Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [173]
“Girl! Anyway I’m not sure I could stand being attenuated in Mr. James’s fashion. I was half glad he didn’t appear, isn’t it awful? I’d have been terrified to find myself talking to him. And he would have distracted my attention from you two.”
She felt warm, tired, cherished. Before the fire’s warmth she positively blinked. It had been the kind of evening that heightened her color and loosened her tongue. First dinner at the house of E. L. God-kin, the editor of The Nation, to meet his houseguest Henry James, who didn’t appear–sent down his apologies because of an earlier indiscretion with coffee. So she had to put up with being seated between Mr. Godkin and Joseph Jefferson. Then Patience, with Godkin on one side of her and Thomas on the other, laughing themselves weak. Then oysters and champagne for eight here at the studio, and praise for her Mexican sketchbooks, spread out on display. Now this sweet and intimate late half hour of low fire and warm eyes. She would have to go back to Milton and work hard for a week to take the bubbles out of her blood.
Thomas’s smiling, narrow face watched her from the shadowy chair. All around, on walls, mantel, whatnot, highboy, were mementoes of the Hudsons’ rich life–the sort of life she had shared all evening: photographs of the famous, a drawing of Augusta by Homer, a pair of china lions, the gift of Raphael Pumpelly, a whole wall of Japanese prints, a Malay kris with a wavy blade, an Australian boomerang, a lugubrious wooden saint from a Burgundian church. They gathered objects as they gathered friends; the richness of their accumulations was an index of the open-handedness of their giving. They made the wildest incongruities harmonious. They took Susan Ward, a country cousin, and blended her with Jefferson, Godkin, themselves–could even have blended her with Henry James if he had appeared. Now they sat and looked at her with such love and approval that her warm face grew warmer. It was joy to hear them praise her; she could not resist.
“All right,” she said, “you may tell me in what way I’m remarkable.”
Augusta from her hassock–soft face, dark hair, shining brown eyes, said, “As if you didn’t know.”
Thomas slid farther into his chair with his elbows propped and his fingers tented before his mouth and talked to the weathered saint on his pedestal behind Susan.
“How art thou remarkable? Let me count the ways. Hmm? She’s been out in the unhistoried vacuum of the West for nearly five years, as far from any cultivated center as possible. What does she do? She histories it, she arts it, she illuminates its rough society. With a house to keep and a child to rear, she does more and better work than most of us could do with all our time free. She goes to Mexico for two months and returns with a hundred magnificent drawings and what amounts to a short book–she writes as well as Cable and draws better than Moran. She has been over Mosquito Pass in a buckboard and across Mexico by stage coach and saddle horse, she has been down mines and among bandits, places where no lady ever was before, and been absolutely unspoiled by it. There isn’t a roughened hair on her head. To cap it, she is so vivacious and charming that she makes an old political warhorse like Godkin beg for sugar lumps, and draws a hundred pairs of glasses to our box.”
“Of course I don’t believe in this woman at all,” Susan said. “Those glasses were on Augusta.”
Thomas ignored her, with a sidling smiling look at his wife. “Her husband is away,” he said. “She has to deal with all the routines of life. So what is she doing? I know of at least three commissions for drawings that she is working on, and I would bet a year’s salary that she is also writing something.”
“Something ridiculously beyond her powers,” Susan said.
“What?” Augusta said. “Tell us.”
“Ah!” Susan said, “what do you care what I’m doing? You’re both doing things so much better and more important.