CALEB CONOVER MAKES A SPEECH
Conover had broken, that night, two rules that had for years formed
inviolate tenets of his life creed. In the first place, he—whose battles
had for the most part been won by the cold eye that told nothing, and by
the colder brain that dictated the words of his every-day speech as
calculatingly as a diplomat dictates a letter of state—he had forced
himself to throw away his guard and to chatter and make himself
agreeable like any bargain counter clerk. The effort had been irksome.
In the second, he had departed from his fixed habit of total abstinence.
The love of strong drink ran high in his blood. Early in life he had
decided that such indulgence would militate against success. So he had
avoided even the mildest potations from thenceforward. To-night (his
usually stolid nerves tense with the excitement of the grand cast he was
making for “social recognition”) he had felt, as never before in
campaign or in business climax, the need for stimulant to enable him to
play his awkward rôle. Moreover—he had his son, Gerald’s, high authority
for the statement—total abstinence was no longer in vogue among the
elect.
As soon, therefore, as he had taken his seat in the supper-room he had
braced himself by a glass of champagne. The unwonted beverage sent a
delicious glow through him. His puzzled brain cleared, his last doubts
of the entertainment’s success began to fade.
An obsequious waiter at his elbow hastened to refill the glass, and
Conover, his eyes darting hither and thither among the guests to single
out and dwell on the various faces he had so long and so vainly yearned
to see in his house, absent-mindedly emptied it and another after it. He
was talking assiduously to Mrs. Van Alstyne, whom at first he had found
somewhat frigid and difficult; but who, he now discovered to his
surprise, it was growing momentarily easier to entertain. He had had no
idea of his own command of language.
Supper was still in its early stages when a fourth glass of heady
vintage champagne followed the other three. From doorways and walls his
political followers looked on with amaze. To them the sight of the Boss
drinking was the eighth wonder of the world. They nudged each other and
muttered awed comments out of the corners of their mouths.
But Caleb heeded this not at all. He was happy. Very happy. The party
over which he had suffered such secret qualms and to secure the desired
guests for which he had strained every atom of his vast political and
business influence, was proving a marvellous success. At last he was in
society. And he had thought the barriers of that Body so impassable! He
was in society. At last. And talking with delightful, brilliant fluency
with one of its acknowledged leaders. He had conquered.
The waiter filled his glass for the fifth time. After all, champagne had
an effect whiskey could never equal. The fifth draught (for he allowed
but one swallow to the goblet) seemed to inspire him even more than had
its predecessors.
Then it was that fifty generations of Irishmen who, under the spell of
liquor, acquired a flow of language not their own, clamored for voice in
this their latest and greatest descendant. Now that he was in so
foreign, brilliant a mood, what more apt than a graceful little speech
of greeting to those his fellow-townsmen who had flocked thither to do
him honor? The idea was sublime. Conover rose to his feet and rapped for
silence. He would speak while the gift of eloquence was still strong
upon him.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” began Caleb, clearing his voice and looking down
the great room across the concourse of wondering, amused, or expectant
faces that gently swayed in a faint haze before his eyes, “I guess you
all know, without my telling you, how glad I am to see you here
to-night, and I want you should enjoy every minute of your evening. Some
of you are old friends of mine. There’s more’n a few here to-night that
remembers me when I was barefooted Cale Conover, without a dollar to my
name nor any very hectic prospects of getting one.
“But there’s a lot more of you here that I hadn’t the honor of knowing
then, nor for that matter of meeting at all till to-night. It’s to
these, mostly, that I’m talking now. For I want ’em to know me better
and like me better. Maybe if they hear more about me they will. That’s
why I’m on my feet now.
“I b’lieve it isn’t customary to make a speech any more at parties. But
you’ll have to forgive me. I’m not much onto the latest frills and
fashions. But give me a chance, and I’ll learn as easy as a Chinaman. It
came to me all of a sudden to say what I’ve got to say, right here and
now, even if it’s at the expense of a little etiquette. I’ve asked you
here to-night, mainly, of course, for the pleasure of entertaining you,
and I hope you’re all having a real good time. But I had another reason,
too.”
The men at the tables looked perplexed. Was this the Caleb Conover they
had met and cringed to in the outer world, this garrulous, rambling man
with the flushed face?
“You see, I’ve come to be a kind of a feature of this city of ours and
of the State, too. I’m here to stay. And I want that my towns-folks and
my fellow-residents of the Mountain State should know me. Many of ’em
do. There’s a full half-million folks in this city and State that know
all about Caleb Conover. They know he’s on the square, that he’ll look
after their interests, that he’s a white man. They know he’s a man they
can trust in their public life and welcome in their homes. And, as I
said, there’s a lot of these people here to-night.
“But there’s a lot of other folks here who only know me by what slander
and jokes they’ve picked up around town or in the out-of-State
newspapers. It’s these latter folks I’m talking to now. I want them to
know the _real_ me; not the uneducated crook and illiterate feller my
p’litical enemies have made me out. They can’t think I’m _all_ bad, or
they wouldn’t be my guests. Would they, now? And a little frankness
ought to do the rest.
“Some people say I’ve risen from the gutter. Well, I’ve _risen_ from it,
haven’t I? A lot of men on Pompton Avenue and in the big clubs are just
where they started when they were born. Not a step in advance of where
their fathers left ’em. Swell chance _they’d_ have had if their parents
had started ’em in the gutter as mine did, wouldn’t they? Where’d they
be now?
“What does the start amount to? The finish line’s where the score’s
counted. Gutter or palace.
“‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ says a poet by the name of R. Burns. And
he was right, even if he did waste his time on verse-stringing. Only it
always seemed a pity to me those words wasn’t said by someone bigger’n a
measly poet. Someone whose name carried weight, and whose words would be
quoted more. Because then more folks might hear of it and believe it. I
don’t suppose one person in fifty’s ever heard of this R. Burns person.
(I never did, myself, till I bought a Famous Quotation book to use in
one of my campaigns. That’s how I got familiar with the writings of R.
Burns and Ibid and Byron and all those rhymer people.) Now, if some
public character like Tom Platt, or Matt Quay, or someone else that
everybody’s heard of, had said that quotation about a man being a man——”
Caleb paused to gather up the loose threads of his discourse. This
caused him a moment of dull bewilderment, for he was not accustomed to
digress, either in mind or talk, and the phenomenon puzzled him. He
rallied and went on:
“But that isn’t the point. I was telling you about myself. I started in
the gutter, just as the ‘knockers’ say I did. Or down by the freight
yards, and that’s about the same thing. My mother took in washing—when
she could get it. My father went to the penitentiary for freight-lifting
when I was ten—he was a stevedore—and he died there. I was brought up on
a street where the feller—man or boy—who couldn’t fight had to stay
indoors. And indoors was one place I never stayed. I began as coal boy
in the C. G. & X. elevators; then I got a job firing on a fast freight,
and from that I took to braking on a local passenger run. Then I was
yardmaster, and then in the sup’rintendent’s office, and then came the
job of sup’rintendent and after that general manager, and I worked my
way up till I ran the C. G. & X. road single-handed. Meantime I was
looking after your city’s interests. Three times as Alderman and then
once as Mayor, for the boys knew they could bank on me. I got hold of
interests here and interests there. Cheap, run-down interests they were,
for the most part, but I built ’em up. Take the C. G. & X., for
instance. Biggest road in the State to-day. How’d it get so? _I_ made
it. It was all run down, and on its last legs when I took hold. I
acquired it and——”
He paused once more, fighting back that queer tendency to let slip his
grasp on his subject.
“I remember that C. G. & X. deal,” whispered Greer to his wife. “He
juggled shares and pulled wires and spread calamity rumors till he was
able to smash the stock down to a dollar-ten per. He scared out all the
other big holders, gobbled their stock, reorganized, and reaped a clean
five million on the deal.”
“Hush!” retorted Mrs. Greer. “This is too rich to miss. I must remember
it all, to——”
“—So, you see,” Caleb was continuing, “I fought my way up. Every move
was a fight, and every fight was a win. That’s my motto. Fight to win.
An’ if you _don’t_ win, let it be your executor, not you, that knows you
lost. But the biggest fight of all was to come. I controlled the city. I
helped control the State. I had all the money any man needed, and I was
spending it right here in the town where it was earned. I was a
successful man. But the man who’s satisfied with success would be
satisfied with failure. And I wasn’t satisfied.
“There was still one thing I couldn’t get. I couldn’t get one set of
people to recognize me when they met me in the street, to ask me to
their houses, to come to _my_ house. Why? I don’t know. Maybe _they_
don’t know. Maybe they didn’t _want_ to know. There’s a lot of things
society folks don’t seem to want to know. And one of those things was
me. I couldn’t win ’em over. I built this house. Cost $200,000 more’n
any other house in town. If you doubt it, step down to the Building
Commissioner’s and look over the specifications. Built it on the most
fash’nable avenue, too. But still society wouldn’t say: ‘Pleased to know
you!’ ‘Maybe it’s my lack of blue blood,’ thinks I. ‘Though my pile’s
been made a good deal cleaner than many an aristocrat’s.’ I married a
lady of the first families here”—a ripple of unintelligible surprise
broke in on his ears, but quickly died. “What was the result? She was
asked out and I wasn’t. But I kept on fighting. And at last I’m in the
winning stride.
“I’m not a college man myself. All my education’s hand-made and since I
was thirty. But I was bound my son should be one. And he is. He’s in
society, too. The best New York affords, I’m told. My girl’s had
advantages, too, and you see the result. Do unto others what you can’t
do for yourself. That’s worth remembering sometimes. And now at last I
get my comeback for all my outlay.
“To-night I guess I cover the final lap of the race. For the bluest
blood of Granite is—are—is among my guests here, and I’m meeting ’em on
equal terms. All this talk, maybe, isn’t what the etiquette books call
‘good form.’ But if you knew how many years I’ve worked for what I’ve
won to-night, you’d sympathize with me for wanting to crow just a
little.”
“Heavens!” murmured Mrs. Greer, “does the creature think anyone’s going
to regard this as his ‘début’? And the awful part of it is, the whole
speech will be in every paper to-morrow. Oh, if only the reporters will
get our names wrong!”
“No fear of that,” answered Greer. “The typewritten list is probably
being put in print even now. But what ails Conover?”
“So,” resumed Caleb, beaming about him, “I wanted the chance to let you
all know me as I really am. Not what my enemies say about me. Is there
any reason why I shouldn’t be your friend and entertain you often? None
in the least, you’ll all say. It seems a little thing, perhaps, to you
who’ve been in the game always. But it’s meant a lot to me!”
He paused. There seemed nothing more to say, yet he longed to end with a
climax. A glorious, dazzling inspiration came, and he hurried on:
“And now, in honor of this little meeting between friends, let me tell
you all a secret. It won’t be a secret to-morrow, but you can always be
able to say you were the first who was told. I have at last yielded to
the earnest entreaties of my constituents and friends and party in
general, and have consented to accept the nomination for Governor at the
coming convention.”
From the proletariat fringing the walls and blocking the doorway arose
an excited, exultant hum. Only the wild efforts of certain efficient, if
unofficial, sergeants-at-arms prevented a mighty yell of applause. At
the tables, however, the women looked bored or puzzled; while the men
glanced at each other with the blank look of people who, out for a day’s
jolly hunting, find themselves caught unexpectedly in a bear trap.
“Good Lord!” grunted Greer, “I hope our being here doesn’t commit any of
us! To think of Conover, of all men, as governor! This’ll be a bombshell
with a vengeance.”
“I have heretofore,” went on Caleb, after allowing the impression of his
words to sink in, “refused all State offices. But now I feel it a social
as well as a political duty that I owe. And I shall be grateful to you
for your honest support.”
He had rehearsed this last sentence many times for campaign speeches. It
seemed to him to have the true oratorical ring, and to be singularly
appropriate. He prepared to sit down, then checked himself.
“Some men,” he added, as an afterthought, “are in politics for a ‘holy’
purpose. Some for what’s in it for them. I find the result’s usually
pretty much the same in both cases. As governor I shall do my best for
Granite and for the Mountain State. Thank you.”
Caleb bowed, reseated himself and swallowed another glass of champagne
at a gulp. He was not ill pleased with himself. He had risen merely to
thank his guests for their presence. Little by little he had drifted
further than he had at first intended. Yet, he was glad he had yielded
to this unprecedented, unaccustomed yearning to expand; to show himself
at his best before these people with whom he now firmly believed himself
on a footing of friendly equality. Yes, on the whole, he was convinced
of his success.
He glanced about him. The buzz of talk had recommenced; it seemed to him
more loudly, more interestedly, with less of constraint than before.
Dozens of eyes were upon him, not with the bored coldness of the earlier
evening, but with curiosity and open interest. He had put people at
their ease. They were accepting him as one of themselves, and behaving
as he had heard they did at other functions.
Caleb was glad.
Then his complacent glance fell on his wife. She was very red in the
face, and was bending over her plate, eating fast.
“Proud of the old man, poor little thing!” mused Conover, a twinge of
affection for his scared, invertebrate spouse sending a softer light
into his strenuous, lean face. His gaze next travelled to Blanche, his
daughter. She, too, was red of face, and was talking hard, as if against
time. Somehow Caleb was less assured as to the cause of her flush.
Perhaps in Europe such speeches were not customary. He could explain to
her later.
Anice Lanier, alone, met his eye with the frank, honest, unafraid look
that was her birthright, and which made her the only living person he
instinctively felt he could not bully. In her look he read, now, a mute
question. He could not fathom the expression.
Caleb left his place and made his way among the tables to where she sat.
“How’d it go?” he asked. “It seemed to take ’em.”
“I think it did,” she replied, noting the flush on his cheek and the
brightness of his gaze, and wondering thereat.
“Wasn’t too long to hold their interest?”
“No. They seemed interested.”
“You think so? Good! Do you know, if I’d had time to think, I’d rather
have made fifty campaign speeches than that one. I’d have been rattled
to death. But it was easier than any speech I ever made. Good climax,
eh, that announcement?”
“How long ago did you make up your mind to run for Governor?”
“Think it’s queer that, as my secretary, you hadn’t heard of it? Well,
I’ll tell you. I decided it just about seven minutes ago. It came to me
like a flash, plumb in the middle of my speech. I figgered out all at
once that if there was any flaw in my plans so far, the governorship was
dead sure to cinch me in society. Folks’ll think twice before they turn
up their noses at a governor. It came as an inspiration. A genuine
hunch. I never have one of them but what it wins. Why, when——”
“But can you get the nomination?”
“Can I get it? _Can_ I get it? Say, Miss Lanier, haven’t you learned yet
that there isn’t a thing in the city of Granite or in the Mountain State
that Caleb Conover, Railroader, can’t get if he wants it bad enough?
To-night ought to have showed you that. Why, with the legislature and
every newspaper, and the railroad system and every decent State job
right here safe between my fingers, all I’ve got to do is to turn the
wheel, and the little ball will drop into the governor’s chair all
right, all right.”
The girl’s big brown eyes were vaguely troubled. The reserve habitual to
her when in her employer’s society deepened. She thought of Clive
Standish and his aspirations. What would become of the young lawyer’s
already desperate hope, now that the Boss himself—and not some mere
puppet of the latter’s—was to be his opponent?
“Say,” sighed Caleb Conover in perfect content, “this is the happiest
night ever! I’ve got everything there is in life for a man. All the
money I want, the running of the State, a place in society at last, a
daughter that’s a princess, a boy that’s making his mark in the biggest
city in America, and now—the governorship. Lord! but I’m a lucky man.
And that speech—I didn’t think I had it in me. Of course, I know those
snobs from the Pompton Avenue crowd were dragged here by the ears. I had
to drag pretty hard, too, in most cases. But they’re _here_. And they
listened to me. They had to. And they can’t ever look on me just as they
did before.”
“No,” assented Anice, “they can’t.”
To her there was something impersonally pathetic in the way this usually
keen, stern man had unbent and made himself ridiculous. She was the only
person living in whose presence, as a rule, he expanded. She was used to
the semi-occasional talkative, boastful moods of this Boss whom all the
rest of the world deemed as sharp, and concise as a steel trap—and as
deadly. Yet never had even she seen him like this before.
It was sad, she mused, that Samson, shorn of his locks of self-restraint
and of his calculating coolness, should thus have made sport for the
Philistines. That he had perhaps done so for a purpose—even though for
once in his life it was a futile purpose—rendered his folly no less
humiliating.
“Yes,” reiterated Conover, as he prepared to return to his own table.
“It was an inspiration. And an ounce of inspiration discounts a half-ton
of any other commodity that ever passed over the counter.”
“What was it like?” rhapsodized Billy Shevlin at 2 A.M., as he gazed
loftily upon a semicircle of humbler querists in the back room of
Kerrigan’s saloon. “It was like the King of England an’ one of them
Fashion Joinals an’ a lake of $4-a-bottle suds, all mixed; with a Letter
Carriers’ Ball on the side. And”—he added, in a glow of divine
memories—“_I_ was ace-high with the biggest of the push. If I hadn’t a’
been, would the Van Alstyne dame a’ stood for it so civil when I treads
on the train of her Sunday regalia and rips about ten yards of the fancy
tatting off’n it?”
“What was it like?” echoed Mrs. Greer to a query of one of her daughters
who had sat up to await the parental home-coming. “It was something
clear outside the scriptural prohibition of swearing. For it was like
nothing in ‘the heavens above, or the earth beneath, or the waters under
the earth.’”
“What was it like?” thought Clive Standish drowsily as he fell asleep.
“A dozen people are certain to ask me that to-morrow. It—her—her eyes
have that same old queer way—of making me feel as if—I were in church.”