Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [70]
There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses. Another is that it was rough, ready, and unkempt, and ribald about anything not as unkempt as itself, whereas in fact there was never a time or place where gentil ity, especially female gentility, was more respected. Not if it was the real thing, and no one in New Almaden doubted that Susan’s was. The camps all but doffed their caps to Susan Ward, as if she had been a lady from a castle instead of from a cottage.
6
After the warm walk down the trail they stood talking at the door of the shaft house. Tregoning the hoist man sent out his window a smile from which all the upper front teeth had been extracted. Ordinarily he would have punctuated the smile with a spurt of tobacco juice from its dark center, but today he had his company manners on: bigwigs going down. Oliver went inside and leaned his elbows on the railing and talked across the machinery at him, easy and familiar.
Looking heavy, soft, and excited, Miss Prouse pushed the perambulator out of the trampled, dusty sunlight and under the shade of the nearest oak. But when Susan made some bright sound of questioning farewell and moved as if to join her, Conrad Prager said with his indulgent smile, “Susan, have you ever been down the mine?”
“Never.” Her eyes went to Mr. Kendall, who was watching Oliver and Tregoning as they talked inside the shaft house. Kendall’s head turned, and her eyes bounced off his impassive face like pebbles off a cliff. Mr. Kendall was the reason she had never been underground. He did not believe in women going down into mines. Mines were for the production of ore.
“Wouldn’t it give you something interesting for your sketch?”
Mr. Kendall’s expression was so marked that she turned to Oliver. He had quit talking to Tregoning and was listening, as impassive as the manager himself. If there was any disagreement between his manager and his brother-in-law, Oliver would have to stay out of it. She understood that. “I’d be in the road,” she said. “Anyway I don’t have drawing materials with me.”
“How about your vocabulary?” Mr. Prager said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I didn’t mean you could draw down there. It would be too dark. I meant it might be an experience you could write into your sketch.” He was wearing a canvas coat with bulging pockets, as if he were headed for a duck blind instead of toward the inspection of an ambiguously behaving ore body. He said, “Oliver, isn’t it your opinion that an engineer’s wife should go down at least once, just to enlarge her sympathies?”
Slightly smiling, alert to the expressions on three faces, Oliver came out of the shack “I certainly have no objection if Mr. Kendall doesn’t.”
“Then that settles it,” Prager said. “Domestic understanding and art both demand it. There’s no objection, is there, Kendall?”
“None,” said Mr. Kendall. He said it promptly and even heartily, but as Susan shudderingly let Mr. Prager fit a mine hat over her hair (what heads have worn that hatl) she had an impression of the manager’s careful eyes and of his mouth that firmed itself into an expression too explicitly meant to be pleasant. Still, if he disapproved, he couldn’t take it out on Oliver, since it was all Mr. Prager’s doing, and Mr. Prager was not only a distinguished mining expert but one of Mr. Kendall