VI

I got off the train, just behind the Capitol building, one cold bright

January morning. I stood for a long while watching the white dome

against a flashing blue sky, with a very religious feeling. After I had

walked about a little and seen the parks, so green though it was winter,

and the Treasury building, and the War and Navy, I decided to put off my

business for a little and give myself a week to enjoy the city. That was

the most sensible thing I did while I was there. For that week I was

wonderfully happy.

My sightseeing over, I got to work. First I went to see the

Representative from our district, to ask for letters of introduction. He

was cordial enough, but he gave me bad advice. He was very positive that

I ought to report to the Indian Commission, and gave me a letter to the

Commissioner. The Commissioner was out of town, and I wasted three days

waiting about his office, being questioned by clerks and secretaries.

They were not very busy, and seemed to find me entertaining. I thought

they were interested in my mission, and interest was what I wanted to

arouse. I didn’t know how influential these people might be--they talked

as if they had great authority. I had brought along in my telescope bag

some good pieces of pottery--not the best, I was afraid of accident, but

some that were representative--and all the photographs Blake and I had

taken. We had only a small kodak, and these pictures didn’t make much

show,--looked, indeed, like grubby little ’dobe ruins such as one can

find almost anywhere. They gave no idea of the beauty and vastness of

the setting. The clerks at the Indian Commission seemed very curious

about everything and made me talk a lot. I was green and didn’t know any

better. But when one of the fellows there tried to get me to give him my

best bowl for his cigarette ashes, I began to suspect the nature of

their interest.

At last the Commissioner returned, but he had pressing engagements, and

I hung around several days more before he would see me. After

questioning me for about half an hour, he told me that his business was

with living Indians, not dead ones, and that his office should have

informed me of that in the beginning. He advised me to go back to our

Congressman and get a letter to the Smithsonian Institution. I packed up

my pottery and got out of the place, feeling pretty sore. The head clerk

followed me down the corridor and asked me what I’d take for that little

bowl he’d taken a fancy to. He said it had no market value, I’d find

Washington full of such things; there were cases of them in the cellar

at the Smithsonian that they’d never taken the trouble to unpack, hadn’t

any place to put them.

I went back to my Congressman. This time he wasn’t so friendly as

before, but he gave me a letter to the Smithsonian. There I went through

the same experience. The Director couldn’t be seen except by

appointment, and his secretary had to be convinced that your business

was important before he would give you an appointment with his chief.

After the first morning I found it difficult to see even the secretary.

He was always engaged. I was told to take a seat and wait, but when he

was disengaged he was hurrying off to luncheon. I would sit there all

morning with a group of unfortunate people: girls who wanted to get

type-writing to do, nice polite old men who wanted to be taken out on

surveys and expeditions next summer. The secretary would at last come

out with his overcoat on, and would hurry through the waiting-room

reading a letter or a report, without looking up.

The office assistants cheered me along, and I kept this up for some

days, sitting all morning in that room, studying the patterns of the

rugs, and the shoes of the patient waiters who came as regularly as I.

One day after the secretary had gone out, his stenographer, a nice

little Virginia girl, came and sat down in an empty chair next to mine

and began talking to me. She wasn’t pretty, but her kind eyes and soft

Southern voice took hold of me at once. She wanted to know what I had in

my telescope, and why I was there, and where I came from, and all about

it. Nearly everyone else had gone out to lunch--that seemed to be the

one thing they did regularly in Washington--and we had the waiting-room

to ourselves. I talked to her a good deal. Her name was Virginia Ward.

She was a tiny little thing, but she had lovely eyes and such gentle

ways. She seemed indignant that I had been put off so long after having

come so far.

“Now you just let me fix it up for you,” she said at last. “Mr. Wagner

is bothered by a great many foolish people who waste his time, and he is

suspicious. The best way will be for you to invite him to lunch with

you. I’ll arrange it. I keep a list of his appointments, and I know he

is not engaged for luncheon to-morrow. I’ll tell him that he is to lunch

with a nice boy who has come all the way from New Mexico to inform the

Department about an important discovery. I’ll tell him to meet you at

the Shoreham, at one. That’s expensive, but it would do no good to

invite him to a cheap place. And, remember, you must ask him to order

the luncheon. It will maybe cost you ten dollars, but it will get you

somewhere.”

I felt grateful to the nice little thing,--she wasn’t older than I. I

begged her wouldn’t she please come to lunch with me herself to-day, and

talk to me.

“Oh, no!” she said, blushing red as a poppy. “Why, I’m afraid you

think----”

I told her I didn’t think anything but how nice she was to me, and how

lonesome I was. She went with me, but she wouldn’t go to any swell

place. She told me a great many useful things.

“If you want to get attention from anybody in Washin’ton,” she said,

“ask them to lunch. People here will do almost anything for a good

lunch.”

“But the Director of the Smithsonian, for instance,” I said, “surely you

don’t mean that the high-up ones like that----? Why would he want to

bother with a cow-puncher from New Mexico, when he can lunch with

scientists and ambassadors?”

She had a pretty little fluttery Southern laugh. “You just name a hotel

like the Shoreham to the Director, and try it! There has to be somebody

to pay for a lunch, and the scientists and ambassadors don’t do that

when they can avoid it. He’d accept your invitation, and the next time

he went to dine with the Secretary of State he’d make a nice little

story of it, and paint you up so pretty you’d hardly know yourself.”

When I asked her whether I’d better take my pottery--it was there under

the table between us--to the Shoreham to show Mr. Wagner, she tittered

again. “I wouldn’t bother. If you show him enough of the Shoreham

pottery, that will be more effective.”

The next morning, when the secretary arrived at his office, he stopped

by my chair and said he understood he had an engagement with me for one

o’clock. That was a good idea, he added: his mind was freer when he was

away from office routine.

I had been in Washington twenty-two days when I took the secretary out

to lunch. It was an excellent lunch. We had a bottle of Chateau d’Yquem.

I’d never heard of such a wine before, but I remember it because it cost

five dollars. I drank only one glass, and that pleased him too, for he

drank the rest. Though he was friendly and talked a great deal, my heart

sank lower, for he wouldn’t let me explain my mission to him at all. He

kept telling me that he knew all about the South-west. He had been sent

by the Smithsonian to conduct parties of European archæologists through

all the show places, Frijoles and Canyon de Chelly, and Taos and the

Hopi pueblos. When some Austrian Archduke had gone to hunt in the Pecos

range, he had been sent by his chief and the German ambassador to manage

the tour, and he had done it with such success that both he and the

Director were given decorations from the Austrian Crown, in recognition

of his services. Then I had to listen to a long story about how well he

was treated by the Archduke when he went to Vienna with his chief the

following summer. I had to hear about balls and receptions, and the

names and titles of all the people he had met at the Duke’s country

estate. I was amazed and ashamed that a man of fifty, a man of the

world, a scholar with ever so many degrees, should find it worth his

while to show off before a boy, and a boy of such humble pretensions,

who didn’t know how to eat the _hors d’œuvres_ any more than if an

assortment of cocoanuts had been set before him with no hammer.

Imagine my astonishment when, as he was drinking his liqueur, he said

carelessly: “By the way, I was successful in arranging an interview with

the Director for you. He will see you at four o’clock on Monday.”

That was Thursday. I spent the time between then and Monday trying to

find out something more about the kind of people I had come among. I

persuaded Virginia Ward to go to the theatre with me, and she told me

that it always took a long while to get anything through with the

Director, that I mustn’t lose heart, and she would always be glad to

cheer me up. She lived with her mother, a widow lady, and they had me

come to dinner and were very nice to me.

All this time I was living with a young married couple who interested me

very much, for they were unlike any people I had ever known. The husband

was “in office,” as they say there, he had some position in the War

Department. How it did use to depress me to see all the hundreds of

clerks come pouring out of that big building at sunset! Their lives

seemed to me so petty, so slavish. The couple I lived with gave me a

prejudice against that kind of life. I couldn’t help knowing a good deal

about their affairs. They had only a small flat, and rented me one room

of it, so I was very much in their confidence and couldn’t help

overhearing. They asked me not to mention the fact that I paid rent, as

they had told their friends I was making them a visit. It was like that

in everything; they spent their lives trying to keep up appearances, and

to make his salary do more than it could. When they weren’t discussing

where she should go in the summer, they talked about the promotions in

his department; how much the other clerks got and how they spent it, how

many new dresses their wives had. And there was always a struggle going

on for an invitation to a dinner or a reception, or even a tea-party.

When once they got the invitation they had been scheming for, then came

the terrible question of what Mrs. Bixby should wear.

The Secretary of War gave a reception; there was to be dancing and a

great showing of foreign uniforms. The Bixbys were in painful suspense

until they got a card. Then for a week they talked about nothing but

what Mrs. Bixby was going to wear. They decided that for such an

occasion she must have a new dress. Bixby borrowed twenty-five dollars

from me, and took his lunch hour to go shopping with his wife and choose

the satin. That seemed to me very strange. In New Mexico the Indian boys

sometimes went to a trader’s with their wives and bought shawls or

calico, and we thought it rather contemptible. On the night of the

reception the Bixbys set off gaily in a cab; the dress they considered a

great success. But they had bad luck. Somebody spilt claret-cup on Mrs.

Bixby’s skirt before the evening was half over, and when they got home

that night I heard her weeping and reproaching him for having been so

upset about it, and looking at nothing but her ruined dress all evening.

She said he cried out when it happened. I don’t doubt it.

Every cab, every party, was more than they could afford. If he lost an

umbrella, it was a real misfortune. He wasn’t lazy, he wasn’t a fool,

and he meant to be honest; but he was intimidated by that miserable sort

of departmental life. He didn’t know anything else. He thought working

in a store or a bank not respectable. Living with the Bixbys gave me a

kind of low-spiritedness I had never known before. During my days of

waiting for appointments, I used to walk for hours around the fence that

shuts in the White House grounds, and watch the Washington monument

colour with those beautiful sunsets, until the time when all the clerks

streamed out of the Treasury building and the War and Navy. Thousands of

them, all more or less like the couple I lived with. They seemed to me

like people in slavery, who ought to be free. I remember the city

chiefly by those beautiful, hazy, sad sunsets, white columns and green

shrubbery, and the monument shaft still pink while the stars were coming

out.

I got my interview with the Director of the Smithsonian at last. He gave

me his attention, he was interested. He told me to come again in three

days and meet Dr. Ripley, who was the authority on prehistoric Indian

remains and had excavated a lot of them. Then came an exciting and

rather encouraging time for me. Dr. Ripley asked the right sort of

questions, and evidently knew his business. He said he’d like to take

the first train down to my mesa. But it required money to excavate, and

he had none. There was a bill up before Congress for an appropriation.

We’d have to wait. I must use my influence with my Representative. He

took my pottery to study it. (I never got it back, by the way.) There

was a Dr. Fox, connected with the Smithsonian, who was also interested.

They told me a good many things I wanted to know, and kept me dangling

about the office. Of course they were very kind to take so much trouble

with a green boy. But I soon found that the Director and all his staff

had one interest which dwarfed every other. There was to be an

International Exposition of some sort in Europe the following summer,

and they were all pulling strings to get appointed on juries or sent to

international congresses--appointments that would pay their expenses

abroad, and give them a salary in addition. There was, indeed, a bill

before Congress for appropriations for the Smithsonian; but there was

also a bill for Exposition appropriations, and that was the one they

were really pushing. They kept me hanging on through March and April,

but in the end it came to nothing. Dr. Ripley told me he was sorry, but

the sum Congress had allowed the Smithsonian wouldn’t cover an

expedition to the South-west.

Virginia Ward, who had been so kind to me, went out to lunch with me

that day, and admitted I had been let down. She was almost as much

disappointed as I. She said the only thing Dr. Ripley really cared about

was getting a free trip to Europe and acting on a jury, and maybe

getting a decoration. “And that’s what the Director wants, too,” she

said. “They don’t care much about dead and gone Indians. What they do

care about is going to Paris, and getting another ribbon on their

coats.”

The only other person besides Virginia who was genuinely concerned about

my affair was a young Frenchman, a lieutenant attached to the French

Embassy, who came to the Smithsonian often on business connected with

this same International Exposition. He was nice and polite to Virginia,

and she introduced him to me. We used to walk down along the Potomac

together. He studied my photographs and asked me such intelligent

questions about everything that it was a pleasure to talk to him. He had

a fine attitude about it all; he was thoughtful, critical, and

respectful. I feel sure he’d have gone back to New Mexico with me if

he’d had the money. He was even poorer than I.

I was utterly ashamed to go home to Roddy, dead broke after all the

money I’d spent, and without a thing to show for it. I hung on in

Washington through May, trying to get a job of some sort, to at least

earn my fare home. My letters to Blake had been pretty blue for some

time back. If I’d been sensible, I’d have kept my troubles to myself. He

was easily discouraged, and I knew that. At last I had to write him for

money to go home. It was slow in coming, and I began to telegraph. I

left Washington at last, wiser than I came. I had no plans, I wanted

nothing but to get back to the mesa and live a free life and breathe

free air, and never, never again to see hundreds of little black-coated

men pouring out of white buildings. Queer, how much more depressing they

are than workmen coming out of a factory.

I was terribly disappointed when I got off the train at Tarpin and Roddy

wasn’t at the station to meet me. It was late in the afternoon, almost

dark, and I went straight to the livery stable to ask Bill Hook for news

of Blake. Hook, you remember, had done all our hauling for us, and had

been a good friend. He gave me a glad hand and said Blake was out on the

mesa.

“I expect maybe he’s had his feelings hurt here. He’s been shy of this

town lately. You see, Tom, folks weren’t bothered none about that mesa

so long as you fellows were playing Robinson Crusoe out there, digging

up curios. But when it leaked out that Blake had got a lot of money for

your stuff, then they begun to feel jealous--said them ruins didn’t

belong to Blake any more than to anybody else. It’ll blow over in time;

people are always like that when money changes hands. But right now

there’s a good deal of bad feeling.”