Gladiator (3 page)

“It wasn't rubbish.”

“Evidently.”

At that crisis Mr. Danner's toe trembled and the kitten, believing it a new toy, curled its paws over the shoe. There was a sound of tearing leather, and the shoe came apart. Fortunately
the
foot inside it was not hurt severely. Danner did not dare to budge. He heard his wife's startled inhalation.

Mrs. Danner did not resume her sewing. She breathed heavily and slow fire crept into her cheeks. The enormity of the crime overcame her. And she perceived that the hateful laboratory had invaded her portion of the house. Moreover, her sturdy religion had been desecrated. Danner read her thoughts.

“Don't be angry,” he said. Beads of perspiration gathered on his brow.

“Angry!” The kitten stirred at the sound of her voice. “Angry! And why not? Here you defied God and man—and made that creature of the devil. You've overrun my house. You're a wicked, wicked man. And as for that cat, I won't have it. I won't stand for it.”

“What are you going to do?”

Her voice rose to a scream. “Do! Do! Plenty—and right here and now.” She ran to the kitchen and came back with a broom. She flung the front door wide. Her blazing eyes rested for a moment on the kitten. To her it had become merely an obnoxious little animal. “Scat! You little demon!” The broom came down on the cat's back with a jarring thud.

After that, chaos. A ball of fur lashed through the air. Whatnot, bird cage, bookcase, morris chair flew asunder. Then the light went out. In the darkness a comet, a hurricane, ricochetted through the room. Then there was a crash mightier than the others, followed by silence.

When Danner was able, he picked himself up and lighted the lamp. His wife lay on the floor in a dead faint. He revived her. She sat up and wept silently over the wreck of her parlour. Danner paled. A round hole—a hole that could have been made by nothing but a solid cannon shot—showed where the kitten had left the room through the wall.

Mrs. Danner's eyes were red-rimmed. Her breath came jerkily. With incredulous little gestures she picked herself up and gazed at the hole. A draught blew through it. Mr. Danner stuffed it with a rug.

“
What are we going to do?” she said.

“If it comes back—we'll call it Samson.”

And—as soon as Samson felt the gnawing of appetite, he returned to his rightful premises. Mrs. Danner fed him. Her face was pale and her hands trembled. Horror and fascination fought with each other in her soul as she offered the food. Her husband was in his classroom, nervously trying to fix his wits on the subject of the day.

“Kitty, kitty, poor little kitty,” she said.

Samson purred and drank a quart of milk. She concealed her astonishment from herself. Mrs. Danner's universe was undergoing a transformation.

At three in the afternoon the kitten scratched away the screen door on the back porch and entered the house. Mrs. Danner fed it the supper meat.

Danner saw it when he returned. It was chasing flies in the yard. He stood in awe. The cat could spring twenty or thirty feet with ease. Then the sharp spur of dread entered him. Suppose someone saw and asked questions. He might be arrested, taken to prison. Something would happen. He tried to analyze and solve the problem. Night came. The cat was allowed to go out unmolested. In the morning the town of Indian Creek rose to find that six large dogs had been slain during the dark hours. A panther had come down from the mountains, they said. And Danner lectured with a dry tongue and errant mind.

It was Will Hoag, farmer of the fifth generation, resident of the environs of Indian Creek, church-goer, and hard-cider addict, who bent himself most mercilessly on the capture of the alleged panther. His chicken-house suffered thrice and then his sheep-fold. After four such depredations he cleaned his rifle and undertook a vigil from a spot behind the barn. An old moon rose late and illuminated his pastures with a blue glow. He drank occasionally from a jug to ward off the evil effects of the night air.

Sometime after twelve his attention was distracted from the jug by stealthy sounds. He moved toward them. A hundred
yards
away his cows were huddled together—a heap of dun shadows. He saw a form which he mistook for a weasel creeping toward the cows. As he watched, he perceived that the small animal behaved singularly unlike a weasel. It slid across the earth on taut limbs, as if it was going to attack the cows. Will Hoag repressed a guffaw.

Then the farmer's short hair bristled. The cat sprang and landed on the neck of the nearest cow and clung there. Its paw descended. There was a horrid sound of ripping flesh, a moan, the thrashing of hoofs, a blot of dribbling blood, and the cat began to gorge on its prey.

Hoag believed that he was intoxicated, that delirium tremens had overtaken him. He stood rooted to the spot. The marauder ignored him. Slowly, unbelievingly, he raised his rifle and fired. The bullet knocked the cat from its perch. Mr. Hoag went forward and picked it up.

“God Almighty,” he whispered. The bullet had not penetrated the cat's skin. And, suddenly, it wriggled in his hand. He dropped it. A flash of fur in the moonlight, and he was alone with the corpse of his Holstein.

He contemplated profanity, he considered kneeling in prayer. His joints turned to water. He called faintly for his family. He fell unconscious.

When Danner heard of that exploit—it was relayed by jeering tongues who said the farmer was drunk and a panther had killed the cow—his lips set in a line of resolve. Samson was taking too great liberties. It might attack a person, in which case he, Danner, would be guilty of murder. That day he did not attend his classes. Instead, he prepared a relentless poison in his laboratory and fed it to the kitten in a brace of meaty chops. The dying agonies of Samson, aged seven weeks, were Homeric.

After that, Danner did nothing for some days. He wondered if his formulæ and processes should be given to the world. But, being primarily a man of vast imagination, he foresaw hundreds of rash experiments. Suppose, he thought, that his
discovery
was tried on a lion, or an elephant! Such a creature would be invincible. The tadpoles were dead. The kitten had been buried. He sighed wearily and turned his life into its usual courses.

Chapter
II

B
EFORE
the summer was ended, however, a new twist of his life and affairs started the mechanism of the professor's imagination again. It was announced to him when he returned from summer school on a hot afternoon. He dropped his portfolio on the parlour desk, one corner of which still showed the claw-marks of the miscreant Samson, and sat down with a comfortable sigh.

“Abednego.” His wife seldom addressed him by his first name.

“Yes?”

“I—I—I want to tell you something.”

“Yes?”

“Haven't you noticed any difference in me lately?”

He had never noticed a difference in his wife. When they reached old age, he would still be unable to discern it. He shook his head and looked at her with some apprehension. She was troubled. “What's the matter?”

“I suppose you wouldn't—yet,” she said. “But—well—I'm with child.”

The professor folded his upper lip between his thumb and forefinger. “With child? Pregnant? You mean—”

“I'm going to have a baby.”

Soon after their marriage the timid notion of parenthood had escaped them. They had, in fact, avoided its mechanics except on those rare evenings when tranquillity and the reproductive urge conspired to imbue him with courage and her with sinfulness. Nothing came of that infrequent union. They never expected anything.

And now they were faced with it. He murmured: “A baby.”

Faint
annoyance moved her. “Yes. That's what one has. What are we going to do?”

“I don't know, Matilda. But I'm glad.”

She softened. “So am I, Abednego.”

Then a hissing, spattering sound issued from the kitchen. “The beans!” Mrs. Danner said. The second idyl of their lives was finished.

Alone in his bed, tossing on the humid muslin sheets, Danner struggled within himself. The hour that was at hand would be short. The logical step after the tadpoles and the kitten was to vaccinate the human mammal with his serum. To produce a super-child, an invulnerable man. As a scientist he was passionately intrigued by the idea. As a husband he was dubious. As a member of society he was terrified.

That his wife would submit to the plan or to the step it necessitated was beyond belief. She would never allow a sticky tube of foreign animal matter to be poured into her veins. She would not permit the will of God to be altered or her offspring to be the subject of experiment. Another man would have laughed at the notion of persuading her. Mr. Danner never laughed at matters that involved his wife.

There was another danger. If the child was female and became a woman like his wife, then the effect of such strength would be awful indeed. He envisioned a militant reformer, an iron-bound Calvinist, remodelling the world single-handed. A Scotch Lilith, a matronly Gabriel, a she-Hercules. He shuddered.

A hundred times he denied his science. A hundred and one times it begged him to be served. Each decision to drop the idea was followed by an effort to discover means to inoculate her without her knowledge. To his wakeful ears came the reverberation of her snores. He rose and paced the floor. A scheme came to him. After that he was lost.

Mrs. Danner was surprised when her husband brought a bottle of blackberry cordial to her. It was his first gift to her in more than a year. She was fond of cordial. He was not. She
took
a glass after supper and then a second, which she drank “for him.” He smiled nervously and urged her to drink it. His hands clenched and unclenched. When she finished the second glass, he watched her constantly.

“I feel sleepy,” she said.

“You're tired.” He tried to dissemble the eagerness in his voice. “Why don't you lie down?”

“Strange,” she said a moment later. “I'm not usually so—so—misty.”

He nodded. The opiate in the cordial was working. She lay on the couch. She slept. The professor hastened to his laboratory. An hour later he emerged with a hypodermic syringe in his hand. His wife lay limply, one hand touching the floor. Her stern, dark face was relaxed. He sat beside her. His conscience raged. He hated the duplicity his task required. His eyes lingered on the swollen abdomen. It was cryptic, enigmatic, filled with portent. He jabbed the needle. She did not stir. After that he substituted a partly empty bottle of cordial for the drugged liquor. It was, perhaps, the most practical thing he had ever done in his life.

Mrs. Danner could not explain herself on the following morning. She belaboured him. “Why didn't you wake me and make me go to bed? Sleeping in my clothes! I never did such a thing in my life.”

“I couldn't wake you. I tried.”

“Rubbish.”

“You were sleeping so hard—you refused to move.”

“Sometimes, old as you are, I'd like to thrash you.”

Danner went to the college. There was nothing more to do, nothing more to require his concentration. He could wait—as he had waited before. He trembled occasionally with the hope that his child would be a boy—a sane, healthy boy. Then, in the end, his work might bear fruit. “The
Euglena viridis
,” he said in flat tones, “will be the subject of to-morrow's study. I want you gentlemen to diagram the structure of the
Euglena viridis
and write five hundred words on its vital principles and
processes.
It is particularly interesting because it shares properties that are animal with properties that are vegetable.”

September, October, November. Chilly winds from the high mountains. The day-by-day freezing over of ponds and brooks. Smoke at the tops of chimneys. Snow. Thanksgiving. And always Mrs. Danner growing with the burden of her offspring. Mr. Danner sitting silent, watching, wondering, waiting. It would soon be time.

On Christmas morning there entered into Mrs. Danner's vitals a pain that was indefinable and at the same time certain. It thrust all thought from her mind. Then it diminished and she summoned her husband. “Get the doctor. It's coming.”

Danner tottered into the street and executed his errand. The doctor smiled cheerfully. “Just beginning? I'll be over this afternoon.”

“But—good Lord—you can't leave her like—”

“Nonsense.”

He came home and found his wife dusting. He shook his head. “Get Mrs. Nolan,” she said. Then she threw herself on the bed again.

Mrs. Nolan, the nearest neighbour, wife of Professor Nolan and mother of four children, was delighted. This particular Christmas was going to be a day of some excitement. She prepared hot water and bustled with unessential occupation. Danner sat prostrate in the parlour. He had done it. He had done more—and that would be known later. Perhaps it would fail. He hoped it would fail. He wrung his hands. The concept of another person in his house had not yet occurred to him. Birth was his wife's sickness—until it was over.

The doctor arrived after Danner had made his third trip. Mrs. Nolan prepared lunch. “I love to cook in other people's kitchens,” she said. He wanted to strike her. Curious, he thought. At three-thirty the industry of the doctor and Mrs. Nolan increased and the silence of the two, paradoxically, increased with it.

Then
the early twilight fell. Mrs. Danner lay with her lank black hair plastered to her brow. She did not moan. Pain twisted and convulsed her. Downstairs Danner sat and sweated. A cry—his wife's. Another—unfamiliar. Scurrying feet on the bare parts of the floor. He looked up. Mrs. Nolan leaned over the stair well.

“It's a boy, Mr. Danner. A beautiful boy. And husky. You never saw such a husky baby.”

“It ought to be,” he said. They found him later in the back yard, prancing on the snow with weird, ungainly steps. A vacant smile lighted his features. They didn't blame him.