At last the Commissioner returned, but he had pressing engagements, and I hung around several days more before he would see me. After questioning me for about half an hour, he told me that his business was with living Indians, not dead ones, and that his office should have informed me of that in the beginning. He advised me to go back to our Congressman and get a letter to the Smithsonian Institution. I packed up my pottery and got out of the place, feeling pretty sore. The head clerk followed me down the corridor and asked me what I’d take for that little bowl he’d taken a fancy to. He said it had no market value, I’d find Washington full of such things; there were cases of them in the cellar at the Smithsonian that they’d never taken the trouble to unpack, hadn’t any place to put them.
I went back to my Congressman. This time he wasn’t so friendly as before, but he gave me a letter to the Smithsonian. There I went through the same experience. The Director couldn’t be seen except by appointment, and his secretary had to be convinced that your business was important before he would give you an appointment with his chief. After the first morning I found it difficult to see even the secretary. He was always engaged. I was told to take a seat and wait, but when he was disengaged he was hurrying off to luncheon. I would sit there all morning with a group of unfortunate people: girls who wanted to get typewriting to do, nice polite old men who wanted to be taken out on surveys and expeditions next summer. The secretary would at last come out with his overcoat on, and would hurry through the waiting-room reading a letter or a report, without looking up.
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 tomorrow. 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 cowpuncher 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 Château 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,
