“Yes,” said Bunny; “but then, what would you direct?”
And the super-director looked at him, bewildered, and suddenly burst out laughing. “By God, that’s so! That’s a good one! Ho, ho, ho!” And he went off, presumably to pass the good one on.
His place was taken by Harvey Manning, who was no longer able to stand up, but sprawled over a chair, and in a voice of the deepest injury declared, “I wanna know whoze been tellin bout me!”
“Telling what?” asked Bunny.
“Thaz what I wanna know. What they been tellin?”
“I don’t know what you mean, Harvey.”
“Thass it! Why don’t you know? Why don’t you tell me? Mean say I ain’t askin straight? You think I’m drunk—that it? I say, I wanna know whoze been talkin bout me an what they been sayin. I gotta take care my reputation. I wanna know why you won’t tell me. I’m gonna know if I have to keep askin all night.” And accordingly he started again, “Please, ole feller, what they been tellin you?”
But just then the Chinese spectre flitted past, and Harvey got up and made an effort to catch him, and failing, caught hold of a lamp-stand, slightly taller than himself. It was not built like the lamp-posts that he was used to clutching on street-corners; it started to fall, and Bunny leaped and caught it, and Harvey cried, in alarm, “Look out, you’re upsettin it!”
Then a funny thing happened. Bunny had noticed at the dinner-table a well-groomed man of the big Western type, polite and unobtrusive; the superintendent of the estate, and one of the few who kept sober. Now it appeared that among the duties of superintendent at a monastery was that of the old-fashioned “bouncer” of the Bowery saloon. He came up, and quietly slipped his arm about Harvey Manning; and the latter, evidently having been there before, set up an agonized wail, “I d’wanna go to bed! I woan go to bed! Dammit, Anderson, lemme lone! If I go to bed now I wake up in the mornin an I can’t have a drink till evenin an I go crazy!”
Against that horrible fate poor Harvey fought frantically; but apparently the material inside the shoulders of Mr. Anderson’s dresscoat was not the ordinary tailor’s padding, and the weeping victim was helpless as in the grip of a boa-constrictor. He went along, even while proclaiming loudly that he wouldn’t. “I’ll get up again, I tell you! I woan be treated like a baby! I woan come this damn place again! It’s an outrage! I’m a grown man an I got a right get drunk if I wanna—” and so his weeping voice died into the elevator!