Satan's Bushel Read online

  SATAN’S BUSHEL

  BY

  GARET GARRETT

  AUTHOR OF “THE DRIVER,” “THE CINDER BUGGY,” ETC.

  NEW YORK

  E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY

  681 FIFTH AVENUE

  Copyright, 1924

  By E. P. Dutton & Company

  All Rights Reserved

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  BY THE SAME AUTHOR

  THE DRIVER

  “I feel as did Mark Sullivan, who said: ‘Garet Garrett has written one of the great novels of the day.’... That is beside the point to one who wants to study man and his works.... The thing that impresses me is its fidelity to life.”

  —BERNARD M. BARUCH.

  THE CINDER BUGGY

  A FABLE IN IRON AND STEEL

  “A startlingly fresh book.”

  —Philadelphia Public Ledger.

  “A real achievement in telling a story of America’s meteoric industrial rise.”

  —The Literary Review.

  Contents

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  CHAPTER I

  WHY they asked me to their grayish feast they perhaps did not know themselves. I was a writing person who happened to know their language. They were men of the market place, pillars thereof, with much in common and nothing in friendship. I had been surprised to see them together until I remembered the news that was running in big headlines all over the country.

  What inclined them suddenly to one another was the centripetal force of a harrowing experience. They had just appeared at Washington before a Committee of Congress to bear witness for that honorable system of use and sorceries that is founded on gambling in wheat—and the mule of public opinion had kicked them in the face. They never saw the mule. They had only felt it. Also they were aware of seeming ridiculous. And having come with one impulse to the seashore to let the thing blow over, they were beginning to be so bored with themselves that when one of them spoke of what they all were thinking the other three silently groaned.

  “What did anybody say that wasn’t so?” Moberly demanded to know, evidently for the ninety-ninth time.

  “Nothing,” said Goran, with weary inattention. “Nothing,” he added, gently fingering his little beard.

  Goran was a corporation lawyer who specialized in Board of Trade practice. His business was to keep wheat gambling free and legal, within the letter of the law. He was supposed also to know the ways of the mule.

  “Then what’s all the damn fuss about?” Moberly continued. “Why do the newspapers do this?”

  He was addressing himself to me, obliquely, as his manner was, and I did not answer. The reason was that I did not hear him, not consciously, although afterward I remembered what he said; for the moment I was absent. There had occurred to me that instant an astonishing probability. I had the premonition that something unreal was about to come true.

  “You, I’m asking,” said Moberly, in a tone to waken me. “You’re in that line of business. Why do the newspapers always put us in wrong? Or don’t they know any better?”

  “I beg your pardon,” I said. “I wasn’t listening. I was thinking of a tree.”

  “A tree!” he said.

  “An inhabited tree,” I said. “Did you know a tree might be inhabited? Neither did I. I don’t know it yet for sure. Nor do I know any better. This tree I am thinking of is at the other side of the world. It has a root that reaches all the way through to the Chicago wheat pit.”

  He disliked to be mystified. So he turned away with a gesture of irritation and went on talking. The others were perfectly stolid, thinking perhaps, as he thought, that I had proposed an enigma with intent to turn it against them.

  That was not the case. Not only was I thinking of a certain tree—a monstrous, haunted vegetable that lived at the edge of an Asian forest and had enslaved two fascinated human beings; I seemed actually to see it again. If I closed my eyes, there it was, like an object imagined in a crystal. That the image associated itself in my mind with the practice of gambling in wheat was a natural fact, requiring only to be explained. That a tree in Asia had, as I said, a living root in the Chicago wheat pit, was a romantic fact, not to be taken literally. But what had suddenly occurred to me was altogether strange.

  This was nothing less than the probability that months before, almost in the shadow of the tree, the present moment with all its accidental conjunctions had been foretold. The circumstances were vivid in memory. The woman had drawn me a little aside. She stood with her hands behind her, looking away. The sun was in her face, yet her eyes were wide open, and her voice was that of one asleep. “In a far place,” she said, “by the water, you will be alone among many people.... Four men will meet you there... as if by chance.... They will take you to sup with them.... Tell them everything and tell no one else until then.... Only be sure they are the right men.... You will think of a sign. Any sign will do.”

  I was a solitary person who traveled a great deal and had made many acquaintances in the world. Thus the conditions were easily fulfilled. There are many places by the water where one may be unexpectedly picked up for dinner; and four is not an eerie number. And yet, nothing of that kind had happened to me since—not until this evening. And beyond the fact that of all the men I knew these four were about the last I should have thought it likely to meet by chance in one group, there was also this singular coincidence—that they were all bound to feel a lively interest in the subject. She had said I would think of a sign and that any sign would do. I had already invented one. Moberly would never ask. That was certain. He would sooner sweat with curiosity than call the answer to a riddle. One of the others might, especially Goran; and if one did—no, but if Goran did, if he and no other should say, “What about your tree?”—I would take that as a sign—I who had never believed in signs. Thus I left it on the knees of superstition, knowing what I did and how silly it was, yet with the feeling that by such device I gave the event its freedom and put the consequences beyond me.

  Dinner was served on a private balcony overhanging the surf. There was no expectation of pleasure in it. Moberly and Goran sat together. Next was Selkirk, a moody and very lucky young speculator, who incessantly smoked cigarettes through a long shell holder with a kind of Oriental calm and seemed never to see the surface of anything. The fourth was Sylvester, a plumb, tan-fisted man, grain merchant and broker, who represented the Board of Trade in an official way.

  Their voices one at a time starting and stopping abruptly left holes of silence in the air. Then other sounds rushed in. One heard again the toothless mumbling of the sea, the brass of a distant band, squeals, cries, laughter, ballyhoo voices, the dying merry-go-round, all the tinkle and patter of life pursuing its aimless recreations up and down the boardwalk.

  What they said did not interest me. I listened distantly. They touched without moving it, almost without knowing they had touched it, the ageless, endless, economic reptile that has now so many names it cannot always remember what guise it presents to view. Yet it is never anything but the simple fact that men cannot trust themselves to divide up one another’s things. This of course has been true from immemorial time. Only now, with society so constituted that division in minute complexity is vital, since no one any longer may exist by his own goods and efforts alone, the consequences are cross-shaped and oppressive.

  The theory underlying their discourse, not formulated, yet clearly implied, was that people live by suspicious, predatory g
roups in a series of jungles, each group taking toll of the other according to the other’s necessities by a natural law of strife.

  And all the time I was thinking of a law less compounded than that—the law of a man who hath taken a woman.

  Moberly did most of the talking. He made one think of a grain elevator—a stark sudden shape, two tiny windows very high up, a door with no steps or threshold, all dark inside, everything glazed with a fine, clean dust. In speaking he made the same monotonous sound a grain elevator makes when it is not mysteriously still.

  The thing he resembled, that precisely he was—a mechanism of dreadful simplicity for manipulating grain. A third more or less of the entire American wheat crop passed annually through his hands. He bought it and sold it for gain. The gain was not his. All the dividend of his work belonged to the Dearborn Grain Corporation, which was an institution existing by virtue of unlimited bank credit. It had a nervous system ramified through the whole bread-eating world. Moberly was its head. All its functions were his. He wore the title of president. Its body was owned by anonymous capital. He did not care. He served his corporate Pharaoh fanatically. From a runner on the Board of Trade he had come up slowly, irresistibly, until now in his own aspect he was greater than the power of money he represented. Having discovered the principle whereby capital, if you have enough of it, overcomes the odds of chance, and with an unlimited amount of credit supporting him, he had reduced the Chicago Board of Trade to the status of a private principality, like that of Monaco, where everyone gambles but the prince of gamblers, who takes the percentage. Able at any time to buy or sell all the visible grain, he terrified other speculators and so laid the game of speculation itself under tribute to his machine. He made and unmade corners; for months at a time he carried the wheat pit in his pocket. His immunity, so far at least, from all those forms of fixed delusion that bewitch and ruin great speculators was owing to the fact that he was not a speculator. Never had he any personal interest in gains and losses.

  This was the state of mystery into which a committee of Congress had been making hostile inquiry. Moberly was a tough-minded witness. He believed in corners, in speculation, in gambling unrestrained. His convictions included the law of the jungle, raw and unequivocal. He did not announce it. But when it was suggested to him as a theory of conduct by the keeper of the invisible mule, namely, the chairman of the committee, he seized upon it, expanded it, applied it, proved it with brutal logic—and proved at the same time that he had never had a social idea in his life.

  And here he sat, full of amazed soreness, two bright red patches burning on his cheek bones, his roaring pouches distended, expounding it all over again—to himself. Nobody was attending to what he said until of a sudden he broke into new ground.

  “And all the time I was loaded,” he said. “Loaded with nitroglycerin. Enough to blow their quill feathers off. They knew it. Two members of that committee knew it, and knew that I knew they knew it. Yet they sat there looking at me like owls pretending to be eagles. I might have been a sack of wheat for all the care they had. And I was loaded. Talk about gambling! I’d hate to take such chances. A man might explode accidentally.”

  “What was the nitroglycerin?” Selkirk asked. His manner was coolly disbelieving. Moberly eyed him aslant and went on:

  “I’m going to tell you. What were they so hot to prove? What was it? That speculation affects the price of wheat one way or another to everybody’s hurt. If the price goes up the loaf is pinched. If the price goes down the farmer’s ruined. But there’s something else in the price of wheat. That’s politics. And they never speak of it. That’s what they’re all interested in. Politics.”

  “I don’t see any nitro yet,” said Selkirk, with the same air as before.

  “No, I know you don’t,” said Moberly. “It’s right there. It’s in what I know about politicians. Last spring my directors came to me and said we had to have more general prosperity in the country. You know who my directors are. No secret about that. Men of affairs in all directions: railroads, banks, manufacturing, and so on. They said we had to have more prosperity. The quickest way to get it was to put grain prices up. Couldn’t I see my way clear to do that? If I could they would stand under with all the credit I needed. I said I’d see, and I did see. When conditions were right I began to buy grain—all there was. Wheat was around eighty cents when we started. First, I told two members of the Cabinet at Washington what we were going to do, and——”

  “Why?” Selkirk asked.

  Moberly hesitated, was about to answer, then gare him a glance of disgust and went on:

  “——and they were pleased of course, because that would keep the farmer quiet. Anyway, they hoped it would. They told the Administration, and everybody was pleased. Prosperity is what keeps a political party in office. Then certain members of Congress, among them the two I speak of on the committee—they got hold of it. That was all right. As party managers they were entitled to know. I didn’t care. The more of that the better. I didn’t expect them to go and dig a grave to bury their information in. They were free to use it if they knew how. If they happened to buy a little wheat, so much to the good. Every little helps. Well, you know what followed. We put wheat to a dollar twenty-five a bushel, and the effect, as my directors had calculated, was to stimulate business all over the place. In one way we were disappointed. Forty-five cents a bushel added to the price of wheat didn’t keep the farmer still. He was stirred up by a crowd of politicians out of office, telling him that if speculation was abolished he could weigh his wheat in gold. And to meet this what does the other crowd—the crowd that’s in office—what does it do? It gets us down there before that committee and puts the goat sign on us. We have to wear it. We can’t say a damned thing. We are wicked speculators. We have only one virtue and that’s a secret. We won’t spill what we know. Huh!”

  “Were you in danger of ornamenting your testimony with a statement like that?” asked Selkirk ironically.

  “What would newspaper editors have done with that?” asked Moberly, ignoring Selkirk and looking at me.

  “They certainly would not have missed the moral,” I answered.

  “Which is what?”

  “That the power of such an organization as yours to make prosperity and bless a political party by advancing the price of wheat is also the power to unmake prosperity and break an administration by depressing the price.”

  “But we would never do that,” he said.

  “People would be less interested in your intentions than in your power,” I said.

  “Then you don’t believe in speculation?”

  “I didn’t say that,” I replied. “You asked me the question how public opinion would act on what you’ve been saying. It might have raised their quill feathers off, but there wouldn’t have been enough left of your institution to wear a feather on.”

  He was the only one of the four who had no flexibility of mind, no glimpse of self-seeing, no pleasantry in disagreement. It was not for that I disliked him. I knew no reason why I should dislike him, yet all the more I did. Our chemistries were antagonistic. My last rejoinder froze him solid. It was more adverse really than I had wished it to be. A silence fell upon us and I was thinking how to restore the broken conversation when Goran spoke, saying, “Let’s change the subject. What about your tree?”

  There was the sign; and I was startled by its clarity.

  “It’s a long story,” I said. “Moreover, it’s the same subject still.”

  “I remember you said it had its roots in the wheat pit—the tree,” said Goran, “whatever that means. But tell us.”

  “It concerns Dreadwind,” I said.

  The name as I pronounced it produced an electrical effect in all four of them, each reacting as his nature was. Selkirk, in the act of gently tapping his cigarette holder over the ash tray, became perfectly still, with his third finger raised, regarding me fixedly. Sylvester straightened his spine and made a slight sound in his throat. I noticed
him particularly. Moberly did not visibly stir; his chair creaked. Goran turned half around in his chair, rested his elbow on the back of it and propped his head on his fist, keeping his eyes on me.

  “Concerns him now? In the present time?” he asked. “Have you seen him?”

  “And Absalom Weaver, too,” I said.

  “But Weaver’s dead,” said Goran.

  “That may be. It is as one thinks. I have seen his shadow.”

  “Anyone else?” asked Goran.

  “Yes. The woman.”

  “Who is that?”

  “Weaver’s daughter.”

  “One romance more on this barren earth!” said Goran, glistening. “Tell it simply.”

  You to whom now I am telling the story would perhaps never have heard of Dreadwind. You would not know what there was about him to make four such minds become taut with interest at the sound of his name. He was a speculator, a wooer of chance, commonly to say a gambler, who shook the sills of the wheat pit and then suddenly disappeared. That would be nothing strange by itself. Many speculators do suddenly vanish from view. It is the rule. Generally they leave some memento, be it only a record in the bankruptcy court or an inexpensive mortuary emblem. Dreadwind left not so much as the print of his foot in the dust of La Salle Street. Still, even that is not unheard of altogether. What made his case unique was that he jilted his star. Surely that never happened in the world before. And such a star!—whimsical, tantalizing, never twice in the same aspect, running all over the heavens, yet true, always true to Dreadwind. No other man could have followed it. He understood it, adored it, obeyed it blindly, and was called eccentric. The word was wrong. It defines an orbit. He had no orbit. His movements were unpredictable. And in full career he quit. Or whether he quit or not, he ceased, dissolved, became utterly extinct.

  As he ended, so he began—with no explanations whatever. Not that he purposely created any mystery about himself; but he was a silent, solitary, uncommunicative person, who in all possible ways said it with money and disappointed personal curiosity. It perhaps never occurred to him to tell how or whence he came. One day he appeared. That was in Wall Street. His introduction to his broker was money. He had no other; knew not how to get one, he said. The broker could take it or leave it, as he pleased. He said he should probably trade a great deal and wanted fast service in the execution of his orders.