Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

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 returned 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-bye, 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-bye, darling, I do not love you any more. C."

It was ludicrous, transparent, pitiful, and heroic. Hugo saw all those qualities. "Good-bye, 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 his 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.

Hugo sat alone and marvelled at the exquisite torment of his Weltschmertz. 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 p�an 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.

It was not fair. Not right. The old and early glory was ebbing from it. When he put down the ball, safely across the goal for the winning touchdown, he saw three of the men on the opposing team lie down and weep. There he stood, pretending to pant, feigning physical distress, making himself a hero at the expense of innocent victims. Jackstraws for a giant. There was no triumph in that. He could not go on.

Afterwards 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.

He desired passionately to be able to give that—to cover the earth, making men glad and bringing a revolution into their lives, to work himself into a fury and to fatigue his incredible sinews, to end with the feeling of a race well run, a task nobly executed. And, for a year, that ambition had seemed in some small way to be approaching fruition. Now it was turned to ashes. It was not with the muscles of men that his goal was to be attained. They could not oppose him.

As he sat gloomy and distressed, he wondered for what reason there burned in him that wish to do great deeds. Humanity itself was too selfish and too ignorant to care. It could boil in its tiny prejudices for centuries to come and never know that there could be a difference. Moreover, who was he to grind his soul and beat his thoughts for the benefit of people who would never know and never care? What honour, when he was dead, to lie beneath a slab on which was punily graven some note of mighty accomplishment? Why could he not content himself with the food he ate, the sunshine, with wind in trees, and cold water, and a woman? It was that sad and silly command within to transcend his vegetable self that made him human. He tried to think about it bitterly: fool man, grown suddenly more conscious than the other beasts—how quickly he had become vain because of it and how that vanity led him forever onward! Or was it vanity—when his aching soul proclaimed that he would gladly achieve and die without other recognition or acclaim than that which rose within himself? Martyrs were made of such stuff. And was not that, perhaps, an even more exaggerated vanity? It was so pitiful to be a man and nothing more. Hugo bowed his head and let his body tremble with strange agony. Perhaps, he thought, even the agony was a selfish pleasure to him. Then he should be ashamed. He felt shame and then thought that the feeling rose from a wish for it and foundered angrily in the confusion of his introspection. He knew only and knew but dimly that he would lift himself up again and go on, searching for some universal foe to match against his strength. So pitiful to be a man! So Christ must have felt in Gethsemane.

"Hey, Hugo!"

"Yeah?"

"What the hell did you come over here for?"

"To be alone."

"Is that a hint?" Lefty entered the room. "They want you over at the bonfire. We've been looking all over for you."

"All right. I'll go. But, honest to God, I've had enough of this business for to-day."

Lefty slapped Hugo's shoulders. "The great must pay for their celebrity. Come on, you sap."

"All right."

"What's the matter? Anything the matter?"

"No. Nothing's the matter. Only—it's sort of sad to be—" Hugo checked himself.

"Sad? Good God, man, you're going stale."

"Maybe that's it." Hugo had a sudden fancy. "Do you suppose I could be let out of next week's game?"

"What for? My God—"

Hugo pursued the idea. "It's the last game. I can sit on the lines. You fellows all play good ball. You can probably win. If you can't—then I'll play. If you only knew, Lefty, how tired I get sometimes—"

"Tired! Why don't you say something about it? You can lay off practice for three or four days."

"Not that. Tired in the head, not the body. Tired of crashing through and always getting away with it. Oh, I'm not conceited. But I know they can't stop me. You know it. It's a gift of mine—and a curse. How about it? Let's start next week without me."

The night ended at last. A new day came. The bell on Webster Hall stopped booming. Woodie, the coach, came to see Hugo between classes. "Lefty says you want us to start without you next week. What's the big idea?"

"I don't know. I thought the other birds would like a shot at Yale without me. They can do it."

Mr. Woodman eyed his player. "That's pretty generous of you, Hugo. Is there any other reason?"

"Not—that I can explain."

"I see." The coach offered Hugo a cigarette after he had helped himself. "Take it. It'll do you good."

"Thanks."

"Listen, Hugo. I want to ask you a question. But, first, I want you to promise you'll give me a plain answer."

"I'll try."

"That won't do."

"Well—I can't promise."

Woodman sighed. "I'll ask it anyway. You can answer or not—just as you wish." He was silent. He inhaled his cigarette and blew the smoke through his nostrils. His eyes rested on Hugo with an expression of intense interest, beneath which was a softer light of something not unlike sympathy. "I'll have to tell you something, first, Hugo. When you went away last summer, I took a trip to Colorado."

Hugo started, and Woodman continued: "To Indian Creek. I met your father and your mother. I told them that I knew you. I did my best to gain their confidence. You see, Hugo, I've watched you with a more skilful eye than most people. I've seen you do things, a few little things, that weren't—well—that weren't—"

Hugo's throat was dry. "Natural?"

"That's the best word, I guess. You were never like my other boys, in any case. So I thought I'd find out what I could. I must admit that my efforts with your father were a failure. Aside from the fact that he is an able biology teacher and that he had a number of queer theories years ago, I learned nothing. But I did find out what those theories were. Do you want me to stop?"

A peculiar, almost hopeful expression was on Hugo's face. "No," he answered.

"Well, they had to do with the biochemistry of cellular structure, didn't they? And with the production of energy in cells? And then—I talked to lots of people. I heard about Samson."

"Samson!" Hugo echoed, as if the dead had spoken.

"Samson—the cat."

Hugo was as pale as chalk. His eyes burned darkly. He felt that his universe was slipping from beneath him. "You know, then," he said.

"I don't know, Hugo. I merely guessed. I was going to ask. Now I shall not. Perhaps I do know. But I had another question, son—"

"Yes?" Hugo looked at Woodman and felt then the reason for his success as a coach, as a leader and master of youth. He understood it.

"Well, I wondered if you thought it was worth while to talk to your father and discover—"

"What he did?" Hugo suggested hoarsely.

Woodman put his hand on Hugo's knee. "What he did, son. You ought to know by this time what it means. I've been watching you. I don't want your head to swell, but you're a great boy, Hugo. Not only in