Gladiator Page 8

“No. I do them.”

  “Aw—you don’t need to kid me.”

  “I’m not. You saw me lift him, didn’t you? Well—that was nothing.”

  “Jeest! That I should live to see the day I got a bird like you.”

  Until three o’clock Hugo and Charlotte occupied their time with feverish activity. They found a small apartment not far from the seashore. It was clean and bright and it had windows on two sides. Its furniture was nearly new, and Charlotte, with tears in her eyes, sat in all the chairs, lay on the bed, took the egg-beater from the drawer in the kitchen table and spun it in an empty bowl. They went out together and bought a quantity and a variety of food. They ate an early luncheon and Hugo set out to gather the properties for his demonstration. At three o’clock, before a dozen men, he gave an exhibition of strength the like of which had never been seen in any museum of human abnormalities.

  When he went back to his apartment, Charlotte, in a gingham dress which she had bought with part of the money he had given her, was preparing dinner. He took her on his lap. “Did you get the job?”

  “Sure I did. Fifty a week and ten per cent of the gate receipts.”

  “Gee! That’s a lot of money!”

  Hugo nodded and kissed her. He was very happy. Happier, in a certain way, than he had ever been or ever would be again. His livelihood was assured. He was going to live with a woman, to have one always near to love and to share his life. It was that concept of companionship, above all other things, which made him glad.

  Two days later, as Hugo worked to prepare the vehicles of his exhibition, he heard an altercation outside the tent that had been erected for him. A voice said: “Whatcha try in’ to do there, anyhow?”

  “Why, I was making this strong man as I saw him. A man with the expression of strength in his face.”

  “But you gotta bat’ robe on him. What we want is muscles. Muscles, bo. Bigger an’ better than any picture of any strong man ever made. Put one here—an’ one there—”

  “But that isn’t correct anatomy.”

  “To hell wit’ that stuff. Put one there, I says.”

  Hugo walked out of the tent. A young man was bending over a huge sheet made of many lengths of oilcloth sewn together. He was a small person, with pale eyes and a white skin. Beside him stood the manager, eying critically the strokes applied to the cloth. In a semi-finished state was the young man’s picture of the imaginary Hogarth.

  “That’s pretty good,” Hugo said.

  The young man smiled apologetically. “It isn’t quite right. You can see for yourself you have no muscles there—and there. I suppose you’re Hogarth?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well—I tried to explain the anatomy of it, but Mr. Smoots says anatomy doesn’t matter. So here we go.” He made a broad orange streak.

  Hugo smiled. “Smoots is not an anatomical critic of any renown. I say, Smoots, let him paint it as he sees best. God knows the other posters are atrocious enough.”

  The youth looked up from his work. “Good God, don’t tell me you’re really Hogarth!”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  “Well—well—I—I guess it was your English.”

  “That’s funny. And I don’t blame you.” Hugo realized that the young sign-painter was a person of some culture. He was about Hugo’s age, although he seemed younger on first glance. “As a matter of fact, I’m a college man.” Smoots had moved away. “But, for the love of God, don’t tell any one around here.”

  The painter stopped. “Is that so! And you’re doing this—to make money?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll be doggoned. Me, too. I study at the School of Design in the winter, and in the summer I come out here to do signs and lightning portraits and whatever else I can to make the money for it. Sometimes,” he added, “I pick up more than a thousand bucks in a season. This is my fourth year at it.”

  There was in the young artist’s eye a hint of amusement, a suggestion that they were in league. Hugo liked him. He sat down on a box. “Live here?”

  “Yes. Three blocks away.”

  “Me, too. Why not come up and have supper with—my wife and me?”

  “Are you married?” The artist commenced work again.

  Hugo hesitated. “Yeah.”

  “Sure I’ll come up. My name’s Valentine Mitchel. I can’t shake hands just now. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked to any one who doesn’t say ‘deez’ and ‘doze.’”

  When, later in the day, they walked toward Hugo’s home, he was at a loss to explain Charlotte. The young painter would not understand why he, a college man, chose so ignorant a mate On the other hand, he owed it to Charlotte to keep their secret and he was not obliged to make any explanation.

  Valentine Mitchel was, however, a young man of some sensitivity. If he winced at Charlotte’s “Pleased to meetcher,” he did not show it. Later, after an excellent and hilarious meal, he must have guessed the situation. He went home reluctantly and Hugo was delighted with him. He had been urbane and filled with anecdotes of Greenwich Village and art-school life, of Paris, whither his struggling footsteps had taken him for a hallowed year. And with his acceptance of Hugo came an equally warm pleasure in Charlotte’s company.

  “He’s a good little kid,” Charlotte said.

  “Yes. I’m glad I picked him up.”

  The gala opening of Hogarth’s Studio of Strength took place a few nights afterwards. It proved even more successful than Smoots had hoped. The flamboyant advertising posters attracted crowds to see the man who could set a bear trap with his teeth, who could pull an angry boa constrictor into a straight line. Before ranks of gaping faces that were supplanted by new ranks every hour, Hugo performed. Charlotte, resplendent in a black dress that left her knees bare, and a red sash that all but obliterated the dress, helped Hugo with his ponderous props, setting off his strength by contrast, and sold the pamphlets Hugo had written at Smoots’s suggestion-pamphlets that purported to give away the secret of Hogarth’s phenomenal muscle power. Valentine Mitchel watched the entire performance.

  When it was over, he said to Hugo: “Now you better beat it back and get a hot bath. You’re probably all in.”

  “Yes,” Charlotte said. “Come. I myself will bathe you.”

  Hugo grinned. “Hell, no. Now we’re all going on a bender to celebrate. We’ll eat at Villapigue’s and we’ll take a moonlight sail.”

  They went together, marveling at his vitality, gay, young, and living in a world that they managed to forget did not exist. The night was warm. The days that followed were warmer. The crowds came and the brassy music hooted and coughed over them night and day.

  Only once that he could recall afterwards did he allow his intellect to act in any critical direction, and that was in a conversation with the young artist. They were sitting together in the sand, and Charlotte, browned by weeks of bathing, lay near by. “Here I am,” Mitchel said with an unusual thoughtfulness, “with a talent that should be recognized, wanting to be an illustrator, able to be one, and yet forced to dawdle with this horrible business to make my living.”

  Hugo nodded. “You’ll come through—some winter—and you won’t ever return to Coney Island.”

  “I know it. Unless I do it for sentimental reasons some day—in a limousine.”

  “It’s myself,” Hugo said then, “and not you who is doomed to—well, to this sort of thing. You have a talent that is at least understandable and”—he was going to say mediocre. He checked himself—“applicable in the world of human affairs. My talent—if it is a talent—has no place, no application, no audience.”

  Mitchel stared at Hugo, wondering first what that talent might be and then recognizing that Hugo meant his strength. “Nonsense. Any male in his right senses would give all his wits to be as strong as you are.”

  It was a polite, friendly thing to say. Hugo could not refrain from comparing himself to Valentine Mitchel. An artist—a clever artist and one who would some day be important to the world
. Because people could understand what he drew, because it represented a level of thought and expression. He was, like Hugo, in the doldrums of progress. But Mitchel would emerge, succeed, be happy—or at least satisfied with himself—while Hugo was bound to silence, was compelled never to allow himself full expression. Humanity would never accept and understand him.

  The increased heat of August suggested by its very intensity a shortness of duration, an end of summer. Hugo began to wonder what he would do with Charlotte when he went back to Webster. He worried about her a good deal and she, guessing the subject of his frequent fits of silence, made a resolve in her tough and worldly mind. She had learned more about certain facets of Hugo than he knew himself. She realized that he was superior to her and that, in almost any other place than Coney Island, she would be a liability to him. The thought that he would have to desert her made Hugo very miserable. He knew that he would miss Charlotte and he knew that the blow to her might spell disaster. After all, he thought, he had not improved her morals or raised her vision. He did not realize that he had made both almost sublime by the mere act of being considerate. “White,” Charlotte called it.

  Nevertheless she was not without an intense sense of self-protection, despite her condition on the night he had found her. She knew that womankind lived at the expense of mankind. She saw the emotional respect in which Valentine Mitchel unwittingly held Hugo. He had scarcely spoken ten serious words to her. She realized that the artist saw her as a property of his friend. That, in a way, made her valuable. It was a subtle advantage, which she pressed with all the skill it required. One night when Hugo was at work and the chill of autumn had breathed on the hot shore, she told Valentine that he was a very nice boy and that she liked him very much. He went away distraught, which was what she had intended, and he carried with him a new and as yet inarticulate idea, which was what she had foreseen.

  When she felt that the situation had ripened to the point of action, she waited for the precise moment. It came swiftly and in a better guise than she had hoped. On a night in early September, when the crowds had thinned a little, Hugo was just buckling himself into the harness that lifted the horse. The spectators were waiting for the denouement with bickering patience. Charlotte was standing on the platform, watching him with expressionless eyes. She knew that soon she would not see Hugo any more. She knew that he was tired of his small show, that he was chafing to be gone; and she knew that his loyalty to her would never let him go unless it was made inevitable by her. The horse was ready. She watched the muscles start out beneath Hugo’s tawny skin. She saw his lips set, his head thrust back. She worshiped him like that. Unemotionally, she saw the horse lifted up from the floor. She heard the applause. There was a bustle at the gate.

  Half a dozen people entered in single file. Three young men. Three girls. They were intoxicated. They laughed and spoke in loud voices. She saw by their clothes and their manner that they were rich. Slumming in Coney Island. She smiled at the young men as she had always smiled at such young men, friendly, impersonally. Hugo did not see their entrance. They came very near.

  “My God, it’s Hugo Danner!”

  Hugo heard Lefty’s voice and recognized it. The horse was dropped to the floor. He turned. An expression of startled amazement crossed his features. Chuck, Lefty, Iris, and three people whom he did not know were staring at him. He saw the stupefied recognition on the faces of his friends. One despairing glance he cast at Charlotte and then he went on with his act.

  They waited for him until it was over. They clasped him to their bosoms. They acknowledged Charlotte with critical glances. “Come on and join the party,” they said.

  After that, their silence was worse than any questions. They talked freely and merrily enough, but behind their words was a deep reserve. Lefty broke it when he had an opportunity to take Hugo aside. “What in hell is eating you? Aren’t you coming back to Webster?”

  “Sure. That is—I think so. I had to do this to make some money. Just about the time school closed, my family went broke.”

  “But, good God, man, why didn’t you tell us? My father is an alumnus and he’d put up five thousand a year, if necessary, to see you kept on the football team.”

  Hugo laughed. “You don’t think I’d take it, Lefty?”

  “Why not?” A pause. “No, I suppose you’d be just the God-damned kind of a fool that wouldn’t. Who’s the girl?”

  Hugo did not falter. “She’s a tart I’ve been living with. I never knew a better one—girl, that is.”

  Have you gone crazy?”

  “On the contrary, I’ve got wise.”

  “Well, for Christ’s sake, don’t say anything about it on the campus.”

  Hugo bit his lip. “Don’t worry. My business is—my own.”

  They joined the others, drinking at the table. Charlotte was telling a joke. It was not a nice joke. He had not thought of her jokes before—because Iris and Chuck and Lefty had not been listening to them. Now, he was embarrassed. Iris asked him to dance with her. They went out on the floor.

  “Lovely little thing, that Charlotte,” she said acidly.

  “Isn’t she!” Hugo answered with such enthusiasm that she did not speak during the rest of the dance.

  Finally the ordeal ended. Lefty and his guests embarked in an automobile for the city.

  “You know such people,” Charlotte half-whispered. Hugo’s cheeks still flamed, but his heart bled for her.

  “I guess they aren’t much,” he replied.

  She answered hotly: “Don’t you be like that! They’re nice people. They’re fine people. That Iris even asked me to her house. Gave me a card to see her.” Charlotte could guess what Iris wanted. So could Hugo. But Charlotte pretended to be innocent.

  He kissed Charlotte good-night and walked in the streets until morning. Hugo could see no solution. Charlotte was so trusting, so good to him. He could not imagine how she would receive any suggestion that she go to New York and get a job, while he return to college, that he see her during vacations, that he send money to her. But he knew that a hot fire dwelt within her and that her fury would rise, her grief, and that he would be made very miserable and ashamed. She chided him at breakfast for his walk in the dark. She laughed and kissed him and pushed him bodily to his work. He looked back as he walked down to the curb. She was leaning out of the window. She waved her hand. He rounded the corner with wretched leaden steps. The morning, concerned with the petty business of receipts, refurbishings, cleaning, went slowly. When he returned for lunch it was with the decision to tell her the truth about his life and its requirements and to let her decide.

  She did not come to the door to kiss him. (She had imagined that lonely return.) She did not answer his brave and cheerful hail. (She had let the sound of it ring upon her ear a thousand times.) She was gone. (She knew he would sit down and cry.) Then, stumbling, he found the two notes. But he already understood.

  The message from Valentine Mitchel was reckless, impetuous. “Dear Hugo—Charlotte and I have fallen in love with each other and I’ve run away with her. I almost wish you’d come after us and kill me. I hate myself for betraying you. But I love her, so I cannot help it. I’ve learned to see in her what you first saw in her. Good-by, good luck.”

  Hugo put it down. Charlotte would be good to him. In a way, he didn’t deserve her. And when he was famous, some day, perhaps she would leave him, too. He hesitated to read her note. “Good-by, darling, I do not love you any more. C.”

  It was ludicrous, transparent, pitiful, and heroic. Hugo saw all those qualities. “Good-by, darling, I do not love you any more.” She had written it under Valentine’s eyes. But she was shrewd enough to placate her new lover while she told her sad little story to her old. She would want him to feel bad. Well, God knew, he did. Hugo looked at the room. He sobbed. He bolted into the street, tears streaming down his cheeks; he drew his savings from the bank—seven hundred and eighty-four dollars and sixty-four cents; he rushed to the haunted house, flung hi
s clothes into a bag; he sat drearily on a subway for an hour. He paced the smooth floor of a station He swung aboard a train. He came to Webster, his head high, feeling a great pride in Charlotte and in his love for her, walking in glad strides over the familiar soil.

  Chapter IX

  HUGO sat alone and marveled at the exquisite torment of his Weltschmerz. Far away, across the campus, he heard singing. Against the square segment of sky visible from the bay window of his room he could see the light of the great fire they had built to celebrate victory—his victory. The light leaped into the darkness above like a great golden ghost in some fantastic ascension, and beneath it, he knew, a thousand students were dancing. They were druid priests at a rite to the god of football. His fingers struggled through his black hair. The day was fresh in his mind—the bellowing stands, the taut, almost frightened faces of the eleven men who faced him, the smack and flight of the brown oval, the lumbering sound of men running, the sucking of the breath of men and their sharp, painful fall to earth.

  In his mind was a sharp picture of himself and the eyes that watched him as he broke away time and again, with infantile ease, to carry that precious ball. He let them make a touchdown that he could have averted. He made one himself. Then another. The bell on Webster Hall was booming its paean of victory. He stiffened under the steady monody. He remembered again. Lefty barking signals with a strange agony in his voice. Lefty pounding on his shoulder. “Go in there, Hugo, and give it to them. I can’t.” Lefty pleading. And the captain, Jerry Painter, cursing in open jealousy of Hugo, vying hopelessly with Hugo Danner, the man who was a god.

  Afterward they had made him speak, and the breathless words that had once come so easily moved heavily through his mind. Yet he had carried his advantage beyond the point of turning back. He could not say that the opponents of Webster might as well attempt to hold back a juggernaut, to throw down a siege-gun, to outrace light, as to lay their hands on him to check his intent. Webster had been good to him. He loved Webster and it deserved his best. His best! He peered again into the celebrating night and wondered what that awful best would be.