recovered herself the young lady from Boston, with whom Vogelstein had
been talking, stood there to take leave. This, for an American type, was
an old one, he was sure; and the process of parting between the guest and
her hostess had an ancient elaboration. Count Otto waited a little; then
he turned away and walked up to Pandora Day, whose group of interlocutors
had now been re-enforced by a gentleman who had held an important place
in the cabinet of the late occupant of the presidential chair. He had
asked Mrs. Bonnycastle if she were “all alone”; but there was nothing in
her present situation to show her for solitary. She wasn’t sufficiently
alone for our friend’s taste; but he was impatient and he hoped she’d
give him a few words to himself. She recognised him without a moment’s
hesitation and with the sweetest smile, a smile matching to a shade the
tone in which she said: “I was watching you. I wondered if you weren’t
going to speak to me.”
“Miss Day was watching him!” one of the foreign ministers exclaimed; “and
we flattered ourselves that her attention was all with us.”
“I mean before,” said the girl, “while I was talking with the President.”
At which the gentlemen began to laugh, one of them remarking that this
was the way the absent were sacrificed, even the great; while another put
on record that he hoped Vogelstein was duly flattered.
“Oh I was watching the President too,” said Pandora. “I’ve got to watch
_him_. He has promised me something.”
“It must be the mission to England,” the judge of the Supreme Court
suggested. “A good position for a lady; they’ve got a lady at the head
over there.”
“I wish they would send you to my country,” one of the foreign ministers
suggested. “I’d immediately get recalled.”
“Why perhaps in your country I wouldn’t speak to you! It’s only because
you’re here,” the ex-heroine of the _Donau_ returned with a gay
familiarity which evidently ranked with her but as one of the arts of
defence. “You’ll see what mission it is when it comes out. But I’ll
speak to Count Vogelstein anywhere,” she went on. “He’s an older friend
than any right here. I’ve known him in difficult days.”
“Oh yes, on the great ocean,” the young man smiled. “On the watery
waste, in the tempest!”
“Oh I don’t mean that so much; we had a beautiful voyage and there wasn’t
any tempest. I mean when I was living in Utica. That’s a watery waste
if you like, and a tempest there would have been a pleasant variety.”
“Your parents seemed to me so peaceful!” her associate in the other
memories sighed with a vague wish to say something sympathetic.
“Oh you haven’t seen them ashore! At Utica they were very lively. But
that’s no longer our natural home. Don’t you remember I told you I was
working for New York? Well, I worked—I had to work hard. But we’ve
moved.”
Count Otto clung to his interest. “And I hope they’re happy.”
“My father and mother? Oh they will be, in time. I must give them time.
They’re very young yet, they’ve years before them. And you’ve been
always in Washington?” Pandora continued. “I suppose you’ve found out
everything about everything.”
“Oh no—there are some things I _can’t_ find out.”
“Come and see me and perhaps I can help you. I’m very different from
what I was in that phase. I’ve advanced a great deal since then.”
“Oh how was Miss Day in that phase?” asked a cabinet minister of the last
administration.
“She was delightful of course,” Count Otto said.
“He’s very flattering; I didn’t open my mouth!” Pandora cried. “Here
comes Mrs. Steuben to take me to some other place. I believe it’s a
literary party near the Capitol. Everything seems so separate in
Washington. Mrs. Steuben’s going to read a poem. I wish she’d read it
here; wouldn’t it do as well?”
This lady, arriving, signified to her young friend the necessity of their
moving on. But Miss Day’s companions had various things to say to her
before giving her up. She had a vivid answer for each, and it was
brought home to Vogelstein while he listened that this would be indeed,
in her development, as she said, another phase. Daughter of small
burghers as she might be she was really brilliant. He turned away a
little and while Mrs. Steuben waited put her a question. He had made her
half an hour before the subject of that inquiry to which Mrs. Bonnycastle
returned so ambiguous an answer; but this wasn’t because he failed of all
direct acquaintance with the amiable woman or of any general idea of the
esteem in which she was held. He had met her in various places and had
been at her house. She was the widow of a commodore, was a handsome mild
soft swaying person, whom every one liked, with glossy bands of black
hair and a little ringlet depending behind each ear. Some one had said
that she looked like the _vieux jeu_, idea of the queen in _Hamlet_. She
had written verses which were admired in the South, wore a full-length
portrait of the commodore on her bosom and spoke with the accent of
Savannah. She had about her a positive strong odour of Washington. It
had certainly been very superfluous in our young man to question Mrs.
Bonnycastle about her social position.
“Do kindly tell me,” he said, lowering his voice, “what’s the type to
which that young lady belongs? Mrs. Bonnycastle tells me it’s a new
one.”
Mrs. Steuben for a moment fixed her liquid eyes on the secretary of
legation. She always seemed to be translating the prose of your speech
into the finer rhythms with which her own mind was familiar. “Do you
think anything’s really new?” she then began to flute. “I’m very fond of
the old; you know that’s a weakness of we Southerners.” The poor lady,
it will be observed, had another weakness as well. “What we often take
to be the new is simply the old under some novel form. Were there not
remarkable natures in the past? If you doubt it you should visit the
South, where the past still lingers.”
Vogelstein had been struck before this with Mrs. Steuben’s pronunciation
of the word by which her native latitudes were designated; transcribing
it from her lips you would have written it (as the nearest approach) the
Sooth. But at present he scarce heeded this peculiarity; he was
wondering rather how a woman could be at once so copious and so
uninforming. What did he care about the past or even about the Sooth?
He was afraid of starting her again. He looked at her, discouraged and
helpless, as bewildered almost as Mrs. Bonnycastle had found him half an
hour before; looked also at the commodore, who, on her bosom, seemed to
breathe again with his widow’s respirations. “Call it an old type then
if you like,” he said in a moment. “All I want to know is what type it
_is_! It seems impossible,” he gasped, “to find out.”
“You can find out in the newspapers. They’ve had articles about it.
They write about everything now. But it isn’t true about Miss Day. It’s
one of the first families. Her great-grandfather was in the Revolution.”
Pandora by this time had given her attention again to Mrs. Steuben. She
seemed to signify that she was ready to move on. “Wasn’t your
great-grandfather in the Revolution?” the elder lady asked. “I’m telling
Count Vogelstein about him.”
“Why are you asking about my ancestors?” the girl demanded of the young
German with untempered brightness. “Is that the thing you said just now
that you can’t find out? Well, if Mrs. Steuben will only be quiet you
never will.”
Mrs. Steuben shook her head rather dreamily. “Well, it’s no trouble for
we of the Sooth to be quiet. There’s a kind of languor in our blood.
Besides, we have to be to-day. But I’ve got to show some energy
to-night. I’ve got to get you to the end of Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Pandora gave her hand to Count Otto and asked him if he thought they
should meet again. He answered that in Washington people were always
meeting again and that at any rate he shouldn’t fail to wait upon her.
Hereupon, just as the two ladies were detaching themselves, Mrs. Steuben
remarked that if the Count and Miss Day wished to meet again the picnic
would be a good chance—the picnic she was getting up for the following
Thursday. It was to consist of about twenty bright people, and they’d go
down the Potomac to Mount Vernon. The Count answered that if Mrs.
Steuben thought him bright enough he should be delighted to join the
party; and he was told the hour for which the tryst was taken.
He remained at Mrs. Bonnycastle’s after every one had gone, and then he
informed this lady of his reason for waiting. Would she have mercy on
him and let him know, in a single word, before he went to rest—for
without it rest would be impossible—what was this famous type to which
Pandora Day belonged?
“Gracious, you don’t mean to say you’ve not found out that type yet!”
Mrs. Bonnycastle exclaimed with a return of her hilarity. “What have you
been doing all the evening? You Germans may be thorough, but you
certainly are not quick!”
It was Alfred Bonnycastle who at last took pity on him. “My dear
Vogelstein, she’s the latest freshest fruit of our great American
evolution. She’s the self-made girl!”
Count Otto gazed a moment. “The fruit of the great American Revolution?
Yes, Mrs. Steuben told me her great-grandfather—” but the rest of his
sentence was lost in a renewed explosion of Mrs. Bonnycastle’s sense of
the ridiculous. He bravely pushed his advantage, such as it was,
however, and, desiring his host’s definition to be defined, inquired what
the self-made girl might be.
“Sit down and we’ll tell you all about it,” Mrs. Bonnycastle said. “I
like talking this way, after a party’s over. You can smoke if you like,
and Alfred will open another window. Well, to begin with, the self-made
girl’s a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she
isn’t self-made at all. We all help to make her—we take such an interest
in her.”
“That’s only after she’s made!” Alfred Bonnycastle broke in. “But it’s
Vogelstein that takes an interest. What on earth has started you up so
on the subject of Miss Day?”
The visitor explained as well as he could that it was merely the accident
of his having crossed the ocean in the steamer with her; but he felt the
inadequacy of this account of the matter, felt it more than his hosts,
who could know neither how little actual contact he had had with her on
the ship, how much he had been affected by Mrs. Dangerfield’s warnings,
nor how much observation at the same time he had lavished on her. He sat
there half an hour, and the warm dead stillness of the Washington
night—nowhere are the nights so silent—came in at the open window,
mingled with a soft sweet earthy smell, the smell of growing things and
in particular, as he thought, of Mrs. Steuben’s Sooth. Before he went
away he had heard all about the self-made girl, and there was something
in the picture that strongly impressed him. She was possible doubtless
only in America; American life had smoothed the way for her. She was not
fast, nor emancipated, nor crude, nor loud, and there wasn’t in her, of
necessity at least, a grain of the stuff of which the adventuress is
made. She was simply very successful, and her success was entirely
personal. She hadn’t been born with the silver spoon of social
opportunity; she had grasped it by honest exertion. You knew her by many
different signs, but chiefly, infallibly, by the appearance of her
parents. It was her parents who told her story; you always saw how
little her parents could have made her. Her attitude with regard to them
might vary in different ways. As the great fact on her own side was that
she had lifted herself from a lower social plane, done it all herself,
and done it by the simple lever of her personality, it was naturally to
be expected that she would leave the authors of her mere material being
in the shade. Sometimes she had them in her wake, lost in the bubbles
and the foam that showed where she had passed; sometimes, as Alfred
Bonnycastle said, she let them slide altogether; sometimes she kept them
in close confinement, resorting to them under cover of night and with
every precaution; sometimes she exhibited them to the public in discreet
glimpses, in prearranged attitudes. But the general characteristic of
the self-made girl was that, though it was frequently understood that she
was privately devoted to her kindred, she never attempted to impose them
on society, and it was striking that, though in some of her
manifestations a bore, she was at her worst less of a bore than they.
They were almost always solemn and portentous, and they were for the most
part of a deathly respectability. She wasn’t necessarily snobbish,
unless it was snobbish to want the best. She didn’t cringe, she didn’t
make herself smaller than she was; she took on the contrary a stand of
her own and attracted things to herself. Naturally she was possible only
in America—only in a country where whole ranges of competition and
comparison were absent. The natural history of this interesting creature
was at last completely laid bare to the earnest stranger, who, as he sat
there in the animated stillness, with the fragrant breath of the Western
world in his nostrils, was convinced of what he had already suspected,
that conversation in the great Republic was more yearningly, not to say
gropingly, psychological than elsewhere. Another thing, as he learned,
that you knew the self-made girl by was her culture, which was perhaps a
little too restless and obvious. She had usually got into society more
or less by reading, and her conversation was apt to be garnished with
literary allusions, even with familiar quotations. Vogelstein hadn’t had
time to observe this element as a developed form in Pandora Day; but
Alfred Bonnycastle hinted that he wouldn’t trust her to keep it under in
a _tête-à-tête_. It was needless to say that these young persons had
always been to Europe; that was usually the first place they got to. By
such arts they sometimes entered society on the other side before they
did so at home; it was to be added at the same time that this resource
was less and less valuable, for Europe, in the American world, had less
and less prestige and people in the Western hemisphere now kept a watch
on that roundabout road. All of which quite applied to Pandora Day—the
journey to Europe, the culture (as exemplified in the books she read on
the ship), the relegation, the effacement, of the family. The only thing
that was exceptional was the rapidity of her march; for the jump she had
taken since he left her in the hands of Mr. Lansing struck Vogelstein,
even after he had made all allowance for the abnormal homogeneity of the
American mass, as really considerable. It took all her cleverness to
account for such things. When she “moved” from Utica—mobilised her
commissariat—the battle appeared virtually to have been gained.
Count Otto called the next day, and Mrs. Steuben’s blackamoor informed
him, in the communicative manner of his race, that the ladies had gone
out to pay some visits and look at the Capitol. Pandora apparently had
not hitherto examined this monument, and our young man wished he had
known, the evening before, of her omission, so that he might have offered
to be her initiator. There is too obvious a connexion for us to fail of
catching it between his regret and the fact that in leaving Mrs.
Steuben’s door he reminded himself that he wanted a good walk, and that
he thereupon took his way along Pennsylvania Avenue. His walk had become
fairly good by the time he reached the great white edifice that unfolds
its repeated colonnades and uplifts its isolated dome at the end of a
long vista of saloons and tobacco-shops. He slowly climbed the great
steps, hesitating a little, even wondering why he had come. The
superficial reason was obvious enough, but there was a real one behind it
that struck him as rather wanting in the solidity which should
characterise the motives of an emissary of Prince Bismarck. The
superficial reason was a belief that Mrs. Steuben would pay her visit
first—it was probably only a question of leaving cards—and bring her
young friend to the Capitol at the hour when the yellow afternoon light
would give a tone to the blankness of its marble walls. The Capitol was
a splendid building, but it was rather wanting in tone. Vogelstein’s
curiosity about Pandora Day had been much more quickened than checked by
the revelations made to him in Mrs. Bonnycastle’s drawing-room. It was a
relief to have the creature classified; but he had a desire, of which he
had not been conscious before, to see really to the end how well, in
other words how completely and artistically, a girl could make herself.
His calculations had been just, and he had wandered about the rotunda for
only ten minutes, looking again at the paintings, commemorative of the
national annals, which occupy its lower spaces, and at the simulated
sculptures, so touchingly characteristic of early American taste, which
adorn its upper reaches, when the charming women he had been counting on
presented themselves in charge of a licensed guide. He went to meet them
and didn’t conceal from them that he had marked them for his very own.
The encounter was happy on both sides, and he accompanied them through
the queer and endless interior, through labyrinths of bleak bare
development, into legislative and judicial halls. He thought it a
hideous place; he had seen it all before and asked himself what senseless
game he was playing. In the lower House were certain bedaubed walls, in
the basest style of imitation, which made him feel faintly sick, not to
speak of a lobby adorned with artless prints and photographs of eminent
defunct Congressmen that was all too serious for a joke and too comic for
a Valhalla. But Pandora was greatly interested; she thought the Capitol
very fine; it was easy to criticise the details, but as a whole it was
the most impressive building she had ever seen. She proved a charming
fellow tourist; she had constantly something to say, but never said it
too much; it was impossible to drag in the wake of a _cicerone_ less of a
lengthening or an irritating chain. Vogelstein could see too that she
wished to improve her mind; she looked at the historical pictures, at the
uncanny statues of local worthies, presented by the different States—they
were of different sizes, as if they had been “numbered,” in a shop—she
asked questions of the guide and in the chamber of the Senate requested
him to show her the chairs of the gentlemen from New York. She sat down
in one of them, though Mrs. Steuben told her _that_ Senator (she mistook
the chair, dropping into another State) was a horrid old thing.
Throughout the hour he spent with her Vogelstein seemed to see how it was
she had made herself. They walked about, afterwards on the splendid
terrace that surrounds the Capitol, the great marble floor on which it
stands, and made vague remarks—Pandora’s were the most definite—about the
yellow sheen of the Potomac, the hazy hills of Virginia, the far-gleaming
pediment of Arlington, the raw confused-looking country. Washington was
beneath them, bristling and geometrical; the long lines of its avenues
seemed to stretch into national futures. Pandora asked Count Otto if he
had ever been to Athens and, on his admitting so much, sought to know
whether the eminence on which they stood didn’t give him an idea of the
Acropolis in its prime. Vogelstein deferred the satisfaction of this
appeal to their next meeting; he was glad—in spite of the appeal—to make
pretexts for seeing her again. He did so on the morrow; Mrs. Steuben’s
picnic was still three days distant. He called on Pandora a second time,
also met her each evening in the Washington world. It took very little
of this to remind him that he was forgetting both Mrs. Dangerfield’s
warnings and the admonitions—long familiar to him—of his own conscience.
Was he in peril of love? Was he to be sacrificed on the altar of the
American girl, an altar at which those other poor fellows had poured out
some of the bluest blood in Germany and he had himself taken oath he
would never seriously worship? He decided that he wasn’t in real danger,
that he had rather clinched his precautions. It was true that a young
person who had succeeded so well for herself might be a great help to her
husband; but this diplomatic aspirant preferred on the whole that his
success should be his own: it wouldn’t please him to have the air of
being pushed by his wife. Such a wife as that would wish to push him,
and he could hardly admit to himself that this was what fate had in
reserve for him—to be propelled in his career by a young lady who would
perhaps attempt to talk to the Kaiser as he had heard her the other night
talk to the President. Would she consent to discontinue relations with
her family, or would she wish still to borrow plastic relief from that
domestic background? That her family was so impossible was to a certain
extent an advantage; for if they had been a little better the question of
a rupture would be less easy. He turned over these questions in spite of
his security, or perhaps indeed because of it. The security made them
speculative and disinterested.
They haunted him during the excursion to Mount Vernon, which took place
according to traditions long established. Mrs. Steuben’s confederates
assembled on the steamer and were set afloat on the big brown stream
which had already seemed to our special traveller to have too much bosom
and too little bank. Here and there, however, he became conscious of a
shore where there was something to look at, even though conscious at the
same time that he had of old lost great opportunities of an idyllic cast
in not having managed to be more “thrown with” a certain young lady on
the deck of the North German Lloyd. The two turned round together to
hang over Alexandria, which for Pandora, as she declared, was a picture
of Old Virginia. She told Vogelstein that she was always hearing about
it during the Civil War, ages before. Little girl as she had been at the
time she remembered all the names that were on people’s lips during those
years of reiteration. This historic spot had a touch of the romance of
rich decay, a reference to older things, to a dramatic past. The past of
Alexandria appeared in the vista of three or four short streets sloping
up a hill and lined with poor brick warehouses erected for merchandise
that had ceased to come or go. It looked hot and blank and sleepy, down
to the shabby waterside where tattered darkies dangled their bare feet
from the edge of rotting wharves. Pandora was even more interested in
Mount Vernon—when at last its wooded bluff began to command the
river—than she had been in the Capitol, and after they had disembarked
and ascended to the celebrated mansion she insisted on going into every
room it contained. She “claimed for it,” as she said—some of her turns
were so characteristic both of her nationality and her own style—the
finest situation in the world, and was distinct as to the shame of their
not giving it to the President for his country-seat. Most of her
companions had seen the house often, and were now coupling themselves in
the grounds according to their sympathies, so that it was easy for
Vogelstein to offer the benefit of his own experience to the most
inquisitive member of the party. They were not to lunch for another
hour, and in the interval the young man roamed with his first and fairest
acquaintance. The breath of the Potomac, on the boat, had been a little
harsh, but on the softly-curving lawn, beneath the clustered trees, with
the river relegated to a mere shining presence far below and in the
distance, the day gave out nothing but its mildness, the whole scene
became noble and genial.