Gladiator

by Wylie, Philip;

  In such a painful and painstaking mood he was carried over the Alleghenies and out on the Western plains. He changed trains at Chicago without having slept, and all he could remember of the journey was a protracted sorrow, a stabbing consciousness of Roseanne, dulled by his last picture of her, and a hopeless guessing of what she thought about him now.

  Hugo’s mother met him at the station. She was unaltered, everything was unaltered. The last few instants in the vestibule of the train had been a series of quick remembrances; the whole countryside was like a long-deserted house to which he had returned. The mountains took on a familiar aspect, then the houses, then the dingy red station. Lastly his mother, upright and uncompromisingly grim, dressed in her perpetual mourning of black silk. Her recognition of Hugo produced only the slightest flurry and immediately she became mundane.

  “Whatever made you come in those clothes?”

  “I was working outdoors, mother. I got right on a train. How is father?”

  “Sinking slowly.

  “I’m glad I’m in time.”

  “It’s God’s will.” She gazed at him. “You’ve changed a little son.”

  “I’m older.” He felt diffident. A vast gulf had risen between this vigorous, religious woman and himself.

  She opened a new topic. “Whatever in the world made you send us all that money?”

  Hugo smiled. “Why—I didn’t need it, mother. And I thought it would make you and father happy.”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps. It has done some good. I’ve sent four missionaries out in the field and I am thinking of sending two more. I had a new addition put on the church, for the drunkards and the fallen. And we put a bathroom in the house. Your father wanted two, but I wouldn’t hear of it.”

  “Have you got a car?”

  “Car? I couldn’t use one of those inventions of Satan. Your father made me hire this one to meet you. There’s Anna Blake’s house. She married that fellow she was flirting with when you went away. And there’s our house. It was painted last month.”

  Now all the years had dropped away and Hugo was a child again, and adolescent again. The car stopped.

  “You can go right up. He’s in the front room. I’ll get lunch.”

  Hugo’s father was lying on the bed watching the door. A little wizened old man with a big head and thin yellow hands. Illness had made his eyes rheumy, but they lighted up when his son entered, and he half raised himself.

  “Hello, father.”

  “Hugo! You’ve come back.”

  “Yes, father.”

  “I’ve waited for you. Sit down here on the bed. Move me over a little. Now close the door. Is it cold out? I was afraid you might not get here. I was afraid you might get sick on the train. Old people are like that, Hugo.” He shaded his eyes. “You aren’t a very big man, son. Somehow I always remembered you as big. But—I suppose”—his voice thinned–“I suppose you don’t want to talk about yourself.”

  “Anything you want to hear, father.”

  “I can’t believe you came back.” He ruminated. “There were a thousand things I wanted to ask you, son—but they’ve all gone from my mind. I’m not so easy in your presence as I was when you were a little shaver.”

  Hugo knew what those questions would be. Here, on his death-bed, his father was still a scientist. His soul flinched from giving its account. He saw suddenly that he could never tell his father the truth; pity, kindredship, kindness, moved him. “I know what you wanted to ask, father. Am I still strong?” It took courage to suggest that. But he was rewarded. The old man sighed ecstatically. “That’s it, Hugo, my son.”

  “Then—father, I am. I grew constantly stronger when I left you. In college I was strong. At sea I was strong. In the war. First I wanted to be mighty in games and I was. Then I wanted to do services. And I did, because I could.”

  The head nodded on its feeble neck. “You found things to do? I—I hoped you would. But I always worried about you. Every day, son, every day for all these years, I picked up the papers and looked at them with misgivings. ‘Suppose,’ I said to myself, ‘suppose my boy lost his temper last night. Suppose some one wronged him and he undertook to avenge himself.’ I trusted you, Hugo. I could not quite trust—the other thing. I’ve even blamed myself and hated myself.” He smiled. “But it’s all right—all right. So I am glad. Then, tell me—what—what—”

  “What have I done?”

  “Do you mind? It’s been so long and you were so far away.”

  “Well—” Hugo swept his memory back over his career–“so many things, father. It’s hard to recite one’s own—”

  “I know. But I’m your father, and my ears ache to hear.”

  “I saved a man pinned under a wagon. I saved a man from a shark. I pulled open a safe in which a man was smothering. Many things like that. Then—there was the war.”

  “I know. I know. When you wrote that you had gone to war, I was frightened—and happy. Try as I might, I could not think of a great constructive cause for you to enter. I had to satisfy myself by thinking that you could find such a cause. Then the war came. And you wrote that you were in it. I was happy. I am old, Hugo, and perhaps my nationalism and my patriotism are dead. Sides in a war did not seem to matter. But peace mattered to me, and I thought—I hoped that you could hasten peace. Four years, Hugo. Your letters said nothing. Four years. And then it stopped. And I understood. War is property fighting property, not David fighting Goliath. The greatest David would be unavailing now. Even you could do little enough.”

  “Perhaps not so little, father?”

  “There were things, then?”

  Hugo could not disappoint his father with the whole formidable truth. “Yes.” He lied with a steady gaze. “I stopped the war.”

  “You!”

  “After four years I perceived the truth of what you have just said. War is a mistake. It is not sides that matter. The object of war is to make peace. On a dark night, father, I went alone into the enemy lines. For one hundred miles that night I upset every gun, I wrecked every ammunition train, I blew up every dump—every arsenal, that is. Alone I did it. The next day they asked for peace. Remember the false armistice? Somehow it leaked out that there would be victory and surrender the next night—because of me. Only the truth about me was never known. And a day later—it came.”

  The weak old man was transported. He raised himself up on his elbows. “You did that! Then all my work was not in vain. My dream and my prayer were justified! Oh, Hugo, you can never know how glad I am you came and told me this. How glad.”

  He repeated his expression of joy until his tongue was weary; then he fell back. Hugo sat with shining eyes during the silence that followed. His father at length groped for a glass of water. Strength returned to him. “I could ask for no more, son. And yet we are petulant, insatiable creatures. What is doing now? The world is wicked. Yet it tries half-heartedly to rebuild itself. One great deed is not enough—or are you tired?”

  Hugo smiled. “Am I ever tired, father? Am I vulnerable?”

  “I had forgotten. It is so hard for the finite mind to think beyond itself. Not tired. Not vulnerable. No. There was Samson—the cat.” He was embarrassed. “I hurt you?”

  “No, father.” He repeated it. Every gentle fall of the word “father” from his lips and every mention of “son” by his father was rare privilege, unfamiliar elixir to the old man. His new lie took its cue from Abednego Danner’s expressions. “My work goes on. Now it is with America. I expect to go to Washington soon to right the wrongs of politics and government. Vicious and selfish men I shall force from their high places. I shall secure the idealistic and the courageous.” It was a theory he had never considered, a possible practice born of necessity. “The pressure I shall bring against them will be physical and mental. Here a man will be driven from his house mysteriously. There a man will slip into the limbo. Yonder an inconspicuous person will suddenly be braced by a new courage; his enemies will be gone and his work will progress unhampe
red. I shall be an invisible agent of right—right as best I can see it. You understand, father?”

  Abednego smiled like a happy child. “I do, son. To be you must be splendid.”

  “The most splendid thing on earth! And I have you to thank, you and your genius to tender gratitude to. I am merely the agent. It is you that created and the whole world that benefits.”

  Abednego’s face was serene—not smug, but transfigured. “I yearned as you now perform. It is strange that one cloistered mortal can become inspired with the toil and lament of the universe. Yet there is a danger of false pride in that, too. I am apt to fall into the pit because my cup is so full here at the last. And the greatest problem of all is not settled.”

  “What problem?” Hugo asked in surprise. “Why, the problem that up until now has been with me day and night. Shall there be made more men like you—and women like you?”

  The idea staggered Hugo. It paralyzed him and he heard his father’s voice come from a great distance. “Up in the attic in the black trunk are six notebooks wrapped in oilpaper. They were written in pencil, but I went over them carefully in ink. That is my lifework, Hugo. It is the secret—of you. Given those books, a good laboratory worker could go through all my experiments and repeat each with the same success. I tried a little myself. I found out things—for example, the effect of the process is not inherited by the future generations. It must be done over each time. It has seemed to me that those six little books—you could slip them all into your coat pocket—are a terrible explosive. They can rip the world apart and wipe humanity from it. In malicious hands they would end life. Sometimes, when I became nervous waiting for the newspapers, waiting for a letter from you, I have been sorely tempted to destroy them. But now—”

  “Now?” Hugo echoed huskily.

  “Now I .understand. There is no better keeping for them than your own. I give them to you.”

  “Me!”

  “You, son. You must take them, and the burden must be yours. You have grown to manhood now and I am proud of you. More than proud. If I were not, I myself would destroy the books here on this bed. Mathilda would bring them and I would watch them burn so that the danger would go with—” he cleared his throat—“my dream.”

  “But—”

  “You cannot deny me. It is my wish. You can see what it means. A world grown suddenly—as you are.”

  “I, father—”

  “You have not avoided responsibility. You will not avoid this, the greatest of your responsibilities. Since the days when I made those notes—what days!—biology has made great strides. For a time I was anxious. For a time I thought that my research might be rediscovered. But it cannot be. The fact of you, at best, may remain always no more than a theory. This is not vanity. My findings were a combination of accidents almost outside the bounds of mathematical probability. It is you who must bear the light.”

  Hugo felt that now, indeed, circumstance had closed around him and left him without succor or recourse. He bowed his head. “I will do it, father.”

  “Now I can die in peace—in joy.”

  With an almost visible wrench Hugo brought himself back to his surroundings. “Nonsense, father. You’ll probably get well.”

  “No, son. I’ve studied the progress of this disease in the lower orders—when I saw it imminent. I shall die—not in pain, but in sleep. But I shall not be dead—because of you.” He held out his hand for Hugo.

  Some time later the old professor fell asleep and Hugo tiptoed from the room. Food was sizzling downstairs in the kitchen, but he ignored it, going out into the sharp air by the front door. He hastened along the streets and soon came to the road that led up the mountain. He climbed rapidly, and when he dared, he discarded the tedious little steps of all mankind. He reached the side of the quarry where he had built the stone fort, and seated himself on a ledge that hung over it. Trees, creepers, and underbrush had grown over the place, but through the October—stripped barricade of their branches he could see a heap of stones that was his dolmen, on which the hieroglyph of him was inscribed.

  Two tears scalded his cheeks; he trembled with the welder of his emotions. He had failed his father, failed his trust, failed the world; and in the abyss of that grief he could catch no sight of promise or hope. Having done his best, he had still done nothing, and it was necessary for him to lie to put the thoughts of a dying man to rest. The pity of that lie! The of the picture he had painted of himself—Hugo Danner scourge of God, Hugo Danner the destroying angel Hugo Danner the hero of a quick love-affair that turned brown and dead like a plucked flower, the sentimental soldier, the voluntary misanthrope.

  “I must do it!” he whispered fiercely. The ruined stones echoed the sound of his voice with a remote demoniac jeer. Do what? What, strong man? What?

  Chapter XXI

  NOW the winds keened from the mountains, and snow fell. Abednego Danner, the magnificent Abednego Danner, was carried to his last resting-place, the laboratory of nature herself. His wife and his son followed the bier; the dirge was intoned, the meaningless cadence of ritual was spoken to the cold ground; a ghostly obelisk was lifted up over his meager remains. Hugo had a wish to go to the hills and roll down some gigantic chunk of living rock to mark that place until the coming of a glacier, but he forbore and followed all the dark conventions of disintegration.

  The will was read and the bulk of Hugo’s sorry gains was thrust back into his keeping. He went into the attic and opened the black trunk where the six small notebooks lay in oilpaper. He took them out and unwrapped them. The first two books were a maze of numbered experiments. In the third a more vigorous calligraphy, a quivering tracery of excitement, marked the repressed beginning of a new earth.

  He bought a bag and some clothes and packed; the false contralto of his mother’s hymns as she went about the house filled him with such despair that he left after the minimum interval allowed by filial decency. She was a grim old woman still, one to whom the coming of the kingdom to Africa was a passion, the polishing of the coal stove a duty, and the presence of her unfamiliar son a burden.

  When he said good-by, he kissed her, which left her standing on the station platform looking at the train with a flat, uncomprehending expression. Hugo knew where he was going and why: he was on his way to Washington. The great crusade was to begin. He had no plans, only ideals, which are plans of a sort. He had told his father he was making the world a better place, and the idea had taken hold of him. He would grapple the world, his world, at its source; he would no longer attempt to rise from a lowly place; he would exert his power in the highest places; government, politics, law, were malleable to the force of one man.

  Most of his illusion was gone. As he had said so glibly to his lather, there were good men and corrupt in the important situations in the world; to the good he would lend his strength, to the corrupt he would exhibit his embattled antipathy. He would be not one impotent person seeking to dominate, but the agent of uplift. He would be what he perceived life had meant him to be: an instrument. He could not be a leader, but he could create a leader.

  Such was his intention; he had seen a new way to reform the world, and if his inspiration was clouded occasionally with doubt, he disavowed the doubts as a Christian disavows temptation. This was to be his magnificent gesture; he closed his eyes to the inferences made by his past.

  He never thought of himself as pathetic or quixotic; his ability to measure up to external requirements was infinite; his disappointment lay always (he thought) in his spirit and his intelligence. He went to Washington: the world was pivoting there.

  His first few weeks were dull. He installed himself in a pleasant house and hired two servants. The use to which he was putting his funds compensated for their origin. It was men like Shayne who would suffer from his mission. And such a man came into view before very long.

  Hugo interested himself in politics and the appearance of politics. He read the Congressional Record, he talked with every one he met, he went daily to
the Capitol and listened to the amazing pattern of harangue from the lips of innumerable statesmen. In looking for a cause his eye fell naturally on the problem of disarmament. Hugo saw at once that it was a great cause and that it was bogged in the greed of individuals. It is not difficult to become politically partisan in the Capitol of any nation. It was patent to Hugo that disarmament meant a removal of the chance of war; Hugo hated war. He moved hither and thither, making friends, learning, entertaining, never exposing his plan—which his new friends thought to be lobbying for some impending legislation.

  He picked out an individual readily enough. Some of the men he had come to know were in the Senate, others in the House of Representatives, others were diplomats, newspaper reporters, attaches. Each alliance had been cemented with care and purpose. His knowledge of an enemy came by whisperings, by hints, by plain statements.

  Congressman Hatten, who argued so eloquently for laying down arms and picking up the cause of humanity, was a guest of Hugo’s.

  “Danner,” he said, after a third highball, “you’re a sensible chap. But you don’t quite get us. I’m fighting for disarmament—”

  “And making a grand fight—”

  The Congressman waved his hand. “Sure. That’s what I mean. You really want this thing for itself. But, between you and me, I don’t give a rap about ships and guns. My district is a farm district. We aren’t interested in paying millions in taxes to the bosses and owners in a coal and iron community. So I’m against it. Dead against it—with my constituency behind me. Nobody really wants to spend the money except the shipbuilders and steel men. Maybe they don’t, theoretically, but the money in it is too big. That’s why I fight.”

  “And your speeches?”

  “Pap, Danner, pure pap. Even the yokels in my home towns realize that.”

  “It doesn’t seem like pap to me.”

  “That’s politics. In a way it isn’t. Two boys I was fond of are lying over there in France. I don’t want to make any more shells. But I have to think of something else first. If I came from some other district, the case would be reversed. I’d like to change the tariff. But the industrials oppose me in that. So we compromise. Or we don’t. I think I could put across a decent arms-limitation bill right now, for example, if I could get Willard Melcher out of town for a month.”