Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- Fiction
"'Wasn't I just giving you his rating?' says Denver. 'His country
is one of the few in South America where the presidents are elected
by popular ballot. The General can't go there just now. It hurts
to be shot against a wall. He needs a campaign manager to go down
and whoop things up for him--to get the boys in line and the new
two-dollar bills afloat and the babies kissed and the machine in
running order. Sully, I don't want to brag, but you remember how I
brought Coughlin under the wire for leader of the nineteenth? Ours
was the banner district. Don't you suppose I know how to manage a
little monkey-cage of a country like that? Why, with the dough the
General's willing to turn loose I could put two more coats of Japan
varnish on him and have him elected Governor of Georgia. New York
has got the finest lot of campaign managers in the world, Sully, and
you give me a feeling of hauteur when you cast doubts on my ability
to handle the political situation in a country so small that they
have to print the names of the towns in the appendix and footnotes.'
"I argued with Denver some. I told him that politics down in that
tropical atmosphere was bound to be different from the nineteenth
district; but I might just as well have been a Congressman from
North Dakota trying to get an appropriation for a lighthouse and a
coast survey. Denver Galloway had ambitions in the manager line, and
what I said didn't amount to as much as a fig-leaf at the National
Dressmakers' Convention. 'I'll give you three days to cogitate about
going,' says Denver; 'and I'll introduce you to General Rompiro
to-morrow, so you can get his ideas drawn right from the rose wood.'
"I put on my best reception-to-Booker-Washington manner the next
day and tapped the distinguished rubber-plant for what he knew.
"General Rompiro wasn't so gloomy inside as he appeared on the
surface. He was polite enough; and he exuded a number of sounds that
made a fair stagger at arranging themselves into language. It was
English he aimed at, and when his system of syntax reached your
mind it wasn't past you to understand it. If you took a college
professor's magazine essay and a Chinese laundryman's explanation
of a lost shirt and jumbled 'em together, you'd have about what the
General handed you out for conversation. He told me all about his
bleeding country, and what they were trying to do for it before the
doctor came. But he mostly talked of Denver C. Galloway.
"'Ah, señor,' says he, 'that is the most fine of mans. Never I have
seen one man so magnifico, so gr-r-rand, so conformable to make done
things so swiftly by other mans. He shall make other mans do the
acts and himself to order and regulate, until we arrive at seeing
accomplishments of a suddenly. Oh, yes, señor. In my countree there
is not such mans of so beegness, so good talk, so compliments, so
strongness of sense and such. Ah, that Señor Galloway!'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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