The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Six Other Stories

  But to Mr In and Mr Out this event was merely a particolored iridescent segment of a whirring, spinning world.

  They heard loud voices; they saw the stout man spring; the picture suddenly blurred.

  Then they were in an elevator bound skyward.

  'What floor, please?' said the elevator man.

  'Any floor,' said Mr In.

  'Top floor,' said Mr Out.

  'This is the top floor,' said the elevator man.

  'Have another floor put on,' said Mr Out.

  'Higher,' said Mr In.

  'Heaven,' said Mr Out.

  XI

  In a bedroom of a small hotel just off Sixth Avenue Gordon Sterrett awoke with a pain in the back of his head and a sick throbbing in all his veins. He looked at the dusky gray shadows in the corners of the room and at a raw place on a large leather chair in the corner where it had long been in use. He saw clothes, dishevelled, rumpled clothes on the floor and he smelt stale cigarette smoke and stale liquor. The windows were tight shut. Outside the bright sunlight had thrown a dust-filled beam across the sill - a beam broken by the head of the wide wooden bed in which he had slept. He lay very quiet - comatose, drugged, his eyes wide, his mind clicking wildly like an unoiled machine.

  It must have been thirty seconds after he perceived the sunbeam with the dust on it and the rip on the large leather chair that he had the sense of life close beside him, and it was another thirty seconds after that before he realized that he was irrevocably married to Jewel Hudson.

  He went out half an hour later and bought a revolver at a sporting goods store. Then he took a taxi to the room where he had been living on East Twenty-seventh Street, and, leaning across the table that held his drawing materials, fired a cartridge into his head just behind the temple.

  'O Russet Witch!'

  I

  Merlin Grainger was employed by the Moonlight Quill Bookshop, which you may have visited, just around the corner from the Ritz-Carlton on Forty-seventh Street. The Moonlight Quill is, or rather was, a very romantic little store, considered radical and admitted dark. It was spotted interiorly with red and orange posters of breathless exotic intent, and lit no less by the shiny reflecting bindings of special editions than by the great squat lamp of crimson satin that, lighted through all the day, swung overhead. It was truly a mellow bookshop. The words 'Moonlight Quill' were worked over the door in a sort of serpentine embroidery. The windows seemed always full of something that had passed the literary censors with little to spare; volumes with covers of deep orange which offered their titles on little white paper squares. And over all there was the smell of the musk, which the clever, inscrutable Mr Moonlight Quill ordered to be sprinkled about - the smell half of a curiosity shop in Dickens' London and half of a coffee-house on the warm shores of the Bosphorus.

  From nine until five-thirty Merlin Grainger asked bored old ladies in black and young men with dark circles under their eyes if they 'cared for this fellow' or were interested in first editions. Did they buy novels with Arabs on the cover, or books which gave Shakespeare's newest sonnets as dictated psychically to Miss Sutton of South Dakota? he sniffed. As a matter of fact, his own taste ran to these latter, but as an employee at the Moonlight Quill he assumed for the working day the attitude of a disillusioned connoisseur.

  After he had crawled over the window display to pull down the front shade at five-thirty every afternoon, and said good-bye to the mysterious Mr Moonlight Quill and the lady clerk, Miss McCracken, and the lady stenographer, Miss Masters, he went home to the girl, Caroline. He did not eat supper with Caroline. It is unbelievable that Caroline would have considered eating off his bureau with the collar buttons dangerously near the cottage cheese, and the ends of Merlin's necktie just missing his glass of milk - he had never asked her to eat with him. He ate alone. He went into Braegdort's delicatessen on Sixth Avenue and bought a box of crackers, a tube of anchovy paste, and some oranges, or else a little jar of sausages and some potato salad and a bottled soft drink, and with these in a brown package he went to his room at Fifty-something West Fifty-eighth Street and ate his supper and saw Caroline.

  Caroline was a very young and gay person who lived with some older lady and was possibly nineteen. She was like a ghost in that she never existed until evening. She sprang into life when the lights went on in her apartment at about six, and she disappeared, at the latest, about midnight. Her apartment was a nice one, in a nice building with a white stone front, opposite the south side of Central Park. The back of her apartment faced the single window of the single room occupied by the single Mr Grainger.

  He called her Caroline because there was a picture that looked like her on the jacket of a book of that name down at the Moonlight Quill.

  Now, Merlin Grainger was a thin young man of twenty-five, with dark hair and no mustache or beard or anything like that, but Caroline was dazzling and light, with a shimmering morass of russet waves to take the place of hair, and the sort of features that remind you of kisses - the sort of features you thought belonged to your first love, but know, when you come across an old picture, didn't. She dressed in pink or blue usually, but of late she had sometimes put on a slender black gown that was evidently her especial pride, for whenever she wore it she would stand regarding a certain place on the wall, which Merlin thought must be a mirror. She sat usually in the profile chair near the window, but sometimes honored the chaise longue by the lamp, and often she leaned 'way back and smoked a cigarette with posturings of her arms and hands that Merlin considered very graceful.

  At another time she had come to the window and stood in it magnificently, and looked out because the moon had lost its way and was dripping the strangest and most transforming brilliance into the areaway between, turning the motif of ash-cans and clotheslines into a vivid impressionism of silver casks and gigantic gossamer cobwebs. Merlin was sitting in plain sight, eating cottage cheese with sugar and milk on it; and so quickly did he reach out for the window cord that he tipped the cottage cheese into his lap with his free hand - and the milk was cold and the sugar made spots on his trousers, and he was sure that she had seen him after all.

  Sometimes there were callers - men in dinner coats, who stood and bowed, hat in hand and coat on arm, as they talked to Caroline; then bowed some more and followed her out of the light, obviously bound for a play or for a dance. Other young men came and sat and smoked cigarettes, and seemed trying to tell Caroline something - she sitting either in the profile chair and watching them with eager intentness or else in the chaise longue by the lamp, looking very lovely and youthfully inscrutable indeed.

  Merlin enjoyed these calls. Of some of the men he approved. Others won only his grudging toleration, one or two he loathed - especially the most frequent caller, a man with black hair and a black goatee and a pitch-dark soul, who seemed to Merlin vaguely familiar, but whom he was never quite able to recognize.

  Now, Merlin's whole life was not 'bound up with this romance he had constructed'; it was not 'the happiest hour of his day.' He never arrived in time to rescue Caroline from 'clutches'; nor did he even marry her. A much stranger thing happened than any of these, and it is this strange thing that will presently be set down here. It began one October afternoon when she walked briskly into the mellow interior of the Moonlight Quill.

  It was a dark afternoon, threatening rain and the end of the world, and done in that particularly gloomy gray in which only New York afternoons indulge. A breeze was crying down the streets, whisking along battered newspapers and pieces of things, and little lights were pricking out all the windows - it was so desolate that one was sorry for the tops of sky-scrapers lost up there in the dark green and gray heaven, and felt that now surely the farce was to close, and presently all the buildings would collapse like card houses, and pile up in a dusty, sardonic heap upon all the millions who presumed to wind in and out of them.

  At least these were the sort of musings that lay heavily upon the soul of Merlin Grainger, as he stood by the window
putting a dozen books back in a row, after a cyclonic visit by a lady with ermine trimmings. He looked out of the window full of the most distressing thoughts - of the early novels of H. G. Wells, of the book of Genesis, of how Thomas Edison had said that in thirty years there would be no dwelling-houses upon the island, but only a vast and turbulent bazaar; and then he set the last book right side up, turned - and Caroline walked coolly into the shop.

  She was dressed in a jaunty but conventional walking costume - he remembered this when he thought about it later. Her skirt was plaid, pleated like a concertina; her jacket was a soft but brisk tan; her shoes and spats were brown and her hat, small and trim, completed her like the top of a very expensive and beautifully filled candy box.

  Merlin, breathless and startled, advanced nervously toward her.

  'Good-afternoon--' he said, and then stopped - why, he did not know, except that it came to him that something very portentous in his life was about to occur, and that it would need no furbishing but silence, and the proper amount of expectant attention. And in that minute before the thing began to happen he had the sense of a breathless second hanging suspended in time: he saw through the glass partition that bounded off the little office the malevolent conical head of his employer, Mr Moonlight Quill, bent over his correspondence. He saw Miss McCracken and Miss Masters as two patches of hair drooping over piles of paper; he saw the crimson lamp overhead, and noticed with a touch of pleasure how really pleasant and romantic it made the book-store seem.

  Then the thing happened, or rather it began to happen. Caroline picked up a volume of poems lying loose upon a pile, fingered it absently with her slender white hand, and suddenly, with an easy gesture, tossed it upward toward the ceiling, where it disappeared in the crimson lamp and lodged there, seen through the illuminated silk as a dark, bulging rectangle. This pleased her - she broke into young, contagious laughter, in which Merlin found himself presently joining.

  'It stayed up!' she cried merrily. 'It stayed up, didn't it?' To both of them this seemed the height of brilliant absurdity. Their laughter mingled, filled the bookshop, and Merlin was glad to find that her voice was rich and full of sorcery.

  'Try another,' he found himself suggesting - 'try a red one.'

  At this her laughter increased, and she had to rest her hands upon the stack to steady herself.

  'Try another,' she managed to articulate between spasms of mirth. 'Oh, golly, try another!'

  'Try two.'

  'Yes, try two. Oh, I'll choke if I don't stop laughing. Here it goes.'

  Suiting her action to the word, she picked up a red book and sent it in a gentle hyperbola toward the ceiling, where it sank into the lamp beside the first. It was a few minutes before either of them could do more than rock back and forth in helpless glee; but then by mutual agreement they took up the sport anew, this time in unison. Merlin seized a large, specially bound French classic and whirled it upward. Applauding his own accuracy, he took a bestseller in one hand and a book on barnacles in the other, and waited breathlessly while she made her shot. Then the business waxed fast and furious - sometimes they alternated, and, watching, he found how supple she was in every movement; sometimes one of them made shot after shot picking up the nearest book, sending it off, merely taking time to follow it with a glance before reaching for another. Within three minutes they had cleared a little place on the table, and the lamp of crimson satin was so bulging with books that it was near breaking.

  'Silly game, basket-ball,' she cried scornfully as a book left her hand. 'High-school girls play it in hideous bloomers.'

  'Idiotic,' he agreed.

  She paused in the act of tossing a book, and replaced it suddenly in its position on the table.

  'I think we've got room to sit down now,' she said gravely.

  They had; they had cleared an ample space for two. With a faint touch of nervousness Merlin glanced toward Mr Moonlight Quill's glass partition, but the three heads were still bent earnestly over their work, and it was evident that they had not seen what had gone on in the shop. So when Caroline put her hands on the table and hoisted herself up Merlin calmly imitated her, and they sat side by side looking very earnestly at each other.

  'I had to see you,' she began, with a rather pathetic expression in her brown eyes.

  'I know.'

  'It was that last time,' she continued, her voice trembling a little, though she tried to keep it steady. 'I was frightened. I don't like you to eat off the dresser. I'm so afraid you'll - you'll swallow a collar button.'

  'I did once - almost,' he confessed reluctantly, 'but it's not so easy, you know. I mean you can swallow the flat part easy enough or else the other part - that is, separately - but for a whole collar button you'd have to have a specially made throat.' He was astonishing himself by the debonnaire appropriateness of his remarks. Words seemed for the first time in his life to run at him shrieking to be used, gathering themselves into carefully arranged squads and platoons, and being presented to him by punctilious adjutants of paragraphs.

  'That's what scared me,' she said. 'I knew you had to have a specially made throat - and I knew, at least I felt sure, that you didn't have one.'

  He nodded frankly.

  'I haven't. It costs money to have one - more money unfortunately than I possess.'

  He felt no shame in saying this - rather a delight in making the admission - he knew that nothing he could say or do would be beyond her comprehension; least of all his poverty, and the practical impossibility of ever extricating himself from it.

  Caroline looked down at her wrist watch, and with a little cry slid from the table to her feet.

  'It's after five,' she cried. 'I didn't realize. I have to be at the Ritz at five-thirty. Let's hurry and get this done. I've got a bet on it.'

  With one accord they set to work. Caroline began the matter by seizing a book on insects and sending it whizzing, and finally crashing through the glass partition that housed Mr Moonlight Quill. The proprietor glanced up with a wild look, brushed a few pieces of glass from his desk, and went on with his letters. Miss McCracken gave no sign of having heard - only Miss Masters started and gave a little frightened scream before she bent to her task again.

  But to Merlin and Caroline it didn't matter. In a perfect orgy of energy they were hurling book after book in all directions, until sometimes three or four were in the air at once, smashing against shelves, cracking the glass of pictures on the walls, falling in bruised and torn heaps upon the floor. It was fortunate that no customers happened to come in, for it is certain they would never have come in again - the noise was too tremendous, a noise of smashing and ripping and tearing, mixed now and then with the tinkling of glass, the quick breathing of the two throwers, and the intermittent outbursts of laughter to which both of them periodically surrendered.

  At five-thirty Caroline tossed a last book at the lamp, and so gave the final impetus to the load it carried. The weakened silk tore and dropped its cargo in one vast splattering of white and color to the already littered floor. Then with a sigh of relief she turned to Merlin and held out her hand.

  'Good-by,' she said simply.

  'Are you going?' He knew she was. His question was simply a lingering wile to detain her and extract for another moment that dazzling essence of light he drew from her presence, to continue his enormous satisfaction in her features, which were like kisses and, he thought, like the features of a girl he had known back in 1910. For a minute he pressed the softness of her hand - then she smiled and withdrew it and, before he could spring to open the door, she had done it herself and was gone out into the turbid and ominous twilight that brooded narrowly over Forty-seventh Street.

  I would like to tell you how Merlin, having seen how beauty regards the wisdom of the years, walked into the little partition of Mr Moonlight Quill and gave up his job then and there; thence issuing out into the street a much finer and nobler and increasingly ironic man. But the truth is much more commonplace. Merlin Grainger stood up and
surveyed the wreck of the bookshop, the ruined volumes, the torn silk remnants of the once beautiful crimson lamp, the crystalline sprinkling of broken glass which lay in iridescent dust over the whole interior - and then he went to a corner where a broom was kept and began cleaning up and rearranging and, as far as he was able, restoring the shop to its former condition. He found that, though some few of the books were uninjured, most of them had suffered in varying extents. The backs were off some, the pages were torn from others, still others were just slightly cracked in the front, which, as all careless book returners know, makes a book unsalable, and therefore second-hand.

  Nevertheless by six o'clock he had done much to repair the damage. He had returned the books to their original places, swept the floor, and put new lights in the sockets overhead. The red shade itself was ruined beyond redemption, and Merlin thought in some trepidation that the money to replace it might have to come out of his salary. At six, therefore, having done the best he could, he crawled over the front window display to pull down the blind. As he was treading delicately back, he saw Mr Moonlight Quill rise from his desk, put on his overcoat and hat, and emerge into the shop. He nodded mysteriously at Merlin and went toward the door. With his hand on the knob he paused, turned around, and in a voice curiously compounded of ferocity and uncertainty, he said:

  'If that girl comes in here again, you tell her to behave.'

  With that he opened the door, drowning Merlin's meek 'Yessir' in its creak, and went out.

  Merlin stood there for a moment, deciding wisely not to worry about what was for the present only a possible futurity, and then he went into the back of the shop and invited Miss Masters to have supper with him at Pulpat's French Restaurant, where one could still obtain red wine at dinner, despite the Great Federal Government. Miss Masters accepted.

  'Wine makes me feel all tingly,' she said.

  Merlin laughed inwardly as he compared her to Caroline, or rather as he didn't compare her. There was no comparison.