"There's a great future in the dry-goods business," Roger Button was

saying. He was not a spiritual man--his aesthetic sense was

rudimentary.

 

"Old fellows like me can't learn new tricks," he observed profoundly.

"It's you youngsters with energy and vitality that have the great

future before you."

 

Far up the road the lights of the Shevlins' country house drifted into

view, and presently there was a sighing sound that crept persistently

toward them--it might have been the fine plaint of violins or the

rustle of the silver wheat under the moon.

 

They pulled up behind a handsome brougham whose passengers were

disembarking at the door. A lady got out, then an elderly gentleman,

then another young lady, beautiful as sin. Benjamin started; an almost

chemical change seemed to dissolve and recompose the very elements of

his body. A rigour passed over him, blood rose into his cheeks, his

forehead, and there was a steady thumping in his ears. It was first

love.

 

The girl was slender and frail, with hair that was ashen under the

moon and honey-coloured under the sputtering gas-lamps of the porch.

Over her shoulders was thrown a Spanish mantilla of softest yellow,

butterflied in black; her feet were glittering buttons at the hem of

her bustled dress.

 

Roger Button leaned over to his son. "That," he said, "is young

Hildegarde Moncrief, the daughter of General Moncrief."

 

Benjamin nodded coldly. "Pretty little thing," he said indifferently.

But when the negro boy had led the buggy away, he added: "Dad, you

might introduce me to her."

 

They approached a group, of which Miss Moncrief was the centre. Reared

in the old tradition, she curtsied low before Benjamin. Yes, he might

have a dance. He thanked her and walked away--staggered away.

 

The interval until the time for his turn should arrive dragged itself

out interminably. He stood close to the wall, silent, inscrutable,

watching with murderous eyes the young bloods of Baltimore as they

eddied around Hildegarde Moncrief, passionate admiration in their

faces. How obnoxious they seemed to Benjamin; how intolerably rosy!

Their curling brown whiskers aroused in him a feeling equivalent to

indigestion.

 

But when his own time came, and he drifted with her out upon the

changing floor to the music of the latest waltz from Paris, his

jealousies and anxieties melted from him like a mantle of snow. Blind

with enchantment, he felt that life was just beginning.

 

"You and your brother got here just as we did, didn't you?" asked

Hildegarde, looking up at him with eyes that were like bright blue

enamel.

 

Benjamin hesitated. If she took him for his father's brother, would it

be best to enlighten her? He remembered his experience at Yale, so he

decided against it. It would be rude to contradict a lady; it would be

criminal to mar this exquisite occasion with the grotesque story of

his origin. Later, perhaps. So he nodded, smiled, listened, was happy.

 

"I like men of your age," Hildegarde told him. "Young boys are so

idiotic. They tell me how much champagne they drink at college, and

how much money they lose playing cards. Men of your age know how to

appreciate women."

 

Benjamin felt himself on the verge of a proposal--with an effort he

choked back the impulse. "You're just the romantic age," she

continued--"fifty. Twenty-five is too worldly-wise; thirty is apt to be

pale from overwork; forty is the age of long stories that take a whole

cigar to tell; sixty is--oh, sixty is too near seventy; but fifty is

the mellow age. I love fifty."

 

Fifty seemed to Benjamin a glorious age. He longed passionately to be

fifty.

 

"I've always said," went on Hildegarde, "that I'd rather marry a man

of fifty and be taken care of than many a man of thirty and take care

of _him_."

 

For Benjamin the rest of the evening was bathed in a honey-coloured

mist. Hildegarde gave him two more dances, and they discovered that

they were marvellously in accord on all the questions of the day. She

was to go driving with him on the following Sunday, and then they

would discuss all these questions further.

 

Going home in the phaeton just before the crack of dawn, when the

first bees were humming and the fading moon glimmered in the cool dew,

Benjamin knew vaguely that his father was discussing wholesale

hardware.

 

".... And what do you think should merit our biggest attention after

hammers and nails?" the elder Button was saying.

 

"Love," replied Benjamin absent-mindedly.

 

"Lugs?" exclaimed Roger Button, "Why, I've just covered the question

of lugs."

 

Benjamin regarded him with dazed eyes just as the eastern sky was

suddenly cracked with light, and an oriole yawned piercingly in the

quickening trees...

6

 

When, six months later, the engagement of Miss Hildegarde Moncrief to

Mr. Benjamin Button was made known (I say "made known," for General

Moncrief declared he would rather fall upon his sword than announce

it), the excitement in Baltimore society reached a feverish pitch. The

almost forgotten story of Benjamin's birth was remembered and sent out

upon the winds of scandal in picaresque and incredible forms. It was

said that Benjamin was really the father of Roger Button, that he was

his brother who had been in prison for forty years, that he was John

Wilkes Booth in disguise--and, finally, that he had two small conical

horns sprouting from his head.

 

The Sunday supplements of the New York papers played up the case with

fascinating sketches which showed the head of Benjamin Button attached

to a fish, to a snake, and, finally, to a body of solid brass. He

became known, journalistically, as the Mystery Man of Maryland. But

the true story, as is usually the case, had a very small circulation.

 

However, every one agreed with General Moncrief that it was "criminal"

for a lovely girl who could have married any beau in Baltimore to

throw herself into the arms of a man who was assuredly fifty. In vain

Mr. Roger Button published his son's birth certificate in large type in

the Baltimore _Blaze_. No one believed it. You had only to look

at Benjamin and see.

 

On the part of the two people most concerned there was no wavering. So

many of the stories about her fiancé were false that Hildegarde

refused stubbornly to believe even the true one. In vain General

Moncrief pointed out to her the high mortality among men of fifty--or,

at least, among men who looked fifty; in vain he told her of the

instability of the wholesale hardware business. Hildegarde had chosen

to marry for mellowness, and marry she did....

7

 

In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde Moncrief were

mistaken. The wholesale hardware business prospered amazingly. In the

fifteen years between Benjamin Button's marriage in 1880 and his

father's retirement in 1895, the family fortune was doubled--and this

was due largely to the younger member of the firm.

 

Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the couple to its

bosom. Even old General Moncrief became reconciled to his son-in-law

when Benjamin gave him the money to bring out his _History of the

Civil War_ in twenty volumes, which had been refused by nine

prominent publishers.

 

In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many changes. It seemed

to him that the blood flowed with new vigour through his veins. It

began to be a pleasure to rise in the morning, to walk with an active

step along the busy, sunny street, to work untiringly with his

shipments of hammers and his cargoes of nails. It was in 1890 that he

executed his famous business coup: he brought up the suggestion that

_all nails used in nailing up the boxes in which nails are shipped

are the property of the shippee_, a proposal which became a

statute, was approved by Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button

and Company, Wholesale Hardware, more than _six hundred nails every

year_.

 

In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming more and more

attracted by the gay side of life. It was typical of his growing

enthusiasm for pleasure that he was the first man in the city of

Baltimore to own and run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his

contemporaries would stare enviously at the picture he made of health

and vitality.

 

"He seems to grow younger every year," they would remark. And if old

Roger Button, now sixty-five years old, had failed at first to give a

proper welcome to his son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what

amounted to adulation.

 

And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it will be well to

pass over as quickly as possible. There was only one thing that

worried Benjamin Button; his wife had ceased to attract him.

 

At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five, with a son,

Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early days of their marriage

Benjamin had worshipped her. But, as the years passed, her

honey-coloured hair became an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her

eyes assumed the aspect of cheap crockery--moreover, and, most of all,

she had become too settled in her ways, too placid, too content, too

anaemic in her excitements, and too sober in her taste. As a bride it

been she who had "dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners--now

conditions were reversed. She went out socially with him, but without

enthusiasm, devoured already by that eternal inertia which comes to

live with each of us one day and stays with us to the end.

 

Benjamin's discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak of the

Spanish-American War in 1898 his home had for him so little charm that

he decided to join the army. With his business influence he obtained a

commission as captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he was

made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel just in time to

participate in the celebrated charge up San Juan Hill. He was slightly

wounded, and received a medal.

 

Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and excitement of

array life that he regretted to give it up, but his business required

attention, so he resigned his commission and came home. He was met at

the station by a brass band and escorted to his house.

8

 

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 gaiety 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 "Maxine," 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....

9

 

One 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's, 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's, 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 somewhat 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 done, except for the

companionship of three or four fifteen-year-old boys in the

neighbourhood. His idea of going to St. Midas's 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....

10

 

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 V.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 materialise. Two days later,

however, his son Roscoe materialised from Baltimore, hot and cross

from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, _sans_

uniform, back to his home.

II

 

In 1920 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 favourite 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 coloured 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 realised 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 hat-rack 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 upstairs with Nana and be fed on 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.