Gladiator by Philip Wylie (top reads txt) 📖

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.

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 their 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 was breathing with ease. Woodman stared at him. “Lessee you jump.”

An hour later Fitzsimmons found Woodman sitting in his office. Beside him was a bottle of whisky which he kept to revive wounded gladiators. “Fitz,” said Woodman, looking at the trainer with dazed eyes, “did you see what I saw?”

“Yes, I did, Woodie.”

“Tell me about it.”

Fitzsimmons scratched his graying head. “Well, Woodie, I seen a young man—”

“Saw, Fitz.”

“I saw a young man come into the gym an’ undress. He looked like an oiled steam engine. I saw him go and knock hell out of three track records without even losing his breath. Then I seen him go out on the field an’ kick a football from one end to the other an’ pass it back. That’s what I seen.”

Woodman nodded his head. “So did I. But I don’t believe it, do you?”

“I do. That’s the man you—an’ all the other coaches—have been wantin’ to see. The perfect athlete. Better in everything than the best man at any one thing. Just a freak, Woodie—but, God Almighty, how New Haven an’ Colgate are goin’ to feel it these next years!”

“Mebbe he’s dumb, Fitz.”

“Mebbe. Mebbe not.”

“Find out.”

Fitz wasted no time. He telephoned to the registrar’s office. “Mr. H. Danner,” said the voice of the secretary, “passed his examinations with the highest honors and was admitted among the first ten.”

“He passed his entrance exams among the first ten,” Fitzsimmons repeated.

“Good!” said Woodman, “it’s the millennium!” And he took a drink.

Late in the afternoon of that day Hugo found his room in Thompson Dormitory. He unpacked his carpet-bag and his straw suitcase. He checked in his mind the things that he had done. It seemed a great deal for one day—a complete alteration of his life. He had seen the dean and arranged his classes: trigonometry, English, French, Latin, biology, physics, economics, hygiene. With a pencil and a ruler he made a schedule, which he pinned on the second-hand desk he had bought.

It was growing dark. From a dormitory near by came the music of a banjo. Presently the player sang and other voices joined with him. A warm and golden sun touched the high clouds with lingering fire. Voices cried out, young and vigorous. Hugo sighed. He was going to be happy at Webster. His greatness was going to be born here.

At that time Woodman called informally on Chuck and Lefty. They were in a heated argument over the decorative arrangement of various liquor bottles when he knocked. “Come in!” they shouted in unison.

“Hello!”

“Oh, Woodie. Come in. Sit down. Want a drink—you’re not in training?’

“No, thanks. Had one. And it would be a damn sight better if you birds didn’t keep the stuff around.”

“It’s Chuck’s.” Lefty grinned.

“All right. I came to see about that bird you brought to me—Danner.”

“Was he any good?”

Woodman hesitated. “Fellows, if I told you how good he was, you wouldn’t believe me. He’s so good—I’m scared of him.”

“Whaddaya mean?”

“Just that. He gave Nellie thirty feet in a lap on the track.”

“Great God!”

“He jumped twenty-eight and eleven feet—running and standing. He kicked half a dozen punts for eighty and ninety yards and he passed the same distance.”

Lefty sat down on the window seat. His voice was hoarse. “That—can’t be done, Woodie.”

“I know it. But he did it. But that isn’t what makes me frightened. How much do you think he weighs?”

“One fifty-five—or thereabouts.”

Woodie shook his head. “No, Lefty, he weighs two hundred and eleven.”

“Two eleven! He can’t, Woodie. There’s something wrong with your scales.”

“Not a thing.”

The two students stared at each other and then at the coach. They were able to grasp the facts intellectually, but they could not penetrate the reactions of their emotions. At last Lefty said: “But that isn’t—well—it isn’t human, Woodie.”

“That’s why I’m scared. By God, if I was a bit superstitious, I’d throw up my job and get as much distance between me and that bird