Collected Fables

by James Thurber

  “I do,” said the Cat. “Nobody could be that ugly and live unless he had an emerald in his head.”

  “I’ll bet you a hundred fish he hasn’t,” said the Pelican.

  “I’ll bet you a hundred clams he has,” said the Sandpiper.

  The Toad, who was pretty well frappéd by this time, fell asleep, and the members of the club debated how to find out whether his head held an emerald, or some other precious stone. They summoned the Woodpecker from the back room and explained what was up. “If he hasn’t got a hole in his head, I’ll make one,” said the Woodpecker.

  There wasn’t anything there, gleaming or lovely or precious. The bartender turned out the lights, the Rooster crowed, the sun came up, and the members of the Fauna Club went silently home to bed.

  MORAL: Open most heads and you will find nothing shining, not even a mind.

  The Butterfly, the Ladybug, and the Phoebe

  A PHOEBE, A bugwinner for a nestful of fledglings, flew out one day to provide dinner for his family, and came upon a ladybug in frantic flight.

  “I know you can catch anything smaller than a golf ball and slower than sound,” said the ladybug, “for you are the fastest of the flycatchers, but my house is on fire and my children will burn unless I fly away home.”

  The phoebe, who had sometimes been guilty of wishing that his own house were on fire, let the ladybug fly away, and turned his attention to a beautiful butterfly.

  “Is your house on fire and will your children burn?” the phoebe asked.

  “Nothing so mundane as all that,” said the butterfly. “I have no children and I have no house, for I am an angel, as anyone can see.” She fluttered her wings at the world about her. “This is heaven,” she said.

  “This is heaven,” cried the fledglings, as one fledgling, when they had the butterfly for dessert that night.

  MORAL: She who goes unarmed in Paradise should first be sure that’s where she is.

  The Foolhardy Mouse and the Cautious Cat

  SUCH SPORT THERE had been that day, in the kitchen and the pantry, for the cat was away and the mice were playing all manner of games: mousy-wants-a-corner, hide-and-squeak, one-old-cat, mouse-in-boots, and so on. Then the cat came home.

  “Cat’s back!” whispered Father Mouse.

  “Into the wainscoting, all of you!” said Mother Mouse, and all of the mice except one hastily hid in the woodwork.

  The exception was an eccentric mouse named Mervyn, who had once boldly nipped a bulldog in the ear and got away with it. Mervyn did not know at the time, and never found out, that the bulldog was a stuffed bulldog, and so he lived in a fool’s paradise.

  The day the cat, whose name was Pouncetta, came back from wherever she had been, she was astonished to encounter Mervyn in the butler’s pantry, nonchalantly nibbling crumbs. She crept toward him in her stocking feet and was astounded when he turned, spit a crumb in her eye, and began insulting her with a series of insults.

  “How did you get out of the bag?” Mervyn inquired calmly. “Put on your pajamas and take a cat nap.” He went back to his nibbling, as blasé as you please.

  “Steady, Pouncetta,” said Pouncetta to herself. “There is more here than meets the eye. This mouse is probably a martyr mouse. He has swallowed poison in the hope that I will eat him and die, so that he can be a hero to a hundred generations of his descendants.”

  Mervyn looked over his shoulder at the startled and suspicious cat and began to mock her in a mousetto voice. “Doodness dwacious,” said Mervyn, “it’s a posse cat, in full pursuit of little me.” He gestured impudently with one foot. “I went that-a-way,” he told Pouncetta. Then he did some other imitations, including a pretty good one of W. C. Fieldmouse.

  “Easy, girl,” said Pouncetta to herself. “This is a mechanical mouse, a trick mouse with a built-in voice. If I jump on it, it will explode and blow me into a hundred pieces. Damned clever, these mice, but not clever enough for me.”

  “You’d make wonderful violin strings, if you had any guts,” Mervyn said insolently. But Pouncetta did not pounce, in spite of the insult unforgivable. Instead, she turned and stalked out of the butler’s pantry and into the sitting room and lay down on her pillow near the fireplace and went to sleep.

  When Mervyn got back to his home in the woodwork, his father and mother and brothers and sisters and cousins and uncles and aunts were surprised to see him alive and well. There was great jollity, and the finest cheese was served at a family banquet. “She never laid a paw on me,” Mervyn boasted. “I haven’t got a scratch. I could take on all the cats in the Catskills.” He finished his cheese and went to bed and fell asleep, and dreamed of taking a catamount* in one minute and twenty-eight seconds of the first round.

  MORAL: Fools rush in where angels fear to tread, and the angels are all in Heaven, but few of the fools are dead.

  The Rose and the Weed

  IN A COUNTRY garden a lovely rose looked down upon a common weed and said, “You are an unwelcome guest, economically useless, and unsightly of appearance. The Devil must love weeds, he made so many of them.”

  The unwelcome guest looked up at the rose and said, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds, and, one supposes, that goes for roses.”

  “My name is Dorothy Perkins,” the rose said haughtily. “What are you—a beetleweed, a bladderweed, a beggar-weed? The names of weeds are ugly.” And Dorothy shuddered slightly, but lost none of her pretty petals.

  “We have some names prettier than Perkins, or, for my taste, Dorothy, among them silverweed, and jewelweed, and candyweed.” The weed straightened a bit and held his ground. “Anywhere you can grow I can grow better,” he said.

  “I think you must be a burglarweed,” said the disdainful Miss Perkins, “for you get in where you aren’t wanted, and take what isn’t yours—the rain and the sunlight and the good earth.”

  The weed smiled a weedy smile. “At least,” he said, “I do not come from a family of climbers.”

  The rose drew herself up to her full height. “I’d have you know that roses are the emblem of old England,” she said. “We are the flower of song and story.”

  “And of war,” the weed replied. “The summer winds take you by storm, not you the winds with beauty. I’ve seen it happen many times, to roses of yesteryear, long gone and long forgotten.”

  “We are mentioned in Shakespeare,” said the rose, “many times in many plays. The lines are too sweet for your ears, but I will tell you some.”

  Just then, and before Miss Perkins could recite, a wind came out of the west, riding low to the ground and swift, like the cavalry of March, and Dorothy Perkins’ beautiful disdain suddenly became a scattering of petals, economically useless, and of appearance not especially sightly. The weed stood firm, his head to the wind, armored, or so he thought, in security and strength, but as he was brushing a few rose petals and aphids from his lapels, the hand of the gardener flashed out of the air and pulled him out of the ground by the roots before you could say Dorothy Perkins, or, for that matter, jewelweed.

  MORAL: Tout, as the French say, in a philosophy older than ours and an idiom often more succinct, passe.

  The Bat Who Got the Hell Out

  A COLONY OF bats living in a great American cave had got along fine for a thousand generations, flying, hanging head down, eating insects, and raising young, and then one year a male named Flitter, who had fluttered secretly out of his room at night and flown among the haunts of men, told his father that he had decided to get the hell out. The shocked father sent Flitter to Fleder, the great-great-grandfather of all the bats in the cave.

  “You should be proud of being a bat among bats,” said old Fleder, “for we are one of the oldest species on the planet, much older than Man, and the only mammal capable of true flight.”

  The discontented young bat was not impressed. “I want to live like a man among men,” he said. “Men have the best food, and the most fun, and the cutest females.”

  At this, old Fl
eder stormed about the cave, squeaking unintelligibly. Then he recovered his calm and continued his talk. “A man got into my room one night,” he said, “and managed somehow to tangle me in his hair. It was a shattering experience, from which I shall never completely recover.”

  “When men die they go to Heaven, but when bats are dead they are dead,” said Flitter. “I want to go to Heaven when I die.”

  This amused old Fleder in a gaunt and gloomy sort of way, and he chittered, quickered, and zickered for some moments before he could say, “You have no more soul than a moose, or a mouse, or a mole. You should be glad that you will never become an angel, for angels do not have true flight. One wants to sleep through eternity, not bumble and flap about forever like a bee or a butterfly.”

  But Flitter had made up his mind, and the old bat’s words of wisdom were in vain. That night, the discontented young bat quit the bat colony, and flickered out of the cave, in the confident hope of giving up his membership in the Chiroptera and joining the happy breed of men. Unfortunately for his dream, he spent his first night hanging head down from the rafters of an auditorium in which a best-selling Inspirationalist was dragging God down to the people’s level. Ushers moved silently among the rapt listeners, selling copies of the speaker’s books: Shake Hands with the Almighty, You Can Be Jehovah’s Pal, and Have You Taken Out Eternity Insurance? The speaker was saying, “Have a little talk with the Lord while you’re waiting for a bus, or riding to work, or sitting in the dentist’s chair. Have comfy chats with the Lord in the little cozy corners of spare time.”

  Flitter decided that there was something the matter with the acoustics, or with his tragus, caused by hanging head down in the presence of the Eternal Species, but when he began flying about the auditorium, there was no change in the nature of the English sentences. “Tell the Lord to put it there,” the inspired man went on. “Give him your duke.” The speaker waved clasped hands above his head and gazed up at the ceiling. “Keep pitching, God,” he said. “You’ve got two strikes on Satan.”

  Flitter, who had never felt sick before in his life, felt sick, and decided to get the air. After he had got the air, he realized that he did not want to become a member of the species Homo sapiens, because of the danger of bumbling or flapping into the Inspirationalist after they had both become angels. And so Flitter returned to the cave, and everybody was astonished to see him, and nobody said anything, and for a time there was a great silence.

  “I’ve come the hell back,” said Flitter, meekly. And he resumed, without discontent, the immemorial life of the Chiroptera,* flying, hanging head down, eating insects, and raising young.

  MORAL: By decent minds is he abhorred who’d make a Babbitt* of the Lord.

  The Lion and the Foxes

  THE LION HAD just explained to the cow, the goat, and the sheep that the stag they had killed belonged to him, when three little foxes appeared on the scene.

  “I will take a third of the stag as a penalty,” said one, “for you have no hunter’s license.”

  “I will take a third of the stag for your widow,” said another, “for that is the law.”

  “I have no widow,” said the lion.

  “Let us not split hairs,” said the third fox, and he took his share of the stag as a withholding tax. “Against a year of famine,” he explained.

  “But I am king of beasts,” roared the lion.

  “Ah, then you will not need the antlers, for you have a crown,” said the foxes, and they took the antlers, too.

  MORAL: It is not as easy to get the lion’s share nowadays as it used to be.

  The Wolf Who Went Places

  A WEALTHY YOUNG wolf, who was oblivious of everything except himself, was tossed out of college for cutting classes and corners, and he decided to see if he could travel around the world in eighty minutes.

  “That isn’t possible,” his grandmother told him, but he only grinned at her.

  “The impossible is the most fun,” he said.

  She went with him to the door of the old Wolf place. “If you go that fast, you won’t live to regret it,” she warned him, but he grinned again, showing a tongue as long as a necktie.

  “That’s an old wolves’ tale,” he said, and went on his reckless way.

  He bought a 1959 Blitzen Bearcat, a combination motorcar and airplane, with skyrocket getaway, cyclone speedrive, cannonball takeoff, blindall headlights, magical retractable monowings, and lightning pushbutton transformationizer. “How fast can this crate go without burning up?” he asked the Blitzen Bearcat salesman.

  “I don’t know,” the salesman said, “but I have a feeling you’ll find out.”

  The wealthy young wolf smashed all the ground records and air records and a lot of other things in his trip around the world, which took him only 78.5 minutes from the time he knocked down the Washington Monument on his takeoff to the time he landed where it had stood. In the crowd that welcomed him home, consisting of about eleven creatures, for all the others were hiding under beds, there was a speed-crazy young wolfess, with built-in instantaneous pickup ability, and in no time at all the wolf and his new-found mate were setting new records for driving upside down, backward, blindfolded, handcuffed, and cockeyed, doubled and redoubled.

  One day, they decided to see if they could turn in to Central Park from Fifth Avenue while traveling at a rate of 175 miles an hour, watching television, and holding hands. There was a tremendous shattering, crashing, splitting, roaring, blazing, cracking, and smashing, ending in a fiery display of wheels, stars, cornices, roofs, treetops, glass, steel, and people, and it seemed to those spectators who did not die of seizures as they watched that great red portals opened in the sky, swinging inward on mighty hinges, revealing an endless nowhere, and then closed behind the flying and flaming wolves with a clanking to end all clanking, as if those gates which we have been assured shall not prevail had, in fact, prevailed.

  MORAL: Where most of us end up there is no knowing, but the hellbent get where they are going.

  The Bluebird and His Brother

  IT WAS SAID of two bluebirds that they were unlike as two brothers could be, that one was a pearl in a pod and the other a pea. Pearl was happy-go-lucky, and Pea was gloomy-go-sorry.

  “I am in love with love and life,” sang the glad bird.

  “I am afraid of sex and flight,” sang the sad bird.

  Pearl flaunted his gay colors like a bonnie blue flag, and his song was as bold as the rebel yell. He went South every winter alone, and came North every spring with a different female. His gay philosophy freed his psyche of the stains of fear and the stresses of guilt, and he attained a serenity of spirit that few male birds and even fewer male human beings ever reach. He did not worry because some of his children were also his nieces, the daughters of one of his sisters. He sat loose, sang pretty, and slept tight, in a hundred honey locusts and cherry trees and lilac bushes. And every winter he went South alone, and every spring he came North with a different female. He did not worry because some of his grandchildren were also his grandnephews, the grandsons of one of his sisters.

  At sunset in summertime, the gay bluebird flew higher than the lark or the wild goose, and he was pleased to note that, like himself, heaven wore blue, with a tinge of red.

  The gloomy bluebird went South alone in the winter and came North alone in the spring, and never flew higher than you could throw a sofa. While still in his prime he developed agoraphobia and went to live underground, to the surprise and dismay of families of frogs and foxes and moles and gophers and crickets and toads, and of the bewildered dog who dug him up one day while burying a bone, and then hastily buried him again, without ceremony or sorrow.

  MORAL: It is more dangerous to straight-arm life than to embrace it.

  The Clothes Moth and the Luna Moth

  A CLOTHES MOTH who lived in a closet and had never done anything, or wanted to do anything, except eat wool and fur, flew out of his closet one twilight just in time to see a lovely Luna moth appea
r on the outside of a windowpane. The Luna moth fluttered against the lighted glass as gracefully as a drifting autumn leaf, and she was dressed in a charming evening gown. What interested her was the flame of a candle burning in the room, burning on the mantelpiece above the fireplace, but the clothes moth thought she was making signs at him, and he conceived a great desire for her.

  “I have to have you,” said the clothes moth, but the Luna moth laughed, and her laughter was like the bells of elfland faintly tinkling.

  “Go eat a shroud,” said the Luna moth haughtily. “You are as vulgar as a tent moth, or a gypsy moth, and nowhere near as handsome as a tiger moth.”

  “If you come to live with me I will feed you on sweaters and stoles,” said the clothes moth, whose ardor was only increased by the lovely Luna’s scorn.

  “You are a flug, who can flugger, but not fly or flutter,” said the Luna moth, trying to get through the windowpane and reach the star on the mantelpiece.

  “You can have wedding dresses and evening clothes and a mink coat,” panted the clothes moth, and again the Luna moth’s laughter was like the bells of elfland faintly tinkling.

  “I live on twilight and the stars,” she said.

  “It was love at first flight,” the clothes moth protested. “It was love at first flutter.”

  The Luna moth’s tiny silvery tone became sharper. “You are a mulch,” she said, “a mulbus, a crawg, and a common creeb.”

  All these words were words a nice moth rarely uses, but they had no effect upon the passion of the clothes moth.

  “I know you have one wing in the grave,” he told her. “I know you’re not long for this world, and so I must have you as soon as I can. A thing of beauty is a joy for such a little time.”