The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories

by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  Suddenly the lights were on and the room was full of policemen, clubbing left and right. The deep voice boomed out:

  “Here now! Here now! Here now!”

  And then:

  “Quiet down and get out! Here now!”

  The room seemed to empty like a wash-bowl. A policeman fast-grappled in the corner released his hold on his soldier antagonist and started him with a shove toward the door. The deep voice continued. Edith perceived now that it came from a bull-necked police captain standing near the door.

  “Here now! This is no way! One of your own sojers got shoved out of the back window an’ killed hisself!”

  “Henry!” called Edith, “Henry!”

  She beat wildly with her fists on the back of the man in front of her; she brushed between two others; fought, shrieked, and beat her way to a very pale figure sitting on the floor close to a desk.

  “Henry,” she cried passionately, “what’s the matter? What’s the matter? Did they hurt you?”

  His eyes were shut. He groaned and then looking up said disgustedly——

  “They broke my leg. My God, the fools!”

  “Here now!” called the police captain. “Here now! Here now!”

  IX

  “Childs’, Fifty-ninth Street,” at eight o’clock of any morning differs from its sisters by less than the width of their marble tables or the degree of polish on the frying-pans. You will see there a crowd of poor people with sleep in the corners of their eyes, trying to look straight before them at their food so as not to see the other poor people. But Childs’, Fifty-ninth, four hours earlier is quite unlike any Childs’ restaurant from Portland, Oregon, to Portland, Maine. Within its pale but sanitary walls one finds a noisy medley of chorus girls, college boys, débutantes, rakes, filles de joie—a not unrepresentative mixture of the gayest of Broadway, and even of Fifth Avenue.

  In the early morning of May the second it was unusually full. Over the marble-topped tables were bent the excited faces of flappers whose fathers owned individual villages. They were eating buckwheat cakes and scrambled eggs with relish and gusto, an accomplishment that it would have been utterly impossible for them to repeat in the same place four hours later.

  Almost the entire crowd were from the Gamma Psi dance at Delmonico’s except for several chorus girls from a midnight revue who sat at a side table and wished they’d taken off a little more make-up after the show. Here and there a drab, mouse-like figure, desperately out of place, watched the butterflies with a weary, puzzled curiosity. But the drab figure was the exception. This was the morning after May Day, and celebration was still in the air.

  Gus Rose, sober but a little dazed, must be classed as one of the drab figures. How he had got himself from Forty-fourth Street to Fifty-ninth Street after the riot was only a hazy half-memory. He had seen the body of Carrol Key put in an ambulance and driven off, and then he had started up town with two or three soldiers. Somewhere between Forty-fourth Street and Fifty-ninth Street the other soldiers had met some women and disappeared. Rose had wandered to Columbus Circle and chosen the gleaming lights of Childs’ to minister to his craving for coffee and doughnuts. He walked in and sat down.

  All around him floated airy, inconsequential chatter and high-pitched laughter. At first he failed to understand, but after a puzzled five minutes he realized that this was the aftermath of some gay party. Here and there a restless, hilarious young man wandered fraternally and familiarly between the tables, shaking hands indiscriminately and pausing occasionally for a facetious chat, while excited waiters, bearing cakes and eggs aloft, swore at him silently, and bumped him out of the way. To Rose, seated at the most inconspicuous and least crowded table, the whole scene was a colorful circus of beauty and riotous pleasure.

  He became gradually aware, after a few moments, that the couple seated diagonally across from him, with their backs to the crowd, were not the least interesting pair in the room. The man was drunk. He wore a dinner coat with a dishevelled tie and shirt swollen by spillings of water and wine. His eyes, dim and bloodshot, roved unnaturally from side to side. His breath came short between his lips.

  “He’s been on a spree!” thought Rose.

  The woman was almost if not quite sober. She was pretty, with dark eyes and feverish high color, and she kept her active eyes fixed on her companion with the alertness of a hawk. From time to time she would lean and whisper intently to him, and he would answer by inclining his head heavily or by a particularly ghoulish and repellent wink.

  Rose scrutinized them dumbly for some minutes, until the woman gave him a quick, resentful look; then he shifted his gaze to two of the most conspicuously hilarious of the promenaders who were on a protracted circuit of the tables. To his surprise he recognized in one of them the young man by whom he had been so ludicrously entertained at Delmonico’s. This started him thinking of Key with a vague sentimentality, not unmixed with awe. Key was dead. He had fallen thirty-five feet and split his skull like a cracked cocoanut.

  “He was a darn good guy,” thought Rose mournfully. “He was a darn good guy, o’right. That was awful hard luck about him.”

  The two promenaders approached and started down between Rose’s table and the next, addressing friends and strangers alike with jovial familiarity. Suddenly Rose saw the fair-haired one with the prominent teeth stop, look unsteadily at the man and girl opposite, and then begin to move his head disapprovingly from side to side.

  The man with the blood-shot eyes looked up.

  “Gordy,” said the promenader with the prominent teeth, “Gordy.”

  “Hello,” said the man with the stained shirt thickly.

  Prominent Teeth shook his finger pessimistically at the pair, giving the woman a glance of aloof condemnation.

  “What’d I tell you Gordy?”

  Gordon stirred in his seat.

  “Go to hell!” he said.

  Dean continued to stand there shaking his finger. The woman began to get angry.

  “You go way!” she cried fiercely. “You’re drunk, that’s what you are!”

  “So’s he,” suggested Dean, staying the motion of his finger and pointing it at Gordon.

  Peter Himmel ambled up, owlish now and oratorically inclined.

  “Here now,” he began as if called upon to deal with some petty dispute between children. “Wha’s all trouble?”

  “You take your friend away,” said Jewel tartly. “He’s bothering us.”

  “What’s at?”

  “You heard me!” she said shrilly. “I said to take your drunken friend away.”

  Her rising voice rang out above the clatter of the restaurant and a waiter came hurrying up.

  “You gotta be more quiet!”

  “That fella’s drunk,” she cried. “He’s insulting us.”

  “Ah-ha, Gordy,” persisted the accused. “What’d I tell you.” He turned to the waiter. “Gordy an’ I friends. Been tryin’ help him, haven’t I, Gordy?”

  Gordy looked up.

  “Help me? Hell, no!”

  Jewel rose suddenly, and seizing Gordon’s arm assisted him to his feet.

  “Come on, Gordy!” she said, leaning toward him and speaking in a half whisper. “Let’s us get out of here. This fella’s got a mean drunk on.”

  Gordon allowed himself to be urged to his feet and started toward the door. Jewel turned for a second and addressed the provoker of their flight.

  “I know all about you!” she said fiercely. “Nice friend, you are, I’ll say. He told me about you.”

  Then she seized Gordon’s arm, and together they made their way through the curious crowd, paid their check, and went out.

  “You’ll have to sit down,” said the waiter to Peter after they had gone.

  “What’s ’at? Sit down?”

  “Yes—or get out.”

  Peter turned to Dean.

  “Come on,” he suggested. “Let’s beat up this waiter.”

  “All right.”

  They advanced
toward him, their faces grown stern. The waiter retreated.

  Peter suddenly reached over to a plate on the table beside him and picking up a handful of hash tossed it into the air. It descended as a languid parabola in snowflake effect on the heads of those near by.

  “Hey! Ease up!”

  “Put him out!”

  “Sit down, Peter!”

  “Cut out that stuff!”

  Peter laughed and bowed.

  “Thank you for your kind applause, ladies and gents. If some one will lend me some more hash and a tall hat we will go on with the act.”

  The bouncer bustled up.

  “You’ve gotta get out!” he said to Peter.

  “Hell, no!”

  “He’s my friend!” put in Dean indignantly.

  A crowd of waiters were gathering. “Put him out!”

  “Better go, Peter.”

  There was a short struggle and the two were edged and pushed toward the door.

  “I got a hat and a coat here!” cried Peter.

  “Well, go get ’em and be spry about it!”

  The bouncer released his hold on Peter, who, adopting a ludicrous air of extreme cunning, rushed immediately around to the other table, where he burst into derisive laughter and thumbed his nose at the exasperated waiters.

  “Think I just better wait a l’il longer,” he announced.

  The chase began. Four waiters were sent around one way and four another. Dean caught hold of two of them by the coat, and another struggle took place before the pursuit of Peter could be resumed; he was finally pinioned after overturning a sugar-bowl and several cups of coffee. A fresh argument ensued at the cashier’s desk, where Peter attempted to buy another dish of hash to take with him and throw at policemen.

  But the commotion upon his exit proper was dwarfed by another phenomenon which drew admiring glances and a prolonged involuntary “Oh-h-h!” from every person in the restaurant.

  The great plate-glass front had turned to a deep creamy blue, the color of a Maxfield Parrish moonlight9—a blue that seemed to press close upon the pane as if to crowd its way into the restaurant. Dawn had come up in Columbus Circle, magical, breathless dawn, silhouetting the great statue of the immortal Christopher,10 and mingling in a curious and uncanny manner with the fading yellow electric light inside.

  X

  Mr. In and Mr. Out are not listed by the census-taker. You will search for them in vain through the social register or the births, marriages, and deaths, or the grocer’s credit list. Oblivion has swallowed them and the testimony that they ever existed at all is vague and shadowy, and inadmissible in a court of law. Yet I have it upon the best authority that for a brief space Mr. In and Mr. Out lived, breathed, answered to their names and radiated vivid personalities of their own.

  During the brief span of their lives they walked in their native garments down the great highway of a great nation; were laughed at, sworn at, chased, and fled from. Then they passed and were heard of no more.

  They were already taking form dimly, when a taxicab with the top open breezed down Broadway in the faintest glimmer of May dawn. In this car sat the souls of Mr. In and Mr. Out discussing with amazement the blue light that had so precipitately colored the sky behind the statue of Christopher Columbus, discussing with bewilderment the old, gray faces of the early risers which skimmed palely along the street like blown bits of paper on a gray lake. They were agreed on all things, from the absurdity of the bouncer in Childs’ to the absurdity of the business of life. They were dizzy with the extreme maudlin happiness that the morning had awakened in their glowing souls. Indeed, so fresh and vigorous was their pleasure in living that they felt it should be expressed by loud cries.

  “Ye-ow-ow!” hooted Peter, making a megaphone with his hands—and Dean joined in with a call that, though equally significant and symbolic, derived its resonance from its very inarticulate-ness.

  “Yo-ho! Yea! Yoho! Yo-buba!”

  Fifty-third Street was a bus with a dark, bobbed-hair beauty atop; Fifty-second was a street cleaner who dodged, escaped, and sent up a yell of, “Look where you’re aimin’!” in a pained and grieved voice. At Fiftieth Street a group of men on a very white sidewalk in front of a very white building turned to stare after them, and shouted:

  “Some party, boys!”

  At Forty-ninth Street Peter turned to Dean. “Beautiful morning,” he said gravely, squinting up his owlish eyes.

  “Probably is.”

  “Go get some breakfast, hey?”

  Dean agreed—with additions.

  “Breakfast and liquor.”

  “Breakfast and liquor,” repeated Peter, and they looked at each other, nodding. “That’s logical.”

  Then they both burst into loud laughter.

  “Breakfast and liquor! Oh, gosh!”

  “No such thing,” announced Peter.

  “Don’t serve it? Ne’mind. We force ’em serve it. Bring pressure bear.”

  “Bring logic bear.”

  The taxi cut suddenly off Broadway, sailed along a cross street, and stopped in front of a heavy tomb-like building in Fifth Avenue.

  “What’s idea?”

  The taxi-driver informed them that this was Delmonico’s.

  This was somewhat puzzling. They were forced to devote several minutes to intense concentration, for if such an order had been given there must have been a reason for it.

  “Somep’m ’bouta coat,” suggested the taxi-man.

  That was it. Peter’s overcoat and hat. He had left them at Delmonico’s. Having decided this, they disembarked from the taxi and strolled toward the entrance arm in arm.

  “Hey!” said the taxi-driver.

  “Huh?”

  “You better pay me.”

  They shook their heads in shocked negation.

  “Later, not now—we give orders, you wait.”

  The taxi-driver objected; he wanted his money now. With the scornful condescension of men exercising tremendous self-control they paid him.

  Inside Peter groped in vain through a dim, deserted check-room in search of his coat and derby.

  “Gone, I guess. Somebody stole it.”

  “Some Sheff student.”

  “All probability.”

  “Never mind,” said Dean, nobly. “I’ll leave mine here too—then we’ll both be dressed the same.”

  He removed his overcoat and hat and was hanging them up when his roving glance was caught and held magnetically by two large squares of cardboard tacked to the two coat-room doors. The one on the left-hand door bore the word “In” in big black letters, and the one on the right-hand door flaunted the equally emphatic word “Out.”

  “Look!” he exclaimed happily——

  Peter’s eyes followed his pointing finger.

  “What?”

  “Look at the signs. Let’s take ’em.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Probably pair very rare an’ valuable signs. Probably come in handy.”

  Peter removed the left-hand sign from the door and endeavored to conceal it about his person. The sign being of considerable proportions, this was a matter of some difficulty. An idea flung itself at him, and with an air of dignified mystery he turned his back. After an instant he wheeled dramatically around, and stretching out his arms displayed himself to the admiring Dean. He had inserted the sign in his vest, completely covering his shirt front. In effect, the word “In” had been painted upon his shirt in large black letters.

  “Yoho!” cheered Dean. “Mister In.”

  He inserted his own sign in like manner.

  “Mister Out!” he announced triumphantly. “Mr. In meet Mr. Out.”

  They advanced and shook hands. Again laughter overcame them and they rocked in a shaken spasm of mirth.

  “Yoho!”

  “We probably get a flock of breakfast.”

  “We’ll go—go to the Commodore.”

  Arm in arm they sallied out the door, and turning east in Forty-fourth Street set out
for the Commodore.

  As they came out a short dark soldier, very pale and tired, who had been wandering listlessly along the sidewalk, turned to look at them.

  He started over as though to address them, but as they immediately bent on him glances of withering unrecognition, he waited until they had started unsteadily down the street, and then followed at about forty paces, chuckling to himself and saying “Oh, boy!” over and over under his breath, in delighted, anticipatory tones.

  Mr. In and Mr. Out were meanwhile exchanging pleasantries concerning their future plans.

  “We want liquor; we want breakfast. Neither without the other. One and indivisible.”

  “We want both ’em!”

  “Both ’em!”

  It was quite light now, and passers-by began to bend curious eyes on the pair. Obviously they were engaged in a discussion, which afforded each of them intense amusement, for occasionally a fit of laughter would seize upon them so violently that, still with their arms interlocked, they would bend nearly double.

  Reaching the Commodore, they exchanged a few spicy epigrams with the sleepy-eyed doorman, navigated the revolving door with some difficulty, and then made their way through a thinly populated but startled lobby to the dining-room, where a puzzled waiter showed them an obscure table in a corner. They studied the bill of fare helplessly, telling over the items to each other in puzzled mumbles.

  “Don’t see any liquor here,” said Peter reproachfully.

  The waiter became audible but unintelligible.

  “Repeat,” continued Peter, with patient tolerance, “that there seems to be unexplained and quite distasteful lack of liquor upon bill of fare.”

  “Here!” said Dean confidently, “let me handle him.” He turned to the waiter—“Bring us—bring us—” he scanned the bill of fare anxiously. “Bring us a quart of champagne and a—a—probably ham sandwich.”

  The waiter looked doubtful.

  “Bring it!” roared Mr. In and Mr. Out in chorus.

  The waiter coughed and disappeared. There was a short wait during which they were subjected without their knowledge to a careful scrutiny by the head-waiter. Then the champagne arrived, and at the sight of it Mr. In and Mr. Out became jubilant.