Freddy and the Popinjay

For the first showing of The Bird of Paradise, Mr. Muszkiski, the owner of the Centerboro theatre, had planned quite a gala evening. The hall was trimmed up to represent a tropical jungle, with festoons of colored paper and a lot of Christmas tree decorations, and two small trees had been cut and set up, one on each side of the screen. After the newsreel had been shown, the lights went up, and Mr. and Mrs. Popinjay flitted about, in and out of the strands and loops of paper, and then flew up into the trees and J. J. sang.

Everything went well up to this point. The Bean animals were all there, and all had seats together, and nearly everybody in Centerboro was there too. After J. J.’s song, Mr. Muszkiski had planned to start the main picture, during which J. J. was to sing some more. But J. J. had just started to sing when back in the rear of the hall somebody laughed. It wasn’t really a loud laugh, but it was a shrill, tight little sarcastic ripple, that cut sharply across J. J.’s warblings and stopped them dead.

The first time everybody was very indignant. People turned around and said: “Sssssh!” and there were cries of “Throw him out!” And then after a second or two J. J. went on.

This time several people giggled, and I am sorry to say that Jinx was one of them. He leaned over and whispered to Freddy: “That’s Uncle Solomon, the old rip! He just came down here to crab J. J.’s act.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said the cat. “J. J.’s got it coming to him. It won’t hurt him to be taken down a peg.”

J. J. had his glasses on, and the third time the laugh interrupted him, he stared so indignantly through them in the direction from which the sound had come that practically everybody in the audience began to giggle, and then when he glared at them they laughed right out, and pretty soon the whole crowd was just rocking and roaring with laughter. Even Freddy joined in, for when everybody is laughing it is pretty hard to keep a sober face.

“Look at him!” Jinx exclaimed. “Why doesn’t the idiot laugh too? Then he’d have the crowd with him. Talk about a stuffed shirt!”

“Look at him” Jinx exclaimed.

But J. J. had become so conceited during the past few weeks, and had got to taking himself so seriously, that it was impossible for him to see it as a joke. He ruffled his feathers and even stamped angrily, and then he and Mrs. Popinjay flew right back over the heads of the audience into the shadows at the back of the hall.

Everybody turned around but they couldn’t see anything. They could hear a lot, though—flappings and flutterings, and sharp chirps and twitters, and then the robins chased Uncle Solomon back towards the front of the house. He dodged in and out among the decorations, diving on the Popinjays to tweak out a feather, then darting off as they twisted to corner him. The feathers floated down—now a white plume from J. J.’s tail, now a red or blue one from Mrs. Popinjay’s fan—and the audience reached up eagerly to catch them, as souvenirs of the most unusual evening they had ever spent.

But at last Uncle Solomon had had enough of it. He gave his tight little laugh and then darted out of an open window into the night, and the Popinjays lit on one of the trees and set about smoothing down their rumpled feathers.

But they weren’t popinjays any more. “Why, they’re nothing but robins!” said someone in a loud voice. And the audience began whispering: “You mean to say Muszkiski made all these elaborate preparations to have a robin sing?” And they laughed some more. So the Popinjays sat there for a minute looking very crestfallen, and rather dilapidated, too, with half their trimming missing, and then they too flew out of the window into the night.

Freddy felt sorry for them, and he left his seat and went outside. He didn’t see them anywhere, but by the light of a street lamp he saw Uncle Solomon sitting on a telephone wire. “Well,” he said, “you spoiled J. J.’s show for him. I expect you’re pretty pleased with yourself.”

“My good pig,” said Uncle Solomon, “you cannot expect something which you believe has already happened. You can no more expect that I am pleased today, than you can remember that I will be pleased tomorrow. You must have had very bad marks in English at school.”

“I expect I did,” said Freddy, and grinned at him.

Uncle Solomon shook his head disapprovingly. “It is hardly worth while attempting to converse with an animal who cannot talk plain English.”

Freddy looked gloomy. “I expect not,” he said.

The owl began to get angry. “Stop it!” he said. “Stop using that word! After I have explained to you that you cannot use it in that way, it is sheer insolence for you to continue.”

Freddy nodded. “I expect it is,” he said.

And at that Uncle Solomon flew into a rage. “Stop it—stop it—stop it,” he shrieked angrily, and he jumped up and down on the telephone wire. “I won’t have it! You can’t argue like that—it’s against all the rules.”

“But I’m not arguing with you,” said Freddy. “I’ve agreed with everything you say. I guess that’s the way to win arguments with you, Uncle Solomon—to agree with you, and then to use the wrong words. And then when you show me they’re wrong, to agree, and keep right on using them.”

The owl just muttered something into his feathers. Freddy had indeed agreed with everything he had said. Yet at the same time he had certainly disagreed with him about the word “expect.” And nobody had ever succeeded in both agreeing and disagreeing with him in the same argument. He couldn’t seem to think of anything to say next.

Freddy was pretty pleased. Nobody had ever managed to silence Uncle Solomon before. And so he changed the subject. “All I meant,” he said, “was that I didn’t think you were very nice to J.J.”

The owl recovered himself. “You must understand, young pig,” he said, “that there are two effects of every action. There is an immediate effect, and a long range effect. If you spank your little boy for being bad, the immediate effect is to hurt him, but the long range effect is to do him good. In the same way, the immediate effect of what I did tonight was to make J. J. look like a fool. But the long range effect I sincerely hope will be to cure him of his foolishness. You see that, I trust?”

“Perhaps you’re right,” Freddy said. “They’ve both been putting on airs lately. They’ve got pretty puffed up, what with being probably the richest robins in the whole country, and then all these fine feathers! Yes, I expect you’re right.… No, no; I’m sorry,” he exclaimed, as Uncle Solomon with an angry titter spread his wings for flight. “I didn’t mean to use the word again, honestly I didn’t.”

But the owl had flown off.

It wasn’t until the next afternoon that Freddy saw the Popinjays again. They came down to the pig pen and tapped on the door, and when he opened it he wouldn’t have recognized them if J. J. hadn’t had on his glasses. For the colored feathers were all gone—they were just two robins.

“For goodness’ sake!” said Freddy. “What’s all this? Where are all your fine feathers?”

“Oh, we threw those away,” J. J. said. “We’re just plain Mr. and Mrs. Pomeroy, Freddy. We’ve been thinking it all over, and I guess we have been pretty silly. We were getting so blown up with our own importance that I guess we’d have ended up by just exploding if Uncle Solomon hadn’t sort of stuck a pin in us last night.”

Freddy nodded. “Well, that’s true, J. J. Your money and your fine clothes did kind of go to your heads for a while. But you’re sensible birds; you’d have come out of it sooner or later.”

“We have Uncle Solomon to thank for it that it’s sooner, rather than later,” J. J. said. “And you too, Freddy. You know that poem you wrote about not trying to be that which you ain’t, or something? Well, that made us see our mistake too, and I wish you’d copy it off for us. We’d like to tack it up over our nest, where we can see it every day. I’m going to make the children learn it by heart.”

So Freddy went in and copied out the poem on his typewriter, and when they had thanked him they said they were going to see Uncle Solomon and thank him too. “We were pretty mad at him at first,” J. J. said, “but now we see that he did us a real service. If he hadn’t laughed, I expect we’d have gone right on that way the rest of our lives.”

“Good gracious,” said Freddy, “don’t use the word ‘expect’ when you talk to him.” And he told them of his argument with the owl.

After they had gone, Freddy went back into the study. He was pretty pleased at what J. J. had said about his poem. As far as he knew, nobody had ever been influenced by one of his poems before. His friends had read them and said ‘Very nice’ and they had even sung those that Freddy had written as songs. But they had never said that anything he had written had had any effect on them.

“Maybe,” he thought, “if this one poem has been such a good influence in J. J.’s life, maybe some of the others might be helpful to other animals. Perhaps they ought to have a wider public. Perhaps I owe it to the American people to see that it has the opportunity to read my poems.”

I guess it didn’t occur to Freddy that he was doing just what he had been lecturing the Pomeroys for doing: taking himself too seriously. Poets are always inclined to do that. On the other hand, pigs, as a rule, seldom take themselves seriously enough. And it is perfectly true that if you don’t take yourself seriously, nobody else will. It’s hard to know just where to draw the line.

Anyhow, Freddy got all his poems together, and then he sat down at his typewriter and typed out several different titles for the collected edition of his Works. Here they are, with Freddy’s comments.

Poems

Freddy

(Simple, but perhaps lacking in dignity.)

COLLECTED POEMS

Frederick Bean, Esq.

(No, has too much dignity.)

COMPLETE WORKS OF FREDDY

(Sounds as if I was a clock.)

F. BEAN

Works

(Same objection.)

POEMS & BALLADS

OF RURAL LIFE

Freddy

(Not so bad. But I still don’t like it.)

He also tried some more fanciful names, such as: RURAL RHYMES, FARM FANCIES, BARNYARD BALLADS, FROM MY STUDY WINDOW, and so on. Altogether, before he finished, he had more than two hundred possible titles to choose from. And the trouble was, not that he didn’t like any of them, but that he liked nearly all. It was almost impossible to choose just one, and you couldn’t publish a book with two hundred titles. It would look funny.

I don’t know what one he finally chose, although I understand that he did finally make up his mind. And I suppose he must have, for the book is being printed now, and Freddy tells me that Uncle Solomon, of all people, is giving a sort of coming-out party for it. Uncle Solomon is going to give a speech about it—a sort of critical review. I don’t think Freddy looks forward to that with much pleasure. My goodness, I’d hate to have Uncle Solomon review one of my books.