 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
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
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. . . .
| Tales of the jazz age | |