Chapter XI

WEAVER’S affairs were easy to settle. His estate consisted entirely in credit balances with Board of Trade members; and when the money was all gathered up and put in bank it amounted to nearly a million dollars. Dreadwind was surprised. He had no idea the salvage would be so large.

Then he bade Cordelia good-bye.

She took from around her neck a thin silver chain of very old workmanship, with a locket attached, and put it over his head, dropping the locket inside his collar.

“Bring it back to me unopened,” she said.

She stood with her back to the kitchen table, her hands grasping the edges of it, her body inclined a little toward him.

“You will find me here like this. I shall hear you coming. The door will not be locked. Open it without knocking. You will think I had never stirred.”

What he did in the war I don’t know. I think it was the tank corps. Hating publicity, he enlisted by an assumed name, or I should have looked it up. He merely said he went in at a place where he could count on a prompt discharge when the show was over. Anyhow, he returned with a slight limp.

When he opened the door, with a sudden panic and faintness of heart, there she stood, exactly as he had seen her last, only a little more inclined toward him, her lips parted, a high light in her eyes. She was wholly present at that moment. Her spirit was there and touched him. She looked him once over with swift anxiety and threw her arms about his neck, at the same time exploring him for the silver locket which, when it was found, she took back.

His ecstasy in that phase was brief. Almost at once she changed again, her eyes once more had that look of far-seeing, and there was an air of impatience about her.

Now, two things remained to be done in order that a third might happen. The first thing was to arrange that Weaver’s money should be lost in the wheat pit, agreeably to his instructions. The next was to find the tree in which his spirit was supposed to be lingering Then it was only to abide the sequel.

There was a broker on the Board of Trade whom Dreadwind trusted as he would trust himself—even more. I do not know his name. He appears to have been a man in whose house gambling in wheat was neither prohibited nor encouraged. It took its place. His true interest lay rather in the handling of actual grain as a dealer. He was an ideal broker for the purpose, since no one would expect him to be handling an irrational gambling account in the phantom stuff of the pit, and his business in actual grain was more than large enough to conceal the other. Dreadwind went to this broker and gave him the strangest order that was ever placed on the Board of Trade. It was an order, you understand, to lose a million dollars in the pit. Only of course it was not said that way. Specifically, it was an order to buy July and September wheat in the pit, on the glut of the harvest, at the highest prices possible, until the money was all gone. When it was lost then the account was to close and Dreadwind was to be notified. The broker stared at him stupidly.

“I know,” said Dreadwind. “It’s perfectly mad. I can’t explain it and I can’t be here to do it myself. That’s why I bring it to you. Imagine it to be an affair of the conscience and let it go at that.”

“Pity to wallow that kind of conscience around in the wheat pit,” said the broker. However, he accepted the commission, and that was that. They thought it was. No one had the faintest doubt as to what would happen to the money. Weaver hadn’t; Dreadwind hadn’t; the broker hadn’t.

Well, now Cordelia and Dreadwind set out together. All they had to go on was her description of the tree. She had never seen one like it. Neither had Dreadwind. Yet neither of them doubted its existence; and Cordelia was sure she would know it at sight. She led the way. I mean it was her impulse always that guided them. And when at length they had found that kind of tree they were no nearer than when they started; for of the teak species there are millions scattered through the forests of Asia. Fancy the chance of finding one! Of finding a certain one with not the slightest physical notion of where it was! It seems often true in human experience that the sense of probability is suspended. Something else goes on working in its place. We cannot imagine what that is. There are those who prefer the supernatural explanation, which leaves it as it was. Others say there is a vast region of the human mind yet to be explored. It has faculties both vestigal and rudimentary which we use unawares. That may be so.

There were times when Cordelia lost all sense of direction and then they drifted in an aimless way, merely looking. Then by one impulse they would go a month’s journey in a straight line, looking neither right nor left, only to be disappointed again at the end. And yet a chart of their movements—Dreadwind had plotted one and showed it to me—clearly revealed a blind tendency from every angle to converge upon a certain point.

For some time Dreadwind had been silent, smoking slowly, his thoughts dwelling upon their travels, as I knew from now and then a wistful smile upon his face or an involuntary contraction of the grief muscles in his forehead.

“That’s all,” he said suddenly. “You passed us several times, you say. Therefore you know. It took us nearly three years to find it.”

“How long?” I asked.

“Nearly three years.”

“Then it wasn’t true?”

“What wasn’t true?”

“Weaver’s notion about his spirit. Three years, you say. Well? His spirit ought long ago to have departed. And if it had, or you thought it had, you would not continue here.”

“Oh! I see,” he said, his puzzled look breaking away. “You assume that the money has been lost. Of course. Anyone would think so. I haven’t told you. It sounds incredible. The money has not been lost. On the contrary, it has multiplied. I could show you the broker’s reports. The first year half of it was lost. The next year the surviving half increased itself threefold. And this year—I’ve just heard—it has doubled. It now amounts to about three million dollars.”

“And the tree meanwhile is flourishing,” I commented.

He looked at me steadily, nodding his head. “I don’t suppose anyone ever tried to lose money in the wheat pit,” he said. “It may be in the nature of chance that it’s as hard to lose as to win if that’s what you set out to do. Of course... I might... No, I couldn’t do that. We shall have to see.”

What it was he might do he did not say and I did not ask. One is permitted to guess.

It was strange that Weaver’s money had not been lost. But you see, in placing it Dreadwind had in mind not the losing of it primarily but the effect Weaver wished it to have in the pit, which was to support the price of wheat in the glut of the harvest; and it had been demonstrated to everyone’s amazement that money employed in that way need not be lost. It was the Joseph thing over again—buying grain when there was too much of it because there was too much, and, behold! it turned out to pay. Yes, but on the other side, if Dreadwind now wished more to lose the money than to prove Weaver’s theory he could very easily do so. Any experienced wheat gambler would know how to do that. Superstition aside, one could do it with certainty.

Dreadwind’s dilemma is clear. He was torn between an impulse to break the spell that enthralled them both and a powerful sentiment of veneration for the form and meaning of it. I have said once that I could not be sure that in his mind he believed it at all, and that yet he unconsciously did, for believing was implicit in his acts. Here it was. He would not change those first instructions to the broker in any way to place the money in greater jeopardy.

There he is. I leave him to you. A man living in a bamboo hut with the woman he loves and cannot possess, unable to destroy the invisible thing that keeps them apart