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.
On the day of the great exodus, Plooie put in some extra hours. He was
in no danger from his youthful persecutors, because they had all gone up
to line Fifth Avenue and help cheer the visiting King of the Belgians.
So had such of the rest of Our Square as were not at work. The place was
practically deserted. Nevertheless, Plooie prowled about, uttering his
cracked and lugubrious cry in the forlorn hope of picking up a parapluie
to raccommode. I was one of the few left to hear him, because Mendel,
the jeweler, had most inconsiderately gone to view royalty, leaving my
unrepaired glasses locked in his shop; otherwise I, too, would have been
on the Fifth Avenue curb shouting with the best of them.
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