The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (43 page)

“I don't think of it that way. You're young, and you're acting just as you were brought up to act. Go ahead—have a good time?”

Her feet, which had been idly swinging, stopped and her voice dropped a note.

“I wish you'd—you'd come back to Harrisburg and have a good time. Do you feel sure that you're on the right track——”

“You're wearing beautiful stockings,” he interrupted. “What on earth are they?”

“They're embroidered,” she replied, glancing down. “Aren't they cunning?” She raised her skirts and uncovered slim, silk-sheathed calves. “Or do you disapprove of silk stockings?”

He seemed slightly exasperated, bent his dark eyes on her piercingly.

“Are you trying to make me out as criticizing you in any way, Edith?”

“Not at all——”

She paused. Bartholomew had uttered a grunt. She turned and saw that he had left his desk and was standing at the window.

“What is it?” demanded Henry.

“People,” said Bartholomew, and then after an instant: “Whole jam of them. They're coming from Sixth Avenue.”

“People?”

The fat man pressed his nose to the pane.

“Soldiers, by God!” he said emphatically. “I had an idea they'd come back.”

Edith jumped to her feet, and running over joined Bartholomew at the window.

“There's a lot of them!” she cried excitedly. “Come here, Henry!”

Henry readjusted his shade, but kept his seat.

“Hadn't we better turn out the lights?” suggested Bartholomew.

“No. They'll go away in a minute.”

“They're not,” said Edith, peering from the window. “They're not even thinking of going away. There's more of them coming. Look—there's a whole crowd turning the corner of Sixth Avenue.”

By the yellow glow and blue shadows of the street lamp she could see that the sidewalk was crowded with men. They were mostly in uniform, some sober, some enthusiastically drunk, and over the whole swept an incoherent clamor and shouting.

Henry rose, and going to the window exposed himself as a long silhouette against the office lights. Immediately the shouting became a steady yell, and a rattling fusillade of small missiles, corners of tobacco plugs, cigarette-boxes, and even pennies beat against the window. The sounds of the racket now began floating up the stairs as the folding doors revolved.

“They're coming up!” cried Bartholomew.

Edith turned anxiously to Henry.

“They're coming up, Henry.”

From down-stairs in the lower hall their cries were now quite audible.

“—God damn Socialists!”

“Pro-Germans! Boche-lovers!”

“Second floor, front! Come on!”

“We'll get the sons——”

The next five minutes passed in a dream. Edith was conscious that the clamor burst suddenly upon the three of them like a cloud of rain, that there was a thunder of many feet on the stairs, that Henry had seized her arm and drawn her back toward the rear of the office. Then the door opened and an overflow of men were forced into the room—not the leaders, but simply those who happened to be in front.

“Hello, Bo!”

“Up late, ain't you?”

“You an' your girl. Damn
you!
”

She noticed that two very drunken soldiers had been forced to the front, where they wobbled fatuously—one of them was short and dark, the other was tall and weak of chin.

Henry stepped forward and raised his hand.

“Friends!” he said.

The clamor faded into a momentary stillness, punctuated with mutterings.

“Friends!” he repeated, his far-away eyes fixed over the heads of the crowd, “you're injuring no one but yourselves by breaking in here to-night. Do we look like rich men? Do we look like Germans? I ask you in all fairness——”

“Pipe down!”

“I'll say you do!”

“Say, who's your lady friend, buddy?”

A man in civilian clothes, who had been pawing over a table, suddenly held up a newspaper.

“Here it is!” he shouted. “They wanted the Germans to win the war!”

A new overflow from the stairs was shouldered in and of a sudden the room was full of men all closing around the pale little group at the back. Edith saw that the tall soldier with the weak chin was still in front. The short dark one had disappeared.

She edged slightly backward, stood close to the open window, through which came a clear breath of cool night air.

Then the room was a riot. She realized that the soldiers were surging forward, glimpsed the fat man swinging a chair over his head—instantly the lights went out, and she felt the push of warm bodies under rough cloth, and her ears were full of shouting and trampling and hard breathing.

A figure flashed by her out of nowhere, tottered, was edged sideways, and of a sudden disappeared helplessly out through the open window with a frightened, fragmentary cry that died staccato on the bosom of the clamor. By the faint light streaming from the building backing on the area Edith had a quick impression that it had been the tall soldier with the weak chin.

Anger rose astonishingly in her. She swung her arms wildly, edged blindly toward the thickest of the scuffling. She heard grunts, curses, the muffled impact of fists.

“Henry!” she called frantically, “Henry!”

Then, it was minutes later, she felt suddenly that there were other figures in the room. She heard a voice, deep, bullying, authoritative; she saw yellow rays of light sweeping here and there in the fracas. The cries became more scattered. The scuffling increased and then stopped.

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!”

“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.”