CHAPTER XIV
Very early Tuesday morning she drove to the Limited lease and got MacAdams. He looked formidable in his good clothes, and now that he had shaved the scrubby gray beard his chin had an even more obstinate line. She talked to him in an easy and friendly manner, without mentioning land. She must not waste her strength. There was a struggle before her and a menace behind. She had opened a livery-stable account against Clark & Hayward, who had never heard of her. The hotel, she knew, had let her go only because she took no baggage and had told the clerk casually that she would return to-morrow. The ticket to Ripley left five dollars of the twenty that belonged to MacAdams. And every moment that the sale was delayed might make it impossible to save Bert.
She sat smiling, listening to a tale of MacAdams' youth, when he was a sea-faring man.
The train reached Fresno, and MacAdams's gaze rested with joy on leafy orchards and vineyards and the cool green of alfalfa fields. She perceived the effect upon him of that refreshing contrast with the arid desert. Before they reached Ripley his mind would be adjusted to a green land and ditches filled with running water. She had lost one point.
Her attention concentrated upon the thoughts slowly forming in his mind. Each word he spoke was an indication which she seized, considered, turned this way and that, searching for the roots of it, the implications growing from it.
The train was now running across a level plain covered with dry grass. Desolation was written upon it, and small unpainted houses stood here and there like periods at the end of sentences expressing the futility of human hope. She smiled above a sinking heart. They alighted at Ripley.
She had never seen the town before, and she saw now, with MacAdams's eyes, a yellow station, several big warehouses, a wide dusty road into which a street of two-story buildings ran at right angles. It was not much larger than Coalinga. She looked anxiously for the agent from Ripley Farmland Acres. That morning she had telegraphed him to meet her.
He came toward them and shook MacAdams' hand heartily. His name was Nichols. He had a consciously frank eye, and a smooth manner. He hustled them toward a dusty automobile whose sides were covered with canvas advertisements of the tract, and put MacAdams into the front seat beside him.
The machine, stirring a cloud of dust behind it, rattled down the road between fields of dry stubble. She was ignored in the back seat. Nichols had taken the situation out of her hands, and she did not trust him. However, she could not trust herself, in the midst of her uncertainties and ignorance.
Nichols talked too much and too enthusiastically. She was astounded by his blindness. To her it seemed obvious that his words were of little importance. It was what MacAdams said that mattered. He gave MacAdams no silences in which to speak, and he appeared oblivious to the fact that MacAdams, gazing contemplatively at the sky-line, said nothing.
They drove beneath an elaborate plaster gateway into the tract. Seventy thousand acres of scorched dry grass lay before them, stretching unbroken to a misty level horizon. Over it was the great arch of a hot sky.
The machine carried them out into the waves of dry grass like the smallest of boats putting out into an ocean of aridity. When it stopped the sun poured its heat upon them and dust settled on perspiring hands and faces. Nichols unrolled a map and talked with galvanic enthusiasm. He talked incessantly and his phrases seemed worn threadbare by previous repetition. MacAdams said nothing, and Helen tried to devise a way to ask Nichols to stop talking.
His manner had dropped her outside of consideration, save as a woman for whom automobile-doors must be opened. She saw that he felt her presence as a handicap in this affair between men; he apologized for saying "damn," and his apology conveyed resentment. He was losing her the sale, and she could not interfere. Her only hope of saving Bert rested on this sale. She controlled a rising desperation, and smiled at him.
They got out of the machine and waded through dusty grass, searching for surveyor's posts. Nichols pointed out the luxuriant growth of wild hay, asked MacAdams what he thought of that, continued without a pause to pour facts and figures upon him, heedless that he received no reply. They got into the car again and Nichols, pulling a pad of blanks from his pocket, tried to make MacAdams buy a certain piece of land then and there. He attacked obliquely, as if expecting to trap MacAdams into signing his name, and MacAdams answered as warily. "Well, I have seen worse. And I have seen better." He lighted his pipe and listened equably. He did not sign his name.
They drove further down the road and got out again. Helen caught Nichols' sleeve, and though he shook his arm impatiently she held him until MacAdams had walked some distance away and picked up a lump of soil.
"Leave him to me, please," she said.
"What do you know about the tract?"
"Just the same, I wish you'd give me a chance, please."
"Do you want to sell him or don't you? I know how to handle prospects."
They spoke quickly. Already MacAdams was turning his head.
"He's my prospect. And, by God! I'm going to sell him or lose him myself!" Her words shocked her like a thunderclap, but the shock steadied her. And Nichols' overthrow was complete. He said hardly a word when they reached MacAdams.
Almost in silence they examined that piece of land. MacAdams walked to each of its corners; he looked at the map for some time; he asked questions that Nichols answered briefly. He pulled up clumps of grass and looked at the earth on their roots. At last he walked back to the machine and leaned against it, lighting his pipe leisurely and looking out across the tract. The silence was palpitant. When she saw that he did not mean to break it, Helen asked, "Shall we look at another piece?"
"No. I've seen enough."
They got into the machine, and this time Nichols was alone on the front seat. They drove back toward the tract office. The sun was sinking, and a gray light lay over the empty fields. Helen felt herself part of it. She had lost, and nothing mattered any more. She had no more to lose. She kept up the hopeless effort, but the approaching end was like the thought of rest to a struggling man who is drowning.
"What do you think of it, Mr. MacAdams?"
"Well—I have seen worse."
"Were you satisfied with the soil?"
"I wouldn't say anything against it."
"Would you like us to show you anything more of the water system?" What did she care about water systems!
"No."
The machine stopped before the tract office. They got out.
"Your man's no good. He's a looker, not a buyer," Nichols said to her in an aside.
"He has money and he wants land," she answered wearily.
"We'll have another go at him. But it's no use."
They went into the office. A smoky lamp stood on a desk littered with papers. MacAdams asked when the train left Ripley. Nichols told him that they had half an hour. They sat down, and Nichols, drawing his chair briskly to the desk, began.
"Now, Mr. MacAdams, in buying land you have to consider four things; land, water, climate, and markets. Our land—"
She could not go back to Coalinga with him. Probably there would be a warrant out for her arrest. Oh, Bert! She had done her best, her very best. There were five dollars left, MacAdams's money. The whole thing was unreal. She was dreaming it.
Nichols was leading him up to the decision. MacAdams evaded it. Nichols began again. The blank form was out now and the fountain-pen ready.
"You like the piece, don't you? You're satisfied with it. You've found everything exactly as we represented it. It's the best buy on the tract. Well, now we'll just close it up."
MacAdams put his hands in his pockets and gazed at the map on the wall. "I'm not saying it isn't a good proposition."
Nichols began again. Was forty acres more than MacAdams wanted to carry? MacAdams would not exactly say that. Would a change in the terms be more convenient for him? MacAdams had no fault to find with the terms. Did the question of getting the land into crop trouble him? No. Well, then they'd get down to the point. The payments on this piece would be—"I'll not be missing my train, Mr. Nichols?"
Patiently Nichols went back to the beginning. Land, water, transportation, and cli—Helen could endure it no longer. One straight question would end it, would leave her facing certainty. She leaned forward and heard her own voice.
"Mr. MacAdams, you came to look at this land. You've looked at it. Do you want it?"
There was one startled, arrested gesture from Nichols. Then they remained motionless. The clock ticked loudly. Slowly MacAdams leaned back in his chair, straightened one leg, put his hand into his trouser pocket. He pulled out a grimy canvas bag.
"Yes. How much is the first payment?"
Deliberately he poured out on the desk a heap of golden coins. His stubby fingers extracted from the sack a wad of banknotes. Nichols was figuring madly. "Twelve hundred and seventy-three dollars and ninety cents," he announced in a shaking voice. MacAdams counted it out with exactness. He signed the contract. Nichols recounted the money and sealed it in an envelope. They rose.
Helen found herself stumbling against the side of the automobile, and felt Nichols squeezing her arm exultantly while he helped her into it. They had reached Ripley before she was able to think. Then she said that she would not return to Coalinga with MacAdams. They put him on the train.
She told Nichols that she wanted the money and the contract. She was going to take the next train to San Francisco. He objected. She argued through a haze, and her greatest difficulty was keeping her voice clear. But she held tenaciously to her purpose. Later she was on the train with the contract and Nichols' check drawn to Clark & Hayward. She slept then and she slept in the taxi-cab on the way to a San Francisco hotel. She felt that she was asleep while she wrote her name on a register She shut a door somehow behind a bell-boy, and at last could sleep undisturbed.
At nine o'clock the next morning she sat facing Mr. Clark across a big flat-topped desk. The contract and Nichols' check lay upon it.
Mr. Clark was a lean, shrewd-looking man about forty-five years old. He gave the impression of having kept his nerves at high tension for so many years that now he must strain them still tighter or relax altogether. This catastrophe he would have described as "losing his grip," and Helen felt that he lived in dread of it as the ultimate calamity. They had been talking for some time. Mr. Clark did not know where Bert was.
"My dear young lady, if we had known—" he said, and he stopped because it would be useless cruelty to complete the sentence. She thought that he would not be cruel unless there were some purpose to be achieved by it. There was even a kindly expression in his eyes at times.
He had explained clearly the situation in which her husband stood. Bert had persuaded the firm to give him an unlimited letter of credit. "That young man has a truly remarkable personality as a salesman. He had us completely up in the air." He had proposed a gigantic selling campaign in the oil fields, and had so filled Clark & Hayward with his own enthusiasm that they had given him free rein.
The campaign had begun with every promise of astounding success. He had brought huge crowds to hear speakers sent down from the city; had gathered the names of thousands of "leads"; had imported fifty salesmen to canvass these names and bring in prospective buyers. Scores of these had been taken to the land and hundreds more were promised. Clark & Hayward contemplated hiring special trains for them.
But expenses were running into disquieting amounts for the actual results produced. Bert's checks poured in, and there began to be annoying rumors. The firm had begun a quiet investigation and had decided that he was spending too much of their money for personal expenses. Mr. Clark need not go into details. They had withdrawn the letter of credit and advised creditors in Bakersfield that the firm would no longer pay Mr. Kennedy's bills.
Mr. Kennedy had been informed of this. He had taken one of the firm's automobiles and disappeared. Later his check had come in. Clark & Hayward could not make that good, in addition to their other losses. The matter was now entirely out of their hands. Mr. Clark's gesture placed it in the hands of inscrutable fate. He was more interested in the MacAdams sale and the unexpected appearance of Helen.
However, under her insistence he admitted that if the check were made good, Clark & Hayward could persuade the bank not to press the charge. Of course the warrant was out, but there were ways. He undertook to employ them for her, thoughtfully fingering Nichols' check. As to finding Bert—well, if the police had failed—
Helen asked how much Bert owed the firm. Mr. Clark told her that the sum was roughly five thousand dollars.
"In thirty days! Why—but—how is it possible?"
The amount included the cost of the automobile. The balance was Mr. Kennedy's personal expenses, not included in his arrangement with the firm. "Wine—ah—" Mr. Clark did not complete the triology. "Mr. Kennedy's—recreations were expensive?" He would have the account itemized?
"Oh, no. It isn't necessary," said Helen. She would like to know only the exact sum. Mr. Clark pressed a button and asked the girl who answered it to look up the amount. "And, by the way, have this sale entered on the books, and a check made out to—?"
"H. D. Kennedy," said Helen.
"To H. D. Kennedy for the commissions. Seven and a half per cent."
"You were paying the other salesmen fifteen per cent.," said Helen.
That was by special arrangement. The ordinary salesmen in the field were paid seven and a half percent. Helen accepted the statement, being unable to refute it. She proposed that she should continue working for the firm on twelve and a half per cent., five per cent. to apply on the amount Bert owed them. Mr. Clark countered by offering her ten per cent. with the same arrangement. She was stubborn, and he yielded.
Helen came out of the office with three hundred dollars in her purse. She saw that the sun was shining, and as she walked through the crowded, familiar streets, passing flower-stands gay with color, feeling the cool breeze on her face, and seeing white clouds sailing over Twin Peaks, she felt that the bright day was mocking her. She understood why most suicides occur on days of sunshine.
Her life was beginning again, in a new way, among strange surroundings. She thought that it would be pleasant to be dead. One would be then as she was, numb, with no emotion, no interest, no concern for anything, and one would not have to move or think. "Cheer up! What's the use of wishing you were dead? You will be some day!" she said to herself, with an effort to be humorous about it.
She thought that she would go out to the old apartment, pack the things she had left there, and take them with her. There was a hard bitterness in the thought that seemed almost sweet to her. To stand unmoved in that place where she had loved and suffered, to handle with uncaring hands those objects saturated with memories, would be a desecration of the past that would prove how utterly dead it was.
But she did not do it. She telephoned from the station, giving up the apartment and abandoning the personal belongings in it, leaving her address for the forwarding of mail. Then she shut her mind against memories and went back to the oil fields.