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Gladiator

<h2>III</h2> Calm and quiet held their negative sway over the Danner ménage for an hour, and then there was a disturbed fretting that developed into a lusty bawl. The professor passed a fatigued hand over his brow. He was unaccustomed to the dissonances of his offspring. Young Hugo—they had named him after a maternal uncle—had attained the age of one week without giving any indication of unnaturalness. That is not quite true. He was as fleshy as most healthy infants, but the flesh was more than normally firm. He was inordinately active. His eyes had been gray but, already, they gave promise of the inkiness they afterwards exhibited. He was born with a quantity of black hair—hair so dark as to be nearly blue. Abednego Danner, on seeing it, exercised the liberty which all husbands take, and investigated rumours of his wife's forbears with his most secret thoughts. The principal rumour was that one of her lusty Covenanter grandsires had been intrigued by a squaw to the point of forgetting his Psalms and recalling only the Song of Solomon. However that may have been, Hugo was an attractive and virile baby. Danner spent hours at the side of his crib speculating and watching for any sign of biological variation. But it was not until a week had passed that he was given evidence. By that time he was ready to concede the failure of his greatest experiment. The baby bawled and presently stopped. And Mrs. Danner, who had put it to breast, suddenly called her husband. "Abednego! Come here! Hurry!" The professor's heart skipped its regular timing and he scrambled to the floor above. "What's the matter?" Mrs. Danner was sitting in a rocking-chair. Her face was as white as paper. Only in her eyes was there a spark of life. He thought she was going to faint. "What's the matter?" he said again. He looked at Hugo and saw nothing terrifying in the ravishing hunger which the infant showed. "Matter! Matter! You know the matter!" Then he knew and he realized that his wife had discovered. "I don't. You look frightened. Shall I bring some water?" Mrs. Danner spoke again. Her voice was icy, distant, terrible. "I came in to feed him just a minute ago. He was lying in his crib. I tried to—to hug him and he put his arms out. As God lives, I could not pull that baby to me! He was too strong, Abednego! Too strong. Too strong. I couldn't unbend his little arms when he stiffened them. I couldn't straighten them when he bent them. And he pushed me—harder than you could push. Harder than I could push myself. I know what it means. You have done your horrible thing to my baby. He's just a baby, Abednego. And you've done your thing to him. How could you? Oh, how could you!" Mrs. Danner rose and laid the baby gently on the chair. She stood before her husband, towering over him, raised her hand, and struck with all her force. Mr. Danner fell to one knee, and a red welt lifted on his face. She struck him again and he fell against the chair. Little Hugo was dislodged. One hand caught a rung of the chair back and he hung suspended above the floor. "Look!" Mrs. Danner screamed. As they looked, the baby flexed its arm and lifted itself back into the chair. It was a feat that a gymnast would have accomplished with difficulty. Danner stared, ignoring the blows, the crimson on his cheek. For once in his lifetime, he suddenly defied his wife. He pointed to the child. "Yes, look!" His voice rang clearly. "I did it. I vaccinated you the night the cordial put you to sleep. And there's my son. He's strong. Stronger than a lion's cub. And he'll increase in strength as he grows until Samson and Hercules would be pygmies beside him. He'll be the first of a new and glorious race. A race that doesn't have to fear—because it cannot know harm. No man can hurt him, no man can vanquish him. He will be mightier than any circumstances. He, son of a weak man, will be stronger than the beasts, even than the ancient dinosaurs, stronger than the tides, stronger than fate—strong as God is strong. And you—you, Matilda—mother of him, will be proud of him. He will be great and famous. You can knock me down. You can knock me down a thousand times. I have given you a son whose little finger you cannot bend with a crow-bar. Oh, all these years I've listened to you and obeyed you and—yes, I've feared you a little—and God must hate me for it. Now take your son. And my son. You cannot change him. You cannot bend him to your will. He is all I might have been. All that mankind should be." Danner's voice broke and he sobbed. He relented. "I know it's hard for you. It's against your religion—against your love, even. But try to like him. He's no different from you and me—only stronger. And strength is a glorious thing, a great thing. Then—afterwards—if you can—forgive me." He collapsed. Blood pounded in her ears. She stared at the huddled body of her husband. He had stood like a prophet and spoken words of fire. She was shaken from her pettiness. For one moment she had loved Danner. In that same instant she had glimpsed the superhuman energy that had driven him through the long years of discouragement to triumph. She had seen his soul. She fell at his feet, and when Danner opened his eyes, he found her there, weeping. He took her in his arms, timidly, clumsily. "Don't cry, Mattie. It'll be all right. You love him, don't you?" She stared at the babe. "Of course I love him. Wash your face, Abednego." After that there was peace in the house, and with it the child grew. During the next months they ignored his peculiarities. When they found him hanging outside his crib, they put him back gently. When he smashed the crib, they discussed a better place for him to repose. No hysteria, no conflict. When, in the early spring, young Hugo began to recognize them and to assert his feelings, they rejoiced as all parents rejoice. When he managed to vault the sill of the second-story window by some antic contortion of his limbs, they dismissed the episode. Mrs. Danner had been baking. She heard the child's voice and it seemed to come from the yard. Startled, incredulous, she rushed upstairs. Hugo was not in his room. His wail drifted through the window. She looked out. He was lying in the yard, fifteen feet below. She rushed to his side. He had not been hurt. Danner made a pen of the iron heads and feet of two old beds. He wired them together. The baby was kept in the inclosure thus formed. The days warmed and lengthened. No one except the Danners knew of the prodigy harboured by their unostentatious house. But the secret was certain to leak out eventually. Mrs. Nolan, the next-door neighbour, was first to learn it. She had called on Mrs. Danner to borrow a cup of sugar. The call, naturally, included a discussion of various domestic matters and a visit to the baby. She voiced a question that had occupied her mind for some time. "Why do you keep the child in that iron thing? Aren't you afraid it will hurt itself?" "Oh, no." Mrs. Nolan viewed young Hugo. He was lying on a large pillow. Presently he rolled off its surface. "Active youngster, isn't he?" "Very," Mrs. Danner said, nervously. Hugo, as if he understood and desired to demonstrate, seized a corner of the pillow and flung it from him. It traversed a long arc and landed on the floor. Mrs. Nolan was startled. "Goodness! I never saw a child his age that could do that!" "No. Let's go downstairs. I want to show you some tidies I'm making." Mrs. Nolan paid no attention. She put the pillow back in the pen and watched while Hugo tossed it out. "There's something funny about that. It isn't normal. Have you seen a doctor?" Mrs. Danner fidgeted. "Oh, yes. Little Hugo's healthy." Little Hugo grasped the iron wall of his miniature prison. He pulled himself toward it. His skirt caught in the floor. He pulled harder. The pen moved toward him. A high soprano came from Mrs. Nolan. "He's moved it! I don't think I could move it myself! I tell you, I'm going to ask the doctor to examine him. You shouldn't let a child be like that." Mrs. Danner, filled with consternation, sought refuge in prevarication. "Nonsense," she said as calmly as she could. "All we Douglases are like that. Strong children. I had a grandfather who could lift a cider keg when he was five—two hundred pounds and more. Hugo just takes after him, that's all." Mrs. Nolan was annoyed. Partly because she was jealous of Hugo's prowess—her own children had been feeble and dull. Partly because she was frightened—no matter how strong a person became, a baby had no right to be so powerful. Partly because she sensed that Mrs. Danner was not telling the whole truth. She suspected that the Danners had found a new way to raise children. "Well," she said, "all I have to say is that it'll damage him. It'll strain his little heart. It'll do him a lot of harm. If I had a child like that, I'd tie it up most of the time for the first few years." "Kate," Mrs. Danner said unpleasantly, "I believe you would." Mrs. Nolan shrugged. "Well—I'm glad none of my children are freaks, anyhow." "I'll get your sugar." In the afternoon the minister called. He talked of the church and the town until he felt his preamble adequate. "I was wondering why you didn't bring your child to be baptized, Mrs. Danner. And why you couldn't come to church, now that it is old enough?" "Well," she replied carefully, "the child is rather—irritable. And we thought we'd prefer to have it baptized at home." "It's irregular." "We'd prefer it." "Very well. I'm afraid—" he smiled—"that you're a little—ah—unfamiliar with the upbringing of children. Natural—in the case of the first-born. Quite natural. But—ah—I met Mrs. Nolan to-day. Quite by accident. And she said that you kept the child—ah—in an iron pen. It seemed unnecessarily cruel to me—" "Did it?" Mrs. Danner's jaw set squarely. But the minister was not to be turned aside lightly. "I'm afraid, if it's true, that we—the church—will have to do something about it. You can't let the little fellow grow up surrounded by iron walls. It will surely point him toward the prison. Little minds are tender and—ah—impressionable." "We've had a crib and two pens of wood," Mrs. Danner answered tartly. "He smashed them all." "Ah? So?" Lifted eyebrows. "Temper, eh? He should be punished. Punishment is the only mould for unruly children." "You'd punish a six-months-old baby?" "Why—certainly. I've reared seven by the rod." "Well—" a blazing maternal instinct made her feel vicious. "Well—you won't raise mine by a rod. Or touch it—by a mile. Here's your hat, parson." Mrs. Danner spent the next hour in prayer. The village is known for the speed of its gossip and the sloth of its intelligence. Those two factors explain the conditions which preluded and surrounded the dawn of consciousness in young Hugo. Mrs. Danner's extemporaneous fabrication of a sturdy ancestral line kept the more supernatural elements of the baby's prowess from the public eye. It became rapidly and generally understood that the Danner infant was abnormal and that the treatment to which it was submitted was not usual. At the same time neither the gossips of Indian Creek nor the slightly more sage professors of the college exercised the wit necessary to realize that, however strong young Hugo might become, it was neither right nor just that his cradle days be augurs of that eventual estate. On the face of it the argument seemed logical. If Mrs. Danner's forbears had been men of peculiar might, her child might well be able to chin itself at three weeks and it might easily be necessary to confine it in a metal pen, however inhumane the process appeared. Hugo was sheltered, and his early antics, peculiar and startling as they were to his parents, escaped public attention. The little current of talk about him was kept alive only because there was so small an array of topics for the local burghers. But it was not extraordinarily malicious. Months piled up. A year passed and then another. Hugo was a good-natured, usually sober, and very sensitive child. Abednego Danner's fear that his process might have created muscular strength at the expense of reason diminished and vanished as Hugo learned to walk and to talk, and as he grasped the rudiments of human behaviour. His high little voice was heard in the house and about its lawns. They began to condition him. Throughout his later life there lingered in his mind a memory of the barriers erected by his family. He was told not to throw his pillow, when words meant nothing to him. Soon after that, he was told not to throw anything. When he could walk, he was forbidden to jump. His jumps were shocking to see, even at the age of two and a half. He was carefully instructed on his behaviour out of doors. No move of his was to indicate his difference from the ordinary child. He was taught kindness and respect for people and property. His every destructive impulse was carefully curbed. That training was possible only because he was sensitive and naturally susceptible to advice. Punishment had no physical terror for him, because he could not feel it. But disfavour, anger, vexation, or disappointment in another person reflected itself in him at once. When he was four and a half, his mother sent him to Sunday school. He was enrolled in a class that sat near her own, so she was able to keep a careful eye on him. But Hugo did not misbehave. It was his first contact with a group of children, his first view of the larger cosmos. He sat quietly with his hands folded, as he had been told to sit. He listened to the teacher's stories of Jesus with excited interest. On his third Sunday he heard one of the children whisper: "Here comes the strong boy." He turned quickly, his cheeks red. "I'm not. I'm not." "Yes, you are. Mother said so." Hugo struggled with the two hymn books on the table. "I can't even lift these books," he lied. The other child was impressed and tried to explain the situation later, taking the cause of Hugo's weakness against the charge of strength. But the accusation rankled in Hugo's young mind. He hated to be different—and he was beginning to realize that he was different. From his earliest day that longing occupied him. He sought to hide his strength. He hated to think that other people were talking about him. The distinction he enjoyed was odious to him because it aroused unpleasant emotions in other people. He could not realize that those emotions sprang from personal and group jealousy, from the hatred of superiority. His mother, ever zealous to direct her son in the path of righteousness, talked to him often about his strength and how great it would become and what great and good deeds he could do with it. Those lectures on virtuous crusades had two uses: they helped check any impulses in her son which she felt would be harmful to her and they helped her to become used to the abnormality in little Hugo. In her mind, it was like telling a hunchback that his hump was a blessing disguised. Hugo was always aware of the fact that her words connoted some latent evil in his nature. The motif grew in Mrs. Danner's thoughts until she sought a definite outlet for it. One day she led her child to a keg filled with sand. "All of us," she said to her son, "have to carry a burden through life. One of your burdens will be your strength. But that might can make right. See that little keg?" "Mmmmm." "That keg is temptation. Can you say it?" "Temshun." "Every day in your life you must bear temptation and throw it from you. Can you bear it?" "Huh?" "Can you pick up that keg, Hugo?" He lifted it in his chubby arms. "Now take it to the barn and back," his mother directed. Manfully he walked with the keg to the barn and back. He felt a little silly and resentful. "Now—throw temptation as far away from you as you can." Mrs. Danner gasped. The distance he threw the keg was frightening. "You musn't throw it so far, Hugo," she said, forgetting her allegory for an instant. "You said as far as I can. I can throw it farther, too, if I wanna." "No. Just throw it a little way. When you throw it far, it doesn't look right. Now—fill it up with sand, and we'll do it over." Hugo was perplexed. A vague wish to weep occupied him as he filled the keg. The lesson was repeated. Mrs. Danner had excellent Sunday-school instincts, even if she had no real comprehension of ethics. Some days later the burden of temptation was exhibited, in all its dramatic passages, to Mrs. Nolan and another lady. Again Hugo was resentful and again he felt absurd. When he threw the keg, it broke. "My!" Mrs. Nolan said in a startled tone. "How awful!" the other woman murmured. "And he's just a child." That made Hugo suddenly angry and he jumped. The woman screamed. Mrs. Nolan ran to tell whomever she could find. Mrs. Danner whipped her son and he cried softly. Abednego Danner left the discipline of his son to his wife. He watched the child almost furtively. When Hugo was five, Mr. Danner taught him to read. It was a laborious process and required an entire winter. But Hugo emerged with a new world open to him—a world which he attacked with interest. No one bothered him when he read. He could be found often on sunny days, when other children were playing, prone on the floor, puzzling out sentences in the books of the family library and trying to catch their significance. During his fifth year he was not allowed to play with other children. The neighbourhood insisted on that. With the busybodyness and contrariness of their kind the same neighbours insisted that Hugo be sent to school in the following fall. When, on the opening day, he did not appear, the truant officer called for him. Hugo heard the conversation between the officer and his mother. He was frightened. He vowed to himself that his abnormality should be hidden deeply. After that he was dropped into that microcosm of human life to which so little attention is paid by adults. School frightened and excited Hugo. For one thing, there were girls in school—and Hugo knew nothing about them except that they were different from himself. There were teachers—and they made one work, whether one wished to work or not. They represented power, as a jailer represents power. The children feared teachers. Hugo feared them. But the lesson of Hugo's first six years was fairly well planted. He blushingly ignored the direct questions of those children whom his fame had reached. He gave no reason to anyone for suspecting him of abnormality. He became so familiar to his comrades that their curiosity gradually vanished. He would not play games with them—his mother had forbidden that. But he talked to them and was as friendly as they allowed him to be. His sensitiveness and fear of ridicule made him a voracious student. He liked books. He liked to know things and to learn them. Thus, bound by the conditionings of his babyhood, he reached the spring of his first year in school without accident. Such tranquillity could not long endure. The day which his mother had dreaded ultimately arrived. A lanky farmer's son, older than the other children in the first grade, chose a particularly quiet and balmy recess period to plague little Hugo. The farmer's boy was, because of his size, the bully and the leader of all the other boys. He had not troubled himself to resent Hugo's exclusiveness or Hugo's reputation until that morning when he found himself without occupation. Hugo was sitting in the sun, his dark eyes staring a little sadly over the laughing, rioting children. The boy approached him. "Hello, strong man." He was shrewd enough to make his voice so loud as to be generally audible. Hugo looked both harmless and slightly pathetic. "I'm not a strong man." "Course you're not. But everybody thinks you are—except me. I'm not afraid of you." "I don't want you to be afraid of me. I'm not afraid of you, either." "Oh, you aren't, huh? Look." He touched Hugo's chest with his finger, and when Hugo looked down, the boy lifted his finger into Hugo's face. "Go away and let me alone." The tormentor laughed. "Ever see a fish this long?" His hands indicated a small fish. Involuntarily Hugo looked at them. The hands flew apart and slapped him smartly. Several of the children had stopped their play to watch. The first insult made them giggle. The second brought a titter from Anna Blake, and Hugo noticed that. Anna Blake was a little girl with curly golden hair and blue eyes. Secretly Hugo admired her and was drawn to her. When she laughed, he felt a dismal loneliness, a sudden desertion. The farmer's boy pressed the occasion his meanness had made. "I'll bet you ain't even strong enough to fight little Charlie Todd. Commere, Charlie." "I am," Hugo replied with slow dignity. "You're a sissy. You're a-scared to play with us." The ring around Hugo had grown. He felt a tangible ridicule in it. He knew what it was to hate. Still, his inhibitions, his control, held him in check. "Go away," he said, "or I'll hurt you." The farmer's boy picked up a stick and put it on his shoulder. "Knock that off, then, strong man." Hugo knew the dare and its significance. With a gentle gesture he brushed the stick away. Then the other struck. At the same time he kicked Hugo's shins. There was no sense of pain with the kick. Hugo saw it as if it had happened to another person. The school-yard tensed with expectation. But the accounts of what followed were garbled. The farmer's boy fell on his face as if by an invisible agency. Then his body was lifted in the air. The children had an awful picture of Hugo standing for a second with the writhing form of his attacker above his head. Then he flung it aside, over the circle that surrounded him, and the body fell with a thud. It lay without moving. Hugo began to whimper pitifully. That was Hugo's first fight. He had defended himself, and it made him ashamed. He thought he had killed the other boy. Sickening dread filled him. He hurried to his side and shook him, calling his name. The other boy came to. His arm was broken and his sides were purpling where Hugo had seized him. There was terror in his eyes when he saw Hugo's face above him, and he screamed shrilly for help. The teacher came. She sent Hugo to the blacksmith to be whipped. That, in itself, was a stroke of genius. The blacksmith whipped grown boys in the high school for their misdeeds. To send a six-year-old child was crushing. But Hugo had risen above the standards set by his society. He had been superior to it for a moment, and society hated him for it. His teacher hated him because she feared him. Mothers of children, learning about the episode, collected to discuss it in high-pitched, hateful voices. Hugo was enveloped in hate. And, as the lash of the smith fell on his small frame, he felt the depths of misery. He was a strong man. There was damnation in his veins. The minister came and prayed over him. The doctor was sent for and examined him. Frantic busybodies suggested that things be done to weaken him—what things, they did not say. And Hugo, suffering bitterly, saw that if he had beaten the farmer's boy in fair combat, he would have been a hero. It was the scale of his triumph that made it dreadful. He did not realize then that if he had been so minded, he could have turned on the blacksmith and whipped him, he could have broken the neck of the doctor, he could have run raging through the town and escaped unscathed. His might was a secret from himself. He knew it only as a curse, like a disease or a blemish. During the ensuing four or five years Hugo's peculiar trait asserted itself but once. It was a year after his fight with the bully. He had been isolated socially. Even Anna Blake did not dare to tease him any longer. Shunned and wretched, he built a world of young dreams and confections and lived in it with whatever comfort it afforded. One warm afternoon in a smoky Indian summer he walked home from school, spinning a top as he walked, stopping every few yards to pick it up and to let its eccentric momentum die on the palm of his hand. His pace thereby was made very slow and he calculated it to bring him to his home in time for supper and no sooner, because, despite his vigour, chores were as odious to him as to any other boy. A wagon drawn by two horses rolled toward him. It was a heavy wagon, piled high with grain-sacks, and a man sat on its rear end, his legs dangling. As the wagon reached Hugo, it jolted over a rut. There was a grinding rip and a crash. Hugo pocketed his top and looked. The man sitting on the back had been pinned beneath the rear axle, and the load held him there. As Hugo saw his predicament, the man screamed in agony. Hugo's blood chilled. He stood transfixed. A man jumped out of a buggy. A Negro ran from a yard. Two women hurried from the spot. In an instant there were six or seven men around the broken wagon. A sound of pain issued from the mouth of the impaled man. The knot of figures bent at the sides of the cart and tried to lift. "Have to get a jack," Hugo heard them say. Hugo wound up his string and put it beside his top. He walked mechanically into the road. He looked at the legs of the man on the ground. They were oozing blood where the backboard rested on them. The men gathered there were lifting again, without result. Hugo caught the side and bent his small shoulders. With all his might he pulled up. The wagon was jerked into the air. They pulled out the injured man. Hugo lowered the wagon slowly. For a moment no attention was paid to him. He waited pridefully for the recognition he had earned. He dug in the dirt with the side of his shoe. A man with a mole on his nose observed him. "Funny how that kid's strength was just enough to turn the balance." Hugo smiled. "I'm pretty strong," he admitted. Another man saw him. "Get out of here," he said sharply. "This is no place for a kid." "But I was the one—" "I said beat it. And I meant beat it. Go home to your ma." Slowly the light went from Hugo's eyes. They did not know—they could not know. He had lifted more than two tons. And the men stood now, waiting for the doctor, telling each other how strong they were when the instant of need came. "Go on, kid. Run along. I'll smack you." Hugo went. He forgot to spin his top. He stumbled a little as he walked. <hr style="width: 65%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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