Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

in the gentle swell. A few stars, liquid bright, hung in the tropical sky. A little puff of wind coming occasionally from the south carried the smell of the jungle to the ship. The crew was awakening.

A man with a bucket on a rope went to the rail and hauled up a brimming pail from the warm sea. He splashed his face and hands into it. Then he poured it back and repeated the act of dipping up water.

"Hey!" he said.

Another man joined him. "Here. Swab off your sweat. Look yonder."

The dorsal fin of a shark rippled momentarily on the surface and dipped beneath it. A third man appeared. He accepted the proffered water and washed himself. His roving eye saw the shark as it rose for the second time. He dried on a towel. The off-shore breeze stirred his dark hair. There was a growth of equally dark beard on his tanned jaw and cheek. Steely muscles bulged under his shirt. His forearm, when he picked up the pail, was corded like cable. A smell of coffee issued from the galley, and the smoke of the cook's fire was wafted on deck for a pungent moment. Two bells sounded. The music went out over the water in clear, humming waves.

The man who had come first from the forecastle leaned his buttocks against the rail. One end of it had been unhooked to permit the discharge of mail. The rail ran, the man fell back, clawing, and then, thinking suddenly of the sharks, he screamed. The third man looked. He saw his fellow-seaman go overboard. He jumped from where he stood, clearing the scuppers and falling through the air before the victim of the slack rail had landed in the water. The two splashes were almost simultaneous. A boatswain, hearing the cry, hastened to the scene. He saw one man lifted clear of the water by the other, who was treading water furiously. He shouted for a rope. He saw the curve and dip of a fin. The first man seized the rope and climbed and was pulled up. The second, his rescuer, dived under water as if aware of something there that required his attention. The men above him could not know that he had felt the rake of teeth across his leg—powerful teeth, which nevertheless did not penetrate his skin. As he dived into the green depths, he saw a body lunge toward him, turn, yawn a white-fringed mouth. He snatched the lower jaw in one hand, and the upper in the other. He exerted his strength. The mouth gaped wider, a tail twelve feet behind it lashed, the thing died with fingers like steel claws tearing at its brain. It floated belly up. The man rose, took the rope, climbed aboard. Other sharks assaulted the dead one.

The dripping sailor clasped his saviour's hand. "God Almighty, man, you saved my life. Jesus!"

"That's four," Hugo Danner said abstractedly, and then he smiled. "It's all right. Forget it. I've had a lot of experience with sharks." He had never seen one before in his life. He walked aft, where the men grouped around him.

"How'd you do it?"

"It's a trick I can't explain very well," Hugo said. "You use their rush to break their jaws. It takes a good deal of muscle."

"Anyway—guy—thanks."

"Sure."

A whistle blew. The ships were lining up in the order of their arrival for admission to the Panama Canal. Gatun loomed in the feeble sun of dawn. The anchor chain rumbled. The Katrina edged forward at half speed.

The sea. Blue, green, restless, ghost-ridden, driven in empty quarters by devils riding the wind, secretive, mysterious, making a last gigantic, primeval stand against the conquest of man, hemming and isolating the world, beautiful, horrible, dead god of ten thousand voices, universal incubator, universal grave.

The Katrina came to the islands in the South Pacific. Islands that issued from the water like green wreaths and seemed to float on it. The small boats were put out and sections of the cargo were sent to rickety wharves where white men and brown islanders took charge of it and carried it away into the fringe of the lush vegetation. Hugo, looking at those islands, was moved to smile. The place where broken men hid from civilization, where the derelicts of the world gathered to drown their shame in a verdant paradise that had no particular position in the white man's scheme of the earth.

At one of the smaller islands an accident to the engine forced the Katrina to linger for two weeks. It was during those two weeks, in a rather extraordinary manner, that Hugo Danner laid the first foundation of the fortune that he accumulated in his later life. One day, idling away a leave on shore in the shade of a mighty tree, he saw the outriggers of the natives file away for the oyster beds, and, out of pure curiosity, he followed them. For a whole day he watched the men plunge under the surface in search of pearls. The next day he came back and dove with one of them.

On the bizarre floor of the ocean, among the colossal fronds of its flora, the two men swam. They were invaders from the brilliance above the surface, shooting like fish, horizontally, through the murk and shadow, and the denizens of that world resented their coming. Great fish shot past them with malevolent eyes, and the vises of giant clams shut swiftly in attempts to trap their moving limbs. Hugo was entranced. He watched the other man as he found the oyster bed and commenced to fill his basket with frantic haste. When his lungs stung and he could bear the agony no longer, he turned and forged toward the upper air. Then they went down again.

Hugo's blood, designed to take more oxygen from the air, and his greater density fitted him naturally for the work. The pressure did not make him suffer and the few moments granted to the divers beneath the forbidding element stretched to a longer time for him.

On the second day of diving he went alone. His amateur attempt had been surprisingly fruitful. Standing erect in the immense solitude, he searched the hills and valleys. At length, finding a promising cluster of shellfish, he began to examine them one by one, pulling them loose, feeling in their pulpy interior for the precious jewels. He occupied himself determinedly while the Katrina was waiting in Apia, and at the end of the stay he had collected more than sixty pearls of great value and two hundred of moderate worth.

It was, he thought, typical of himself. He had decided to make a fortune of some sort after the first bitter rage over his debacle at Webster had abated in his heart. He realized that without wealth his position in the world would be more difficult and more futile than his fates had decreed. Poverty, at least, he was not forced to bear. He could wrest fortune from nature by his might. That he had begun that task by diving for pearls fitted into his scheme. It was such a method as no other man would have considered and its achievement robbed no one while it enriched him.

When the Katrina turned her prow westward again, Hugo worked with his shipmates in a mood that had undergone considerable change. There was no more despair in him, little of the taciturnity that had marked his earliest days at sea, none of the hatred of mankind. He had buried that slowly and carefully in a dull year of work ashore and a month of toil on the heaving deck of the ship. For six months he had kept himself alive in a manner that he could scarcely remember. Driving a truck. Working on a farm. Digging in a road. His mind a bitter blank, his valiant dreams all dead.

One day he had saved a man's life. The reaction to that was small, but it was definite. The strength that could slay was also a strength that could succour. He had repeated the act some time later. He felt it was a kind of atonement. After that, he sought deliberately to go where he might be of assistance. In the city, again, in September, when a fire engine clanged and whooped through the streets, he followed and carried a woman from a blazing roof as if by a miracle. Then the seaman. He had counted four rescues by that time. Perhaps his self-condemnation for the boy who had fallen on the field at Webster could be stifled eventually. Human life seemed very precious to Hugo then.

He sold his pearls when the ship touched at large cities—a handful here and a dozen there, bargaining carefully and forwarding the profit to a bank in New York. He might have continued that voyage, which was a voyage commenced half in new recognition of his old wish to see and know the world and half in the quest of forgetfulness; but a slip and shifts in the history of the world put an abrupt end to it. When the Katrina rounded the Bec d'Aiglon and steamed into the blue and cocoa harbour of Marseilles, Hugo heard that war had been declared by Germany, Austria, France, Russia, England....

XI

In a day the last veil of mist that had shrouded his feelings and thoughts, making them numb and sterile, vanished; in a day Hugo found himself—or believed that he had; in a day his life changed and flung itself on the course which, in a measure, destined its fixation. He never forgot that day.

It began in the early morning when the anchor of the freighter thundered into the harbour water. The crew was not given shore leave until noon. Then the mysterious silence of the captain and the change in the ship's course was explained. Through the third officer he sent a message to the seamen. War had been declared. The seaways were unsafe. The Katrina would remain indefinitely at Marseilles. The men could go ashore. They would report on the following day.

The first announcement of the word sent Hugo's blood racing. War! What war? With whom? Why? Was America in it, or interested in it? He stepped ashore and hurried into the city. The populace was in feverish excitement. Soldiers were everywhere, as if they had sprung up magically like the seed of the dragon. Hugo walked through street after street in the furious heat. He bought a paper and read the French accounts of mobilizations, of a battle impending. He looked everywhere for some one who could tell him. Twice he approached the American Consulate, but it was jammed with frantic and frightened people who were trying only to get away. Hugo's ambition, growing in him like a fire, was in the opposite direction. War! And he was Hugo Danner!

He sat at a caf� toward the middle of the afternoon. He was so excited by the contagion in his veins that he scarcely thrilled at the first use of his new and half-mastered tongue. The gar�on hurried to his table.

"De la bi�re," Hugo said.

The waiter asked a question which Hugo could not understand, so he repeated his order in the universal language of measurement of a large glass by his hands. The waiter nodded. Hugo took his beer and stared out at the people. They hurried along the sidewalk, brushing the table at which he sat. They called to each other, laughed, cried sometimes, and shook hands over and over. "La guerre" was on every tongue. Old men gestured the directions of battles. Young men, a little more serious perhaps, and often very drunk, were rushing into uniform as order followed order for mobilization. And there were girls, thousands of them, walking with the young men.

Hugo wanted to be in it. He was startled by the impact of that desire. All the ferocity of him, all the unleashed wish to rend and kill, was blazing in his soul. But it was a subtle conflagration, which urged him in terms of duty, in words that spoke of the war as his one perfect opportunity to put himself to a use worthy of his gift. A war. In a war what would hold him, what would be superior to him, who could resist him? He swallowed glass after glass of the brackish beer, quenching a mighty thirst and firing a mightier ambition. He saw himself charging into battle, fighting till his ammunition was gone, till his bayonet broke; and then turning like a Titan and doing monster deeds with bare hands. And teeth.

Bands played and feet marched. His blood rose to a boiling-point. A Frenchman flung himself at Hugo's table. "And you—why aren't you a soldier?"

"I will be," Hugo replied.

"Bravo! We shall revenge ourselves." The man gulped a glass of wine, slapped Hugo's shoulder, and was gone. Then a girl talked to Hugo. Then another man.

Hugo dwelt on the politics