Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

nothing to him. Soon after that, he was told not to throw anything. When he could walk, he was forbidden to jump. His jumps were shocking to see, even at the age of two and a half. He was carefully instructed on his behaviour out of doors. No move of his was to indicate his difference from the ordinary child.

He was taught kindness and respect for people and property. His every destructive impulse was carefully curbed. That training was possible only because he was sensitive and naturally susceptible to advice. Punishment had no physical terror for him, because he could not feel it. But disfavour, anger, vexation, or disappointment in another person reflected itself in him at once.

When he was four and a half, his mother sent him to Sunday school. He was enrolled in a class that sat near her own, so she was able to keep a careful eye on him. But Hugo did not misbehave. It was his first contact with a group of children, his first view of the larger cosmos. He sat quietly with his hands folded, as he had been told to sit. He listened to the teacher's stories of Jesus with excited interest.

On his third Sunday he heard one of the children whisper: "Here comes the strong boy."

He turned quickly, his cheeks red. "I'm not. I'm not."

"Yes, you are. Mother said so."

Hugo struggled with the two hymn books on the table. "I can't even lift these books," he lied.

The other child was impressed and tried to explain the situation later, taking the cause of Hugo's weakness against the charge of strength. But the accusation rankled in Hugo's young mind. He hated to be different—and he was beginning to realize that he was different.

From his earliest day that longing occupied him. He sought to hide his strength. He hated to think that other people were talking about him. The distinction he enjoyed was odious to him because it aroused unpleasant emotions in other people. He could not realize that those emotions sprang from personal and group jealousy, from the hatred of superiority.

His mother, ever zealous to direct her son in the path of righteousness, talked to him often about his strength and how great it would become and what great and good deeds he could do with it. Those lectures on virtuous crusades had two uses: they helped check any impulses in her son which she felt would be harmful to her and they helped her to become used to the abnormality in little Hugo. In her mind, it was like telling a hunchback that his hump was a blessing disguised. Hugo was always aware of the fact that her words connoted some latent evil in his nature.

The motif grew in Mrs. Danner's thoughts until she sought a definite outlet for it. One day she led her child to a keg filled with sand. "All of us," she said to her son, "have to carry a burden through life. One of your burdens will be your strength. But that might can make right. See that little keg?"

"Mmmmm."

"That keg is temptation. Can you say it?"

"Temshun."

"Every day in your life you must bear temptation and throw it from you. Can you bear it?"

"Huh?"

"Can you pick up that keg, Hugo?"

He lifted it in his chubby arms. "Now take it to the barn and back," his mother directed. Manfully he walked with the keg to the barn and back. He felt a little silly and resentful. "Now—throw temptation as far away from you as you can."

Mrs. Danner gasped. The distance he threw the keg was frightening.

"You musn't throw it so far, Hugo," she said, forgetting her allegory for an instant.

"You said as far as I can. I can throw it farther, too, if I wanna."

"No. Just throw it a little way. When you throw it far, it doesn't look right. Now—fill it up with sand, and we'll do it over."

Hugo was perplexed. A vague wish to weep occupied him as he filled the keg. The lesson was repeated. Mrs. Danner had excellent Sunday-school instincts, even if she had no real comprehension of ethics. Some days later the burden of temptation was exhibited, in all its dramatic passages, to Mrs. Nolan and another lady. Again Hugo was resentful and again he felt absurd. When he threw the keg, it broke.

"My!" Mrs. Nolan said in a startled tone.

"How awful!" the other woman murmured. "And he's just a child."

That made Hugo suddenly angry and he jumped. The woman screamed. Mrs. Nolan ran to tell whomever she could find. Mrs. Danner whipped her son and he cried softly.

Abednego Danner left the discipline of his son to his wife. He watched the child almost furtively. When Hugo was five, Mr. Danner taught him to read. It was a laborious process and required an entire winter. But Hugo emerged with a new world open to him—a world which he attacked with interest. No one bothered him when he read. He could be found often on sunny days, when other children were playing, prone on the floor, puzzling out sentences in the books of the family library and trying to catch their significance. During his fifth year he was not allowed to play with other children. The neighbourhood insisted on that.

With the busybodyness and contrariness of their kind the same neighbours insisted that Hugo be sent to school in the following fall. When, on the opening day, he did not appear, the truant officer called for him. Hugo heard the conversation between the officer and his mother. He was frightened. He vowed to himself that his abnormality should be hidden deeply.

After that he was dropped into that microcosm of human life to which so little attention is paid by adults. School frightened and excited Hugo. For one thing, there were girls in school—and Hugo knew nothing about them except that they were different from himself. There were teachers—and they made one work, whether one wished to work or not. They represented power, as a jailer represents power. The children feared teachers. Hugo feared them.

But the lesson of Hugo's first six years was fairly well planted. He blushingly ignored the direct questions of those children whom his fame had reached. He gave no reason to anyone for suspecting him of abnormality. He became so familiar to his comrades that their curiosity gradually vanished. He would not play games with them—his mother had forbidden that. But he talked to them and was as friendly as they allowed him to be. His sensitiveness and fear of ridicule made him a voracious student. He liked books. He liked to know things and to learn them.

Thus, bound by the conditionings of his babyhood, he reached the spring of his first year in school without accident. Such tranquillity could not long endure. The day which his mother had dreaded ultimately arrived. A lanky farmer's son, older than the other children in the first grade, chose a particularly quiet and balmy recess period to plague little Hugo. The farmer's boy was, because of his size, the bully and the leader of all the other boys. He had not troubled himself to resent Hugo's exclusiveness or Hugo's reputation until that morning when he found himself without occupation. Hugo was sitting in the sun, his dark eyes staring a little sadly over the laughing, rioting children.

The boy approached him. "Hello, strong man." He was shrewd enough to make his voice so loud as to be generally audible. Hugo looked both harmless and slightly pathetic.

"I'm not a strong man."

"Course you're not. But everybody thinks you are—except me. I'm not afraid of you."

"I don't want you to be afraid of me. I'm not afraid of you, either."

"Oh, you aren't, huh? Look." He touched Hugo's chest with his finger, and when Hugo looked down, the boy lifted his finger into Hugo's face.

"Go away and let me alone."

The tormentor laughed. "Ever see a fish this long?"

His hands indicated a small fish. Involuntarily Hugo looked at them. The hands flew apart and slapped him smartly. Several of the children had stopped their play to watch. The first insult made them giggle. The second brought a titter from Anna Blake, and Hugo noticed that. Anna Blake was a little girl with curly golden hair and blue eyes. Secretly Hugo admired her and was drawn to her. When she laughed, he felt a dismal loneliness, a sudden desertion. The farmer's boy pressed the occasion his meanness had made.

"I'll bet you ain't even strong enough to fight little Charlie Todd. Commere, Charlie."

"I am," Hugo replied with slow dignity.

"You're a sissy. You're a-scared to play with us."

The ring around Hugo had grown. He felt a tangible ridicule in it. He knew what it was to hate. Still, his inhibitions, his control, held him in check. "Go away," he said, "or I'll hurt you."

The farmer's boy picked up a stick and put it on his shoulder. "Knock that off, then, strong man."

Hugo knew the dare and its significance. With a gentle gesture he brushed the stick away. Then the other struck. At the same time he kicked Hugo's shins. There was no sense of pain with the kick. Hugo saw it as if it had happened to another person. The school-yard tensed with expectation. But the accounts of what followed were garbled. The farmer's boy fell on his face as if by an invisible agency. Then his body was lifted in the air. The children had an awful picture of Hugo standing for a second with the writhing form of his attacker above his head. Then he flung it aside, over the circle that surrounded him, and the body fell with a thud. It lay without moving. Hugo began to whimper pitifully.

That was Hugo's first fight. He had defended himself, and it made him ashamed. He thought he had killed the other boy. Sickening dread filled him. He hurried to his side and shook him, calling his name. The other boy came to. His arm was broken and his sides were purpling where Hugo had seized him. There was terror in his eyes when he saw Hugo's face above him, and he screamed shrilly for help. The teacher came. She sent Hugo to the blacksmith to be whipped.

That, in itself, was a stroke of genius. The blacksmith whipped grown boys in the high school for their misdeeds. To send a six-year-old child was crushing. But Hugo had risen above the standards set by his society. He had been superior to it for a moment, and society hated him for it. His teacher hated him because she feared him. Mothers of children, learning about the episode, collected to discuss it in high-pitched, hateful voices. Hugo was enveloped in hate. And, as the lash of the smith fell on his small frame, he felt the depths of misery. He was a strong man. There was damnation in his veins.

The minister came and prayed over him. The doctor was sent for and examined him. Frantic busybodies suggested that things be done to weaken him—what things, they did not say. And Hugo, suffering bitterly, saw that if he had beaten the farmer's boy in fair combat, he would have been a hero. It was the scale of his triumph that made it dreadful. He did not realize then that if he had been so minded, he could have turned on the blacksmith and whipped him, he could have broken the neck of the doctor, he could have run raging through the town and escaped unscathed. His might was a secret from himself. He knew it only as a curse, like a disease or a blemish.

During the ensuing four or five years Hugo's peculiar trait asserted itself but once. It was a year after his fight with the bully. He had been isolated socially. Even Anna Blake did not dare to tease him any longer. Shunned and wretched, he built a world of young dreams and confections and lived in it with whatever comfort it afforded.

One warm afternoon in a smoky Indian summer he walked home from school, spinning a top as he walked, stopping every few yards to pick it up and to let its eccentric momentum die on the palm of his hand. His pace thereby was made very slow and he calculated it to bring him to his home in time for supper and no sooner, because, despite his vigour, chores were as odious to him as to any other boy. A wagon drawn by two horses rolled toward him. It was a heavy wagon, piled high with grain-sacks, and a man sat on its rear end, his legs dangling.

As the wagon reached Hugo, it jolted over a rut. There was a grinding rip and a crash. Hugo pocketed his top and looked. The man sitting on the back had been pinned beneath the rear axle, and the load held him there. As