Our Square and the People in ItAdams, Samuel Hopkins
General
Our Square and the People in It
Adams, Samuel Hopkins
New York (N.Y.) -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction; Short stories
Very likely the phenomenon would have gone unexplained to this day
had not both the Rosser twins fallen into the fountain simultaneously,
contrary to their usual custom, which is for one of them to take the
careless plunge while the other dances frantically on terra firma
and yells till help comes. Madam Tallafferr once termed them “Death's
playmates,” because of this ineradicable passion for gambling on the
brink of the pool which is just deep enough to cover their two-year-old
heads. On this occasion Old Sally was the nearest aid. So she waddled
fatly over and hauled them out easily enough. Then, quite inexplicably,
she fell in herself and lay gently oscillating at the bottom of three
feet of water. Still more inexplicably, she refused to come to properly
when Mr. Boggs and I fished her out after not more than thirty
seconds' immersion. Also she looked queerly flattened and misshapen and
unnatural. So we ran her into the Little Red Doctor's office and awaited
the verdict.
It was a long wait. When at length the Little Red Doctor emerged there
was a wild kind of glint in his eye.
“D' you know what's the matter with that old black idiot?” he demanded.
“Martyr to her own hee-roism,” suggested Mr. Boggs, the romantic. “Is
she drowned?”
The Little Red Doctor snorted: “She's starved. That's what she is!”
“She's as fat as butter,” I protested.
“Fat like a sliver!” retorted the physician scornfully. “Padded!”
“What on earth should she pad for?” I cried.
“To fool her mistress. She's been going without food so as to buy more
for madam.”
At this information the eyes of the Destroying Angel bade fair to pop
from their sockets and injure the Little Red Doctor toward whom they
were violently protruding. “D' ye meantersay they're poor?” he gasped.
The Little Red Doctor outlined the history of the aristocratic pair,
as he had extracted it from Old Sally. In the extraction he had grossly
violated his professional ethics, as he shamelessly admitted, by giving
her a half glass of port, which, on her pinched stomach operated as a
tongue-loosener and betrayed her secret into his hands.
“I'm not going to have two aged females dying of want in Our Square just
for the sake of a paper ethic or two,” he declared rebelliously.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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