Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [61]
Lizzie glanced up, and for a moment Susan saw in her face the expression she had been trying for all morning–the question that gleamed from the up-glancing eyes, the recklessness of the falling hair. “Wait,” she said. “Stay just as you are.” But she had barely picked up pencil and pad when Lizzie said, looking down through the woods, “Here comes Mr. Ward with somebody.”
“We’ll stop,” Susan said, and stood up. “My goodness, I wonder what . . . ?”
Fearing emergency, she hurried, but when she met him at the gate she saw that he was relaxed and cheerful, in his mine clothes but not smeared with mud as he always was if he had been underground. The dark young man with him was Baron Starling, an Austrian engineer. They had only come to let Starling change into mine clothes.
Going up the steps, Susan gave Oliver a meaningful look. “Not in my bedroom,” she meant it to say. “The spare room, even if it is full of trunks.” But he led the baron straight to the bedroom door and showed him in and shut the door behind him.
“Oh, why did you take him in there!” she said to him, low-voiced.
Oliver looked surprised. “Where else could I take him?”
“But my bedroom!”
He looked at her, frowning. The mulish look was gathering in his face, but she was too annoyed to care. “I’m sorry,” he said at last. “I guess I was thinking of it as our bedroom.”
Rebuked and angry, she was facing him on the veranda when the baron came out, ridiculous in Oliver’s too-large clothes, sleeves rolled up and trouser cuffs turned up, like a girl dressed up as a man. He had thick brown hair and great brown girl’s eyes, and he gave her what she supposed he supposed was a winning smile. “Thank you,” he said. “Now I am better prepared.”
“You’re very welcome.” She turned her eyes on Oliver, sulky on the veranda rail, and since she was condemned to this sort of hospitality in which her privacy was invaded and her home at the command of every stray engineer or geologist, she said, “Aren’t you going to eat before you go down?”
“We’ll share my lunch pail. We have to be down there when the labor isn’t being worked in, when the men are eating.” His eyes locked with hers, he smiled as if he knew his smile would be misinterpreted. “Maybe tea when we come out?”
“Of course.”
They went off down the trail toward the Kendall shaft house, and she flew inside to write indignantly to Augusta. I cannot tell you how it offended me to have a strange man taken into my bedroom. We must furnish our spare room at once if this sort of thing is to happen often.
Oliver and the baron returned late in the afternoon, soggy from the hot mine and the hotter trail. They sat on the veranda and had a glass of ale, and she drank with them because she would not be less than polite and also because she had been told that ale was good for queasiness.
For a while the two men were talking techniques of timbering in different kinds of rock, and she was silent. But then the baron made an effort to bring her into the conversation, broke off and turned to her to praise the house and the view, and to remark respectfully that he had heard she was a splendid artist, and to apologize for being so ill-educated as not to know her work. Oliver went and got The Skeleton in Armor and The Hanging of the Crane and some old copies of Scribner’s and St. Nicholas and laid them in Starling’s lap. Starling was charmed. He praised the quality of sentiment she was able to convey in a mere posture, the tilt or lowering of a head. She brought out her Scarlet Letter blocks, and Starling was amused to find in Oliver and Lizzie the recognizable originals of Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. Pressed for criticism, he ventured to point out a certain stiffness in one of the figures, a criticism that she accepted almost with enthusiasm.
It was Oliver’s turn to sit outside the conversation. She and the baron were eagerly tracing the relations of the Dusseldorf painters to the Hudson River school, and discussing