Foxfire (11 page)

“Doctor Slater. Hello! Aren't you going to speak to me?” cried Amanda, having run the gamut and being now deserted by her hostess with a murmur about seeing to the refreshments. “Thank God for a familiar face,” she added, sinking down beside him. “I feel like a new girl the first day at school.”

Hugh nodded. “Probation period. We're a tight little group and we're careful about outsiders.”

“Yes. Yes, I know. And I'm frustrated because I don't understand who anybody is. I want so much to be a helpful wife to Dart—you know, polish the right apples, further his career, but they don't seem to like me. Why don't they—?” She had forgotten her own dislike of him and spoke with a mixture of wistful humor and genuine dismay.

Hugh shrugged. “Well, you better not polish this apple, my dear”—he said—“I'm of no use whatsoever to Dart's career. You might go and bat those eyelashes at your host, if you fancy yourself as a Mata Hari.”

She laughed ruefully and looked at Mablett who had now walked over to join Dart and Tyson. The three men seemed to be chatting casually, but Amanda caught something of their tension. “Listen—” she said seriously to Hugh, “what is it all about—the ‘trouble' at the mine? Dart doesn't like to talk about it, he doesn't talk much anyway, but I know he's worried ... maybe I really could help, though you think I'm such a dope.”

There was a pause while a tiny fourteen-year-old Mexican girl, dressed in a black satin uniform with an embroidered white apron, appeared from the kitchen, seized the heavy tray of punch glasses and staggered around amongst the guests with them. Amanda took a glass and sipped. “Gosh,” she said and hid the glass beneath her chair. “Oh, for a Martini!”

This remark softened Hugh who had just decided to disappear to the bathroom where he could get at his flask, and he paused to answer her appeal. “I don't know exactly what's going on at the mine, except that Dart thinks Mablett is taking risks with the men. Inadequate ventilation, flimsy timbering, second-grade powder—that sort of thing. And Mablett bullies them all, too. He won't let them play the practical jokes on each other that miners have always used to relieve strain, he won't give them long enough rest periods—petty tyranny. And I know he's paying about the lowest wages in the West.”

“Why do they stand for it then?”

Hugh shrugged. “I suppose because the poor devils know they're lucky to have any jobs at all in this year of Grace, because we're a very isolated camp and have always run on our own, and maybe because they have faith in Dart. I don't know. I do know that Mablett countermands every constructive order Dart tries to give. It's tough. The fight between them stems partly from the classic feud, of course.”

“What classic feud?”

“Dart's a technical man, highly educated for the job, while Mablett never got past eighth grade in Butte thirty years ago, and ever since he's been battering his way up from mucker in what is prettily called the school of experience. Naturally, he thinks he knows it all.”

Amanda frowned. “What about Mr. Tyson? Isn't he supposed to—to arbitrate?”

“Oh, go talk to him,” said Hugh suddenly bored, and bound for privacy and his flask. “Maybe you'll understand better. Anyway, you shouldn't be sitting here with me. Sexes are segregated at these parties.”

So they were. After Hugh's abrupt departure towards the stairs, Amanda noticed that all the ladies were in one group by the Nottingham-lace-curtained windows, while the men clustered in the opposite corner near Tyson. Nobody else was in the dining room. Mrs. Mablett and the little Mexican girl were clattering around in the kitchen.

She sighed and got up and, walking slowly past the men's group, she threw Dart an imploring look. He smiled but made no move toward her. She saw that Mr. Tyson was speaking and caught a sentence. “No, Dartland—no problems tonight. This is a party. And a red-letter day for me, incidentally. I found a complete Hohokam palette in the ruins today.”

This reference to his archeological hobby was gibberish to Amanda, but she saw Mablett give Dart a look of mulish triumph, saw the other men turn away and begin to talk of something else, as though a moment of crisis had passed. That Dart was trying to force an issue, her intuition told her, and that Mr. Tyson had gently evaded it. Dart shouldn't do that at a party, she thought, must have plenty of chance at the mine. But there she was wrong. Tyson was equally elusive at the mine. He was often bed-ridden, and his Filipino manservant guarded him fiercely from all intrusion.

“May I join you?” said Amanda meekly to the ladies' group and sat down in the nearest chair, which happened to be next to Pearl Pottner. They all stopped talking and looked at her in silence. Pearl's huge satin-covered bosom swelled. She had not forgotten the affront in her store last Monday, nor missed Amanda's puzzled look of semi-recognition during the introductions tonight. In truth, Amanda had not at once associated this resplendent and becurled matron with the woman in the butcher apron who sold groceries. She now tried to make amends. “What a lovely dress—” she said wildly, eyeing the yellow satin. “Just like a French import—Lanvin—my sister has at home.”

This was not only untrue, but a mistake. She had meant to say the most flattering thing possible and saw that she had only succeeded in sounding pretentious.

Pearl said “Thank you” in iced tones. “I made it myself. I'm afraid we know little of French clothes in poor old Lodestone.”

Oh, dear, thought Amanda. The silence resumed. She glanced helplessly around the group and fastened on a face warmer than the others. A little woman in brown velveteen with brown, intelligent eyes. Amanda called upon the charming frankness which had never yet failed her and spoke directly to the little woman. “I do feel such a fool, but you know I was so frightened when I came in, I don't remember anybody's name—except Mrs. Pottner, of course—” she added hastily.

The little woman smiled. “To be sure,” she said. “'Tis very natural. Shall I put you to rights?”

“Oh, please—” cried Amanda, startled, for the voice was not at all what she expected; it had an almost cockney lilt.

“I'm Tessie Rubrick, the postmistress, my husband's shift boss at the mine. He's working now. We're Cousin Jacks,” she added, her brown eyes twinkling—“Cornish—” she explained with a lift to her chin. “Both of us from Penzance fifteen years back. Mrs. Dartland, did ye not know the Cousin Jacks're the best miners in the world?”

Amanda laughed, relieved to find friendliness at last. The others smiled vaguely. They were used to Tessie and her Cornish pride. They continued to smile vaguely as Tessie reintroduced them to Amanda.

The thin, pinched woman in black was Mrs. Kolsanko, wife of the mill superintendent, and therefore, as Amanda later discovered, theoretically on equal social footing with the Mabletts. The Kolsankos, however, did not aspire to power. He was of Montenegrin extraction, and a shy, quiet man who ran the mill efficiently and kept to himself. Mrs. Kolsanko spoke broken English and had no interests in life beyond crocheting, and her internal ailments which she dosed with Lydia Pinkham's.

Besides Mrs. Mablett and Mrs. Kolsanko and now Amanda there was no other staff wife, for like many small and isolated mines, both staff and miners consisted mostly of unattached men, rolling stones, who had, while the choice of operations was still large, drifted from one mine to another with rapidity.

The remaining ladies of the Lodestone hierarchy turned out to be Mrs. Naylor, whose husband ran the Miners' Hardware and Supply Store, Mrs. Zuckowski, the wiry meager little woman who owned the Hotel, Mrs. Mattie Thompson, a fat widow who ran the switchboard in her home (ten phones in town and they seldom had night calls, so her niece Cora, over from Ray on a visit, was pinch-hitting tonight), and Miss Gladys Arden, the schoolteacher who was forty-four and afflicted with warts to such an extent that she had escaped the matrimony usually urged on all schoolteachers in the West by the woman-hungry males.

Miss Arden had been to college in Nebraska, she informed Amanda in mincing tones, and she named one Amanda had never heard of. “Where did
you
go, Mrs. Dartland?” she asked, “and what was your sorority?”

“I went to Vassar, though only two years—” said Amanda apologetically, “and they—they don't have sororities—.” There was another silence. All the pairs of eyes contemplated her without expression, except Mrs. Kolsanko's who was crocheting, and Tessie Rubrick's which showed uncritical admiration.

“I fear”—said Pearl Pottner, in a stately voice, folding her fat hands together—“that you may find Lodestone sadly lacking in cultural refinement; Pearline always said——”

“Oh, no,” interrupted Amanda, eager to propitiate, “I mean culture doesn't really mean very much anyway, does it? There are always books and things, Mother is going to send me some of the new ones—I'd love to lend them around—if anyone would like them.” She finished lamely for she saw at once she had made another mistake, even before Pearl said with a thin smile—“Kind of you, but we always receive the latest, most improving books for our little Book Club through arrangement with a library in Tucson.” And she did not ask Amanda to join the Lodestone Literary Ladies of which she was president.

“But we'd be mighty glad to have Mrs. Dartland's books too, now wouldn't we, Pearl!” cried Tessie, smiling at the discomfited girl.

Pearl gave a majestic and noncommittal smile and rose to meet her hostess who was shepherding the little Mexican girl out from the kitchen with another loaded tray.

Amanda had never been snubbed before, and her heart was sore. I can't help it if I'm an Easterner, she thought. She tried to chat and laugh with the remaining ladies, but there was nothing to talk about. Tessie had gone too, to help with the serving. Amanda subsided into unhappy silence, staring at the Mablett walls. They were papered in sulphur yellow, lavishly dotted with chromos and framed photographs of the Mablett family.

The evening dragged on its appointed way. The collation was impressive. Lydia Mablett belonged to the Woman's Page, or Hand-painted, school of cookery. Each dish was cunningly designed to look like something else. The salads had little faces drawn on canned pear halves with pimento features, and marshmallow and cheese hair. The main dish represented nesting birds, the birds (cut from pork with cookie cutters) nesting on green-pea eggs. These creations provoked much admiring comment, and they were certainly very good. Everyone ate greedily except Hugh. He sat slumped in a corner, glowering into space.

At nine, Mrs. Mablett gaily proposed a few hands of Auction and Amanda, who was a good bridge player but knew Auction only by name as an ancestor of Contract, was relieved to have Dart stand up saying, “I'm sorry, Mrs. Mablett, but I don't play. And I've got to get back up to the mine tonight.”

“Tonight!” cried Amanda. All heads turned and looked at Dart, who stood very quiet, his hand resting on the table, his head thrown back a little.

“I understand there's been orders to enter the old Shamrock workings tonight on the graveyard. That there's been orders to start pulling the pillars in the old No. 33 stope,” Dart said pleasantly. He looked at Mablett, then he looked at Tyson. “Now I happen to know the timbering's rotten in there. Any drilling'll start a cave-in.”

Amanda saw Mr. Tyson raise his head and frown. She did not understand the terrifying impact of the two little words “cave-in,” but she saw a tremor run over the faces of all the men, and a hostility too, as they looked up at Dart. He continued in the same voice—“So I think I better go up and change the orders.”

Luther Mablett hoisted himself out of his chair; he thrust his glistening red face towards Dart. “You can't do that. They're my orders.”

Dart's mouth tightened and his eyes also narrowed to a cold implacability that frightened Amanda. Dart, don't—she cried to him silently—don't make a scene now! Dart merely bowed a trifle. “Then I shall go underground to be there with the men when your orders are obeyed.”

“Bravo,” said Hugh loudly from his corner.

There was a moment of complete silence. The company sat transfixed, staring at the two big men by the table.

Mablett's ponderous brain reacted slowly. Then suddenly his great hand formed into a fist and came crashing down on the walnut top. Veins stood out on his forehead—“God-damn know-it-all! Will you stop butting into every God-damn...”

“Luther!” cried Mrs. Mablett, clutching at his arm. He shook her off.

“Lousy mine foreman with a fancy degree, sucking up to the men, stirring up trouble, sneaking around behind my back, I'll show you who's...”

“Wait a minute, Mablett! Hold on.” The thin, weak voice cut between the angry men like a cold knife. The general manager stood on his feet beside them swaying a little, his head barely reached to their shoulders, but his tired old eyes were steady and authority had returned to them.

“Dart,” he said, “how do you know the timbering's rotten?"

“Because I've tested every inch of it.”

Mablett scowled furiously. “I say it's not. I say it'll hold up until we get the old stope cleaned out and we need that ore. You know God-damn well we need that ore, and fast—if you cared anything about the mine...” He glared at Dart, but his voice was more subdued.

Tyson held up his transparent, veined hand. “Wait, Mablett. We all care about the mine, but we care about the men, too. Now I don't know who's right and I can't get underground to see for myself just now, but as long as there's any doubt, I think you better hold up work on that stope until everything's shored up.”

Amanda saw Dart's muscles relax, and her throat unclosed, too. A rustling sigh fluttered over the rooms, then there was no sound again but Mablett's heavy breathing. He stood there with his jaw thrust out, his fists still clenched, his bulging eyes shifted from Tyson's face to the carpet, and in them there was an angry bewilderment.