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 alone, 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....
X
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.