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 groups 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.

Well, it isn’t every day that a golden goose falls out of the sky into a stockbroker’s lap; and when it happens the miracle shall not be stared in the mouth. This stranger, giving no account of himself, was seen at once to be more than a cool and practiced votary. He was rare. His operations were so large, so audacious and so unexpected that after a little while the broker found himself in a serious dilemma. True, his till was overflowing with commissions. That was all very well. But the fathers of the stock market had summoned him to kneel on the carpet and hear out of the book of rules that paragraph which forbids unsafe trading. Then they warned him that unless he controlled the gambling cyclone that dwelt in his office he should be deemed guilty of conduct prejudicial to the welfare of the Stock Exchange and expelled therefrom.

Very gently, very ruefully, the broker brought this difficulty to the notice of his client. Dreadwind was not angry. He had rather the look of a man whose feelings are hurt.

“Limits!” he said to himself. “Limits, limits. Is there no game in the world without a limit?”

“One,” said the broker.

“What is it?”

“Wheat.”

Dreadwind stood still, struck with an idea.

“I’ve never gambled in wheat,” he said. “I never thought of it.”

There was a grain ticker in the office. He walked over to it, gazed at it thoughtfully, ran some of the tape through his fingers.

“This isn’t like the stock ticker,” he said. “I don’t remember ever to have looked at a grain ticker before. On the stock ticker the amounts bought and sold are printed along with the prices. Here are prices only. No amounts.”

“That’s all,” said the broker. “The prices only. Amounts are not recorded.”

“You mean there is no record of the amount of wheat bought and sold in speculation?”

“That’s correct.”

“How much wheat could I buy or sell this minute?” Dreadwind asked, his eye still upon the grain ticker.

“Any amount.”

“A million bushels?”

“Ten million, fifty million. Any amount.”

“And all that would show here on the tape would be the price?”

“Yes,” said the broker.

“Thanks,” said Dreadwind. “It’s two-thirty. Balance my account, please, and give me the credit in cash.”

“What are you going to do?” the broker asked.

“Going to the wheat pit,” said Dreadwind. He added, “I’ll have to see. I don’t believe it.”

“You knew him as well as anyone here,” I said to Moberly. “He must have crossed you often in the wheat pit. What did you make of him?”

“He was ten feet high,” said Moberly. “The only man I was ever afraid of—in the pit, I mean to say.”

That was handsome from Moberly, for, as we all knew, Dreadwind had several times upset him in the open market place. He had been the only man who dared single handed to engage Moberly in a wheat-pit contest; and Moberly without his backing of organized bank credit—Moberly, that is to say, on his own two legs, would have been no match for this invader who knew no rules, no limits and followed a zigzag star.

“I did not know him,” I said, beginning the story. “Not until afterward, as I shall tell you. I had never seen him, had in fact no idea of his personality. Therefore, what arrested my attention at sight, besides certain singularities of circumstance, was the personality itself, with no suggestion of its identity—I mean, no suggestion that he was the missing Dreadwind. All the time you must keep in mind the kind of man he was—I should say is. No rule of probability contains him. To say that he acts upon impulse, without reflection, in a headlong manner, is true only so far as it goes. Many people have that weakness. With him it is not a weakness. It is a principle of conduct. The impulse in his case is not ungovernable. It does not possess him and overthrow his judgment. It is the other way around. He takes possession of the impulse, mounting it as it were the enchanted steed of the Arabian Nights, and rides it to its kingdom of consequences. What lies at the end is always a surprise; if it is something he doesn’t care for, no matter. Another steed is waiting. Meaning to do this, living for it, he has no baggage. There is nothing behind him. If he has wealth it is portable. He is at any moment ready. A kind of high vagabond, you see.”

“You almost persuade me to be likewise,” sighed Goran. He was of Polish blood.

“Very exciting,” I said. “That was Dreadwind’s torment. He could not come to rest. His craving for excitement was a vast hunger. Yet his outwardness, as you know, his superficial aspect, is a mask of perfect serenity. His physical movements are slow, rather hesitating, or as if retarded. I saw them the first time——”

“Them?” said Moberly, interrupting.

“Yes,” said Goran. “There’s a woman. Didn’t you get that? Absalom Weaver’s girl. Go on.”

“——at the edge of a desert,” I continued. “My own errand there was one pertaining to oil. I am not an oil expert. But international oil people are interested obliquely in many collateral things: politics, intrigue, personalities, religion, and what not. Such work is confidential. For that reason I hesitate to mention the place explicitly. No matter. It was such a place as you may see almost anywhere in Southwest Asia—a misspelled name on your map, a journey’s interruption, a jagged symbol of eternity sticking out of the sand, the tomb of a race untended, mythical tomb of a prophet commercialized.

“I was arriving. They were leaving. There was much make-believe commotion about getting them off. From this I knew that he was free with his money. So he was. He threw it around, not with any air of vanity, for there was nobody of his own kind to be impressed, but simply because its language was instantly understood and a plentiful utterance of it galvanized the action. I was the only other sign of Western civility on the scene and he never so much as glanced at me, though I stood near by, looking on. He observed the preparations, attended to them, spoke now and then to his guide and interpreter a word or two in the tone of voice that dead and sleeping people are not supposed to hear—and all the time his mind was somewhere else.

“The only present reality he seemed conscious of was the woman. I could not imagine what their relations were. His manner toward her was impersonal, formal, even distant; yet that was not his feeling at all. One could sense beneath the manner an aching contradiction. He was absorbed in her utterly. There is no other way to say it. Whatever it was they were doing, or about to do, concerned her; and she herself, not what they did, was his concern.

“And the woman! A more oblivious human being could not be described. What she was concerned with lay far, far away, or it was something that had never been found, possibly something that did not exist. One would have thought she moved in a trance. She saw nothing, said nothing, heard nothing. Even when her camel got to its feet—a disagreeable sensation that one could see was new to her body—even then her face expressed no awareness of the senses. It might hare been a camel of her dreams.

“So they went—the stare-blind woman first, the man next, followed by guides and servants, into the rising sun. Ahead of them, on the horizon, many miles away, rose a glinting pyramidal form. In the middle distance was the faint perception of a ruined temple they should pass, some broken stone columns and the torso of a monumental stone figure seated.

“It left a vivid picture with me. What the picture signified was quest. I made some inquiries about them. All that anybody knew was that they had come and gone, no whence or whither. More was suspected. A very old Arab, thinking perhaps that I should feel some responsibility for a fellow countryman, confronted me repeatedly with accusing gestures. One hand was full of gold which he showed; with the other hand he tapped his forehead and pointed in the direction they had gone.

“The second time was stranger still. I thought it was. This occurred three months later in Mongolia, north of the Wall, in a country where you meet your kind only once or twice a day, and then not without a sense of personal anxiety. We passed and they did not see me. That was all. They were mounted on shaggy little horses, pads for saddles, hair-rope bridles, two servants following. She was looking straight ahead. He was still absorbed in her.

“Then the third time was at Buenos Ayres. They came one evening to the gayest hotel, with no luggage or servants, looking desperately weary and travel sore, lodged for the night, and sailed the next morning. I looked at the registration. The name was Jones—A. Jones and wife. I was sure that was not the man’s right name. It couldn’t be.”

“Put in something about the woman. I want to see her,” said Goran.

“I’ve tried,” I said.

“Yes, but something about her appearance,” he insisted. “What was her type?”

“I can’t describe her,” I said. “Not directly in terms of herself. I never saw her that way. She reminds me of something symbolic.”

“What?” Goran asked.

“There’s a picture of the virgins descending stone steps. Their feet are bare. They are clad all alike in draperies of classic simplicity, drawn in a little with a girdle just under the arms, giving them a sweet, long-limbed appearance. In their faces there is knowledge without experience—knowledge of existence, none of life. She is that first one with the bent knee thrusting against her drape.”

“Now I see her,” said Goran. “It’s what I thought. Go on.”

“A long time later, a year and a half perhaps, I was on my way up the Irawadi River. Business pertaining to oil still. A young Britisher with whom I keep a vow of friendship was then commissioner of one of the Northern Burmese provinces, newly appointed; and I went out of my path to see him. We had resolved the nature of matter and whether man was risen from a low estate or fallen from a high one, when of a sudden he thought to say:

“‘One of your mad Americans has broken loose in my province. That’s what you say, isn’t it? He’s told the British Empire what it cannot do. I’m trying to keep it from becoming a diplomatic incident.’ “

“Where?’ I asked.

“‘Up the river.’

“‘Who is he?’

“‘That’s another thing,’ he said. ‘Whether he’s going by an alias or has a false passport I can’t make out. He says his name is Jones—something Jones—A. Jones, I think. But I have reason to suppose his real name is—ah—Dread something—yes, Dreadwind. Why do you look so taken up? Do you know him?’

“I told him of a man named Dreadwind, a Chicago wheat speculator, who had become suddenly nonexistent; also of the pair I had seen wandering about the world in a hypnotized condition, and that the name under which they passed through Buenos Ayres was A. Jones.

“‘Quite,’ he said. ‘I’m sure of it. A romance, clearly. I hate to interfere, and yet——’

“‘What’s the row about?’ I asked.

“‘Perfectly silly!’ he said. ‘It’s about an old teak tree.’

“‘Why make a fuss about one teak tree more or less?’ I asked. ‘You’ve millions of them.’

“‘Now, you see,’ he said, ‘it isn’t so simple quite. The teak in these forests is controlled by the state and scientifically cultivated. It has to be cut with reference to age, condition and new growth. A certain bit of it is due to be cut. The order goes out. Then it appears that this particular bit includes one tree for which your fellow countryman has conceived some sort of wild infatuation. I don’t know what or why. He won’t say. But he says—he says—that tree shall not be cut. The British Empire says it shall be. There you are.’

“‘What will happen?’ I asked.

“‘It will be cut.’

“‘Teak wood is a commercial substance,’ I said. ‘Isn’t it a matter money will settle? He probably has plenty of that.’

“‘Yes, he seems to have a lot of money,’ the commissioner said, rather acidly. ‘He’s offered to buy the whole forest. That was silly, wasn’t it? Then he corrupted the native officials. Bribed them to spare the tree. That’s a very serious offense. The next thing was that he got some kind of magic or witchcraft to be practiced on the tree until now I understand the whole place is weird with superstition about it.’

“The English understand human idiosyncrasy, envy it secretly, and are yet quite capable of dealing in an unromantic manner with its troublesome manifestations. This was altogether true of my friend, the commissioner. He was greatly annoyed; it seemed to him his government had been made to appear ludicrous. It could not cut down a teak tree in its own forest because an American preferred to have it stand. Well, we put the subject aside, thinking of it still, and talked absently of other matters. As we parted he said: ‘You’re going that way. Perhaps you’ll have a look at this tree-fey person.’ And he gave me exact directions.

“My curiosity by this time was absurdly moved, and I pursued it in a straight line—as straight as the native means of transportation permitted. On the way, with nothing else to think about, I discovered in myself a sentiment of irrational sympathy for the man; for both of them in fact, but for the man especially. That is the sort of thing I have learned to call a human chemistry. We seem to have nothing to do with it. Do you know that impulse to serve or befriend in a romantic spirit someone who apparently does not need you at all, a stranger perhaps, one you have never seen before and may never see again? That is what I mean. Then again people who do need you, who have rightful claims upon your goods and interest, and whose claims you honor, do not move your sympathies at all. I’m trying to explain the fact that the mere thought of being able to assist Dreadwind, or Jones, to save his tree gave me a sense of charity, gratitude and pleasure mingled.

“I had been through this country before. The river and its affluents at the time of year it was are littered with small craft. I was only surprised that as we neared my destination the number of them seemed to increase. Presently there was no doubt of it. More than I had ever seen before at one time so far north were moored at the landing place. The village was a short distance inland. A procession was headed that way. Knowing it to be a small village of bamboo houses with no metropolitan attractions I began to inquire. A religious ceremony was taking place. One of a most unusual character. Then I remembered what the commissioner had said and was not unprepared to hear that the ceremony connected itself with a tree.

“A word about teakwood. It is in many respects the finest wood there is—dark, heavy, oily, does not crack, warp or shrink, much used in fine shipbuilding and for ornamental carving. The teak tree grows in isolated, defensive clusters among other trees of the forest, aloof and lordly, sometimes attaining to a height of a hundred and fifty feet, with a girth of twenty-five. But the particular teak tree that had become so suddenly an object of preposterous interest was not one of a cluster. It stood alone at the edge of the forest, sole survivor of its group, for it was of enormous age, much older than anything organic or human in the village near by.

“It was not then, however, that I got my impression of the tree. There was too much going on. In the act of comprehending the scene itself I grasped the fact that here was something new in Asia. The imagination, the cynical daring, the gold, of a Chicago wheat speculator acting through a corrupt, cunning and greedy priestcraft upon native Oriental superstition! Can you imagine it?

“In a ring around the tree stood ten elephants, ornately decorated, their heads pointing in. The most gorgeously geared one bore on its back a miniature temple with an idol indwelling. Next within the elephant circle was a ring of holy devotees in propitiating attitudes. Inside this kneeling circle were the officiating magicians, all in loin cloths. One crawled on all fours around the tree, pretending to be an animal. One was preoccupied with self-torturing gymnastics. One ate a nauseous substance from a dish and spewed it out. Others resting from their grotesque exertions lay prone as if in prayer. A rude clay image suggestively mutilated was an object of grimacing attention. Around the body of the tree was wound some red stuff of hateful texture. Above this, attached to the bark, was the effigy of a gigantic butterfly; and over that a great leering mask. Four men squatting in a square drew snaky, unmusical notes from reed pipes. There was no other sound. Incense was burning at the base of the tree. The pungent odor of it seemed to float through other smells—the smell of elephants, the smell of people, the smell of Eastern food—without touching or mingling. The spectators numbered several thousand, and they had been bought without knowing it. When their eyes should be sated with the spectacle of the tree rite there would be a feast in the village. It was then preparing; and the scent of it, savory to these thin nostrils, was causing the stomach to assert its claims against those of the fascinated soul.

“I turned away in disgust, ashamed of mankind in the sight of trees and noble beasts. It is sickening enough to witness the soul’s groveling under fears of the mind’s invention when its puerile acts are spontaneous and emotionally true; but here was pretence at the source. The priesthood was bought. Only the people were deceived. At the same time one was obliged to admire Dreadwind’s shrewdness. He was creating an enormous superstition—that is to say, a native public opinion, in defense of the tree. The published purpose of all this magic was to cajole, propitiate, persuade to beneficence, a spirit—a western spirit and therefore a hostile one—that had come to dwell in the tree. It followed without saying that the dwelling must not be destroyed, for if it were, then of course the angry spirit would burst forth in the form of a blue bull and take its revenge upon the whole community.

“No figure in the resemblance of Dreadwind was visible among the spectators. As the grand impresario he had a reserved seat and was himself unseen. His dwelling place was a double bamboo house not more than two hundred yards from the tree. From two facts about it—one that it was new and the other that the natives avoided it in a curious way—I guessed it was his.

“He must have observed my approach, for he was at the door when I reached it and admitted me silently, with no mark of surprise.

“‘Why do you do it?’ I asked, that sense of disgust controlling my tongue.

“Without answering or reacting in any way whatever to my question he stood looking out through the blind, holding two slats a little apart for that purpose, with his back to me, as if I had been a common interruption. He was in slippers, stockings, riding breeches, wore a loose cotton shirt with a purple silk robe over all, and had a turban thing wound around his head.

“He was very tall. His hair was light yellow, almost white; his eyes were blue, expressing a kind of impersonal wonder; the nose was large and indefinite; the lower part of the face was heavy, denoting sensuality tempered by extreme sensitiveness.

“The interior of the house was rather dim; all the blinds were closed. I made out a table on bamboo legs, fast to the floor; also some bent-wood chairs and an iron cot. The chairs and cot were not of native origin. I wondered how he had got them here. There was nothing else but some grass mats on the floor.

“He turned presently, passed me, sat down by the table and crossed his legs heavily.

“‘What did you say?’ he asked.

“‘I said, why do you do this? It’s abominable.’

“‘It can’t hurt the tree,’ he said absently. ‘Not even if it were so,’ he added. This was like an observation, or a comment, upon his own thoughts, which I was permitted to hear.

“‘If what were so?’ I asked.

“Then for the first time he looked at me with a touch of personal interest.

“‘I thought you were an Englishman from the provincial government office,’ he said, as if that were somehow explanatory.

“‘You are the most incurious person I ever met,’ I said. ‘I might be a product of that magic outside for any probability I naturally have in relation to you; and yet you do not ask who or what I am.’

“‘Why should I have to ask?’ he said.

“At that I suddenly realized what a meddling, turbid ass I looked. I began to apologize and to account for myself, and became extremely uncomfortable, because even to me what I said sounded as if I were making it up. And that it was true did not save me in the least. My interest and interference alike were gratuitous. He did not encourage me to go on; neither did he offer to stop me. He listened and showed no emotion. I told him under what conditions I had passed him three times in the world, how I had got his name—the name of Jones—from his hotel registration at Buenos Ayres, and how his whereabouts and identity had been revealed to rae in a fortuitous manner by my friend the provincial commissioner, who was exceedingly annoyed and obliged me to hear what a countryman of mine was doing in his provincial forest.

“‘As for my being Dreadwind,’ he said, when I had finished, ‘there’s no secret about it. I’ve used another name for personal convenience, to avoid curiosity in places where my own name might be known. I am not hiding. You may tell your friend, the Mister Commissioner, that I have also a passport in my legal name, if that’s what he’s worried about.’

“‘It isn’t,’ I said.

“He made no reply to that.

“‘It’s his precious teakwood,’ I said.

“And he made no reply to that, either.

“‘You’re at an impasse with him,’ I said. ‘He can’t understand why you should be permitted to cross the British Empire in the management of its own teak in its own forest, and his official mind is extremely vexed.’

“No answer.

“‘He says the tree will be cut,’ I said.

“The rite apparently had been concluded. The serpentine notes of the reed pipes had now a kind of rhythm, coming nearer, and there was a sense of heavy bodies stirring. The elephants were passing the house. Dreadwind got up to look out again.

“‘It won’t be cut,’ he said, returning.

“‘It’s my own blundering fault,’ I said, ‘that I can’t make you see or feel why I have thrust myself into this thing.’

“‘Why?’ he asked.

“There I hung for a minute.

“‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘I may have thought I did. Now that you ask me, I don’t. No matter why. Say it pleases me to give you the right to command my friendly offices. There is something to be done, if only we can think of it, and I am anxious to do it.’

“‘I know,’ he said very simply, putting forth his hand. ‘But there is nothing to be done.’

“‘I’ve told you the commissioner is an old friend of mine. I’ve told you also that he is obstinately minded to cut down your tree.’

“‘He won’t, though,’ said Dreadwind.

“‘But,’ I said, ‘you can’t just sit here with your finger in the lion’s eye. There would never be any peace. You don’t want to keep up this ghastly mummery outside.’

“‘It’s distasteful,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t think of anything else, and it works.’

“‘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.”