第102章

This was a sensation, the like of which he found it difficult to describe.But it seemed to be a slow, tense crisping of every tiniest nerve in his body.It would begin as he lay in bed--counting interminably to get himself to sleep--between his knees and ankles, and thence slowly spread to every part of him, creeping upward, from loin to shoulder, in a gradual wave of torture that was not pain, yet infinitely worse.Adry, pringling aura as of billions of minute electric shocks crept upward over his flesh, till it reached his head, where it seemed to culminate in a white flash, which he felt rather than saw.

His body felt strange and unfamiliar to him.It seemed to have no weight, and at times his hands would appear to swell swiftly to the size of mammoth boxing-gloves, so that he must rub them together to feel that they were his own.

He put off consulting a doctor from day to day, alleging that he had not the time.But the real reason, though he never admitted it, was the fear that the doctor might tell him what he guessed to be the truth.

Were his wits leaving him? The horror of the question smote through him like the drive of a javelin.What was to happen? What nameless calamity impended?

"Wheat-wheat-wheat, wheat-wheat-wheat."

His watch under his pillow took up the refrain.How to grasp the morrow's business, how control the sluice gates of that torrent he had unchained, with this unspeakable crumbling and disintegrating of his faculties going on?

Jaded, feeble, he rose to meet another day.He drove down town, trying not to hear the beat of his horses'

hoofs.Dizzy and stupefied, he gained Gretry's office, and alone with his terrors sat in the chair before his desk, waiting, waiting.

Then far away the great gong struck.Just over his head, penetrating wood and iron, he heard the mighty throe of the Pit once more beginning, moving.And then, once again, the limp and ravelled fibres of being grew tight with a wrench.Under the stimulus of the roar of the maelstrom, the flagging, wavering brain righted itself once more, and--how, he himself could not say--the business of the day was despatched, the battle was once more urged.Often he acted upon what he knew to be blind, unreasoned instinct.Judgment, clear reasoning, at times, he felt, forsook him.

Decisions that involved what seemed to be the very stronghold of his situation, had to be taken without a moment's warning.He decided for or against without knowing why.Under his feet fissures opened.He must take the leap without seeing the other edge.Somehow he always landed upon his feet; somehow his great, cumbersome engine, lurching, swaying, in spite of loosened joints, always kept the track.

Luck, his golden goddess, the genius of glittering wings, was with him yet.Sorely tried, flouted even she yet remained faithful, lending a helping hand to lost and wandering judgment.

So the month of May drew to its close.Between the twenty-fifth and the thirtieth Jadwin covered his July shortage, despite Gretry's protests and warnings.To him they seemed idle enough.He was too rich, too strong now to fear any issue.Daily the profits of the corner increased.The unfortunate shorts were wrung dry and drier.In Gretry's office they heard their sentences, and as time went on, and Jadwin beheld more and more of these broken speculators, a vast contempt for human nature grew within him.

Some few of his beaten enemies were resolute enough, accepting defeat with grim carelessness, or with sphinx-like indifference, or even with airy jocularity.

But for the most part their alert, eager deference, their tame subservience, the abject humility and debasement of their bent shoulders drove Jadwin to the verge of self-control.He grew to detest the business;he regretted even the defiant brutality of Scannel, a rascal, but none the less keeping his head high.The more the fellows cringed to him, the tighter he wrenched the screw.In a few cases he found a pleasure in relenting entirely, selling his wheat to the unfortunates at a price that left them without loss;but in the end the business hardened his heart to any distress his mercilessness might entail.He took his profits as a Bourbon took his taxes, as if by right of birth.Somewhere, in a long-forgotten history of his brief school days, he had come across a phrase that he remembered now, by some devious and distant process of association, and when he heard of the calamities that his campaign had wrought, of the shipwrecked fortunes and careers that were sucked down by the Pit, he found it possible to say, with a short laugh, and a lift of one shoulder:

_"Vae victis."_

His wife he saw but seldom.Occasionally they breakfasted together; more often they met at dinner.

But that was all.Jadwin's life by now had come to be so irregular, and his few hours of sleep so precious and so easily disturbed, that he had long since occupied a separate apartment.

What Laura's life was at this time he no longer knew.

She never spoke of it to him; never nowadays complained of loneliness.When he saw her she appeared to be cheerful.But this very cheerfulness made him uneasy, and at times, through the murk of the chaff of wheat, through the bellow of the Pit, and the crash of collapsing fortunes there reached him a suspicion that all was not well with Laura.

Once he had made an abortive attempt to break from the turmoil of La Salle Street and the Board of Trade, and, for a time at least, to get back to the old life they both had loved--to get back, in a word, to her.But the consequences had been all but disastrous.Now he could not keep away.

"Corner wheat!" he had exclaimed to her, the following day."Corner wheat! It's the wheat that has cornered me.It's like holding a wolf by the ears, bad to hold on, but worse to let go."But absorbed, blinded, deafened by the whirl of things, Curtis Jadwin could not see how perilously well grounded had been his faint suspicion as to Laura's distress.