A PEACE CONFERENCE
“I don’t know why we were all so carried away by it,” said Caine,
reflectively. “I’ve been thinking it over. There was much more bathos
than pathos; and a delightful absence of both elegance and eloquence
about his speech. Yet for a moment I was almost tempted to join in
your charmingly ill-timed applause. The whole thing savored of cheap
melodrama. But--”
“It was the man himself. Not what he said,” answered Jack Hawarden,
eager in defense of his new-built idol. “He stood there facing a crowd
that would have liked nothing better than to annihilate him. That
drunken Thing on the floor was enough by itself to ruin him forever
at the Arareek. Yet Conover made us listen and he swayed us to suit
himself. Not by what he said, but by his own big strength, I think.
There’s something about him I don’t understand. But he’s a _man_. And,
after to-night,--whatever the others say--I take my hat off to him.”
“For the perfecting of a young author’s style,” observed Caine,
irrelevantly, “what sample of nervous English can be finer than
Carlyle’s ‘_Heroes and Hero Worship_?’”
His raillery jarred on the boy’s enthusiasm and checked the gush of
extravagant praise. Letty Standish, with whom the two were walking home
from the Club, took advantage of Jack’s snubbed silence, to put in a
word.
“I think Mr. Hawarden is right, Amzi,” she ventured. “There’s something
about Mr. Conover that one can’t very well define. I think he could
make one do anything he chose. I know _I_ was almost--afraid of
him,--before I’d known him ten minutes. I don’t quite think I like him.
He’s so powerful, so rough, so domineering. Not like anyone I ever met
before. But,” with a slight shudder, “I believe I’d do whatever he
ordered me to. Especially if he scowled at me in that bullying way,
with his eyes half-shut. Isn’t it funny to feel like that about a
person you hardly know?”
She ended with a nervous laugh, and looked up at Caine with a pretty,
helpless air of seeking protection. Amzi always found this appealing
attitude irresistible. If social longings were Conover’s “feet of
clay,” Letty Standish served as a similar pedal handicap for Caine.
He wished young Hawarden had not thrust himself upon the tête-à-tête
of their homeward walk. He wanted, loverlike, to reassure Letty with
unspeakably doughty promises of safeguard from peril; to see her soft
round eyes raised to his in the admiration such protestations are wont
to excite between very young or very old lovers. But Jack was doggedly
treading along beside them in all the charming ignorance of his age and
temperament. The boy’s sulks were even now dissolving and he joined
again in the talk; still harping on his hero.
“I never met Conover till this morning,” said he. “I wish now I’d known
him better. It’s queer I never met him at Miss Shevlin’s. She’s his
ward, you know.”
Letty, to whom he spoke, answered with a tinge of the latent sub-acid
in her gentle voice:
“I didn’t know. But I’ve noticed things about Miss Shevlin that made it
seem quite likely.”
“Miss Shevlin,” said the boy, hotly, “is the prettiest, brightest,
best-bred girl I ever knew. If you mean she is--”
“I dare say,” answered Letty with elaborate carelessness. “But I never
noticed her especially.”
“I don’t see,” persisted Jack, “how you could have helped it. She’s the
sort of girl everyone notices. There’s something about her--”
“Why, what a zealous champion she has!” exclaimed Letty, playfully, her
laughter ringing thin. “I congratulate her.”
“You needn’t,” retorted Jack. “And I’m afraid you’ll never even have a
chance to congratulate _me_. I--”
“By the way, Hawarden,” interposed Caine, lazily pouring oil on the
churned waters, according to his wont. “I read your _Scribner’s_ story
to-day. I can congratulate you on _that_, at any rate, can’t I? It was
decidedly good. I wondered at your knowledge of human nature.”
Hawarden’s chest swelled. At twenty-two, who does not know human nature
as never can it be known in later years? And who does not rejoice at
recognition of that vast knowledge?
“I’ve had some experience with life, in my time,” said Jack, darkly.
“And I paint my fellow-man as I see him. Not as he ought to be. But as
he is. If I seem merciless in my character drawing--”
“You do indeed!” began Caine. But a fit of very well executed coughing
cut short his righteous praise. Jack, disappointed, sought to lead the
talk back to the former happy theme.
“I’m writing a story now,” he said, “that is bigger in every way than
anything I’ve done before. But I can’t decide yet, even in my own mind,
whether it is very good or very bad. It is one or the other. I know
that.”
“If it’s enough of either,” replied Caine, “it is certain to make a
popular hit.”
“I’ve made De--Miss Shevlin my heroine,” pursued Hawarden, scornfully
disregarding Caine’s untimely flippancy. “But it’s hard to put a girl
like her on paper the way one sees her in one’s mind. I wrote a poem
about her once. _Harper’s Magazine_ accepted it.”
He paused. Then, ridden by the demon of truth, added with reluctance,
“They published it in fine print over toward the end. But,” more
buoyantly, “I saw it copied afterward in no less than two papers.”
“Why don’t you put Mr. Conover into a story, too?” suggested Letty,
unwilling not to seem quite at home in so profound a literary
discussion. “Wouldn’t he make a good character? He’s so--”
“I’m afraid not,” decided the boy, judicially weighing his verdict.
“He’s more of a _man_ than anyone else in all my experience. But he
wouldn’t quite fit into a story, I’m afraid. You see, he lacks romance,
for one thing. One could hardly fancy Caleb Conover in love. And
then--unless you count this evening’s affair--I doubt if he was ever in
an adventure of any sort in his life. His character, from a literary
viewpoint, doesn’t lend itself to action or analysis. In making the
study of human nature my hobby, I have--”
“I see!” broke in Letty, almost sharply. “You are quite right. He would
be impossible in a story--as he is in real life!”
“I hardly think so,” demurred Caine. “Not impossible. Improbable, at
worst. I am afraid a great many people in Granite will find that out
before he is through.”
They had reached the Standish home. Hawarden bade them goodnight at the
door; declining Letty’s perfunctory invitation to come in. The evening
was still young. But the lack of cordiality in Letty’s voice grated on
his armor of youth. He reflected somewhat belatedly that she and Caine
were engaged and that it was possible they might find themes even more
alluring than literature to talk over, together. So, unwilling, he left
them.
Caine and Letty strolled slowly up the walk. The night was cool, for
June. So, ignoring the lounging chairs on the veranda, they passed into
the house.
“This is one of the last evenings we can sit indoors,” commented Letty.
“It’s hard to realize that summer is so near. I suppose this week will
wind up the season. Everywhere else except in old-fashioned Granite, it
must have ended weeks ago.”
“Yes. We’re old-fashioned here in Granite,” said Caine, seating himself
on the arm of the chair into which she had thrown herself. “I think
somebody once left an 1860 calendar in this town, and we’ve all been
living by it ever since. We’re like the scaly, finny Oldest Inhabitants
in the poem, who dreamed away their lives in the coral grove, while a
seven stanza storm roared across the ocean overhead. When the storm of
progress cuts a little below the surface we Granite folk blink upward
from our dreams in pained disapproval. I think that’s why we look
askance at Conover. He represents--”
“Oh, am I to have that dreadful creature’s name forever dinned into my
ears?” complained Letty. “Isn’t it enough that Father makes us ask him
here to dinner, Friday; without _your_ talking forever about him in the
little while people leave us alone together? In another minute Aunt
Lydia will be pottering in to play propriety. And then--”
“And then, ‘Fly from the Aunt, thou sluggard!’ shall be my motto,”
finished Caine. “I wish her virtues didn’t oppress me so. I wouldn’t
object to her so much, if someone whose vocabulary was as limited as
his knowledge of heaven’s _personnel_, hadn’t once described her looks
as ‘Saintly.’ She has been trying so hard to live up to the picture,
ever since, that it’s a bit wearing on poor sinners like me.”
“It’s wicked to be so sacrilegious,” returned Letty, primly. “And I
don’t like to have you speak so of my family. After all, she is my
aunt.”
“Don’t think for a moment I’m blaming _you_ for that, sweetheart,” he
protested with an earnestness that left Letty as usual in doubt whether
or not he had perpetrated some witticism she ought to have seen. Taking
hasty mental review of their talk, she decided he had not, and went on:
“And her face _is_ saintly. You know she--”
“Perhaps it is,” he acquiesced. “But what a pity Fra Angelico and
Rafael couldn’t have seen her! Then we should have had all those
cherubs and red-and-gold angels of theirs depicted with thin gray hair
parted in the middle, and with gray switches and half-inch eye-glasses.”
“You have grown coarse from associating with that Conover man,” pouted
Letty. “It’s--it’s indelicate to speak of switches. And it hurts my
feelings cruelly to have you abuse the people I love!”
The tears, always comfortably near the surface, trembled in Letty’s
voice and eyes. Caine, in a fever of remorse, begged forgiveness and
tried to put his arm about her. But she drew away with a little hunch
of the shoulders.
“You’ve spoiled my evening!” she wailed. “First you introduced that
miserable man to me and made him frighten me, and now you make fun of--”
Footsteps crossing the hall brought her tale of wrong to an abrupt
halt. She sat up and furtively mopped her eyes. Tears were so common
and so easy a relief to her that normally they left scant mark of their
presence. Caine rose and faced the door; the distressed lover merging
as by magic into the bored, suave man of the world.
Reuben Standish’s widowed sister-in-law glided into the room, diffusing
an aura of mild beneficence that struck Caine’s nerves to the raw. Her
near-sighted eyes turned as in lofty benediction upon the lovers; her
thick glasses diffusing and magnifying the glance until it seemed to
embrace all the visible world.
Mrs. Standish, on the death of her husband, had come to keep house
for her widower brother-in-law. She had brought with her her orphaned
grandnephew, Clive, (only son of Letty’s elder brother, long dead),
whose upbringing was at once her chief visible claim to sanctity and
her scriptural thorn in the flesh.
“Clive has been so bad again this evening!” she said with a sigh, after
a distant greeting to Caine, “I suppose these crosses are sent to us.
But sometimes I am nearly tempted to wonder why. I actually caught him
tacking his grandfather’s slippers to the floor, where I had left them,
in front of the chiffonier, in Mr. Standish’s room. I locked him in the
nursery for an hour while I prayed to see my duty clear. And when I
went to him, strengthened and inspired to make him see his fault, what
do you think I found him doing? The hardened boy was actually drawing
caricature, depicting his grandfather trying to walk in the tacked-down
slippers. He had not even the grace to hide it when he saw me coming.
There was nothing left for me to do but to whip him. So I have sent him
out to cut a small stick.”
“Poor little chap!” muttered Caine, stifling a smile. He was fond of
the boy, who in turn idolized him.
“Perhaps,” went on Amzi, aloud, “If, instead of whipping him, you could
let me talk to him and explain--”
“Aunt Lydia!” piped a voice from the doorway. A little Eton-suited boy
with a mop of yellow hair and sorrowful dark eyes, hesitated on the
threshold.
“Oh, _here_ you are,” added the child, coming into the room and walking
straight up to Mrs. Standish. “I--”
“Where is the stick?” asked Nemesis, her glasses reflecting less
sanctity than was their custom, as they sought a glimpse of the hands
Clive held clasped behind him.
“I’m sorry,” replied the boy, apologetically. “It was so dark I
couldn’t find a stick. But,” with a propitiatory smile, as he brought
his hands forward, “Here are two stones you can throw at me, instead,
if you like.”
Caine’s laughter exploded; breaking in with scandalous intrusion, upon
the penitential scene.
“Mr. Caine,” said Mrs. Standish, her coldly righteous rebuke rising
above Letty’s milder reproval, “I think, perhaps, for discipline’s
sake, it might be well for you to end your call before you do anything
more to make this wicked boy regard his fault as a matter for levity.”
Caine glanced in humorous appeal toward Letty. But his fiancée, as
usual in matters of family crisis, only stared back in piteous fear.
“Mr. Caine,” called Clive, as the visitor completed somewhat frigid
adieux and moved toward the door, “I am _very_ sorry I got you into
trouble. I’m afraid Aunt Lydia don’t _quite_ understand us men.”