From 5757f234b6d28fd3fc6647bb4659594fc370642c Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Alex Cabal Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2024 18:26:39 -0600 Subject: [PATCH] =?UTF-8?q?[Editorial]=20Hallowe=E2=80=99en=20->=20Hallowe?= =?UTF-8?q?en?= MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit --- src/epub/text/next-to-reading-matter.xhtml | 2 +- 1 file changed, 1 insertion(+), 1 deletion(-) diff --git a/src/epub/text/next-to-reading-matter.xhtml b/src/epub/text/next-to-reading-matter.xhtml index 0f8c4d3..327b26f 100644 --- a/src/epub/text/next-to-reading-matter.xhtml +++ b/src/epub/text/next-to-reading-matter.xhtml @@ -28,7 +28,7 @@

“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 don’t quite understand. You have yet to hear my story.

“Fergus McMahan was a friend of mine in the capital. For a handsome man I’ll 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.

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“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 dishpan 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, don’t you think? Looking at the Hallowe’en mask that I call my face when I’m shaving seemed to give Fergus pleasure; and I’m 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.

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“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 dishpan 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, don’t you think? Looking at the Halloween mask that I call my face when I’m shaving seemed to give Fergus pleasure; and I’m 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 he’ll 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 doesn’t belong to Japan when T. R. is at Oyster Bay. 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, I’ll 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; 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! It’s the larynx that the beauty doctors ought to work on. It’s 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.

“The local Astors put me and Fergus up at the Centipede Club, a frame building built on posts sunk in the surf. The tide’s only nine inches. The Little Big High Low Jack-in-the-game of the town came around and kowtowed. Oh, it wasn’t to Herr Mees. They had heard about Judson Tate.