. . . “The cannonading has got the wind up in young Raleigh, sir,” said the sergeant. Captain Mitty looked up at him through touseled 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 Walter 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.
Interview with a Lemming
THE WEARY scientist, tramping through the mountains of northern Europe in the winter weather, dropped his knapsack and prepared to sit on a rock.
“Careful, brother,” said a voice.
“Sorry,” murmured the scientist, noting with some surprise that a lemming which he had been about to sit on had addressed him. “It is a source of considerable astonishment to me,” said the scientist, sitting down beside the lemming, “that you are capable of speech.”
“You human beings are always astonished,” said the lemming, “when any other animal can do anything you can. Yet there are many things animals can do that you cannot, such as stridulate, or chirr, to name just one. To stridulate, or chirr, one of the minor achievements of the cricket, your species is dependent on the intestines of the sheep and the hair of the horse.”
“We are a dependent animal,” admitted the scientist.
“You are an amazing animal,” said the lemming.
“We have always considered you rather amazing, too,” said the scientist. “You are perhaps the most mysterious of creatures.”
“If we are going to indulge in adjectives beginning with ‘m,’ ” said the lemming, sharply, “let me apply a few to your species—murderous, maladjusted, maleficent, malicious and muffle-headed.”
“You find our behavior as difficult to understand as we do yours?”
“You, as you would say, said it,” said the lemming. “You kill, you mangle, you torture, you imprison, you starve each other. You cover the nurturing earth with cement, you cut down elm trees to put up institutions for people driven insane by the cutting down of elm trees, you—”
“You could go on all night like that,” said the scientist, “listing our sins and our shames.”
“I could go on all night and up to four o’clock tomorrow afternoon,” said the lemming. “It just happens that I have made a lifelong study of the self-styled higher animal. Except for one thing, I know all there is to know about you, and a singularly dreary, dolorous and distasteful store of information it is, too, to use only adjectives beginning with ‘d.’ ”
“You say you have made a lifelong study of my species—” began the scientist.
“Indeed I have,” broke in the lemming. “I know that you are cruel, cunning and carnivorous, sly, sensual and selfish, greedy, gullible and guileful—”
“Pray don’t wear yourself out,” said the scientist, quietly. “It may interest you to know that I have made a lifelong study of lemmings, just as you have made a lifelong study of people. Like you, I have found but one thing about my subject which I do not understand.”
“And what is that?” asked the lemming.
“I don’t understand,” said the scientist, “why you lemmings all rush down to the sea and drown yourselves.”
“How curious,” said the lemming. “The one thing I don’t understand is why you human beings don’t.”
You Could Look It Up
IT ALL begun when we dropped down to C’lumbus, Ohio, from Pittsburgh to play a exhibition game on our way out to St. Louis. It was gettin’ on into September, and though we’d been leadin’ the league by six, seven games most of the season, we was now in first place by a margin you could ’a’ got it into the eye of a thimble, bein’ only a half a game ahead of St. Louis. Our slump had given the boys the leapin’ jumps, and they was like a bunch a old ladies at a lawn fete with a thunderstorm comin’ up, runnin’ around snarlin’ at each other, eatin’ bad and sleepin’ worse, and battin’ for a team average of maybe .186. Half the time nobody’d speak to nobody else, without it was to bawl ’em out.
Squawks Magrew was managin’ the boys at the time, and he was darn near crazy. They called him “Squawks” ’cause when things was goin’ bad he lost his voice, or perty near lost it, and squealed at you like a little girl you stepped on her doll or somethin’. He yelled at everybody and wouldn’t listen to nobody, without maybe it was me. I’d been trainin’ the boys for ten year, and he’d take more lip from me than from anybody else. He knowed I was smarter’n him, anyways, like you’re goin’ to hear.
This was thirty, thirty-one year ago; you could look it up, ’cause it was the same year C’lumbus decided to call itself the Arch City, on account of a lot of iron arches with electric-light bulbs into ’em which stretched acrost High Street. Thomas Albert Edison sent ’em a telegram, and they was speeches and maybe even President Taft opened the celebration by pushin’ a button. It was a great week for the Buckeye capital, which was why they got us out there for this exhibition game.
Well, we just lose a double-header to Pittsburgh, 11 to 5 and 7 to 3, so we snarled all the way to C’lumbus, where we put up at the Chittaden Hotel, still snarlin’. Everybody was tetchy, and when Billy Klinger took a sock at Whitey Cott at breakfast, Whitey throwed marmalade all over his face.
“Blind each other, whatta I care?” says Magrew. “You can’t see nothin’ anyways.”
C’lumbus win the exhibition game, 3 to 2, whilst Magrew set in the dugout, mutterin’ and cursin’ like a fourteen-year-old Scotty. He bad-mouthed everybody on the ball club and he bad-mouthed everybody offa the ball club, includin’ the Wright brothers, who, he claimed, had yet to build a
airship big enough for any of our boys to hit it with a ball bat.
“I wisht I was dead,” he says to me. “I wisht I was in heaven with the angels.”
I told him to pull hisself together, ’cause he was drivin’ the boys crazy, the way he was goin’ on, sulkin’ and bad-mouthin’ and whinin’. I was older’n he was and smarter’n he was, and he knowed it. I was ten times smarter’n he was about this Pearl du Monville, first time I ever laid eyes on the little guy, which was one of the saddest days of my life.
Now, most people name of Pearl is girls, but this Pearl du Monville was a man, if you could call a fella a man who was only thirty-four, thirty-five inches high. Pearl du Monville was a midget. He was part French and part Hungarian, and maybe even part Bulgarian or somethin’. I can see him now, a sneer on his little pushed-in pan, swingin’ a bamboo cane and smokin’ a big cigar. He had a gray suit with a big black check into it, and he had a gray felt hat with one of them rainbow-colored hatbands onto it, like the young fellas wore in them days. He talked like he was talkin’ into a tin can, but he didn’t have no foreign accent. He might a been fifteen or he might a been a hundred, you couldn’t tell. Pearl du Monville.
After the game with C’lumbus, Magrew headed straight for the Chittaden bar—the train for St. Louis wasn’t goin’ for three, four hours—and there he set, drinkin’ rye and talkin’ to this bartender.
“How I pity me, brother,” Magrew was tellin’ this bartender. “How I pity me.” That was alwuz his favorite tune. So he was settin’ there, tellin’ this bartender how heart-breakin’ it was to be manager of a bunch a blindfolded circus clowns, when up pops this Pearl du Monville outa nowheres.
It give Magrew the leapin’ jumps. He thought at first maybe the D.T.’s had come back on him; he claimed he’d had ’em once, and little guys had popped up all around him, wearin’ red, white and blue hats.
“Go on, now!” Magrew yells. “Get away from me!”
But the midget dumb up on a chair acrost the table from Magrew and says, “I seen that game today, Junior, and you ain’t got no ball club. What you got there, Junior,” he says, “is a side show.”
“Whatta ya mean, ‘Junior’?” says Magrew, touchin’ the little guy to satisfy hisself he was real.
“Don’t pay him no attention, mister,” says the bartender. “Pearl calls everybody ‘Junior,’ ’cause it alwuz turns out he’s a year older’n anybody else.”
“Yeh?” says Magrew. “How old is he?”
“How old are you, Junior?” says the midget.
“Who, me? I’m fifty-three,” says Magrew.
“Well, I’m fifty-four,” says the midget.
Magrew grins and asts him what he’ll have, and that was the beginnin’ of their beautiful friendship, if you don’t care what you say.
Pearl du Monville stood up on his chair and waved his cane around and pretended like he was ballyhooin’ for a circus. “Right this way, folks!” he yells. “Come on in and see the greatest collection of freaks in the world! See the armless pitchers, see the eyeless batters, see the infielders with five thumbs!” and on and on like that, feedin’ Magrew gall and handin’ him a laugh at the same time, you might say.
You could hear him and Pearl du Monville hootin’ and hollerin’ and singin’ way up to the fourth floor of the Chittaden, where the boys was packin’ up. When it come time to go to the station, you can imagine how disgusted we was when we crowded into the doorway of that bar and seen them two singin’ and goin’ on.
“Well, well, well,” says Magrew, lookin’ up and spottin’ us. “Look who’s here. . . . Clowns, this is Pearl du Monville, a monseer of the old, old school. . . . Don’t shake hands with ’em, Pearl, ’cause their fingers is made of chalk and would bust right off in your paws,” he says, and he starts guffawin’ and Pearl starts titterin’ and we stand there givin’ ’em the iron eye, it bein’ the lowest ebb a ball-club manager’d got hisself down to since the national pastime was started.
Then the midget begun givin’ us the ballyhoo. “Come on in!” he says, wavin’ his cane. “See the legless base runners, see the outfielders with the butter fingers, see the southpaw with the arm of a little chee-ild!”
Then him and Magrew begun to hoop and holler and nudge each other till you’d of thought this little guy was the funniest guy than even Charlie Chaplin. The fellas filed outa the bar without a word and went on up to the Union Depot, leavin’ me to handle Magrew and his new-found crony.
Well, I got ’em outa there finely. I had to take the little guy along, ’cause Magrew had a holt onto him like a vise and I couldn’t pry him loose.
“He’s comin’ along as masket,” says Magrew, holdin’ the midget in the crouch of his arm like a football. And come along he did, hollerin’ and protestin’ and beatin’ at Magrew with his little fists.
“Cut it out, will ya, Junior?” the little guy kept whinin’. “Come on, leave a man loose, will ya, Junior?”
But Junior kept a holt onto him and begun yellin’, “See the guys with the glass arm, see the guys with the cast-iron brains, see the fielders with the feet on their wrists!”
So it goes, right through the whole Union Depot, with people starin’ and catcallin’, and he don’t put the midget down till he gets him through the gates.
“How’m I goin’ to go along without no toothbrush?” the midget asts. “What’m I goin’ to do without no other suit?” he says.
“Doc here,” says Magrew, meanin’ me—“doc here will look after you like you was his own son, won’t you, doc?”
I give him the iron eye, and he finely got on the train and prob’ly went to sleep with his clothes on.
This left me alone with the midget. “Lookit,” I says to him. “Why don’t you go on home now? Come mornin’, Magrew’ll forget all about you. He’ll prob’ly think you was somethin’ he seen in a nightmare maybe. And he ain’t goin’ to laugh so easy in the mornin’, neither,” I says. “So why don’t you go on home?”
“Nix,” he says to me. “Skiddoo,” he says, “twenty-three for you,” and he tosses his cane up into the vestibule of the coach and clam’ers on up after it like a cat. So that’s the way Pearl du Monville come to go to St. Louis with the ball club.
I seen ’em first at breakfast the next day, settin’ opposite each other; the midget playin’ “Turkey in the Straw” on a harmonium and Magrew starin’ at his eggs and bacon like they was a uncooked bird with its feathers still on.
“Remember where you found this?” I says, jerkin’ my thumb at the midget. “Or maybe you think they come with breakfast on these trains,” I says, bein’ a good hand at turnin’ a sharp remark in them days.
The midget puts down the harmonium and turns on me. “Sneeze,” he says; “your brains is dusty.” Then he snaps a couple drops of water at me from a tumbler. “Drown,” he says, tryin’ to make his voice deep.
Now, both them cracks is Civil War cracks, but you’d of thought they was brand new and the funniest than any crack Magrew’d ever heard in his whole life. He started hoopin’ and hollerin’, and the midget started hoopin’ and hollerin’, so I walked on away and set down with Bugs Courtney and Hank Metters, payin’ no attention to this weak-minded Damon and Phidias acrost the aisle.
Well, sir, the first game with St. Louis was rained out, and there we was facin’ a double-header next day. Like maybe I told you, we lose the last three double-headers we play, makin’ maybe twenty-five errors in the six games, which is all right for the intimates of a school for the blind, but is disgraceful for the world’s champions. It was too wet to go to the zoo, and Magrew wouldn’t let us go to the movies, ’cause they flickered so bad in them days. So we just set around, stewin’ and frettin’.
One of the newspaper boys come over to take a pitture of Billy Klinger and Whitey Cott shakin’ hands—this reporter’d heard about the fight—and whilst they was standin’ there, toe to toe, shakin’ hands, Billy give a back lunge and a jerk, and throwed Whitey over his shoulder into a cor
ner of the room, like a sack a salt. Whitey come back at him with a chair, and Bethlehem broke loose in that there room. The camera was tromped to pieces like a berry basket. When we finely got ’em pulled apart, I heard a laugh, and there was Magrew and the midget standin’ in the door and givin’ us the iron eye.
“Wrasslers,” says Magrew, cold-like, “that’s what I got for a ball club, Mr. Du Monville, wrasslers—and not very good wrasslers at that, you ast me.”
“A man can’t be good at everythin’,” says Pearl, “but he oughta be good at somethin’.”
This sets Magrew guffawin’ again, and away they go, the midget taggin’ along by his side like a hound dog and handin’ him a fast line of so-called comic cracks.
When we went out to face that battlin’ St. Louis club in a double-header the next afternoon, the boys was jumpy as tin toys with keys in their back. We lose the first game, 7 to 2, and are trailin’, 4 to 0, when the second game ain’t but ten minutes old. Magrew set there like a stone statue, speakin’ to nobody. Then, in their half a the fourth, somebody singled to center and knocked in two more runs for St. Louis.
That made Magrew squawk. “I wisht one thing,” he says. “I wisht I was manager of a old ladies’ sewin’ circus ’stead of a ball club.”
“You are, Junior, you are,” says a familyer and disagreeable voice.
It was that Pearl du Monville again, poppin’ up outa nowheres, swingin’ his bamboo cane and smokin’ a cigar that’s three sizes too big for his face. By this time we’d finely got the other side out, and Hank Metters slithered a bat acrost the ground, and the midget had to jump to keep both his ankles from bein’ broke.