Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

shrugged. "I merely speculated on the possible outcome of such a thing; assume that they were snatched from prison and hidden beyond the law."

Skorvsky meditated. "It would be a great victory for the cause, of course. A splendid lift to its morale."

"The cause of Bolshevism?"

"A higher and a different cause. I cannot explain it briefly. Perhaps I cannot explain it at all. But the old world of empires is crumbled. Democracy is at its farcical height. The new world is not yet manifest. I shall be direct. What is your plan, Mr. Danner?"

"I couldn't tell you. Anyway, you would not believe it. But I could guarantee to deliver those two men anywhere in the country within a few days without leaving a trace of how it was done. What do you think of that, Skorvsky?"

"I think you are a dangerous and a valuable man."

"Not many people do." Hugo's eyes were moody. "I have been thinking about it for a long time. Nothing that I can remember has happened during my life that gives me a greater feeling of understanding than the imprisonment and sentencing of those men. I know poignantly the glances that are given them, the stupidity of the police and the courts, the horror-stricken attitude of those who condemn them without knowledge of the truth or a desire for such knowledge." He buried his face in his hands and then looked up quickly. "I know all that passionately and intensely. I know the blind fury to which it all gives birth. I hate it. I detest it. Selfishness, stupidity, malice. I know the fear it engenders—a dreadful and a justified fear. I've felt it. Very little in this world avails against it. You'll forgive so much sentiment, Skorvsky?"

"It makes us brothers." The Russian spoke with force and simplicity. "You, too—"

Hugo crossed the room restlessly. "I don't know. I am always losing my grip. I came to Washington with a purpose and I cannot screw myself to it unremittingly. These men seem—"

Skorvsky was thinking. "Your plan for them. What assistance would you need?"

"None."

"None!"

"Why should I need help? I—never mind. I need none."

"You have your own organization?"

"There is no one but me."

Skorvsky shook his head. "I cannot—and yet—looking at you—I believe you can. I shall tell you. You will come with me to-night and meet my friends—those who are working earnestly for a new America, an America ruled by intelligence alone. Few outsiders enter our councils. We are all—nearly all—foreigners. Yet we are more American than the Maine fisherman, the Minnesota farmer. Behind us is a party that grows apace. This incident in New Jersey has added to it, as does every dense mumble of Congress, every scandalous metropolitan investigation. I shall telephone."

Hugo allowed himself to be conducted half-dubiously. But what he found was superficially, at least, what he had dreamed for himself. The house to which he was taken was pretentious; the people in its salon were amiable and educated; there was no sign of the red flag, the ragged reformer, the anarchist. The women were gracious; the men witty. As he talked to them, one by one, he began to believe that here was the nucleus around which he could construct his imaginary empire. He became interested; he expanded.

It was late in the night when Skorvsky raised his voice slightly, so that everyone would listen, and made an announcement: "Friends, I have had the honour to introduce Mr. Danner to you. Now I have the greater honour of telling you his purpose and pledge. To-morrow night he will go to New Jersey"—the silence became absolute—"and two nights later he will bring to us in person from their cells Davidoff and Pletzky."

A quick, pregnant pause was followed by excitement. They took Hugo by the hand, some of them applauded, one or two cheered, they shouldered near him, they asked questions and expressed doubts. It was broad daylight before they dispersed. Hugo walked to his house, listening to a long rhapsody from Skorvsky.

"We will make you a great man if you succeed," Skorvsky said. "Good-night, comrade."

"Good-night." Hugo went into the hall and up to his bedroom. He sat on his bed. A dullness overcame him. He had never been patronized quite in the same way as he had that night; it exerted at once a corrosive and a lethargic influence. He undressed slowly, dropping his shoes on the floor. Splendid people they were, he thought. A smaller voice suggested to him that he did not really care to go to New Jersey for the prisoners. They would be hard to locate. There would be a sensation and a mystery again. Still, he had found a purpose.

His telephone rang. He reached automatically from the bed. The room was bright with sunshine, which meant that it was late in the day. His brain took reluctant hold on consciousness. "Hello?"

"Hello? Danner, my friend—"

"Oh, hello, Skorvsky—"

"May I come up? It is important."

"Sure. I'm still in bed. But come on."

Hugo was under the shower bath when his visitor arrived. He invited Skorvsky to share his breakfast, but was impatiently refused. "Things have happened since last night, Comrade Danner. For one, I saw the chief."

"Chief?"

"You have not met him as yet. We conferred about your scheme. He—I regret to say—opposed it."

Hugo nodded. "I'm not surprised. I'll tell you what to do. You take me to him—and I'll prove conclusively that it will be successful. Then, perhaps, he will agree to sanction it. Every time I think of those two poor devils—snatched from a mob—waiting there in the dark for the electric chair—it makes my blood boil."

"Quite," Skorvsky agreed. "But you do not understand. It is not that he doubts your ability—if you failed it would not be important. He fears you might accomplish it. I assured him you would. I have faith in you."

"He's afraid I would do it? That doesn't make sense, Skorvsky."

"It does, I regret to say." His expressive face stirred with discomfort. "We were too hasty, too precipitate. I see his reason now. We cannot afford as a group to be branded as jail-breakers."

"That's—weak," Hugo said.

Skorvsky cleared his throat. "There are other matters. Since Davidoff and Pletzky were jailed, the party has grown by leaps and bounds. Money has poured in—"

"Ah," Hugo said softly, "money."

Skorvsky raged. "Go ahead. Be sarcastic. To free those men would cost us a million dollars, perhaps."

"Too bad."

"With a million—the million their electrocution will bring from the outraged—we can accomplish more than saving two paltry lives. We must be hard, we must think ahead."

"In thinking ahead, Skorvsky, do you not think of the closing of a switch and the burning of human flesh?"

"For every cause there must be martyrs. Their names will live eternally."

"And they themselves—?"

"Bah! You are impractical."

"Perhaps." Hugo ate a slice of toast with outward calm. "I was hoping for a government that—did not weigh people against dollars—"

"Nor do we!"

"No?"

Skorvsky leaped to his feet. "Fool! Dreamer! Preposterous idealist! I must be going."

Hugo sighed. "Suppose I went ahead?"

"One thing!" The Russian turned with a livid face. "One thing the chief bade me tell you. If those men escape—you die."

"Oh," Hugo said. He stared through the window. "And supposing I were to offer your chief a million—or nearly a million—for the privilege of freeing them?"

Skorvsky's face returned to its look of transfiguration, the look that had accompanied his noblest words of the night before. "You would do that, comrade?" he whispered. "You would give us—give the cause—a million? Never since the days of our Saviour has a man like you walked on this—"

Hugo stood up suddenly. "Get out of here!" His voice was a cosmic menace. "Get out of here, you dirty swine. Get out of here before I break you to matchwood, before I rip out your guts and stuff them back through your filthy, lying throat. Get out, oh, God, get out!"

XXII

Hugo realized at last that there was no place in his world for him. Tides and tempest, volcanoes and lightning, all other majestic vehemences of the universe had a purpose, but he had none. Either because he was all those forces unnaturally locked in the body of a man, or because he was a giant compelled to stoop and pander to live at all among his feeble fellows, his anachronism was complete.

That much he perceived calmly. His tragedy lay in the lie he had told to his father: great deeds were always imminent and none of them could be accomplished because they involved humanity, humanity protecting its diseases, its pettiness, its miserable convictions and conventions, with the essence of itself—life. Life not misty and fecund for the future, but life clawing at the dollar in the hour, the security of platitudes, the relief of visible facts, the hope in rationalization, the needs of skin, belly, and womb.

Beyond that, he could see destiny by interpreting his limited career. Through a sort of ontogenetic recapitulation he had survived his savage childhood, his barbaric youth, and the Greeces, Romes, Egypts, and Babylons of his early manhood, emerging into a present that was endowed with as much aspiration and engaged with the same futility as was his contemporary microcosm. No life span could observe anything but material progress, for so mean and inalterable is the gauge of man that his races topple before his soul expands, and the eventualities of his growth in space and time must remain a problem for thousands and tens of thousands of years.

Searching still further, he appreciated that no single man could force a change upon his unwilling fellows. At most he might inculcate an idea in a few and live to see its gradual spreading. Even then he could have no assurance of its contortions to the desire for wealth and power or of the consequences of those contortions.

Finally, to build, one must first destroy, and he questioned his right to select unaided the objects for destruction. He looked at the Capitol in Washington and pondered the effect of issuing an ultimatum and thereafter bringing down the great dome like Samson. He thought of the churches and their bewildering, stupefying effect on masses who were mulcted by their own fellows, equally bewildered, equally stupefied. Suppose through a thousand nights he ravaged the churches, wrecking every structure in the land, laying waste property, making the loud, unattended volume of worship an impossibility, taking away the purple-robed gods of his forbears? Suppose he sank the navy, annihilated the army, set up a despotism? No matter how efficiently and well he ruled, the millions would hate him, plot against him, attempt his life; and every essential agent would be a hypocritical sycophant seeking selfish ends.

He reached the last of his conclusions sitting beside a river whither he had walked to think. An immense loathing for the world rose up in him. At its apex a locomotive whistled in the distance, thundered inarticulately, and rounded a bend. It came very near the place where Hugo reclined, black, smoking, and noisy, drivers churning along the rails, a train of passenger cars behind. Hugo could see the dots that were people's heads. People! Human beings! How he hated them! The train was very near. Suddenly all his muscles were unsprung. He threw himself to his feet and rushed toward the train, with a passionate desire to get his fingers around the sliding piston, to up-end the locomotive and to throw the ordered machinery into a blackened, blazing, bloody tangle of ruin.

His lips uttered a wild cry; he jumped across the river and ran two prodigious steps. Then he stopped. The train went on unharmed. Hugo shuddered.

If the world did not want him, he would leave the world. Perhaps he was a menace to it. Perhaps he should kill himself. But his burning, sickened heart refused once more to give up. Frenzy departed, then numbness. In its place came a fresh hope, new determination. Hugo Danner would do his utmost until the end. Meanwhile, he would remove himself some distance from the civilization that had tortured him. He would go away and find a new dream.

The sound of the locomotive was dead in the distance. He crossed the river on a bridge and went back to his house. He felt strong again and glad—glad because he had won an obscure victory, glad because the farce of his quest in political government had ended with no tragic d�nouement.

They were electrocuting Davidoff and Pletzky that day. The news scarcely interested Hugo. The part he had very nearly played in the affair seemed like the folly of a dimly remembered acquaintance. The relief of resigning that impossible purpose overwhelmed him. He dismissed his servants, closed his house, and boarded a train. When the locomotive pounded through the station, he suffered a momentary pang. He sat in a seat with people all around him. He was tranquil and almost content.

XXIII

Hugo had no friends. One single individual whom he loved, whom he could have taken fully into his