The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

== THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY ==
=== By James Thurber ===
Originally published in The NewYorker 1939
"WE'RE going through!" The Commander's voice was like thin ice
breaking. He wore his full-dress uniform, with the heavily braided white cap
pulled down rakishly over one cold gray eye. "We can't make it, sir. It's
spoiling for a hurricane, if you ask me." "I'm not asking you,
Lieutenant Berg," said the Commander. "Throw on the power lights! Rev
her up to 8500! We're going through!" The pounding of the cylinders
increased: ta-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. The Commander stared at
the ice forming on the pilot window. He walked over and twisted a row of
complicated dials. "Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" he shouted.
"Switch on No. 8 auxiliary!" repeated Lieutenant Berg. "Full
strength in No. 3 turret!" shouted the Commander. "Full strength in
No. 3 turret!" The crew, bending to their various tasks in the huge,
hurtling eight-engined Navy hydroplane, looked at each other and grinned.
"The Old Man'll get us through," they said to one another. "The
Old Man ain't afraid of hell!" . . . 
"Not so fast! You're driving too fast!" said Mrs. Mitty.
"What are you driving so fast for?" 
"Hmm?" said Walter Mitty. He looked at his wife, in the seat
beside him, with shocked astonishment. She seemed grossly unfamiliar, like a
strange woman who had yelled at him in a crowd. "You were up to
fifty-five," she said. "You know I don't like to go more than forty.
You were up to fifty-five." Walter Mitty drove on toward Waterbury in
silence, the roaring of the SN202 through the worst storm in twenty years of Navy
flying fading in the remote, intimate airways of his mind. "You're tensed
up again," said Mrs. Mitty. "It's one of your days. I wish you'd let
Dr. Renshaw look you over." 
Walter Mitty stopped the car in front of the building where his wife
went to have her hair done. "Remember to get those overshoes while I'm
having my hair done," she said. "I don't need overshoes," said
Mitty. She put her mirror back into her bag. "We've been all through
that," she said, getting out of the car. "You're not a young man any
longer." He raced the engine a little. "Why don't you wear your
gloves? Have you lost your gloves?" Walter Mitty reached in a pocket and
brought out the gloves. He put them on, but after she had turned and gone into
the building and he had driven on to a red light, he took them off again.
"Pick it up, brother!" snapped a cop as the light changed, and Mitty
hastily pulled on his gloves and lurched ahead. He drove around the streets
aimlessly for a time, and then he drove past the hospital on his way to the
parking lot. 
. . . "It's the millionaire banker, Wellington McMillan," said
the pretty nurse. "Yes?" said Walter Mitty, removing his gloves
slowly. "Who has the case?" "Dr. Renshaw and Dr. Benbow, but
there are two specialists here, Dr. Remington from New York and Dr. Pritchard-Mitford
from London. He flew over." A door opened down a long, cool corridor and
Dr. Renshaw came out. He looked distraught and haggard. "Hello,
Mitty," he said. `'We're having the devil's own time with McMillan, the
millionaire banker and close personal friend of Roosevelt. Obstreosis of the
ductal tract. Tertiary. Wish you'd take a look at him." "Glad
to," said Mitty. 
In the operating room there were whispered introductions: "Dr.
Remington, Dr. Mitty. Dr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty." "I've read your
book on streptothricosis," said Pritchard-Mitford, shaking hands. "A
brilliant performance, sir." "Thank you," said Walter Mitty.
"Didn't know you were in the States, Mitty," grumbled Remington.
"Coals to Newcastle, bringing Mitford and me up here for a tertiary."
"You are very kind," said Mitty. A huge, complicated machine,
connected to the operating table, with many tubes and wires, began at this
moment to go pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. "The new anesthetizer is giving
away!" shouted an intern. "There is no one in the East who knows how
to fix it!" "Quiet, man!" said Mitty, in a low, cool voice. He
sprang to the machine, which was now going pocketa-pocketa-queep-pocketa-queep
. He began fingering delicately a row of glistening dials. "Give me a
fountain pen!" he snapped. Someone handed him a fountain pen. He pulled a
faulty piston out of the machine and inserted the pen in its place. "That
will hold for ten minutes," he said. "Get on with the operation. A
nurse hurried over and whispered to Renshaw, and Mitty saw the man turn pale.
"Coreopsis has set in," said Renshaw nervously. "If you would
take over, Mitty?" Mitty looked at him and at the craven figure of Benbow,
who drank, and at the grave, uncertain faces of the two great specialists.
"If you wish," he said. They slipped a white gown on him, he adjusted
a mask and drew on thin gloves; nurses handed him shining . . . 
"Back it up, Mac!! Look out for that Buick!" Walter Mitty
jammed on the brakes. "Wrong lane, Mac," said the parking-lot
attendant, looking at Mitty closely. "Gee. Yeh," muttered Mitty. He
began cautiously to back out of the lane marked "Exit Only."
"Leave her sit there," said the attendant. "I'll put her
away." Mitty got out of the car. "Hey, better leave the key."
"Oh," said Mitty, handing the man the ignition key. The attendant
vaulted into the car, backed it up with insolent skill, and put it where it
belonged. 
They're so damn cocky, thought Walter Mitty, walking along Main Street;
they think they know everything. Once he had tried to take his chains off,
outside New Milford, and he had got them wound around the axles. A man had had
to come out in a wrecking car and unwind them, a young, grinning garageman.
Since then Mrs. Mitty always made him drive to a garage to have the chains
taken off. The next time, he thought, I'll wear my right arm in a sling; they
won't grin at me then. I'll have my right arm in a sling and they'll see I
couldn't possibly take the chains off myself. He kicked at the slush on the
sidewalk. "Overshoes," he said to himself, and he began looking for a
shoe store. 
When he came out into the street again, with the overshoes in a box
under his arm, Walter Mitty began to wonder what the other thing was his wife
had told him to get. She had told him, twice before they set out from their
house for Waterbury. In a way he hated these weekly trips to town--he was
always getting something wrong. Kleenex, he thought, Squibb's, razor blades?
No. Tooth paste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, Carborundum, initiative and
referendum? He gave it up. But she would remember it. "Where's the
what's-its- name?" she would ask. "Don't tell me you forgot the
what's-its-name." A newsboy went by shouting something about the Waterbury
trial. 
. . . "Perhaps this will refresh your memory." The District
Attorney suddenly thrust a heavy automatic at the quiet figure on the witness
stand. "Have you ever seen this before?'' Walter Mitty took the gun and
examined it expertly. "This is my Webley-Vickers 50.80," ho said
calmly. An excited buzz ran around the courtroom. The Judge rapped for order.
"You are a crack shot with any sort of firearms, I believe?" said the
District Attorney, insinuatingly. "Objection!" shouted Mitty's
attorney. "We have shown that the defendant could not have fired the shot.
We have shown that he wore his right arm in a sling on the night of the
fourteenth of July." Walter Mitty raised his hand briefly and the
bickering attorneys were stilled. "With any known make of gun," he
said evenly, "I could have killed Gregory Fitzhurst at three hundred feet
with my left hand." Pandemonium broke loose in the courtroom. A woman's
scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, dark-haired girl was in
Walter Mitty's arms. The District Attorney struck at her savagely. Without
rising from his chair, Mitty let the man have it on the point of the chin.
"You miserable cur!" . . . 
"Puppy biscuit," said Walter Mitty. He stopped walking and the
buildings of Waterbury rose up out of the misty courtroom and surrounded him
again. A woman who was passing laughed. "He said 'Puppy biscuit,'"
she said to her companion. "That man said 'Puppy biscuit' to
himself." Walter Mitty hurried on. He went into an A. P., not the first
one he came to but a smaller one farther up the street. "I want some
biscuit for small, young dogs," he said to the clerk. "Any special
brand, sir?" The greatest pistol shot in the world thought a moment.
"It says 'Puppies Bark for It' on the box," said Walter Mitty. 
His wife would be through at the hairdresser's in fifteen minutes' Mitty
saw in looking at his watch, unless they had trouble drying it; sometimes they
had trouble drying it. She didn't like to get to the hotel first, she would
want him to be there waiting for her as usual. He found a big leather chair in
the lobby, facing a window, and he put the overshoes and the puppy biscuit on
the floor beside it. He picked up an old copy of Liberty and sank down into the
chair. "Can Germany Conquer the World Through the Air?" Walter Mitty
looked at the pictures of bombing planes and of ruined streets. 
. . . "The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh,
sir," said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through tousled
hair. "Get him to bed," he said wearily, "with the others. I'll
fly alone." "But you can't, sir," said the sergeant anxiously.
"It takes two men to handle that bomber and the Archies are pounding hell
out of the air. Von Richtman's circus is between here and Saulier."
"Somebody's got to get that ammunition dump," said Mitty. "I'm
going over. Spot of brandy?" He poured a drink for the sergeant and one
for himself. War thundered and whined around the dugout and battered at the
door. There was a rending of wood and splinters flew through the room. "A
bit of a near thing," said Captain Mitty carelessly. 'The box barrage is
closing in," said the sergeant. "We only live once, Sergeant,"
said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. "Or do we?" He poured
another brandy and tossed it off. "I never see a man could hold his brandy
like you, sir," said the sergeant. "Begging your pardon, sir."
Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic.
"It's forty kilometers through hell, sir," said the sergeant. Mitty
finished one last brandy. "After all," he said softly, "what
isn't?" The pounding of the cannon increased; there was the
rat-tat-tatting of machine guns, and from somewhere came the menacing
pocketa-pocketa-pocketa of the new flame-throwers. Walter Mitty walked to the
door of the dugout humming "Auprès de Ma Blonde." He turned and waved
to the sergeant. "Cheerio!" he said. . . . 
Something struck his shoulder. "I've been looking all over this
hotel for you," said Mrs. Mitty. "Why do you have to hide in this old
chair? How did you expect me to find you?" "Things close in,"
said Walter Mitty vaguely. "What?" Mrs. Mitty said. "Did you get
the what's-its-name? The puppy biscuit? What's in that box?"
"Overshoes," said Mitty. "Couldn't you have put them on in the
store?" 'I was thinking," said Walter Mitty. "Does it ever occur
to you that I am sometimes thinking?" She looked at him. "I'm going
to take your temperature when I get you home," she said. 
They went out through the revolving doors that made a faintly derisive
whistling sound when you pushed them. It was two blocks to the parking lot. At
the drugstore on the corner she said, "Wait here for me. I forgot
something. I won't be a minute." She was more than a minute. Walter Mitty
lighted a cigarette. It began to rain, rain with sleet in it. He stood up
against the wall of the drugstore, smoking. . . . He put his shoulders back and
his heels together. "To hell with the handkerchief," said Waker Mitty
scornfully. He took one last drag on his cigarette and snapped it away. Then,
with that faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips, he faced the firing squad;
erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty the Undefeated,
inscrutable to the last.
Category:Thurber
Category:NewYorker
Category:Published