Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [71]
She wished she could like Mr. Kendall better, for he and his wife had gone out of their way to be friendly, and he had given Oliver every chance to prove himself. Only last week he had taken Oliver off the survey, which he was tired of, and put him on construction, where his inventiveness had a chance to show. Nothing but kindness, really, for nearly a year. Yet she couldn’t quite like him, and she knew no one who did. So nearly a gentleman, Mr. Kendall was, so fatally not one.
Mr. Prager was tucking her hair up under the edges of the hat. “It wouldn’t do to set you afire. You wouldn’t be half so attractive bald.”
Feeling with her hands around the rim of the unfamiliar headgear with its candle socket on the front, she had a dismayed thought. “The baby! How long will we be?”
“No more than an hour,” Oliver said. “Unless we’re going to look at more than this labor on the four hundred.”
“That’s all,” Prager said. Kendall nodded without comment. “You may take him home, then,” Susan said to Marian Prouse, and let Prager help her aboard the skip. It moved under her with a thin iron groan. A birdcage on a string, it hung by its cable over unimaginable depths–six hundred feet this shaft went down; there were others twice as deep.
The manager lighted his candle and replaced the hat on his head. “All right, Tregoning.” The bell clinked, steam sighed, the bottom caved away, slowly the light went gray, grayer, dusky, dark. Hanging to Oliver’s arm, Susan turned her face upward, staring up along the cable at the shrinking square from which daylight peered blindly down after them. She was looking for stars, knowing that stars were visible in daylight from deep wells, but she saw none. It took her a few seconds to realize that she was looking not into sky but into the roof of the shaft house.
The square of light was dim and small now, the air was warm and damp and smelled of creosote. She found herself breathing through her mouth. The candle on the manager’s hat flickered along a sluggish upward flow of yellowish rock. As they sank, the shaft appeared to narrow, the walls pinched and squeezed together. If anything should slump or cave they would all be pressed into the rock like fossils.
“All right?” Oliver said. A solid shadow, he might have been looking down at her; somehow she felt he was smiling. His arm squeezed her hand against his side.
“Of course she’s all right,” said Prager. “This is a thoroughbred. Not one lady-like scream.”
“I wouldn’t dare scream,” Susan said shakily. “If I started I couldn’t stop.”
Their laughter reassured her. They took this descent into Hades as casually as she would go down a flight of stairs.
The single candle wavered, their shadows slid on the upward-flowing rock. Then the rock became plank, the skip snagged for an instant that stopped her heart, shook free, rattled past some obstruction. A hole gaped, hollowed by dim light out of utter blackness, and in the hollow she saw a loaded ore car, a man beside it, both of them already sliding up out of sight before they had been more than half seen. “Hello, Tommy,” Oliver said to the vanishing apparition. “Going down to the four hundred. You’ll have a little wait.”
The hole had already squeezed shut, wiping him out from the head downward. Smudged face, white eyes, yellow pocket of light, obscure body and legs and ore car, were gone. Plank was wet rock again. “There was a picture for you,” said Conrad Prager.
“For Rembrandt, you mean.”
Her heart was thudding from the momentary alarm of the snag ging skip; she quivered from the unexpectedness of that encounter. It was as if a shutter had opened and a wild face looked in for an awful moment and then been shut back into its blackness. It terrified her to think that the whole riddled mountain crawled with men like that one. Under her feet as she walked in sunshine, under her stool and umbrella as she sat sketching, under the piazza as she rocked the baby in his cradle, creatures like that one were swinging picks, drilling holes, shoveling, pushing ore cars, sinking in cages to ever deeper levels, groping along black tunnels with the energy of ants. It raised the gooseflesh on her arms; it was as if she had suddenly discovered that the conduits of her blood teemed with tiny, busy, visible vermin.