CHAPTER XVI
Returning to Coalinga after the meeting with Paul, Helen ached with weariness. But she was alive again. The haze in which she had been existing was gone. She had risen early that morning, met her prospective land-buyer at the train, and made the sale. It had been doubly difficult, because the salesman for Alfalfa Tracts had met the train, too, and had almost taken the prospect from her, thinking it would be easy to do because she was only a woman. There was a hard triumph in her victory. The sale had reduced Bert's debt by another four hundred dollars, for she could afford now to turn in the entire commission against it.
The jolting of the train shook her relaxed body. Her cheek lay against the rough plush of the chairback, for she was too tired to sit upright. Against the black square of the window her life arranged itself before her. How many times she had seen her life lying before her like a straight road, and had determined what its course and end would be! But she was older now, and wiser, and able to control her destiny.
She was a land-salesman; she was a good salesman. This was the only thing she had saved from wreckage. At least she would succeed in this. She would make money; she would clear Bert's name, which was hers; she would buy a little house and make it beautiful. Perhaps Bert would want to come to it some day and she would have it waiting for him. She knew that she would never love him as she had loved him, for she saw him too clearly now, but she felt that their lives were inextricably bound together and that the tie between them was stronger because he needed her.
A letter from Clark & Hayward was in her box at the hotel. She tore it open quickly. As always, she had a wild thought that it contained news of Bert.
It said that the firm had given the oil fields territory to two other salesmen, Hutchinson and Monroe. The oil fields had proved a good territory, and it was too large for her to handle alone. She would turn over to Hutchinson and Monroe any leads she had not followed up. Doubtless she could make arrangements with them as to commissions; the firm hoped she would continue to work in the fields; Hutchinson and Monroe would expect an overage on her sales. Mr. Clark trusted they would work in harmony, and congratulated her on her success.
Her first astonishment changed quickly to a cold rage. Did they think they could take her territory from her? Her territory, that she had developed herself, alone? After her days and weeks of hard, exhausting work, after her hours of talking, of distributing advertising, of making sales that would lead to more sales, they were coming in and taking the fruits of it away from her? Oh, she would fight!
The clerk told her that Hutchinson and Monroe had arrived that afternoon. She asked him to tell them that she would see them in the parlor at nine o'clock. There would be some slight advantage in making them come to her.
She was sitting in the small, stuffy room, her eyes fixed on a newspaper, when they came in. She felt hard, like a machine of steel, when she rose smiling to meet them.
Hutchinson was a tall, angular man, who moved in an easy-going way as if his body had nothing to do with the loose-fitting, gray clothes he wore. His eyes were frank, with a humorous expression in them, but though his face was lean there were deep lines from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth, and when he smiled, which he did easily, two more deep lines appeared in his cheeks.
Monroe was older, shorter, and stout. There was a smooth suavity in the effect of his neat, dapper person, his heavy gold watch-chain, his eye-glasses. He removed the glasses at intervals, as if from habit, wiping them with a silk handkerchief, and at such moments his blandly paternal manner was accentuated. His eyes were set too close to the thin bridge of a nose that grew heavy at the tip, but his gray hair, the kindly patronage of his smile, and his soft, heavy voice were impressive.
Helen perceived that both of these men were good salesmen, and that their working together made a happy combination of opposite abilities. She saw herself opposing them, an inexperienced girl, and felt that the odds were overwhelmingly against her. But her determination to fight was not lessened.
Upright on a hard red davenport, she argued. The territory was hers. She had come into it first. She had developed it. She conceded their right to work there, but not the justice of their demanding part of the commissions she earned. The stale little room, filled with smells of heat-blistered varnish and dusty plush, became a battle-ground, and the high back of the davenport was a wall against which she stood at bay, confronting these men who had come to rob her.
But she was a woman. They did not let her forget it. They asked her permission to smoke, but not her consent to their business arrangements. They smiled at her arguments. After all, she was of the sex that must be humored. "My dear Mrs. Kennedy," said Monroe, gallantly. "Do let us be—ah—reasonable." Their courtesy was perfect. They would let her talk, since it pleased her to do so. They would pick up her handkerchief when it slid from her lap. If it was her whim to work in the oil fields they would even indulge her in it. But she struck rock when she spoke of commissions. They would take two and a half per cent. from any sales she made.
It bored Hutchinson to point out the situation to her, but he did it, courteously. The firm had given them the territory. They were experienced salesmen. Naturally, Clark would not leave the territory in the hands of a young saleswoman, however charming personally. This was business, he gently explained. They would take two and a half per cent.
But she was a woman, and a charming one. Their tone implied that some slight sentimentality existed even in business. On sales they made from the leads she gave them, they would be generous. They would give her two and a half per cent. on those.
At this there was an interval when she sat smiling, speechless with rage. But she saw that the situation was hopeless. And every one of those names on her lists was a potential sale that would have paid her twelve and a half per cent. Anger surged up in her, almost beyond her control. However, there was no value in fighting when she was beaten.
They parted on the best of terms; she yielded every point; she would give them the leads in the morning. She left them satisfied, thinking that women, while annoying, were not hard to handle.
In her room she stood shaken by her anger, by resentment and disgust. "Oh, beastly, beastly!" she said through clenched teeth. Striking her hand furiously against the edge of the dresser, she felt a physical pain that was a relief. She was able even to smile, ironically and wearily. This was the game she had to play, was it? Well—she had to play it.
She sat down and from her note-book copied a list of names and addresses. She chose only those of men to whom she had talked until convinced they were not land-buyers. In the morning she met Hutchinson in the lobby and gave him the list. She also insisted on a written agreement promising her two and a half per cent. commission on sales made to any of those men. Hutchinson gave it to her in patronizing good-humor.
Her buggy was waiting as usual in the shade of the hotel building. She felt grim satisfaction while she climbed into it and drove away, toward the Limited lease. Hutchinson and Monroe would work industriously for some time before they perceived her duplicity, and she did not care for their opinion when they did discover it. Her own conscience was harder to handle, but she reflected that she would have to revise her standards of honesty. "My dear Mrs. Kennedy—ah—really—this is business." She hoped viciously that Monroe would see that she had quite understood his words. She made another good sale before they stopped working on the worthless leads. Their attitude toward her changed abruptly.
"You certainly put one over on us," Hutchinson said without malice, and from that time they regarded her more as an equal than as a woman.
She was surprised to discover the bitterness developing in her.
Often in the evenings she walked in the quiet streets of little houses. Women were watering the lawns. A cool, sweet odor rose from refreshened grass and clumps of dripping flowers. Here and there a man leaned on the handle of a lawnmower, pipe in hand, talking to a neighbor. Children were playing in the twilight. Their young voices rose in happy shouts, and their feet pattered on the pavement. Hardness and bitterness vanished then, and Helen felt only an ache of wistfulness.
Later, lights bloomed through the deepening night, and the houses became dark masses framing squares of brightness. Vaguely beyond lace curtains Helen saw a woman swaying in a rocking-chair, a group of girls gathered at a piano. From dim porches mothers called the children to bed, and at an up-stairs window a shade came down like an eyelid. Helen felt alone and very lonely. She realized that she had been walking for a long time on tired feet. But she did not want to go back to the hotel. She must remind herself that to-morrow would be another hard day.
In the hotel lobby she encountered Hutchinson or Monroe. Sharpness and hardness came back then. Monroe was able to handle the smart young tool-dressers; his bland paternal manner crushed them into a paralyzing sense of their youth and crudeness. He had got hold of a tool-dresser she had canvassed and hoped to sell. That meant a fight about the commissions, in which, of course, Hutchinson backed Monroe. She was still alone, but now she was among enemies.
"You've got to fight!" she told herself. "Are you going to let them put it over on you because you're a woman?" She lay awake thinking of selling arguments, talking points, ways of handling this prospect and that. Every sale brought her nearer to freedom. Some day she would have a house, with a big gray living-room, rose curtains, dozens of fine embroidered towels and tablecloths. She jerked her thoughts back to her work, angry at herself for letting them stray. But when, triumphantly, she closed the biggest sale yet,—sixty acres!—she celebrated by buying a linen lunch cloth stamped in a pattern of wild roses. She sat in her room in the evenings and embroidered it beautifully with fine even stitches.
When it was finished and laundered, she folded it in tissue-paper and put it carefully away in one of the cheap, warped drawers of her bureau. Often she took it out, spreading the shining folds over the foot of her bed and looking at it with joy. It lay in her thoughts like a nucleus of a future contentment. But when her sister Mabel wrote from Masonville that she was going to marry the most wonderful man in the world, Bob Mason, "Old Man" Mason's grandson, who was head clerk of Robertson's store, the rose lunch cloth became something Helen could not keep. It was too keenly a symbol of all that she had missed, all that she wanted her little sister to have.
It went to Mabel in a rose-lined white box, with a letter and a check. Mabel's letter, palpitating with happiness and awkwardly triumphant over the splendid match,—"though of course it makes no difference, because I would marry him if he was the poorest man on earth, because money isn't everything, is it?"—had suggested that Helen come home for the wedding. But this would mean facing curiosity and sympathy and whispered discussion of her own tragedy, unforgotten, she knew, in Masonville. She replied that she could not get away from her work, and read Mabel's relief in the light regrets sprinkled through her radiant thanks for the check. "And the table-cloth is beautiful, too, one of the loveliest ones I have."
"After all, it is good to think that it matters so little to her," Helen thought quickly. But the letters had shown her the deep gulf time had dug between her and her girlhood, and the realization increased her loneliness. Her life went by. Business filled it, and it was empty.
One day late in the fall she came in early from the oil fields. Over the level yellow plains a sense of autumn had come, an indefinable change in the air. She felt another change, too, a vague foreboding, something altered and restless in the spirit of the men with whom she had talked. For a week she had not found a new prospect, and two sales had slipped through her fingers. She stopped at the hotel to get a newspaper and read the financial news. Then she walked down Main Street to the little office Hutchinson and Monroe had rented.
Hutchinson was there, leaning back in a chair, his feet crossed on the desk. He did not move when she came in, save to lift his eyes from the sporting page and knock the ashes from his cigar. He accepted her now as an equal in his own game, and there was respect in his voice. "Well, how's it coming?"
"I'm going to get out of the fields," she said. She pushed back her hat with a tired gesture and dropped into a chair.
"The hell you say! What's wrong?" Hutchinson set up, dropping the paper, and leaned forward on the desk. His interest was almost alarmed. She was making him money.
"Territory's gone bum. K. T. O. 25 will close down in another two weeks. The Limited's going to stop drilling. I'm going somewhere else."
"What! Who told you?"
"Nobody. I just doped it out."
He was relieved. He cajoled her. She was tired, he said. She was working in a streak of bad luck. Every salesman struck it sometime. Look at him; he hadn't made a sale in four weeks, and he hadn't lost his nerve. Cheer up!
She had been considering a plan, and she had chosen the moment to present it to him. The obliqueness of real-estate methods had astounded her. She had always supposed that men thought and acted in straight lines, logical lines. That, she had thought, gave them their superiority over irrational womankind. But the waste and blindness of business as she had seen it had altered her opinion of them. Her plan was logical, but she did not count upon its logic to impress Hutchinson. She reckoned on the emotional effect that would be produced by the truth of her prophecy. Letting that prophecy stand, she began to unfold her plan.
The big point in making a land sale was getting hold of a good prospect. That should not be done by personal canvassing. It was too wasteful of time and energy. It should be done by advertising. Now Clark & Hayward's advertising was all "Whoop'er up! Come on!" stuff. It made a bid for suckers. Hutchinson smiled, but she went on.
Men who would fall for that advertising were not of the class that had bank accounts. Hutchinson had lost a lot of money trying to sell the type of men who answered those advertisements. She mentioned incidents, and Hutchinson's smile faded.
She proposed a new kind of real-estate advertising; small type, reading matter, sensible, straight-forward arguments. She was going into a settled farming community, where land values were high, and she was going to try out an advertising campaign for farmers. It had been a good farming year; farmers had money, and they had brains. She was going to offer them cheap land, and she was going to sell them.
She had the money to pay for the advertising, but she needed some one to work with her. She proposed that Hutchinson come in with her on a fifty-fifty basis. He could have his name on the door; he could make arrangements with the firm for the territory. They would hesitate to give it to her. But he knew she could sell land. Together they could make money.
Hutchinson did not take the proposition very seriously. She had not expected that he would. He thought about it, and grinned.
"I'd have to be mighty careful my wife didn't get wise!" he remarked.
"Cut that out!" she said in a voice that slashed. She unloosened her fury at him, at all men, and looked at him with blazing eyes. He stammered—he didn't mean—"When I talk business to you, don't forget that it's business," she said. She picked up her wallet of maps and left the office. As she did so she reflected that the scheme would work out.
Ten days later word ran through the oil fields that all the K. T. O. leases were letting out men. Hutchinson's inquiries showed that the Limited was not starting any new wells. Monroe, who had saved his money, announced that he would stop work for the winter. Hutchinson, remembering that Mrs. Kennedy had funds for an advertising campaign, decided that her proposition offered a shelter in time of storm.
They talked it over again, considering the details, and Hutchinson went to the city to see Clark. He got a small advance on commission, and the Santa Clara Valley territory.
On the train, leaving the oil fields for the last time, Helen looked back at the little station, the sand hills covered with black derricks, the wide, level desert, and felt that she was leaving behind her the chrysalis of the woman she had become.