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.
CHAPTER VII
AS 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.
Thus speculation in phantom wheat is fomented. That is the main thing. Why else should Board of Trade houses hire experts to estimate the wheat crop?
Those clients who sit in rows before the blackboards are like leaden lumps if you let them alone. They cannot make up their own minds. Act upon them with suggestion and they become golden geese. They neither sow in righteousness nor reap in mercy. Few of them would know a field of wheat from a patch of alfalfa. Yet in the course of a year they will buy and sell twenty bushels of phantom wheat for each bushel of real wheat produced by the labor of two and a half millions of farmers. In order that they shall do this they must be supplied with suggestions. Hence these private crop experts, hired by the proprietors of the blackboards, to keep the speculative mind in a state of futile anxiety.
The Department of Agriculture also estimates the crop. But its reports are issued once a month. That is not often enough. What would speculation do between times? Besides, the private experts always disagree with the government experts, and this adds zest to the blackboard betting.
A more painstaking and very secretive type of expert was new to Dreadwind. He represented neither private speculators in the wheat pit nor the proprietors of blackboards with their little pens of golden geese. His employer was the hard-minded miller; and it was his extraordinary business to know what was in the wheat—in the kernels of the wheat.
The chemical content of wheat varies with soil and local weather. In an area where growing conditions have been exceptionally favorable—where, for example, there has been by chance just the right amount of rainfall, the precious gluten content may be higher than in wheat on similar soil in the next neighborhood, though it all looks precisely alike. The difference is invisible and yet very important. The miller’s expert works intensively. He marks those areas where for special reasons the gluten content is likely to run high and watches them tenderly. When threshing begins he takes from each area a little sample and rushes it off to a laboratory to be analyzed.
If the chemical examination confirms his expectations the miller is informed that wheat in this particular place contains a premium
percentage of gluten. Does the miller then instruct his agent to buy that wheat at a premium price? No, indeed. He enters the fact on his working record. He knows what the wheat contains and to what elevators the farmers who grew it will bring it for sale and storage. In due time he needs such wheat to mix with other wheat, and when he does he orders a few carloads from the local elevator in one of those high-gluten areas—orders just the common grade at the common price and nobody knows the difference. Thus the millers, thanks to the work of their experts, are able to fish premium wheat out of the great No. 2 stream and pay only the average price.
* * *
“And what’s the matter with that?” said Moberly with a snort. “How will a miller know where the gluten is unless he finds it for himself? The farmer might analyze his own wheat. But he won’t. And when the miller has found it it has already cost him enough.”
“I’ve nothing to argue,” I said. “I’m telling you, as he told me, how Dreadwind saw the harvest.”
“Meanwhile the needle is lost in the straw,” said Goran, groaning. “We’ve got to learn all about straw before we can find the lovely object. If I didn’t know it had been found by the way the story started I’d go to bed now. How? That’s what I want to hear.”
“You’d better hear what happened to Dreadwind,” I said; “how he saw more than appears in the harvest and what construction he put upon it. Otherwise you cannot understand the change in him. I remember he said just at this point that all his life in the city he had been asking himself a certain question. It arose from the theatrical spectacle of spending. Everywhere this spending—silly, wasteful, competitive, imitative spending, until many were bored with it, wanting nothing and spending more. Shops more magnificent than ancient temples, all dedicated to this worship. Miles of lighted streets frantically jammed with spenders. Where did they get it? That was the question. Somebody had to pay for all this spending. He never could see who the payers were. He was a spender, you see. He produced nothing and yet he could spend. How and by what right? Perhaps the question arose really not from the spectacle as he thought; he had got to wondering about himself. Well, now he began to see. The farmer was one who paid. There might be others also. The farmer certainly paid. Everyone who touched him made him pay. The whole modern affair was organized against him. What he sold he sold on the buyer’s terms. What he bought he bought on the seller’s terms. That was all you needed to know about him, Dreadwind said. One in that situation was bound to be exploited. People could not help exploiting him. It was not a conspiracy. It was a condition. Imagine trusting human nature not to take advantage of the seller who asks, ‘How much will you give?’ Imagine trusting it not to take advantage of the buyer who asks, ‘How much will you take?’ “
“Rotten nonsense,” said Moberly. “A farmer’s a farmer. That’s all you need to know about him. He doesn’t know any better. If he did he wouldn’t be a farmer.”
“Yes, he said that, too,” I answered; “almost in those words—that the farmer was what was left. The talent he wants is attracted away in the gristle and trained on the other side to be used against him. He spoke of you, Moberly. He said you were the most skillful grain manipulator in the world. You were born on a farm. Did you remain there? No. Instead of developing your extraordinary skill of trade in the farmer’s behalf you went over to the other side—to the buyer’s side.”
Moberly snorted. “What do you mean by the buyer’s side?” he demanded.
“I don’t mean anything. Are you asking me what Dreadwind meant?”
“What does anybody mean by that?” he asked. “One side or another. There is no one side. Grain is handled in a two-sided market place like any other merchandise, or like securities on the Stock Exchange. There is buying, and there is selling, neither without the other. A trader must work on both sides.”
“Obviously,” I answered. “Only Dreadwind called my attention to a fact I had never thought of before. The Stock Exchange, for example, is a seller’s market. It is organized and conducted from the seller’s point of view—in the interest of those who create securities for sale. Therefore the paramount effort is to keep prices as high as possible against the buyer. But the Board of Trade is a buyer’s market. Its machinery was designed and is controlled in the buyer’s interest—that is, in the interest of those who buy and consume grain. Therefore the dominant motive is to keep prices as low as possible, to the seller’s disadvantage.”
“It isn’t so,” said Moberly, speaking without reflection.
“But it is,” said Selkirk, who had not spoken before. “It is so,” he added, exquisitively tapping the ashes from the end of his cigarette. “I shall never forget it”
“Is this a tale at all?” sighed Goran. “Did your reflective hero, this Mr. Dreadwind, now living with a haunted tree in Burma—did he—?”
“No. He did not.”
* * *
CHAPTER VIII
THAT wave of green-gold color breaks in Canada. There the harvest ends. The reapers disappear.
One September day Dreadwind parked a worn-out car by a little railroad station in the province of Alberta and bought a ticket for Chicago.
His office was one little room in a high corner of the Eyrie Building. With the act of inserting the key he remembered having closed the door. It had not turned on its hinges since. Everything would be as he left it; and yet nothing would be the same. He was vaguely aware of some fundamental change. Closing the door had been like the careless farewell which turns out to have been the parting forever; and opening it again was the sudden discovery.
Nearly four months had elapsed. All that had happened in that time flashed across his inner vision in one momentous picture. He was one of those rare persons whose memory restores the scene itself in full color so that it seems actually to be viewed again. Most of us are able to retrace only the faintest outline of things in black and white. He saw himself as an actor in that picture, sitting with Cordelia in those first moments under the apple tree on the lantern-lighted lawn, then kneeling with her in the wheat field at dawn, then pursuing her.
There was a nonexistent moment in which he almost saw her where he had not seen her, clairvoyantly. So he believed.
What really occurred to him in that imaginary interval on the threshold of his office was much more thrilling than any mental presentment of her image. I am telling you this. He could not say it. There came to him in that instant an aching physical sense of her existence, as of something that had never been realized before, originally wonderful. With that experience came also the clear and astonishing perception of another reality. A very singular fact this was. When he closed the door he had been alone in the world, a free and solitary person, preferring that state above any other. Now that was no longer so. He was not alone, nor did he wish to be.
The hour of day was one o’clock. He pushed the door open. On the floor were some letters. He stirred them with his foot and did not pick them up. The ticker by the window was running without tape. All this time it had been running without tape, producing a phantom record of a phantom thing. How appropriate! He wondered where the dust came from—how it could get into a closed room—and began absently to trace a pattern in it on the flat surface of his desk. The pattern was—CCCCC. Then seeing what he did he smiled and with his handkerchief wiped the top of the desk.
He shook the handkerchief in the air and used it again to rough-clean the little wooden object he had picked up with the other hand. This was a rudely carved bear, about four inches high, with an absurd and friendly leer. Its history is worth knowing. As a lonesome boy in Wall Street he used to pass it night and morning in a curio dealer’s window and gradually invested it with a superstitious phantasy. With the proceeds of his first tiny gambling transaction in the bucket shop where he worked he went and bought it for two dollars and it became, I believe, his only permanent possession. It was both a luck idol and the symbol of his practice as a speculator.
Now, having dusted it off, with a kind of abu
sive affection, he put it down again in the middle of the desk and stood for a long time gazing alternately at it and then around the room. Nothing else in the room seemed in any way personal. Everything else had first to be remembered, like the things one sees on coming awake in strange surroundings. The past has to be recreated, up to the moment of having gone to sleep.
Dreadwind’s past came back to him slowly. It was not merely that a certain experience discontinuous with his past and perhaps incompatible therewith had befallen him. Here was another kind of fact. What he had been he no longer was and could not be again. This was not a decision, not a matter of resolve, not a conclusion arrived at by reflection. It was simply so. How it came to be so he did not know. There in front of him lay the memorandum in his own handwriting of his last transactions in the pit. He had been a wheat gambler. Yes. But he knew that he should never make another bet in the wheat pit. Why? He did not know why. And it was not until he had dusted off the little bear and sat there communing with it that he knew it at all. There was no moralizing about it. There was only the finality.
* * *
“How extraordinary!” said Selkirk, in a tone of soliloquy.
“In what aspect?” I asked.
He replied slowly: “That a man’s luck idol should tell him when to quit.”
Of course, gambling is full of these concealed superstitions. It would be so. There is no way of accounting for luck beyond the simple rule of three. In its runs and wanton freaks it is totally mysterious; and its votaries may believe anything, not because what they believe is of itself probable, but because the mind cannot rest in a state of disbelief. It is necessary to believe that one believes something. Every successful gambler walks with the dread that his luck will turn, or, worse still, that it will leave him without warning. He will think it is only willful, prankish, that it is teasing him, when in fact it has turned its back, and this he is seldom aware of until it is too late.
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