Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [180]
“How art thou remarkable? Let me count the ways. Hmm? She’s been out in the unhistoried vacuum of the West for nearly five years, as far from any cultivated center as possible. What does she do? She histories it, she arts it, she illuminates its rough society. With a house to keep and a child to rear, she does more and better work than most of us could do with all our time free. She goes to Mexico for two months and returns with a hundred magnificent drawings and what amounts to a short book–she writes as well as Cable and draws better than Moran. She has been over Mosquito Pass in a buckboard and across Mexico by stage coach and saddle horse, she has been down mines and among bandits, places where no lady ever was before, and been absolutely unspoiled by it. There isn’t a roughened hair on her head. To cap it, she is so vivacious and charming that she makes an old political warhorse like Godkin beg for sugar lumps, and draws a hundred pairs of glasses to our box.”
“Of course I don’t believe in this woman at all,” Susan said. “Those glasses were on Augusta.”
Thomas ignored her, with a sidling smiling look at his wife. “Her husband is away,” he said. “She has to deal with all the routines of life. So what is she doing? I know of at least three commissions for drawings that she is working on, and I would bet a year’s salary that she is also writing something.”
“Something ridiculously beyond her powers,” Susan said.
“What?” Augusta said. “Tell us.”
“Ah!” Susan said, “what do you care what I’m doing? You’re both doing things so much better and more important.”
“Of course we’re important,” said Thomas. “I would be the last to deny it. But I call your attention to the almost diseased modesty of this young woman we’re speaking of. To hear her tell it, she is a clumsy illustrator and a writer of amateur sketches. The fact is, any editor in the country would jump at the chance to sew up everything she does. I live in daily fear that she’ll be lured away from the Century by gold and flattery.”
“What are you writing?” Augusta said. Where she sat by the fire, the light touched one side of her face, which glowed with dark warmth. Her skin had always been Susan’s despair, it was as flawless as wax fruit. “You have to tell us-we’re your first public. Did you know I’ve kept every single letter from you, ever since you went out to New Almaden?”
“And made up my first sketch for me out of them. If I am anything, you two made me.”
“Nobody made you but yourself,” Thomas said. “I also suspect the hand of God–no other hand could be quite that sure of itself. Now tell us what you’re writing, in those hours when lesser people sleep.”
He was one who could make her believe in herself. Close friend, once a sort of suitor, he was also the most respected editor in the United States. Merely to be his contributor made one’s reputation. She said, “Something beyond me. I’m constantly being stopped by ignorance. I have always to write from outside, from the protected woman’s point of view, when I ought to be writing from within. I’m doing a novel about Leadville.”
“Will it serialize? Never mind. We must have it. I’ll top all other bids.”
“There won’t be any. Nobody but a friend like you would publish it.”
“If it were something by Mr. James I wouldn’t guarantee to take it with more confidence. You’re sure fire, Leadville is sure fire. Howells will gnash his teeth.”
That beautiful, reassuring smile! “Ah, isn’t it nice to be loved by you two!” Susan said. “Yes, it’s about Leadville, and the Adelaide’s trouble with the Highland Chief and the Argentina. Pricey is in it–do you remember Pricey? I’m sure I wrote you about him, the little Englishman who stood up in his stirrups one day and quoted Emerson to me on the banks of the Arkansas. He was terribly beaten by the Highland Chief thugs when they came in to steal or destroy records in Oliver’s office. There’s a girl in it whom I’ve made the daughter of the villain, and a young engineer who’s in love with her but at war with her father.”
“They sound like people I know,” Thomas said,