Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [36]
Was he showing off? I suppose so. God knows why else a man would bring a pistol to his courting. His character and his role were already Western, he had only that way of asserting himself against the literary gentility with which her house was associated in his mind.
I don’t care about that, and I don’t care whether she was astonished, impressed, shocked, or amused. What I find myself held by, in imagination, is their tentativeness, their half-awkward half-willingness to admit their understanding, as they faced each other in the doorway by the light of the lamp she carried. That too is like one of her drawings —narrative, sidelighted, suffused with possibility.
5
She was quickly reassured that he was not impossible, at least for any society short of Augusta’s. He was most admiring of her talent and respectful of her friends, he was as big and restful as she had found him in the library in Brooklyn Heights, he had a way of speaking lightly of things without persuading her that he felt them lightly. He was not talkative, but once wound up he charmed them all with his stories of life in California. Her parents sat up late to hear him, though when her New York friends visited they went early to bed. He could play chess—that promised cozy evenings. Her father said he had never seen a man pick a basket of apples faster. And when he took hold of the oars of a rowboat, the rowboat nearly jumped out of the water.
But she puzzled where to take him on some excursion. Long Pond and Black Pond, liked by New York visitors, were not enough for a man who had seen the Yosemite and ridden the length of the San Joaquin Valley through square miles of wildflowers. So she and Bessie and John took him to Big Pond, eight miles back in the woods, a wild romantic place where a waterfall poured into a marble pool and then fell through diminishing pools to the lake.
It was incorrigibly Hudson River school—brown light, ragged elms, romantic water. There they sat on the grass confronting nature. When they had eaten, they did what poets and philosophers did outdoors in the early years of the picturesque—strolled, picked early autumn leaves or late gentians. Susan sketched a little while he stood admiring by. They did not spoon, though Bessie strategically led her husband away so the two could be alone. Having no acceptable way of expressing their feelings directly, they probably vented them on nature. I can see a lot of tableaux while she is struck speechless by a view or a flaming swamp maple, and he stands there with his hat in his hand before the purity of her sensibility.
Late in the afternoon they were back at their picnic spot at the top of the fall. She had always responded strongly to storms, rain in the face, wild winds, wild waters, exciting crossings of the Hudson through floating ice. On this day she lay down and hung her face over the cliff to see down the waterfall. At about the same time, and for similar reasons, John Muir was hanging over the brink of Yosemite Falls dizzying himself with the thunder of hundreds of tons of foam and green glass going by him. Muir had a good deal farther to look down, and the rush of water was far wilder past his ear, but Susan Burling had something her fellow romantic did not. She had Oliver Ward hanging onto her ankles to make sure she didn’t spill over.
Anxious? Not on your life. In these days when a girl goes to bed with anybody who will pat her in a friendly way on the rump, few will be able to imagine how Oliver Ward felt, holding those little ankles. He would not have let go if fire had swept the hilltop, if warrior ants had swarmed over him from head to foot, if Indians had sneaked from the bushes and hacked him loose from his hands. As for Susan Burling, upside down and with her world whirling, that strong grip on her ankles was more than physical contact made sweet by the fact that it came between the bars of an iron cage of propriety, touch asserting itself against a thousand conventions. It was the very hand of the protective male.