The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  One reason we didn’t want grandfather to roam around at night was that he had said something once or twice about going over to Lancaster, his old home town, and putting his problem up to ‘Cump’ – that is, General William Tecumseh Sherman, also an old Lancaster boy. We knew that his inability to find Sherman would be bad for him and we were afraid that he might try to get there in the little electric runabout that had been bought for my grandmother. She had become, surprisingly enough, quite skilful at getting around town in it. Grandfather was astonished and a little indignant when he saw her get into the contraption and drive off smoothly and easily. It was her first vehicular triumph over him in almost fifty years of married life and he determined to learn to drive the thing himself. A famous old horseman, he approached it as he might have approached a wild colt. His brow would darken and he would begin to curse. He always leaped into it quickly, as if it might pull out from under him if he didn’t get into the seat fast enough. The first few times he tried to run the electric, he went swiftly around in a small circle, drove over the kerb, across the sidewalk, and up, on to the lawn. We all tried to persuade him to give up, but his spirit was aroused. ‘Git that goddam buggy back in the road!’ he would say, imperiously. So we would manoeuvre it back into the street and he would try again. Pulling too savagely on the guiding-bar – to teach the electric a lesson – was what took him around in a circle, and it was difficult to make him understand that it was best to relax and not get mad. He had the notion that if you didn’t hold her, she would throw you. And a man who (or so he often told us) had driven a four-horse McCormick reaper when he was five years old did not intend to be thrown by an electric runabout.

  Since there was no way of getting him to give up learning to operate the electric, we would take him out to Franklin Park, where the roadways were wide and unfrequented, and spend an hour or so trying to explain the differences between driving a horse and carriage and driving an electric. He would keep muttering all the time; he never got it out of his head that when he took the driver’s seat the machine flattened its ears on him, so to speak. After a few weeks, nevertheless, he got so he could run the electric for a hundred yards or so along a fairly straight line. But whenever he took a curve, he invariably pulled or pushed the bar too quickly and too hard and headed for a tree or a flower bed. Someone was always with him and we would never let him take the car out of the park.

  There Was a Tremendous To-Do

  One morning when grandmother was all ready to go to market, she called the garage and told them to send the electric around. They said that grandfather had already been there and taken it out. There was a tremendous to-do. We telephoned Uncle Will and he got out his Lozier and we started off to hunt for grandfather. It was not yet seven o’clock and there was fortunately little traffic. We headed for Franklin Park, figuring that he might have gone out there to try to break the car’s spirit. One or two early pedestrians had seen a tall old gentleman with a white beard driving a little electric and cussing as he drove. We followed a tortuous trail and found them finally on Nelson Road, about four miles from the town of Shepard. Grandfather was standing in the road shouting, and the back wheels of the electric were deeply entangled in a barbed-wire fence. Two workmen and a farmhand were trying to get the thing loose. Grandfather was in a state of high wrath about the electric. ‘The — — — backed up on me!’ he told us.

  But to get back to the war. The Columbus draft board never called grandfather for service, which was a lucky thing for them because they would have had to take him. There were stories that several old men of eighty or ninety had been summoned in the confusion, but somehow or other grandfather was missed. He waited every day for the call, but it never came. My own experience was quite different. I was called almost every week, even though I had been exempted from service the first time I went before the medical examiners. Either they were never convinced that it was me or else there was some clerical error in the records which was never cleared up. Anyway, there was usually a letter for me on Monday ordering me to report for examination on the second floor of Memorial Hall the following Wednesday at 9 p.m. The second time I went up I tried to explain to one of the doctors that I had already been exempted. ‘You’re just a blur to me,’ I said, taking off my glasses. ‘You’re absolutely nothing to me,’ he snapped, sharply.

  I had to take off all my clothes each time and jog around the hall with a lot of porters and bank presidents’ sons and clerks and poets. Our hearts and lungs would be examined, and then our feet; and finally our eyes. That always came last. When the eye specialist got around to me, he would always say, ‘Why, you couldn’t get into the service with sight like that!’ ‘I know,’ I would say. Then a week or two later I would be summoned again and go through the same rigmarole. The ninth or tenth time I was called, I happened to pick up one of several stethoscopes that were lying on a table and suddenly, instead of finding myself in the line of draft men, I found myself in the line of examiners. ‘Hello, doctor,’ said one of them, nodding. ‘Hello,’ I said. That, of course, was before I took my clothes off, I might have managed it naked, but I doubt it. I was assigned, or rather drifted, to the chest-and-lung section, where I began to examine every other man, thus cutting old Dr Ridgeway’s work in two. ‘I’m glad to have you here, doctor,’ he said.

  I passed most of the men that came to me, but now and then I would exempt one just to be on the safe side. I began by making each of them hold his breath and then say ‘mi, mi, mi, mi,’ until I noticed Ridgeway looking at me curiously. He, I discovered, simply made them say ‘ah’, and sometimes he didn’t make them say anything. Once I got hold of a man who, it came out later, had swallowed a watch – to make the doctors believe there was something wrong with him inside (it was a common subterfuge: men swallowed nails, hairpins, ink, etc., in an effort to be let out). Since I didn’t know what you were supposed to hear through a stethoscope, the ticking of the watch at first didn’t surprise me, but I decided to call Dr Ridgeway into consultation, because nobody else had ticked. ‘This man seems to tick,’ I said to him. He looked at me in surprise but didn’t say anything. Then he thumped the man, laid his ear to his chest, and finally tried the stethoscope. ‘Sound as a dollar,’ he said. ‘Listen lower down,’ I told him. The man indicated his stomach. Ridgeway gave him a haughty, indignant look. ‘That is for the abdominal men to worry about,’ he said, and moved off. A few minutes later, Dr Blythe Ballomy got around to the man and listened, but he didn’t blink an eye; his grim expression never changed. ‘You have swallowed a watch, my man,’ he said, crisply. The draftee reddened in embarrassment and uncertainty. ‘On purpose?’ he asked. ‘That I can’t say,’ the doctor told him, and went on.

  I served with the draft board for about four months. Until the summonses ceased, I couldn’t leave town and as long as I stayed and appeared promptly for examination, even though I did the examining, I felt that technically I could not be convicted of evasion. During the daytime, I worked as publicity agent for an amusement park, the manager of which was a tall, unexpected young man named Byron Landis. Some years before, he had dynamited the men’s lounge in the statehouse annex for a prank: he enjoyed pouring buckets of water on sleeping persons, and once he had barely escaped arrest for jumping off the top of the old Columbus Transfer Company building with a homemade parachute.

  He asked me one morning if I would like to take a ride in the new Scarlet Tornado, a steep and wavy roller-coaster. I didn’t want to but I was afraid he would think I was afraid, so I went along. It was about ten o’clock and there was nobody at the park except workmen and attendants and concessionaires in their shirt-sleeves. We climbed into one of the long gondolas of the roller-coaster and while I was looking around for the man who was going to run it, we began to move off. Landis, I discovered, was running it himself. But it was too late to get out; we had begun to climb, clickety-clockety, up the first steep incline, down the other side of which we careened at eighty miles an hour. ‘I didn’t know you could run
this thing!’ I bawled at my companion, as we catapulted up a sixty-degree arch and looped headlong into space. ‘I didn’t either!’ he bawled back. The racket and the rush of air were terrific as we roared into the pitch-black Cave of Darkness and came out and down Monohan’s Leap, so called because a workman named Monohan had been forced to jump from it when caught between two approaching experimental cars while it was being completed. That trip, although it ended safely, made a lasting impression on me. It is not too much to say that it has flavoured my life. It is the reason I shout in my sleep, refuse to ride on the elevator, keep jerking the emergency brake in cars other people are driving, have the sensation of flying like a bird when I first lie down, and in certain months can’t keep anything in my stomach.

  During my last few trips to the draft board, I went again as a draft prospect, having grown tired of being an examiner. None of the doctors who had been my colleagues for so long recognized me, not even Dr Ridgeway. When he examined my chest for the last time, I asked him if there hadn’t been another doctor helping him. He said there had been. ‘Did he look anything like me?’ I asked. Dr Ridgeway looked at me. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said, ‘he was taller.’ (I had my shoes off while he was examining me.) ‘A good pulmonary man,’ added Ridgeway. ‘Relative of yours?’ I said yes. He sent me on to Dr Quimby, the specialist who had examined my eyes twelve or fifteen times before. He gave me some simple reading tests. ‘You could never get into the army with eyes like that,’ he said. ‘I know,’ I told him.

  Late one morning, shortly after my last examination, I was awakened by the sound of bells ringing and whistles blowing. It grew louder and more insistent and wilder. It was the Armistice.

  A Note at the End

  A Note at the End

  The hard times of my middle years I pass over, leaving the ringing bells of 1918, with all their false promise, to mark the end of a special sequence. The sharp edges of old reticences are softened in the autobiographer by the passing of time – a man does not pull the pillow over his head when he wakes in the morning because he suddenly remembers some awful thing that happened to him fifteen or twenty years ago, but the confusions and the panics of last year and the year before are too close for contentment. Until a man can quit talking loudly to himself in order to shout down the memories of blunderings and gropings, he is in no shape for the painstaking examination of distress and the careful ordering of events so necessary to a calm and balanced exposition of what, exactly, was the matter. The time I fell out of the gun-room in Mr James Stanley’s house in Green Lake, New York, is for instance, much too near for me to go into with any peace of mind, although it happened in 1925, the ill-fated year of ‘Horses, Horses, Horses’ and ‘Valencia’. There is now, I understand, a porch to walk out on to when you open the door I opened that night, but there wasn’t then.

  A Hotel Room in Louisville

  The mistaken exits and entrances of my thirties have moved me several times to some thought of spending the rest of my days wandering aimlessly around the South Seas, like a character out of Conrad, silent and inscrutable. But the necessity for frequent visits to my oculist and dentist has prevented this. You can’t be running back from Singapore every few months to get your lenses changed and still retain the proper mood for wandering. Furthermore, my horn-rimmed glasses and my Ohio accent betray me, even when I sit on the terrasses of little tropical cafes, wearing a pith helmet, staring straight ahead, and twitching a muscle in my jaw. I found this out when I tried wandering around the West Indies one summer. Instead of being followed by the whispers of men and the glances of women, I was followed by bead salesmen and native women with postcards. Nor did any dark girl, looking at all like Tondelaya in White Cargo, come forward and offer to go to pieces with me. They tried to sell me baskets.

  They Tried to Sell Me Baskets

  Under these circumstances it is impossible to be inscrutable and a wanderer who isn’t inscrutable might just as well be back at Broad and High Streets in Columbus sitting in the Baltimore Dairy Lunch. Nobody from Columbus has ever made a first rate wanderer in the Conradean tradition. Some of them have been fairly good at disappearing for a few days to turn up in a hotel in Louisville with a bad headache and no recollection of how they got there, but they always scurry back to their wives with some cock-and-bull story of having lost their memory or having gone away to attend the annual convention of the Fraternal Order of Eagles.

  There was, of course, even for Conrad’s Lord Jim, no running away. The cloud of his special discomfiture followed him like a pup, no matter what ships he took or what wildernesses he entered. In the pathways between office and home and home and houses of settled people there are always, ready to snap at you, the little perils of routine living, but there is no escape in the unplanned tangent, the sudden turn. In Martinique, when the whistle blew for the tourists to get back on the ship, I had a quick, wild, and lovely moment when I decided I wouldn’t get back on the ship. I did, though. And I found that somebody had stolen the pants to my dinner jacket.

  6

  FROM FABLES FOR OUR TIME AND ILLUSTRATED POEMS

  The Birds and the Foxes

  Once upon a time there was a bird sanctuary in which hundreds of Baltimore orioles lived together happily. The refuge consisted of a forest entirely surrounded by a high wire fence. When it was put up, a pack of foxes who lived nearby protested that it was an arbitrary and unnatural boundary. However, they did nothing about it at the time because they were interested in civilizing the geese and ducks on the neighbouring farms. When all the geese and ducks had been civilized, and there was nothing else left to eat, the foxes once more turned their attention to the bird sanctuary. Their leader announced that there had once been foxes in the sanctuary but that they had been driven out. He proclaimed that Baltimore orioles belonged in Baltimore. He said, furthermore, that the orioles in the sanctuary were a continuous menace to the peace of the world. The other animals cautioned the foxes not to disturb the birds in their sanctuary.

  So the foxes attacked the sanctuary one night and tore down the fence that surrounded it. The orioles rushed out and were instantly killed and eaten by the foxes.

  The next day the leader of the foxes, a fox from whom God was receiving daily guidance, got upon the rostrum and addressed the other foxes. His message was simple and sublime. ‘You see before you,’ he said, ‘another Lincoln. We have liberated all those birds!’

  Moral: Government of the orioles, by the foxes, and for the foxes, must perish from the earth.

  The Little Girl and the Wolf

  One afternoon a big wolf waited in a dark forest for a little girl to come along carrying a basket of food to her grandmother. Finally a little girl did come along and she was carrying a basket of food. ‘Are you carrying that basket to your grandmother?’ asked the wolf. The little girl said yes, she was. So the wolf asked her where her grandmother lived and the little girl told him and he disappeared into the wood.

  When the little girl opened the door of her grandmother’s house she saw that there was somebody in bed with a nightcap and nightgown on. She had approached no nearer than twenty-five feet from the bed when she saw that it was not her grandmother but the wolf, for even in a nightcap a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge. So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead.

  Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

  The Scotty Who Knew Too Much

  Several summers ago there was a Scotty who went to the country for a visit. He decided that all the farm dogs were cowards, because they were afraid of a certain animal that had a white stripe down its back. ‘You are a pussy-cat and I can lick you,’ the Scotty said to the farm dog who lived in the house where the Scotty was visiting. ‘I can lick the little animal with the white stripe, too. Show him to me.’ ‘Don’t you want to ask any questions about him?’ said the farm dog. ‘Naw,’ said the Scotty. ‘You
ask the questions.’

  So the farm dog took the Scotty into the woods and showed him the white-striped animal and the Scotty closed in on him, growling and slashing. It was all over in a moment and the Scotty lay on his back. When he came to, the farm dog said, ‘What happened?’ ‘He threw vitriol,’ said the Scotty, ‘but he never laid a glove on me.’

  A few days later the farm dog told the Scotty there was another animal all the farm dogs were afraid of. ‘Lead me to him,’ said the Scotty. ‘I can lick anything that doesn’t wear horseshoes.’ ‘Don’t you want to ask any questions about him?’ said the farm dog. ‘Naw,’ said the Scotty. ‘Just show me where he hangs out.’ So the farm dog led him to a place in the woods and pointed out the little animal when he came along. ‘A clown,’ said the Scotty, ‘a pushover,’ and he closed in, leading with his left and exhibiting some mighty fancy footwork. In less than a second the Scotty was flat on his back, and when he woke up the farm dog was pulling quills out of him. ‘What happened?’ said the farm dog. ‘He pulled a knife on me,’ said the Scotty, ‘but at least I have learned how you fight out here in the country, and now I am going to beat you up.’ So he closed in on the farm dog, holding his nose with one front paw to ward off the vitriol and covered his eyes with the other front paw to keep out the knives. The Scotty couldn’t see his opponent and he couldn’t smell his opponent and he was so badly beaten that he had to be taken back to the city and put in a nursing home.