Angle of Repose - Wallace Stegner [76]
Then ahead the low roof lifted, the right hand wall opened into a roomlike vault, the sound of hammers came plainly through air instead of secretly through the rock. Across the opening, figures that had been bending to work on the face rose and turned; their candles stared. Behind them three fixed candles like the candles on an altar shone on a wall of living red.
While the men talked, stooping to follow something from low on one side to high on the other, looking over samples of rock that the captain picked out and handed them, Susan stood back out of the way. It seemed to her that the intent group were like priests at a ceremony. She did not try to understand what they were talking about, beyond her vague comprehension that the vein was not acting as it should, or going where it ought to, and that Mr. Kendall was ready to blame someone for something. Whether it was Oliver he blamed, she couldn’t tell, and she was too fascinated by the pictures they made, the gleams and reflections that came off planes and facets of rock, the way shadows swallowed whole corners and pockets of the labor, to worry about it now.
How living the faces were, and how eloquent the postures, of the miners who stood or sat waiting for the bosses to get through. What things the vagrant inadequate light did to a brown cheek, a mustache, the whiteness of teeth, the shine of eyes looking out their corners at her. It was like nothing she had ever drawn, a world away from the cider presses and sheepfolds and quiet lanes and farmyard scenes and pensive maidens of her published drawings, yet this scene, lurid and dimly fearful, spoke to her. She felt it as a painting of saints in a grotto, or drinkers in a dark Dutch cellar. The curve of a shovel had the pewterish gleam of a Ten Eyck tankard, the very buttons on overalls had life.
She made an effort to see the Mexican crew as the strengthless dead flocking around visitors who had just brought word of the living world, but they did not really suggest shades. If they had been tallow-faced Cornishmen they would have served that fancy better. These dark-skinned ones could not grow pale even underground; they might be buried but they were fiercely alive. She stood memorizing them, hoping to draw them later.
“Well, why didn’t you?” she heard Mr. Kendall say to the Mexican captain. “You should have come to Ward or me the minute you suspected it, instead of fooling around guessing. Now we won’t know till we shoot these holes. So let’s get ahead with it.”
The cluster of miners stirred, one or two squatting ones stood up, a standing one reached for the hammer he had leaned against the wall. Though their eyes had kept wandering to Susan, about as common a sight down that mine as a unicorn would have been, they had obviously kept their ears tuned to the bosses. It was clear to Susan that Kendall made them uneasy. She believed that if Oliver were examining that face, and made a decision, and gave an order, they would have moved no less promptly, but with more relaxation in their muscles, and perhaps with words in their mouths, or jokes, or humorous complaints. For Mr. Kendall they said nothing, but they moved very promptly.
But now Conrad Prager was pulling something from the vast pocket of his shooting coat. “Maybe we should pour a little libation, for luck,” he said.
He had a bottle in his hand. A laugh went around the miners, an alertness had come over them all. “Kendall?” Mr. Prager said, and of fered the bottle.
“Not for me,” Kendall said, and waved it away. Prager offered it to Oliver, who passed it to the captain. The captain took it, but before he drank he turned his dark, heavy-mustached face toward Susan