The Combined Maze.

by May Sinclair.

CHAPTER I

You may say that there was something wrong somewhere, some mistake, from the very beginning, in his parentage, in the time and place and manner of his birth. It was in the early eighties, over a shabby chemist's shop in Wandsworth High Street, and it came of the union of Fulleymore Ransome, a little, middle-aged chemist, weedy, parched, furtively inebriate, and his wife Emma, the daughter of John Randall, a draper.

They called him John Randall Fulleymore Ransome, and Ranny for short.

Ranny should have been born in lands of adventure, under the green light of a virgin forest, or on some illimitable prairie; he should have sailed with the vikings or fought with Cromwell's Ironsides; or, better still, he should have run, half-naked, splendidly pagan, bearing the torch of Marathon.

And yet he bore his torch.

From the very first his mother said that Ranny was that venturesome. He showed it in his ill-considered and ungovernable determination to be born, and it was hard to say which of them, Ranny or his mother, more nearly died of it. She must have been aware that there was a hitch somewhere; for, referring again and again, as she did, to Ranny's venturesomeness, she would say, "It beats me where he gets it from."

He may have got some of it from her, for she, poor thing, had sunk, adventurously, in one disastrous marriage her whole stock of youth and gaiety and charm. It was Ranny's youth and charm and gaiety that made him so surprising and so unaccountable.

Circ.u.mstances were not encouraging to Ranny's youth, nor to his private and particular ambition, the cultivation of a superb physique. For, not only was he a little chemist's son, he was a great furniture dealer's inexpensive and utterly insignificant clerk, one of a dozen confined in a long mahogany pen where they sat at long mahogany desks, upon high mahogany stools, making invoices of chairs and tables and wardrobes and washstands and all manner of furniture. You would never have known, to see him sitting there, that John Randall Fulleymore Ransome was a leader in Section I of the London Polytechnic Gymnasium.

So far, in his way, he testified, he bore his torch. Confined as he was in a mahogany pen, born and brought up in the odor of drugs, and surrounded by every ignominious sign of disease and infirmity, his dream was yet of cleanness, of health, and the splendor of physical perfection. The thing that young Ransome most loathed and abhorred was Flabbiness, next to Flabbiness, Weediness. The years of his adolescence were one long struggle and battle against these two. He had them ever before him, and a.s.sociated them, absurdly but inveterately, with a pharmaceutical chemist's occupation; of Weediness his father being the prime example; while for Flabbiness, young Mercier, his father's a.s.sistant--well, Mercier, as he said, "took the biscuit." It was horrible for young Ransome to inhabit the same house with young Mercier, because of his flabbiness.

In all cities there are many thousand Ransomes, more or less confined in mahogany cages, but John Randall Fulleymore stands for all of them. He was one of those who, in a cold twilight on a Sat.u.r.day afternoon, stagger from the trampled field, hot-eyed under their wild hair, whose garments are stained from the torn gra.s.s and uptrodden earth, with here and there a rent and the white gleam of a shoulder or a thigh; whose vivid, virile odor has a tang of earth in it. He is the image and the type of these forlorn, foredoomed young athletes, these exponents of a city's desperate adolescence, these inarticulate enthusiasts of the earth. He bursts from his pen in the evening at seven or half past, he s.n.a.t.c.hes somewhere a cup of cocoa and a sandwich, and at nine he is seen, half pagan in his "zephyr" and his "shorts," sprinting like mad through the main thoroughfares. In summer some pitch, more or less perfect, waits for him in suburban playing fields; and the River knows him, at Battersea, at Chelsea, at Hammersmith, and at Wandsworth, the River knows him as he is, the indomitable and impa.s.sioned wors.h.i.+per of the body and the earth.

And if the moon sees him sometimes haggard, panting, though indomitable, though impa.s.sioned, reeling on the last lap of his last mile, and limping through Wandsworth High Street home to the house of the weedy pharmaceutical chemist his father, if the moon sees Ransome, why, the Moon is a lady, and she does not tell.

If you asked him what he did it for, he would say you did it because it kept you fit, also (if you pressed him) because it kept you decent.

And to know how right he was you had only to look at him, escaped from his cage; you had only to follow his progress through the lighted streets and observe his unbending behavior before the salutations of the night. His fitness, combined with his decency, made him a wonder, a desire, and a despair. Slender and upright, immaculately high-collared, his thin serge suit molded by his sheer muscular development to the semblance of perfection, Ranny was a mark for loitering feet and wandering eyes. Ranny was brown-faced and brown-haired; he had brown eyes made clear with a strain of gray, rather narrow eyes, ever so slightly tilted, narrowing still, and lengthening, as with humor, at the outer corners. There was humor in his mouth, wide but fine, that tilted slightly upward when he spoke. There was humor even in his nose with its subtle curve, the slender length of its bridge, and its tip, wide spread, and like his mouth and eyes, slightly uptilted.

Ranny, in short, was fascinating. And at every turn his mysterious decency betrayed the promise of his charm.

It was Fred Booty, his friend and companion of the pen, who first put him in the right way, discerning in him a fine original genius for adventure.

For when Ranny's mother said he was that venturesome, she meant that he was fond, fantastically and violently fond of danger, of adventure. His cunning in this matter beat her clean--how he found the things to do he did do; the things, the frightful things he did about the house with bannisters and windows, of which she knew. As for the things he found to do with bicycles on Wandsworth Common and Putney Hill they were known mainly to his Maker and Fred Booty. Booty, who could judge (being "a bit handy with a bike" himself), said of them that they were "a fair treat."

But these were the deeds of his boyhood, and in nineteen-two Ransome looked back on them with contempt. Follies they were, things a silly kid does; and it wasn't by those monkey tricks that a fellow developed his physique. Booty had found Ransome in his attic one Sat.u.r.day afternoon, a year ago, half stripped, and contemplating ruefully what he conceived to be the first horrible, mushy dawn of Flabbiness in his biceps muscle.

All he wanted, Booty had then declared, was a turn or two at the Poly.

Gym. Then Booty took Ransome round to his place in Putney Bridge Road, and they sat on Booty's bed with their arms round each other's shoulders while Booty read aloud to Ransome from the pages of the Poly.

Prospectus. Booty was a slender, agile youth with an innocent, sanguine face, the face of a beardless faun, finished off with a bush of blond hair that stood up from his forehead like a monumental flame.

He read very slowly, in a voice that had in it both an adolescent croak and an engaging c.o.c.kney tang.

"The Poly.," said Booty, "really was a Club, '_where_,'" he underlined it, "'every reasonable facil'ty shall bee offered fer the formation of a steadfast character, _and_--_of_--true friends.h.i.+ps; fer trainin' the intellec'--'"

"Int'lec' be blowed," said Ransome.

"'_And_ fer leadin' an upright, unselfish life. Day by day,'" read Booty, "'the battle of life becomes more strenuous. To succeed entyles careful preparation and stern'--stern, Ranny--'deetermination, it deemands the choice of _good friends_ and the avoid'nce of those persons and things which tend _to_ lessen, instead of _to_ increase the reesources of the individyool.' There, wot d'you think of _that_, Ran?"

Ran didn't think much of it until Booty pointed out to him, one by one, the privileges he would enjoy as a member of the Poly.

For the ridiculous yearly sum of ten-and-six (it was all he could rise to) Ransome had become a member of the Poly. Ten-and-six threw open to him every year the Poly. Gym., the Poly. Swimming Bath, and the Poly.

Circulating Library. For ten-and-six he could further command the services (once a week) of the doctor attached to the Poly. and of its experienced legal adviser.

That tickled Ransome. He didn't see himself by any possibility requiring communion with that experienced man. But it tickled him, the sheer fantastic opulence and extravagance of the thing. It tickled him so much that whenever you disagreed with or offended Ransome his jest was to refer you, magnificently, to "my legal adviser."

Yes, for fantastic opulence and extravagance, Ransome had never seen anything to beat the Poly. There was no end to it, no end to the privileges you enjoyed. He positively ran amuck among his privileges--those, that is to say, offered him by the Poly. Swimming Bath and the Poly. Gym. As he said, he "fair abused 'em." But he considered that the Poly. "got home again" on his exceptionally moderate use of the Circulating Library, and his total abstention from the Bible Cla.s.ses. He was not yet aware of any soul in him apart from that abounding and sufficing physical energy expressed in Fitness, nor was he violently conscious of any moral sense apart from Decency.

And Ranny despised the votaries of intellectual light; he more than suspected them of Weediness, if not of Flabbiness. Yet (as he waited for Booty in the vestibule), through much darkness and confusion, and always at an immeasurable distance from him, he discerned, glory beyond glory, the things that the Poly., in its great mercy and pity, had reserved for those "queer johnnies." It made him giddy merely to look at the posters of its lectures and its cla.s.ses. It gave him the headache to think of the things the fellows--fellows of a deplorable physique--and girls, too, did there. For his part, he looked forward to the day when, by a further subscription of ten-and-six, he would enroll himself as a member of the Athletic Club.

It was as if the Poly. put out feeler after feeler to draw him to itself. Only to one thing he would not be drawn. When Booty advised him to join the Poly. Ramblers he stood firm. For some shy or unfathomable reason of his own he refused to become a Poly. Rambler. When it came to the Poly. Ramblers he was adamant. It was one of those vital points at which he resisted this process of absorption in the Poly. Booty denounced his att.i.tude as eminently anti-social--uppish, he called it.

CHAPTER II

All that winter Ransome's nights and days were regulated in a perfect order--making statements of account for nine hours on five days of the week and four on Sat.u.r.days. Three evenings for the Poly. Gym. One for the Swimming Bath. One for sprinting. One (Sat.u.r.day) for rest or relaxation after the violence of Rugger. One (Sunday) for the improvement of the mind. On Sundays he was very seldom good for anything else.

But in the spring of nineteen-two something stirred in him, something watched and waited; with a subtle agitation, a vague and delicate excitement, it exulted and aspired. The sensation, or whatever it was, had as yet no separate existence of its own. So perfect, in this spring of nineteen-two, was the harmony of Ransome's being that the pulse of the unborn thing was one with all his other pulses; it was one, indistinguishably, with the splendor of life, the madness of running, and the joy he took in his own remarkable performances on the horizontal bar. It had the effect of heightening, mysteriously and indescribably, the joy, the madness, and the splendor. And it was dominant, insistent.

Like some great and unintelligible _motif_ it ran ringing and sounding through the vast rhythmic tumult of physical energy.

Not for a moment did he connect it with the increasing interest that he took in the appearance of the Young Ladies of the Poly. Gym. He was not aware how aware he was of their coming, nor how his heart thumped and throbbed and his nerves trembled at the tramp, tramp of their feet along the floor.

For sometimes, it might be twice a year, the young men and the young women of the Gymnasium met and mingled in a Grand Display.

He was fairly well used to it; and yet he had never got over his amazement at finding that girls, those things of const.i.tutional and predestined flabbiness, could do very nearly (though not quite) everything that he could, leaving him little besides his pre-eminence on the horizontal bar. And yearly the regiment of girls who could "do things" at the Poly. increased under his very eyes. Their invasion disturbed him in his vision of their flabbiness; it rubbed it into him, the things that they could do.

Not but what he had felt it--he had felt _them_--all about him, outside, in the streets where they jostled him, and in the world made mostly of mahogany, the world of counters and of desks, of pens where they too were herded and shut up and compelled, like him, to toil. Queer things, girls, for they seemed, incomprehensibly, to like it. Their liking it, their businesslike a.s.sumption of equality, their incessant appearance (authorized, it is true, by business) at the railings of his pen, the peculiar disenchanting promiscuity of it all, preserved young Ransome in his eccentricity of indifference to their s.e.x. In fact, if you tried to talk about s.e.x to young Ransome (and Mercier did try) he would denounce it as "silly goat's talk," and your absorption in it as "the most mutton-headed form of Flabbiness yet out."

But that was before the Grand Display of the autumn of last year, when Winny Dymond appeared in the March Past of Section I of the Women's Gymnasium; before he had followed Winny as she ran at top speed through all the turnings and windings of the Combined Maze.

There were about fifty of them, picked; all attired in black stockings, in dark-blue knickerbockers, and in tunics that reached to the knee, red-belted and trimmed with red. Stunning, he called them; so much so that they fair took away his breath.

That was what he said when it was all over. By that time he was ashamed to confess that at the moment of its apparition the March Past had been somewhat of a shock to him. He had his ideas, and he was not prepared for the uniform; still less was he prepared for a personal encounter with such quant.i.ties of young women all at once.

All sorts of girls--st.u.r.dy and slender girls; queer girls with lean, wiry bodies; deceptive girls with bodies curiously plastic under the appearance of fragility; here a young miracle of physical culture; there a girl with the pointed b.r.e.a.s.t.s and flying shoulders, the limbs, the hips, the questing face that recalled some fugitive soul of the woods and mountains; long-nosed, sallow, nervous Jewish girls; English girls with stolid, colorless faces; here and there a face rosy and full-blown, or a pretty tilted profile and a wonderful, elaborate head of hair. One or two of these heads positively lit up the procession with their red and gold, gave it the splendor and beauty of a pageant.

They came on, single file and double file and four abreast, the long line doubling and turning upon itself; all alike in the straight drop of the arms to the hips, the rise and fall of their black-stockinged legs, the arching and pointing of the feet; all deliciously alike in their air of indestructible propriety. Here you caught one leas.h.i.+ng an iniquitous little smile in the corners of her eyes under her lashes; or one, aware of her proud beauty, and bearing herself because of it, with the extreme of indestructible propriety.

There were no words to express young Ransome's indifference to proud beauty.