By Friday, December 9, the most careful journals were saying, on what they declared to be the best sort of authority, that the United States was going into a pact with Japan and England and France, guaranteeing various things. There was considerable diversity in the assertions about what it guaranteed. Washington said nothing. The news came from all of the capitals of the powers concerned, except our own. It was evidently very hard for Washington to say “treaty.”
There was much entertaining gossip running around as to how Tokyo and London and Paris had been able to give the press the news of what was going to be done, while Washington was silent. One story was that a clever Japanese journalist had managed to get a glimpse of the document in preparation and had cabled what he had been able to make out of its contents to Tokyo; that from there it had gone to Paris and London and finally came here. That was one story. Another was a rather thin version of that old, old device of writers of diplomatic fiction—a lively and lovely lady lunches with an elderly diplomat, who, to win her favor, reveals the secret that is in the air. That evening she dines with a young journalist whom she naturally (and necessarily for the purpose of the plot) much prefers, and to prove her devotion she tells him what her elder suitor has revealed. Threadbare as the formula is, it was honored the week that the treaty was coming out of the fog by at least one important newspaper.
Mr. Hughes seems to have concluded by the end of Friday, the 9th, that unless he acted quickly his reputation for dramatic diplomacy might be shaken, and so the hasty summons, the thrill at the breakfast table, the quick readjustments of plans, the rush to make sure that your credentials were all right and your ticket waiting you.
From the beginning of the Conference, sun and air were in league with those who were staging it with such a sense of dramatic values. Never was there a morning of lovelier tenderness than that on which they carried the Unknown Soldier to his grave; Mr. Hughes’ big gun was fired under a perfect morning sky—it was only when we came out that things had grown stern and the clouds were dark, as if to give us a sense that a serious thing had been done that morning and it was well to get down to work, if it was to be made good.