Pandora

Before it began he said a word to young Mr. Day, raising his hat at the same time to the little girl, whom he had not yet greeted and who dodged his salute by swinging herself boldly outward to the dangerous side of the pier.  She was indeed still unformed, but was evidently as light as a feather.

“I see you’re kept waiting like me.  It’s very tiresome,” Count Otto said.

The young American answered without looking behind him.  “As soon as we’re started we’ll go all right.  My sister has written to a gentleman to come down.”

“I’ve looked for Miss Day to bid her good-bye,” Vogelstein went on; “but I don’t see her.”

“I guess she has gone to meet that gentleman; he’s a great friend of hers.”

“I guess he’s her lover!” the little girl broke out.  “She was always writing to him in Europe.”

Her brother puffed his cigar in silence a moment.  “That was only for this.  I’ll tell on you, sis,” he presently added.

But the younger Miss Day gave no heed to his menace; she addressed herself only, though with all freedom, to Vogelstein.  “This is New York; I like it better than Utica.”

He had no time to reply, for his servant had arrived with one of the dispensers of fortune; but as he turned away he wondered, in the light of the child’s preference, about the towns of the interior.  He was naturally exempt from the common doom.  The officer who took him in hand, and who had a large straw hat and a diamond breastpin, was quite a man of the world, and in reply to the Count’s formal declarations only said, “Well, I guess it’s all right; I guess I’ll just pass you,” distributing chalk-marks as if they had been so many love-pats.  The servant had done some superfluous unlocking and unbuckling, and while he closed the pieces the officer stood there wiping his forehead and conversing with Vogelstein.  “First visit to our country, sir?—quite alone—no ladies?  Of course the ladies are what we’re most after.”  It was in this manner he expressed himself, while the young diplomatist wondered what he was waiting for and whether he ought to slip something into his palm.  But this representative of order left our friend only a moment in suspense; he presently turned away with the remark quite paternally uttered, that he hoped the Count would make quite a stay; upon which the young man saw how wrong he should have been to offer a tip.  It was simply the American manner, which had a finish of its own after all.  Vogelstein’s servant had secured a porter with a truck, and he was about to leave the place when he saw Pandora Day dart out of the crowd and address herself with much eagerness to the functionary who had just liberated him.  She had an open letter in her hand which she gave him to read and over which he cast his eyes, thoughtfully stroking his beard.  Then she led him away to where her parents sat on their luggage.  Count Otto sent off his servant with the porter and followed Pandora, to whom he really wished to address a word of farewell.  The last thing they had said to each other on the ship was that they should meet again on shore.  It seemed improbable however that the meeting would occur anywhere but just here on the dock; inasmuch as Pandora was decidedly not in society, where Vogelstein would be of course, and as, if Utica—he had her sharp little sister’s word for it—was worse than what was about him there, he’d be hanged if he’d go to Utica.  He overtook Pandora quickly; she was in the act of introducing the representative of order to her parents, quite in the same manner in which she had introduced the Captain of the ship.  Mr. and Mrs. Day got up and shook hands with him and they evidently all prepared to have a little talk.  “I should like to introduce you to my brother and sister,” he heard the girl say, and he saw her look about for these appendages.  He caught her eye as she did so, and advanced with his hand outstretched, reflecting the while that evidently the Americans, whom he had always heard described as silent and practical, rejoiced to extravagance in the social graces.  They dawdled and chattered like so many Neapolitans.

“Good-bye, Count Vogelstein,” said Pandora, who was a little flushed with her various exertions but didn’t look the worse for it.  “I hope you’ll have a splendid time and appreciate our country.”

“I hope you’ll get through all right,” Vogelstein answered, smiling and feeling himself already more idiomatic.

“That gentleman’s sick that I wrote to,” she rejoined; “isn’t it too bad?  But he sent me down a letter to a friend of his—one of the examiners—and I guess we won’t have any trouble.  Mr. Lansing, let me make you acquainted with Count Vogelstein,” she went on, presenting to her fellow-passenger the wearer of the straw hat and the breastpin, who shook hands with the young German as if he had never seen him before.  Vogelstein’s heart rose for an instant to his throat; he thanked his stars he hadn’t offered a tip to the friend of a gentleman who had often been mentioned to him and who had also been described by a member of Pandora’s family as Pandora’s lover.

“It’s a case of ladies this time,” Mr. Lansing remarked to him with a smile which seemed to confess surreptitiously, and as if neither party could be eager, to recognition.

“Well, Mr. Bellamy says you’ll do anything for him,” Pandora said, smiling very sweetly at Mr. Lansing.  “We haven’t got much; we’ve been gone only two years.”

Mr. Lansing scratched his head a little behind, with a movement that sent his straw hat forward in the direction of his nose.  “I don’t know as I’d do anything for him that I wouldn’t do for you,” he responded with an equal geniality.  “I guess you’d better open that one”—and he gave a little affectionate kick to one of the trunks.

“Oh mother, isn’t he lovely?  It’s only your sea-things,” Pandora cried, stooping over the coffer with the key in her hand.

“I don’t know as I like showing them,” Mrs. Day modestly murmured.

Vogelstein made his German salutation to the company in general, and to Pandora he offered an audible good-bye, which she returned in a bright friendly voice, but without looking round as she fumbled at the lock of her trunk.

“We’ll try another, if you like,” said Mr. Lansing good-humouredly.

“Oh no it has got to be this one!  Good-bye, Count Vogelstein.  I hope you’ll judge us correctly!”

The young man went his way and passed the barrier of the dock.  Here he was met by his English valet with a face of consternation which led him to ask if a cab weren’t forthcoming.

“They call ’em ’acks ’ere, sir,” said the man, “and they’re beyond everything.  He wants thirty shillings to take you to the inn.”

Vogelstein hesitated a moment.  “Couldn’t you find a German?”

“By the way he talks he is a German!” said the man; and in a moment Count Otto began his career in America by discussing the tariff of hackney-coaches in the language of the fatherland.

II

He went wherever he was asked, on principle, partly to study American society and partly because in Washington pastimes seemed to him not so numerous that one could afford to neglect occasions.  At the end of two winters he had naturally had a good many of various kinds—his study of American society had yielded considerable fruit.  When, however, in April, during the second year of his residence, he presented himself at a large party given by Mrs. Bonnycastle and of which it was believed that it would be the last serious affair of the season, his being there (and still more his looking very fresh and talkative) was not the consequence of a rule of conduct.  He went to Mrs. Bonnycastle’s simply because he liked the lady, whose receptions were the pleasantest in Washington, and because if he didn’t go there he didn’t know what he should do; that absence of alternatives having become familiar to him by the waters of the Potomac.  There were a great many things he did because if he didn’t do them he didn’t know what he should do.  It must be added that in this case even if there had been an alternative he would still have decided to go to Mrs. Bonnycastle’s.  If her house wasn’t the pleasantest there it was at least difficult to say which was pleasanter; and the complaint sometimes made of it that it was too limited, that it left out, on the whole, more people than it took in, applied with much less force when it was thrown open for a general party.  Toward the end of the social year, in those soft scented days of the Washington spring when the air began to show a southern glow and the Squares and Circles (to which the wide empty avenues converged according to a plan so ingenious, yet so bewildering) to flush with pink blossom and to make one wish to sit on benches—under this magic of expansion and condonation Mrs. Bonnycastle, who during the winter had been a good deal on the defensive, relaxed her vigilance a little, became whimsically wilful, vernally reckless, as it were, and ceased to calculate the consequences of an hospitality which a reference to the back files or even to the morning’s issue of the newspapers might easily prove a mistake.  But Washington life, to Count Otto’s apprehension, was paved with mistakes; he felt himself in a society founded on fundamental fallacies and triumphant blunders.  Little addicted as he was to the sportive view of existence, he had said to himself at an early stage of his sojourn that the only way to enjoy the great Republic would be to burn one’s standards and warm one’s self at the blaze.  Such were the reflexions of a theoretic Teuton who now walked for the most part amid the ashes of his prejudices.

Mrs. Bonnycastle had endeavoured more than once to explain to him the principles on which she received certain people and ignored certain others; but it was with difficulty that he entered into her discriminations.  American promiscuity, goodness knew, had been strange to him, but it was nothing to the queerness of American criticism.  This lady would discourse to him à perte de vue on differences where he only saw resemblances, and both the merits and the defects of a good many members of Washington society, as this society was interpreted to him by Mrs. Bonnycastle, he was often at a loss to understand.  Fortunately she had a fund of good humour which, as I have intimated, was apt to come uppermost with the April blossoms and which made the people she didn’t invite to her house almost as amusing to her as those she did.  Her husband was not in politics, though politics were much in him; but the couple had taken upon themselves the responsibilities of an active patriotism; they thought it right to live in America, differing therein from many of their acquaintances who only, with some grimness, thought it inevitable.  They had that burdensome heritage of foreign reminiscence with which so many Americans were saddled; but they carried it more easily than most of their country-people, and one knew they had lived in Europe only by their present exultation, never in the least by their regrets.  Their regrets, that is, were only for their ever having lived there, as Mrs. Bonnycastle once told the wife of a foreign minister.  They solved all their problems successfully, including those of knowing none of the people they didn’t wish to, and of finding plenty of occupation in a society supposed to be meagrely provided with resources for that body which Vogelstein was to hear invoked, again and again, with the mixture of desire and of deprecation that might have attended the mention of a secret vice, under the name of a leisure-class.  When as the warm weather approached they opened both the wings of their house-door, it was because they thought it would entertain them and not because they were conscious of a pressure.  Alfred Bonnycastle all winter indeed chafed a little at the definiteness of some of his wife’s reserves; it struck him that for Washington their society was really a little too good.  Vogelstein still remembered the puzzled feeling—it had cleared up somewhat now—with which, more than a year before, he had heard Mr. Bonnycastle exclaim one evening, after a dinner in his own house, when every guest but the German secretary (who often sat late with the pair) had departed: “Hang it, there’s only a month left; let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the President.”

This was Mrs. Bonnycastle’s carnival, and on the occasion to which I began my chapter by referring the President had not only been invited but had signified his intention of being present.  I hasten to add that this was not the same august ruler to whom Alfred Bonnycastle’s irreverent allusion had been made.  The White House had received a new tenant—the old one was then just leaving it—and Count Otto had had the advantage, during the first eighteen months of his stay in America, of seeing an electoral campaign, a presidential inauguration and a distribution of spoils.  He had been bewildered during those first weeks by finding that at the national capital in the houses he supposed to be the best, the head of the State was not a coveted guest; for this could be the only explanation of Mr. Bonnycastle’s whimsical suggestion of their inviting him, as it were, in carnival.  His successor went out a good deal for a President.

The legislative session was over, but this made little difference in the aspect of Mrs. Bonnycastle’s rooms, which even at the height of the congressional season could scarce be said to overflow with the representatives of the people.  They were garnished with an occasional Senator, whose movements and utterances often appeared to be regarded with a mixture of alarm and indulgence, as if they would be disappointing if they weren’t rather odd and yet might be dangerous if not carefully watched.  Our young man had come to entertain a kindness for these conscript fathers of invisible families, who had something of the toga in the voluminous folds of their conversation, but were otherwise rather bare and bald, with stony wrinkles in their faces, like busts and statues of ancient law-givers.  There seemed to him something chill and exposed in their being at once so exalted and so naked; there were frequent lonesome glances in their eyes, as if in the social world their legislative consciousness longed for the warmth of a few comfortable laws ready-made.  Members of the House were very rare, and when Washington was new to the inquiring secretary he used sometimes to mistake them, in the halls and on the staircases where he met them, for the functionaries engaged, under stress, to usher in guests and wait at supper.  It was only a little later that he perceived these latter public characters almost always to be impressive and of that rich racial hue which of itself served as a livery.  At present, however, such confounding figures were much less to be met than during the months of winter, and indeed they were never frequent at Mrs. Bonnycastle’s.  At present the social vistas of Washington, like the vast fresh flatness of the lettered and numbered streets, which at this season seemed to Vogelstein more spacious and vague than ever, suggested but a paucity of political phenomena.  Count Otto that evening knew every one or almost every one.  There were often inquiring strangers, expecting great things, from New York and Boston, and to them, in the friendly Washington way, the young German was promptly introduced.  It was a society in which familiarity reigned and in which people were liable to meet three times a day, so that their ultimate essence really became a matter of importance.

“I’ve got three new girls,” Mrs. Bonnycastle said.  “You must talk to them all.”

“All at once?” Vogelstein asked, reversing in fancy a position not at all unknown to him.  He had so repeatedly heard himself addressed in even more than triple simultaneity.

“Oh no; you must have something different for each; you can’t get off that way.  Haven’t you discovered that the American girl expects something especially adapted to herself?  It’s very well for Europe to have a few phrases that will do for any girl.  The American girl isn’t any girl; she’s a remarkable specimen in a remarkable species.  But you must keep the best this evening for Miss Day.”

“For Miss Day!”—and Vogelstein had a stare of intelligence.  “Do you mean for Pandora?”

Mrs. Bonnycastle broke on her side into free amusement.  “One would think you had been looking for her over the globe!  So you know her already—and you call her by her pet name?”

“Oh no, I don’t know her; that is I haven’t seen her or thought of her from that day to this.  We came to America in the same ship.”

“Isn’t she an American then?”

“Oh yes; she lives at Utica—in the interior.”

“In the interior of Utica?  You can’t mean my young woman then, who lives in New York, where she’s a great beauty and a great belle and has been immensely admired this winter.”

“After all,” said Count Otto, considering and a little disappointed, “the name’s not so uncommon; it’s perhaps another.  But has she rather strange eyes, a little yellow, but very pretty, and a nose a little arched?”

“I can’t tell you all that; I haven’t seen her.  She’s staying with Mrs. Steuben.  She only came a day or two ago, and Mrs. Steuben’s to bring her.  When she wrote to me to ask leave she told me what I tell you.  They haven’t come yet.”

Vogelstein felt a quick hope that the subject of this correspondence might indeed be the young lady he had parted from on the dock at New York, but the indications seemed to point another way, and he had no wish to cherish an illusion.  It didn’t seem to him probable that the energetic girl who had introduced him to Mr. Lansing would have the entrée of the best house in Washington; besides, Mrs. Bonnycastle’s guest was described as a beauty and belonging to the brilliant city.

“What’s the social position of Mrs. Steuben?” it occurred to him to ask while he meditated.  He had an earnest artless literal way of putting such a question as that; you could see from it that he was very thorough.

Mrs. Bonnycastle met it, however, but, with mocking laughter.  “I’m sure I don’t know!  What’s your own?”—and she left him to turn to her other guests, to several of whom she repeated his question.  Could they tell her what was the social position of Mrs. Steuben?  There was Count Vogelstein who wanted to know.  He instantly became aware of course that he oughtn’t so to have expressed himself.  Wasn’t the lady’s place in the scale sufficiently indicated by Mrs. Bonnycastle’s acquaintance with her?  Still there were fine degrees, and he felt a little unduly snubbed.  It was perfectly true, as he told his hostess, that with the quick wave of new impressions that had rolled over him after his arrival in America the image of Pandora was almost completely effaced; he had seen innumerable things that were quite as remarkable in their way as the heroine of the Donau, but at the touch of the idea that he might see her and hear her again at any moment she became as vivid in his mind as if they had parted the day before: he remembered the exact shade of the eyes he had described to Mrs. Bonnycastle as yellow, the tone of her voice when at the last she expressed the hope he might judge America correctly.  Had he judged America correctly?  If he were to meet her again she doubtless would try to ascertain.  It would be going much too far to say that the idea of such an ordeal was terrible to Count Otto; but it may at least be said that the thought of meeting Pandora Day made him nervous.  The fact is certainly singular, but I shall not take on myself to explain it; there are some things that even the most philosophic historian isn’t bound to account for.

He wandered into another room, and there, at the end of five minutes, he was introduced by Mrs. Bonnycastle to one of the young ladies of whom she had spoken.  This was a very intelligent girl who came from Boston and showed much acquaintance with Spielhagen’s novels.  “Do you like them?”  Vogelstein asked rather vaguely, not taking much interest in the matter, as he read works of fiction only in case of a sea-voyage.  The young lady from Boston looked pensive and concentrated; then she answered that she liked some of them very much, but that there were others she didn’t like—and she enumerated the works that came under each of these heads.  Spielhagen is a voluminous writer, and such a catalogue took some time; at the end of it moreover Vogelstein’s question was not answered, for he couldn’t have told us whether she liked Spielhagen or not.