Gladiator (6 page)

“Nobody can do that, not even an acrobat,” he whispered. Again he tried, jumping straight up. He rose fully forty feet in the air.

“Good Jesus!” he exulted. In those lonely, incredible moments Hugo found himself. There in the forest, beyond the eye of man, he learned that he was superhuman. It was a rapturous discovery. He knew at that hour that his strength was not a curse. He had inklings of his invulnerability.

He ran. He shot up the steep trail like an express train, at a rate that would have been measured in miles to the hour rather than yards to the minute. Tireless blood poured through his veins. Green streaked at his sides. In a short time he came to the end of the trail. He plunged on, careless of obstacles that would have stopped an ordinary mortal. From trunk to trunk he leaped a burned stretch. He flung himself from a high rock. He sped like a shadow across a pine- carpeted knoll. He gained the bare rocks of the first mountain, and in the open, where the horror of no eye would tether his strength, he moved in flying bounds to its summit.

Hugo stood there, panting. Below him was the world. A little world. He laughed. His dreams had been broken open. His depression was relieved. But he would never let them know—he, Hugo, the giant. Except, perhaps, his father. He lifted his arms—to thank God, to jeer at the world. Hugo was happy.

He went home wondering. He was very hungry—hungrier than he had ever been—and his parents watched him eat with hidden glances. Samson had eaten thus, as if his stomach were bottomless and his food digested instantly to make room for more. And, as he ate, Hugo tried to open a conversation that would lead to a confession to his father. But it seemed impossible.

Hugo
liked his father. He saw how his mother dominated the little professor, how she seemed to have crushed and bewildered him until his mind was unfocused from its present. He could not love his mother because of that. He did not reason that her religion had made her blind and selfish, but he felt her blindness and the many cloaks that protected her and her interests. He held her in respect and he obeyed her. But often and wistfully he had tried to talk to his father, to make friends with him, to make himself felt as a person.

Abednego Danner's mind was buried in the work he had done. His son was a foreign person for whom he felt a perplexed sympathy. It is significant that he had never talked to Hugo about Hugo's prowess. The ten-year-old boy had not wished to discuss it. Now, however, realizing its extent, he felt he must go to his father. After dinner he said: “Dad, let's you and me take a walk.”

Mrs. Danner's protective impulses functioned automatically. “Not to-night. I won't have it.”

“But, mother—”

Danner guessed the reason for that walk. He said to his wife with rare firmness: “If the boy wants to walk with me, we're going.”

After supper they went out. Mrs. Danner felt that she had been shut out of her own son's world. And she realized that he was growing up.

Danner and his son strolled along the leafy street. They talked about his work in school. His father seemed to Hugo more human than he had ever been. He even ventured the first step toward other conversation. “Well, son, what is it?”

Hugo caught his breath. “Well—I kind of thought I ought to tell you. You see—this afternoon—well—you know I've always been a sort of strong kid—”

Danner trembled. “I know—”

“And you haven't said much about it to me. Except to be gentle—”

“That's so. You must remember it.”

“
Well—I don't have to be gentle with myself, do I? When I'm alone—like in the woods, that is?”

The older one pondered. “You mean—you like to—ah—let yourself out—when you're alone?”

“That's what I mean.” The usual constraint between them had receded. Hugo was grateful for his father's help. “You see, Dad, I—well—I went walkin' to-day—and I—I kind of tried myself out.”

Danner answered in breathless eagerness: “And?”

“Well—I'm not just a strong kid, Dad. I don't know what's the matter with me. It seems I'm not like other kids at all. I guess it's been gettin' worse all these years since I was a baby.”

“Worse?”

“I mean—I been gettin' stronger. An' now it seems like I'm about—well—I don't like to boast—but it seems like I'm about the strongest man in the world. When I try it, it seems like there isn't any stopping me. I can go on—far as I like. Runnin'. Jumpin'.” His confession had commenced in detail. Hugo warmed to it. “I can do things, Dad. It kind of scares me. I can jump higher'n a house. I can run faster'n a train. I can pull up big trees an' push 'em over.”

“I see.” Danner's spine tingled. He worshipped his son then. “Suppose you show me.”

Hugo looked up and down the street. There was no one in sight. The evening was still duskily lighted by afterglow. “Look out then. I'm gonna jump.”

Mr. Danner saw his son crouch. But he jumped so quickly that he vanished. Four seconds elapsed. He landed where he had stood. “See, Dad?”

“Do it again.”

On the second trial the professor's eyes followed the soaring form. And he realized the magnitude of the thing he had wrought.

“Did you see me?”

Danner nodded. “I saw you, son.”

“Kind of funny, isn't it?”

“
Let's talk some more.” There was a pause. “Do you realize, son, that no one else on earth can do what you just did?”

“Yeah. I guess not.”

Danner hesitated. “It's a glorious thing. And dangerous.”

“Yeah.”

The professor tried to simplify the biology of his discovery. He perceived that it was going to involve him in the mysteries of sex. He knew that to unfold them to a child was considered immoral. But Danner was far, far beyond his epoch. He put his hand on Hugo's shoulder. And Hugo set off the process.

“Dad, how come I'm—like this?”

“I'll tell you. It's a long story and a lot for a boy your age to know. First, what do you know about—well—about how you were born?”

Hugo reddened. “I—I guess I know quite a bit. The kids in school are always talkin' about it. And I've read some. We're born like—well—like the kittens were born last year.”

“That's right.” Danner knitted his brow. He began to explain the details of conception as it occurs in man—the biology of ova and spermatazoa, the differences between the anatomy of the sexes, and the reasons for those differences. He drew, first, a botanical analogy. Hugo listened intently. “I knew most of that. I've seen—girls.”

“What?”

“Some of them—after school—let you.”

Danner was surprised, and at the same time he was amused. He had forgotten the details of his young investigation. They are blotted out of the minds of most adults—to the great advantage of dignity. He did not show his amusement or his surprise.

“Girls like that,” he answered, “aren't very nice. They haven't much modesty. It's rather indecent, because sex is a personal thing and something you ought to keep for the one you're very fond of. You'll understand that better when you're older. But what I was going to tell you is this. When you were little more than a mass of plasm inside your mother, I put a medicine in
her
blood that I had discovered. I did it with a hypodermic needle. That medicine changed you. It altered the structure of your bones and muscles and nerves and your blood. It made you into a different tissue from the weak fibre of ordinary people. Then—when you were born—you were strong. Did you ever watch an ant carry many times its weight? Or see a grasshopper jump fifty times its length? The insects have better muscles and nerves than we have. And I improved your body till it was relatively that strong. Can you understand that?”

“Sure. I'm like a man made out of iron instead of meat.”

“That's it, Hugo. And, as you grow up, you've got to remember that. You're not an ordinary human being. When people find that out, they'll—they'll—”

“They'll hate me?”

“Because they fear you. So you see, you've got to be good and kind and considerate—to justify all that strength. Some day you'll find a use for it—a big, noble use—and then you can make it work and be proud of it. Until that day, you have to be humble like all the rest of us. You mustn't show off or do cheap tricks. Then you'd just be a clown. Wait your time, son, and you'll be glad of it. And—another thing—train your temper. You must never lose it. You can see what would happen if you did? Understand?”

“I guess I do. It's hard work—doin' all that.”

“The stronger, the greater, you are, the harder life is for you. And you're the strongest of them all, Hugo.”

The heart of the ten-year-old boy burned and vibrated. “And what about God?” he asked.

Danner looked into the darkened sky. “I don't know much about Him,” he sighed.

Such was the soundest counsel that Hugo was given during his youth. Because it came to him accompanied by unadulterated truths that he was able to recognize, it exerted a profound effect on him. It is surprising that his father was the one to give it. Nevertheless, Professor Danner was the only person in
all
of Indian Creek who had sufficient imagination to perceive his son's problems and to reckon with them in any practical sense.

Hugo was eighteen before he gave any other indication of his strength save in that fantastic and Gargantuan play which he permitted himself. Even his play was intruded upon by the small-minded and curious world before he had found the completeness of its pleasure. Then Hugo fell into his coma.

Hugo went back to the deep forest to think things over and to become acquainted with his powers. At first, under full pressure of his sinews, he was clumsy and inaccurate. He learned deftness by trial and error. One day he found a huge pit in the tangled wilderness. It had been an open mine long years before. Sitting on its brink, staring into its pool of verdure, dreaming, he conceived a manner of entertainment suitable for his powers.

He jumped over its craggy edge and walked to its centre. There he selected a high place, and with his hands he cleared away the growth that covered it. Next he laid the foundations of a fort, over which he was to watch the fastnesses for imaginary enemies. The foundations were made of boulders. Some he carried and some he rolled from the floor of the man-made canyon. By the end of the afternoon he had laid out a square wall of rock some three feet in height. On the next day he added to it until the four walls reached as high as he could stretch. He left space for one door and he made a single window. He roofed the walls with the trunks of trees and he erected a turret over the door.

For days the creation was his delight. After school he sped to it. Until dark he strained and struggled with bare rocks. When it was finished, it was an edifice that would have withstood artillery fire creditably. Then Hugo experimented with catapults, but he found no engine that could hurl the rocks he used for ammunition as far as his arms. He cached his treasures in his fortress—an old axe, the scabbard of a sword, tops
and
marbles, two cans of beans for emergency rations—and he made a flag of blue and white cloth for himself.

Then he played in it. He pretended that Indians were stalking him. An imaginary head would appear at the rim of the pit. Hugo would see it through a chink. Swish! Crash! A puff of dust would show where rock met rock—with the attacker's head between. At times he would be stormed on all sides. To get the effect he would leap the canyon and hurl boulders on his own fort. Then he would return and defend it.

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.”