Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [125]
Somehow we kept picking up other friends, and when we arrived home we bulged our little cabin. Mr. Jackson and Mr. Abadie had returned, which gave us three sedate couples, but there were in addition Mr. King, Mr. Emmons, and Mr. Wilson of the Survey, Conrad Prager and Henry Janin who have recently arrived, Mr. Donaldson of the Public Lands Commission, Oliver’s clerk Pricey, who hid under the chairs, practically, but immensely enjoyed himself, and Frank, who had returned from fishing with two fish which he handsomely presented to me. He helped me do the dishes left from lunch. Mr. King went up to his camp and brought back a bottle of brandy, and we toasted the republic and sang war and jubilee songs around the fire.
Most of these people are skeptical about our determination to bring Ollie out, and my determination to stay myself. Mr. King and Mr. Jackson, in a cynical way, pretended to believe that long and frequent separations are the only basis for a sound marriage. This brought Mrs. Jackson up yipping like a little terrier, for like me she followed her husband West. Yet even she doubts Leadville as a home. She urged Denver upon us. Leadville, she said, is too high. Grass won’t grow here, hens won’t lay, cows won’t give milk, cats can’t live. Needless to say, none of them persuaded us. Oliver, who normally tests his condition by how he feels after a hundred-mile ride, says he never felt better, and I must say I feel exhilarated.
I closed the evening by getting out a note I had just had from Professor Rossiter Raymond, who had left us a little while before, after a mine inspection. He had enjoyed himself by our fire, but had caught a tremendous cold as soon as he left the mountains. He sent this humorous little roofer to express his sentiments.
Let princes cough and sneeze
In their palaces of ease
Let colds and influenzas plague the rich;
But give to me instead
A well-ventilated head
In a little log cabin on a ditch.
Don’t you think we have pleasant times? The only single hard thing is that Oliver has to be so much away inspecting mines that, as they say here, are too poor to pay, too rich to quit. He envies the Survey men, who can ride off in the morning with a sandwich and a geological hammer and spend the whole day hunting fossils, or just looking at magnified mountains through a theodolite.
5
“Let me pose you a question,” said Helen Hunt Jackson. “It has nothing to do with the Indian. I know how Americans respond when their interests conflict with the Indian’s rights. They respond dishonorably. But I would like to know something else. How does a government scientist act when he finds himself in possession of information worth millions to some capitalist, when all his closest friends are mining experts in search of precisely that sort of information?”
Filling the rocker but not rocking, she sat with arms folded across her stomach, her shoes hanging like sash weights two inches off the floor. Imperturbably she met the smiles, murmurs, and cries of mock dismay–when she chose to, she could make every eye in the room turn her way, every mouth stop talking. All but Mr. Jackson, who looked at the ceiling and clapped a hand to his brow.
Clarence King raised his plump, animated face and laughed. “I hope you’re not suggesting that any of us would have trouble telling the public interest from our own.”
“I suggest nothing,” said Mrs. Jackson comfortably. “I ask a question that occurs to me. Here sit you geologists charged with surveying the resources of the Public Domain, and here sit your friends whose whole business it is to get hold of such information, preferably before it’s published. It seems to me to offer a nice ethical problem.”
“Now,” said her husband, “you see the consequences of letting women in where men are transacting business. She’ll bring on a congressional investigation.”
“Tell me, Mr. King,” said Mrs. Jackson.