I was not aware, said I, that South America produced any ivory.
There you are twice mistaken, said Judson Tate, distributing the words over at least an octave of his wonderful voice. I did not say that the country I spoke of was in South America I must be careful, my dear man; I have been in politics there, you know. But, even so I have played chess against its president with a set carved from the nasal bones of the tapir one of our native specimens of the order of perissodactyle ungulates inhabiting the Cordilleras[183] which was as pretty ivory as you would care to see.
But it was of romance and adventure and the ways of women that was I going to tell you, and not of zoological animals.
For fifteen years I was the ruling power behind old Sancho Benavides, the Royal High Thumbscrew of the republic. Youve seen his picture in the papers a mushy black man with whiskers like the notes on a Swiss music-box cylinder, and a scroll in his right hand like the ones they write births on in the family Bible. Well, that chocolate potentate used to be the biggest item of interest anywhere between the colour line and the parallels of latitude. It was three throws, horses, whether he was to wind up in the Hall of Fame or the Bureau of Combustibles. Hed have been sure called the Roosevelt[184] of the Southern Continent if it hadnt been that Grover Cleveland[185] was President at the time. Hed hold office a couple of terms, then hed sit out for a hand always after appointing his own successor for the interims.
But it was not Benavides, the Liberator, who was making all this fame for himself. Not him. It was Judson Tate. Benavides was only the chip over the bug. I gave him the tip when to declare war and increase import duties and wear his state trousers. But that wasnt what I wanted to tell you. How did I get to be It? Ill tell you. Because Im the most gifted talker that ever made vocal sounds since Adam[186] first opened his eyes, pushed aside the smelling-salts, and asked: Where am I?
As you observe, I am about the ugliest man you ever saw outside the gallery of photographs of the New England early Christian Scientists. So, at an early age, I perceived that what I lacked in looks I must make up in eloquence. That Ive done. I get what I go after. As the back-stop and still small voice of old Benavides I made all the great historical powers-behind-the-throne, such as Talleyrand[187], Mrs. De Pompadour[188], and Loeb[189], look as small as the minority report of a Duma. I could talk nations into or out of debt, harangue armies to sleep on the battlefield, reduce insurrections, inflammations, taxes, appropriations or surpluses with a few words, and call up the dogs of war or the dove of peace with the same bird-like whistle. Beauty and epaulettes and curly moustaches and Grecian profiles in other men were never in my way. When people first look at me they shudder. Unless they are in the last stages of angina pectoris they are mine in ten minutes after I begin to talk. Women and men I win em as they come. Now, you wouldnt think women would fancy a man with a face like mine, would you?
Oh, yes, Mr. Tate, said I. History is bright and fiction dull with homely men who have charmed women. There seems
Pardon me, interrupted Judson Tate, but you dont quite understand. You have yet to hear my story.
Fergus McMahan was a friend of mine in the capital. For a handsome man Ill admit he was the duty-free merchandise. He had blond curls and laughing blue eyes and was featured regular. They said he was a ringer for the statue they call Herr Mees, the god of speech and eloquence resting in some museum at Rome. Some German anarchist, I suppose. They are always resting and talking.
But Fergus was no talker. He was brought up with the idea that to be beautiful was to make good. His conversation was about as edifying as listening to a leak dropping in a tin dish-pan at the head of the bed when you want to go to sleep. But he and me got to be friends maybe because we was so opposite, dont you think? Looking at the Halloween mask that I call my face when Im shaving seemed to give Fergus pleasure; and Im sure that whenever I heard the feeble output of throat noises that he called conversation I felt contented to be a gargoyle with a silver tongue.
One time I found it necessary to go down to this coast town of Oratama to straighten out a lot of political unrest and chop off a few heads in the customs and military departments. Fergus, who owned the ice and sulphur-match concessions of the republic, says hell keep me company.
So, in a jangle of mule-train bells, we gallops into Oratama, and the town belonged to us as much as Long Island Sound[190] doesnt belong to Japan when T. R. is at Oyster Bay[191]. I say us; but I mean me. Everybody for four nations, two oceans, one bay and isthmus, and five archipelagoes around had heard of Judson Tate. Gentleman adventurer, they called me. I had been written up in five columns of the yellow journals, 40,000 words (with marginal decorations) in a monthly magazine, and a stickful on the twelfth page of the New York Times. If the beauty of Fergus McMahan gained any part of our reception in Oratama, Ill eat the price-tag in my Panama. It was me that they hung out paper flowers and palm branches for. I am not a jealous man; I am stating facts. The people were Nebuchadnezzars[192]; they bit the grass before me; there was no dust in the town for them to bite. They bowed down to Judson Tate. They knew that I was the power behind Sancho Benavides. A word from me was more to them than a whole deckle-edged library from East Aurora in sectional bookcases was from anybody else. And yet there are people who spend hours fixing their faces rubbing in cold cream and massaging the muscles (always toward the eyes) and taking in the slack with tincture of benzoin and electrolyzing moles to what end? Looking handsome. Oh, what a mistake! Its the larynx that the beauty doctors ought to work on. Its words more than warts, talk more than talcum, palaver more than powder, blarney more than bloom that counts the phonograph instead of the photograph. But I was going to tell you.