Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

the feeble sun of dawn. The anchor chain rumbled. The Katrina edged forward at half speed.

The sea. Blue, green, restless, ghost-ridden, driven in empty quarters by devils riding the wind, secretive, mysterious, making a last gigantic, primeval stand against the conquest of man, hemming and isolating the world, beautiful, horrible, dead god of ten thousand voices, universal incubator, universal grave.

The Katrina came to the islands in the South Pacific. Islands that issued from the water like green wreaths and seemed to float on it. The small boats were put out and sections of the cargo were sent to rickety wharves where white men and brown islanders took charge of it and carried it away into the fringe of the lush vegetation. Hugo, looking at those islands, was moved to smile. The place where broken men hid from civilization, where the derelicts of the world gathered to drown their shame in a verdant paradise that had no particular position in the white man’s scheme of the earth.

At one of the smaller islands an accident to the engine forced the Katrina to linger for two weeks. It was during those two weeks, in a rather extraordinary manner, that Hugo Danner laid the first foundation of the fortune that he accumulated in his later life. One day, idling away a leave on shore in the shade of a mighty tree, he saw the outriggers of the natives file away for the oyster beds, and, out of pure curiosity, he followed them. For a whole day he watched the men plunge under the surface in search of pearls. The next day he came back and dove with one of them.

On the bizarre floor of the ocean, among the colossal fronds of its flora, the two men swam. They were invaders from the brilliance above the surface, shooting like fish, horizontally, through the murk and shadow, and the denizens of that world resented their coming. Great fish shot past them with malevolent eyes, and the vises of giant clams shut swiftly in attempts to trap their moving limbs. Hugo was entranced. He watched the other man as he found the oyster bed and commenced to fill his basket with frantic haste. When his lungs stung and he could bear the agony no longer, he turned and forged toward the upper air. Then they went down again.

Hugo’s blood, designed to take more oxygen from the air, and his greater density fitted him naturally for the work. The pressure did not make him suffer and the few moments granted to the divers beneath the forbidding element stretched to a longer time for him.

On the second day of diving he went alone. His amateur attempt had been surprisingly fruitful. Standing erect in the immense solitude, he searched the hills and valleys. At length, finding a promising cluster of shellfish, he began to examine them one by one, pulling them loose, feeling in their pulpy interior for the precious jewels. He occupied himself determinedly while the Katrina was waiting in Apia, and at the end of the stay he had collected more than sixty pearls of great value and two hundred of moderate worth.

It was, he thought, typical of himself. He had decided to make a fortune of some sort after the first bitter rage over his debacle at Webster had abated in his heart. He realized that without wealth his position in the world would be more difficult and more futile than his fates had decreed. Poverty, at least, he was not forced to bear. He could wrest fortune from nature by his might. That he had begun that task by diving for pearls fitted into his scheme. It was such a method as no other man would have considered and its achievement robbed no one while it enriched him.

When the Katrina turned her prow westward again, Hugo worked with his shipmates in a mood that had undergone considerable change. There was no more despair in him, little of the taciturnity that had marked his earliest days at sea, none of the hatred of mankind. He had buried that slowly and carefully in a dull year of work ashore and a month of toil on the heaving deck of the ship. For six months he had kept himself alive in a manner that he could scarcely remember. Driving a truck. Working on a farm. Digging in a road. His mind a bitter blank, his valiant dreams all dead.

One day he had saved a man’s life. The reaction to that was small, but it was definite. The strength that could slay was also a strength that could succour. He had repeated the act some time later. He felt it was a kind of atonement. After that, he sought deliberately to go where he might be of assistance. In the city, again, in September, when a fire engine clanged and whooped through the streets, he followed and carried a woman from a blazing roof as if by a miracle. Then the seaman. He had counted four rescues by that time. Perhaps his self-condemnation for the boy who had fallen on the field at Webster could be stifled eventually. Human life seemed very precious to Hugo then.

He sold his pearls when the ship touched at large cities⁠—a handful here and a dozen there, bargaining carefully and forwarding the profit to a bank in New York. He might have continued that voyage, which was a voyage commenced half in new recognition of his old wish to see and know the world and half in the quest of forgetfulness; but a slip and shifts in the history of the world put an abrupt end to it. When the Katrina rounded the Bec d’Aiglon and steamed into the blue and cocoa harbour of Marseilles, Hugo heard that war had been declared by Germany, Austria, France, Russia, England.⁠ ⁠…

XI

In a day the last veil of mist that had shrouded his feelings and thoughts, making