Satan's Bushel

by Garet Garrett

  Just then Dreadwind caught a glance from the girl. In it he read, or thought he read, both mild surprise at his pertinacity and a sign not to mind her father’s curtness. At any rate, if he needed encouragement, which is doubtful, he was encouraged to go on.

  “And that part about the elm tree,” he continued. “The illustration itself was perfectly clear until you seemed to turn it against the idea of coöperation. Do not the leaves of the elm coöperate?”

  This was a challenge to the old man’s mind and his manner somewhat relented.

  “A tree is a community,” he said, “a complex society of many different parts, separately acting, all governed by one spirit which we call an instinct. The leaves, do you say, coöperate for the preservation of the whole? That is in seeming only. Each leaf strives with all its might to take care of itself alone, and it is so ordered that the result of this shall be the good of the tree. The leaves themselves know nothing about it. What each leaf does for itself is good for the tree, but no leaf ever stops to think of that. It thinks only of itself. And because all the leaves think alike they appear to coöperate. Call it coöperation if you like. But will you say that elms as elms coöperate? They have no common bin; they do not share and share alike; they have no sick religion of equality. They contend with each other for advantage. What they have in common is an instinct—one way of fighting against all other plants. That is what the farmer needs. If farmers, like elm trees, had a common fighting instinct, then every individual selfishly attending to his own profit would be working for the good of the race without thinking of it and coöperation would be what it is and should be—namely, a natural means and not an end to which you shall need to be exhorted. It would simply occur. What they tell the farmer is that coöperation is a golden end. Ha! What would they accomplish? Elm would share with elm that all might be lean alike.”

  “What would you do?” Dreadwind asked.

  “Nothing,” Weaver answered. “Do nothing. It amuses me to torment the place where their minds ought to be. The farmer has the stomach of the world in his hands and cannot make it pay. Instead he drudges for it. He is a slave vegetable without any brains at all.... Good night.”

  The two turned abruptly out of the road and passed through a gate. Dreadwind stood alone in the moonlight, thinking of what you may guess. Certainly not of coöperative marketing. The girl had looked at him only that one time and was afterward apparently unaware of his existence.

  He was weary from walking. Not a great distance on he saw a straw stack close by the road and pitched his bed there; which is to say, he cast himself down in the straw and fell asleep.

  He dreamed a honeysuckle had him by the neck and smothered him with its flowers; and it was not at all disagreeable. Very decidedly otherwise, in fact, except that the edges of its leaves were sharp and pricked his face. There was some baffling circumstance in the case. It seemed there was a hostile tree that forbade him to touch the honeysuckle vine, as he longed to do; and he never knew what might have happened, for he came awake with a start, as if he had heard voices. Dawn was breaking. He sat up and looked around, slowly reconstructing the realities, and heard the voices again. This time there was no doubt of it. They were near, just around the straw stack, and coming nearer.

  Weaver and Cordelia appeared. Not in the least astonished at the sight of a man sitting on the edge of that kind of bed, they deflected their steps and meant to pass him without speaking. It occurred to Dreadwind to wonder why Weaver, knowing who he was, showed no curiosity about him. For a man to be found sleeping in a straw stack might be common enough; but not a man like himself.

  “Good morning,” he said, as they were going by.

  They stopped. The girl regarded him frankly but did not speak. A shade of annoyance crossed the old man’s face. It was no more than a shade. He was apparently in better humor.

  “Good enough if it lasts,” he said.

  “May I walk with you again?” Dreadwind said.

  Weaver regarded him thoughtfully and did not reply directly. “I was rough last night,” he said. “I was made to think of it afterward. I was chided for it.”

  Dreadwind glanced at Cordelia. She was looking away.

  “We’re not walking,” Weaver added. “We’ve come to a wedding.”

  “At dawn!” said Dreadwind. “A wedding at dawn?”

  “Why not a wedding at dawn, sir?” said Weaver. “The time is perfect.” He hesitated. “It isn’t private. Anyone may come who knows how to see it. If you don’t know I’ll show you.”

  Dreadwind rose and went with them. They crossed the road and entered the edge of a wheat field. There Weaver stopped and his hands began slowly to go apart in a gesture of benediction as he contemplated the wimpling wheat in the strained light of early morning. He spoke of it, or to it, in apostrophe. “Oh, lucid wheat!” he said. “Man’s friendly nourishment, multiplying to his want, proudly fawning at his feet.”

  He stood for some time in this attitude with a rapt expression.

  “It seems always to be running toward one,” said Dreadwind.

  “Ha!” exclaimed the old man, looking at him quickly. “You see that?”

  “I see it,” said Dreadwind, “and yet I do not understand it. I’ve been thinking it was an illusion.”

  “I’ll tell you why,” said Weaver. “Wheat is tame. It does not fight. Man fights the battle for it, and what you see is gratitude.”

  “I don’t quite see yet,” said Dreadwind.

  “Reflect,” said Weaver. “What was wild wheat like? It was a scrawny grass. You would not know it for kin to this. It had to fight. Half its strength went out in strife. Then man made a bargain with it. If it would devote itself to him and multiply with all its strength according to his needs he would guard it from its enemies, fix it in security and peace, give it a private garden for its nuptials. Trusting man it put aside its weapons; and this is now so long ago it has probably forgotten how to fight. What if man’s protection failed? Would it not become a scrawny grass again or more likely perish altogether? Its life is in man’s keeping. And for the bread that stays him here man relies upon the ceremony we shall witness, so mysterious that no one understands it, so obscure that few have ever seen it.”

  * * *

  “I’ve seen it,” said Moberly. “He’s right, though. I don’t know a dozen men that have. It’s the flowering of the wheat.”

  This wheat pit automaton! He knew. He had seen it. The recollection of it stirred him suddenly. My dislike for him remained constant as a quantity; only now it began to be balanced by another feeling. The others were as much astonished at him as I was. We eased ourselves around. Goran ordered up some refreshments, Selkirk more cigarettes, and I went on with the story.

  * * *

  Weaver’s last few words, I resumed, were spoken with divided attention. He had already begun to examine the wheat stalks, one here, another there, taking care not to hurt or trample them.

  Dreadwind and the girl waited and watched him; and he was some distance from them when he fell on his knees, verified his discovery through a magnifying glass and called them to come. They also knelt, to bring their vision into the plane of his.

  Can you see it? The three of them kneeling before a wheat stalk there in the dawn?—the male principle in its two aspects, one blindly pursuing, one defending what it could not possess, the maid between them, all kneeling to observe a microscopic drama in the wheat bud, unaware of the greater drama passing in themselves? Or which is greater? There is perhaps no scale to infinity. Less and greater may be tricks of the finite lens.

  The old man offered the glass impersonally, holding it out behind him, without taking his eyes from the wheat stalk. Dreadwind made a gesture to mean that Cordelia should look first. At that she took the glass from her father’s hand and put it in his. In the act she looked at him, shaking her head. What her eyes said was: “I’ve seen it many times. You look.” She might as well have said it out loud. The old man was oblivious. However,
she didn’t say it out loud. She said it the other way. And this slight business aside, between themselves, was amazing sweet to Dreadwind. It was a complete episode, miraculous, creative, with structural proportions, and yet more fragile than a cobweb, so that if one dared to challenge it, or to touch it, instantly it turned to nothingness.

  Well, the old man never knew which one of them it was looked first, nor that Cordelia knelt there through forty minutes without moving, except to shake her head each time Dreadwind offered her the glass. She knelt there like a saint at vespers, her weight inclined slightly backward, her hands clasped in front of her, regarding the two aspects of the male principle with that eternal knowledge which is pure innocence.

  Weaver was talking. On a spikelet of the wheat stem he indicated a small, greenish swelling.

  “That is the church,” he said. “We are at the door of the conventicle. In a few minutes it will slowly open and three weary cupids will come out on the steps to rest.”

  He chuckled.

  “Why to rest?” Dreadwind asked.

  “To rest,” the old man repeated. “You will understand when I tell you what is going on inside. At the very bottom of this little swelling lies the egg. The infinite concavity. The devouring mother principle. The egg is not yet the mother. Every mother is first a bride. This bride is very modest. Not shy, only modest. All that she reveals of herself are two lovely plumes, growing tall and straight inside the bud. Around these plumes and growing very much faster are the three cupids I speak of, whom you shall see when their prank is played. Each of these cupids bears aloft an innumerable number of bridegrooms—I don’t know how many—all blindfolded. Now there comes a moment—see! it is happening—the sign is when the door comes a little ajar—a moment when the plumes spread out, and the cupids, standing higher than the plumes, hurl the bridegrooms down. They fall upon those spreading plumes. The bridegrooms are the pollen grains—millions and millions of them. And out of all that number the bride will select one. She does not do this at once. There is first a struggle. She requires it. All those bridegrooms must seek her. They must grow down to her. It becomes a terrific drama. They alternately unite to perform prodigious engineering feats in order to reach her and then engage in combat each one for himself. One succeeds. One she receives. The rest? What becomes of those whom she rejects? It does not matter. They are wasted in Nature’s own way. It is so. In every piece of life it is so. Millions of surplus bridegrooms are created only to make sure that the bride in her leisure shall be able to choose one.... There!... See!”

  The bud was slowly bursting. What had been at first an ovoid, greenish swelling now was opening into petals at the top; and out from between the petals as they opened came what Weaver called the cupids and what botanists call the anthers—one, then another, then another, looking, as the old man had predicted, very weary and perhaps a little bored, from the task of hurling millions of enterprising bridegrooms into the tentative, plumelike embrace of an invisible and fastidious bride who should in her own time choose one. They lay there, the three cupids, sort of hanging out, with their heads in their hands, saying plainly the ceremony was over.

  “The honeymoon comes afterward,” said Weaver. “Nobody may see that.”

  They all stood up. Dreadwind looked around and was surprised to see that the appearance of the wheat had wonderfully changed. Then he realized that what he had been watching on one stalk had been taking place everywhere at the same time. The whole field was in flower.

  As they came back to the road Weaver’s manner of a sudden changed for the worse. Dreadwind walked at Cordelia’s side. That may have been it. Several attempts on Dreadwind’s part to make conversation the old man rebuffed either by silence or a sultry exclamation. When they came to the gate where father and daughter had turned in the night before they turned again in the same way, with this difference, that the old man did not speak and the girl looked back.

  Dreadwind began to search the circumstances for some pretext on which to continue seeing them. Not them of course, but one of them. And the question was not whether he should see her again, or why; it was only how. The impulse that had brought him to the wheat fields was off the track, ditched, abandoned upside down. A different locomotive now was pulling his train. By the same road he had come he walked back to the town, and saw only as much of the landscape as his feet touched, and that dimly. What he did in the town was to buy an automobile out of a dealer’s window and spend the afternoon learning to drive it. Then he clothed himself to new purpose, drove in the evening to the house where they were, walked up the door and asked for them—for Weaver.

  And they were gone. She was gone!

  Their going, he was told, had nothing strange about it; that was their whimsical way. They would come with one wind and go with another. Nevertheless, it was sudden. Yes, a little more so than usual. No, they did not say where they were going. They never did say. Right after dinner, the midday meal in the country, they calmly departed. At first Dreadwind suspected that the woman who stood in the doorway telling him this was evasive. As he became convinced of her sincerity he was bewildered.

  “Have you known them long?” the woman asked.

  Dreadwind said he hadn’t, but did not disclose how very slight his acquaintance with them was.

  “Then you wouldn’t know,” said the woman. “They appear and disappear that way, like migratory birds, as my mother said, only of course it’s strange—the two of them so. As long as we’ve lived here, it’s now going on eight years, they’ve come every year. They never stopped with us before. I don’t mean we wouldn’t be glad to have them again.”

  “How do they live?” Dreadwind asked.

  “By this and that and what the Lord provides,” said the woman. “Anyone is glad to have them, as I say, especially if it’s about harvest time. The girl helps indoors. Him? You’d have to ask the men what he does. I can’t exactly say. It’s what he knows, I reckon. Once I heard him preach a funeral. Naturally he would get something for that. He can cure animals, they say, and take spells off.”

  She stopped and began to regard Dreadwind in a quizzical manner, with some slyness in it.

  “I don’t think you’ll find them,” she said.

  “Why not.”

  “So many roads going every which way,” she said.

  “That isn’t what you meant,” said Dreadwind. “Why do you think I won’t find them?”

  “Well, maybe you can,” she said, of the first opinion still. “I’d certainly tell you how if I knew myself. He’s very suspicious.”

  “Of whom?” asked Dreadwind.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” said the woman, pretending to be perfectly blank.

  She knew the direction in which they had walked away. And that was all. Dreadwind thanked her and was halfway to the gate when the woman called to him as if she had forgotten something.

  “Was she expecting you to ask for her?”

  “I don’t know,” Dreadwind replied.

  “Because you didn’t ask for her, did you?” the woman continued. “You asked for him. She said if anybody asked for her to give them this.”

  She held out an envelope.

  “Thank you,” said Dreadwind, taking it. The envelope was sealed, but had no writing on it. Afterward it occurred to him that his claim to it had not been proved, not even asserted more so than by the act of reaching for it, and he wondered why the woman had made not the slightest difficulty about giving it to him.

  A mile from the house he broke it open, and out of it fell a wheat spikelet in flower. There was nothing else.

  CHAPTER V

  IN the direction they had gone he drove to the first crossroad and turned right. After many miles in vain that way he came back to the point at which he had turned right, and turned left. Returning again he drove straight ahead to the next crossroad and went first right and then left. In this manner he searched the country methodically. Nobody had seen them. They had passed without trace if they passed at all
.

  Thus a fortnight had elapsed when one morning Dreadwind’s quest was almost rewarded and then immediately disappointed again in a very singular manner.

  He had spent the latter part of the night in the automobile, a little off the road, in a space screened on three sides by a high wild hedge. He came awake as streaks of light began to show in the east. For several moments he lay motionless, observing the sky. Suddenly in a spectral manner a tall, lone figure appeared in the road. He recognized it instantly as Weaver; and even in that dim light he could see that the old man was in extreme trouble with his thoughts. He would start, stop, turn, walk up and down, and kept twisting his hands together. Then he seemed to have resolved it, for suddenly he left the road, leaped the ditch, and stood in the edge of a field of wheat. From Dreadwind’s angle of vision he was in silhouette above the wheat and so exaggerated in stature that he seemed supernaturally tall, touching the sky. The whole omen of him was evil. Dreadwind had a flash of phantasy. He though of Abraham about to sacrifice his son, and shuddered.

  What happened next was mysterious. Out of the depths of an inner garment the old man produced as it were a pouch or small sack, opened it, dipped his fingers therein and appeared to be casting an impalpable substance on the air. There was a fresh breeze blowing against the wheat and that of course would account in a natural way for what Dreadwind at this moment observed with a superstitious feeling—namely, that the wheat seemed to be running from Weaver, not toward him. Although he took rational note of the obvious physical explanation, still he could do nothing with the fancy that it was running from the old man in terror.

  After Weaver had several times repeated the act of sowing something on the air, Dreadwind’s curiosity moved him. He rose and approached. Weaver neither saw nor heard him. With only the ditch between them Dreadwind stopped and called his name.

  The old man turned his face—only his face. Its expression was so calamitous, so mingled of pity, pain and cruel resolve, that Dreadwind was shocked. Before he could speak again, Weaver dropped the pouch and went stumbling away through the wheat, trampling it in a heedless manner and never once looked back. His walking down the wheat in that way, as if it were nonexistent or lifeless, so contrary to the feeling of tenderness hitherto revealed, was a sight that unnerved Dreadwind. He said it was like an act of murder unconsciously committed. When he had so far recovered as to be able to act the old man was invisible.