The Thurber Carnival

by James Thurber

  Olympy decided the extra pedal was the embrayage, shifted into low from neutral, and the next thing I knew we were making a series of short forward bounds like a rabbit leaping out of a wheat field to see where he is. This form of locomotion takes a lot out of a man and car. The engine complained in loud, rhythmic whines. And then Olympy somehow got his left foot on the starter and there was a familiar undertone of protest; this set his right foot to palpitating on the accelerator and the rabbit-jumps increased in scope. Abandoning my search for the word for starter, I grabbed his left knee and shouted ‘Ça commence!’ Just what was commencing Olympy naturally couldn’t figure – probably some habitual and ominous idiosyncrasy of the machinery. He gave me a quick, pale look. I shut off the ignition, and we discussed the starter situation, breathing a little heavily. He understood what it was finally, and presently we were lurching ahead again, Olympy holding her in low gear, like a wrestler in a clinch, afraid to risk shifting into second. He tried it at last and with a jamming jolt and a roar we went into reverse: the car writhed like a tortured leopard and the engine quit.

  I was puzzled and scared, and so was Olympy. Only a foolish pride in masculine fortitude kept us going. I showed him the little jog to the right you have to make to shift into second and he started the engine and we were off again, jolting and lurching. He made the shift, finally, with a noise like lightning striking a foundry – and veered swoopingly to the right. We barely missed a series of staunch granite blocks, set in concrete, that mark ditches and soft shoulders. We whisked past a pole. The leaves of a vine hanging on a wall slapped at me through the window. My voice left me. I was fascinated and paralyzed by the swift passes disaster was making at my head. At length I was able to grope blindly toward the ignition switch, but got my wrist on the klaxon button. When I jerked my arm away, Olympy began obediently sounding the horn. We were riding on the edge of a ditch. I managed somehow to shut off the ignition and we rolled to a stop. Olympy, unused to a left-hand drive, had forgotten there was a large portion of the car to his right, with me in it. I told him, ‘A gauche, à gauche, toujours à gauche!’ ‘Ah,’ said Olympy, but there was no comprehension in him. I could see he didn’t know we had been up against the vines of villa walls: intent on the dark problem of gear shifting, he had been oblivious of where the car and I had been. There was a glint in his eye now. He was determined to get the thing into high on his next attempt; we had come about half a mile in the lower gears.

  The road curved downhill as it passed Eden Roc and it was here that an elderly English couple, unaware of the fact that hell was loose on the highway, were walking. Olympy was in second again, leaning forward like a racing bicycle rider. I shouted at him to look out, he said ‘Oui’ – and we grazed the old man and his wife. I glanced back in horror: they were staring at us, mouths and eyes wide, unable to move or make a sound. Olympy raced on to a new peril: a descending hairpin curve, which he negotiated in some far-fetched manner, with me hanging on to the emergency brake. The road straightened out, I let go the brake, and Olympy slammed into high with the desperate gesture of a man trying to clap his hat over a poised butterfly. We began to whiz: Olympy hadn’t counted on a fast pickup. He whirled around a car in front of us with a foot to spare. ‘Lentement!’ I shouted, and then ‘Gauche!’ as I began to get again the whimper of poles and walls in my ears. ‘Ça va mieux, maintenant,’ said Olympy, quietly. A wild thought ran through my head that maybe this was the way they used to drive in Russia in the old days.

  Ahead of us now was one of the most treacherous curves on the Cap. The road narrowed and bent, like a croquet wicket, around a high stone wall that shut off your view of what was coming. What was coming was usually on the wrong side of the road, so it wouldn’t do to shout ‘Gauche!’ now. We made the turn all right. There was a car coming, but it was well over on its own side. Olympy apparently didn’t think so. He whirled the wheel to the right, didn’t take up the play fast enough in whirling it back, and there was a tremendous banging crash, like a bronze monument falling. I had a glimpse of Olympy’s right hand waving around like the hand of a man hunting for something under a table. I didn’t know what his feet were doing. We were still moving, heavily, with a ripping noise and a loud roar. ‘Poussez le phare!’ I shouted, which means ‘push the headlight!’ ‘Ah-h-h-h,’ said Olympy. I shut off the ignition and pulled on the hand brake, but we had already stopped. We got out and looked at the pole we had sideswiped and at the car. The right front fender was crumpled and torn and the right back one banged up, but nothing else had been hurt. Olympy’s face was so stricken when he looked at me that I felt I had to cheer him up. ‘Il fait beau,’ I announced, which is to say that the weather is fine. It was all I could think of.

  I started for a garage that Olympy knew about. At the first street we came to he said ‘Gauche’ and I turned left. ‘Ah, non,’ said Olympy. ‘Gauche,’ and he pointed the other way. ‘You mean droit?’ I asked, just that way. ‘Ah!’ said Olympy. ‘C’est bien ça!’ It was as if he had thought of something he hadn’t been able to remember for days. That explained a great deal.

  I left Olympy and the car at the garage; he said he would walk back. One of the garage men drove me into Juan-les-Pins and I walked home from there – and into a look of wild dismay in Maria’s eyes. I hadn’t thought about that: she had seen us drive away together and here I was, alone. ‘Où est votre mari?’ I asked her, hurriedly. It was something of a failure as a reassuring beginning. I had taken the question out of her own mouth, so I answered it. ‘He has gone for a walk,’ I told her. Then I tried to say that her husband was bon, but I pronounced it beau, so that what I actually said was that her husband was handsome. She must have figured that he was not only dead but laid out. There was a mauvais quart d’heure for both of us before the drooping figure of Olympy finally appeared. He explained sadly to Maria that the mechanism of the Ford is strange and curious compared to the mechanism of the Morgan. I agreed with him. Of course, he protested, he would pay for the repairs to the car, but Maria and I both put down that suggestion. Maria’s idea of my work was that I was paid by the City of New York and enjoyed a tremendous allowance. Olympy got forty francs a day at the boat factory.

  That night, at dinner, Maria told us that her mari was pacing up and down in their little bedroom at the rear of the house. He was in a state. I didn’t want an attack of chagrin to come on him as it had on the cordonnier and perhaps reach his brain. When Maria was ready to go we gave her a handful of cigarettes for Olympy and a glass of Bénédictine. The next day, at dawn, I hear the familiar tintamarre and hurlement and brouhaha of Olympy’s wonderful contraption getting under way once more. He was off to the boat factory and his forty francs a day, his dollar and thirty cents. It would have cost him two weeks’ salary to pay for the fenders, but he would have managed it somehow. When I went down to breakfast, Maria came in from the kitchen with a large volume, well fingered and full of loose pages, which she handed to me. It was called Le Musée d’Art and subtitled Galerie des Chefs-d’œuvre et Précis de l’Histoire de l’Art au XIXe Siècle, en France et à l’Étranger (1000 gravures, 58 planches hors texte). A present to Monsieur from Olympy Sementzoff, with his compliments. The incident of the automobile was thus properly rounded off with an exchange of presents: cigarettes, Bénédictine, and Le Musée d’Art. It seemed to me the way such things should always end, but perhaps Olympy and I were ahead of our day – or behind it.

  3

  FROM LET YOUR MIND ALONE

  Destructive Forces in Life

  The mental efficiency books go into elaborate detail about how to attain Masterful Adjustment, as one of them calls it, but it seems to me the problems they set up, and knock down, are in the main unimaginative and pedestrian: the little fusses at the breakfast table, the routine troubles at the office, the familiar anxieties over money and health – the welter of workaday annoyances which all of us meet with and usually conquer without extravagant wear and tear. Let us examine, as a typical instance
, a brief case history presented by the learned Mr David Seabury, author of What Makes Us Seem So Queer, Unmasking Our Minds, Keep Your Wits, Growing Into Life and How to Worry Successfully. I select it at random. ‘Frank Fulsome,’ writes Mr Seabury, ‘flung down the book with disgust and growled an insult at his wife. That little lady put her hands to her face and fled from the room. She was sure Frank must hate her to speak so cruelly. Had she known it, he was not really speaking to her at all. The occasion merely gave vent to a pent-up desire to “punch his fool boss in the jaw”.’ This is, I believe, a characteristic Seabury situation. Many of the women in his treatises remind you of nobody so much as Ben Bolt’s Alice, who ‘wept with delight when you gave her a smile, and trembled with fear at your frown’. The little ladies most of us know would, instead of putting their hands to their faces and fleeing from the room, come right back at Frank Fulsome. Frank would perhaps be lucky if he didn’t get a punch in the jaw himself. In any case, the situation would be cleared up in approximately three minutes. This ‘had she known’ business is not as common among wives today as Mr Seabury seems to think it is. The Latent Content (as the psychologists call it) of a husband’s mind is usually as clear to the wife as the Manifest Content, frequently much clearer.

  I could cite a dozen major handicaps to Masterful Adjustmen, which the thought technicians never touch upon, a dozen situations not so easy of analysis and solution as most of theirs. I will, however, content myself with one. Let us consider the case of a man of my acquaintance who had accomplished Discipline of Mind, overcome the Will to Fail, mastered the Technique of Living – had, in a word, practically attained Masterful Adjustment – when he was called on the phone one afternoon about five o’clock by a man named Bert Scursey. The other man, whom I shall call Harry Conner, did not answer the phone, however; his wife answered it. As Scursey told me the story later, he had no intention when he dialled the Conners’ apartment at the Hotel Graydon of doing more than talk with Harry. But, for some strange reason, when Louise Conner answered, Bert Scursey found himself pretending to be, and imitating the voice of, a coloured woman. This Scursey is by way of being an excellent mimic, and a coloured woman is one of the best things he does.

  ‘Hello,’ said Mrs Conner. In a plaintive voice, Scursey said, ‘Is dis heah Miz Commah?’ ‘Yes, this is Mrs Conner,’ said Louise. ‘Who is speaking?’ ‘Dis heah’s Edith Rummum,’ said Scursey. ‘Ah used wuck for yo frens was nex doah yo place a Sou Norwuck.’ Naturally, Mrs Conner did not follow this, and demanded rather sharply to know who was calling and what she wanted. Scursey, his voice soft with feigned tears, finally got it over to his friend’s wife that he was one Edith Rummum, a coloured maid who had once worked for some friends of the Conners’ in South Norwalk, where they had lived some years before. ‘What is it you want, Edith?’ asked Mrs Conner, who was completely taken in by the impostor (she could not catch the name of the South Norwalk friends, but let that go). Scursey – or Edith, rather – explained in a pitiable, hesitant way that she was without work or money and that she didn’t know what she was going to do; Rummum, she said, was in the gaolhouse because of a cutting scrape on a roller-coaster. Now, Louise Conner happened to be a most kind-hearted person, as Scursey well knew, so she said that she could perhaps find some laundry work for Edith to do. ‘Yessum,’ said Edith. ‘Ah laundas.’ At this point, Harry Conner’s voice, raised in the room behind his wife, came clearly to Scursey, saying, ‘Now, for God’s sake, Louise, don’t go giving our clothes out to somebody you never saw or heard of in your life.’ This interjection of Conner’s was in firm keeping with a theory of logical behaviour which he had got out of the Mind and Personality books. There was no Will to Weakness here, no Desire to Have His Shirts Ruined, no False Sympathy for the Coloured Woman Who Has Not Organized Her Life.

  But Mrs Conner who often did not listen to Mr Conner, in spite of his superior mental discipline, prevailed.* ‘Where are you now, Edith?’ she asked. This disconcerted Scursey for a moment, but he finally said, ‘Ah’s jes rounda corna, Miz Commah.’ ‘Well, you come over to the Hotel Graydon,’ said Mrs Conner. ‘We’re in Apartment 7-A on the seventh floor.’ ‘Yessm,’ said Edith. Mrs Conner hung up and so did Scursey. He was now, he realized, in something of a predicament. Since he did not possess a streamlined mind, as Dr Mursell has called it, and had definitely a Will to Confuse, he did not perceive that his little joke had gone far enough. He wanted to go on with it, which is a characteristic of wool-gatherers, pranksters, wags, wishfulfillers, and escapists generally. He enjoyed fantasy as much as reality, probably even more, which is a sure symptom of Regression, Digression and Analogical Redintegration. What he finally did, therefore, was to call back the Conners and get Mrs Conner on the phone again. ‘Jeez, Miz Commah,’ he said, with a hint of panic in his voice, ‘Ah cain’ fine yo apottoman!’ ‘Where are you, Edith?’ she asked. ‘Lawd, Ah doan know,’ said Edith. ‘Ah’s on some floah in de Hotel Graydon.’ ‘Well, listen, Edith, you took the elevator, didn’t you?’ ‘Das whut Ah took,’ said Edith, uncertainly. ‘Well, you go back to the elevator and tell the boy you want off at the seventh floor. I’ll meet you at the elevator.’ ‘Yessm,’ said Edith, with even more uncertainty. At this point, Conner’s loud voice, speaking to his wife, was again heard by Scursey. ‘Where in the hell is she calling from?’ demanded Conner, who had developed Logical Reasoning. ‘She must have wandered into somebody else’s apartment if she is calling you from this building, for God’s sake!’ Whereupon, having no desire to explain where Edith was calling from, Scursey hung up.

  After an instant of thought, or rather Disintegrated Phantasmagoria, Scursey rang the Conners again. He wanted to prevent Louise from going out to the elevator and checking up with the operator. This time, as Scursey had hoped, Harry Conner answered, having told his wife that he would handle this situation. ‘Hello!’ shouted Conner, irritably. ‘Who is this?’ Scursey now abandoned the role of Edith and assumed a sharp, fussy, masculine tone. ‘Mr Conner,’ he said, crisply, ‘this is the office. I am afraid we shall have to ask you to remove this coloured person from the building. She is blundering into other people’s apartments, using their phones. We cannot have that sort of thing, you know, at the Graydon.’ The man’s words and his tone infuriated Conner. ‘There are a lot of sort of things I’d like to see you not have at the Graydon!’ he shouted. ‘Well, please come down to the lobby and do something about this situation,’ said the man, nastily. ‘You’re damned right I’ll come down!’ howled Conner. He banged down the receiver.

  Bert Scursey sat in a chair and gloated over the involved state of affairs which he had created. He decided to go over to the Graydon, which was just up the street from his own apartment, and see what was happening. It promised to have all the confusion which his disorderly mind so deplorably enjoyed. And it did have. He found Conner in a tremendous rage in the lobby, accusing an astonished assistant manager of having insulted him. Several persons in the lobby watched the curious scene. ‘But, Mr Conner,’ said the assistant manager, a Mr Bent, ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’ ‘If you listen, you’ll find out!’ bawled Harry Conner. ‘In the first place, this coloured woman’s coming to the hotel was no idea of mine. I’ve never seen her in my life and I don’t want to see her! I want to go to my grave without seeing her!’ He had forgotten what the Mind and Personality books had taught him: never raise your voice in anger, always stick to the point. Naturally, Mr Bent could only believe that his guest had gone out of his mind. He decided to humour him. ‘Where is this – ah – coloured woman, Mr Conner?’ he asked, warily. He was somewhat pale and was fiddling with a bit of paper. A dabbler in psychology books himself, he knew that coloured women are often Sex Degradation symbols, and he wondered if Conner had not fallen out of love with his wife without realizing it. (This theory, I believe, Mr Bent has clung to ever since, although the Conners are one of the happiest couples in the country.) ‘I don’t know where she is!’ cried Conner. ‘She’s up on some other floo
r phoning my wife! You seemed to know all about it! I had nothing to do with it! I opposed it from the start! But I want no insults from you no matter who opposed it!’ ‘Certainly not, certainly not,’ said Mr Bent, backing slightly away. He began to wonder what he was going to do with this maniac.

  At this juncture Scursey, who had been enjoying the scene at a safe distance, approached Conner and took him by the arm ‘What’s the matter, old boy?’ he asked. ‘H’lo, Bert,’ said Conner, sullenly. And then, his eyes narrowing, he began to examine the look on Scursey’s face. Scursey is not good at dead-panning; he is only good on the phone. There was a guilty grin on his face. ‘You – ’ said Conner, bitterly, remembering Scursey’s pranks of mimicry, and he turned on his heel, walked to the elevator, and, when Scursey tried to get in too, shoved him back into the lobby. That was the end of the friendship between the Conners and Bert Scursey. It was more than that. It was the end of Harry Conner’s stay at the Graydon. It was, in fact, the end of his stay in New York City. He and Louise live in Oregon now, where Conner accepted a less important position than he had held in New York because the episode of Edith had turned him against Scursey, Mr Bent, the Graydon, and the whole metropolitan area.