Half an hour later he called again, and demanded the same explanations. Then suddenly he interrupted her, and told her to come to Coalinga. It was a rotten hole, he repeated, and he wanted her.
That he should want her was almost too much happiness, but she tried to be cool and reasonable about it. She pointed out that she had just paid a month’s rent, that she had only ten dollars, that it might be wiser, she might be less a burden to him, if she stayed in San Francisco. She would make the ten dollars last a month, and that would give him time—He interrupted her savagely. He wanted her. Was she coming or was she throwing him down? Thought he couldn’t support her, did she? He always had done it, hadn’t he? Where she’d get this sudden notion he was no good? He could tell her Gilbert Kennedy wasn’t done for yet, not by a damned sight. Was she coming or—
“Oh, yes! yes! yes! I’ll come right away!” she cried.
While she was packing, she wished that she had something to pawn. She would have braved a pawnbroker’s shop herself. But the diamond ring had gone when the Guatemala rubber plantation failed; her other jewels were paste or semiprecious stones; her furs were too old to bring anything. She could take Bert nothing but her courage and her faith.
She found that her ticket cost nine dollars and ninety cents. When she reached Coalinga, after a long restless night on the train and a two-hours’ careful toilet in the swaying dressing-room, she gave the porter the remaining dime. It was a gesture of confidence in Bert and in the future. She was going to him with a high spirit, matching his reckless daring with her own.
He was not on the platform. When the train had gone she still waited a few minutes, looking at a row of one-story ramshackle buildings which paralleled the single track. Obviously they were all saloons. A few loungers stared at her from the sagging board sidewalk. She turned her head, to see on either side the far level stretches of a desert broken only by dirty splashes of sagebrush. The whole scene seemed curiously small under a high gray sky quivering with blinding heat.
She picked up her bags and walked across the street in a white glare of sunlight. A heavy, sickening smell rose in hot waves from the oiled road. She felt ill. But she knew that it would be a simple matter to find Bert in a town so small. He would be at the best hotel.
She found it easily, a two-story building of cream plaster which rose conspicuously on the one main street. There was coolness and shade in the wide clean lobby, and the clerk told her at once that Bert was there. He told her where to find the room on the second floor.
Her heart fluttered when she tapped on the panels and heard Bert call, “Come in!” She dropped her bags and rushed into a dimness thick with the smoke of cigars. The room seemed full of men, but when the first flurry of greetings and introductions were over and she was sitting on the edge of the bed beside Bert, she saw that there were only five.
They were all young and appeared at the moment very gloomy. Depression was in the air as thickly as the cigar smoke. She gathered from their bitter talk that they were land salesmen, that a campaign in Bakersfield had ended in some sudden disaster—“blown up,” they said—and that they found a miserable pleasure in repeating that Coalinga was a “rotten territory.”
Bert, lounging against the heaped-up pillows on the bed, with a cigar in his hand and whisky and ice-water at his elbow, let them talk until it seemed that despondency could not be more blacker, then suddenly sitting up, he poured upon them a flood of tingling words. His eyes glowed, his face was vividly keen and alive, and his magnetic charm played upon them like a tangible force. Helen, sitting silent, listening to phrases which meant nothing to her, thrilled with pride while she watched him handle these men, awakening sparks in the dead ashes of their enthusiasm, firing them, giving them something of his own irresistible confidence in himself.
“I tell you fellows this thing’s going to go. It’s going to go big. There’s thousands of dollars in it, and every man that sticks is going to be rolling in velvet. Get out if you want to; if you’re pikers, beat it. I don’t need you. I’m going to bring into this territory the livest bunch of salesmen that ever came home with the bacon. But I don’t want any pikers in my game. If you’re going to lay down on me, do it now, and get out.”
They assured him that they were with him. The most reluctant wanted to know something about details, there was some talk of percentage and agreements. Bert slashed at him with cutting words, and the others bore him down with their aroused enthusiasm. Then Bert offered to buy drinks, and they all went out together in a jovial crowd.
Helen was left alone, to realize afresh her husband’s power, and to reflect on her own smallness and stupidity. She stifled a nagging little worry about Bert’s drinking. She always wished he would not do it, but she knew it was a masculine habit which she did not understand because she was a woman. After all, men accomplished the big things, and they must be allowed to do them in their own way.
She opened the windows, but letting out the smoke let in a stifling heat and the sickening smell of crude oil. She closed them again and reduced the confusion of the room to orderliness, smoothing the bed, gathering up armfuls of scattered papers and unpacking her bags. When Bert came back a few hours later she
