Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [62]
At a certain point Susan lifted her eyes to Oliver, realizing it was quite late, and asked a silent question that got a silent answer. “Won’t you stay to supper–a very simple supper?” she asked the baron. The baron was delighted A brief trip inside, a word to Lizzie, and she was back on the porch, talking.
Supper was a rattle and volley of opinions, reminders, acknowledgments, and discoveries of shared tastes. Starling was not only posted on art, he had read books. He was keen on Mr. James, he could quote Goethe, he had theories that the American tale was an indigenous form, quite different from the German Novelle. He was quick to shift the topic from Theodor Storm, whom Susan had not read, to Turgenev, whom she had. He tried to explain to her the precise meaning of the German term Stimmung. Listening to him, she was humiliated to see that Oliver had not properly washed his hands for supper: there was a dark smudge on one thumb.
When Lizzie had cleared away they tried the veranda again, but found it chilly. So silent Oliver lit a fire in the Franklin stove and they sat for two more hours talking about the Turco-Serbian difficulties that might involve Austria-Hungary, and hence the baron, in war; and of the reputation of Wagner, whom Starling thought overpraised by people more intent on being fashionable than in listening to music.
Oliver sat listening, nearly silent. When the baron finally, regretfully, rose to leave, he lighted a lantern and prepared to escort him down to Mother Fall’s. On the veranda steps Starling took Susan’s hand and kissed it. “Never,” he said to her earnestly in his almost-perfect English, “never in the world would I have dreamed that an evening like this could be spent in an American mining camp.”
When Oliver returned, Susan was still by the fire. She had been thinking unhappily how far out of the conversation Oliver was, just as he had been out of it during his one evening at the studio with Augusta and Thomas. How limitedly practical his talents were! His brother-in-law Conrad Prager, by contrast, would have risen gracefully to such an evening, would have been able to talk about books, art, and music, would probably have read Theodor Storm, would have quoted the baron back some Goethe. But Oliver, in such circumstances, fell silent, over-matched. No sooner had she had that treasonable thought than she was flooded with contrite affection, and determined to bring her old boy into things and not let him be shut out. But when he opened the door and stepped in and levered up the lantern’s glass and blew out the flame and came to sit beside her, and she opened her mouth to say something, what did she say? She praised the baron.
“Wasn’t he charming?” she said. “I don’t know when I’ve found anyone easier to talk to.”
With his legs outstretched before the fire, he seemed to ponder. Finally he said, “Kendall wants to make him my assistant ”
“Oh, good!” But he did not answer, only cocked his eyebrow, and so she said, “It would be good, wouldn’t it?”
“Good for supper parties. Not for the mine.”
“Why, what’s the matter with him?”
“He’s too soft.”
“Soft? He’s cultivated!”
“I wasn’t talking about his culture, I was talking about his capacities down the mine.” He unlaced his fingers from across his chest and showed her the back of one hand. What in the candlelight at supper she had thought a smudge at the base of the thumb was a scraped, swollen, discolored bruise. “See that? If I didn’t have that, he’d probably be dead.”
It