Worrying Won't Win Part 5

Couldn't eat _gestoffte Miltz_ no more, so tony he gets all of a sudden!'

"'_Aber_ mommer, listen to me for a moment,' Hoover says, but it ain't a bit of use because Mrs. Hoover goes into the bedroom and locks the door on him, and by the time he has got her to be on speaking terms again he has violated the don't-eat-no-sugar DON'T to the extent of four dollars and fifty cents for a five-pound box of mixed chocolates and b.u.m-b.u.ms, understand me. Also just to show that she forgives him they take in a show mit afterward a supper in which Mr. Hoover violates not only all the other DON'TS in the food-conservation circulars, but also makes himself liable to go to jail for giving a couple of dollars to a German head waiter under the Trading with the Enemy law."

"At that, the way some of our best hotels conservates food nowadays is setting a good example to the women of the country," Morris declared.

"What do you mean--nowadays?" Abe retorted. "They always conservated food, the only difference being, Mawruss, that in former times, when them crooks used to get ten portions of chicken _a la_ King out of a two-pound cold-storage chicken and charged you a dollar and a quarter a portion for it, y'understand, they was a bunch of crooks--ain't it?--whereas nowadays when them crooks get eleven portions out of the same chicken and charge you a dollar and a half a portion for it, y'understand, they're a bunch of patriots, understand me, which if the coal-dealer and the retail grocer and butcher would short-weight you and overcharge you the way some of them patriotic New York hotel proprietors does, it would be hard to find many patriots in New York City outside of Blackwells Island _oder_ the Tombs prison."

"And yet, Abe, if you would go to work and figure out the overhead on a chicken which is used for eleven portions of chicken _a la_ King,"

Morris said, "you would find that the hotel-keeper gets his profit only from the neck which he uses for chicken consomme."

"Well, say!" Abe exclaimed. "A profit of six cups of chicken consomme at forty cents a cup ain't to be sneezed at, neither, and even then you are taking the hotel-keeper's word for the overhead, which I don't care if a feller would be ordinarily a regular George Washington, y'understand, and wouldn't even lie to his wife about how he come out in his weekly Sat.u.r.day-night pinochle game, understand me, but when such a feller reckons the overhead on the goods he manufactures it don't make no difference if it would be locomotive engines or pants, in addition to the legitimate cost of every one-twelfth dozen articles, he figures in as overhead one-twelfth of his telephone number, one-twelfth of the year he was born, one-twelfth of how old his grandfather _olav hasholom_ was when he married for the fourth time, and one-twelfth of every other number he can remember, from his automobile number to his street number, and usually such a crook lives in the last house from the city limits."

"I tell yer, Abe," Morris said, "the feller which invented poison gas was some _Rosher_, and the feller which invented T.M.T. also, but the feller which invented the overhead is in a cla.s.s by himself just behind the Kaiser. I don't know what his name is, but he is the feller what fixed things so that a ten-cent loaf of bread has not only got into it the air-holes which is caused by the yeast, but also the air-holes which is caused by the lawyer's bill that the baking company paid at the time they issued their five-million-dollar consolidated and refunding four-per-cent. first-mortgage bonds, y'understand, and there's just as much nourishment in that kind of air-hole for a truck-driver's family of growing children as there is in any other kind of air-hole."

"Well, the bakers 'ain't got nothing on the farmers when it comes to cost bookkeeping, Mawruss," Abe said. "I was reading where the milk-raisers' _Verein_ claims the price of feed is so high that they've got to sell milk at ten cents a quart wholesale, but for all them farmers figure that the same feed goes to fatten the cow for the market, Mawruss, you might suppose that there was a big inst.i.tution somewheres up state called the Ezra B. Cornell Home for Aged and Indignant Cows, y'understand, and that so soon as a cow gets through giving milk, y'understand, instead of slaughtering it the farmer takes it to the home in his automobile and contributes five dollars a week toward its support until it dies of hardening of the arteries at the age of eighty-two."

"Take it from me, Abe," Morris said, "them farmers ain't such farmers as people think they are. It's going to be so, pretty soon, that people will be paying two dollars and a half for an orchestra seat and pretty near break their hearts while the poor old second-mortgage shark is being turned out of his little home by the farmer."

"And on the opening night, Mawruss, the front rows will be filled with milk agents," Abe said, "and after the show you will see them sitting around Rector's and Churchill's and getting terrible noisy over a magnum of Sheffield Farms nineteen sixteen."

"Of course n.o.body is going to be the worser for making a joke about such things, Abe," Morris interrupted, "but last winter when these fellers which gets off mommerlogs in vaudeville shows was talking about somebody being immensely wealthy on account his breath smelt from onions, y'understand, there wasn't many people raising a family on less than twenty-five dollars a week whose breath smelt from onions at that."

"Did I say they did?" Abe asked.

"And it is the same way with potatoes and fruit, not to say fish and poultry and all the other foods which Mr. Hoover says we should eat in order to save beef, sugar, and flour for the soldiers," Morris continued. "When a woman buys nowadays flounder at twenty-five cents a pound, she is paying ten cents for fish and fifteen cents toward the fish-dealer's wife's diamonds or his six-cylinder automobile, so if I would be Mr. Hoover, before I issued bread and meat cards to the consumer I would hand out automobile and diamond cards to the fish-dealer and the vegetable-dealer and maybe it would help to stop them fellers from loading their prices with what it costs 'em to keep up their expensive habits."

"A fish-dealer is ent.i.tled to expensive habits the same like anybody else," Abe said, "which if Mr. Hoover stops him from buying his wife once in a while diamonds, sooner or later Mr. Hoover will stop him from buying his wife furs and it will work down right along the line till Mr.

Hoover hits the garment business, Mawruss, which, while I ain't got no particular sympathy for a fish-dealer, y'understand, his money is just so good as the next one's, so I ask you, as a garment-manufacturer, what are you going to do about it?"

"Let him buy Liberty Bonds."

"But in that case, how many Liberty Bonds could the diamond merchant, the automobile-manufacturer, or the furrier buy?"

"Say, looky here," Morris said, "let me alone, will you? This is something which is up to Mr. Hoover, not me."

"I know it is," Abe concluded, "and I've got a great deal of sympathy for him, too, because before Mr. Hoover gets through he would not only make a bunch of enemies, Mawruss, but he is going to use up a whole lot of headache medicine, and don't you forget it."

VII

POTASH AND PERLMUTTER ON FOREIGN AFFAIRS

The hopeless part of it is that there's no way of putting a nation of ninety million people in a lunatic asylum, even if there was an asylum big enough to hold them, which there ain't.

"I see where the French President is going to lose his Prime Minister again," Abe Potash said, "which the way that feller is always changing Prime Ministers, Mawruss, he must be a terrible hard man to work for."

"Say," Morris Perlmutter replied, "I've got enough to think about keeping track of what happens here in this country without I should worry my head over political _Meises_ in France."

"Well, you are the same like a whole lot of Americans," Abe said, "which for all they read about what is going on over in Europe the Edison Manufacturing Company might just so well never have invented the telegraph at all."

"I don't _got_ to read it with such a statesman like you around here,"

Morris retorted, "so go ahead and tell me: what did the French Prime Minister done _now_ that he gets fired for it?"

"That only goes to show what you know from Prime Ministers!" Abe declared. "A Prime Minister never gets fired, Mawruss--he resigns, and while I admit that nine times out of ten when the French President has had a Prime Minister resign on him, it's probably been a case of the stenographer tipping the Prime Minister off that before the boss went to lunch he said, 'If that grafter's still here when I come back there'll be another Prime Minister going around on crutches,' y'understand, yet at the same time this here last Prime Minister has been right on the job, and the French President has been quite worried for fear he's going to quit."

"Well, let him get along _without_ a Prime Minister for a while," Morris said. "With the money the French people is spending for war supplies it won't do him no harm to cut down his pay-roll, and, besides, what does he want a Prime Minister for, _anyway_? Has President Wilson got a Prime Minister? Them people come over here a couple of months ago and cashed in a hard-luck story for a matter of a few hundred million dollars, y'understand, and like a lot of come-ons that we are, understand me, it never even occurred to us but what them boys was living right up close to the cushion."

"How much do you think a Prime Minister draws, Mawruss--a million a week?" Abe asked.

"It ain't how much he draws," Morris said. "It's the idea of the thing which I don't care if he only gets five dollars a day and commissions, Abe, if President Wilson would got a Prime Minister working for him instead of attending to the business himself, which is what President Wilson gets paid for, y'understand, there's many a time when the President has been out late at the theayter or when he is feeling under the weather, understand me, where he would say: 'Why should I kill myself slaving day in, day out, like a slave, y'understand. What have I got a Prime Minister for, anyway?' And that's how I bet yer the French President has pa.s.sed over to the Prime Minister a whole lot of important stuff which the poor _nebich_ was bound to slip up on, because, after all, a Prime Minister is only a Prime Minister."

"Maybe you're right," Abe admitted, "but at the same time there's some pretty smart Prime Ministers, too, which you take this here Prime Minister Lord George, over in England, and that feller practically runs the country. In fact, as I understand it, King George leaves the entire management to him, so much confidence he's got in the feller."

"Perhaps it's because this here Lord George and King George is related maybe," Morris suggested.

"I don't think so," Abe replied. "The names is only a quincidence, which even before Lord George was ever heard of at all the Prime Minister always run things in England while the King put in his whole time opening charity bazars and laying corner-stones. First and last I suppose that feller has laid more corner-stones than all the heads of all the fraternal orders in the United States put together, and if there's such a disease as grand master's thumb, like smoker's heart and housemaid's knee, Mawruss, I'll bet that King George has got it."

[Ill.u.s.tration: "Perhaps it's because this here Lord George and King George is related maybe," Morris suggested. "I don't think so," Abe replied. "The name is only a quincidence."]

"Well an English king can afford to spend his time that way," Morris said, "because them English Prime Ministers is really prime, y'understand, whereas you take the Prime Ministers which the Czar _nebich_, the King of Greece, and even the King of Sweden had it, and instead of them Prime Ministers being prime, understand me, they ranged all the way from sirloin to chuck, as they would say in the meat business."

"Some of the English Prime Ministers wasn't so awful prime, neither,"

Abe said. "Take the feller which was holding down the job of Prime Minister around July fourth, seventeen seventy-six, and the way that boy let half a continent slip through his fingers was enough to make King Schmooel the Second, or whatever the English king's name was in them days, swear off laying corner-stones for the rest of his life. Also the English Prime Minister which engineered the real-estate deal where Germany got ahold of the island of Heligoland wasn't what Mr. P.B.

Armour would call first cut exactly, which, if England would now own Heligoland instead of Germany, Mawruss, such a serial number as U Fifty-three for a German submarine would never have been heard of. They would have stopped short at U Two or U Two B."

"Well, anybody's liable to get stuck in a swap with vacant lots, Abe,"

Morris said, "and the chances is the poor feller figured that with this here Heligoland, the only person who would have the nerve to call such real estate _real estate_, y'understand, would be a real-estater with a first-cla.s.s imagination when the tide was out."

"That's what Germany figured, too," Abe said, "and the consequence is she went to work and improved them vacant lots with fortifications which lay so low in the water, Mawruss, that from two miles out at sea no one would dream of such things--least of all an admiral."

"So how could you blame a Prime Minister if he didn't suspect what Germany was up to when she bought that sand-bank?" Morris asked.

"Of course that was a long time before the war, Mawruss," Abe said.

"Nowadays the dumbest Prime Minister knows enough to know that coming from a German diplomat a simple remark like, 'Good morning, ain't it an elegant weather we are having?' is subject to one of several constructions, none of which is exactly what you could call _kosher_, y'understand."

"And supposing he finds such a remark in a letter from a German diplomat to the Kaiser, Abe?" Morris asked. "What does it mean then?"

"That depends on where it is written from," Abe said, "which if the Minister of Foreign Affairs down in Paraguay or Peru finds out that a German amba.s.sador has written home to the effect that he is feeling quite well again and hopes this letter finds you the same, y'understand, the Foreign Minister hustles over to the War Department and wants to know if they are going to allow him to be insulted in that way by a dirty crook like that. On the other hand, if the chief of the United States Secret Service gets ahold of a letter from any one of them honorary German diplomats who is practically holding down the job of Imperial German Consul to the Bronx while drawing the salary of--we would say, for example--a New York Supreme Court justice, Mawruss, and if the letter says, 'Accept my best wishes for a prosperous and happy new year in which my wife joins and remain,' y'understand, that means the copper was shipped in pasteboard containers marked:

PRUNES USE NO HOOKS."

"The German Secret Service certainly fixes up some wonderful cipher codes, Abe," Morris said. "Sometimes as much as two hours and a quarter pa.s.ses before a United States Secret Service man gets the right dope on one of them code letters."

"Sure, I know," Abe said. "But most times he don't have no more trouble over it than the average business man would with a baseball column, which the way every government secret service knows every other government's secret service's secrets, Mawruss, it's a wonder to me that they don't call the whole thing off by mutual consent, because the only difference between government secret services is that some secret services is louder than others. Take, for instance, the German Secret Service, and there was months and months when this here Dr. Heinrich Albert, Captain von Papen and his boy Ed got as much newspaper publicity as one of them rotten shows which received such a good notice from the cricket of the _Cloak and Suit Gazette_ that the manager thinks it may have a chance, y'understand. Why, there wasn't a district messenger-boy which couldn't direct you to number Eleven Broadway, where that secret service had its head offices, and I would be very much surprised if they didn't ship their bombs from number Eleven Broadway, to the steamboat docks in covered automobile delivery-wagons with signs painted on 'em:

Telephone Battery 2222