The Secret Life of Walter Mitty Page 4

  ‘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 kilo-metres 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 machineguns, 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.

  The Macbeth Murder Mystery

  ‘It was a stupid mistake to make,’ said the American woman I had met at my hotel in the English lake country, ‘but it was on the counter with the other Penguin books – the little sixpenny ones, you know, with the paper covers – and I supposed of course it was a detective story. All the others were detective stories. I’d read all the others, so I bought this one without really looking at it carefully. You can imagine how mad I was when I found it was Shakespeare.’ I murmured something sympathetically. ‘I don’t see why the Penguin-books people had to get out Shakespeare plays in the same size and everything as the detective stories,’ went on my companion. ‘I think they have different-coloured jackets,’ I said. ‘Well, I didn’t notice that,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I got real comfy in bed that night and all ready to read a good mystery story and here I had The Tragedy of Macbeth – a book for high-school students. Like Ivanhoe,’ ‘Or Lorna Doone,’ I said. ‘Exactly,’ said the American lady. ‘And I was just crazy for a good Agatha Christie, or something. Hercule Poirot is my favourite detective.’ ‘Is he the rabbity one?’ I asked. ‘Oh, no,’ said my crime-fiction expert. ‘He’s the Belgian one. You’re thinking of Mr Pinkerton, the one that helps Inspector Bull. He’s good, too.’

  Over her second cup of tea my companion began to tell the plot of a detective story that had fooled her completely – it seems it was the old family doctor all the time. But I cut in on her. ‘Tell me,’ I said. ‘Did you read Macbeth?’ ‘I had to read it,’ she said. ‘There wasn’t a scrap of anything else to read in the whole room.’ ‘Did you like it?’ I asked. ‘No, I did not,’ she said decisively. ‘In the first place, I don’t think for a moment that Macbeth did it.’ I looked at her blankly. ‘Did what?’ I asked. ‘I don’t think for a moment that he killed the King,’ she said. ‘I don’t think the Macbeth woman was mixed up in it, either. You suspect them the most, of course, but those are the ones that are never guilty – or shouldn’t be, anyway.’ ‘I’m afraid,’ I began, ‘that I –’ ‘But don’t you see?’ said the American lady. ‘It would spoil everything if you could figure out right away who did it. Shakespeare was too smart for that. I’ve read that people never have figured out Hamlet, so it isn’t likely Shakespeare would have made Macbeth as simple as it seems.’ I thought this over while I filled my pipe. ‘Who do you suspect?’ I asked, suddenly. ‘Macduff,’ she said, promptly. ‘Good God!’ I whispered, softly.

  ‘Oh Macduff did it, all right,’ said the murder specialist. ‘Hercule Poirot would have got him easily.’ ‘How did you figure it out?’ I demanded. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I didn’t right away. At first I suspected Banquo. And then, of course, he was the second person killed. That was good right in there, that part. The person you suspect of the first murder should always be the second victim.’ ‘Is that so?’ I murmured. ‘Oh, yes,’ said my informant. ‘They have to keep surprising you. Well, after the second murder I didn’t know who the killer was for a while.’ ‘How about Malcolm and Donalbain, the King’s sons?’ I asked. ‘As I remember it, they fled right after the first murder. That looks suspicious.’ ‘Too suspicious,’ said the American lady. ‘Much too suspicious. When they flee, they’re never guilty. You can count on that.’ ‘I believe,’ I said, ‘I’ll have a brandy,’ and I summoned the waiter. My companion leaned toward me, her eyes bright, her teacup quivering. ‘Do you know who discovered Duncan’s body?’ she demanded. I said I was sorry, but I had forgotten. ‘Macduff discovers it,’ she said, slipping into the historical present. ‘Then he comes running downstairs and shouts, “Confusion has broke open the Lord’s anointed temple” and “Sacrilegious murder has made his masterpiece” and on and on like that.’ The good lady tapped me on the knee. ‘All that stuff was rehearsed,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t say a lot of stuff like that, offhand, would you – if you had found a body?’ She fixed me with a glittering eye. ‘I – ‘ I began. ‘You’re right!’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t! Unless you had practiced it in advance. “My God, there’s a body in here!” is what an innocent man would say.’ She sat back with a confident glare.<
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  I thought for a while. ‘But what do you make of the Third Murderer?’ I asked. ‘You know, the Third Murderer has puzzled Macbeth scholars for three hundred years.’ ‘That’s because they never thought of Macduff,’ said the American lady. ‘It was Macduff, I’m certain. You couldn’t have one of the victims murdered by two ordinary thugs – the murderer always has to be somebody important.’ ‘But what about the banquet scene?’ I asked, after a moment. ‘How do you account for Macbeth’s guilty actions there, when Banquo’s ghost came in and sat in his chair?’ The lady leaned forward and tapped me on the knee again. ‘There wasn’t any ghost,’ she said. ‘A big, strong man like that doesn’t go around seeing ghosts – especially in a brightly lighted banquet hall with dozens of people around. Macbeth was shielding somebody!’ ‘Who was he shielding?’ I asked. ‘Mrs Macbeth, of course,’ she said. ‘He thought she did it and he was going to take the rap himself. The husband always does that when the wife is suspected.’ ‘But what,’ I demanded, ‘about the sleepwalking scene, then?’ ‘The same thing, only the other way around,’ said my companion. ‘That time she was shielding him. She wasn’t asleep at all. Do you remember where it says, “Enter Lady Macbeth with a taper”?’ ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, people who walk in their sleep never carry lights!’ said my fellow-traveller. ‘They have a second sight. Did you ever hear of a sleepwalker carrying a light?’ ‘No,’ I said, ‘I never did.’ ‘Well, then, she wasn’t asleep. She was acting guilty to shield Macbeth.’ ‘I think,’ I said, ‘I’ll have another brandy,’ and I called the waiter. When he brought it, I drank it rapidly and rose to go. ‘I believe,’ I said, ‘that you have got hold of something. Would you lend me that Macbeth? I’d like to look it over tonight. I don’t feel, somehow, as if I’d ever really read it.’ ‘I’ll get it for you,’ she said. ‘But you’ll find that I am right.’

  I read the play over carefully that night, and the next morning, after breakfast, I sought out the American woman. She was on the putting green, and I came up behind her silently and took her arm. She gave an exclamation. ‘Could I see you alone?’ I asked, in a low voice. She nodded cautiously and followed me to a secluded spot. ‘You’ve found out something?’ she breathed. ‘I’ve found out,’ I said, triumphantly, ‘the name of the murderer!’ ‘You mean it wasn’t Macduff?’ she said. ‘Macduff is as innocent of those murders,’ I said, ‘as Macbeth and the Macbeth woman.’ I opened the copy of the play, which I had with me, and turned to Act II, Scene 2. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘you will see where Lady Macbeth says, “I laid their daggers ready. He could not miss ‘em. Had he not resembled my father as he slept, I had done it.” Do you see?’ ‘No,’ said the American woman, bluntly, ‘I don’t.’ ‘But it’s simple!’ I exclaimed. ‘I wonder I didn’t see it years ago. The reason Duncan resembled Lady Macbeth’s father as he slept is that it actually was her father!’ ‘Good God!’ breathed my companion, softly. ‘Lady Macbeth’s father killed the King,’ I said, ‘and, hearing someone coming, thrust the body under the bed and crawled into the bed himself.’ ‘But,’ said the lady, ‘you can’t have a murderer who only appears in the story once. You can’t have that.’ ‘I know that,’ I said, and I turned to Act II, Scene 4. ‘It says here, “Enter Ross with an old Man.” Now, that old man is never identified and it is my contention he was old Mr Macbeth, whose ambition it was to make his daughter Queen. There you have your motive.’ ‘But even then,’ cried the American lady, ‘he’s still a minor character!’ ‘Not,’ I said, gleefully, ‘when you realize that he was also one of the weird sisters in disguise!’ ‘You mean one of the three witches?’ ‘Precisely,’ I said. ‘Listen to this speech of the old man’s. “On Tuesday last, a falcon towering in her pride of place, was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d.” Who does that sound like?’ ‘It sounds like the way the three witches talk,’ said my companion, reluctantly. ‘Precisely!’ I said again. ‘Well,’ said the American woman, ‘maybe you’re right, but –’ ‘I’m sure I am,’ I said. ‘And do you know what I’m going to do now?’ ‘No,’ she said. ‘What?’ ‘Buy a copy of Hamlet,’ I said, ‘and solve that!’ My companion’s eye brightened. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘you don’t think Hamlet did it?’ ‘I am,’ I said, ‘absolutely positive he didn’t.’ ‘But who,’ she demanded, ‘do you suspect?’ I looked at her cryptically. ‘Everybody,’ I said, and disappeared into a small grove of trees as silently as I had come.

  A Ride with Olympy

  Olympy Sementzoff called me ‘Monsieur’ because I was the master of the Villa Tamisier and he was the gardener, the Russian husband of the French caretaker, Maria. I called him ‘Monsieur’, too, because I could never learn to call any man Olympy and because there was a wistful air of ancien régime about him. He drank Bénédictine with me and smoked my cigarettes; he also as you will see, drove my car. We conversed in French, a language alien to both of us, but more alien to me than to him. He said ‘gauche’ for both ‘right’ and ‘left’ when he was upset, but when I was upset I was capable of flights that put the French people on their guard, wide-eyed and wary. Once, for instance, when I cut my wrist on a piece of glass I ran into the lobby of a hotel shouting in French, ‘I am sick with a knife!’ Olympy would have known what to say (except that it would have been his left wrist in any case) but he wouldn’t have shouted: his words ran softly together and sounded something like the burbling of water over stones. Often I did not know what he was talking about; rarely did he know what I was talking about. There was a misty, far-away quality about this relationship, in French, of Russia and Ohio. The fact that the accident Olympy and I were involved in fell short of catastrophe was, in view of everything, something of a miracle.

  Olympy and Maria ‘came with’ the villa my wife and I rented on Cap d’Antibes. Maria was a deep-bosomed, large-waisted woman, as persistently pleasant as Riviera weather in a good season; no mistral ever blew in the even climate of her temperament. She must have been more than forty-five but she was as strong as a root; once when I had trouble getting a tough cork out of a wine bottle she took hold and whisked it out as if it had been a maidenhair fern. On Sundays her son came over from the barracks in Antibes and we all had a glass of white Bordeaux together, sometimes the Sementzoffs’ wine, sometimes our own. Her son was eighteen and a member of the Sixth Regiment of Chasseurs Alpins, a tall, sombre boy, handsome in his uniform and cape. He was an enfant du premier lit, as the French say. Maria made her first bed with a sergeant of the army who was cordonnier for his regiment during the war and seemed somehow to have laid by quite a little money. After the war the sergeant-shoemaker resigned from the army, put his money in investments of some profoundly mysterious nature in Indo-China, and lost it all. ‘ll est mort,’ Maria told us, ‘de chagrin. Grief over his ill-fortune brought on a decline; the chagrin, Maria said, finally reached his brain, and he died at the age of thirty-eight. Maria had to sell their house to pay the taxes, and go to work.

  Olympy Sementzoff, Maria’s second husband, was shy, not very tall, and wore a beard; in his working clothes you didn’t notice much more than that. When he was dressed for Sunday – he wore a fine double-breasted jacket – you observed that his mouth was sensitive, his eyes attractively sad, and that he wore his shyness with a certain air. He worked in a boat factory over near Cannes – Maria said that he was a spécialiste de bateaux; odd jobs about the villa grounds he did on his off days. It was scarcely light when he got up in the morning, for he had to be at work at seven; it was almost dark when he got home. He was paid an incredibly small amount for what he did at the factory and a handful of sous each month for what he did about the grounds. When I gave him a hundred francs for some work he had done for me in the house – he could repair anything from a drain to a watch – he said, ‘Oh, monsieur, c’est trop!’ ‘Mais non, monsieur,’ said I. ‘Ce n’est pas beaucoup.’ He took it finally, after an exchange of bows and compliments.

  The elderly wife of the Frenchman from whom we rented the villa told us, in a dark whisper, that Olym
py was a White Russian and that there was perhaps a petit mystère about him, but we figured this as her own fanciful bourgeois alarm. Maria did not make a mystery out of her husband. There was the Revolution, most of Olympy’s brothers and sisters were killed – one knew how that was – and he escaped. He was, of course, an exile and must not go back. If she knew just who he was in Russia and what he had done, she didn’t make it very clear. He was in Russia and he escaped; she had married him thirteen years before; et puis, voilà! It would have been nice to believe that there was the blood of the Czars in Olympy, but if there was anything to the ancient legend that all the stray members of the Imperial House took easily and naturally to driving a taxi, that let Olympy out. He was not a born chauffeur, as I found out the day I came back from our automobile ride on foot and – unhappily for Maria – alone.

  Olympy Sementzoff rose to and from his work in one of those bastard agglomerations of wheels, motor, and superstructure that one saw only in France. It looked at first glance like the cockpit of a cracked-up plane. Then you saw that there were two wheels in front and a single wheel in back. Except for the engine – which Maria said was a ‘Morgan moteur’ – and the wheels and tyres, it was handmade. Olympy’s boss at the boat factory had made most of it, but Olympy himself had put on the ailes, or fenders, which were made of some kind of wood. The strange canopy that served as a top was Maria’s proud handiwork; it seemed to have been made of canvas and kitchen aprons. The thing had a right-hand drive. When the conducteur was in his seat he was very low to the ground: you had to bend down to talk to him. There was a small space beside the driver in which another person could sit, or crouch. The whole affair was not much larger than an overturned cabinet victrola. It got bouncingly under way with all the racket of a dog fight and in full swing was capable of perhaps thirty miles an hour. The contraption had cost Olympy three thousand francs, or about a hundred dollars. He had driven it for three years and was hand in glove with its mysterious mechanism. The gadgets on the dash and on the floorboard, which he pulled or pushed to make the thing go, seemed to include fire tongs, spoons, and doorknobs. Maria miraculously managed to squeeze into the seat beside the driver in an emergency, but I could understand why she didn’t want to drive to the Nice Carnival in the ‘Morgan’. It was because she didn’t that I suggested Olympy should take her over one day in my Ford sedan. Maria had given us to understand that her mari could drive any car – he could be a chauffeur if he wanted to, a bon chauffeur. All I would have to do, voyez-vous, was to take Olympy for a turn around the Cap so that he could get the hang of the big car. Thus it was that one day after lunch we set off.