Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [49]
She flew into the bedroom and slammed the door, and as she fumbled into her traveling dress, all she had until the trunks came, she heard feet come up the porch and into the house, and voices, a man’s and a woman’s. When she came out–and she would have come out rosy and vivacious and charming as if she had not twenty seconds before been biting her lips and muttering un-Quakerish words at hooks and eyes that had disappeared in the fabric or eluded her fingers –Oliver introduced her to Mr. and Mrs. Kendall, the manager and his wife.
Mr. Kendall was not a smiler. He had gimlet eyes and a notably still, restrained manner. But he took her hand and looked into her face until she blushed, and said to Oliver, “Well, Ward, I see why you were so impatient to get readied up here.” Wanting to dislike him for his broken promise, she could find no fault with his manners. His wife was ladylike, gentle, soft-spoken, and welcoming. Both of them regretted that the Wards had not chosen to live down at the Hacienda, where things were rather more civilized and where people would have had a better chance of their company. Mrs. Kendall asked if she might come by in her carriage and take Susan for a drive around on the mountain trails. She asked them to dinner the Sunday following. She was almost effusively glad to have so charming an addition to New Almaden society, she had heard that Susan was an accomplished artist and hoped to become familiar with her work, she hoped that New Almaden would offer many subjects for her pencil. They stood on the veranda and admired the view and praised what Oliver had been able to do with the old cottage. There was a lot of waving and smiling in both directions as they left.
“Well,” Oliver said when the carriage had passed out of sight among the oaks. “That’s something I never saw before.”
“What? Their calling? It seems only polite.”
“They’ve never called on anyone else.”
“It’s because of Conrad Prager. Mr. Kendall knows you’ve got an important connection.”
“If he thought my connections were that important, why wouldn’t he let me go East and get you?” Oliver said. “Why would he stick me for the whole price of the renovations? No, you’ve got them wrong. They’re impressed because you’re an artist. You make New Almaden look classy.” He looked at her as he might have looked at a horse he was thinking of buying. “Matter of fact,” he said, “you do.”
In the afternoon Susan got a few minutes to herself and began a serial letter to Augusta. She got in a good deal of literary landscape painting and an impression of the manager and his wife. Mrs. Kendall, she thought, “has those qualities of surface prettiness and ladylike manners that make her at once attractive and uninteresting.” Of Kendall himself she said, “It is hard to believe that this largest mine in the world–Oliver says there are twenty-seven miles of underground workings-should be under the absolute despotic control of this small, mild-mannered man, and that one’s whole future should be at the mercy of his whim. Fortunately, he appears to regard Oliver highly, and Oliver, I am proud to say, bears himself in the presence of his superior as befits a man. In spite of his agreeableness I could not quite forget that he forced Oliver to spend his last cent in making over the cottage that is properly part of his compensation–the cottage moreover which he now praises for its charm.”
That night they had supper with the lower echelons of New Almaden society, the crew of junior engineers, college students, and “outside captains” who boarded with Mother Fall. I don’t suppose the atmosphere of a third-class boardinghouse was any more exhilarating to her than the near-gentility of the Kendalls, but at least it was honestly what it was, and Oliver was at ease in it. The talk was about evenly divided between engineering technicalities and comments an Oliver’s undeserved luck. In their exaggerated joking, at once boisterous and shy, they enlisted her sympathy, because she thought them lonely, but she did not therefore think of them as potential friends or companions. When she had occasion to add a few paragraphs to her letter she told Augusta that they were