Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

hell, yes."

"You in it?" Hugo asked.

"Up to my God-damned neck, buddy."

"Me, too. Guess I'll go up the line."

"I'll go witcha."

"Well—"

They waited a moment longer, for the man with the chalk had reappeared. Hugo's comrade grunted. "Wash windows an' work in the steel mills. Break your neck or burn your ear off. Wha' do they care?" Hugo had taken a step toward the door, but the youth with the troubled eyes caught his sleeve. "Don't go up for that, son. They burn you in them steel mills. I seen guys afterward. Two years an' you're all done. This is tough, but that's tougher. Sweet Jesus, I'll say it is."

Hugo loosened himself. "Gotta eat, buddy. I don't happen to have even three bones available at the moment."

The man looked after him. "Gosh," he murmured. "Even guys like that."

He was in a dingy room standing before a grilled window. A voice from behind it asked his name, age, address, war record. Hugo was handed a piece of paper to sign and then a second piece that bore the scrawled words: "Amalgamated Crucible Steel Corp., Harrison, N. J."

Hugo's emotional life was reawakened when he walked into the mills. His last nickel was gone. He had left the train at the wrong station and walked more than a mile. He was hungry and cold. He came, as if naked, to the monster and he did it homage.

Its predominant colour scheme was black and red. It had a loud, pagan voice. It breathed fire. It melted steel and rock and drank human sweat, with human blood for an occasional stimulant. On every side of him were enormous buildings and woven between them a plaid of girders, cables, and tracks across which masses of machinery moved. Inside, Thor was hammering. Inside, a crane sped overhead like a tarantula, trailing its viscera to the floor, dangling a gigantic iron rib. A white speck in its wounded abdomen was a human face.

The bright metal gushed from another hole. It was livid and partially alive; it was hot and had a smell; it swept away the thought of the dark descending night. It made a pool in a great ladle; it made a cupful dipped from a river in hell. A furnace exhaled sulphurously, darting a snake's tongue into the sky. The mills roared and the earth shook. It was bestial, reptilian—labour, and the labour of creation, and the engine that turned the earth could be no more terrible.

Hugo, standing sublimely small in its midst, measured his strength against it, soaked up its warmth, shook his fist at it, and shouted in a voice that could not be heard for a foot: "Christ Almighty! This—is something!"

"Name?"

"Hugo Danner."

"Address?"

"None at present."

"Experience?"

"None."

"Married?"

"No."

"Union?"

"What?"

"Lemme see your union card."

"I don't belong."

"Well, you gotta join."

He went to the headquarters of the union. Men were there of all sorts. The mills were taking on hands. There was reconstruction to be done abroad and steel was needed. They came from Europe, for the most part. Thickset, square-headed, small-eyed men. Men with expressionless faces and bulging muscles that held more meaning than most countenances. They gave him room and no more. They answered the same questions that he answered. He stood in a third queue with them, belly to back, mouths closed. He was sent to a lodging-house, advanced five dollars, and told that he would be boarded and given a bed and no more until the employment agency had taken its commission, and the union its dues. He signed a paper. He went on the night shift without supper.

He ran a wheelbarrow filled with heavy, warm slag for a hundred feet over a walk of loose bricks. The job was simple. Load, carry, dump, return, load. On some later night he would count the number of loads. But on this first night he walked with excited eyes, watching the tremendous things that happened all around him. Men ran the machinery that dumped the ladle. Men guided liquid iron from the furnaces into a maze of channels and cloughs, clearing the way through the sand, cutting off the stream, making new openings. Men wheeled the slag and steered the trains and trams and cranes. Men operated the hammers. And almost all of the men were nude to the waist, sleek and shining with sweat; almost all of them drank whisky.

One of the men in the wheelbarrow line even offered a drink to Hugo. He held out the flask and bellowed in Czech. Hugo took it. The drink was raw and foul. Pouring into his empty stomach, it had a powerful effect, making him exalted, making him work like a demon. After a long, noisy time that did not seem long a steam whistle screamed faintly and the shift was ended.

The Czech accompanied Hugo through the door. The new shift was already at work. They went out. A nightmare of brilliant orange and black fled from Hugo's vision and he looked into the pale, remote chiaroscuro of dawn.

"Me tired," the Czech said in a small, aimless tone.

They flung themselves on dirty beds in a big room. But Hugo did not sleep for a time—not until the sun rose and day was evident in the grimy interior of the bunk house.

That he could think while he worked had been Hugo's thesis when he walked up Sixth Avenue. Now, working steadily, working at a thing that was hard for other men and easy for him, he nevertheless fell into the stolid vacuum of the manual labourer. The mills became familiar, less fantastic. He remembered that oftentimes the war had given a more dramatic passage of man's imagination forged into fire and steel.

His task was changed numerous times. For a while he puddled pig iron with the long-handled, hoe-like tool.

"Don't slip in," they said. It was succinct, graphic.

Then they put him on the hand cars that fed the furnaces. It was picturesque, daring, and for most men too hard. Few could manage the weight or keep up with the pace. Those who did were honoured by their fellows. The trucks were moved forward by human strength and dumped by hand-windlasses. Occasionally, they said, you became tired and fell into the furnace. Or jumped. If you got feeling woozy, they said, quit. The high rails and red mouths were hypnotic, like burning Baal and the Juggernaut.

Hugo's problems had been abandoned. He worked as hard as he dared. The presence of grandeur and din made him content. How long it would have lasted is uncertain; not forever. On the day when he had pushed up two hundred and three loads during his shift, the boss stopped him in the yard.

A tall, lean, acid man. He caught Hugo's sleeve and turned him round. "You're one of the bastards on the furnace line."

"Yes."

"How many cars did you push up to-day?"

"Two hundred and three."

"What the hell do you think this is, anyway?"

"I don't get you."

"Oh, you don't, huh? Well, listen here, you God-damned athlete, what are you trying to do? You got the men all sore—wearing themselves out. I had to lay off three—why? Because they couldn't keep up with you, that's why. Because they got their guts in a snarl trying to bust your record. What do you think you're in? A race? Somebody's got to show you your place around here and I think I'll just kick a lung out right now."

The boss had worked himself into a fury. He became conscious of an audience of workers. Hugo smiled. "I wouldn't advise you to try that—even if you are a big guy."

"What was that?" The words were roared. He gathered himself, but when Hugo did not flinch, did not prepare himself, he was suddenly startled. He remembered, perhaps, the two hundred and three cars. He opened his fist. "All right. I ain't even goin' to bother myself tryin' to break you in to this game. Get out."

"What?"

"Get out. Beat it. I'm firing you."

"Firing me? For working too hard?" Hugo laughed. He bent double with laughter. His laughter sounded above the thunder of the mill. "Oh, God, that's funny. Fire me!" He moved toward the boss menacingly. "I've a notion to twist your liver around your neck myself."

The workers realized that an event of some magnitude was taking place. They drew nearer. Hugo's laughter came again and changed into a smile—an emotion that cooled visibly. Then swiftly he peeled up the sleeve of his shirt. His fist clenched; his arm bent; under the nose of his boss he caused his mighty biceps to swell. His whole body trembled. With his other hand he took the tall man's fingers and laid them on that muscle.

"Squeeze," he shouted.

The boss squeezed. His face grew pallid and he let go suddenly. He tried to speak through his dry mouth, but Hugo had turned his back. At the brick gate post he paused and drew a breath.

His words resounded like the crack of doom. "So long!"

XVIII

In the next four weeks Hugo knew the pangs of hunger frequently. He found odd jobs, but none of them lasted. Once he helped to remove a late snowstorm from the streets. He worked for five days on a subway excavation. His clothes became shabby, he began to carry his razor in his overcoat pocket and to sleep in hotels that demanded only twenty-five cents for a night's lodging. When he considered the tens of thousands of men in his predicament, he was not surprised at or ashamed of himself. When, however, he dwelt on his own peculiar capacities, he was both astonished and ashamed to meander along the dreary pavements.

Hunger did curious things to him. He had moments of fury, of imagined violence, and other moments of fantasy when he dreamed of a rich and noble life. Sometimes he meditated the wisdom of devouring one prodigious meal and fleeing through the dead of night to the warm south. Occasionally he considered going back to his family in Colorado. His most bitter hours were spent in thinking of Mr. Shayne and of accepting a position in one of Mr. Shayne's banks.

In his maculate, threadbare clothes, with his dark, aquiline face matured by the war he was a sharp contrast of facts and possibilities. It never occurred to him that he was young, that his dissatisfaction, his idealism, his Weltschmertz were integral to the life-cycle of every man.

At the end of four weeks, with hunger gnawing so avidly at his core that he could not pass a restaurant without twitching muscles and quivering nerves, he turned abruptly from the street into a cigar store and telephoned to Mr. Shayne. The banker was full of sound counsel and ready charity. Hugo regretted the call as soon as he heard Mr. Shayne's voice; he regretted it when he was ravishing a luxurious dinner at Mr. Shayne's expense. It was the weakest thing he had done in his life.

Nevertheless he accepted the position offered by Mr. Shayne. That same evening he rented a small apartment, and, lying on his bed, a clean bed, he wondered if he really cared about anything or about anyone. In the morning he took a shower and stood for a long time in front of the mirror on the bathroom door, staring at his nude body as if it were a rune he might learn to read, an enigma he might solve by concentration. Then he went to work. His affiliation with the Down Town Savings Bank lasted into the spring and was terminated by one of the oddest incidents of his career.

Until the day of that incident his incumbency was in no way unusual. He was one of the bank's young men, receiving fifty dollars weekly to learn the banking business. They moved him from department to department, giving him mentally menial tasks which afforded him in each case a glimpse of a new facet of financial technique. It was fairly interesting. He made no friends and he worked diligently.

One day in April when he had returned from lunch and a stroll in the environs of the Battery—returned to a list of securities and a strip from an adding machine, which he checked item by item—he was conscious of a stirring in his vicinity. A woman employee on the opposite side of a wire wicket was talking shrilly. A vice-president rose from his desk and hastened down the corridor, his usually composed face suddenly white and disconcerted. The tension was cumulative. Work stopped and clusters of people began to chatter. Hugo joined one of them.

"Yeah," a boy was saying, "it's happened before. A couple o' times."

"How do they know he's there?"

"They got a telephone goin' inside and they're talkin' to him."

"I'll be damned."

The boy nodded rapidly. "Yeah—some talk! Tellin' him what to try next."

"Poor devil!"

"What's the matter?" Hugo asked.

The boy was glad of a new and uninformed listener. "Aw, some dumb vault clerk got himself locked in, an'