CHAPTER XXVII
A SCHEME TO STARVE THE WORLD
THERE is a menace about Monday morning which few have escaped. It is a menace which in one guise or another clouds hundreds of millions of pillows, gives to the golden sunlight which filters through a billion panes the very hues and character of jaundice. It is the menace of factory and workshop, harsh prisons which shut men and women from the green fields and the pleasant by-ways; the menace of new responsibilities to be faced and new difficulties to be overcome. Into the space of Monday morning drain the dregs of last week's commitments to gather into stagnant pools upon the desks and benches of toiling and scheming humanity. It is the end of the holiday, the foot of the new hill whose crest is Saturday night and whose most pleasant outlook is the Sunday to come.
Men go to their work reluctant and resentful and reach out for the support which the lunch-hour brings. One o'clock in London is about six o'clock in Chicago. Therefore the significance of shoals of cablegrams which lay on the desks of certain brokers was not wholly apparent until late in the evening, and was not thoroughly understood until late on Tuesday morning, when to other and greater shoals of cables came the terse price-lists from the Board of Trade in Chicago, and on top of all the wirelessed Press accounts for the sensational jump in wheat.
"Wheat soaring," said one headline. "Frantic scenes in the Pit," said another. "Wheat reaches famine price," blared a third.
Beale passing through to Whitehall heard the shrill call of the newsboys and caught the word "wheat." He snatched a paper from the hands of a boy and read.
Every corn-market in the Northern Hemisphere was in a condition of chaos. Prices were jumping to a figure beyond any which the most stringent days of the war had produced.
