Plooie Of Our Square

After all, Plooie was not much hurt. Perhaps more frightened than anything else. Panic was, in fact, the reason generally ascribed in Our Square for his quiet departure, with his Annie, of course, on the following Sunday. Only the Bonnie Lassie dissented. But as the Bonnie Lassie reasons with her heart instead of her head, we accept her theories with habitual and smiling indulgence rather than respect--until the facts bear them out. She had, it appeared, called on the Plooies to inquire as to their proposed course, and had rather more than hinted that if the head of the house wished to respond to his country's call, Our Square would look after Annie Oombrella. To this he returned only a stubborn and somber silence. The Bonnie Lassie said afterward that he seemed ashamed. She added that he had left good-bye for me and hoped the Dominie would not think too hard of him. Recalling that I had rather markedly failed to acknowledge his salute on the morning before his departure, I felt a qualm of misgiving. After all, judging your neighbor's soul is a kittle business. There is such an insufficiency of data.

So Schepstein lost a renter. The basement cubbyhole remained vacant, with only the picture of Albert of the Kingdom of Sorrows in the window as a memento. Nothing further was seen or heard of Plooie. But Schepstein, wandering far afield in search of tenement sales a full year after, encountered Annie Oombrella washing down the steps of an office far over in Lewis Street, nearly to the river. All the plumpness which she had taken on in the happy days was gone. She looked wistful and haggard.

Schepstein, doing the polite (which, as he accurately states, costs nothing and might get you something some time), asked after Plooie. Where was he? Annie Oombrella shook her head.

"Left you, has he?" asked Schepstein, astonished at this evidence of iniquity.

"Yes," said Annie Oombrella. But there was a ring in her voice that Schepstein failed to understand. It sounded almost like defiance. Her eyes were deep-hollowed and sorrowful, but they met his as squarely as they could, considering their cast. Schepstein was quite shocked to observe that there was no shame in them. I suppose the shock temporarily unbalanced his principles, for, having caught sight of one of her shoes, he offered to lend her three dollars, indefinitely and without interest, on her bare note-of-hand. (When he saw the other shoe, he made it five.) She looked at the money anxiously, but shook her head.

"Well, if you ever need a home, the basement's vacant and there ain't a better basement in Our Square."

Annie Oombrella began to cry quietly, and Schepstein went on about his business.

Through the ensuing years many women cried quietly or vehemently, according to their natures, and many men went away from places that had known them, to be no more known of those places; and the little Kingdom of Sorrows, shattered, blood-soaked, and unconquerable, stood fast, a bulwark between the ravager of the world and his victory until there sped across the death-haunted seas the army that was to turn the scales. Our Square gave to that sacrifice what it can never recover: witness the simple memorials in Our Square.

Many people see ghosts; Our Square is well haunted, as befits its ancient and diminished glories. Few hear ghosts. This is as it ought to be. In their very nature, ghosts should be seen, not heard. Yet, in the year of grace, 1919, under a blazing September sun, with a cicada, vagrant from heaven knows whence, frying his sizzling sausages in our lilac bush, and other equally insistent sounds of reality filling the air, my ears were smitten with a voice from the realm of wraiths.

"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees," it cried on a faint and cluttering note. "Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees à raccommoder."

Over in the far corner of the park an apparition moved into my visual range. It looked like Plooie. It moved like Plooie. It was loaded like Plooie. It opened a mouth like Plooie's and emitted again the familiar though diminished falsetto shriek. No doubt of it now; it was Plooie. He had come back to us who never thought to see him again, who never wished to see him again, still unpurged of his stigma.

As he passed me, I acknowledged his greeting, somewhat stiffly, I fear, and walked over to Schepstein's. There in the basement, amid the familiar wreckage as of a thousand umbrellas, sat little Annie.

"Bonjour, Dominie," said she wistfully.

"Good-morning, Annie. So you are back."

"Yes, Dominie. Is there need that one wash the step at your house?"

"There is need that one explain one's self. What have you been doing these three years?"

"I work. I work hard."

"And your husband? What has he been doing?" I asked sternly.

Annie Oombrella's soft face drooped. "Soyez gentil, Dominie," she implored. "Be a kind, good man and ask him not. That make him so triste--so sad."

"He doesn't look well, Annie."

"He have been ver' seeck. Now we come home he is already weller."

"But do you think it is wise for you to come back here?" I demanded, feeling brutal as I put the question. Annie Oombrella's reply did not make me feel any less so. She sent a quivering look around that unspeakably messy, choked-up little hole in the wall that was home to Plooie and her.

"We have loved each other so much here," said she.

Our Square is too poor to be enduringly uncharitable, either in deed or thought. War's resentments died out quickly in us. No longer was Plooie in danger of mob violence. By common consent we let him alone; he made his rounds unmolested, but also unpatronized. But for Annie Oombrella's prodigies of industry with pail and brush, the little couple in Schepstein's basement would have fared ill.

Annie earned for both. In the process, happiness came back to her face.

To the fat Rosser twin accrues the credit of a pleasurable discovery about Plooie. This was that, if you sneaked softly up behind him and shouted: "Hey, Plooie! What was you doing in the war?" his jaw would drop and his whole rackety body begin to quiver, and he would heave his burden to his shoulder and break into a spavined gallop, muttering and sobbing like one demented. As the juvenile sense of humor is highly developed in Our Square, Plooie got a good deal of exercise, first and last.

Eventually he foiled them by coming out only in school hours. This didn't help his trade. But then his trade had dwindled to the vanishing point anyway. Even Madame Tallafferr had dropped him. She preferred not to deal with a poltroon, as she put it.

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