Family Sabbatical (Nancy Pearl's Book Crush Rediscoveries)

by Carol Ryrie Brink

  “Mice?” said everybody. George said it hopefully.

  “Yes, mice!” said Mother in the disapproving tone of voice that she reserved for moths, flies, and weevils.

  The children were up now, but they were still convalescing from the measles, and they weren’t allowed to go back to school yet. George and Susan had secrets that kept them busy and contented most of the day. Dumpling still spent most of her time lying on the couch, listening to stories or just gazing sadly at the ceiling. Even mice made a welcome diversion at a time like this.

  “What makes you think so, dear?” Father asked.

  “Last night I heard them scurrying around,” Mother said. “And I can smell them.” She screwed up her nose in a disgusted sort of way. Everybody else began to sniff.

  “I don’t smell them,” Susan and Father said, but George said eagerly, “I do.”

  “It’s natural enough,” Mother said, “with meals for three being sent up on trays three times a day. Crumbs are bound to be dropped here and there, and this is a very old house.”

  “Four hundred years old, at least,” said Father happily. “It must have been built during the reign of—”

  “Mother,” said George, “I know where we could get a cat.”

  “No, George,” said Mother, “no cats. We are traveling in Europe now. A cat would be worse than a stone collection.”

  “But I know where there are millions of cats, Mother.”

  “Millions of Cats,” Susan said. “That’s a book, George.”

  “No, this is a real place,” said George. “It’s not a book. There are millions—well, anyway, hundreds of cats, and they don’t belong to anyone at all.”

  “No cats—not even if there are millions of them to be had,” said Mother firmly. “But we shall certainly have to get a trap. Jonathan, you must buy us a trap on your way home from the university today. Shall I tie a string around your finger to help you remember?”

  “Very well,” said Father. “Make it a red string, so I’ll be sure to notice it.”

  “Poor little mice,” said Dumpling. “Will the trap hurt them, Daddy?”

  “Honey,” said Father, “I’ll try to get one that won’t.”

  That afternoon Professor Ridgeway came back to the pension with a large parcel under his arm.

  “Don’t tell me that’s a mousetrap,” Mother said. She was used to very small, flat mousetraps with springs.

  “It is indeed,” said Professor Ridgeway. “I remember a storybook of my childhood which contained a picture of just such a mousetrap as this. Tom Thumb was caught in it, and a very large cat was sitting outside the trap, looking in at Tom and thinking that he was an odd sort of mouse. It’s a very old type of trap—historical, in fact.”

  “But will it work?” asked Mother anxiously.

  “Perfectly,” said Father, “and painlessly, too. Dumpling will be pleased.”

  The trap was really a wire cage with a small door that could easily be pushed open by a mouse in search of cheese. But once the mouse was inside, the door would fall shut, and the mouse would be unable to escape. Other mice could enter, but none of them could get out again.

  “I also bought cheese,” said Father. Since there was more cheese than was needed for the mice, the Ridgeway children sampled it, and it was quite delicious. They almost forgot the mice, in sampling the mice’s cheese.

  But Mother said, “Here, here!—stop now. You, too, Jonathan. Save some of the cheese for the mice.”

  So that night they put the rest of the cheese inside the trap and set the trap near the crack in the baseboard where Mother had heard the scurrying of mice.

  In the morning the piece of cheese had disappeared, but inside the trap were two very small gray mice with bright black eyes and long tails.

  “Oh boy, oh boy!” shouted George, quite red in the face with pleasure.

  “Aren’t they darling!” cried Susan.

  Even Dumpling was pleased. “They’re cute, Mommy,” she said.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Ridgeway firmly, “now we’ll be rid of the mouse smell and the scurrying noises.”

  “What do we do next?” asked Professor Ridgeway uncertainly.

  “Why, I suppose we execute them,” Mother said.

  “They’re very cute, they’re extra-cute,” chanted Dumpling happily.

  “Not extra-cute. Mother said ‘execute,’ ” explained Susan.

  “You mean to kill them, Mother?” asked George incredulously.

  “Isn’t that why we got the trap?” said Mother sensibly.

  “But, Mother,” said Susan, “Daddy bought this painless kind of trap that wouldn’t kill. It was very kind of Daddy.”

  “But you don’t expect to keep them, do you?” Mother asked.

  “They are so cute, so extra-cute,” said Dumpling.

  “We could name them Mickey and Minnie,” said George. “Look at how they watch us. They aren’t a bit afraid. They trust us to be good to them, Mother.”

  “Oh dear!” said Mother. “This is beyond me. Jonathan, it’s up to you now. You got this painless kind of trap. Now you must do something about it as quickly as you can.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Father, “certainly, my dear. But let’s not be hasty about this. Minnie and Mickey—ahem!—that is—in fact, they really are very small and helpless mice, aren’t they?”

  “The trap makes a good cage,” George said. “We could feed them breadcrumbs and anything else we saved from our meals. We wouldn’t have to buy horse meat like for a dog, or ants’ eggs, like for turtles. It would be a very cheap way of keeping pets.”

  “Pets?” said Mother. “Oh dear!”

  “It would be almost as nice as having a cat,” said Susan.

  “Maybe we could train them to do tricks,” suggested George.

  “But I wanted to get rid of them,” said Mother.

  “You could always change your mind, Mommy,” Dumpling said.

  “Maybe if we waited until tomorrow, dear—” suggested Father. “A slight reprieve, a stay of execution—”

  “Mus musculus, Daddy!” cried George, quickly remembering the scientific name for a house mouse. He knew that Professor Ridgeway was much too tenderhearted to kill anything that had a scientific name like Mus musculus.

  “Splendid!” said Father. “Where did you acquire this useful piece of information, George?”

  “Out of one of my animal books,” said George. “Daddy, can we keep them?”

  “Only until tomorrow,” said Father, “until we can think of some very kind and painless way of getting rid of them—a way that will please Mother and not offend Dumpling.”

  “Humpf!” said Mother, and Dumpling said, “Oh, goody!”

  So the mousetrap sat in the middle of the floor, and everybody, except possibly Mother, had a good time entertaining Minnie and Mickey.

  There is nothing better than a pair of small mice to help children get over the measles.

  “The measles are all gone today, Mommy,” Dumpling said.

  “They folded their tents, like the Arabs, and as silently stole away,” quoted Mother. She had tents on her mind at the moment, because she was busy folding up the yards of cheesecloth and wondering if she could think of some practical use for it.

  “Mother, we could make angels’ costumes with it,” Susan said, “and all dress up to sing carols.”

  “Not me!” said George.

  And Mother said, “Susie, you’ve already started so many Christmas projects that I’m afraid you’ll never get them finished in time.”

  “Okay, Mother,” Susan said, “but you’ll have to admit, it was a nice idea.”

  The day passed very pleasantly, with mice to feed and watch and Christmas projects to attend to. Even Dumpling seemed to have Christmas secrets of her own. She borrowed crayons from Susan and paste from George and paper from Mother, and from Father she borrowed advice that seemed to have something to do with spelling.

  About noon the postman brought them a lette
r, and it was from Mademoiselle.

  “Dear, darling enfants,” wrote Mademoiselle, “I also miss. I miss very much. Therefore I make great haste to reply. I would reply before I get your letter, but unfortunately at that time I have not already received your address, so how the heck could I, my darling little ones?”

  “Who taught her to say ‘how the heck’?” asked Father sternly.

  “I’m afraid it was George, Daddy,” Susan said.

  “Alas, George!” said Professor Ridgeway, “I fear that you have permanently dislocated the pure and elegant flow of Mademoiselle’s language.”

  “Wait a minute, Daddy,” Susan said, “the rest of the letter is in French, and it’s too pure and elegant for me to read it. Will you help?”

  “Very well,” said Professor Ridgeway, “I’ll do my best, but she does have a rather peculiar handwriting. Let me see—she says she dies with loneliness, and that she loves all of you with a formidable devotion that explodes in her heart like an atomic bomb—”

  “Mademoiselle looks very old-fashioned,” commented Mother, “but I must say her ideas are modern. She’s always willing to learn.”

  “Atomic bomb . . . atomic bomb. Let’s see, where was I? Oh yes, she says that she regrets very much that Irene was eaten by an earnest camel, and if she were not so far away she would make it up to Dumpling with chestnuts and marzi-malos and a thousand kisses. She says no other children will ever replace you in her affections, and she wishes you a joyous Christmas and a good New Year, and she ends with many felicitations and a thousand vows of undying gratitude and good-will. P.S., she adds, I love you.”

  “Dear, darling Mademoiselle,” said Dumpling, “I guess she really does. But she got Irene and the Earnest Camel mixed up the wrong way.”

  “It’s because she has a hard time reading English, just as we have a hard time reading French,” Susan said. “But she has a good heart.”

  Everyone agreed that Mademoiselle had a heart of gold, and then Dumpling said sadly, “But what if we should never see her again?”

  “Now, darling,” Mother said, “Mademoiselle’s letter should cheer you up, not make you sad. Isn’t it pleasant to get a letter from someone who loves you?”

  “Yes,” Dumpling said. “And, if Irene could write, she would write me a letter, too, and tell me a thousand vows and felicitations and all those things, and how it is with her in that dark place, wouldn’t she?”

  “Yes, I’m sure she would,” Mother said. “But look out of the window now. The sun is shining. It really doesn’t look like winter, does it?”

  “There’s a little girl in the backyard,” George said. “She’s got on a blue coat, and she’s rolling a hoop. That’s a funny thing to do.”

  Everybody crowded to the window to see, and George was right. There was a little girl in a blue coat rolling a hoop around and around the circular brick walk in the small back garden. She was quite serious about keeping her hoop rolling along and not letting it fall over on its side. She had a stick to push it and make it go, and she went around and around without smiling. She was larger than Dumpling, but not quite as big as George, and under her blue cap and over her blue coat spilled a lot of yellow hair.

  Susan opened the window and called, “Hi!” The little girl stopped and looked up. Her hoop fell over with a clatter on the brick walk. She had a round pink face with round blue eyes, and her mouth, too, was round with surprise, like a small red hoop.

  “Hi!” the Ridgeways all shouted. “Bonjour! Good day! How are you?”

  The little girl didn’t say a word, but continued to stand there looking up at them. The sun shone on her hair and made it shine, too. Her eyes were the color of the clear winter sky over the rooftops and chimney pots.

  “Haven’t we seen her somewhere before?” asked Susan.

  “Sure,” said George, “we’ve seen her somewhere. What’s your name, little girl?”

  The little girl did not answer.

  “I know who she is,” said Dumpling. “It’s someone we saw at the Grand Hotel and So Forth and So Forth.”

  “But how could we have seen her there? There weren’t any girls but us at the Grand Hotel and So Forth and So Forth.”

  “Still, she does look familiar,” said George. “Maybe she knows us.”

  “Hey!” the Ridgeways called. “Do you know us, little girl? Tell us your name. We think we know you.”

  The poor little girl was quite terrified to have so many strangers looking at her and calling to her in an unknown language. For a moment she stood quite still; then quickly she stooped to pick up her hoop and her stick. She gave her shiny hair a toss and her skirts a flicker, and suddenly she vanished into the house.

  “Well!” said Susan. “We scared her out of her wits. We didn’t mean to, but just the same, it wasn’t very polite of us.”

  “Maybe if we do something kind to her, she will forgive us,” Dumpling said.

  “But we don’t even know who she is, or how long she will stay,” said George. “How can we do something kind to her?”

  “We could give her something, maybe—” said Dumpling.

  “Like the measles, for instance,” said George.

  “Oh, bother the measles!” said Susan. “Aren’t we all through with those now?”

  “Perhaps she would like a couple of nice little gray mice,” said George. “That would be a good present.”

  “She’s very shy,” said Susan, “and some girls are scared of mice. We’d have to think it over.”

  “It would be a kind thing for the mice,” said George, “to give them to such a pretty little girl instead of executing them.”

  “Please let’s not extra-cute them,” Dumpling begged. “I’d rather give them to the little girl than that.”

  “We have until tomorrow to decide about the mice,” Susan said. “Let’s go and look at them. I think they would like some more crumbs.”

  That evening, for the first time since the start of the measles, the children were allowed to go downstairs for dinner in the dining room. It seemed as if they had been confined to their two rooms upstairs for a very long time, and going downstairs was quite a pleasant adventure. The Chinese and Romanian and Swedish students all greeted them very politely and inquired after their health in many different accents.

  Madame Duprés looked them all over to be sure there were no more measles showing, and then she said, “Very well now, you shall see my little daughter who has been with her grandmama. Germaine! Germaine!”

  In ran the little girl with the shiny hair, but when she saw the three Ridgeway children standing in a row, all ready to shout, “Hi!” she turned around and ran right out again.

  Madame scolded and coaxed, but Germaine wouldn’t come back until the Ridgeways were seated at the table with their napkins under their chins. Then she came and sat beside her mother, but she would not speak to the Ridgeways, and would only look at them when they were not looking at her.

  “Don’t pay any attention to her,” Susan said. “I think she’ll be braver after supper.”

  “After supper I’ll show her our mice,” said George.

  When the meal was over Germaine went into the small salon next to the dining room. She took out a pack of cards and began to play with them all by herself at a round table in one corner of the room. She shuffled the cards very carefully and then laid them out in rows, like a game of solitaire. There was another round table in another corner of the room, and Susan and Dumpling sat down there while George went upstairs to get the mice. Mother and Father were still in the dining room, talking with some of the students.

  Presently George came down with the mousetrap and set it on the table in front of Susan and Dumpling. The three Ridgeways began to feed the mice with crumbs of bread. Mickey and Minnie were already becoming tame and clever. They would stand up on their hind legs and reach for the crumbs.

  “Sit up and beg, Mickey,” said George.

  “Say ‘please,’ ” said Susan.

  �
��Cute, cute, extra-cute,” chanted Dumpling.

  The Ridgeways were so busy with their mice that they forgot to watch Germaine. When they looked up again, she had left the cards spread out on the table and had come quite near, to look over George’s shoulder.

  “Meeky Moose?” asked the little girl in a small, shy voice.

  “Oui, oui! Mickey Mouse,” replied the Ridgeways eagerly. They made room for Germaine at their table.

  “Meenie Moose?” asked Germaine, pointing to the second mouse.

  “Oui, oui!” cried the Ridgeways. “Minnie Mouse!”

  It is a strange and curious thing that children all over Europe know Mickey and Minnie Mouse. They may not know a word of the English language or who’s the president of the United States or how to eat corn on the cob, but they always know about “Meeky Moose.”

  So now in a few moments the Ridgeway children and Germaine, the little girl who looked so much like someone they knew, became friends because they all knew Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

  It was only when the grown-ups came into the salon from the dining room that the unpleasantness started.

  Germaine’s mother gave a loud squeak of displeasure. “What!” she cried. “Mice in my house! No, no! This is impossible!”

  Everyone could see that it was perfectly possible and, indeed, a fact, but that only made matters worse.

  “George,” said Mother, “whatever made you bring them down?”

  “It was just so we could get acquainted with Germaine, Mother,” Susan said. “And you see, it worked.”

  “They are to be executed tomorrow, Madame,” explained Father in his best French. “That is, unless we can think of a more painless way of disposing of them.”

  “Mice in my house!” Madame Duprés wailed. “Oh, this is horrible. I must get a cat. Where, oh where, shall I get a cat?”

  “Daddy,” cried George, hardly trusting his ears and his French, “is she asking where to get a cat?”

  “I believe she is, George,” Father said.

  “Madame,” cried George, “Je sais ou je can get you a cat. Le chat joue avec le ballon, and I will get you one tomorrow.”

  “George,” said Father, “are you sure you can do what you promise?”

  “Perfectly sure, Daddy,” said George.