Hugo put it down. Charlotte would be good to him. In a way, he didn't deserve her. And when he was famous, some day, perhaps she would leave him, too. He hesitated to read her note. "Good-bye, darling, I do not love you any more. C."
It was ludicrous, transparent, pitiful, and heroic. Hugo saw all those qualities. "Good-bye, darling, I do not love you any more." She had written it under Valentine's eyes. But she was shrewd enough to placate her new lover while she told her sad little story to her old. She would want him to feel bad. Well, God knew, he did. Hugo looked at the room. He sobbed. He bolted into the street, tears streaming down his cheeks; he drew his savings from the bank—seven hundred and eighty-four dollars and sixty-four cents; he rushed to the haunted house, flung his clothes into a bag; he sat drearily on a subway for an hour. He paced the smooth floor of a station. He swung aboard a train. He came to Webster, his head high, feeling a great pride in Charlotte and in his love for her, walking in glad strides over the familiar soil.
IX
Hugo sat alone and marvelled at the exquisite torment of his Weltschmertz. Far away, across the campus, he heard singing. Against the square segment of sky visible from the bay window of his room he could see the light of the great fire they had built to celebrate victory—his victory. The light leaped into the darkness above like a great golden ghost in some fantastic ascension, and beneath it, he knew, a thousand students were dancing. They were druid priests at a rite to the god of football. His fingers struggled through his black hair. The day was fresh in his mind—the bellowing stands, the taut, almost frightened faces of the eleven men who faced him, the smack and flight of the brown oval, the lumbering sound of men running, the sucking of the breath of men and their sharp, painful fall to earth.
In his mind was a sharp picture of himself and the eyes that watched him as he broke away time and again, with infantile ease, to carry that precious ball. He let them make a touchdown that he could have averted. He made one himself. Then another. The bell on Webster Hall was booming its pæan of victory. He stiffened under the steady monody. He remembered again. Lefty barking signals with a strange agony in his voice. Lefty pounding on his shoulder. "Go in there, Hugo, and give it to them. I can't." Lefty pleading. And the captain, Jerry Painter, cursing in open jealousy of Hugo, vying hopelessly with Hugo Danner, the man who was a god.
It was not fair. Not right. The old and early glory was ebbing from it. When he put down the ball, safely across the goal for the winning touchdown, he saw three of the men on the opposing team lie down and weep. There he stood, pretending to pant, feigning physical distress, making himself a hero at the expense of innocent victims. Jackstraws for a giant. There was no triumph in that. He could not go on.
Afterwards they had made him speak, and the breathless words that had once come so easily moved heavily through his mind. Yet he had carried his advantage beyond the point of turning back. He could not say that the opponents of Webster might as well attempt to hold back a Juggernaut, to throw down a siege-gun, to outrace light, as to lay their hands on him to check his intent. Webster had been good to him. He loved Webster and it deserved his best. His best! He peered again into the celebrating night and wondered what that awful best would be.
He desired passionately to be able to give that—to cover the earth, making men glad and bringing a revolution into their lives, to work himself into a fury and to fatigue his incredible sinews, to end with the feeling of a race well run, a task nobly executed. And, for a year, that ambition had seemed in some small way to be approaching fruition. Now it was turned to ashes. It was not with the muscles of men that his goal was to be attained. They could not oppose him.
As he sat gloomy and distressed, he wondered for what reason there burned in him that wish to do great deeds. Humanity itself was too selfish and too ignorant to care. It could boil in its tiny prejudices for centuries to come and never know that there could be a difference. Moreover, who was he to grind his soul and beat his thoughts for the benefit of people who would never know and never care? What honour, when he was dead, to lie beneath a slab on which was punily graven some note of mighty accomplishment? Why could he not content himself with the food he ate, the sunshine, with wind in trees, and cold water, and a woman? It was that sad and silly command within to transcend his vegetable self that made him human. He tried to think about it bitterly: fool man, grown suddenly more conscious than the other beasts—how quickly he had become vain because of it and how that vanity led him forever onward! Or was it vanity—when his aching soul proclaimed that he would gladly achieve and die without other recognition or acclaim than that which rose within himself? Martyrs were made of such stuff. And was not that, perhaps, an even more exaggerated vanity? It was so pitiful to be a man and nothing more. Hugo bowed his head and let his body tremble with strange agony. Perhaps, he thought, even the agony was a selfish pleasure to him. Then he should be ashamed. He felt shame and then thought that the feeling rose from a wish for it and foundered angrily in the confusion of his introspection. He knew only and knew but dimly that he would lift himself up again and go on, searching for some universal foe to match against his strength. So pitiful to be a man! So Christ must have felt in Gethsemane.