Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

the harder life is for you. And you're the strongest of them all, Hugo."

The heart of the ten-year-old boy burned and vibrated. "And what about God?" he asked.

Danner looked into the darkened sky. "I don't know much about Him," he sighed.

Such was the soundest counsel that Hugo was given during his youth. Because it came to him accompanied by unadulterated truths that he was able to recognize, it exerted a profound effect on him. It is surprising that his father was the one to give it. Nevertheless, Professor Danner was the only person in all of Indian Creek who had sufficient imagination to perceive his son's problems and to reckon with them in any practical sense.

Hugo was eighteen before he gave any other indication of his strength save in that fantastic and Gargantuan play which he permitted himself. Even his play was intruded upon by the small-minded and curious world before he had found the completeness of its pleasure. Then Hugo fell into his coma.

Hugo went back to the deep forest to think things over and to become acquainted with his powers. At first, under full pressure of his sinews, he was clumsy and inaccurate. He learned deftness by trial and error. One day he found a huge pit in the tangled wilderness. It had been an open mine long years before. Sitting on its brink, staring into its pool of verdure, dreaming, he conceived a manner of entertainment suitable for his powers.

He jumped over its craggy edge and walked to its centre. There he selected a high place, and with his hands he cleared away the growth that covered it. Next he laid the foundations of a fort, over which he was to watch the fastnesses for imaginary enemies. The foundations were made of boulders. Some he carried and some he rolled from the floor of the man-made canyon. By the end of the afternoon he had laid out a square wall of rock some three feet in height. On the next day he added to it until the four walls reached as high as he could stretch. He left space for one door and he made a single window. He roofed the walls with the trunks of trees and he erected a turret over the door.

For days the creation was his delight. After school he sped to it. Until dark he strained and struggled with bare rocks. When it was finished, it was an edifice that would have withstood artillery fire creditably. Then Hugo experimented with catapults, but he found no engine that could hurl the rocks he used for ammunition as far as his arms. He cached his treasures in his fortress—an old axe, the scabbard of a sword, tops and marbles, two cans of beans for emergency rations—and he made a flag of blue and white cloth for himself.

Then he played in it. He pretended that Indians were stalking him. An imaginary head would appear at the rim of the pit. Hugo would see it through a chink. Swish! Crash! A puff of dust would show where rock met rock—with the attacker's head between. At times he would be stormed on all sides. To get the effect he would leap the canyon and hurl boulders on his own fort. Then he would return and defend it.

It was after such a strenuous sally and while he was waiting in high excitement for the enemy to reappear that Professors Whitaker and Smith from the college stumbled on his stronghold. They were walking together through the forest, bent on scaling the mountain to make certain observations of an ancient cirque that was formed by the seventh great glacier. As they walked, they debated matters of strata curvature. Suddenly Whitaker gripped Smith's arm. "Look!"

They stared through the trees and over the lip of Hugo's mine. Their eyes bulged as they observed the size and weight of the fortress.

"Moonshiners," Smith whispered.

"Rubbish. Moonshiners don't build like that. It's a second Stonehenge. An Indian relic."

"But there's a sign of fresh work around it."

Whitaker observed the newly turned earth and the freshly bared rock. "Perhaps—perhaps, professor, we've fallen upon something big. A lost race of Indian engineers. A branch of the Incas—or—"

"Maybe they'll be hostile."

The men edged forward. And at the moment they reached the edge of the pit, Hugo emerged from his fort. He saw the men with sudden fear. He tried to hide.

"Hey!" they said. He did not move, but he heard them scrambling slowly toward the spot where he lay.

"Dressed in civilized clothes," the first professor said in a loud voice as his eye located Hugo in the underbrush. "Hey!"

Hugo showed himself. "What?"

"Who are you?"

"Hugo Danner."

"Oh—old Danner's boy, eh?"

Hugo did not like the tone in which they referred to his father. He made no reply.

"Can you tell us anything about these ruins?"

"What ruins?"

They pointed to his fort. Hugo was hurt. "Those aren't ruins. I built that fort. It's to fight Indians in."

The pair ignored his answer and started toward the fort. Hugo did not protest. They surveyed its weighty walls and its relatively new roof.

"Looks recent," Smith said.

"This child has evidently renovated it. But it must have stood here for thousands of years."

"It didn't. I made it—mostly last week."

They noticed him again. Whitaker simpered. "Don't lie, young man."

Hugo was sad. "I'm not lying. I made it. You see—I'm strong." It was as if he had pronounced his own damnation.

"Tut, tut." Smith interrupted his survey. "Did you find it?"

"I built it."

"I said"—the professor spoke with increasing annoyance—"I said not to tell me stories any longer. It's important, young man, that we know just how you found this dolmen and in what condition."

"It isn't a dolly—whatever you said—it's a fort and I built it and I'm not lying."

The professor, in the interests of science, made a grave mistake. He seized Hugo by the arms and shook him. "Now, see here, young man, I'll have no more of your impertinent lip. Tell me just what you've done to harm this noble monument to another race, or, I swear, I'll slap you properly." The professor had no children. He tried, at the same time, another tack, which insulted Hugo further. "If you do, I'll give you a penny—to keep."

Hugo wrenched himself free with an ease that startled Smith. His face was dark, almost black. He spoke slowly, as if he was trying to piece words into sense. "You—both of you—you go away from here and leave me or I'll break your two rotten old necks."

Whitaker moved toward him, and Smith interceded. "We better leave him—and come back later." He was still frightened by the strength in Hugo's arms. "The child is mad. He may have hydrophobia. He might bite." The men moved away hastily. Hugo watched them climb the wall. When they reached the top, he called gently. They wheeled.

And Hugo, sobbing, tears streaming from his face, leaped into his fort. Rocks vomited themselves from it—huge rocks that no man could budge. Walls toppled and crashed. The men began to move. Hugo looked up. He chose a stone that weighed more than a hundred pounds.

"Hey!" he said. "I'm not a liar!" The rock arched through the air and Professors Whitaker and Smith escaped death by a scant margin. Hugo lay in the wreck of the first thing his hands had built, and wept.

After a little while he sprang to his feet and chased the retreating professors. When he suddenly appeared in front of them, they were stricken dumb. "Don't tell any one about that or about me," he said. "If you do—I'll break down your house just like I broke mine. Don't even tell my family. They know it, anyhow."

He leaped. Toward them—over them. The forest hid him. Whitaker wiped clammy perspiration from his brow. "What was it, Smith?"

"A demon. We can't mention it," he repeated, thinking of the warning. "We can't speak of it anyway. They'll never believe us."

V

Extremely dark of hair, of eyes and skin, moderately tall, and shaped with that compact, breath-taking symmetry that the male figure sometimes assumes, a brilliantly devised, aggressive head topping his broad shoulders, graceful, a man vehemently alive, a man with the promise of a young God. Hugo at eighteen. His emotions ran through his eyes like hot steel in a dark mould. People avoided those eyes; they contained a statement from which ordinary souls shrank.

His skin glowed and sweated into a shiny red-brown. His voice was deep and alluring. During twelve long and fierce years he had fought to know and control himself. Indian Creek had forgotten the terrible child.

Hugo's life at that time revolved less about himself than it had during his first years. That was both natural and fortunate. If his classmates in school and the older people of the town had not discounted his early physical precocity, even his splendid vitality might not have been sufficient to prevent him from becoming moody and melancholy.

But when with the passage of time he tossed no more bullies, carried no more barrels of temptation, built no more fortresses, and grew so handsome that the matrons of Indian Creek as well as the adolescent girls in high school followed him with wayward glances, when the men found him a gay and comprehending companion for any sport or adventure, when his teachers observed that his intelligence was often embarrassingly acute, when he played on three teams and was elected an officer in his classes each year, then that half of Hugo which was purely mundane and human dominated him and made him happy.

His adolescence, his emotions, were no different from those of any young man of his age and character. If his ultimate ambitions followed another trajectory, he postponed the evidence of it. Hugo was in love with Anna Blake, the girl who had attracted him when he was six. The residents of Indian Creek knew it. Her family received his calls with the winking tolerance which the middle class grants to young passion. And she was warm and tender and flirtatious and shy according to the policies that she had learned from custom.

The active part of Hugo did not doubt that he would marry her after he had graduated from the college in Indian Creek, that they would settle somewhere near by, and that they would raise a number of children. His subconscious thoughts made reservations that he, in moments when he was intimate with himself, would admit frankly. It made him a little ashamed of himself to see that on one night he would sit with Anna and kiss her ardently until his body ached, and on another he would deliberately plan to desert her. His idealism at that time was very great and untried and it did not occur to him that all men are so deliberately calculating in the love they disguise as absolute.

Anna had grown into a very attractive woman. Her figure was rounded and tall. Her hair was darker than the waxy curls of her childhood, and a vital gleam had come into it. Her eyes were still as blue and her voice, shorn of its faltering youngness, was sweet and clear. She was undoubtedly the prettiest girl in high school and the logical sweet-heart for Hugo Danner. A flower ready to be plucked, at eighteen.

When Hugo reached his senior year, that readiness became almost an impatience. Girls married at an early age in Indian Creek. She looked down the corridor of time during which he would be in college, she felt the pressure of his still slumbering passion, and she sensed his superiority over most of the town boys. Only a very narrow critic would call her resultant tactics dishonourable. They were too intensely human and too clearly born of social and biological necessity.

She had let him kiss her when they were sixteen. And afterwards, before she went to sleep, she sighed rapturously at the memory of his warm, firm lips, his strong, rough arms. Hugo had gone home through the dizzily spinning dusk, through the wind-strummed trees and the fragrant fields, his breath deep in his chest, his eyes hot and somewhat understanding.

Gradually Anna increased that license. She knew and she did not know what she was doing. She played a long game in which she said: "If our love is consummated too soon, the social loss will be balanced by a speedier marriage, because Hugo is honourable; but that will never happen." Two years after that first kiss, when they were floating on the narrow river in a canoe, Hugo unfastened her blouse and exposed the creamy beauty of her bosom to the soft moonlight and she did not protest. That night he nearly possessed her, and after that night he learned through her unspoken, voluptuous suggestion all the technique of love-making this side of consummation.

When, finally, he called one night at her house and found that she was alone and that her parents