Gladiator by Philip Wylie (great novels txt) 📕

and her brother would not return until the next day, they looked at each other with a shining agreement. He turned the lights out and they sat on the couch in the darkness, listening to the passing of people on the sidewalk outside. He undressed her. He whispered halting, passionate phrases. He asked her if she was afraid and let himself be laughed away from his own conscience. Then he took her and loved her.

Afterwards, going home again in the gloom of late night, he looked up at the stars and they stood still. He realized that a certain path of life had been followed to its conclusion. He felt initiated into the adult world. And it had been so simple, so natural, so sweet.... He threw a great stone into the river and laughed and walked on, after a while.

Through the summer that followed, Hugo and Anna ran the course of their affair. They loved each other violently and incessantly and with no other evil consequence than to invite the open "humphs" of village gossips and to involve him in several serious talks with her father. Their courtship was given the benefit of conventional doubt, however, and their innocence was hotly if covertly protested by the Blakes. Mrs. Danner coldly ignored every fragment of insinuation. She hoped that Hugo and Anna would announce their engagement and she hinted that hope. Hugo himself was excited and absorbed. Occasionally he thought he was sterile, with an inclination to be pleased rather than concerned if it was true.

He added tenderness to his characteristics. And he loved Anna too much. Toward the end of that summer she lost weight and became irritable. They quarrelled once and then again. The criteria for his physical conduct being vague in his mind, Hugo could not gauge it correctly. And he did not realize that the very ardour of his relation with her was abnormal. Her family decided to send her away, believing the opposite of the truth responsible for her nervousness and weakness. A week before she left, Hugo himself tired of his excesses.

One evening, dressing for a last passionate rendezvous, he looked in his mirror as he tied his scarf and saw that he was frowning. Studying the frown, he perceived with a shock what made it. He did not want to see Anna, to take her out, to kiss and rumple and clasp her, to return thinking of her, feeling her, sweet and smelling like her. It annoyed him. It bored him. He went through it uneasily and quarrelled again. Two days later she departed.

He acted his loss well and she did not show her relief until she sat on the train, tired, shattered, and uninterested in Hugo and in life. Then she cried. But Hugo was through. They exchanged insincere letters. He looked forward to college in the fall. Then he received a letter from Anna saying that she was going to marry a man she had met and known for three weeks. It was a broken, gasping, apologetic letter. Every one was outraged at Anna and astounded that Hugo bore the shock so courageously.

The upshot of that summer was to fill his mind with fetid memories, which abated slowly, to make him disgusted with himself and tired of Indian Creek. He decided to go to a different college, one far away from the scene of his painful youth and his disillusioned maturity. He chose Webster University because of the greatness of its name. If Abednego Danner was hurt at his son's defection from his own college, he said nothing. And Mrs. Danner, grown more silent and reserved, yielded to her son's unexpected decision.

Hugo packed his bags one September afternoon, with a feeling of dreaminess. He bade farewell to his family. He boarded the train. His mind was opaque. The spark burning in it was one of dawning adventure buried in a mass of detail. He had never been far from his native soil. Now he was going to see cities and people who were almost foreign, in the sophisticated East. But all he could dwell on was a swift cinema of a defeated little boy, a strong man who could never be strong, a surfeited love, a truant and dimly comprehensible blonde girl, a muddy street and a red station, a clapboard house, a sonorous church with hushed puppets in the pews, fudge parties, boats on the little river, cold winter, and ice over the mountains, and a fortress where once upon a time he had felt mightier than the universe.

VI

The short branch line to which Hugo changed brought him to the fringe of the campus. The cars were full of boys, so many of them that he was embarrassed. They all appeared to know each other, and no one spoke to him. His dreams on the train were culminated. He had decided to become a great athlete. With his mind's eye, he played the football he would play—and the baseball. Ninety-yard runs, homers hit over the fence into oblivion. Seeing the boys and feeling their lack of notice of him redoubled the force of that decision. Then he stepped on to the station platform and stood facing the campus. He could not escape a rush of reverence and of awe; it was so wide, so green and beautiful. Far away towered the giant arches of the stadium. Near by were the sharp Gothic points of the chapel and the graduate college. Between them a score or more of buildings rambled in and out through the trees.

"Hey!"

Hugo turned a little self-consciously. A youth in a white shirt and white trousers was beckoning to him. "Freshman, aren't you?"

"Yes. My name's Danner. Hugo Danner."

"I'm Lefty Foresman. Chuck!" A second student separated himself from the bustle of baggage and young men. "Here's a freshman."

Hugo waited with some embarrassment. He wondered why they wanted a freshman. Lefty introduced Chuck and then said: "Are you strong, freshman?"

For an instant he was stunned. Had they heard, guessed? Then he realized it was impossible. They wanted him to work. They were going to haze him. "Sure," he said.

"Then get this trunk and I'll show you where to take it."

Hugo was handed a baggage check. He found the official and located the trunk. Tentatively he tested its weight, as if he were a normally husky youth about to undertake its transportation. He felt pleased that his strength was going to be tried so accidentally and in such short order. Lefty and Chuck heaved the trunk on his back. "Can you carry it?" they asked.

"Sure."

"Don't be too sure. It's a long way."

Peering from beneath the trunk under which he bent with a fair assumption of human weakness, Hugo had his first close glimpse of Webster. They passed under a huge arch and down a street lined with elms. Students were everywhere, carrying books and furniture, moving in wheelbarrows and moving by means of the backs of other freshmen. The two who led him were talking and he listened as he plodded.

"Saw Marcia just before I left the lake—took her out one night—and got all over the place with her—and then came down—she's coming to the first prom with me—and Marj to the second—got to get some beer in—we'll buzz out and see if old Snorenson has made any wine this summer. Hello, Eddie—glad to see you back—I've elected the dean's physics, though, God knows, I'll never get a first in them and I need it for a key. That damn Frosh we picked up sure must have been a porter—hey, freshmen! Want a rest?"

"No, thanks."

"Went down to the field this afternoon—looks all right to me. The team, that is. Billings is going to quarter it now—and me after that—hope to Christ I make it—they're going to have Scapper and Dwan back at Yale and we've got a lot of work to do. Frosh! You don't need to drag that all the way in one yank. Put it down, will you?"

"I'm not tired. I don't need a rest."

"Well, you know best—but you ought to be tired. I would. Where do you come from?"

"Colorado."

"Huh! People go to Colorado. Never heard of any one coming from there before. Whereabouts?"

"Indian Creek."

"Oh." There was a pause. "You aren't an Indian, are you?" It was asked bluntly.

"Scotch Presbyterian for twenty generations."

"Well, when you get through here, you'll be full of Scotch and emptied of the Presbyterianism. Put the trunk down."

Their talk of women, of classes, of football, excited Hugo. He was not quite as amazed to find that Lefty Foresman was one of the candidates for the football team as he might have been later when he knew how many students attended the university and how few, relatively, were athletes. He decided at once that he liked Lefty. The sophistication of his talk was unfamiliar to Hugo; much of it he could not understand and only guessed. He wanted Lefty to notice him. When he was told to put the trunk down, he did not obey. Instead, with precision and ease, he swung it up on his shoulder, held it with one hand and said in an unflustered tone: "I'm not tired, honestly. Where do we go from here?"

"Great howling Jesus!" Lefty said, "what have we here? Hey! Put that trunk down." There was excitement in his voice. "Say, guy, do that again."

Hugo did it. Lefty squeezed his biceps and grew pale. Those muscles in action lost their feel of flesh and became like stone. Lefty said: "Say, boy, can you play football?"

"Sure," Hugo said.

"Well, you leave that trunk with Chuck, here, and come with me."

Hugo did as he had been ordered and they walked side by side to the gymnasium. Hugo had once seen a small gymnasium, ill equipped and badly lighted, and it had appealed mightily to him. Now he stood in a prodigious vaulted room with a shimmering floor, a circular balcony, a varied array of apparatus. His hands clenched. Lefty quit him for a moment and came back with a man who wore knickers. "Mr. Woodman, this is—what the hell's your name?"

"Danner. Hugo Danner."

"Mr. Woodman is football coach."

Hugo took the man's hand. Lefty excused himself. Mr. Woodman said: "Young Foresman said you played football."

"Just on a high-school team in Colorado."

"Said you were husky. Go in my office and ask Fitzsimmons to give you a gym suit. Come out when you're ready."

Hugo undressed and put on the suit. Fitzsimmons, the trainer, looked at him with warm admiration. "You're sure built, son."

"Yeah. That's luck, isn't it?"

Then Hugo was taken to another office. Woodman asked him a number of questions about his weight, his health, his past medical history. He listened to Hugo's heart and then led him to a scale. Hugo had lied about his weight.

"I thought you said one hundred and sixty, Mr. Danner?"

The scales showed two hundred and eleven, but it was impossible for a man of his size and build to weigh that much. Hugo had lied deliberately, hoping that he could avoid the embarrassment of being weighed. "I did, Mr. Woodman. You see—my weight is a sort of freak. I don't show it—no one would believe it—and yet there it is." He did not go into the details of his construction from a plasm new to biology.

"Huh!" Mr. Woodman said. Together they walked out on the floor of the gymnasium. Woodman called to one of the figures on the track who was making slow, plodding circuits. "Hey, Nellie! Take this bird up and pace him for a lap. Make it fast."

A little smile came at the corners of Hugo's mouth. Several of the men in the gymnasium stopped work to watch the trial of what was evidently a new candidate. "Ready?" Woodman said, and the runners crouched side by side. "Set? Go!"

Nelson, one of the best sprinters Webster had had for years, dashed forward. He had covered thirty feet when he heard a voice almost in his ear. "Faster, old man."

Nelson increased. "Faster, boy, I'm passing you." The words were spoken quietly, calmly. A rage filled Nelson. He let every ounce of his strength into his limbs and skimmed the canvas. Half a lap. Hugo ran at his side and Nelson could not lead him. The remaining half was not a race. Hugo finished thirty feet in the lead.

Woodman, standing on the floor, wiped his forehead and bawled: "That the best you can do, Nellie?"

"Yes, sir."

"What in hell have you been doing to yourself?"

Nelson drew a sobbing breath. "I—haven't—done—a thing. Time—that man. He's—faster than the intercollegiate mark."

Woodman, still dubious, made Hugo run against time. And Hugo, eager to make an impression and unguided by a human runner, broke the world's record for the distance around the track by a second and three-fifths. The watch in Woodman's hands trembled.

"Hey!" he said, uncertain of his voice, "come down here, will you?"

Hugo descended the spiral iron staircase. He