Chapter 11

Had the Bonnie Lassie been able to hold her painted retainers in line, the owner's golden prophecy might have been made good. But they had other matters on hand for their evenings than sitting about in a dim cellar gazing cross-eyed at their own scandalous noses. MacLachan was the first defection. He said that he thought he was going crazy and he knew he was going blind. The Little Red Doctor was unreliable owing to the pressure of professional calls. He complained with some justice that a green nose on a practicing physician tended to impair confidence. Then Leon Coventry went away, and Boggs discovered (or invented) an important engagement with a growing family of clothes-moths in a Connecticut country house. So there remained only the faithful Phil. One swallow does not make a summer; nor does one youth with a vernal proboscis convince a skeptical public that it is enjoying the fearful companionship of a subversive and revolutionary cult. Patronage ebbed out as fast as it had flooded in. Barbran's eyes were as soft and happy as ever in the evenings, when she and Phil sat in a less and less interrupted solitude. But in the mornings palpable fear stalked her. Phil never saw it. He was preoccupied with a dread of his own.

One evening of howling wind and hammering rain, when all was cosy and home-like for two in the little firelit Wrightery, she nerved herself up to facing the facts.

"It's going to be a failure," she said dismally.

"Then you're going away?" he asked, trying to keep his voice from quaking.

She set her little chin quite firmly. "Not while there's a chance left of pulling it out."

"Well; it doesn't matter as far as I'm concerned," he muttered. "I'm going away myself."

"You?" She sat up very straight and startled. "Where?"

"Kansas City."

"Oh! What for?"

"Do you remember a fat old grandpa who was here last month and came back to ask about the decorations?"

"Yes."

"He's built him a new house--he calls it a mansion--and he wants me to paint the music-room. He likes"--Phil gulped a little--"my style of art."

"Isn't that great!" said Barbran in the voice of one giving three cheers for a funeral. "How does he want his music-room decorated?"

Young Phil put his head in his hands. "Scenes from Moody and Sankey," he said in a muffled voice.

"Good gracious! You aren't going to do it?"

"I am," retorted the other gloomily. "It's good money." Almost immediately he added, "Damn the money!"

"No; no; you mustn't do that. You must go, of course. Would--will it take long?"

"I'm not coming back."

"I don't _want_ you not to come back," said Barbran, in a queer, frightened voice. She put out her hand to him and hastily withdrew it.

He said desperately: "What's the use? I can't sit here forever looking at you and--and dreaming of--of impossible things, and eating my heart out with my nose painted green."

"The poor nose!" murmured Barbran.

With one of her home-laundered handkerchiefs dipped in turpentine, she gently rubbed it clean. It then looked (as she said later in a feeble attempt to palliate her subsequent conduct) very pink and boyish and pathetic, but somehow faithful and reliable and altogether lovable.

So she kissed it. Then she tried to run away. The attempt failed.

It was not Barbran's nose that got kissed next. Nor, for that matter, was it young Phil's. Then he held her off and shut his eyes, for the untrammeled exercise of his reasoning powers, and again demanded of Barbran and the fates:

"What's the use?"

"What's the use of what?" returned Barbran tremulously.

"Of all this? Your father's a millionaire, and I won't--I can't--"

"He isn't!" cried Barbran. "And you can--you will."

"He isn't?" ejaculated Phil. "What is he?"

"He's a school-teacher, and I haven't got a thing but debts."

Phil received this untoward news as if a flock of angels, ringing joy bells, had just brought him the gladdest tidings in history. After an interlude he said:

"But, why--"

"Because," said Barbran, burrowing her nose in his coat: "I thought it would be an asset. I thought people would consider it romantic and it would help business. See how much that reporter made of it! Phil! Wh-wh-why are you treating me like a--a--a--dumbbell?"

For he had thrust her away from him at arm's-length again.

"There's one other thing between us, Barbran."

"If there is, it's your fault. What is it?"

"Harvey Wheelwright," he said solemnly. "Do you really like that sickening slush-slinger?"

She raised to him eyes in which a righteous hate quivered. "I loathe him. I've always loathed him. I despise the very ink he writes with and the paper it's printed on."

When I happened in a few minutes later, they were ritually burning the "Dear Friend and Admirer" letter in a slow candle-flame, and Harvey Wheelwright, as represented by his unctuously rolling signature, was writhing in merited torment. Between them they told me their little romance.

"And he's not going to Kansas City," said Barbran defiantly.

"I'm not going anywhere, ever, away from Barbran," said young Phil.

"And he's going to paint what he wants to."

"Pictures of Barbran," said young Phil.

"And we're going to burn the Wheel sign in effigy, and wipe off the walls and _make_ the place a success," said Barbran.

"And we're going to be married right away," said Phil.

"Next week," said Barbran.

"What do you think?" said both.

Now I know what I ought to have said just as well as MacLachan himself. I should have pointed out the folly and recklessness of marrying on twenty-five dollars a week and a dowry of debts. I should have preached prudence and caution and delay, and have pointed out--The wind blew the door open: Young Spring was in the park, and the wet odor of little burgeoning leaves was borne in, wakening unwithered memories in my withered heart.

"Bless you, my children!" said I.

It was actually for this, as holding out encouragement to their reckless, feckless plans, that Wisdom, in the person of MacLachan, the tailor, reprehended me, rather than for my historical intentions regarding the pair.

"What'll they be marryin' on?" demanded Mac Wisdom--that is to say, MacLachan.

"Spring and youth," I said. "The fragrance of lilac in the air, the glow of romance in their hearts. What better would you ask?"

"A bit of prudence," said MacLachan.

"Prudence!" I retorted scornfully. "The miser of the virtues. It may pay its own way through the world. But when did it ever take Happiness along for a jaunt?"

I was quite pleased with my little epigram until the Scot countered upon me with his observation about two young fools and an old one.

Oh, well! Likely enough. Most unwise, and rash and inexcusable, that headlong mating; and there will be a reckoning to pay. Babies, probably, and new needs and pressing anxieties, and Love will perhaps flutter at the window when Want shows his grim face at the door; and Wisdom will be justified of his forebodings, and yet--and yet--who am I, old and lonely and uncompanioned, yet once touched with the spheral music and the sacred fire, that I should subscribe to the dour orthodoxies of MacLachan and that ilk?

Years and years ago a bird flew in at my window, a bird of wonderful and flashing hues, and of lilting melodies. It came; it tarried--and I let the chill voice of Prudence overbear its music. It left me. But the song endures; the song endures, and all life has been the richer for its echoes. So let them hold and cherish their happiness, the two young fools.

As for the old one, would that some good fairy, possessed of the pigment and secret of perishable youth, might come down and paint his nose green!

PLOOIE OF OUR SQUARE

Whenever Plooie went shuffling by my bench, I used to think of an old and melancholy song that my grandfather sang:

"And his skin was so thin You could almost see his bones As he ran, hobble--hobble--hobble Over the stones."

Before I could wholly recapture the quaint melody, my efforts would invariably be nullified by the raucous shriek of his trade which had forever fixed the nickname whereby Our Square knew Plooie:

"Parapluie-ee-ee-ee-ees à raccommoder!" He would then recapitulate in English, or rather that unreproducible dialect which was his substitute for it. "Oombrella for mend? Annie oombrella for mend?"

So he would pass on his way, shattering the peaceful air at half-minute intervals with his bilingual disharmonies. He was pallid, meagerly built, stoop-shouldered, bristly-haired, pock-marked, and stiff-gaited, with a face which would have been totally insignificant but for an obstinate chin and a pair of velvet-black, pathetically questioning eyes; and he was incurably an outlander. For five years he had lived among us, occupying a cubbyhole in Schepstein's basement full of ribs, handles, crooks, patches, and springs, without appreciably improving his speech or his position. It was said that his name was Garin--nobody really knew or cared--and it was assumed from his speech that he was French.

Few umbrellas came his way. Those of us affluent enough to maintain such non-essentials patch them ourselves until they are beyond reclamation. Why Plooie did not starve is one of the mysteries of Our Square, though by no means the only one of its kind. I have a notion that the Bonnie Lassie, to whom any variety of want or helplessness is its own sufficient recommendation, drummed up trade for him among her uptown friends. Something certainly enlisted his gratitude, for he invariably took off his frowsy cap when he passed her house, whether or not she was there to see, and he once unbosomed himself to me to the extent of declaring that she was a kind lady. This is the only commentary I ever heard him make upon any one in Our Square, which in turn completely ignored him until the development of his love affair stimulated our condescending and contemptuous interest.

The object of Plooie's addresses was a little Swiss of unknown derivation and obscure history. She appeared to be as detached from the surrounding world as the umbrella-mender himself. An insignificant bit of a thing she was, anaemic and subdued, with a sad little face, soft hazel eyes slightly crossed, and the deprecating manner of those who scrub other people's doorsteps at fifteen cents an hour.

For a year their courtship, if such it might be termed, ran an uneventful course. I had almost said unromantic. But who shall tell where is fancy bred or wherein romance consists? Whenever Plooie saw the drabbled little worker busy on a doorstep, he would cross over and open the conversation according to an invariable formula.

"Annie oombrella for mend? Annie oombrella?" Thereby the little Swiss became known as, and ever will be called locally, "Annie Oombrella." Like most close-knit, centripetal communities, we have a fatal penchant for nicknames in Our Square.

She would look up and smile wanly, and shake her head. Where, indeed, should the like of her get an umbrella to be mended!

Then would he say--I shall not attempt to torture the good English alphabet into a reproduction of his singular phonetics: "It makes fine to-day, it do!"

And she would reply "Yes, a fine day"; and look as if the sun were a little warmer upon her pale skin because of Plooie's greeting, as, perhaps, indeed, it was.

After that he would nod solemnly, or, if feeling especially loquacious, venture some prophecy concerning the morrow, before resuming his unproductive rounds and his lugubrious yawp. One day he discovered that she spoke French. From that time the relationship advanced rapidly. On Christmas he gave her a pair of red woolen gloves. On New Year's he took her walking among the tombstones in God's Acre, which is a serious and sentimental, not to say determinative, social step. Twice in the following week he carried her bucket from house to house. And in the glowing dusk of a crisp winter afternoon they sat together hand in hand, on a bench back of my habitual seat, and looked in each other's eyes, and spoke, infrequently, in their own language, forgetful of the rest of the world, including myself, who was, perhaps, supposed not to understand. But even without hearing their words, I could have guessed. It was very simple and direct, and rather touching. Plooie said:

"If one marries themselves?"

And she replied: "I believe it well."

They kissed solemnly, and their faces, in the gleam of the electric light which at that moment spluttered into ill-timed and tactless activity, were transfigured so that I marveled at the dim splendor of them.

But the Bonnie Lassie was scandalized. On general principles she mistrusts that any marriage is really made in heaven unless she acts as earthly agent of it. What had those two poverty-stricken little creatures to marry on? She put the question rhetorically to Our Square in general and to the two people most concerned in particular. Courts of law might have rejected their replies as irrelevant. Humanly, however, they were convincing enough.

Said Plooie: "Who will have a care of that little one if I have not?"

Said Annie Oombrella: "He is so lonely!"

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.