Freddy and the Popinjay

by Walter R. Brooks

  So Freddy came back and told him about Jimmy and their plan for keeping him awake. He talked fast so that the owl wouldn’t be able to stop him, but Uncle Solomon was always very mannerly. He never interrupted. But when you were all through, he would begin and take your whole argument to pieces.

  When Freddy had finished, he said: “I do not like boys who throw stones, and I am therefore inclined to assist you. But there are one or two points in your statement which do not appear to be logical—”

  “Oh, please!” said Freddy. “If you’ll just come down! And anyway,” he said, thinking that he could perhaps turn the owl’s own method of argument against him, “how can you say that there are one or two? If there is one, there can’t be two, and if there are two, then you shouldn’t say ‘one or two’—isn’t that so?”

  “Very well reasoned,” said Uncle Solomon. “But I was using the phrase ‘one or two’ in the accepted sense of ‘several.’ There are, in fact, six. And to begin with the first one:—”

  “Excuse me,” Freddy cut in; “I really have to get back. I don’t want to interrupt you—”

  “You do want to, or you wouldn’t,” said the owl. “And conversely, if you didn’t want to, you would. Which proves, of course, that you really don’t know your own mind.” He laughed his neat little laugh. “Correct me if I am wrong.”

  “Oh, I don’t care whether you’re right or wrong,” said Freddy, “if you’ll only show up down at the Witherspoons’ at half-past two tomorrow morning, and scream in Jimmy’s window. We’re counting on you. But goodbye for now.” And he ran off. But before he was out of earshot he heard Uncle Solomon starting to tear his remarks to pieces. “Show up down at the Witherspoons’! Well, is it to be up or down—you can’t have it both ways …”

  It took the rest of the morning to get all the animals lined up and persuade them to do their part, but most of them were willing, and they all felt pretty sure that after a night or two of being kept awake, Jimmy would give in. Freddy and Jinx were going to stay up all night, because not only would they have to make two visits each to the Witherspoon house, but they would have to be sure that none of the others overslept their appointed times. And Freddy was just going down to his study to take a nap until supper time when he met Mr. Bean.

  “Ah!” said Mr. Bean, and stopped.

  Freddy stopped too, but he didn’t say anything. For perhaps a minute they looked at each other, then Mr. Bean leaned down and slapped Freddy on the shoulder. “Smart pig,” he said. “Know enough not to make explanations.” He straightened up and looked off thoughtfully over the fields, puffing his pipe. “Got a lot of thinking done this morning,” he said, as if talking to himself. “Good place to think, down that hole. Guess we’d better keep it. Anybody wants to think, leaves word when he wants to be pulled out, then jumps in and thinks.” He bent and slapped Freddy again. “If you need any help with that Witherspoon boy, let me know,” he said, and went on towards the house.

  Chapter 9

  Jimmy slept in a corner room on the ground floor of the Witherspoon house. It wasn’t much of a room. As Freddy said: “My pig pen is a palace to it.” There was nothing in it but a cot, an old-fashioned washstand, and one small chair. It had one window, but the glass in the lower sash had been broken when Jimmy was three, and Mr. Witherspoon wouldn’t put in a new one. He said it would only be throwing money away, because it would only get broken again. In winter an old burlap sack was stuffed into the hole to keep the wind and snow out.

  At nine-twenty-nine that night Jinx was at his post, just under Jimmy’s window. And at exactly nine-thirty he gave his yell. It wasn’t the long mournful rising and falling yowl that cats make when they get together to sing sentimental songs in the moonlight. It was the short sharp screech that a cat gives if you step on his tail. Jinx didn’t wait to see just what happened. He bounded off behind some bushes where Freddy was waiting. But they could tell that it had waked up Jimmy, and his father and mother too, for there was movement in the house, and voices, and then somebody leaned out of an upper window and said: “Scat!” But in a few minutes everything was quiet again.

  At ten o’clock Freddy went up to the window and squealed. “Boy!” said Jinx when the pig had rejoined him behind the bushes. “That was a squeal and three quarters. I didn’t know you had it in you, Freddy.”

  “I haven’t, now,” Freddy panted. “That took all my wind. Hey, we’d better get out of here.” For a light had sprung up in the house, and as they sneaked off past the barn they saw someone come out with a lantern.

  Jimmy and his father hunted around outside for nearly fifteen minutes, while Freddy and Jinx watched from the hill above the house. Then they went back in. And they had just settled again comfortably in their beds when at half-past ten Charles crowed.

  And so it went on all night. The only hitch occurred when it was Emma’s turn. Freddy and Jinx stayed close to the house, to protect her in case of trouble. But they didn’t hear any quacking, and when she rejoined them a minute later, she just said: “I’m sorry, but I listened, and he was breathing so peacefully that I couldn’t bear to wake him up. Poor boy! So I just tiptoed away.”

  So Freddy went down and squealed again.

  On the whole, however, the night was entirely successful. Vera’s scream was all that Jinx had claimed for it. It scared Mr. Witherspoon so that he jumped up and poured a pitcher of water over Mrs. Witherspoon’s head, under the impression that she was having a nightmare. And Jimmy came out of his sleep with a yell and dove for the chair and wrestled with it until he tore a leg off before he discovered that it wasn’t a tiger that had got into the room. The animals were sorry that they had to disturb Mr. and Mrs. Witherspoon along with Jimmy, but as Charles said: “It can’t be helped. The innocent have to suffer with the guilty.”

  Not a stone was thrown the next day, and no one could find out what had become of Jimmy until a scouting party of swallows reported that he was asleep in the hay mow. A little later Mrs. Witherspoon was discovered snoozing quietly out by the chicken coop, where she had been overcome by drowsiness as she was feeding the chickens, and Mr. Witherspoon, snoozing not so quietly, was heard, if not seen, in the cow barn.

  Some of the animals thought that the committee ought to go over and try to come to an agreement with Jimmy right away. But most of them agreed with Jinx when he said: “Not on your life—no agreements! What we want is unconditional surrender. Let him come to us.” So they decided to keep on with their program of half-hourly yells.

  And so they kept on for two more nights. Emma had to be counted out, of course, but Uncle Solomon said he didn’t mind taking her place. He said he got a great kick out of scaring people—only of course he didn’t say it that way; what he said was: “It affords me much pleasure, and a certain understandable satisfaction.” He introduced a variation, too: he screeched down the chimney, so that the sound went down into the furnace and up through the hot air pipes into every room in the house. The Witherspoons couldn’t figure out where it came from. They had a pretty miserable time.

  On the morning of the third day, Jinx and Freddy had gone up to the edge of the woods on reconnaissance. When they reached a fence corner that overlooked the Witherspoon house, they stopped and Jinx said: “Hey, what goes on?” For Eunice, Mr. Witherspoon’s cow, and Jerry, his horse, had climbed up on the back porch and were looking in the kitchen window.

  “I wonder if anything’s wrong?” said Freddy.

  Just then Jerry looked up and caught sight of them, and he jerked his head up at them as if beckoning them to come. They were sure Jerry wouldn’t lead them into any ambush, so they went down. They got up on the porch beside the two other animals and looked in the window.

  The Witherspoons were sitting at the breakfast table. It wasn’t much like the Beans’ breakfast table, for there was no tablecloth, and apparently all there was to eat was a loaf of bread and a big pot of tea. Mr. Witherspoon had a slice of bread in one hand, and a large bite had been taken out of it.
But he wasn’t chewing it, for his face was in his plate. He had evidently fallen asleep in the middle of the bite, and they could hear him snoring even through the window. Mrs. Witherspoon had hold of the teapot handle but she had fallen back in her chair and her eyes were closed. And Jimmy was huddled down in his chair and he was asleep too.

  “Ha!” said Jinx. “So they couldn’t take it! Golly, it looks like the castle of the sleeping princess. You be the fairy prince, Freddy, and go in and kiss Jimmy and they’ll all wake up.”

  “How long have they been like this?” Freddy asked.

  “All morning,” Eunice said. “Mr. Witherspoon and Jimmy got up and did the chores, and then they went in to breakfast, and that’s the last we saw of them. We got worried, because there’s so much work to be done, and so we came up to see what was the matter.”

  “Well, you’d better just let them sleep,” said Freddy. He went over and took hold of the doorknob with his teeth and turned it, and opened the door and went in. Jinx followed, grinning. “Which one you goin’ to kiss, prince?” he asked.

  But Freddy didn’t go up to the table. He went into the other room and found a pencil and paper and wrote a note which he put in front of Jimmy. It said: “Have you had enough? If so, come down under a flag of truce and we’ll talk it over. The Bean Animals.”

  “But what will we do?” Jerry asked, when Jinx and Freddy came out. “There’s an awful lot of work to be done.”

  “I guess I can wake ’em up for you,” said Jinx. “Get a good start, Freddy.” And as soon as Freddy was halfway back to the shelter of the woods, he let out a terrible yowl. There was a crash, as Mr. Witherspoon fell out of his chair, and then Jinx turned and bounded after his friend.

  But as Jimmy did not appear that afternoon, either with or without a flag of truce, the animals went on that night with their musical program. But by midnight they were all pretty well puzzled. Not a sound had come from the inside of the house; no lights were lit; and no effort was made to drive them away. And the morning after, as the three cows were sampling some rather choice grass that grew so near the fence that they had been unable to get at it for several weeks, a stone came whizzing between them, and they looked up to see Jimmy grinning at them.

  They galloped off and got home safely, though Mrs. Wogus was hit once. It was plain that something had gone wrong, and the committee met immediately. Jimmy was certainly wide awake, and two rabbits who were acting as spies brought word that Mr. Witherspoon was hard at work. Yet the animals had yelled on schedule all night.

  Henrietta suggested that maybe the Witherspoons had sneaked off somewhere else to sleep, and so hadn’t been disturbed by the noise. But either Freddy or Jinx had been watching the house all night; it wouldn’t have been possible for them to go anywhere without being seen.

  “This scheme is working out just backwards,” Freddy said. “We’re the ones that are sleepy. I’m so tired today from sitting up so many nights that my head buzzes like a beehive, and I don’t dare wink, because if I was to close my eyes even for the inside of a second, I’d be gone.”

  “Me too,” said Jinx. “I keep dreaming with my eyes open. Seeing things that aren’t there. Like when we were in the Witherspoons’ kitchen, I kept thinking Mrs. Witherspoon had a pair of ear muffs on.”

  “What?” Freddy exclaimed, swinging around. “Say that again!”

  “Don’t jump at me like that!” said Jinx crossly. “I just said I thought Mrs. Witherspoon—”

  “—had ear muffs on,” Freddy interrupted. “Well, she did! Now I come to think of it, I saw them too, but I didn’t think anything about it then. Sure, she probably forgot to take them off when she got up. That’s what happened—they all wore ear muffs last night, and probably stuffed their ears with cotton before they put the muffs on. That’s why they all slept all night and were so wide awake today: they didn’t hear us when we yelled.”

  The committee looked glumly at one another. “Well,” said Henrietta finally, “I guess that spoils our fine scheme, all right. So what do we do now?”

  But nobody had any suggestions. Each of them had had a plan, and all three plans had failed.

  “Mr. Bean offered to help us,” Freddy said. “We never do go to him for help; we always have prided ourselves on getting out of any trouble we got into without bothering him with it. But this time we’re stuck. We’d better go see him. Unless one of you can think of something. How about you, Jinx? Got any ideas?”

  Jinx mumbled something, and when Freddy looked at him, he saw that the cat’s eyes were closed and his chin slowly drooping down to touch his chest.

  “Look at him!” said Henrietta. “Fine, intelligent looking committee member, isn’t he? And you too; you’re so sleepy you’re looking cross-eyed at me. Go take a nap, and we’ll talk to Mr. Bean later. We want at least to look as if we had some sense, even if we haven’t got any.”

  Chapter 10

  On the day that J. J. Pomeroy was to get his glasses, he and Mrs. Pomeroy flew down to Centerboro together. J. J. had learned to manage his new tail by this time; he no longer bumped into trees or turned unexpected somersaults in the air when he changed direction in flight. He was very pleased with the long white plumes that streamed behind him, although some of his neighbors were rather sarcastic about it. One of them, a wren who lived in the same tree, had remarked that the first time she saw J. J. fly past she thought he was coming unraveled. Mrs. Pomeroy no longer spoke to her.

  Mr. Watt didn’t recognize J. J. at first. When the two birds flew in his window he tried to shoo them out, but they managed to explain and then he brought out the little spectacles he had made. He had done a beautiful job. The lenses were only about half the size of your little fingernail, and they were set in small gold frames, and the side pieces hooked together at the back of J. J.’s head. Mr. Watt put them on and adjusted them, and then he held up a mirror so J. J. could see how nice they looked.

  “Good gracious!” J. J. said. “I’m quite handsome!”

  “You always were, dear,” said Mrs. Pomeroy loyally.

  “That may be,” said J. J., “but you must remember that I have never had a good look at myself before. I’ve tried to see myself in windowpanes, but they’re never very good, and then I was so nearsighted that I always had to get so close that my beak was against the glass. And all I could see was my eyes.”

  “Such nice eyes!” murmured Mrs. Pomeroy.

  “They’re the most beautifully made pair of glasses I’ve ever seen,” said Mr. Watt, who was never one to underestimate his own work.

  “They’re very nice indeed,” said Mrs. Pomeroy. “But Mr. Pomeroy is a very handsome bird.”

  “Sets off my glasses well,” Mr. Watt admitted.

  On the way back to their nest they stopped in to see Freddy and show him the glasses. Freddy was taking a nap. He had slept for two days after the animals had abandoned the yelling campaign against Jimmy, but by now he had made up all his lost sleep. This was just one of his regular naps. He always took several every day. He said it kept him on his toes. I guess Uncle Solomon would have given him a good argument about that statement.

  The Pomeroys didn’t like to wake Freddy, so they flew on home. And by and by the pig woke up. He had been dreaming that the two boys, Adoniram and Byram, were still living on the farm, and that they had been kicking around the football that someone had given them, and that they had then gone up to the duck pond for a swim. “Guess I’ll go for a swim myself,” Freddy thought. He knew that the animals all expected him to go talk to Mr. Bean about Jimmy that afternoon, but he thought: “I’m all hot from sleeping so hard, and I don’t want to talk to Mr. Bean when I’m hot and sticky. I wonder why it is that it makes you just as hot to sleep hard as to work hard? I suppose it’s because even in my sleep my mind is so active.” He was pleased with this idea; it seemed to make all those naps pretty praiseworthy. He had always claimed that his best ideas came to him when he was asleep, and that his mind was at work all the time. If he persp
ired in his sleep, that proved it, didn’t it?

  When he got to the pond, he found Alice and Emma sitting on the bank, watching Mrs. Wiggins, who was trying to learn to float. All he could see of the cow was four hoofs disappearing under the water; the rest of her had sunk.

  “She always does that,” said Emma, who seemed not at all disturbed.

  “But she’ll drown!” Freddy exclaimed. He ran out on the springboard which Mr. Bean had put up for the boys two summers ago and was about to dive to the rescue, when there was a great bubbling and commotion in the water, and first one horn appeared, and then the other, and then Mrs. Wiggins’s head broke the surface. It came up with a sort of bubbling roar, for Mrs. Wiggins had got to laughing under water. It isn’t a very good place to laugh. She had swallowed a lot of water and got a lot more up her nose, and she coughed and laughed and snorted and whooshed for several minutes. Freddy retreated from the springboard, and even the ducks backed away until she had got her breath again.

  And then Mrs. Wiggins’s head broke the surface.

  “You oughtn’t to go in swimming when you’re alone,” Freddy said. “You might have drowned.”

  “I suppose I might have, at that,” said the cow. “But it’s such fun when I think I’m going to float, and then I just sink. Each time, I think: ‘Now this time, Wiggins, you’ll stay up.’ It seems so easy. And then down I go!” And she began to laugh again.

  “She’s been doing it all morning,” said Emma, and Uncle Wesley waddled out grumpily from behind a clump of goldenrod where he had taken shelter, and said peevishly: “I suppose she’ll drown eventually, but in the meantime nobody else can get anywhere near the pond. I wish she’d hurry up.”

  “I must say, I don’t see what fun you get out of it,” Freddy said.

  “I don’t either, Freddy, but I do,” said the cow. “It just tickles me when I think I’m floating around all cool and pretty like a lump of ice cream in an ice cream soda, and then plunk!—my back hits the bottom. It’s me, thinking I’m one thing, and really being something else; that’s what makes it funny. It would be just as funny to me if it was you.”