Gladiator by Philip Wylie (top reads txt) 📖

HUGO sat in Madison Square Park giving his attention in a circuit to the Flatiron Building, the clock on the Metropolitan Tower, and the creeping barrage of traffic that sent people scampering, stopped, moved forward again. He had sat on the identical bench at the identical time of day during his obscure undergraduate period. He was without money now, as he had been then, so long ago. He budged on the bench and challenged himself to think.

What would you do if you were the strongest man in the world, the strongest thing in the world, mightier than the machine? He made himself guess answers for that rhetorical query. “I would—I would have won the war. But I did not. I would run the universe single-handed. Literally single-handed. I would scorn the universe and turn it to my own ends. I would be a criminal. I would rip open banks and gut them. I would kill and destroy. I would be a secret, invisible blight. I would set out to stamp crime off the earth; I would be a super-detective, following and summarily punishing every criminal until no one dared to commit a felony. What would I do? What will I do?”

Then he realized that he was hungry. He had not eaten enough in the last few days. Enough for him. With some intention of finding work he had left Mr. Shayne’s house. A call on the telephone from Mr. Shayne himself volunteering a position had crystallized that intention. In three days he had discovered the vast abundance of young men, the embarrassment of young men, who were walking along the streets looking for work. He who had always worked with his arms and shoulders had determined to try to earn his living with his head. But the white-collar ranks were teeming, overflowing, supersaturated. He went down in the scale of clerkships and inexperienced clerkships. There was no work.

Thence he had gone to the park, and presently he rose. He had seen the clusters of men on Sixth Avenue standing outside the employment agencies. He could go there. Any employment was better than hunger—and he had learned that hunger could come swiftly and formidably to him. Business was slack, hands were being laid off, where an apprentice was required, three trained men waited avidly for work. It was appalling and Hugo saw it as appalling. He was not frightened, but, as he walked, he knew that it was a mistake to sit in the park with the myriad other men. Walking made him feel better. It was action, it bred the thought that any work was better than none. Work would not hinder his dreams, meantime.

When he reached Forty-second Street he could see the sullen, watchful groups of men. He joined one of them. A loose-jointed, dark-faced person came down a flight of stairs, wrote on a blackboard in chalk, and went up again. Several of the group detached themselves and followed him—to compete for a chance to wash windows.

A man at his side spoke to him. “Tough, ain’t it, buddy?”

“Yeah, it’s tough,” Hugo said.

“I got three bones left. Wanna join me in a feed an’ get a job afterward?”

Hugo looked into his eyes. They were troubled and desirous of companionship. “No, thanks,” he replied.

They waited for the man to scribble again in chalk.

“They was goin’ to fix up everybody slick after the war. Oh, hell, yes.”

“You in it?” Hugo asked.

“Up to my God-damned neck, buddy.”

“Me, too. Guess I’ll go up the line.”

“I’ll go witcha.”

“Well—”

They waited a moment longer, for the man with the chalk had reappeared. Hugo’s comrade grunted. “Wash windows an’ work in the steel mills. Break your neck or burn your ear off. Wha’ do they care?” Hugo had taken a step toward the door, but the youth with the troubled eyes caught his sleeve. “Don’t go up for that, son. They burn you in them steel mills. I seen guys afterward. Two years an’ you’re all done. This is tough, but that’s tougher. Sweet Jesus, I’ll say it is.”

Hugo loosened himself. “Gotta eat, buddy. I don’t happen to have even three bones available at the moment.”

The man looked after him. “Gosh,” he murmured. “Even guys like that.”

He was in a dingy room standing before a grilled window A voice from behind it asked his name, age, address, war record. Hugo was handed a piece of paper to sign and then a second piece that bore the scrawled words: “Amalgamated Crucible Steel Corp., Harrison, N. J.”

Hugo’s emotional life was reawakened when he walked into the mills. His last nickel was gone. He had left the train at the wrong station and walked more than a mile. He was hungry and cold. He came as if naked, to the monster and he did it homage.

Its predominant color scheme was black and red. It had a loud, pagan voice. It breathed fire. It melted steel and rock and drank human sweat, with human blood for an occasional stimulant. On every side of him were enormous buildings and woven between them a plaid of girders, cables, and tracks across which masses of machinery moved. Inside, Thor was hammering. Inside, a crane sped overhead like a tarantula, trailing its viscera to the floor, dangling a gigantic iron rib. A white speck in its wounded abdomen was a human face.

Hugo, standing sublimely small in its midst, measured his strength against it, soaked up its warmth, shook his fist at it, and shouted in a voice that could not be heard for a foot: “Christ Almighty! This—is something!”

“Name?”

“Hugo Danner.”

“Address?”

“None at present.”

“Experience?”

“None.”

“Married?”

“No.”

“Union?”

“What?”

“Lemme see your union card.”

“I don’t belong.”

“Well, you gotta join.”

He was sent to a lodging-house, advanced five dollars, and told that he would be boarded and given a bed and no more until the employment agency had taken its commission, and the union its dues. He signed a paper. He went on the night shift without supper.

He ran a wheelbarrow filled with heavy, warm slag for a hundred feet over a walk of loose bricks. The job was simple. Load, carry, dump, return, load. On some later night he would count the number of loads. But on this first night he walked with excited eyes, watching the tremendous things that happened all around him. Man ran the machinery that dumped the ladle. Men guided liquid iron from the furnaces into a maze of channels and doughs, clearing the way through the sand, cutting off the stream, making new openings. Men wheeled the slag and steered the trains and trams and cranes. Men operated the hammers. And almost all of the men were nude to the waist, sleek and shining with sweat; almost all of them drank whiskey.

One of the men in the wheelbarrow line even offered a drink to Hugo. He held out the flask and bellowed in Czech. Hugo took it. The drink was raw and foul. Pouring into his empty stomach, it had a powerful effect, making him exalted, making him work like a demon. After a long, noisy time that did not seem long a steam whistle screamed faintly and the shift was ended.

The Czech accompanied Hugo through the door. The new shift was already at work. They went out. A nightmare of brilliant orange and black fled from Hugo’s vision and he looked into the pale, remote chiaroscuro of dawn. “Me tired,” the Czech said in a small, aimless tone. They flung themselves on dirty beds in a big room. But Hugo did not sleep for a time—not until the sun rose and day was evident in the grimy interior of the bunk house.

That he could think while he worked had been Hugo’s thesis when he walked up Sixth Avenue. Now working steadily, working at a thing that was hard for other men and easy for him, he neverthelesss fell into the stolid vacuum of the manual laborer. The mills became familiar, less fantastic. He remembered that oftentimes the war had given a more dramatic passage of man’s imagination forged into fire and steel. His task was changed numerous times. For a while he puddled pig iron with the long-handled, hoelike tool. “Don’t slip in,” they said. It was succinct, graphic.

Then they