Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

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 tomorrow.”

“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-colored 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