"I very often get that way myself nowadays when I am reading in the newspapers, Mawruss," Abe said, "in particular when they print them full texts, like the full text of the League of Nations Covenant or the full text of the President's message. Former times when the papers had in 'em straight murders and bank robberies from the inside or out, Mawruss, and you sat opposite somebody in the Subway who had to move his lips while he was reading, you took it for granted that he was an ignoramus which had to hear them simple words p.r.o.nounced, even if it was by his own lips, before he could understand them, Mawruss, but you take this here letter of the 20th inst., Mawruss, and when you read where President Wilson says with reference to telephone and telegraph rates, Mawruss, 'there are many confusions and inconsistencies of rates. The scientific means by which communication by such instrumentalities could missing be rendered more thorough and satisfactory has not been made full use of,' understand me, you could move your lips, your scalp, Heaven and Earth, Mawruss, and still you couldn't tell what Mr. Wilson was driving into."

"Well, I glanced over that Message myself, Abe," Morris said, "and the capital I's was sticking up all through it like toothpicks on the cashier's desk of an armchair lunch-room, Abe. In just a few lines, Abe, Mr. Wilson says, 'I hesitate, I feel, I am conscious, I trust, I may, I shall, I dare say, I hope and I shall,' and when he started to say something about Woman Suffrage, he undoubtedly begun with 'May I not,'

but evidently when he showed the first draft to Colonel House or somebody, they said, 'Why do you always say, _May I not_'? and after discussing such subst.i.tutes as '_Doch allow me_,' 'If you 'ain't got no objections,' and 'You would excuse me if I would take the liberty,' Abe, they decided to use, 'Will you not permit me,' so, therefore, that part of the President's message which talks about Woman Suffrage says, 'Will you not permit me to speak once more and very earnestly of the proposed amendment to the Const.i.tution and so forth,' and that, to my mind, is what give President Wilson the idea that it might be a good thing to let the manufacture and sale of wine and beer continue after June 30th, which he probably argued, 'If I have such a tough time shaking off the _May-I-not_ habit, how about them poor fellers which has got the liquor habit?'"

"Maybe he figured that way and maybe he didn't, Mawruss," Abe said, "but if any one feels that he ought to stock up with a few bottles of wine for _kiddush_ or _habdolah_ purposes on or after June 30, 1919, Mawruss, he oughtn't to be misled by anything President Wilson said in his letter of the 20th ulto., Mawruss, because when it comes to extending the life of the beer and wine industry after June 30th, Mawruss, them Senators and Representatives is more likely to take suggestions from the President of the Anti-Saloon League than from the President of the United States."

"And I don't know but what they are right at that, Abe," Morris said, "because this here Prohibition is strictly a matter of what the majority thinks, Abe."

"But from the howl that has been going up, Mawruss," Abe protested, "it looks to me like the majority of people wants the sale of schnapps to continue."

"I didn't say it was a question of what they want, Abe," Morris declared, "I said it was a question of what the majority thinks, and the majority of people thinks that while they can drink schnapps and they can let it alone, Abe, the majority of people also think that the majority of the people who drink schnapps would be a whole lot better off without it. So that's the way it stands, Abe. n.o.body wants to leave off buying liquor, but n.o.body wants to take the responsibility of letting the sale of liquor continue."

"Also, Mawruss, I've been reading a good many articles in the magazines about this here Prohibition lately," Abe declared, "and in every case the writer shows how disinterested he is, y'understand, by stating right at the start that so far as he is concerned, they could leave off selling liquor to-morrow and he would be perfectly satisfied."

"And he is going to have to be, Abe," Morris said, "because that way of looking at the liquor question is what has brought about Prohibition.

Practically everybody who drinks schnapps and enjoys it, Abe, is afraid that everybody else who drinks schnapps and _enjoys_ it is going to think that he drinks schnapps and enjoys it, so he goes to work and pulls this phony unselfish stuff about, 'So-far-as-I-am-concerned, it don't make no difference how soon the country goes Prohibition,' and the result is that the country is going Prohibition, and n.o.body even now has got nerve enough to admit that it's going to cut him out of a great many good times in the future."

"Well, there's one thing about it, Mawruss," Abe declared, "it's going to make near-by foreign countries, no matter what the climate may be, great summer and winter resorts for these fellers who don't care how soon Prohibition goes into effect and who will continue not to care until 1 A.M. on July 1, 1919. Yes, Mawruss, this here Prohibition is going to give a wonderful boost to the business of building bridges across the Rio Grande River and to running lines of steamers between the United States and them foreign countries near by where the inhabitants have got it figured out that if you drink and enjoy it, you might just as well admit it before it's too late to keep the government from not taking a joke, if you know what I mean."

"Sure I know what you mean," Morris said, "and it has always seemed to me, Abe, that even the Scotch whisky business ain't going to be affected so adversely by this here Prohibition, neither, except that the merchandise is going to reach its ultimate hobnail liver _via_ Mexico and Cuba instead of New York and Chicago, and furthermore, Abe, there will be a great demand for sleepers on them northbound trains from Mexico, and the berths will only have to be made up once on leaving the Mexican frontier. However, the diners won't do much of a business on them trains, but they will certainly have to carry extra-large ice-water tanks."

"And while I don't wish them drink-and-leave-it-alone fellers no particular harm, Mawruss," Abe declared, vehemently, "some time when they are traveling on one of them oasis-bound limiteds, Mawruss, it would serve them right if it run off the rails or something and shook 'em up just enough to make them realize the inconvenience their own foolishness has brought on them."

"Say!" Morris exclaimed. "I didn't know you was taking this Prohibition affair so much to heart, Abe."

"What do you mean--take it so much to heart?" Abe protested. "I take a gla.s.s of schnapps once in a while, Mawruss, but so far as I am concerned this here Prohibition can come into effect this afternoon yet, and it wouldn't affect me none."

"I am the same way, Abe. I can drink and I can leave it alone," Morris said. "Or, anyhow, I _think_ I can."

XVIII

BEING UP IN THE AIR, AS APPLIED TO TRANSATLANTIC FLIGHTS, CROWN JEWELS, AND LEAGUE OF NATIONS SPEECHES

"The way I feel about it is this, Mawruss," Abe Potash said to his partner, Morris Perlmutter: "It don't make no difference if them two boys failed in their intentions, y'understand, they succeeded in making millions and millions of people in Paris, Winnipeg, New York, and who knows where not, stop hating each other for anyhow a few hours, and instead they smiled and shook hands and allowed themselves a recess in their regular work of winning strikes, losing strikes, shooting, starving, and cheating each other and their countries, while they all joined in being glad that Mrs. Hawker and the baby had got the popper back home with them and that Grieve was safe with his family or anyhow as safe as a young feller can be who is liable to quit his home at any moment and do the same wonderful, foolish thing all over again."

"It's too bad that all them strikers and Bolsheviks which is acting as senselessly as children, couldn't also act as sensibly as children, Abe," Morris Perlmutter observed, "and stop crying long enough to forget what they were crying about, y'understand, but they won't. They are bound and determined to eat the goose which lays the golden eggs, Abe, and the end is going to be that they will find out it ain't a goose at all, but that instead of killing a goose that's fit for food they have only smashed an incubator that's fit for nothing but laying more eggs, and that's the way it goes."

"Well, it's certainly wonderful how popular them two young fellers become in the course of a few days, Mawruss," Abe declared. "Which makes you think, Mawruss, if such a thing happens to two unknown young men like Hawker and Grieve, there is big possibilities in this cross-the-ocean flight for fellers which was once highly thought of and which nowadays n.o.body gives a nickel about. Take, for instance, them two William J. fellers, Bryan and McAdoo, which only a short time since people was reading about it in the papers, Mawruss, and what them fellers should ought to do is to hire a good, undependable airyoplane, y'understand, and take the first boat for Trespa.s.sing, or whatever the place is. Then all they have to do is to make a good start, and get afterwards rescued by a tramp steamer, and right away they become general favorites again. Or the kaiser and the crown prince might try it, Mawruss. There must be plenty of airyoplanes laying around Germany nowadays which could be picked up for a song, and when word come that it had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean with them two birds aboard somewhere around one thousand five hundred miles from sixty degrees forty-three minutes, y'understand, it might make the Hohenzollerns so popular that there would be a counter-revolution or something."

"But suppose they would overdo the thing and not get rescued," Morris suggested.

"Well, that would make them popular with _me_, anyhow," Abe said, "and there is probably millions of people like me in that respects, Mawruss.

Still, joking to one side, Mawruss, there is some things which you couldn't joke about like what this young feller Read did, which is working for the United States navy, Mawruss. There was a young feller what took his life in his hands, Mawruss, and yet from the maps which the newspapers printed, you would think it was already a dead open-and-shut proposition that if the airyoplane was to break down anywheres between Trespa.s.sing and Europe, Mawruss, there would be waiting United States navy ships like taxi-cabs around the Hotel Knickerbocker, waiting to pick up this here Read before he even so much as got his feet wet, understand me. Yes, Mawruss, right across the whole page of the newspaper was strung the _Winthrop_, the _Farragut_, the _Cushing_, and other fellers' names up to the number of fourteen destroyers, and the way it looked on that map, there was a solid line of boats waiting to receive any falling airyoplane all the way from one side of the ocean to the other, whereas you know as well as I do, Mawruss, you can as much make both ends meet on the Atlantic Ocean with fourteen ships as a shipping-clerk with ten children can in New York City on a salary of eighteen dollars a week."

"I understand them ships was only fifty miles apart," Morris observed.

"Sure, I know," Abe agreed, "but if that airyoplane was to drop anywheres between the second and the forty-ninth mile, Mawruss, them ships might just as well have been stationed on the North River between Seventy-second and One Hundred and Thirtieth streets, Mawruss, for all the good it would have done this young feller Read. Also, Mawruss, if they would have had so many destroyers on the Atlantic Ocean that they would have run out of regular navy names for them and had to resort to the business directory so as to include the Acker, the Merrall, the Condit, the Rogers, the Peet, the Browning, the King, the Marshall, and the Field, in that collection of ships, Mawruss, that wouldn't of made this here Read's life a first-cla.s.s insurable risk, neither."

"And being picked up by a destroyer ain't such a wonderful _Capora_, neither, y'understand," Morris said, "which they tell me that on one of them destroyers an admiral even couldn't last out as far as the Battery even without anyhow getting pale. Also, Abe, I couldn't see that it proved anything when this here Read had the good luck to arrive at Lisbon, except that he was a brave young feller and seemingly didn't care how much his family worried about him."

"That's what people have always said when anything new in the way of transportation was tried, Mawruss, but them people was never the ones that deposited the checks when the scheme begun to pay dividends some two or three years later," Abe retorted. "The world never made no advances with the a.s.sistance of the even-so and what-of-it fellers, which, when the king and queen of Spain raised a little money on the crown jewels, Mawruss, so that Christopher Columbus _olav hasholom_ could make the first trip across the Atlantic Ocean by water, Mawruss, the people which saw in it the first steps towards the _Aquitania_ and _Levinathan_ wasn't so plentiful, neither."

"Probably the feller which lent the money on the jewels wasn't so enthusiastic about it, at any rate," Morris declared, "because as first-cla.s.s, A-number-one security for a loan, Abe, crown jewels 'ain't got very much of an edge on them sympathetic pearls which carries such a tremendous overhead for electric light in the store windows where they are displayed. Take, for instance, the Austrian crown jewels, Abe, and I see in the paper where for years and years everybody took the Austrian emperor's word for it that they contained more first-water diamonds than could be found in stocks of all the Fifth Avenue jewelers and Follies of from 1910 to 1919 chorus ladies combined, and the other day when the provisional government tried to sell them Austrian crown jewels to buy food for the starving Austrians, y'understand, for what was thought to be rubies, diamonds, and pearls weighing from twenty to a hundred carats apiece, Abe, they couldn't get an offer of as much as a bowl of crackers and milk."

"What do you suppose happened to the originals, Mawruss?" Abe asked.

"What _should_ of happened to them?" Morris asked, rhetorically. "I bet yer that not once, but hundreds of times, an Austrian emperor has taken one of the ladies of the Vienna Opera House ballet to the vaults of the Vienna Deposit and Storage Company and just to show her how much he thought of her, when she said, '_My, ain't that a gorgeous stone!_' he has said, '_Do you really like it?_' and pried it right out of its setting right then and there."

"And I also bet yer that when the ballet lady got a valuation on it the next day," Abe said, "the p.a.w.nbroker said to her, '_Ain't this a diamond which the Emperor pried out of his crown for you?_' and when she said, '_Yes_,' he says that the fixed loaning value of an imperial pried-out diamond was one dollar and eighty-five cents, and from that time on the ballet lady would be very much off all emperors."

"It seems to me that in all the other countries of the world where kings and emperors still hold on to their jobs, Abe, it wouldn't be a bad thing for the government to check up the crown jewels on them, in case of emergencies like revolutions or having to pay war indemnities,"

Morris remarked, "which I wouldn't be surprised if right now the German people is figuring on raising several million marks on the German crown jewels towards paying the first billion-dollar instalment of the war indemnity, and when the government appraiser gets ahold of them, he will turn in a report that they are not even using that kind of stuff in decorating soda-fountains even."

"In that case the German government will probably try to arrange a swop," Abe said, "trusting to luck that the Allied governments having agreed to take them crown jewels at the value placed on them by the kaiser, will not discover their real value until they've changed hands, Mawruss, in which event the German government will claim that the subst.i.tution took place after the Allies received them and did the Allies think they could get away with anything as raw as that."

"Even the Germans 'ain't got such a nerve," Morris commented.

"'Ain't they?" Abe retorted. "Well, how about the counter-claim they are now making for an indemnity of $3,048,300,000, _aus gerechnent_? Them Germans has got the nerve to claim anything that they think they've got the slightest chance of getting away with, Mawruss, so they stick in this indemnity which they say they ought to receive from the Allies because the blockade which the Allies kept up against Germany during the war caused such a shortage in food that one million less German children was born during that time."

"Three thousand and forty-eight dollars and thirty cents is a pretty high valuation to put on a German, and a new-born German at that,"

Morris commented. "You're sure that the three thousand and forty-eight dollars ain't a mistake? Because thirty cents sounds like the correct figures to me, Abe."

"The birth reduction ain't the only item in their bill, Mawruss," Abe continued. "They also claim that the blockade prevented the importing of rubber, camphor, and quinine."

"And I suppose they claim that tire trouble, moths, and malaria increased something terrible," Morris said. "Well, they're going to have just as hard a time proving that claim as Senator Reed would that Brazil is a nation of colored people, Abe."

"When did Senator Reed say that, Mawruss?" Abe asked.

"When he was arguing against the League of Nations, in the Senate the other day," Morris replied. "He said that there were fifteen white nations in the League and seventeen colored nations, and he reckoned Brazil in as one of the colored nations, probably because he confused the Brazil population with the Brazil nuts which are sometimes called n.i.g.g.e.r-toes, Abe. However, Abe, he also included Cuba as a colored nation, because he claimed that fifty per cent. of the population is colored."

"But the President of Cuba and the gentlemen which is running the Cuban government ain't colored people, Mawruss," Abe said.

"That don't make no difference to Senator Reed, Abe," Morris declared.

"To Senator Reed, anything that's found alive in a stable is a horse, Abe; in fact, coming from Missouri, as Senator Reed does, considering the size of the colored population of that state, Senator Reed probably considers himself a colored man, because Senator Reed is perfectly honest in his opinions, Abe. When he argues that Cuba is a colored nation, he believes it, so, therefore, when he argues himself into being a colored man, he probably believes that he ain't quite so dark a colored man as Senator Vardaman, who comes from Mississippi, Abe, but only a light colored man, which is of course all nonsense, like Senator Reed's arguments. Senator Vardaman is a white man and Senator Reed is a white man and they are both of them as white as, but no whiter than, the President of Cuba and several million Brazilian gentlemen. But with Senator Reed it's a case of any argument is a good argument, so long as it is an argument against the League of Nations."

"But as I understand it Senator Vardaman ain't in the Senate no more,"

Abe said. "He got defeated last election."

"And the way he is heading, Abe," Morris said, "Senator Reed will join him next election, because, while nine times out of ten, when it comes to re-election, a United States Senator has got things pretty well sewed-up, _so_ sewed-up he couldn't have them, that he could make such foolish speeches on such an important matter. Furthermore, it don't make no difference how wise or how foolish the speeches which Senators makes against the League of Nations might be, Abe, it is going to go through, _anyhow_."

"What makes you think that?" Abe asked.

"Because I see where the National Democratic Committee met in Chicago the other day, and the chairman by the name c.u.mmings threatened that if the Senate don't approve the League of Nations Covenant, Mr. Wilson would run for President again," Morris said.

"What do you mean--threatened?" Abe demanded. "You talk like Mr. Wilson running for President again was something to be scared about."