Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [66]
Though Susan would not have called the assortment of people who passed through her house a society of a stimulating kind, she was neither lonely nor bored. Though she affected to view with dismay Mary Prager’s suggestion that they plan to stay their lives in New Almaden, she took great satisfaction in how well Oliver did his job. His survey had spotted the Santa Isabel tunnel within a foot, his map grew by tiny meticulous increments and had the praise of Mr. Smith, who said there was no finer thing of its kind. Without glancing at the implications, Susan praised him to Augusta for having taken the measure of the largest and most difficult mine on the continent in a single year. She tried not to begrudge him the time he spent working at night and on Sundays, and when his eyes gave out on him or one of his headaches came on, she willingly read aloud to him the things he felt he should study-treatises on the construction of arches, reports on Colorado mining districts, technical journals full of the grimmest algebra. While she had him there helplessly listening, she generally managed to work in Thomas Hudson’s latest poem of Old Cupboard essay, and she always reported him to Augusta as deeply moved.
Her own work did not satisfy her, but the closer she came to her time the harder she worked, though she could hardly sit in a chair for ten consecutive minutes. She was always one to clean her desk. Work, progress, and the inviolability of contract, three of the American gospels, met and fused in her with the doctrines of gentility and the cult of the picturesque. She was some sort of cross between a hummingbird and an earth mover. The Scarlet Letter blocks went off in March.
It would be pleasant to find that these pictures, though done in exile and against difficulties, triumphantly justify her as an artist. They don’t. They are fairly routine illustrations of a kind now rendered almost obsolete by facsimile reproduction processes. However she attenuated Grandfather, who was her only male model, she couldn’t make him come out looking like a guilty and remorseful preacher. As for Lizzie, she looks more propped-up than passionate.
Nevertheless, done, packed up, sent off, the contract satisfied, the money assured. Hardly had she had Oliver turn the package over to Eugene the stage driver than he brought her a letter from Thomas Hudson. He said that he and Augusta had found her Almaden letters so colorful and interesting that he thought Scribner’s readers should share in the pleasure. Would she want to try putting them together into an article? If she could not (he was too delicate to hint why she perhaps could not), Augusta had said she would be glad to do the little arranging necessary. And did she have any drawings that could be used as illustrations?
“Good heavens,” she said to Oliver, “I can’t think Scribby is in such a bad way that it has to fall back on me for its Western correspondent. He ought to get Mr. Harte or Mark Twain or someone.”
“Harte and Mark Twain don’t live in New Almaden,” Oliver said. “If he didn’t want you to do it he wouldn’t have asked you. Wait till you’re rested after the baby and do it then.”
“But I’m not a writer!”
“He seems to think you are.”
She brooded. That night she wrote a hasty sketch and showed it to Oliver. “It’s all right,” he said. “But I’d take out that stuff about Olympian mountains and the Stygian caverns of the mine. That’s about used up, I should think.”
Meekly, astonished at herself, she took it out, rewrote the sketch as much in the spirit of discovery as possible, and sent it in. She put in Mother Fall, and her cook China Sam, who had murdered a rival and been reprieved from the rope because he was too good a cook to hang. He had a fourteen-year-old mail-order bride–sent, rumor said, by his real wife in China, who did not want to risk herself when Sam sent for her. She put in the Christmas custom of the Cornish miners, who visited the house and sang carols, those “rude uncultivated people” singing parts as if they had been born the children of choir masters. She put in every rag of local color she could think of about New Almaden, but she still mistrusted what she had done, and she still was afraid that Thomas would take it out of friendship and not for its own merits.