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.
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 faraway 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 anyone 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 percent 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, learned 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’t sell you 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 wildcat 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
