 | Tales of the jazz age |  |
IX
One September day in 1910—a few years after Roger
Button & Co., Wholesale Hardware, had been handed
over to young Roscoe Button—a man, apparently about
twenty years old, entered himself as a freshman at
Harvard University in Cambridge. He did not make
the mistake of announcing that he would never see
fifty again nor did he mention the fact that his son had
been graduated from the same institution ten years before.
He was admitted, and almost immediately attained a
prominent position in the class, partly because he seemed
a little older than the other freshmen, whose average
age was about eighteen.
But his success was largely due to the fact that in the
football game with Yale he played so brilliantly, with so
much dash and with such a cold, remorseless anger that
he scored seven touchdowns and fourteen field goals for
Harvard, and caused one entire eleven of Yale men to
be carried singly from the field, unconscious. He was
the most celebrated man in college.
Strange to say, in his third or junior year he was
scarcely able to "make" the team. The coaches said
that he had lost weight, and it seemed to the more observant
among them that he was not quite as tall as
before. He made no touchdowns—indeed, he was retained
reputation would bring terror and disorganization to
the Yale team.
In his senior year he did not make the team at all. He
had grown so slight and frail that one day he was taken
by some sophomores for a freshman, an incident which
humiliated him terribly. He became known as something
of a prodigy—a senior who was surely no more
than sixteen—and he was often shocked at the worldliness
of some of his classmates. His studies seemed
harder to him—he felt that they were too advanced. He
had heard his classmates speak of St. Midas', the famous
preparatory school, at which so many of them had prepared
for college, and he determined after his graduation
to enter himself at St. Midas', where the sheltered
life among boys his own size would be more congenial
to him.
Upon his graduation in 1914 he went home to Baltimore
with his Harvard diploma in his pocket. Hildegarde
was now residing in Italy, so Benjamin went to
live with his son, Roscoe. But though he was welcomed
in a general way, there was obviously no heartiness in
Roscoe's feeling toward him—there was even perceptible
a tendency on his son's part to think that Benjamin,
as he moped about the house in adolescent mooniness,
was somewhat in the way. Roscie was married now and
prominent in Baltimore life, and he wanted no scandal
to creep out in connection with his family.
Benjamin, no longer persona grata with the débutantes
and younger college set, found himself left much
alone, except for the companionship of three or four
fifteen-year-old boys in the neighborhood. His idea of
going to St. Midas' school recurred to him.
"Say," he said to Roscoe one day, "I've told you over
and over that I want to go to prep school."
"Well, go, then," replied Roscoe shortly. The matter
was distasteful to him, and he wished to avoid a
discussion.
"I can't go alone," said Benjamin helplessly. "You'll
have to enter me and take me up there."
"I haven't got time," declared Roscoe abruptly. His
eyes narrowed and he looked uneasily at his father.
"As a matter of fact," he added, "you'd better not go
on with this business much longer. You better pull up
short. You better—you better"—he paused and his
face crimsoned as he sought for words—"you better
turn right around and start back the other way. This
has gone too far to be a joke. It isn't funny any longer.
You—you behave yourself!"
Benjamin looked at him, on the verge of tears.
"And another thing," continued Roscoe, "when visitors
are in the house I want you to call me `Uncle'—not
`Roscoe,' but `Uncle,' do you understand? It looks
absurd for a boy of fifteen to call me by my first name.
Perhaps you'd better call me `Uncle' all the time, so
you'll get used to it."
With a harsh look at his father, Roscoe turned
away. . . .
| Tales of the jazz age | |