It was a very ordinary morning on the Tropical Isle. The parakeets chattered cheerily in the banana trees outside Penny’s cage, and the cockatoos preened themselves, casting scornful glances towards Penny as they admired their reflections in the pool of rainwater. But Penny was thinking about her shoes. Would this current pair of feathers ever wear out? They were so dreadfully dull! It was always blue—bluer than any blue she ever saw. Someone had once told her that blue was the color of thought, but she didn’t feel very thoughtful. She wished with all her heart that her wings were like those of her friend by the cage-door, whose purple feathers changed into gold from different angles.
The morning wore on, but the polar bear never for a moment left the foot of the ladder. It rather appears as though he waited for one of the islanders to come down, and tell him that he has lost the playtime his mother promised him. After all, Penny reflected: “If you have to stay at home, it is kinder to stay and refuse playmates here than to let everybody else have a good time.”
Penny sighed heavily, and paced far more slowly up and down her cage than she had ever done before. “Only, oh, dear!” she thought, “if I had a pair of real feathers, I should like all the creatures to come and see them. Why did not my own father think of such a feather store in the garden at home? Perhaps the peacocks would have been glad to pay a visit to me! I wonder if my father had the parrot-house painted brown as a hint to them, or whether it was only so that it might escape observation in the foliage.”
“Pretty Polly,” Penny cried loudly, in a voice she meant to be very sugary; still she found it hard to forgive her mother for teaching her that delectable phrase. “Polly will be dead in the morning,” she scolded. “All your horrible insinuations will come to true; I give my word you have worn my heart out long ago, you have indeed.”
All the same, she was just as glad to see her mother after such an absence, nearly twelve hours now, the last five spent wandering in unknown woods. She flew gladly to the lady-blackbird, and introduced her to Juanita and Miguelito, whom she already knew by the name of “The Darlings,” only she was still a little terrified of Miguelito’s fingers.
When darkness fell, the islanders took their leave, not without extracting a small promise from Penny to send her mother to them on the following evening, if she had no engagements. At yet a later hour Miss Blackbird prayed her daughter to contain herself. “It is all very well for you, who have seen things, to arrive home an hour late, but, my dear, for me to be strolling about Mother Earth’s premises without leave at so unseemly an hour would only make us both look very foolish—indeed fatal injury too might accrue to both us from such a proceeding. I, for one, am only too glad this visit is over, and that my house is got ready in time.”
“Yes, I thought her house was charming,” Penny replied. “And don’t you think it was deliberate neglect not to provide any drinks? Neither any for the fowls nor for their guests, neither her four chickens nor their two legs—Why, mother?” she said suddenly.
But her mother was deaf—she was about to make an observation when she suddenly transformed into a fledgling, nothing but a fledgling, and flew through the air to most impossible distances, and her wings did so mightily overshadow others, that every feature of each one was lost.
“I was hurrying home as fast as I could after my party,” this strand of thought continued, “when suddenly everything went wrong. I have grown fine bright white feathers from head to foot, which I particularly wish to go on wearing. Gluttony never managed to squeeze anything out of me, there was nothing left to squeeze, but she strapped my wings into full growth at the Governor-General’s school, but I was outside, you know, only looking in to admire myself in the mirror.”
Penny could now hear—and very painfully all that had been going on too inside her head. She is sorry, of course, regretful of those extra injuries caused by her mother’s love and thoughtful care, which put more defects in her than shortcuts can take out.
“What is the good of it altogether?” she asked reproachfully, when she found out her mother had not yet left this Inferno of sights and sounds to join her on the pier. “Some spirits can only pipe on a penny whistle—see! Dear mother, that nice old bird is shaking her wings, and one top feather in front does ‘fearfully and wonderfully’ repeat the motion she misplaces. That means, outside the confusion we are breeding here, there is another bird measuring watches on the pier, while another one shakes her petticoat feathers, too. Maestro! No one will be able to hear a raven croak in your legacies here, there is so much to hear.”
Penny felt now all the annoying inconveniences she had inflicted on her age-mates on former nights, she who had passed them quite harmlessly, she was evading them now. It didn’t seem to Penny very polite either not to keep up a sort of conversation with her fellow-pupils, so she produced Mrs. Williams’s feather-store from her pocket, stuck it in her top knot, and answered it as well as her age, and more advanced than her years, allowed. By the haphazard formation of her own top-knot or headgear no jingoism or party spirit need appear. Maestro, or the Dictator, was got rid of—the flora, or instead of this, as we used to say, of the department of plants, was burnt to darkness and ashes to prevent her interfering in worldly affairs much against her will.