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

  The gymnasium was brightly lit, and when his eyes became accustomed to the glare he found the meditative fat man seated on a pile of canvas mats smoking a big cigar.

  'Say,' began Horace directly, 'were you in earnest last night when you said I could make money on my trapeze stunts?'

  'Why, yes,' said the fat man in surprise.

  'Well, I've been thinking it over, and I believe I'd like to try it. I could work at night and on Saturday afternoons - and regularly if the pay is high enough.'

  The fat man looked at his watch.

  'Well,' he said, 'Charlie Paulson's the man to see. He'll book you inside of four days, once he sees you work out. He won't be in now, but I'll get hold of him for to-morrow night.'

  The fat man was as good as his word. Charlie Paulson arrived next night and put in a wondrous hour watching the prodigy swoop through the air in amazing parabolas, and on the night following he brought two large men with him who looked as though they had been born smoking black cigars and talking about money in low, passionate voices. Then on the succeeding Saturday Horace Tarbox's torso made its first professional appearance in a gymnastic exhibition at the Coleman Street Gardens. But though the audience numbered nearly five thousand people, Horace felt no nervousness. From his childhood he had read papers to audiences - learned that trick of detaching himself.

  'Marcia,' he said cheerfully later that same night, 'I think we're out of the woods. Paulson thinks he can get me an opening at the Hippodrome, and that means an all-winter engagement. The Hippodrome, you know, is a big--'

  'Yes, I believe I've heard of it,' interrupted Marcia, 'but I want to know about this stunt you're doing. It isn't any spectacular suicide, is it?'

  'It's nothing,' said Horace quietly. 'But if you can think of any nicer way of a man killing himself than taking a risk for you, why that's the way I want to die.'

  Marcia reached up and wound both arms tightly round his neck.

  'Kiss me,' she whispered, 'and call me "dear heart." I love to hear you say "dear heart." And bring me a book to read to-morrow. No more Sam Pepys, but something trick and trashy. I've been wild for something to do all day. I felt like writing letters, but I didn't have anybody to write to.'

  'Write to me,' said Horace. 'I'll read them.'

  'I wish I could,' breathed Marcia. 'If I knew words enough I could write you the longest love-letter in the world - and never get tired.'

  But after two more months Marcia grew very tired indeed, and for a row of nights it was a very anxious, weary-looking young athlete who walked out before the Hippodrome crowd. Then there were two days when his place was taken by a young man who wore pale blue instead of white, and got very little applause. But after the two days Horace appeared again, and those who sat close to the stage remarked an expression of beatific happiness on that young acrobat's face, even when he was twisting breathlessly in the air in the middle of his amazing and original shoulder swing. After that performance he laughed at the elevator man and dashed up the stairs to the flat five steps at a time - and then tiptoed very carefully into a quiet room.

  'Marcia,' he whispered.

  'Hello!' She smiled up at him wanly. 'Horace, there's something I want you to do. Look in my top bureau drawer and you'll find a big stack of paper. It's a book - sort of - Horace. I wrote it down in these last three months while I've been laid up. I wish you'd take it to that Peter Boyce Wendell who put my letter in his paper. He could tell you whether it'd be a good book. I wrote it just the way I talk, just the way I wrote that letter to him. It's just a story about a lot of things that happened to me. Will you take it to him, Horace?'

  'Yes, darling.'

  He leaned over the bed until his head was beside her on the pillow, and began stroking back her yellow hair.

  'Dearest Marcia,' he said softly.

  'No,' she murmured, 'call me what I told you to call me.'

  'Dear heart,' he whispered passionately - 'dearest, dearest heart.'

  'What'll we call her?'

  They rested a minute in happy, drowsy content, while Horace considered.

  'We'll call her Marcia Hume Tarbox,' he said at length.

  'Why the Hume?'

  'Because he's the fellow who first introduced us.'

  'That so?' she murmured, sleepily surprised. 'I thought his name was Moon.'

  Her eyes closed, and after a moment the slow, lengthening surge of the bedclothes over her breast showed that she was asleep.

  Horace tiptoed over to the bureau and opening the top drawer found a heap of closely scrawled, lead-smeared pages. He looked at the first sheet:

  SANDRA PEPYS, SYNCOPATED

  BY MARCIA TARBOX

  He smiled. So Samuel Pepys had made an impression on her after all. He turned a page and began to read. His smile deepened - he read on. Half an hour passed and he became aware that Marcia had waked and was watching him from the bed.

  'Honey,' came in a whisper.

  'What, Marcia?'

  'Do you like it?'

  Horace coughed.

  'I seem to be reading on. It's bright.'

  'Take it to Peter Boyce Wendell. Tell him you got the highest marks in Princeton once and that you ought to know when a book's good. Tell him this one's a world beater.'

  'All right, Marcia,' said Horace gently.

  Her eyes closed again and Horace crossing over kissed her forehead - stood there for a moment with a look of tender pity. Then he left the room.

  All that night the sprawly writing on the pages, the constant mistakes in spelling and grammar, and the weird punctuation danced before his eyes. He woke several times in the night, each time full of a welling chaotic sympathy for this desire of Marcia's soul to express itself in words. To him there was something infinitely pathetic about it, and for the first time in months he began to turn over in his mind his own half-forgotten dreams.

  He had meant to write a series of books, to popularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had popularized pessimism and William James pragmatism.

  But life hadn't come that way. Life took hold of people and forced them into flying rings. He laughed to think of that rap at his door, the diaphanous shadow in Hume, Marcia's threatened kiss.

  'And it's still me,' he said aloud in wonder as he lay awake in the darkness. 'I'm the man who sat in Berkeley with temerity to wonder if that rap would have had actual existence had my ear not been there to hear it. I'm still that man. I could be electrocuted for the crimes he committed.

  'Poor gauzy souls trying to express ourselves in something tangible. Marcia with her written book; I with my unwritten ones. Trying to choose our mediums and then taking what we get - and being glad.'

  V

  'Sandra Pepys, Syncopated,' with an introduction by Peter Boyce Wendell, the columnist, appeared serially in Jordan's Magazine, and came out in book form in March. From its first published instalment it attracted attention far and wide. A trite enough subject - a girl from a small New Jersey town coming to New York to go on the stage - treated simply, with a peculiar vividness of phrasing and a haunting undertone of sadness in the very inadequacy of its vocabulary, it made an irresistible appeal.

  Peter Boyce Wendell, who happened at that time to be advocating the enrichment of the American language by the immediate adoption of expressive vernacular words, stood as its sponsor and thundered his indorsement over the placid bromides of the conventional reviewers.

  Marcia received three hundred dollars an instalment for the serial publication, which came at an opportune time, for though Horace's monthly salary at the Hippodrome was now more than Marcia's had ever been, young Marcia was emitting shrill cries which they interpreted as a demand for country air. So early April found them installed in a bungalow in Westchester Country, with a place for a lawn, a place for a garage, and a place for everything, including a sound-proof impregnable study, in which Marcia faithfully promised Mr Jordan she would shut herself up when her daughter's demands began to be abated, and compose immortally illiterate liter
ature.

  'It's not half bad,' thought Horace one night as he was on his way from the station to his house. He was considering several prospects that had opened up, a four months' vaudeville offer in five figures, a chance to go back to Princeton in charge of all gymnasium work. Odd! He had once intended to go back there in charge of all philosophic work, and now he had not even been stirred by the arrival in New York of Anton Laurier, his old idol.

  The gravel crunched raucously under his heel. He saw the lights of his sitting-room gleaming and noticed a big car standing in the drive. Probably Mr Jordan again, come to persuade Marcia to settle down to work.

  She had heard the sound of his approach and her form was silhouetted against the lighted door as she came out to meet him.

  'There's some Frenchman here,' she whispered nervously. 'I can't pronounce his name, but he sounds awful deep. You'll have to jaw with him.'

  'What Frenchman?'

  'You can't prove it by me. He drove up an hour ago with Mr Jordan, and said he wanted to meet Sandra Pepys, and all that sort of thing.'

  Two men rose from chairs as they went inside.

  'Hello, Tarbox,' said Jordan. 'I've just been bringing together two celebrities. I've brought M'sieur Laurier out with me. M'sieur Laurier, let me present Mr Tarbox, Mrs Tarbox's husband.'

  'Not Anton Laurier!' exclaimed Horace.

  'But, yes. I must come. I have to come. I have read the book of Madame, and I have been charmed' - he fumbled in his pocket - 'ah, I have read of you too. In this newspaper which I read to-day it has your name.'

  He finally produced a clipping from a magazine.

  'Read it!' he said eagerly. 'It has about you too.'

  Horace's eye skipped down the page.

  'A distinct contribution to American dialect literature,' it said. 'No attempt at literary tone; the book derives its very quality from this fact, as did "Huckleberry Finn." '

  Horace's eyes caught a passage lower down; he became suddenly aghast - read on hurriedly: 'Marcia Tarbox's connection with the stage is not only as a spectator but as the wife of a performer. She was married last year to Horace Tarbox, who every evening delights the children at the Hippodrome with his wondrous flying-ring performance. It is said that the young couple have dubbed themselves Head and Shoulders, referring doubtless to the fact that Mrs Tarbox supplies the literary and mental qualities, while the supple and agile shoulders of her husband contribute their share to the family fortunes.

  'Mrs Tarbox seems to merit that much-abused title - "prodigy." Only twenty--'

  Horace stopped reading, and with a very odd expression in his eyes gazed intently at Anton Laurier.

  'I want to advise you--' he began hoarsely.

  'What?'

  'About raps. Don't answer them! Let them alone - have a padded door.'

  The Cut-Glass Bowl

  I

  There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents - punch-bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, wine-glasses, ice-cream dishes, bonbon dishes, decanters, and vases - for, though cut glass was nothing new in the nineties, it was then especially busy reflecting the dazzling light of fashion from the Back Bay to the fastnesses of the Middle West.

  After the wedding the punch-bowls were arranged on the sideboard with the big bowl in the center; the glasses were set up in the china-closet; the candlesticks were put at both ends of things - and then the struggle for existence began. The bonbon dish lost its little handle and became a pin-tray upstairs; a promenading cat knocked the little bowl off the sideboard, and the hired girl chipped the middle-sized one with the sugar-dish; then the wine-glasses succumbed to leg fractures, and even the dinner-glasses disappeared one by one like the ten little niggers, the last one ending up, scarred and maimed, as a tooth-brush holder among other shabby genteels on the bathroom shelf. But by the time all this had happened the cut-glass age was over, anyway.

  It was well past its first glory on the day the curious Mrs Roger Fairboalt came to see the beautiful Mrs Harold Piper.

  'My dear,' said the curious Mrs Roger Fairboalt, 'I love your house. I think it's quite artistic.'

  'I'm so glad,' said the beautiful Mrs Harold Piper, lights appearing in her young, dark eyes; 'and you must come often. I'm almost always alone in the afternoon.'

  Mrs Fairboalt would have liked to remark that she didn't believe this at all and couldn't see how she'd be expected to - it was all over town that Mr Freddy Gedney had been dropping in on Mrs Piper five afternoons a week for the past six months. Mrs Fairboalt was at that ripe age where she distrusted all beautiful women--

  'I love the dining-room most,' she said, 'all that marvellous china, and that huge cut-glass bowl.'

  Mrs Piper laughed, so prettily that Mrs Fairboalt's lingering reservations about the Freddy Gedney story quite vanished.

  'Oh, that big bowl!' Mrs Piper's mouth forming the words was a vivid rose petal. 'There's a story about that bowl--'

  'Oh--'

  'You remember young Carleton Canby? Well, he was very attentive at one time, and the night I told him I was going to marry Harold, seven years ago, in ninety-two, he drew himself way up and said: "Evylyn, I'm going to give a present that's as hard as you are and as beautiful and as empty and as easy to see through." He frightened me a little - his eyes were so black. I thought he was going to deed me a haunted house or something that would explode when you opened it. That bowl came, and of course it's beautiful. Its diameter or circumference or something is two and a half feet - or perhaps it's three and a half. Anyway, the sideboard is really too small for it; it sticks way out.'

  'My dear, wasn't that odd! And he left town about then, didn't he?' Mrs Fairboalt was scribbling italicized notes on her memory - 'hard, beautiful, empty, and easy to see through.'

  'Yes, he went West - or South - or somewhere,' answered Mrs Piper, radiating that divine vagueness that helps to lift beauty out of time.

  Mrs Fairboalt drew on her gloves, approving the effect of largeness given by the open sweep from the spacious music-room through the library, disclosing a part of the dining-room beyond. It was really the nicest smaller house in town, and Mrs Piper had talked of moving to a larger one on Devereaux Avenue. Harold Piper must be coining money.

  As she turned into the sidewalk under the gathering autumn dusk she assumed that disapproving, faintly unpleasant expression that almost all successful women of forty wear on the street.

  If I were Harold Piper, she thought, I'd spend a little less time on business and a little more time at home. Some friend should speak to him.

  But if Mrs Fairboalt had considered it a successful afternoon she would have named it a triumph had she waited two minutes longer. For while she was still a black receding figure a hundred yards down the street, a very good-looking distraught young man turned up the walk to the Piper house. Mrs Piper answered the door-bell herself, and with a rather dismayed expression led him quickly into the library.

  'I had to see you,' he began wildly; 'your note played the devil with me. Did Harold frighten you into this?'

  She shook her head.

  'I'm through, Fred,' she said slowly, and her lips had never looked to him so much like tearings from a rose. 'He came home last night sick with it. Jessie Piper's sense of duty was too much for her, so she went down to his office and told him. He was hurt and - oh, I can't help seeing it his way, Fred. He says we've been club gossip all summer and he didn't know it, and now he understands snatches of conversation he's caught and veiled hints people have dropped about me. He's mighty angry, Fred, and he loves me and I love him - rather.'

  Gedney nodded slowly and half closed his eyes.

  'Yes,' he said, 'yes, my trouble's like yours. I can see other people's points of view too plainly.' His gray eyes met her da
rk ones frankly. 'The blessed thing's over. My God, Evylyn, I've been sitting down at the office all day looking at the outside of your letter, and looking at it and looking at it--'

  'You've got to go, Fred,' she said steadily, and the slight emphasis of hurry in her voice was a new thrust for him. 'I gave him my word of honor I wouldn't see you. I know just how far I can go with Harold, and being here with you this evening is one of the things I can't do.'

  They were still standing, and as she spoke she made a little movement toward the door. Gedney looked at her miserably, trying, here at the end, to treasure up a last picture of her - and then suddenly both of them were stiffened into marble at the sound of steps on the walk outside. Instantly her arm reached out grasping the lapel of his coat - half urged, half swung him through the big door into the dark dining-room.

  'I'll make him go upstairs,' she whispered close to his ear; 'don't move till you hear him on the stairs. Then go out the front way.'

  Then he was alone listening as she greeted her husband in the hall.

  Harold Piper was thirty-six, nine years older than his wife. He was handsome - with marginal notes: these being eyes that were too close together, and a certain woodenness when his face was in repose. His attitude toward this Gedney matter was typical of all his attitudes. He had told Evylyn that he considered the subject closed and would never reproach her nor allude to it in any form; and he told himself that this was rather a big way of looking at it - that she was not a little impressed. Yet, like all men who are preoccupied with their own broadness, he was exceptionally narrow.

  He greeted Evylyn with emphasized cordiality this evening.

  'You'll have to hurry and dress, Harold,' she said eagerly; 'we're going to the Bronsons'.'

  He nodded.

  'It doesn't take me long to dress, dear,' and, his words trailing off, he walked on into the library. Evylyn's heart clattered loudly.

  'Harold--' she began, with a little catch in her voice, and followed him in. He was lighting a cigarette. 'You'll have to hurry, Harold,' she finished, standing in the doorway.