Worrying Won't Win Part 14

"Well, you've got to hand it to Mr. Roosevelt," Morris Perlmutter said.

"He has had some small experience in that line, although, at that, you've got to take his statements of what ain't being done to run the war right with a grain of salt, Abe, whereas with Senator Chamberlain, y'understand, when he says that the President ain't running the war right according to the idees of a man which used to was a practising lawyer and politician out in the state of Oregon, y'understand, and, therefore, Abe, his speeches should ought to be barred by the Food Conservation Commission as being contrary to the Save the Salt movement."

"But even Mr. Roosevelt, which he may or may not know anything about running a modern army, as the case may be and probably ain't, Mawruss, because lots of changes has come about in the running of armies since Mr. Roosevelt went out of the business, Mawruss," Abe said, "but as I was saying, Mawruss, even Mr. Roosevelt, as big a patriot as _he_ is, y'understand, ain't above spoiling a perfectly good job half done by Mr.

Wilson, because he just couldn't resist saying: 'Here, give me hold of them soldiers. Is that a way to run an army?"

"And besides, Abe," Morris said, "there's a great many people in this country, including Mr. Roosevelt, which believes that the only man which has got any license to say how the army should ought to be run is Mr.

Roosevelt, y'understand, and ever since we got into this war, Abe, them fellers has been hanging around looking at Mr. Wilson like a crowd watching a feller gilding the ball on the top of the Metropolitan Tower, not wishing the feller any harm, y'understand, and hoping that he will either get away with it unhurt or make the drop while they are still standing there."

"They ain't so patient like all that, Mawruss," Abe said. "Them fellers has got so tired waiting for Mr. Wilson to fall down on his job that they now want to drag him down or, anyhow, trip him up."

"Well, I wouldn't go so far as to say that," Morris declared, "but it looks to me that when Mr. Roosevelt read the results of the Senate investigations, y'understand, he wasn't as much shocked and surprised as he would have liked to have been, although to hear Senator Chamberlain talk you might think that what them investigations showed was bad enough to satisfy not only Mr. Roosevelt, but the Kaiser and his friends, also, when, as a matter of fact, the worst that any good American can say about Mr. Wilson as a result of them investigations is that instead of hiring angels who performed miracles, y'understand, he hired human beings who made mistakes."

"Sure, I know," Abe said. "But the worst thing of all that Mr. Wilson did was to say that Senator Chamberlain was talking wild when he made a speech about how every department of the government had practically gone to pieces, which Senator Chamberlain says that no matter how wild he may have talked before, n.o.body ever accused him that he talked wild in all the twenty-four years he has held public office."

"Well, that only goes to show how wild some people talk, Abe," Morris said, "because when a man has held office for twenty-four years, talking wild is the very least people accuse him of."

"But as a matter of fact, Mawruss, a feller from Oregon was telling me that Senator Chamberlain has held public office ever since eighteen eighty," Abe said. "He has run for everything from a.s.semblyman to Governor, and if he ain't able to remember by fourteen years how long he has held public office, Mawruss, how could he blame Mr. Wilson for accusing him that he is talking wild, in especially as he now admits that when he said all the departments of the government had broken down, y'understand, what he really meant was that the War Department had broken down. His word should not be questioned, or, in effect, that when a Senator presents a statement, the terms he is ent.i.tled to are seventy-five per cent. discount for facts."

"Some of 'em needs a hundred per cent.," Morris said, "but that ain't here nor there, Abe. This war is bigger than Mr. Chamberlain's reputation, even as big as Mr. Chamberlain thinks it is, and it don't make no difference to us how many speeches Mr. Roosevelt makes or what Senator Stone calls him or he calls Senator Stone. Furthermore, Senator Penrose, Senator McKellar, and this here Hitchc.o.c.k can also volunteer to police the game, Abe, but when it comes right _to_ it, y'understand, every one of them fellers is just a _Kibbitzer_, the same like these nuisances that sit around a Second Avenue coffee-house and give free advice to the pinochle-players--all they can see is the cards which has been played, and as for the cards which is still remaining in Mr.

Wilson's hand, they don't know no more about it than you or I do."

"And the only kick they've got, after all," Abe said, "is that President Wilson won't expose his hand, which if he did, Mawruss, he might just so well throw the game to Germany and be done with it."

"So you see, Abe, them fellers, including Mr. Roosevelt, is willing to let no personal modesty stand in the way of a plain patriotic duty, at least so far as thirty-three and a third per cent. of his answer was concerned. But at that, it wouldn't do him no good, Abe, because, owing to what Mr. Roosevelt maintains is an oversight at the time the Const.i.tution of the United States was fixed up 'way back in the year seventeen seventy-six, y'understand, the President of the United States was appointed the Commander-in-chief to run the United States army and navy, and also the President was otherwise mentioned several other times, but you could read the Const.i.tution backward and forward, from end to end, and the word ex-President ain't so much as hinted at, y'understand."

"Evidencely they thought that an ex-President would be willing to stay ex," Abe suggested.

"But Mr. Roosevelt ain't," Morris said. "All that he wanted from Mr.

Wilson was a little encouragement to take some small, insignificant part in this war, Abe, and it would only have been a matter of a short time when it would have required an expert to tell which was the President and which was the ex, y'understand."

"I don't agree with you, Mawruss," Abe said. "Where Mr. Wilson has made his big mistake is that he is conducting this war on the theory of the old whisky brogan, 'Wilson! That's All.' If he would only of understood that you couldn't run a restaurant, a garment business, or even a war without stopping once in a while to jolly the knockers, Mawruss, all this investigation stuff would never of happened. Why, if I would have been Mr. Wilson and had a proposition like Mr. Roosevelt on my hands it wouldn't make no difference how rushed I was, every afternoon him and me would drink coffee together, and after I had made up my mind what I was going to do I would put it up to him in such a way that he would think the suggestion came from him, y'understand. Then I would find out what it was that Senator Chamberlain preferred, _gefullte Rinderbrust_ or _Tzimmas_, and whenever we had it for dinner, y'understand, I would have Senator Chamberlain up to the house and after he had got so full of _Tzimmas_ that he couldn't argue no more I would tell him what me and Mr. Roosevelt had agreed upon, and it wouldn't make no difference if I said to him, 'Am I right or wrong?' or 'Ain't that the sensible view to take of it?' he would say, 'Sure!' in either case."

"You may be right, Abe," Morris agreed, "but if he was to begin that way with Roosevelt and Chamberlain, the first thing you know, William Randolph Hearst would be looking to be invited up for a five-course-luncheon consultation, and the least Senator Wadsworth and Senator McKellar would expect would be an occasional Welsh rabbit up at the White House, which even if Mr. Wilson's conduct of the war didn't suffer by it, his digestion might, and the end would be, Abe, that every Senator who couldn't get the ear of the President with, anyhow, a Dutch lunch, would pull an investigation on him as bad as anything that Chamberlain ever started."

"It's too bad them fellers couldn't act the way Mr. Taft is behaving,"

Abe said. "There is an ex-President which is really and truly ex, y'understand, and seemingly don't want to be nothing else, neither."

"Well, Mr. Taft has got a whole lot of sympathy for Mr. Wilson, Abe,"

Morris said. "He knows how it is himself, because when he was President, y'understand, he also had experience with Mr. Roosevelt trying to police his administration."

"There's only one remedy, so far as I could see, Morris," Abe said, "if we're ever going to have Mr. Wilson make any progress with the war."

"You don't mean we should put through that law for the three brightest men in the country to run it?" Morris inquired.

"No, sir," Abe replied. "Put through a law that after anybody has held the office of ex-President for two administrations, Mawruss, he should become a private sitson--and mind his own business."

XX

POTASH AND PERLMUTTER DISCUSS THE GRAND-OPERA BUSINESS

"Where grand opera gets its big boost, Mawruss," Abe Potash said, the morning after Madame Galli-Curci made her sensational first appearance in New York, "is that practically everybody with a rating higher than J to L, credit fair, hates to admit that it don't interest them at all."

"And even if it did interest them, Abe," Morris Perlmutter said, "they would got to have at least that rating before they could afford it to buy a decent seat."

"Most of them don't begrudge the money spent this way, Mawruss, because it comes under the head of advertising and not amus.e.m.e.nt," Abe said.

"Next to driving a four-horse coach down Fifth Avenue in the afternoon rush hour with a feller playing a New-Year's-eve horn on the back of the roof, Mawruss, owning a box at the Metropolitan Opera House is the highest-grade form of publicity which exists, and the consequence is that other people which believes in that kind of advertising medium, but couldn't afford to take so much s.p.a.ce per week, sits in the cheaper ten-and six-dollar seats. And that's how the Metropolitan Opera House makes its money, Mawruss. It gets a thousand times better rates as any of the big five-cent weeklies, and it don't have to worry about the second-cla.s.s-postage zones."

"But you don't mean to tell me that the people which stands up down-stairs and buys seats in the gallery is also looking for publicity?" Morris said.

"Them people is something else, again," Abe replied. "They are as different from the rest of the audience as magazine-readers is from magazine-advertisers. Take the box-holders in the Metropolitan Opera House and they _oser_ give a nickel what happens to Caruso. He could get burned in 'Trovatore,' stabbed in 'Pagliacci,' go to the devil in 'Faust,' and have his intended die on him in 'Boheme,' and just so long as their names is spelled right on the programs it don't affect them millionaires no more than if, instead of being the greatest tenor in the world, he would be an Interstate Commerce Commissioner. On the other hand, them top-gallery fellers treats him like a little G.o.d, y'understand, which if Caruso hands them opera fans a high C, Mawruss, it's the equivalence of Dun or Bradstreet giving one of them box-holders an A-a."

"Maybe you're right, Abe," Morris said, "but how do you account for people paying forty dollars for an orchestra seat at the Lexington Opera House just to hear this singer Galli-Curci in one performance only, which I admit I ain't no advertising expert, Abe, but it seems to me that if anybody is going to get benefit from publicity like that he might just so well circulate a picture of himself drinking champanyer wine out of a lady's satin slipper and be done with it, for all the good it is going to do him with the National a.s.sociation of Credit Men."

"That is another angle of the grand-opera proposition, Mawruss," Abe said. "Paying forty dollars for an orchestra seat to hear this lady with the Lloyd-George name is the same like an operation for appendicitis to some people, Mawruss. It not only makes them feel superior to their friends which 'ain't had the experience, but it gives 'em a tropic of conversation which is never going to be barred by the statue of limitations, and for months to come such a feller is going to go round saying, 'Well, I heard Galli-Curci the other night,' and it won't make no difference if it's a pinochle game, a lodge funeral, or a real-estate transaction, he's going to hold it up for from fifteen minutes to half an hour while he talks about her upper register, her middle register, and her lower register to a bunch of people who don't know whether a coloratura soprano can travel on a sleeper south to Washington, D.C., or has to use the Jim Crow cars."

"All right, if it's such a crime not to know what a coloratura soprano is, Abe," Morris commented, "I'm guilty in the first degree. So go ahead, Abe. I'm willing to take my punishment. Tell me, what _is_ a coloratura soprano?"

"I suppose you think I don't know," Abe said.

"I don't think you don't know," Morris replied, "but I do think that the only reason you _do_ know, Abe, is that you 'ain't looked it up long enough since to have forgotten it."

"Is _that_ so!" Abe exclaimed. "Well, that's where you make a big mistake. I am already an experienced hand at going on the opera. When I was by Old Man Baum we had a customer by the name Harris Feinsilver, which if you only get him started on how he heard Jenny Lind at what is now the Aquarium in Battery Park somewheres around eighteen hundred and fifty-two, y'understand, you could sell him every sticker in the place, and him and me went often on the opera together. In fact I got so that I didn't mind it at all, and that's how I become acquainted with the different grades of singers which works by grand opera. Take, for instance, sopranos, and they come in two cla.s.ses. There is the soprano which hollers murder police and they call her a dramatic soprano. And then again there is the soprano which gargles. That is a coloratura soprano."

"And people is paying forty dollars an orchestra seat to hear a woman gargle?" Morris exclaimed.

"Of course I don't say she actually gargles, y'understand," Abe explained, "anyhow not all the time, Mawruss. Once in a while she sings a song which has got quite a tune in it pretty near up to the end, and then she carries on something terrible anywheres from two to eight minutes till the feller that runs the orchestra couldn't stand it no longer and he gives them the signal they should drown her out."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Take, for instance, sopranos, and they come in two cla.s.ses. There is the soprano which hollers murder police and they call her a dramatic soprano. And then again there is the soprano which gargles. That is a coloratura soprano."]

"I should think he would get to know when it is coming on her and drown her out before she starts," Morris said.

"What do you mean--drown her out before she starts?" Abe continued.

"That's what she gets paid for--carrying on in such a manner, and them people up in the top gallery goes crazy over it."

"Then why don't the feller which runs the orchestra let her keep it up?"

Morris asked.

"A question!" Abe said. "There is from forty to fifty men working in the orchestra, and if the feller which runs it let them top-gallery people have their way it would cost him a fortune for overtime for them fellers that plays the fiddles alone."

"He should arrange a wage scale accordingly," Morris said, "because it don't make no difference if it's the garment business or the grand-opera business, Abe, the customer should ought to come first."

"_I_ always felt that I got _my_ money's worth, Mawruss," Abe said. "In particular when it comes to one of them operas with a coloratura soprano in it, y'understand, it seemed to me they could of cut down on the working time without hurting the quality of the goods in the slightest.

There's always a good fifteen minutes wasted in such operas where a feller in the orchestra plays a little something on the flute and the coloratura soprano sings the same music on the stage, the idee being to show that you couldn't tell the difference between the feller playing the flute and the coloratura soprano except the feller playing the flute has all his clothes on. Then, again, during the death-bed scene in the last act they kill a whole lot of time also."

"Do you mean to say there's a death-bed scene in every one of them operas?" Morris inquired.