Gladiator

by Wylie, Philip;

“It is.” Mr. Shayne perceived that Hugo was angry. “Now. don’t get sentimental. Keep your eye on the ball. I—” He did not finish, because Mrs. Shayne came into the room. Hugo stared at him fixedly, his face livid, for several seconds before he was conscious of her. Even then it was only a partial consciousness.

  She was stuffed into a tight, bright dress. She was holding out her hand, holding his hand, holding his hand too long. There was mascara around her eyes and they dilated and blinked in a foolish and flirtatious way; her voice was syrup. She was taking a cocktail with the other hand—maybe if he gave her hand a real squeeze, she would let go. A tall, sallow young man had come in behind her; he was Mr. Jerome Leonardo Bateau, a perfect dear. Mrs. Shayne was still holding his hand and murmuring; Mr. Shayne was patting his shoulder; Mr. Bateau was staring with haughty and jealous eyes. Hugo excused himself.

  In the hall he asked for Mr. Shayne’s secretary. He collected himself in a few frigid sentences. “Please tell Mr. Shayne I am very grateful. I wish to transfer my entire fortune to my parents in Indian Creek, Colorado. The name is Abednego Danner. Make all arrangements.”

  A faint “But—” followed him futilely through the door. In the space of a block he had cut a pace that set other pedestrians gaping to a fast walk.

  Chapter XVII

  HUGO sat in Madison Square Park giving his attention in a circuit to the Flatiron Building, the clock on the Metropolitan Tower, and the creeping barrage of traffic that sent people scampering, stopped, moved forward again. He had sat on the identical bench at the identical time of day during his obscure undergraduate period. He was without money now, as he had been then, so long ago. He budged on the bench and challenged himself to think.

  What would you do if you were the strongest man in the world, the strongest thing in the world, mightier than the machine? He made himself guess answers for that rhetorical query. “I would—I would have won the war. But I did not. I would run the universe single-handed. Literally single-handed. I would scorn the universe and turn it to my own ends. I would be a criminal. I would rip open banks and gut them. I would kill and destroy. I would be a secret, invisible blight. I would set out to stamp crime off the earth; I would be a super-detective, following and summarily punishing every criminal until no one dared to commit a felony. What would I do? What will I do?”

  Then he realized that he was hungry. He had not eaten enough in the last few days. Enough for him. With some intention of finding work he had left Mr. Shayne’s house. A call on the telephone from Mr. Shayne himself volunteering a position had crystallized that intention. In three days he had discovered the vast abundance of young men, the embarrassment of young men, who were walking along the streets looking for work. He who had always worked with his arms and shoulders had determined to try to earn his living with his head. But the white-collar ranks were teeming, overflowing, supersaturated. He went down in the scale of clerkships and inexperienced clerkships. There was no work.

  Thence he had gone to the park, and presently he rose. He had seen the clusters of men on Sixth Avenue standing outside the employment agencies. He could go there. Any employment was better than hunger—and he had learned that hunger could come swiftly and formidably to him. Business was slack, hands were being laid off, where an apprentice was required, three trained men waited avidly for work. It was appalling and Hugo saw it as appalling. He was not frightened, but, as he walked, he knew that it was a mistake to sit in the park with the myriad other men. Walking made him feel better. It was action, it bred the thought that any work was better than none. Work would not hinder his dreams, meantime.

  When he reached Forty-second Street he could see the sullen, watchful groups of men. He joined one of them. A loose-jointed, dark-faced person came down a flight of stairs, wrote on a blackboard in chalk, and went up again. Several of the group detached themselves and followed him—to compete for a chance to wash windows.

  A man at his side spoke to him. “Tough, ain’t it, buddy?”

  “Yeah, it’s tough,” Hugo said.

  “I got three bones left. Wanna join me in a feed an’ get a job afterward?”

  Hugo looked into his eyes. They were troubled and desirous of companionship. “No, thanks,” he replied.

  They waited for the man to scribble again in chalk.

  “They was goin’ to fix up everybody slick after the war. Oh, hell, yes.”

  “You in it?” Hugo asked.

  “Up to my God-damned neck, buddy.”

  “Me, too. Guess I’ll go up the line.”

  “I’ll go witcha.”

  “Well—”

  They waited a moment longer, for the man with the chalk had reappeared. Hugo’s comrade grunted. “Wash windows an’ work in the steel mills. Break your neck or burn your ear off. Wha’ do they care?” Hugo had taken a step toward the door, but the youth with the troubled eyes caught his sleeve. “Don’t go up for that, son. They burn you in them steel mills. I seen guys afterward. Two years an’ you’re all done. This is tough, but that’s tougher. Sweet Jesus, I’ll say it is.”

  Hugo loosened himself. “Gotta eat, buddy. I don’t happen to have even three bones available at the moment.”

  The man looked after him. “Gosh,” he murmured. “Even guys like that.”

  He was in a dingy room standing before a grilled window A voice from behind it asked his name, age, address, war record. Hugo was handed a piece of paper to sign and then a second piece that bore the scrawled words: “Amalgamated Crucible Steel Corp., Harrison, N. J.”

  Hugo’s emotional life was reawakened when he walked into the mills. His last nickel was gone. He had left the train at the wrong station and walked more than a mile. He was hungry and cold. He came as if naked, to the monster and he did it homage.

  Its predominant color scheme was black and red. It had a loud, pagan voice. It breathed fire. It melted steel and rock and drank human sweat, with human blood for an occasional stimulant. On every side of him were enormous buildings and woven between them a plaid of girders, cables, and tracks across which masses of machinery moved. Inside, Thor was hammering. Inside, a crane sped overhead like a tarantula, trailing its viscera to the floor, dangling a gigantic iron rib. A white speck in its wounded abdomen was a human face.

  Hugo, standing sublimely small in its midst, measured his strength against it, soaked up its warmth, shook his fist at it, and shouted in a voice that could not be heard for a foot: “Christ Almighty! This—is something!”

  “Name?”

  “Hugo Danner.”

  “Address?”

  “None at present.”

  “Experience?”

  “None.”

  “Married?”

  “No.”

  “Union?”

  “What?”

  “Lemme see your union card.”

  “I don’t belong.”

  “Well, you gotta join.”

  He was sent to a lodging-house, advanced five dollars, and told that he would be boarded and given a bed and no more until the employment agency had taken its commission, and the union its dues. He signed a paper. He went on the night shift without supper.

  He ran a wheelbarrow filled with heavy, warm slag for a hundred feet over a walk of loose bricks. The job was simple. Load, carry, dump, return, load. On some later night he would count the number of loads. But on this first night he walked with excited eyes, watching the tremendous things that happened all around him. Man ran the machinery that dumped the ladle. Men guided liquid iron from the furnaces into a maze of channels and doughs, clearing the way through the sand, cutting off the stream, making new openings. Men wheeled the slag and steered the trains and trams and cranes. Men operated the hammers. And almost all of the men were nude to the waist, sleek and shining with sweat; almost all of them drank whiskey.

  One of the men in the wheelbarrow line even offered a drink to Hugo. He held out the flask and bellowed in Czech. Hugo took it. The drink was raw and foul. Pouring into his empty stomach, it ha
d a powerful effect, making him exalted, making him work like a demon. After a long, noisy time that did not seem long a steam whistle screamed faintly and the shift was ended.

  The Czech accompanied Hugo through the door. The new shift was already at work. They went out. A nightmare of brilliant orange and black fled from Hugo’s vision and he looked into the pale, remote chiaroscuro of dawn. “Me tired,” the Czech said in a small, aimless tone. They flung themselves on dirty beds in a big room. But Hugo did not sleep for a time—not until the sun rose and day was evident in the grimy interior of the bunk house.

  That he could think while he worked had been Hugo’s thesis when he walked up Sixth Avenue. Now working steadily, working at a thing that was hard for other men and easy for him, he neverthelesss fell into the stolid vacuum of the manual laborer. The mills became familiar, less fantastic. He remembered that oftentimes the war had given a more dramatic passage of man’s imagination forged into fire and steel. His task was changed numerous times. For a while he puddled pig iron with the long-handled, hoelike tool. “Don’t slip in,” they said. It was succinct, graphic.

  Then they put him on the hand cars that fed the furnaces. It was picturesque, daring, and for most men too hard. Few could manage the weight or keep up with the pace. Those who did were honored by their fellows. The trucks were moved forward by human strength and dumped by hand-windlasses. Occasionally, they said, you became tired and fell into the furnace. Or jumped. If you got feeling woozy, they said, quit. The high rails and red mouths were hypnotic, like burning Baal and the Juggernaut.

  Hugo’s problems had been abandoned. He worked as hard as he dared. The presence of grandeur and din made him content. How long it would have lasted is uncertain; not forever. On the day when he had pushed up two hundred and three loads during his shift, the boss stopped him in the yard. A tall, lean, acid man. He caught Hugo’s sleeve and turned him round. “You’re one of the bastards on the furnace line.”

  “Yes.”

  “How many cars did you push up to-day?”

  “Two hundred and three.”

  “What the hell do you think this is, anyway?”

  “I don’t get you.”

  “Oh, you don’t, huh? Well, listen here, you God-damned athlete, what are you trying to do? You got the men all sore—wearing themselves out. I had to lay off three—why? Because they couldn’t keep up with you, that’s why. Because they got their guts in a snarl trying to bust your record. What do you think you’re in? A race? Somebody’s got to show you your place around here and I think I’ll just kick a lung out right now.”

  The boss had worked himself into a fury. He became conscious of an audience of workers. Hugo smiled. “I wouldn’t advise you to try that—even if you are a big guy.”

  “What was that?” The words were roared. He gathered himself, but when Hugo did not flinch, did not prepare himself, he was suddenly startled. He remembered, perhaps, the two hundred and three cars. He opened his fist. “All right. I ain’t even goin’ to bother myself tryin’ to break you in to this game. Get out.”

  “What?”

  “Get out. Beat it. I’m firing you.”

  “Firing me? For working too hard?” Hugo laughed. He bent double with laughter. His laughter sounded above the thunder of the mill. “Oh, God, that’s funny. Fire me!” He moved toward the boss menacingly. “I’ve a notion to twist your liver around your neck myself.”

  The workers realized that an event of some magnitude was taking place. They drew nearer. Hugo’s laughter came again and changed into a smile—an emotion that cooled visibly. Then swiftly he peeled up the sleeve of his shirt. His fist clenched; his arm bent; under the nose of his boss he caused his mighty biceps to swell. His whole body trembled. With his other hand he took the tall man’s fingers and laid them on that muscle.

  “Squeeze,” he shouted.

  The boss squeezed. His face grew pallid and he let go suddenly. He tried to speak through his dry mouth, but Hugo had turned his back. At the brick gate post he paused and drew a breath.

  His words resounded like the crack of doom. “So long!”

  Chapter XVIII

  IN THE next four weeks, Hugo knew the pangs of hunger frequently. He found odd jobs, but none of them lasted. Once he helped remove a late snowstorm from the streets. He worked for five days on a subway excavation. His clothes became shabby, he began to carry his razor in his overcoat pocket and to sleep in hotels that demanded only twenty-five cents for a night’s lodging. When he considered the tens of thousands of men in his predicament, he was not surprised at or ashamed of himself. When, however, he dwelt on his own peculiar capacities, he was both astonished and ashamed to meander along the dreary pavements.

  Hunger did curious things to him. He had moments of fury, of imagined violence, and other moments of fantasy when he dreamed of a rich and noble life. Sometimes he meditated the wisdom of devouring one prodigious meal and fleeing through the dead of night to the warm south. Occasionally he considered going back to his family in Colorado. His most bitter hours were spent in thinking of Mr. Shayne and of accepting a position in one of Mr. Shayne’s banks.

  At the end of four weeks, with hunger gnawing so avidly at his core that he could not pass a restaurant without twitching muscles and quivering nerves, he turned abruptly from the street into a cigar store and telephoned to Mr. Shayne. The banker was full of sound counsel and ready charity. Hugo regretted the call as soon as he heard Mr. Shayne’s voice; he regretted it when he was ravishing a luxurious dinner at Mr. Shayne’s expense. It was the weakest thing he had ever done in his life.

  Nevertheless he accepted the position offered by Mr. Shayne. That same evening he rented a small apartment, and lying on his bed, a clean bed, he wondered if he really cared about anything or about any one. In the morning he took a shower and stood for a long time in front of the mirror on the bathroom door, staring at his nude body as if it were a rune he might learn to read, an engima he might solve by concentration. Then he went to work. His affiliation with the Down Town Savings Bank lasted into the spring and was terminated by one of the oddest incidents of his career.

  Until the day of that incident his incumbency was in no way unusual. He was one of the bank’s young men, receiving fifty dollars weekly to learn the banking business. They moved him from department to department, giving him mentally menial tasks which afforded him in each case a glimpse of a new facet of financial technique. It was fairly interesting. He made no friends and he worked diligently.

  One day in April when he had returned from lunch and a stroll in the environs of the Battery—returned to a list of securities and a strip from an adding machine, which he checked item by item—he was conscious of a stirring in his vicinity. A woman employee on the opposite side of a wire wicket was talking shrilly. A vice-president rose from his desk and hastened down the corridor, his usually composed face suddenly white and disconcerted. The tension was cumulative. Work stopped and clusters of people began to chatter. Hugo joined one of them.

  “Yeah,” a boy was saying, “it’s happened before. A couple o’ times.”

  “How do they know he’s there?”

  “They got a telephone goin’ inside and they’re talkin’ to him.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  The boy nodded rapidly. “Yeah—some talk! Tellin’ him what to try next.”

  “Poor devil!”

  “What’s the matter?” Hugo asked.

  The boy was glad of a new and uninformed listener. “Aw, some dumb vault clerk got himself locked in, an’ the locks jammed an’ they can’t get him out.”

  “Which vault? The big one?”

  “Naw. The big one’s got pipes for that kinda trouble. The little one they moved from the old building.”

  “It’s not so darn little at that,” some one said.

  Another person, a man, chuckled. “Not so darn. But there isn’t air in there to last three hours. Caughlin said so.”

  “Honest to God?”

&
nbsp; “Honest. An’ he’s been there more than an hour already.”

  “Jeest!” There was a pregnant, pictorial silence. Some one looked at Hugo.

  “What’s eatin’ you, Danner? Scared?”

  His face was tense and his hands were opening and closing convulsively. “No,” he answered. “Guess I’ll go down and have a look.”

  He rang for an elevator in the corridor and was carried to the basement. In the small room on which the vault opened were five or six people, among them a woman who seemed to command the situation. The men were all smoking; their attitudes were relaxed, their voices hushed.

  One repeated nervously: “Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ.”

  “That won’t help, Mr. Quail. I’ve sent for the expert and he will probably have the safe open in a short time.”

  “Blowtorches?” the swearing man asked abruptly. “Absurd. He would cook before he was out. And three feet of steel and then two feet more.”

  “Nitroglycerin?”

  “And make jelly out of him?” The woman tapped her finger-nails with her glasses.

  Another arrival, who carried a small satchel, talked with her in an undertone and then took off his coat. He went first to a telephone on the wall and said: “Gi’ me the inside of the vault. Hello… . Hello? You there? Are you all right? … Try that combination again.” The safe-expert held the wire and waited. Not even the faintest sounds of the attempt were audible in the front room. “Hello? You tried it? … Well, see if those numbers are in this order.” He repeated a series of complicated directions. Finally he hung up. “Says it’s getting pretty stuffy in there. Says he’s lying down on the floor.”

  People came and went. The president himself walked in calmly and occupied a chair. He lit a cigar, puffed on it, and stared with ruminative eyes at the shiny mechanism on the front of the safe.

  “We are doing everything possible,” the woman said to him crisply.

  “Of course,” he nodded. “I called up the insurance company. We’re amply covered.” A pause. “Mrs. Robinson, post one of the guards to keep people from running in and out of here. There are enough around already.”