Mr. Popper's Penguins (8 page)

It had been decided that Mr. Popper should ride in the baggage car with the penguins to keep them from getting nervous, while Mrs. Popper and the children should ride in one of the Pullmans. Because of getting on at the observation end of the train, Mr. Popper had to take the birds through the whole length of the train.

It was easy enough to get them through the club car, even with the pail of fish to carry. In the sleeping cars, however, where the porter was already making up some of the berths, there was trouble.

The porters’ ladders offered too much temptation to the penguins.

There were a dozen happy
Orks
from a dozen ecstatic beaks. Popper’s Performing Penguins, completely forgetting their discipline, fought to climb the ladders and get into the upper berths.

Poor Mr. Popper! One old lady screamed that she was going to get off the train, whether it was going ninety miles an hour or not. A gentleman wearing a clergyman’s collar suggested opening a window, so that the penguins could jump out. Two porters tried to shoo the birds out of the berths. Finally the conductor and the brakeman, with a lantern, came to the rescue.

It was quite a while before Mr. Popper got his pets safely into the baggage car.

Mrs. Popper worried a little, at the start, over the idea of having Janie and Bill miss ten weeks of school while they were on the road, though the children did not seem to mind.

“And you must remember, my love,” said Mr. Popper, who had never before been out of Stillwater, in spite of his dreams of distant countries, “that travel is very broadening.”

From the start the penguins were a riotous success. Even their opening performance in Seattle went off without a hitch — probably because they had already rehearsed on a real stage.

It was here that the penguins added a little novelty number of their own to the program. They were the first thing on the bill. When they finished their regular act, the audience went wild. They clapped and stamped and roared for more of Popper’s Performing Penguins.

Janie and Bill helped their father herd the penguins off the stage, so that the next act could go on.

This next act was a tightrope walker, named Monsieur Duval. The trouble was that instead of watching him from the wings, as they should have done, the penguins got interested and walked out on the stage again to watch him more closely.

Unfortunately at this moment Monsieur Duval was doing a very difficult dance on the wire overhead.

The audience, of course, had thought that the penguins were all through, and were very much pleased to see them return and line up with their backs to the audience and look up at Monsieur Duval, dancing so carefully on the wire high above them.

This made everyone laugh so hard that Monsieur Duval lost his balance.

“
Ork!
” said the penguins waddling away hurriedly, in order not to be under him when he fell.

Cleverly recovering his balance, Monsieur Duval caught the wire by the inside of his elbow and saved himself. He was very angry when he saw the Popper Performing Penguins opening wide their twelve red beaks, as if they were laughing at him.

“Go away, you stupid things,” he said to them in French.

“
Ork?
” said the penguins, pretending not to understand, and making remarks to each other in penguin language about Monsieur Duval.

And whenever they appeared, the more they interfered with the other acts on the program the better the audiences liked them.

T
HE BIRDS SOON BECAME
so famous that whenever it was known that the Popper Performing Penguins were to appear at any theater, the crowds would stand in line for half a mile down the street, waiting their turn to buy tickets.

The other actors on the program were not always so pleased, however. Once, in Minneapolis, a celebrated lady opera singer got very much annoyed when she heard that the Popper Penguins were to appear on the same program. In fact, she refused to go on the stage unless the penguins were put away. So the stage hands helped Mr. and Mrs. Popper and the children get the birds off the stage and downstairs to a basement under the stage, while the manager guarded the stage entrance to make sure that the penguins did not get past.

Down in the basement, the birds soon discovered another little flight of steps going up; and in another minute the audience was shrieking with laughter, as the penguins’ heads suddenly appeared, one by one, in the orchestra pit, where the musicians were playing.

The musicians kept on playing, and the lady on the stage, when she saw the penguins, sang all the louder to show how angry she was. The audience was laughing so hard that nobody could hear the words of her song.

Mr. Popper, who had followed the penguins up the stairs, stopped when he saw that it led to the orchestra pit.

“I don’t think I’m supposed to go up there with the musicians,” he told Mrs. Popper.

“The penguins did,” said Mrs. Popper.

“Papa, you’d better get them off before they start biting the pegs and strings off the fiddles,” said Bill.

“Oh dear, I just don’t know what to do,” said Mr. Popper, sitting down helplessly on the top step.

“Then
I
will catch the penguins,” said Mrs. Popper, climbing up past him, with Janie and Bill following.

When they saw Mrs. Popper coming after them, the penguins felt very guilty, because they knew they did not belong there. So they jumped up on the stage, ran over the footlights, and hid under the singing lady’s blue skirts.

That stopped the singing entirely except for one high, shrill note that had not been written in the music.

The birds loved the bright lights of the theater, and the great, laughing audiences, and all the traveling. There was always something new to see.

From Stillwater out to the Pacific coast they traveled. It was a long way now to the little house at 432 Proudfoot Avenue, where the Poppers had had to worry about whether their money would hold out until spring.

And every week they got a check for five thousand dollars.

When they were not actually playing in some theater, or traveling on trains between cities, their life was spent in the larger hotels.

Now and then a startled hotelkeeper would object to having the birds register there.

“Why, we don’t even allow lap dogs in this hotel,” he would say.

“Yes, but do you have any rule against penguins?” Mr. Popper would ask.

Then the hotelkeeper would have to admit that there was no rule at all about penguins. And of course, when he saw how neat the penguins were, and how other guests came to his hotel in the hope of seeing them, he was very glad to have them. You might think that a large hotel would offer a great many opportunities for mischief to a lot of penguins, but they behaved very well, on the whole, never doing anything worse than riding up and down too often in the elevators, and occasionally biting the brass buttons off some bell-boy’s uniform.

Five thousand dollars a week may sound like a great deal of money, and yet the Poppers were far from rich. It was quite expensive to live in grand hotels and travel about town in taxicabs. Mr. Popper often thought that the penguins could just as well have walked back and forth between hotels and theaters, but every one of their walks looked so much like a parade that it always tied up the traffic. So Mr. Popper, who never liked to be a nuisance to anyone, always took taxis instead.

It was expensive to have huge cakes of ice brought up to their hotel rooms, to cool the penguins. The bills in the fine restaurants where the Poppers often took their meals were often dreadfully high. Fortunately, however, the penguins’ food had stopped being an expense to them. On the road, they had to give up having tank cars of live fish shipped to them, because it was so hard to get deliveries on time. So they went back to feeding the birds on canned shrimps.

This cost them absolutely nothing, for Mr. Popper had written a testimonial saying: “Popper’s Performing Penguins thrive on Owens’ Oceanic Shrimp.”

This statement, with a picture of the twelve penguins, was printed in all the leading magazines, and the Owens Oceanic Shrimp Company gave Mr. Popper an order that was good for free cans of shrimps at any grocery store anywhere in the country.

Several other companies, such as the Great Western Spinach Growers’ Association and the Energetic Breakfast Oats Company, wanted him to recommend their product, too, and offered him large sums of cash. But the penguins simply refused to eat spinach or oats, and Mr. Popper was much too honest to say they would, even though he knew the money would come in handy.

From the Pacific coast they turned east again, to cross the continent. They had time enough, on this brief tour, to touch only the larger cities. After Minneapolis, they played Milwaukee, Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia.

Wherever they went, their reputation traveled ahead of them. When, early in April, they reached Boston, huge crowds awaited them in the railway station.

Up to now, it had not been too difficult to keep the penguins comfortable. But a warm spring wind was blowing across Boston Common, and at the hotel Mr. Popper had to have the ice brought up to his rooms in thousand-pound cakes. He was glad that the ten-week contract was almost up, and that the next week, when his birds were to appear in New York, was the last.

Already Mr. Greenbaum was writing about a new contract. Mr. Popper was beginning to think, however, that he had better be getting back to Stillwater, for the penguins were growing irritable.

I
F IT WAS
unseasonably warm in Boston, it was actually hot in New York. In their rooms at the great Tower Hotel, overlooking Central Park, the penguins were feeling the heat badly.

Mr. Popper took them up to the roof garden to catch whatever cool breeze might be blowing. The penguins were all charmed by the sparkling lights and the confusion of the city below. The younger birds began crowding over to the edge of the roof and looking down at the great canyons beneath them. It made Mr. Popper very nervous to see them shoving each other, as if at any moment they might succeed in pushing one over. He remembered how the South Pole penguins always did this to find out what danger lay below.

The roof was not a safe place for them. Mr. Popper had never forgotten how badly frightened he had been when Captain Cook had been so ill, before Greta came. He could not risk the chance of losing one of his penguins now.

Where the penguins were concerned, nothing was ever too much trouble for him. He took them downstairs again and bathed them under the cold showers in the bathroom. This kept him busy a large part of the night.

With all this lack of sleep, he was quite drowsy the next morning when he had to call the taxis to get to the theater. Besides, Mr. Popper had always been a little absent-minded. That is how he made his great mistake when he said to the first taxi-driver: —

“Regal Theater.”

“Yes, sir,” said the driver, threading his way in and out the traffic of Broadway, which greatly interested both the children and the penguins.

They had almost reached the theater, when the driver suddenly turned. “Say,” he said, “you don’t mean to say those penguins are going to be on the same bill with Swenson’s Seals, do you?”

“I don’t know what else is on the bill,” said Mr. Popper, paying him. “Anyway, here’s the Regal.” And they piled out and filed in the stage entrance.

In the wings stood a large, burly, red-faced man. “So these are the Popper Performing Penguins, huh?” he said. “Well, I want to tell you, Mr. Popper, that I’m Swen Swenson, and those are my seals in there on the stage now, and if your birds try any funny business, it’ll be too bad for them. My seals are tough, see? They’d think nothing of eating two or three penguins apiece.”

From the stage could be heard the hoarse barks of the seals, who were going through their act.

“Papa,” said Mrs. Popper, “the penguins are the last act on the bill. You go run back quick and get those taxis and we’ll let the penguins ride around a while until it’s time for their number.”