was worthy of his humour. He maintained to his companion that the
shallow painted mansion resembled a false house, a “wing” or structure of
daubed canvas, on the stage; but she answered him so well with certain
economical palaces she had seen in Germany, where, as she said, there was
nothing but china stoves and stuffed birds, that he was obliged to allow
the home of Washington to be after all really _gemüthlich_. What he
found so in fact was the soft texture of the day, his personal situation,
the sweetness of his suspense. For suspense had decidedly become his
portion; he was under a charm that made him feel he was watching his own
life and that his susceptibilities were beyond his control. It hung over
him that things might take a turn, from one hour to the other, which
would make them very different from what they had been yet; and his heart
certainly beat a little faster as he wondered what that turn might be.
Why did he come to picnics on fragrant April days with American girls who
might lead him too far? Wouldn’t such girls be glad to marry a
Pomeranian count? And _would_ they, after all, talk that way to the
Kaiser? If he were to marry one of them he should have to give her
several thorough lessons.
In their little tour of the house our young friend and his companion had
had a great many fellow visitors, who had also arrived by the steamer and
who had hitherto not left them an ideal privacy. But the others
gradually dispersed; they circled about a kind of showman who was the
authorised guide, a big slow genial vulgar heavily-bearded man, with a
whimsical edifying patronising tone, a tone that had immense success when
he stopped here and there to make his points—to pass his eyes over his
listening flock, then fix them quite above it with a meditative look and
bring out some ancient pleasantry as if it were a sudden inspiration. He
made a cheerful thing, an echo of the platform before the booth of a
country fair, even of a visit to the tomb of the _pater patriæ_. It is
enshrined in a kind of grotto in the grounds, and Vogelstein remarked to
Pandora that he was a good man for the place, but was too familiar. “Oh
he’d have been familiar with Washington,” said the girl with the bright
dryness with which she often uttered amusing things. Vogelstein looked
at her a moment, and it came over him, as he smiled, that she herself
probably wouldn’t have been abashed even by the hero with whom history
has taken fewest liberties. “You look as if you could hardly believe
that,” Pandora went on. “You Germans are always in such awe of great
people.” And it occurred to her critic that perhaps after all Washington
would have liked her manner, which was wonderfully fresh and natural.
The man with the beard was an ideal minister to American shrines; he
played on the curiosity of his little band with the touch of a master,
drawing them at the right moment away to see the classic ice-house where
the old lady had been found weeping in the belief it was Washington’s
grave. While this monument was under inspection our interesting couple
had the house to themselves, and they spent some time on a pretty terrace
where certain windows of the second floor opened—a little rootless
verandah which overhung, in a manner, obliquely, all the magnificence of
the view; the immense sweep of the river, the artistic plantations, the
last-century garden with its big box hedges and remains of old espaliers.
They lingered here for nearly half an hour, and it was in this retirement
that Vogelstein enjoyed the only approach to intimate conversation
appointed for him, as was to appear, with a young woman in whom he had
been unable to persuade himself that he was not absorbed. It’s not
necessary, and it’s not possible, that I should reproduce this colloquy;
but I may mention that it began—as they leaned against the parapet of the
terrace and heard the cheerful voice of the showman wafted up to them
from a distance—with his saying to her rather abruptly that he couldn’t
make out why they hadn’t had more talk together when they crossed the
Atlantic.
“Well, I can if you can’t,” said Pandora. “I’d have talked quick enough
if you had spoken to me. I spoke to you first.”
“Yes, I remember that”—and it affected him awkwardly.
“You listened too much to Mrs. Dangerfield.”
He feigned a vagueness. “To Mrs. Dangerfield?”
“That woman you were always sitting with; she told you not to speak to
me. I’ve seen her in New York; she speaks to me now herself. She
recommended you to have nothing to do with me.”
“Oh how can you say such dreadful things?” Count Otto cried with a very
becoming blush.
“You know you can’t deny it. You weren’t attracted by my family.
They’re charming people when you know them. I don’t have a better time
anywhere than I have at home,” the girl went on loyally. “But what does
it matter? My family are very happy. They’re getting quite used to New
York. Mrs. Dangerfield’s a vulgar wretch—next winter she’ll call on me.”
“You are unlike any Mädchen I’ve ever seen—I don’t understand you,” said
poor Vogelstein with the colour still in his face.
“Well, you never _will_ understand me—probably; but what difference does
it make?”
He attempted to tell her what difference, but I’ve no space to follow him
here. It’s known that when the German mind attempts to explain things it
doesn’t always reduce them to simplicity, and Pandora was first
mystified, then amused, by some of the Count’s revelations. At last I
think she was a little frightened, for she remarked irrelevantly, with
some decision, that luncheon would be ready and that they ought to join
Mrs. Steuben. Her companion walked slowly, on purpose, as they left the
house together, for he knew the pang of a vague sense that he was losing
her.
“And shall you be in Washington many days yet?” he appealed as they went.
“It will all depend. I’m expecting important news. What I shall do will
be influenced by that.”
The way she talked about expecting news—and important!—made him feel
somehow that she had a career, that she was active and independent, so
that he could scarcely hope to stop her as she passed. It was certainly
true that he had never seen any girl like her. It would have occurred to
him that the news she was expecting might have reference to the favour
she had begged of the President, if he hadn’t already made up his mind—in
the calm of meditation after that talk with the Bonnycastles—that this
favour must be a pleasantry. What she had said to him had a
discouraging, a somewhat chilling effect; nevertheless it was not without
a certain ardour that he inquired of her whether, so long as she stayed
in Washington, he mightn’t pay her certain respectful attentions.
“As many as you like—and as respectful ones; but you won’t keep them up
for ever!”
“You try to torment me,” said Count Otto.
She waited to explain. “I mean that I may have some of my family.”
“I shall be delighted to see them again.”
Again she just hung fire. “There are some you’ve never seen.”
In the afternoon, returning to Washington on the steamer, Vogelstein
received a warning. It came from Mrs. Bonnycastle and constituted, oddly
enough, the second juncture at which an officious female friend had,
while sociably afloat with him, advised him on the subject of Pandora
Day.
“There’s one thing we forgot to tell you the other night about the
self-made girl,” said the lady of infinite mirth. “It’s never safe to
fix your affections on her, because she has almost always an impediment
somewhere in the background.”
He looked at her askance, but smiled and said: “I should understand your
information—for which I’m so much obliged—a little better if I knew what
you mean by an impediment.”
“Oh I mean she’s always engaged to some young man who belongs to her
earlier phase.”
“Her earlier phase?”
“The time before she had made herself—when she lived unconscious of her
powers. A young man from Utica, say. They usually have to wait; he’s
probably in a store. It’s a long engagement.”
Count Otto somehow preferred to understand as little as possible. “Do
you mean a betrothal—to take effect?”
“I don’t mean anything German and moonstruck. I mean that piece of
peculiarly American enterprise a premature engagement—to take effect, but
too complacently, at the end of time.”
Vogelstein very properly reflected that it was no use his having entered
the diplomatic career if he weren’t able to bear himself as if this
interesting generalisation had no particular message for him. He did
Mrs. Bonnycastle moreover the justice to believe that she wouldn’t have
approached the question with such levity if she had supposed she should
make him wince. The whole thing was, like everything else, but for her
to laugh at, and the betrayal moreover of a good intention. “I see, I
see—the self-made girl has of course always had a past. Yes, and the
young man in the store—from Utica—is part of her past.”
“You express it perfectly,” said Mrs. Bonnycastle. “I couldn’t say it
better myself.”
“But with her present, with her future, when they change like this young
lady’s, I suppose everything else changes. How do you say it in America?
She lets him slide.”
“We don’t say it at all!” Mrs. Bonnycastle cried. “She does nothing of
the sort; for what do you take her? She sticks to him; that at least is
what we _expect_ her to do,” she added with less assurance. “As I tell
you, the type’s new and the case under consideration. We haven’t yet had
time for complete study.”
“Oh of course I hope she sticks to him,” Vogelstein declared simply and
with his German accent more audible, as it always was when he was
slightly agitated.
For the rest of the trip he was rather restless. He wandered about the
boat, talking little with the returning picnickers. Toward the last, as
they drew near Washington and the white dome of the Capitol hung aloft
before them, looking as simple as a suspended snowball, he found himself,
on the deck, in proximity to Mrs. Steuben. He reproached himself with
having rather neglected her during an entertainment for which he was
indebted to her bounty, and he sought to repair his omission by a proper
deference. But the only act of homage that occurred to him was to ask
her as by chance whether Miss Day were, to her knowledge, engaged.
Mrs. Steuben turned her Southern eyes upon him with a look of almost
romantic compassion. “To my knowledge? Why of course I’d know! I
should think you’d know too. Didn’t you know she was engaged? Why she
has been engaged since she was sixteen.”
Count Otto gazed at the dome of the Capitol. “To a gentleman from Utica?
“Yes, a native of her place. She’s expecting him soon.”
“I’m so very glad to hear it,” said Vogelstein, who decidedly, for his
career, had promise. “And is she going to marry him?”
“Why what do people fall in love with each other _for_? I presume
they’ll marry when she gets round to it. Ah if she had only been from
the Sooth—!”
At this he broke quickly in: “But why have they never brought it off, as
you say, in so many years?”
“Well, at first she was too young, and then she thought her family ought
to see Europe—of course they could see it better _with_ her—and they
spent some time there. And then Mr. Bellamy had some business
difficulties that made him feel as if he didn’t want to marry just then.
But he has given up business and I presume feels more free. Of course
it’s rather long, but all the while they’ve been engaged. It’s a true,
true love,” said Mrs. Steuben, whose sound of the adjective was that of a
feeble flute.
“Is his name Mr. Bellamy?” the Count asked with his haunting
reminiscence. “D. F. Bellamy, so? And has he been in a store?”
“I don’t know what kind of business it was: it was some kind of business
in Utica. I think he had a branch in New York. He’s one of the leading
gentlemen of Utica and very highly educated. He’s a good deal older than
Miss Day. He’s a very fine man—I presume a college man. He stands very
high in Utica. I don’t know why you look as if you doubted it.”
Vogelstein assured Mrs. Steuben that he doubted nothing, and indeed what
she told him was probably the more credible for seeming to him eminently
strange. Bellamy had been the name of the gentleman who, a year and a
half before, was to have met Pandora on the arrival of the German
steamer; it was in Bellamy’s name that she had addressed herself with
such effusion to Bellamy’s friend, the man in the straw hat who was about
to fumble in her mother’s old clothes. This was a fact that seemed to
Count Otto to finish the picture of her contradictions; it wanted at
present no touch to be complete. Yet even as it hung there before him it
continued to fascinate him, and he stared at it, detached from
surrounding things and feeling a little as if he had been pitched out of
an overturned vehicle, till the boat bumped against one of the
outstanding piles of the wharf at which Mrs. Steuben’s party was to
disembark. There was some delay in getting the steamer adjusted to the
dock, during which the passengers watched the process over its side and
extracted what entertainment they might from the appearance of the
various persons collected to receive it. There were darkies and loafers
and hackmen, and also vague individuals, the loosest and blankest he had
ever seen anywhere, with tufts on their chins, toothpicks in their
mouths, hands in their pockets, rumination in their jaws and diamond pins
in their shirt-fronts, who looked as if they had sauntered over from
Pennsylvania Avenue to while away half an hour, forsaking for that
interval their various slanting postures in the porticoes of the hotels
and the doorways of the saloons.
“Oh I’m so glad! How sweet of you to come down!” It was a voice close
to Count Otto’s shoulder that spoke these words, and he had no need to
turn to see from whom it proceeded. It had been in his ears the greater
part of the day, though, as he now perceived, without the fullest
richness of expression of which it was capable. Still less was he
obliged to turn to discover to whom it was addressed, for the few simple
words I have quoted had been flung across the narrowing interval of
water, and a gentleman who had stepped to the edge of the dock without
our young man’s observing him tossed back an immediate reply.
“I got here by the three o’clock train. They told me in K Street where
you were, and I thought I’d come down and meet you.”
“Charming attention!” said Pandora Day with the laugh that seemed always
to invite the whole of any company to partake in it; though for some
moments after this she and her interlocutor appeared to continue the
conversation only with their eyes. Meanwhile Vogelstein’s also were not
idle. He looked at her visitor from head to foot, and he was aware that
she was quite unconscious of his own proximity. The gentleman before him
was tall, good-looking, well-dressed; evidently he would stand well not
only at Utica, but, judging from the way he had planted himself on the
dock, in any position that circumstances might compel him to take up. He
was about forty years old; he had a black moustache and he seemed to look
at the world over some counter-like expanse on which he invited it all
warily and pleasantly to put down first its idea of the terms of a
transaction. He waved a gloved hand at Pandora as if, when she exclaimed
“Gracious, ain’t they long!” to urge her to be patient. She was patient
several seconds and then asked him if he had any news. He looked at her
briefly, in silence, smiling, after which he drew from his pocket a large
letter with an official-looking seal and shook it jocosely above his
head. This was discreetly, covertly done. No one but our young man
appeared aware of how much was taking place—and poor Count Otto mainly
felt it in the air. The boat was touching the wharf and the space
between the pair inconsiderable.
“Department of State?” Pandora very prettily and soundlessly mouthed
across at him.
“That’s what they call it.”
“Well, what country?”
“What’s your opinion of the Dutch?” the gentleman asked for answer.
“Oh gracious!” cried Pandora.
“Well, are you going to wait for the return trip?” said the gentleman.
Our silent sufferer turned away, and presently Mrs. Steuben and her
companion disembarked together. When this lady entered a carriage with
Miss Day the gentleman who had spoken to the girl followed them; the
others scattered, and Vogelstein, declining with thanks a “lift” from
Mrs. Bonnycastle, walked home alone and in some intensity of meditation.
Two days later he saw in a newspaper an announcement that the President
had offered the post of Minister to Holland to Mr. D. F. Bellamy of
Utica; and in the course of a month he heard from Mrs. Steuben that
Pandora, a thousand other duties performed, had finally “got round” to
the altar of her own nuptials. He communicated this news to Mrs.
Bonnycastle, who had not heard it but who, shrieking at the queer face he
showed her, met it with the remark that there was now ground for a new
induction as to the self-made girl.