Freddy and the Bean Home News Page 4

  Mr. Dimsey thought this was a fine idea. He left Hank to finish the garden by himself and went in to set type, and Freddy started off to hunt up a reporter.

  Henrietta’s aunt was an elderly hen named Abigail, who lived with old Miss Halsey on Elm Street. Anything that old Miss Halsey didn’t know about what went on in Centerboro wasn’t worth knowing, and whatever Miss Halsey knew, Aunt Abigail knew too, for the old lady talked to the hen as if she was a human being. The townspeople said that the two looked so much alike that if Abigail was a little bigger, and wore an old-fashioned bonnet, you couldn’t tell them apart. They were certainly alike in one way: they both hated not to know everything that was going on.

  Miss Halsey always sat in her front window, peeking out through the curtains. And as Freddy didn’t want to be seen, he went in through the back gate, and found Abigail sitting in the sun on the south side of her little coop.

  “Hello, Aunt Abby,” said Freddy. All the animals called her Aunt Abby.

  “Well, deary me,” said Abigail, “if it isn’t Freddy! Bless my soul, how you have grown since I saw you last.”

  “Oh, do you think so?” said Freddy. “I’m not any taller.”

  “You’re a lot fatter,” said Abigail bluntly.

  Freddy was rather touchy about his weight, but he changed the subject quickly and said that as he’d been in town, he thought he’d just drop in and pay his respects.

  “Why, that’s very thoughtful of you,” said Abigail. “But you always were thoughtful, even as a little squealer. Why Henrietta couldn’t have picked out someone like you, instead of that Charles! Talk, talk, talk, from morning to night; I should think he’d drive her to distraction. But how is Henrietta getting on? I haven’t heard from her in months. And how are the good Beans, and all the animals?”

  Freddy started to say that they were all well, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “Of course I read about the wedding in your paper. And so you’re an editor now? Dear me, such an interesting career, journalism, I always think. I’ve sometimes thought that I might have done well in it.”

  “I’m sure you would,” said Freddy, “and it’s too bad that you haven’t some newspaper experience, for I need someone really clever now to help me.” And he told her about the Centerboro column he planned to run in the Bean Home News. “But of course,” he said, “I’m afraid you wouldn’t do for the job.”

  There was a contrary streak in Abigail, as there is in most hens, and Freddy knew that if he asked her straight out, she would probably refuse. But if she thought he didn’t want her, she would be determined to get the job. And that was the way it worked out.

  “Well!” she exclaimed. “I don’t know why I wouldn’t do! I flatter myself I know as much about what happens in Centerboro as anybody you could find.” And she began telling him some of the gossip. Did he know that the Reverend Dr. Wintersip of the First Methodist Church, had the measles? Did he know that Mr. Weezer, the President of the Centerboro Bank, was going to marry Miss Biles, the Assistant Cashier? Did he know that Jonas Harrington fell off a ladder and broke his leg, and then picked himself up, and with the broken leg under his arm, hopped two blocks home on the other one—

  “What?” said Freddy.

  “It was his wooden leg, of course,” said Abigail.

  “Oh,” said Freddy.

  And did Freddy know about Miss Burnham and the burglar, and about the fight at town meeting when Major Sibney had hit old Mr. Lawrence over the head with his ear trumpet?

  “Ah, there it is,” said Freddy. “You see, if you had had experience, you’d know that we couldn’t use that last item. We don’t want to print unpleasant things.”

  “Pleasant or unpleasant,” snapped Abigail, “it happened, and it’s news.”

  “Quite true,” said Freddy. “And yet it could cause trouble. Probably Major Sibney was sorry afterwards, and probably he and Mr. Lawrence made up their quarrel and are good friends again. But if this came out in the paper, it would start it up all over again. You see, your lack of experience—”

  But Abigail continued to argue, and gradually Freddy allowed himself to be persuaded. And when he left a little later, all arrangements were made, and Abigail was pretty pleased with her success in persuading Freddy to take her on.

  It was unfortunate that on his way back to Mr. Dimsey’s, Freddy went past the Busy Bee dry goods store just at the moment when Mrs. Humphrey Underdunk was getting out of her limousine in front of that establishment. The chauffeur held the car door open for Mrs. Underdunk, and she swept majestically across the sidewalk and ran smack into Freddy, who had turned to wave to his old friend, the sheriff.

  She swept majestically across the sidewalk.

  “Oh, I beg your pardon,” said Freddy.

  “Clumsy idiot!” exclaimed Mrs. Underdunk. Then she stared at Freddy. “Why, it’s a pig!” she exclaimed. “I declare, this town is becoming impossible! Pigs running wild in the streets! Sheriff, sheriff! I want something done about this. Who owns that pig?”

  “I’m Mr. Bean’s pig,” said Freddy. “And I’m very sorry I ran into you.”

  “Oh, so you’re that pig!” exclaimed Mrs. Underdunk, glaring at him. “H’m, well I think we’ve had about enough of you.”

  “Freddy ain’t running wild, ma’am,” said the sheriff. “Nobody ever complained about him before.”

  “Well, I’m complaining about him now,” she snapped. “There’s a law about animals running wild in the streets. And there’s another law, that dangerous animals must be shot.”

  The sheriff laughed good-naturedly. “Freddy’s about as dangerous as a pint of milk,” he said, and Freddy looked a little glum, for no animal, or person either, likes to be thought as harmless as all that. But the sheriff went on. “Aside from that, he’s done the gentlemanly thing and apologized. I don’t believe any lions or tigers would be as polite as that.”

  “Your views on lions and tigers are of no interest to me,” said Mrs. Underdunk. “I demand that this animal be locked up. Main Street is not a barnyard. I expect you to get in touch with his owner at once, and see that this is done.”

  The sheriff looked down at the silver star on his vest and polished it with his sleeve. “Well now, ma’am,” he said softly, “it ain’t for you to give me such orders, and if it was, I wouldn’t carry them out. I don’t say this because Freddy here is a special friend of mine, although he is. If he breaks the law, I take him to jail. But he ain’t broke any law I know of. You think it over, ma’am, and when you cool off—”

  “You might do well to remember, sheriff,” said Mrs. Underdunk, “that I have some influence in this town. And I understand that you come up for election again this fall. There are some people who are not too well satisfied with the way you perform your duties—particularly the way you run the jail. If all the facts were to be looked into—”

  “Just a minute, ma’am,” interrupted the sheriff. “I don’t like threats. So let’s have this clear. You’re tellin’ me that you’re going to have the Guardian publish some criticisms of me, is that it?”

  “I certainly intend to ask the editor to investigate the facts,” said Mrs. Underdunk. “If they are unfavorable, that is your lookout.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the sheriff. “Then I see no need for prolongin’ this interview. You get your facts, and I’ll get mine. Because there’s some folks in town that’d like to know how come you got so much gasoline to go shopping with, when you live within ten minutes’ walk of the stores. Good day, ma’am.”

  He lifted his hat, and Mrs. Underdunk compressed her lips and walked off. But she did not go into the Busy Bee. She went up the stairs to the Guardian office.

  Freddy and the sheriff walked on together. “Gosh, sheriff,” said the pig, “I’m sorry that happened. Why couldn’t you have pretended to chase me out of town. Could it be bad for you if she did what she said?”

  “She owns the newspaper, and that gives her a lot of influence,” said the sheriff. “And she’s r
ich—there’s lots of ways she could put the pressure on. Yes, I expect she could lose me my job. Not that I’d mind so much for myself—it’s the boys in the jail I’m thinking of. I’m pretty easy on ’em—lettin’ ’em out to the movies and giving them parties and so on. But most of ’em ain’t really bad, and when I turn ’em out, I usually manage to make good citizens of ’em. But put a real tough sheriff in there, and they’d have a bad time. But don’t you worry, Freddy. I got a trick or two up my sleeve yet.”

  “Well, I hope so,” said Freddy. “I’ll drop in and see you next time I’m in town. Now I’ve got to go help Mr. Dimsey.”

  Chapter 6

  There was an ant named Jerry Peters who lived in a big ant hill near the henhouse. Ants are worthy citizens, but they are not, as a rule, very much fun. They work hard from dawn to dusk seven days a week without even stopping for lunch, and they despise all creatures who do not work as hard as they do. Since there are no animals or insects that work as hard as they do, they despise nearly everybody. And as for games and jokes, I don’t suppose there is a man living who has ever seen an ant laugh.

  But this Jerry Peters was different. On warm sunny days you would often find him lolling comfortably under the shade of a dandelion leaf, leaning back with his feelers clasped behind his head and his six legs crossed, and the little brown beetle which he kept as a pet, crouched at his feet. The beetle’s name was Fido, and he was devoted to his master. He was not much bigger than the head of a pin, but his heart belonged to Jerry.

  Or sometimes Jerry would go off, with Fido at his heels, for a long aimless ramble about the farm. The other ants could not see that he brought back anything of practical value from these excursions, since to them the discovery of something new and different which could not be eaten, or an interesting exchange of experience with a chance-met grasshopper, was a complete waste of time. But though they considered him a loafer, they never argued with him, for argument too was a waste of time. And if they pushed him contemptuously aside when he got in the way, Jerry didn’t mind. He just went and took a nap somewhere else.

  But Jerry was no fool. The summer before, in the course of his explorations, he had wandered into the pigpen, and had been very curious about the papers and books on Freddy’s desk. He had hidden in a crack and watched for a week. He had seen Freddy typewriting, and then heard him read over what was written, and then he had put two and two together and one day came up over the edge of the page and waved his feelers.

  “Hey!” said Freddy. “Go away, ant, I’m busy. I … What is it?” he said, as Jerry continued to wave. “You want something? O. K. let’s have it.” And he put his ear down as close as he could get it. But all he could hear was a faint whispering.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Your voice is too small. Wait a minute, though! We need a megaphone.” He took a sheet of paper and rolled it into a cone. Then he put the small end close to the ant and put the big end at his ear. And Jerry’s voice came quite clearly. “I want to learn to read,” he said.

  “You want—what?” said Freddy. “Learn to read? What on earth for?”

  “So I can read, stupid,” said Jerry. “What else would I want to learn for?”

  “H’m,” said Freddy; “well, I suppose that is a good reason. But—”

  “Now don’t give me a lot of stuff about what use will it be for me,” interrupted Jerry. “Because I like things that aren’t any use to me. Such as watching the clouds on a summer day, or taking walks to nowhere in particular, or listening to the wind in the grass. And as far as I can see, reading is just another of those things.”

  “Not at all,” said Freddy rather stiffly. “Reading is the—h’m, the gateway to knowledge. It opens up the—ha, the portals of wisdom. It permits you to share the thoughts of all great thinkers of the past—”

  “Such as what?” said the ant.

  “Eh?” said Freddy.

  “What thoughts?” said Jerry. “What are some of these great thoughts? You read a lot. Give me just one great thought you’ve got out of your reading.”

  “Well, naturally,” said Freddy, “you can’t just offhand pick out one. There’s Shakespeare, for instance, whose Complete-Works-in-One-Volume I possess. Shakespeare is full of great thoughts—”

  “Such as?” said the ant.

  “See here,” said Freddy, “you—whatever your name is—I’m not going to be cross-examined by an ant. You say you want to learn to read. Very good, very praiseworthy. But you can’t ex pect me to give you the results of my wide reading in two minutes. If you want to know these things, learn to read and then read them for yourself.”

  “That’s just what I want to do,” said Jerry. “Look, I didn’t mean to be fresh. I’ve just got the idea from watching you that reading was fun, and I thought I’d like it. I don’t want to work. I don’t like work. And what’s more, I don’t see that it gets you anything, either. Look at my family. Work, work, work—and what has it ever got them? Just more work, that’s all. Well, what fun is there in that?”

  “None,” said Freddy. “I quite agree with you. And yet, there’s something wrong about your argument, too. For instance, I write poetry.” He paused a moment for Jerry to express gratification at meeting so distinguished a pig, but as the ant didn’t say anything, he went on. “Now that is work, and pretty hard work, too. And yet it’s fun. Eh? How about that?”

  Freddy always liked this kind of argument, and could go on for hours without ever getting anywhere. Which was an advantage in a way, because if it had ever got anywhere it would have to stop. But in Jerry he had met someone who was just as good as he was.

  “You say your work is fun,” said the ant. “But if it’s fun then it can’t be work. It can’t be both.”

  Well, the argument went on for a long time, but I don’t know that we need to follow it any further. In the end, Freddy agreed to teach Jerry to read, and the lessons began that day. Freddy had taught most of the Bean animals, and was a pretty good teacher, and Jerry could learn when he put his mind to it, and whether it was work or fun, by the end of the summer he could read almost anything. Freddy would open a book and Jerry would walk along the line of print. When he came to a word he didn’t understand, Freddy would tell him what it meant, and Jerry would go on. Often Freddy would leave a book or a magazine open on the desk, when he was going out, and Jerry would read along until he got to a word he didn’t know, and then he would just lie down on it and go to sleep till Freddy came back. Or if he wasn’t very sleepy, he would try to teach Fido to read. But it wasn’t much use. I guess anybody as small as Fido is too small to be a very good student.

  Freddy got very fond of Jerry Peters. They spent hours arguing about nothing much, and talking about nothing in particular. Freddy made a big funnel out of brown paper and hung it up on the wall, and when they wanted to talk, Jerry would go down into the little end of the funnel and then his voice would come out almost as loud as Freddy’s. And at last, along in the fall, Jerry asked if he and Fido couldn’t come and live in the pigpen that winter.

  “You see,” he said, “in winter the ants all stay underground. It’s dark and gloomy, and there’s nothing to read, and there’s a kind of general atmosphere at work that’s very depressing. We wouldn’t take up much room. And of course we wouldn’t expect you to entertain us or anything; you’d just go your way and we’d go ours.”

  Freddy’s experience with guests had been that they expected to be entertained a lot, and that when they weren’t being entertained, they expected you to be feeding them. But Jerry didn’t care about parties, and feeding him was no problem, for one gumdrop would keep him going for six months. As for Fido, I guess food rationing wouldn’t have bothered him much either, for it would probably have taken him his entire lifetime to work through a jelly bean. As it turned out, they both lived very well on the crumbs they found in Freddy’s old armchair, which of course had never had a cleaning since Freddy got it. In fact, Jerry said afterwards that he had never had such a variety of good meal
s before, for there were crumbs of all sorts of cookies and cake, and bits of pie and candy.… He said if the other ants found out about it they would certainly leave their hill and move into the armchair. Freddy said it made him itch just to think of it.

  Of course Jerry had to stay indoors all winter, but as soon as spring came and it began to get warm, he was anxious to get out. It was still too wet underfoot for an ant to go anywhere, so Freddy took him. He rode on the tip of Freddy’s ear, and when he wanted to say anything, he would shout it down the ear, and then Freddy would answer him. At first it seemed pretty funny to the other animals to see Freddy walking around, apparently talking to himself, and some of his friends thought he was getting queer and began worrying about him. And as often happens in such cases, they were so worried that they just talked among themselves about it and didn’t say anything to Freddy.

  One morning—it was the day after the second issue of the Bean Home News came out—Freddy and Jerry were coming down past the back porch of the farmhouse, busily discussing an idea Freddy was working out for his paper. Freddy thought he would take some of the old familiar poems, and rewrite them for animals. He had started to rewrite one:

  Breathes there a pig with soul so dead

  Who never to himself hath said:

  “This is my own, my native pen?”

  Whose heart has ne’er within him burned

  As home his trotters he has turned

  From wandering in the world of men?

  Jerry didn’t like the idea. He thought Freddy ought to write original poems, his own poems,—not try to fix up something that had been written by someone else. He thought Freddy’s poems were much finer than those he wanted to rewrite.

  “Nonsense!” said Freddy modestly. “That poem is by Sir Walter Scott. I may be good, but I’m not as good as Scott and Longfellow and Shakespeare. No, no, my dear fellow,” he said, “you have much too high an opinion of my feeble verses.”