Part 6

Hugo tightened his belt and swung the electric light back and forth with a slow-moving fist. Another man expertly strapped his fists with adhesive tape.

"When do I go out?" Hugo asked.

"You mean, when do you get knocked out?" the second laughed.

"Fight?"

"Well, if you're determined to get croaked, you do it now."

In the arena it was dazzling. A bank of noisy people rose on all sides of him. Hugo walked down the aisle and clambered into the ring. Ole was one of the largest men he had ever seen in his life. There was no doubt of his six feet nine inches and his two hundred and eighty pounds. Hugo imagined that the man was not a scientific fighter. A bruiser. Well, he knew nothing of fighting, either.

A man in his shirt sleeves stood up in the ring and bellowed, "The next contestant for the reward of fifty dollars to stay three rounds with battling Ole and one hundred dollars to knock him out is Mr. H. Smith." They cheered. It was a nasty sound, filled with the lust for blood. Hugo realized that he was excited. His knees wabbled when he rose and his hand trembled as he took the monstrous paw of the Swede and saw his unpleasant smile. Hugo's heart was pounding. For one instant he felt weak and human before Battling Ole. He whispered to himself: "Quit it, you fool; you know better; you can't even be hurt." It did not make him any more quiet.

Then they were sitting face to face. A bell rang. The hall became silent as the mountainous Swede lumbered from his corner. He towered over Hugo, who stood up and went out to meet him like David approaching Goliath. To the crowd the spectacle was laughable. There was jeering before they met. "Where's your mamma?" "Got your bottle, baby?" "Put the poor little bastard back in his carriage." "What's this--a fight or a freak show?" Laughter.

It was like cold water to Hugo. His face set. He looked at Ole. The Swede's fist moved back like the piston of a great engine into which steam has been let slowly. Then it came forward. Hugo, trained to see and act in keeping with his gigantic strength, dodged easily. "Atta boy!" "One for Johnny-dear!" The fist went back and came again and again, as if that piston, gathering speed, had broken loose and was flailing through the screaming air. Hugo dodged like a beam of light, and the murderous weapon never touched him. The spectators began to applaud his speed. He could beat the Swede's fist every time. "Run him, kiddo!" "It's only three rounds."

The bell. Ole was panting. As he sat in his corner, his coal-scuttle gloves dangling, he cursed in his native tongue. Too little to hit. Bell. The second round was the same. Hugo never attempted to touch the Swede. Only to avoid him. And the man worked like a Trojan. Sweat seethed over his big, blank face. His small eyes sharpened to points. He brought his whole carcass flinging through the air after his fist. But every blow ended in a sickening wrench that missed the target. The crowd grew more excited. During the interval between the second and third rounds there was betting on the outcome. Three to one that Ole would connect and murder the boy. Four to one. One to five that Hugo would win fifty dollars before he died beneath the trip-hammer.

The third round opened. The crowd suddenly tired of the sport. A shrill female voice reached Hugo's cold, concentrated mind: "Keep on running, yellow baby!"

So. They wanted a killing. They called him yellow. The Swede was on him, elephantine, sweating, sucking great, rumbling breaths of air, swinging his fists. Hugo studied the motion. That fist to that side, up, down, now!

Like hail they began to land upon the Swede. Bewilderingly, everywhere. No hope of guarding. Every blow smashed, stung, ached. No chance to swing back. Cover up. His arms went over his face. He felt rivets drive into his kidneys. He reached out and clinched. They rocked in each other's arms. Dazed by that bitter onslaught of lightning blows, Ole thought only to lock Hugo in his arms and crush him. When they clinched, the crowd, grown instantly hysterical, sank back in despair. It was over. Ole could break the little man's back. They saw his arms spring into knots. Jesus! Hugo's fist shot between their chests and Ole was thrown violently backward. Impossible. He lunged back, crimson to kill, one hand guarding his jaw. "Easy, now, for the love of God, easy," Hugo said to himself. There. On the hand at the chin. Hugo's gloves went out. Lift him! It connected. The Swede left the floor and crumpled slowly, with a series of bumping sounds. And how the hyenas yelled!

They crowded into his dressing-room afterwards. Epstein came to his side before he had dressed. "Come out and have a mug of suds, kid. That was the sweetest fight I ever hope to live to see. I can sign you up for a fortune right now. I can make you champ in two years."

"No, thanks," Hugo said.

The man persisted. He talked earnestly. He handed Hugo a hundred-dollar bill. Hugo finished his dressing. Izzie wormed his way in. "Fifty dollars I won yet! Didn't I tole you, Mr. Epstein!"

"Come here, Izzie!"

The little man ran to shake Hugo's hand, but it was extended for another reason. "I want that fifty you won," he said unsmilingly. "When a bird tracks along for a free feed and lets another guy fight for him and has a roll big enough to stop up a rainspout, he owes money. That lunch will set you back just exactly what you won on me."

There was laughter in the room. Izzie whimpered. "Ain't you got a hundred all ready that I got for you? Ain't it enough that you got it? Ain't I got a wife wit' kids yet?"

"No, it ain't, yet." Hugo snapped the fingers of his extended hand. The other hand doubled significantly. Izzie gave him the money. He was almost in tears. The others guffawed.

"Wait up, bo. Give us your address if you ever change your mind. You can pick up a nice livin' in this game."

"No, thanks. All I needed was railroad fare. Thank you, gentlemen--and--good-by."

No one undertook to hinder Hugo's departure.

VIII

Greatness seemed to elude Hugo, success such as he had earned was inadequate, and his friendships as well as his popularity were tinged with a sort of question that he never understood. By the end of winter he was well established in Webster as a great athlete. Psi Delta sang his praises and was envied his deeds. Lefty and Chuck treated him as a brother. And, Hugo perceived, none of that treatment and none of that society was quite real. He wondered if his personality was so meagre that it was not equal to his strength. He wondered if his strength was really the asset he had dreamed it would be, and if, perhaps, other people were not different from him in every way, so that any close human contact was impossible to him.

It was a rather tragic question to absorb a man so filled with life and ambition as he. Yet every month had raised it more insistently. He saw other men sharing their inmost souls and he could never do that. He saw those around him breaking their hearts and their lungs for the university, and, although it was never necessary for him to do that, he doubted that he could if he would. Webster was only a school. A sentiment rather than an ideal, a place rather than a goal of dreams. He thought that he was cynical. He thought that he was inhuman. It worried him.

His love was a similar experience. He fell in love twice during that first year in college. Once at a prom with a girl who was related to Lefty--a rich, socially secure girl who had studied abroad and who almost patronized her cousin.

Hugo had seen her dancing, and her long, slender legs and arms had issued an almost tangible challenge to him. She had looked over Lefty's shoulder and smiled vaguely. They had met. Hugo danced with her. "I love to come to a prom," she said; "it makes me feel young again."

"How old are you?"

She ignored the obvious temptation to be coy and he appreciated that. "Twenty-one."

It seemed reasonably old to Hugo. The three years' difference in their ages had given her a pinnacle of maturity.

"And that makes you old," he reflected.

She nodded. Her name was Iris. Afterwards Hugo thought that it should have been Isis. Half goddess, half animal. He had never met with the vanguard of emancipated American womanhood before then. "You're the great Hugo Danner, aren't you? I've seen your picture in the sporting sections." She read sporting sections. He had never thought of a woman in that light. "But you're really much handsomer. You have more sex and masculinity and you seem more intelligent."

Then, between the dances, Lefty had come. "She? Oh, she's a sort of cousin. Flies in all the high altitudes in town. Blue Book and all that. Better look out, Hugo. She plays rough."

"She doesn't look rough."

Both youths watched her. Long, dark hair, willowy body, high, pale forehead, thin nose, red mouth, smiling like a lewd agnostic and dancing close to her partner, enjoying even that. "Well, look out, Hugo. If she wants to play, don't let her play with your heart. Anything else is quite in the books."

"Oh."

She came to the stag line, ignoring a sequence of invitations, and asked him to dance. They went out on the velvet campus. "I could love you--for a little while," she said. "It's too bad you have to play football to-morrow."

"Is that an excuse?"

She smiled remotely. "You're being disloyal." Her fan moved delicately. "But I shan't chide you. In fact, I'll stay over for the game--and I'll enjoy the anticipation--more, perhaps. But you'll have to win it--to win me. I'm not a soothing type."

"It will be easy--to win," Hugo said and she peered through the darkness with admiration, because he had made his ellipsis of the object very plain.

"It is always easy for you to win, isn't it?" she countered with an easy mockery, and Hugo shivered.

The game was won. Hugo had made his touchdown. He unfolded a note she had written on the back of a score card. "At my hotel at ten, then."

"Then." Someone lifted his eyes to praise him. His senses swam in careful anticipation. They were cheering outside the dressing-room. A different sound from the cheers at the fight-arena. Young, hilarious, happy.

At ten he bent over the desk and was told to go to her room. The clerk shrugged. She opened the door. One light was burning. There was perfume in the air. She wore only a translucent kimono of pale-coloured silk. She taught him a great many things that night. And Iris learned something, too, so that she never came back to Hugo, and kept the longing for him as a sort of memory which she made hallowed in a shorn soul. It was, for her, a single asceticism in a rather selfish life.

Hugo loved her for two weeks after that, and then his emotions wearied and he was able to see what she had done and why she did not answer his letters. His subdued fierceness was a vehement fire to women. His fiercer appetite was the cause of his early growth in a knowledge of them. When most of his companions were finding their way into the mysteries of sex both unhandily and with much turmoil, he learned well and abnormally. It became a part of his secret self. Another barrier to the level of the society that surrounded him. When he changed the name of Iris to Isis in his thoughts, he moved away from the Psi Deltas, who would have been incapable of the notion. In person he stayed among them, but in spirit he felt another difference, which he struggled to reconcile.

In March the thaws came, and under the warming sun Hugo made a deliberate attempt to fall in love with Janice, who was the daughter of his French professor. She was a happy, innocent little girl, with gold hair, and brown eyes that lived oddly beneath it. She worshipped Hugo. He petted her, talked through long evenings to her, tried to be faithful to her in his most unfettered dreams, and once considered proposing to her. When he found himself unable to do that, he was compelled to resist an impulse to seduce her. Ashamed, believing himself unfit for a nice girl, he untangled that romance as painlessly as he could, separating himself from Janice little by little and denying every accusation of waning interest.

Then for a month he believed that he could never be satisfied by any woman, that he was superior to women. He read the lives of great lovers and adulterers and he wished that he could see Bessie, who had taken his money long before in New York City. She appealed to him then more than all the others--probably, he thought, because he was drunk and had not viewed her in sharp perspective. For hours he meditated on women, while he longed constantly to possess a woman.

But the habitual routine of his life did not suffer. He attended his classes and lectures, played on the basketball team, tried tentatively to write for the campus newspaper, learned to perform indifferently on the mandolin, and made himself into the semblance of an ideal college man. His criticism of college then was at its lowest ebb. He spent Christmas in New York at Lefty Foresman's parents' elaborate home, slightly intoxicated through the two weeks, hastening to the opera, to balls and parties, ill at ease when presented to people whose names struck his ears familiarly, seeing for the first time the exaggeration of scale on which the very rich live and wondering constantly why he never met Iris, wishing for and fearing that meeting while he wondered.

When his first year at college was near to its end, and that still and respectful silence that marks the passing of a senior class had fallen over the campus, Hugo realized with a shock that he would soon be on his way back to Indian Creek. Then, suddenly, he saw what an amazing and splendid thing that year at college had been. He realized how it had filled his life to the brim with activities of which he had not dreamed, how it had shaped him so that he would be almost a stranger in his own home, how it had aged and educated him in the business of living. When the time of parting with his new friends drew near, he understood that they were valuable to him, in spite of his questioning. And they made it clear that he would be missed by them. At last he shared a feeling with his classmates, a fond sadness, an illimitable poignancy that was young and unadulterated by motive. He was perversely happy when he became aware of it. He felt somewhat justified for being himself and living his life.

A day or two before college closed, he received a letter from his father. It was the third he had received during the year. It said:

Dear Son--

Your mother and I have decided to break the news to you before you leave for home, because there may be better opportunities for you in the East than here at Indian Creek. When you went away to Webster University, I agreed to take care of all your expenses. It was the least I could do, I felt, for my only son. The two thousand dollars your mother and I had saved seemed ample for your four years. But the bills we have received, as well as your own demands, have been staggering. In March, when a scant six hundred dollars of the original fund remained, I invested the money in a mine stock which, the salesman said, would easily net the six thousand dollars you appeared to need. I now find to my chagrin that the stock is worthless. I am unable to get back my purchase money.

It will be impossible during the coming year for me to let you have more than five hundred dollars. Perhaps, with what you earn this summer and with the exercise of economy, you can get along. I trust so. But, anxious as we are to see you again, we felt that, in the light of such information, you might prefer to remain in the East to earn what you can.

We are both despondent over the situation and we wish that we could do more than tender our regrets. But we hope that you will be able to find some solution to this situation. Thus, with our very warmest affection and our fondest hope, we wish you good fortune.

Your loving father,

ABEDNEGO DANNER.

Hugo read the letter down to the last period after the rather tremulous signature. His emotions were confused. Touched by the earnest and pathetically futile efforts of his father and by the attempt of that lonely little man to express what was, perhaps, a great affection, Hugo was nevertheless aghast at a prospect that he had not considered. He was going to be thrown into the world on his own resources. And, resting his frame in his worn chair--a frame capable of smashing into banks and taking the needed money without fear of punishment--Hugo began to wonder dismally if he was able even to support himself. No trade, no occupation, suggested itself. He had already experienced some of the merciless coldness of the world. The boys would all leave soon. And then he would be alone, unprovided for, helpless.

Hugo was frightened. He read the letter again, his wistful thoughts of his parents diminishing before the reality of his predicament. He counted his money. Eighty dollars in the bank and twelve in his pockets. He was glad he had started an account after his experience with Bessie. He was glad that he had husbanded more than enough to pay his fare to Indian Creek. Ninety-two dollars. He could live on that for a long time. Perhaps for the summer. And he would be able to get some sort of job. He was strong, anyway. That comforted him. He looked out of his window and tried to enumerate the things that he could do. All sorts of farm work. He could drive a team in the city. He could work on the docks. He considered nothing but manual labor. It would offer more. Gradually his fear that he would starve if left to his own devices ebbed from him, and it was replaced by grief that he could not return to Webster. Fourteen hundred dollars--that was the cost of his freshman year. He made a list of the things he could do without, of the work he could do to help himself through college. Perhaps he could return. The fear slowly diminished. He would be a working student in the year to come. He hated the idea. His fraternity had taken no members from that class of humble young men who rose at dawn and scrubbed floors and waited on tables to win the priceless gem of education. Lefty and Chuck would be chilly toward such a step. They would even offer him money to avoid it. It was a sad circumstance, at best.

When that period of tribulation passed, Hugo became a man. But he suffered keenly from his unwonted fears for some time. The calm and suave youth who had made love to Iris was buried beneath his frightened and imaginative adolescence. It wore out the last of his childishness. Immediately afterwards he learned about money and how it is earned. He sat there in the dormitory, almost trembling with uncertainty and used mighty efforts to do the things he felt he must do. He wrote a letter to his father which began: "Dear Dad--Why in Sam Hill didn't you tell me you were being reamed so badly by your nit-witted son and I'd have shovelled out and dug up some money for myself long ago?" On rereading that letter he realized that its tone was false. He wrote another in which he apologized with simple sincerity for the condition he had unknowingly created, and in which he expressed every confidence that he could take care of himself in the future.

He bore that braver front through the last days of school. He shook Lefty's hand warmly and looked fairly into his eyes. "Well, so long, old sock. Be good."

"Be good, Hugo. And don't weaken. We'll need all your beef next year. Decided what you're going to do yet?"

"No. Have you?"

Lefty shrugged. "I suppose I've got to go abroad with the family as usual. They wrote a dirty letter about the allowance I'd not have next year if I didn't. Why don't you come with us? Iris'll be there."

Hugo grinned. "No, sir! Iris once is very nice, but no man's equal to Iris twice." His grin became a chuckle. "And that's a poem which you can say to Iris if you see her--and tell her I hope it makes her mad."

Lefty's blue eyes sparkled with appreciation. Danner was a wonderful boy. Full of wit and not dumb like most of his kind. Getting smooth, too. Be a great man. Too bad to leave him--even for the summer. "Well--so long, old man."

Hugo watched Lefty lift his bags into a cab and roll away in the warm June dust. Then Chuck:

"Well--by-by, Hugo. See you next September."

"Yeah. Take care of yourself."

"No chance of your going abroad, is there? Because we sure could paint the old Avenue de l'Opéra red if you did."

"Not this year, Chuck."

"Well--don't take any wooden money."

"Don't do anything you wouldn't eat."

Hugo felt a lump in his throat. He could not say any more farewells. The campus was almost deserted. No meals would be served after the next day. He stared at the vacant dormitories and listened to the waning sound of departures. A train puffed and fumed at the station. It was filled with boys. Going away. He went to his room and packed. He'd leave, too. When his suit-cases were filled, he looked round the room with damp eyes. He thought that he was going to cry, mastered himself, and then did cry. Some time later he remembered Iris and stopped crying. He walked to the station, recalling his first journey in the other direction, his pinch-backed green suit, the trunk he had carried. Grand old place, Webster. Suddenly gone dead all over. There would be a train for New York in half an hour. He took it. Some of the students talked to him on the trip to the city. Then they left him, alone, in the great vacuum of the terminal. The glittering corridors were filled with people. He wondered if he could find Bessie's house.

At a restaurant he ate supper. When he emerged, it was dark. He asked his way, found a hotel, registered in a one-dollar room, went out on the street again. He walked to the Raven. Then he took a cab. He remembered Bessie's house. An old woman answered the door. "Bessie? Bessie? No girl by that name I remember."

Hugo described her. "Oh, that tart! She ran out on me--owin' a week's rent."

"When was that?"

"Some time last fall."

"Oh." Hugo meditated. The woman spoke again. "I did hear from one of my other girls that she'd gone to work at Coney, but I ain't had time to look her up. Owes me four dollars, she does. But Bessie, as you calls her--her name's Sue--wasn't never much good. Still--" the woman scrutinized Hugo and giggled--"Bessie ain't the only girl in the world. I got a cute little piece up here named Palmerlee says only the other night she's lonely. Glad to interdooce you."

Hugo thought of his small capital. "No, thanks."

He walked away. A warm moon was dimly sensible above the lights of the street. He decided to go to Coney Island and look for the lost Bessie. It would cost him only a dime, and she owed him money. He smiled a little savagely and thought that he would collect its equivalent. Then he boarded the subway, cursing himself for a fool and cursing his appetite for the fool's master. Why did he chase that particular little harlot on an evening when his mind should be bent toward more serious purposes? Certainly not because he had any intention of getting back his money. Because he wished to surprise her? Because he was angry that she had cheated him? Or because she was the only woman in New York whom he knew? He decided it was the last reason. Finally the train reached Coney Island, and Hugo descended into the fantastic hurly-burly on the street below. He realized the ridiculousness of his quest as he saw the miles of thronging people in the loud streets.