Gladiator (14 page)

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, wondering first what that talent might be and then recognizing that Hugo meant his strength. “Nonsense. Any male in his right senses would give all his wits to be as strong as you are.”

It was a polite, friendly thing to say. Hugo could not refrain from comparing himself to Valentine Mitchel. An artist—a clever artist and one who would some day be important to the world. Because people could understand what he drew, because it represented a level of thought and expression. He was, like Hugo, in the doldrums of progress. But Mitchel would emerge, succeed, be happy—or at least satisfied with himself—while Hugo was bound to silence, was compelled never to allow himself full expression. Humanity would never accept and understand him. They were not similar people, but their case was, at that instant, ironically parallel. “It isn't only being strong,” he answered meditatively, “but it's knowing what to do with your strength.”

“Why—there are a thousand things to do.”

“Such as?”

Mitchel raised himself on his elbows and turned his watercoloured eyes on the populous beach. “Well—well—let's see. You could, of course, be a strong man and amuse people—which you're doing. You could—oh, there are lots of things you could do.”

Hugo smiled. “I've been thinking about them—for years. And I can't discover any that are worth the effort.”

“Bosh!”

Charlotte moved close to him. “There's one thing you can do, honey, and that's enough for me.”

“I wonder,” Hugo said with a seriousness the other two did not perceive.

The
increased heat of August suggested by its very intensity a shortness of duration, an end of summer. Hugo began to wonder what he would do with Charlotte when he went back to Webster. He worried about her a good deal and she, guessing the subject of his frequent fits of silence, made a resolve in her tough and worldly mind. She had learned more about certain facets of Hugo than he knew himself. She realized that he was superior to her and that, in almost any other place than Coney Island, she would be a liability to him. The thought that he would have to desert her made Hugo very miserable. He knew that he would miss Charlotte and he knew that the blow to her might spell disaster. After all, he thought, he had not improved her morals or raised her vision. He did not realize that he had made both almost sublime by the mere act of being considerate. “White,” Charlotte called it.

Nevertheless she was not without an intense sense of self-protection, despite her condition on the night he had found her. She knew that womankind lived at the expense of mankind. She saw the emotional respect in which Valentine Mitchel unwittingly held Hugo. He had scarcely spoken ten serious words to her. She realized that the artist saw her as a property of his friend. That, in a way, made her valuable. It was a subtle advantage, which she pressed with all the skill it required. One night when Hugo was at work and the chill of autumn had breathed on the hot shore, she told Valentine that he was a very nice boy and that she liked him very much. He went away distraught, which was what she had intended, and he carried with him a new and as yet inarticulate idea, which was what she had foreseen.

He believed that he loved her. He told himself that Hugo was going to desert her, that she would be forsaken and alone. At that point, she recited to him the story of her life and the tale of her rescue by Hugo and said at the end that she would be very lonely when Hugo was gone. Because Hugo had loved her, Mitchel thought she contained depths and values which
did
not appear. That she contained such depths neither man really knew then. Both of them learned it much later. Mitchel found himself in that very artistic dilemma of being in love with his friend's mistress. It terrified his romantic soul and it involved him inextricably.

When she felt that the situation had ripened to the point of action, she waited for the precise moment. It came swiftly and in a better guise than she had hoped. On a night in early September, when the crowds had thinned a little, Hugo was just buckling himself into the harness that lifted the horse. The spectators were waiting for the dénouement with bickering patience. Charlotte was standing on the platform, watching him with expressionless eyes. She knew that soon she would not see Hugo any more. She knew that he was tired of his small show, that he was chafing to be gone; and she knew that his loyalty to her would never let him go unless it was made inevitable by her. The horse was ready. She watched the muscles start out beneath Hugo's tawny skin. She saw his lips set, his head thrust back. She worshipped him like that. Unemotionally, she saw the horse lifted up from the floor. She heard the applause. There was a bustle at the gate.

Half a dozen people entered in single file. Three young men. Three girls. They were intoxicated. They laughed and spoke in loud voices. She saw by their clothes and their manner that they were rich. Slumming in Coney Island. She smiled at the young men as she had always smiled at such young men, friendlily, impersonally. Hugo did not see their entrance. They came very near.

“My God, it's Hugo Danner!”

Hugo heard Lefty's voice and recognized it. The horse was dropped to the floor. He turned. An expression of startled amazement crossed his features. Chuck, Lefty, Iris, and three people whom he did not know were staring at him. He saw the stupefied recognition on the faces of his friends. One despairing glance he cast at Charlotte and then he went on with his act.

They
waited for him until it was over. They clasped him to their bosoms. They acknowledged Charlotte with critical glances. “Come on and join the party,” they said.

After that, their silence was worse than any questions. They talked freely and merrily enough, but behind their words was a deep reserve. Lefty broke it when he had an opportunity to take Hugo aside. “What in hell is eating you? Aren't you coming back to Webster?”

“Sure. That is—I think so. I had to do this to make some money. Just about the time school closed, my family went broke.”

“But, good God, man, why didn't you tell us? My father is an alumnus and he'd put up five thousand a year, if necessary, to see you kept on the football team.”

Hugo laughed. “You don't think I'd take it, Lefty?”

“Why not?” A pause. “No, I suppose you'd be just the God-damned kind of a fool that wouldn't. Who's the girl?”

Hugo did not falter. “She's a tart I've been living with. I never knew a better one—girl, that is.”

“Have you gone crazy?”

“On the contrary, I've got wise.”

“Well, for Christ's sake, don't say anything about it on the campus.”

Hugo bit his lip. “Don't worry. My business is—my own.”

They joined the others, drinking at the table. Charlotte was telling a joke. It was not a nice joke. He had not thought of her jokes before—because Iris and Chuck and Lefty had not been listening to them. Now, he was embarrassed. Iris asked him to dance with her. They went out on the floor.

“Lovely little thing, that Charlotte,” she said acidly.

“Isn't she!” Hugo answered with such enthusiasm that she did not speak during the rest of the dance.

Finally the ordeal ended. Lefty and his guests embarked in an automobile for the city.

“You know such people,” Charlotte half-whispered. Hugo's cheeks still flamed, but his heart bled for her.

“
I guess they aren't much,” he replied.

She answered hotly: “Don't you be like that! They're nice people. They're fine people. That Iris even asked me to her house. Gave me a card to see her.” Charlotte could guess what Iris wanted. So could Hugo. But Charlotte pretended to be innocent.

He kissed Charlotte good-night and walked in the streets until morning. Hugo could see no solution. Charlotte was so trusting, so good to him. He could not imagine how she would receive any suggestion that she go to New York and get a job, while he returned to college, that he see her during vacations, that he send money to her. But he knew that a hot fire dwelt within her and that her fury would rise, her grief, and that he would be made very miserable and ashamed. She chided him at breakfast for his walk in the dark. She laughed and kissed him and pushed him bodily to his work. He looked back as he walked down to the curb. She was leaning out of the window. She waved her hand. He rounded the corner with wretched, leaden steps. The morning, concerned with the petty business of receipts, refurbishings, cleaning, went slowly. When he returned for lunch it was with the decision to tell her the truth about his life and its requirements and to let her decide.

She did not come to the door to kiss him. (She had imagined that lonely return.) She did not answer his brave and cheerful hail. (She had let the sound of it ring upon her ear a thousand times.) She was gone. (She knew he would sit down and cry.) Then, stumbling, he found the two notes. But he already understood.

The message from Valentine Mitchel was reckless, impetuous. “Dear Hugo—Charlotte and I have fallen in love with each other and I've run away with her. I almost wish you'd come after us and kill me. I hate myself for betraying you. But I love her, so I cannot help it. I've learned to see in her what you first saw in her. Good-bye, good luck.”

Hugo put it down. Charlotte would be good to him. In a way, he didn't deserve her. And when he was famous, some
day,
perhaps she would leave him, too. He hesitated to read her note. “Good-bye, darling, I do not love you any more. C.”

It was ludicrous, transparent, pitiful, and heroic. Hugo saw all those qualities. “Good-bye, darling, I do not love you any more.” She had written it under Valentine's eyes. But she was shrewd enough to placate her new lover while she told her sad little story to her old. She would want him to feel bad. Well, God knew, he did. Hugo looked at the room. He sobbed. He bolted into the street, tears streaming down his cheeks; he drew his savings from the bank—seven hundred and eighty-four dollars and sixty-four cents; he rushed to the haunted house, flung his clothes into a bag; he sat drearily on a subway for an hour. He paced the smooth floor of a station. He swung aboard a train. He came to Webster, his head high, feeling a great pride in Charlotte and in his love for her, walking in glad strides over the familiar soil.

Chapter
IX

H
UGO
sat alone and marvelled at the exquisite torment of his
Weltschmertz
. Far away, across the campus, he heard singing. Against the square segment of sky visible from the bay window of his room he could see the light of the great fire they had built to celebrate victory—his victory. The light leaped into the darkness above like a great golden ghost in some fantastic ascension, and beneath it, he knew, a thousand students were dancing. They were druid priests at a rite to the god of football. His fingers struggled through his black hair. The day was fresh in his mind—the bellowing stands, the taut, almost frightened faces of the eleven men who faced him, the smack and flight of the brown oval, the lumbering sound of men running, the sucking of the breath of men and their sharp, painful fall to earth.

In his mind was a sharp picture of himself and the eyes that watched him as he broke away time and again, with infantile ease, to carry that precious ball. He let them make a touchdown that he could have averted. He made one himself. Then another. The bell on Webster Hall was booming its pæan of victory. He stiffened under the steady monody. He remembered again. Lefty barking signals with a strange agony in his voice. Lefty pounding on his shoulder. “Go in there, Hugo, and give it to them. I can't.” Lefty pleading. And the captain, Jerry Painter, cursing in open jealousy of Hugo, vying hopelessly with Hugo Danner, the man who was a god.

It was not fair. Not right. The old and early glory was ebbing from it. When he put down the ball, safely across the goal for the winning touchdown, he saw three of the men on the opposing team lie down and weep. There he stood, pretending to pant, feigning physical distress, making himself a hero at the
expense
of innocent victims. Jackstraws for a giant. There was no triumph in that. He could not go on.

Afterwards they had made him speak, and the breathless words that had once come so easily moved heavily through his mind. Yet he had carried his advantage beyond the point of turning back. He could not say that the opponents of Webster might as well attempt to hold back a Juggernaut, to throw down a siege-gun, to outrace light, as to lay their hands on him to check his intent. Webster had been good to him. He loved Webster and it deserved his best. His best! He peered again into the celebrating night and wondered what that awful best would be.

He desired passionately to be able to give that—to cover the earth, making men glad and bringing a revolution into their lives, to work himself into a fury and to fatigue his incredible sinews, to end with the feeling of a race well run, a task nobly executed. And, for a year, that ambition had seemed in some small way to be approaching fruition. Now it was turned to ashes. It was not with the muscles of men that his goal was to be attained. They could not oppose him.

As he sat gloomy and distressed, he wondered for what reason there burned in him that wish to do great deeds. Humanity itself was too selfish and too ignorant to care. It could boil in its tiny prejudices for centuries to come and never know that there could be a difference. Moreover, who was he to grind his soul and beat his thoughts for the benefit of people who would never know and never care? What honour, when he was dead, to lie beneath a slab on which was punily graven some note of mighty accomplishment? Why could he not content himself with the food he ate, the sunshine, with wind in trees, and cold water, and a woman? It was that sad and silly command within to transcend his vegetable self that made him human. He tried to think about it bitterly: fool man, grown suddenly more conscious than the other beasts—how quickly he had become vain because of it and how that vanity led him forever onward! Or was it vanity—when his aching soul proclaimed that he would gladly
achieve
and die without other recognition or acclaim than that which rose within himself? Martyrs were made of such stuff. And was not that, perhaps, an even more exaggerated vanity? It was so pitiful to be a man and nothing more. Hugo bowed his head and let his body tremble with strange agony. Perhaps, he thought, even the agony was a selfish pleasure to him. Then he should be ashamed. He felt shame and then thought that the feeling rose from a wish for it and foundered angrily in the confusion of his introspection. He knew only and knew but dimly that he would lift himself up again and go on, searching for some universal foe to match against his strength. So pitiful to be a man! So Christ must have felt in Gethsemane.