Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [72]
Within three weeks Boykins was swinging in his cradle from the veranda ceiling–long, easy swings that they thought Mrs. Elliott would have to approve of. None of your jerky ordinary cradle motions. Cosmic tides. Susan was resolved that he was to be the world’s healthiest infant. Never so much as a cold, if care could prevent it. She bragged to her mother and Augusta that he had napped outside from the age of two weeks. (A little Western boastfulness? You, Grandmother?) Studying him, she decided that he was not pretty (beauty was reserved for Augusta’s children), but that his face already showed character. His eyes, she reluctantly reported to ox-eyed Augusta, were fatally blue.
While she was recovering among the letters, gifts, and attentions of those who loved and looked after her, Thomas Hudson with his delicate sense of timing requested three illustrations for a ballad by the Norwegian poet Hjalmar Boyesen. He said with tongue in cheek that her experience of drawing Longfellow Vikings ought to let her do these without models, and she might find them a pleasant diversion from the duties of motherhood. She understood him perfectly: he believed in her not only as a woman, but as an artist. So there she sat, drawing burros and senoritas for the New Almaden sketch with one hand, and with the other producing the synthetic stuff that gentility thought virile. Give her credit, she laughed at herself.
She laughed even harder when she was well enough to go out sketching in the open air, hunting the local color of Mexican Camp, Cornish Camp, and the mine. Miners and miners’ wives meeting her on the trails must have clutched their brows. Here came the engineer’s missus in a serge walking costume and a big hat. Behind her came Miss Prouse, almost as authentically a lady, pushing Boykins in his perambulator through the cinnabar-colored dust. (He had to go along with the chuck wagon, so to speak.) Behind Miss Prouse came an urchin, Cornish or Mexican, lugging drawing materials, a stool, and an umbrella. People got clear off the trail to let them pass. Some may have laughed when it was safe to do so. But not all, and none without some sort of acknowledged respect that was less for Susan’s art than for her quality.
There are several dubious assumptions about the early West. One is that it was the home of intractable self-reliance amounting to anarchy, whereas in fact large parts of it were owned by Eastern and foreign capital and run by iron-fisted bosses. Another is that it was rough, ready, and unkempt, and ribald about anything not as unkempt as itself, whereas in fact there was never a time or place where gentil ity, especially female gentility, was more respected. Not if it was the real thing, and no one in New Almaden doubted that Susan’s was. The camps all but doffed their caps to Susan Ward, as if she had been a lady from a castle instead of from a cottage.
6
After the warm walk down the trail they stood talking at the door of the shaft house. Tregoning the hoist man sent out his window a smile from which all the upper front teeth had been extracted. Ordinarily he would have punctuated the smile with a spurt of tobacco juice from its dark center, but today he had his company manners on: bigwigs going down. Oliver went inside and leaned his elbows on the railing and talked across the machinery at him, easy and familiar.
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