Formerly this reaping animal made no sound at all, seeming rather to work by stealth with sharp sickle teeth, and was so much smaller and less voracious that only a painstaking observer would know it for the same species of thing. The conclusion would be that it had increased thus in size and effectiveness because the stuff on which it feeds became for some unknown reason much more abundant on the face of the earth.

But to its own eye this animal resembles nothing so complex and fanciful. It sees itself simply as a band of diverse individuals united for a time in the task of driving through the wheat fields mechanical beasts—that is to say, automatic reapers, binders and threshers. And that of course is as we see it. We take everything for granted, including the mechanical beasts all evolved from the sickle, the greatest of which is called a combine, moving under its own power on wheels eight feet high, devouring a swath forty feet wide, cutting, threshing, cleaning and sacking the wheat as it goes, in one continuous operation. Tending these beasts is increasingly the work of the harvest hand.

If it seems less romantic than when grain was cut with a blade on a crooked stick and threshed under the feet of oxen, that is so. But if it seems less thrilling that is because wonder moves only in mysteries and man is not mystified by his own inventions. No deity ever thought to create a harvesting machine. That one could have done it, had one thought of it, is open to doubt.

Even yet among the migrant reapers you will find skilled farmers. They are needed on the smaller farms, where the wheat on being cut is first shocked or stacked to be threshed afterward—men who know how to build and cap a shock to make it wind and weather proof. These are the landless ones who hunger for it. Some are tragic, worthy only to be hired. They reap in envy. Others are peasant immigrants hither blown by winds of hope. They will presently take root. But in the modern harvest, owing to the use of power machinery, much of the work requires no special farming skill. Almost anyone may turn his hand raw to it. Hence in that sprawling procession, which to the eye above would resemble a monstrous, devouring organism, one will find tramps, casual vagabonds, preachers, artisans, college students, anæmics in quest of health, criminals in hiding, foreigners, derelicts, poets, artists, strife bringers, thieves, old wives and new at the cook shacks with numerous self-preserving progeny appended. The scene has many aspects and there are many ways of viewing it. There are ways to view it profitably. The men who do this do nothing else. They look with keen, appraising eyes, seem never to be in haste, give no account of their errand and are always passing. Dreadwind, to whom everything else was strange, knew a good deal about these men. He identified them at once. Not as individuals. He had never seen them before. But he knew what they were doing and whose instruments they were.

They were the eyes of the wheat pit.

A
S a timber looker by walking through a forest and sighting it with his eyes may guess very accurately how many board feet of lumber it will cut, so these crop experts who go ceaselessly to and fro in the wheat, observing its growth, charting its area, comparing its conditions, detecting rust and blight, are believed to be able to estimate the total yield in bushels.

Seldom does it happen that any two of them agree. There is no difficulty in that fact. It is rather better that they should disagree, for then as their reports are received in the wheat pit and telegraphed simultaneously to thousands of offices all over the country where people sit in front of blackboards betting on the rise and fall of prices there is the excitement of contrary opinion; gambling is stimulated. Violent controversies arise. One expert, who last year was right when the United States Department of Agriculture was wrong, says there will be a big crop; rumors of damage have been exaggerated for reasons which he will not demean himself to characterize as they deserve. And the Board of Trade house that employs him swears to this and advises its clients to sell wheat for a fall. Another expert, who does not pretend to be infallible but whose record for five years has been such that one who had bet on his conclusions consistently would have gained all the money in the world—he says the crop will be short, no matter what faked-up estimates to the contrary are put out by whom he forbears to name; and the Board of Trade house that employs him urges its clients to buy for a rise.