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

  At this point the little Jew's oration was interrupted by the hostile impact of a fist upon the point of his bearded chin and he toppled backward to a sprawl on the pavement.

  'God damn Bolsheviki!' cried the big soldier-blacksmith who had delivered the blow. There was a rumble of approval, the crowd closed in nearer.

  The Jew staggered to his feet, and immediately went down again before a half-dozen reaching-in fists. This time he stayed down, breathing heavily, blood oozing from his lip where it was cut within and without.

  There was a riot of voices, and in a minute Rose and Key found themselves flowing with the jumbled crowd down Sixth Avenue under the leadership of a thin civilian in a slouch hat and the brawny soldier who had summarily ended the oration. The crowd had marvellously swollen to formidable proportions and a stream of more non-committal citizens followed it along the sidewalks lending their moral support by intermittent huzzas.

  'Where we goin'?' yelled Key to the man nearest him.

  His neighbor pointed up to the leader in the slouch hat.

  'That guy knows where there's a lot of 'em! We're goin' to show 'em!'

  'We're goin' to show 'em!' whispered Key delightedly to Rose, who repeated the phrase rapturously to a man on the other side.

  Down Sixth Avenue swept the procession, joined here and there by soldiers and marines, and now and then by civilians, who came up with the inevitable cry that they were just out of the army themselves, as if presenting it as a card of admission to a newly formed Sporting and Amusement Club.

  Then the procession swerved down a cross street and headed for Fifth Avenue and the word filtered here and there that they were bound for a Red meeting at Tolliver Hall.

  'Where is it?'

  The question went up the line and a moment later the answer floated back. Tolliver Hall was down on Tenth Street. There was a bunch of other sojers who was goin' to break it up and was down there now!

  But Tenth Street had a faraway sound and at the word a general groan went up and a score of the procession dropped out. Among these were Rose and Key, who slowed down to a saunter and let the more enthusiastic sweep on by.

  'I'd rather get some liquor,' said Key as they halted and made their way to the sidewalk amid cries of 'Shell hole!' and 'Quitters!'

  'Does your brother work around here?' asked Rose, assuming the air of one passing from the superficial to the eternal.

  'He oughta,' replied Key. 'I ain't seen him for a coupla years. I been out to Pennsylvania since. Maybe he don't work at night anyhow. It's right along here. He can get us some o'right if he ain't gone.'

  They found the place after a few minutes' patrol of the street - a shoddy tablecloth restaurant between Fifth Avenue and Broadway. Here Key went inside to inquire for his brother George, while Rose waited on the sidewalk.

  'He ain't here no more,' said Key emerging. 'He's a waiter up to Delmonico's.'

  Rose nodded wisely, as if he'd expected as much. One should not be surprised at a capable man changing jobs occasionally. He knew a waiter once - there ensued a long conversation as they walked as to whether waiters made more in actual wages than in tips - it was decided that it depended on the social tone of the joint wherein the waiter labored. After having given each other vivid pictures of millionaires dining at Delmonico's and throwing away fifty-dollar bills after their first quart of champagne, both men thought privately of becoming waiters. In fact, Key's narrow brow was secreting a resolution to ask his brother to get him a job.

  'A waiter can drink up all the champagne those fellas leave in bottles,' suggested Rose with some relish, and then added as an afterthought, 'Oh, boy!'

  By the time they reached Delmonico's it was half past ten, and they were surprised to see a stream of taxis driving up to the door one after the other and emitting marvelous, hatless young ladies, each one attended by a stiff young gentleman in evening clothes.

  'It's a party,' said Rose with some awe. 'Maybe we better not go in. He'll be busy.'

  'No, he won't. He'll be o'right.'

  After some hesitation they entered what appeared to them to be the least elaborate door and, indecision falling upon them immediately, stationed themselves nervously in an inconspicuous corner of the small dining-room in which they found themselves. They took off their caps and held them in their hands. A cloud of gloom fell upon them and both started when a door at one end of the room crashed open, emitting a comet-like waiter who streaked across the floor and vanished through another door on the other side.

  There had been three of these lightning passages before the seekers mustered the acumen to hail a waiter. He turned, looked at them suspiciously, and then approached with soft, catlike steps, as if prepared at any moment to turn and flee.

  'Say,' began Key, 'say, do you know my brother? He's a waiter here.'

  'His name is Key,' annotated Rose.

  Yes, the waiter knew Key. He was up-stairs, he thought. There was a big dance going on in the main ballroom. He'd tell him.

  Ten minutes later George Key appeared and greeted his brother with the utmost suspicion; his first and most natural thought being that he was going to be asked for money.

  George was tall and weak chinned, but there his resemblance to his brother ceased. The waiter's eyes were not dull, they were alert and twinkling, and his manner was suave, in-door, and faintly superior. They exchanged formalities. George was married and had three children. He seemed fairly interested, but not impressed by the news that Carrol had been abroad in the army. This disappointed Carrol.

  'George,' said the younger brother, these amenities having been disposed of, 'we want to get some booze, and they won't sell us none. Can you get us some?'

  George considered.

  'Sure. Maybe I can. It may be half an hour, though.'

  'All right,' agreed Carrol, 'we'll wait.'

  At this Rose started to sit down in a convenient chair, but was hailed to his feet by the indignant George.

  'Hey! Watch out, you! Can't sit down here! This room's all set for a twelve o'clock banquet.'

  'I ain't goin' to hurt it,' said Rose resentfully. 'I been through the delouser.'

  'Never mind,' said George sternly, 'if the head waiter seen me here talkin' he'd romp all over me.'

  'Oh.'

  The mention of the head waiter was full explanation to the other two; they fingered their overseas caps nervously and waited for a suggestion.

  'I tell you,' said George, after a pause, 'I got a place you can wait; you just come here with me.'

  They followed him out the far door, through a deserted pantry and up a pair of dark winding stairs, emerging finally into a small room chiefly furnished by piles of pails and stacks of scrubbing brushes, and illuminated by a single dim electric light. There he left them, after soliciting two dollars and agreeing to return in half an hour with a quart of whiskey.

  'George is makin' money, I bet,' said Key gloomily as he seated himself on an inverted pail. 'I bet he's making fifty dollars a week.'

  Rose nodded his head and spat.

  'I bet he is, too.'

  'What'd he say the dance was of?'

  'A lot of college fellas. Yale College.'

  They both nodded solemnly at each other.

  'Wonder where that crowda sojers is now?'

  'I don't know. I know that's too damn long to walk for me.'

  'Me too. You don't catch me walkin' that far.'

  Ten minutes later restlessness seized them.

  'I'm goin' to see what's out here,' said Rose, stepping cautiously toward the other door.

  It was a swinging door of green baize and he pushed it open a cautious inch.

  'See anything?'

  For answer Rose drew in his breath sharply.

  'Doggone! Here's some liquor I'll say!'

  'Liquor?'

  Key joined Rose at the door, and looked eagerly.

  'I'll tell the world that's liquor,' he said, after a moment of concentrated gazing.

  It was a roo
m about twice as large as the one they were in - and in it was prepared a radiant feast of spirits. There were long walls of alternating bottles set along two white covered tables; whiskey, gin, brandy, French and Italian vermouths, and orange juice, not to mention an array of syphons and two great empty punch bowls. The room was as yet uninhabited.

  'It's for this dance they're just starting,' whispered Key; 'hear the violins playin'? Say, boy, I wouldn't mind havin' a dance.'

  They closed the door softly and exchanged a glance of mutual comprehension. There was no need of feeling each other out.

  'I'd like to get my hands on a coupla those bottles,' said Rose emphatically.

  'Me too.'

  'Do you suppose we'd get seen?'

  Key considered.

  'Maybe we better wait till they start drinkin' 'em. They got 'em all laid out now, and they know how many of them there are.'

  They debated this point for several minutes. Rose was all for getting his hands on a bottle now and tucking it under his coat before any one came into the room. Key, however, advocated caution. He was afraid he might get his brother in trouble. If they waited till some of the bottles were opened it'd be all right to take one, and everybody'd think it was one of the college fellas.

  While they were still engaged in argument George Key hurried through the room and, barely grunting at them, disappeared by way of the green baize door. A minute later they heard several corks pop, and then the sound of cracking ice and splashing liquid. George was mixing the punch.

  The soldiers exchanged delighted grins.

  'Oh, boy!' whispered Rose.

  George reappeared.

  'Just keep low, boys,' he said quickly. 'I'll have your stuff for you in five minutes.'

  He disappeared through the door by which he had come.

  As soon as his footsteps receded down the stairs, Rose, after a cautious look, darted into the room of delights and reappeared with a bottle in his hand.

  'Here's what I say,' he said, as they sat radiantly digesting their first drink. 'We'll wait till he comes up, and we'll ask him if we can't just stay here and drink what he brings us - see. We'll tell him we haven't got any place to drink it - see. Then we can sneak in there whenever there ain't nobody in that there room and tuck a bottle under our coats. We'll have enough to last us a coupla days - see?'

  'Sure,' agreed Rose enthusiastically. 'Oh, boy! And if we want to we can sell it to sojers any time we want to.'

  They were silent for a moment thinking rosily of this idea. Then Key reached up and unhooked the collar of his O. D. coat.

  'It's hot in here, ain't it?'

  Rose agreed earnestly.

  'Hot as hell.'

  IV

  She was still quite angry when she came out of the dressing-room and crossed the intervening parlor of politeness that opened onto the hall - angry not so much at the actual happening which was, after all, the merest commonplace of her social existence, but because it had occurred on this particular night. She had no quarrel with herself. She had acted with that correct mixture of dignity and reticent pity which she always employed. She had succinctly and deftly snubbed him.

  It had happened when their taxi was leaving the Biltmore - hadn't gone half a block. He had lifted his right arm awkwardly - she was on his right side - and attempted to settle it snugly around the crimson fur-trimmed opera cloak she wore. This in itself had been a mistake. It was inevitably more graceful for a young man attempting to embrace a young lady of whose acquiescence he was not certain, to first put his far arm around her. It avoided that awkward movement of raising the near arm.

  His second faux pas was unconscious. She had spent the afternoon at the hairdresser's; the idea of any calamity overtaking her hair was extremely repugnant - yet as Peter made his unfortunate attempt the point of his elbow had just faintly brushed it. That was his second faux pas. Two were quite enough.

  He had begun to murmur. At the first murmur she had decided that he was nothing but a college boy - Edith was twenty-two, and anyhow, this dance, first of its kind since the war, was reminding her, with the accelerating rhythm of its associations, of something else - of another dance and another man, a man for whom her feelings had been little more than a sad-eyed, adolescent mooniness. Edith Bradin was falling in love with her recollection of Gordon Sterrett.

  So she came out of the dressing-room at Delmonico's and stood for a second in the doorway looking over the shoulders of a black dress in front of her at the groups of Yale men who flitted like dignified black moths around the head of the stairs. From the room she had left drifted out the heavy fragrance left by the passage to and fro of many scented young beauties - rich perfumes and the fragile memory-laden dust of fragrant powders. This odor drifting out acquired the tang of cigarette smoke in the hall, and then settled sensuously down the stairs and permeated the ballroom where the Gamma Psi dance was to be held. It was an odor she knew well, exciting, stimulating, restlessly sweet - the odor of a fashionable dance.

  She thought of her own appearance. Her bare arms and shoulders were powdered to a creamy white. She knew they looked very soft and would gleam like milk against the black backs that were to silhouette them tonight. The hairdressing had been a success; her reddish mass of hair was piled and crushed and creased to an arrogant marvel of mobile curves. Her lips were finely made of deep carmine; the irises of her eyes were delicate, breakable blue, like china eyes. She was a complete, infinitely delicate, quite perfect thing of beauty, flowing in an even line from a complex coiffure to two small slim feet.

  She thought of what she would say tonight at this revel, faintly prestiged already by the sounds of high and low laughter and slippered footsteps, and movements of couples up and down the stairs. She would talk the language she had talked for many years - her line - made up of the current expressions, bits of journalese and college slang strung together into an intrinsic whole, careless, faintly provocative, delicately sentimental. She smiled faintly as she heard a girl sitting on the stairs near her say: 'You don't know the half of it, dearie!'

  And as she smiled her anger melted for a moment, and closing her eyes she drew in a deep breath of pleasure. She dropped her arms to her side until they were faintly touching the sleek sheath that covered and suggested her figure. She had never felt her own softness so much nor so enjoyed the whiteness of her own arms.

  'I smell sweet,' she said to herself simply, and then came another thought - 'I'm made for love.'

  She liked the sound of this and thought it again; then in inevitable succession came her new-born riot of dreams about Gordon. The twist of her imagination which, two months before, had disclosed to her her unguessed desire to see him again, seemed now to have been leading up to this dance, this hour.

  For all her sleek beauty, Edith was a grave, slow-thinking girl. There was a streak in her of that same desire to ponder, of that adolescent idealism that had turned her brother socialist and pacifist. Henry Bradin had left Cornell, where he had been an instructor in economics, and had come to New York to pour the latest cures for incurable evils into the columns of a radical weekly newspaper.

  Edith, less fatuously, would have been content to cure Gordon Sterrett. There was a quality of weakness in Gordon that she wanted to take care of; there was a helplessness in him that she wanted to protect. And she wanted someone she had known a long while, someone who had loved her a long while. She was a little tired; she wanted to get married. Out of a pile of letters, half a dozen pictures and as many memories, and this weariness, she had decided that next time she saw Gordon their relations were going to be changed. She would say something that would change them. There was this evening. This was her evening. All evenings were her evenings.

  Then her thoughts were interrupted by a solemn undergraduate with a hurt look and an air of strained formality who presented himself before her and bowed unusually low. It was the man she had come with, Peter Himmel. He was tall and humorous, with horned-rimmed glasses and an air of attractive wh
imsicality. She suddenly rather disliked him - probably because he had not succeeded in kissing her.

  'Well,' she began, 'are you still furious at me?'

  'Not at all.'

  She stepped forward and took his arm.

  'I'm sorry,' she said softly. 'I don't know why I snapped out that way. I'm in a bum humor tonight for some strange reason. I'm sorry.'

  'S'all right,' he mumbled, 'don't mention it.'

  He felt disagreeably embarrassed. Was she rubbing in the fact of his late failure?

  'It was a mistake,' she continued, on the same consciously gentle key. 'We'll both forget it.' For this he hated her.

  A few minutes later they drifted out on the floor while the dozen swaying, sighing members of the specially hired jazz orchestra informed the crowded ballroom that 'if a saxophone and me are left alone why then two is com-pan-ee!'

  A man with a mustache cut in.

  'Hello,' he began reprovingly. 'You don't remember me.'

  'I can't just think of your name,' she said lightly - 'and I know you so well.'

  'I met you up at --' His voice trailed disconsolately off as a man with very fair hair cut in. Edith murmured a conventional 'Thanks, loads - cut in later,' to the inconnu.

  The very fair man insisted on shaking hands enthusiastically. She placed him as one of the numerous Jims of her acquaintance - last name a mystery. She remembered even that he had a peculiar rhythm in dancing and found as they started that she was right.

  'Going to be here long?' he breathed confidentially.

  She leaned back and looked up at him.

  'Couple of weeks.'

  'Where are you?'

  'Biltmore. Call me up some day.'

  'I mean it,' he assured her. 'I will. We'll go to tea.'

  'So do I - Do.'

  A dark man cut in with intense formality.

  'You don't remember me, do you?' he said gravely.

  'I should say I do. Your name's Harlan.'

  'No-ope. Barlow.'

  'Well, I knew there were two syllables anyway. You're the boy that played the ukulele so well up at Howard Marshall's house party.'

  'I played - but not--'

  A man with prominent teeth cut in. Edith inhaled a slight cloud of whiskey. She liked men to have had something to drink; they were so much more cheerful, and appreciative and complimentary - much easier to talk to.