Читать книгу Freddy and the Men From Mars - Walter Rollin Brooks - Страница 5

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The circus was nearly ten days getting up to Centerboro, and in all that time Freddy didn’t find a single chance to talk to the Martians. Mr. Garble chased him away with a stick. But it wasn’t so easy to chase Mrs. Peppercorn away.

“See here, young Herbert,” she said to him, the first time he warned her away from the wagon in which the Martians were living, “don’t you give me any of your sass. You stand aside and let me talk to these critters.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Mr. Garble, “but we can’t have the Martians annoyed by idle curiosity. If there’s anything you wish to know about them, you may address yourself to me.”

“Oh, I may!” she said sarcastically. “When I had you in the fifth grade and addressed myself to you, I don’t seem to remember that you ever knew the answers to anything.”

Mr. Garble turned a little red, for a number of animals had come up to see what the argument was about, and Mrs. Peppercorn had indeed been his fifth-grade teacher, and knew a lot of things about him that were not entirely to his credit. But he stood his ground. “That was a long time ago,” he said.

“Not so long that I’ve forgotten a lot of pretty silly things,” she retorted. “Remember when you were reading something about ‘the land of Egypt’ and you called it ‘the land of Egg-wiped’?”

“I did that a’purpose,” said Mr. Garble sullenly. “I was trying to be funny.”

“Land sakes, you never had to try! Remember that little Ella Tingley you were so sweet on?” She looked around at her audience, which now numbered nearly a dozen—among them Hercules Boomschmidt. “This will amuse you, Mr. Hercules,” she said. She always called him Mr. Hercules, though everyone else just called him Herc. “This here Herbie Garble, he gave Ella a five-cent bag of gum drops. But then I guess he got to wishin’ he’d kept it himself—he wasn’t ever much of a hand for being generous—and he sneaked back in during recess and reached in her desk where he’d seen her put it. But I guess Ella sort of figured what might happen, and she’d set a mouse-trap which it went snap! on Herbie’s finger. Well, sir, he set up the most awful roaring and bawling you ever heard. Ella was watching behind the door and I guess she felt sorry for him, for she came in and put her arm around him, and he—well, Herbert, you remember, don’t you?—you kicked her. And then—”

But Mr. Garble, who had been getting redder and redder, was now a deep purple, and he shouted suddenly: “Oh, shut up!” And then he turned and shoved through the ring of laughing animals, which was now two deep, and hurried off.

Mrs. Peppercorn smiled at her audience. “There’s a lot of things Herbie don’t like being reminded of. And I guess,” she added, “there ain’t anybody knows more about ’em than me. Keep me from talking to his Martians! Just let him try!”

“You started to tell about after he kicked her,” said Willy, the boa constrictor.

“That’s the part he didn’t want me to tell,” she said. “Why, Ella, she had kind of a temper, and she picked up a bottle of mucilage and emptied it over his head. Of course his mother washed it out when he got home. But I don’t know, he was kind of sticky all the rest of the year. The other children claimed that he stuck to things. Some said he stuck particularly to small things that didn’t belong to him.

“There was another funny thing, too,” she added. “They never got that mucilage smell out of him. After all these years, at night when the air gets damp, he still smells of it a little.”

“Don’t seem to me you ought to talk that way behind his back,” said Andrew, the hippo, mildly.

“Oh, it don’t?” she snapped. “Well, you bring him back here and I’ll say it to his face. I’ve done that often enough, just the same as all the other teachers he ever had. Miss Plaskett, she had him in the seventh grade, she used to make him turn out his pockets every half hour. She said you’d be surprised what you’d find. She said she wished she had him for a piggy bank—she could quit teaching.”

Mr. Hercules suddenly began making strange sounds. “Huh!” he said in his deep voice. “Huh—huh!” Although he looked so much like Mr. Boomschmidt, he wasn’t really like him at all. His mind was as slow and heavy as his brother’s was quick, and he had only one expression on his face where Mr. Boom had a hundred. Now his face didn’t change at all, but the animals knew he was laughing. “Huh, huh!” he grunted. “Caught in a mouse-trap! Uh, uh!” He had just begun to laugh about the mouse-trap; in an hour or so he would get to the mucilage and begin to laugh about that. He wasn’t very quick to get a joke but when he did get it, it stayed got. He would be rumbling with laughter about this for a week.

Now with Mr. Garble out of the way there was nothing to prevent Mrs. Peppercorn from interviewing the Martians. She went over to the wagon which had been fitted up as a house for them. Of course it was only a wild-animal cage with bars on the sides, but there were six little beds at one end, with red coverlets, and on six pegs over them hung six small red nightshirts. In the middle was a doll’s dinner table, Martian size, which was about four inches high, with a red checked tablecloth and dishes and silver and everything. At the other end was their living room, with six little overstuffed chairs, and a table on which was a vase with forget-me-nots in it. There were a lot of other things scattered about; on the wall there were even pictures of the solar system and of the planets and the moon and so on. At one end was a little door, so that the Martians could get in and out. It wouldn’t have been safe for them to walk around the grounds when the crowds were there, but sometimes late at night two or three of them might be seen strolling about, arm in arm.

One of the Martians got up from his chair and came over towards Mrs. Peppercorn. He walked oddly, she thought, like a dog walking on its hind legs. He was dressed all in red, he even had red gloves on his tiny hands and red cloth shoes on his long feet, and his black beady eyes stared at her expressionlessly over a fluff of red whiskers that hid all but the tip of his extremely long nose. He bowed to her, rubbing his hands together—and looking, she thought, very much like Mr. Metacarpus, the floor-walker in the Busy Bee in Centerboro.

“Yes, madam?” he said politely.

“You speaka da Eenglish?” Mrs. Peppercorn demanded in a loud voice. Since she was speaking to a foreigner, Mrs. Peppercorn, like many other people, thought that in order to be understood she would have to shout, and because his English was probably bad, she thought he would understand if she spoke bad English too. Nobody knows why people do this in addressing a foreigner, but it is a fact that they always do. Some people even talk baby talk to them.

“Yes, madam,” replied the Martian. “I speak English. And I am indeed happy to welcome you to our little home from home, our little corner of Mars in your wonderful America.” His voice was oily, and he bowed in a humble way when he had finished.

“Land sakes!” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “Why you do speak English real good. Understand you learned it here?”

“We have made many trips to your beautiful country, yes.”

“Well, I tried hard enough to get to yours last summer. But our space ship pilot, he got sort of mixed up and landed us back on earth.”

“Ah, yes,” said the Martian. “I have heard of this. You are, I believe, Mrs. Cornpopper?”

“Peppercorn, Peppercorn!” said the old lady sharply. “And how might you be called?”

“It is a little hard to pronounce for an earth dweller,” he said. “In Martian, it is spelled S-i-m-g-h-k.”

“Goodness!” said Mrs. Peppercorn.

“The i is silent,” he added helpfully.

“The whole thing can stay silent for all of me,” she replied. “Well, Mr. Martian, what’s it like on Mars? We’re planning to try again to get there, and we’d sort of like to know what we’ll find. Folks be pleasant to us, you think?”

“Perhaps they would ask you to join a circus,” he said.

Mrs. Peppercorn frowned and stared at him suspiciously. “You get funny with me, young man,” she said, “and you’ll get your ears boxed.”

“Oh, ma’am!” he said. “How can you imagine I would attempt to poke fun at so talented a lady? No, no, madam; I and my fellow Martians consider ourselves most fortunate in having been asked to join a circus. We wish to travel and see your country, to observe your manners and customs—and what better way could we have found?”

“Well, I expect maybe that’s so,” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “If you don’t mind being stared at, and probably poked and prodded, by a lot a zanies who’re never so happy as when they’re peekin’ through somebody else’s keyhole.”

“Curiosity towards other worlds is only natural,” said the Martian. “It was curiosity that brought us here, just as it was curiosity that made you try to reach Mars last summer. I’m told you took a pig with you. That seemed to us, back on Mars—excuse me, tee-hee”—he tittered behind his hand—“that seemed funny. Hardly an animal that we would choose for company on a long trip—”

“Now just stop right there,” said Mrs. Peppercorn. “Nobody’s going to miscall that pig when I’m around. He’s the most famous pig in the country, and he’s my friend, and I’m proud of it. You mean to say that up on Mars you’ve never heard of Freddy?”

“Freddy?” The Martian shook his head. “Freddy,” he said thoughtfully. “No ... no, can’t say I have. Though, wait!” He slapped his forehead with his hand. “Yes, we have heard of an obscure detective of that name. Up in York State, wasn’t it? Tried to set himself up in the poetry business, didn’t he? Of course! How we laughed! The poetic pig! Oh, dear, ma’am,” he said suddenly, “I’m afraid I’ve offended you. Do not be angry, I beg. We are so ignorant of your earthly ways. I’m sure he must be a wonderful poet.”

“Well, well, don’t overdo it,” said Mrs. Peppercorn impatiently. “He’s a good poet, I don’t deny. Good, sound rhymes, maybe a little ordinary by the highest standards. I expect he just tries to do too much. He flies his own plane, he runs the First Animal Bank, and as a detective—well, there ain’t anybody can touch him in the whole country. I give him that. But you can’t do that and be a poet, too. No, sir, my idea of poetry is something that everybody ain’t done before. You don’t use the old rhymes, like ‘love’ and ‘dove’ and ‘eyes’ and ‘sighs.’ You make words rhyme that nobody has ever rhymed before. Like, say, in ‘The Night Before Christmas.’ It goes like this:

“ ‘’Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house

Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.’

“Well, sir, that’s the kind of rhymes Freddy uses. But the way I’d write it, it goes like this:

“ ‘All through the house ’twas the night before Christmas.

Not a creature

Would meet yer,

Neither Mr. nor Miss Mouse.’ ”

“Phooey!” said the Martian. The five other Martians, who had been dozing in their chairs, sat up with a jerk. “You can’t make such horrible verses in this house,” one of them muttered angrily.

But Mrs. Peppercorn went right on. “Now, what have you got?” she said. “Instead of one ordinary rhyme: ‘house’ and ‘mouse,’ you’ve got two brand new ones: ‘creature’ and ‘meet yer,’ and ‘Christmas’ and ‘Miss Mouse.’

“Now let me recite for you my poem about the universe. It isn’t very long, only about seven thousand verses, and every one of ’em as bright and clear as a new penny.

“Some stars are large, some stars are small,

And some are quite invisiball ...”

Two hours later when the dinner bell rang over in the big dining tent, all six Martians were asleep in their overstuffed chairs, and Mrs. Peppercorn was on line 5,226 of her long poem. And she hadn’t found out a single thing about what life was like on Mars.