by Willa Cather
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 today, 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 Chòteau 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 Southwest. 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’oeuvres 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 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 strea
med 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 Southwest.
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.”
I told him I didn’t know what he was talking about.
“You mean you ain’t heard about the German, Fechtig? Well, Rodney’s got some surprise waiting for you! Why, he’s had the damnedest luck! He’s cleaned up a neat little pile on your stuff.”
I begged him to tell me what stuff he meant.
“Why, your curios. This German, Fechtig, come along; he’d been buying up a lot of Indian things out here, and he bought your whole outfit and paid four thousand dollars down for it. The transaction made quite a stir here in Tarpin. I’m not kicking. I made a good thing out of it. My mules were busy three weeks packing the stuff out of there on their backs, and I held the Dutchman up for a fancy price. He had packing cases made at the wagon shop and took ’em up to the mesa full of straw and sawdust, and packed the curios out there. I lost one of my mules, too. You remember Jenny? Well, they were leading her down with a big box on her, and right there where the trail runs so narrow around a bump in the cliff above Black Canyon, she lost her balance and fell clean to the bottom, her load on her. Pretty near a thousand feet, I guess. We never went down to hold a post-mortem, but Fechtig paid for her like a gentleman.”
I remember I sat down on the sofa in Hook’s office because I couldn’t stand up any longer, and the smell of the horse blankets began to make me deathly sick. In a minute I went over, like a girl in a novel. Hook pulled me out on the sidewalk and gave me some whisky out of his pocket flask.
When I felt better I asked him how long this German had been gone, and what he had done with the things.
“Oh, he cleared out three weeks ago. He didn’t waste no time. He treated everybody well, though; nobody’s sore at him. It’s your partner they’re turned against. Fechtig took the stuff right along with him, chartered a freight car, and travelled in the car with it. I reckon it’s on the water by now. He took it straight through into Old Mexico, and was to load it on a French boat. Seems he was afraid of having trouble getting curiosities out of the United States ports. You know you can take anything out of the City of Mexico.”
I had heard all I wanted to hear. I went to the hotel, got a room, and lay down without undressing to wait for daylight. Hook was to drive me and my trunk out to the mesa early the next morning. All I’d been through in Washington was nothing to what I went through that night. I thought Blake must have lost his mind. I didn’t for a minute believe he’d meant to sell me out, but I cursed his stupidity and presumption. I had never told him just how I felt about those things we’d dug out together, it was the kind of thing one doesn’t talk about directly. But he must have known; he couldn’t have lived with me all summer and fall without knowing. And yet, until that night, I had never known myself that I cared more about them than about anything else in the world.
At the first blink of daylight I jumped up from my damnable bed and went round to the stable to rout Hook out of his bunk. We had breakfast and got out of town with his best team. On the way to the mesa we had a break-down, one of the old dry wheels smashed to splinters. Hook had to unhitch and ride back to Tarpin and get another. Everything took an unreasonably long time, and the afternoon was half gone when he put me and my trunk down at the foot of the Black Canyon trail. Every inch of that trail was dear to me, every delicate curve about the old piñon roots, every chancy track along the face of the cliffs, and the deep windings back into shrubbery and safety. The wild-currant bushes were in bloom, and where the path climbed the side of a narrow ravine, the scent of
them in the sun was so heavy that it made me soft, made me want to lie down and sleep. I wanted to see and touch everything, like home-sick children when they come home.
When I pulled out on top of the mesa, the rays of sunlight fell slantingly through the little twisted piñons,—the light was all in between them, as red as a daylight fire, they fairly swam in it. Once again I had that glorious feeling that I’ve never had anywhere else, the feeling of being on the mesa, in a world above the world. And the air, my God, what air!—Soft, tingling, gold, hot with an edge of chill on it, full of the smell of piñons—it was like breathing the sun, breathing the colour of the sky. Down there behind me was the plain, already streaked with shadow, violet and purple and burnt orange until it met the horizon. Before me was the flat mesa top, thinly sprinkled with old cedars that were not much taller than I, though their twisted trunks were almost as thick as my body. I struck off across it, my long black shadow going ahead.
I made straight for the cabin, it was about three miles from the spot where the trail emerged at the top. I saw smoke rising before I could see the hut itself. Blake was in the doorway when I got there. I didn’t look at his face, but I could feel that he looked at mine.
“Don’t say anything, Tom. Don’t rip me up until you hear all about it,” he said as I came toward him.
“I’ve heard enough to about do for me,” I blurted out. “What made you do it, Blake? What made you do it?”
“It was a chance in a million, boy. There wasn’t any time to consult you. There’s only one man in thousands that wants to buy relics and pay real money for them. I could see how your Washington campaign was coming out. I know you’d thought about big figures, so had I. But that was all a pipe dream. Four thousand’s not so bad, you don’t pick it up every day. And he bore all the expenses. Why, it was a terrible expensive job, getting all that frail stuff out of here. Who else would have bought it, I want to know? We’d have had to pack it around at Harvey Houses, selling it at a dollar a bowl, like the poor Indians do. I took the best chance going, for both of us, Tom.”
