Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [134]
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