Gladiator by Philip Wylie (top reads txt) 📖

be a good guy and take me to your hotel, will you? I’m scared I’ll lose you.”

He held her hands. “You won’t lose me. And I haven’t got a hotel—yet.”

“Then-come up an’ stay with me. Honest, I’m all right. I can prove it to you. It’ll be doin’ me a favor.”

“I ought not to, Charlotte.”

She threw her arms around him and kissed him. He felt her breath on his lips and the warmth of her body. “You gotta, kid. You’re all I ever had. Please, please.”

Hugo walked up the stairs thoughtfully. In her small room he watched her disrobe. So willingly now-so eagerly. She turned back the covers of the bed. “It ain’t much of a dump, baby, but I’ll make you like it.”

Much later, in the abyss of darkness, he heard her voice, sleepy and still husky. “Say, mister, what’s your name?”

They had breakfast together in a quiet enchantment. Once she kissed him.

“Would you like to keep house-for me?” he asked.

“Do you mean it?”

“Sure, I mean it. I’ll get a job and we’ll find an apartment and you can spend your spare time swimming and lying on the beach.” He knew a twinge of unexpected jealousy. “That is, if you’ll promise not to look at all the men who are going to look at you.” He was ashamed of that statement.

Charlotte, however, was not sufficiently civilized to be displeased. “Do you think I’d two-time the first gent that ever worried about what I did in my spare moments? Why, if you brought home a few bucks to most of the birds I know, they wouldn’t even ask how you earned it—they’d be so busy lookin’ for another girl an’ a shot of gin.”

“Well—let’s go.”

Hugo went to one of the largest side shows. After some questioning he found the manager. “I’m H. Smith,” he said, “and I want to apply for a job.”

“Doin’ what?”

“A strong-man act,” Hugo said.

Charlotte tittered. She thought that the bravado of her new friend was overstepping the limits of good sense. The manager sat up. “I’d like to have a good strong man, yes. The show needs one. But you’re not the bird. You haven’t got the beef. Go over and watch that damned German work.”

Hugo bent over and fastened one hand on the back of the chair on which the manager sat. Without evidence of effort he lifted the chair and its occupant high over his head.

“For Christ’s sake, let me down,” the manager said.

Hugo swung him through the air in a wide arc. “I say, mister, that I’m three times stronger than that German. And I want your job. If I don’t look strong enough, I’ll wear some padded tights. And I’ll give you a show that’ll be worth the admission. But I want a slice of the entrance price—and maybe a separate tent, see? My name is Hogarth”—he winked at Charlotte—“and you’ll never be sorry you took me on.”

The manager, panting and astonished, was returned to the floor. His anger struggled with his pleasure at Hugo’s showmanship. “Well, what else can you do? Weight-lifting is pretty stale.”

Hugo thought quickly. “I can bend a railroad rail—not a spike. I can lift a full-grown horse with one—one shoulder. I can chin myself on my little finger. I can set a bear trap with my teeth—”

“That’s a good number.”

“I can push up just twice as much weight as any one else in the game and you can print a challenge on my tent. I can pull a boa constrictor straight—”

“We’ll give you a chance. Come around here at three this afternoon with your stuff and we’ll try your act. Does this lady work in it? That’ll help.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said.

Hugo nodded. “She’s my assistant.”

They left the building, and when she was sure they were out of earshot, Charlotte said: “What do you do, strong boy, fake em?”

“No. I do them.”

“Aw—you don’t need to kid me.”

“I’m not. You saw me lift him, didn’t you? Well—that was nothing.”

“Jeest! That I should live to see the day I got a bird like you.”

Until three o’clock Hugo and Charlotte occupied their time with feverish activity. They found a small apartment not far from the seashore. It was clean and bright and it had windows on two sides. Its furniture was nearly new, and Charlotte, with tears in her eyes, sat in all the chairs, lay on the bed, took the egg-beater from the drawer in the kitchen table and spun it in an empty bowl. They went out together and bought a quantity and a variety of food. They ate an early luncheon and Hugo set out to gather the properties for his demonstration. At three o’clock, before a dozen men, he gave an exhibition of strength the like of which had never been seen in any museum of human abnormalities.

When he went back to his apartment, Charlotte, in a gingham dress which she had bought with part of the money he had given her, was preparing dinner. He took her on his lap. “Did you get the job?”

“Sure I did. Fifty a week and ten per cent of the gate receipts.”

“Gee! That’s a lot of money!”

Hugo nodded and kissed her. He was very happy. Happier, in a certain way, than he had ever been or ever would be again. His livelihood was assured. He was going to live with a woman, to have one always near to love and to share his life. It was that concept of companionship, above all other things, which made him glad.

Two days later, as Hugo worked to prepare the vehicles of his exhibition, he heard an altercation outside the tent that had been erected for him. A voice said: “Whatcha try in’ to do there, anyhow?”

“Why, I was making this strong man as I saw him. A man with the expression of strength in his face.”

“But you gotta bat’ robe on him. What we want is muscles. Muscles, bo. Bigger an’ better than any picture of any strong man ever made. Put one here—an’ one there—”

“But that isn’t correct anatomy.”

“To hell wit’ that stuff. Put one there, I says.”

Hugo walked out of the tent. A young man was bending over a huge sheet made of many lengths of oilcloth sewn together. He was a small person, with pale eyes and a white skin. Beside him stood the manager, eying critically the strokes applied to the cloth. In a semi-finished state was the young man’s picture of the imaginary Hogarth.

“That’s pretty good,” Hugo said.

The young man smiled apologetically. “It isn’t quite right. You can see for yourself you have no muscles there—and there. I suppose you’re Hogarth?”

“Yes.”

“Well—I tried to explain the anatomy of it, but Mr. Smoots says anatomy doesn’t matter. So here we go.” He made a broad orange streak.

Hugo smiled. “Smoots is not an anatomical critic of any renown. I say, Smoots, let him paint it as he sees best. God knows the other posters are atrocious enough.”

The youth looked up from his work. “Good God, don’t tell me you’re really Hogarth!”

“Sure. Why not?”

“Well—well—I—I guess it was your English.”

“That’s funny. And I don’t blame you.” Hugo realized that the young sign-painter was a person of some culture. He was about Hugo’s age, although he seemed younger on first glance. “As a matter of fact, I’m a college man.” Smoots had moved away. “But, for the love of God, don’t tell any one around here.”

The painter stopped. “Is that so! And you’re doing this—to make money?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I’ll be doggoned. Me, too. I study at the School of Design in the winter, and in the summer I come out here to do signs and lightning portraits and whatever else I can to make the money for it. Sometimes,” he added, “I pick up more than a thousand bucks in a season. This is my fourth year at it.”

There was in the young artist’s eye a hint of amusement, a suggestion that they were in league. Hugo liked him. He sat down on a box. “Live here?”

“Yes. Three blocks away.”

“Me, too. Why not come up and have supper with—my wife and me?”

“Are you married?” The artist commenced work again.

Hugo hesitated. “Yeah.”

“Sure I’ll come up. My name’s Valentine Mitchel. I can’t shake hands just now. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked to any one who doesn’t say ‘deez’ and ‘doze.’”

When, later in the day, they walked toward Hugo’s home, he was at a loss to explain Charlotte. The young painter would not understand why he, a college man, chose so ignorant a mate On the other hand, he owed it to Charlotte to keep their secret and he was not obliged to make any explanation.

Valentine Mitchel was, however, a young man of some sensitivity. If he winced at Charlotte’s “Pleased to meetcher,” he did not show it. Later, after an excellent and hilarious meal, he must have guessed the situation. He went home reluctantly and Hugo was delighted with him. He had been urbane and filled with anecdotes of Greenwich Village and art-school life, of Paris, whither his struggling footsteps had taken him for a hallowed year. And with his acceptance of Hugo came an equally warm pleasure in Charlotte’s company.

“He’s a good little kid,” Charlotte said.

“Yes. I’m glad I picked him up.”

The gala opening of Hogarth’s Studio of Strength took place a few nights afterwards. It proved even more successful than Smoots had hoped. The flamboyant advertising posters attracted crowds to see the man who could set a bear trap with his teeth, who could pull an angry boa constrictor into a straight line. Before ranks of gaping faces that were supplanted by new ranks every hour, Hugo performed. Charlotte, resplendent in a black dress that left her knees bare, and a red sash that all but obliterated the dress, helped Hugo with his ponderous props, setting off his strength by contrast, and sold the pamphlets Hugo had written at Smoots’s suggestion-pamphlets that purported to give away the secret of Hogarth’s phenomenal muscle power. Valentine Mitchel watched the entire performance.

When it was over, he said to Hugo: “Now you better beat it back and get a hot bath. You’re probably all in.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “Come. I myself will bathe you.”

Hugo grinned. “Hell, no. Now we’re all going on a bender to celebrate. We’ll eat at Villapigue’s and we’ll take a moonlight sail.”

They went together, marveling at his vitality, gay, young, and living in a world that they managed to forget did not exist. The night was warm. The days that followed were warmer. The crowds came and the brassy music hooted and coughed over them night and day.

Only once that he could recall afterwards did he allow his intellect to act in any critical direction, and that was in a conversation with the young artist. They were sitting together in the sand, and Charlotte, browned by weeks of bathing, lay near by. “Here I am,” Mitchel said with an unusual thoughtfulness, “with a talent that should be recognized, wanting to be an illustrator, able to be one, and yet forced to dawdle with this horrible business to make my living.”

Hugo nodded. “You’ll come through—some winter—and you won’t ever return to Coney Island.”

“I know it. Unless I do it for sentimental reasons some day—in a limousine.”

“It’s myself,” Hugo said then, “and not you who is doomed to—well, to this sort of thing. You have a talent that is at least understandable and”—he was going to say mediocre. He checked himself—“applicable in the world of human affairs. My talent—if it is a talent—has no place, no application, no audience.”

Mitchel stared at Hugo,