The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (11 page)

“Who's he?” asked Sally Carrol innocently.

“Don't you know?”

“I've heard the name.”

“Greatest wheat man in the Northwest, and one of the greatest financiers in the country.”

She turned suddenly to a voice on her right.

“I guess they forgot to introduce us. My name's Roger Patton.”

“My name is Sally Carrol Happer,” she said graciously.

“Yes, I know. Harry told me you were coming.”

“You a relative?”

“No, I'm a professor.”

“Oh,” she laughed.

“At the university. You're from the South, aren't you?”

“Yes; Tarleton, Georgia.”

She liked him immediately—a reddish-brown mustache under watery blue eyes that had something in them that these other eyes lacked, some quality of appreciation. They exchanged stray sentences through dinner, and she made up her mind to see him again.

After coffee she was introduced to numerous good-looking young men who danced with conscious precision and seemed to take it for granted that she wanted to talk about nothing except Harry.

“Heavens,” she thought, “they talk as if my being engaged made me older than they are—as if I'd tell their mothers on them!”

In the South an engaged girl, even a young married woman, expected the same amount of half-affectionate badinage and flattery that would be accorded a débutante, but here all that seemed banned. One young man, after getting well started on the subject of Sally Carrol's eyes, and how they had allured him ever since she entered the room, went into a violent confusion when he found she was visiting the Bellamys—was Harry's fiancée. He seemed to feel as though he had made some risqué and inexcusable blunder, became immediately formal, and left her at the first opportunity.

She was rather glad when Roger Patton cut in on her and suggested that they sit out a while.

“Well,” he inquired, blinking cheerily, “how's Carmen from the South?”
¹

“Mighty fine. How's—how's Dangerous Dan McGrew? Sorry, but he's the only Northerner I know much about.”

He seemed to enjoy that.

“Of course,” he confessed, “as a professor of literature I'm not supposed to have read Dangerous Dan McGrew.”

“Are you a native?”

“No, I'm a Philadelphian. Imported from Harvard to teach French. But I've been here ten years.”

“Nine years, three hundred an' sixty-four days longer than me.”

“Like it here?”

“Uh-huh. Sure do!”

“Really?”

“Well, why not? Don't I look as if I were havin' a good time?”

“I saw you look out the window a minute ago—and shiver.”

“Just my imagination,” laughed Sally Carrol. “I'm used to havin' everythin' quiet outside, an' sometimes I look out an' see a flurry of snow, an' it's just as if somethin' dead was movin'.”

He nodded appreciatively.

“Ever been North before?”

“Spent two Julys in Asheville, North Carolina.”

“Nice-looking crowd, aren't they?” suggested Patton, indicating the swirling floor.

Sally Carrol started. This had been Harry's remark.

“Sure are! They're—canine.”

“What?”

She flushed.

“I'm sorry; that sounded worse than I meant it. You see I always think of people as feline or canine, irrespective of sex.”

“Which are you?”

“I'm feline. So are you. So are most Southern men an' most of these girls here.”

“What's Harry?”

“Harry's canine distinctly. All the men I've met to-night seem to be canine.”

“What does ‘canine' imply? A certain conscious masculinity as opposed to subtlety?”

“Reckon so. I never analyzed it—only I just look at people an' say ‘canine' or ‘feline' right off. It's right absurd, I guess.”

“Not at all. I'm interested. I used to have a theory about these people. I think they're freezing up.”

“What?”

“I think they're growing like Swedes—Ibsenesque, you know. Very gradually getting gloomy and melancholy. It's these long winters. Ever read any Ibsen
²
?”

She shook her head.

“Well, you find in his characters a certain brooding rigidity. They're righteous, narrow, and cheerless, without infinite possibilities for great sorrow or joy.”

“Without smiles or tears?”

“Exactly. That's my theory. You see there are thousands of Swedes up here. They come, I imagine, because the climate is very much like their own, and there's been a gradual mingling. There're probably not half a dozen here to-night, but—we've had four Swedish governors. Am I boring you?'

“I'm mighty interested.”

“Your future sister-in-law is half Swedish. Personally I like her, but my theory is that Swedes react rather badly on us as a whole. Scandinavians, you know, have the largest suicide rate in the world.”

“Why do you live here if it's so depressing?”

“Oh, it doesn't get me. I'm pretty well cloistered, and I suppose books mean more than people to me anyway.”

“But writers all speak about the South being tragic. You know—Spanish señoritas, black hair and daggers an' haunting music.”

He shook his head.

“No, the Northern races are the tragic races—they don't indulge in the cheering luxury of tears.”

Sally Carrol thought of her graveyard. She supposed that that was vaguely what she had meant when she said it didn't depress her.

“The Italians are about the gayest people in the world—but it's a dull subject,” he broke off. “Anyway, I want to tell you you're marrying a pretty fine man.”

Sally Carrol was moved by an impulse of confidence.

“I know. I'm the sort of person who wants to be taken care of after a certain point, and I feel sure I will be.”

“Shall we dance? You know,” he continued as they rose, “it's encouraging to find a girl who knows what she's marrying for. Nine-tenths of them think of it as a sort of walking into a moving-picture sunset.”

She laughed, and liked him immensely.

Two hours later on the way home she nestled near Harry in the back seat.

“Oh, Harry,” she whispered, “it's so co-old!”

“But it's warm in here, darling girl.”

“But outside it's cold; and oh, that howling wind!”

She buried her face deep in his fur coat and trembled involuntarily as his cold lips kissed the tip of her ear.

The first week of her visit passed in a whirl. She had her promised toboggan-ride at the back of an automobile through a chill January twilight. Swathed in furs she put in a morning tobogganing on the country-club hill; even tried skiing, to sail through the air for a glorious moment and then land in a tangled laughing bundle on a soft snow-drift. She liked all the winter sports, except an afternoon spent snow-shoeing over a glaring plain under pale yellow sunshine, but she soon realized that these things were for children—that she was being humored and that the enjoyment round her was only a reflection of her own.

At first the Bellamy family puzzled her. The men were reliable and she liked them; to Mr. Bellamy especially, with his iron-gray hair and energetic dignity, she took an immediate fancy, once she found that he was born in Kentucky; this made of him a link between the old life and the new. But toward the women she felt a definite hostility. Myra, her future sister-in-law, seemed the essence of spiritless conventionality. Her conversation was so utterly devoid of personality that Sally Carrol, who came from a country where a certain amount of charm and assurance could be taken for granted in the women, was inclined to despise her.

“If those women aren't beautiful,” she thought, “they're nothing. They just fade out when you look at them. They're glorified domestics. Men are the center of every mixed group.”

Lastly there was Mrs. Bellamy, whom Sally Carrol detested. The first day's impression of an egg had been confirmed—an egg with a cracked, veiny voice and such an ungracious dumpiness of carriage that Sally Carrol felt that if she once fell she would surely scramble. In addition, Mrs. Bellamy seemed to typify the town in being innately hostile to strangers. She called Sally Carrol “Sally,” and could not be persuaded that the double name was anything more than a tedious ridiculous nickname. To Sally Carrol this shortening of her name was like presenting her to the public half clothed. She loved “Sally Carrol”; she loathed “Sally.” She knew also that Harry's mother disapproved of her bobbed hair; and she had never dared smoke downstairs after that first day when Mrs. Bellamy had come into the library sniffing violently.

Of all the men she met she preferred Roger Patton, who was a frequent visitor at the house. He never again alluded to the Ibsenesque tendency of the populace, but when he came in one day and found her curled upon the sofa bent over “Peer Gynt”
³
he laughed and told her to forget what he'd said—that it was all rot.

And then one afternoon in her second week she and Harry hovered on the edge of a dangerously steep quarrel. She considered that he precipitated it entirely, though the Serbia
⁴
in the case was an unknown man who had not had his trousers pressed.

They had been walking homeward between mounds of high-piled snow and under a sun which Sally Carrol scarcely recognized. They passed a little girl done up in gray wool until she resembled a small Teddy bear, and Sally Carrol could not resist a gasp of maternal appreciation.

“Look! Harry!”

“What?”

“That little girl—did you see her face?”

“Yes, why?”

“It was red as a little strawberry. Oh, she was cute!”

“Why, your own face is almost as red as that already! Everybody's healthy here. We're out in the cold as soon as we're old enough to walk. Wonderful climate!”

She looked at him and had to agree. He was mighty healthy-looking; so was his brother. And she had noticed the new red in her own cheeks that very morning.

Suddenly their glances were caught and held, and they stared for a moment at the street-corner ahead of them. A man was standing there, his knees bent, his eyes gazing upward with a tense expression as though he were about to make a leap toward the chilly sky. And then they both exploded into a shout of laughter, for coming closer they discovered it had been a ludicrous momentary illusion produced by the extreme bagginess of the man's trousers.

“Reckon that's one on us,” she laughed.

“He must be a Southerner, judging by those trousers,” suggested Harry mischievously.

“Why, Harry!”

Her surprised look must have irritated him.

“Those damn Southerners!”

Sally Carrol's eyes flashed.

“Don't call 'em that!”

“I'm sorry, dear,” said Harry, malignantly apologetic, “but you know what I think of them. They're sort of—sort of degenerates—not at all like the old Southerners. They've lived so long down there with all the colored people that they've gotten lazy and shiftless.”

“Hush your mouth, Harry!” she cried angrily. “They're not! They may be lazy—anybody would be in that climate—but they're my best friends, an' I don't want to hear 'em criticised in any such sweepin' way. Some of 'em are the finest men in the world.”

“Oh, I know. They're all right when they come North to college, but of all the hangdog, ill-dressed, slovenly lot I ever saw, a bunch of small-town Southerners are the worst!”

Sally Carrol was clinching her gloved hands and biting her lip furiously.

“Why,” continued Harry, “there was one in my class at New Haven, and we all thought that at last we'd found the true type of Southern aristocrat, but it turned out that he wasn't an aristocrat at all—just the son of a Northern carpetbagger, who owned about all the cotton round Mobile.”

“A Southerner wouldn't talk the way you're talking now,” she said evenly.

“They haven't the energy!”

“Or the somethin' else.”

“I'm sorry, Sally Carrol, but I've heard you say yourself that you'd never marry——”

“That's quite different. I told you I wouldn't want to tie my life to any of the boys that are round Tarleton now, but I never made any sweepin' generalities.”

They walked along in silence.

“I probably spread it on a bit thick, Sally Carrol. I'm sorry.”

She nodded but made no answer. Five minutes later as they stood in the hallway she suddenly threw her arms round him.

“Oh, Harry,” she cried, her eyes brimming with tears, “let's get married next week. I'm afraid of having fusses like that. I'm afraid, Harry. It wouldn't be that way if we were married.”

But Harry, being in the wrong, was still irritated.

“That'd be idiotic. We decided on March.”

The tears in Sally Carrol's eyes faded; her expression hardened slightly.

“Very well—I suppose I shouldn't have said that.”

Harry melted.

“Dear little nut!” he cried. “Come and kiss me and let's forget.” That very night at the end of a vaudeville performance the orchestra played “Dixie” and Sally Carrol felt something stronger and more enduring than her tears and smiles of the day brim up inside her. She leaned forward gripping the arms of her chair until her face grew crimson.

“Sort of get you, dear?” whispered Harry.