Freddy Goes to the North Pole (16 page)

“Yes,” said Mr. Bashwater as he hurled his harpoon again at the snow man, “and the men is contented, ain't they, Joel?”

“Ay, that they are,” said the boatswain. “Happy as larks, they are. And why, sir? Well, if you ask me—”

“We didn't ask you, Joel,” said Mr. Hooker quietly. “Don't forget that.”

“No, sir, now I come to think, you didn't. But I'll tell you anyway. They're happy because they get lots to eat and presents every day, and because they can lie abed o' mornin's, but mostly on account o' the ice cream.”

“The ice cream!” exclaimed the mate.

“Ay, sir. Y' see, our cookie is a good cook; I ain't breathin' a whisper against him. But he ain't no hand with a freezer; you know it yourself, sir. While Mr. Claus's ice cream—well, sir, I never tasted nothin' like it. It's grand, and that's the gospel truth.”

Jack did not wait to hear any more, but went up into the Present Room, where his friends were playing games. He told them what Joel had said. “And,” he added, “if we could do something to the ice cream so it wouldn't be so good, maybe the sailors would get homesick, and then they would leave of their own accord.”

The animals didn't think it was a very bright idea, but as it was the only one they had, they decided to try it out. Freddy, who spent a good deal of time in the kitchen and could come and go there without being noticed, went downstairs and presently returned with the inside part of the freezer under his fur coat. They put it on Mrs. Wiggins's left horn, and after several tries she managed to punch a hole through it. Then Freddy took it back. And that day at dinner the ice cream was so salty that no one could eat it.

The animals were greatly pleased when they looked down the long dining-room and saw the sailors waving their arms angrily and beating on the table with their spoons and heard the shouts of anger. “That'll fix 'em,” said Freddy. “If we can just keep them good and discontented, the captain'll have to take them back to the ship.” But unfortunately for their plot, Santa Claus, having found out the cause of the trouble, had an enormous bowl of caramel custard brought in to take the place of the ice cream. The animals, knowing that the ice cream would be bad, had all said they didn't want any dessert, so of course the caramel custard wasn't passed to them, and the sailors got it all.

“Well,” said Uncle William, “I guess we bit off our nose to spite our face that time.”

The animals all looked very glum—all but Ferdinand, who didn't care for sweets. He laughed. But Jinx said: “Well, we mustn't stop trying to think of something just because this failed. We've
got
to make them go away.”

All this time it was getting closer to Christmas. Every day the eagle came with a big sack of mail in his claws containing letters that children had written to Santa Claus. They had been forwarded by the postmasters in different cities to the Postmaster General in Washington, who kept a special sack for them. Letters that didn't go through the mail, but were put up chimneys and into fireplaces by their writers, were collected by birds and passed on from claw to claw until they reached some point on the eagle's route, where he stopped and picked them up. The toy-makers in the workshops were carving and whittling and sawing and hammering and gluing and painting for dear life; and the sailors worked all day in the wrapping-room, surrounded by piles of coloured paper and bales of ribbon and big boxes of stickers, wrapping up presents. Santa Claus got his sleigh out and gave it a fresh coat of red paint and greased the runners and shined up the harness. He was a little worried about one of his reindeer, who had gone lame as the result of a fall, but the reindeer himself wasn't worried. “I'll be all right Christmas Eve,” he said. “Sound as a dollar! Don't you fret, sir.”

The captain had become very fond of the mice. He carried them round in his pocket and petted them all the time, and as he was very handy at carving things with a jack-knife, he had made them a little merry-go-round that they never got tired riding on. In the evening he would take them up to his room, which was fitted up like the cabin of a ship, and put them on the table, and then he would play old-fashioned waltzes and polkas and mazurkas and schottisches on his flute, and they would dance for him. Then when it was ten o'clock, he would take them to their own room and tuck them up in bed. This was a little difficult for him, as the room was so small that he could only get his head and one arm through the door, but he enjoyed doing it very much.

They particularly liked it when he took them to the meetings of the board, because then he and Mr. Pomeroy and Mr. Bashwater all made long speeches at Santa Claus. They liked Mr. Bashwater's speeches best, because he made a great many gestures and banged on the table and was so eloquent that he was always bathed in perspiration when he finally sat down. They were a little sorry for Santa Claus, who always seemed to want to know what the speeches were about. They themselves, like most people, just enjoyed the speeches, without caring what they were about.

They were a little embarrassed when the other animals asked them what had been going on. “Oh, Mr. Bashwater made a fine long speech,” they'd answer.

“But what did he
say?
” Jinx would ask impatiently.

They'd think and think, and by and by Eeny would say: “We—e—ell, let me see; I guess it was about the advertising appropriation for 1931, wasn't it, Eek? Mr. Hooker wanted to use some of the big magazines, and Mr. Pomeroy said they were trying to reach children and not just people with childish minds, and then Mr. Bashwater made a long speech, and—Well, I don't know, but it was a swell speech, anyway.” And so the animals knew just as much as they did before they had asked.

But sometimes the captain took the mice down into the smoking-room where the sailors went to have what they called a night-cap before going to bed, and here they learned two very important things. The sailors sat in a big half-circle before the roaring fire, each with a cup of tea or a glass of hot milk in his hand, smoking and telling stories and munching on cookies and little sweet crackers. But all the stories were of three kinds: they were about whales, or about ghosts, or about buried treasure. When Ferdinand heard of this, he said: “H'm” several times very thoughtfully, and then he flew up on to the big chandelier in the Present Room and stood on one leg and put his head under his wing and meditated for nearly an hour.

The mice didn't think very much about it, because Ferdinand always said he was meditating when he did this, but they knew that usually it was only another way of saying that he was taking a nap. But that evening the crow called them together in a corner of the Present Room.

“I want you to tell me,” he said, “just what kind of ghost-stories the sailors tell.”

“Scary ones,” said Eeny; and Quik said: “Awful scary ones.” And Eeny said: “Mostly they're about figures in long white sheets that wail, and sometimes they're about voices that come out of the darkness, or about things that creep up behind and jump.”

“H'm,” said Ferdinand. “All these things take place at night, I suppose?”

“Oh, yes; late at night,” said Cousin Augustus. “Goodness, I wish they wouldn't tell so many of them. I used to like to run round at night; all mice do. But now whenever I'm up after twelve, I hear footsteps coming after me and at every corner see giant cats with phosphorescent eyes.”

“H'm,” said Ferdinand again. “That certainly gives me an idea.” So he went back and meditated again for a while, and then he called a meeting and told the animals about his plan and what he wanted each of them to do. “Go to your rooms at the usual time,” he said, “just as you always do. But don't go to bed. And on the stroke of midnight we'll all meet here, and if those sailors stay here after tonight—well, my name isn't Ferdinand.”

CHAPTER XIII

THE ANIMALS PLAY GHOSTS

Everyone in the big palace was sound asleep when the animals came one by one into the Present Room. The midnight adventure was so exciting and so funny that they laughed and whispered together until Ferdinand's “Ssssh!” quieted them. “Now no giggling,” he said severely. “You know this is a serious business. It may seem like a joke, but it isn't. All ready?”

They stole down a long corridor, through an archway and across a wide court, and then up a winding stair towards the sailors' wing. Half-way up the stair they became aware of a continuous steady murmur, which rose and fell rather like the distant roar of surf on a rocky coast. It was the sailors snoring.

“My goodness,” said Mrs. Wiggins, “we don't have to be very quiet.”

“We'll have to do a little groaning first, to wake them up,” said Ferdinand. “Mrs. W., you and the bear can do that better than the rest of us. Go up and groan outside the doors. And the rest of you be getting your costumes on and your things ready.”

So the cow and the bear went up into the long hall with its many doors, behind each of which two sailors were asleep, and began to groan. They groaned low at first, but they couldn't even hear themselves above the snoring. Then they groaned louder, and louder still. And still the snoring went on uninterrupted. Even when Mrs. Wiggins let out a good full-throated bellow, it made no impression at all.

The animals didn't know what to do. “We can't scare 'em if we can't wake 'em up,” said Bill.

“I can wake 'em up,” said Charles. “If I crow, they'll think it's morning.” So Charles crowed, and the snoring died down like the sound an airplane makes when it leaves the earth and disappears slowly in the sky, and the sound of sleepy voices came from the rooms: “Hey, Bill, time to get up.” “Wake up, Ed.” “Why, it's only half past twelve.” “What's that noise?” “'Tain't morning yet.” And so on.

Then the six largest animals, who had dressed themselves in sheets and had false faces on, each opened one of the doors and stood on their hind legs and walked into the bedrooms, while the other animals in the hall made all the frightening noises they could think of, only not so loud that their voices would be recognized.

As soon as the sailors heard the noises and looked towards the doors and saw the tall sheeted figures with their ferocious goblin faces coming slowly towards them, they all let out terrific yells and pulled the bed-clothes up over their heads. They pulled them up so hard that their bare feet were uncovered, and the animals came up to the beds and gently nipped the sailor's toes with their teeth. Then the sailors all yelled again and tumbled out of the beds and tried to get under them. But as the beds weren't very wide, there wasn't quite room for two underneath, so the sailors fought each other and tried to push each other out into the rooms. And while they were doing that, the animals went back into the hall and closed the doors softly behind them.

They pulled them up so hard that their bare feet were uncovered.

Mr. Pomeroy slept in a room at the head of the stairs with Mr. Bashwater. Now, each of the animals had scared two sailors, and as each sailor yelled twice, you will see that there were twenty-four yells in all. And twenty-four yells, from sailors whose throats have been toughened by the gales of the seven seas, are loud enough to wake up the soundest sleepers. So they woke Mr. Pomeroy and Mr. Bashwater.

Mr. Pomeroy came to the door and opened it. Directly in front of him he saw a huge white form whose wildly grinning face was topped by two horns. He didn't know that the form was his old friend Hank, or that the two horns were Hank's ears, for which holes had been cut in the sheet. He fell backward with a scream into the arms of Mr. Bashwater, who, as soon as Mr. Pomeroy's fall gave him an unobstructed view of the door, also fell backward, and there they lay on their backs inside the door, Mr. Pomeroy's head on Mr. Bashwater's chest.

But these two were of sterner stuff than the other sailors, and as soon as they had mustered up courage to open their eyes and saw that the door was closed and the dreadful apparition had vanished, they got up, and Mr. Pomeroy went to the speaking-tube that connected his room with Mr. Hooker's, and blew in it.