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.