A Mouse Called Wolf Read online

  So intent was Wolf on his singing and so lost in admiration was the listening Mary that neither heard foot-steps approaching the grand piano.

  Very slowly, very quietly, the lady of the house opened the top of her instrument to see within a mouse watching another, smaller mouse. The smaller mouse was, to her complete shock, singing an old ballad in a high, pure, true voice. There was not the shadow of a doubt about the tune. It was “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”

  – FIVE –

  A Lesson

  WOLF HAD HIS back turned as the piano lid was slowly opened. What’s more, in the sheer pleasure of exercising his newfound talent, his eyes were shut tight as he caroled.

  When the song ended, he opened them to see once again his mother staring over his shoulder in terror. Looking quickly behind him, he saw the huge round human face peering in, and once again he cried, “Quick, Mommy! Follow me!”

  Out of the body of the piano they leaped, down onto the keyboard, turned a sharp right, whizzed along to the lowest of the bass keys, down the leg, and into their hole.

  Carefully the lady replaced the prop stick and sat down on the piano stool. She did not notice the few ginger hairs stuck under the rim of the top. For a moment she wondered if this was some sort of dream, but she pinched herself hard and it hurt, so it wasn’t.

  “Oh!” she said quietly. “To think that in my house there lives the world’s first singing mouse!”

  She flexed her fingers to get the stiffness out of them and then began to play, very softly, “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”

  Wouldn’t it be lovely, she thought, if that mouse came out again and sang to my accompaniment. But of course no such thing happened.

  Mrs. Honeybee (for that was the lady’s name) rose from the piano stool, got down on her hands and knees—with difficulty, for she was not young and her joints were creaky—and found the hole in the molding behind the left front leg of the piano.

  Most people, on finding mice in their home, would think right away of traps and poison, or—if they had a cat—would hope that the cat would solve the problem. But no such thoughts entered Mrs. Honeybee’s head. She loved all animals and could not bear the idea of killing anything, even a wasp or a fly.

  The one thing that immediately worried her was the cat, which was a stray that had walked in one day and adopted Mrs. Honeybee. But now, finding that she had mice in the house, she realized what a threat the cat posed to them.

  The cat might kill my singing mouse, she thought. It must never come in here again. She got to her feet and shut the door, not realizing that nothing could ever persuade her ginger cat to enter the living room again.

  Seated once more at her piano, Mrs. Honeybee pondered what to play. In her youth she had been a concert pianist, and though rheumatism meant that her gifts were now limited, she still loved to play short pieces by her favorite classical composers—Brahms, Beethoven, and of course Mozart. She liked to play traditional songs and ballads and folk tunes as well.

  It suddenly occurred to her to test out her singing mouse. It could have learned “Love’s Old Sweet Song” only by sitting in that hole in the molding and listening to me playing it many times, she thought.

  “All right, then, my mouse,” said Mrs. Honeybee. “I’ll teach you another tune, something very simple, and we’ll see how soon you can pick it up. What shall it be?”

  And then, because she was thinking about the little animals, she said, “I know! ‘Three Blind Mice’! It doesn’t matter that there are only two of you with perfectly good eyesight. You couldn’t understand the words anyway. All we need is the tune.”

  So for perhaps ten minutes old Mrs. Honeybee played “Three Blind Mice,” again and again and again.

  At first she just played the melody, but then she began to sing the words to the old nursery rhyme. A horrible woman, that farmer’s wife, she thought as she sang. Imagine cutting the tails off mice—and blind ones at that! How I hate cruelty to animals.

  “There,” she said, bending down toward the mousehole as the last notes died away, “you ought to have learned it by now.” And she got up and left the living room, being careful to close the door.

  Later that evening, after Mrs. Honeybee had fed herself and her cat and was on her way to bed, she couldn’t resist going to listen outside the living room door, just in case the mouse might be singing. She put her ear to the keyhole, but all was silent within.

  Mrs. Honeybee sighed, but before the sigh had even finished, she heard that high, pure, true voice begin to sing “Three Blind Mice.”

  But this time Wolf wasn’t just singing “La-la-la.” While practicing the new song in his head as Mrs. Honeybee was eating her dinner, he had made up some words for it.

  Mrs. Honeybee couldn’t know, of course, but this was what the mouse called Wolf was actually singing:

  “Singsong mouse.

  Singsong mouse.

  Hark to his song.

  Hark to his song.

  He sings as sweetly as any bird

  That anyone else in the world has heard.

  Did you ever hear of a thing as absurd

  As a singsong mouse?”

  – SIX –

  A Lure

  THOUGH THEY COULD not have known it, Mrs. Honeybee and Mary Mouse had something in common. Both were widows.

  Mr. Honeybee had died peacefully of heart failure many years ago, and the heart of Mary’s mate had failed, not at all peacefully, after an unfortunate encounter with the cat.

  But in another way Mrs. Honeybee and Mary were not at all alike.

  Mary didn’t miss her husband in the least. Mrs. Honeybee missed hers very much. Mary had her favorite young child at home with her. Mrs. Honeybee’s children were middle-aged and lived far away, so she seldom saw them or her grandchildren.

  In short, Mary was not lonely, but Mrs. Honeybee was.

  For a while the ginger cat had given her someone to talk to, but now the animal seemed to have become a nervous wreck. The kitchen door needed oiling, and each time Mrs. Honeybee opened it, it gave out a mouselike squeak, whereupon the cat would leap from its basket and dash out through the cat flap.

  Perhaps because of the piano player’s loneliness, many of the tunes that Wolf listened to were rather sad-sounding ones. But one morning he was awakened by the sound of a rather lively tune. What’s more, the lady was singing as she played.

  In fact, Mrs. Honeybee, who talked to herself a lot, had given herself a good talking-to.

  “Jane Honeybee,” she said severely, “you are becoming a miserable old woman, and it shows in your choice of music. The next thing you know, you’ll be playing the funeral march. You should count your blessings, my girl. How many other people do you suppose are lucky enough to have a singing mouse in their house? Why, none. So why don’t you choose a happy piece of music to teach your mouse? Then it can sing it to you and cheer you up.”

  She thought for a while, and then she smiled and began to play and sing a song that she remembered singing as a small girl:

  “Come on, everyone!

  Sing and dance and run!

  Making friends and

  Having a lot of fun!

  Even if it’s raining

  And the skies are gray,

  Nobody’s complaining—

  It’s a lovely day.

  Come on, everyone!

  Sing and dance and run!

  Making friends and

  Having a lot of fun!”

  “There!” said Mrs. Honeybee when she had played and sung the song several times. “You should have gotten it in your head by now, mouse. The tune, I mean, not the words.” And she stood up, smiling to herself at the ridiculous idea of a mouse putting words to a song.

  But that is exactly what Wolf now spent a long time doing.

  “That was a happy tune, wasn’t it, Mommy?” he said once the lady had left the room.

  “She doesn’t sing half as well as you do, dear,” said Mary. “And, of course, I couldn’t understan
d the words.”

  “I’ll make some up for you,” said Wolf.

  That evening as Mrs. Honeybee sat down at her piano, she heard that voice again, somewhat muffled since it was coming from the depths of the mousehole. Though of course she could not understand the words Wolf had composed and was now trying out on his mother. And they were:

  “Merry mice are we!

  Mommy Mouse and me!

  Hear me sing this

  Lovely old melody!

  You may chance to see us,

  Lady of the house.

  Wolfgang Amadeus

  And Mom, who’s Mary Mouse.

  Merry mice are we!

  Mommy Mouse and me!

  Hear me sing this

  Lovely old melody!”

  When Wolf finished singing, he was startled by a sudden sharp noise. Peering cautiously out of the hole, he saw that the lady was sitting on the piano stool, clapping her hands together loudly.

  “Bravo, mouse!” said Mrs. Honeybee. “You sing twice as well as I do. If only you would come out of your hole and climb up here on the piano, then I could accompany you as you sing.”

  “Silly old woman!” she went on to herself. “Accompanying a singing mouse! What a crazy idea. But then the idea of a mouse singing is crazy anyway, yet this one does, beautifully. One thing’s obvious. I must make friends with him. Or her. Him, I somehow think, and I have a feeling the other, bigger one may be his mother. Now, what’s the best way to make a friend of a mouse? Why, food, of course! But what sort?”

  Then Mrs. Honeybee remembered hearing somewhere that mice are especially fond of chocolate (as indeed she herself was). She got up and went across the living room to a small table. On it stood a tin in which she kept sweets. From the tin she took out a packet of chocolates. From the packet she took out one chocolate and then put the rest back in the tin and closed the lid.

  She went over to the grand piano and, to avoid bending, carefully dropped the one chocolate beside the wheel on the piano’s left front leg, outside the mousehole. Then she left the room, shutting the door behind her.

  Before she went to bed, Mrs. Honeybee just couldn’t resist going back to the living room.

  “They probably haven’t eaten it yet, I don’t suppose,” she said.

  She turned on the light to see if the chocolate was still there. It wasn’t.

  “Good boy!” she said softly. “There’s plenty more where that came from, if only you’ll come out and sing for me.”

  – SEVEN –

  A Reward

  “THE BEST LAID schemes o’ mice and men,” said the poet Robert Burns, don’t always turn out quite right. But maybe it’s different with women.

  At any rate, Mrs. Honeybee’s plan for making friends with her singing mouse seemed likely, as the days went by, to be a winner.

  The very next day after she had put down that first chocolate, she put another down in the same place just as she was about to begin her morning piano playing. No sooner had she played the first few bars of a tune (it was “Food, Glorious Food,” from the musical Oliver!) than she saw from the corner of her eye a little mouse dart out of the hole in the molding, grab the chocolate, and whisk back in again.

  “Look, Mommy,” said Wolf as he laid the prize before his mother. “Another one of those yummy sweets!”

  Mary, newly awakened, listened to the music above.

  “Wolfgang Amadeus!” she said. “D’you mean to tell me you just went out and took it while the lady was actually playing?”

  “Don’t be angry, Mommy,” said Wolf. “She’s nice, I’m sure of it. She must feel kindly toward us, or she wouldn’t be feeding us this stuff.”

  “It could be a trick,” said Mary, but all the same she bit a lump out of the chocolate.

  Mrs. Honeybee wisely did not hurry. Patience, she knew, was what was needed, and she took one step at a time.

  After evening playing that day, she put out another chocolate, but not on the floor this time. Instead she placed it at the bass end of the keyboard beside the bottom A.

  “You’ll have to climb for this one, mouse,” she said.

  By bedtime it was gone.

  The following morning she put another in the same place, sat down, and began to play a song called “Climb Ev’ry Mountain.” Halfway through the song, she was delighted to see a mouse climbing up the piano leg. It sat beside the chocolate, watching her with bright eyes. Mrs. Honeybee continued playing, but in a higher key so that her left hand would not come too close to the mouse. After a few seconds, he took the candy in his mouth and ran down the leg of the piano and into the hole.

  So it went on. Day by day Mrs. Honeybee lured the singing mouse upward and inward. She now played with the top of the piano closed, and once the mouse had grown accustomed to taking a chocolate at keyboard height, she began to place each fresh one up on the top, first at the left-hand edge and then gradually closer to the center of the instrument. Until at last the candy was directly above middle C, directly over STEINWAY & SONS, in fact, directly opposite the face of the pianist.

  Although Wolf was by now quite used to collecting his prize from wherever it had been placed, confident that the lady would not harm him, he nevertheless did not usually stick around. But when at last he found himself sitting so close to her, their eyes on the same level and no more than a foot and a half apart, he paused for a moment before picking up the candy, and they looked directly at each other.

  “Well done, mouse!” said Mrs. Honeybee quietly, and she began to play a song called “You’re the Top.”

  Now came the final part of Mrs. Honeybee’s plan.

  Once Wolf had become accustomed to showing up twice a day to get his chocolate from that spot above middle C, right in front of the lady’s face, there came an evening when things were different. He arrived to find that there was no chocolate awaiting him. He looked down to see that the lady was holding the candy in the fingers of her left hand, while with her right she played, very softly, the melody of “Love’s Old Sweet Song.”

  Mrs. Honeybee had worried about which song to choose at such an important moment. She had considered “Three Blind Mice” and “Come On, Everyone,” but had decided that she would play the tune her mouse had been singing so sweetly when she had first opened the top of the piano and set eyes on him.

  So now, in the twilight, she played this song in the high notes of the treble, gently waving the chocolate to and fro in time to the music. All the while she kept her eyes fixed on the mouse, willing him to do what she wanted. Sing for your supper, she thought, sing, sing, sing, like a good boy.

  Wolf crouched stock-still, as quiet as a mouse indeed, listening to the melody and watching the little round piece of chocolate as it was waved in front of his nose.

  Suddenly something clicked in his tiny brain. She wants me to sing for my supper, he said to himself, that’s what she wants. I haven’t got any words for this song, but perhaps it doesn’t matter. He waited until the melody ended, then he sat up, straightened his whiskers with one paw, cleared his throat, and took a deep breath.

  Right on cue Mrs. Honeybee once more began to play the tune with her right hand, and from the mouse’s mouth there came again that high, pure, true voice.

  “La-la-la-la-la-la!” caroled Wolf to Mrs. Honeybee’s delighted accompaniment.

  When the song ended, the accompanist gently held out her left hand to the singer, who took his reward, equally gently, in his two front paws.

  – EIGHT –

  A Groan

  “DID MY EARS deceive me,” said Mary when Wolf arrived home with his reward, “or were you singing at the same time as the lady was playing?”

  “Yes, I was, Mommy,” said Wolf. “It was fantastic!”

  “How close to her were you?”

  “Very close. I took this chocolate from her hand.”

  “You did what?” cried Mary. “You must be crazy!”

  “Look, Mommy,” said Wolf. “Tomorrow, when she comes to play and
I go up on the piano to sing, which I certainly intend to do, why don’t you come with me?”

  “I don’t think so!” said Mary.

  “What do you mean ‘I don’t think so!’?” said Wolf. “It seems to me that my mother is too scared. I’m not afraid, but you are.”

  Mary’s eyes flashed.

  “Wolfgang Amadeus!” she said. “Are you calling me a coward?”

  “That remains to be seen,” replied Wolf.

  And seen it was, the following morning. To Mrs. Honeybee’s surprise, not one but two mice appeared on the piano top. To be sure, the larger one seemed very wary, jumping nervously when the pianist raised her hands to play. But once the first bars of “Come On, Everyone” had rung out and the little mouse (could Mrs. Honeybee but have known it) was cheerfully singing “Merry mice are we! Mommy Mouse and me!” the other one (the mother, Mrs. Honeybee felt quite sure now) calmed down and sat listening proudly to her son.

  Next the pianist played “Three Blind Mice” (and the singer sang “Singsong Mouse”). Mrs. Honeybee paused for Wolf to catch his breath.

  The day’s first chocolate, Wolf noted, was waiting there on the piano top, but he did not take it. Not only did he want to sing some more, but he also wanted to learn a new song (to impress his mother), and he stared beadily at Mrs. Honeybee, his eyes fixed on her, willing her to do what he wanted. Teach me a new song, he thought. Teach me, teach me, teach me, like a good woman.

  Suddenly something clicked in Mrs. Honeybee’s large brain. He wants to learn a new song, she thought, to impress his mother, I dare say. Perhaps his mother could learn it too, now that she’s here. What a good idea! she decided. They can sing duets in close harmony. I’ll try a cradle song, and then they’ll be able to lull each other to sleep. She began to play, very quietly, the six-in-a-measure rhythm of a berceuse by Chopin.