"You were paying the other salesmen fifteen per cent.," said Helen.
That was by special arrangement. The ordinary salesmen in the field were paid seven and a half percent. Helen accepted the statement, being unable to refute it. She proposed that she should continue working for the firm on twelve and a half per cent., five per cent. to apply on the amount Bert owed them. Mr. Clark countered by offering her ten per cent. with the same arrangement. She was stubborn, and he yielded.
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.
CHAPTER 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 far-away 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 any one 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.