CHAPTER XV
During the weeks that followed she felt that she was moving in a dream, a shadow among unrealities. She drove across endless yellow plains that wavered in the heat. The lines were lax in her hands, her thoughts hardly moved. Again she had the sensation of gazing upon herself from an infinite distance, and she saw her whole life very small and far-away and unimportant.
It was odd that she should be where she was.—They would reach the watering-trough soon, and then the horse could drink.—The lake she saw rippling upon the burning sand was a mirage.—The horse was not interested in it. Horses must recognize water by smelling it.—The sunlight struck her hands, and they were turning browner. Complexions.—How strange that women cared about them.—How strange that any one cared about anything.
She reached an oil lease, and part of her brain awoke. It worked so smoothly that she felt an impersonal pride in it. It was concerned only with Ripley Farmland Acres. It was intent upon selling them. She tapped at screen doors, and knew she was being charming to tired women exhausted by heat and babies. She skirted black pools of oil, climbed into derricks,—she had learned to call them "rigs,"—and heard herself talking easily to grimy men beside a swaying steel cable that went eternally up and down, up and down, in the well-shaft.
Selling land, she found, was not the difficult and intricate business she had supposed it to be. California's great estates, the huge Mexican grants of land now passed to the second and third generations, were breaking up under the pressure of growing population and increased land taxes; for the first time in the State's history the land-hunger of the poor man could be satisfied. Deep in the heart of every man imprisoned by those burning wastes of desert was the longing for a small bit of green earth, a home embowered in trees and vines. Her task was to find the workman who had saved enough money for the first payment, the ten or twenty per cent. of the purchase price asked by the subdividing land companies, and having found him to play upon his longing and his imagination until the pictures she painted meant more to him than his hoarded savings.
Half of his first payment was hers; one sale meant to her five hundred or even a thousand dollars. But while she talked she forgot this; she thought only of cool water flowing through fields of alfalfa, of cows knee-deep in grass beneath the shade of oaks, of the fertile earth blooming in harvests. The skill in handling another's thoughts before they took form, teamed in her life with Bert, enabled her to impress these pictures upon her hearer's mind so that they seemed his own, and grimy men in oil-soaked overalls, listening to her without combativeness because she was a woman and not to be taken seriously in business, felt that they must buy this land so temptingly described.
"I'm not really a land-salesman," she said, believing it. "I know I can'tsellyou this land. I can only tell you about it. And then if you want to buy it, you will. Won't you?" She found that she need only talk to a sufficient number of men to find one who would buy, and each sale brought her enough money to give her weeks in which to trudge from derrick to derrick searching for another buyer. All her life had narrowed to that search.
She accumulated a store of facts. Drillers were the best prospects because they earned good salaries and had steady, straight-thinking brains. Tool-dressers were younger men, inclined to smartness, harder to handle. Pumpers were lonely and liked to talk; one must not waste too much time on them; they made small wages, but would give her "leads" to good prospects. A superintendent of a wild-cat lease was a good prospect; approach him with talk of a safe investment. Shallow fields were poor territory to work; jobs were longer and wages surer among the deeper wells. At a house ask for a drink of water; on a rig begin conversation by remarking, "Getting pretty deep, isn't she?" She was known throughout the fields as the Real-Estate Lady.
At twilight she drove back to the hotel. Her khaki skirt was spattered with crude oil; her pongee waist showed streaks of grime where dust had dried in perspiration. There was sand in its folds, sand in her shoes, sand in her hair. Her body seemed as lifeless as her emotions, and her brain had stopped again. She would not dream to-night.
She smiled again at the hotel clerk. Yes, thank you, business was fine! There were letters, no word of Bert. Her mother wrote puzzled and anxious inquiries. What was Helen doing in Coalinga? Was something wrong? What was her husband doing? Mrs. Updike was telling that she had seen in the paper—Helen folded the pages. There were a couple of thin envelopes from Clark & Hayward, announcements of sales, Farm 406—J. D. Hutchinson; Farms 915-917—H. D. Kennedy.
It was good to be in bed, feeling unconsciousness creeping over her like dark, cool water, lapping higher and higher.
On her third trip to the land with buyers she met Paul's mother on the main street in Ripley. Mrs. Masters appeared competent and self-assured, walking briskly from a butcher-shop with some packages on her arm. She was bare-headed, carrying a parasol above her smooth, gray hair. Small as she was, there was something formidable in the lines of her stocky figure and in the crispness of her stiff white shirt-waist. She looked at Helen with shrewd, interested eyes, and Helen realized that her hair was untidy, that there was dust on her shoes and on her blue serge suit. It was dust from the tract where she had just made another sale. Helen supposed there was dust on her face, too, when she perceived Mrs. Masters' eyes fixed so intently upon it.
They shook hands and spoke of the heat. Helen explained that she was selling land. She had just put one buyer on the Coalinga train and was waiting in Ripley for another man to meet her next day.
Mrs. Masters asked her to supper. A realization that meeting her might be embarrassing to Paul flickered through Helen's mind. She made some excuse, which Mrs. Masters overruled briskly. The strain of making a sale had left Helen without energy for resistance. She found they were walking down the street together, and she tried to rouse herself, as one struggles under an anesthetic. Mrs. Masters was the first person to whom she had tried to talk of anything but land, and the effort made her realize that she had been living in something like delirium.
They came to the cottage of which Paul had written her long ago. There was the little white-picket fence, the yard with rose-bushes in it, and the peach-tree. The graveled walk led to a tiny porch ornamented with wooden lace work, and through a screen door they went into the parlor. The shades were drawn to keep the afternoon sun from the flowered Brussels carpet; the room was cool and dim and rose-scented. There was a crocheted mat on the oak center-table; cushions stood stiff and plump on the sofa; in one corner on an easel was an enlarged crayon portrait of Paul as a little boy.
There was not a detail of the room that Helen would not have changed, but as she looked at it tears came unexpectedly into her eyes. Something was here that she wanted, something that she had always missed. Currents of indefinable emotion rose in her. Her heart ached, and suddenly she was shaken by a sense of irretrievable loss.
"I—I'm very tired. You must forgive me—a very hard day. If I could—lie down a minute?" She could not stop the quivering of her lips. Mrs. Masters looked at her curiously, leading her to the bedroom and folding back an immaculate white spread. Helen, hating herself for her weakness, took off her hat and lay down. She would be all right in a minute; she was sorry to make so much trouble; Mrs. Masters must not bother; she was just a little tired.
She lay still, hearing the rattling of pans and sizzling of meat from the kitchen where Mrs. Masters was getting supper. Voices went by in the street; a dog barked joyously; a shrill whistling passed, accompanied by the rattle of a stick along the picket fence. The sharp shadows of vine-leaves on the shade blurred into the twilight. Mrs. Masters was singing throatily, "Rock of Ages, cleft for me-e-e," while she set the table.
It was peace and security and rest. It was all that Helen did not have. The crudely papered walls enclosed a haven warmed by innumerable homely satisfactions. How sweet to have no care but the crispness of curtains, the folding away of linen, the baking of bread! She was an alien spirit here, with her aching head and heart, her disheveled hair and dusty shoes. A tear slipped down her cheek and spread into a damp splash on the white pillow.
She rose quickly, knowing that she must be stronger than the longing that shook her. The towel lying across the water pitcher was embroidered. She had always wanted embroidered towels, and she had made dozens of them. They had been left in the apartment. She bathed her face for a long time, dashing cool water on her eyelids.
The gate clicked, and Paul came whistling up the path. She stood clutching the towel, shivering with panic. Had she been mad that she had come to his house? Oh, for anything, anything, that would erase the past hour, and let her be anywhere but here! She heard his step on the porch, the bang of the screen door, his voice. "Hello, Mother? Supper ready?" And at the same time she saw unrolling in her mind the picture of herself and Mrs. Masters on the sidewalk, heard the definite, polite excuse she might have made, saw herself going back to the hotel. She might easily have done that. Why was her life nothing but one blundering stupidity? She waited until his mother had time to tell him she was there. Then she went out, smiling, and met him.
His hand was warm and strong, closing around her cold fingers. He could not conceal the shock her whiteness and thinness gave him. He stammered something about it, and reddened. She saw that he felt he had referred to Bert and hurt her. Yes, she said lightly, the heat in the oil fields was better than banting. She rather liked it, though, really. And selling land was fascinating work. She found that she was clinging to his hand, drawing strength from it, as though she could not let go. She released her fingers quickly, hoping he had not noticed that second's delay, which meant nothing, nothing except that she was tired.
Mrs. Masters sat opposite her at the supper table, and with those polite, neutral eyes upon her it was hard to make conversation. She told the story of the MacAdams sale, making it humorous instead of tragic, trying to keep the talk away from Masonville and the people there. Paul spoke only to offer her food, to advise a small glass of his mother's blackberry cordial, and urge her to drink it, to suggest a cushion for her back. Tears threatened her eyes again, and she conquered them with a laugh.
He went with her to the hotel. They walked in silence through moon-light and shadow, on the tree-bordered graveled sidewalk. Through lighted cottage windows Helen saw women clearing supper-tables, men leaning back in easychairs, with cigar and newspaper. They passed groups of girls, bare-headed, bare-armed, chattering in the moon-light They spoke to Paul, and Helen felt their curious eyes upon her. Children were playing in the street; somewhere a baby wailed thinly, and farther away a piano tinkled.
"It's very lovely—all this," she said.
"It suits me," Paul replied. A little later he cleared his throat and said, "Helen—I—I'm sorry."
"I'm all right," she said quickly. It was almost as if she had slammed a door in his face, and she did not want to be rude to him. "I mean—it's good of you to care. I'd rather not talk about it."
"I—sometimes I think I could—I could commit murder!" he said thickly. "When I get to thinking—"
"Don't," she said. It was some time before he spoke again.
"Well, if there is ever any chance for me to do anything—I guess you know I'd be glad to."
She thanked him. When he left her at the door of the hotel she thanked him again, and he asked her not to forget. If he could help her with her sales or the bank people or anything—She said she would surely let him know.
It was necessary to sleep, because she had another sale, a hard sale, to make next day. But she was unable to do it. Long after midnight she was lying awake, beating the pillows with clenched hands and biting her lips to keep from sobbing aloud. It seemed to her that all of life was torture and that she could no longer bear it.