Plooie Of Our Square

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.

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