Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [73]
“So,” Oliver said, and pulled at her arm. But she held back for a moment, laying her ear to the wall, half convinced that the sound she had heard there was phantasmal, that this lonely boy with his loaded car was all there was, that her vision of busy little men swarming through the dark was the product of her overheated imagination. She was oppressed and made strangely afraid by the sight of the straining boy, and by the fact that he wore a face she recognized, and she wasn’t sure whether she wanted to hear the patient Morse of the drillers or whether she hoped to hear only the reassuring silence of stone.
Tak . . . the mountain said to her. Tak . . . tak . . . tak . . . tak. She let herself be led forward. Ahead, darkness opened to dim radiance; behind, dim radiance was swiftly overtaken by black. Shaken, dependent, nearly abject, she stumbled along thinking how for months Oliver had been surveying this honeycombed hell, how the black hole that so oppressed her was only one of dozens, a few hundred feet out of twenty-seven miles. And he knew it all, he had groped through all of it by candlelight, through parts of it scores of times. Down in this oppressive darkness and oppressive air he had stayed for fifteen, twenty, twenty-four hours at a stretch, while she sat in the cottage and felt how lonely she was. Even as she hopped and stumbled beside him, laughing a little at her own clumsiness, she felt gratitude for the big warm hand on her arm, and she knew an appalled pride in what he could do.
Then ahead the low roof lifted, the right hand wall opened into a roomlike vault, the sound of hammers came plainly through air instead of secretly through the rock. Across the opening, figures that had been bending to work on the face rose and turned; their candles stared. Behind them three fixed candles like the candles on an altar shone on a wall of living red.
While the men talked, stooping to follow something from low on one side to high on the other, looking over samples of rock that the captain picked out and handed them, Susan stood back out of the way. It seemed to her that the intent group were like priests at a ceremony. She did not try to understand what they were talking about, beyond her vague comprehension that the vein was not acting as it should, or going where it ought to, and that Mr. Kendall was ready to blame someone for something. Whether it was Oliver he blamed, she couldn’t tell, and she was too fascinated by the pictures they made, the gleams and reflections that came off planes and facets of rock, the way shadows swallowed whole corners and pockets of the labor, to worry about it now.
How living the faces were, and how eloquent the postures, of the miners who stood or sat waiting for the bosses to get through. What things the vagrant inadequate light did to a brown cheek, a mustache, the whiteness of teeth, the shine of eyes looking out their corners at her. It was like nothing she had ever drawn, a world away from the cider presses and sheepfolds and quiet lanes and farmyard scenes and pensive maidens of her published drawings, yet this scene, lurid and dimly fearful, spoke to her. She felt it as a painting of saints in a grotto, or drinkers in a dark Dutch cellar. The curve of a shovel had the pewterish gleam of a Ten Eyck tankard, the very buttons on overalls had life.
She made an effort to see the Mexican crew as the strengthless dead flocking around visitors who had just brought word of the living world, but they did not really suggest shades. If they had been tallow-faced Cornishmen they would have served that fancy better. These dark-skinned ones could not grow pale even underground; they might be buried but they were fiercely alive. She stood memorizing them, hoping to draw them later.
“Well, why didn’t you?” she heard Mr. Kendall say to the Mexican captain. “You should have come to Ward or me the minute you suspected it, instead of fooling around guessing. Now we won’t know till we shoot these holes. So let’s get ahead with it.”
The cluster of miners stirred, one or two squatting ones stood up, a standing one reached for the hammer he had leaned against the wall. Though their eyes had kept wandering to Susan, about as common a sight down that mine as a unicorn would have been, they had obviously kept their ears tuned to the bosses. It was clear to Susan that Kendall made them uneasy. She believed that if Oliver were examining that face, and made a decision, and gave an order, they would have moved no less promptly, but with more relaxation in their muscles, and perhaps with words in their mouths, or jokes, or humorous complaints. For Mr. Kendall they said nothing, but they moved very promptly.