Philip Van Doren Stern (ed)

by Travelers In Time

  "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 "Maxixe," 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 naive 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 disorganization 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', 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', 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 Ros-coe'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 debutantes and younger college set, found himself left much alone, except for the companionship of three or four fifteen-year-old boys in the neighborhood. His idea of going to St. Midas' 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. . . .

  1 o

  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 eyeglasses 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 comer 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. Vemon Place, so you know I'm good for it."

  "Well," admitted the clerk, hesitatingly, "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 Y. 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 someone 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 c
oncealed 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 dam 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 stem revenge.

  But this revenge did not materialize. Two days later, however, his son Roscoe materialized from Baltimore, hot and cross from a hasty trip, and escorted the weeping general, sans uniform, back to his hofne.

  1 1 §-k>

  In 1920 Roscoe Button's first child was bom. 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 favorite expression—but in a curious and perverse manner. Indeed, to think about the matter for as much as a half 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 colored 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 comer—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 realized 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 hatrack 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 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.

  Reprinted by permission of William Heinemann Ltd., and the Estate of Maurice Baring.

  Tke Alternative

  By MAURICE BARING

  I WAS READING HISTORY, AND NOT FOR FUN. I WAS READING FOR MY

  schools. My third year at Balliol was drawing to an end, and I was expected to do well, and at the back of my dreams there was a vision of a fellowship and a quiet life in the security of Oxford.

  I had been reading until late in the night. I was tired. I had been reading about Napoleon and the Russian Campaign of 1812. And now I had stopped reading and had fallen into an abstraction. I noticed that the time by the clock was 1.15.1 was thinking of great men and the part they played in history, and to what extent events were modified by phenomena, such as Caesar or Napoleon; as to whether they made a difference, or whether writers such as Tolstoi were right, who maintained that they made no difference. I thought of many things: of William James's Essay on Great Men, of Carlyle's Heroes, of Ferrerio, of Mr. Wells's Outline of History. What would have happened, I said to myself, if Napoleon's father had sent his son into the British Navy, as he wanted to do at one moment, instead of into the French Army? Would everything have been different, or would everything have been exactly the same?

  "Everything would have been different, but the result would have been just the same," said a voice at my elbow.

  I looked up and saw sitting in the armchair which stood on the left of my writing table a little old man. He was old and yet he did not look old. He was ageless. He had a thick head of hair, and you could not tell whether it was white or grey. His eyes were clear and luminous. There were no lines on his face. There were none of the usual signs of old age about him, and yet he gave the impression of immense old age, and of an almost infinite experience.

  I did not feel in the least surprised at this sudden apparition. It seemed to me quite natural that this strange unaged old man should be sitting in my armchair. I did not even interrupt; I merely waited for the old man to go on.

  "Everything would have been different, but the result would have been the same," the stranger repeated.
"You know how to play chess?" he asked.

  I said I was an enthusiastic but unskilful chess player.

  "Very well," said the stranger. "Supposing you play a game with a professional, you make certain mistakes, and you lose the game. Let us assume you keep a record of the moves, and that when the game is over your adversary allows you to play it over again. Say you rectify an initial blunder; you use different openings, different gambits; you have a new scheme, an improved strategical plan. Every move you make in this second game is different from those you made in the first game. But do you win? No. Because your adversary, the professional, changes his game in such a manner as to meet and answer the changed nature of your game. He replies to your new strategy with a new counter-strategy; his counter-moves lead you to move as he wishes, and in the end he checkmates you.

  "So it is with men in history. Supposing you were to eliminate the great men of history, and substitute for them men of a different nature; or supposing you left them as they were, but changed the quality of the moves and shortened or lengthened their careers inversely to what happened in history, as you know it, then every move in the game would be different; but, in spite of that, the march of history and the fate of mankind would be the same."

  "I understand that's quite possible," I said, "but forgive the question, how do you know?"

  "Because," said the stranger, "I am the historiographer of the Kingdom of Limbo. I teach the ghosts history—alternative history, in case they should be conceited."

  "Yes," I said, "but how I don't quite see. Films? A cinematograph?"

  "Oh, no," said the stranger. "We do better than that; we plunge the student into the life of an alternative world; alternative to the period in which he lived on earth; and we let him leam from experience, as an eyewitness, what that epoch would have been like had his part been either nonexistent or different."