Mr. Popper's Penguins (5 page)

With a yell and a leap, the gentleman rose from his reclining position, left the barber’s chair, and fled into the street, not even stopping for his coat and hat.

“
Gaw!
” said Captain.

“Hey,” said the barber to Mr. Popper. “Take that thing out of my shop. This is no zoo. What’s the idea?”

“Do you mind if I take him out your back door?” asked Mr. Popper.

“Any door,” said the barber, “as long as it’s quick. Now it’s biting the teeth off my combs.”

Mr. Popper took Captain Cook in his arms, and amid cries of “
Quork?
” “
Gawk!
” and “
Ork!
” made his way out of the shop and its back room and out a door into an alley.

Captain Cook now discovered his first back stairway.

Mr. Popper discovered that when a penguin has found steps going up somewhere, it is absolutely impossible to keep him from climbing them.

“All right,” said Mr. Popper, panting up the steps behind Captain Cook. “I suppose, being a bird, and one that can’t fly, you have to go up in the air somehow, so you like to climb stairs. Well, it’s a good thing this building has only three stories. Come on. Let’s see what you can do.”

Slowly but unwearyingly, Captain Cook lifted one pink foot after another from one step to the next, followed by Mr. Popper at the other end of the clothesline.

At last they came to the top landing.

“Now what?” inquired Mr. Popper of Captain Cook.

Finding there were no more steps to climb, Captain Cook turned around and surveyed the steps that now went down.

Then he raised his flippers and leaned forward.

Mr. Popper, who was still panting for breath, had not supposed the determined bird would plunge so quickly. He should have remembered that penguins will toboggan whenever they get a chance.

Perhaps he had been unwise in tying one end of the clothesline to his own wrist.

At any rate, this time Mr. Popper found himself suddenly sliding, on his own white-clad stomach, down the three flights of steps. This delighted the penguin, who was enjoying his own slide just ahead of Mr. Popper.

When they reached the bottom, Captain Cook was so eager to go up again that Mr. Popper had to call a taxi, to distract him.

“432 Proudfoot Avenue,” said Mr. Popper to the driver.

The driver, who was a kind and polite man, did not laugh at his oddly assorted passengers until he had been paid.

“Oh dear!” said Mrs. Popper, when she opened the door to her husband. “You looked so neat and handsome when you started for your walk. And now look at the front of you!”

“I am sorry, my love,” said Mr. Popper in a humble tone, “but you can’t always tell what a penguin will do next.”

So saying, he went to lie down, for he was quite exhausted from all the unusual exercise, while Captain Cook had a shower and took a nap in the icebox.

N
EXT DAY THE PICTURE
of Mr. Popper and Captain Cook appeared in the Stillwater
Morning Chronicle,
with a paragraph about the house painter who had received a penguin by air express from Admiral Drake in the faraway Antarctic. Then the Associated Press picked up the story, and a week later the photograph, in rotogravure, could be seen in the Sunday edition of the most important newspapers in all the large cities in the country.

Naturally the Poppers all felt very proud and happy.

Captain Cook was not happy, however. He had suddenly ceased his gay, exploring little walks about the house, and would sit most of the day, sulking, in the refrigerator. Mrs. Popper had removed all the stranger objects, leaving only the marbles and checkers, so that Captain Cook now had a nice, orderly little rookery.

“He won’t play with us any more,” said Bill. “I tried to get some of my marbles from him, and he tried to bite me.”

“Naughty Captain Cook,” said Janie.

“Better leave him alone, children,” said Mrs. Popper. “He feels mopey, I guess.”

But it was soon clear that it was something worse than mopiness that ailed Captain Cook. All day he would sit with his little white-circled eyes staring out sadly from the refrigerator. His coat had lost its lovely, glossy look; his round little stomach grew flatter every day.

He would turn away now when Mrs. Popper would offer him some canned shrimps.

One evening she took his temperature. It was one hundred and four degrees.

“Well, Papa,” she said, “I think you had better call the veterinary doctor. I am afraid Captain Cook is really ill.”

But when the veterinary came, he only shook his head. He was a very good animal doctor, and though he had never taken care of a penguin before, he knew enough about birds to see at a glance that this one was seriously ill.

“I will leave you some pills. Give him one every hour. Then you can try feeding him on sherbet and wrapping him in ice packs. But I cannot give you any encouragement because I am afraid it is a hopeless case. This kind of bird was never made for this climate, you know. I can see that you have taken good care of him, but an Antarctic penguin can’t thrive in Stillwater.”

That night the Poppers sat up all night, taking turns changing the ice packs.

It was no use. In the morning Mrs. Popper took Captain Cook’s temperature again. It had gone up to one hundred and five.

Everyone was very sympathetic. The reporter on the
Morning Chronicle
stopped in to inquire about the penguin. The neighbors brought in all sorts of broths and jellies to try to tempt the little fellow. Even Mrs. Callahan, who had never had a very high opinion of Captain Cook, made a lovely frozen custard for him. Nothing did any good. Captain Cook was too far gone.

He slept all day now in a heavy stupor, and everyone was saying that the end was not far away.

All the Poppers had grown terribly fond of the funny, solemn little chap, and Mr. Popper’s heart was frozen with terror. It seemed to him that his life would be very empty if Captain Cook went away.

Surely someone would know what to do for a sick penguin. He wished that there were some way of asking advice of Admiral Drake, away down at the South Pole, but there was not time.

In his despair, Mr. Popper had an idea. A letter had brought him his pet. He sat down and wrote another letter.

It was addressed to Dr. Smith, the Curator of the great Aquarium in Mammoth City, the largest in the world. Surely if anyone anywhere had any idea what could cure a dying penguin, this man would.

Two days later there was an answer from the Curator. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “it is not easy to cure a sick penguin. Perhaps you do not know that we too have, in our aquarium at Mammoth City, a penguin from the Antarctic. It is failing rapidly, in spite of everything we have done for it. I have wondered lately whether it is not suffering from loneliness. Perhaps that is what ails your Captain Cook. I am, therefore, shipping you, under separate cover, our penguin. You may keep her. There is just a chance that the birds may get on better together.”

And that is how Greta came to live at 432 Proudfoot Avenue.

S
O
C
APTAIN
C
OOK
did not die, after all.

There were two penguins in the refrigerator, one standing and one sitting on the nest under the ice cubes.

“They’re as like as two peas,” said Mrs. Popper.

“As two penguins, you mean,” answered Mr. Popper.

“Yes, but which is which?”

At this moment the standing penguin jumped out of the icebox, reached inside and took one of the checkers from under the sitting penguin, whose eyes were closed in sleep, and laid it at Mr. Popper’s feet.

“See, Mamma, he’s thanking me,” said Mr. Popper, patting the penguin. “At the South Pole that’s the way a penguin shows its friendship, only it uses a stone instead of a checker. This one must be Captain Cook, and he’s trying to show that he’s grateful to us for getting him Greta and saving his life.”

“Yes, but how are we going to tell them apart? It’s very confusing.”

“I will go down in the cellar and get some white paint and paint their names on their black backs.”

And he opened the cellar door and started down, nearly tripping when Captain Cook unexpectedly tobogganed down after him. When he came up again, Mr. Popper had a brush and a small paint-can in his hands, while the penguin had a white CAPT. COOK on his back.

“
Gook!
” said Captain Cook, proudly showing his name to the penguin in the icebox.

“
Gaw!
” said the sitting Penguin, and then squirming around in her nest, she turned her back to Mr. Popper.

So Mr. Popper sat down on the floor in front of the icebox, while Captain Cook watched, first with one eye, then with the other.

“What are you going to call her?” asked Mrs. Popper.

“Greta.”

“It’s a nice name,” said Mrs. Popper, “and she seems like a nice bird, too. But the two of them fill the icebox, and pretty soon there will be eggs, and the next thing you know, the icebox won’t be big enough for your penguins. Besides, you haven’t done a thing about how I’m going to keep the food cold.”

“I will, my love,” promised Mr. Popper. “It is already pretty cold for the middle of October, and it will soon be cold enough outside for Captain Cook and Greta.”

“Yes,” said Mrs. Popper, “but if you keep them outside the house, they might run away.”

“Mamma,” said Mr. Popper, “you put your food back in the icebox tonight, and we will just keep Greta and Captain Cook in the house. Captain Cook can help me move the nest into the other room. Then I will open all the windows and leave them open, and the penguins will be comfortable.”

“They will be comfortable, all right,” said Mrs. Popper, “but what about us?”

“We can wear our winter overcoats and hats in the house,” said Mr. Popper, as he got up to go around and open all the windows.

“It certainly is colder,” said Mrs. Popper, sneezing.

The next few days were even colder, but the Poppers soon got used to sitting around in their overcoats. Greta and Captain Cook always occupied the chairs nearest the open windows.

One night, quite early in November, there was a blizzard, and when the Poppers got up in the morning, there were large drifts of snow all over the house.

Mrs. Popper wanted to get her broom and have Mr. Popper bring his snow shovel to clear away the drifts, but the penguins were having so much fun in the snow that Mr. Popper insisted it should be left where it was.

In fact, he even went so far as to bring an old garden hose up from the basement and sprinkle all the floors that night until the water was an inch deep. By the next morning all the Popper floors were covered with smooth ice, with snowdrifts around the edges near the open windows.

Both Greta and Captain Cook were tremendously pleased with all that ice. They would go up on the snowdrift at one end of the living room, and run down, one behind the other, onto the ice, until they were running too fast to keep their balance. Then they would flop on their stomachs and toboggan across the slippery ice.

This amused Bill and Janie so much that they tried it, too, on the stomachs of their overcoats. This in turn pleased the penguins greatly. Then Mr. Popper moved all the furniture in the living room to one side, so that the penguins and the children would have plenty of room for real sliding. It was a little hard at first to move the furniture, because the feet of the chairs had frozen into the ice.

Toward afternoon the weather got warmer and the ice began to melt “Now, Papa,” said Mrs. Popper, “you really must do something. We can’t go on like this.”