Abe and Mawruss Part 30

"Well, I guess now I would be getting back to the store."

"You got my permission," Sol said as Morris started from the restaurant.

These were destined to be the last words addressed to Morris by Sol Klinger in many a long day, for the moving incidents which awaited Morris's return to his showroom put an end to all friends.h.i.+p between him and Sol.

_Imprimis_, when Morris entered, Moe Griesman was seated in the firm's private office, the centre of an animated group of four. "h.e.l.lo, there, Mawruss!" Moe shouted; "there's a couple of gentlemen here which would like to talk to you."

He indicated a ruddy, clean-shaven person of approximately fifty years, who on closer inspection proved to be Max Kirschner shorn of his white moustache and without the attendant nimbus of his diamond pin. The other individual was even harder to identify by reason of a neat-fitting business suit of brown and a general air of prosperity; but in him Morris descried the person of what had once been Sam Green.

"Morris, you old rascal," Max cried, "when you took me over to the Prince Clarence Hotel that day why didn't you tell me that the man you wanted me to go into business with ran a store in Cyprus?"

"I couldn't remember the name of the place at all," Morris admitted.

Abe gazed at him sorrowfully.

"The fact is, gentlemen," he said, "my partner ain't got no head at all."

Sam Green's face flushed in recollection of the phrase.

"Never mind," he said fervently; "he's got anyhow a heart."

"And I've got a stomach," Max Kirschner added irrelevantly. "At least, I've recovered one since I've been eating Leah Green's good cooking."

Sam and Moe Griesman smiled sympathetically.

"Well, what's the use wasting time here, boys?" Moe said at last. "Let's explain to Mawruss about the new combination. Me and Max and Sam Green here have agreed to go as partners together in Cyprus under the name 'The Cyprus Dry-goods Company.' In a small town like Cyprus compet.i.tion is nix."

"Good!" Morris exclaimed. "I'm glad to hear it. Is the Sarahcuse store included too?"

"A ten per cent. interest they got, although I am going to run my Sarahcuse business and these here boys is going to run the Cyprus end,"

Moe continued. "And now, Abe, as Max has got to pick out a lot of goods for the Cyprus store and I want to do the same for my Sarahcuse store, let's get to work."

For three hours without cessation they laboured over Potash & Perlmutter's sample line until garments to an amount in excess of five thousand dollars had been ordered.

When Max Kirschner saw the total of Moe Griesman's selection for the Syracuse store he emitted a low whistle.

"Say, Moe," he said, "ain't you going to give your nephew, Rabiner, any show at all this season?"

"_Oser a Stuck_," Griesman declared. "I done enough for that feller when I got him a three years' contract with Klinger & Klein."

CHAPTER SIX

A PRESENT FOR MR. GEIGERMANN

"Well, Abe," Morris Perlmutter declared, one morning in midwinter, "you look like you had a pretty lively session last night."

Abe nodded slowly. "I want to tell you something, Mawruss," he said solemnly; "I would do anything at all to hold a customer's trade, Mawruss. I would go on theayter with him. I would _schmier_ him tenspots when he's got the bid already, and I would go _bate_ on hands which even a rotten player like you couldn't lose, Mawruss. But before I would got to sit through such another evening like last night, Mawruss, Felix Geigermann should never buy from us again a dollar's worth more goods.

That's all I got to say."

"Why, what was the matter?" Morris asked.

"Well, in the first place, Mawruss, to show you what a liar that feller Geigermann is, he brings out a fiddle which he tells us is three hundred years old."

"Yow! Three hundred years old!" Morris exclaimed skeptically. "A fiddle three hundred years old would be worth, the very least, a hundred or a hundred and fifty dollars."

"That's what I told him, Mawruss," Abe said. "I says to him if I would got a fiddle which it is worth that much money I would quick sell it and buy something which it is anyhow useful, like a diamond ring _oder_ a scarfpin. But Geigermann only laughs at me, Mawruss; he says he don't own the fiddle, Mawruss, but that somebody loaned it him. Even if he would own it, he wouldn't take two hundred dollars for it."

"My worries, if he owns the fiddle _oder_ not, Abe!" Morris commented.

"Sure, I know, Mawruss; but that ain't the point. Afterward Mozart Rabiner comes in; and if I would be Felix Geigermann, Mawruss, and a salesman comes into my house and gets fresh with a pianner which the least it stands Geigermann in is a hundred dollars, Mawruss, I would kick him into the street yet."

"What is Mozart Rabiner doing there, Abe?" Morris inquired anxiously.

Abe preserved a cheerful demeanour, although it was the circ.u.mstance of Mozart Rabiner's prominence at Geigermann's musicale that had rendered the evening so unbearable.

"Well, Mawruss," he explained, "you don't suppose that Geigermann buys all his goods from us?"

Morris elevated his eyebrows gloomily.

"I don't suppose nothing, Abe," he said; "but once you let a shark like Rabiner get in with Geigermann, Klinger & Klein would give him the privilege to cut our price till they run us right out of there."

"It's an open market, Mawruss," Abe said, "and anyhow I am doing all I can to keep that feller's business. You would think so if you would of been there last night, Mawruss. First a lady in one of them two-piece velvet suits--afterward I see the jacket; a ringer for our style forty-two-twenty, Mawruss--she gets up on the floor, Mawruss, and she hollers b.l.o.o.d.y murder, Mawruss. I never heard the like since that Italiener girl which we got working for us on White Street catches her finger in the b.u.t.tonhole machine. Mozart Rabiner plays for her on the pianner, Mawruss; and when she gets through, the way Rabiner jollies her you would think she would be buying goods for Marshall Field yet. After that, Geigermann takes the fiddle and him and Moe Rabiner gets together by the pianner and for three quarters of an hour, Mawruss, they work away like they was being paid for it."

"Moe Rabiner gets paid for it, I bet yer," Morris agreed.

"What a noise them fellers make it, Mawruss!" Abe continued. "Honestly, I thought my head was busting; and when they get finished the lady which done the hollering asks 'em who the piece is by, Mawruss--and who do you think Rabiner says?"

"How should I know who he says?" Morris retorted angrily.

"Richard Strauss," Abe replied.

"Richard Strauss?" Morris asked. "You mean that feller Strauss of Klipmann, Strauss & Bleimer, I suppose?"

"It must be the same feller," Abe said. "Seemingly everybody there knows him; and besides, Mawruss, that feller Strauss is another one of them musical fellers too. Only the other day Klipmann tells me that feller spends a fortune going on the opera with customers."

"But I thought Klipmann's partner was called Milton Strauss," Morris said.

"Maybe it was Milton Strauss," Abe continued. "Milton _oder_ Richard, I couldn't remember. It was one of them up-to-date names anyhow; and, mind you, Mawruss, that feller Rabiner has got the nerve to ask me if I didn't like Strauss. What could I say? If that cut-throat Rabiner thinks he is going to get me to knock a compet.i.tor in front of Geigermann he's mistaken. 'Sure I like him,' I says; 'why not?' 'In that case,' Moe says, 'we'll play some more of this.' 'Go as far as you like,' I says, and they kept it up till the elevator boy rings the bell and says a lady on the top floor is sick. I don't blame her, Mawruss; I was pretty sick myself."

Morris nodded sympathetically.

"So, then, Mawruss," Abe continued, "Geigermann takes the fiddle again and shows it to us, Mawruss; and he says on the back is a ruby varnish."

"Rubies is pretty high now, Abe," Morris said; "carat for carat, rubies is a whole lot more expensive as diamonds."

"_Gewiss_, Mawruss," Abe cried; "but I seen the back of the fiddle, Mawruss, and if the varnish on it was made from rubies, Mawruss, I would eat it. The fiddle was an ordinary fiddle like any other fiddle; only one thing I see, Mawruss--on the inside is a little piece from paper, y'understand, and printed on it is the name from some Italiener or another, with some figures on it. Geigermann says it was stuck in there three hundred years ago, when the fiddle was made. And you ought to see Moe Rabiner, Mawruss. He looks at that fiddle for pretty near half an hour. He turns it upside down and he blows into it and he takes his finger and wets it and rubs on it, and he smells it, and _Gott weiss_ what he don't do with it."