Abbeville by Jack Fuller

home.”
    â€œHe does look nice, doesn’t he?” she said, and Karl felt like a stallion that had taken a ribbon.
    Luella signed the store ticket. Though Karl knew his uncle’s generosity would pay the bill, his gratitude went to her, and he said so.
    â€œYou are a real gentleman,” she said. “Do you know that? For someone raised with goats.”
    O VER THE NEXT SEVERAL days his uncle tutored Karl in the firm’s basics.
    â€œMy company deals in promises,” Uncle John explained. “Promisesto sell a certain quantity of grain at a certain price on a specific date in the future. People buy and sell those promises until the day arrives. Then whoever has sold it last must fulfill the promise, either in grain or cash.”
    â€œWhat is the point?” said Karl.
    â€œThe only way to control the future is to pay its price today,” said Uncle John.
    Within a few weeks he moved Karl from the office to the Board of Trade itself.
    The trading floor spread out over what seemed like an acre under high, grimy windows. Above it stood enormous clock-like devices. An attendant manned each, following the action on the floor and moving the dial’s single arm, clockwise on a rising market, counterclockwise on a decline.
    Karl’s first job was to take orders over the leased telegraph line that connected to Uncle John’s office down the street. When he received an order, Karl dispatched it via one of a half-dozen young toughs who ran them to the Schumpeter traders in the pits.
    Karl was amazed at how this stone-hard city transformed grain into an abstraction, but it was not as though the physical world did not intrude. A surfeit of rain moved the market, though no one on the trading floor suffered a drop of it falling on his shoulders. A military upheaval in Europe stampeded the market, though no one here heard a cannon.
    Every day as Karl walked home to the boardinghouse, he passed a little square where street-corner orators condemned everything Karl was learning how to do:
    â€œWho are the wolves who wager on our toil?” Predators speculating upon the very food in our children’s mouths. They buy and sell you as surely as slave masters. They stir great waves of panic, then mount the crests for gain.
    â€œThere is nothing in this world that is not material. Love? Religion? The milk of human kindness? Money and class crush them.
    â€œBut one day the contradictions will all lie bare before you. The workers of the world will come together in the great, inevitable surge of history. Class will battle class, and the weak shall rise up as one and bring the predators down!”
    The next day Karl told Luella about the man.
    â€œYou should have seen him,” he said. “He had a head of hair out to here and a beard scragglier than any I saw in the woods. And the mouth on him. He doesn’t stop for a breath.”
    â€œMaybe he has a lot to say,” said Luella.
    Less than a week later, one of the regular traders fell seriously ill. Uncle John asked Karl if he was ready to take his place.
    â€œYou have everything in your head that you need,” Uncle John said. “Now we must find out what’s in your belly.”
    That afternoon Karl pulled at his starched collar, cleared his throat, and asked Luella to dinner. She accepted immediately, and he wondered why he had waited so long.
    As afternoon wore into evening, his uncle left for some engagement or another, and the activity in the office slowed. Luella came to Karl’s desk, and side by side they looked out the window into LaSalle Street. The city lay before him as if it were his. Luella on his arm, he tipped his hat to one of the clerks and winked at the doorman, who got them a carriage and received a nice gratuity for his trouble.
    Karl had chosen a fancy place on the Gold Coast north of the river near where Uncle John lived—along with the Swifts and Armours and Potter Palmers and everyone else