Gladiator by Philip Wylie (top reads txt) 📖

IT WAS bright morning when Hugo awoke. Through the window-pane in the room where he had slept, he could see a straggling back yard; damp clothes moved in the breeze, and beyond was a depression green with young shoots. He descended to the restaurant and ate his breakfast. Automobiles were swishing along the road outside and he could hear a clatter of dishes in the kitchen. Afterwards he went out doors and walked through the busy center of the village and on into the country.

He followed the road into the hills. Long stretches of woodland were interrupted by fields. He passed farmhouses and the paved drive of an estate. More than a mile from the deserted farm, more than two miles from the main road, half hidden in a skirt of venerable trees, he saw an old, green house behind which was a row of barns. It was a big house; tile medallions had been set in its foundations by an architect whose tombstone must now be aslant and illegible. It was built on a variety of planes and angles; gables cropped at random from its mossy roof. Grass grew in the broad yard under the trees, and in the grass were crocuses, yellow and red and blue, like wind-strewn confetti.

Hugo paused to contemplate this peaceful edifice. A man walked briskly from one of the barn doors. He perceived Hugo and stopped, holding a spade in his hand. Then, after starting across to the house, he changed his mind and, dropping the spade, approached Hugo.

“Looking for work, my man?”

Hugo smiled. “Why—yes.”

“Know anything about cattle?”

“I was reared in a farming country.”

“Good.” He scrutinized Hugo minutely. “I’ll try you at eight dollars a week, room and board.” He opened the gate. Hugo paused. The notion of finding employment somewhere in the country had been fixed in his mind and he wondered why he waited, even as he did, when the charm of the old manor had offered itself to him as if by a miracle. The man swung open the gate; he was lithe, sober, direct.

“My name is Cane—Ralph Cane. We raise blooded Guernsey stock here. At the moment we haven’t a man.”

“I see,” Hugo said.

“I could make the eight ten—in a week—if you were satisfactory.”

“I wasn’t considering the money—”

“How?”

“I wasn’t considering the money.”

“Oh! Come in. Try it.” An eagerness was apparent in his tone. While Hugo still halted on a knoll of indecision, a woman opened the French windows which lined one facade of the house and stepped down from the porch. She was very tall and very slender. Her eyes were slaty blue and there was a delicate suggestion—almost an apparition—of gray in her hair.

“What is it, Ralph?” Her voice was cool and pitched low.

“This is my wife,” Cane said.

“My name is Danner.”

Cane explained. “I saw this man standing by the gate, and now I’m hiring him.”

“I see,” she said. She looked at Hugo. The crystalline substance of her eyes glinted transiently with some inwardness—surprise, a vanishing gladness, it might have been. “You are looking for work?”

“Yes,” Hugo answered.

Cane spoke hastily. “I offered him eight a week and board, Roseanne.”

She glanced at her husband and returned her attention inquisitively to Hugo. “Are you interested?”

“I’ll try it.”

Cane frowned nervously, walked to his wife, and nodded with averted face. Then he addressed Hugo: “You can sleep in the barn. We have quarters there. I don’t think we’ll be in for any more cold weather. If you’ll come with me now, I’ll start you right in.”

Until noon Hugo cleaned stables. There were two dozen cows—animals that would have seemed beautiful to a rustic connoisseur—and one lordly bull with malignant horns and bloodshot eyes. He shoveled the pungent and not offensive debris into a wheelbarrow and transferred it to a dung-heap that sweated with internal humidity. At noon Cane came into the barn.

“Pretty good,” he said, viewing floors fairly shaved by Hugo’s diligence. “Lunch is ready. You’ll eat in the kitchen.” Hugo saw the woman again. She was toiling over a stove, her hair in disarray, a spotted apron covering her long body. He realized that they had no servants, that the three of them constituted the human inhabitants of the estate—but there were shades, innumerable shades, of a long past, and some of those ghosts had crept into Roseanne’s slaty eyes. She carried lunch for herself and her husband into a front room and left him to eat in the soft silence.

After lunch Cane spoke to him again. “Can you plow?”

“It’s been a long time—but I think so.”

“Good. I have a team. We’ll drive to the north field. I’ve got to start getting the corn in pretty soon.”

The room in the barn was bare: four board walls, a board ceiling and floor, an iron cot, blankets, the sound and smell of the cows beneath. Hugo slept dreamlessly, and when he woke, he was ravenous.

His week passed. Cane drove him like a slavemaster, but to drive Hugo was an unhazardous thing. He did not think much, and when he did, it was to read the innuendo of living that was written parallel to the existence of his employer and Roseanne. They were troubled with each other. Part of that trouble sprang from an evident source: Cane was a miser. He resented the amount of food that Hugo consumed, despite the unequal ratio of Hugo’s labors. When Hugo asked for a few dollars in advance, he was curtly refused. That had happened at lunch one day. After lunch, however, and evidently after Cane had debated with his wife, he inquired of Hugo what he wanted. A razor and some shaving things and new trousers, Hugo had said.

Cane drove the station wagon to town and returned with the desired articles. He gave them to Hugo. “Thank you,” Hugo said.

Cane chuckled, opening his thin lips wide. “All right, Danner. As a matter of fact, it’s money in my bank.”

“Money in your bank?”

“Sure. I’ve lived here for years and I get a ten-per-cent discount at the general store. But I’m charging you full price—naturally.”

“Naturally,” Hugo agreed.

That was one thing that would make the tribulation in her eyes. Hugo wished that he could have met these two people on a different basis, so that he could have learned the truth about them—It was plain ‘hat they were educated, cultured, refined. Cane had said something once about raising cattle in England, and Roseanne had cooked peas as she had learned to cook them in France. “Petit pois an beurre,” she had murmured—with an unimpeachable accent.

Then the week had passed and there had been no mention of the advance in wages. For himself, Hugo did not care. But it was easy to see why no one had been working on the place when Hugo arrived, why they were eager to hire a transient stranger.

He learned part of what he had already guessed from a clerk in the general store. One of the cows was ailing. Mr. Cane could not drive to town (Mrs. Cane, it seemed, never left the house and its environs) and they had sent Hugo.

“You working for the Canes?” the clerk had asked.

“Yes.”

“Funny people.”

Hugo replied indirectly. “Have they lived here long?”

“Long? Roseanne Cane was a Bishop. The Bishops built that house and the house before it—back in the seventeen hundreds. They had a lot of money. Have it still, I guess, but Cane’s too tight to spend it.” There was nothing furtive in the youth’s manner; he was evidently touching on common village gossip. “Yes, sir, too tight. Won’t give her a maid. But before her folks died, it was Europe every year and a maid for every one of ‘em, and ‘Why, deary, don’t tell me that’s the second time you’ve put on that dress! Take it right off and never wear it again.’ ” The joke was part of the formula for telling about the Canes, and the clerk snickered appreciatively. “Yes, sir. You come down here some day when I ain’t got the Friday orders to fill an’ I’ll tell you some thing about old man Cane that’ll turn your stummick.”

June came, and July. The seashore was not distant and occasionally at night Hugo slipped away from the woods and lay on the sand, sometimes drinking in the firmament, sometimes closing his eyes. When it was very hot he undressed behind a pile of barnacle-covered boulders and swam far out in the water. He swam naked, unmolested, stirring up tiny whirlpools of phosphorescence, and afterwards, damp and cool, he would dress and steal back to the barn through the forest and the hay-sweet fields.

One day a man in Middletown asked Mr. Cane to call on him regarding the possible purchase of three cows. Cane’s cows were raised with the maximum of human care, the minimum of extraneous expense. His profit on them was great and he sold them, ordinarily, one at a time. He was so excited at the prospect of a triple sale that for a day he was almost gay, very nearly generous. He drove off blithely—not in the sedan, but in the station wagon, because its gasoline mileage was greater.

It was a day filled with wonder for Hugo. When Cane drove from the house, Roseanne was standing beside the drive. She walked over to the barn and said to Hugo in an oddly agitated voice: “Mr. Danner, could you spare an hour or two this morning to help me get some flowers from the woods?”

“Certainly.”

She glanced in the direction her husband had taken and hurried to the kitchen, returning presently with two baskets and a trowel. He followed her up the road. They turned off on an overgrown path, pushed through underbrush, and arrived in a few minutes at the side of a pond. The edges were grown thick with bushes and water weeds, dead trees lifted awkward arms at the upper end, and dragon flies skimmed over the warm brown water.

“I used to come here to play when I was a little girl,” she said. “It’s still just the same.” She wore a blue dress; branches had disheveled her hair; she seemed more alive than he had ever seen her.

“It’s charming,” Hugo answered.

“There used to be a path all the way around—with stones crossing the brook at the inlet. And over there, underneath those pine trees, there are some orchids. I’ve always wanted to bring them down to the house. I think I could make them grow. Of course, this is a bad time to transplant anything—but I so seldom get a chance. I can’t remember when—

He realized with a shock that she was going to cry. She turned her head away and peered into the green wall. “I think it’s here,” she said tremulously.

They followed a dimly discernible trail; there were deer tracks in it and signs of other animals whose feet had kept it passable. It was hot and damp and they were forced to bend low beneath the tangle to make progress. Almost suddenly they emerged in a grove of white pines. They stood upright and looked: wind stirred sibilantly in the high tops, and the ground underfoot was a soft carpet; the lake reflected the blue of the sky instead of the brown of its soft bottom.

They sat down. This was a new emotion—a paradoxical emotion for him. He had come to an inharmonious sanctuary and he could expect both tragedy and enchantment. There was Roseanne herself, a hidden beautiful thing in whom were prisoned many beauties. She was growing old in the frosty seclusion of her husband’s