Hugo was sad. "I'm not lying. I made it. You see--I'm strong." It was as
if he had pronounced his own damnation.
"Tut, tut." Smith interrupted his survey. "Did you find it?"
"I built it."
"I said"--the professor spoke with increasing annoyance--"I said not to
tell me stories any longer. It's important, young man, that we know just
how you found this dolmen and in what condition."
"It isn't a dolly--whatever you said--it's a fort and I built it and I'm
not lying."
The professor, in the interests of science, made a grave mistake. He
seized Hugo by the arms and shook him. "Now, see here, young man, I'll
have no more of your impertinent lip. Tell me just what you've done to
harm this noble monument to another race, or, I swear, I'll slap you
properly." The professor had no children. He tried, at the same time,
another tack, which insulted Hugo further. "If you do, I'll give you a
penny--to keep."
Hugo wrenched himself free with an ease that startled Smith. His face
was dark, almost black. He spoke slowly, as if he was trying to piece
words into sense. "You--both of you--you go away from here and leave me
or I'll break your two rotten old necks."
Whitaker moved toward him, and Smith interceded. "We better leave
him--and come back later." He was still frightened by the strength in
Hugo's arms. "The child is mad. He may have hydrophobia. He might bite."
The men moved away hastily. Hugo watched them climb the wall. When they
reached the top, he called gently. They wheeled.
And Hugo, sobbing, tears streaming from his face, leaped into his fort.
Rocks vomited themselves from it--huge rocks that no man could budge.
Walls toppled and crashed. The men began to move. Hugo looked up. He
chose a stone that weighed more than a hundred pounds.
"Hey!" he said. "I'm not a liar!" The rock arched through the air and
Professors Whitaker and Smith escaped death by a scant margin. Hugo lay
in the wreck of the first thing his hands had built, and wept.
After a little while he sprang to his feet and chased the retreating
professors. When he suddenly appeared in front of them, they were
stricken dumb. "Don't tell any one about that or about me," he said. "If
you do--I'll break down your house just like I broke mine. Don't even
tell my family. They know it, anyhow."
He leaped. Toward them--over them. The forest hid him. Whitaker wiped
clammy perspiration from his brow. "What was it, Smith?"
"A demon. We can't mention it," he repeated, thinking of the warning.
"We can't speak of it anyway. They'll never believe us."
V
Extremely dark of hair, of eyes and skin, moderately tall, and shaped
with that compact, breath-taking symmetry that the male figure sometimes
assumes, a brilliantly devised, aggressive head topping his broad
shoulders, graceful, a man vehemently alive, a man with the promise of a
young God. Hugo at eighteen. His emotions ran through his eyes like hot
steel in a dark mould. People avoided those eyes; they contained a
statement from which ordinary souls shrank.
His skin glowed and sweated into a shiny red-brown. His voice was deep
and alluring. During twelve long and fierce years he had fought to know
and control himself. Indian Creek had forgotten the terrible child.
Hugo's life at that time revolved less about himself than it had during
his first years. That was both natural and fortunate. If his classmates
in school and the older people of the town had not discounted his early
physical precocity, even his splendid vitality might not have been
sufficient to prevent him from becoming moody and melancholy.
But when with the passage of time he tossed no more bullies, carried no
more barrels of temptation, built no more fortresses, and grew so
handsome that the matrons of Indian Creek as well as the adolescent
girls in high school followed him with wayward glances, when the men
found him a gay and comprehending companion for any sport or adventure,
when his teachers observed that his intelligence was often
embarrassingly acute, when he played on three teams and was elected an
officer in his classes each year, then that half of Hugo which was
purely mundane and human dominated him and made him happy.
His adolescence, his emotions, were no different from those of any young
man of his age and character. If his ultimate ambitions followed another
trajectory, he postponed the evidence of it. Hugo was in love with Anna
Blake, the girl who had attracted him when he was six. The residents of
Indian Creek knew it. Her family received his calls with the winking
tolerance which the middle class grants to young passion. And she was
warm and tender and flirtatious and shy according to the policies that
she had learned from custom.
The active part of Hugo did not doubt that he would marry her after he
had graduated from the college in Indian Creek, that they would settle
somewhere near by, and that they would raise a number of children. His
subconscious thoughts made reservations that he, in moments when he was
intimate with himself, would admit frankly. It made him a little ashamed
of himself to see that on one night he would sit with Anna and kiss her
ardently until his body ached, and on another he would deliberately plan
to desert her. His idealism at that time was very great and untried and
it did not occur to him that all men are so deliberately calculating in
the love they disguise as absolute.
Anna had grown into a very attractive woman. Her figure was rounded and
tall. Her hair was darker than the waxy curls of her childhood, and a
vital gleam had come into it. Her eyes were still as blue and her voice,
shorn of its faltering youngness, was sweet and clear. She was
undoubtedly the prettiest girl in high school and the logical
sweet-heart for Hugo Danner. A flower ready to be plucked, at eighteen.
When Hugo reached his senior year, that readiness became almost an
impatience. Girls married at an early age in Indian Creek. She looked
down the corridor of time during which he would be in college, she felt
the pressure of his still slumbering passion, and she sensed his
superiority over most of the town boys. Only a very narrow critic would
call her resultant tactics dishonourable. They were too intensely human
and too clearly born of social and biological necessity.
She had let him kiss her when they were sixteen. And afterwards, before
she went to sleep, she sighed rapturously at the memory of his warm,
firm lips, his strong, rough arms. Hugo had gone home through the
dizzily spinning dusk, through the wind-strummed trees and the fragrant
fields, his breath deep in his chest, his eyes hot and somewhat
understanding.
Gradually Anna increased that license. She knew and she did not know
what she was doing. She played a long game in which she said: "If our
love is consummated too soon, the social loss will be balanced by a
speedier marriage, because Hugo is honourable; but that will never
happen." Two years after that first kiss, when they were floating on the
narrow river in a canoe, Hugo unfastened her blouse and exposed the
creamy beauty of her bosom to the soft moonlight and she did not
protest. That night he nearly possessed her, and after that night he
learned through her unspoken, voluptuous suggestion all the technique of
love-making this side of consummation.
When, finally, he called one night at her house and found that she was
alone and that her parents and her brother would not return until the
next day, they looked at each other with a shining agreement. He turned
the lights out and they sat on the couch in the darkness, listening to
the passing of people on the sidewalk outside. He undressed her. He
whispered halting, passionate phrases. He asked her if she was afraid
and let himself be laughed away from his own conscience. Then he took
her and loved her.
Afterwards, going home again in the gloom of late night, he looked up at
the stars and they stood still. He realized that a certain path of life
had been followed to its conclusion. He felt initiated into the adult
world. And it had been so simple, so natural, so sweet.... He threw a
great stone into the river and laughed and walked on, after a while.
Through the summer that followed, Hugo and Anna ran the course of their
affair. They loved each other violently and incessantly and with no
other evil consequence than to invite the open "humphs" of village
gossips and to involve him in several serious talks with her father.
Their courtship was given the benefit of conventional doubt, however,
and their innocence was hotly if covertly protested by the Blakes. Mrs.
Danner coldly ignored every fragment of insinuation. She hoped that Hugo
and Anna would announce their engagement and she hinted that hope. Hugo
himself was excited and absorbed. Occasionally he thought he was
sterile, with an inclination to be pleased rather than concerned if it
was true.
He added tenderness to his characteristics. And he loved Anna too much.
Toward the end of that summer she lost weight and became irritable. They
quarrelled once and then again. The criteria for his physical conduct
being vague in his mind, Hugo could not gauge it correctly. And he did
not realize that the very ardour of his relation with her was abnormal.
Her family decided to send her away, believing the opposite of the truth
responsible for her nervousness and weakness. A week before she left,
Hugo himself tired of his excesses.
One evening, dressing for a last passionate rendezvous, he looked in his
mirror as he tied his scarf and saw that he was frowning. Studying the
frown, he perceived with a shock what made it. He did not want to see
Anna, to take her out, to kiss and rumple and clasp her, to return
thinking of her, feeling her, sweet and smelling like her. It annoyed
him. It bored him. He went through it uneasily and quarrelled again. Two
days later she departed.
He acted his loss well and she did not show her relief until she sat on
the train, tired, shattered, and uninterested in Hugo and in life. Then
she cried. But Hugo was through. They exchanged insincere letters. He
looked forward to college in the fall. Then he received a letter from
Anna saying that she was going to marry a man she had met and known for
three weeks. It was a broken, gasping, apologetic letter. Every one was
outraged at Anna and astounded that Hugo bore the shock so courageously.
The upshot of that summer was to fill his mind with fetid memories,
which abated slowly, to make him disgusted with himself and tired of
Indian Creek. He decided to go to a different college, one far away from
the scene of his painful youth and his disillusioned maturity. He chose
Webster University because of the greatness of its name. If Abednego
Danner was hurt at his son's defection from his own college, he said
nothing. And Mrs. Danner, grown more silent and reserved, yielded to her
son's unexpected decision.
Hugo packed his bags one September afternoon, with a feeling of
dreaminess. He bade farewell to his family. He boarded the train. His
mind was opaque. The spark burning in it was one of dawning adventure
buried in a mass of detail. He had never been far from his native soil.
Now he was going to see cities and people who were almost foreign, in
the sophisticated East. But all he could dwell on was a swift cinema of
a defeated little boy, a strong man who could never be strong, a
surfeited love, a truant and dimly comprehensible blonde girl, a muddy
street and a red station, a clapboard house, a sonorous church with
hushed puppets in the pews, fudge parties, boats on the little river,
cold winter, and ice over the mountains, and a fortress where once upon
a time he had felt mightier than the universe.