The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  “Yes, I suppose I did. Everybody told me there was no hurry—and I’d had these various offers.”

  Mr. Macy delivered a paragraph on present-day opportunities which Dalyrimple’s mind completely skipped.

  “Have you had any business experience?”

  “I worked on a ranch two summers as a rider.”

  “Oh, well,” Mr. Macy disparaged this neatly, and then continued: “What do you think you’re worth?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, Bryan, I tell you, I’m willing to strain a point and give you a chance.”

  Dalyrimple nodded.

  “Your salary won’t be much. You’ll start by learning the stock. Then you’ll come in the office for a while. Then you’ll go on the road. When could you begin?”

  “How about to-morrow?”

  “All right. Report to Mr. Hanson in the stock-room. He’ll start you off.”

  He continued to regard Dalyrimple steadily until the latter, realizing that the interview was over, rose awkwardly.

  “Well, Mr. Macy, I’m certainly much obliged.”

  “That’s all right. Glad to help you, Bryan.”

  After an irresolute moment, Dalyrimple found himself in the hall. His forehead was covered with perspiration, and the room had not been hot.

  “Why the devil did I thank the son of a gun?” he muttered.

  III

  Next morning Mr. Hanson informed him coldly of the necessity of punching the time-clock at seven every morning, and delivered him for instruction into the hands of a fellow worker, one Charley Moore.

  Charley was twenty-six, with that faint musk of weakness hanging about him that is often mistaken for the scent of evil. It took no psychological examiner to decide that he had drifted into indulgence and laziness as casually as he had drifted into life, and was to drift out. He was pale and his clothes stank of smoke; he enjoyed burlesque shows, billiards, and Robert Service,4 and was always looking back upon his last intrigue or forward to his next one. In his youth his taste had run to loud ties, but now it seemed to have faded, like his vitality, and was expressed in pale-lilac four-in-hands and indeterminate gray collars. Charley was listlessly struggling that losing struggle against mental, moral, and physical anæmia that takes place ceaselessly on the lower fringe of the middle classes.

  The first morning he stretched himself on a row of cereal cartons and carefully went over the limitations of the Theron G. Macy Company.

  “It’s a piker organization. My Gosh! Lookit what they give me. I’m quittin’ in a coupla months. Hell! Me stay with this bunch!”

  The Charley Moores are always going to change jobs next month. They do, once or twice in their careers, after which they sit around comparing their last job with the present one, to the infinite disparagement of the latter.

  “What do you get?” asked Dalyrimple curiously.

  “Me? I get sixty.” This rather defiantly.

  “Did you start at sixty?”

  “Me? No, I started at thirty-five. He told me he’d put me on the road after I learned the stock. That’s what he tells ’em all.”

  “How long’ve you been here?” asked Dalyrimple with a sinking sensation.

  “Me? Four years. My last year, too, you bet your boots.”

  Dalyrimple rather resented the presence of the store detective as he resented the time-clock, and he came into contact with him almost immediately through the rule against smoking. This rule was a thorn in his side. He was accustomed to his three or four cigarettes in a morning, and after three days without it he followed Charley Moore by a circuitous route up a flight of back stairs to a little balcony where they indulged in peace. But this was not for long. One day in his second week the detective met him in a nook of the stairs, on his descent, and told him sternly that next time he’d be reported to Mr. Macy. Dalyrimple felt like an errant schoolboy.

  Unpleasant facts came to his knowledge. There were “cave-dwellers” in the basement who had worked there for ten or fifteen years at sixty dollars a month, rolling barrels and carrying boxes through damp, cement-walled corridors, lost in that echoing half-darkness between seven and five-thirty and, like himself, compelled several times a month to work until nine at night.

  At the end of a month he stood in line and received forty dollars. He pawned a cigarette-case and a pair of field-glasses and managed to live—to eat, sleep, and smoke. It was, however, a narrow scrape; as the ways and means of economy were a closed book to him and the second month brought no increase, he voiced his alarm.

  “If you’ve got a drag with old Macy, maybe he’ll raise you,” was Charley’s disheartening reply. “But he didn’t raise me till I’d been here nearly two years.”

  “I’ve got to live,” said Dalyrimple simply. “I could get more pay as a laborer on the railroad but, Golly, I want to feel I’m where there’s a chance to get ahead.”

  Charles shook his head sceptically and Mr. Macy’s answer next day was equally unsatisfactory.

  Dalyrimple had gone to the office just before closing time.

  “Mr. Macy, I’d like to speak to you.”

  “Why—yes.” The unhumorous smile appeared. The voice was faintly resentful.

  “I want to speak to you in regard to more salary.”

  Mr. Macy nodded.

  “Well,” he said doubtfully, “I don’t know exactly what you’re doing. I’ll speak to Mr. Hanson.”

  He knew exactly what Dalyrimple was doing, and Dalyrimple knew he knew.

  “I’m in the stock-room—and, sir, while I’m here I’d like to ask you how much longer I’ll have to stay there.”

  “Why—I’m not sure exactly. Of course it takes some time to learn the stock.”

  “You told me two months when I started.”

  “Yes. Well, I’ll speak to Mr. Hanson.”

  Dalyrimple paused irresolute.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Two days later he again appeared in the office with the result of a count that had been asked for by Mr. Hesse, the bookkeeper. Mr. Hesse was engaged and Dalyrimple, waiting, began idly fingering a ledger on the stenographer’s desk.

  Half unconsciously he turned a page—he caught sight of his name—it was a salary list:

  Dalyrimple

  Demming

  Donahoe

  Everett

  His eyes stopped——

  Everett..............................................................................................$60

  So Tom Everett, Macy’s weak-chinned nephew, had started at sixty—and in three weeks he had been out of the packing-room and into the office.

  So that was it! He was to sit and see man after man pushed over him: sons, cousins, sons of friends, irrespective of their capabilities, while he was cast for a pawn, with “going on the road” dangled before his eyes—put off with the stock remark: “I’ll see; I’ll look into it.” At forty, perhaps, he would be a bookkeeper like old Hesse, tired, listless Hesse with dull routine for his stint and a dull background of boarding-house conversation.

  This was a moment when a genii should have pressed into his hand the book for disillusioned young men. But the book has not been written.

  A great protest swelling into revolt surged up in him. Ideas half forgotten, chaoticly perceived and assimilated, filled his mind. Get on—that was the rule of life—and that was all. How he did it, didn’t matter—but to be Hesse or Charley Moore.

  “I won’t!” he cried aloud.

  The bookkeeper and the stenographers looked up in surprise.

  “What?”

  For a second Dalyrimple stared—then walked up to the desk.

  “Here’s that data,” he said brusquely. “I can’t wait any longer.”

  Mr. Hesse’s face expressed surprise.

  It didn’t matter what he did—just so he got out of this rut. In a dream he stepped from the elevator into the stock-room, and walking to an unused aisle, sat down on a box, covering his face with his hands.
<
br />   His brain was whirring with the frightful jar of discovering a platitude for himself.

  “I’ve got to get out of this,” he said aloud and then repeated, “I’ve got to get out”—and he didn’t mean only out of Macy’s wholesale house.

  When he left at five-thirty it was pouring rain, but he struck off in the opposite direction from his boarding-house, feeling, in the first cool moisture that oozed soggily through his old suit, an odd exultation and freshness. He wanted a world that was like walking through rain, even though he could not see far ahead of him, but fate had put him in the world of Mr. Macy’s fetid storerooms and corridors. At first merely the overwhelming need of change took him, then half-plans began to formulate in his imagination.

  “I’ll go East—to a big city—meet people—bigger people—people who’ll help me. Interesting work somewhere. My God, there must be.”

  With sickening truth it occurred to him that his facility for meeting people was limited. Of all places it was here in his own town that he should be known, was known—famous—before the waters of oblivion had rolled over him.

  You had to cut corners, that was all. Pull—relationship—wealthy marriages——

  For several miles the continued reiteration of this preoccupied him and then he perceived that the rain had become thicker and more opaque in the heavy gray of twilight and that the houses were falling away. The district of full blocks, then of big houses, then of scattering little ones, passed and great sweeps of misty country opened out on both sides. It was hard walking here. The sidewalk had given place to a dirt road, streaked with furious brown rivulets that splashed and squashed around his shoes.

  Cutting corners—the words began to fall apart, forming curious phrasings—little illuminated pieces of themselves. They resolved into sentences, each of which had a strangely familiar ring.

  Cutting corners meant rejecting the old childhood principles that success came from faithfulness to duty, that evil was necessarily punished or virtue necessarily rewarded—that honest poverty was happier than corrupt riches.

  It meant being hard.

  This phrase appealed to him and he repeated it over and over. It had to do somehow with Mr. Macy and Charley Moore—the attitudes, the methods of each of them.

  He stopped and felt his clothes. He was drenched to the skin. He looked about him and, selecting a place in the fence where a tree sheltered it, perched himself there.

  In my credulous years—he thought—they told me that evil was a sort of dirty hue, just as definite as a soiled collar, but it seems to me that evil is only a manner of hard luck, or heredity-and-environment, or “being found out.” It hides in the vacillations of dubs like Charley Moore as certainly as it does in the intolerance of Macy, and if it ever gets much more tangible it becomes merely an arbitrary label to paste on the unpleasant things in other people’s lives.

  In fact—he concluded—it isn’t worth worrying over what’s evil and what isn’t. Good and evil aren’t any standard to me—and they can be a devil of a bad hindrance when I want something. When I want something bad enough, common sense tells me to go and take it—and not get caught.

  And then suddenly Dalyrimple knew what he wanted first. He wanted fifteen dollars to pay his overdue board bill.

  With a furious energy he jumped from the fence, whipped off his coat, and from its black lining cut with his knife a piece about five inches square. He made two holes near its edge and then fixed it on his face, pulling his hat down to hold it in place. It flapped grotesquely and then dampened and clung to his forehead and cheeks.

  Now . . . The twilight had merged to dripping dusk . . . black as pitch. He began to walk quickly back toward town, not waiting to remove the mask but watching the road with difficulty through the jagged eye-holes. He was not conscious of any nervousness . . . the only tension was caused by a desire to do the thing as soon as possible.

  He reached the first sidewalk, continued on until he saw a hedge far from any lamp-post, and turned in behind it. Within a minute he heard several series of footsteps—he waited—it was a woman and he held his breath until she passed . . . and then a man, a laborer. The next passer, he felt, would be what he wanted . . . the laborer’s footfalls died far up the drenched street . . . other steps grew near, grew suddenly louder.

  Dalyrimple braced himself.

  “Put up your hands!”

  The man stopped, uttered an absurd little grunt, and thrust pudgy arms skyward.

  Dalyrimple went through the waistcoat.

  “Now, you shrimp,” he said, setting his hand suggestively to his own hip pocket, “you run, and stamp—loud! If I hear your feet stop I’ll put a shot after you!”

  Then he stood there in sudden uncontrollable laughter as audibly frightened footsteps scurried away into the night.

  After a moment he thrust the roll of bills into his pocket, snatched off his mask, and running quickly across the street, darted down an alley.

  IV

  Yet, however Dalyrimple justified himself intellectually, he had many bad moments in the weeks immediately following his decision. The tremendous pressure of sentiment and inherited tradition kept raising riot with his attitude. He felt morally lonely.

  The noon after his first venture he ate in a little lunch-room with Charley Moore and, watching him unspread the paper, waited for a remark about the hold-up of the day before. But either the hold-up was not mentioned or Charley wasn’t interested. He turned listlessly to the sporting sheet, read Doctor Crane’s crop of seasoned bromides, took in an editorial on ambition with his mouth slightly ajar, and then skipped to Mutt and Jeff.5

  Poor Charley—with his faint aura of evil and his mind that refused to focus, playing a lifeless solitaire with cast-off mischief.

  Yet Charley belonged on the other side of the fence. In him could be stirred up all the flamings and denunciations of righteousness; he would weep at a stage heroine’s lost virtue, he could become lofty and contemptuous at the idea of dishonor.

  On my side, thought Dalyrimple, there aren’t any resting-places; a man who’s a strong criminal is after the weak criminals as well, so it’s all guerilla warfare over here.

  What will it all do to me? he thought, with a persistent weariness. Will it take the color out of life with the honor? Will it scatter my courage and dull my mind?—despiritualize me completely—does it mean eventual barrenness, eventual remorse, failure?

  With a great surge of anger, he would fling his mind upon the barrier—and stand there with the flashing bayonet of his pride. Other men who broke the laws of justice and charity lied to all the world. He at any rate would not lie to himself. He was more than Byronic now: not the spiritual rebel, Don Juan; not the philosophical rebel, Faust6; but a new psychological rebel of his own century—defying the sentimental a priori forms of his own mind——

  Happiness was what he wanted—a slowly rising scale of gratifications of the normal appetites—and he had a strong conviction that the materials, if not the inspiration of happiness, could be bought with money.

  V

  The night came that drew him out upon his second venture, and as he walked the dark street he felt in himself a great resemblance to a cat—a certain supple, swinging litheness. His muscles were rippling smoothly and sleekly under his spare, healthy flesh—he had an absurd desire to bound along the street, to run dodging among trees, to turn “cart-wheels” over soft grass.

  It was not crisp, but in the air lay a faint suggestion of acerbity, inspirational rather than chilling.

  “The moon is down—I have not heard the clock!”

  He laughed in delight at the line which an early memory had endowed with a hushed, awesome beauty.

  He passed a man, and then another a quarter of mile afterward.

  He was on Philmore Street now and it was very dark. He blessed the city council for not having put in new lamp-posts as a recent budget had recommended. Here was the red-brick Sterner residence which marked the beginning of the avenue; h
ere was the Jordon house, the Eisenhaurs’, the Dents’, the Markhams’, the Frasers’; the Hawkins’, where he had been a guest; the Willoughbys’, the Everetts’, colonial and ornate; the little cottage where lived the Watts old maids between the imposing fronts of the Macys’ and the Krupstadts’; the Craigs’——

  Ah . . . there! He paused, wavered violently—far up the street was a blot, a man walking, possibly a policeman. After an eternal second he found himself following the vague, ragged shadow of a lamp-post across a lawn, running bent very low. Then he was standing tense, without breath or need of it, in the shadow of his limestone prey.

  Interminably he listened—a mile off a cat howled, a hundred yards away another took up the hymn in a demoniacal snarl, and he felt his heart dip and swoop, acting as shock-absorber for his mind. There were other sounds; the faintest fragment of song far away; strident, gossiping laughter from a back porch diagonally across the alley; and crickets, crickets singing in the patched, patterned, moonlit grass of the yard. Within the house there seemed to lie an ominous silence. He was glad he did not know who lived here.

  His slight shiver hardened to steel; the steel softened and his nerves became pliable as leather; gripping his hands he gratefully found them supple, and taking out knife and pliers he went to work on the screen.

  So sure was he that he was unobserved that, from the dining-room where in a minute he found himself, he leaned out and carefully pulled the screen up into position, balancing it so it would neither fall by chance nor be a serious obstacle to a sudden exit.

  Then he put the open knife in his coat pocket, took out his pocket-flash, and tiptoed around the room.

  There was nothing here he could use—the dining-room had never been included in his plans, for the town was too small to permit disposing of silver.

  As a matter of fact his plans were of the vaguest. He had found that with a mind like his, lucrative in intelligence, intuition, and lightning decision, it was best to have but the skeleton of a campaign. The machine-gun episode had taught him that. And he was afraid that a method preconceived would give him two points of view in a crisis—and two points of view meant wavering.