The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Other Jazz Age Stories (61 page)

He worked still in the bookshop with the assistance of a youth, whom, of course, he considered very idle, indeed, and a new young woman, Miss Gaffney. Miss McCracken, ancient and unvenerable as himself, still kept the accounts. Young Arthur was gone into Wall Street to sell bonds, as all the young men seemed to be doing in that day. This, of course, was as it should be. Let old Merlin get what magic he could from his books—the place of young King Arthur was in the counting-house.

One afternoon at four when he had slipped noiselessly up to the front of the store on his soft-soled slippers, led by a newly formed habit, of which, to be fair, he was rather ashamed, of spying upon the young man clerk, he looked casually out of the front window, straining his faded eyesight to reach the street. A limousine, large, portentous, impressive, had drawn to the curb, and the chauffeur, after dismounting and holding some sort of conversation with persons in the interior of the car, turned about and advanced in a bewildered fashion toward the entrance of the Moonlight Quill. He opened the door, shuffled in, and, glancing uncertainly at the old man in the skull-cap, addressed him in a thick, murky voice, as through his words came through a fog.

“Do you—do you sell additions?”

Merlin nodded.

“The arithmetic books are in the back of the store.”

The chauffeur took off his cap and scratched a close-cropped, fuzzy head.

“Oh, naw. This I want's a detecatif story.” He jerked a thumb back toward the limousine. “She seen it in the paper. Firs' addition.”

Merlin's interest quickened. Here was possibly a big sale.

“Oh, editions. Yes, we've advertised some firsts, but—detective stories, I—don't—believe—What was the title?”

“I forget. About a crime.”

“About a crime. I have—well, I have ‘The Crimes of the Borgias'—full morocco, London 1769, beautifully—”

“Naw,” interrupted the chauffeur, “this was one fella did this crime. She seen you had it for sale in the paper.” He rejected several possible titles with the air of connoisseur.

“ ‘Silver Bones,' ” he announced suddenly out of a slight pause.

“What?” demanded Merlin, suspecting that the stiffness of his sinews were being commented on.

“Silver Bones. That was the guy that done the crime.”

“Silver Bones?”

“Silver Bones. Indian, maybe.”

Merlin stroked his grizzly cheeks.

“Gees, Mister,” went on the prospective purchaser, “if you wanna save me an awful bawlin' out jes' try an' think. The old lady goes wile if everything don't run smooth.”

But Merlin's musings on the subject of Silver Bones were as futile as his obliging search through the shelves, and five minutes later a very dejected charioteer wound his way back to his mistress. Through the glass Merlin could see the visible symbols of a tremendous uproar going on in the interior of the limousine. The chauffeur made wild, appealing gestures of his innocence, evidently to no avail, for when he turned around and climbed back into the driver's seat his expression was not a little dejected.

Then the door of the limousine opened and gave forth a pale and slender young man of about twenty, dressed in the attenuation of fashion and carrying a wisp of a cane. He entered the shop, walked past Merlin, and proceeded to take out a cigarette and light it. Merlin approached him.

“Anything I can do for you, sir?”

“Old boy,” said the youth coolly, “there are several things. You can first let me smoke my ciggy in here out of sight of that old lady in the limousine, who happens to be my grandmother. Her knowledge as to whether I smoke it or not before my majority happens to be a matter of five thousand dollars to me. The second thing is that you should look up your first edition of the ‘Crime of Sylvester Bonnard' that you advertised in last Sunday's
Times.
My grandmother there happens to want to take it off your hands.”

Detecatif story! Crime of somebody! Silver Bones! All was explained. With a faint deprecatory chuckle, as if to say that he would have enjoyed this had life put him in the habit of enjoying anything, Merlin doddered away to the back of his shop where his treasures were kept, to get this latest investment which he had picked up rather cheaply at the sale of a big collection.

When he returned with it the young man was drawing on his cigarette and blowing out quantities of smoke with immense satisfaction.

“My God!” he said. “She keeps me so close to her the entire day running idiotic errands that this happens to be my first puff in six hours. What's the world coming to, I ask you, when a feeble old lady in the milk-toast era can dictate to a man as to his personal vices? I happen to be unwilling to be so dictated to. Let's see the book.”

Merlin passed it to him tenderly and the young man, after opening it with a carelessness that gave a momentary jump to the book-dealer's heart, ran through the pages with his thumb.

“No illustrations, eh?” he commented. “Well, old boy, what's it worth? Speak up! We're willing to give you a fair price, though why I don't know.”

“One hundred dollars,” said Merlin with a frown.

The young man gave a startled whistle.

“Whew! Come on. You're not dealing with somebody from the cornbelt. I happen to be a city-bred man and my grandmother happens to be a city-bred woman, though I'll admit it'd take a special tax appropriation to keep her in repair. We'll give you twenty-five dollars, and let me tell you that's liberal. We've got books in our attic, up in our attic with my old play-things, that were written before the old boy that wrote this was born.”

Merlin stiffened, expressing a rigid and meticulous horror.

“Did your grandmother give you twenty-five dollars to buy this with?”

“She did not. She gave me fifty, but she expects change. I know that old lady.”

“You tell her,” said Merlin with dignity, “that she has missed a very great bargain.”

“Give you forty,” urged the young man. “Come on now—be reasonable and don't try to hold us up——”

Merlin had wheeled around with the precious volume under his arm and was about to return it to its special drawer in his office when there was a sudden interruption. With unheard-of magnificence the front door burst rather than swung open, and admitted into the dark interior a regal apparition in black silk and fur which bore rapidly down upon him. The cigarette leaped from the fingers of the urban young man and he gave breath to an inadvertent “Damn!”—but it was upon Merlin that the entrance seemed to have the most remarkable and incongruous effect—so strong an effect that the greatest treasure of his shop slipped from his hand and joined the cigarette on the floor. Before him stood Caroline.

She was an old woman, an old woman remarkably preserved, unusually handsome, unusually erect, but still an old woman. Her hair was a soft, beautiful white, elaborately dressed and jewelled; her face, faintly rouged à la grande dame, showed webs of wrinkles at the edges of her eyes and two deeper lines in the form of stanchions connected her nose with the corners of her mouth. Her eyes were dim, ill natured, and querulous.

But it was Caroline without a doubt: Caroline's features though in decay; Caroline's figure, if brittle and stiff in movement; Caroline's manner, unmistakably compounded of a delightful insolence and an enviable self assurance; and, most of all, Caroline's voice, broken and shaky, yet with a ring in it that still could and did make chauffeurs want to drive laundry wagons and cause cigarettes to fall from the fingers of urban grandsons.

She stood and sniffed. Her eyes found the cigarette upon the floor.

“What's that?” she cried. The words were not a question—they were an entire litany of suspicion, accusation, confirmation, and decision. She tarried over them scarcely an instant. “Stand up!” she said to her grandson, “stand up and blow that nicotine out of your lungs!”

The young man looked at her in trepidation.

“Blow!” she commanded.

He pursed his lips feebly and blew into the air.

“Blow!” she repeated, more peremptorily than before.

He blew again, helplessly, ridiculously.

“Do you realize,” she went on briskly, “that you've forfeited five thousand dollars in five minutes?”

Merlin momentarily expected the young man to fall pleading upon his knees, but such is the nobility of human nature that he remained standing—even blew again into the air, partly from nervousness, partly, no doubt, with some vague hope of reingratiating himself.

“Young ass!” cried Caroline. “Once more, just once more and you leave college and go to work.”

This threat had such an overwhelming effect upon the young man that he took on an even paler pallor than was natural to him. But Caroline was not through.

“Do you think I don't know what you and your brothers, yes, and your asinine father too, think of me? Well, I do. You think I'm senile. You think I'm soft. I'm not!” She struck herself with her fist as though to prove that she was a mass of muscle and sinew. “And I'll have more brains left when you've got me laid out in the drawing-room some sunny day than you and the rest of them were born with.”

“But Grandmother—”

“Be quiet. You, a thin little stick of a boy, who if it weren't for my money might have risen to be a journey-man barber out in the Bronx—Let me see your hands. Ugh! The hands of a barber—
you
presume to be smart with
me,
who once had three counts and a bonafide duke, not to mention half a dozen papal titles pursue me from the city of Rome to the city of New York.” She paused, took breath. “Stand up! Blow!”

The young man obediently blew. Simultaneously the door opened and an excited gentleman of middle age who wore a coat and hat trimmed with fur, and seemed, moreover, to be trimmed with the same sort of fur himself on upper lip and chin, rushed into the store and up to Caroline.

“Found you at last,” he cried. “Been looking for you all over town. Tried your house on the 'phone and your secretary told me he thought you'd gone to a bookshop called the Moonlight——”

Caroline turned to him irritably.

“Do I employ you for your reminiscences?” she snapped. “Are you my tutor or my broker?”

“Your broker,” confessed the fur-trimmed man, taken somewhat aback. “I beg your pardon. I came about that phonograph stock. I can sell for a hundred and five.”

“Then do it.”

“Very well. I thought I'd better——”

“Go sell it. I'm talking to my grandson.”

“Very well. I——”

“Good-by.”

“Good-by, Madame.” The fur-trimmed man made a slight bow and hurried in some confusion from the shop.

“As for you,” said Caroline, turning to her grandson, “you stay just where you are and be quiet.”

She turned to Merlin and included his entire length in a not unfriendly survey. Then she smiled and he found himself smiling too. In an instant they had both broken into a cracked but none the less spontaneous chuckle. She seized his arm and hurried him to the other side of the store. There they stopped, faced each other, and gave vent to another long fit of senile glee.

“It's the only way,” she gasped in a sort of triumphant malignity. “The only thing that keeps old folks like me happy is the sense that they can make other people step around. To be old and rich and have poor descendants is almost as much fun as to be young and beautiful and have ugly sisters.”

“Oh, yes,” chuckled Merlin. “I know. I envy you.”

She nodded, blinking.

“The last time I was in here, forty years ago,” she said, “you were a young man very anxious to kick up your heels.”

“I was,” he confessed.

“My visit must have meant a good deal to you.”

“You have all along,” he exclaimed. “I thought—I used to think at first that you were a real person—human, I mean.”

She laughed.

“Many men have thought me inhuman.”

“But now,” continued Merlin excitedly, “I understand. Understanding is allowed to us old people—after nothing much matters. I see now that on a certain night when you danced upon a table-top you were nothing but my romantic yearning for a beautiful and perverse woman.”

Her old eyes were far away, her voice no more than the echo of a forgotten dream.

“How I danced that night! I remember.”

“You were making an attempt at me. Olive's arms were closing about me and you warned me to be free and keep my measure of youth and irresponsibility. But it seemed like an effect gotten up at the last moment. It came too late.”

“You are very old,” she said inscrutably. “I did not realize.”

“Also I have not forgotten what you did to me when I was thirty-five. You shook me with that traffic tie-up. It was a magnificent effort. The beauty and power you radiated! You became personified even to my wife, and she feared you. For weeks I wanted to slip out of the house at dark and forget the stuffiness of life with music and cocktails and a girl to make me young. But then—I no longer knew how.”

“And now you are so very old.”

With a sort of awe she moved back and away from him.

“Yes, leave me!” he cried. “You are old also; the spirit withers with the skin. Have you come here only to tell me something I had best forget: that to be old and poor is perhaps more wretched than to be old and rich; to remind me that
my
son hurls my gray failure in my face?”

“Give me my book,” she commanded harshly. “Be quick, old man!”