The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  Mr Martin looked quickly around the living-room for the weapon. He had counted on finding one there. There were handirons and a poker and something in a corner that looked like an Indian club. None of them would do. It couldn’t be that way. He began to pace around. He came to a desk. On it lay a metal paper knife with an ornate handle. Would it be sharp enough? He reached for it and knocked over a small brass jar. Stamps spilled out of it and it fell to the floor with a clatter. ‘Hey,’ Mrs Barrows yelled from the kitchen, ‘are you tearing up the pea patch?’ Mr Martin gave a strange laugh. Picking up the knife, he tried its point against his left wrist. It was blunt. It wouldn’t do.

  When Mrs Barrows reappeared, carrying two highballs, Mr Martin, standing there with his gloves on, became acutely conscious of the fantasy he had wrought. Cigarettes in his pocket, a drink prepared for him – it was all too grossly improbable. It was more than that; it was impossible. Somewhere in the back of his mind a vague idea stirred, sprouted. ‘For heaven’s sake, take off those gloves,’ said Mrs Barrows. ‘I always wear them in the house,’ said Mr Martin. The idea began to bloom, strange and wonderful. She put the glasses on a coffee table in front of a sofa and sat on the sofa. ‘Come over here, you odd little man,’ she said. Mr Martin went over and sat beside her. It was difficult getting a cigarette out of the pack of Camels, but he managed it. She held a match for him, laughing. ‘Well,’ she said, handing him his drink, ‘this is perfectly marvellous. You with a drink and a cigarette.’

  Mr Martin puffed, not too awkwardly, and took a gulp of the highball. ‘I drink and smoke all the time,’ he said. He clinked his glass against hers. ‘Here’s nuts to that old windbag, Fitweiler,’ he said, and gulped again. The stuff tasted awful, but he made no grimace. ‘Really, Mr Martin,’ she said, her voice and posture changing, ‘you are insulting our employer.’ Mrs Barrows was now all special adviser to the president. ‘I am preparing a bomb,’ said Mr Martin, ‘which will blow the old goat higher than hell.’ He had only had a little of the drink, which was not strong. It couldn’t be that. ‘Do you take dope or something?’ Mrs Barrows asked coldly. ‘Heroin,’ said Mr Martin. ‘I’ll be coked to the gills when I bump that old buzzard off.’ ‘Mr Martin!’ she shouted, getting to her feet. ‘That will be all of that. You must go at once.’ Mr Martin took another swallow of his drink. He tapped his cigarette out in the ashtray and put the pack of Camels on the coffee table. Then he got up. She stood glaring at him. He walked over and put on his hat and coat. ‘Not a word about this,’ he said, and laid an index finger against his lips. All Mrs Barrows could bring out was ‘Really!’ Mr Martin put his hand on the doorknob. ‘I’m sitting in the catbird seat,’ he said. He stuck his tongue out at her and left. Nobody saw him go.

  Mr Martin got to his apartment, walking, well before eleven. No one saw him go in. He had two glasses of milk after brushing his teeth, and he felt elated. It wasn’t tipsiness, because he hadn’t been tipsy. Anyway, the walk had worn off all effects of the whisky. He got in bed and read a magazine for a while. He was asleep before midnight.

  Mr Martin got to the office at eight-thirty the next morning, as usual. At a quarter to nine, Ulgine Barrows, who had never before arrived at work before ten, swept into his office. ‘I’m reporting to Mr Fitweiler now!’ she shouted. ‘If he turns you over to the police, it’s no more than you deserve!’ Mr Martin gave her a look of shocked surprise. ‘I beg your pardon?’ he said. Mrs Barrows snorted and bounced out of the room, leaving Miss Paird and Joey Hart staring after her. ‘What’s the matter with that old devil now?’ asked Miss Paird. ‘I have no idea,’ said Mr Martin, resuming his work. The other two looked at him and then at each other. Miss Paird got up and went out. She walked slowly past the closed door of Mr Fitweiler’s office. Mrs Barrows was yelling inside, but she was not braying. Miss Paird could not hear what the woman was saying. She went back to her desk.

  Forty-five minutes later, Mrs Barrows left the president’s office and went into her own, shutting the door. It wasn’t until half an hour later that Mr Fitweiler sent for Mr Martin. The head of the filing department, neat, quiet, attentive, stood in front of the old man’s desk. Mr Fitweiler was pale and nervous. He took his glasses off and twiddled them. He made a small, bruffing sound in his throat. ‘Martin,’ he said, ‘you have been with us more than twenty years.’ ‘Twenty-two sir,’ said Mr Martin. ‘In that time,’ pursued the president, ‘your work and your – uh – manner have been exemplary.’ ‘I trust so, sir,’ said Mr Martin. ‘I have understood, Martin,’ said Mr Fitweiler, ‘that you have never taken a drink or smoked.’ ‘That is correct, sir,’ said Mr Martin. ‘Ah, yes.’ Mr Fitweiler polished his glasses. ‘You may describe what you did after leaving the office yesterday, Martin,’ he said. Mr Martin allowed less than a second for his bewildered pause. ‘Certainly, sir,’ he said. ‘I walked home. Then I went to Schrafft’s for dinner. Afterward I walked home again. I went to bed early, sir, and read a magazine for a while. I was asleep before eleven.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ said Mr Fitweiler again. He was silent for a moment, searching for the proper words to say to the head of the filing department. ‘Mrs Barrows,’ he said finally, ‘Mrs Barrows has worked hard, Martin, very hard. It grieves me to report that she has suffered a severe breakdown. It has taken the form of a persecution complex accompanied by distressing hallucinations.’ ‘I am very sorry, sir,’ said Mr Martin. ‘Mrs Barrows is under the delusion,’ continued Mr Fitweiler, ‘that you visited her last evening and behaved yourself in an – uh – unseemly manner.’ He raised his hand to silence Mr Martin’s little pained outcry. ‘It is the nature of these psychological diseases,’ Mr Fitweiler said, ‘to fix upon the least likely and most innocent party as the – uh – source of persecution. These matters are not for the lay mind to grasp, Martin. I’ve just had my psychiatrist, Dr Fitch, on the phone. He would not, of course, commit himself, but he made enough generalizations to substantiate my suspicions. I suggested to Mrs Barrows when she had completed her – uh – story to me this morning, that she visit Dr Fitch, for I suspected a condition at once. She flew, I regret to say, into a rage, and demanded – uh – requested that I call you on the carpet. You may not know, Martin, but Mrs Barrows had planned a reorganization of your department – subject to my approval, of course, subject to my approval. This brought you, rather than anyone else, to her mind – but again that is a phenomenon for Dr Fitch and not for us. So, Martin, I am afraid Mrs Barrows’ usefulness here is at an end.’ ‘I am dreadfully sorry, sir,’ said Mr Martin.

  It was at this point that the door to the office blew open with the suddenness of a gas-main explosion and Mrs Barrows catapulted through it. ‘Is the little rat denying it?’ she screamed. ‘He can’t get away with that!’ Mr Martin got up and moved discreetly to a point beside Mr Fitweiler’s chair. ‘You drank and smoked at my apartment,’ she bawled at Mr Martin, ‘and you know it! You called Mr Fitweiler an old windbag and said you were going to blow him up when you got coked to the gills on your heroin!’ She stopped yelling to catch her breath and a new glint came into her popping eyes. ‘If you weren’t such a drab, ordinary little man,’ she said, ‘I’d think you’d planned it all. Sticking your tongue out, saying you were sitting in the catbird seat, because you thought no one would believe me when I told it! My God, it’s really too perfect!’ She brayed loudly and hysterically, and the fury was on her again. She glared at Mr Fitweiler. ‘Can’t you see how he has tricked us, you old fool? Can’t you see his little game?’ But Mr Fitweiler had been surreptitiously pressing all the buttons under the top of his desk and employees of F. & S. began pouring into the room. ‘Stockton,’ said Mr Fitweiler, ‘you and Fishbein will take Mrs Barrows to her home. Mrs Powell, you will go with them.’ Stockton, who had played a little football in high school, blocked Mrs Barrows as she made for Mr Martin. It took him and Fishbein together to force her out of the door into the hall, crowded with stenographers and office boys. She was still screaming imprecations at Mr Martin, tangled and contradictory im
precations. The hubbub finally died out down the corridor.

  ‘I regret that this has happened,’ said Mr Fitweiler. ‘I shall ask you to dismiss it from your mind, Martin.’ ‘Yes, sir,’ said Mr Martin, anticipating his chief’s ‘That will be all’ by moving to the door. ‘I will dismiss it.’ He went out and shut the door, and his step was light and quick in the hall. When he entered his department he had slowed down to his customary gait, and he walked quietly across the room to the W20 file, wearing a look of studious concentration.

  Memoirs of a Drudge

  Mr Thurber … went to Ohio State University for his formal education. His informal education included … drudgery on several newspapers – in Columbus, in New York, and in Paris. – From Horse Sense in American Humor, by Walter Blair.

  I don’t know about that. There is, of course, a certain amount of drudgery in newspaper work, just as there is in teaching classes, tunnelling into a bank, or being President of the United States. I suppose that even the most pleasurable of imaginable occupations, that of batting baseballs through the windows of the R.C.A. Building, would pall a little as the days ran on. Seldom, it is true, do I gather my grandchildren about my knees and tell them tall tales out of my colourful years as a leg man, but I often sit in the cane-seated rocker on the back porch, thinking of the old days and cackling with that glee known only to ageing journalists. Just the other evening, when the womenfolks were washing up the supper dishes and setting them to dreen, they could hear me rocking back and forth and laughing to myself. I was thinking about the Riviera edition of the Chicago Tribune in southern France during the winter of 1925–6.

  Seven or eight of us had been assigned to the task of getting out a little six-page newspaper, whose stories were set up in 10-point type, instead of the customary 8-point, to make life easier for everybody, including the readers. Most of our news came by wire from the Paris edition, and all we had to do was write headlines for it, a pleasurable occupation if you are not rushed, and we were never rushed. For the rest, we copied from the Éclaireur de Nice et du Sud-Est, a journal filled with droll and mystical stories, whose translation, far from being drudgery, was pure joy. Nice, in that indolent winter, was full of knaves and rascals, adventurers and impostors, pochards and indiscrets, whose ingenious exploits, sometimes in full masquerade costume, sometimes in the nude, were easy and pleasant to record.

  We went to work after dinner and usually had the last chronicle of the diverting day written and ready for the linotypers well before midnight. It was then our custom to sit around for half an hour, making up items for the society editor’s column. She was too pretty, we thought, to waste the soft southern days tracking down the arrival of prominent persons on the Azure Coast. So all she had to do was stop in at the Ruhl and the Negresco each day and pick up the list of guests who had just registered. The rest of us invented enough items to fill up the last half of her column, and a gay and romantic cavalcade, indeed, infested the littoral of our imagination. ‘Lieutenant General and Mrs Pendleton Gray Winslow,’ we would write, ‘have arrived at their villa, Heart’s Desire, on Cap d’Antibes, bringing with them their prize Burmese monkey, Thibault.’ Or ‘The Hon. Mr Stephen H. L. Atterbury, Chargé-d’Affaires of the American Legation in Peru, and Mrs Atterbury, the former Princess Ti Ling of Thibet are motoring to Monte Carlo from Aix-en-Provence, where they have been visiting Mr Atterbury’s father, Rear Admiral A. Watson Atterbury, U.S.N., retired. Mr Stephen Atterbury is the breeder of the famous Schnauzer-Pincer, Champion Adelbert von Weigengrosse of Tamerlane, said to be valued at $15,000.’ In this manner we turned out, in no time at all, and with the expenditure of very little mental energy, the most glittering column of social notes in the history of the American newspaper, either here or abroad.

  As the hour of midnight struck twice, in accordance with the dreamy custom of town and church clocks in southern France, and our four or five hours of drudgery were ending, the late Frank Harris would often drop in at the Tribune office, and we would listen to stories of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, Bernard Shaw, Emma Goldman and Frank Harris. Thus ran the harsh and exacting tenor of those days of slavery.

  It is true that the languorous somnolence of our life was occasionally broken up. This would happen about one night a week, around ten o’clock, when our French composing room went on strike. The printers and their foreman, a handsome, black-bearded giant of a man, whose rages resembled the mistral, wanted to set up headlines in their own easygoing way, using whatever size type was handiest and whatever space it would fit into most easily. That is the effortless hit-or-miss system which has made a crazy quilt of French newspaper headlines for two hundred years, and André and his men could not understand why we stubbornly refused to adopt so sane and simple a method. So now and then, when he couldn’t stand our stupid and inviolable headline schedules any longer, André would roar into our little city room like a storm from the Alps. Behind him in the doorway stood his linotypers, with their hats and coats on. Since the Frenchmen could comprehend no English and spoke only Niçois, an argot entirely meaningless to us, our arguments were carried on in shouting and gesticulating and a great deal of waving of French and American newspapers in each other’s faces. After a while all the combatants on both sides would adjourn to the bar next door, still yelling and gesturing, but after four or five rounds of beer we would fall to singing old Provençal songs and new American ones, and there would be a truce for another six or seven days, everybody going back to work, still singing.

  On one of those nights of battle, song and compromise, several of us defenders of the immutable American headline went back to the bar after we had got the Tribune to press and sat up till dawn, drinking grog américain. Just as the sun came up, we got on a train for Cannes, where the most talked-about international struggle of the year was to take place that afternoon, the tennis match between Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills. As we climbed aboard, one of my colleagues, spoiling for an argument, declared that a French translation he had read of Edgar Allen Poe’s ‘The Raven’ was infinitely superior to the poem in the original English. How we had got around to this curious subject I have no idea, but it seemed natural enough at the time. I remember that a young reporter named Middleton visited all the compartments on the train, demanding of their sleepy and startled French occupants if they did not believe that a raven was more likely to say ‘Jamais plus’ than ‘Nevermore’. He returned with the claim that our fellow-passengers to a man were passionately on the side of ‘Jamais plus’. So passed a night of drudgery in the fond, far-away days of the Third Republic and the Riviera edition of the Chicago Tribune.

  We had the long days of warm blue weather for our own, to climb the Corniche roads or wind up the mountain in a char à bancs to the magical streams and the million springtime flowers of St-Martin-Vésubie. Sometimes we sat the day out on the terrace of a restaurant overlooking the Bay of Angels and gave the tireless Albert suggestions as to where he might find Henry James. Albert was a young Englishman who did interviews for us with distinguished visitors to the Riviera, and he had got the curious idea that the celebrated novelist was hiding away in a pension somewhere between St Tropez and Mentone, rewriting ‘The Golden Bowl’. We decided that Albert had got his tip about the whereabouts of the great dead man from some ageing aunt who lived in the parlours and the gardens of the past. It was one way to spend an afternoon, sitting over our glasses of vermouth-cassis, bringing back to life the poor, sensitive creator of Peter Quint and Mme de Vionnet, figuring him lost and wandering, ever so wonderfully, somewhere among the bougainvillaea and the passionflowers. Thus in fancy and in dream passed the long days of warm blue weather.

  Before going to France, I worked on the Columbus Evening Dispatch, a fat and amiable newspaper, whose city editor seldom knew where I was and got so that he didn’t care. He had a glimpse of me every day at 9 a.m., arriving at the office, and promptly at ten he saw me leave it, a sheaf of folded copy paper in my pocket and a look of enterprise in my eye. I was on my
way to Marzetti’s, a comfortable restaurant just down the street, where a group of us newspapermen met every morning. We would sit around for an hour drinking coffee, telling stories, drawing pictures on the tablecloth, and giving imitations of the more eminent Ohio political figures of the day, many of whom fanned their soup with their hats but had enough good, old-fashioned horse sense to realize that a proposal to shift the clocks of the state from Central to Eastern standard time was directly contrary to the will of the Lord God Almighty and that the supporters of the project would burn in hell.

  After this relaxing and often stimulating interlude I would stroll out to the Carnegie Library and read the New York World in the periodical room. It so happened that the city offices, which I was assigned to cover, were housed at that time in the library building, the old City Hall having burned down the first night I ever attended a council meeting in it. After I had put the World back on its rack, only a little fragment of forenoon remained in which to gather the news, but I somehow managed the aggravating chore.