After supper the Missus called me out in the kitchen to bawl me out.
“It’s rough stuff to embarrass a guest,” she says.
“He’s always embarrassed,” says I. “But you admit now, don’t you, that I was tellin’ the truth about him touchin’ me?”
“Yes,” she says.
“Well,” says I, “if he’s so soiled with money, why don’t he pay a little puny debt?”
“He’s probably forgot it,” says she.
“Did he look like he’d forgot it?” I ast her. And she had no comeback.
But when my Missus can overlook a guy stingin’ me for legal tender, it means he’s in pretty strong with her. And I couldn’t count on no help from her, even if Bishop was a murderer, so long as Bess wanted him.
The next mornin’, just to amuse myself, I called up the Criterion people and ast them if they was goin’ to hire a scenario writer name Elmer Bishop.
“Never heard of him,” was what they told me.
So I called up the Western.
“Elmer Bishop?” they says. “He ain’t no scenario writer. He’s what we call an extra. He plays small parts sometimes.”
“And what pay do them extras drag down?” I ast.
“Five dollars a day, but nothin’ when they don’t work,” was the thrillin’ response.
My first idea was to slip this dope to the Wife and Bess both. But what’d be the use? They wouldn’t believe it even if they called up and found out for themself; and if they did believe it, Bessie’d say a man’s pay didn’t make no difference where true love was concerned, and the Missus would take her part, and they’d cry a little, and wind up by sendin’ for Bishop and a minister to make sure o’ the ceremony comin’ off before Bishop lost his five-dollar job and croaked himself.
Then I thought o’ forbiddin’ him the hospitality o’ my abode. But that’d be just as useless. They’d meet somewheres else, and if I threatened to lock Bess out, the Wife’d come back with a counter-proposition to not give me no more stewed beets or banana soufflés. Besides that, strong-arm methods don’t never kill sweet love, but act just the opposite and make the infected parties more set on gettin’ each other. This here case was somethin’ delicate, and if a man didn’t handle it exactly right you wouldn’t never get over bein’ sorry.
So, instead o’ me quarrelin’ with the Wife and Bess, and raisin’ a fuss at Bishop spendin’ eight evenin’s a week with us, I kept my clam closed and tried to be pleasant, even when I’d win a hand o’ rummy and see this guy carelessly lose a few of his remainin’ face cards under the table.
We had an awful spell o’ heat in July and it wasn’t no fun playin’ cards or goin’ to pitcher shows, or nothin’. Saturday afternoons and Sundays, I and the Missus would go over to the lake and splash. Bess only went with us a couple o’ times; that was because she couldn’t get Bishop to come along. He’d always say he was busy, or he had a cold and was afraid o’ makin’ it worse. So far as I was concerned, I managed to enjoy my baths just as much with them two stayin’ away. The sight o’ Bessie in a bathin’ suit crabbed the exhilaratin’ effects o’ the swim. When she stood up in the water the minnows must of thought two people was still-fishin’.
It was one night at supper, after Bessie’d been with us about a month, when the idear come to me. Bishop was there, and I’d been lookin’ at he and Bess, and wonderin’ what they’d seen in each other. The Missus ast ’em if they was goin’ out some place.
“No,” says Bessie. “It’s too hot and they ain’t no place to go.”
“They’s lots o’ places to go,” says the Wife. “For one thing, they’re havin’ grand opera out to Ravinia Park.”
“I wouldn’t give a nickel to see a grand opera,” says Bess, “unless it was Ada, that Elmer took us to last winter.”
So they went on talkin’ about somethin’ else. I don’t know what, because the minute she mentioned Ada I was all set.
I guess maybe I’d better tell you a little about this here opera, so’s you’ll see how it helped me out. A fella named Gus Verdi wrote it, and the scenes is laid along the Illinois Central, round Memphis and Cairo. Ada’s a big wench, with a pretty voice, and she’s the hired girl in the mayor’s family. The mayor’s daughter gets stuck on a fat little tenor that you can’t pronounce and that should of had a lawn mower ran over his chin. The tenor likes the colored girl better than the mayor’s daughter, and the mayor’s daughter tries every way she can think of to bust it up and grab off the tenor for herself; but nothin’ doin’! Finally the mayor has the tenor pinched for keepin’ open after one o’clock, and the law’s pretty strict; so, instead o’ just finin’ him, they lock him up in a safety-deposit vault. Well, the wench is down in the vault, too, dustin’ off the papers and cleanin’ the silver, and they don’t know she’s there; so the two o’ them’s locked up together and can’t get out. And when they can’t get away and haven’t got nobody else to look at or talk to, they get so’s they hate each other; and finally they can’t stand it no longer and they both die. They’s pretty music in it, but if old Gus had of seen the men that was goin’ to be in the show he’d of laid the scenes in Beardstown instead o’ Memphis.
Well, do you get the idear? If the mayor’s daughter had of been smart, instead o’ tryin’ to keep the tenor and Ada from bein’ with each other she’d of locked ’em up together a long while ago, and, first thing you know, they’d of been sick o’ one another; and just before they
