Chapter X

No blast of sound assailed the ear. It was as if a cannon had missed fire. Here and there a voice was heard naming September wheat. May was not named at all. Most of those ranged round the pit stood at ease, idly looking on.

“May! May!” called Weaver, with now an alarmed and dazed expression.

There was a moment of stillness. Then a voice said: “Go read what’s on the board. There’s no such thing as May wheat.”

Weaver heard. He walked out of the pit to the bulletin board. There stood the notice of his defeat. He read:

At a special meeting of the directors of the Chicago Board of Trade it was decided to discontinue trading in May wheat. All existing contracts shall be adjusted either by delivery of the property—the actual wheat—or at the settling price to be determined by a special committee to be appointed by the president of the Board. Patriotic duty to the country in this hour of national stress prompted the directors in reaching their conclusion to take this unprecedented action.

(Signed) BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE BOARD.

Thus the wheat pit was saved. Thus all the gamblers who had sold phantom wheat which they could not deliver were saved. They would be able to settle at a reasonable price, at a price to be determined by themselves. And the greatest wheat corner in all time, the only one that ever had the Bank of England behind it, was beaten by the simple expedient of shutting up the gambling layout.

Weaver stood there before the notice for a long time, motionless, with a fixed expression. Then he turned and walked slowly back to the pit. Standing again at the center of it he held up both hands, all fingers extended, the palms toward himself. This is the buying gesture. Each finger and thumb calls for five thousand bushels. He shouted:

“May wheat!... May wheat!... Is this a wheat market?... I’ll buy May wheat at three-fifty.”

There was no response. The ring stared at him in embarrassment, not knowing how to act.

“At four dollars!” he shouted.

His voice filled that enormous room. All other sound had ceased. The wheat pit now began to fill up with spectators drawn from the corn pit, the cash tables and elsewhere.

“Five!” he shouted.

Voices were lifted against him. Angry voices, saying: “You’re breaking the rules!” “Expel him!” “Bughouse!” “Get the committee!” “Who do you think you are?”

Several approached, meaning evidently to dissuade him gently. He thrust them aside.

“Six,” he shouted. “Six dollars a bushel for May wheat! Eight! Nine! I call you to witness I am bidding nine dollar a bushel for May wheat! Mark it up there. May wheat is nine dollars. Put it up.”

Many were now turning away, some with expressions of disgust, others with morbid faces. He wheeled once all around, sustaining the buying gesture of the extended fingers and inturned palms, and shouted for the last time:

“Ten! I bid ten dollars a bushel for May wheat. All you’ve got.”

A committee arrived. Four men pushed their way authoritatively into the pit and surrounded Weaver. He did not resist, for he was through. They led him out of the pit. On the top step his feet stumbled and almost he had fallen; but they held him up and brought him to the gate where Cordelia and Dreadwind were waiting. One of the four whispered to Dreadwind: “Get him home. Keep him away from here. His lamp is out.”

Cordelia walked on one side of him and Dreadwind on the other, anxiously; he declined support from either of them. When they were outside Dreadwind signaled for a cab. The old man shook his head, pulled away from them and plunged alone into the traffic. From his manner it was evident he had a destination and an errand both. They caught up with him and walked as before, one on each side, a little surprised that he knew his own way and wondering at his air of purpose.

At the door of the La Salle Hotel he turned in.

There in the big ballroom several hundred farmers were assembled. They represented a national grain growers’ association, by whatever the latest name was for that chronic futility. The name is changed every little while. There is no other way to renew the delusion that farming is a business, to sustain the hope that ultimately the producers of food, like the organized producers of all fabricated and glittering things, shall be able to say what they will take and how much they will give. But by any name it is always the same thing. This was the annual convention. The subject was cooperative marketing, temporarily complicated by the idea that on account of the war it was the farmer’s duty to forget everything else and produce to the utmost, regardless of price.

As Weaver entered the ballroom, followed by Cordelia and Dreadwind, the national association of grain growers in annual convention assembled was singing a sacred hymn. A large white badge with a man pinned to it asked Weaver for his ticket of admission. He shook his head and walked toward the platform with his hat on. Many faces regarded him curiously. Before he had reached the platform prayer was announced. He waited in the aisle, still with hat on. When the prayer was finished he mounted the platform by the steps at the end and moved toward the front center, facing the audience. The presiding officer, who was on the point of introducing the first speaker, frowned in perplexity and looked about him as if expecting someone to explain away this apparition. No one offered to do so; and he made a weak intercepting gesture. But Weaver had already passed him and was at the front of the platform.

“Some of you know me,” he said. “I am Absalom Weaver.”

A cheer broke forth. Those who did not know him knew what he was. A wheat-pit gambler on the farmer’s side is a crossroad’s hero. More than that, he is an inverted sign, a contradiction, an angel of darkness fallen upward. News of him travels weirdly. There was hardly a farmer in the country who by this time had not heard or read some legend of him. Out of the cheering his name was lifted up. Words of rude praise and encouragement were howled at him. The presiding officer shrugged his shoulders and sat down.

Weaver laid his hand on the tumult. Instantly it ceased. His manner chilled them. The notion that he had come to show himself and make a speech was succeeded by a sense of original tragedy transacting. And it was a little unreal, as natural drama is, without setting or perspective. He was seen to be touched with that madness which belongs to prophets. It makes people uneasy. It must be staged or have a painted history; then it is real.

Dreadwind’s description of the scene at this moment may have overemphasized its dramatic value. That was as he saw and felt it. To him it was real in all dimensions. Weaver, by an act of rhetorical suspense, by simply holding one cold gesture beyond all expectation, to which you add the strange effect of that unseeing expression peculiar to morbid long-sightedness, stretched his audience to almost the point of groaning. A voice—it might have been that of man or woman—cried hysterically: “What is it?”

Then he spoke in a low penetrating tone.

“Wheat,” he said, “is ten dollars a bushel.”

The tension snapped; the audible reaction was a stupid titter. That was natural enough. No one knew what he meant. It was possibly a verbal hoax. And some relief from the suspense was a reflex necessity. But it moved Weaver to anger.

“Laugh!” he said. “Laugh. You have learned nothing since you were called dust feet two thousand years ago in Greece. Wheat is ten dollars a bushel. I come to tell you this—to tell you I, Absalom Weaver, in the market place this morning offered that price for all the May wheat in the world and there was none to sell me a peck of it—to tell you I am banished from the pit for having done this, that the pit is closed to both buyers and sellers because the price is beyond the control of your enemies—and you laugh! Simple dust feet! Docile dust feet! Do you know what I am talking about? Do you care? What is it you know? The speculator who sells your wheat before it is grown—do you know what he sells? He sells your labor. Do you know how he sells it? He sells it at auction. A few hundred speculators sell the labor of three million farmers—at auction! Do you understand? The pharaohs buying and selling slaves did nothing more. All you want of a slave is his labor. Only now it is a little disguised. Therefore, silly dust feet, you do not see it. They pretend to auction off your wheat, not your labor, and this idle distinction deceives you; but it is the same thing. You do not see it.”

He paused and focused his eyes at them. Voices, not many, called: “Aye, aye. We see it.... Yes.... Go on.”

“Do you buy the labor of others at auction?” Weaver continued. “A plow is labor, as a bushel of wheat is labor. When you buy a plow do you buy it at auction? Or do you say, when you buy a plow, ‘What will you take for it?’ The price of the plow is fixed by those who have learned to sell their own labor. They tell you this is necessary. They tell you it is necessary to fix the price of everything you buy and then to auction off your labor, the sweat of your face, for what it will bring—and you believe them.

“Why do they sell your produce at auction? Why do a few hundred speculators thus appoint themselves to sell your labor? Why, for gain. There is no other reason. They sell your wheat before you sow it. They sell it while you tend it. Then when you reap it they say to you, ‘There is too much wheat. There is a surplus. You have made more breadstuff than people want.’ And with saying this they beat you down until you give up your wheat at a price below that at which they have already sold it. And you believe them when they say this is necessary.”

Voices: “No! No! We don’t believe it. It isn’t so.”

“You do,” said Weaver. “You may not know it, but you do. The chains of bondage are imaginary. What holds the bondsman is his fear. You are afraid. If in one instant you could overthrow the auction and destroy those who all these years have been selling away your labor, would you dare? You would be afraid. They are about to be self-destroyed. The Lord hath set them in your hand. Did you know it? I find you singing songs of deliverance. I find you praying. They neither sing nor pray. To save themselves they close the auction, shut up the wheat pit which they have made you believe was an economic necessity, calling it now a patriotic duty to do so, and here ye sit by the rivers of Babylon twanging the harp of despair. When they are saved they will open the pit again. They are not afraid. I tell you all this and ye laugh.”

Directly in front of Weaver a gaunt man rose up. He was made in Weaver’s image, had somewhat of his manner, and spoke in a strong voice without effort.

“We did not laugh,” he said. “Not at that. Say no more about it. You tell us many things we know. Tell us something we don’t know. What shall we do with our surplus wheat? How shall we dispose of it? Tell us that.”

“And you say you do not believe them,” said Weaver, full of scorn. “What shall you do with our surplus? You ask me that and still say you do not believe them. Hear me! There is no surplus. There never was a surplus. Where is it if there ever was? I have held in my hands some grains of wheat as old as the pyramids. If ground into meal they would still make excellent bread. Wheat is imperishable. Since the beginning of civilization man has been producing it diligently. Why have we no store of it? All that man has been able to produce of it in thousands of years has been eaten up, saving only seed for the next crop. Never since Abraham came out of Ur to farm in the land of Shinar would there have been, if one crop failed, more than six and a half bushels between man and starvation. And you talk of a surplus! There is only the idea of a surplus. The idea of it is the invisible chain that binds you to the auction. It is the fear with which they have clothed your neck. It is the mythical stone they have condemned you to roll uphill forever. There is no surplus. Yet you are continually running from it, competing with one another to deliver yourselves into the hands of the auctioneers lest one shall come last with a bushel of wheat that cannot be sold at all. And there is no surplus. The utmost there can ever be is a little wheat over from a fat year to lie against the want of a lean year. You call this a surplus?”

The gaunt man rose again. “What shall we do with that,” he asked, “that little over from the fat year? For we see that in the fat years we are worse off than ever, the little wheat that shall be over uneaten making a low price for all that is eaten.”

“Keep it,” said Weaver. “Keep what is over until the world’s belly swells with hunger. Then it will pay. Joseph kept grain seven years in a mud storehouse. It does not spoil. I know what you will say. You will say you cannot keep it. You have borrowed money at the bank. You are called upon to pay it back. Therefore you must sell that bushel which breaks the price of the whole crop. They are demanding it in the market place. I say, do not grow that Satan’s bushel. See to it. But if it be you have grown it, or your neighbor hath produced it, and they plow your backs too hard to make you give it up against yourselves at the auction... if you cannot keep it”—here he paused to shape his period—“then kill it, and the Lord forgive you.”

At this confused and contending murmurs rose. Then voices began to ask: “What of the war?”

His answer was: “They who sell the phantom wheat, who conjure up a non-existing surplus, who say the price freely made at auction is what produces wheat, and now suddenly deny this, now stop the price and shut the pit to save themselves and name it patriotism—I say, let them feed the war. Be not deceived. This war of yours is the oldest war there is.”

He probably did not mean in any case to go on. His thought must have culminated in that apostrophe to the power of forgiveness. And this at the same time was his own cry, his own defence. Dreadwind was the only person present who could have so understood it. Kill the surplus! Kill it, as he had done, and the Lord forgive them all!

Until then his audience had been in a state of vague perplexity, inclined as a whole to be sympathetic, yet with its emotions divided in disorder. But suddenly he had gone too far. A change took place when the question was asked: “What about the war?” That touched a dangerous basic feeling. His answer grossly offended it. Instantly, therefore, it crystallized against him. His theme was swept away. In a far corner of the room a tiny, timorous hiss was heard. Then a loud one. With no more warning than that the audience raised itself as one many-headed adder and hurried him in hisses, imprecations breaking through.

One would think he must have known; that he had been deliberately heedless. But he was amazed and looked about him in a stricken manner, unable to comprehend it.

Cordelia was running up the aisle. She reached him just as he turned away with a weary sign of defeat. As far as the steps down from the platform he was all right. It was well that Dreadwind met them there, however, for the old man began to lurch. They supported him out and he did not decline their strength. He leaned heavily upon them, whispering: “Quickly, quickly!”

Here Dreadwind omitted the harrowing details. How they got him home he did not say. After having been silent several minutes he skipped all that and began again with what happened next day:

About two o’clock he was sitting with Cordelia in the kitchen. One hates to pass that simple statement. I can see what they were doing. They were at the table, leaning on it. Her hands were lying in his and her eyes were wide and dry. They had not spoken a word for some time. What were they thinking? Nothing. That would be true of the man, I am sure. He was probably tracing the pattern on the oilcloth, over and over, and a tune he had not remembered for years was running around in his head. Water was dripping in the black iron sink. A three-color poster lady in tights was looking down at them from the wall with an eye of skeptical wonder. It was very still.

So Dreadwind was sitting with Cordelia in the kitchen. There was a heavy knock at the door. He went to see; and was not astonished when he stood facing two men in uniform. One was a captain, the other a lieutenant, both new to this business. The captain spoke.

“Is Absalom Weaver here?”

“What is wanted of him?” Dreadwind asked.

“He is wanted.”

“By whom?”

The captain hesitated. “We are from the Military Intelligence Bureau,” he said.

This Dreadwind had already guessed. And he construed the rest. A man who had publicly proposed to the wheat growers that they should limit their output and destroy their surplus in time of war, with the Government exhorting them to produce more and more, was certain to be charged with disloyalty. It was possible, besides, that the crime of casting rust upon the wheat had at last been traced to him.

“This is where he lived, but he is not here,” said Dreadwind.

“We followed him here yesterday from the La Salle Hotel,” said the captain. “We have watched ever since. He has not been seen going out.”

“No. You wouldn’t have seen him go out,” said Dreadwind. “But he is not here.”

The captain glanced down the hallway. Several men in uniform were at the head of the stairs. “Shall we have to search the place?” he asked.

“That isn’t necessary,” said Dreadwind. “I’ll show you.”

He led the two officers down the hall to the door of

Weaver’s room, opened it, and stood a little aside. The officers came on the threshold and looked—at a long horizontal figure covered with a sheet. The captain went in. He turned down the sheet to uncover the face, put it back, and came out, his polished military boots with their silly spurs making a fatuous inept sound on the bare floor.

“Case closed,” he said, and abruptly departed with his men, whistling on a dry breath.

Thus ended the earthly phase of Absalom Weaver. Now the other begins. And whether the other was real in itself or existed fantastically in the minds of two human beings is a question I wish to leave as I found it. I have my own reluctant opinion; it is irrelevant. I cannot say for certain what Dreadwind’s opinion was. Sometimes I thought he believed it; then again I thought he didn’t. No. He must have believed it really. At every crucial point the faith of it lay in his conduct. It does not matter what he thought.

The old man’s faculties appear to have been clear to the end. I mean to say, clear so far as they could be, bent as they were to his fanatical purpose. First, he legally authorized Dreadwind to gather up his assets—that is to say his profits in the wheat market; and then he gave simple, explicit directions as to what should be done with the money.

“As far as it will go,” he said, “do with it as Joseph did in Egypt. In time of plenty he bought grain. Do you remember? He gathered grain as the sands of the sea. Stretch the money. Each year until it is lost buy wheat in the first glut of the harvest, the new wheat, in the months of July and September, as the farmers bring it wet to the auction and dump it.”

---

“Say that again,” said Moberly, breaking in.

“In the pit,” I said, “what you call July wheat is the first of the fall-sown crop. September wheat is the first of the spring-sown crop. Those are the two new wheat months in the pit. Three-quarters of the total wheat crop is rushed to market during the harvest period and sold for what it will bring as July or September wheat. It is the grower’s folly. There is a glut of wheat at this time. Everything overflows and the price is depressed.”

“Yes, yes,” said Moberly irritably. “We know all that. What did he mean about Joseph? That’s what I’m asking. Joseph made a corner in grain, didn’t he? Isn’t that what he did?”

“You Board of Trade people say it,” I answered. “Look at Joseph, you say. He was the first great grain speculator. He saved Egypt. So it was then; so it is now. Grain speculation is historically necessary. Well, maybe so. I wonder. The fact is that Joseph did a thing you never heard of one doing on the Board of Trade. If you heard of one doing it you would call in his credit and send for his heirs to have him examined in lunacy.”

“What is that?” Moberly asked.

“Joseph bought grain when there was too much of it, because there was too much of it. Then he sold it when there was famine. What does the modern grain speculator do when he thinks there is too much wheat? He sells it. What does he do when he thinks there isn’t enough? He buys it.”

“Rot,” said Moberly. “It works out.” “It wouldn’t have worked in Egypt,” I said. “If there had been a Board of Trade and no Joseph in Egypt what would have happened? During the seven fat years the price of wheat would have been so low, with all the speculators selling it because there was too much, that people would have had to stop growing it. Then when the seven lean years came the quotation for wheat on the Board of Trade might have been a thousand dollars a bushel because there wasn’t any and Egypt had perished.”

“Stop quarreling,” said Goran. “Who cares what Joseph did? Nobody knows. What happened to your precious lovers? I want to know that.”

---

There would be two versions of what Weaver’s death did to the lovers. One I can give. That is Dreadwind’s. The other—well, a woman never tells. You cannot be sure she could if she would or that she knows. She seems to have no verbal curiosity about her soul’s experience.

For Cordelia, whose life hitherto had been dedicated wholly to daughterhood, turning from the father of her being to embrace the miraculous stranger must have been a tremendous emotional act. Perhaps she had not achieved it perfectly and was keeping fire on two altars. There is the other possibility that she had overachieved it and was touched with remorse at not having waited when the end was so near. Or you may believe that the power of the father to command her spirit was even greater in death than it was in life.

What Dreadwind said very simply was that the part of her that was Weaver’s seemed to go with him. He said it with a kind of wonder and not at all as if he wished it otherwise. What he did not say, though I knew it to be true, was that the part of her that survived for him was less than he had before. It was and it was not. How shall it be said? She was changed. Her spirit was absent. She had but one compelling thought, which was to act on a revelation that occurred to her as Weaver’s life departed. This was irrational. Yet to all circumstances of reality she reacted passively in a rational way notwithstanding; and with Dreadwind she was both infinitely distant and exquisitely near, like someone you love asleep in your arms and dreaming.

Everything else now turns upon that revelation.

After having imparted to Dreadwind very clearly those extraordinary instructions as to how the money should be lost, Weaver said a weird thing. With the ebb of his strength he said that until the money was lost in the way he directed, all of it to the last dollar, his spirit could not leave the earth. It would abide here in suspense. It would dwell in a place he seemed to see and evidently meant to describe; the end was sudden and he failed to get it out.

But Cordelia saw it. She was holding his hand. He was already dead. They were standing at opposite sides of the bed—Dreadwind and Cordelia. She started, her brows contracted violently, and she closed her eyes. When she opened them again they were very wide, her eyebrows were lifted, and she was looking far away.

“A tree!” she whispered.

“Where is it?” Dreadwind asked.

“A tree I” she said again. “What a strange tree!”

“Where?” asked Dreadwind anxiously, for it seemed to him very important to know.

His voice disturbed her. She closed her eyes again, then looked at him with a bothered expression.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly, remembering his question.

The thought that instantly obsessed her was to find the tree. It was more than a thought. It had the force of a psychic compulsion. Dreadwind could imagine that if she had been alone she would have gone immediately forth into the wide world with that image in her eyes. Almost he could believe that alone, walking in a trance over the face of the earth, she would have found it some time.

But she was not alone. Her anxiety included him so implicitly that they never once spoke of it in question. It was not that she should go to the tree; it was that they should go and be with it, that the three of them should dwell together again in that other place to be discovered. How she should have known, if she did know, that it would be possible for Dreadwind to do this and at the same time carry out Weaver’s instructions, is immaterial. It was possible; and it may never have occurred to her to ask whether it was or not.

But there were certain frustrating facts. Dreadwind laid them before her.

First, was the fact that with the whole civilized world in a state of war it was not feasible for people to move about freely on an errand that could not be explained—and the tree, which she described minutely, was clearly a foreign tree. They would have to find it in a strange land.

Secondly, while the war continued it would not be possible to carry out Weaver’s instructions in the wheat market, for already the Government was taking steps to fix the price of wheat, thereby suspending speculation altogether.

Thirdly, there was something else. He wondered if she would understand. There was a certain thing men had to do in their own way, without women. It would be necessary on this account for him to leave her. It would not take long; but it was very pressing.

She did understand; at least she accepted his reasons gravely and without comment.

But when he said, therefore, they would be married at once and that she should take his apartment for her own and wait for him there where nothing could touch her, she listened with a tense, thoughtful expression and shook her head.

“Here,” she said. “I shall wait here. Wait for him as for the rain,” she added musingly.

“But we will be married at once,” he said.

Again she shook her head.

“I do not know what marriage is,” she said. “I only know that when we are married it shall be all of me.

He protested, argued, insisted. He would marry the tiniest fragment of her, the shadow, the memory and thought of her, and be satisfied. He represented it in a practical light, a romantic light, in the light of his need. She was pleased. He could see in her eyes that she was coming nearer, slowly nearer, as with a great effort of longing, but all the time she kept shaking her head. Then suddenly he lost her. She was snatched back.

“Would it were all of me now,” she said. Saying it she dropped her head on her arms and wept bitterly. When he would have touched her consolingly she gently repulsed him.

Thus the father prevailed in spite of them.