The Umbrella Man and Other Stories Read online

  A DANGEROUS WAGER . . .

  “No, no. I make you a good bet. I am rich man and I am sporting man also. Listen to me. Outside de hotel iss my car. Iss very fine car. American car from your country. Cadillac—”

  “Hey, now. Wait a minute.” The boy leaned back in his deck chair and he laughed. “I can’t put up that sort of property. This is crazy.”

  “Not crazy at all. You strike lighter ten times running and Cadillac is yours. You like to have dis Cadillac, yes?”

  “Sure, I’d like to have a Cadillac.” The boy was still grinning.

  “All right. Fine. We make a bet and I put up my Cadillac.”

  “And what do I put up?”

  The little man carefully removed the red band from his still unlighted cigar. “I never ask you, my friend, to bet something you cannot afford. You understand?”

  “Then what do I bet?”

  “I make it very easy for you, yes?”

  “OK. You make it easy.”

  “Some small ting you can afford to give away, and if you happen to lose it you would not feel too bad. Right?”

  “Such as what?”

  “Such as, perhaps, the little finger on your left hand.”

  “My what?” The boy stopped grinning.

  —from “Man from the South”

  Books by Roald Dahl

  The BFG

  Boy: Tales of Childhood

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

  Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

  Danny the Champion of the World

  Dirty Beasts

  The Enormous Crocodile

  Esio Trot

  Fantastic Mr. Fox

  George’s Marvelous Medicine

  The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me

  Going Solo

  James and the Giant Peach

  The Magic Finger

  Matilda

  The Minpins

  The Missing Golden Ticket and Other Splendiferous Secrets

  Roald Dahl’s Revolting Rhymes

  Skin and Other Stories

  The Twits

  The Umbrella Man and Other Stories

  The Vicar of Nibbleswicke

  The Witches

  The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More

  Roald Dahl

  speak

  An Imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Speak

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 345 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

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  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

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  Registered Offices: Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in Great Britain as The Great Automatic Grammatizator

  by Hamish Hamilton Limited, 1996

  First published in the United States of America by Viking, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc., 1998

  Published by Puffin Books, a division of Penguin Putnam Books for Young Readers, 2000

  This edition published by Speak, an imprint of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 2003, 2010

  Copyright © Roald Dahl Nominee Limited, 1996

  All rights reserved

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following stories from Kiss Kiss: “Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat,” “The Landlady,” and “Royal Jelly,” copyright © 1959 by Roald Dahl; copyright renewed 1987 by Roald Dahl. “Parson’s Pleasure,” copyright © 1958 by Roald Dahl; copyright renewed 1986 by Roald Dahl. “The Way Up to Heaven,” copyright © 1954 by Roald Dahl; copyright renewed 1982 by Roald Dahl. By permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” “Man from the South,” “Taste,” and “Neck” were published in Someone Like You (Knopf). Copyright © 1948, 1949, 1950, 1952, 1953, 1961 by Roald Dahl.

  “The Butler,” “The Umbrella Man,” and “Vengeance Is Mine Inc.” were published in More Tales of the Unexpected (Michael Joseph, London). Copyright © 1973, 1980 by Roald Dahl.

  “Katina” was published in Over to You (Reynal & Hitchcock). Copyright © 1946 by Roald Dahl.

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Dahl, Roald

  The umbrella man and other stories / Roald Dahl.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Thirteen stories, selected for teenagers, from Dahl’s adult writings, including “The Great Automatic Grammatizator,” “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat,” and “Vengeance Is Mine Inc.”

  1. Short stories, English. [1. Short stories.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D1515Um 1998 97-32549 CIP AC

  ISBN: 978-1-101-63628-2

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

  CONTENTS

  The Great Automatic Grammatizator

  Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat

  The Butler

  Man from the South

  The Landlady

  Parson’s Pleasure

  The Umbrella Man

  Katina

  The Way Up to Heaven

  Royal Jelly

  Vengeance Is Mine Inc.

  Taste

  Neck

  “Well, Knipe, my boy. Now that it’s finished, I just called you in to tell you I think you’ve done a fine job.”

  Adolph Knipe stood still in front of Mr. Bohlen’s desk. There seemed to be no enthusiasm in him at all.

  “Aren’t you pleased?”

  “Oh yes, Mr. Bohlen.”

  “Did you see what the papers said this morning?”

  “No sir, I didn’t.”

  The man behind the desk pulled a folded newspaper towards him, and began to read: “The building of the great automatic computing engine, ordered by the government some time ago, is now complete. It is probably the fastest electronic calculating machine in the world today. Its function is to satisfy the ever-increasing need of science, industry, and administration for rapid mathematical calculation which, in the past, by traditional methods, would have been physically impossible, or would have required more time than the problems justified. The speed with which the new engine works, said Mr. John Bohlen, head of the firm of electrical engineers mainly responsible for its construction, may be grasped by the fact that it can provide the correct answer in five seconds to a problem that would occupy a mathematician for a month. In three minutes, it can produce a calculation that by hand (if it were possible) would fill half a million sheets of foolscap paper. The automatic computing engine uses
pulses of electricity, generated at the rate of a million a second, to solve all calculations that resolve themselves into addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. For practical purposes there is no limit to what it can do . . . ”

  Mr. Bohlen glanced up at the long, melancholy face of the younger man. “Aren’t you proud, Knipe? Aren’t you pleased?”

  “Of course, Mr. Bohlen.”

  “I don’t think I have to remind you that your own contribution, especially to the original plans, was an important one. In fact, I might go so far as to say that without you and some of your ideas, this project might still be on the drawing boards today.”

  Adolph Knipe moved his feet on the carpet, and he watched the two small white hands of his chief, the nervous fingers playing with a paper clip, unbending it, straightening out the hairpin curves. He didn’t like the man’s hands. He didn’t like his face either, with the tiny mouth and the narrow purple-coloured lips. It was unpleasant the way only the lower lip moved when he talked.

  “Is anything bothering you, Knipe? Anything on your mind?”

  “Oh no, Mr. Bohlen. No.”

  “How would you like to take a week’s holiday? Do you good. You’ve earned it.”

  “Oh, I don’t know, sir.”

  The older man waited, watching this tall, thin person who stood so sloppily before him. He was a difficult boy. Why couldn’t he stand up straight? Always drooping and untidy, with spots on his jacket, and hair falling all over his face.

  “I’d like you to take a holiday, Knipe. You need it.”

  “All right, sir. If you wish.”

  “Take a week. Two weeks if you like. Go somewhere warm. Get some sunshine. Swim. Relax. Sleep. Then come back, and we’ll have another talk about the future.”

  Adolph Knipe went home by bus to his two-room apartment. He threw his coat on the sofa, poured himself a drink of whisky, and sat down in front of the typewriter that was on the table. Mr. Bohlen was right. Of course he was right. Except that he didn’t know the half of it. He probably thought it was a woman. Whenever a young man gets depressed, everybody thinks it’s a woman.

  He leaned forward and began to read through the half-finished sheet of typing still in the machine. It was headed “A Narrow Escape,” and it began “The night was dark and stormy, the wind whistled in the trees, the rain poured down like cats and dogs . . . ”

  Adolph Knipe took a sip of whisky, tasting the malty-bitter flavour, feeling the trickle of cold liquid as it travelled down his throat and settled in the top of his stomach, cool at first, then spreading and becoming warm, making a little area of warmness in the gut. To hell with Mr. John Bohlen anyway. And to hell with the great electrical computing machine. To hell with . . .

  At exactly that moment, his eyes and mouth began slowly to open, in a sort of wonder, and slowly he raised his head and became still, absolutely motionless, gazing at the wall opposite with this look that was more perhaps of astonishment than of wonder, but quite fixed now, unmoving, and remaining thus for forty, fifty, sixty seconds. Then gradually (the head still motionless), a subtle change spreading over the face, astonishment becoming pleasure, very slight at first, only around the corners of the mouth, increasing gradually, spreading out until at last the whole face was open wide and shining with extreme delight. It was the first time Adolph Knipe had smiled in many, many months.

  “Of course,” he said, speaking aloud, “it’s completely ridiculous.” Again he smiled, raising his upper lip and baring his teeth in a queerly sensual manner.

  “It’s a delicious idea, but so impracticable it doesn’t really bear thinking about at all.”

  From then on, Adolph Knipe began to think about nothing else. The idea fascinated him enormously, at first because it gave him a promise—however remote—of revenging himself in a most devilish manner upon his greatest enemies. From this angle alone, he toyed idly with it for perhaps ten or fifteen minutes; then all at once he found himself examining it quite seriously as a practical possibility. He took paper and made some preliminary notes. But he didn’t get far. He found himself, almost immediately, up against the old truth that a machine, however ingenious, is incapable of original thought. It can handle no problems except those that resolve themselves into mathematical terms—problems that contain one, and only one, correct answer.

  This was a stumper. There didn’t seem any way around it. A machine cannot have a brain. On the other hand, it can have a memory, can it not? Their own electronic calculator had a marvellous memory. Simply by converting electric pulses, through a column of mercury, into supersonic waves, it could store away at least a thousand numbers at a time, extracting any one of them at the precise moment it was needed. Would it not be possible, therefore, on this principle, to build a memory section of almost unlimited size?

  Now what about that?

  Then suddenly, he was struck by a powerful but simple little truth, and it was this: that English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness! Given the words, and given the sense of what is to be said, then there is only one correct order in which those words can be arranged.

  No, he thought, that isn’t quite accurate. In many sentences there are several alternative positions for words and phrases, all of which may be grammatically correct. But what the hell. The theory itself is basically true. Therefore, it stands to reason that an engine built along the lines of the electric computer could be adjusted to arrange words (instead of numbers) in their right order according to the rules of grammar. Give it the verbs, the nouns, the adjectives, the pronouns, store them in the memory section as a vocabulary, and arrange for them to be extracted as required. Then feed it with plots and leave it to write the sentences.

  There was no stopping Knipe now. He went to work immediately, and there followed during the next few days a period of intense labour. The living room became littered with sheets of paper: formulae and calculations; lists of words, thousands and thousands of words; the plots of stories, curiously broken up and subdivided; huge extracts from Roget’s Thesaurus; pages filled with the first names of men and women; hundreds of surnames taken from the telephone directory; intricate drawings of wires and circuits and switches and thermionic valves; drawings of machines that could punch holes of different shapes in little cards, and of a strange electric typewriter that could type ten thousand words a minute. Also a kind of control panel with a series of small push buttons, each one labelled with the name of a famous American magazine.

  He was working in a mood of exultation, prowling around the room amidst this littering of paper, rubbing his hands together, talking out loud to himself; and sometimes, with a sly curl of the nose he would mutter a series of murderous imprecations in which the word “editor” seemed always to be present. On the fifteenth day of continuous work, he collected the papers into two large folders which he carried—almost at a run—to the offices of John Bohlen Inc., electrical engineers.

  Mr. Bohlen was pleased to see him back.

  “Well Knipe, good gracious me, you look a hundred per cent better. You have a good holiday? Where’d you go?”

  He’s just as ugly and untidy as ever, Mr. Bohlen thought. Why doesn’t he stand up straight? He looks like a bent stick. “You look a hundred per cent better, my boy.” I wonder what he’s grinning about. Every time I see him, his ears seem to have got larger.

  Adolph Knipe placed the folders on the desk. “Look, Mr. Bohlen!” he cried. “Look at these!”

  Then he poured out his story. He opened the folders and pushed the plans in front of the astonished little man. He talked for over an hour, explaining everything, and when he had finished, he stepped back, breathless, flushed, waiting for the verdict.

  “You know what I think, Knipe? I think you’re nuts.” Careful now, Mr. Bohlen told himself. Treat him carefully. He’s valuable, this one is. If only he didn’t look so awful, with that long horse face and the big teeth. The fellow had ears as big as rhubarb leaves.

  “
But Mr. Bohlen! It’ll work! I’ve proved to you it’ll work! You can’t deny that!”

  “Take it easy now, Knipe. Take it easy, and listen to me.”

  Adolph Knipe watched his man, disliking him more every second.

  “This idea,” Mr. Bohlen’s lower lip was saying, “is very ingenious—I might almost say brilliant—and it only goes to confirm my opinion of your abilities, Knipe. But don’t take it too seriously. After all, my boy, what possible use can it be to us? Who on earth wants a machine for writing stories? And where’s the money in it, anyway? Just tell me that.”

  “May I sit down, sir?”

  “Sure, take a seat.”

  Adolph Knipe seated himself on the edge of a chair. The older man watched him with alert brown eyes, wondering what was coming now.

  “I would like to explain something Mr. Bohlen, if I may, about how I came to do all this.”

  “Go right ahead, Knipe.” He would have to be humoured a little now, Mr. Bohlen told himself. The boy was really valuable—a sort of genius, almost—worth his weight in gold to the firm. Just look at these papers here. Darndest thing you ever saw. Astonishing piece of work. Quite useless, of course. No commercial value. But it proved again the boy’s ability.

  “It’s a sort of confession, I suppose, Mr. Bohlen. I think it explains why I’ve always been so . . . so kind of worried.”

  “You tell me anything you want, Knipe. I’m here to help you—you know that.”

  The young man clasped his hands together tight on his lap, hugging himself with his elbows. It seemed as though suddenly he was feeling very cold.

  “You see, Mr. Bohlen, to tell the honest truth, I don’t really care much for my work here. I know I’m good at it and all that sort of thing, but my heart’s not in it. It’s not what I want to do most.”

  Up went Mr. Bohlen’s eyebrows, quick like a spring. His whole body became very still.

  “You see, sir, all my life I’ve wanted to be a writer.”

  “A writer!”

  “Yes, Mr. Bohlen. You may not believe it, but every bit of spare time I’ve had, I’ve spent writing stories. In the last ten years I’ve written hundreds, literally hundreds of short stories. Five hundred and sixty-six, to be precise. Approximately one a week.”