After I had got back to America (safe and sound, to the surprise of my friends), I produced this same expression on the face of a garage man in Connecticut one afternoon. I had driven the same car from Newtown to Litchfield on a crisp October day. It happened that I was just getting over an attack of grippe, and still running a temperature of a couple of degrees. The car, out of plain devilry, began to run one, too. The red fluid in the engine gauge on the dashboard started to rise alarmingly. It got to the point marked ‘Danger’. I drove into a garage in a pretty jumpy state of mind. A garage man looked at the gauge and said the thermostat was clogged – or something of the kind. I was standing outside the car, staring at the dashboard and its, to me, complicated dials, when I noticed to my horror that one of them registered 1650. I pointed a shaking finger at it and said to the mechanic, ‘That dial shouldn’t be registering as high as all that, should it?’ He gave me the same look I had got from the man in England. ‘That’s your radio dial, Mac,’ he said. ‘You got her set at WQXR.’
I got into the car and drove home. The garage man stared after me until I was out of sight. He is probably still telling it around.
My temperature rose a degree that night, and I developed a theory about my automobile. The thing possessed, I decided, a certain antic intelligence, akin to that of a six-months-old poodle. It had run a temperature that afternoon out of mischief and mockery, because I was running one. It had deliberately betrayed me in the Scottish wilderness that other afternoon, by running its gasoline gauge toward ‘Full’ instead of ‘Empty’. I began to wonder what I had done to the car to arouse its malice. Finally I put my finger on it. The car had probably never forgiven me for an incident that had occurred at the border between Belgium and France one day in 1937.
We had stopped at the Belgium customs on our way into France. A customs man leaned into the car, glanced at the mileage recorded on the speedometer, and said something in French. I thought he said I would have to pay one franc for every kilometre the car had travelled. I was loudly indignant in French and in English. The car had gone about 35,000 miles. I figured this out in kilometres, and it came roughly to 55,000. Changing that figure into francs and then into dollars, still loudly and angrily, I estimated I would have to pay around $1,800 to the Belgian customs. The customs man kept trying to get a word in, and so did my wife, but I roared on to my peroration. I shouted that the car had not cost one half of $1,800 when it was new, and even then it hadn’t been worth a third of that. I announced that I would not pay as much as fifty dollars to drive the car into Oz or Never-Never Land (Jamais-Jamais Pays).
The engine, which had been running, stopped. The customs man finally got in a word. Dismissing me as obviously insane, he spoke to my wife. He shouted that he had said nothing about $1,800 or even eight dollars. He had simply made some small comment on the distance the car had gone. As far as he was concerned, we Could drive it to Jamais-Jamais Pays and stay there. He turned on his heel and stalked away, and I started the motor. It took quite a while. The car was acting up. The night my fever rose, I thought I knew why. It had resented the slighting remarks I made about its value and had determined to get even with me.
It got even with me in more ways than I have described.
Whenever I tried to put chains on a tyre, the car would maliciously wrap them around a rear axle. If I parked it ten feet from a fire plug and went into a store, it would be only five feet from the plug when I came out. If it saw a nail in the road, the car would swerve and pick the nail up. Once, driving into a bleak little town in the Middle West, I said aloud, ‘I’d hate to be stuck in this place.’ The car promptly burned out a bearing, and I was stuck there for two days.
If Mrs Robertson is right in her prophecy, and the gas engine is really on the way out, it will be no dire blow for me. I will move within roller-skating distance of a grocery, a drugstore, a church, a library, and a movie house. If the worst comes to the worst, I could even walk.
2
FROM MY WORLD AND WELCOME TO IT
What Do You Mean It Was Brillig?
I was sitting at my typewriter one afternoon several weeks ago, staring at a piece of blank white paper, when Della walked in. ‘They are here with the reeves,’ she said. It did not surprise me that they were. With a coloured woman like Della in the house it would not surprise me if they showed up with the toves. In Della’s afternoon it is always brillig; she could outgrabe a mome rath on any wabe in the world. Only Lewis Carroll would have understood Della completely. I try hard enough. ‘Let them wait a minute,’ I said. I got out the big Century Dictionary and put it on my lap and looked up ‘reeve’. It is an interesting word, like all of Della’s words; I found out that there are four kinds of reeves. ‘Are they here with strings of onions?’ I asked. Della said they were not. ‘Are they here with enclosures or pens for cattle, poultry, or pigs; sheepfolds?’ Della said no sir. ‘Are they here with administrative officers?’ From a little nearer the door Della said no again. ‘Then they’ve got to be here,’ I said, ‘with some females of the Common European sandpiper.’ These scenes of ours take as much out of Della as they do out of me, but she is not a woman to be put down by a crazy man with a dictionary. ‘They are here with the reeves for the windas,’ said Della with brave stubbornness. Then, of course, I understood what they were there with: they were with the Christmas wreaths for the windows. ‘Oh those reeves!’ I said. We were both greatly relieved; we both laughed. Della and I never quite reach the breaking point; we just come close to it.
Della is a New England coloured woman with nothing of the South in her accent; she doesn’t say ‘d’ for ‘th’ and she pronounces her ‘r’s. Hearing her talk in the next room, you might not know at first that she was coloured. You might not know till she said some such thing as ‘Do you want cretonnes for the soup tonight?’ (She makes wonderful cretonnes for the soup.) I have not found out much about Della’s words, but I have learned a great deal about her background. She told me one day that she has three brothers and that one of them works into a garage and another works into an incinerator where they burn the refuge. The one that works into the incinerator has been working into it since the Armitage. That’s what Della does to you; she gives you incinerator perfectly and then she comes out with the Armitage. I spent most of an hour one afternoon trying to figure out what was wrong with the Armitage; I thought of Armistead and armature and Armentières, and when I finally hit on Armistice it sounded crazy. It still does. Della’s third and youngest brother is my favourite; I think he’ll be yours, too, and everybody else’s. His name is Arthur and it seems that he has just passed, with commendably high grades, his silver-service eliminations. Della is delighted about that, but she is not half so delighted about it as I am.
Della came to our house in Connecticut some months ago, trailing her glory of cloudiness. I can place the date for you approximately: it was while there were still a great many fletchers about. ‘The lawn is full of fletchers,’ Della told me one morning, shortly after she arrived, when she brought up my orange juice. ‘You mean neighbours?’ I said. ‘This early?’ By the way she laughed I knew that fletchers weren’t people; at least not people of flesh and blood. I got dressed and went downstairs and looked up the word in the indispensable Century. A fletcher, I found, is a man who makes arrows. I decided, but without a great deal of conviction, that there couldn’t be any arrow-makers on my lawn at that hour in the morning and at this particular period in history. I walked cautiously out the back door and around to the front of the house – and there they were. I don’t know many birds but I do know flickers. A flicker is a bird which, if it were really named fletcher, would be called flicker by all the coloured cooks in the United States. Out of a mild curiosity I looked up ‘flicker’ in the dictionary and I discovered that he is a bird of several aliases. When Della brought my toast and coffee into the dining-room I told her about this. ‘Fletchers,’ I said, ‘are also golden-winged woodpecker, yellowhammers, and high-holders.’ For the first time Dell
a gave me the look that I was to recognize later, during the scene about the reeves. I have become very familiar with that look and I believe I know the thoughts that lie behind it. Della was puzzled at first because I work at home instead of in an office, but I think she has it figured out now. This man, she thinks, used to work into an office like anybody else, but he had to be sent to an institution; he got well enough to come home from the institution, but he is still not well enough to go back to the office. I could have avoided all these suspicions, of course, if I had simply come out in the beginning and corrected Della when she got words wrong. Coming at her obliquely with a dictionary only enriches the confusion; but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I share with Della a form of escapism that is the most mystic and satisfying flight from actuality I have ever known. It may not always comfort me, but it never ceases to beguile me.
Every Thursday when I drive Della to Waterbury in the car for her day off, I explore the dark depths and the strange recesses of her nomenclature. I found out that she had been married for ten years but was now divorced; that is, her husband went away one day and never came back. When I asked her what he did for a living, she said he worked into a dove-wedding. ‘Into a what?’ I asked. ‘Into a dove-wedding,’ said Della. It is one of the words I haven’t figured out yet, but I am still working on it. ‘Where are you from, Mr Thurl?’ she asked me one day. I told her Ohio, and she said, ‘Ooooh, to be sure!’ as if I had given her a clue to my crazy definitions, my insensitivity to the ordinary household nouns, and my ignorance of the commoner migratory birds. ‘Semantics, Ohio,’ I said. ‘Why, there’s one of them in Massachusetts, too,’ said Della. ‘The one I mean,’ I told her, ‘is bigger and more confusing.’ ‘I’ll bet it is,’ said Della.
Della told me the other day that she had had only one sister, a beautiful girl who died when she was twenty-one. ‘That’s too bad,’ I said. ‘What was the matter?’ Della had what was the matter at her tongue’s tip. ‘She got tuberculosis from her teeth,’ she said, ‘and it went all through her symptom.’ I didn’t know what to say to that except that my teeth were all right but that my symptom could probably be easily gone all through. ‘You work too much with your brain,’ said Della. I knew she was trying to draw me out about my brain and what had happened to it so that I could no longer work into an office, but I changed the subject. There is no doubt that Della is considerably worried about my mental condition. One morning when I didn’t get up till noon because I had been writing letters until three o’clock, Della told my wife at breakfast what was the matter with me. ‘His mind works so fast his body can’t keep up with it,’ she said. This diagnosis has shaken me not a little. I have decided to sleep longer and work less. I know exactly what will happen to me if my mind gets so far ahead of my body that my body can’t catch up with it. They will come with a reeve and this time it won’t be a red-and-green one for the window, it will be a black one for the door.
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
‘We’re going through!’ The Commander’s voice was like thin ice breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap pulled down rakishly over one cold grey eye. ‘We can’t make it, sir. It’s spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me.’ ‘I’m not asking you, Lieutenant Berg,’ said the Commander. ‘Throw on the power lights! Rev her up to 8,500! We’re going through!’ The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of complicated dials. ‘Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!’ he shouted. ‘Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!’ repeated Lieutenant Berg. ‘Full strength in No. 3 turret!’ shouted the Commander. ‘Full strength in No. 3 turret!’ The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge, hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned. ‘The Old Man’ll get us through,’ they said to one another. ‘The Old Man ain’t afraid of Hell!’
‘Not so fast! You’re driving too fast!’ said Mrs Mitty. ‘What are you driving so fast for?’
‘Hmm?’ said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. ‘You were up to fifty-five,’ she said. ‘You know I don’t like to go more than forty. You were up to fifty-five.’ Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in silence, the roaring of the SN 202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. ‘You’re tensed up again,’ said Mrs Mitty. ‘It’s one of your days. I wish you’d let Dr Renshaw look you over.’
Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife went to have her hair done. ‘Remember to get those overshoes while I’m having my hair done,’ she said. ‘I don’t need overshoes,’ said Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. ‘We’ve been all through that,’ she said, getting out of the car. ‘You’re not a young man any longer.’ He raced the engine a little. ‘Why don’t you wear your gloves? Have you lost your gloves?’ Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again. ‘Pick it up, brother!’ snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the parking lot.
… ‘It’s the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan,’ said the pretty nurse. ‘Yes?’ said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves slowly. ‘Who has the case?’ ‘Dr Renshaw and Dr Benbow, but there are two specialists here, Dr Remington from New York and Mr Pritchard-Mitford from London. He flew over.’ A door opened down a long, cool corridor and Dr Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. ‘Hello, Mitty,’ he said. ‘We’re having the devil’s own time with McMillan, the millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you’d take a look at him.’ ‘Glad to,’ said Mitty.
In the operating room there were whispered introductions: ‘Dr Remington, Dr Mitty. Mr Pritchard-Mitford, Dr Mitty.’ ‘I’ve read your book on streptothricosis,’ said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. ‘A brilliant performance, sir.’ ‘Thank you,’ said Walter Mitty. ‘Didn’t know you were in the States, Mitty,’ grumbled Remington. ‘Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary,’ ‘You are very kind,’ said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine, connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. ‘The new anaesthetizer is giving way!’ shouted an interne. ‘There is no one in the East who knows how to fix it!’ ‘Quiet, man!’ said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. ‘Give me a fountain-pen!’ he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain-pen. He pulled a faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. ‘That will hold for ten minutes,’ he said. ‘Get on with the operation.’ A nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale. ‘Coreopsis has set in,’ said Renshaw nervously. ‘If you would take over, Mitty?’ Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow, who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists. ‘If you wish,’ he said. They slipped a white gown on him; he adjusted a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining …
‘Back it up, Mac! Look out for that Buick!’ Walter Mitty jammed on the brakes. ‘Wrong lane, Mac,’ said the parking-lot attendant, looking at Mitty closely. ‘Gee. Yeh,’ muttered Mitty. He began cautiously to back out of the lane marked ‘Exit Only.’ ‘Leave her sit there,’ said the attendant. ‘I’ll put her away.’ Mitty got out of the car. ‘Hey, better leave the key.’ ‘Oh,’ said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it belonged.
They’re so damn c
ocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street; they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off, outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman. Since then Mrs Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains taken off. The next time, he thought, I’ll wear my right arm in a sling; they won’t grin at me then. I’ll have my right arm in a sling and they’ll see I couldn’t possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the sidewalk. ‘Overshoes,’ he said to himself, and he began looking for a shoe store.
When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife had told him to get. She had told him twice, before they set out from their house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town – he was always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb’s, razor blades? No. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, carborundum, initiative and referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. ‘Where’s the what’s-its-name?’ she would ask. ‘Don’t tell me you forgot the what’s-its-name.’ A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury trial.
… ‘Perhaps this will refresh your memory.’ The District Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness stand. ‘Have you ever seen this before?’ Walter Mitty took the gun and examined it expertly. ‘This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80,’ he said calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The judge rapped for order. ‘You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?’ said the District Attorney, insinuatingly. ‘Objection!’ shouted Mitty’s attorney. ‘We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot. We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the fourteenth of July.’ Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the bickering attorneys were stilled. ‘With any known make of gun,’ he said evenly, ‘I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet with my left hand.’ Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman’s scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in Walter Mitty’s arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin. ‘You miserable cur!’ …
The Thurber Carnival Page 6