Drawing upon all her resources of salesmanship, she presented her plan. She wished to organize a crew of subscription solicitors and cover the state, section by section. She would interview chambers of commerce, boards of trade, business men, and farmers, gathering material for an article on local conditions; she would get free publicity from the newspapers; she would stimulate interest in the Pacific Coast.
“Everyone likes to read about himself, and next he likes to read about his town. I will see that every man and woman in the territory knows that the Pacific Coast will run articles about his own local interests. Then the solicitors will come along and take his subscription. The solicitors will work on commission; the only expense will be my salary and the cost of writing the articles. And the articles will be good magazine features, in addition to their circulation value.”
His smile was pityingly superior.
“My dear young lady, if I used our columns for schemes like that!” She perceived that she had encountered a system of ethics unknown to her. “We are not running a cheap booster’s magazine, angling for subscriptions.” And he pointed out that every article must interest a hundred thousand subscribers, while an article on one section of the state appealed only to the local interest. The talk became an argument on this point.
“But towns have characters, like people. Every town in California is full of stories, atmosphere, romance, color. Why, you couldn’t write the character of one of them without interesting every reader of your magazine!”
He ended the interview with a challenge.
“Well, you bring me one article that will pass one of our readers and I may consider the scheme.” He turned to a pile of letters, and his gesture indicated his satisfaction in dismissing her so neatly and finally.
It left a sting that pricked her pride and made her nerves tingle. She was passed outward through the suave atmosphere of the offices, and every shining wood surface affected her like a smile of conscious superiority.
She went to see Mr. Clark, who welcomed her with regrets that she had left the organization, and at her suggestion readily promised her a place in his office at a moderate salary. But to take it seemed a self-confession of failure. Mr. Clark’s offer was left open, and she returned to San José smarting with resentful humiliation.
The sun was low when she alighted at the station. Amber-colored light lay over the green of St. James Park, and the long street beyond glowed with the dull, warm tone of weathered brick. The tall windows and gabled roofs of the old business blocks threw back the flames of the level sun-rays. In the gray light below them the bell of El Camino Real stood voiceless at the corner of the old Alameda beside a red fire-alarm box, and around it scores of farmers’ automobiles fringed the wide cement sidewalks.
Here, within the memory of men yet living, fields of wild mustard had hidden hundreds of grazing cattle and vaqueros, riding down to them from the foothills, had vanished in seas of yellow bloom; here the padres had trudged patiently on the road from Santa Clara to Mission San José; here pioneers had broken the raw soil and lined the cup of the valley with golden wheat fields, and Blaine had come in the heyday of his popularity, counseling orchards.
Now, mile after mile to the edge of the blue hills, prune-trees and apricots and cherries stood in trim rows, smooth boulevards hummed with the passing of motorcars, and where the vaqueros had broken the wild mustard, San José stood, the throbbing heart of all these arteries reaching into past and present and future.
“And he says there’s nothing of interest here!” she cried. “Oh, if only I could write it! If I could write one tenth of it!”
Midnight found her sitting before her typewriter, disheveled, hot-eyed, surrounded by crumpled sheets of paper, pondering over sentences, discarding paragraphs, by turns glowing with satisfaction and chilled by hopelessness. “I could write an advertisement about it,” she thought. “I could interest a buyer. Magazine articles are different. But human beings are all alike. Interest them. I’ve got to interest them. If I can just make it human, make them see—Oh, what an idiot that man was!” Absorbed in her attempt to express the spirit of San José, she still felt burning within her a rage against him. “I’ll show him, anyway, that there are some things he doesn’t see!”
Next morning she read her work and found it worthless.
“I’ll write it like a letter,” she thought, and pages poured easily from the typewriter. She spent the next day slashing black pencil-marks through paragraphs, shifting sentences, altering words. The intricacy of the work fascinated her; it allured like an embroidery pattern, challenged like a land sale, roused all her energies.
When she could do no more, she read and reread the finished article. She thought it hopelessly stupid; she thought it as good as some she had read; a sentence glinted at her like a ray of light, and again it faded into insignificance. She did not know what she thought about it. The memory of that irritating young man decided her. “It may be done absurdly, but it will prove my point. There is something here to write about.” She sent it to him.
After five empty days, during which she struggled in a chaos of indecisions, she tore open an envelope with the Pacific Coast imprint. “Perhaps that plan will go through, after all,” she thought. She read a note asking her to call, a note signed “A. C. Hayden, Editor.”
The next afternoon
