Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [128]
“How does one guarantee the probity of government science,” King said.
“Exactly.”
King examined his nails. Lifting his eyes from those, he threw across at Oliver a look that Susan could not read. It seemed friendly, but she detected in it some glint of appraisal or judgment. Suddenly aware of the thickness and warmth of the air, she rose quietly and opened the window above the table and sat down again. The cabin held an almost theatrical waiting silence, into which now, from the opened window, came the mournful sounds of a night wind under the eaves.
King let them wait. In her mood of critical appraisal, Susan reflected that when he was younger than Oliver–far younger, no more than twenty-five-he had been able to conceive his Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, and without money of his own, or influence beyond what he could generate by his own enthusiasm, get it funded by a skeptical Congress. He had impressed Presidents and made himself an intimate of the great. His reputation had gone around the world. But Oliver had been unable to persuade anybody in San Francisco to put money behind his demonstrated formula for hydraulic cement.
She was watching King, who now smiled at her out of the corners of his eyes. “It’s quite simple,” he said to Mrs. Jackson. “You pick men you would trust with your life, and you trust them with the Public Domain.”
The cabin murmured with approval. Over on her cot, Frank shook an enthusiastic fist in the air toward Oliver. Susan herself clapped her hands, she couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help being aware that part of her enthusiasm was for King’s reply and part was relief that Oliver’s insistence had not spoiled the talk, but elevated it.
Helen Jackson rocked and unclasped her arms from across her stomach. “That’s very well said. Let us hope you can find enough men you would trust with your life. Now tell me, how do you manage the private experts? How do you keep their association with your men from being profitable to a few rather than to the public? How do you prevent talk?”
“Talk you can’t stop,” King said. “But I can tell you to their faces, Madame, that the kind of men I try to pick for the Survey can be trusted as surely with their associations as they can with the Public Domain. What is more, any mining man in this room, including that henpecked man Mr. Jackson, would be as slow to take advantage of association with the Survey as the Survey would be to permit it.”
Smiling the widest of smiles, Mrs. Jackson rocked backward, then forward, and on the forward rock stood up. “I’ve been working too long on the Indians. That wretched history has made a cynic of me. I thought I would try you, and I’m satisfied. Mr. Jackson, we must go.”
Susan felt that they had been collectively working toward a climax that they were wise to cut short. Everybody rose, Oliver’s two helpers slid out the door so as not to be in the way. Such dears they were, and so right in their instincts. Shaking hands with W. S. Ward, she sent past him a warm look, first at Pricey and then at Frank, who said something elaborate and silent and then disappeared. Then Ward was gone, and Helen Jackson’s plump bosom was pressed against hers, with a hard brooch watch between them.
“My dear Susan, without your house Leadville would be a desert.”
She and her husband went. From the doorway, standing in the soft, buffeting, strangely warm wind, Susan saw them angle down the welted ditch in moonlight pale as milk. The mountains, luminous and romantic, lay all across the western horizon.
Emmons took her hand, then Janin–ugly chinless man, ugly crooked-faced Creole, both charming. Then Conrad Prager, whose good looks were as elegant as their ugliness: the old shooting coat hung on him like ermine. Finally Clarence King, who held her hand and gave her his full, warm, enveloping attention. She said, “If I had not heard it from Conrad’s lips I would never have believed your iniquity, and if I hadn’t heard it from yours, I would never have known how noble you are. We should all be grateful for you.”
“Frail,” King said. “Mortal and frail. I can sing my own praises until the first scandal. What we should be grateful for is you.