Part 4 (1/2)
”Pooh!” said the Idiot. ”You are not a non-producer. It doesn't take a very smart doctor these days to produce patients, does it? You could a.s.sign your cases to the bank. One little case of hypochondria alone ought to be a sufficient guarantee of a steady income for years, properly managed. If you haven't learned how to keep your patients in such shape that they have to send for you two or three times a week, you'd better go back to the medical school and fit yourself for your real work in life. You never knew a plumber to be so careless of his interests as to clean up a job all at once, and what the plumber is to the household, the physician should be to the individual. Same way with Mr. Brief. With the machinery of the law in its present shape there is absolutely no excuse for a lawyer who settles any case inside of fifteen years, by which time it is reasonable to suppose his client will get into some new trouble that will keep him going as a paying concern for fifteen more. There isn't a field of human endeavor in which a man applies himself industriously that does not produce something that should be a negotiable security.”
”How about burglars?” queried the Bibliomaniac.
”I stand corrected,” said the Idiot. ”The burglar is an exception, but then he is an exception also at the banks. The expert burglar very seldom leaves any security for what he gets at the banks, and so he isn't affected by the situation one way or the other.”
”Oh, well,” said Mr. Brief, rising, ”it's only a pipe-dream all the way through. They might start in on such a proposition, but it would never last. When you went in to borrow fifteen dollars, putting up your idiocy as collateral, the emptiness of the whole scheme would reveal itself.”
”You never can tell,” observed the Idiot. ”Even under their present system the banks have done worse than that.”
”Never!” cried the Lawyer.
”Yes, sir,” replied the Idiot. ”Only the other day I saw in the papers that a bank out in Oklahoma had loaned a man ten thousand dollars on sixty thousand shares of Hot Air preferred.”
”And is that worse than Idiocy?” demanded Mr. Brief.
”Infinitely,” said the Idiot. ”If a bank lost fifteen dollars on my idiocy it would be out ninety-nine hundred and eighty-five dollars less than that Oklahoma inst.i.tution is on its hot-air loan.”
”Bos.h.!.+ What's Hot Air worth on the Exchange to-day?”
”As a selling proposition, zero and commissions off,” said the Idiot.
”Fact is, they've changed its name. It is now known as International Nitting.”
V
HE SUGGESTS A COMIC OPERA
”There's a harvest for you,” said the Idiot, as he perused a recently published criticism of a comic opera. ”There have been thirty-nine new comic operas produced this year and four of 'em were worth seeing. It is very evident that the Gilbert and Sullivan industry hasn't gone to the wall whatever slumps other enterprises have suffered from.”
”That is a goodly number,” said the Poet. ”Thirty-nine, eh? I knew there was a raft of them, but I had no idea there were as many as that.”
”Why don't you go in and do one, Mr. Poet?” suggested the Idiot. ”They tell me it's as easy as rolling off a log. All you've got to do is to forget all your ideas and remember all the old jokes you ever heard, slap 'em together around a lot of dances, write two dozen lyrics about some Googoo Belle, hire a composer, and there you are. Hanged if I haven't thought of writing one myself.”
”I fancy it isn't as easy as it looks,” observed the Poet. ”It requires just as much thought to be thoughtless as it does to be thoughtful.”
”Nonsense,” said the Idiot. ”I'd undertake the job cheerfully if some manager would make it worth my while, and, what's more, if I ever got into the swing of the business I'll bet I could turn out a libretto a day for three days of the week for the next two months.”
”If I had your confidence I'd try it,” laughed the Poet, ”but, alas! in making me Nature did not design a confidence man.”
”Nonsense, again,” said the Idiot. ”Any man who can get the editors to print sonnets to 'Diana's Eyebrow,' and little lyrics of Madison Square, Longacre Square, Battery Place, and Boston Common, the way you do, has a right to consider himself an adept at bunco. I tell you what I'll do with you: I'll swap off my confidence for your lyrical facility, and see what I can do. Why can't we collaborate and get up a libretto for next season? They tell me there's large money in it.”
”There certainly is if you catch on,” said the Poet. ”Vastly more than in any other kind of writing that I know. I don't know but that I would like to collaborate with you on something of the sort. What is your idea?”
”Mind's a blank on the subject,” sighed the Idiot. ”That's the reason I think I can turn the trick. As I said before, you don't need ideas.
Better go without 'em. Just sit down and write.”
”But you must have some kind of a story,” persisted the Poet.
”Not to begin with,” said the Idiot. ”Just write your choruses and songs, slap in your jokes, fasten 'em together, and the thing is done.