So those two unfortunates united their misfortunes, and lo! happiness
came of it. Luckily that is all that did come of it. What disposition
the pair would have made of children, had any arrived, it is difficult
to conjecture. Only by miraculous compression of ribs, handles, and
fabrics was space contrived in the basement cubbyhole for Annie
Oombrella to squeeze in. However, she set up housekeeping cheerily as a
bird, with an odd lot of pots and pans which Schepstein had picked up at
an auction and resold to them at not more than two hundred per cent
profit, plus a kerosene stove, the magnificent wedding gift of the
Bonnie Lassie and her husband, Cyrus the Gaunt. Twice a week they had
meat. They were rising in the social scale.
Habitude is the real secret of tolerance. As we became accustomed to
Plooie, Our Square ceased to resent his invincible outlandishness; we
endured him with equanimity, although it would be exaggeration to say
that we accepted him, and we certainly did not patronize him
professionally. Nevertheless, in a minor degree, he nourished. Annie
Oombrella must have lavished care upon him. His pinched-in shoulders
broadened perceptibly. His gait, still a halting shuffle, grew
noticeably brisker. There was even a heartier note in his lamentable
trade cry:
"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees à raccommoder!"
As for Annie Oombrella, having some one to look after quite transformed
her. She grew plump and chirpy, and bustling as a blithe little sparrow,
though perhaps duck would be a happier comparison, for she was dabbling
and splashing in water all the day long, making the stairs and porches
of her curatorship fairly glisten with cleanliness. Her rates went up to
twenty cents an hour. There were rumors that she had started a savings
account. Life stretched out before the little couple, smooth and
peaceful and sunny with companionship.
Then came the war.
The calamitous quality of a great world tragedy is that it brings to so
many helpless little folk bitter and ignoble tragedies of shame and
humiliation and misunderstanding. With a few racial exceptions, Our
Square was vehemently pro-Ally. In spirit we fought with valiant France
and prayed for heroic Belgium. What a Godspeed we gave to the few sons
of Gaul who, in those early days, left us to fight the good fight! How
sourly we looked upon Plooie continuing his peaceful rounds. Whence
arose the rumor, I cannot say, but it was noised about just at that time
of wrath and tension that Plooie was born in Liège. Liège, that city of
fire and slaughter and heroism, upon which the eyes and hopes of the
world were turned in wonder and admiration. Somebody had seen the entry
on the marriage register! The Bonnie Lassie told me of it, pausing at my
bench with a little furrow between her bright eyes.
"Dominie, you know Emile Garin pretty well?"
"Not at all," I replied, failing to identify the rickety Plooie by his
rightful name.
"Of course you do! Never a morning but he stops at your bench and asks
if you have an umbrella to mend."
"I never have. What of him?"
"Have you any influence with him?"
"Not compared with yours."
The Bonnie Lassie made a little gesture of despair. "I can't find him.
And Annie Oombrella won't tell me where he is. She only cries."
"That's bad. You think he--he is--"
"Why don't you say it outright, Dominie? _You_ think he's hiding."
"Really!" I expostulated. "You come to me with accusations against the
poor fellow and then undertake to make me responsible for them."
"I don't believe it's true at all," averred the Bonnie Lassie loyally.
"I don't believe Plooie is a coward. There's some reason why he doesn't
go over and help! I want to know what it is."
Perceiving that I was expected to provide excuses for the erring one, I
did my best. "Over age," I suggested.
"He's only thirty-two."
"Bless me! He looks sixty. Well--physical infirmity."
"He can carry a load all day."
"He won't leave Annie Oombrella, then. Or perhaps she won't let him."
"When I asked her, she cried harder than ever and said that her mother
was French and she would go and fight herself, if they'd have her."
"Then I give it up. What does your Olympian wisdom make of it?"
"I don't know. But I'm afraid the Garins are going to have trouble."
Within a few days Plooie reappeared and his strident falsetto appeal for
trade rang shrill in the space of Our Square. Trouble developed at once.
Small boys booed at him, called him "yellow," and advised him to go
carefully, there was a German behind the next tree. Henri Dumain, our
little old French David who fought the tragic duel of tooth and claw
with his German Jonathan in Thornsen's Élite Restaurant, stung him with
that most insulting word in any known tongue--"Lâche!"--and threatened
him with uplifted cane; and poor Plooie slunk away. But I think it was
the fact that he who stayed at home when others went forward had set a
picture of Albert of Belgium in the window of his cubbyhole that most
exasperated us against him. Tactless, to say the least! His call grew
quavery and furtive. Annie Oombrella ceased to sing at work. Matters
looked ill for the Garins.
The evil came to a head the week after David and Jonathan broke off all
relations. Perhaps that tragedy of shattered friendship (afterward
rejoined through the agency of the great peacemaker, Death) had got on
our nerves. Ordinarily, had Plooie chased a small boy who had tipped a
barrel down his basement steps, nothing would have come of it. But the
chase took him into the midst of a group of the younger and more
boisterous element, returning from a business meeting of the Gentlemen's
Sons of Avenue B, and before he could turn, they had surrounded him.
"Here's our little 'ee-ro!" "Looka the Frenchy that won't fight!"
"Safety first, hey, Plooie?" "Charge umbrellas--backward, march!"
Plooie did his best to break for a run through, which was the worst
thing he could have tried. They collared him. By that contact he became
their captive, their prey. What to do with him? To loose a prisoner,
once in the hand, is an unthinkable anti-climax. Somebody developed an
inspirational thought: "Ride him on a rail!"
Near by, a house front under repair supplied a scantling. Plooie was
hustled upon it. He fell off. They jammed him back again. He clung,
wide-eyed, white-faced, and silent. The mob, for it was that now, bore
him with jeers and jokes and ribaldry along the edge of the park.
When they came within my ken he was riding high, and the mob was being
augmented momentarily from every quarter. I looked about for Terry the
Cop. But Terry was elsewhere. It is not beyond the bounds of reasonable
probability that he had absented himself on purpose. "God hates a
coward" is a tenet of Terry's creed. I confess to a certain sympathy
with it myself. After all, a harsh lesson might not be amiss for Plooie,
the recusant. Composing my soul to a non-intervention policy, I leaned
back on my bench, when a pitiful sight ruined my neutrality.
Along the outer edge of the compact mob trotted little Annie Oombrella.
From time to time she dashed herself blindly against that human wall,
which repulsed her not too roughly and with indulgent laughter. Their
concern was not with her. It was with the coward; their prisoner,
delivered by fate to the stern decrees of mob justice. I could hear his
voice now, calling out to her in their own language across the
supervening heads:
"Do not have fear, my little one. They do me no harm. Go you home,
little cat. Soon I come also. Do not fear."
From his forehead ran a little stream of blood. But there was that in
his face which told me that if he was fearful it was only for her. His
voice, steady and piercing, overrode the clamor of the crowd. I began to
entertain doubts as to his essential cowardice.
Annie Oombrella, dumb with misery and terror, only dashed herself the
more hopelessly against the barrier of bodies.
Even the delight of rail-riding a victim becomes monotonous in time. The
many-headed sought further measures of correction and reprobation.
"Le's tar-and-feather him."
"White feathers!"
"Where'll we gettum?"
"Satkins's kosher shop on the Av'noo."
"Where's yer tar?"
This was a poser; Satkins was saved from a raid. A more practical
expedient now evolved from the collective brain.
"Duck'm in the fountain!"
"_Drown_ him in the fountain!" amended an enthusiast.
Whooping with delight, the mob turned toward the gate. This was becoming
dangerous. That there was no real intent to drown the unfortunate
umbrella-mender I was well satisfied. But mob intent is subject to mob
impulse. If they once got him into the water, the temptation of the
playful to push his head under just once more might be too strong.
Plainly the time was ripe for intervention.
Owing to some enthusiastically concerted but ill-directed engineering,
the scantling with its human burden had jammed crosswise of the posts.
Now, if ever, was the opportunity for eloquence of dissuasion.
For the heroic rôle of Horatius at the Bridge I am ill-fitted both by
temperament and the fullness of years. Nevertheless, I advanced into the
imminent deadly breach and raised the appeal to reason.
The result was unsatisfactory. Some hooted. Others laughed.
"Never mind the Dominie," yelled Inky Mike, laying hold of the rail by
an end and hauling it around. "He don't mean nothin'."
Old bones are no match for young barbarism. The rush through the gate
brushed me aside like a feather. I saw the tragi-comic parade go by, as
I leaned against a supporting tree: the advance guard of clamorous
urchins, the rail-bearers, the white-faced figure of Plooie, jolted
aloft, bleeding but calm, self-forgetful, and still calling out
reassurances to his wife; the jostling rabble, and upon the edge of it a
frantic woman, clawing, sobbing, imploring. On they swept. I listened
for the splash.
It did not come.
A lion had risen in the path. To be more accurate, a lioness. To my
unsuccessful rôle of Horatius, a Horatia better fitted for the fray had
succeeded, in the austere and superb person of Madame Rachel Pinckney
Pemberton Tallafferr, aforetime of the sovereign State of Virginia.
Where all my eloquence had failed, she checked that joyously
anticipative rabble by the simple query, set in the chillest and most
peremptory of aristocratic tones, as to what they were doing.
I like to think--the Bonnie Lassie says that I am flattering myself
thereby--that it was the momentary halt caused by my abortive effort to
hold the gate, which gave time for a greater than my humble self to
intervene.
Madame Tallafferr, in the glory of black silk, the Pinckney lace, the
Pemberton diamond, and accompanied by that fat relic of slavery, Black
Sally, had been taking the air genteelly on a bench when the disturbance
grated upon her sensitive ear.
"What is that rabble about, Sally?" she inquired.
The aged negress reconnoitered. "Reckon dey's ridin' a gentmun on a
rail," she reported.
"A _gentleman_, Sally? Impossible. No gentleman would endure such an
affront. Look again."
"Yessum. It's dat po' white trash dey call Plooie. Mainded yo' umbrella
oncet."
"My umbrella-mender!" (The mere fact that the victim had once tinkered
for her a decrepit parasol entitled him in her feudal mind to the high
protection of the Tallafferr tradition.) "Tell them to desist at once."
Apologetically but shrewdly Sally opined that the neighborhood of the
advancing mob was "no place foh a niggah."
With perfect faith in the powers of her superior she added: "You desist
'em, mist'ess."
Sally's confidence in her mistress was equaled or perhaps even excelled
by her mistress's confidence in herself.
Leaning upon her cane and attended by the faithful though terrified
servitor, Madame Tallafferr rustled forward. She took her stand upon the
brink of the fountain in almost the exact spot where she had disarmed
MacLachan, the tailor, drunk, songful, and suicidal, two years before.
Since that feat an almost mythologic awe had attached itself to
her locally.
She waited, small and thin, hawk-eyed, imperious, and tempered like
steel. The ring of tempered steel, too, was in her voice when, at the
proper moment, she raised it.
"What are you doing?"
The clamor of the mob died down. The sight of Horatia (I beg her pardon
humbly, Madame Tallafferr) in the path smote them with misgivings. As in
Macaulay's immortal, if somewhat jingly epic, "those behind cried
'Forward' and those before cried 'Back'!" That single hale and fiery old
lady held them. No more could those two hundred ruffians have defied the
challenge of her contemptuous eyes than they could have advanced into
the flaming doors of a furnace.