From a Bench in Our Square Part 35

"Have you any influence with him?"

"Not compared with yours."

The Bonnie La.s.sie 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 La.s.sie 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 s.p.a.ce 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 elite Restaurant, stung him with that most insulting word in any known tongue--"Lache!"--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 friends.h.i.+p (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 bas.e.m.e.nt 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. "G.o.d 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 role 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 rea.s.surances 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 role 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 antic.i.p.ative 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 La.s.sie 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.