Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

lightning portraits and whatever else I can to make the money for it. Sometimes,” he added, “I pick up more than a thousand bucks in a season. This is my fourth year at it.”

There was in the young artist’s eye a hint of amusement, a suggestion that they were in league. Hugo liked him. He sat down on a box. “Live here?”

“Yes. Three blocks away.”

“Me, too. Why not come up and have supper with⁠—my wife and me?”

“Are you married?” The artist commenced work again.

Hugo hesitated. “Yeah.”

“Sure I’ll come up. My name’s Valentine Mitchel. I can’t shake hands just now. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked to anyone who doesn’t say ‘deez’ and ‘doze.’ ”

When, later in the day, they walked toward Hugo’s home, he was at a loss to explain Charlotte. The young painter would not understand why he, a college man, chose so ignorant a mate. On the other hand, he owed it to Charlotte to keep their secret and he was not obliged to make any explanation.

Valentine Mitchel was, however, a young man of some sensitivity. If he winced at Charlotte’s “Pleased to meetcher,” he did not show it. Later, after an excellent and hilarious meal, he must have guessed the situation. He went home reluctantly and Hugo was delighted with him. He had been urbane and filled with anecdotes of Greenwich Village and art-school life, of Paris, whither his struggling footsteps had taken him for a hallowed year. And with his acceptance of Hugo came an equally warm pleasure in Charlotte’s company.

“He’s a good little kid,” Charlotte said.

“Yes. I’m glad I picked him up.”

The gala opening of Hogarth’s Studio of Strength took place a few nights afterwards. It proved even more successful than Smoots had hoped. The flamboyant advertising posters attracted crowds to see the man who could set a bear trap with his teeth, who could pull an angry boa constrictor into a straight line. Before ranks of gaping faces that were supplanted by new ranks every hour, Hugo performed. Charlotte, resplendent in a black dress that left her knees bare, and a red sash that all but obliterated the dress, helped Hugo with his ponderous props, setting off his strength by contrast, and sold the pamphlets Hugo had written at Smoots’s suggestion⁠—pamphlets that purported to give away the secret of Hogarth’s phenomenal muscle power. Valentine Mitchel watched the entire performance.

When it was over, he said to Hugo: “Now you better beat it back and get a hot bath. You’re probably all in.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. “Come. I myself will bathe you.”

Hugo grinned. “Hell, no. Now we’re all going on a bender to celebrate. We’ll eat at Villapigue’s and we’ll take a moonlight sail.”

They went together, marvelling at his vitality, gay, young, and living in a world that they managed to forget did not exist. The night was warm. The days that followed were warmer. The crowds came and the brassy music hooted and coughed over them night and day.

There are, in the lives of almost every man and woman, certain brief episodes that, enduring for a long or a short time, leave in the memory a sense of completeness. To those moments humanity returns for refuge, for courage, and for solace. It was of such material that Hugo’s next two months were composed. The items of it were nearly all sensuous: the sound of the sea when he sat in the sand late at night with Charlotte; the whoop and bellow of the merry-go-round that spun and glittered across the street from his tent; the inarticulate breathing and the white-knuckled clenchings of the crowd as it lifted its face to his efforts, for each of which he assumed a slow, painful motion that exaggerated its difficulty; the smell of the sea, intermingled with a thousand man-made odors; the faint, pervasive scent of Charlotte that clung to him, his clothes, his house; the pageant of the people, always in a huge parade, going nowhere, celebrating nothing but the functions of living, loud, garish, cheap, splendid; breakfasts at his table with his woman’s voluptuousness abated in the bright sunlight to little more than a reminiscence and a promise; the taste of beer and popcorn and frankfurters and lobster and steak; the affable, talkative company of Valentine Mitchel.

Only once that he could recall afterwards did he allow his intellect to act in any critical direction, and that was in a conversation with the young artist. They were sitting together in the sand, and Charlotte, browned by weeks of bathing, lay near by. “Here I am,” Mitchel said with an unusual thoughtfulness, “with a talent that should be recognized, wanting to be an illustrator, able to be one, and yet forced to dawdle with this horrible business to make my living.”

Hugo nodded. “You’ll come through⁠—some winter⁠—and you won’t ever return to Coney Island.”

“I know it. Unless I do it for sentimental reasons some day⁠—in a limousine.”

“It’s myself,” Hugo said then, “and not you who is doomed to⁠—well, to this sort of thing. You have a talent that is at least understandable and⁠—” he was going to say mediocre. He checked himself⁠—“applicable in the world of human affairs. My talent⁠—if it is a talent⁠—has no place, no application, no audience.”

Mitchel stared at Hugo, wondering first what that talent might be and then recognizing that Hugo meant his strength. “Nonsense. Any male in his right senses would give all his wits to be as strong as you are.”

It was a polite, friendly thing to say. Hugo could not refrain from comparing himself to Valentine Mitchel. An artist⁠—a clever artist and one who would some day be important to the world. Because people could understand what he drew, because it represented a level of thought and expression. He was, like Hugo, in the doldrums of progress. But Mitchel would emerge, succeed, be happy⁠—or at least satisfied with himself⁠—while Hugo was bound to silence, was compelled never to allow himself full expression. Humanity would never accept and understand him. They were not similar