The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

by James Thurber

  ‘And I’ll have one more drink, George,’ he called after the waiter.

  He had one more drink. When he looked up at the clock in the lobby it was only 9.30. He went up to his room and, feeling sleepy, he lay down on his bed without turning out the overhead light. When he woke up it was 12.30 by his wristwatch. He got up and washed his face and brushed his teeth and put on a clean shirt and another suit and went back down into the lobby, without looking at the disarranged papers on the tables and on the desk. He went into the dining-room and had some soup and a lamb chop and a glass of milk. There was nobody there he knew. He began to realize that he had to see somebody he knew. He paid his check and went out and got into a cab and gave the driver an address on Fifty-third Street.

  There were several people in Dick and Joe’s that he knew. There were Dick and Joe, for two – or, rather, for one, because he always thought of them as one; he could never tell them apart. There were Bill Vardon and Mary Wells. Bill Vardon and Mary Wells were a little drunk and gay. He didn’t know them very well, but he could sit down with them. …

  It was after three o’clock when he left the place and got into a cab. ‘How are you tonight, Mr Kirk?’ asked the driver. The driver’s name was Willie. ‘I’m fine tonight, Willie,’ he said. ‘You want to go on somewheres else?’ asked Willie. ‘Not tonight, Willie,’ he said. ‘I’m going home.’ ‘Well,’ said Willie, ‘I guess you’re right there, Mr Kirk. I guess you’re right about that. These places is all right for what they are – you know what I mean – it’s O.K. to kick around in ’em for a while and maybe have a few drinks with your friends, but when you come right down to it, home is the best place there is. Now, you take me, I’m hackin’ for ten years, mostly up around here – because why? Because all these places know me; you know that, Mr Kirk. I can get into ’em you might say the same way you do, Mr Kirk – I have me a couple drinks in Dick and Joe’s maybe or in Tony’s or anywheres else I want to go into – hell, I’ve had drinks in ’em with you, Mr Kirk – like on Christmas night, remember? But I got a home over in Brooklyn and a wife and a couple kids and, boy, I’m tellin’ you that’s the best place, you know what I mean?’

  ‘You’re right, Willie,’ he said. ‘You’re absolutely right, there.’

  ‘You’re darn tootin’ I am,’ said Willie. ‘These joints is all right when a man wants a couple drinks or maybe even get a little tight with his friends, that’s O.K. with me –’

  ‘Getting tight with friends is O.K. with me, too,’ he said to Willie.

  ‘But when a man gets fed up on that kind of stuff, a man wants to go home. Am I right, Mr Kirk?’

  ‘You’re absolutely right, Willie,’ he said. ‘A man wants to go home.’

  ‘Well, here we are, Mr Kirk. Home it is.’

  He got out of the cab and gave the driver a dollar and told him to keep the change and went into the lobby of the hotel. The night clerk gave him his key and then put two fingers into the recesses of the letter box. ‘Nothing,’ said the night clerk.

  When he got to his room, he lay down on the bed a while and smoked a cigarette. He found himself feeling drowsy and he got up. He began to take his clothes off, feeling drowsily contented, mistily contented. He began to sing, not loudly, because the man in 711 would complain. The man in 711 was a grey-haired man, living alone … an analyser … a rememberer …

  ‘Make my bed and light the light, for I’ll be home late tonight …’

  The Night the Bed Fell

  I suppose that the high-water mark of my youth in Columbus? Ohio, was the night the bed fell on my father. It makes a better recitation (unless, as some friends of mine have said, one has heard it five or six times) than it does a piece of writing, for it is almost necessary to throw furniture around, shake doors, and bark like a dog, to lend the proper atmosphere and verisimilitude to what is admittedly a somewhat incredible tale. Still, it did take place.

  It happened, then, that my father had decided to sleep in the attic one night, to be away where he could think. My mother opposed the notion strongly because, she said, the old wooden bed up there was unsafe; it was wobbly and the heavy headboard would crash down on father’s head in case the bed fell, and kill him. There was no dissuading him, however, and at a quarter past ten he closed the attic door behind him and went up the narrow twisting stairs. We later heard ominous creakings as he crawled into bed. Grandfather, who usually slept in the attic bed when he was with us, had disappeared some days before. (On these occasions he was usually gone six or eight days and returned growling and out of temper, with the news that the federal Union was run by a passel of blockheads and that the Army of the Potomac didn’t have any more chance than a fiddler’s bitch.)

  We had visiting us at this time a nervous first cousin of mine named Briggs Beall, who believed that he was likely to cease breathing when he was asleep. It was his feeling that if he were not awakened every hour during the night, he might die of suffocation. He had been accustomed to setting an alarm clock to ring at intervals until morning, but I persuaded him to abandon this. He slept in my room and I told him that I was such a light sleeper that if anybody quit breathing in the same room with me, I would wake instantly. He tested me the first night – which I had suspected he would – by holding his breath after my regular breathing had convinced him I was asleep. I was not asleep, however, and called to him. This seemed to allay his fears a little, but he took the precaution of putting a glass of spirits of camphor on a little table at the head of his bed. In case I didn’t arouse him until he was almost gone, he said, he would sniff the camphor, a powerful reviver. Briggs was not the only member of his family who had his crotchets. Old Aunt Melissa Beall (who could whistle like a man, with two fingers in her mouth) suffered under the premonition that she was destined to die on South High Street, because she had been born on South High Street and married on South High Street. Then there was Aunt Sarah Shoaf, who never went to bed at night without the fear that a burglar was going to get in and blow chloroform under her door through a tube. To avert this calamity – for she was in greater dread of anaesthetics than of losing her house hold goods – she always piled her money, silverware, and other valuables in a neat stack just outside her bedroom, with a note reading: ‘This is all I have. Please take it and do not use your chloroform, as this is all I have.’ Aunt Gracie Shoaf also had a burglar phobia, but she met it with more fortitude. She was confident that burglars had been getting into her house every night for forty years. The fact that she never missed anything was to her no proof to the contrary. She always claimed that she scared them off before they could take anything, by throwing shoes down the hallway. When she went to bed she piled, where she could get at them handily, all the shoes there were about her house. Five minutes after she had turned off the light, she would sit up in bed and say ‘Hark!’ Her husband, who had learned to ignore the whole situation as long ago as 1903, would either be sound asleep or pretend to be sound asleep. In either case he would not respond to her tugging and pulling, so that presently she would arise, tiptoe to the door, open it slightly and heave a shoe down the hall in one direction, and its mate down the hall in the other direction. Some nights she threw them all, some nights only a couple of pair.

  But I am straying from the remarkable incidents that took place during the night that the bed fell on father. By midnight we were all in bed. The layout of the rooms and the disposition of their occupants is important to an understanding of what later occurred. In the front room upstairs (just under father’s attic bedroom) were my mother and my brother Herman, who sometimes sang in his sleep, usually ‘Marching Through Georgia’ or ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. Briggs Beall and myself were in a room adjoining this one. My brother Roy was in a room across the hall from ours. Our bull terrier, Rex, slept in the hall.

  Some Nights She Threw Them All

  My bed was an army cot, one of those affairs which are made wide enough to sleep on comfortably only by putting up, flat with the middle section, the two si
des which ordinarily hang down like the sideboards of a drop-leaf table. When these sides are up, it is perilous to roll too far toward the edge, for then the cot is likely to tip completely over, bringing the whole bed down on top of one, with a tremendous banging crash. This, in fact, is precisely what happened, about two o’clock in the morning. (It was my mother who, in recalling the scene later, first referred to it as ‘the night the bed fell on your father’.)

  Always a deep sleeper, slow to arouse (I had lied to Briggs), I was at first unconscious of what had happened when the iron cot rolled me on to the floor and toppled over on me. It left me still warmly bundled up and unhurt, for the bed rested above me like a canopy. Hence I did not wake up, only reached the edge of consciousness and went back. The racket, however, instantly awakened my mother, in the next room, who came to the immediate conclusion that her worst dread was realized: the big wooden bed upstairs had fallen on father. She therefore screamed, ‘Let’s go to your poor father!’ It was this shout, rather than the noise of my cot falling, that awakened Herman, in the same room with her. He thought that mother had become, for no apparent reason, hysterical. ‘You’re all right, Mamma!’ he shouted, trying to calm her. They exchanged shout for shout for perhaps ten seconds: ‘Let’s go to your poor father!’ and ‘You’re all right!’ That woke up Briggs. By this time I was conscious of what was going on, in a vague way, but did not yet realize that I was under my bed instead of on it. Briggs, awakening in the midst of loud shouts of fear and apprehension, came to the quick conclusion that he was suffocating and that we were all trying to ‘bring him out’. With a low moan, he grasped the glass of camphor at the head of his bed and instead of sniffing it poured it over himself. The room reeked of camphor. ‘Ugf, ahfg,’ choked Briggs, like a drowning man, for he had almost succeeded in stopping his breath under the deluge of pungent spirits. He leaped out of bed and groped toward the open window, but he came up against one that was closed. With his hand, he beat out the glass, and I could hear it crash and tinkle on the alleyway below. It was at this juncture that I, in trying to get up, had the uncanny sensation of feeling my bed above me! Foggy with sleep, I now suspected, in my turn, that the whole uproar was being made in a frantic endeavour to extricate me from what must be an unheard-of and perilous situation. ‘Get me out of this!’ I bawled. ‘Get me out!’ I think I had the nightmarish belief that I was entombed in a mine. ‘Gugh,’ gasped Briggs, floundering in his camphor.

  He Came to the Conclusion That He Was Suffocating

  By this time my mother, still shouting, pursued by Herman, still shouting, was trying to open the door to the attic, in order to go up and get my father’s body out of the wreckage. The door was stuck, however, and wouldn’t yield. Her frantic pulls on it only added to the general banging and confusion. Roy and the dog were up, the one shouting questions, the other barking.

  Father, farthest away and soundest sleeper of all, had by this time awakened by the battering on the attic door. He decided that the house was on fire. ‘I’m coming, I’m coming!’ he wailed in a slow, sleepy voice – it took him many minutes to regain full consciousness. My mother, still believing he was caught under the bed, detected in his ‘I’m coming!’ the mournful, resigned note of one who is preparing to meet his Maker.’ He’s dying!’ she shouted.

  ‘I’m all right!’ Briggs yelled to reassure her. ‘I’m all right!’ He still believed that it was his own closeness to death that was worrying mother. I found at last the light switch in my room, unlocked the door, and Briggs and I joined the others at the attic door. The dog, who never did like Briggs, jumped for him – assuming that he was the culprit in whatever was going on – and Roy had to throw Rex and hold him. We could hear father crawling out of bed upstairs. Roy pulled the attic door open, with a mighty jerk, and father came down the stairs, sleepy and irritable but safe and sound. My mother began to weep when she saw him. Rex began to howl. ‘What in the name of God is going on here?’ asked father.

  The situation was finally put together like a gigantic jig-saw puzzle. Father caught a cold from prowling around in his bare feet but there were no other bad results. ‘I’m glad,’ said mother, who always looked on the bright side of things, ‘that your grandfather wasn’t here.’

  Roy Had to Throw Rex

  The Dog That Bit People

  Probably no one man should have as many dogs in his life as I have had, but there was more pleasure than distress in them for me except in the case of an Airedale named Muggs. He gave me more trouble than all the other fifty-four or -five put together, although my moment of keenest embarrassment was the time a Scotch terrier named Jeannie, who had just had six puppies in the clothes closet of a fourth floor apartment in New York, had the unexpected seventh and last at the corner of Eleventh Street and Fifth Avenue during a walk she had insisted on taking. Then, too, there was the prize-winning French poodle, a great big black poodle – none of your little, untroublesome white miniatures – who got sick riding in the rumble seat of a car with me on her way to the Greenwich Dog Show. She had a red rubber bib tucked around her throat and, since a rain storm came up when we were half way through the Bronx, I had to hold over her a small green umbrella, really more of a parasol. The rain beat down fearfully and suddenly the driver of the car drove into a big garage, filled with mechanics. It happened so quickly that I forgot to put the umbrella down and I will always remember, with sickening distress, the look of incredulity mixed with hatred that came over the face of the particular hardened garage man that came over to see what we wanted, when he took a look at me and the poodle. All garage men, and people of that intolerant stripe, hate poodles with their curious haircut, especially the pom-poms that you got to leave on their hips if you expect the dogs to win a prize.

  But the Airedale, as I have said, was the worst of all my dogs. He really wasn’t my dog, as a matter of fact: I came home from a vacation one summer to find that my brother Roy had bought him while I was away. A big, burly, choleric dog, he always acted as if he thought I wasn’t one ot the family. There was a slight advantage in being one of the family, for he didn’t bite the family as often as he bit strangers. Still, in the years that we had him he bit everybody but mother, and he made a pass at her once but missed. That was during the month when we suddenly had mice, and Muggs refused to do anything about them. Nobody ever had mice exactly like the mice we had that month. They acted like pet mice, almost like mice somebody had trained. They were so friendly that one night when mother entertained at dinner the Friraliras, a club she and my father had belonged to for twenty years, she put down a lot of little dishes with food in them on the pantry floor so that the mice would be satisfied with that and wouldn’t come into the dining-room. Muggs stayed out in the pantry with the mice, lying on the floor, growling to himself – not at the mice, but about all the people in the next room that he would have liked to get at. Mother slipped out into the pantry once to see how everything was going. Everything was going fine. It made her so mad to see Muggs lying there, oblivious of the mice – they came running up to her – that she slapped him and he slashed at her, but didn’t make it. He was sorry immediately, mother said. He was always sorry, she said, after he bit someone, but we could not understand how she figured this out. He didn’t act sorry.

  Mother used to send a box of candy every Christmas to the people the Airedale bit. The list finally contained forty or more names. Nobody could understand why we didn’t get rid of the dog. I didn’t understand it very well myself, but we didn’t get rid of him. I think that one or two people tried to poison Muggs – he acted poisoned once in a while – and old Major Moberly fired at him once with his service revolver near the Seneca Hotel in East Broad Street – but Muggs lived to be almost eleven years old and even when he could hardly get around he bit a Congressman who had called to see my father on business. My mother had never liked the Congressman – she said the signs of his horoscope showed he couldn’t be trusted (he was Saturn with the moon in Virgo) – but she sent him a box of
candy that Christmas. He sent it right back, probably because he suspected it was trick candy. Mother persuaded herself it was all for the best that the dog had bitten him, even though father lost an important business association because of it. ‘I wouldn’t be associated with such a man,’ mother said, ‘Muggs could read him like a book.’

  We used to take turns feeding Muggs to be on his good side, but that didn’t always work. He was never in a very good humour, even after a meal. Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with him, but whatever it was it made him irascible, especially in the mornings. Roy never felt very well in the morning, either, especially before breakfast, and once when he came downstairs and found that Muggs had moodily chewed up the morning paper he hit him in the face with a grapefruit and then jumped up on the dining-room table, scattering dishes and silverware and spilling the coffee. Muggs’ first free leap carried him all the way across the table and into a brass fire screen in front of the gas grate but he was back on his feet in a moment and in the end he got Roy and gave him a pretty vicious bite in the leg. Then he was all over it; he never bit anyone more than once at a time. Mother always mentioned that as an argument in his favour; she said he had a quick temper but that he didn’t hold a grudge. She was forever defending him. I think she liked him because he wasn’t well. ‘He’s not strong,’ she would say, pityingly, but that was inaccurate; he may not have been well but he was terribly strong.

  Nobody Knew Exactly What Was the Matter with Him

  One time my mother went to the Chittenden Hotel to call on a woman mental healer who was lecturing in Columbus on the subject of ‘Harmonious Vibrations’. She wanted to find out if if was possible to get harmonious vibrations into a dog. ‘He’s a large tan-coloured Airedale,’ mother explained. The woman said that she had never treated a dog but she advised my mother to hold the thought that he did not bite and would not bite. Mother was holding the thought the very next morning when Muggs got the iceman but she blamed that slip-up on the iceman. ‘If you didn’t think he would bite you, he wouldn’t,’ mother told him. He stomped out of the house in a terrible jangle of vibrations.