Gladiator by Philip Wylie (top reads txt) đź“–
- Author: Philip Wylie
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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.”
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.”
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 mold. 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.
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, a 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.
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 sweetheart 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 dishonorable. 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 honorable; but that will never happen.” When, finally, he called one night at her house and found that she was alone and that her parents 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 quarreled 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 ardor 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 quarreled 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
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