Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [175]
“My dear,” said Augusta, and bent her glowing glance on Susan and seemed to forget for a moment, in that searching, half-smiling, meaningful look, what it was she had started to say. “Coeur d‘Alene,” she said after a moment. “He was well advised to choose that over Tombstone. Coeur d’Alene, that’s charming.”
“The mine he’s interested in is called the Wolf Tooth,” Susan said.
Lovers and antagonists, they stared at each other. “My friend whom you do not intend to like” was between them as solidly as if he stood warming his coattails at Augusta’s fire. Susan read in Augusta’s face her opinion of men who followed gold strikes and wound up wintering among the seedy politics of territorial capitals. Her own chest was tight, she felt overcorseted and smothered. She might in a moment jump up and leave the room, or fly to Augusta and throw her arms about her and cry that it made no difference, no matter what direction her life had taken, no matter whom she was married to, Augusta would always have her place. But he’s not what you think him, he’s not! she felt like saying. Why must you always pull back from touching even his name? Why must you act as if I had married a leper or a cad or a ne’er-do-well?
Because the silence was growing tense, she withdrew her eyes from Augusta’s and looked at Thomas. Sleepy-eyed, without untenting his fingers, he said, “How does your story end?”
“Not the way ours did,” Susan said, and made a face and laughed. “The villain has to die, I think. I think he has his men set a powder charge in the hero’s drift, to blow up that entrance to the mine and shut the right people out. The men beat up Pricey when he stumbles on them setting the charge. Then the hero finds Pricey, and goes hunting them with a Winchester. He finds the dynamite and carries it into the enemy’s tunnel before it explodes, and the villain, coming down to check on his villainy, is killed by it.”
Again she made a face, threw a look at Thomas and then, for a flickering instant, at Augusta, and then looked down at her hands. She felt embarrassed, all her pleasure in the evening was gone. In this room hung with the trophies of culture, her story sounded melodramatic and rough. She felt like a squaw explaining how you tanned a deerskin by working brains into the bloody hide and then chewing it all over until it was soft. Augusta was sitting with her head bent, frowning at the jeweled hands on her knees.
“I know nothing about explosives,” Susan said. “I know nothing about the motives of criminal, drunken, brutal men, nothing about the working of mines, nothing about how it feels to be beaten up or to hold off a gang of thugs with a Winchester. Oliver keeps all that to himself, he thinks I should be protected from it.”
Another quick clash with the dark eyes. Augusta’s mouth was pursed, her brows raised as if she asked a question. You see? Susan meant to tell her. I’ll defend him. I declare his right to be.
“But I nursed poor Pricey,” she said to Thomas. “They broke his nose and his cheekbone and kicked out his front teeth and hurt his head so that he was never right afterward.”
“I believe your qualifications are adequate,” Thomas said with his slow smile. “How about the engineer and the young lady? Wedding bells?”
“I . . . don’t know. I don’t think so. She has been raised in the East, she is altogether above her father, though he was once a gentleman. I think, don’t you, that a girl with any delicacy of feeling couldn’t bring herself to marry a man indirectly responsible for her father’s death. No matter how much she was in love with him.”
“An unhappy ending?” Augusta said. “Oh, Sue, why?”
Susan’s oppression had grown until she felt she would shrink away to nothing under the weight of it. Her story, barbarous to begin with, and hence open to Augusta’s unspoken scorn, was silly when told from the woman’s point of view, and hence open to her own. It was as if Mr. James should write a dime novel. And Thomas’s imperturbable consideration could not warm away the chill. She knew that with Oliver in New York an evening like this would simply not have happened. The one time they had gone together to dine, the studio had been full of dark spaces, uncomfortable silences, too much trying on both sides.