The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  Lots of People Reported Our Dog to the Police

  Muggs at his meals was an unusual sight. Because of the fact that if you reached toward the floor he would bite you, we usually put his food plate on top of an old kitchen table with a bench alongside the table. Muggs would stand on the bench and eat. I remember that my mother’s Uncle Horatio, who boasted that he was the third man up Missionary Ridge, was splutteringly indignant when he found out that we fed the dog on a table because we were afraid to put his plate on the floor. He said he wasn’t afraid of any dog that ever lived and that he would put the dog’s plate on the floor if we would give it to him. Roy said that if Uncle Horatio had fed Muggs on the ground just before the battle he would have been the first man up Missionary Ridge. Uncle Horatio was furious. ‘Bring him in! Bring him in now!’ he shouted. ‘I’ll feed the — on the floor!’ Roy was all for giving him a chance, but my father wouldn’t hear of it. He said that Muggs had already been fed. ‘I’ll feed him again!’ bawled Uncle Horatio. We had quite a time quieting him.

  Muggs at His Meals Was an Unusual Sight

  In his last year Muggs used to spend practically all of his time outdoors. He didn’t like to stay in the house for some reason or other – perhaps it held too many unpleasant memories for him. Anyway, it was hard to get him to come in and as a result the garbage man, the iceman, and the laundryman wouldn’t come near the house. We had to haul the garbage down to the corner, take the laundry out and bring it back, and meet the iceman a block from home. After this had gone on for some time we hit on an ingenious arrangement for getting the dog in the house so that we could lock him up while the gas meter was read, and so on. Muggs was afraid of only one thing, an electrical storm. Thunder and lightning frightened him out of his senses (I think he thought a storm had broken the day the mantelpiece fell). He would rush into the house and hide under a bed or in a clothes closet. So we fixed up a thunder machine out of a long narrow piece of sheet iron with a wooden handle on one end. Mother would shake this vigorously when she wanted to get Muggs into the house. It made an excellent imitation of thunder, but I suppose it was the most roundabout system for running a household that was ever devised. It took a lot out of mother.

  A few months before Muggs died, he got to ‘seeing things’. He would rise slowly from the floor, growling low, and stalk stiff-legged and menacing toward nothing at all. Sometimes the Thing would be just a little to the right or left of a visitor. Once a Fuller Brush salesman got hysterics. Muggs came wandering into the room like Hamlet following his father’s ghost. His eyes were fixed on a spot just to the left of the Fuller Brush man, who stood it until Muggs was about three slow, creeping paces from him. Then he shouted. Muggs wavered on past him into the hallway grumbling to himself but the Fuller man went on shouting. I think mother had to throw a pan of cold water on him before he stopped. That was the way she used to stop us boys when we got into fights.

  Muggs died quite suddenly one night. Mother wanted to bury him in the family lot under a marble stone with some such inscription as ‘Flights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ but we persuaded her it was against the law. In the end we just put up a smooth board above his grave along a lonely road. On the board I wrote with an indelible pencil ‘Cave Canem’. Mother was quite pleased with the simple classic dignity of the old Latin epitaph.

  University Days

  I passed all the other courses that I took at my University, but I could never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would just be standing there. ‘I can’t see anything,’ I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through a microscope, but he would always end up in a fury, claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended that I couldn’t. ‘It takes away from the beauty of flowers anyway,’ I used to tell him. ‘We are not concerned with beauty in this course,’ he would say. ‘We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flars.’ ‘Well,’ I’d say, ‘I can’t see anything.’ ‘Try it just once again,’ he’d say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again a nebulous milky substance – a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. ‘I see what looks like a lot of milk,’ I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of my not having adjusted the microscope properly, so he would readjust it for me, or rather, for himself. And I would look again and see milk.

  I finally took a deferred pass, as they called it, and waited a year and tried again. (You had to pass one of the biological sciences or you couldn’t graduate.) The professor had come back from vacation brown as a berry, bright-eyed, and eager to explain cell-structure again to his classes. ‘Well,’ he said to me, cheerily, when we met in the first laboratory hour of the semester, ‘we’re going to see cells this time, aren’t we?’ ‘Yes, sir,’ I said. Students to right of me and to left of me and in front of me were seeing cells; what’s more, they were quietly drawing pictures of them in their notebooks. Of course, I didn’t see anything.

  ‘We’ll try it,’ the professor said to me, grimly, ‘with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. As God is my witness, I’ll arrange this glass so that you see cells through it or I’ll give up teaching. In twenty-two years of botany, I – ’ He cut off abruptly for he was beginning to quiver all over, like Lionel Barrymore, and he genuinely wished to hold on to his temper; his scenes with me had taken a great deal out of him.

  So we tried it with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. With only one of them did I see anything but blackness or the familiar lacteal opacity, and that time I saw, to my pleasure and amazement, a variegated constellation of flecks, specks and dots. These I hastily drew. The instructor, noting my activity, came back from an adjoining desk, a smile on his lips and his eyebrows high in hope. He looked at my cell drawing. ‘What’s that?’ he demanded, with a hint of a squeal in his voice. ‘That’s what I saw,’ I said. ‘You didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t!’ he screamed, losing control of his temper instantly, and he bent over and squinted into the microscope. His head snapped up. ‘That’s your eye!’ he shouted. ‘You’ve fixed the lens so that it reflects! You’ve drawn your eye!’

  Another course that I didn’t like, but somehow managed to pass, was economics. I went to that class straight from the botany class, which didn’t help me any in understanding either subject. I used to get them mixed up. But not as mixed up as another student in my economics class who came there direct from a physics laboratory. He was a tackle on the football team, named Bolenciecwcz. At that time Ohio State University had one of the best football teams in the country, and Bolenciecwcz was one of its outstanding stars. In order to be eligible to play it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter. Most of his professors were lenient and helped him along. None gave him more hints, in answering questions, or asked him simpler ones than the economics professor, a thin, timid man named Bassum. One day when we were on the subject of transportation and distribution, it came Bolenciecwcz’s turn to answer a question. ‘Name one means of transportation,’ the professor said to him. No light came into the big tackle’s eyes. ‘Just any means of transportation,’ said the professor. Bolenciecwcz sat staring at him. ‘That is,’ pursued the professor, ‘any medium, agency or method of going from one place to another.’ Bolenciecwcz had the look of a man who is being led into a trap. ‘You may choose among steam, horse-drawn or electrically propelled vehicles,’ said the instructor. ‘I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making l
ong journeys across land.’ There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr Bassum. Mr Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. ‘Choo-choo-choo,’ he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room. All of us, of course, shared Mr Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics, for the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off. ‘Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!’ some student with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr Bassum himself rounded off the little show. ‘Ding, dong, ding, dong,’ he said hopefully. Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red.

  He Was Beginning to Quiver All Over Like Lionel Barrymore

  ‘How did you come to college this year, Mr Bolenciecwcz?’ asked the professor. ‘Chuffa chuffa, chuffa. chuffa.’

  ‘M’father sent me,’ said the football player.

  ‘What on?’ asked Bassum.

  ‘I git an ’lowance,’ said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed.

  ‘No, no,’ said Bassum. ‘Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?’

  ‘Train,’ said Bolenciecwcz.

  ‘Quite right,’ said the professor. ‘Now, Mr Nugent, will you tell us –’

  If I went through anguish in botany and economics – for different reasons – gymnasium work was even worse. I don’t even like to think about it. They wouldn’t let you play games or join in the exercises with your glasses on and I couldn’t see with mine off. I bumped into professors, horizontal bars, agricultural students, and swinging iron rings. Not being able to see, I could take it but I couldn’t dish it out. Also, in order to pass gymnasium (and you had to pass it to graduate) you had to learn to swim if you didn’t know how. I didn’t like the swimming pool, I didn’t like swimming, and I didn’t like the swimming instructor, and after all these years I still don’t. I never swam but I passed my gym work anyway, by having another student give my gymnasium number (978) and swim across the pool in my place. He was a quiet, amiable blond youth, number 473, and he would have seen through a microscope for me if we could have got away with it, but we couldn’t get away with it. Another thing I didn’t like about gymnasium work was that they made you strip the day you registered. It is impossible for me to be happy when I am stripped and being asked a lot of questions. Still, I did better than a lanky agricultural student who was cross-examined just before I was. They asked each student what college he was in – that is, whether Arts, Engineering, Commerce, or Agriculture. ‘What college are you in?’ the instructor snapped at the youth in front of me. ‘Ohio State University,’ he said promptly.

  Bolenciecwez Was Trying to Think

  It wasn’t that agricultural student but it was another a whole lot like him who decided to take up journalism, possibly on the ground that when farming went to hell he could fall back on newspaper work. He didn’t realize, of course, that that would be very much like falling back full-length on a kit of carpenter’s tools. Haskins didn’t seem cut out for journalism, being too embarrassed to talk to anybody and unable to use a typewriter, but the editor of the college paper assigned him to the cow barns, the sheep house, the horse pavilion, and the animal husbandry department generally. This was a genuinely big ‘beat’, for it took up five times as much ground and got ten times as great a legislative appropriation as the College of Liberal Arts. The agricultural student knew animals, but nevertheless his stories were dull and colourlessly written. He took all afternoon on each of them, on account of having to hunt for each letter on the typewriter. Once in a while he had to ask somebody to help him hunt. ‘C’ and ‘L’, in particular, were hard letters for him to find. His editor finally got pretty much annoyed at the farmer-journalist because his pieces were so uninteresting. ‘See here, Haskins,’ he snapped at him one day, ‘Why is it we never have anything hot from you on the horse pavilion? Here we have two hundred head of horses on this campus – more than any other university in the Western Conference except Purdue – and yet you never get any real low down on them. Now shoot over to the horse barns and dig up something lively.’ Haskins shambled out and came back in about an hour; he said he had something. ‘Well, start it off snappily,’ said the editor. ‘Something people will read.’ Haskins set to work and in a couple of hours brought a sheet of typewritten paper to the desk; it was a two-hundred word story about some disease that had broken out among the horses. Its opening sentence was simple but arresting. It read: ‘Who has noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the animal husbandry building?’

  Ohio State was a land grant university and therefore two years of military drill was compulsory. We drilled with old Springfield rifles and studied the tactics of the Civil War even though the World War was going on at the time. At eleven o’clock each morning thousands of freshmen and sophomores used to deploy over the campus, moodily creeping up on the old chemistry building. It was good training for the kind of warfare that was waged at Shiloh but it had no connexion with what was going on in Europe. Some people used to think there was German money behind it, but they didn’t dare say so or they would have been thrown in jail as German spies. It was a period of muddy thought and marked, I believe, the decline of higher education in the Middle West.

  As a soldier I was never any good at all. Most of the cadets were glumly indifferent soldiers, but I was no good at all. Once General Littlefield, who was commandant of the cadet corps, popped up in front of me during regimental drill and snapped, ‘You are the main trouble with this university!’ I think he meant that my type was the main trouble with the university but he may have meant me individually. I was mediocre at drill, certainly – that is, until my senior year. By that time I had drilled longer than anybody else in the Western Conference, having failed at military at the end of each preceding year so that I had to do it all over again. I was the only senior still in uniform. The uniform which, when new, had made me look like an inter-urban railway conductor, now that it had become faded and too tight made me look like Bert Williams in his bellboy act. This had a definitely bad effect on my morale. Even so, I had become by sheer practice little short of wonderful at squad manoeuvres.

  One day General Littlefield picked our company out of the whole regiment and tried to get it mixed up by putting it through one movement after another as fast as we could execute them: squads right, squads left, squads on right into line, squads right about, squads left front into line etc. In about three minutes one hundred and nine men were marching in one direction and I was marching away from them at an angle of forty degrees, all alone. ‘Company, halt!’ shouted General Littlefield, ‘That man is the only man who has it right!’ I was made a corporal for my achievement.

  The next day General Littlefield summoned me to his office. He was swatting flies when I went in. I was silent and he was silent too, for a long time. I don’t think he remembered me or why he had sent for me, but he didn’t want to admit it. He swatted some more flies, keeping his eyes on them narrowly before he let go with the swatter. ‘Button up your coat!’ he snapped. Looking back on it now I can see that he meant me although he was looking at a fly but I just stood there. Another fly came to rest on a paper in front of the general and began rubbing its hind legs together. The general lifted the swatter cautiously. I moved restlessly and the fly flew away. ‘You startled him!’ barked General Littlefield, looking at me severely. I said I was sorry. ‘That won’t help the situation!’ snapped the General, with cold military logic. I didn’t see what I could do except offer to chase some more flies toward his desk, but I didn’t say anything. He stared out the window at the faraway figures of co-eds crossing the campus toward the library. Finally, he told me I could go. So I went. He either didn’t know which cadet I was or else he forgot what he wanted to see me a
bout. It may have been that he wished to apologize for having called me the main trouble with the university; or maybe he had decided to compliment me on my brilliant drilling of the day before and then at the last minute decided not to. I don’t know. I don’t think about it much any more.

  Draft Board Nights

  I left the University in June, 1918, but I couldn’t get into the army on account of my sight, just as grandfather couldn’t get in on account of his age. He applied several times and each time he took off his coat and threatened to whip the men who said he was too old. The disappointment of not getting to Germany (he saw no sense in everybody going to France) and the strain of running around town seeing influential officials finally got him down in bed. He had wanted to lead a division and his chagrin at not even being able to enlist as a private was too much for him. His brother Jake, some fifteen years younger than he was, sat up at night with him after he took to bed, because we were afraid he might leave the house without even putting on his clothes. Grandfather was against the idea of Jake watching over him – he thought it was a lot of tomfoolery – but Jake hadn’t been able to sleep at night for twenty-eight years, so he was the perfect person for such a vigil.

  About Four O’Clock He Caught His Brother Asleep

  On the third night, grandfather was wakeful. He would open his eyes, look at Jake, and close them again, frowning. He never answered any question Jake asked him. About four o’clock that morning, he caught his brother sound asleep in the big leather chair beside the bed. When once Jake did fall asleep he slept deeply, so that grandfather was able to get up, dress himself, undress Jake, and put him in bed without waking him. When my Aunt Florence came into the room at seven o’clock, grandfather was sitting in the chair reading the Memoirs of U.S. Grant and Jake was sleeping in the bed. ‘He watched while I slept,’ said grandfather, ‘so now I’m watchin’ while he sleeps.’ It seemed fair enough.