EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY
[Used by permission of the author.]
ONCE upon a time there was a black beetle named Butterwops. He was very old, very wise, and had seen a great deal of the world. He had lived in a number of different houses, and was said to know more about the various qualities of sugar than a blue-bottle, and to understand the ways of men better than a cricket. Therefore, it is not to be wondered at that he became the leader of a small army of beetles, who called him “The General.” He had a thick hoarse laugh, and could tell many tales, both fierce and merry, of battles he had fought against earwigs, cockroaches, and caterpillars. But for some time his laugh had not been heard, and he had been sad and melancholy, for his army were dying by the thousands, and if things went on in the way they were going, there would soon be not a single beetle left to listen to the tales of “The General.”
The kitchen he lived in had plenty to eat in it, and was warm and comfortable, with lots of cracks in the walls and ceiling to live in during the day; but lately the master of the house had taken to spreading yellow powder over the floor and the young beetles would eat it, and it disagreed with them and they died. This yellow powder, so Butterwops told me, smelled deliciously of sugar and cheese and all the young beetles, being greedy, ate it up wherever they could find it. What happened to them after they tasted it was this: as soon as they had three mouthfuls, they felt a bad pain underneath their shell, turned over on their backs, kicked a little and died, and in the morning the cook swept them up and threw them into the garden. No wonder that Butterwops felt sad. He himself never tasted anything unless he had seen another beetle try it first and had watched him walk about for quite five minutes. That is how he came to live to be old and became general; but he told nobody about that, keeping it a secret.
Butterwops had a great-grandson called little Jimmy. He was very lively and adventurous, and was always trotting across the floor in the daytime to frighten the cook; so it is a wonder he had lived as long as he had. He did not eat the yellow powder, for he was an obedient little beetle, and always did what Butterwops told him to do. As he ran about so much in the daytime he was generally the first to hear the news, and one day, about this time, he came to Butterwops and told him that the house on the other side of the street was rented, and he had seen some people moving into it while he was sitting on the window-sill in the gloaming on Thursday evening, which was the cook’s night out.
“Fancy that!” said Butterwops. “Why I used to live in that house when I was a tiny little beetle just your size. It’s a grand old house. Not a skirting board within half an inch of the floor, cracks in all the walls and holes in the plaster. I wonder what sort of people are living in it.”
“Newly married people,” said little Jimmy, “whatever that may mean. I heard the cook say so, and the policeman told her about it.”
“Ah!” said Butterwops, rubbing his hind legs together thoughtfully; “newly married people. They will do for us. They will have lots of sugar and leave it about, and then they will get some children to live with them, and the children won’t eat fat and will make crumbs all over the floors; there will be lots to eat. We shall move.”
That night “The General” called all the beetles round him after the cook had rolled the rug up and had gone to bed, and, sitting on the heel of one of the master’s boots which were drying on the fender, explained to all the beetles that they must move across the road. “For,” said he, “there is a newly married couple over the way. Now this kind of human being eats little else than sugar, and knows nothing of the ways of the world or the habits of the beetle. Their hearts are full of kindliness, and believing others to be as good as they are, they leave the best food in the easiest places. So happy are they together, that they would not interfere with the happiness of others, even though they are black and wear shells. With them we may live for many years in health and comfort, whereas, here we die by tens and twenties every night. Arise, therefore, and follow me carefully and quickly. But when you are on the pavements in the road listen carefully for the tread of the policeman. If he comes among us while we are on the pavements he will kill many of us, for policemen have bigger feet than any other kind of men; only, luckily, they wear squeaky boots so that they may be heard coming a long way off. Now follow me and remember what I have said.”
So speaking he crawled off the boot, down across the floor, under the scullery door, along the garden walk, across the pavements, in at the opposite gateway, round to the back door of the other house; and in half an hour Butterwops, little Jimmy, and two hundred and forty-nine of the beetles were safe in their new house, having crossed the road with the loss of only three beetles. Two tumbled down a drain, and a third lost his way in trying to make a short cut across a flower bed.
They all set to work to get comfortable in their new quarters, and Butterwops, who liked to be near the fire, found a crack in the wall on top of the oven where they dried the wood. From this place of safety, he could come out and walk about among the warm wood and enjoy the heat, and yet run away on the first alarm.
“This is capital,” he said, as he sat warming himself and watching twenty-five beetles climbing into the sugar basin at once; “this is peace and quiet, and here we shall be very happy.”
As for the master of the old house they had lived in, he was very happy too, and wrote and told the man from whom he had bought the yellow powder: “Your powder has killed all the beetles in my house.” And the man who sold the powder printed that in all the newspapers, and other people bought it; but it did not kill all their beetles, and that made them angry. Now if they read this story they will know how it really happened.
Although, as I have said, the house itself was very old, and suitable for beetles in every respect, yet all the things in the house were new, and perhaps the newest thing of all was the young servant, who seemed rather jealous of the other new things and often broke them. At present they had no cat, and as there was no one else to blame, the new mistress scolded the new servant, and then they both cried; especially if it happened, as it often did, that what was broken was a wedding present. However, the mistress was far too happy to be angry for long, and too proud of all the beautiful pots and pans in the kitchen, which she loved better than any of the lovely furniture in the drawing-room, to keep away from them for many hours. Besides, the young servant did not know much about anything, and the mistress used to help her to cook, and especially to get the master’s tea ready when he came home. Indeed, in spite of the breakages, they were all very happy. The mistress used to go about the house singing brightly and cheerfully; while the young servant had four lumps of sugar in her tea and a large slice of cake with it every night, so that she was quite happy, although singing was out of the question. As for the master, you had only to see him running up the house steps to see how glad he was to get home again after his day’s work.
And dear old Butterwops! Why, it did his kind heart good to see so much happiness. The food was left about in easy places, and the larder door was always wide open so that you did not have to scrape your shell getting underneath it. It was a grand place for beetles, and Butterwops told them that if they kept quiet during the day and came out only at night, things would go well with them. Indeed, I have no doubt it would have been as he said, if they had only obeyed his instructions; but beetles, like children, sometimes forget to do what they are told.
Little Jimmy, for instance, was never happy unless he was frightening womenkind, and one afternoon three or four days after they had arrived, when the mistress and her servant were getting tea ready, he scuttled across the room, helter-skelter, right under their eyes. The girl saw him first and threw the toasting fork on to the best tea-things, breaking two cups and saucers with it; she bounded on to a chair, pulled her skirts tight round her legs and screamed out, “Beetles! Black ones.”
In a moment the mistress dropped the kettle, which nearly crushed little Jimmy, and jumped on to the table herself, screaming louder than the servant. Little Jimmy could hardly get under the skirting board, he was laughing so, and old Butterwops, looking out cautiously from the wood pile grunted to himself, “Little Jimmy again,” for he knew who must have done it as soon as he heard the women screaming.
How long the two ladies might have stayed there screaming before they would have dared to step down on to the floor again I do not know, but the master of the house came in just then, and hearing the cause of the trouble laughed aloud and said. “If there are beetles, I will get a beetle trap.” And he did so.
That night he brought one into the kitchen, and before they went to bed he and his wife mixed up a dose of treacle and sugar and put it in the trap and left the trap on the floor. Butterwops was looking on all the time from out of the wood pile, and he laughed all down the back of his shell at them. He had seen that kind of beetle trap before. It was a box of wood, with sloping sides to walk up and a sort of inkstand in the middle, leading to the sugar and treacle. When you walk up the sides, you smelled the mixture and if you went to the edge of the glass inkstand, you stepped in and got drowned. There was no getting out of it.
That night Butterwops was very anxious about the other beetles, for he knew what duffers they were, so he got down right away and sat on the edge of the trap and told them all about it. As the master of the house had been foolish enough to leave the sugar and treacle on the table, no one bothered about the trap. They had a merry feast, only spoilt by one giddy young beetle tumbling head first into the treacle pot, and there the master found him when he came down to light the fire. When he found nothing in the trap, and the dead beetle in the treacle pot on the table, he seemed very angry and threw both treacle and trap out of the scullery window, across the garden into the ashpit.
“To-night,” he said, “we will have a hedge-hog!”
Butterwops, who had stuck his head out of his crack to see what was going on, drew it back quickly and shuddered at this, for he knew what hedge-hogs were. His grandfather had been eaten by one in a garden close to the house, and he had heard they were terrible fellows for catching beetles, as indeed they are.
Sure enough, that night the master brought home a hedge-hog, a little prickly round ball in a basket. He unrolled himself by the fire and had a cup of milk.
“Let us call him Curlywig,” said the mistress, as she poured out the milk; “he is such a little darling. See him drink.”
So they called him Curlywig; but he paid no attention to them, and curled up on the rug and went to sleep.
That night Butterwops did not come down from the fireplace, but looked out from the wood pile in great trouble. When all his army of beetles were creeping and crawling over the floor, picking up food and having a rare good time, he kept shouting out from the edge of a log: “Do go home! Do go in! There’s a hedge-hog in the corner.”
But some of the beetles went close to Curlywig to look at him, and came back and said to Butterwops: “Nonsense, it’s only a mop-head. You are growing old and nervous, General. Go to bed and let us eat in peace.”
Almost as soon as they had spoken, Curlywig unrolled himself, and darting here and there and everywhere, went round the room cracking up beetles furiously while poor old Butterwops sat wringing his feelers and crying out from the wood pile: “I told you so! I told you so!”
From that time onwards, there was no peace for beetles. If one put his head up above a crack in the floor, Curlywig was on to him and he was snapped up. In three days, one hundred and four beetles had been eaten, and the rest were all starving. Butterwops himself had not tasted bite or sup all the time, and you could hear little Jimmy crying behind the skirting board that he had nothing to eat and was very hungry.
How long this might have gone on no one can say, but at last Butterwops hit on a bright idea, and the next night as soon as the people of the house were in bed, he came to the edge of the wood pile and said to the hedge-hog: “Mr. Curlywig, sir!”
Curlywig looked up, and seeing a beetle, snapped his jaws at him but said nothing.
“Mr. Curlywig, sir, can you explain to me why you are here?”
“To eat beetles, I suppose. What better job can you have? I’d eat you if you would come down, though you look rather old and tough, and there are lots of young ones left yet.”
“Ah, but I sha’n’t come down, thank you,” said Butterwops, smiling blandly. “I suppose,” he continued, as if he was merely thinking it out, “you don’t know what it is like to be eaten, do you?”
“Not I,” said Curlywig, “How should I?”
“No, of course not,” said Butterwops. “Poor little fellow, how should he! It seems a cruel shame to bring him here for that. Poor little fellow!”
“Who is a poor little fellow?” asked Curlywig, rather angrily.
“That’s what the mistress said, while you were asleep,” said Butterwops, innocently, “as she was making the pie-crust. She said, ‘Poor little fellow, I hope they won’t hurt him skinning him!’”
Curlywig shivered in every prickle. “Who is to be skinned?” he snapped out, looking round nervously.
“The cookery book was open at Hedge-hog Tart,” went on Butterwops, quite coolly, as though he was talking about the weather, “and the servant said at the rate you were eating beetles she thought you would be fat enough by to-morrow.”
“Dear me! dear me!” said Curlywig; “what wicked things these men are. I remember now when the master of the house bought me, he said: ‘Lean little beggar this, but he’ll soon fatten up at our house for we are full of black beetles,’ What wretches they are! What shall I do?”
“As far as I can learn,” continued Butterwops, “it is done like this. You take a young hedge-hog, the fatter the better, first remove the prickles and skin quickly——”
“Do be quiet,” groaned Curlywig, rolling himself up into a ball. “What shall I do? What shall I do?”
“That is to say,” said Butterwops, “that is how it is done if they decide on tart. If it’s to be curry you won’t be skinned, only then you will catch it hotter in the saucepan.”
“Shut up!” shouted Curlywig, running round the kitchen table in despair. “Oh my poor prickles! What shall I do?”
“Well, if I were you,” continued the General, calmly, “I do not think I should stay on, but do not go on my account. You might squeeze under the scullery door if you wanted to, or you may stay and be eaten and I have no doubt you will look as handsome in a tart as you do out of it. But after all, handsome is as handsome does, and the real question is what will you taste like. Now you will never know, but I shall hear all about it. Yes,” chuckled Buttercups, “I shall hear all about it.”
Curlywig was now galloping round the room mad with terror, shouting out: “Oh, my poor prickles! Oh, my poor prickles!”
Butterwops continued slowly as though he was addressing a dear friend. “I am really very sorry for you, but don’t worry so much. They are going to put some steak and kidney in the pie, so you will have company; and I dare say being baked is not bad, though I fear you won’t like the skinning, especially this chilly weather. But it will soon be over, and once inside the oven you will be warm again in a jiffy.”
Curlywig did not hear all this. He had heard enough. The foolish fellow believed every word Butterwops said to him, and when he came to the word skinning, Curlywig uttered a wild shriek and away he fled underneath the scullery door, across the garden, out into the fields beyond the church, where he hid in a dry ditch for three days, and dared not move out for fear the people of the house were hunting him.
Then the beetles had peace and grew up with the children who came to stay at that house, and cleaned up the floors, and kept out of sight as much as might be. Even little Jimmy grew wiser and gave up frightening the mistress. No one ever heard of Curlywig any more. And everyone in that house, from the master of it down to little Jimmy, lived happily ever afterwards.
This much more there is to tell: that if you can make friends with a black beetle you should get him to tell you stories of Butterwops. And this any good beetle will do willingly, for there never has been such a General as he was before or since. But of all the many tales of his valour and wisdom, there is none they love to tell better than the story of how he outwitted Curlywig the Hedge-hog. “That,” as little Jimmy said at a dinner given by all the beetles to their General to celebrate Curlywig’s flight, “is a story fit to be written in letters of Treacle on the Skirting Boards of Time.” (Adapted.)