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, straightforward 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 someone 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.
XVII
On a hot July afternoon three years later she drove a dusty car through the traffic on Santa Clara Street in San José, and stopped it at the curb. When she had jumped to the sidewalk she walked around the car and thoughtfully kicked a ragged tire with a stubby boot. The tire had gone flat on the Cupertino road, and it was on her mind that she had put too much air into the patched tube. For two miles she had been expecting to hear the explosion of another blowout, and had been too weary to stop the car and unscrew the air valve.
“Darn thing’s rim-cut, anyway,” she said under her breath. “I’ll have to get a new one.” She dug her notebook and wallet from the mass of dusty literature in the tonneau and walked into the building.
Hutchinson was telephoning when she entered their office on the fourth floor. A curl of smoke rose from his cigar-end on the flat-topped desk and drifted through the big open window. There were dusty footprints on the ingrain rug, and the helter-skelter position of the chairs showed that prospects had come in during her absence. Hutchinson chuckled when he hung up the receiver.
“Ted’s going to catch it when he gets home!” he remarked, picking up the cigar.
“Stalling his wife again?” Helen was running through her mail. “I suppose there isn’t a man on earth who won’t joyfully lie to another man’s wife for him,” she added, ripping an envelope.
“Well, Holy Mike! What would you tell her?”
Helen looked up quickly from the letter.
“I’d tell her the—” she began hotly, and stopped. “Oh, I don’t know. I suppose he’s got that redheaded girl out in the machine again? He makes me tired. If you ask me, I think we’d better get rid of him. That sort of thing doesn’t make us any sales.”
There was silence while she ripped open the other letters and glanced through them. Her momentary anger subsided. She reflected that there were men on whom one could rely. Her thoughts returned to Paul as to a point of security. His appearance in San José a few months earlier had been like the sight of a cool spring in a desert. She had not realized the scorn for all men that had grown in her until she met him again and could not feel it for him.
She glanced from the window at the clock in the tower of the Bank of San José building. Half-past four. He would still be at the ice-plant. This thought, popping unexpectedly into her mind, startled her with the realization that all day she had been subconsciously dwelling on the fact that it was the day on which he usually came to San José since his firm had acquired its interests there.
The clock suggested simultaneously another thought, and she snatched the telephone-receiver from its hook. “Am I too late for the afternoon delivery?” she anxiously asked the groceryman who answered the
