He hoisted the tray on to his shoulder. Just at that moment Polly looked out of the window again.
“Sorry to be so long,” she called out. “Mother would give me a second soaping. And please, Butcher, she says, is it frying steak or stewing steak?”
“Oh—both!” said the wolf quickly. “Either,” he added.
“But where is it?” asked Polly. “Just now when I looked out I saw a great piece of meat on your tray, but now it isn’t there!”
“Not there! Good heavens!” said the wolf. “Some great animal must have eaten it while I was looking the other way.”
“Oh dear,” said Polly, “so you haven’t any meat for us, then?”
“No, I suppose I haven’t,” said the wolf sadly.
“Well, I shan’t come to the door, then,” said Polly, “and anyhow I’ve got to have my hair dried now. Next time you come you’d better make sure no one eats the meat before you deliver it to us, Butcher.”
When he got home again the wolf thought and thought what he could take to the door of Polly’s house that she wouldn’t be able to resist and that he could.
Suddenly he knew. He would be a postman with a parcel. Polly couldn’t possibly refuse to open the door to a postman with a parcel for her, and as long as the parcel did not contain meat, he himself would not be tempted.
So a few days later a Wolf postman rang the bell at Polly’s door. In his hand he held a large brown paper parcel, addressed to Polly.
For a long time no one answered the door. Then the flap of the letter box lifted up from inside and Polly’s voice said, “Who is it?”
“The postman,” said the wolf, as carelessly as he could, “with a parcel for someone called Polly.”
“Oh! Will you leave it on the doorstep, please,” said Polly.
“No, I can’t do that,” said the wolf. “You must open the door and take it in. Post-office regulations.”
“But I’m not allowed to open the door,” said Polly. “My mother thinks that a wolf has been calling here lately, and she has told me not to open the door to anyone unless she is there too, and she’s not here, so I can’t.”
“Oh, what a pity,” said the wolf. “Then I shall have to take this lovely parcel away again.”
“Won’t you bring it another day?” asked Polly.
“No, there won’t be time before Christmas,” said the wolf, very much pleased with himself.
“Well, perhaps it isn’t anything I want anyway,” said Polly, comforting herself.
“Oh but it is,” said the wolf quickly. “It’s something very exciting, that you’d like very much.”
“What is it?” asked Polly.
“I don’t think I ought to tell you,” said the wolf primly.
“How do you know what it is?” asked Polly. “If you’re really a postman you ought not to know what’s inside the parcels you carry.”
“Oh—but it’s—it’s—a talking bird,” said the wolf. “I heard it talking to itself inside the parcel.”
“What did it say?” asked Polly.
“Oh—‘tweet, tweet,’ and things like that,” replied the wolf.
“Oh, just bird talk. Then I don’t think I want it,” said Polly. She was beginning to be a little suspicious.
“Oh no,” said the wolf hastily. “It can say words too. It says ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’, and ‘Pretty Polly’,” he added.
“It sounds lovely,” said Polly. “But can it talk to you? I only want a bird who can carry on a conversation.”
“Oh yes, we had ever such a long talk coming up the hill,” the wolf assured her.
“What did you talk about?” asked Polly.
“Well, the weather,” said the wolf, “and how hungry it makes us. And about Christmas dinner. And—and—the weather—and being very hungry.”
“What did the bird say it ate?” asked Polly.
The wolf was beginning to enjoy himself. Obviously Polly was interested now, and at any moment she would open the door to be given the parcel, and then he would be able to gobble her up.
“The bird said it ate gooseberries and chocolate creams,” he said, inventing wildly. “So then I said I wouldn’t like that at all. Not solid enough for me, I said. Give me a juicy little g–” he stopped himself just in time.
“A juicy little what?” asked Polly.
“A juicy little grilled steak,” said the wolf hastily.
“And what did the bird say then?”
“He said, ‘Well, that may be all very well for a wolf’–”
“Oho!” said Polly. “So that’s what you are! Not a postman at all, nothing but a wolf. Now listen, Wolf. Go away, and take your parcel, which I don’t want, because it isn’t a bird in a cage or anything like it, and don’t come back either in your own skin or dressed up as anyone else, because whatever you do, I shan’t let you catch me, now or ever. Happy Christmas, Wolf.” She shut the letter-box lid.
So the wolf did not get his Christmas dinner after all.
13. A Short Story
OUTSIDE Polly’s house the lawn was white with daisies in the spring, and one day Polly, looking out of the window, saw the wolf, sitting on the grass busily taking the petals one by one, off a daisy. He was muttering to himself.
Polly leaned a little further, and rather dangerously, out of the window to listen. He wasn’t saying, “She loves me, she loves me not,” as you or I might, but, “I get her, I don’t get her, I get her, I don’t get her.”
“Bother,” he ended suddenly, throwing away a stalk with no petals left on it. Obviously he had not got the answer he wanted. He picked another flower and started again.
“I get her,” he announced loudly, looking up at the house triumphantly, as he came to the end of his daisy.
“Oh no you don’t,” said Polly. “I saw you take off two petals together and count them as one. Cheating, Wolf, that is, and very unfair.”
“I didn’t think anyone was looking,” the wolf said. “You must have terribly good eyesight to be able to see from there.”
“I have,” said Polly. “But even if I hadn’t you ought not to cheat. You don’t deserve to get anyone or anything if you cheat because no one is looking.”
“So you don’t think I shall get you then?” the wolf asked, disappointed.
“Not on that daisy,” Polly answered.
“On the others?” the wolf asked hopefully.
“If you do them all,” Polly answered decidedly.
“Do you mean I’ve got to do the whole lot?” the wolf said in despair. He looked round the lawn. “Why, there are hundreds here,” he protested. “It would take me years to take the petals off all of them.”
“But you’ll never know if you’re going to get me or not unless you do,” Polly insisted.
“But by the time I’ve finished these daisies there’ll probably be some more coming up.”
“It will keep you rather busy,” Polly admitted. “But I expect you’ll get through quite a lot if you stick to it. Besides you’ll get quicker in time. Practice, you know,” she said encouragingly.
“But my paws are so clumsy,” the wolf protested. “It isn’t as if I had neat little hands like you.”
“You’ve quite nice paws, for a wolf,” Polly said kindly.
“You wouldn’t like to help me, I suppose?” the wolf asked hopefully.
“No thank you,” said Polly. “I’ve got quite a lot of other things I want to do.”
“If I get through all these daisies,” said the wolf, “and it ends up that I’m going to get you at last, will you agree to come along quietly, without any fuss?”
Polly looked round the lawn. There were hundreds, probably thousands of daisies. But then the wolf might get really quick at taking the petals off. Or he might cheat.
“This isn’t all the daisies in the world, Wolf,” Polly pointed out.
“Oh but surely there are enough here?” the wolf almost wailed.
“Quite enough,” Polly said. “But, of course, you’l
l never know if it’s the truth until you’ve got to the last daisy. And of course I couldn’t agree to be eaten quietly, without any fuss, if I didn’t know it was the truth.”
“You mean, I’ve got to unpick all the daisies there are, anywhere, everywhere?” cried the wolf.
“And when you get to the very last, if it says you are going to get me, I’ll come,” said clever Polly. “You can start here,” she added. “There are a nice lot here to begin with.”
So the wolf spends his time picking daisies on Polly’s lawn, and as there are plenty of daisies in the world, Polly thinks it will be a long time before he finds out whether or not he will ever get her. A Very Long Time.
Polly and the Wolf Again
Illustrated by Marjorie Ann Watts
1. The Clever Wolf and Poor Stupid Little Polly (1)
THE WOLF sat at home in his kitchen, where he usually enjoyed himself so much; his elbows were on the table, and he was chewing, but there was no feeling of peace, of comfortable fullness, of not being likely to be hungry again for several hours, which was how the wolf liked to feel in his own house.
The table was covered with sheets of paper. Some of them had only a word or two written on them, some had a whole sentence. Most of them were blank.
Presently the wolf sighed, spat out the object he had been chewing—it was a pencil—and tried again. On a large, clean sheet of paper he wrote, laboriously:
“One day the Clever Wolf caught Polly and ate her all up!”
He stopped. He read what he had written. Then he read it again. He put the pencil back between his teeth and began to search among the sheets of paper for something. When he found it, he opened it flat on the table and leant over it, spelling out the longer words as he read. It was a book.
But reading did not seem much more satisfactory than writing. Every now and then the wolf snarled, and at last he shut the book up with a snap and pushed it away from him; but as he did so, his eyes fell on the cover, and the name of the book, printed there in large black letters:
CLEVER POLLY AND THE STUPID WOLF
“It’s so unfair!” he muttered angrily to himself. “Clever Polly, indeed! Just because she’s managed to escape me for a time. And calling me stupid! Me! Why, I always used to win when we played Hide the Piglet as wolf cubs. ‘Stupid Wolf!’ I’ll show them. I’ll write a book full of stories which will show how clever I am—far cleverer than that silly little Polly. I’ll start the story of my life now, and then everyone will be able to see that it’s not me that is stupid.”
He pulled another sheet of paper towards him.
“I was born,” he began writing in his untidy sprawling hand, “in a large and comfortable hole, in the year—”
He stopped.
“Well, I know I’m about eleven,” he said to himself. “So if I take eleven away from now, I shall know when I was born. Eleven away from . . . eleven away from . . . What am I taking eleven away from?”
“I’ll do it with beans!” he thought, encouraging himself. “It’s always easier with beans.”
Leaving his pencil on the table, he got up and fetched a large canister of dried beans from a shelf over the stove. He shook a small shower out on the table; one or two fell on the floor.
“Nine, ten, eleven,” counted the wolf. He tipped the spare beans back into the canister.
“But I’m taking eleven away from something,” he remembered. He looked doubtfully into the tin and tipped it a little to see how full it was. The beans made an agreeable rattling sound as they slid about inside, and the wolf shook the canister gently several times to hear it again.
“There seem to be an awful lot of beans in there,” he said aloud. “I wonder just what I’ve got to take eleven away from?”
He sat down to consider the point. Could it be eleven? He spread the eleven beans out on the table and looked at them. Then he took eleven beans off the table, counting them one by one.
“Eleven away leaves none. So eleven years ago was nothing. The year nothing. It seems a very long time ago.”
The wolf was puzzled. It did certainly seem a very long time ago, but it still didn’t sound quite right. He could not remember ever having seen a book which gave as a date the year nothing.
“It can’t be right,” he decided. “It must be eleven away from something else. I wonder what it is? Who could I ask to tell me?”
There was, of course, only one answer to this, and five minutes later the wolf had walked down the path through the garden to Polly’s front door and was ringing her bell.
“I’ll talk to you from up here if you don’t mind,” said Polly’s voice from the first-floor window. “Yes, Wolf, what can I do for you today?”
“You can tell me what I have to take eleven away from.”
“Eleven? Why eleven?”
“Because that is how old I am.”
“Why do you want to take how old you are away from anything?”
“Because I want to know what year it was.”
“What year what was?”
“The year I was born in, of course. Silly!” said the wolf triumphantly. “I said it was Silly Polly and you are! What do I take it away from?”
“Nineteen fifty-seven.”
“And what do I have to do with it?” the wolf asked, now thoroughly muddled.
“You take that away from it.”
“What’s That?”
“Eleven. Well, that’s what you said,” Polly answered, a little confused herself.
“Don’t go away,” pleaded the wolf. “Let me get it straight in my head. I take eleven away from nineteen and then from fifty-seven and then—”
“No, stupid. Not from nineteen, from nineteen hundred and fifty-seven; and then the answer is the year you were born in!”
“Nineteen hundred!” said the wolf, appalled.
“And fifty-seven.”
“Nineteen hundred and fifty-seven. I don’t think I’ve got enough beans,” said the wolf gloomily.
“I don’t see how beans come into it,” Polly said. “It’s years you’re counting in, not beans.”
“It’s beans while I’m actually counting,” the wolf said firmly. “And you’re sure the answer is the year I was born?”
“Certain.”
“Thank you. Good morning,” the wolf called over his shoulder, as he trotted away down the garden path. He went home, sat down at his kitchen table and began to count out beans.
“A hundred and thirty-three, a hundred and thirty-four, a hundred and thirty-five . . . Bother.”
The hundred and thirty-sixth bean was a very highly polished one. It slipped out of the wolf’s paw, leapt nimbly into the air, fell on the floor, and rolled under the cooking stove.
“Bother, bother, BOTHER!” the wolf said out loud. He looked into the canister. There were only seven or eight beans left: he could not afford to lose one. He got down from his chair and lay flat on his front on the floor to look for the missing bean. It lay out of reach, right at the back of the cooker, against the wall, in company with a burnt chestnut and a very dirty toasting fork.
“My toasting fork!” the wolf exclaimed, delighted to see it again; it had been missing for several months. He retrieved the fork, dusted it with his tail, and used it to poke out the bean.
The wolf dusted the bean, said solemnly out loud, “One hundred and thirty-six,” and put it on the table.
He gave a triumphant wave of his useful tail. Several beans were swept off the table and disappeared under various pieces of furniture.
“Oh—!” cried the wolf, enraged. He sat down at the table, staring angrily at the remaining beans. He tipped up the canister and added the rest of the beans to the pile he had already counted.
“A hundred and thirty-seven, a hundred and thirty-eight, a hundred and . . . What’s the use when I want nineteen hundred and something? I’ll never be able to count the whole lot!”
He absent-mindedly put the last bean in his mouth. It wasn’t too bad. He ate another.
“Easier with a spoon,” he murmured a minute or two later, and going to the dresser fetched a battered tablespoon. With its help he ate another two dozen beans fairly quickly.
“That’s funny!” he thought after the second spoonful. “I believe I generally eat these cooked. Very absent-minded I seem to be getting.”
He fetched a saucepan, filled it with water, and put it on the fire. When the water was boiling he tossed in the remaining beans, salt, pepper and herbs. He fried some rashers of bacon, an onion and a few mushrooms in a pan, and when everything was cooked he mixed it into a glorious mess together, added a tomato and, in a very few mouthfuls, swallowed the lot.
“Ah,” he said, wiping his mouth on the back of his paw, “that’s better. Now, let me see—What was I doing?”
He looked round the kitchen and his eye fell on the empty canister.
“Oh!” he said aloud. “Bother!”
“Never mind,” he said. “They tasted much better than they counted. Besides it would have taken me ages to get up to nineteen hundred and fifty-seven. I’d never have had time to write anything. After all what does it matter what year it was I was born? I’m here now, that’s the important thing.”
He picked up the last sheet of paper he had written on and tore it across several times. Then, sitting down, he pulled another towards him and wrote in a bolder hand:
THE CLEVER WOLF AND POOR STUPID POLLY
“Fortunately,” (the wolf wrote), “I was born.”
2. The Clever Wolf and Poor Stupid Little Polly (2)
A FEW DAYS later Polly was looking longingly in at the window of her nearest bookshop, rehearsing to herself what she would buy if she had enough money, when she realized that someone large and dark was standing by her side. The wolf was gazing through the glass and was murmuring the titles aloud to himself.
“Fairy Tales. Hmm. Well-Known Fairy Tales. If they’re well known already, who wants another book about them? Grimm Fairy Tales—that sounds more interesting. I like grim stories as long as they’re really frightening and full of crunching bones and blood and things!”
The Complete Polly and the Wolf Page 6
