Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [73]
“Never.” Her eyes went to Mr. Kendall, who was watching Oliver and Tregoning as they talked inside the shaft house. Kendall’s head turned, and her eyes bounced off his impassive face like pebbles off a cliff. Mr. Kendall was the reason she had never been underground. He did not believe in women going down into mines. Mines were for the production of ore.
“Wouldn’t it give you something interesting for your sketch?”
Mr. Kendall’s expression was so marked that she turned to Oliver. He had quit talking to Tregoning and was listening, as impassive as the manager himself. If there was any disagreement between his manager and his brother-in-law, Oliver would have to stay out of it. She understood that. “I’d be in the road,” she said. “Anyway I don’t have drawing materials with me.”
“How about your vocabulary?” Mr. Prager said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I didn’t mean you could draw down there. It would be too dark. I meant it might be an experience you could write into your sketch.” He was wearing a canvas coat with bulging pockets, as if he were headed for a duck blind instead of toward the inspection of an ambiguously behaving ore body. He said, “Oliver, isn’t it your opinion that an engineer’s wife should go down at least once, just to enlarge her sympathies?”
Slightly smiling, alert to the expressions on three faces, Oliver came out of the shack “I certainly have no objection if Mr. Kendall doesn’t.”
“Then that settles it,” Prager said. “Domestic understanding and art both demand it. There’s no objection, is there, Kendall?”
“None,” said Mr. Kendall. He said it promptly and even heartily, but as Susan shudderingly let Mr. Prager fit a mine hat over her hair (what heads have worn that hatl) she had an impression of the manager’s careful eyes and of his mouth that firmed itself into an expression too explicitly meant to be pleasant. Still, if he disapproved, he couldn’t take it out on Oliver, since it was all Mr. Prager’s doing, and Mr. Prager was not only a distinguished mining expert but one of Mr. Kendall’s directors.
She wished she could like Mr. Kendall better, for he and his wife had gone out of their way to be friendly, and he had given Oliver every chance to prove himself. Only last week he had taken Oliver off the survey, which he was tired of, and put him on construction, where his inventiveness had a chance to show. Nothing but kindness, really, for nearly a year. Yet she couldn’t quite like him, and she knew no one who did. So nearly a gentleman, Mr. Kendall was, so fatally not one.
Mr. Prager was tucking her hair up under the edges of the hat. “It wouldn’t do to set you afire. You wouldn’t be half so attractive bald.”
Feeling with her hands around the rim of the unfamiliar headgear with its candle socket on the front, she had a dismayed thought. “The baby! How long will we be?”
“No more than an hour,” Oliver said. “Unless we’re going to look at more than this labor on the four hundred.”
“That’s all,” Prager said. Kendall nodded without comment. “You may take him home, then,” Susan said to Marian Prouse, and let Prager help her aboard the skip. It moved under her with a thin iron groan. A birdcage on a string, it hung by its cable over unimaginable depths–six hundred feet this shaft went down; there were others twice as deep.
The manager lighted his candle and replaced the hat on his head. “All right, Tregoning.” The bell clinked, steam sighed, the bottom caved away, slowly the light went gray, grayer, dusky, dark. Hanging to Oliver’s arm, Susan turned her face upward, staring up along the cable at the shrinking square from which daylight peered blindly down after them. She was looking for stars, knowing that stars were visible in daylight from deep wells, but she saw none. It took her a few