by Hugh Lofting
Our greatest happening during those first weeks was passing an iceberg.When the sun shone on it it burst into a hundred colors, sparklinglike a jeweled palace in a fairy-story. Through the telescope we sawa mother polar bear with a cub sitting on it, watching us. The Doctorrecognized her as one of the bears who had spoken to him when he wasdiscovering the North Pole. So he sailed the ship up close and offeredto take her and her baby on to the _Curlew_ if she wished it. But sheonly shook her head, thanking him; she said it would be far too hot forthe cub on the deck of our ship, with no ice to keep his feet cool. Ithad been indeed a very hot day; but the nearness of that great mountainof ice made us all turn up our coat-collars and shiver with the cold.
During those quiet peaceful days I improved my reading and writing agreat deal with the Doctor’s help. I got on so well that he let me keepthe ship’s log. This is a big book kept on every ship, a kind of diary,in which the number of miles run, the direction of your course andeverything else that happens is written down.
The Doctor too, in what spare time he had, was nearly always writing—inhis note-books. I used to peep into these sometimes, now that I couldread, but I found it hard work to make out the Doctor’s handwriting.Many of these note-books seemed to be about sea things. There were sixthick ones filled full with notes and sketches of different seaweeds;and there were others on sea birds; others on sea worms; others onseashells. They were all some day to be re-written, printed and boundlike regular books.
One afternoon we saw, floating around us, great quantities of stuffthat looked like dead grass. The Doctor told me this was gulf-weed. Alittle further on it became so thick that it covered all the water asfar as the eye could reach; it made the _Curlew_ look as though shewere moving across a meadow instead of sailing the Atlantic.
Crawling about upon this weed, many crabs were to be seen. And thesight of them reminded the Doctor of his dream of learning the languageof the shellfish. He fished several of these crabs up with a net andput them in his listening-tank to see if he could understand them.Among the crabs he also caught a strange-looking, chubby, little fishwhich he told me was called a Silver Fidgit.
After he had listened to the crabs for a while with no success, he putthe fidgit into the tank and began to listen to that. I had to leavehim at this moment to go and attend to some duties on the deck. Butpresently I heard him below shouting for me to come down again.
“Stubbins,” he cried as soon as he saw me—“a most extraordinarything—Quite unbelievable—I’m not sure whether I’m dreaming—Can’tbelieve my own senses. I—I—I—”
“‘He talks English!’”]
“Why, Doctor,” I said, “what is it?—What’s the matter?”
“The fidgit,” he whispered, pointing with a trembling finger to thelistening-tank in which the little round fish was still swimmingquietly, “he talks English! And—and—and _he whistles tunes_—Englishtunes!”
“Talks English!” I cried—“Whistles!—Why, it’s impossible.”
“It’s a fact,” said the Doctor, white in the face with excitement.“It’s only a few words, scattered, with no particular sense to them—allmixed up with his own language which I can’t make out yet. But they’reEnglish words, unless there’s something very wrong with my hearing—Andthe tune he whistles, it’s as plain as anything—always the same tune.Now you listen and tell me what you make of it. Tell me everything youhear. Don’t miss a word.”
I went to the glass tank upon the table while the Doctor grabbed anote-book and a pencil. Undoing my collar I stood upon the emptypacking-case he had been using for a stand and put my right ear downunder the water.
For some moments I detected nothing at all—except, with my dry ear, theheavy breathing of the Doctor as he waited, all stiff and anxious, forme to say something. At last from within the water, sounding like achild singing miles and miles away, I heard an unbelievably thin, smallvoice.
“Ah!” I said.
“What is it?” asked the Doctor in a hoarse, trembly whisper. “What doeshe say?”
“I can’t quite make it out,” I said. “It’s mostly in some strange fishlanguage—Oh, but wait a minute!—Yes, now I get it—‘No smoking’.... ‘My,here’s a queer one!’ ‘Popcorn and picture postcards here’.... ‘Thisway out’.... ‘Don’t spit’—What funny things to say, Doctor!—Oh, butwait!—Now he’s whistling the tune.”
“What tune is it?” gasped the Doctor.
“John Peel.”
“Ah hah,” cried the Doctor, “that’s what I made it out to be.” And hewrote furiously in his note-book.
I went on listening.
“This is most extraordinary,” the Doctor kept muttering to himselfas his pencil went wiggling over the page—“Most extraordinary—butfrightfully thrilling. I wonder where he—”
“Here’s some more,” I cried—“some more English.... ‘_The big tank needscleaning_’.... That’s all. Now he’s talking fish-talk again.”
“The big tank!” the Doctor murmured frowning in a puzzled kind of way.“I wonder where on earth he learned—”
Then he bounded up out of his chair.
“I have it,” he yelled, “this fish has escaped from an aquarium.Why, of course! Look at the kind of things he has learned: ‘Picturepostcards’—they always sell them in aquariums; ‘Don’t spit’; ‘Nosmoking’; ‘This way out’—the things the attendants say. And then, ‘My,here’s a queer one!’ That’s the kind of thing that people exclaimwhen they look into the tanks. It all fits. There’s no doubt aboutit, Stubbins: we have here a fish who has escaped from captivity. Andit’s quite possible—not certain, by any means, but quite possible—thatI may now, through him, be able to establish communication with theshellfish. This is a great piece of luck.”
_THE SECOND CHAPTER_
THE FIDGIT’S STORY
WELL, now that he was started once more upon his old hobby of theshellfish languages, there was no stopping the Doctor. He worked rightthrough the night.
A little after midnight I fell asleep in a chair; about two in themorning Bumpo fell asleep at the wheel; and for five hours the _Curlew_was allowed to drift where she liked. But still John Dolittle workedon, trying his hardest to understand the fidgit’s language, strugglingto make the fidgit understand him.
When I woke up it was broad daylight again. The Doctor was stillstanding at the listening-tank, looking as tired as an owl anddreadfully wet. But on his face there was a proud and happy smile.
“Stubbins,” he said as soon as he saw me stir, “I’ve done it. I’vegot the key to the fidgit’s language. It’s a frightfully difficultlanguage—quite different from anything I ever heard. The only thing itreminds me of—slightly—is ancient Hebrew. It isn’t shellfish; but it’sa big step towards it. Now, the next thing, I want you to take a penciland a fresh notebook and write down everything I say. The fidgit haspromised to tell me the story of his life. I will translate it intoEnglish and you put it down in the book. Are you ready?”
Once more the Doctor lowered his ear beneath the level of the water;and as he began to speak, I started to write. And this is the storythat the fidgit told us.
THIRTEEN MONTHS IN AN AQUARIUM
“I was born in the Pacific Ocean, close to the coast of Chile. I was one of a family of two-thousand five-hundred and ten. Soon after our mother and father left us, we youngsters got scattered. The family was broken up—by a herd of whales who chased us. I and my sister, Clippa (she was my favorite sister) had a very narrow escape for our lives. As a rule, whales are not very hard to get away from if you are good at dodging—if you’ve only got a quick swerve. But this one that came after Clippa and myself was a very mean whale. Every time he lost us under a stone or something he’d come back and hunt and hunt till he routed us out into the open again. I never saw such a nasty, persevering brute.
“Well, we shook him at last—though not before he had worried us for hundreds of miles northward, up the west
coast of South America. But luck was against us that day. While we were resting and trying to get our breath, another family of fidgits came rushing by, shouting, ‘Come on! Swim for your lives! The dog-fish are coming!’
“Now dog-fish are particularly fond of fidgits. We are, you might say, their favorite food—and for that reason we always keep away from deep, muddy waters. What’s more, dog-fish are not easy to escape from; they are terribly fast and clever hunters. So up we had to jump and on again.
“After we had gone a few more hundred miles we looked back and saw that the dog-fish were gaining on us. So we turned into a harbor. It happened to be one on the west coast of the United States. Here we guessed, and hoped, the dog-fish would not be likely to follow us. As it happened, they didn’t even see us turn in, but dashed on northward and we never saw them again. I hope they froze to death in the Arctic Seas.
“But, as I said, luck was against us that day. While I and my sister were cruising gently round the ships anchored in the harbor looking for orange-peels, a great delicacy with us—_Swoop! Bang!_—we were caught in a net.
“We struggled for all we were worth; but it was no use. The net was small-meshed and strongly made. Kicking and flipping we were hauled up the side of the ship and dumped down on the deck, high and dry in a blazing noon-day sun.
“Here a couple of old men in whiskers and spectacles leant over us, making strange sounds. Some codling had got caught in the net the same time as we were. These the old men threw back into the sea; but us they seemed to think very precious. They put us carefully into a large jar and after they had taken us on shore they went to a big house and changed us from the jar into glass boxes full of water. This house was on the edge of the harbor; and a small stream of sea-water was made to flow through the glass tank so we could breathe properly. Of course we had never lived inside glass walls before; and at first we kept on trying to swim through them and got our noses awfully sore bumping the glass at full speed.
“Then followed weeks and weeks of weary idleness. They treated us well, so far as they knew how. The old fellows in spectacles came and looked at us proudly twice a day and saw that we had the proper food to eat, the right amount of light and that the water was not too hot or too cold. But oh, the dullness of that life! It seemed we were a kind of a show. At a certain hour every morning the big doors of the house were thrown open and everybody in the city who had nothing special to do came in and looked at us. There were other tanks filled with different kinds of fishes all round the walls of the big room. And the crowds would go from tank to tank, looking in at us through the glass—with their mouths open, like half-witted flounders. We got so sick of it that we used to open our mouths back at them; and this they seemed to think highly comical.
“One day my sister said to me, ‘Think you, Brother, that these strange creatures who have captured us can talk?’
“‘Surely,’ said I, ‘have you not noticed that some talk with the lips only, some with the whole face, and yet others discourse with the hands? When they come quite close to the glass you can hear them. Listen!’
“At that moment a female, larger than the rest, pressed her nose up against the glass, pointed at me and said to her young behind her, ‘Oh, look, here’s a queer one!’
“And then we noticed that they nearly always said this when they looked in. And for a long time we thought that such was the whole extent of the language, this being a people of but few ideas. To help pass away the weary hours we learned it by heart, ‘Oh, look, here’s a queer one!’ But we never got to know what it meant. Other phrases, however, we did get the meaning of; and we even learned to read a little in man-talk. Many big signs there were, set up upon the walls; and when we saw that the keepers stopped the people from spitting and smoking, pointed to these signs angrily and read them out loud, we knew then that these writings signified, _No Smoking_ and _Don’t Spit_.
“Then in the evenings, after the crowd had gone, the same aged male with one leg of wood, swept up the peanut-shells with a broom every night. And while he was so doing he always whistled the same tune to himself. This melody we rather liked; and we learned that too by heart—thinking it was part of the language.
“Thus a whole year went by in this dismal place. Some days new fishes were brought in to the other tanks; and other days old fishes were taken out. At first we had hoped we would only be kept here for a while, and that after we had been looked at sufficiently we would be returned to freedom and the sea. But as month after month went by, and we were left undisturbed, our hearts grew heavy within our prison-walls of glass and we spoke to one another less and less.
“One day, when the crowd was thickest in the big room, a woman with a red face fainted from the heat. I watched through the glass and saw that the rest of the people got highly excited—though to me it did not seem to be a matter of very great importance. They threw cold water on her and carried her out into the open air.
“This made me think mightily; and presently a great idea burst upon me.
“‘Sister,’ I said, turning to poor Clippa who was sulking at the bottom of our prison trying to hide behind a stone from the stupid gaze of the children who thronged about our tank, ‘supposing that _we_ pretended we were sick: do you think they would take us also from this stuffy house?’
“‘Brother,’ said she wearily, ‘that they might do. But most likely they would throw us on a rubbish-heap, where we would die in the hot sun.’
“‘But,’ said I, ‘why should they go abroad to seek a rubbish-heap, when the harbor is so close? While we were being brought here I saw men throwing their rubbish into the water. If they would only throw us also there, we could quickly reach the sea.’
“‘The Sea!’ murmured poor Clippa with a far-away look in her eyes (she had fine eyes, had my sister, Clippa). ‘How like a dream it sounds—the Sea! Oh brother, will we ever swim in it again, think you? Every night as I lie awake on the floor of this evil-smelling dungeon I hear its hearty voice ringing in my ears. How I have longed for it! Just to feel it once again, the nice, big, wholesome homeliness of it all! To jump, just to jump from the crest of an Atlantic wave, laughing in the trade wind’s spindrift, down into the blue-green swirling trough! To chase the shrimps on a summer evening, when the sky is red and the light’s all pink within the foam! To lie on the top, in the doldrums’ noonday calm, and warm your tummy in the tropic sun! To wander hand in hand once more through the giant seaweed forests of the Indian Ocean, seeking the delicious eggs of the pop-pop! To play hide-and-seek among the castles of the coral towns with their pearl and jasper windows spangling the floor of the Spanish Main! To picnic in the anemone-meadows, dim blue and lilac-gray, that lie in the lowlands beyond the South Sea Garden! To throw somersaults on the springy sponge-beds of the Mexican Gulf! To poke about among the dead ships and see what wonders and adventures lie inside!—And then, on winter nights when the Northeaster whips the water into froth, to swoop down and down to get away from the cold, down to where the water’s warm and dark, down and still down, till we spy the twinkle of the fire-eels far below where our friends and cousins sit chatting round the Council Grotto—chatting, Brother, over the news and gossip of _the Sea_!... Oh—’
“And then she broke down completely, sniffling.
“‘Stop it!’ I said. ‘You make me homesick. Look here: let’s pretend we’re sick—or better still, let’s pretend we’re dead; and see what happens. If they throw us on a rubbish-heap and we fry in the sun, we’ll not be much worse off than we are here in this smelly prison. What do you say? Will you
risk it?’
“‘I will,’ she said—‘and gladly.’
“So next morning two fidgits were found by the keeper floating on the top of the water in their tank, stiff and dead. We gave a mighty good imitation of dead fish—although I say it myself. The keeper ran and got the old gentlemen with spectacles and whiskers. They threw up their hands in horror when they saw us. Lifting us carefully out of the water they laid us on wet cloths. That was the hardest part of all. If you’re a fish and get taken out of the water you have to keep opening and shutting your mouth to breathe at all—and even that you can’t keep up for long. And all this time we had to stay stiff as sticks and breathe silently through half-closed lips.
“Well, the old fellows poked us and felt us and pinched us till I thought they’d never be done. Then, when their backs were turned a moment, a wretched cat got up on the table and nearly ate us. Luckily the old men turned round in time and shooed her away. You may be sure though that we took a couple of good gulps of air while they weren’t looking; and that was the only thing that saved us from choking. I wanted to whisper to Clippa to be brave and stick it out. But I couldn’t even do that; because, as you know, most kinds of fish-talk cannot be heard—not even a shout—unless you’re under water.
“Then, just as we were about to give it up and let on that we were alive, one of the old men shook his head sadly, lifted us up and carried us out of the building.
