The middle-aged man, the one with the large acquaintance among belated drunkards, seemingly had little interest when the conversation turned from bootlegging to the silver screen. We never did hear what business "The Sheik" did in Albany because he was roaring at a skeptic about cabbage.
"I tell you," he shouted, "they got 110 tons off of every acre."
Now we yield to no man in love of cabbage, but we should not find such quantities appealing. It would compel corn beef commitments beyond the point of comfort.
The skeptic made some timid observation about onions. We did not catch whether it was for or against.
"Do you know," said the cabbage king, "that 75 per cent. of all the onions in America are eaten by Jews?" He said it with rancor, whether racial or vegetable we could not determine. To us it seemed an unusual tribute to an ancient people. No other story of their executive capacity had ever seemed to us quite so convincing. We marveled at the extraordinary coöperation which could hold a habit so precisely to an average easy to compute and remember.
We were also moved to admiration for the census takers. Statistics seem to us man's supreme triumph in solving the mysteries of a chaotic world. Creation, of course, was divine, but even that did not involve bookkeeping.
For a time we considered abandoning our project to write a novel about a newspaper man and his son and make it, instead, a pastoral about a hero simple and sincere whose life was dedicated to the task of determining the ultimate destination of every onion raised in America. Then, since art ought to be international, we planned to widen the scope of the tale and include Bermuda. This would enable us to develop a tropical love interest and get a sex appeal into the story. We are not sure that a book would have a wide sale on onions alone.
Of course other vegetables might enter the story. There could be a villain forever tempting the hero to abandon his career and go after parsnips. Titles simply flooded our mind. We thought of "Desperate Steaks," "Out of the Frying Pan" and "A Bed of Onions," although we had a vague impression that W. L. George had done something of this sort in one of his earlier novels. "Breath Control" we dismissed as too frivolous. "Smothered" was too sensational.
Eventually we abandoned the whole project. We feared that we might not be up to the atmosphere of an onion novel.
Still, the advertising might be very effective if the publisher could be induced to bill the book under a great, flaring headline, "The Onion Forever."