Kalsomining An Elephant

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Title:     Kalsomining An Elephant
Author: Francis Metcalfe [More Titles by Metcalfe]

A delegation from the National Association of Press Agents which was holding its annual meeting in the interests of the Furtherance of Truth and the Elevation of the Show Business had left the meeting place in New York, and after inspecting the various moral and entertaining performances at Coney Island was gathered about one of the white-topped tables near the Dreamland tower. Colonel Tody Hamilton, prince of press agents, master of a picturesque vocabulary, inventor of superlatives in the English language and champion of veracity, pointed laughingly toward the Arena, where the Proprietor of the trained animal exhibition was instructing a new barker how to make the most out of a trick of one of the elephants which was being used for ballyhoo purposes in front of the entrance to his show.

"Listen to him, gentlemen, and you will be convinced that he is eligible to membership in our truth-loving fraternity," he remarked admiringly. The ungainly pachyderm was standing on its hind legs, trumpeting through its upraised trunk a protest against the prodding of the sharp goad which was forcing it to walk backward in that absurd position. The voice of the Proprietor, who was using a megaphone, came to them distinctly as he invited the people to look at "One of the greatest triumphs of the animal trainer's art; something which has never been exhibited in any country--an elephant WALKING UPON ITS HIND LEGS, BACKWARD!"

The speech caught and held the attention of the crowd, and when the elephant was allowed to rejoin its companions and the three great beasts entered the building in single file, Tom grasping Roger's tail in his trunk and Alice following suit with the caudal appendage of Tom, a goodly number stepped up to the ticket booth and paid their entrance money. The Colonel and his associates, whose business had made them familiar with elephants, smiled at the credulity of the crowd, but acknowledged the Proprietor's skill in attracting an audience.

"You wouldn't believe that I spent over seven hundred dollars to turn that smallest elephant white a few years ago," said the Colonel as the waiter refilled their glasses, but his companions made unanimous protestation that they would believe any statement he made, and the Colonel settled back comfortably in his chair to tell the story which they demanded.

"You will have to listen to the story of the famous war of the white elephants, then," he said, good-naturedly, "a struggle which will remain famous in the circus world as long as the big tops are spread. It was in the good old days of fierce competition in the business, the days when the press agents earned every dollar of their salaries, and sometimes had to go to the extent of saying things in print which were not strictly true. There was intense rivalry between the two big shows, the P. T. Barnum and the Forepaugh aggregations, and the bitter feeling between the proprietors was transmitted to the employees. The advance agents would steal each other's printed matter and posters out of the express offices, and you could always count on a fight between the canvas men whenever the two shows were close enough together. They would damage each other's property, loosen nuts on the wagons so that the wheels would come off and cause upsets, and do anything to embarrass the rival show.

"Each show tried to outdo the other at every point; advertising, number of performers, length of the street parade, menagerie collection and everything which money could buy. They started in to see which could get the largest herd of elephants, each advertising the largest herd in captivity, and that competition raised the price of elephants all over the world and denuded every small zoological park in Europe, while it pretty nearly bankrupted the shows to feed them. We had eighty with the Barnum circus, and finally Mr. Barnum came to me and said that he had purchased a Sacred White Elephant and told me to start giving it publicity. Of course, I didn't know anything about that particular kind of elephant, but as I always like to be perfectly accurate in my statements I made a scientific study of it. I found that, as a matter of fact, there was no such thing as a white elephant known in natural history, although there was an occasional absence of the usual pigment in the skins of some beasts which give them a trifle lighter color, and that these animals were apt to have a few spots on the body which were nearly white, just as you sometimes hear of a negro who is spotted. When such a spot occurs in the center of the forehead the Buddhists regard the beast as sacred, from the fact that the god, Buddha, is always depicted as wearing a jewel in that position and it is looked upon as his special mark of protection. It is the ambition of every Indian Rajah to possess one, for then he is billed as 'The Lord of the Sacred White Elephant,' a title which seems to fill a long-felt want in the heart of an Oriental potentate.

"Well, Barnum's agent had, by some hook or crook, procured one of these and sent it to London, but owing to the lateness of the season it was decided to leave it there in the Zoological Gardens and get up a controversy which, in itself, would be a good advertisement for it. The average Englishman is very fond of writing to the Times to expose a fraud, and we knew that there would be a protest from those who would be disappointed in the brute's color. There are hundreds of retired officers who have served in India living in London, and they know all about Sacred White Elephants, and time hangs heavily on their hands. They were only too anxious to certify to its genuineness, and they wrote the peppery kind of replies to the criticisms which might be expected from men who had spent the best years of their lives under a hot sun and lived upon curries and red peppers. Of course, I saw that the letters were copied in the home papers, and before the circus season opened I had the Great American Public watching anxiously for the reported sailing of the Sacred White Elephant.

"I should have been on my guard, for the Forepaugh bunch just kept sawing wood and saying nothing, but whenever I met their press agent he gave me the quiet laugh. Our elephant was finally shipped, and you can imagine that I made the most of it in the papers. I had 'em filled up for two days, and then, while ours was still in mid-ocean, out comes Forepaugh's announcement that his Sacred White Elephant would land in New York the following day. I knew it was a fake, for they were very difficult to obtain, but they stole our thunder, just the same. I managed to get a peep at it while it was being unloaded, and although it was only a dirty yellowish color, I knew that it would make ours look like a decided brunette by comparison. They had worked it well and kept it quiet, but knowing that there was a nigger in the woodpile and that money would bring him out, I spent it like a drunken sailor in trying to get information.

"Forepaugh had eminent scientists examine the beast and give their certificates that it was genuine, and all the inside information I could get was that the elephant had been purchased through Cross, the great animal dealer in Liverpool, and that it had been kept secluded in his place there all winter. Sam Watson, who was Forepaugh's foreign agent, and his groom, a man named Telford, were the only people who had access to it, and they had spent hours every day in its stall. Cross would give us no information as to how or where he obtained the elephant, for Forepaugh bought all of the animals for his menagerie through him, while we dealt with his great rival, Hagenbeck, of Hamburg.

"Forepaugh got all the newspaper space for the next few days, and when our elephant finally arrived it looked mighty dark-colored for a white elephant when compared with the fake one. It was hard to educate the people up to the significance of the little white spot in the center of the forehead, but any one but a blind man could see that Forepaugh's fake was lighter in color. We went at it, horse, foot and artillery, and the fight cost the two shows more than a quarter of a million dollars, and lasted until we patched up a truce in St. Louis to save us both going into bankruptcy. I got some of Cross's employees to swear that they had seen the elephant being painted in Liverpool, and Forepaugh replied by getting a commission of scientific sharps from Ann Arbor to examine the beast and swear that the color was natural. There was good money in perjury and scientific opinions those days, but I never let up for a minute in my endeavor to get at the truth of the matter, for I knew it was hanky panky and I am a diligent searcher after truth, especially when a rival has sunk it to the bottom of a well. I experimented with some of our elephants until I nearly took their thick hides off, but I could get no satisfactory results until I called in Marchand, the chemist, and asked him if he could give me something to bleach an elephant. He had an especially strong solution of peroxide of hydrogen made up, and I selected the smallest animal out of our herd of eighty to try it on. It happened to be the one which you just saw working on the ballyhoo over there, which you noticed was the ordinary slate color. We soaked cloths in the peroxide and covered the beast with them and then put blankets on top. After they had been on for awhile we washed the animal with ammonia and water and repeated the performance until that elephant was as white as snow.

"Forepaugh was to open in Philadelphia, so I shipped our fake over there, and when they had their street parade I followed right behind it with our bleached animal on a truck which was liberally placarded. The notices called attention to the fact that Forepaugh's alleged sacred elephant was simply painted and that the men who did it were bunglers at the business. 'LOOK AT THIS ONE!' read our largest placard. 'WE TELL YOU THAT IT IS A FAKE! So is Forepaugh's, but he won't tell! This is A BETTER JOB BY A BETTER ARTIST!' That made the Forepaugh people hot, and they replied with a new bunch of affidavits and expert opinions from a lot of University of Pennsylvania professors. That couldn't offset our show-up, though, and the whole situation had become so mixed that the public thought all of the elephants were fakes. We had the only genuine one and the best fake also, but they were a pair of white elephants in every sense of the term, and a losing proposition. The one which we had bleached would only keep white for about two weeks, and as each treatment cost seven hundred dollars Barnum called me off. The Forepaugh bunch was trying to poison it, and as the whole thing was dead as a money-making venture and white elephants a drug in the market, we let this one regain its natural color. When the great herd was broken up it was sold off, and I never saw it again until to-night."

"But what was the inside history of the Forepaugh white elephant?" asked one of his companions, and the Colonel smiled as he lighted a fresh cigar.

"I never knew it until this year, when one night over a friendly drink Sam Watson, who is now a clown with the Big Show, confessed the whole thing. Forepaugh is dead and the shows have been consolidated, so there is no further object in keeping the thing quiet. It seems that Forepaugh's agents found out that Barnum had purchased the elephant from an impecunious Indian Rajah; in fact, he had purchased two, the first one having died on its way to England. It was the misdirection of a cable announcing the death and ordering another at any cost which put them wise to the fact that Barnum had a rarity. Watson had never heard of a sacred elephant, but he started out to get one when he read that cablegram. They were scarce articles, and Barnum had bought the only two which were to be had for love or money in all India, so he and Cross got their heads together and started out to manufacture a bogus one in Liverpool.

"They prepared a closed stall, which was always kept locked, and put an elephant in it--just a common, or garden, elephant. Then Sam and his groom, Telford, proceeded to get busy with bath bricks, pumice stone and a barrel of white aniline dye. I imagine they had a pretty hard winter's work and it was certainly a tough period for the elephant, because they had to scrape about half the skin off the poor brute before the dye would take hold. They finally succeeded in getting him several shades lighter than normal, all except about eighteen inches at the end of the trunk. They could do nothing with that on account of the habit of the beast, which was always mussing around in its bedding, searching for stray peanuts.

"They kept in touch with the London Zoo and found out when we were to ship the genuine one, and then got their fake on a steamer which would land it in New York a few days ahead of us. Of course, they had to keep working at it all the way over, but they kept it quiet and no one caught on. When the scientific sharps came to examine it, Sam would hoist the trunk up in the air while he drew their attention to the marvelous whiteness of the under side, and no one caught on to the fact that the end of the trunk was the natural color.

"He let them remove some bits of skin for microscopic examination to prove that no dye was used, but he always had them taken from the inner side of the foreleg near the body, from which the natural pigment is absent in all elephants. Sam swears that they never had to fix one of the experts; they were only too anxious to get the advertisement, and they were prepared to swear, and did in this particular case, that black was white.

"I have a few gray hairs in my head, and most of them came during the strain of that fight. The game isn't what it used to be and I'm glad that it isn't, and let me tell you, as a result of long experience, that the worst thing which can happen to a man is to have a white elephant, fake or genuine, on his hands."

[The end]
Francis Metcalfe's short story: Kalsomining An Elephant

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