Angle of Repose

by Wallace Stegner

  “You choose to be frivolous,” said Mrs. Jackson. “What would you say if a Congressman did ask you such a question? As one sometime might.”

  “But Helen,” said Henry Janin from the nearer cot, “none of these geologists has any information that’s worth thirty cents to your husband or me. I’ve pumped them, I know. The Survey’s function is to publish on pretty maps what’s already known to everyone.”

  “Including the diamond-producing formations,” Emmons said into his empty brandy glass.

  It seemed to Susan that for a moment everybody held his breath. She thought in dismay, It’s the kind of remark duels are fought over! But Janin only reeled from the hips, contorting his dark Creole features into an expression of anguish, and with his hand on his heart said in a high voice, “Unfair! Murder most foul!”

  “Poor Henry,” King said. “Deceived by unscrupulous men, he vouched for the authenticity of that wretched diamond mine. So a government scientist, whom out of modesty I forbear to name, had to expose the fraud. It very neatly demonstrates the difference you inquire about, being private interest and government principle.”

  Conrad Prager, consulting his long beautiful hands, said, “I’ve always wondered about that case, if it wasn’t a put-up job. Private expert and government scientist could have planned the whole thing together, hired their accomplices, salted the mine. Janin could have gone and inspected it, all properly blindfolded and all that. Then comes King, like a knight on a white horse, to expose it-well after the accomplices have flown. Janin consoles himself for the trifling loss of his reputation with a good slice of cash-takes the cash and lets the credit go, you might say-and King gets not only cash but a great deal of credit. It’s like letting thieves into the vaults of the Bank of England and then knighting them for crying ‘Stop thief!’ after they’ve stolen everything.”

  “Must I bear this?” Janin said.

  They were all laughing, Susan not least. How characteristic, she was thinking, that these men of great capacity, captains and heroes involved in great affairs, should take their accomplishments as a light-hearted joke, and their expertness with such levity that they could joke Mr. Janin about his error, accepting the fact that they were his equals in that as in other things. Their life was the life toward which Oliver had always aspired, and she for him-a life that could provide real elegance and association with first class minds. Stopped for a moment while she watched Oliver, in shirt sleeves, sitting on the floor, reach King’s brandy bottle across to Emmons, she said, “I never till now knew how unprincipled you are, Mr. King.”

  King said, “I call the jury’s attention to the way in which speculation has become supposition, supposition certainty, and certainty accusation. It’s a lesson in the workings of the expert mind, which can go from a hunch to an affidavit, and from an affidavit to a fee, within minutes. With great authority the expert says what is not necessarily so.”

  “I was only suggesting some of the possibilities of government science,” Prager said.

  “Now that you’ve abandoned ship and joined the enemy. Tell the people what’s happened to Ross Raymond, as a possibility of private expertise.”

  Prager laughed and laid his hand on his thigh. “Alas.”

  “Alas, why?” Jackson asked.

  “Alas his mine is played out. It’s been high-graded to death.”

  “According to whom?”

  “According to an upright government scientist, who just might have been tipped off by a private expert. They both got here too late to keep him from making a mistake that’s going to cost somebody a lot of money.”

  “Oh, what a shame,” Susan said. She had liked Rossiter Raymond, and he had been so uplifted by the altitude, and the prospects of the mine, and the company in her cabin. “He was such a good companion,” she said.

  “When he had that well-ventilated head here,” Prager said. “Well, he’s like Henry, he’ll get over his error, unless he should make another mistake and come back to Denver and meet some of his principals. Then he’d really have a well-ventilated head.”

  “Which does not answer my original question,” said Mrs. Jackson, placid in her rocker. “I know mining experts make mistakes—my heavens, I’m married to one. Mr. Janin pretends to think they are paid by investors to tell investors what investors want to hear. By that rule Mr. Raymond made no mistake at all. By any rule he hasn’t been dishonest. But how does a government scientist remain honest? I read newspaper editorials saying that Mr. King and Mr. Donaldson and Major Powell and Secretary Schurz are inaugurating a period of unfamiliar integrity in the Department of the Interior. Given the temptations, how can you guarantee any such thing?”

  King’s lips pursed, his bright blue eyes looked at once amused and watchful. Intelligence jumped in them, words formed on his lips but did not fall. He looked a question at Donaldson, but Donaldson pushed the unspoken suggestion away with bearlike hands.

  “Well,” King said, “Schurz has it easy. He’s a crusading Dutchman, honesty has brought him to power and there’s no reason he should change. He finds it as natural to remain honest in office as Mrs. Jackson would. Donaldson has it easy, too. His report on the public lands will be the only thing of its kind ever undertaken in this country, incomparably better than anything we’ve had, but Western Congressmen will seize on its information and ignore its recommendations, and bury. the report so efficiently that nobody will ever offer poor Tom a bribe worth taking. Powell also has it easy. Having only one hand, and having that in a dozen things, he has no other to hold out. I’m the one to pity. I’d prefer to be honest but I’d like very much to be rich. It’s a precarious position.”

  “I shall begin to believe the Tribune can’t be believed,” said Mrs. Jackson with a smile.

  “You know,” said Oliver unexpectedly from his seat against the wall, “I’d kind of like to hear you answer that question of Mrs. Jackson’s.”

  It was the wrong note. They were all having such fun, like skaters cutting figures on rubbery ice, and now Oliver had clumsily fallen through. His remark suggested criticism of King’s playfulness. Playfulness was part of his charm. No one doubted his integrity in the least -who in the country had demonstrated more? She bent her brows very slightly at Oliver behind the semicircle of heads, but the damage was done. She could feel King, Prager, Janin, Emmons, all of them, with their impeccable social awareness, adjusting with the slightest changes of position and expression to the new tone.

  “You mean you’re serious,” King said.

  “I certainly am,” said Mrs. Jackson.

  “Me too,” said Oliver.

  She wished he had not taken off his coat, hot as the cabin was. With his brown corded forearms and his sunburned forehead he seemed one fitted for merely physical actions, like a man one might hire to get work done, not one who could devise policy and direct the actions of others. With a sad, defensive certainty she saw that he lacked some quality of elegance and ease, some fineness of perception, that these others had. It seemed to her that he sat like a boy among men, earnest and honest, but lacking in nimbleness of mind.

  “How does one guarantee the probity of government science,” King said.

  “Exactly.”

  King examined his nails. Lifting his eyes from those, he threw across at Oliver a look that Susan could not read. It seemed friendly, but she detected in it some glint of appraisal or judgment. Suddenly aware of the thickness and warmth of the air, she rose quietly and opened the window above the table and sat down again. The cabin held an almost theatrical waiting silence, into which now, from the opened window, came the mournful sounds of a night wind under the eaves.

  King let them wait. In her mood of critical appraisal, Susan reflected that when he was younger than Oliver-far younger, no more than twenty-five-he had been able to conceive his Survey of the Fortieth Parallel, and without money of his own, or influence beyond what he could generate by his own enthusiasm, get it funded by a skeptical Congress. He had impressed Presidents and m
ade himself an intimate of the great. His reputation had gone around the world. But Oliver had been unable to persuade anybody in San Francisco to put money behind his demonstrated formula for hydraulic cement.

  She was watching King, who now smiled at her out of the corners of his eyes. “It’s quite simple,” he said to Mrs. Jackson. “You pick men you would trust with your life, and you trust them with the Public Domain.”

  The cabin murmured with approval. Over on her cot, Frank shook an enthusiastic fist in the air toward Oliver. Susan herself clapped her hands, she couldn’t help it, and she couldn’t help being aware that part of her enthusiasm was for King’s reply and part was relief that Oliver’s insistence had not spoiled the talk, but elevated it.

  Helen Jackson rocked and unclasped her arms from across her stomach. “That’s very well said. Let us hope you can find enough men you would trust with your life. Now tell me, how do you manage the private experts? How do you keep their association with your men from being profitable to a few rather than to the public? How do you prevent talk?”

  “Talk you can’t stop,” King said. “But I can tell you to their faces, Madame, that the kind of men I try to pick for the Survey can be trusted as surely with their associations as they can with the Public Domain. What is more, any mining man in this room, including that henpecked man Mr. Jackson, would be as slow to take advantage of association with the Survey as the Survey would be to permit it.”

  Smiling the widest of smiles, Mrs. Jackson rocked backward, then forward, and on the forward rock stood up. “I’ve been working too long on the Indians. That wretched history has made a cynic of me. I thought I would try you, and I’m satisfied. Mr. Jackson, we must go.”

  Susan felt that they had been collectively working toward a climax that they were wise to cut short. Everybody rose, Oliver’s two helpers slid out the door so as not to be in the way. Such dears they were, and so right in their instincts. Shaking hands with W. S. Ward, she sent past him a warm look, first at Pricey and then at Frank, who said something elaborate and silent and then disappeared. Then Ward was gone, and Helen Jackson’s plump bosom was pressed against hers, with a hard brooch watch between them.

  “My dear Susan, without your house Leadville would be a desert.”

  She and her husband went. From the doorway, standing in the soft, buffeting, strangely warm wind, Susan saw them angle down the welted ditch in moonlight pale as milk. The mountains, luminous and romantic, lay all across the western horizon.

  Emmons took her hand, then Janin-ugly chinless man, ugly crooked-faced Creole, both charming. Then Conrad Prager, whose good looks were as elegant as their ugliness: the old shooting coat hung on him like ermine. Finally Clarence King, who held her hand and gave her his full, warm, enveloping attention. She said, “If I had not heard it from Conrad’s lips I would never have believed your iniquity, and if I hadn’t heard it from yours, I would never have known how noble you are. We should all be grateful for you.”

  “Frail,” King said. “Mortal and frail. I can sing my own praises until the first scandal. What we should be grateful for is you.” His full-lidded, bright blue eyes fixed on hers with an easy, flattering familiarity, he kept hold of her hand in the doorway. “Let me second Mrs. Jackson. There are things about this cabin that make me gnash my teeth, one of them being that it should all belong to your undeserving husband. You hear that, Oliver? You should live on your knees. Not only do you have one of the few wives in Leadville, you have to have such a wife.” To Susan he said, “I forgive him only on condition that my knock is never ignored.”

  Again he looked at Oliver, lightly smiling, as if there were some sort of understanding or question between them. Oliver said, “She’d open it even if I objected.”

  Their look broke off easily. Was there, Susan wondered again, a faint condescension on King’s part? How much did these men know about Oliver? How much might Conrad have told them? The notion flicked into her mind that King thought Oliver Ward inferior to his wife. At once her mind began justifying and explaining, it called her attention to the injustice of a world in which Mr. King’s acts of probity made him a national hero and Oliver’s only lost him his job. Why hadn’t she thought to turn the talk to inventiveness, so that she could have mentioned Oliver’s creation of cement? Then they wouldn’t all leave his house thinking of him as somehow junior, shaking his hand with this edged, polite condescension.

  Oliver obviously did not feel it. He said, “Thank you for the brandy—again.”

  “A trifle,” King said. “Less than Henry’s reputation. Don’t tell Mrs. Jackson, but I have my valet steal it from the White House cellar. It’s one of the perquisites of government service.”

  He gave them, one after the other, the smile that melted people and made them eager to believe or serve him. Henry Adams said of him, much later, that he had something Greek in him, a touch of Alcibiades or Alexander, and Susan would have agreed. She stood hugging herself in the doorway, collecting the tossed-back good nights, watching their shadows ripple ahead of them in the windy moonlight as they turned up the ditch. When they were only an unseen grating of boots in gravel, she shut the door and turned, not entirely contented in mind.

  “Well,” she said. “Mrs. Jackson ended the evening with a hard question.”

  “And got a good answer.”

  “He’s charming company.”

  “He’s a great man.”

  “Yes,” she said, somewhat surprised. “I suppose he is.” She went to open both casements wide, and came back to open the door.

  “Good idea,” Oliver said. “We sort of smoked the place up.”

  She thought he watched her curiously as she turned off the lamps. They undressed in the dark, kissed lightly, and lay down, each in his separate narrow cot. The wind blew through the cabin, bellying the curtains bunched on their wire, wakening a curl of flame in the fire.. Gradually the room expanded into bluish dusk. Out the open door the hillside swam in pale light, and in the visible strip of sky a cloud, dark silver with bright edges, blazed like something just out of a smelter pot. The air flowing across her felt fresh, cool, high, and late. She lay experimenting with the shadow of her hand in the slash of moonlight from the window; and still thinking rebelliously about his lacks, about his incorrigible juniorness, she said in argument against her own discontent, “It was you who got him to answer seriously.”

  “I wanted to hear what his answer really was.”

  “You ought to speak up more in company.”

  “That’s what you’re always telling me.”

  “It’s true. If you don’t, people will think you haven’t anything to say.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Oh, Oliver, you do too! But you just sit back.”

  “Like a bump on a log,” Oliver said. Did his voice growl with the surliness which meant that any minute he would shut up completely and let her go on urging in the dark, getting herself more and more entangled and unhappy and exposing more and more her disappointment in him? Because that was what it was. She wanted more for him, and better, than he apparently wanted for himself.

  But he didn’t close up. In a moment he said, almost as if he sensed a clash coming on and wanted to avoid it as much as she did, “If I listen I might learn something. I won’t learn anything listening to myself.”

  “Other people might.”

  “Not any of those people.”

  “You mean they’re incapable of learning?”

  “I mean they already know anything I could tell them.”

  “You could have told them something about integrity, when that subject came up. What was more to the point than your experience with Kendall or Hearst?”

  He barked once, incredulously. He heaved over in the cot to face her. “What should I have said? ‘Speaking of integrity, let me tell you about the time I told George Hearst where to head in?”’

  “Of course you’re right. I should have told them.”

  “If you had, I’d have died righ
t there.”

  “But they ought to know you! You sit so silent they’ll all think you’re nobody, and it isn’t true. You don’t want to seem like Pricey.”

  Now surliness did roughen his voice. “You can always tell me from Pricey because I don’t rock.”

  “Oh, Oliver,” she said hopelessly, “be serious. Those are some of the most important people in the world in your field. You owe it to yourself to make a good impression.”

  “Did I insult anybody?”

  “No, you just never say anything. Mr. King and Mr. Emmons won’t have any idea how good you are at things, and how much you can do.”

  He said something muffled by the pillow.

  “What?”

  “I said, They know what I can do.” ’

  “How could they, possibly?”

  “If they didn’t, they wouldn’t have asked me to join the Survey.”

  For a moment she lay completely still, with her face turned toward his shadowy shape. The room snowed slowly with flakes of luminousness. “They did? When?”

  “This afternoon.”

  “But you didn’t say anything!”

  “No,” he said with a little laugh. “I never do. Matter of fact, I never had the chance. Everybody else has been talking seventeen to the rod.”

  “But why didn’t one of them say something tonight?”

  “I suppose they’re waiting till I’ve had a chance to talk it over with you.”

  “And you were going right to sleep!”

  “I didn’t want to keep you awake all night thinking about it.”

  “Oliver,” she said, “they must think very well of you. If we can believe Mr. King, it means he’d trust you with his life.”

  “King’s got a literary side. What it means is, he’d trust me with the Public Domain. Or with a job.”

  She slid out of bed and sat on the edge of his cot. His arm curled to hold her there, and she bent and said quickly into his neck, behind his ear, “Will thee forgive me?”