Gladiator | Page 9

not a strong man."
"Course you're not. But everybody thinks you are--except me. I'm not
afraid of you."
"I don't want you to be afraid of me. I'm not afraid of you, either."
"Oh, you aren't, huh? Look." He touched Hugo's chest with his finger,
and when Hugo looked down, the boy lifted his finger into Hugo's face.
"Go away and let me alone."
The tormentor laughed. "Ever see a fish this long?"
His hands indicated a small fish. Involuntarily Hugo looked at them.
The hands flew apart and slapped him smartly. Several of the children
had stopped their play to watch. The first insult made them giggle. The
second brought a titter from Anna Blake, and Hugo noticed that. Anna
Blake was a little girl with curly golden hair and blue eyes. Secretly
Hugo admired her and was drawn to her. When she laughed, he felt a
dismal loneliness, a sudden desertion. The farmer's boy pressed the

occasion his meanness had made.
"I'll bet you ain't even strong enough to fight little Charlie Todd.
Commere, Charlie."
"I am," Hugo replied with slow dignity.
"You're a sissy. You're a--scared to play with us."
The ring around Hugo had grown. He felt a tangible ridicule in it. He
knew what it was to hate. Still, his inhibitions, his control, held him in
check. "Go away," he said, "or I'll hurt you."
The farmer's boy picked up a stick and put it on his shoulder. "Knock
that off, then, strong man."
Hugo knew the dare and its significance. With a gentle gesture he
brushed the stick away. Then the other struck. At the same time he
kicked Hugo's shins. There was no sense of pain with the kick. Hugo
saw it as if it had happened to another person. The school-yard tensed
with expectation. But the accounts of what followed were garbled. The
farmer's boy fell on his face as if by an invisible agency. Then his body
was lifted in the air. The children had an awful picture of Hugo
standing for a second with the writhing form of his attacker above his
head. Then he flung it aside, over the circle that surrounded him, and
the body fell with a thud. It lay without moving. Hugo began to
whimper pitifully.
That was Hugo's first fight. He had defended himself, and it made him
ashamed. He thought he had killed the other boy. Sickening dread filled
him. He hurried to his side and shook him, calling his name. The other
boy came to. His arm was broken and his sides were purpling where
Hugo had seized him. There was terror in his eyes when he saw Hugo's
face above him, and he screamed shrilly for help. The teacher came.
She sent Hugo to the blacksmith to be whipped.
That, in itself, was a stroke of genius. The blacksmith whipped grown
boys in the high school for their misdeeds. To send a six-year-old child

was crushing. But Hugo had risen above the standards set by his
society. He had been superior to it for a moment, and society hated him
for it. His teacher hated him because she feared him. Mothers of
children, learning about the episode, collected to discuss it in
high-pitched, hateful voices. Hugo was enveloped in hate. And, as the
lash of the smith fell on his small frame, he felt the depths of misery.
He was a strong man. There was damnation in his veins.
The minister came and prayed over him. The doctor was sent for and
examined him. Frantic busybodies suggested that things be done to
weaken him--what things, they did not say. And Hugo, suffering
bitterly, saw that if he had beaten the farmer's boy in fair combat, he
would have been a hero. It was the scale of his triumph that made it
dreadful. He did not realize then that if he had been so minded, he
could have turned on the blacksmith and whipped him, he could have
broken the neck of the doctor, he could have run raging through the
town and escaped unscathed. His might was a secret from himself. He
knew it only as a curse, like a disease or a blemish.
During the ensuing four or five years Hugo's peculiar trait asserted
itself but once. It was a year after his fight with the bully. He had been
isolated socially. Even Anna Blake did not dare to tease him any longer.
Shunned and wretched, he built a world of young dreams and
confections and lived in it with whatever comfort it afforded.
One warm afternoon in a smoky Indian summer he walked home from
school, spinning a top as he walked, stopping every few yards to pick it
up and to let its eccentric momentum die on the palm of his