“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!”