Satan's Bushel (15 page)

But there was another unexpected object in that room. In one bare corner of it, just inside the entrance to the left, where the light was dim—there stood Cordelia. Like a splendid wheat stalk in a sty, thought Dreadwind. He had a glimpse of her before he saw Weaver. Having glanced at the pit scene he looked at her again; and her face was averted. He was sure she had seen him enter; she had been looking straight at him. She was the only woman in the place, not counting the one who kept the tobacco stand by the outside door; and no one was near her. As Dreadwind approached her he felt that she was aware of him. He stood at her side and still she did not look.

In that instant the price of wheat changed and the air of the room was blasted by a fury of sound. Dreadwind saw that she shuddered. He heard Weaver’s voice above the tumult and looked toward the pit.

The old man was standing alone, still in the center of it. The howling ring seemed by some invisible means restrained from crowding in upon him. From the steps it leaned inward toward him, as far as possible, with its multiple neck stretched, with cries of rage, with flying arms and clawing fingers, as if but for that invisible restraint it would seize and tear him to pieces. But of course they were only selling wheat to him—phantom wheat. He was apparently the sole buyer. He bought it from them, bought all they dared sell, and then taunted them—

“Farmers, are you through? Farmers of nonexistent acres, have you no more grain? A little more. I want it. Go sweep your bins and see. Ye who can reap what was never sown, surely you shall find a bushel more. You grow it in your minds. Come, grow me a little more.”

The price changed again and his voice was drowned.

Dreadwind turned to look at Cordelia and found her regarding him with a sad, wondering expression. He realized that what he had just heard and seen was already old to her. She heard without hearing it; saw without seeing it; and hated it.

Not a word passed between them. He got something from his pocket and held it out to her in his closed hand. She blushed a little, yet took it with no hesitation or sign of surprise and put it away in her dress, not looking to see what it was. Immediately he left her.

Why? I did not ask him. It was his impulse. Undoubtedly he sensed the fact that she was humiliated at his finding them in this vulgar environment.

What she had received from him in a little satin case turned out to be an exact and exquisite reproduction, in jewels, precious metal and enamel, of that wheat spikelet in flower he had once received from her in an uninscribed envelope. With it was a slip of paper bearing his address and telephone number. Nothing else.

When he came the next day she was in the same place. He went directly to her. She was wearing the jewel at her throat. The first thing she did with a naïve gesture was to hand him a slip of paper on which their address was written. She had it ready and was therefore expecting him.

“When may I come there?” he asked.

“We used to come from there straight here,” she said, “and go from here straight home again. Never anywhere else. Lately on leaving here we’ve been walking a good deal, just to go out of our way. That takes a little time.”

“To avoid the people who follow you?” he asked.

She nodded. “They’re beginning to do that,” she said. “Father doesn’t like it to be known where we live.”

“Why not a cab?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “We tried that. But we had to keep giving the driver directions without knowing any place to go. It’s better to walk.”

Dreadwind was wondering how they lived—in what circumstances. The address was a number in Wabash Avenue, far down; it would be in the press of the city, where no one lived any more.

“We have some rooms there, over a store,” she said, answering his thoughts. “Three. It’s very simple.”

She regarded him again with that wondering expression.

“What is it?” he asked.

For a moment she hesitated, then reddened and asked: “Do you do this too?”

By this she obviously meant what her father was doing over there in the pit. Did Dreadwind do a similar thing in another place? That was what she was asking.

“Once I did,” he said. “Not any more.” She seemed relieved and looked away; and he became distressed. “I think I know why your father does it,” he added. “His reason is better than mine was.”

This was delicate ground. First, his answer to her question implied a reflection on her father; then what he added in defence of him to mend that effect seemed clearly to imply that she had cast a reflection upon him to begin with.

“I was thinking of you,” she said.

What he said next was utterly stupid. Still, it was the kind of stupidity that does not matter.

“Did you know I tried all summer to find you?” he asked.

She looked at him gravely for a moment, the trace of a smile appeared, and she made no answer.

T
HAT evening Dreadwind called.

Their rooms were on the top floor of one of those very old brick-wall buildings that have still enough economic life left to pay taxes while the land continues to increase in value for the steel structures that will ultimately dispossess them. The entrance lay between haberdashery and musical instruments. The character of the tenantry above was indicated by tin signs and placards on the walls of the hallway and on the stair risers—a painless dental parlor, a manufacturer of sporting novelties, a banjo teacher, a job printer, Prof. Ranjit, presumably a vender of bottled darkness, and so on. At the top of each stairway was a low-burning gas jet. The place was very still. The uppermost floor, which was the fourth, had the appearance of being unoccupied until Dreadwind saw far back a light showing through a transom. There he knocked.

The response was not immediate. After several moments of silence light footsteps approached the door. The bolt clicked and Cordelia looked out. Seeing who it was she opened the door wide and said good evening.

What Dreadwind entered was evidently their kitchen, dining room and living room all in one. It was lighted by gas, burning in a single jet at the end of a pipe that came straight down from the ceiling and terminated in a snakish curve. A black iron sink in one corner. Some pieces of crockery on a painted shelf. On a box by the window a one-burner gas stove, the flame at low duty under a kettle of water. On the window ledge outside milk bottles and food parcels. That was the larder. They had just dined on milk, bread, cheese and stewed prunes. The things had not been cleared off the table, which was covered with checkered oilcloth. Two wooden chairs were a little pushed back from it. The walls were decorated in a startling way with three-color advertising posters, fine half-tone impressions in black and white, and innumerable miscellany of the printing art—pasted to the wall with no thought of symmetry, order or agreement. Once this had been a job pressroom. There was an odor of printer’s ink, chemicals, strange incense, dried paste and closed plumbing.

Under the gas light in a folding canvas chair sat Weaver. A dish of coffee was on the floor beside him. His knees were as high as his face. Open on one knee, as it were a pulpit-stand, lay the book he was reading—Paracelsus Theophrastus Bombastus in Latin.

“Even to his habitation will ye seek and come,” he said, looking at Dreadwind. That was his salutation.

“I have an errand with you,” said Dreadwind.

“He has an errand,” the old man retorted. “No doubt he has an errand. That which is smoke is the mercurial principle. That which burns is the sulphurous principle. What remains is the ash.” He was so pleased with this delphic saying that he remembered the uses of hospitality. “Will you break bread with us?” he asked.

Cordelia gave Dreadwind an expectant look and stood poised, with an arm already reached out toward the things she would prepare if he should say yes.

“Another time, if you will ask me,” he said.

“Some coffee, then. Bring him a dish of coffee, ye mercurial principle.”

She moved to do this; but Dreadwind declined again.

“My errand is with you alone,” he said to Weaver.

“Leave us, Cordelia,” said the old man.

He put his book face down on his knee, brought his ten finger tips together and gazed over them fixedly at Dreadwind, who, when Cordelia was gone, sat on one of the wooden chairs, facing him.

“So you are the evil spirit one hears of in the wheat fields,” said Dreadwind in a low tone. “Father Rust himself. The killer of wheat.”

There was a hardening of Weaver’s expression from a change in his eyes; nothing else. He did not move, but continued to gaze steadily at his acuser.

“That bag you dropped the morning I surprised you by the roadside—I know what was in it,” said Dreadwind. “The seed of rust. Enough to have killed half the wheat in Kansas.”

The old man’s eyes did not flinch.

“I might deliver you to the law,” said Dreadwind, and waited.

“You might,” said Weaver thoughtfully. “You might do that very thing. If it worries thee thou shouldst.”

“I don’t intend to,” said Dreadwind.

“I know you don’t intend to,” said Weaver.

“However,” said Dreadwind, “I’m not the only person who knows what you’ve been sowing on the wind. I couldn’t have found out without letting others know. I mean that no matter what I intend to do the law may find you out.”

“It may,” said the old man. “That is quite possible. Even so.”

His voice was calm, quite level, with a note of taunting in it. Dreadwind was baffled. He regarded the old man with wonder. Could he be blind to the enormity of his offense? Was he a monster then? Or had he in him some deformed, fanatical conviction by which he justified his acts? In any respect, what a fatalist he was!

“You must see the implications,” said Dreadwind. “They are damning. In one personality you go about the country casting death upon the wheat, pretending all the time to love and cherish it. In another personality you are a gambler in Chicago betting on the price to rise. First, you destroy the food itself; then you seek to profit by that wickedness. The more you kill with rust the scarcer wheat will be and the higher it will rise. That’s how any jury on earth would see it. I can’t help seeing it that way myself.”

There it was all naked. They looked at each other for a whole minute. Then in a low tone Weaver said: “Pretend is a strong word. A heinous word. I cannot forgive it.”

That one word he seized upon. Evidently nothing else in the accusation had hurt at all.

“You have been doing this now for a long time,” said Dreadwind, as if he knew it. There was no denial. “For years,” he added. Still no sign or gesture of denial. He continued relentlessly. “Each year the new wheat runs to meet you. Do you remember? Silly wheat! How easily you deceive it! Or perhaps it cannot imagine treachery. Is that it? And yet it knows. When you come with your sack of plague it knows. I saw that too. I saw it turn and run from you in terror.”

He had touched the thing at last.

With a singular continuous effort Weaver rose. For a moment he stood poised in a menacing attitude, looking down at Dreadwind. Then he put his hands behind him and began to walk, in a blind, trampling way, precisely as he had walked through the wheat that morning. The chair capsized and was propelled aside as if it were invisible and without weight. His book was trodden underfoot. The dish of coffee overturned and he did not see it. These sounds brought Cordelia to the door. He did not see her, either. She stood looking from one to the other with a curious, unfrightened expression. Dreadwind now was standing. Suddenly the old man stopped and faced him.

“What will you have of me?” he asked.

“Your reasons,” said Dreadwind.

“You spoke of the farmers,” said Weaver.

“I did not,” said Dreadwind.

“You said they would hang me.”

“I did not,” said Dreadwind.

“You said what was true. They would,” said Weaver. “They would hang me with a hempen rope. But they hang themselves, they hang each other, with a rope they cannot see, a rope that does not exist. It’s name is surplus. Reasons—what? Reasons? There is only one. I did not make it. Nor do I understand it. Tell me if you do. Tell me why less brings more than plenty. Why do seven bushels profit the farmer more than ten? If you know why that is then everything else is clear. You don’t know. Nobody knows. And why will the farmer grow ten instead of seven? The surplus, what is called the surplus—the rope that hangs him—it is in the last three bushels. Yet he will produce them. He cannot help it. He must keep that bargain I spoke of—his side of it—which is to defend wheat from its enemies and give it space; and wheat in its boundless gratitude hath overwhelmed him. Now what? Shall the farmer who produces plenty be destroyed by his own industry? Or——”

He paused, gazing all the time at Dreadwind, and when he spoke again his voice was altered.

“The wheat,” he said. “The wheat itself. You spoke of that.”

“I did,” said Dreadwind. “I spoke of that.”

“That I stretched forth my hand against it.”

“Yes,” said Dreadwind.

“Thou didst,” said Weaver, extending his arm and pointing his finger. At a certain intensity of personal feeling he went naturally to the archaic pronouns and his tones became sepulchral. Does it sound theatrical? But it was effective because the emotion required that mode of expression. “Abominably thou didst,” he continued. “And that of all things was the one thou shouldst not have spoken of—to me. I say again, if it troubles thee in thy mind thou shouldst tell it to the law. Sooner do that than speak of it again—to me.”

That was his period. It required an exit. There was always the possibility that he consciously dramatized such moments; but even if he did there was never anything false about the action. It expressed the deep and permanent phantasy of his being. That one has invented one’s own phantasy does not stultify the acting of it provided the invention to begin with was true to one’s nature. Weaver’s was. He lived a made-up tragedy, acted a self-assigned rôle, and yet it was all true.

Having made the period he groped his way to the door through imaginary darkness—toward the outer door through which Dreadwind had entered, the door in which Cordelia was standing. She moved to let him pass, turning her back to the jamb. For a while he paced the hallway, Cordelia watching him from the doorway. His steps gradually diminished. Then a door opened and closed and all was still. He had gone into his room, which opened off the hall separately, as all the rooms did.