Gladiator

by Philip Wylie

  X

  A year passed. In the harbour of Cristobal, at the northern end of thelocks, waiting for the day to open the great steel jaws that dammed thePacific from the Atlantic, the _Katrina_ pulled at her anchor chain inthe gentle swell. A few stars, liquid bright, hung in the tropical sky.A little puff of wind coming occasionally from the south carried thesmell of the jungle to the ship. The crew was awakening.

  A man with a bucket on a rope went to the rail and hauled up a brimmingpail from the warm sea. He splashed his face and hands into it. Then hepoured it back and repeated the act of dipping up water.

  "Hey!" he said.

  Another man joined him. "Here. Swab off your sweat. Look yonder."

  The dorsal fin of a shark rippled momentarily on the surface and dippedbeneath it. A third man appeared. He accepted the proffered water andwashed himself. His roving eye saw the shark as it rose for the secondtime. He dried on a towel. The off-shore breeze stirred his dark hair.There was a growth of equally dark beard on his tanned jaw and cheek.Steely muscles bulged under his shirt. His forearm, when he picked upthe pail, was corded like cable. A smell of coffee issued from thegalley, and the smoke of the cook's fire was wafted on deck for apungent moment. Two bells sounded. The music went out over the water inclear, humming waves.

  The man who had come first from the forecastle leaned his buttocksagainst the rail. One end of it had been unhooked to permit thedischarge of mail. The rail ran, the man fell back, clawing, and then,thinking suddenly of the sharks, he screamed. The third man looked. Hesaw his fellow-seaman go overboard. He jumped from where he stood,clearing the scuppers and falling through the air before the victim ofthe slack rail had landed in the water. The two splashes were almostsimultaneous. A boatswain, hearing the cry, hastened to the scene. Hesaw one man lifted clear of the water by the other, who was treadingwater furiously. He shouted for a rope. He saw the curve and dip of afin. The first man seized the rope and climbed and was pulled up. Thesecond, his rescuer, dived under water as if aware of something therethat required his attention. The men above him could not know that hehad felt the rake of teeth across his leg--powerful teeth, whichnevertheless did not penetrate his skin. As he dived into the greendepths, he saw a body lunge toward him, turn, yawn a white-fringedmouth. He snatched the lower jaw in one hand, and the upper in theother. He exerted his strength. The mouth gaped wider, a tail twelvefeet behind it lashed, the thing died with fingers like steel clawstearing at its brain. It floated belly up. The man rose, took the rope,climbed aboard. Other sharks assaulted the dead one.

  The dripping sailor clasped his saviour's hand. "God Almighty, man, yousaved my life. Jesus!"

  "That's four," Hugo Danner said abstractedly, and then he smiled. "It'sall right. Forget it. I've had a lot of experience with sharks." He hadnever seen one before in his life. He walked aft, where the men groupedaround him.

  "How'd you do it?"

  "It's a trick I can't explain very well," Hugo said. "You use their rushto break their jaws. It takes a good deal of muscle."

  "Anyway--guy--thanks."

  "Sure."

  A whistle blew. The ships were lining up in the order of their arrivalfor admission to the Panama Canal. Gatun loomed in the feeble sun ofdawn. The anchor chain rumbled. The _Katrina_ edged forward at halfspeed.

  The sea. Blue, green, restless, ghost-ridden, driven in empty quartersby devils riding the wind, secretive, mysterious, making a lastgigantic, primeval stand against the conquest of man, hemming andisolating the world, beautiful, horrible, dead god of ten thousandvoices, universal incubator, universal grave.

  The _Katrina_ came to the islands in the South Pacific. Islands thatissued from the water like green wreaths and seemed to float on it. Thesmall boats were put out and sections of the cargo were sent to ricketywharves where white men and brown islanders took charge of it andcarried it away into the fringe of the lush vegetation. Hugo, looking atthose islands, was moved to smile. The place where broken men hid fromcivilization, where the derelicts of the world gathered to drown theirshame in a verdant paradise that had no particular position in the whiteman'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 arather extraordinary manner, that Hugo Danner laid the first foundationof the fortune that he accumulated in his later life. One day, idlingaway a leave on shore in the shade of a mighty tree, he saw theoutriggers of the natives file away for the oyster beds, and, out ofpure curiosity, he followed them. For a whole day he watched the menplunge under the surface in search of pearls. The next day he came backand dove with one of them.

  On the bizarre floor of the ocean, among the colossal fronds of itsflora, the two men swam. They were invaders from the brilliance abovethe surface, shooting like fish, horizontally, through the murk andshadow, and the denizens of that world resented their coming. Great fishshot past them with malevolent eyes, and the vises of giant clams shutswiftly in attempts to trap their moving limbs. Hugo was entranced. Hewatched the other man as he found the oyster bed and commenced to fillhis basket with frantic haste. When his lungs stung and he could bearthe agony no longer, he turned and forged toward the upper air. Thenthey went down again.

  Hugo's blood, designed to take more oxygen from the air, and his greaterdensity fitted him naturally for the work. The pressure did not make himsuffer and the few moments granted to the divers beneath the forbiddingelement stretched to a longer time for him.

  On the second day of diving he went alone. His amateur attempt had beensurprisingly fruitful. Standing erect in the immense solitude, hesearched the hills and valleys. At length, finding a promising clusterof shellfish, he began to examine them one by one, pulling them loose,feeling in their pulpy interior for the precious jewels. He occupiedhimself determinedly while the _Katrina_ was waiting in Apia, and at theend of the stay he had collected more than sixty pearls of great valueand two hundred of moderate worth.

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

  When the _Katrina_ turned her prow westward again, Hugo worked with hisshipmates in a mood that had undergone considerable change. There was nomore despair in him, little of the taciturnity that had marked hisearliest days at sea, none of the hatred of mankind. He had buried thatslowly and carefully in a dull year of work ashore and a month of toilon the heaving deck of the ship. For six months he had kept himselfalive in a manner that he could scarcely remember. Driving a truck.Working on a farm. Digging in a road. His mind a bitter blank, hisvaliant dreams all dead.

  One day he had saved a man's life. The reaction to that was small, butit was definite. The strength that could slay was also a strength thatcould succour. He had repeated the act some time later. He felt it was akind of atonement. After that, he sought deliberately to go where hemight be of assistance. In the city, again, in September, when a fireengine clanged and whooped through the streets, he followed and carrieda woman from a blazing roof as if by a miracle. Then the seaman. He hadcounted four rescues by that time. Perhaps his self-condemnation for theboy 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 hereand a dozen there, bargaining carefully and forwarding the profit to abank in New York. He might have continued that voyage, which was avoyage commenced half in new recognition of his old wish to see and knowthe world and half in the quest of forgetfulness; but a slip and shiftsin 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 ofMarseilles, Hugo heard that war had been declared by Germany, Austria,France, Russia, England....