Gladiator Page 4

  “The stronger, the greater, you are, the harder life is for you. And you’re the strongest of them all, Hugo.”

  The heart of the ten-year-old boy burned and vibrated. “And what about God?” he asked.

  Danner looked into the darkened sky. “I don’t know much about Him,” he sighed.

  Hugo was eighteen before he gave any other indication of his strength save in that fantastic and Gargantuan play which he permitted himself. Even his play was intruded upon by the small-minded and curious world before he had found the completeness of its pleasure. Then Hugo fell into his coma.

  Hugo went back to the deep forest to think things over and to become acquainted with his powers. At first, under full pressure of his sinews, he was clumsy and inaccurate. He learned deftness by trial and error. One day he found a huge pit in the tangled wilderness. It had been an open mine long years before. Sitting on its brink, staring into its pool of verdure, dreaming, he conceived a manner of entertainment suitable for his powers.

  He jumped over its craggy edge and walked to its center. There he selected a high place, and with his hands he cleared away the growth that covered it. Next he laid the foundations of a fort, over which he was to watch the fastness for imaginary enemies. The foundations were made of boulders. Some he carried and some he rolled from the floor of the man-made canyon. By the end of the afternoon he had laid out a square wall of rock some three feet in height. On the next day he added to it until the four walls reached as high as he could stretch. He left space for one door and he made a single window. He roofed the walls with the trunks of trees and he erected a turret over the door.

  For days the creation was his delight. After school he sped to it—Until dark he strained and struggled with bare rocks. When it was finished, it was an edifice that would have withstood artillery fire creditably.

  Then he played in it. He pretended that Indians were stalking him. An imaginary head would appear at the rim of the pit. Hugo would see it through a chink. Swish! Crash! A puff of dust would show where rock met rock—with the attacker’s head between. At times he would be stormed on all sides. To get the effect he would leap the canyon and hurl boulders on his own fort. Then he would return and defend it.

  It was after such a strenuous sally and while he was waiting in high excitement for the enemy to reappear that Professors Whitaker and Smith from the college stumbled on his stronghold. They were walking together through the forest, bent on scaling the mountain to make certain observations of an ancient cirque that was formed by the seventh great glacier. As they walked, they debated matters of strata curvature. Suddenly Whitaker gripped Smith’s arm. “Look!”

  They stared through the trees and over the lip of Hugo’s mine. Their eyes bulged as they observed the size and weight of the fortress.

  “Moonshiners,” Smith whispered.

  “Rubbish. Moonshiners don’t build like that. It’s a second Stonehenge. An Indian relic.”

  “But there’s a sign of fresh work around it.”

  Whitaker observed the newly turned earth and the freshly bared rock. “Perhaps—perhaps, professor, we’ve fallen upon something big. A lost race of Indian engineers. A branch of the Incas-or—”

  “Maybe they’ll be hostile.”

  The men edged forward. And at the moment they reached the edge of the pit, Hugo emerged from his fort. He saw the men with sudden fear. He tried to hide.

  “Hey!” they said. He did not move, but he heard them scrambling slowly toward the spot where he lay.

  “Dressed in civilized clothes,” the first professor said in a loud voice as his eye located Hugo in the underbrush. “Hey!”

  Hugo showed himself. “What?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Hugo Danner.”

  “Oh—old Danner’s boy, eh?”

  Hugo did not like the tone in which they referred to his father. He made no reply.

  “Can you tell us anything about these ruins?”

  “What ruins?”

  They pointed to his fort. Hugo was hurt. “Those aren’t ruins. I built that fort. It’s to fight Indians in.”

  The pair ignored his answer and started toward the fort. Hugo did not protest. They surveyed its weighty walls and its relatively new roof.

  “Looks recent,” Smith said.

  “This child has evidently renovated it. But it must have stood here for thousands of years.”

  “It didn’t. I made it—mostly last week.”

  They noticed him again. Whitaker simpered. “Don’t lie, young man.”

  Hugo was sad. “I’m not lying. I made it. You see—I’m strong.” It was as if he had pronounced his own damnation.

  “Tut, tut,” Smith interrupted his survey. “Did you find it?”

  “I built it.”

  The professor, in the interests of science made a grave mistake. He seized Hugo by the arms and shook him. “Now, see here, young man, I’ll have no more of your impertinent lip. Tell me just what you’ve done to harm this noble monument to another race, or, I swear, I’ll slap you properly.” The professor had no children. He tried, at the same time, another tack, which insulted Hugo further. “If you do, I’ll give you a penny—to keep.”

  Hugo wrenched himself free with an ease that startled Smith. His face was dark, almost black. He spoke slowly, as if he was trying to piece words into sense. “You—both of you—you go away from here and leave me or I’ll break your two rotten old necks.”

  Whitaker moved toward him, and Smith interceded. “We better leave him—and come back later.” He was still frightened by the strength in Hugo’s arms. “The child is mad. He may have hydrophobia. He might bite.” The men moved away hastily. Hugo watched them climb the wall. When they reached the top, he called gently. They wheeled.

  And Hugo, sobbing, tears streaming from his face, leaped into his fort. Rocks vomited themselves from it—huge rocks that no man could budge. Walls toppled and crashed. The men began to move. Hugo looked up. He chose a stone that weighed more than a hundred pounds.

  “Hey!” he said. “I’m not a liar!” The rock arched through the air and Professors Whitaker and Smith escaped death by a scant margin. Hugo lay in the wreck of the first thing his hands had built, and wept.

  After a little while he sprang to his feet and chased the retreating professors. When he suddenly appeared in front of them, they were stricken dumb. “Don’t tell any one about that or about me,” he said. “If you do—I’ll break down your house just like I broke mine. Don’t even tell my family. They know it, anyhow.”

  He leaped. Toward them—over them. The forest hid him. Whitaker wiped clammy perspiration from his brow. “What was it, Smith?”

  “A demon. We can’t mention it,” he repeated, thinking of the warning. “We can’t speak of it anyway. They’ll never believe us.”

  Chapter V

  EXTREMELY dark of hair, of eyes and skin, moderately tall, and shaped with that compact, breath-taking symmetry that the male figure sometimes assumes, a brilliantly devised, aggressive head topping his broad shoulders, graceful, a man vehemently alive, a man with the promise of a young god. Hugo at eighteen. His emotions ran through his eyes like hot steel in a dark mold. People avoided those eyes; they contained a statement from which ordinary souls shrank.

  His skin glowed and sweated into a shiny red-brown. His voice was deep and alluring. During twelve long and fierce years he had fought to know and control himself. Indian Creek had forgotten the terrible child.

  Hugo’s life at that time revolved less about himself than it had during his first years. That was both natural and fortunate. If his classmates in school and the older people of the town had not discounted his early physical precocity, even his splendid vitality might not have been sufficient to prevent him from becoming moody and melancholy.

  His adolescence, his emotions, were no different from those of any young man of his age and character. If his ultimate ambitions followed another trajectory, he postponed the evidence of it, Hugo w
as in love with Anna Blake, a girl who had attracted him when he was six. The residents of Indian Creek knew it. Her family received his calls with the winking tolerance which the middle class grants to young passion. And she was warm and tender and flirtatious and shy according to the policies that she had learned from custom.

  Anna had grown into a very attractive woman. Her figure was rounded and tall. Her hair was darker than the waxy curls of her childhood, and a vital gleam had come into it. Her eyes were still as blue and her voice, shorn of its faltering youngness, was sweet and clear. She was undoubtedly the prettiest girl in high school and the logical sweetheart for Hugo Danner. A flower ready to be plucked, at eighteen.

  When Hugo reached his senior year, that readiness became almost an impatience. Girls married at an early age in Indian Creek. She looked down the corridor of time during which he would be in college, she felt the pressure of his still slumbering passion, and she sensed his superiority over most of the town boys. Only a very narrow critic would call her resultant tactics dishonorable. They were too intensely human and too clearly born of social and biological necessity.

  She had let him kiss her when they were sixteen. And afterwards, before she went to sleep, she sighed rapturously at the memory of his warm, firm lips, his strong, rough arms. Hugo had gone home through the dizzily spinning dusk, through the wind-strummed trees and the fragrant fields, his breath deep in his chest, his eyes hot and somewhat understanding.

  Gradually Anna increased that license. She knew and she did not know what she was doing. She played a long game in which she said: “If our love is consummated too soon, the social loss will be balanced by a speedier marriage, because Hugo is honorable; but that will never happen.” When, finally, he called one night at her house and found that she was alone and that her parents and her brother would not return until the next day, they looked at each other with a shining agreement. He turned the lights out and they sat on the couch in the darkness, listening to the passing of people on the sidewalk outside. He undressed her. He whispered halting, passionate phrases. He asked her if she was afraid and let himself be laughed away from his own conscience. Then he took her and loved her.

  Afterwards, going home again in the gloom of late night, he looked up at the stars and they stood still. He realized that a certain path of life had been followed to its conclusion. He felt initiated into the adult world. And it had been so simple, so natural, so sweet… . He threw a great stone into the river and laughed and walked on, after a while.

  Through the summer that followed, Hugo and Anna ran the course of their affair. They loved each other violently and incessantly and with no other evil consequence than to invite the open “humphs” of village gossips and to involve him in several serious talks with her father. Their courtship was given the benefit of conventional doubt, however, and their innocence was hotly if covertly protested by the Blakes.

  Mrs. Danner coldly ignored every fragment of insinuation. She hoped that Hugo and Anna would announce their engagement and she hinted that hope. Hugo himself was excited and absorbed. Occasionally he thought he was sterile, with an inclination to be pleased rather than concerned if it was true.

  He added tenderness to his characteristics. And he loved Anna too much. Toward the end of that summer she lost weight and became irritable. They quarreled once and then again. The criteria for his physical conduct being vague in his mind, Hugo could not gauge it correctly. And he did not realize that the very ardor of his relation with her was abnormal. Her family decided to send her away, believing the opposite of the truth responsible for her nervousness and weakness. A week before she left, Hugo himself tired of his excesses.

  One evening, dressing for a last passionate rendezvous, he looked in his mirror as he tied his scarf and saw that he was frowning. Studying the frown, he perceived with a shock what made it. He did not want to see Anna, to take her out, to kiss and rumple and clasp her, to return thinking of her, feeling her, sweet and smelling like her. It annoyed him. It bored him. He went through it uneasily and quarreled again. Two days later she departed.

  He acted his loss well and she did not show her relief until she sat on the train, tired, shattered, and uninterested in Hugo and in life. Then she cried. But Hugo was through. They exchanged insincere letters. He looked forward to college in the fall. Then he received a letter from Anna saying that she was going to marry a man she had met and known for three weeks. It was a broken, gasping, apologetic letter. Every one was outraged at Anna and astounded that Hugo bore the shock so courageously.

  The upshot of that summer was to fill his mind with fetid memories, which abated slowly, to make him disgusted with himself and tired of Indian Creek. He decided to go to a different college, one far away from the scene of his painful youth and his disillusioned maturity. He chose Webster University because of the greatness of its name. If Abednego Danner was hurt at his son’s defection from his own college, he said nothing. And Mrs. Danner, grown more silent and reserved, yielded to her son’s unexpected decision. Hugo packed his bags one September afternoon, with a feeling of dreaminess. He bade farewell to his family. He boarded the train. His mind was opaque. The spark burning in it was one of dawning adventure buried in a mass of detail. He had never been far from his native soil. Now he was going to see cities and people who were almost foreign, in the sophisticated East. But all he could dwell on was a swift cinema of a defeated little boy, a strong man who could never be strong, a surfeited love, a truant and dimly comprehensible blond girl, a muddy street and a red station, a clapboard house, a sonorous church with hushed puppets in the pews, fudge parties, boats on the little river, cold winter, and ice over the mountains, and a fortress where once upon a time he had felt mightier than the universe.

  Chapter VI

  THE short branch line to which Hugo changed brought him to the fringe of the campus. The cars were full of boys, so many of them that he was embarrassed. They all appeared to know each other, and no one spoke to him. His dreams on the train were culminated. He had decided to become a great athlete. With his mind’s eye, he played the football he would play—and the baseball. Ninety-yard runs, homers hit over the fence into oblivion. Seeing the boys and feeling their lack of notice of him redoubled the force of that decision. Then he stepped on to the station platform and stood facing the campus. He could not escape a rush of reverence and of awe; it was so wide, so green and beautiful. Far away towered the giant arches of the stadium. Near by were the sharp Gothic points of the chapel and the graduate college. Between them a score or more of buildings rambled in and out through the trees.

  “Hey!”

  Hugo turned a little self-consciously. A youth in a white shirt and white trousers was beckoning to him. “Freshman, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. My name’s Danner. Hugo Danner.”

  “I’m Lefty Foresman. Chuck!” A second student separated himself from the bustle of baggage and young men. “Here’s a freshman.”

  Hugo waited with some embarrassment. He wondered why they wanted a freshman. Lefty introduced Chuck and then said: “Are you strong, freshman?”

  For an instant he was stunned. Had they heard, guessed? Then he realized it was impossible. They wanted him to work. They were going to haze him. “Sure,” he said.

  “Then get this trunk and I’ll show you where to take it.”

  Hugo was handed a baggage check. He found the official and located the trunk. Tentatively he tested its weight, as if he were a normally husky youth about to undertake its transportation. He felt pleased that his strength was going to be tried so accidentally and in such short order. Lefty and Chuck heaved the trunk on his back. “Can you carry it?” they asked.

  “Sure.”

  “Don’t be too sure. It’s a long way.”

  Peering from beneath the trunk under which he bent with a fair assumption of human weakness, Hugo had his first close glimpse of Webster. They passed under a huge arch and down a street lined with elms. Students were everywhere, carrying boo
ks and furniture, moving in wheelbarrows and moving by means of the backs of other freshmen. The two who led him were talking and he listened as he plodded.

  Their talk of women, of classes, of football, excited Hugo. He was not quite as amazed to find that Lefty Foresman was one of the candidates for the football team as he might have been later when he knew how many students attended the university and how few, relatively, were athletes. He decided at once that he liked Lefty. The sophistication of his talk was unfamiliar to Hugo; much of it he could not understand and only guessed. He wanted Lefty to notice him. When he was told to put the trunk down, he did not obey. Instead, with precision and ease, he swung it up on his shoulder, held it with one hand and said in an unflustered tone: “I’m not tired, honestly. Where do we go from here?”

  “Great howling Jesus!” Lefty said, “what have we here? Hey! Put that trunk down.” There was excitement in his voice. “Say, guy, do that again.”

  Hugo did it. Lefty squeezed his biceps and grew pale. Those muscles in their action lost their feel of flesh and became like stone. Lefty said: “Say, boy, can you play football?”

  “Sure,” Hugo said.

  “Well, you leave that trunk with Chuck, here, and come with me.”

  Hugo did as he had been ordered and they walked side by side to the gymnasium. Hugo had once seen a small gymnasium, ill equipped and badly lighted, and it had appealed mightily to him. Now he stood in a prodigious vaulted room with a shimmering floor, a circular balcony, a varied array of apparatus. His hands clenched. Lefty quit him for a moment and came back with a man who wore knickers. “Mr. Woodman, this is—what the hell’s your name?”

  “Danner. Hugo Danner.”

  “Mr. Woodman is football coach.”

  Hugo took the man’s hand. Lefty excused himself. Mr. Woodman said; “Young Foresman said you played football.”

  “Just on a high-school team in Colorado.”

  “Said you were husky. Go in my office and ask Fitzsimmons to give you a gym suit. Come out when you’re ready.”