 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
VII
In one particular, at least, the friends of Hildegarde
Moncrief were mistaken. The wholesale hardware business
prospered amazingly. In the fifteen years between
Benjamin Button's marriage in 1880 and his father's retirement
in 1895, the family fortune was doubled—and
this was due largely to the younger member of the firm.
Needless to say, Baltimore eventually received the
couple to its bosom. Even old General Moncrief became
reconciled to his son-in-law when Benjamin gave
War" in twenty volumes, which had been refused by
nine prominent publishers.
In Benjamin himself fifteen years had wrought many
changes. It seemed to him that the blood flowed with
new vigor through his veins. It began to be a pleasure
to rise in the morning, to walk with an active step along
the busy, sunny street, to work untiringly with his shipments
of hammers and his cargoes of nails. It was in
1890 that he executed his famous business coup: he
brought up the suggestion that all nails used in nailing
up the boxes in which nails are shipped are the property of
the shippee, a proposal which became a statute, was approved
by Chief Justice Fossile, and saved Roger Button
and Company, Wholesale Hardware, more than six hundred
nails every year.
In addition, Benjamin discovered that he was becoming
more and more attracted by the gay side of life. It
was typical of his growing enthusiasm for pleasure that
he was the first man in the city of Baltimore to own and
run an automobile. Meeting him on the street, his contemporaries
would stare enviously at the picture he made
of health and vitality.
"He seems to grow younger every year," they would
remark. And if old Roger Button, now sixty-five years
old, had failed at first to give a proper welcome to his
son he atoned at last by bestowing on him what
amounted to adulation.
And here we come to an unpleasant subject which it
will be well to pass over as quickly as possible. There
was only one thing that worried Benjamin Button: his
wife had ceased to attract him.
At that time Hildegarde was a woman of thirty-five,
with a son, Roscoe, fourteen years old. In the early
days of their marriage Benjamin had worshipped her.
an unexciting brown, the blue enamel of her eyes assumed
the aspect of cheap crockery—moreover, and most of
all, she had become too settled in her ways, too placid,
too content, too anemic in her excitements, and too
sober in her taste. As a bride it had been she who had
"dragged" Benjamin to dances and dinners—now conditions
were reversed. She went out socially with him,
but without enthusiasm, devoured already by that
eternal inertia which comes to live with each of us one
day and stays with us to the end.
Benjamin's discontent waxed stronger. At the outbreak
of the Spanish-American War in 1898 his home had
for him so little charm that he decided to join the army.
With his business influence he obtained a commission as
captain, and proved so adaptable to the work that he
was made a major, and finally a lieutenant-colonel just
in time to participate in the celebrated charge up San
Juan Hill. He was slightly wounded, and received a
medal.
Benjamin had become so attached to the activity and
excitement of army life that he regretted to give it up,
but his business required attention, so he resigned his
commission and came home. He was met at the station
by a brass band and escorted to his house.
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