Gladiator - Philip Wylie (readnow .TXT) 📗

get a ten-per-cent discount at the general store. But I’m charging you full price⁠—naturally.”

“Naturally,” Hugo agreed.

That was one thing that would make the tribulation in her eyes. Hugo wished that he could have met these two people on a different basis, so that he could have learned the truth about them. It was plain that they were educated, cultured, refined. Cane had said something once about raising cattle in England, and Roseanne had cooked peas as she had learned to cook them in France. “Petits pois au beurre,” she had murmured⁠—with an unimpeachable accent.

Then the week had passed and there had been no mention of the advance in wages. For himself, Hugo did not care. But it was easy to see why no one had been working on the place when Hugo arrived, why they were eager to hire a transient stranger.

He learned part of what he had already guessed from a clerk in the general store. One of the cows was ailing. Mr. Cane could not drive to town (Mrs. Cane, it seemed, never left the house and its environs) and they had sent Hugo.

“You working for the Canes?” the clerk had asked.

“Yes.”

“Funny people.”

Hugo replied indirectly. “Have they lived here long?”

“Long? Roseanne Cane was a Bishop. The Bishops built that house and the house before it⁠—back in the seventeen hundreds. They had a lot of money. Have it still, I guess, but Cane’s too tight to spend it.” There was nothing furtive in the youth’s manner; he was evidently touching on common village gossip. “Yes, sir, too tight. Won’t give her a maid. But before her folks died, it was Europe every year and a maid for every one of ’em, and ‘Why, deary, don’t tell me that’s the second time you’ve put on that dress! Take it right off and never wear it again.’ ” The joke was part of the formula for telling about the Canes, and the clerk snickered appreciatively. “Yes, sir. You come down here some day when I ain’t got the Friday orders to fill an’ I’ll tell you some things about old man Cane that’ll turn your stummick.”

Hugo accepted his bundle, set it in the seat beside himself, and drove back to the big, green house.

Later in the day he said to Cane: “If you will want me to drive the station wagon very often, I ought to have a license.”

“Go ahead. Get one.”

“I couldn’t afford it at the moment, and since it would be entirely for you, I thought⁠—”

“I see,” Cane answered calmly. “Trying to get a license out of me. Well, you’re out of luck. You probably won’t be needed as a chauffeur again for the next year. If you are, you’ll drive without a license, and drive damn carefully, too, because any fines or any accidents would come out of your wages.”

Hugo received the insult unmoved. He wondered what Cane would say if he smashed the car and made an escape. He knew he would not do it; the whole universe appeared so constructed that men like Cane inevitably avoided their desserts.

June came, and July. The seashore was not distant and occasionally at night Hugo slipped away from the woods and lay on the sand, sometimes drinking in the firmament, sometimes closing his eyes. When it was very hot he undressed behind a pile of barnacle-covered boulders and swam far out in the water. He swam naked, unmolested, stirring up tiny whirlpools of phosphorescence, and afterwards, damp and cool, he would dress and steal back to the barn through the forest and the hay-sweet fields.

One day a man in Middletown asked Mr. Cane to call on him regarding the possible purchase of three cows. Cane’s cows were raised with the maximum of human care, the minimum of extraneous expense. His profit on them was great and he sold them, ordinarily, one at a time. He was so excited at the prospect of a triple sale that for a day he was almost gay, very nearly generous. He drove off blithely⁠—not in the sedan, but in the station wagon, because its gasoline mileage was greater.

It was a day filled with wonder for Hugo. When Cane drove from the house, Roseanne was standing beside the drive. She walked over to the barn and said to Hugo in an oddly agitated voice: “Mr. Danner, could you spare an hour or two this morning to help me get some flowers from the woods?”

“Certainly.”

She glanced in the direction her husband had taken and hurried to the kitchen, returning presently with two baskets and a trowel. He followed her up the road. They turned off on an overgrown path, pushed through underbrush, and arrived in a few minutes at the side of a pond. The edges were grown thick with bushes and water weeds, dead trees lifted awkward arms at the upper end, and dragon flies skimmed over the warm brown water.

“I used to come here to play when I was a little girl,” she said. “It’s still just the same.” She wore a blue dress; branches had dishevelled her hair; she seemed more alive than he had ever seen her.

“It’s charming,” Hugo answered.

“There used to be a path all the way around⁠—with stones crossing the brook at the inlet. And over there, underneath those pine trees, there are some orchids. I’ve always wanted to bring them down to the house. I think I could make them grow. Of course, this is a bad time to transplant anything⁠—but I so seldom get a chance. I can’t remember when⁠—when⁠—”

He realized with a shock that she was going to cry. She turned her head away and peered into the green wall. “I think it’s here,” she said tremulously.

They followed a dimly discernible trail; there were deer tracks in it and signs of other animals whose feet had kept it passable. It was hot and damp and they were forced to bend low beneath the tangle to make progress. Almost suddenly they emerged in a grove of white pines. They stood upright