Angle of Repose (39 page)

King’s lips pursed, his bright blue eyes looked at once amused and watchful. Intelligence jumped in them, words formed on his lips but did not fall. He looked a question at Donaldson, but Donaldson pushed the unspoken suggestion away with bearlike hands.

“Well,” King said, “Schurz has it easy. He’s a crusading Dutchman, honesty has brought him to power and there’s no reason he should change. He finds it as natural to remain honest in office as Mrs. Jackson would. Donaldson has it easy, too. His report on the public lands will be the only thing of its kind ever undertaken in this country, incomparably better than anything we’ve had, but Western Congressmen will seize on its information and ignore its recommendations, and bury. the report so efficiently that nobody will ever offer poor Tom a bribe worth taking. Powell also has it easy. Having only one hand, and having that in a dozen things, he has no other to hold out. I’m the one to pity. I’d prefer to be honest but I’d like very much to be rich. It’s a precarious position.”

“I shall begin to believe the
Tribune
can’t be believed,” said Mrs. Jackson with a smile.

“You know,” said Oliver unexpectedly from his seat against the wall, “I’d kind of like to hear you
answer
that question of Mrs. Jackson’s.”

It was the wrong note. They were all having such fun, like skaters cutting figures on rubbery ice, and now Oliver had clumsily fallen through. His remark suggested criticism of King’s playfulness. Playfulness was part of his charm. No one doubted his integrity in the least –who in the country had demonstrated more? She bent her brows very slightly at Oliver behind the semicircle of heads, but the damage was done. She could feel King, Prager, Janin, Emmons, all of them, with their impeccable social awareness, adjusting with the slightest changes of position and expression to the new tone.

“You mean you’re serious,” King said.

“I certainly
am,” said Mrs. Jackson.

“Me too,” said Oliver.

She wished he had not taken off his coat, hot as the cabin was. With his brown corded forearms and his sunburned forehead he seemed one fitted for merely physical actions, like a man one might hire to get work done, not one who could devise policy and direct the actions of others. With a sad, defensive certainty she saw that he lacked some quality of elegance and ease, some fineness of perception, that these others had. It seemed to her that he sat like a boy among men, earnest and honest, but lacking in nimbleness of mind.

“How does one guarantee the probity of government science,” King said.

“Exactly.”

King examined his nails. Lifting his eyes from those, he threw across at Oliver a look that Susan could not read. It seemed friendly, but she detected in it some glint of appraisal or judgment. Suddenly aware of the thickness and warmth of the air, she rose quietly and opened the window above the table and sat down again. The cabin held an almost theatrical waiting silence, into which now, from the opened window, came the mournful sounds of a night wind under the eaves.

King let them wait. In her mood of critical appraisal, Susan reflected that when he was younger than Oliver–far younger, no more than twenty-five-he had been able to conceive his Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, and without money of his own, or influence beyond what he could generate by his own enthusiasm, get it funded by a skeptical Congress. He had impressed Presidents and made himself an intimate of the great. His reputation had gone around the world. But Oliver had been unable to persuade anybody in San Francisco to put money behind his demonstrated formula for hydraulic cement.

She was watching King, who now smiled at her out of the corners of his eyes. “It’s quite simple,” he said to Mrs. Jackson. “You pick men you would trust with your life, and you trust them with the Public Domain.”

The cabin murmured with approval. Over on her cot, Frank shook an enthusiastic fist in the air toward Oliver. Susan herself clapped her hands, she couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help being aware that part of her enthusiasm was for King’s reply and part was relief that Oliver’s insistence had not spoiled the talk, but elevated it.

Helen Jackson rocked and unclasped her arms from across her stomach. “That’s very well said. Let us hope you can find enough men you would trust with your life. Now tell me, how do you manage the private experts? How do you keep their association with your men from being profitable to a few rather than to the public? How do you prevent talk?”

“Talk you can’t stop,” King said. “But I can tell you to their faces, Madame, that the kind of men I try to pick for the Survey can be trusted as surely with their associations as they can with the Public Domain. What is more, any mining man in this room, including that henpecked man Mr. Jackson, would be as slow to take advantage of association with the Survey as the Survey would be to permit it.”

Smiling the widest of smiles, Mrs. Jackson rocked backward, then forward, and on the forward rock stood up. “I’ve been working too long on the Indians. That wretched history has made a cynic of me. I thought I would try you, and I’m satisfied. Mr. Jackson, we must go.”

Susan felt that they had been collectively working toward a climax that they were wise to cut short. Everybody rose, Oliver’s two helpers slid out the door so as not to be in the way. Such dears they were, and so right in their instincts. Shaking hands with W. S. Ward, she sent past him a warm look, first at Pricey and then at Frank, who said something elaborate and silent and then disappeared. Then Ward was gone, and Helen Jackson’s plump bosom was pressed against hers, with a hard brooch watch between them.

“My dear Susan, without your house Leadville would be a desert.”

She and her husband went. From the doorway, standing in the soft, buffeting, strangely warm wind, Susan saw them angle down the welted ditch in moonlight pale as milk. The mountains, luminous and romantic, lay all across the western horizon.

Emmons took her hand, then Janin–ugly chinless man, ugly crooked-faced Creole, both charming. Then Conrad Prager, whose good looks were as elegant as their ugliness: the old shooting coat hung on him like ermine. Finally Clarence King, who held her hand and gave her his full, warm, enveloping attention. She said, “If I had not heard it from Conrad’s lips I would never have believed your iniquity, and if I hadn’t heard it from yours, I would never have known how noble you are. We should all be grateful for you.”

“Frail,” King said. “Mortal and frail. I can sing my own praises until the first scandal. What we should be grateful for is you.” His full-lidded, bright blue eyes fixed on hers with an easy, flattering familiarity, he kept hold of her hand in the doorway. “Let me second Mrs. Jackson. There are things about this cabin that make me gnash my teeth, one of them being that it should all belong to your undeserving husband. You hear that, Oliver? You should live on your knees. Not only do you have one of the few wives in Leadville, you have to have
such
a wife.” To Susan he said, “I forgive him only on condition that my knock is never ignored.”

Again he looked at Oliver, lightly smiling, as if there were some sort of understanding or question between them. Oliver said, “She’d open it even if I objected.”

Their look broke off easily. Was there, Susan wondered again, a faint condescension on King’s part? How much did these men know about Oliver? How much might Conrad have told them? The notion flicked into her mind that King thought Oliver Ward inferior to his wife. At once her mind began justifying and explaining, it called her attention to the injustice of a world in which Mr. King’s acts of probity made him a national hero and Oliver’s only lost him his job. Why hadn’t she thought to turn the talk to inventiveness, so that she could have mentioned Oliver’s creation of cement? Then they wouldn’t all leave his house thinking of him as somehow
junior,
shaking his hand with this edged, polite condescension.

Oliver obviously did not feel it. He said, “Thank you for the brandy–again.”

“A trifle,” King said. “Less than Henry’s reputation. Don’t tell Mrs. Jackson, but I have my valet steal it from the White House cellar. It’s one of the perquisites of government service.”

He gave them, one after the other, the smile that melted people and made them eager to believe or serve him. Henry Adams said of him, much later, that he had something Greek in him, a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander, and Susan would have agreed. She stood hugging herself in the doorway, collecting the tossed-back good nights, watching their shadows ripple ahead of them in the windy moonlight as they turned up the ditch. When they were only an unseen grating of boots in gravel, she shut the door and turned, not entirely contented in mind.

“Well,” she said. “Mrs. Jackson ended the evening with a hard question.”

“And got a good answer.”

“He’s charming company.”

“He’s a great man.”

“Yes,” she said, somewhat surprised. “I suppose he is.” She went to open both casements wide, and came back to open the door.

“Good idea,” Oliver said. “We sort of smoked the place up.”

She thought he watched her curiously as she turned off the lamps. They undressed in the dark, kissed lightly, and lay down, each in his separate narrow cot. The wind blew through the cabin, bellying the curtains bunched on their wire, wakening a curl of flame in the fire. Gradually the room expanded into bluish dusk. Out the open door the hillside swam in pale light, and in the visible strip of sky a cloud, dark silver with bright edges, blazed like something just out of a smelter pot. The air flowing across her felt fresh, cool, high, and late. She lay experimenting with the shadow of her hand in the slash of moonlight from the window; and still thinking rebelliously about his lacks, about his incorrigible juniorness, she said in argument against her own discontent, “It was you who got him to answer seriously.”

“I wanted to hear what his answer really was.”

“You ought to speak up more in company.”

“That’s what you’re always telling me.”

“It’s true. If you don’t, people will think you haven’t anything to say.”

“I don’t.”

“Oh, Oliver, you do too! But you just sit back.”

“Like a bump on a log,” Oliver said. Did his voice growl with the surliness which meant that any minute he would shut up completely and let her go on urging in the dark, getting herself more and more entangled and unhappy and exposing more and more her disappointment in him? Because that was what it was. She wanted more for him, and better, than he apparently wanted for himself.

But he didn’t close up. In a moment he said, almost as if he sensed a clash coming on and wanted to avoid it as much as she did, “If I listen I might learn something. I won’t learn anything listening to myself.”

“Other people might.”

“Not any of those people.”

“You mean they’re incapable of learning?”

“I mean they already know anything I could tell them.”

“You could have told them something about integrity, when that subject came up. What was more to the point than your experience with Kendall or Hearst?”

He barked once, incredulously. He heaved over in the cot to face her. “What should I have said? ‘Speaking of integrity, let me tell you about the time I told George Hearst where to head in?”’

“Of course you’re right. I should have told them.”

“If you had, I’d have died right there.”

“But they ought to
know
you! You sit so silent they’ll all think you’re nobody, and it isn’t true. You don’t want to seem like Pricey.”

Now surliness did roughen his voice. “You can always tell me from Pricey because I don’t rock.”

“Oh, Oliver,” she said hopelessly, “be serious. Those are some of the most important people in the world in your field. You owe it to yourself to make a good impression.”

“Did I insult anybody?”

“No, you just never
say
anything. Mr. King and Mr. Emmons won’t have any idea how good you are at things, and how much you can
do
.”

He said something muffled by the pillow.

“What?”

“I said, They know what I can do.” ’

“How could they, possibly?”

“If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have asked me to join the Survey.”

For a moment she lay completely still, with her face turned toward his shadowy shape. The room snowed slowly with flakes of luminousness. “They did? When?”

“This afternoon.”

“But you didn’t
say
anything!”

“No,” he said with a little laugh. “I never do. Matter of fact, I never had the chance. Everybody else has been talking seventeen to the rod.”

“But why didn’t one of them say something tonight?”

“I suppose they’re waiting till I’ve had a chance to talk it over with you.”

“And you were going right to sleep!”

“I didn’t want to keep you awake all night thinking about it.”

“Oliver,” she said, “they must think
very
well of you. If we can believe Mr. King, it means he’d trust you with his life.”

“King’s got a literary side. What it means is, he’d trust me with the Public Domain. Or with a job.”

She slid out of bed and sat on the edge of his cot. His arm curled to hold her there, and she bent and said quickly into his neck, behind his ear, “Will thee forgive me?”

“Sure. What for?”

“For wanting to make thee over. I’m a foolish woman, I’m too much in love with talk and talkers. Talk isn’t that important. What’s important is thee. Thee is dear to me.”

“I’m awful glad to hear it,” he said. “Come inside, you’re shivering.”

Obediently she slid in beside him. The sagging narrowness of the cot jammed them together. “Will thee take it?” she asked.

“That depends on you.”

“Thee’d be happier.”

“Maybe. I hate all this lawing and claim jumping and swearing to false affidavits and all this playing expert in a game where both sides are crooked. It’d be nice to do a job that just expanded knowledge.”