Hildegarde, waving a large silk flag, greeted him on the porch,
and even as he kissed her he felt with a sinking of the heart that
these three years had taken their toll. She was a woman of forty
now, with a faint skirmish line of gray hairs in her head. The
sight depressed him.
Up in his room he saw his reflection in the
familiar mirror—he went closer and examined his own face with
anxiety, comparing it after a moment with a photograph of himself
in uniform taken just before the war.
"Good Lord!" he said aloud. The process was continuing. There
was no doubt of it—he looked now like a man of thirty. Instead of
being delighted, he was uneasy—he was growing younger. He had
hitherto hoped that once he reached a bodily age equivalent to his
age in years, the grotesque phenomenon which had marked his birth
would cease to function. He shuddered. His destiny seemed to him
awful, incredible.
When he came downstairs Hildegarde was waiting for him. She
appeared annoyed, and he wondered if she had at last discovered
that there was something amiss. It was with an effort to relieve
the tension between them that he broached the matter at dinner in
what he considered a delicate way.
"Well," he remarked lightly, "everybody says I look younger than
ever."
Hildegarde regarded him with scorn. She sniffed. "Do you think
it's anything to boast about?"
"I'm not boasting," he asserted uncomfortably.
She sniffed again. "The idea," she said, and after a moment: "I
should think you'd have enough pride to stop it."
"How can I?" he demanded.
"I'm not going to argue with you," she retorted. "But there's a
right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your
mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can
stop you, but I really don't think it's very considerate."
"But, Hildegarde, I can't help it."
"You can too. You're simply stubborn. You think you don't want
to be like any one else. You always have been that way, and you
always will be. But just think how it would be if every one
else looked at things as you do—what would the world be like?"
As this was an inane and unanswerable argument Benjamin made no
reply, and from that time on a chasm began to widen between them.
He wondered what possible fascination she had ever exercised over
him.
To add to the breach, he found, as the new century gathered
headway, that his thirst for gayety grew stronger. Never a party of
any kind in the city of Baltimore but he was there, dancing with
the prettiest of the young married women, chatting with the most
popular of the debutantes, and finding their company charming,
while his wife, a dowager of evil omen, sat among the chaperons,
now in haughty disapproval, and now following him with solemn,
puzzled, and reproachful eyes.
"Look!" people would remark. "What a pity! A young fellow that
age tied to a woman of forty-five. He must be twenty years younger
than his wife." They had forgotten—as people inevitably forget—that
back in 1880 their mammas and papas had also remarked about this
same ill-matched pair.
Benjamin's growing unhappiness at home was compensated for by
his many new interests. He took up golf and made a great success of
it. He went in for dancing: in 1906 he was an expert at "The
Boston," and in 1908 he was considered proficient at the "Maxixe,"
while in 1909 his "Castle Walk" was the envy of every young man in
town.
His social activities, of course, interfered to some extent with
his business, but then he had worked hard at wholesale hardware for
twenty-five years and felt that he could soon hand it on to his
son, Roscoe, who had recently graduated from Harvard.
He and his son were, in fact, often mistaken for
each other. This pleased Benjamin—he soon forgot the insidious
fear which had come over him on his return from the
Spanish-American War, and grew to take a naïve pleasure in his
appearance. There was only one fly in the delicious ointment—he
hated to appear in public with his wife. Hildegarde was almost
fifty, and the sight of her made him feel absurd… .
IX
e September day in 1910—a few years after Roger Button &
Co., Wholesale Hardware, had been handed over to young Roscoe
Button—a man, apparently about twenty years old, entered himself as
a freshman at Harvard University in Cambridge. He did not make the
mistake of announcing that he would never see fifty again, nor did
he mention the fact that his son had been graduated from the same
institution ten years before.
He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a prominent
position in the class, partly because he seemed a little older than
the other freshmen, whose average age was about eighteen.
But his success was largely due to the fact that in the football
game with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so much dash and with
such a cold, remorseless anger that he scored seven touchdowns and
fourteen field goals for Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of
Yale men to be carried singly from the field, unconscious. He was
the most celebrated man in college.
Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was scarcely able
to "make" the team. The coaches said that he had lost weight, and
it seemed to the more observant among them that he was not quite as
tall as before. He made no touchdowns—indeed, he was retained
on the team chiefly in hope that his enormous reputation would
bring terror and disorganisation to the Yale team.
In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He had grown
so slight and frail that one day he was taken by some sophomores
for a freshman, an incident which humiliated him terribly. He
became known as something of a prodigy—a senior who was surely no
more than sixteen—and he was often shocked at the worldliness of
some of his classmates. His studies seemed harder to him—he felt
that they were too advanced. He had heard his classmates speak of
St. Midas', the famous preparatory school, at which so many of them
had prepared for college, and he determined after his graduation to
enter himself at St. Midas', where the sheltered life among boys
his own size would be more congenial to him.
Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore with his
Harvard diploma in his pocket. Hildegarde was now residing in
Italy, so Benjamin went to live with his son, Roscoe. But though he
was welcomed in a general way there was obviously no heartiness in
Roscoe's feeling toward him—there was even perceptible a tendency
on his son's part to think that Benjamin, as he moped about the
house in adolescent mooniness, was some-what in the way. Roscoe was
married now and prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no
scandal to creep out in connection with his family.
Benjamin, no longer persona grata with the débutantes and
younger college set, found himself left much alone, except for the
companionship of three or four fifteen-year-old boys in the
neighborhood. His idea of going to St. Midas school recurred to
him.
"Say," he said to Roscoe one day, "I've told you over and over
that I want to go to prep school."
"Well, go, then," replied Roscoe shortly. The matter was
distasteful to him, and he wished to avoid a discussion.
"I can't go alone," said Benjamin helplessly. "You'll have to
enter me and take me up there."
"I haven't got time," declared Roscoe abruptly. His eyes
narrowed and he looked uneasily at his father. "As a matter of
fact," he added, "you'd better not go on with this business much
longer. You better pull up short. You better—you better"—he paused
and his face crimsoned as he sought for words—"you better turn
right around and start back the other way. This has gone too far to
be a joke. It isn't funny any longer. You—you behave yourself!"
Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears.
"And another thing," continued Roscoe, "when visitors are in the
house I want you to call me 'Uncle'—not 'Roscoe,' but 'Uncle,' do
you understand? It looks absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by
my first name. Perhaps you'd better call me
'Uncle' all the time, so you'll get used to
it."
With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned away… .
X
At the termination of this interview, Benjamin wandered dismally
upstairs and stared at himself in the mirror. He had not shaved for
three months, but he could find nothing on his face but a faint
white down with which it seemed unnecessary to meddle. When he had
first come home from Harvard, Roscoe had approached him with the
proposition that he should wear eye-glasses and imitation whiskers
glued to his cheeks, and it had seemed for a moment that the farce
of his early years was to be repeated. But whiskers had itched
and made him ashamed. He wept and Roscoe had reluctantly
relented.
Benjamin opened a book of boys' stories, "The Boy Scouts in
Bimini Bay," and began to read. But he found himself thinking
persistently about the war. America had joined the Allied cause
during the preceding month, and Benjamin wanted to enlist, but,
alas, sixteen was the minimum age, and he did not look that old.
His true age, which was fifty-seven, would have disqualified him,
anyway.
There was a knock at his door, and the butler appeared with a
letter bearing a large official legend in the corner and addressed
to Mr. Benjamin Button. Benjamin tore it open eagerly, and read the
enclosure with delight. It informed him that many reserve officers
who had served in the Spanish-American War were being called back
into service with a higher rank, and it enclosed his commission as
brigadier-general in the United States army with orders to report
immediately.
Benjamin jumped to his feet fairly quivering with enthusiasm.
This was what he had wanted. He seized his cap, and ten minutes
later he had entered a large tailoring establishment on Charles
Street, and asked in his uncertain treble to be measured for a
uniform.
"Want to play soldier, sonny?" demanded a clerk casually.
Benjamin flushed. "Say! Never mind what I want!" he retorted
angrily. "My name's Button and I live on Mt. Vernon Place, so you
know I'm good for it."
"Well," admitted the clerk hesitantly, "if you're not, I guess
your daddy is, all right."
Benjamin was measured, and a week later his uniform was
completed. He had difficulty in obtaining the proper general's
insignia because the dealer kept insisting to Benjamin that a
nice Y. W. C. A. badge would look just as well and be much more fun
to play with.
Saying nothing to Roscoe, he left the house one night and
proceeded by train to Camp Mosby, in South Carolina, where he was
to command an infantry brigade. On a sultry April day he approached
the entrance to the camp, paid off the taxicab which had brought
him from the station, and turned to the sentry on guard.
"Get some one to handle my luggage!" he said briskly.
The sentry eyed him reproachfully. "Say," he remarked, "where
you goin' with the general's duds, sonny?"
Benjamin, veteran of the Spanish-American War, whirled upon him
with fire in his eye, but with, alas, a changing treble voice.
"Come to attention!" he tried to thunder; he paused for
breath—then suddenly he saw the sentry snap his heels together and
bring his rifle to the present. Benjamin concealed a smile of
gratification, but when he glanced around his smile faded. It was
not he who had inspired obedience, but an imposing artillery
colonel who was approaching on horseback.
"Colonel!" called Benjamin shrilly.
The colonel came up, drew rein, and looked coolly down at him
with a twinkle in his eyes. "Whose little boy are you?" he demanded
kindly.
"I'll soon darn well show you whose little boy I am!" retorted
Benjamin in a ferocious voice. "Get down off that horse!"
The colonel roared with laughter.
"You want him, eh, general?"
"Here!" cried Benjamin desperately. "Read this." And he thrust
his commission toward the colonel.
The colonel read it, his eyes popping from their sockets.
"Where'd you get this?" he demanded, slipping the document into
his own pocket.
"I got it from the Government, as you'll soon find out!"
"You come along with me," said the colonel with a peculiar look.
"We'll go up to headquarters and talk this over. Come along."
The colonel turned and began walking his horse in the direction
of headquarters. There was nothing for Benjamin to do but follow
with as much dignity as possible—meanwhile promising himself a
stern revenge.
But this revenge did not materialize. Two days later, however,
his son Roscoe materialized from Baltimore, hot and cross from a
hasty trip, and escorted the weeping
general, sans uniform, back to his home.
XI
20 Roscoe Button's first child was born. During the
attendant festivities, however, no one thought it "the thing" to
mention, that the little grubby boy, apparently about ten years of
age who played around the house with lead soldiers and a miniature
circus, was the new baby's own grandfather.
No one disliked the little boy whose fresh, cheerful face was
crossed with just a hint of sadness, but to Roscoe Button his
presence was a source of torment. In the idiom of his generation
Roscoe did not consider the matter "efficient." It seemed to him
that his father, in refusing to look sixty, had not behaved like a
"red-blooded he-man"—this was Roscoe's favorite expression—but in a
curious and perverse manner. Indeed, to think about the matter for
as much as a half an hour drove him to the edge of insanity. Roscoe
believed that "live wires" should keep young, but carrying it out
on such a scale was—was—was inefficient. And there Roscoe
rested.
Five years later Roscoe's little boy had grown old enough to
play childish games with little Benjamin under the supervision of
the same nurse. Roscoe took them both to kindergarten on the same
day, and Benjamin found that playing with little strips of colored
paper, making mats and chains and curious and beautiful designs,
was the most fascinating game in the world. Once he was bad and had
to stand in the corner—then he cried—but for the most part there
were gay hours in the cheerful room, with the sunlight coming in
the windows and Miss Bailey's kind hand resting for a moment now
and then in his tousled hair.
Roscoe's son moved up into the first grade after a year, but
Benjamin stayed on in the kindergarten. He was very happy.
Sometimes when other tots talked about what they would do when they
grew up a shadow would cross his little face as if in a dim,
childish way he realized that those were things in which he was
never to share.
The days flowed on in monotonous content. He went back a third
year to the kindergarten, but he was too little now to understand
what the bright shining strips of paper were for. He cried because
the other boys were bigger than he, and he was afraid of them. The
teacher talked to him, but though he tried to understand he could
not understand at all.
He was taken from the kindergarten. His nurse, Nana, in her
starched gingham dress, became the centre of his tiny world. On
bright days they walked in the park; Nana would point at a great
gray monster and say "elephant," and Benjamin would say it after
her, and when he was being undressed for bed that night he would
say it over and over aloud to her: "Elyphant, elyphant,
elyphant." Sometimes Nana let him jump on the bed, which was fun,
because if you sat down exactly right it would bounce you up on
your feet again, and if you said "Ah" for a long time while you
jumped you got a very pleasing broken vocal effect.
He loved to take a big cane from the hatrack and go around
hitting chairs and tables with it and saying: "Fight, fight,
fight." When there were people there the old ladies would cluck at
him, which interested him, and the young ladies would try to kiss
him, which he submitted to with mild boredom. And when the long day
was done at five o'clock he would go up-stairs with Nana and be fed
oatmeal and nice soft mushy foods with a spoon.
There were no troublesome memories in his childish sleep; no
token came to him of his brave days at college, of the glittering
years when he flustered the hearts of many girls. There were only
the white, safe walls of his crib and Nana and a man who came to
see him sometimes, and a great big orange ball that Nana pointed at
just before his twilight bed hour and called "sun." When the sun
went his eyes were sleepy—there were no dreams, no dreams to haunt
him.
The past—the wild charge at the head of his men up San Juan
Hill; the first years of his marriage when he worked late into the
summer dusk down in the busy city for young Hildegarde whom he
loved; the days before that when he sat smoking far into the night
in the gloomy old Button house on Monroe Street with his
grandfather—all these had faded like unsubstantial dreams from his
mind as though they had never been.
He did not remember. He did not remember clearly whether the
milk was warm or cool at his last feeding or how the days
passed—there was only his crib and Nana's familiar presence. And
then he remembered nothing. When he was hungry he cried—that
was all. Through the noons and nights he breathed and over him
there were soft mumblings and murmurings that he scarcely heard,
and faintly differentiated smells, and light and darkness.
Then it was all dark, and his white crib and the dim faces that
moved above him, and the warm sweet aroma of the milk, faded out
altogether from his mind.