The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories Page 9

  'Le's see you make him.'

  At this point the darn fool entered in person and included the crowd in one of his irritating smiles. Two boys said, ''Lo, Mer'dith'; the others gave him a chilly glance and went on talking to Gilly. But Samuel seemed unsatisfied.

  'Would you mind not sitting on my bed?' he suggested politely to two of Gilly's particulars who were perched very much at ease.

  'Huh?'

  'My bed. Can't you understand English?'

  This was adding insult to injury. There were several comments on the bed's sanitary condition and the evidence within it of animal life.

  'S'matter with your old bed?' demanded Gilly truculently.

  'The bed's all right, but--'

  Gilly interrupted this sentence by rising and walking up to Samuel. He paused several inches away and eyed him fiercely.

  'You an' your crazy ole bed,' he began. 'You an' your crazy--'

  'Go to it, Gilly,' murmured some one.

  'Show the darn fool--'

  Samuel returned the gaze coolly.

  'Well,' he said finally, 'it's my bed--'

  He got no further, for Gilly hauled off and hit him succinctly in the nose.

  'Yea! Gilly!'

  'Show the big bully!'

  'Just let him touch you - he'll see!'

  The group closed in on them and for the first time in his life Samuel realized the insuperable inconvenience of being passionately detested. He gazed around helplessly at the glowering, violently hostile faces. He towered a head taller than his roommate, so if he hit back he'd be called a bully and have half a dozen more fights on his hands within five minutes; yet if he didn't he was a coward. For a moment he stood there facing Gilly's blazing eyes, and then, with a sudden choking sound, he forced his way through the ring and rushed from the room.

  The month following bracketed the thirty most miserable days of his life. Every waking moment he was under the lashing tongues of his contemporaries; his habits and mannerisms became butts for intolerable witticisms and, of course, the sensitiveness of adolescence was a further thorn. He considered that he was a natural pariah; that the unpopularity at school would follow him through life. When he went home for the Christmas holidays he was so despondent that his father sent him to a nerve specialist. When he returned to Andover he arranged to arrive late so that he could be alone in the bus during the drive from station to school.

  Of course when he had learned to keep his mouth shut every one promptly forgot all about him. The next autumn, with his realization that consideration for others was the discreet attitude, he made good use of the clean start given him by the shortness of boyhood memory. By the beginning of his senior year Samuel Meredith was one of the best-liked boys of his class - and no one was any stronger for him than his first friend and constant companion, Gilly Hood.

  II

  Samuel became the sort of college student who in the early nineties drove tandems and coaches and tallyhos between Princeton and Yale and New York City to show that they appreciated the social importance of football games. He believed passionately in good form - his choosing of gloves, his tying of ties, his holding of reins were imitated by impressionable freshmen. Outside of his own set he was considered rather a snob, but as his set was the set, it never worried him. He played football in the autumn, drank high-balls in the winter, and rowed in the spring. Samuel despised all those who were merely sportsmen without being gentlemen, or merely gentlemen without being sportsmen.

  He lived in New York and often brought home several of his friends for the week-end. Those were the days of the horse-car and in case of a crush it was, of course, the proper thing for any one of Samuel's set to rise and deliver his seat to a standing lady with a formal bow. One night in Samuel's junior year he boarded a car with two of his intimates. There were three vacant seats. When Samuel sat down he noticed a heavy-eyed laboring man sitting next to him who smelt objectionably of garlic, sagged slightly against Samuel and, spreading a little as a tired man will, took up quite too much room.

  The car had gone several blocks when it stopped for a quartet of young girls, and, of course, the three men of the world sprang to their feet and proffered their seats with due observance of form. Unfortunately, the laborer, being unacquainted with the code of neckties and tallyhos, failed to follow their example, and one young lady was left at an embarrassed stance. Fourteen eyes glared reproachfully at the barbarian; seven lips curled slightly; but the object of scorn stared stolidly into the foreground in sturdy unconsciousness of his despicable conduct. Samuel was the most violently affected. He was humiliated that any male should so conduct himself. He spoke aloud.

  'There's a lady standing,' he said sternly.

  That should have been quite enough, but the object of scorn only looked up blankly. The standing girl tittered and exchanged nervous glances with her companions. But Samuel was aroused.

  'There's a lady standing,' he repeated, rather raspingly. The man seemed to comprehend.

  'I pay my fare,' he said quietly.

  Samuel turned red and his hands clinched, but the conductor was looking their way, so at a warning nod from his friends he subsided into sullen gloom.

  They reached their destination and left the car, but so did the laborer, who followed them, swinging his little pail. Seeing his chance, Samuel no longer resisted his aristocratic inclination. He turned around and, launching a full-featured, dime-novel sneer, made a loud remark about the right of the lower animals to ride with human beings.

  In a half-second the workman had dropped his pail and let fly at him. Unprepared, Samuel took the blow neatly on the jaw and sprawled full length into the cobblestone gutter.

  'Don't laugh at me!' cried his assailant. 'I been workin' all day. I'm tired as hell!'

  As he spoke the sudden anger died out of his eyes and the mask of weariness dropped again over his face. He turned and picked up his pail. Samuel's friends took a quick step in his direction.

  'Wait!' Samuel had risen slowly and was motioning them back. Some time, somewhere, he had been struck like that before. Then he remembered - Gilly Hood. In the silence, as he dusted himself off, the whole scene in the room at Andover was before his eyes - and he knew intuitively that he had been wrong again. This man's strength, his rest, was the protection of his family. He had more use for his seat in the street-car than any young girl.

  'It's all right,' said Samuel gruffly. 'Don't touch him. I've been a damn fool.'

  Of course it took more than an hour, or a week, for Samuel to rearrange his ideas on the essential importance of good form. At first he simply admitted that his wrongness had made him powerless - as it had made him powerless against Gilly - but eventually his mistake about the workman influenced his entire attitude. Snobbishness is, after all, merely good breeding grown dictatorial; so Samuel's code remained, but the necessity of imposing it upon others had faded out in a certain gutter. Within that year his class had somehow stopped referring to him as a snob.

  III

  After a few years Samuel's university decided that it had shone long enough in the reflected glory of his neckties, so they declaimed to him in Latin, charged him ten dollars for the paper which proved him irretrievably educated, and sent him into the turmoil with much self-confidence, a few friends, and the proper assortment of harmless bad habits.

  His family had by that time started back to shirt-sleeves, through a sudden decline in the sugar-market, and it had already unbuttoned its vest, so to speak, when Samuel went to work. His mind was that exquisite tabula rasa that a university education sometimes leaves, but he had both energy and influence, so he used his former ability as a dodging half-back in twisting through Wall Street crowds as runner for a bank.

  His diversion was - women. There were half a dozen: two or three debutantes, an actress (in a minor way), a grass-widow, and one sentimental little brunette who was married and lived in a little house in Jersey City.

  They had met on a ferry-boat. Samuel was crossing from New
York on business (he had been working several years by this time) and he helped her look for a package that she had dropped in the crush.

  'Do you come over often?' he inquired casually.

  'Just to shop,' she said shyly. She had great brown eyes and the pathetic kind of little mouth. 'I've only been married three months, and we find it cheaper to live over here.'

  'Does he - does your husband like your being alone like this?'

  She laughed, a cheery young laugh.

  'Oh, dear me, no. We were to meet for dinner but I must have misunderstood the place. He'll be awfully worried.'

  'Well,' said Samuel disapprovingly, 'he ought to be. If you'll allow me I'll see you home.'

  She accepted his offer thankfully, so they took the cable-car together. When they walked up the path to her little house they saw a light there; her husband had arrived before her.

  'He's frightfully jealous,' she announced, laughingly apologetic.

  'Very well,' answered Samuel, rather stiffly. 'I'd better leave you here.'

  She thanked him and, waving a good night, he left her.

  That would have been quite all if they hadn't met on Fifth Avenue one morning a week later. She started and blushed and seemed so glad to see him that they chatted like old friends. She was going to her dressmaker's, eat lunch alone at Taine's, shop all afternoon, and meet her husband on the ferry at five. Samuel told her that her husband was a very lucky man. She blushed again and scurried off.

  Samuel whistled all the way back to his office, but about twelve o'clock he began to see that pathetic, appealing little mouth every where - and those brown eyes. He fidgeted when he looked at the clock; he thought of the grill down-stairs where he lunched and the heavy male conversation thereof, and opposed to that picture appeared another: a little table at Taine's with the brown eyes and the mouth a few feet away. A few minutes before twelve-thirty he dashed on his hat and rushed for the cable-car.

  She was quite surprised to see him.

  'Why - hello,' she said. Samuel could tell that she was just pleasantly frightened.

  'I thought we might lunch together. It's so dull eating with a lot of men.'

  She hesitated.

  'Why, I suppose there's no harm in it. How could there be!'

  It occurred to her that her husband should have taken lunch with her - but he was generally so hurried at noon. She told Samuel all about him; he was a little smaller than Samuel, but, oh, much better-looking. He was a bookkeeper and not making a lot of money, but they were very happy and expected to be rich within three or four years.

  Samuel's grass-widow had been in a quarrelsome mood for three or four weeks, and, through contrast, he took an accentuated pleasure in this meeting; so fresh was she, and earnest, and faintly adventurous. Her name was Marjorie.

  They made another engagement; in fact, for a month they lunched together two or three times a week. When she was sure that her husband would work late Samuel took her over to New Jersey on the ferry, leaving her always on the tiny front porch, after she had gone in and lit the gas to use the security of his masculine presence outside. This grew to be a ceremony - and it annoyed him. Whenever the comfortable glow fell out through the front windows, that was his conge; yet he never suggested coming in and Marjorie didn't invite him.

  Then, when Samuel and Marjorie had reached a stage in which they sometimes touched each other's arms gently, just to show that they were very good friends, Marjorie and her husband had one of those ultrasensitive, supercritical quarrels that couples never indulge in unless they care a great deal about each other. It started with a cold mutton-chop or a leak in the gas-jet - and one day Samuel found her in Taine's, with dark shadows under her brown eyes and a terrifying pout.

  By this time Samuel thought he was in love with Marjorie - so he played up the quarrel for all it was worth. He was her best friend and patted her hand - and leaned down close to her brown curls while she whispered in little sobs what her husband had said that morning; and he was a little more than her best friend when he took her over to the ferry in a hansom.

  'Marjorie,' he said gently, when he left her, as usual, on the porch, 'if at any time you want to call on me, remember that I am always waiting, always waiting.'

  She nodded gravely and put both her hands in his.

  'I know,' she said. 'I know you're my friend, my best friend.'

  Then she ran into the house and he watched there until the gas went on.

  For the next week Samuel was in a nervous turmoil. Some persistently rational strain warned him that at bottom he and Marjorie had little in common, but in such cases there is usually so much mud in the water that one can seldom see to the bottom. Every dream and desire told him that he loved Marjorie, wanted her, had to have her.

  The quarrel developed. Marjorie's husband took to staying in New York until late at night, came home several times disagreeably over-stimulated, and made her generally miserable. They must have had too much pride to talk it out - for Marjorie's husband was, after all, pretty decent - so it drifted on from one misunderstanding to another. Marjorie kept coming more and more to Samuel; when a woman can accept masculine sympathy it is much more satisfactory to her than crying to another girl. But Marjorie didn't realize how much she had begun to rely on him, how much he was part of her little cosmos.

  One night, instead of turning away when Marjorie went in and lit the gas, Samuel went in, too, and they sat together on the sofa in the little parlor. He was very happy. He envied their home, and he felt that the man who neglected such a possession out of stubborn pride was a fool and unworthy of his wife. But when he kissed Marjorie for the first time she cried softly and told him to go. He sailed home on the wings of desperate excitement, quite resolved to fan this spark of romance, no matter how big the blaze or who was burned. At the time he considered that his thoughts were unselfishly of her; in a later perspective he knew that she had meant no more than the white screen in a motion picture: it was just Samuel - blind, desirous.

  Next day at Taine's, when they met for lunch, Samuel dropped all pretense and made frank love to her. He had no plans, no definite intentions, except to kiss her lips again, to hold her in his arms and feel that she was very little and pathetic and lovable... He took her home, and this time they kissed until both their hearts beat high - words and phrases formed on his lips.

  And then suddenly there were steps on the porch - a hand tried the outside door. Marjorie turned dead-white.

  'Wait! she whispered to Samuel, in a frightened voice, but in angry impatience at the interruption he walked to the front door and threw it open.

  Every one has seen such scenes on the stage - seen them so often that when they actually happen people behave very much like actors. Samuel felt that he was playing a part and the lines came quite naturally: he announced that all had a right to lead their own lives and looked at Marjorie's husband menacingly, as if daring him to doubt it. Marjorie's husband spoke of the sanctity of the home, forgetting that it hadn't seemed very holy to him lately; Samuel continued along the line of 'the right to happiness'; Marjorie's husband mentioned firearms and the divorce court. Then suddenly he stopped and scrutinized both of them - Marjorie in pitiful collapse on the sofa, Samuel haranguing the furniture in a consciously heroic pose.

  'Go up-stairs, Marjorie,' he said, in a different tone.

  'Stay where you are!' Samuel countered quickly.

  Marjorie rose, wavered, and sat down, rose again and moved hesitatingly toward the stairs.

  'Come outside,' said her husband to Samuel. 'I want to talk to you.'

  Samuel glanced at Marjorie, tried to get some message from her eyes; then he shut his lips and went out.

  There was a bright moon and when Marjorie's husband came down the steps Samuel could see plainly that he was suffering - but he felt no pity for him.

  They stood and looked at each other, a few feet apart, and the husband cleared his throat as though it were a bit husky.

  'That's my wife,'
he said quietly, and then a wild anger surged up inside him. 'Damn you!' he cried - and hit Samuel in the face with all his strength.

  In that second, as Samuel slumped to the ground, it flashed to him that he had been hit like that twice before, and simultaneously the incident altered like a dream - he felt suddenly awake. Mechanically he sprang to his feet and squared off. The other man was waiting, fists up, a yard away, but Samuel knew that though physically he had him by several inches and many pounds, he wouldn't hit him. The situation had miraculously and entirely changed - a moment before Samuel had seemed to himself heroic; now he seemed the cad, the outsider, and Marjorie's husband, silhouetted against the lights of the little house, the eternal heroic figure, the defender of his home.

  There was a pause and then Samuel turned quickly away and went down the path for the last time.

  IV

  Of course, after the third blow Samuel put in several weeks at conscientious introspection. The blow years before at Andover had landed on his personal unpleasantness; the workman of his college days had jarred the snobbishness out of his system, and Marjorie's husband had given a severe jolt to his greedy selfishness. It threw women out of his ken until a year later, when he met his future wife; for the only sort of woman worth while seemed to be the one who could be protected as Marjorie's husband had protected her. Samuel could not imagine his grass-widow, Mrs De Ferriac, causing any very righteous blows on her own account.

  His early thirties found him well on his feet. He was associated with old Peter Carhart, who was in those days a national figure. Carhart's physique was like a rough model for a statue of Hercules, and his record was just as solid - a pile made for the pure joy of it, without cheap extortion or shady scandal. He had been a great friend of Samuel's father, but he watched the son for six years before taking him into his own office. Heaven knows how many things he controlled at that time - mines, railroads, banks, whole cities. Samuel was very close to him, knew his likes and dislikes, his prejudices, weaknesses and many strengths.

  One day Carhart sent for Samuel and, closing the door of his inner office, offered him a chair and a cigar.

  'Everything O. K., Samuel?' he asked.