The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

by James Thurber

  The Evening’s at Seven

  He hadn’t lighted the upper light in his office all afternoon and now he turned out the desk lamp. It was a quarter of seven in the evening and it was dark and raining. He could hear the rattle of taxicabs and trucks and the sound of horns. Very far off a siren screamed its frenzied scream and he thought: it’s a little like an anguish dying with the years. When it gets to Third Avenue, or Ninety-fifth Street, he thought, I won’t hear it any more.

  I’ll be home he said to himself, as he got up slowly and slowly put on his hat and overcoat (the overcoat was damp), by seven o’clock, if I take a taxicab, I’ll say hello, my dear, and the two yellow lamps will be lighted and my papers will be on my desk, and I’ll say I guess I’ll lie down a few minutes before dinner, and she will say all right and ask two or three small questions about the day and I’ll answer them.

  When he got outside of his office, in the street, it was dark and raining and he lighted a cigarette. A young man went by whistling loudly. Two girls went by talking gaily, as if it were not raining, as if this were not a time for silence and for remembering. He called to a taxicab and it stopped and he got in, and sat there, on the edge of the seat, and the driver finally said where to? He gave a number he was thinking about.

  She was surprised to see him and, he believed, pleased. It was very nice to be in her apartment again. He faced her, quickly, and it seemed to him as if he were facing somebody in a tennis game. She would want to know (but wouldn’t ask) why he was, so suddenly, there, and he couldn’t exactly say: I gave a number to a taxi-driver and it was your number. He couldn’t say that; and besides, it wasn’t that simple.

  It was dark in the room and still raining outside. He lighted a cigarette (not wanting one) and looked at her. He watched her lovely gestures as of old and she said he looked tired and he said he wasn’t tired and he asked her what she had been doing and she said oh, nothing much. He talked, sitting awkwardly on the edge of a chair, and she talked, lying gracefully on a chaise-longue, about people they had known and hadn’t cared about. He was mainly conscious of the rain outside and of the soft darkness in the room and of other rains and other darknesses. He got up and walked around the room looking at pictures but not seeing what they were, and realizing that some old familiar things gleamed darkly, and he came abruptly face to face with something he had given her, a trivial and comic thing, and it didn’t seem trivial or comic now, but very large and important and embarrassing, and he turned away from it and asked after somebody else he didn’t care about. Oh, she said, and this and that and so and such (words he wasn’t listening to). Yes, he said, absently, I suppose so. Very much, he said (in answer to something else), very much. Oh, she said, laughing at him, not that much! He didn’t have any idea what they were talking about.

  She asked him for a cigarette and he walked over and gave her one, not touching her fingers but very conscious of her fingers. He was remembering a twilight when it had been raining and dark, and he thought of April and kissing and laughter. He noticed a clock on the mantel and it was ten after seven. She said you never used to believe in clocks. He laughed and looked at her for a time and said I have to be at the hotel by seven-thirty, or I don’t get anything to eat; it’s that sort of hotel. Oh, she said.

  He walked to a table and picked up a figurine and set it down again with extreme care, looking out of the corner of his eye at the trivial and comic and gigantic present he had given her. He wondered if he would kiss her and when he would kiss her and if she wanted to be kissed and if she were thinking of it, but she asked him what he would have to eat tonight at his hotel. He said clam chowder. Thursday, he said, they always have clam chowder. Is that the way you know it’s Thursday, she said, or is that the way you know it’s clam chowder?

  He picked up the figurine and put it down again, so that he could look (without her seeing him look) at the clock. It was eighteen minutes after seven and he had the mingled thoughts clocks gave him. You mustn’t, she said, miss your meal. (She remembered he hated the word meal.) He turned around quickly and went over quickly and sat beside her and took hold of one of her fingers and she looked at the finger and not at him and he looked at the finger and not at her, both of them as if it were a new and rather remarkable thing.

  He got up suddenly and picked up his hat and coat and as suddenly put them down again and took two rapid determined steps toward her, and her eyes seemed a little wider. A bell rang. Oh that, she said, will be Clarice. And they relaxed. He looked a question and she said: my sister; and he said oh, of course. In a minute it was Clarice like a small explosion in the dark and rainy day talking rapidly of this and that: my dear he and this awful and then of all people so nothing loth and I said and he said, if you can imagine that! He picked up his hat and coat and Clarice said hello to him and he said hello and looked at the clock and it was almost twenty-five after seven.

  She went to the door with him looking lovely, and it was lovely and dark and raining outside and he laughed and she laughed and she was going to say something but he went out into the rain and waved back at her (not wanting to wave back at her) and she closed the door and was gone. He lighted a cigarette and let his hand get wet in the rain and the cigarette get wet and rain dripped from his hat. A taxicab drove up and the driver spoke to him and he said: what? and: oh, sure. And now he was going home.

  He was home by seven-thirty, almost exactly, and he said good evening to old Mrs Spencer (who had the sick husband), and good evening to old Mrs Holmes (who had the sick Pomeranian), and he nodded and smiled and presently he was sitting at his table and the waitress spoke to him. She said: the Mrs will be down, won’t she? and he said yes, she will. And the waitress said clam chowder tonight, and consommé: you always take the clam chowder, ain’t I right? No, he said, I’ll have the consommé.

  One is a Wanderer

  The walk up Fifth Avenue through the slush of the sidewalks and the dankness of the air had tired him. The dark was coming quickly down, the dark of a February Sunday evening, and that vaguely perturbed him. He didn’t want to go ‘home’, though, and get out of it. It would be gloomy and close in his hotel room, and his soiled shirts would be piled on the floor of the closet where he had been flinging them for weeks, where he had been flinging them for months, and his papers would be disarranged on the tops of the tables and on the desk, and his pipes would be lying around, the pipes he had smoked determinedly for a while only to give them up, as he always did, to go back to cigarettes. He turned into the street leading to his hotel, walking slowly, trying to decide what to do with the night. He had had too many nights alone. Once he had enjoyed being alone. Now it was hard to be alone. He couldn’t read any more, or write, at night. Books he tossed aside after nervously flipping through them; the writing he tried to do turned into spirals and circles and squares and empty faces.

  I’ll just stop in, he thought, and see if there are any messages; I’ll see if there have been any phone calls. He hadn’t been back to the hotel, after all, for – let’s see – for almost five hours; just wandering around. There might be some messages. I’ll just stop in, he thought, and see; and maybe I’ll have one brandy. I don’t want to sit there in the lobby again and drink brandy; I don’t want to do that.

  He didn’t go through the revolving doors of the hotel, though. He went on past the hotel and over to Broadway. A man asked him for some money. A shabbily dressed woman walked by, muttering. She had what he called the New York Mouth, a grim, set mouth, a strained, querulous mouth, a mouth that told of suffering and discontent. He looked in the window of a cane-and-umbrella shop and in the window of a cheap restaurant, a window holding artificial pie and cake, a cup of cold coffee, a plate of artificial vegetables. He got into the shoving and pushing and halting and slow flowing of Broadway. A big cop with a red face was striking his hands together and kidding with a couple of girls whom he had kept from crossing the street against a red light. A thin man in a thin overcoat watched them out of thin, emotionless eyes.


  It was a momentary diversion to stand in front of the book counter in the drugstore at Forty-fifth Street and Broadway and look at the books, cheap editions of ancient favourites, movie editions of fairly recent best-sellers. He picked up some of the books and opened them and put them down again, but there was nothing he wanted to read. He walked over to the soda counter and sat down and asked for hot chocolate. It warmed him up a little and he thought about going to the movie at the Paramount; it was a movie with action and guns and aeroplanes, and Myrna Loy, the kind of movie that didn’t bother you. He walked down to the theatre and stood there a minute, but he didn’t buy a ticket. After all, he had been to one movie that day. He thought about going to the office. It would be quiet there, nobody would be there; maybe he could get some work done; maybe he could answer some of the letters he had been putting off for so long.

  It was too gloomy, it was too lonely. He looked around the office for a while, sat down at his typewriter, tapped out the alphabet on a sheet of paper, took a paper-clip, straightened it, cleaned the ‘e’ and the ‘o’ on the typewriter, and put the cover over it. He never remembered to put the cover over the typewriter when he left in the evening. I never, as a matter of fact, remember anything, he thought. It is because I keep trying not to; I keep trying not to remember anything. It is an empty and cowardly thing, not to remember. It might lead you anywhere; no, it might stop you, it might stop you from getting anywhere. Out of remembrance comes everything; out of remembrance comes a great deal, anyway. You can’t do anything if you don’t let yourself remember things. He began to whistle a song because he found himself about to remember things, and he knew what things they would be, things that would bring a grimace to his mouth and to his eyes, disturbing fragments of old sentences, old scenes and gestures, hours, and rooms, and tones of voice, and the sound of a voice crying. All voices cry differently; there are no two voices in the whole world that cry alike; they’re like footsteps and finger-prints and the faces of friends …

  He became conscious of the song he was whistling. He got up from the chair in front of his covered typewriter, turned out the light, and walked out of the room to the elevator, and there he began to sing the last part of the song, waiting for the elevator. ‘Make my bed and light the light, for I’ll be home late tonight, blackbird, bye bye.’ He walked over to his hotel through the slush and the damp gloom and sat down in a chair in the lobby, without taking off his overcoat. He didn’t want to sit there long.

  ‘Good evening, sir,’ said the waiter who looked after the guests in the lobby. ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ he said. ‘I’m fine. I’ll have a brandy, with water on the side.’

  He had several brandies. Nobody came into the lobby that he knew. People were gone to all kinds of places Sunday night. He hadn’t looked at his letter box back of the clerk’s desk when he came in, to see if there were any messages there. That was a kind of game he played, or something. He never looked for messages until after he had had a brandy. He’d look now after he had another brandy. He had another brandy and looked. ‘Nothing,’ said the clerk at the desk, looking too.

  He went back to his chair in the lobby and began to think about calling up people. He thought of the Graysons. He saw the Graysons, not as they would be, sitting in their apartment, close together and warmly, but as he and Lydia had seen them in another place and another year. The four had shared a bright vacation once. He remembered various attitudes and angles and lights and colours of that vacation. There is something about four people, two couples, that like each other and get along; that have a swell time; that grow in intimacy and understanding. One’s life is made up of twos, and of fours. The Graysons understood the nice little arrangements of living, the twos and fours. Two is company, four is a party, three is a crowd. One is a wanderer.

  No, not the Graysons. Somebody would be there on Sunday night, some couple, some two; somebody he knew, somebody they had known. That is the way life is arranged. One arranges one’s life – no, two arrange their life – in terms of twos, and fours, and sixes. Marriage does not make two people one, it makes two people two. It’s sweeter that way, and simpler. All this, he thought, summoning the waiter, is probably very silly and sentimental. I must look out that I don’t get to that state of tipsiness where all silly and lugubrious things seem brilliant divinations of mine, sound and original ideas and theories. What I must remember is that such things are sentimental and tiresome and grow out of not working enough and out of too much brandy. That’s what I must remember. It is no good remembering that it takes four to make a party, two to make a house.

  People living alone, after all, have made a great many things. Let’s see, what have people living alone made? Not love, of course, but a great many other things: money, for example, and black marks on white paper. ‘Make this one a double-brandy,’ he told the waiter. Let’s see, who that I know has made something alone, who that I know of has made something alone? Robert Browning? No, not Robert Browning. Odd, that Robert Browning would be the first person he thought of. ‘And had you only heard me play one tune, or viewed me from a window, not so soon with you would such things fade as with the rest.’ He had written that line of Browning’s in a book once for Lydia, or Lydia had written it in a book for him; or they had both written it in a book for each other. ‘Not so soon with you would such things fade as with the rest.’ Maybe he didn’t have it exactly right; it was hard to remember now, after so long a time. It didn’t matter. ‘Not so soon with you would such things fade as with the rest.’ The fact is that all things do fade; with twos, and with fours; all bright things, all attitudes and angles and lights and colours, all growing in intimacy and understanding.

  I think maybe I’ll call the Bradleys, he thought, getting up out of his chair. And don’t, he said to himself, standing still a moment, don’t tell me you’re not cockeyed now, because you are cockeyed now, just as you said you wouldn’t be when you got up this morning and had orange juice and coffee and determined to get some work done, a whole lot of work done; just as you said you wouldn’t be but you knew you would be, all right. You knew you would be, all right.

  The Bradleys, he thought, as he walked slowly around the lobby, avoiding the phone booths, glancing at the headlines of the papers on the newsstand, the Bradleys have that four-square thing, that two-square thing – that two-square thing, God damn them! Somebody described it once in a short story that he had read: an intimacy that you could feel, that you could almost take hold of, when you went into such a house, when you went into where such people were, a warming thing, a nice thing to be in, like being in warm sea water, a little embarrassing, too, yes, damned embarrassing, too. He would only take a damp blanket into that warmth. That’s what I’d take into that warmth, he told himself, a damp blanket. They know it, too. Here comes old Kirk again with his damp blanket. It isn’t because I’m so damned unhappy – I’m not so damned unhappy – it’s because they’re so damned happy, damn them. Why don’t they know that? Why don’t they do something about it? What right have they got to flaunt it at me, for God’s sake? … Look here now, he told himself, you’re getting too cockeyed now; you’re getting into one of those states, you’re getting into one of those states that Marianne keeps telling you about, one of those states when people don’t like to have you around … Marianne, he thought. He went back to his chair, ordered another brandy, and thought about Marianne.

  She doesn’t know how I start my days, he thought, she only knows how I end them. She doesn’t even know how I started my life. She only knows me when night gets me. If I could only be the person she wants me to be, why, then I would be fine, I would be fine, I would be the person she wants me to be. Like ordering a new dress from a shop, a new dress that nobody ever wore, a new dress that nobody’s ever going to wear but you. I wouldn’t get mad suddenly, about nothing. I wouldn’t walk out of places suddenly, about nothing. I wouldn’t snarl at nice people. About what she says is nothing. I wouldn’t be
‘unbearable’. Herword ‘unbearable’. A female word, female as a cat. Well, she’s right, too. I am unbearable. ‘George,’ he said to the waiter, ‘I am unbearable, did you know that?’ ‘No, sir, I did not, sir,’ said the waiter. ‘I would not call you unbearable, Mr Kirk.’ ‘Well, you don’t know, George,’ he said. ‘It just happens that I am unbearable. It just happened that way. It’s a long story.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said the waiter.

  I could call up the Mortons, he thought. They’ll have twos and fours there, too, but they’re not so damned happy that they’re unbearable. The Mortons are all right. Now look, the Mortons had said to him, if you and Marianne would only stop fighting and arguing and forever analysing yourselves and forever analysing everything, you’d be fine. You’d be fine if you got married and just shut up, just shut up and got married. That would be fine. Yes, sir, that would be fine. Everything would work out all right. You just shut up and get married, you just get married and shut up. Everybody knows that. It is practically the simplest thing in the world. … Well, it would be, too, if you were twenty-five maybe, it would be if you were twenty-five, and not forty.

  ‘George,’ he said, when the waiter walked over for his empty glass, ‘I will be forty-one next November.’ ‘But that’s not old, sir, and that’s a long way off,’ said George. ‘No, it isn’t,’ he said. ‘It’s almost here. So is forty-two and forty-three and fifty, and here I am trying to be – do you know what I’m trying to be, George? I’m trying to be happy.’ ‘We all want to be happy, sir,’ said George. ‘I would like to see you happy, sir.’ ‘Oh, you will,’ he said. ‘You will, George. There’s a simple trick to it. You just shut up and get married. But you see, George, I am an analyser. I am also a rememberer. I have a pocketful of old used years. You put all those things together and they sit in a lobby getting silly and old.’ ‘I’m very sorry, sir’ said George.