Greatness seemed to elude Hugo, success such as he had earned was
inadequate, and his friendships as well as his popularity were tinged
with a sort of question that he never understood. By the end of winter
he was well established in Webster as a great athlete. Psi Delta sang
his praises and was envied his deeds. Lefty and Chuck treated him as a
brother. And, Hugo perceived, none of that treatment and none of that
society was quite real. He wondered if his personality was so meagre
that it was not equal to his strength. He wondered if his strength was
really the asset he had dreamed it would be, and if, perhaps, other
people were not different from him in every way, so that any close human
contact was impossible to him.
It was a rather tragic question to absorb a man so filled with life and
ambition as he. Yet every month had raised it more insistently. He saw
other men sharing their inmost souls and he could never do that. He saw
those around him breaking their hearts and their lungs for the
university, and, although it was never necessary for him to do that, he
doubted that he could if he would. Webster was only a school. A
sentiment rather than an ideal, a place rather than a goal of dreams. He
thought that he was cynical. He thought that he was inhuman. It worried
him.
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
to-morrow."
"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-coloured 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 home,
slightly intoxicated through the two weeks, hastening to the opera, to
balls and parties, ill at ease when presented to people whose names
struck his ears familiarly, seeing for the first time the exaggeration
of scale on which the very rich live and wondering constantly why he
never met Iris, wishing for and fearing that meeting while he wondered.
When his first year at college was near to its end, and that still and
respectful silence that marks the passing of a senior class had fallen
over the campus, Hugo realized with a shock that he would soon be on his
way back to Indian Creek. Then, suddenly, he saw what an amazing and
splendid thing that year at college had been. He realized how it had
filled his life to the brim with activities of which he had not dreamed,
how it had shaped him so that he would be almost a stranger in his own
home, how it had aged and educated him in the business of living. When
the time of parting with his new friends drew near, he understood that
they were valuable to him, in spite of his questioning. And they made it
clear that he would be missed by them. At last he shared a feeling with
his classmates, a fond sadness, an illimitable poignancy that was young
and unadulterated by motive. He was perversely happy when he became
aware of it. He felt somewhat justified for being himself and living his
life.
A day or two before college closed, he received a letter from his
father. It was the third he had received during the year. It said: