Pandora
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Henry James >> Pandora
"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.