Ellen's Lion

by Crockett Johnson

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 1959 by Crockett Johnson

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Originally published in 1959 by Harper & Brothers.

  KNOPF, BORZOI BOOKS, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  randomhouse.com/kids

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Johnson, Crockett, 1906-1975

  Ellen’s lion : twelve stories / by Crockett Johnson.—1st Alfred A. Knopf ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Presents twelve episodes in Ellen’s relationship with her toy lion.

  ISBN 978-0-375-82288-9 (trade)

  eISBN: 978-0-375-98372-6 (ebk.)

  [1. Toys—Fiction. 2. Play—Fiction. 3. Lions—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.J63162 El 2003

  [Fic]—dc21

  2002007288

  v3.1

  Title Page

  Copyright

  First Page

  About the Author

  12 Stories

  Conversation and Song

  Trip to Arabia

  Close Escape

  Two Pairs of Eyes

  Doctor’s Orders

  Growing Confusion

  Five-Pointed Star

  The Two Statues

  Sad Interlude

  Fairy Tale

  Mountain Climb

  The New Squirrel

  CONVERSATION AND SONG

  Ellen sat on the footstool and looked down thoughtfully at the lion. He lay on his stomach on the floor at her feet.

  “Whenever you and I have a conversation I do all the talking, don’t I?” she said.

  The lion remained silent.

  “I never let you say a single word,” Ellen said.

  The lion did not say a word.

  “The trouble with me is I talk too much,” Ellen continued. “I haven’t been very polite, I guess. I apologize.”

  “Oh, that’s all right, Ellen,” the lion said.

  Ellen sprang to her feet and jumped up and down in delight.

  “You talked!” she cried. “You said something!”

  “It wasn’t anything that important,” said the lion. “And watch where you’re jumping.”

  “It was the way you said it,” said Ellen, sitting down again. “You have such a funny deep voice!”

  “I think my voice sounds remarkably like yours,” the lion said.

  “No, it sounds very different,” Ellen told him, speaking with her mouth pulled down at the corners and her chin pressed against her chest to lower her voice. “This is how you talk.”

  “I don’t make a face like that,” said the lion.

  “You don’t have to. Your face is always like that,” Ellen said. “It’s probably why you have the kind of voice you have.”

  The lion did not reply.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” said Ellen.

  “I’m nothing but a stuffed animal. I have no feelings,” the lion said, and with a sniff, he became silent.

  “I like your face the way it is,” Ellen said, trying to think of a way to cheer him up. “And you have got a lovely deep voice. Let’s sing a song.”

  “What song?” said the lion.

  Ellen thought of a cheerful song.

  “Let’s sing ‘Old King Cole.’ ”

  The lion immediately began to sing.

  “Old King Cole was a merry old soul—”

  “Wait,” Ellen said. “Let’s sing it together.”

  “All right,” said the lion.

  “Old King Cole was a merry old soul—” Ellen sang, and then she stopped. “You’re not singing.”

  “And a merry old soul was he—” sang the lion.

  “—was he,” sang Ellen, trying to catch up. “He called for his pipe and he called for his bowl—”

  She realized the lion was not singing with her and she stopped again.

  “And he called for his fiddlers three—” sang the lion.

  “Can’t we both sing at the same time?” Ellen said.

  The lion considered the question.

  “I don’t think we can,” he said. “Do you?”

  “Let’s talk,” Ellen said. “It’s easier.”

  “All right,” said the lion.

  “Think of something to talk about,” Ellen said.

  “All right,” said the lion.

  Ellen waited. After a minute or two she looked at the lion. He lay motionless on the floor.

  “He thought so hard he fell asleep,” she whispered as she left the playroom on tiptoe.

  TRIP TO ARABIA

  “Here comes the train,” said Ellen. “It’s stopping at the station. Are you ready to go?”

  “Go where?” said the lion.

  “To Arabia.”

  “That train doesn’t go to Arabia,” the lion said. “It goes around in a little circle on those tracks on the floor.”

  “It goes through the tunnel to Arabia,” Ellen told him. “And then it comes around and back to the station, by way of Greenland and Delaware Water Gap.”

  Sprawled out comfortably, the lion showed no inclination to go anywhere or to move at all.

  “Whoooo!” said the train. “All aboard for Arabia!”

  Ellen had to help the lion onto the train. She balanced him on his stomach on the roofs of the last two cars with his legs dangling on each side.

  “Good-bye,” said Ellen, waving her handkerchief as the train started.

  The train gathered speed and headed for the tunnel. It plunged in, engine and cars and lion, and the tunnel jumped and joggled. When the last two cars reappeared from the other side the lion was not on board.

  “He got off at Arabia,” said Ellen.

  The train continued around the tracks by way of Greenland and Delaware Water Gap. It passed Ellen and the station without stopping and it headed for the tunnel again.

  This time the tunnel bounced forward as the engine drove into it and the train came to a noisy stop, with its cars off the tracks.

  Ellen turned off the electric control switch and crawled around to the tunnel. She lifted it and pulled the train forward, setting the cars on the rails. She turned the tunnel upside down to examine it, pried the lion out of it, and set it over the tracks again behind the train. She put the lion back on his stomach on the last two cars and returned to the station and the control switch.

  The train started smoothly and picked up speed. A family of Eskimos in Greenland were surprised to see it go by with a lion riding on it.

  “Whooooo!” said the train as it approached the station and began to slow down. “Here we come from Arabia!”

  But before the train came to a stop the lion’s front paw hit the station roof. The roof fell off the station and the lion slid back on the tops of the cars and tumbled off the train.

  With a little difficulty Ellen got the station roof back in place. Then she picked up the lion.

  “Well, hello!” she said, shaking his front paw warmly. “How was your trip to Arabia? What is it like there?”

  The lion refused to say a word about it.

  CLOSE ESCAPE

  Ellen screamed into the telephone.

  “Help! There’s a lion in my room!”

  “Where?” said the lion.

  “You!” Ellen pointed at him.

  “Me? But I’ve always been here,” the lion said. “Since the Christmas before last.”

  “You’ve got a tail
with a brush on the end of it and a mane!” Ellen let her eyes grow wide. “I just realized you’re supposed to be a real lion!”

  “I suppose so.” The lion sounded a bit annoyed. “What of it?”

  Ellen stared at him with a terribly frightened expression on her face.

  “What of it?” she repeated, in a trembling voice. “If you’re supposed to be a real lion you’re supposed to eat people when you’re hungry.”

  “You are not in the least frightened of me, Ellen,” said the lion, losing patience. “You know very well that a stuffed lion cannot be hungry and cannot possibly eat people.”

  “You’re stuffed, so you can’t be hungry.” Ellen began to laugh and laugh. “That’s a funny joke. Don’t you see?”

  The lion did not smile.

  Ellen became serious too. She looked guiltily at the telephone as she set it on top of a heap of other toys.

  “I don’t blame you for being angry,” she said. “I should have asked you if you ate people before I called a policeman.”

  “You didn’t call on a real telephone,” said the lion.

  “But I called a real policeman,” said Ellen. “He’ll be here any minute to take you away.”

  The lion said nothing. Ellen rested her chin on a fist and thought.

  “Don’t worry, though,” she said. “I’ll think of something.”

  “I am not worried,” said the lion.

  “Well, you ought to be,” Ellen said. “They’ll put you in the zoo, in a cage. You won’t be able to get out, or go anywhere.”

  “I never go anywhere anyway,” the lion said.

  Ellen looked at the window. She jumped up and opened it wide.

  “I know what,” she said. “I’ll tell the policeman you went away. I’ll tell him you made a big leap out of the window. And you can hide.”

  Before the lion could argue about it Ellen snatched him up and put him in the bottom drawer of the bureau, on top of a pile of clothes. She had to press him down hard to get the drawer closed. Even so it would not close all the way. The lion’s tail was caught and half of it hung down outside the drawer.

  “Ouch,” said the lion when Ellen finally noticed what the trouble was.

  “Be quiet,” she whispered. “Here comes the policeman.”

  “Hello, Ellen,” the policeman said. “Where is the lion? I have come to put him in a cage in the zoo.”

  “You are too late,” Ellen told him, standing in front of the bureau so he would not see the lion’s tail. “The lion jumped out of the window.”

  “Oh.” The policeman sounded disappointed. “Then I cannot put him in the zoo.”

  “No,” said Ellen, shaking her head.

  “Good-bye,” said the policeman, and he went away. Ellen opened the drawer and took out the lion. She squeezed him all over to unflatten him. But there wasn’t much she could do about the kink in his tail.

  “Anyway, you’re safe now, thanks to me,” she said as she made him comfortable on the arm of the big chair. “And you can live here happily ever after.”

  TWO PAIRS OF EYES

  “I wish I had a drink of water,” said Ellen in the middle of the night.

  “Well, get one,” said the lion, from the other end of the pillow.

  “I’m afraid,” Ellen said.

  “Of what?” said the lion.

  “Of things,” said Ellen.

  “What kind of things?” said the lion.

  “Frightening things,” Ellen said. “Things I can’t see in the dark. They always follow along behind me.”

  “How do you know?” said the lion. “If you can’t see them—”

  “I can’t see them because they’re always behind me,” said Ellen. “When I turn around they jump behind my back.”

  “Do you hear them?” asked the lion.

  “They never make a sound,” Ellen said, shivering. “That’s the worst part of it.”

  The lion thought for a moment.

  “Hmm,” he said.

  “They’re awful,” Ellen continued.

  “Ellen,” the lion said, “I don’t think there are any such things.”

  “Oh, no? Then how can they scare me?” said Ellen indignantly. “They’re terribly scary things.”

  “They must be exceedingly scary,” said the lion.

  “If they keep hiding in back of you they can’t be very brave.”

  Ellen frowned at the lion. Then she considered what he had said.

  “I guess they’re not very brave,” she agreed. “They wouldn’t dare bother me if I could look both ways at the same time.”

  “Yes,” said the lion. “But who has two pairs of eyes?”

  “Two people have,” Ellen said, staring up at where the ceiling was when it wasn’t so dark. “I wouldn’t be afraid to go down the hall for a drink of water if I was two people.”

  Suddenly she reached out for the lion, dragged him to her, and looked him in the eyes.

  “Mine are buttons,” he said. “They’re sewn on. I can’t see very well in the dark.”

  “Nobody can,” Ellen whispered as she got out of bed. “But the things don’t know that.”

  “How do you know they don’t know?” said the lion.

  “I know all about them,” said Ellen. “After all, I made them up in my head, didn’t I?”

  “Ah,” said the lion. “I said there were no such things.”

  “But of course there are,” Ellen said. “I just told you I made them up myself.”

  “Yes,” the lion said. “But—”

  “So I should know, shouldn’t I?” said Ellen, putting the lion up on her shoulder so that he faced behind her. “Stop arguing with me and keep your eyes open.”

  “They’re buttons,” said the lion, bouncing on Ellen’s shoulder as she walked across the bedroom. “My eyes never close.”

  “Good,” said Ellen, and she opened the door to the hall.

  With a firm grip on the lion’s tail to hold him in place she marched down the hall to the bathroom, drank a glass of water, and marched back to bed. She looked straight ahead all the way while the lion stared into the darkness behind her and during the entire trip not a single thing dared bother either of them.

  DOCTOR’S ORDERS

  The doctor listened to the lion’s stuffing and she shook her head so sadly that her stethoscope fell off her ears.

  “You’re a mighty sick little lion,” she said. “You’ll have to stop smoking.”

  “You know very well that I have never smoked in my life, Ellen,” said the lion, speaking in a muffled voice through his bandages.

  “You are so sick you can’t tell one person from another,” the doctor said, reaching into a paper bag and taking out a licorice cigar. “I’m not Ellen.”

  “Uh?” said the lion as the cigar wedged into his mouth.

  “I’m the doctor,” the doctor said. “And I say you have to stop smoking. You want to get well, don’t you?”

  She snatched the cigar from the lion’s mouth and frowned at it. She put it in her own mouth and she ate it while she took the lion’s pulse and tapped his knees with a small rubber hammer to check his reflexes.

  “You’re going to be all right,” she said. “But you’ll have to take things easy for a while.”

  She took off the lion’s bandages, bundled them up with her instruments, and closed her doctor’s bag. With a BANG-BANG-BANG of the ambulance bell she drove off a hundred miles an hour through heavy city traffic. When she reached the main highway she called back over her shoulder to the lion.

  “Remember, now. You have to take things easy.”

  The main highway widened and spread out into the prairie, where she had to use her whip on the horses to outrace a band of Indians attacking her covered wagon, and she barely made it across the Rocky Mountains, where she discovered gold.

  “Gold!” she cried, and suddenly she became aware of the pirate ship sailing in close to the gold mine.

  She drew her cutlass and held her own in th
e fight until the gang of pirates were joined by a gang of cattle rustlers and a gang of gangsters. Then she called to the lion on the end table.

  “Help!”

  The lion made no move to come to her aid.

  “Pirates! Rustlers! Gangsters!” she shouted.

  The lion didn’t even look up.

  “I have to take things easy,” he explained.

  She frowned at him.

  “We were just making believe that you were sick and I was the doctor,” she told him. “I’m really Ellen. And pirates and rustlers and gangsters are after me.”

  Exasperated, she got out the stethoscope. Holding off the pirates and rustlers and gangsters with one hand, she listened to the lion’s stuffing.

  “Anyway, you’re perfectly all right now,” she said. But by then the pirates and rustlers and gangsters had made off with the gold. And besides, it was lunchtime. As Ellen left the playroom she made a face at the lion.

  “You always spoil everything,” she said to him.

  The lion continued to take things easy.

  GROWING CONFUSION

  “Have you been doing any thinking about what you’re going to be when you grow up?” asked Ellen.

  “No,” said the lion. “Have you?”

  “It never occurred to me,” said Ellen, raising her eyebrows. “Should I?”

  “I think so,” the lion said. “Why don’t you? While I take a nap.”

  Ellen stared at him.

  “I should think you’d show a little more interest,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” said the lion. “I didn’t mean to be impolite.”

  “That’s all right,” said Ellen. “Now, suppose I think of a few suggestions. And you can decide.”

  “Me?” said the lion. “I can’t decide. It’s not my problem, Ellen.”

  “Of course it’s your problem,” Ellen said.

  “Well,” said the lion, sounding a little doubtful. “I’m willing to try to help.”

  Ellen put her chin on her fist and she began to think.

  “How would it be—to be—a tiger?”

  “A tiger?” said the lion.

  “A real tiger. With stripes. And a big ferocious growl.”

  Ellen sprang about the playroom on all fours, growling ferociously.