Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and
twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that
they were years of normal ungrowth. When Benjamin was eighteen he
was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark
gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver and
descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to
Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to Yale College.
Benjamin passed his examination and became a member of the freshman
class.
On the third day following his matriculation he received a
notification from Mr. Hart, the college registrar, to call at his
office and arrange his schedule. Benjamin, glancing in the mirror,
decided that his hair needed a new application of its brown dye,
but an anxious inspection of his bureau drawer disclosed that the
dye bottle was not there. Then he remembered—he had emptied it the
day before and thrown it away.
He was in a dilemma. He was due at the registrar's in five
minutes. There seemed to be no help for it—he must go as he was. He
did.
"Good-morning," said the registrar politely. "You've come to
inquire about your son."
"Why, as a matter of fact, my name's Button—" began Benjamin,
but Mr. Hart cut him off.
"I'm very glad to meet you, Mr. Button. I'm expecting your son
here any minute."
"That's me!" burst out Benjamin. "I'm a freshman."
"What!"
"I'm a freshman."
"Surely you're joking."
"Not at all."
The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before him. "Why, I
have Mr. Benjamin Button's age down here as eighteen."
"That's my age," asserted Benjamin, flushing slightly.
The registrar eyed him wearily. "Now surely, Mr. Button, you
don't expect me to believe that."
Benjamin smiled wearily. "I am eighteen," he repeated.
The registrar pointed sternly to the door. "Get out," he said.
"Get out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous
lunatic."
"I am eighteen."
Mr. Hart opened the door. "The idea!" he shouted. "A man of your
age trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are
you? Well, I'll give you eighteen minutes to get out of town."
Benjamin Button walked with dignity from the room, and half a
dozen undergraduates, who were waiting in the hall, followed him
curiously with their eyes. When he had gone a little way he turned
around, faced the infuriated registrar, who was still standing in
the door-way, and repeated in a firm voice: "I am eighteen years
old."
To a chorus of titters which went up from the group of
undergraduates, Benjamin walked away.
But he was not fated to escape so easily. On his melancholy walk
to the railroad station he found that he was being followed by a
group, then by a swarm, and finally by a dense mass of
undergraduates. The word had gone around that a lunatic had passed
the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself
off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the
college. Men ran hatless out of classes, the football team
abandoned its practice and joined the mob, professors' wives with
bonnets awry and bustles out of position, ran shouting after the
procession, from which proceeded a continual succession of remarks
aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin Button.
"He must be the wandering Jew!"
"He ought to go to prep school at his age!"
"Look at the infant prodigy!"
"He thought this was the old men's home."
"Go up to Harvard!"
Benjamin increased his gait, and soon he was running. He would
show them! He would go to Harvard, and then they
would regret these ill-considered taunts!
Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his head from
the window. "You'll regret this!" he shouted.
"Ha-ha!" the undergraduates laughed. "Ha-ha-ha!" It was the
biggest mistake that Yale College had ever made… .
V
In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and he signalised
his birthday by going to work for his father in Roger Button &
Co., Wholesale Hardware. It was in that same year that he began
"going out socially"—that is, his father insisted on taking him to
several fashionable dances. Roger Button was now fifty, and he and
his son were more and more companionable—in fact, since Benjamin
had ceased to dye his hair (which was still grayish) they appeared
about the same age, and could have passed for brothers.
One night in August they got into the phaeton attired in their
full-dress suits and drove out to a dance at the Shevlins' country
house, situated just outside of Baltimore. It was a gorgeous
evening. A full moon drenched the road to the lustreless colour of
platinum, and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into the
motionless air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter. The
open country, carpeted for rods around with bright wheat, was
translucent as in the day. It was almost impossible not to be
affected by the sheer beauty of the sky—almost.
"There's a great future in the dry-goods business," Roger Button
was saying. He was not a spiritual man—his aesthetic sense was
rudimentary.
"Old fellows like me can't learn new tricks," he observed
profoundly. "It's you youngsters with energy and vitality that have
the great future before you."
Far up the road the lights of the Shevlins' country house
drifted into view, and presently there was a sighing sound that
crept persistently toward them—it might have been the fine plaint
of violins or the rustle of the silver wheat under the moon.
They pulled up behind a handsome brougham whose passengers were
disembarking at the door. A lady got out, then an elderly
gentleman, then another young lady, beautiful as sin. Benjamin
started; an almost chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose
the very elements of his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose
into his cheeks, his forehead, and there was a steady thumping in
his ears. It was first love.
The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under
the moon and honey-coloured under the sputtering gas-lamps of the
porch. Over her shoulders was thrown a Spanish mantilla of softest
yellow, butterflied in black; her feet were glittering buttons at
the hem of her bustled dress.
Roger Button leaned over to his son. "That," he said, "is young
Hildegarde Moncrief, the daughter of General Moncrief."
Benjamin nodded coldly. "Pretty little thing," he said
indifferently. But when the negro boy had led the buggy away, he
added: "Dad, you might introduce me to her."
They approached a group, of which Miss Moncrief was the centre.
Reared in the old tradition, she curtsied low before Benjamin. Yes,
he might have a dance. He thanked her and walked away—staggered
away.
The interval until the time for his turn should arrive dragged
itself out interminably. He stood close to the wall, silent,
inscrutable, watching with murderous eyes the young bloods of
Baltimore as they eddied around Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate
admiration in their faces. How obnoxious they seemed to Benjamin;
how intolerably rosy! Their curling brown whiskers aroused in him a
feeling equivalent to indigestion.
But when his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the
changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his
jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow.
Blind with enchantment, he felt that life was just beginning.
"You and your brother got here just as we did, didn't you?"
asked Hildegarde, looking up at him with eyes that were like bright
blue enamel.
Benjamin hesitated. If she took him for his father's brother,
would it be best to enlighten her? He remembered his experience at
Yale, so he decided against it. It would be rude to contradict a
lady; it would be criminal to mar this exquisite occasion with the
grotesque story of his origin. Later, perhaps. So he nodded,
smiled, listened, was happy.
"I like men of your age," Hildegarde told him. "Young boys are
so idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college,
and how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know
how to appreciate women."
Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal—with an effort
he choked back the impulse. "You're just the romantic age," she
continued—"fifty. Twenty-five is too wordly-wise; thirty is apt to
be pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a
whole cigar to tell; sixty is—oh, sixty is too near seventy; but
fifty is the mellow age. I love fifty."
Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed passionately
to be fifty.
"I've always said," went on Hildegarde, "that I'd rather marry a
man of fifty and be taken care of than many a man of thirty and
take care of him."
For Benjamin the rest of the evening was bathed in a
honey-coloured mist. Hildegarde gave him two more dances, and they
discovered that they were marvellously in accord on all the
questions of the day. She was to go driving with him on the
following Sunday, and then they would discuss all these questions
further.
Going home in the phaeton just before the crack of dawn, when
the first bees were humming and the fading moon glimmered in the
cool dew, Benjamin knew vaguely that his father was discussing
wholesale hardware.
"… . And what do you think should merit our biggest attention
after hammers and nails?" the elder Button was saying.
"Love," replied Benjamin absent-mindedly.
"Lugs?" exclaimed Roger Button, "Why, I've just covered the
question of lugs."
Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the eastern sky
was suddenly cracked with light, and an oriole yawned piercingly in
the quickening trees…
VI
When, six months later, the engagement of Miss Hildegarde
Moncrief to Mr. Benjamin Button was made known (I say "made known,"
for General Moncrief declared he would rather fall upon his sword
than announce it), the excitement in Baltimore society reached a
feverish pitch. The almost forgotten story of Benjamin's birth was
remembered and sent out upon the winds of scandal in picaresque and
incredible forms. It was said that Benjamin was really the father
of Roger Button, that he was his brother who had been in prison for
forty years, that he was John Wilkes Booth in disguise—and,
finally, that he had two small conical horns sprouting from his
head.
The Sunday supplements of the New York papers played up the case
with fascinating sketches which showed the head of Benjamin Button
attached to a fish, to a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid
brass. He became known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of
Maryland. But the true story, as is usually the case, had a very
small circulation.
However, every one agreed with General Moncrief that it was
"criminal" for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in
Baltimore to throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly
fifty. In vain Mr. Roger Button published his son's birth
certificate in large type in the Baltimore Blaze. No
one believed it. You had only to look at Benjamin and see.
On the part of the two people most concerned there was no
wavering. So many of the stories about her fiancé were false that
Hildegarde refused stubbornly to believe even the true one. In vain
General Moncrief pointed out to her the high mortality among men of
fifty—or, at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain he told her
of the instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde
had chosen to marry for mellowness, and marry she did… .
VII
In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde Moncrief
were mistaken. The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly.
In the fifteen years between Benjamin Button's marriage in 1880 and
his father's retirement in 1895, the family fortune was doubled—and
this was due largely to the younger member of the firm.
Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the couple to its
bosom. Even old General Moncrief became reconciled to his
son-in-law when Benjamin gave him the money to bring out his
"History of the Civil War" in twenty volumes, which had been
refused by nine prominent publishers.
In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many changes. It
seemed to him that the blood flowed with new vigor through his
veins. It began to be a pleasure to rise in the morning, to walk
with an active step along the busy, sunny street, to work
untiringly with his shipments of hammers and his cargoes of nails.
It was in 1890 that he executed his famous business coup: he
brought up the suggestion that all nails used in nailing
up the boxes in which nails are shipped are the property of the
shippee, a proposal which became a statute, was approved by
Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button and Company,
Wholesale Hardware, more than six hundred nails every
year.
In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and
more attracted by the gay side of life. It was typical of his
growing enthusiasm for pleasure that he was the first man in the
city of Baltimore to own and run an automobile. Meeting him on the
street, his contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he
made of health and vitality.
"He seems to grow younger every year," they would remark. And if
old Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to
give a proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on
him what amounted to adulation.
And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well
to pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that
worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him.
At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son,
Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage
Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her
honey-colored hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of
her eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery—moreover, and, most
of all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too
content, too anemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste.
As a bride it had been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and
dinners—now conditions were reversed. She went out socially with
him, but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal
inertia which comes to live with each of us one day and stays with
us to the end.
Benjamin's discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak of the
Spanish-American War in 1898 his home had for him so little charm
that he decided to join the army. With his business influence he
obtained a commission as captain, and proved so adaptable to the
work that he was made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel
just in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San Juan
Hill. He was slightly wounded, and received a medal.
Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and excitement
of army life that he regretted to give it up, but his business
required attention, so he resigned his commission and came home. He
was met at the station by a brass band and escorted to his
house.