Freddy and the Popinjay

by Walter R. Brooks

  Then Mrs. Church pulled open the door and dashed into the shop. “Harriet!” she exclaimed. “The most extraordinary thing—that hat! It’s not sold, is it? I must have it. It’s exactly the popinjay on our crest—you know?”

  “Yes,” said Miss Peebles. “It’s a popinjay.”

  “But where did you find it? I didn’t know such a bird existed. And—oh, dear!” She stopped short. “It’s against the law to trim hats with birds, isn’t it? To wear them, anyway. I couldn’t wear it—”

  “It’s against the law to trim hats with dead birds,” said Miss Peebles.

  “Well, of course. You couldn’t very well trim them with live ones. What are you getting at, Harriet?”

  Miss Peebles just raised her eyebrows and smiled. “All right, Mr. Pomeroy,” she said. “Will you come over here, please?” And J. J. flew over and perched on the back of her chair.

  “Merciful heavens!” said Mrs. Church, and sank down into the chair which Freddy hastily pushed forward. Then she looked up at him. “You’re here again, Freddy? I suppose you’re at the bottom of this somehow. I don’t imagine you’re learning the millinery trade, though it wouldn’t surprise me any—the things you do!” She blinked her eyes, and then turned her head slowly and stared again at the robin. “But there isn’t any such bird!”

  “Yes, ma’am, I am at the bottom of it,” Freddy said. “But perhaps Miss Peebles wants to explain.”

  “Why, you see, Mrs. Church,” Miss Peebles said, “we knew you would be getting a new hat for the wedding. And since the popinjay is, in a way, your family bird, we knew that a hat with a popinjay on it would be exactly what you’d want. But of course, that was difficult—first, because it is against the law to trim hats with dead birds, and second, because there isn’t any such bird anyway. So we made up a popinjay for you, using a robin as base.”

  “It’s Mr. J. J. Pomeroy, the robin I introduced to you yesterday,” Freddy said.

  “I see,” said Mrs. Church, but she didn’t look as if she did. “How do you do, Mr. Pop—that is, Mr. Pomeroy. Perhaps I’d better call you Mr. Popinjay, to avoid confusion. Though how I can avoid it,” she added, “when I’m completely confused myself, I don’t know.”

  “The point is,” said Miss Peebles, “that you can hire Mr. Pomeroy to act as your hat—you can wear him at the wedding. Freddy’s idea was to have him sing during, or right after, the ceremony, and of course, he could do that, too. You see, he needs money to pay for some new eyeglasses, and that was about the only way Freddy could think of in which he could earn it. Do you like the idea?”

  “Like it? Of course I like it! The bird on the family crest singing for joy at the wedding—it’s a lovely idea! And as for wearing him—I think it would be marvelous! Mr. Pomeroy, how much would you charge to sing, and to allow me to wear you for the afternoon?”

  J. J. said he hardly knew what to ask; he’d never done work like that before. “Would a dollar be too much?”

  “He needs eight dollars for his glasses,” Freddy said quickly.

  “Eight dollars!” exclaimed Mrs. Church. “That’s not very much. My goodness, an ordinary soprano would charge me at least twenty-five, and she wouldn’t be engaged to sit on my head during the ceremony either. Let’s say twenty-five anyway.”

  “But I really don’t need that much—” Mr. Pomeroy began.

  “Well, you can buy glasses for your wife and children with what’s left over,” Mrs. Church said. She lifted off the hat she was wearing and set it on the counter. “But perhaps I’d better try you on.”

  So J. J. flew up and lit on her head. He spread his wings and flattened his head and his body so that his beak was just over her left eye and Mrs. Church examined herself in the glass. “Really, it’s remarkable!” she said. “Very smart. My word, Mr. Popinjay, we’ve got style, you and I!” She smiled at him. “Don’t blink any more than you can help,” she said, “and try not to pull my hair. On the wedding day we’ll fasten something—a skewer would do—in my hair so you’ll have something to hang on to.” She took some bills out of her purse. “Here’s your twenty-five. And you had better come up to the house one day next week so we can rehearse. Freddy, you come along too. And you, of course, Harriet. I count on all of you to help me make the wedding a success.” She got up, and when J. J. had hopped down, put on her hat. “Goodbye for now. And thank you all. I don’t know what I should have done without you.”

  Mrs. Church examined herself in the glass.

  On the way back to the farm Mr. Pomeroy rode most of the time on Freddy’s back. He found that until he could practice using it, his new tail was more of a hindrance than a help. “You see,” he said, “when I’m flying I steer with my tail, and now that there’s so much more of it, it throws me off. I’ll have to get used to it.”

  “Oh, you’ll get used to it,” said Freddy. He was thinking of the poem he had written yesterday, and not paying much attention to his passenger. All about how we can’t change our looks, and so we’d better be satisfied with what we’ve got. It had all seemed very true, and yet here today he had been surrounded by people who were not only trying to change their looks, but were succeeding at it. There was this robin, who had become a popinjay, and there was Mrs. Weezer, who had made herself look different with a red hat with forget-me-nots on it. And there was Mrs. Church wearing the popinjay.

  Finally he spoke to J. J. about it.

  “Well, I think your poem was perfectly right, Freddy,” the robin said. “You hadn’t ought to try to look like something that you aren’t. Of course, you can say that I am doing just that, but I’m doing it in order to make money. Just as when you put on one of your disguises you wear in your detective work, you’re doing it to solve a case.”

  “But Mrs. Weezer and Mrs. Church aren’t doing it for business reasons. They’re just not satisfied with the way they look, and they want to look like someone else.”

  “Do they want to look like someone else, or do they want to look more like themselves?” asked the robin. “That’s the answer. Take Mrs. Weezer. The forget-me-nots on her hat make her eyes look bluer. Well then, she’s just Mrs. Weezer, only more so. And Mrs. Church—if she wears her family crest, she looks more like a Church, doesn’t she?”

  Freddy shook his head. “It’s kind of confusing,” he said. “That’s what always happens when I begin to think about my poems. Pretty soon I begin to wonder if I haven’t said just the opposite of what I mean.”

  “There’s always two sides to every question,” said J. J. “And the funny part of it is, both sides are usually right. There wouldn’t ever be any arguments if one side was always right and the other always wrong.”

  “And there sure are plenty of arguments,” said Freddy. “You know, J. J., what you have just said makes me surer than ever that there’s something to be said for that Witherspoon boy. Just thinking about his hurting Alice, and shooting at the rest of us all the time, you’d say he was a bad boy and ought to be locked up. But I don’t think he wants to be bad. I think other people have always been bad to him, and he doesn’t know how to act any different. Now if we were all to start being nice to him—ask him to play games with us and things like that—”

  “Ha ha!” said the robin sarcastically. “If you’re going to play games with that kid, you wear a tin suit and carry a sock full of rocks.”

  Freddy nodded. “I guess maybe you’re right. I guess maybe you ought to carry a machine gun, too.”

  Chapter 6

  During the next few days it certainly looked as if the animals had made a lot of trouble for themselves by throwing Jimmy Witherspoon into the duck pond. The boundary between the two farms was partly fence and partly stone wall, and it ran from the road, on the east of Mr. Bean’s land, right up into the woods. And now it was as much as any animal’s life was worth to go near that fence. Jimmy had always been a nuisance, but now he had declared open war, and although he was afraid of getting into trouble with Mr. Bean, and so never crossed the fence, he spent mo
st of his time in hiding behind it, with a pocket full of stones. And he was a pretty good shot.

  In the first two days, Mrs. Wogus and Mrs. Wurzburger had each been hit twice, and Mrs. Wiggins, seven times. Bill, the goat, had a nick taken out of one of his horns, and a large number of the smaller animals had been hit. Rabbit No. 13, who had been one of Freddy’s ablest assistants in the detective business, was quite badly bruised, and had to be brought down to the barn on a stretcher. The situation was pretty serious, and so on the evening of the second day of hostilities, the animals held a meeting in the barn to consider what should be done.

  The meeting was a stormy one. Mrs. Wiggins made the opening address, but in the middle of it, Charles, the rooster, flew up to the seat of the old phaeton and called for the animals to rise in their might and march upon the enemy. “How long,” he shouted, “are we to put up with these vicious attacks upon our homes, our liberty—yes, upon our very lives? I, for one, refuse to cower before these powerful assaults, to squeal beneath the heel of the oppressor. Let us not waste time in idle talk. Let us march this very moment. And I, Charles, will lead you. Let us, beneath the banner of Bean, descend upon the stronghold of the Witherspoons and destroy it utterly, so that not one stone shall remain upon another. Let us—”

  It was perhaps fortunate that at this moment Henrietta, Charles’ wife, flew up beside him and gave him a jab with her beak, which knocked him squawking to the barn floor. For some of the animals were beginning to cheer and act very warlike, and Charles’ rousing words might well have persuaded them to a course which could only have ended disastrously.

  “Destroy the Witherspoon house, eh?” she said angrily. “You noisy bunch of feathers, you couldn’t destroy a paper bag. Unless you blew in it. You’ve got wind enough. Now shut up, and let somebody with a little sense talk.”

  “Henrietta’s right,” said Mrs. Wiggins. “We mustn’t do anything foolish. We can’t do much to that boy without getting Mr. Bean into trouble with Mr. Witherspoon. Anyway, we animals always settle our own quarrels without dragging Mr. Bean into it. Now if Peter were here, he could take that boy in hand without any fuss. A bear is about the only animal that his stones wouldn’t hurt. But as you know, Peter is spending some weeks with relatives in Herkimer County.

  “Now of course we can keep out of trouble by staying away from the side of the farm by the Witherspoon property—”

  “No, no!” shouted everyone.

  Mrs. Wiggins nodded. “Quite right,” she said. “It’s Mr. Bean’s land, and we have a right there. Besides, there are a lot of you rabbits and woodchucks that live near the fence, and you aren’t to be driven from your homes. But I must say, I don’t know what we can do. Has anybody any suggestions?”

  Well of course every animal there had a suggestion, and they all began talking at once. And at last Mrs. Wiggins rapped for order.

  “Good grief,” she said, “we’ll never get anywhere this way! If we could drive that boy away with talk, he’d be in China by now. Now I’ll take you in order, and you’ll each have a minute to talk; we don’t want to be here all night. You first, young chipmunk—yes, you in the front row.”

  Even in this way, it took quite a while. And although some of the plans offered weren’t bad, the meeting ended just where it had begun, for as soon as an animal had finished, his plan was voted on; and as no animal liked the plan of any other animal, each plan was immediately voted down.

  This would have stumped almost anyone but Mrs. Wiggins. But she had been to Washington and seen how Congress worked, and she knew that if you can’t get action from a big meeting, the thing to do is make the meeting smaller. And the way to do that is to appoint a committee. So she said: “Since we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, I will appoint Freddy and Jinx and myself as a committee of three to decide on what course to take. The committee will now adjourn upstairs for an hour, and when we have reached a decision we will come down and tell you about it.”

  So the committee went up the steep narrow stairs into the loft. Jinx bounded up easily, and Freddy climbed up after him, but Mrs. Wiggins was so big that although all the animals got behind her and pushed, she only got halfway up, and there she stuck. So she backed down slowly.

  “I find,” she said in such a dignified way that all the others stopped laughing at once, “that I am unable to attend the committee meeting. I therefore appoint Henrietta in my place.”

  The loft had been turned into a workroom for Mr. Bean’s Uncle Ben, who sometimes came to visit, and his workbench and all his tools were there, as well as thirty or forty clocks—for Uncle Ben was an expert on clocks. Jinx turned on the light over the workbench, and the committee all started to talk at once. For of course, each of them had a different plan, too.

  But since there were only three plans, instead of a hundred, they were at last able to agree on a sort of combination of the three. “And I think,” said Freddy, “that we ought to keep what we’re doing secret. Of course nobody would tell Jimmy on purpose, but some of those squirrels and rabbits are pretty gossipy, and it might get out.”

  “We’ll have to tell them something when we go down,” said Jinx, “or they’ll tear us to pieces.”

  “Leave it to me,” said Freddy. “You stay up here a minute.” He went to the head of the stairs and shouted: “Your attention, ladies and gentlemen!”

  The animals, who had been passing the time by playing Twenty Questions, all stopped talking and turned their faces up towards him.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” said Freddy, “your committee has decided upon a plan, but has not yet settled all the details. It is necessary for us first to ask for three volunteers for a dangerous duty—a mission so perilous that I shudder to think of it.” He shuddered.

  “But wait!” he continued, as several animals seemed about to step forward. “You will not only be in great danger, you will also appear very foolish. I must warn you that if you survive the perils, you will not be acclaimed as heroes—you will just be laughed at. For no one will know about the danger but yourselves; no one will see in you anything but three animals making monkeys of themselves. Personally, I have refused to volunteer. As President of the First Animal Bank, I cannot afford to act in a silly and undignified manner. But if there are three among you who are willing to sacrifice their dignity—and perhaps their lives, of course—for the good of all, kindly come up and join the committee.” And he turned away.

  Through knotholes in the floor the committee watched the proceedings below. The animals were all talking at once, as they had been before Freddy’s announcement. But now, instead of keeping their places, they were moving around, each one weaving in and out of the crowd until he got close to the door—and then disappearing quietly into the night. In ten minutes the committee went down, and the barn was empty, except for Hank, who lived there.

  “They’re a fine lot of heroes, I must say!” Henrietta exclaimed.

  “Well, I dunno,” said Hank. “Bein’ a hero’s one thing and bein’ a monkey’s another. Lots of folks wouldn’t mind dying a hero’s death in a good cause—no, you needn’t look at me; I ain’t one of ’em—but to perish looking like a silly fool ain’t got anything grand about it. At least that’s my idea. I’d rather die than do anything like that.” He looked puzzled. “That wouldn’t fix it, either,” he said. “There ain’t much difference, is there?”

  “You’re just as dead one way as the other,” Jinx said.

  Hank shook his head. “No I ain’t. Not as much so. Not near as much.” He looked at them triumphantly. “I said something pretty good there, didn’t I? Explain it to me, will you?”

  “You’re going to talk yourself into volunteering before you get through,” Henrietta said, and winked at the others. Hank always got mixed up when he tried to think. He was like a kitten with a ball of yarn. He could take a few tag ends of ideas and get so snarled up in them that it took his friends several days to untangle him.

  But this time he managed to get untangled himself. �
�No, sir,” he said, “I ain’t volunteering. Why should I volunteer to make a fool of myself? I can do that all by myself, without makin’ any ceremony of it.” He looked at them thoughtfully for a minute, then said: “Well, goodnight,” and clumped off into his stall. And the animals turned out the light and left.

  But the committee didn’t go to bed. They went up to where, just below the woods, a stone wall separated the two farms. Trees and bushes grew close along the wall, but at one place there was a gap through which went a seldom used path. This they examined carefully.

  “I guess it will do all right,” Freddy said. “I’ll get Raymond.” And he went back to where a large rock stuck up out of the pasture, and rapped on it.

  There was a scrabbling underground, and then in the faint starlight Freddy saw a blunt head poke up out of a hole under the rock, and a husky voice said: “What’s wanted?”

  “It’s me, Raymond,” said Freddy. “Get the boys together, will you? I’ve got a digging job for them.”

  Raymond was the head woodchuck on the Bean farm. It was a pretty responsible position. He had charge of all digging, and of the location of all new homes. He had had so much experience that he could tell by just looking over a piece of ground exactly how the rocks lay under the surface, and just how the underground rooms should be arranged.

  “Well, I don’t know, Freddy,” he said. “The boys don’t like night work. Everybody’s in bed and asleep. Can’t it wait?”

  Freddy said no, it couldn’t. And when he had explained why it couldn’t, Raymond got up on the rock and sounded the general alarm—three long whistles.

  Considering what a sleepy lot woodchucks are, it was surprising how quickly they gathered. In ten minutes, forty-two of them had reported, and then Freddy led them over and showed them where they were to dig. The place selected was in the path, just on the Bean side of the wall. Raymond looked the ground over. Then he spit on his paws. “O.K., boys,” he said. “Let’s go.”