Загадочная история Бенджамина Баттона / The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

“I am grown,” he announced determinedly. “I want to put on long trousers.”

His father hesitated.

“Well,” he said finally, “I don’t know. Fourteen is the age for putting on long trousers – and you are only twelve.”

“But you’ll have to admit,” protested Benjamin, “that I’m big for my age.”

His father looked at him with illusory speculation.

“Oh, I’m not so sure of that,” he said. “I was as big as you when I was twelve.”

This was not true – it was all part of Roger Button’s silent agreement with himself to believe in his son’s normality.

Finally a compromise was reached. Benjamin was to continue to dye his hair. He was to make a better attempt to play with boys of his own age. He was not to wear his spectacles or carry a cane in the street. In return for these concessions he was allowed his first suit of long trousers…

IV

Of the life of Benjamin Button between his twelfth and twenty-first year I intend to say little. Suffice to record that they were years of normal ungrowth. When Benjamin was eighteen he was erect as a man of fifty; he had more hair and it was of a dark gray; his step was firm, his voice had lost its cracked quaver and descended to a healthy baritone. So his father sent him up to Connecticut to take examinations for entrance to Yale College. Benjamin passed his examination and became a member of the freshman class.

On the third day following his matriculation he received a notification from Mr. Hart, the college registrar, to call at his office and arrange his schedule. Benjamin, glancing in the mirror, decided that his hair needed a new application of its brown dye, but an anxious inspection of his bureau drawer disclosed that the dye bottle was not there. Then he remembered – he had emptied it the day before and thrown it away.

He was in a dilemma. He was due at the registrar’s in five minutes. There seemed to be no help for it – he must go as he was. He did.

“Good-morning,” said the registrar politely. “You’ve come to inquire about your son.”

“Why, as a matter of fact, my name’s Button-” began Benjamin, but Mr. Hart cut him off.

“I’m very glad to meet you, Mr. Button. I’m expecting your son here any minute.”

“That’s me!” burst out Benjamin. “I’m a freshman.”

“What!”

“I’m a freshman.”

“Surely you’re joking.”

“Not at all.”

The registrar frowned and glanced at a card before him.

“Why, I have Mr. Benjamin Button’s age down here as eighteen.”

“That’s my age,” asserted Benjamin, flushing slightly.

The registrar eyed him wearily.

“Now surely, Mr. Button, you don’t expect me to believe that.”

Benjamin smiled wearily.

“I am eighteen,” he repeated.

The registrar pointed sternly to the door.

“Get out,” he said. “Get out of college and get out of town. You are a dangerous lunatic.”

“I am eighteen.”

Mr. Hart opened the door.

“The idea!” he shouted. “A man of your age trying to enter here as a freshman. Eighteen years old, are you? Well, I’ll give you eighteen minutes to get out of town.”

Benjamin Button walked with dignity from the room, and half a dozen undergraduates, who were waiting in the hall, followed him curiously with their eyes. When he had gone a little way he turned around, faced the infuriated registrar, who was still standing in the doorway, and repeated in a firm voice:

“I am eighteen years old.”

To a chorus of titters which went up from the group of undergraduates, Benjamin walked away.

But he was not fated to escape so easily. On his melancholy walk to the railroad station he found that he was being followed by a group, then by a swarm, and finally by a dense mass of undergraduates. The word had gone around that a lunatic had passed the entrance examinations for Yale and attempted to palm himself off as a youth of eighteen. A fever of excitement permeated the college. Men ran hatless out of classes, the football team abandoned its practice and joined the mob, professors’ wives with bonnets awry and bustles out of position, ran shouting after the procession, from which proceeded a continual succession of remarks aimed at the tender sensibilities of Benjamin Button.

“He must be the wandering Jew!”

“He ought to go to prep school at his age!”

“Look at the infant prodigy!”

“He thought this was the old men’s home.”

“Go up to Harvard!”

Benjamin increased his gait, and soon he was running. He would show them! He would go to Harvard, and then they would regret these ill-considered taunts!

Safely on board the train for Baltimore, he put his head from the window.

“You’ll regret this!” he shouted.

“Ha-ha!” the undergraduates laughed. “Ha-ha-ha!” It was the biggest mistake that Yale College had ever made…

V

In 1880 Benjamin Button was twenty years old, and he signalised his birthday by going to work for his father in Roger Button amp; Co., Wholesale Hardware. It was in that same year that he began “going out socially”-that is, his father insisted on taking him to several fashionable dances. Roger Button was now fifty, and he and his son were more and more companionable – in fact, since Benjamin had ceased to dye his hair (which was still grayish) they appeared about the same age, and could have passed for brothers.

One night in August they got into the phaeton attired in their full-dress suits and drove out to a dance at the Shevlins’ country house, situated just outside of Baltimore. It was a gorgeous evening. A full moon drenched the road to the lustreless colour of platinum, and late-blooming harvest flowers breathed into the motionless air aromas that were like low, half-heard laughter. The open country, carpeted for rods around with bright wheat, was translucent as in the day. It was almost impossible not to be affected by the sheer beauty of the sky – almost.

“There’s a great future in the dry-goods business,” Roger Button was saying. He was not a spiritual man – his aesthetic sense was rudimentary.

“Old fellows like me can’t learn new tricks,” he observed profoundly. “It’s you youngsters with energy and vitality that have the great future before you.”