“Like a buzz saw, I sound! Like a Mack truck! Like a hurricane roaring through a redwood forest! Like the subway—!”
“They said that?”
“No. They tapped me gently on my third left leg and said, ‘Chester dear, would you please—’ ‘—roll over?’ ‘Neither one of us—’ ‘—can sleep a wink.’ And the thing is—this really is what did me in—they snore!”
“O bitter irony!” Walter lifted his eyes toward the sky—where there was no bitter irony, so he smiled down on Chester again. “And what do they sound like, might I ask?”
Chester giggled. “I have to admit, it’s very nice—like two cute music boxes.”
“I love it!” Walter thrashed his tail with delight. “Two musical little chipmunk snores—in a little house by itself at night—with the little darkness tight all around. I do love it!”
“And they sound absolutely identical, too! Exactly the same! I couldn’t find a speck of difference.”
“So this is how you spent the night? In a scientific investigation, pacing from one room into the other in a vain attempt to find a single speck of difference between the beautiful, musical snores of Emily and Henry Chipmunk?”
“You might put it like that,” said Chester. “I don’t know anyone but you who would—except maybe a mischievous bat—but, yes, that’s how I spent the night. Anyway, though, I never could live with them. I just felt—with everything being so perfect, with the ferns and the flowers and the stones just so—I felt—”
“Maladjusted!” The water snake did a flip-flop. “It’s something I rarely suffer from. But I know all about maladjustment, I do! That little boy, Jaspar—the one who helped you to save the Old Meadow—one day I heard him lamenting the trials of family life with his best friend, Ben Thompson. And he was complaining about just the same things that are bugging you. In Jaspar’s case, it was his own devoted mama, not persnickety chipmunks, who was causing him such distress. She made him wipe feet, she made him wash hands. ‘She’s making me maladjusted!’ he screamed. Poor soul. You should have seen him chewing his gum and tearing his hair. I hope she let him snore, at least.”
“Mamas usually do,” said Simon Turtle, from ancient wisdom.
“I learned a lot about maladjustment that day,” Walter went on. “As a matter of fact—as a matter of fact!—ohhhh—!”
Chester put some grumpiness into his voice. “Now it comes:
“A cricket lived in a neat chip’s lair—
In a sweet munk’s lair lived he.
But he was maladjusted there—
And snored most dreadfully!”
SEVEN
Donald Dragonfly
“Well, I have to admit”—Chester Cricket lay back and just drifted—“it’s an awfully nice day to be homeless on.”
For several hours, the three Meadow dwellers had gone boating. At least Walt and Chester went boating. Simon Turtle, with that solid black shell of his, was too heavy to float on the pieces of wood that were circling slowly around his pool. When he made the offhanded suggestion—“Might just lumber up and bite me off a big chunk near the top of my log”—Walter Water Snake glared at him sternly, behind Chester’s back. Simon mumbled, “Oh,” and contented himself with offering bits of nautical advice, whenever the other two would listen.
The cricket invented a game he liked. He spread out his wings and turned himself into a sturdy little workable sail in the breeze. Walter Water Snake thought that was wonderful. He shouted, “Hey! Great!”—found a hunk of wood, slithered up on it, and hoisted his tail straight up in the air. It made the skinniest, silliest sail—like an upright rope—that was ever seen in Connecticut. And keeping his whole lower half like that, so rigid and stiff, in such a difficult position, was hard work for even the most supple creature. Walter toppled over constantly, with a whoop and laugh as he splashed out of sight. He made up his mind that instead of playing “sail,” he’d play “shipwreck,” and enjoyed his own game very much.
Chester called his skiff the West Wind—since that happened to be blowing—and Walter called his the Curlicue, named after himself, of course.
But evening came, and along with the shadows, in a twilight that lacked all coziness, the cricket’s gloom returned. He eyed the log. “I guess I’ll have to spend the night in that narrow old crack again.”
“No!” blurted Walt. “We need some more time. I mean—I mean—it’s uncomfortable. Isn’t it, Chester? Uncomfortable?”
“Well, yes,” began Chester, “but if that’s all there is—”
“That isn’t all there is!” said Walter. “There’s—there’s—the West Wind! A sleeper ship, if ever I saw one. She may not have staterooms or bunk beds, Chester—or even a hammock, spun by a spider—but she’ll rock you asleep on the bosom of the deep, ol’ pal. Won’t she, Simon? Your pool is the deep.”
“It’s deep enough for me, ol’ pal.” Simon treated himself to a long and leisurely yawn. “And time to be turning in.” He crept to his favorite resting place. The old turtle had several comfortable beds, but this time of year there was one special spot, where the bank overhung his pool and the mud was soft and oozy and good, that felt most right, most covered and snug. He stretched his legs, then pulled them in, beneath his shell. His head was last. A final “Good night” echoed out in the dark.
For the first time ever, Chester envied his friend his safe, secure shell. When all else failed, that at least was a very private home.
Walter Water Snake whisked to a clump of reeds where he usually spent the night. “You get some rest now, Chester. And don’t worry! Things are bound to work out. Just trust me.”
“I do,” said Chester. And added under his breath, “I guess.” He wondered just how many crickets had ever put their faith in a snake—and one with a devilish sense of humor at that.
He was tired enough, poor cheerless Chester—more exhausted that night than he’d ever been. Yet he still couldn’t sleep. It wasn’t his boat. As Walter had said, the rocking and bobbing was very restful. It lulled him sweetly, and the stars seemed to sway, as the West Wind drifted. Perhaps it was just those August stars that were keeping him awake. They seemed so huge this time of year, like lamps that someone had hung in the air. And, as always in August—there! one went—the sky was full of shooting stars. In New York, on his expedition to the Museum of Natural History, Chester Cricket had been taken to the Planetarium, which was right next door. And there he had heard that every August the earth passed through a shower of meteors, and they were the shooting stars. He sort of believed that. But also there was a legend among all insects that shooting stars were fireflies that had flown too high, and he sort of believed that, too. Whatever they were, falling stars could keep a soul awake—sometimes in the pure joy of watching and waiting for one, sometimes in the sadness that beauty can give when a man, or a cricket, has trouble.
Against his will, Chester leaped from the boat to the bank. He knew where he was going, all right, and knew that he really didn’t want to go there—but didn’t know how to stop himself.
One summer there’d been a bad fire over on Mountain Road. Nobody was hurt, but a whole house burned down. And the afternoon after the accident, the family that lived there—every single member of it—had gathered in front of the smoking ruins. Chester Cricket remembered that sad scene well. There were two children, a boy and a girl, and the man and his wife. No one said a word. They all just stood there, silently staring at smoking embers.
In just such a mood of helpless, hopeless emptiness Chester Cricket was drawn through the radiant, soft summer night to his stump. He felt like a little mechanical insect with no choice at all, as he leaped and landed, leaped and landed, beside the brook on the old familiar path. John Robin had told him the stump was in ruins. He’d seen it himself; the whole Meadow knew it. Still, he had to go back again.
Late moonlight silvered the tumbled wood. Because of the way the trees grew close, or the turn it made, or the rush of the current, the brook made a faint ghost-echo here. The
water was talking to Chester’s stump—still talking, the way it always had, but now in a lower, more private tone.
“Why,” said the cricket aloud, astonished, “it’s beautiful!”
He jumped to one side and took another careful look. Dark fragments where the top was crushed stood up like towers, like battlements, against the star-struck sky. The stump was transformed. And it seemed to Chester as if the change had taken place not because of some silly accident but as if the magician’s hand of Nature had passed above his well-known house and conjured it into something else. His home it would never be again—Chester stared at the stump as if in its ruin it somehow was new—and never belong to him anymore. “But, still,” he murmured to himself, “it always can be beautiful.”
He spoke one word aloud, “Brookview,” then began the hop back to Simon’s Pool.
And halfway there, a flicker of misty light, like a tiny mooncloud hovering above the brook, caught his eye. Entranced by the sight, the cricket paused. The Meadow had many such gifts to give, unexpected jolts of sudden wonder, and Chester instinctively pressed each one as deep as he could in his memory.
He was trying to decide if the mooncloud was drifting on the brook’s surface—or was it a patch of mist trapped in a spider’s web?—when a dry squeak of voice asked, “Chister?”
“Donald,” said Chester, “is that you?”
“It’s me, Chister. Jump out. Be kirful! My twig’s pritty little.”
Chester saw a thin branch, like a finger of darkness pointing out in the soft darkness of night. Donald’s voice and the cloud of light came from its end. The cricket jumped and landed beside Donald Dragonfly. They were only an inch above the brook, which swayed beneath them, until the branch had steadied itself.
“Why, it’s only the moon on your wings,” said Chester. “I thought that light was mist, or something.”
“I kin make myself look like mist,” said Donald, “I kin fade in real good, whin I want to, Chister. It’s how I stay alive.”
“And this is where you live, Donald?”
“Yiss! Right here in this fork of my twig. Not minny folks know it.” Donald gave off the puff of a dragonfly’s laughter. “You like it?”
“It’s marvelous!” said Chester Cricket, holding on tight to the jiggling twig. “Very safe here, I imagine.”
“Kik! kik! kik!” That was how Donald laughed. “It’s safe, all right! Thir’s not minny can balance here.” Very hard to describe, a dragonfly’s laughter, but very infectious: the cricket found himself chuckling, too.
“I barely can, myself.”
“I heered about all your troubles, Chister. The whole Middow’s talkin’. The way you can’t find a new home.”
“I’ll just bet,” said the cricket.
“And I want you to know”—Donald took in a breath, to help the timid truth along—“you kin live with me here, Chister Cricket! Jist is long is you want. Feriver, even!”
“Why, Donald Dragonfly!” Chester gasped. The dragonfly had a reputation, among the reeds, along the grass, for being—“eccentric,” a few people said, and “peculiar,” said others. But everyone, insects, animals—even the fish in the brook who knew him—agreed that he was solitary. To be asked to share a home with Donald: “I honestly don’t know what to say.”
“It’s Augist now, Chister, and a bug’s most a bug in Augist. Jist listen to ivrybody! Kik! kik! kik! The world’s ours ivry year this time.”
In the dark that trembled with pale moonlight, Chester Cricket was learning a lot. “I didn’t know that you thought about things like this, Donald. August—and the time of year.”
“Will, what ilse should a bug think about, Chister? Till me.”
The cricket shrugged. “Nothing, I guess. I’ve been thinking about stuff like that the whole night myself.”
“Innyway, it’s not a good time to be by yersilf,” said Donald. “Yer wings kin drop off.”
Chester shook his head. “You’re quite a soul, I have to admit. You’re not—” He stopped. As always—or at least, as often—good manners seemed to come too late.
“Oh, you kin say it,” the dragonfly squeaked. “I know what people think of me. They think I’m titched. And you know something, Chister? They’re right. Kik! kik! kik! It’s the light is does it. I bin titched so often—my wings, I mean—and by so many diffrint kinds of light—by sunlight, and moonlight, and starlight, too—why, ’course I’m titched!”
“I think your wings are beautiful, Donald! And the colors that dance all over them—they’re the very most beautiful things in the Meadow.”
‘Will, I think so, too,” agreed Donald. “Ixcipt you have to pay a price. And the price is that I’m titched, I guiss. And as far as being beautiful goes, I think the music that you kin make goes ivry bit is far is my light!”
“Oh no—” began Chester.
“We could find out!” the dragonfly interrupted him. He was shivering with excitement—so much that his wings shed a cascade of silver drops. “If you were to come and live with me—will, I could flicker my wings in the light and make my colors look like your music. Wowy me! Kik! kik! kik! How would that be, Chister?”
“Terrific, Donald,” said Chester. “But…” Whatever the “but” was, it made him pause. “I just think—somehow—you make colors, and I make music, and—”
“Yiss, I see.” Donald nodded philosophically. “It’s bitter to keep thim apart.”
“Most times,” said the cricket. “But some times, of course, we could do it together.”
“Fer spicial occasions!”
“Yiss! I mean, yes.”
“You still could live with me, Chister, though.”
“I could,” agreed Chester, “but—” And this “but”—the biggest—needed no explanations.
“I know,” said Donald. “I’m a loner, too. But I jist had to ask.”
“I will always be grateful,” said Chester Cricket. He hesitated, but then decided to speak his whole heart. “And, Donald, after this talk we’ve had—which I really enjoyed very much, more even than I can say—I always will think of you as being my secret best friend.”
They touched wings, which is something that insects do.
EIGHT
The Lady Beatrice
The next morning, back at Simon’s Pool, the cricket didn’t tell either the snake or the turtle about what had happened the night before. It was too private—just insect to insect, one might say.
However, the problem still remained. In fact, it stayed around all day.
Walt Water Snake didn’t seem too upset—impatient, if anything, Chester thought. He was frisking and fidgeting all afternoon, as if he simply couldn’t wait for Chester to leave on another trial flight toward home.
“Surely some kindly soul will offer you a night’s lodging,” said Walter. “As a matter of fact, I do believe that I spy a kindly soul—who looks like a whole week’s worth of lodging—waddling toward me this very minute!”
Chester glanced at the bank. “Shh!” he whispered.
“She’ll hear you. You know how sensitive Beatrice is.”
“Why, Madame Plumage”—Walter made a very elaborate bow, which had at least three curves in it—“I just this second was saying to Chester, I wish those elegant fowl the Pheasants would come toddling over and pay us a visit.”
Ambling along, by the side of the brook, were Beatrice Pheasant and her husband, Jerome. Now, it is well known that in most pheasant families the male bird always grows the most beautiful plumage. It’s his right—Nature says so. And, indeed, in the case of Jerome and Beatrice, if you looked very closely, you would see that the gold and the amber and the brown—and perhaps a hidden trace of green—that his feathers contained were more brilliant than hers. Yet, somehow, Beatrice seemed the more grand. Perhaps it was just that she always walked first, and talked first, and spoke with such quiet authority. Or maybe her size, which was very impressive, made her look rather special. Whatever the reason, and despite what Nature
might say, Beatrice was the Pheasant who favored the Old Meadow with her presence, and Jerome was a pheasant, her husband, whom everyone tended to like and forget. (On most matters, in fact, Beatrice Pheasant liked to have the last word, and not leave it to Nature or anyone else whose views might differ from her own.)
She cleared her throat and spoke with a slight but becoming warble. “Jerome and I were out for our constitutional—” By which she meant a high-class walk that the Pheasants took late every afternoon. “And we thought we’d just drop round and see how dear Chester was faring. Didn’t we, Jerome?”
“Mhmm.”
“He’s faring lousy!” said Walter, from the pool. For some reason known only to himself—or perhaps to another water snake—Walter’s speech had a curious tendency to become somewhat crude whenever he talked to Beatrice. “Tell ’em, Cricket. Unburden your woes on these sympathetic listeners.”
“You tell ’em,” said Chester. “You’re enjoying my woes a lot more than I am.”
So Walter did just that: with many a flourish and many a flip—a few of which splashed water all over the Pheasants, but only by accident—he narrated Chester’s night in the willow and his night in the wall.
Beatrice found it all very distressing. She murmured “Shocking! How very common!” when she heard about all those party-flocking birds, and muttered something to the effect that she herself had been told by the chipmunks to stay off the grass—and none too politely, at that. Jerome seemed a little more amused. He had a kind of private laugh, a cackle or chuckle, that showed how much he enjoyed the adventures, but Beatrice, with a polite look, managed to silence him before he could start to laugh out loud.
When Walter finished speaking, she tsked and tutted—which she did very well—and scratched the earth firmly with her sharp right claw. “Most upsetting, I’m sure. But the answer’s perfectly obvious.” With a swish of her tail—which she swished very often—she solved all problems. “Chester dear, you must live with us!”
“Oh—uh—I—” Chester looked one way, then another, and his six legs started to creep backwards. “I’d hate to be a nuisance, Beatrice.”
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