The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories Read online

  Dean stiffened a bit more. The pats he was bestowing on his knees grew perfunctory. He felt vaguely that he was being unfairly saddled with responsibility; he was not even sure he wanted to be told. Though never surprised at finding Gordon Sterrett in mild difficulty, there was something in this present misery that repelled him and hardened him, even though it excited his curiosity.

  'Go on.'

  'It's a girl.'

  'Hm.' Dean resolved that nothing was going to spoil his trip. If Gordon was going to be depressing, then he'd have to see less of Gordon.

  'Her name is Jewel Hudson,' went on the distressed voice from the bed. 'She used to be "pure," I guess, up to about a year ago. Lived here in New York - poor family. Her people are dead now and she lives with an old aunt. You see it was just about the time I met her that everybody began to come back from France in droves - and all I did was to welcome the newly arrived and go on parties with 'em. That's the way it started, Phil, just from being glad to see everybody and having them glad to see me.'

  'You ought to've had more sense.'

  'I know,' Gordon paused, and then continued listlessly. 'I'm on my own now, you know, and Phil, I can't stand being poor. Then came this darn girl. She sort of fell in love with me for a while and, though I never intended to get so involved, I'd always seem to run into her somewhere. You can imagine the sort of work I was doing for those exporting people - of course, I always intended to draw; do illustrating for magazines; there's a pile of money in it.'

  'Why didn't you? You've got to buckle down if you want to make good,' suggested Dean with cold formalism.

  'I tried, a little, but my stuff's crude. I've got talent, Phil; I can draw - but I just don't know how. I ought to go to art school and I can't afford it. Well, things came to a crisis about a week ago. Just as I was down to about my last dollar this girl began bothering me. She wants some money; claims she can make trouble for me if she doesn't get it.'

  'Can she?'

  'I'm afraid she can. That's one reason I lost my job - she kept calling up the office all the time, and that was sort of the last straw down there. She's got a letter all written to send to my family. Oh, she's got me, all right. I've got to have some money for her.'

  There was an awkward pause. Gordon lay very still, his hands clenched by his side.

  'I'm all in,' he continued, his voice trembling. 'I'm half crazy, Phil. If I hadn't known you were coming East, I think I'd have killed myself. I want you to lend me three hundred dollars.'

  Dean's hands, which had been patting his bare ankles, were suddenly quiet - and the curious uncertainty playing between the two became taut and strained.

  After a second Gordon continued:

  'I've bled the family until I'm ashamed to ask for another nickel.'

  Still Dean made no answer.

  'Jewel says she's got to have two hundred dollars.'

  'Tell her where she can go.'

  'Yes, that sounds easy, but she's got a couple of drunken letters I wrote her. Unfortunately she's not at all the flabby sort of person you'd expect.'

  Dean made an expression of distaste.

  'I can't stand that sort of woman. You ought to have kept away.'

  'I know,' admitted Gordon wearily.

  'You've got to look at things as they are. If you haven't got money you've got to work and stay away from women.'

  'That's easy for you to say,' began Gordon, his eyes narrowing. 'You've got all the money in the world.'

  'I most certainly have not. My family keep darn close tab on what I spend. Just because I have a little leeway I have to be extra careful not to abuse it.'

  He raised the blind and let in a further flood of sunshine.

  'I'm no prig, Lord knows,' he went on deliberately. 'I like pleasure - and I like a lot of it on a vacation like this, but you're - you're in awful shape. I never heard you talk just this way before. You seem to be sort of bankrupt - morally as well as financially.'

  'Don't they usually go together?'

  Dean shook his head impatiently.

  'There's a regular aura about you that I don't understand. It's a sort of evil.'

  'It's an air of worry and poverty and sleepless nights,' said Gordon, rather defiantly.

  'I don't know.'

  'Oh, I admit I'm depressing. I depress myself. But, my God, Phil, a week's rest and a new suit and some ready money and I'd be like - like I was. Phil, I can draw like a streak, and you know it. But half the time I haven't had the money to buy decent drawing materials - and I can't draw when I'm tired and discouraged and all in. With a little ready money I can take a few weeks off and get started.'

  'How do I know you wouldn't use it on some other woman?'

  'Why rub it in?' said Gordon quietly.

  'I'm not rubbing it in. I hate to see you this way.'

  'Will you lend me the money, Phil?'

  'I can't decide right off. That's a lot of money and it'll be darn inconvenient for me.'

  'It'll be hell for me if you can't - I know I'm whining, and it's all my own fault but - that doesn't change it.'

  'When could you pay it back?'

  This was encouraging. Gordon considered. It was probably wisest to be frank.

  'Of course, I could promise to send it back next month, but - I'd better say three months. Just as soon as I start to sell drawings.'

  'How do I know you'll sell any drawings?'

  A new hardness in Dean's voice sent a faint chill of doubt over Gordon. Was it possible that he wouldn't get the money?

  'I supposed you had a little confidence in me.'

  'I did have - but when I see you like this I begin to wonder.'

  'Do you suppose if I wasn't at the end of my rope I'd come to you like this? Do you think I'm enjoying it?' He broke off and bit his lip, feeling that he had better subdue the rising anger in his voice. After all, he was the suppliant.

  'You seem to manage it pretty easily,' said Dean angrily. 'You put me in the position where, if I don't lend it to you, I'm a sucker - oh, yes, you do. And let me tell you it's no easy thing for me to get hold of three hundred dollars. My income isn't so big but that a slice like that won't play the deuce with it.'

  He left his chair and began to dress, choosing his clothes carefully. Gordon stretched out his arms and clenched the edges of the bed, fighting back a desire to cry out. His head was splitting and whirring, his mouth was dry and bitter and he could feel the fever in his blood resolving itself into innumerable regular counts like a slow dripping from a roof.

  Dean tied his tie precisely, brushed his eyebrows, and removed a piece of tobacco from his teeth with solemnity. Next he filled his cigarette case, tossed the empty box thoughtfully into the waste basket, and settled the case in his vest pocket.

  'Had breakfast?' he demanded.

  'No; I don't eat it any more.'

  'Well, we'll go out and have some. We'll decide about that money later. I'm sick of the subject. I came East to have a good time.

  'Let's go over to the Yale Club,' he continued moodily, and then added with an implied reproof: 'You've given up your job. You've got nothing else to do.'

  'I'd have a lot to do if I had a little money,' said Gordon pointedly.

  'Oh, for Heaven's sake drop the subject for a while! No point in glooming on my whole trip. Here, here's some money.'

  He took a five-dollar bill from his wallet and tossed it over to Gordon, who folded it carefully and put it in his pocket. There was an added spot of color in his cheeks, an added glow that was not fever. For an instant before they turned to go out their eyes met and in that instant each found something that made him lower his own glance quickly. For in that instant they quite suddenly and definitely hated each other.

  II

  Fifth Avenue and Forty-fourth Street swarmed with the noon crowd. The wealthy, happy sun glittered in transient gold through the thick windows of the smart shops, lighting upon mesh bags and purses and strings of pearls in gray velvet cases; upon gaudy feather fans of m
any colors; upon the laces and silks of expensive dresses; upon the bad paintings and the fine period furniture in the elaborate show rooms of interior decorators.

  Working-girls, in pairs and groups and swarms, loitered by these windows, choosing their future boudoirs from some resplendent display which included even a man's silk pajamas laid domestically across the bed. They stood in front of the jewelry stores and picked out their engagement rings, and their wedding rings and their platinum wrist watches, and then drifted on to inspect the feather fans and opera cloaks; meanwhile digesting the sandwiches and sundaes they had eaten for lunch.

  All through the crowd were men in uniform, sailors from the great fleet anchored in the Hudson, soldiers with divisional insignia from Massachusetts to California, wanting fearfully to be noticed, and finding the great city thoroughly fed up with soldiers unless they were nicely massed into pretty formations and uncomfortable under the weight of a pack and rifle.

  Through this medley Dean and Gordon wandered; the former interested, made alert by the display of humanity at its frothiest and gaudiest; the latter reminded of how often he had been one of the crowd, tired, casually fed, overworked, and dissipated. To Dean the struggle was significant, young, cheerful; to Gordon it was dismal, meaningless, endless.

  In the Yale Club they met a group of their former classmates who greeted the visiting Dean vociferously. Sitting in a semicircle of lounges and great chairs, they had a highball all around.

  Gordon found the conversation tiresome and interminable. They lunched together en masse, warmed with liquor as the afternoon began. They were all going to the Gamma Psi dance that night - it promised to be the best party since the war.

  'Edith Bradin's coming,' said some one to Gordon. 'Didn't she used to be an old flame of yours? Aren't you both from Harrisburg?'

  'Yes.' He tried to change the subject. 'I see her brother occasionally. He's sort of a socialistic nut. Runs a paper or something here in New York.'

  'Not like his gay sister, eh?' continued his eager informant. 'Well, she's coming tonight with a junior named Peter Himmel.'

  Gordon was to meet Jewel Hudson at eight o'clock - he had promised to have some money for her. Several times he glanced nervously at his wrist watch. At four, to his relief, Dean rose and announced that he was going over to Rivers Brothers to buy some collars and ties. But as they left the Club another of the party joined them, to Gordon's great dismay. Dean was in a jovial mood now, happy, expectant of the evening's party, faintly hilarious. Over in Rivers' he chose a dozen neckties, selecting each one after long consultations with the other man. Did he think narrow ties were coming back? And wasn't it a shame that Rivers couldn't get any more Welsh Margotson collars? There never was a collar like the 'Covington.'

  Gordon was in something of a panic. He wanted the money immediately. And he was now inspired also with a vague idea of attending the Gamma Psi dance. He wanted to see Edith - Edith whom he hadn't met since one romantic night at the Harrisburg Country Club just before he went to France. The affair had died, drowned in the turmoil of the war and quite forgotten in the arabesque of these three months, but a picture of her, poignant, debonnaire, immersed in her own inconsequential chatter, recurred to him unexpectedly and brought a hundred memories with it. It was Edith's face that he had cherished through college with a sort of detached yet affectionate admiration. He had loved to draw her - around his room had been a dozen sketches of her - playing golf, swimming - he could draw her pert, arresting profile with his eyes shut.

  They left Rivers' at five-thirty and paused for a moment on the sidewalk.

  'Well,' said Dean genially, 'I'm all set now. Think I'll go back to the hotel and get a shave, haircut, and massage.'

  'Good enough,' said the other man, 'I think I'll join you.'

  Gordon wondered if he was to be beaten after all. With difficulty he restrained himself from turning to the man and snarling out, 'Go on away, damn you!' In despair he suspected that perhaps Dean had spoken to him, was keeping him along in order to avoid a dispute about the money.

  They went into the Biltmore - a Biltmore alive with girls - mostly from the West and South, the stellar debutantes of many cities gathered for the dance of a famous fraternity of a famous university. But to Gordon they were faces in a dream. He gathered together his forces for a last appeal, was about to come out with he knew not what, when Dean suddenly excused himself to the other man and taking Gordon's arm led him aside.

  'Gordy,' he said quickly, 'I've thought the whole thing over carefully and I've decided that I can't lend you that money. I'd like to oblige you, but I don't feel I ought to - it'd put a crimp in me for a month.'

  Gordon, watching him dully, wondered why he had never before noticed how much those upper teeth projected.

  '--I'm mighty sorry, Gordon,' continued Dean, 'but that's the way it is.'

  He took out his wallet and deliberately counted out seventy-five dollars in bills.

  'Here,' he said, holding them out, 'here's seventy-five; that makes eighty all together. That's all the actual cash I have with me, besides what I'll actually spend on the trip.'

  Gordon raised his clenched hand automatically, opened it as though it were a tongs he was holding, and clenched it again on the money.

  'I'll see you at the dance,' continued Dean. 'I've got to get along to the barber shop.'

  'So-long,' said Gordon in a strained and husky voice.

  'So-long.'

  Dean began to smile, but seemed to change his mind. He nodded briskly and disappeared.

  But Gordon stood there, his handsome face awry with distress, the roll of bills clenched tightly in his hand. Then, blinded by sudden tears, he stumbled clumsily down the Biltmore steps.

  III

  About nine o'clock of the same night two human beings came out of a cheap restaurant in Sixth Avenue. They were ugly, ill-nourished, devoid of all except the very lowest form of intelligence, and without even that animal exuberance that in itself brings color into life; they were lately vermin-ridden, cold, and hungry in a dirty town of a strange land; they were poor, friendless; tossed as driftwood from their births, they would be tossed as driftwood to their deaths. They were dressed in the uniform of the United States Army, and on the shoulder of each was the insignia of a drafted division from New Jersey, landed three days before.

  The taller of the two was named Carrol Key, a name hinting that in his veins, however thinly diluted by generations of degeneration, ran blood of some potentiality. But one could stare endlessly at the long, chinless face, the dull, watery eyes, and high cheek-bones, without finding a suggestion of either ancestral worth or native resourcefulness.

  His companion was swart and bandy-legged, with rat-eyes and a much-broken hooked nose. His defiant air was obviously a pretense, a weapon of protection borrowed from that world of snarl and snap, of physical bluff and physical menace, in which he had always lived. His name was Gus Rose.

  Leaving the cafe they sauntered down Sixth Avenue, wielding toothpicks with great gusto and complete detachment.

  'Where to?' asked Rose, in a tone which implied that he would not be surprised if Key suggested the South Sea Islands.

  'What you say we see if we can getta holda some liquor?' Prohibition was not yet. The ginger in the suggestion was caused by the law forbidding the selling of liquor to soldiers.

  Rose agreed enthusiastically.

  'I got an idea,' continued Key, after a moment's thought, 'I got a brother somewhere.'

  'In New York?'

  'Yeah. He's an old fella.' He meant that he was an elder brother. 'He's a waiter in a hash joint.'

  'Maybe he can get us some.'

  'I'll say he can!'

  'B'lieve me, I'm goin' to get this darn uniform off me to-morra. Never get me in it again, neither. I'm goin' to get me some regular clothes.'

  'Say, maybe I'm not.'

  As their combined finances were something less than five dollars, this intention can be taken largely as a pleasant game
of words, harmless and consoling. It seemed to please both of them, however, for they reinforced it with chuckling and mention of personages high in biblical circles, adding such further emphasis as 'Oh, boy!' 'You know!' and 'I'll say so!' repeated many times over.

  The entire mental pabulum of these two men consisted of an offended nasal comment extended through the years upon the institution - army, business, or poor-house - which kept them alive, and toward their immediate superior in that institution. Until that very morning the institution had been the 'government' and the immediate superior had been the 'Cap'n' - from these two they had glided out and were now in the vaguely uncomfortable state before they should adopt their next bondage. They were uncertain, resentful, and somewhat ill at ease. This they hid by pretending an elaborate relief at being out of the army, and by assuring each other that military discipline should never again rule their stubborn, liberty-loving wills. Yet, as a matter of fact, they would have felt more at home in a prison than in this new-found and unquestionable freedom.

  Suddenly Key increased his gait. Rose, looking up and following his glance, discovered a crowd that was collecting fifty yards down the street. Key chuckled and began to run in the direction of the crowd; Rose thereupon also chuckled and his short bandy legs twinkled beside the long, awkward strides of his companion.

  Reaching the outskirts of the crowd they immediately became an indistinguishable part of it. It was composed of ragged civilians somewhat the worse for liquor, and of soldiers representing many divisions and many stages of sobriety, all clustered around a gesticulating little Jew with long black whiskers, who was waving his arms and delivering an excited but succinct harangue. Key and Rose, having wedged themselves into the approximate parquet, scrutinized him with acute suspicion, as his words penetrated their common consciousness.

  '--What have you got outa the war?' he was crying fiercely. 'Look arounja, look arounja! Are you rich? Have you got a lot of money offered you? - no; you're lucky if you're alive and got both your legs; you're lucky if you came back an' find your wife ain't gone off with some other fella that had the money to buy himself out of the war! That's when you're lucky! Who got anything out of it except J. P. Morgan an' John D. Rockerfeller?'