“I can’t quite make it out,” I said. “It’s mostly in some strange fish language—Oh, but wait a minute!—Yes, now I get it—‘No smoking.’ … ‘My, here’s a queer one!’ ‘Popcorn and picture postcards here.’ … ‘This way out.’ … ‘Don’t spit’—What funny things to say, Doctor!—Oh, but wait!—Now he’s whistling the tune.”
“What tune is it?” gasped the Doctor.
“John Peel.”
“Ah hah,” cried the Doctor, “that’s what I made it out to be.” And he wrote furiously in his notebook.
I went on listening.
“This is most extraordinary,” the Doctor kept muttering to himself as his pencil went wiggling over the page—“Most extraordinary—but frightfully thrilling. I wonder where he—”
“Here’s some more,” I cried—“some more English. … ‘The big tank needs cleaning.’ … That’s all. Now he’s talking fish-talk again.”
“The big tank!” the Doctor murmured frowning in a puzzled kind of way. “I wonder where on earth he learned—”
Then he bounded up out of his chair.
“I have it,” he yelled, “this fish has escaped from an aquarium. Why, of course! Look at the kind of things he has learned: ‘Picture postcards’—they always sell them in aquariums; ‘Don’t spit’; ‘No smoking’; ‘This way out’—the things the attendants say. And then, ‘My, here’s a queer one!’ That’s the kind of thing that people exclaim when they look into the tanks. It all fits. There’s no doubt about it, Stubbins: we have here a fish who has escaped from captivity. And it’s quite possible—not certain, by any means, but quite possible—that I may now, through him, be able to establish communication with the shellfish. This is a great piece of luck.”
II
The Fidgit’s Story
Well, now that he was started once more upon his old hobby of the shellfish languages, there was no stopping the Doctor. He worked right through the night.
A little after midnight I fell asleep in a chair; about two in the morning Bumpo fell asleep at the wheel; and for five hours the Curlew was allowed to drift where she liked. But still John Dolittle worked on, trying his hardest to understand the fidgit’s language, struggling to make the fidgit understand him.
When I woke up it was broad daylight again. The Doctor was still standing at the listening-tank, looking as tired as an owl and dreadfully wet. But on his face there was a proud and happy smile.
“Stubbins,” he said as soon as he saw me stir, “I’ve done it. I’ve got the key to the fidgit’s language. It’s a frightfully difficult language—quite different from anything I ever heard. The only thing it reminds me of—slightly—is ancient Hebrew. It isn’t shellfish; but it’s a big step towards it. Now, the next thing, I want you to take a pencil and a fresh notebook and write down everything I say. The fidgit has promised to tell me the story of his life. I will translate it into English and you put it down in the book. Are you ready?”
Once more the Doctor lowered his ear beneath the level of the water; and as he began to speak, I started to write. And this is the story that the fidgit told us.
Thirteen Months in an Aquarium
“I was born in the Pacific Ocean, close to the coast of Chile. I was one of a family of two-thousand five-hundred and ten. Soon after our mother and father left us, we youngsters got scattered. The family was broken up—by a herd of whales who chased us. I and my sister, Clippa (she was my favorite sister) had a very narrow escape for our lives. As a rule, whales are not very hard to get away from if you are good at dodging—if you’ve only got a quick swerve. But this one that came after Clippa and myself was a very mean whale. Every time he lost us under a stone or something he’d come back and hunt and hunt till he routed us out into the open again. I never saw such a nasty, persevering brute.
“Well, we shook him at last—though not before he had worried us for hundreds of miles northward, up the west coast of South America. But luck was against us that day. While we were resting and trying to get our breath, another family of fidgits came rushing by, shouting, ‘Come on! Swim for your lives! The dogfish are coming!’
“Now dogfish are particularly fond of fidgits. We are, you might say, their favorite food—and for that reason we always keep away from deep, muddy waters. What’s more, dogfish are not easy to escape from; they are terribly fast and clever hunters. So up we had to jump and on again.
“After we had gone a few more hundred miles we looked back and saw that the dogfish were gaining on us. So we turned into a harbor. It happened to be one on the west coast of the United States. Here we guessed, and hoped, the dogfish would not be likely to follow us. As it happened, they didn’t even see us turn in, but dashed on northward and we never saw them again. I hope they froze to death in the Arctic Seas.
“But, as I said, luck was against us that day. While I and my sister were cruising gently round the ships anchored in the harbor looking for orange-peels, a great delicacy with us—Swoop! Bang!—we were caught in a net.
“We struggled for all we were worth; but it was no use. The net was small-meshed and strongly made. Kicking and flipping we were hauled up the side of the ship and dumped down on the deck, high and dry in a blazing noonday sun.
“Here a couple of old men in whiskers and spectacles leant over us, making strange sounds. Some codling had got caught in the net the same time as we were. These the old men threw back into the sea; but us they seemed to think very precious. They put us carefully into a large jar and after they had taken us on shore they went
