Gladiator (25 page)

“Now,” Hugo said gently, “I will demonstrate how I opened that safe.”

“Christ save us,” one of the men whispered, crossing himself.

McClaren was frozen still. Hugo walked to the wall of the jail and stabbed his fist through it. Brick and mortar burst out on the other side and fell into the cinder yard. Hugo kicked and lashed with his fists. A large hole opened. Then he turned to the men. They broke toward the door, but he caught them one by one—and one by one he knocked them unconscious. That much was for his own soul. Only McClaren was left. He carried McClaren to the hole and dropped him into the yard. He wrenched open the iron gate and walked out on the street, holding the policeman by the arm. McClaren fainted twice and Hugo had to keep him upright by clinging to his collar. It was dark. He hailed a cab and lifted the man in.

“Just drive out of town,” Hugo said.

McClaren came to. They bumped along for miles and he did not dare to speak. The apartment buildings thinned. Street lights disappeared. They traversed a stretch of woodland and then rumbled through a small town.

“Who are you?” McClaren said.

“I'm just a man, McClaren—a man who is going to teach you a lesson.”

The taxi was on a smooth turnpike. It made swift time. Twice Hugo satisfied the driver that the direction was all right. At last, on a deserted stretch, Hugo called to the driver to stop.
McClaren
thought that he was going to die. He did not plead. Hugo still held him by the arm and helped him from the cab.

“Got any money on you?” Hugo asked.

“About twenty dollars.”

“Give me five.”

With trembling fingers McClaren produced the bill. He put the remainder of his money back in his pocket automatically. The taxi-driver was watching, but Hugo ignored him.

“McClaren,” he said soberly, “here's your lesson. I just happen to be the strongest man in the world. Never tell anybody that. And don't tell anyone where I took you to-night—wherever it is. I shan't be here anyway. If you tell either of those two things, I'll eat you. Actually. There was a poor devil smothering in that safe and I yanked it open and dragged him out. As a reward you and your dirty scavengers were put to work on me. If I weren't as merciful as God Himself, you'd all be dead. Now, that's your lesson. Keep your mouth shut. Here is the final parable.”

Still holding the policeman's arm, he walked to the taxi and, to the astonishment of the driver, gripped the axle in one hand, lifted up the front end like a derrick, and turned the entire car around. He put McClaren in the back seat.

“Don't forget, McClaren.” To the driver: “Back to where you picked us up. The bird in the back seat will be glad to pay.”

The red lamp of the cab vanished. Hugo turned in the other direction and began to run in great leaps. He slowed when he came to a town. A light was burning in an all-night restaurant. Hugo produced the five-dollar bill.

“Give me a bucket of water—and put on about five steaks. Five.”

Chapter
XIX

I
T
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 centre of the village and on into the country.

Sun streamed upon him; the sky was blue; birds twittered in the budding bushes. He had almost forgotten the beauty and peacefulness of springtime; now it came over him with a rush—pastel colours and fecund warmth, smells of earth and rain, melodious, haphazard wind. He knew intuitively that McClaren would never send for him; he wondered what Mr. Mills would say to Mr. Shayne about him. Both thoughts passed like white clouds over his mind and he forgot them for an indolent vegetative tranquillity.

The road curved over hills and descended into tinted valleys. Farmers were ploughing and planting. The men at the restaurant had told him that he was in Connecticut. That did not matter, for any other place would have been the same on this May morning. A truck-driver offered him a ride, which Hugo refused, and then, watching the cubic van surge away in the distance, he wished fugitively that he had accepted.

Two half dollars and a quarter jingled in his pocket. His suit was seedy and his beard unshaven. A picture of New York ran through his mind: he stood far off from it gazing at the splendour of its towers in the morning light; he came closer and the noise of it smote his ears; suddenly he plunged into the city, his
perspective
vanished, and there rose about him the ugly, unrelated, inchoate masses of tawdriness that had been glorious from a distance, while people—dour, malicious, selfish people who scuttled like ants—supplanted the vista of stone and steel. The trite truth of the ratio between approach and enchantment amused him. It was so obvious, yet so few mortals had the fine sense to withdraw themselves. He was very happy walking tirelessly along that road.

After his luncheon he allowed a truck to carry him farther from the city, deeper into the magic of spring. The driver bubbled with it—he wore a purple tulip in his greasy cap and he slowed down on the hilltops with an unassuming reverence and a naïve slang that fitted well with Hugo's mood. When he reached his destination, Hugo walked on with reluctance. Shadows of the higher places moved into the lowlands. He crossed a brook and leaned over its middle on the bridge rail, fascinated by an underwater landscape, complete, full of colour, less than a foot high. From every side came the strident music of frogs. Spring, spring, spring, they sang, rolling their liquid gutturals and stopping abruptly when he came too near.

In the evening, far from the city, he turned from the pavement on a muddy country road, walking on until he reached the skeleton of an old house. There he lay down, taking his supper from his pocket and eating it slowly. The floor of the second story had fallen down and he could see the stars through a hole in the roof. In such houses, he thought, the first chapters of American history had been lived. When it was entirely dark, a whippoorwill began to make its sweet and mournful music. Warmth and chilliness came together from the ground. He slept.

In the morning 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 façade 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 grey 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 débris 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 plough?”

“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 slave-master, 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 labours. 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 that 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. “
Petits pois au 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 things about old man Cane that'll turn your stummick.”