Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [38]
“In California.”
“Yes.”
“And he wants to take you out there.”
“As soon as he finds the right place, with some permanence in it.”
“And you’ll go.”
“When he sends for me, yes.”
Augusta resumed her pacing, throwing her hands outward in little distracted gestures. She straightened a picture on the wall without stopping. She bent her head to gnaw on a knuckle. “What about your art? What about everything we’ve worked for?”
“My art isn’t that important. I’ll never be anything but a commercial illustrator.”
“You know that’s utterly wrongheaded!”
“I know I want to marry him and go where his career takes him. It won’t be forever, but it may take some time. He’s not flashy, he’ll take a little while to establish himself. I can go on drawing. He wants me to.”
“In some mining camp.”
“I don’t know where.”
Now Augusta’s agitation broke out. She stopped, she gripped her hands before her face and shook them. “Susan, Susan, you’re madl You’re throwing yourself away! Ask Thomas. He’d never agree this is right.”
“In this,” said Susan, as if in a novel, “I can consult no one but myself.”
“And make a mistake that will ruin your career and lead you a desolate life.”
“Augusta, you’ve never even met him!”
“And don’t want to. I loathe his very name. He can’t come in and overturn your life like this. What about us?”
They looked, they fell into each other’s arms, they even laughed at the extremity of their disagreement. But though they patched up their difference, they did not change; they were both strong-minded women. Augusta did not abate her disapproval, Susan’s resolution did not weaken. Maybe she was trapped—she had given an impulsive promise, and promises with her were binding. But I think she had been stirred by Oliver Ward’s masculine strength, by his stories of an adventurous life, by his evenness of disposition, by his obvious adoration. I think she was for the first time physically in love with a man, and I like her courage in going where her emotions led her.
But it was hard to know where that would be. For a while Oliver was surveying something for the Southern Pacific around Clear Lake. Then he was on the loose in San Francisco, refusing to take just anything, turning down the jobs with no future, looking for just the right place that would lead somewhere. He stayed for several months with his sister Mary, who had married a prominent mining engineer named Conrad Prager, and at last he found, through Prager’s influence, a job that excited him. He wrote that he was to be Resident Engineer of the New Almaden mercury mine near San Jose, an ancient and famous mine that had furnished mercury for the reduction of the gold of the whole Gold Rush. In a few weeks he would come East and marry her and lead her West.
Then he wrote saying that he was in the midst of an underground survey and couldn’t get away. He would have to finish it before he could leave.
She waited while the river broke up and the old Mary Powell began again to lay her plume along the high spring water. Crocuses came and went, the apple trees exploded, lilacs drenched the air, summer came with its visitors and boarders. Before long it was a year since Oliver Ward had held her by the ankles over the waterfall at Big Pond. Augusta was pregnant, they were reconciled to some new relationship, they wrote each other a good deal about the contrary pulls upon a woman who was also an artist. Augusta was very strong that Susan should not let marriage destroy her career. It was as if, having all but given up painting herself, she wanted to force Susan to be their double justification. And give her credit—perhaps she recognized in Susan Burling a capacity that she herself did not have.
But she never accepted Oliver Ward. They simply agreed not to talk about him any more than necessary.
Susan waited, not unhappily, diligent in her work, dutiful in her daughterhood, refreshing herself occasionally in the old friendships at the 15th Street studio. Counting from New Year’s Eve, 1868, when she first met Oliver Ward, she had been waiting just a little longer than