James Thurber - The Secret Life of Walter Mitty | Текст песни

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The Secret Life of Walter Mitty The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
James Thurber
\"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
8,500! We're going through!\" The pounding of the cylinders increased: ta-pocketa-pocketapocketa-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 will 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 Mr.
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.
Mr. Pritchard-Mitford, Dr. Mitty.\" \"I've read your book on streptothricosis,\" said PritchardMitford,
shaking hands. \"A brilliant performance, sir.\" \"Thank you,\" said Walter Mitty.
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\"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 way!\"
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 going pocketa-pocketaqueep-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 the 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. Toothpaste, toothbrush, bicarbonate, cardorundum, 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,\" he
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
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the courtroom. A woman's scream rose above the bedlam and suddenly a lovely, darkhaired
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 win

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