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.