Potash and Perlmutter Settle Things | Page 2

"Didn't the
Kaiser abdicate just before them Germans got ready to kick him out?"
"The king business ain't the garment business," Morris observed.
"I know it ain't," Abe agreed. "Kings has got their worries, too, but
when it comes to laying awake nights trying to figure out whether them
designers somewheres in France is going to turn out long, full skirts or
short, narrow skirts for the fall and winter of nineteen-nineteen and
nineteen-twenty, Mawruss, I bet yer the entire collection of kings,
active or retired, doesn't got to take two grains of trional between
them."
"If everybody worried like you do, Abe," Morris said, "the government
would got to issue sleeping-powder cards like sugar cards and limit the
consumption of sleeping-powders to not more than two pounds of
sleeping-powders per person per month in each household."
"Well, some one has got to do the worrying around here, Mawruss,"
Abe said, "which if it rested with you, y'understand, we could make up
a line of samples for next season that wouldn't be no more like Paris
designs than General Pershing looks like his pictures in the magazines."
"Say, for that matter," Morris said, "we are just as good guessers as our
competitors; on account the way things is going nowadays, nobody is
going to try to make a trip to Paris to get fashion designs, because if he
figured on crossing the ocean to buy model gowns for the fall and
winter of nineteen-nineteen and nineteen-twenty, y'understand, between
the time that he applied for his passport and the time the government
issued it to him, y'understand, it would already be the spring and
summer season of nineteen-twenty-four and nineteen-twenty-five. So
the best thing we could do is to snoop round among the trade, and
whatever we find the majority is making up for next year, we would
make up the same styles also, and that's all there would be to it."
"We wouldn't do nothing of the kind," Abe declared. "I've been

thinking this thing over, and I come to the conclusion that it's up to you
to go over to Paris and see what is going on over there."
"I don't got to go to Paris for that, Abe," Morris said. "I can read the
papers the same like anybody else, and just so long as there is a chance
that the war would start up again and them hundred-mile guns is going
to resume operations, I am content to get my ideas of Paris styles at a
distance of three thousand miles if I never sold another garment as long
as I live."
"But when it was working yet, it only went off every twenty minutes,"
Abe said.
"I don't care if it went off every Fourth of July," Morris said, "because
if I went over there it would be just my luck that the peace nogotiations
falls through and the Germans invent a gun leaving Frankfort ever hour
on the hour and arriving in Paris daily, including Sundays, without
leaving enough trace of me to file a proof of death with. Am I right or
wrong?"
"All right," Abe said. "If that's the way you feel about it, I will go to
Paris."
"You will go to Paris?" Morris exclaimed.
"Sure!" Abe declared. "The operators is on strike, business is rotten,
and I'm sick and tired of paying life-insurance premiums, anyway.
Besides, if Leon Sammet could get a passport, why couldn't I?"
"You mean to say that faker is going to Paris to buy model gowns?"
Morris demanded.
"I seen him on the Subway this morning, and the way he talked about
how easy he got his passport, you would think that every time he was
in Washington with a line of them masquerade costumes which
Sammet Brothers makes up, if he didn't stop in and take anyhow a bit
of lunch with the Wilsons, y'understand, the President raises the devil
with Tumulty why didn't he let him know Leon Sammet was in town."

"Then that settles it," Morris declared, reaching for his hat.
"Where are you going?" Abe asked.
"I am going straight down to see Henry D. Feldman and tell that crook
he should get for me a passport," Morris said.
"You wouldn't positively do nothing of the kind," Abe said. "Did you
ever hear the like? Wants to go to a lawyer to get a passport! An idea!"
"Well, who would I go to, then--an osteaopath?" Morris asked.
"Leon Sammet told me all about it," Abe said. "You go down to a place
on Rector Street where you sign an application, and--"
"That's just what I thought," Morris interrupted, "and the least what
happens to fellers which signs applications without a lawyer,
y'understand, is that six months later a truck-driver arrives one morning
and says where