Elkan Lubliner, American Part 43

"I should know!" he said.

"What d'ye mean you should know?" Elkan cried. "Ain't I always told it you you should write down always the name when people call?"

"Ain't Jacobowitz a name?" Sam replied. "Furthermore, you couldn't expect me I should get the family history from everybody which is coming in the place, Mr. Lubliner--especially when the feller says he would come back."

"Why didn't you tell me he is coming back?" Elkan asked, and again Sam shrugged.

"When the feller is coming back, Mr. Lubliner," he said, "it don't make no difference if I tell you _oder_ not. He would come back anyhow."

Having thus disposed of the matter to his entire satisfaction, Sam withdrew and banged the door triumphantly behind him, while Elkan fell to examining his mail. He had hardly cut the first envelope, however, when his door opened to admit Dishkes.

"_Nu_, Dishkes!" Elkan said. "You are pretty early, ain't it?"

Dishkes nodded.

"I'm a _Schlemiel_, Mr. Lubliner," he said, "and that's all there is to it. Yesterday I went to work and lost my wife's picture."

Elkan slapped his thigh with his hand.

"Well, ain't I a peach?" he said. "I am getting so mixed up with these here antics I completely forgot to tell Yetta anything about it. I didn't even show it to her, Dishkes; so you must leave me have it for a day longer, Dishkes."

As he spoke he drew the cabinet photograph from his breast pocket and handed it to Dishkes, who gazed earnestly at it for a minute. Then, resting his elbows on his knees, he buried his face in his hands and burst into a fit of hysterical sobbing, whereat Elkan jumped from his seat and pa.s.sed hurriedly out of the room. As he walked toward the showroom the strains of a popular song came from behind a rack.

"Sam," he bellowed, "who asks you you should whistle round here?"

The whistling ceased and Sam emerged from his hiding-place with a feather brush.

"I could whistle without being asked," Sam replied; "and furthermore, Mr. Lubliner, when I am dusting the samples I must got to whistle; otherwise the dust gets in my lungs, which I value my lungs the same like you do, Mr. Lubliner, even if I would be here only a boy working on stock!"

With this decisive rejoinder he resumed dusting the samples, while Elkan returned to his office, where he found that Dishkes had regained his composure.

Despite the fact that all of Dishkes' creditors save one had signed an extension agreement, the meeting in Polatkin, Scheikowitz & Company's showroom was well attended; and when Leon Sammet came in, at quarter-past eleven, the a.s.semblage had already elected Charles Finkman, of Maisener & Finkman, as chairman. He had just taken his seat in Philip Scheikowitz's new revolving chair and was in the act of noisily clearing his throat in lieu of pounding the table with a gavel.

"Gentlemen," he said, "first, I want to thank you for the signal honour you are doing me in appointing me your chairman. For sixteen years now my labours in the Independent Order Mattai Aaron ain't unknown to most of you here. Ten years ago, at the national convention held in Sarahcuse, gentlemen, I was unanimously elected by the delegates from sixty lodges to be your National Grand Master; and----"

At this juncture Leon Sammet rose ponderously to his feet.

"Say, Finkman!" retorted Sammet. "What has all this _Stuss_ about the I.

O. M. A. got to do _mit_ Dishkes here?"

Again Finkman cleared his throat, and this time he produced a note of challenge that caused the members of the I. O. M. A. there present to lean forward in their seats. They expected a crus.h.i.+ng rejoinder and they were not disappointed.

"What is the motto of the I. O. M. A., Sammet?" Finkman thundered.

"'Justice, Fraternity and Charity!' And I say to you now that, as chairman of this meeting, as well as Past National Grand Master of that n.o.ble order to which you and I both belong, _verstehst du_, I will see that justice be done, fraternity be encouraged and charity dispensed on each and every occasion.

"Now, my brothers, here is a fellow member of our organization in distress, y'understand; and I ask you one and all this question"--he raised his voice to a pitch that made the filaments tremble in the electric-light bulbs--"Who," he roared, "who will come to his a.s.sistance?"

He paused dramatically just as Sam, the office boy, stuck his head in the showroom doorway and rent the silence with his high, piping voice.

"Mr. Lubliner," he said, "the man is here about Jacobowitz."

Elkan flapped his hand wildly, but it was too late to prevent the entrance of no less a person than Jacob Paul--the connoisseur of antiques and fine arts.

"h.e.l.lo, Finkman!" he said; "what's the trouble here?"

Elkan started from his seat to interrupt his visitor, but there was something in Finkman's manner that made him sit down again.

"Why, how do you do, Mr. Paul?" Finkman exclaimed; and the clarion note had deserted his voice, leaving only a slight hoa.r.s.eness to mark its pa.s.sing. "What brings you here?"

"I might ask the same of you, Finkman," Jacob Paul replied; and as his keen eyes scanned the a.s.sembled company they rested for a minute on Leon Sammet, who forthwith began to perspire.

"The fact is," Finkman began, "this here is a meeting of creditors of Louis Dishkes, of the Villy dee Paris Store on Amsterdam Avenue."

Paul turned to Louis Dishkes, proprietor of the Ville de Paris Store, who sat at the side of the room behind Scheikowitz's desk in an improvised prisoner's dock.

"What's the matter, Dishkes?" Paul asked. "Couldn't you make it go up there?"

Dishkes shrugged hopelessly.

"Next month, when them houses round the corner is rented," he said, "I could do a good business there."

"You ought to," Paul agreed. "You ain't got no compet.i.tors, so far as I could see."

"That's what we all think!" Elkan broke in--"that is to say, all of us except Mr. Sammet; and he ain't willing to wait for his money."

Leon Sammet moved uneasily in his chair as Jacob Paul faced about in his direction.

"Why ain't you willing to wait, Sammet?" he asked; and Leon mopped his face with his handkerchief.

"Well, it's like this, Mr. Paul----" he began, but the connoisseur of antiques raised his hand.

"One moment, Sammet," he said. "You know as well as anybody else, and better even, that a millionaire concern like the Hamsuckett Mills must got to wait once in a while." He paused significantly. "If we didn't,"

he continued, "there's plenty of solvent concerns would be forced to the wall--ain't it? Furthermore, if the Hamsuckett Mills did business the way you want to, Sammet, I wouldn't keep my job as credit man and treasurer very long."

Sammet nodded weakly and plied his handkerchief with more vigour, while Elkan sat and stared at his acquaintance of Sunday night in unfeigned astonishment.

"Then what is the use of talking, Sammet?" Paul said. "So long as you are the only one standing out, why don't you make an end of it? How long an extension does Dishkes want?"

"Two months," Finkman answered.

"And where is the agreement you fellows all signed?" Paul continued.

Elkan took a paper from the desk in front of Dishkes and pa.s.sed it to Paul, who drew from his waistcoat pocket an opulent gold-mounted fountain pen. Then he walked over to Leon Sammet and handed him the pen and the agreement.

"_Schreib_, Sammet," he said, "and don't make no more fuss about it."

A moment later Sammet appended a shaky signature to the agreement and returned it, with the pen, to Paul.