Satan's Bushel (4 page)

“‘If there was a reason,’ I said suggestively. ‘Almost any sort of reason. The commissioner is not official to the core. I know him very well.’

“‘There isn’t,’ said Dreadwind, and that was final. No further that way.

“I went away knowing just as much as when I came, but with the resolve——”

“You didn’t see the woman?” Goran asked.

“Not that time. I saw not the faintest trace of her. I’ve told you it was a double house, a kind of twin affair. I was in one part of it only—but with the resolve, as I was saying, to pry one teak tree loose from the British Empire. I had no case. The use of friendship is that in a pinch it needs none.

“‘All right,’ said the commissioner. ‘Show me a way out.’

“That was easy enough, once the mind were inclined. Teakwood was an article of commerce. If an American wished to buy a certain quantity more or less and would agree to cut and deliver it to himself, when, if and as he wanted it, subject to all the local uses and customs, and, furthermore, if he agreed to take it all from a certain forest area to be indicated by metes and bounds—why, what if that area contained only one tree? and what if he never took it at all? There was really no obstacle. The cutting or not cutting of that particular tree was of no interest to the department of forests, because it stood all alone.

“‘Quite!’ said the commissioner. ‘You do know how to beat the government.’

“The next morning a sheaf of papers went up the river—the teakwood contract in duplicate, long but lucid; an official covering note from the commissioner to Mr. Dreadwind, and a personal note from me telling him what it was all about. And with that done I went the way of my own business.

“I heard from the commissioner that the contract had been returned to him, duly signed, and nothing more until one day on my return journey a messenger found me with a note from Dreadwind asking me to visit him.

“He came to the river bank to greet me.

“‘Be a little careful,’ he said as we turned into the path. ‘I find that nothing happens if you give everybody plenty of room. There’s a——’

“As he spoke it was there, standing in the path, barring our way—a cobra on its dignity. We stopped of course. I waited to see what he would do. He was in no haste to do anything. For some time he looked at it steadily; then he began to talk to it, in a coaxing, conversational tone, half in earnest, half in jest. I don’t remember what he said. He seemed to choose the words for the sound they made. Presently the snake dipped its head and glided to one side. We passed.

“‘You seem to have a way with them,’ I remarked.

“‘I hadn’t at first,’ he said. ‘One learns.’

“As we emerged in the clearing where the village stood I exclaimed, ‘How tranquil!’

“‘By contrast, you mean,’ he said. ‘Yes, thanks to you.’

“‘What is the state of native superstition now?’ I asked.

“‘Indifferent,’ he answered. ‘I got the magicians to undo their work. They banished the spirit, shooed it away. The tree now is believed to be uninhabited.’

“We were walking toward it. Several times he took in his breath to speak and then said nothing. When we were close to the tree he turned, and I turned, and we stood with our backs to the sun. It was evening. The shadow of the tree lay before us, creeping as we watched it. How we came to be watching it I don’t quite know. I must have got the suggestion from him. One naturally looks to see what it is another person has fixed his attention upon; and he was observing the shadow with an air of timed expectation, as if something were about to happen.

“‘There’s an Eastern saying that the shadow of a thing is its spirit,’ he said.

“‘Do you believe it?’ I asked, not in earnest.

“‘That isn’t the point,’ he said.

“We were silent again.

“‘Huh!’ I exclaimed.

“‘You see it?’ he asked.

“‘Yes. What an improbable accident.’

“All at once the shadow had assumed a human outline—the outline of a man from the waist up, in profile. It was not only very distinct, like a silhouette; it had character. One knew the kind of man it was, or had been, or would be if he had ever existed. He would be a man who leaned forward in his steps, pressed life for an answer, lived for defeat and loved little things.

“‘If you go to the top of the shadow and get the tree against the sun you will not see how it happens,’ said Dreadwind.

“I did as he suggested, with an impulse to walk around the shadow instead of through or on it; and it was as he said. The mass of the tree did not forecast the shadow. However, I shouldn’t have thought it would, in that case or any other.

“Just then the figure of a woman appeared, walking toward us from the house. I recognized her at once. She came straight up to us and held out her hand to me. There was no introduction.

“‘Mrs. Jones particularly wished you to come, he said. I noticed that he hesitated slightly at the name.

“She nodded her head slowly to confirm this and then the three of us stood watching the shadow.

“‘It doesn’t change,’ said Dreadwind.

“I had already noticed that fact. But the time of its phenomenal duration was really very short—not more than five or six minutes, for then the sun went down with a lurch behind the forest. As this occurred and the shadow was extinguished she went close to the tree and touched it lingeringly. It occurred to me that they did this every evening—that they stood together watching the outline come and go and that then invariably she touched the tree in just that way. Their movements had a settled pattern, even that with which he took possession of her and turned her toward the house again.

“She was no longer in that somnambulant condition I have tried to describe. That state had been succeeded by one much more subtly enigmatic. She was alive to the realities of her environment, listened attentively, reacted normally to whatever happened, spoke with direct simplicity—and was like an object seen through an inverted telescope. She was near as a phenomenal fact and at the same time enormously remote to the senses. Not all the time. There were moments, two or three, when she seemed suddenly magnified as if the telescope had been turned around. Her attitude toward Dreadwind was one of implicit believing. It was distinctly not an attitude of seeing. She seemed to have no sense perception of him whatever.

Her gaze never lingered upon him in the natural way of women. The fancy occurred to me that he would give the whole world, if he had it, to be touched by her once as I had seen her touch the tree. There was about them an air of living in suspense, of waiting together for an imminent thing that was taking its time.

“There was a frugal dinner of rice and fruit. Conversation withered and died. Our words rattled about the room like seeds in a dry gourd. Such questions as how long they meant to stay, whether they liked it, and what it was they liked, were foreclosed by circumstances. I tried oil and he wasn’t interested; then descriptions of the country farther north where I had been and she at once betrayed symptoms of distress. Neither of them seemed in the least to care for the vocal amenities and we fell at length into utter silence. Presently she rose, thanked me for coming, shook hands again with a cool, firm handclasp, and said good night. He excused himself and retired with her, going, as I supposed, to the other part of the house.

“He was uneasy in his mind when he returned, walked about a bit, then sat down and began to smoke, staring at the ceiling.

“‘Mrs. Jones wishes it,’ he said. ‘Do you mind?’

“‘Whatever it is,’ I said.

“‘I think I told you she was particularly anxious that you should come,’ he said. ‘Just now she surprised me very much by asking me to tell you everything from the beginning—the whole story, I mean, of why we are here and how it came. She was sure you wouldn’t mind.’

“‘She knew,’ I said.

“He looked at me quickly. ‘She knows many things that cannot be learned,’ he said.

“With that he began. I shall not try to reproduce his words. He left much to be filled in by the understanding, especially in those passages which dealt intimately with her. He was naturally an inarticulate person. I shall tell it broadly in the third person. If it isn’t always clear, interrupt me.”

“Move it,” said Goran.

“Did the shadow you speak of resemble Weaver?” Sylvester asked: “The girl’s father, I mean.”

“As it were his own,” I said.

“And now Dreadwind is talking?”

“Yes. Only, as I’ve said, I shall not use his words. I undertake to tell you what he told me; and that was more than he uttered in syllables. The full strangeness of it occurred to me afterward. It occurs to me now—there through an Oriental night, in the land of the White Elephant and sacred python, to hear a man talking of the Chicago wheat pit, the American grain crop, Western Kansas, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, all these things leading to a haunted teak tree in the Burmese forest.”

D
READWIND was born in New York City. When he was thirteen he got a job as door boy in a Wall Street bucket shop, and his widowed mother supposed he had begun a career in banking. What begins in a bucket shop is a career in pure gambling. Pretending to be a broker, the proprietor of a bucket shop is the same as a race-track bookmaker or the keeper of a gambling house. People bet with him on the rise and fall of shares. If they guess wrong he wins their money. If a number of them happen to guess right he absconds. That is why the bucket shop is both immoral and illegal; why also the bucket shop fraternity is beyond the pale in Wall Street. Its members bear a stigma, like people of the underworld; they cannot be received in respectable financial society. They walk in the same thoroughfares; they eat and drink in the same restaurants. The unsophisticated eye is unable to see wherein they differ from respectability itself. Some of them are very likable to know, yet one shall not know them—that is, not without besmirching oneself with the stigma that is theirs.

There Dreadwind started. At fourteen, because he was tall and alert, he was put to the blackboard, marking up prices for the bettors to see, just as the names of horses and the betting odds against them are chalked up in a pool room. At fifteen he began to bet for himself.

After seventeen he lived by gambling. He knew nothing about stocks beyond the names of them; but his flair for guessing their fluctuations was uncanny and filled his elders with anguished amazement. After a while the keepers of that bucket shop declined to take his bets. Then he went to another. His mother supposed he was advancing, as well she might, since never before in her life had she known what it was like to have plenty of money. A year later she died in great comfort.

Dreadwind was twenty-seven when one day he took all of his gains in cash and crossed the line into the rectified air of Wall Street’s upper world. He did this simply for the reason that he had exhausted the possibilities of the other. One after another the bucketshop keepers declined to take his bets, because of his consistent winning, until at last the biggest one flourishing at that time had consented to let him go on only provided he would confine himself to certain stocks and keep within certain limits of play. “I’ll go where there are no limits,” he said. And that day he appeared in the office of a Stock Exchange broker, asking to open a speculative account. And of course, his origin being what it was, nobody knew him there. The sequel to that episode we already know. In a very short time he encountered limits on the Stock Exchange. So again he took all his wealth in cash and departed for the Chicago wheat pit, where there were no limits, leastwise none that had ever been discovered.

In all his life up to that time he had never been west of the North River, never had been thirty miles outside of New York City. He had noticed vegetation in the parks and sometimes in suburban gardens. Agriculture was a word that had a pharmaceutical sound; wheat was the raw stuff of bread and rolls, and a farm, to judge from the way people spoke of having been born there, was a romantic place to come from. On the way to Chicago from New York he appears to have been so engrossed in the study of wheat-pit dynamics that for all he saw out-of-doors he might as well have been riding in a subway train. He studied wheat, as he had studied stocks, purely from the point of view of fluctuations. That was a sound way for his purpose. You do not gamble or speculate in things, but in the prices of things.

He gambled in wheat quotations as he had gambled in stock quotations, knowing only concerning the thing itself that it was a vegetable substance called grain, and never thinking of that. All that interested him was the symbol of it, the word wheat, against which were other symbols—that is to say, simple Arabic numerals expressing changes of price.

This is very strange if you do not take it for granted—that a man may buy and sell millions of bushels of wheat with not the remotest interest in the wheat itself, as a food, as a vital commodity, as a sign of civilization. His sole idea of it is a word on the dial that hangs over the wheat pit with a hand spinning round to indicate the alterations of value. Dreadwind knew of course the statistics of wheat. He knew also every detail of the mechanism of wheat speculation. Knowledge of that character is easily acquired. Many have it who never gamble or speculate in grain prices. What made him notable at once in the wheat pit, marked him out as one to be wary of, was the faculty we know and cannot define, an instinct perhaps, or in its lowest term a lucky way with the secrets of futurity. He was not infallible. He made heavy losses; yet in the average, which is all that counts, he did almost from the time of his advent in the wheat pit out-trade, outguess, outreach, the hardest, most glassy-minded crowd of gamblers in the world. Nobody ever knew where or how he stood. His methods were new, daring, pyramidal; they were very dangerous, too, for he seemed always trying to prove to himself that the game was in fact limitless. What might have been the sequel now is needless to imagine. That line of fate was interrupted.

One day he was standing away from the wheat pit, idling his mind, when the trifling incident occurred that changed the course of his life. There was no excitement in the pit; the market was dull. Near Dreadwind a blue-nosed man and a moldy broker were playing checkers. A third man in big glasses with a little gray hat pulled far down in front sauntered up and stood watching the game. The blue-nosed man, without looking up, accosted him lewdly.