Читать книгу Freddy and the Men From Mars - Walter Rollin Brooks - Страница 4

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Forty-eight hours after the capture of the Martians by Mr. Herbert Garble, Boomschmidt’s Stupendous & Unexcelled Circus was on the road. Mr. Boomschmidt and Mademoiselle Rose, the bareback rider (who was Mrs. Boomschmidt in private life), came first, in a big red limousine with the Boomschmidt coat of arms in gold on the doors. Then came the red-and-gold wagons in which the dangerous wild animals lived. Only, instead of being in the cages, the lions and tigers were usually sitting up beside the driver, or even driving the horses themselves. For, as Mr. Boomschmidt explained when people expressed surprise at this arrangement: “Animals aren’t really wild except when they’re shut up. My goodness,” he said, “you’d be wild yourself if you had to live in a cage.”

And indeed his animals were always polite and well behaved, and in the towns where they had given shows summer after summer they had hosts of friends. On Sundays, when no shows were given, you could hardly ever find a single animal on the circus grounds—they would all be invited out to Sunday dinner by people in the town.

After the wild-animal wagons came the elephants and zebras and old Uncle Bill, the buffalo, and a lot of other animals, and then the little houses on wheels in which the circus people lived. There weren’t as many of these as there had been in the early days, for more and more of the circus work was done by animals instead of humans. Elephants can put up a tent as quickly as men can, and almost any animal can be trained to sell tickets, or drive cars, or do clerical work. It had always been Mr. Boom’s ambition to have an all-animal circus, and now all his performers in the main tent were animals except Mademoiselle Rose.

In the side shows, of course, there were some people. There was Madame Delphine, the gypsy fortune-teller, whose real name was Annie Carraway. She was Mlle. Rose’s mother. And there was a new side show this year—the strong man. He was Mr. Boomschmidt’s brother, Mr. Hercules Boomschmidt, and he looked exactly like Mr. Boomschmidt except that he was twice as tall and twice as wide. He looked like Mr. Boomschmidt seen through a large magnifying glass. He did a weight-lifting act, and sometimes in the big tent he sang in a quartet made up, besides himself, of the lion, a hippopotamus named Andrew, and Uncle Bill, the buffalo. It was really something to hear them render “Asleep in the Deep,” or “Down by the Old Mill Stream.” For they all had deep bass voices; Mr. Hercules, who was the tenor, sounded, even when he hit a high one, like the bass viol in the orchestra; and when Andrew really got down to work, it was like nothing but a thunderstorm coming up on the other side of the mountain.

And of course now there were the Martians. There hadn’t been time to give them much of a build-up, but Mr. Boomschmidt didn’t think they needed it. He had some signs painted: “Men from Mars. They have come a million miles to visit you.” And there were pictures of little red men climbing out of a flying saucer, with planets and comets zipping around. He had the carpenter build some little chairs and tables and other furniture, and fit up one of the wagons like a room that was supposed to be from a Martian house. And then the Martians were to sit around in the room and just talk and have their meals and do whatever they did at home on Mars, while the people filed past at fifty cents a head and stared at them. Mr. Garble would be standing by to answer questions.

It was plain before they started out that the show could stay right in Lanksburg all summer and make more money than it ever had before. For as soon as news that the Martians were with the circus came out in the newspapers, people from near-by towns came crowding into the city in the hope of catching sight of them. Mr. Garble wanted to stay right there. “Folks’ll drive here from all over the country,” he had said. “Instead of giving your regular show, we’ll buy a couple hundred cots and put ’em up in the big tent and rent ’em out at five dollars a night. We’ll turn the Martian side show into the main show and up the price to two dollars a night. There’s seven dollars a head we’ll make out of everybody that spends the night, and then there’s all the people that’ll just stop long enough to see the Martians and then drive on. I bet we can clear seven or eight thousand dollars a day.”

Mr. Boomschmidt had replied that that was fine, only it wasn’t going to be that way. “My goodness me,” he said, “what do you suppose all those people up in New York and Pennsylvania and Connecticut and a dozen other states are going to say when they hear we’re not coming this year? They’re all my friends, and friends of my animals, and good gracious, you don’t think I’d disappoint them, do you? And there’s my animals—how do you think they’d like it to sit around and watch the crowd all going in to look at half a dozen stupid little peewees in red suits that can’t even turn a somersault?”

“But think of the money,” said Mr. Garble.

“You think of it,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “I’m thinking of my friends. We’re going straight up to Centerboro and give our first show there.”

But they didn’t. For the newspapers in Washington, as well as everywhere else in the country, had the story about the Martians in them, and the President happened to see a paper one day and he sent a high-up official in the State Department down to request Mr. Boomschmidt to stop in Washington and give a special performance for the Cabinet and the Members of the Congress. So the circus went straight up to Washington and put up the big tent and gave a performance right in the White House grounds.

Mr. Boomschmidt said they ought to give the performance free. Mr. Garble didn’t like that much. He couldn’t do anything about the main show, but when the crowd began filing in to see the Martians, he went and stood beside the door with some tickets in his hand. He hoped maybe the Congressmen would think they had to pay even if he didn’t ask them to. But they just pushed right past him, pretending not to see the tickets. The President was the only one who paid. He insisted on buying tickets for his wife and himself. He paid a dollar, and later Mr. Boomschmidt bought that dollar bill from Mr. Garble for a dollar and a half, and he had it framed and hung up beside the speedometer on the dashboard of his limousine. He was pretty proud of that dollar bill.

Two days after leaving the farm, the station wagon, with Uncle Ben and Mrs. Peppercorn on the front seat, and Jinx and Freddy bounding around on the back seat, came roaring down into Washington and stopped in front of the White House with a jerk that all but sent the entire party through the windshield.

“If there’s one thing I insist on in a car,” said Freddy sarcastically, feeling of his nose, which had banged hard into the seat-back in front of him, “it’s first-class brakes.”

Mrs. Peppercorn, who had been straightening her bonnet, which had been knocked over one eye, stopped and sat up straight. “I hear music,” she said.

Uncle Ben grinned. “Should think you might, ma’am,” he said. “Brakes little tight, seemingly. Made your ears ring.”

“By golly, it really is music!” said Jinx. “Yes sir—why, listen!” And he began to sing:

“Boom—be quick! Buy a ticket at the wicket!

Boom—get your pink lemonade. Get your gum!

Boom—get your peanuts, popcorn, lollypops—”

And then Freddy and Mrs. Peppercorn joined in:

“Boom—Mr. Boom—Mr. Boomschmidt’s come!”

It was the marching song of the circus, and as they watched, around the corner ahead of them came the big red limousine, and behind it, two by two, all the animals, with the elephants leading. On the back of old Hannibal rode the six Martians. They had little red handkerchiefs which they waved at the President, who waved back at them from the White House window; and all the Congressmen, who were grouped about the front porch, cheered and waved. There was some pushing and shoving to get in the front row, and one small Senator got knocked down and stepped on. He got mad and next day made a speech on the radio about it, saying that the President ought to have turned his back instead of saluting those Commies. “Waving their red flags right in front of the White House!” he shouted. “What is this country coming to?” But nobody paid any attention to him.

Uncle Ben started his engine, the station wagon gathered its wheels under it and bounded out into the middle of the street, spun around with a series of loud bangs, and ran jerkily alongside Mr. Boomschmidt’s car. Everybody in the station wagon tried to yell Hello—except of course Uncle Ben, who just touched his hat to Mlle. Rose—and Mr. Boomschmidt and Mlle. Rose tried to yell back, but the street was jammed with people, all of whom were cheering madly and waving to the Martians, so nobody could hear anything.

It was like that all the way north. Even when they took the back country roads, people seemed to get word somehow that the famous Martians were in the vicinity, and they came running across the fields and scrambling over fences and driving their cars cross-country, until the road would be so thick with them that the elephants had to be sent ahead to clear a way for the wagons.

At night they camped by the roadside. Mr. Boomschmidt put several small tents at the disposal of the party from the Bean farm, and they had pleasant evenings about the campfire, singing songs and telling stories. Mr. Garble seldom took part. He and Freddy had fought more than once, and indeed Mr. Garble was never a person that anyone cared to be friendly with. For that reason it was impossible for either Freddy or Mrs. Peppercorn to talk to the Martians about conditions on their home planet. Mr. Garble wouldn’t let them near the Martian wagon.

On the road Mr. Garble wanted to keep the Martians out of sight; he didn’t think people ought to see them unless they paid. But Mr. Boomschmidt said that as long as the circus couldn’t stop to give any shows he thought it would be mean to keep all these people from getting a look at them. At last, one evening by the campfire, when the exhausted Martians had gone to bed and most of the sightseers had left for home, Mr. Garble got really angry.

“You’re making us lose money,” he shouted. “These people are getting the Martians for nothing!”

“Oh, my gracious,” said Mr. Boomschmidt, “you got them for nothing yourself, didn’t you?”

“What’s that got to do with it?” asked Mr. Garble.

“Do with it!” Mr. Boomschmidt exclaimed. “Oh, dear me, why I should think it had everything to do with it. Wouldn’t you, Leo?” He appealed to the lion. “Why, here’s Mr. Garble saying that it hasn’t anything to do with it that he got the Martians for nothing.”

“Hasn’t anything to do with what?” the lion asked.

“That’s just it,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “He doesn’t say. Do with what, Mr. Garble? Oh, dear me, do please tell us, so we’ll have some idea what we’re talking about.”

This of course was just Mr. Boomschmidt’s usual way of winning an argument. He got his opponents so confused that they didn’t know finally what they had been talking about. And in the end they were quite likely to agree to something that they had been fighting hard against five minutes earlier.

Now Mr. Garble made the mistake of trying to set Mr. Boomschmidt right. “The fact that I got the Martians for nothing,” he said slowly, “has nothing—now wait a minute, I want to get this straight—has nothing to do with the fact that we’re losing money by letting these people see the Martians free.”

“Oh, dear, dear,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “Now really, I don’t think you’ve got it straight at all. Do you, Leo? Because we aren’t losing money, are we? You mean, if we shut the Martians up in their wagon, we’ll have more money at the end of the day than if we let them ride where everybody can see ’em? My, my! If you can show me how we can do that, I’ll say shut ’em up.”

“Oh, that isn’t it at all,” said Mr. Garble. “I just mean—” And then he stopped. “I mean—” he began, and stopped again. Then he made a dreadful face, put up his hands and pulled out two large handfuls of hair, and turned and walked slowly away.

“Well, you shut him up anyway, chief,” said Leo.

“For a little while, I guess,” said Mr. Boomschmidt. “But Freddy’s right: we’re going to have more trouble with him. Maybe this Martian show was a mistake.”