The Man Who Knew Coolidge/Part 2
—Certainly are too gummy, these cards, and besides that, I'll bet Billy Dodd here, as soon as he got through soaking me with the most gosh-awful assortment of office supplies you ever saw—I'll bet he sneaked up here in the hotel and marked the whole darn' pack. Just what you'd expect a Chicago guy to do! So we'll get a fresh pack and go on with our scientific investigation into poker and—
But say, speaking about coming to Chicago, I certainly did have one rotten ole trip from Zenith, last night. Now here's a funny thing about me: the first night on a sleeper, I can't hardly sleep at all.
And yet the time that Mrs. Schmaltz and I went 'way clear out to California last year, great big long trip like that, while I couldn't sleep very good the first night—just kept turning over and over, and whenever the train'd stop, I'd wake up with a start—
Now I know you boys are impatient to get on with the game and don't want to hear anything about California. I know how it is. Why sometimes in the family circle, when we have these little heart-to-heart talks that are so valuable in molding the characters of children—for, as the Good Book says, "The tree is inclined as the twig is bent"—and while I may tell Robby and Delmerine, my children, that it's only things of the culture and mind that matter, yet all the time I'm lecturing 'em, myself maybe I'd like to make a duck and get off to a poker game! So I simply despise a fellow that interrupts a game with a lot of gabble. But I did want to speak about California just for a second,
And what a state it is! What a state!
Now I'm mighty good and proud of my own state, Winnemac. It's a matter of proven facts and statistics that next to Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, and possibly New York and New Jersey, we have the largest output of motor cars in the United States. And the Zenith High School is the largest and finest high-school building for any city of equal size in the country, and furthermore, by a recent and very wise enactment of the Board of Education, no teacher is allowed to teach in the school unless he—or she, as the case may be—unless he proves that at the last election he turned out and voted either the Republican or Democratic ticket, which gives us an unusually large percentage of really solid and responsible birds among the profs in the school, instead of a lot of crazy intelligentizias and lice like that. And then of course there's other states—
I can well imagine that New York is proud of its great cities, manufacturing so many electric goods, like such absolutely essential accessories to civilization as electric irons, and I can imagine that Georgia is proud of the way it's turned from a lazy plantation state with a lot of folks just riding horseback into a modern industrial center with as big factories and as many machines as Massachusetts.
And then old Massachusetts itself—what a state that is! Right up to date, and yet showing their respect for the principles of the Founders of the Country by resolutely pinching any or all books that by reference to prostitution and marital unhappiness and all those things that we grown-up men know exist, yet why increase the unhappiness of the world by talking about them—
But I mean: there's a lot of high-class states in the Union, but is there any one of them that better combines natural and scenic beauties with a high scale of comfortable living than California?
I've read quite a lot about the history of California—I read clear through an article in the Literary Digest that gave all the more important facts, and here's the way I figure out the history of the state:
Of course California has always had a lot of high mountains, which, it's needless to say, were there since long before man came to the trackless wilds, also, of course, the ocean, but still, in the old days, even after the state was settled by white and civilized men, there was nobody there to advertise them—to, you might say, correlate them with the rest of our American life.
Way I understand it: in the former and earlier days, the whole state was just filled with a lot of lazy ranchereros, partly descended from the Spanish, which of course let them out from the start. You certainly could by no stretch of the imagination see the Spanish as contributing constructively to Americanization. And then around San Francisco there was a lot of these artists and painters and all like that, and writers, and they just sat around and did nothing constructive, you might say, but just sit around and drink a lot of wine and chew the rag and do a lot of talking—lot of these fellows like Jack London and Frank Norris and Bret Harte and Upton Sinclair and Eugene Debs—no, Eugene Field I think his name was.
But aside from nothing but scenery, what did California have in those days? What did it have?
Here was this great empire that—
I remember reading the Reverend Dr. Sieffer in his remarkable book—and say, there's a book that I want to recommend to you boys. It's all right to read a lot of fiction, and I guess I appreciate a rattling good story, say like a Western novel where the hero prevents this fellow from running off his boss's stock, as much as anybody; but if you're going to improve your mind—and what is after all more characteristic of American life than improving our minds?—and if you're going to improve your mind, what a fellow needs is real constructive and historical stuff.
And Reverend Sieffer—I can't remember just what he called his book, and fact is, busy like I am with all my business interests, I don't hardly get time enough to sit down and improve my mind like I'd like to, but it was a book about the Purposes of God as Shown in American History.
And the picture he gave of California in the days before it was combined with the main streams and currents of American destiny— Say, it certainly'd make a fellow stop and think.
Here was this great country. Here was these titanic mountains—well, I don't want to get highfalutin and poetic, but as I said in my little talk that I gave to the Kiwanis Club on my return from California, here was these titanic mountains with their snow-crowned tops kissing the eternal blue of that vast Western sky. And here, as Reverend Sieffer pointed out in his book, were those great canyons, stretching their silent but pine-filled depths up to the higher and unknown divides. And here was vast plains ready for the happy plow of civilized man but as yet filled with nothing but the howl of the coyote. And here was this great big huge long seacoast with the waves of the blue Pacific beating against it but without one single solitary real-estate development or even a resort to prepare it for the coming and use of civilized men.
And then what happened? What happened!
Say, to my mind, what happened in California, and that within just a few years, mind you, is one of the miracles that to a thinking man proves the providence and care of God that has always guided the destinies of the American people.
Some guy—and say, it's a damn' shame but I don't suppose his name will ever be known to history—some guy in Iowa (or it might have been Minnesota or Wisconsin or Illinois or even Missouri, yes, or for that matter he might have come from Kansas)—but anyway, this fellow, he saw that when the great Middle Western population had finished their efforts in growing corn and those equally valuable and constructive efforts in selling supplies to the farmers who are, after all, say what you may, the great backbone and strength of our nation—he saw that it would be the proper caper for these gentlemen to retire to that lovely and you might say idyllic California coast and there in their old age enjoy the fruits of a lifetime of arduous and frugal toil.
And then what happened? What happened!
All along that barren land, lovely little bungalows began to spring up. Where formerly there hadn't been one single darn' thing but seashore and mountain valleys, there sprung up, almost overnight you might say, a whole kit and bilin' of dandy little bungalows, and where formerly, as Reverend Sieffer says, you couldn't hear a blasted thing but the sullen roaring of the breakers on the shore, you could hear phonographs going, radios tuned in on Chicago, nice jolly normal young folks dancing to the sound of jazz, and the sound of Fords and motor cars as the folks started off for a nice picnic in some canyon.
Say, you take it from one who's traveled! I've seen it and I know! I've seen beauty-spots in California where even twenty years ago there couldn't 've been hardly a single human being in sight—some point of interest filled with holy quiet between the eternal hills; and now you'll find there, especially on a Sunday, no less than maybe a couple hundred cars parked, and all the folks out there laughing and talking and being neighborly and swapping news from the folks back home in Iowa, and cooking hot dogs and wienies and all like that, and looking at the scenery.
★
What a state! Say, I don't know where you boys were born, and I wouldn't want to hurt anybody's feelings, but my experience is that the cafeterias in Los Angeles are the best in the world, bar none!
Why, I remember one time Mame (that's my wife), Mamie and I went into a place—
Say, golly, it looked like one of these cathedrals! This cafeteria, I mean.
Say, that place was so high, it must 've occupied the first two stories of this building it was in—it was a great big skyscraper, in fact the national executive headquarters of the Fundamentalist and Anti-Evolution Full Bible League, so you can imagine what a big structure it was. Well sir, this cafeteria occupied the full heighth of the first two stories and—and now this'll surprise any of you boys that haven't been in California—the whole interior was in tiles, floor, ceiling, and walls.
Elegant? Why say, those tiles shone so's it almost hurt your eyes. And all the tables, and there must 've been a thousand of them or maybe fifteen hundred, I figured about twelve hundred myself and Mame agreed with me, was every one of 'em stained a nice neat green, and every one had on it—now this was what you might call Service, and mind you, they didn't charge one cent extra for it—every table had on it a nice illuminated motto in art printing.
I can still remember the one that was on our table. It was kind of surrounded by a border of poppies and Columbia River salmon, and it said:
Welcome, folks! How's the old Mother back home?
We like our Special Onion and Peanut Butter Sandwiches, our Fullfruit Vegetarian Steak, and our Antialcohol Mince Pie, but while you're smacking their flavor, don't forget that maybe your old Mammy back home might like to hear from you.
And if she comes to join you, just bring her around to the Manager here and introduce her, and he'll be glad to blow her, free of charge, on her first visit here, to a Welcome Mammy Free Feed, to the value of not over forty-seven cents.Pretty damn' thoughtful, eh? and good advertising.
As I say, here was this elegant place, and they had a full orchestra, playing Southern airs, and at one end there was a reading and club room all with velvet chairs—a kind of an alcove railed off with velvet ropes—where you could go up after supper and read the home papers—they had the papers from Omaha and Hartford and Winona and Kalamazoo and all those places. And after supper, as you left the place, every man was presented with a free cigarette, two toothpicks and a copy of the Gospel of St. Mark; and every lady was presented with a peppermint candy in a glassy-paper wrapper, and a free powder puff, all free.
And did it please the customers? Say, did it! Well, you take just for an example—
Mame and I had just started throwing the chow into our faces when all of a sudden I hears a fellow at the next table—
Now mind you, if I hadn't learned later that he was a farmer, I wouldn't have known it, nor anybody else, not even the shrewdest observer. Why say, that fellow was dressed in a nice neat conservative College Park mixed-worsted suit, same as I was, and his wife, and a real bright little woman she was, too, she had on almost as nice a closefitting cloche hat as Mame herself. But I mean to say: you couldn't have told they was farming folks—fact is, later, when I just happened to run into him at my garage, he told me that he was in the habit of reading the Cosmopolitan and all the best literature, just the same as we do in the big cities.
Well, as I say, this fellow, he kind of leaned forward, and he says to me, "Pretty nice place, this."
"It certainly is," I says.
"Say," he says, "while maybe the food itself don't taste so good, they certainly got everything else fixed up about as swell as a man could ask for—fixed up to the Queen's taste, eh?" he says.
"They certainly have," I says—I could feel he was a friendly sort of a cuss and I never was a fellow, even with my college training and the fact that I know President Coolidge and all, I never felt that a fellow ought to high-hat any really agreeable and you might say interesting fellow that you happen to meet along the way, for what, after all, as our pastor, Dr. G. Prosper Edwards, has on more than one occasion said in our church, what are we after all, even the best of us, but fellow pilgrims on that great Highway which is Life?
So I says to him, "They certainly have," I says. "Stranger here?" I says.
"Well, kind of, you might say," he says. "Mother and I been coming here to Los for quite a few years now, but still, same time, when you think it all over," he says, "when you take a great city like this, with all its wonders and entertainments," he says, "a fellow could be here quite a few years and still not exhaust all the novelties, and particularly," he says, "in the line of religion."
The point is, to cut it short, that this gentleman said that his wife and he had found a lot of interest in investigating the different kind of religions in Los Angeles.
Say! That guy may have been a farmer, but he wasn't so slow when it come to the real low-down on philosophy and religion! Say, he could teach me some things I didn't know!
He informed me (and I've had no reason to question his statistics) that this lady prophet, this Mrs. Aimee Semple McPherson, had increased her membership turnover 1800 per cent. in two years, and that out of all her faith-healings, 62.9 per cent. had been successful and lasting, as observed by regular conservative physicians, over a period of two years, or it may have been even more than two years, I can't at the present moment, not having made a note of it, be exactly sure about the period involved.
And then—say! He certainly did tell me about a lot of new and interesting religions in Los Angeles.
Not that I'd want to go out for them personally, you understand. But he explained that there was—oh God, I can't hardly remember them all, now. But there was this Hindu Breathing Cult, where if you just learned how to control your breathing you were guaranteed to live at least a hundred years. And there was the Lost Tribes of Israel Irish Consolidation that proved the English were the descendants of Moses. And there was the Great Marzipan—no, Mazeppa, I think it was, something like that anyway—seems he was a guy that could get you right into touch with your ancestors and also a corker at palmistry—
But I'm afraid I'm drifting a little from my point. Point is that this gentleman and his wife both agreed that this cafeteria was better than any place they'd ever seen, even in Minneapolis!
Well, as I say, when I saw this place, I said to Mame—
Not that we had to economize, you understand. After all, I guess maybe we could 've stood the gaff at the Ambassador and the Biltmore and those other high-toned Los Angeles hotels, maybe stood it better than a lot of these movie actors and oil men and all like that in dress-suits that try to show a lot of little wrens how well heeled they are, but probably next morning, back in the ole hall-room, they can't afford nothing more'n coffee and sinkers for breakfast!
We didn't have to economize, but at the same time, as you boys will realize, it's mighty nice to save a quarter now and then, and Mame and I had thought when we went to a cafeteria, maybe we'd get off cheap.
But when I saw this place, I says, "Well, Mamie," I says, "I guess here's where we get stuck."
You would 've thought that, wouldn't you, seeing all that luxury, and my God, maybe twenty-five hundred folks all feeding their faces at once and a hell of a bang of dishes—regular feast of Lucullus, or whoever he was, you might say.
But say—
What do you think the prices were? I noted 'em down (of course a fellow in the office-supply business, like Billy Dodd here and me, we simply can't help becoming scientific)—I noted the prices down, while Mame and I was going along filling our trays at this cafeteria counter, and I still remember what we paid.
And remember all this food was high-class modern chow made by the best modern machinery with scientific proportion of the ingredients and no hand had ever touched or spoiled it.
Well, here were some of the prices: Old-fashioned Cape Cod Clam Chowder was seventeen cents. And real honest-to-God clams in it, too! And Old-time Essex Barbecue Roast Beef was twenty-three cents, and a great, big juicy South Dakota Mammoth Baked Potato was only eleven cents, and Mussolini Macaroni was twelve, and finally—
I'm kind of what you might call an epicure, and I do like to top off a good feed with something spicy, and so I had a Dickens Little Tim Old-time Christmas Plum Pudding, and all they soaked me for it, with both hard and soft sauce and a leaf of real holly on it, was twenty-seven cents! And say, I've tried all these plum puddings, Van Camp and Heinz and all the nationally advertised brands, yes sir, I've tried the most scientific of 'em, and I've never had a better one than I got myself surrounded with that evening at the cafeteria—the Father Junipero Serra Mission Inn they called it, by the way.
Fact, afterward I kind of introduced myself to one of the managers, and he told me they made this plum pudding up themselves, and he claimed they used one and a quarter—well, it may have been one and three quarters per cent., I can't just exactly remember now—but anyway, he claimed they used more citron and more raisins in their plum pudding than any of the nationally advertised brands, and he told me that during the Christmas and holiday months, that is, from October to March, they sold an average of 897 plum puddings a day!
So you can see what a place that was!
And I almost forgot: for every six tables they had a free Christian Science literature stand with the Monitor and all the rest of 'em right there perfectly free for the taking.
Not that I think much of Christian Science myself. Me, I'm a Congregationalist. But still, it was pretty nice to be able to take some free literature home to your hotel, so's you could read it if you ever got time in between trolley rides, and going out motoring with folks from your home town, and the movies, and all those other pleasures that you find in Los Angeles.
But I fear I'm getting a little off my subject. I didn't mean to spend so much time on California. I just meant to say that I didn't sleep as good last night as I did on my trip to California—
And oh say, there is just one thing more that I want to add, if it won't bore you too much, about that Junipero Serra Inn: On each and every tray a fellow—and you don't have to ask him, he just does it voluntarily, without any fuss and feathers and nonsense about it, which is, of course, the ideal of Service—on each and every tray this fellow, and I figured he was a Portuguese or maybe a Wop, he places, instead of the paper napkins like you get in so many of the Eastern cafeterias, he places a real cloth napkin, that had printed on it, "Take Me Home with You, and When You Want an Old-time Time and a Homey Home away from Home, Don't Forget I Came from the World-famed Serra Inn."
Pretty cute, eh?
But as I was saying:
★
You boys want to get on with the poker game, and so do I, and so I won't go into any details about my adventures in California. I agree with Billy that these cards are too gummy, and so I'll send down for some more and then we can get on with the game. And I guess maybe you boys could stand another highball, so we'll make it snappy—
★
Hello. Hello. Hel-lo! Hey, girlie, I want to get hold of one of your bright young bell-boys.
Oh you will, will you? Well say, I'd rather have you come up yourself!
Oh they do, do they! Well, I ain't one of that kind of guys.
No, I ain't! But say, girlie, if you happen to get kind of lonesome along about quitting-time, you just come up here to 232 and I'll introduce you to a few princes.
Oh is that so!
★
Say, jeeze, these telephone girls are too fresh for any use. That is a kind of a cute kid though, that number two.
Well, as I was saying—
Say, for God's sake, ain't that bell-boy ever coming? If I was running a hotel—
Not that I pretend to be any John Bowman or Statler or anybody like that, but if I was running a big hotel, I'd have—
Come in!
Oh it's you, is it, kid! Where you been all night? Been out burying a sick grandmother at the baseball game? Now listen, son: You beat it right down to the drug-store here in the hotel and bring us up a nice fresh pack of cards—no, by God, we'll make it two packs, and the best kind they got! And shoot us up two more quarts of White Rock, and make it snappy, see?
★
Well say, gentlemen, all this time while we've been waiting for this damn' bell-boy, I'm afraid I've been forgetting my duties as a host.
Say when! That's what I call a real drink. That'll put hair on your chest!
Say when! Fine!
Say when! Attaboy!
So! Now Father Schmaltz will try to get rid of his own cold and maybe the bots and triphosus with a little touch of the old family remedy, and while we're waiting for the fresh cards, I'll go on, if it won't bore you, with what I was trying to say when this bell-boy interrupted us:
★
Now what I was starting to say was: I heard a story, here about a year ago, no, thirteen months ago it must be now—a story that I wanted to tell you gentlemen—
But oh say, before I start that, I want to explain—
I felt that Mr. Laks here, I felt he kind of wondered about it when I drew two cards, this last hand.
Well, here was the idea, and you may be interested in the psychology of it, and as Billy Dodd will tell you, there's no profession where you got to use more psychology than in the office-supply business.
Well, when I got this hand I figured that Mr. Laks—
Excuse me, Mr. Laks, for not calling you by your first name. I don't want you for one moment to think it's because I don't feel friendly, but what I feel is: The first time you meet a guy, you ought to show you know your social onions by giving him his proper handle—shows you aren't one of these roughnecks—and then after that you can call him Pete or Pootch or Fat-ear or whatever his regular name is.
But's I was saying:
You remember that Simms was dealing. And do you know what I got? Well, I'll tell you: When I looked at my hand, I had the deuce of diamonds, the seven of spades, the king of clubs, the nine of hearts, and the six of—
Now by golly I can't remember—and I'm ashamed of myself—but I can't remember whether the fifth card was the trey of hearts or the trey of diamonds. But anyway, be that as it may, the point that I wanted to make clear is: I didn't have so much as one single solitary little pair in my whole hand.
So, thinks I, "Well, Low, you certainly got one swell-elegant grove of lemons here."
It kind of amused me—
What I always say is, intellect is always important, in its place, and industry, and even ideals, so long as they are thoroughly practical, but what is more important in life than a Sense of Humor? And whatever faults I may have, certainly no one has ever been able to accuse me of lacking a Sense of Humor. And so—
Say, I hate to put Mr. Laks on to this; guess maybe it'll cost me a lot of money the rest of this game, but what he may 've thought was my being tickled by having such a good hand wasn't nothing but my being amused by having such a collection of tripe.
"He thinks," I thinks, "he thinks I've got a lallapaloosa here. I'll make him think I got three of a kind."
So when Simms calls for cards, I discards two cards—
★
★
But as I started saying—
I certainly do hate conversation during a poker game. That's the trouble with women; that's why it isn't any fun to play with 'em.
You get going on a game, and they want to stop and talk about kitchen-mechanics and kids and God knows what all. What I always say to Mamie is, "If we're going to talk, all right, we'll talk, but if we're playing cards, then let's play cards!"
But considering that we've been interrupted by having to send out for these new cards, I just thought I'd tell you this new story I heard about a year ago—story that a fellow named Mack McMack told me one time on a fishing trip.
Mack is, I may say, about the leading undertaker of Zenith, and one of the funniest clowns you ever listened to. Well, to make it short, Mack told us—
It seems—the way Mack told it—it seems an Englishman and a Jew and an Irishman got wrecked on a desert island. Now you boys just stop me if you ever heard this one. Well, it seems these three fellows—
But say, before I go on with the story, I think you gentlemen might be interested in hearing just where it was that I heard it. As I say, we were on this fishing trip—
And I've traveled all around, and I certainly have seen a lot of the world, but I guess I'll never have a better time than I had on that trip. Here's how it all came about.
It happened I was attending a meeting of the Americanization Committee of the Zenith Chamber of Commerce. And say, whatever other honors may come to me, I want to tell you that I'll never take greater pride in anything than in having served on that committee, and when the Chamber of Commerce informed me that I was appointed to it, well sir, do you know, I felt like saying, "Boys, I don't know that I'm worthy of this honor." And believe me, we certainly have done great work.
Just think of what real Americanization means to the future of our nation and thus to the whole world. And we tackled the problem—
Well, you take this, for example: There was a bunch of Hunkies working for the Zenith Steel and Machinery Company. They all lived near each other down in Shantytown and there was some doggone sorehead Bolshevik among 'em that insisted they keep up all these ridiculous and uncivilized customs they'd had back in Hungary (or is it Jugoslovakia?—wherever it is that Hunkies come from) instead of reaching outward and upward and grabbing their chance to become real Americans.
Zabo, this fellow's name was—only I think he spelled it S-c-a-b-o, and I often laughed and said, "Well," I said to the committee, "this fellow certainly has got it spelled right, anyway," I said. "He certainly is one scab-oh, all right!"
Well, seems this fellow's shack was the center for all the disaffection and lack of patriotism among that whole Hunky crowd. They'd meet there, and drink beer, and talk their own language, and dance a lot of fool foreign dances, and seems his wife was actually going so far as to get up a Hunky dramatic association and play a lot of these Hunky plays by Gorky or whoever this Hunky playwright was.
Well, we certainly put a stop to that, when the visiting nurse reported this state of conditions to us.
We went to Whitelaw Sonnenshine, the first V.P. of the Zenith Steel and Machinery—and say, there's certainly one fine, upstanding, 100 per cent. American patriot—and he agreed with us and got busy at once. First, he fired this Zabo, or whatever his name was, and then we got the cops to pick up old Scabovitch on a charge of vagrancy the minute he was broke, and so we run him out of town, and I hear his wife got a job later as hired girl and got over all her damned nonsense, and when Scabby got killed in a steel mill in Gary, she married a real upstanding American named Harry Kahn.
And say, inside six months, once we removed this Bolshevik influence, those Hunks were dancing the Charleston just like you and I would, and they were reading the tabloid papers—maybe we may prefer more highbrow newspapers, but for them cattle, the pictures put over a message of Americanization they couldn't get no other way—and a couple of 'em had bought radios, and they were going to the movies, and in general getting so their grandchildren won't hardly be distinguishable even from yours and mine.
That's the kind of work we been doing on the committee, and this particular day I was speaking of, we were having a meeting to settle the question of birth control.
Now there, gentlemen, is a very vexed question.
That all of us practice it is, of course, beyond dispute. But we're different, because we are, after all, when all is said and done, the rulers of this great democratic country. But when it comes to a question as to whether the masses and the lower classes ought to be allowed to practice it, why say, there you get into an involved economic problem that even a college professor couldn't hardly handle.
In fact, some says one thing and some says another, and that's the way it goes.
One faction claims that the superior classes like ourselves, in fact the great British stock, had ought to produce as many kids as possible, to keep in control of this great nation and maintain the ideals for which we and our ancestors have always stood, while these lower masses hadn't ought to spawn their less intellectual masses. But then again, there's them that hold and maintain that now we've cut down immigration, we need a supply of cheap labor, and where get it better than by encouraging these Wops and Hunks and Spigs and so on to raise as many brats as they can?
Well sir, we certainly had one great old debate. One side invoked the sacred name of Roosevelt, with those undying words of his about Race Suicide—and then by golly if the other side don't go and take the very same words and prove they meant something just opposite!
I tell you, I guess when it comes to a question of practical affairs, like how you're going to have your store windows dressed or whether to put on a sale of pencil-sharpeners, I guess I'm about up to the general run and generality of thinkers, but this question was just a lee-tle mite beyond me. And I could see Joe Minchin felt the same, and say, of all the more important men of affairs in Zenith, there's mighty few that can hold a candle to Joe Minchin.
In fact his name is one that to some extent has spread far beyond the local boundaries of Zenith, to every street and hamlet in the whole length and breadth of the land. Joe—and I'm mighty proud to be privileged to call him Joe, and he never fails to call me Low—he's the president of the Little Titan Oil Cleanser Corporation, and say, if any of you boys haven't yet tried the Little Titan on your car, well, you take the tip from me and do so, that's all I've got to say. Naturally I'd always had a great reverence for Joe—
★
Oh here you are, son! My God, why didn't you take all night to bring up the cards? Got the White Rock? Oh you have, have you! Well, I didn't expect it. Well, here's a quarter for yourself, and you can go out and invest it in G.M.C. stock, but be sure to get the preferred.
Well gentlemen, here's the new cards, and now at last, thank God, we can get on with the game. But if you'll grant me just one more moment, I'd like to finish this story that Mack McMack told me. When you hear it I think you'll agree with me that it was worth taking out the time even from a poker game.
★
Well, as I say, just to get the background of the story straight, Joe Minchin and I were both on this Americanization Committee, and I could see he got just as bored by this birth-control discussion as I did. So I kind of edged up near him at the back of the room, and I says, "How these birds do like to chew the rag! I like a fellow that can say his say and then shut up."
"You bet," he says. "Say, Low," he says, "I don't think you've ever seen my cabin up on Lake Misheepagontiluckit, have you?"
"No, I never have," I tells him, "but I've heard of it as one of the slickest and most elaborate log cabins in the state."
"Well," he says to me, "I don't know as it's so much-a-much, but a lot of architects and so on, and even the Reverend Elmer Gantry, that's traveled abroad, they've told me it wasn't so bad. Say, Low," he says, "I've been thinking about getting up a little week-end fishing party to go up there for the week-end, this week-end after next, now it's getting warm, and what do you say about going along?"
Here was this fellow, Mr. Minchin, making all his dough—-say, I bet he don't make one sou less'n sixty or maybe seventy thousand dollars clear a year, and just as simple and unpretentious and not feeling he's one bit better than you or me. Of course I told him I'd be tickled to death to come along, providing I could get the wife to let me check out, and so I starts off with Joe and his party—after, I must admit, a kind of a hell of a lot of talkee-talkee with the wife about it.
Now there's no point in my telling you who the other fellows on the party were—in fact I just want to tell you the story that Mack McMack told me, and then we'll get back to our game. But just to mention them, there was, besides Joe Minchin and me, there was Vergil Gunch, who's in the coal and wood business and one of the most influential business men in Zenith, and say, he's a great orator, and Depew LeVie, the lawyer, a very fine gentleman, graduate of the City College of New York—only trouble with him is, he's got such a down on the Jews that he makes you tired talking about it all the time—and Mack McMack—
And say now, when you're speaking of fine fellows, there's one of the finest.
Say, when Mack come into the undertaking business, they all just called themselves undertakers, but since he's been after them (because for all his fun and natural high spirits he's got a mighty serious and idealistic streak in him), since he's been after 'em, and he proved it to me by statistics, 51.7 per cent. of them now insist on being called morticians.
And Mack was the first mortician in Zenith to put in really fine funeral parlors—or no, mortuary apartments I believe they're now called by the leaders of the profession. I saw 'em—not, thank God, because of any unhappy and unfortunate catastrophe in my own little family, but because when he opened up, Mack gave a reception, and we all went to see how lovely and at the same time efficient a funeral parlor can be.
Say, that place was a treat! It must be a whale of a comfort to some poor family that has got to plant one of its loved ones. The main funeral chapel is just like the most elegant private drawing-room, great big room with a nice fireplace and simple but tasteful pictures of scenery and kittens and so on, and lots of palms, and two canaries in gilded cages, and big fine overstuffed chairs, and a couple of brocade davenports long enough so's you could sleep on 'em—not that you'd want to sleep on 'em in a place like that, of course—and a little anteroom where the bereaved family can sit in semi-privacy, fixed up by golly as nice as any boudoir, with a nice reading-table and on which are the latest Vogue and the Western Christian Advocate and the Chiropractic and Abrams Method Quarterly and a lot of serious but interesting magazines like that, and—and now here was a mighty touching touch that Mack himself thought up—with a pile of nice linen handkerchiefs for the bereaved, and all absolutely free.
And then the preacher was to stand in a lovely kind of a secluded nook, kind of like an old-fashioned sedan chair, I think they used to call 'em, and not stand right out and obtrude on the feelings of everybody while giving his last words about the deceased. And the coffin, or perhaps it would be better to say the casket, was to slide out of the back room into the chapel-drawing-room on a little electric trolley, as if by magic, untouched by human hands, thus giving, as Mack himself explained it to me, a feeling of awe and mystery.
Yes sir, by God, not one thing that you could think of, lacking to soften and ameliorate those last sad rites.
And Mack certainly did give one crackajack reception to open those funeral parlors—or mortuary parlors.
After we'd all had a chance to look around, and sign the Visitors' Book, and a mighty neat volume, bound in rough calfskin, it was, too, he had the Y.M.C.A. quartette there to sing several suitable selections, like "Whither Away, O Autumn Swallow?" and "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes," and then the Reverend Otto Hickenlooper of Central Methodist Church made some very interesting and thought-provoking remarks on what science and modern American efficiency could do to lessen the pangs of unavoidable grief and sorrow, and then orange sorbet and a large assortment of French pastry was served.
A high-class affair, in every way, and—
And pay?
Say, Mack himself told me that these funeral parlors, or mortuary apartment, paid for itself in less than seventeen months!
Why say, every undertaker in town bid for the funeral of the Reverend Dr. Efflins, that was murdered by his hired girl, and Mack got the job solely and entirely, even though his prices was higher, because the widow appreciated the elegance of his funeral parlors. That's the kind of man of affairs he is!
★
And then finally the last member of our fishing party was no less a person than a professor in the University of Winnemac. You bet!
We all felt, even Joe Minchin felt, that he was kind of a notch above us, but Lord bless you, you'd never think it to meet him—just as simple and unaffected and slap-you-on-the-back as any of us.
Professor Baroot, prof of industrial sociology in the U, this was, but say, that guy, he never went at teaching in any of these old-fashioned stand-off methods.
He told me himself, he volunteered it, in fact, that he didn’t give more than half of his time to teaching, and that because of his subject—it was his job to show the students that the great American industrial corporations can care for their men and prevent accidents and keep clear of anarchists and labor troubles better than any small firm—as I say, because of what he taught, he was as thick as thieves with a lot of managers of big industries, and it was his job to keep in with those guys and get them to contribute to the University.
A mighty fine fellow. Belonged to the Rotary Club and the American Security League and the Klan—or rather he did till the Klan got unpopular—and the Moose and the Odd Fellows and the Key Men, and he could sing a good song or dance a clog, and say, he just about made up for all the old crabs on the University faculty.
Yes sir, he showed what an up-to-date and forward-looking professor can be. Why, he looked like a bond salesman!
So there was the bunch of us—Joe Minchin, Prof Baroot, Vergil Gunch, Mack McMack, Depew LeVie the lawyer, and yours truly, thanking you for your order and begging to oblige. And that's how we happened to go off together, and that's how I happened to hear this story that Mack told us, and I must hasten to finish it, so we can get back to the game.
Well, here was the story. As I said, if any of you boys have heard it, just stop me.
Seems there was this Englishman and this Irishman and this Jew—they were all a bunch of traveling salesmen or something like that. Anyway, whatever they were, it happened that they were all on a steamer that was sailing on the Pacific, and something happened to their ship, and anyway it got wrecked, and it was wrecked on a desert island, and when these three guys come ashore, they found that by golly everybody on the ship had been drowned except them and a girl they'd all been looking at on shipboard—
Say, I'll never forget the way Mack looked at us when he got to that point in the story.
He didn't say anything dirty. Naturally, Mack being an undertaker, it isn't proper for him to use common or improper language, but say, that fellow's just a natural clown. If he'd gone on the vaudeville stage, he'd 've made this Sir Harry Lauder look like seven cents. You could just feel those three birds were crazy about this girl—
By golly, I certainly did enjoy that story. I'll never forget the whole background. It was one of the greatest nights I ever spent.
You see, if I may interrupt myself just for a second, we arrived at Joe Minchin's place—it's on Lake Misheepagontiluckit, which is in the northern part of the state, about four hours from Zenith—
No; let's see; it's less than four hours. I remember we left the Union Station at 2:37 in the afternoon; I remember it exactly because when I was leaving the house, the wife said I'd be late—and by golly she was sore about my skipping off and leaving her, and she sounded like she'd be tickled to death if I was late—and she said, "You'll be late catching the train," and I remember saying, "I will not," I said, "I've got exactly forty minutes, because the train leaves at 2:37, and it's now exactly three or anyway two and a half minutes to two." So I remember we left at 2:37 exactly, and we got to Lucknow, which is the station for Lake Misheepagontiluckit, at 6:17; and I remember that because it was just seventeen minutes after six, which makes an easy date to remember. So it was less than four hours.
But of course we had to take a couple of flivvers out to the lake—not taxis, you understand, because of course this Lucknow was a hick town; why say, it was such a rube burg that they didn't have a high school or a restaurant, and they only had one movie theater and six garages, that's how raw that place was, regular jumping-off place—and we had to take a brace of flivvers out to Joe's cabin (if you could call a regular palace like that a cabin!)—and that must have took us half an hour, and so all in all, it was just practically four hours and maybe a little more from the Union Station in Zenith to his place, to be exact.
Well, we got in there, and we got ourselves a little supper—say, I used to lambaste college profs as not being practical, but Doc Baroot was the cook, and he took those canned pork and beans and added whisky and an egg to 'em, and say! man! that was a dish fit to set before a king.
And some good apple pie with evaporated cream on it, and of course plenty of gin and hootch to wash it all down. Man, we ate like a bunch of dukes!
Well, by the time we'd fed our faces and washed up the dishes it was about eight o'clock, and Joe says, "Well say, boys, now we want to get a lot of rest and exercise and outdoor life while we're out on this trip, and what say we play poker till ten and then quit on the dot and get to bed and be up at six tomorrow and hike right out for the big gamey denizens of the deep?"
"Fine," we says; "you bet; we'll hit the hay at ten."
So we starts playing there in the big living-room—
Now by golly can you beat that! Can you beat it! I haven't described Joe's place at all, and that was the biggest surprise of all.
★
I knew he had a log cabin fixed up all swell, but I'd never expected the kind of place we found. Logs—yeh, sure, it was built of logs, but my God!
Why say, that place would 've done the Prince of Wales or J. Pierpont Morgan proud. Every log was varnished on the outside till it shone like a mirror, and every single last log had the end of it carved with the name of some movie star. Then under the eaves, both ends, there was an elegant wood fretwork imported from abroad, carved like vines, with stars and crescents and snakes and wood roses all mixed up together.
Then inside, say, that living-room was two stories high, with a balcony running along three sides of it, and a lot of dandy Navajo rugs and college banners and banners advertising the Little Titan Oil Cleanser and Rotary banners and Coolidge for President banners and all like that hanging over the railing of the balcony—and of course I was especially glad to see the Coolidge banners, because as Billy Dodd here knows, Coolidge and I have always been great pals, and I've had a high old time with him in the White House, talking about taxation and the situation in China.
And the furniture—say, Joe may be just one of your roughneck business men, but the imagination he showed about the furniture in that main living-room, which was also the dining-room, was something that just took your breath away.
Say, the fireplace was composed of every sort and kind of stone to be found within forty miles of Lake Misheepagontiluckit, and also it had set into it a lucky horseshoe, and the golf ball that Joe won the Fathers and Sons Golf Tournament with, and the bottom of a bottle of red wine that he'd drunk in Paris—um, some of that real honest-to-God parley-voo red ink would go pretty good now, but you boys don't want to forget that we still got two complete bottles of real hootch left, just help yourselves and don't be shy, like the lady organist said to the deacon—and then it had, this fireplace, it had mortared into it a real genuwine cannon ball from Gettysburg, and the first dollar Joe ever earned, and the first nail driven into the Billy Sunday tabernacle in Zenith—which later became the Swiss Skating Rink and Boxing Arena—and a piece of iron from a radiator in the Vanderbilt mansion in New York that Joe happened to be there and was able to secure when the mansion was being torn down, and as he told me, it'd surprise you if you knew what he had to pay the workmen to get it, too!
And all the rest of the furniture was in keeping.
One of the chairs was made out of an ancient Spanish altar, and one was a genuwine Louis Cants chair from some palace or other in France that they say Napoleon sat in one time, and one was one of these basket chairs with a little roof over it that they used to have on the seashore, or so they tell me, and one was just a rough wooden bench made out of the timbers of a cabin in Kentucky that, and Joe has papers to prove it, Lincoln used to visit at when he was a young man.
And all over the room—
Say, by golly, there was more pictures and posters and banners and advertising posters than you could shake a stick at, and by golly, and now this was something you'd never expect, in a northern cabin there among the aboriginal pines, by golly if he didn't have a real library, with Dr. Eliot's three-foot shelf of books and the complete works of Zane Grey.
So as I say, we certainly were living off the fat of the land, and we settled down to the game and—
★
Oh by the way, a funny thing happened. It just happened that along about the fourth hand, or it may have been the fifth, I can't exactly remember just at the moment, but I remember Mr. LeVie was dealing, and by golly if he didn't deal me four jacks, and as I say, there I sat with four jacks pat. Well, I won't go into what happened—
If there's anything that bores me, it's these guys that insist on going into a post mortem after each and every game, whether it's poker or bridge—or any other game, for that matter, you understand—and insist on explaining just why they did this or didn't do that. I often say to Mame, to my wife, "My God, play the cards, and let the other fellow draw his own conclusions!" But still, this was kind of a funny thing.
This Professor Baroot—or maybe I ought to call him Doctor Baroot; I understand he's a Doctor of Philosophy, and they tell me that's a mighty hard degree to get, not like one of these Doctor of Laws degrees that they just hand out to a bunch of bankers and authors and cabinet members and so on so's to get some dough out of 'em, but anyway, whether it's hard to get or not, they tell me that no guy, no matter how smart he is in a teaching way, can ever hope to hit the higher and better-paid grades of teaching and research unless he can show the bosses at the college that he's got a Ph.D. degree—
But anyway, this Professor—or Doctor—Baroot was watching me, just like Mr. Laks was here just recently, and so I pulled a long mouth—say, I guess if you'd seen me, you'd 've thought Germany had won the war or I'd been unable to collect my biggest account. So I made up my mind I'd make out like I had a bobtailed flush, and fix my mind on that thought and put it over—
Because you can say what you like, and God. knows I'm a good Congregationalist and not no New Thoughter or Theosophist or Swedenborgian or anything like that, but they can say what they like, a fellow—I mean if he's developed his own will-power, if a fellow concentrates on a self-conscious—subconscious, I mean—on a subconscious thought, and determines to think it into reality, the other guy is going to get it, see how I mean?
So naturally I draws one card, and I look disappointed as all hell, like I hadn't filled my flush or straight, and then when the betting started, I acts irritated, like I was bluffing, and sort of comes in reluctant. But then when Mack lays down an ace-high full, and I bangs down them four little jackses, count 'em, four—say, their faces certainly was a study!
Well, along about half-past nine, Joe Minchin springs a surprise on us. What do you think he brings out? What do you think! Nothing less than a real, genuwine, old-time bottle of pre-war Canadian Club.
Say!
These fellows can talk all they want to about the elegant port and claret and red wine and everything that they get abroad, but any fellow that is a fellow, he'd rather let some of that liquid gold run down his gullet than all the effeminate brands of European and French wine, and you take it from me!
★
And so—
Well, of course we'd agreed to quit at ten, but at ten the game was just going hot and heavy, and Verg Gunch was losing and he said, "My God," he said, "you got to give me my chance for revenge," and we agreed that after all that was only fair, and so we agreed to play till midnight and then quit and hit the hay.
Well, somehow or other, I don't exactly remember the details, at midnight we agreed to play till two, and at two we all said that after all, hang it, we were tired from our work in the city and we needed some recreation, and so we'd play till dawn and sleep all next day and get in some fishing late in the afternoon. So that was agreed. And then we had another little feed.
Say, that fellow, Joe Minchin, he certainly is one high roller.
You gentlemen would be surprised to know what he had in the larder there, ready against just such an emergency as this—of course it wouldn't have been safe to have left all that chow there in an uninhabited cottage if he hadn't had a caretaker, 'way off there in those trackless and uninhabited northern wilds, where any bum might come in and help himself, but luckily there was a Norsky farmer living not over a hundred feet away, just across the road, his name was Oscar Swanson, great big squarehead farmer he was, had a son that worked on the section gang out of Lucknow, and his daughter had gone to business college in Winniwaka and was working for a firm of insurance agents in Winniwaka, mighty bright successful young lady, and Oscar kind of kept an eye on Joe's place, and so he had—
Say, it would 've knocked you for a loop to go into that pantry! Every luxury and necessity of the table, you might say—all canned, of course, but my God! No Roman feast that you read about—or rather, probably, that you see in the movies—had anything on that. Why say, there was canned chicken, and corned-beef hash, and sweet potatoes, and chop suey, real regular Chinese style, and pickled pig's feet, and elegant mackerel, and a canned fruit salad that say, I'll bet it'd make the eyes of even a French chef bung right out—slices of peaches and pears and apples and cherries, in fact, two kinds of cherries—say, no Chicago hotel could shake you up a better fruit salad.
And he had crackers and real genuwine Scranton pretzels, too. Um! And so, as I say, we had a swell feed, and it was then, while we were sitting around feeding, that Mack McMack told us this story that I started to tell you.
Well! I'm afraid I've taken kind of a long time getting down to the story itself, but I wanted you to understand the background, so you'd understand the story better, and it's kind of a funny thing about me: I always did have a what the newspapers call a Dramatic Instinct.
★
I've always had a kind of sneaking feeling that I wouldn't have done so bad as an actor, if life hadn't called me into more serious and responsible affairs. Or maybe as a theatrical producer or playwright. Why say, when I was just a young fellow, trying to get along, as the fellow says, there was six or seven of us—or no, it must have been more than that; I guess in all, first and last, we must have had eleven or twelve different young men and ladies in the organization at different times, and we organized a dramatic organization, but amateur, you understand, and say, we put on "Charley's Aunt" and "Box and Cox," and say, without wishing to hand myself anything, I must say I always got the best hand in the show—I got the audiences there at the church entertainment laughing fit to die.
Although in some ways I've often wondered if I wouldn't 've done better as a dramatist.
Sometime when I get time—of course I haven't got the time for any such nonsense now; a man of affairs has got to be concentrated and not fritter his ideas away, and in fact, you might say, concentrate his energies—but I've thought that sometime I'd try my hand at writing a play.
I've got a rip-snorting idea for a dramatic comedy play, too.
It seems this fellow, my hero, he's an American traveling abroad in one of these hick old-fashioned countries where they haven't got a bathroom or a cake of ice in the whole doggone country, but they got more grand dukes and all like that than you could shake a stick at.
Well, seems the Prince of Wales or whatever they call him, or prime minister or whatever he is that's heir to the throne, well, there's a plot against him and he gets kidnapped, and come to find out, this American—he's a young fellow; I'd make him a newspaperman, I guess, though Delmerine—my daughter—she thinks he ought to be an aviator—well, come to find out, this American is the spittin' image of the fellow that gets kidnapped, and by golly they make out he's the fellow that's missing, and he gets crowned!
And meantime he's been knocked down to the chief princess around there, and she falls for him, and she thinks he's the real High Guy, see how I mean? But he won't marry her because he feels that would be playing kind of a dirty trick on her—see, you get a lot of complications and dramatic problems and so on, that way.
Well, you get the idea. It's one that a lot of folks have taken a crack at, but here's where I'll make my play entirely different:
Most authors, if they were doing that piece, they'd leave the poor American there in Uneeda or Nabisco or whatever you want to call this fool kingdom. And that would be agin all my American ideals, besides not being original. So what I plan to do is this:
He tells the princess what he really is, and they by golly chuck all their rank and come back to America, and he makes good on the job and say, wouldn't that make a whale of a what they call a Dramatic Contrast—second act you show 'em there in the foreign palace, swell-elegant, all right, with tapestries and crystal chandeliers and big gilt chairs and all like that, but old-fashioned—my God, moldy as a last year's bird's nest.
Then in the last act, you see 'em happy's a bug in a rug in a really snappy up-to-date modern American mansion.
At first I thought the scene ought to be in the parlor, but here couple of years ago I got an entirely new idea. What's more characteristic of American luxury than a real breakfast room? Put the scene in the breakfast room, with the folks at breakfast!
Make it a dandy modern sun-parlor, with nice light yellow curtains at the windows, and a red-tiled floor, and a canary in a Hendryx cage just singing his head off, and on the table you can see they've got an automatic electric toaster—this new automatic kind where you don't have to turn over the toast but it does it itself automatically—and a nice bright shiny electric percolator, and they're passing the comment that it certainly is great to be eating real corn-flakes and honest-to-God coffee and waffles and sausages and real Vermont maple syrup, see, instead of the awful chow they'd be getting in Europe—pickles and sauerkraut for breakfast, probably, and all like that.
Well, then, in comes the ambassador from this European country, and he says they want the hero to come back—they'll make him sure-enough king, but he says, "Nix, not on your life—just look around you," he says, "and use your own eyes, how's this for class and real sure-enough solid comfort." And so on—you know, a lot of discussion back and forth.
And then, say, if I do say it myself, I certainly got one knockout last curtain. Just when the ambassador is arguing his head off—in comes the nurse with their little kid, just born!
But I'm getting entirely away from my subject, I'm afraid, and as I said, it was there at Joe's while we were having that little snack that Mack finally told this story I started to tell you, and I guess it's up to me to repeat it and then shut up and we can get back to the game.
★
Well, as I started to say, seems these three fellows, this Jew and Mick and Englishman, were all wrecked on a desert island, and the only other person that was saved was this pretty girl, maybe she was a missionary, but say, she was a peach. On shipboard they'd all three tried to make her, but she was standoffish as all get out and wouldn't talk to 'em, but here where they were all sharing a couple of tents, she couldn't very well hand 'em the icy mitt, considering they were doing everything for her and building up a kind of—oh, a wall or a barricade or whatever it is that they always put up around your shack in these novels you read about people that get wrecked on a desert island, to keep off these wild beasts that they have on desert islands.
So she gets pretty chummy with the whole bunch of 'em, but she don't pick any favorites, and so one night these three guys and the girl are all sitting around the campfire, and each of the guys tries to pull a line that'd make this Jane think he was it—that he was the cat's left auricle. (God, I wish you could 've heard Mack tell this!)
So they're sitting there around the fire, and the Englishman, he puts on his monocle, and he says to her, "Hy sy, me deuh, ayn't it simply something grand to think that you and me could establish a new dominion of the good old British Empire here in these waste places—"
Say, you'd 've laughed fit to split if you could have heard the way Mack took off that Englishman—just as natural as life—the intonation absolutely perfect, and the choice of words and everything. And same way when he came to take off the Jew and the Irishman. Perfect! Say, that fellow certainly is a natural-born comedian—whole show right in himself.
And yet I don't want any of you boys to think that Mack is nothing but a clown. Say, when it comes to a time of grief and bereavement, you can bank on Mack. He'll be as sympathetic and serious as any undertaker you ever saw.
I remember he had charge of the finest funeral I ever saw—I tell you it was a credit to Zenith (and to Mack), that funeral—I'll bet Chicago itself never pulled off a more impressive and touching funeral. It was a Shriner funeral to one of the finest fellows you ever met in your life—Ed S. Swanson, the great divorce lawyer—why, they say Ed never took a divorce case in his life where he didn't get a favorable verdict, whether there was any grounds or not; a real crack lawyer that he didn't care what the law was—"I'll make the law and you furnish my fee," he used to say—but laughingly, of course, because he was a real square straight-shooter.
And one of the most public-spirited citizens in Zenith.
Why say, he was on the Better Interurban Trolley and Transportation Commission that got us several extensions of street-car lines to the suburbs—and while I guess Ed himself profited somewhat by advance knowledge of what suburbs these new lines were going to tap, still, that was only sensible, after all, when you look at it in the right way—somebody had to make that profit, didn't they? And it had nothing to do with the fact that he put in some mighty good licks on behalf of the body politic, and not one cent of pay for his services, you understand.
And he was one of the men most responsible for the Board of Education passing the act requiring a half hour of Bible study in every school every day, and in forcing every school to start the day with prayer and the singing of "The Star-Spangled Banner" and the salute to the flag.
A fine fellow—one of the kind that makes our more progressive cities what they are today. And in private life, say, Ed was one of the most charming hosts you ever met—he'd fix you up an old-fashioned whisky cocktail that would just about make you see stars, and he could tell a smutty story, that bird, good as Mack himself, pretty near.
Well, of course the Shriners had to give a guy like Ed a bang-up funeral, and Mack ran it, and to see Mack then, with his black cutaway coat on, and to hear him speak to the unfortunate widow, say, you'd 've thought he was going to bust out crying. But it was a scream!
Just when he was looking so doggone down in the mouth you wanted to boohoo yourself, he come over near me in the corner, and he gave me the comicalest wink you ever saw, and he whispers to me, "Or do we get a drink after this, dearly beloved brethren and sisters, or do we not? I'll say, fellow Shriners and relatives, that we by God do!"
So that's the kind of fellow he was, real all-round guy, and so he goes on with that story, there that night, and he tells how these three are sitting around with this girl, and the Englishman he says if the girl and him could make a go of it, they'd by golly start a new department of the British Empire.
And then, as Mack tells it, while the girl's thinking the Englishman wouldn't be such a bad bet, after all, the Irishman speaks up—let's say his name was Mike—Mike he speaks up and he says:
"Now faith and begorra," he says to the girl, "now faith and begorra, with the blue eyes of yez and the cunning ways of yez, begorra," he says, "we could start a revolution in any new empire that Sandy here would be afther instituting!"
Well, that gets her pretty good, too, and she thinks maybe Mike is a little better on the Blarney stone than the Englishman is, and then up speaks the Jew, and say—
But first I want to tell you that poor old Mack certainly did have a hard time finishing his story. By this time, after we'd eaten, we'd all lapped up a pretty fair average amount of hootch, and we kept kidding him along and interrupting him, and along about here in his story, Prof Baroot—say, he may be an elegant high-class scholar, but he's got just about as much pep and ginger and good-fellowship as any man you ever met, and he insisted before we heard the rest of the story, we ought to go out and have a swim.
No sooner said than done! Yes sir! Just like that!
Off with the old pants and lingerie and into the drink, and all acting up—there was enough moon still so we could just see, and there we was acting up by golly like a bunch of school kids, splashing water on each other and ducking each other and just generally raising Ned.
And then we got to singing like a regular barber-shop quartette—only of course we were a Sextette—and say, Prof Baroot certainly did make a rip-snorting joke on that word sextette, but I'll tell you that later—and we all stood there bare-naked as Adam (and my God, what a tummy I found Vergil Gunch had been hiding out on us!—and maybe I wasn't so good myself!)—and we stood there and sang:
Home was nothing like this,
Yip ay-addee ay-yeh.
And it made us feel fine, getting a little exercise like that.
I tell you, there's an awful lot of fellows that, however intelligent they may be about business, don't realize and comprehend the need of exercise.
That's one thing to which I attribute my own success and the ability to think quickly and dispose of the day's rush of business without a lot of mental puttering: the fact that I take regular exercise. There's scarcely a day goes by that I don't walk from my office to the Zenith Athletic Club for lunch, and that's not less than a half a mile each way, and every single Sunday from May to November I either have a good round of golf or I'm out driving in the fresh air.
So as I say, we all had a good swim that kind of cleared our heads up, and we were ready for the rest of Mack's story—about the good one that the Jew there on this desert island pulled after Mike and his Lordship had shot their bolts.
Though I remember, just for a brief second, before Mack went on, we got into a kind of a discussion that I think might interest you gentlemen.
Somebody happened to mention the Ford, and somebody else, I think it was Depew LeVie, he turned to Prof Baroot, and he says, "Say, Doc, I've got a real scientific question for you. Now that Ford's bringing out this new model of his, will it be proper to call that new model a flivver?"
Well say, that started us off. My God, we fought like a Democratic convention.
Some claimed one thing and some claimed the other, and one fellow got sarcastic and said, "But how do you define a flivver, while you're arguing so much about it?" And so it went back and forth, and poor Mack, I guess it must 've been all of half an hour before he got back to his story.
So then he goes on.
Up pipes Mr. Jew, it seems, and he says—
He says, uh, "Oy, oy," he says to the girl, "if you and me vos married," he says, "ve'd— Ve'd—"
Say now, by golly, that's funny! I can't to save my life remember just what it was the Jew said, and it's almost the whole point of the story!
Well, never mind. Prob'ly I'll remember it later. Anyway, it was a doggone good story, and you'd 've enjoyed hearing it, and—
Say, let's get on with the game! Are we playing poker, or aren't we playing poker!