The programme of the Grand Display announced as its first item:

PARALLEL BARS _Tableau by_ MESSRS. BOOTY, TYSER, BUIST, WAUCHOPE, AND J. R. F. RANSOME

There was a murmur of surrept.i.tious, half-ironic applause. "Stick it, Ransome; stick it, old boy!"

The reference was to his extraordinary att.i.tude.

J. R. F. Ransome appeared as the apex and the crown of a rude triangular structure whose base was formed by the high parallel bars, flanked at each end by two bodies (Booty and Tyser front), two supple adolescent bodies, bent backward like two bows. He stood head downward on his hands that grasped and were supported by the locked arms of two solid athletes, Buist and Wauchope, themselves mounted gloriously and perilously on the straining bars.

Considered as to his arms, and the white "zephyr" and flannels that he wore, he was merely a marvelous young man balancing himself with difficulty in an unnatural posture. But his body, uptilted, poised as by a miracle in air, with the slender curve of its back, its flattened hips, its feet laid together like wings folded in the first downrush, might have been the body of a young immortal descending with facile precipitancy to earth.

He maintained for a sensible moment his appearance of having just flown from the roof of the Gymnasium. Far below, the photographer fumbled leisurely with his apparatus.

"Hurry up, there!" "Stick it, Ransome!" "Half a mo!" "Stick it, Ranny; stick it!" they whispered. "Steady does it."

And Ranny stuck it. Ranny actually, from his awful eminence, sang out, "No fear!"

The flashlight immortalized his moment.

That was his way--to stick it; to see it out; to go through with the adventure alert and gay, wearing that fine smile of his, so extravagantly uplifted at the corners. "Stick it!" was the motto of his individual recklessness and of the dogged, enduring conservatism of his cla.s.s. It kept him in a mahogany pen, at a mahogany desk, for forty-four hours a week, and it sustained him in his orgies of physical energy at the Poly. Gym.

Best of all, it sustained him in his daily and nightly encounters with young Mercier.

He was all the more determined to stick it by the knowledge that young Mercier was up there in the gallery looking at him. He could see him leaning over the bal.u.s.trade and smiling at him atrociously. He took advantage of an interval and joined him. He was half inclined to ask him what he meant by it. For he was always at it. Whenever young Mercier caught Ranny doing a sprint he smiled atrociously. At Wandsworth, behind the counter, or in the little zinc-roofed dispensing-room at the back, among the horribly smelling materials of his craft, he smiled, remembering him.

Mercier was a black-haired, thick-set youth with heavy features in a heavy, pasty face, a face oddly decorated by immense and slightly prominent blue eyes, a face where all day long the sensual dream brooded heavily. His black eyebrows gave it a certain accent and distinction. It was because of his dream that Leonard Mercier could afford to smile.

He was one of those who wanted to know what Ranny did it for. He couldn't see what fun the young goat got out of his evenings. Not half, no, nor a quarter of what he, Mercier, could get from one night at the Empire or when he took his girl to Earl's Court or the Wandsworth Coliseum. And, though up there in the gallery he had said "By Jove!" and that he was blowed, and that that young Ransome was a corker, though he boasted to three entire strangers that that young fellow was a friend of his, his curiosity was still unsatisfied. He still wanted to know what the young goat did it for.

He wanted to know it now. And at his insistence young Ransome was abashed. How could he explain to old Eno what he did it for or what it felt like? He couldn't explain it to himself, he had no words for it, for that ecstasy of living, that fusion of all faculties in one rhythm and one vibration, one continuous transport of physical energy. Take sprinting alone. How could he convey to Jujubes in his disgusting flabbiness any sense of the fine madness of running, of the race of the blood through the veins, of the hammer strokes of the heart, of the soft pad of the feet on the highway? To Jujubes, who went in like a cus.h.i.+on no matter where you prodded him, how describe the feel of a taut muscle, the mounting swell of it, the resistance, and the small, almost impalpable ripple and throb under the skin? He couldn't have described it to himself.

So he gave Jujubes his invariable casual answer. You did it because it kept you fit and because (he let old Eno have it) it kept you decent.

Old Eno would be a lot decenter if he went in for it. It would do him worlds of good.

To which old Eno replied that he thought he saw himself! As for joining Ranny's precious old Poly., why, for all the Life you were likely to see there, you might as well be in a young ladies' boarding-school. And Ransome said that that was where Jujubes ought to be. He liked young ladies. Among them (he intimated) his flabbiness might not excite remark. Girls (he pondered it) were flabby things.

Chivalry constrained him to a mental reservation: Winny Dymond and the young ladies of the Poly. Gym. excepted.

But he was glad that Mercier didn't stay to see them. Young Leonard (whose smile was growing more and more atrocious) had declared that the young ladies of the Empire ballet were a bit more in his line, and he had made off, elbowing his way through the crowded gallery and crooning "Boys of the Empire!" as he went, while Ransome pursued him with the scornful adjuration to "Go home and take a saline draught!"

But you couldn't shame old Eno. He triumphed and exulted in his flabbiness. For he was a Boy of the Empire. He had seen Life, and would see more and more of it.

Ransome went down again into the hall. He removed himself from the crowd and leaned against a pillar, in abstraction, arms folded, showing the great muscles; a splendid figure in his white "zephyr" trimmed with crimson, with the crimson sash of leaders.h.i.+p knotted at his side. Thus withdrawn, he watched, half furtively, the performance of the young ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium.

One by one, with an air incorruptibly decorous, the young ladies of the Polytechnic Gymnasium hurled themselves upon the parallel bars; they waggled themselves by their hands along them; they swung themselves from side to side of them, and outstretched themselves between them with a foot and a hand upon each bar; they raised their bodies, thus supported, like an arch; they slackened them and flung themselves (with a crescendo of decorous delirium) from side to side again, and over; alighting on their feet in a curtseying posture and with the left arm extended in a little perfunctory gesture of demonstration to the audience, as much as to say, "There you are, and nothing could be easier!"

Nothing could be more conventional and more unspeakably correct. Only when Winny Dymond did it there was a difference, or it seemed so to young Ransome. Winny approached the bars with shyness and a certain earnestness and gravity of intent. She hesitated; for a moment she was adorable in vacillation. She shook her head at the bars, she bit her lip at them; she set her face at them in defiance; then, with a sudden amazing celerity she gave a little run forward and leaped upon them; she swung herself in perfect rhythm and motion onward and upward and from side to side; she arched her st.u.r.dy but exquisitely supple body like a bridge, flung herself over as if in pure abandonment of joy and lighted on her feet, curtseying correctly but with something piteous in the gesture of the outstretched arm, and upon her face an expression of great surprise and wonder at herself, as if Winny said, not "There you are!" but "Here I am, and oh, I never thought I should be!"

And from his place by the pillar Ransome gave the little inarticulate murmur he reserved for Winny. It was charged with his sense of tenderness and absurdity.

A quarter to ten. His own performances--his wonderful performances on the horizontal bar--were over; and over the demonstration by F. Booty with the Indian clubs, where young Fred, slender and supple as a faun, played on his own muscles in faultless rhythm. And now with an eye upon the Mayor the order was given for the last item on the programme:

/# THE COMBINED MAZE #/

There was a rush of energetic young men who flung themselves upon the properties of the Gymnasium. They ran them--the parallel bars, the horses, the mattresses--in under the galleries; they uprooted the posts of the horizontal bar; they cleared the whole of the vast oblong s.p.a.ce bounded by the pillars.

An attendant then appeared with a bit of chalk in his hand, and with the chalk he drew upon the floor certain mystic circles, one at each corner of the oblong, one in the center, the heart of the Maze, and facing it two smaller circles, one at each side on a visionary line. Seven mystic, seven sacred circles in all did he draw, and vanished, unconscious of the sanct.i.ty and symbolism of his deed.

For he, with his bit of white chalk, had marked the course for the great running, for the race that the young men and the young girls run together with the racing of the stars, for the unloosening of the holy primal energies in a figure and a measure and a ritual old as time.

It was all very well for the instructor (blind instrument of unspeakably mysterious forces) to pretend that he invented it, that august figure of the seven-circled Maze; to explain it, as he does to the inquiring, by the a.n.a.logy of a billiard table with its pockets. For never yet, on any billiard table, was a race run and a contest waged like that in which these young men and girls ran and contended. Drawn up at the far end of the hall under the east gallery in two ranks, four-breasted, the men on the one side and the women on the other, they waited, and the leader of each rank had a foot on a corner circle. They waited, marking time with their feet, first, to the thudding beat of the barbell on the floor and then to an unheard measure, secret and restrained, the murmur of life in the blood, the rhythm of the soundless will, the beat of the unseen, urging energy, that gathered to intensity, desirous of the race.

As yet the soul of it slept in their rigid bodies, their grave, forward-looking faces, their behavior, so excessively correct. Somebody whispered the word, and on a sudden they let themselves go; they started. Young Tyser, breasting the wind of his own speed, his head uplifted and thrown backward, led the men, and she with the questing face and wide-pointing b.r.e.a.s.t.s of Artemis led the girls; and he had young Ransome on his heels and she Winny; and behind them the fourfold serried ranks thinned and thinned out and spun themselves in two lines of single file, two threads, one white, one dark blue, both flecked with crimson, two threads that in their running were wound and unwound and woven in a pattern, dark blue and white and crimson, that ran and never paused and never ended and was never the same. For first, each line was flung slantwise from the corner circle whence it had started, and where the two met, point by point perpetually, in the center circle, they as it were intersected, men and women wriggling, sliding, and darting with incredible dexterity through each other's ranks; and the pattern was a cross, a tricolor. Then they wheeled round the circle that was and was not their goal, and did it all over again; but instead of intersecting at the center circle they struck off there at a tangent, and the pattern, blue by blue divided from white by white, and all red-flecked, was two wide V's set point to point, a pattern that ran away and vanished as each thread, returning, wheeled round the circle whence the other thread had started.

And all this at the top speed set by Tyser, and with the thud of the men's feet and the pad of the women's; all this with a secret challenge and defiance of one s.e.x to the other, with separation and estrangement, with a never-ending, baffling approach and flight, with the furtive darting of man from woman and of woman from man, whirled in their courses from each other as they met.

And now the lines doubled; they were running two abreast, slantwise; and as they intersected in the sacred center circle it was with a mingling of the threads, a weaving of blue with white, and white with blue; so that each man had in flight before him a maiden, and so that at their circles, east and west, where they wheeled they wheeled together, side by side, as the Maze flung them. And now they were circling and serpentining up and down, and down and up, with contrary motion, in a double figure of eight; they were winding in and out among the pillars and wheeling round the middle circles north and south, side by side, till they split there and parted and met again in the center and were flung from it, to wheel again deliriously, double-ringed, round all the six outermost circles at once.

And now, as if they were torn from the ends of the earth by the irresistible attraction of the seventh circle, they were whirling round the center in a double ring, a ring of young men round a ring of girls; and then, as by some mysterious compulsion, they divided and cast themselves off in rows of two couples, man and girl by man and girl, linked with arms on each other's shoulders, eight rows in all, eight spokes that sprang from the sacred circle ringed with eight, four men and four girls, who were the felly of the wheel, all running, all revolving. Such was the magic of the Maze, and the unconscious genius of the instructor, that the pattern of the running wound and unwound and knit itself together in the supreme symbol of the great Wheel of Eight Spokes, the Wheel of Life.

And the ancient rhythmic rush and race of the worlds, and the wheeling of all stars, the swinging and dancing of all atoms, the streaming and eddying of the ancestral stuff of life was in the whirling of that living Wheel; it was one immortal motion, continuous and triumphant in the bodies of those men and maidens as they ran. And they, shop-girls and shop-boys and young clerks, slipped off their memories of the desk and counter, and a joy, an instinct, and a sense that had no memory woke in them, savage, virgin, and shy; the pure and perfect joy of the young body in its own strength and speed; the instinct of the hunter of the hills and woodlands; the sense of feet padding on gra.s.s and fallen leaves, of ears p.r.i.c.king alert, of eyes that face the dawn on the high downs and go glancing through the coverts. And as this radiant and vehement life rose in them like a tide their gravity and shyness and severity pa.s.sed from them; here and there hair was loosened, combs were shed, and n.o.body stopped to gather them; for frenzy seized on the young men, and their arms pressed on the girls' shoulders, urging the pace faster and faster; and light, swift as their flying feet, shot from their eyes, and they laughed each to the other as they ran. So divine was now the madness of their running, so inspired the whirling of the Wheel, that the thing showed plainly as the undying, immemorial ecstasy; showed as the secret dance of magic and of mystery, taken over by the London Polytechnic, and, at the very moment when its corybantic nature most declared itself, constrained to an order and a beauty tremendous and austere.

So wise and powerful was the London Polytechnic.

For Ransome, mixed with that joy of the running, there was a joy of his own, an instinct and a sense, virgin and shy, absolved from memory. He found it, when Winny Dymond ran before him, in the slender, innocent movement of her hips under her thin tunic, in the absurd flap-flapping of the door-knocker plat on her shoulders, in the glances flicked at him by the tail of her eye as she wheeled from him in the endless pursuit and capture and approach and flight, as she was parted, was flung from him and returned to him in the windings of the Maze. He found it to perfection in the pressure of each other's arms as the Maze wed them and whirled them running, locked together in the pattern of the wheel. It was not love so much as some inspired sense of comrades.h.i.+p mingled inextricably with that other sense of absurdity and tenderness.

Not love, not pa.s.sion, even when in the excitement of the running she swerved to the wrong side and he had to turn her with his two hands upon her waist. For it was the law of their running that, though it was one with the movement of life itself, mysteriously, while the thing lasted, it precluded pa.s.sion.

CHAPTER IV

Ransome left Winny Dymond at St. Ann's Terrace, and went home along the High Street. He went very slowly, as if in thought.

At the railings of the Parish Church he paused, recalling something. Low and square-towered, couchant in the moonlight behind its railings, the Parish Church guarded under its long flank its huddled graves.

He smiled for very Youth. It was here that he had run Winny to earth and caught her. The Parish Church had been his accomplice in that capture.

Wandsworth High Street twists and winds with the waywardness of a river.

The first turn brought him to the old stone bridge over the Wandle. On the bridge before him, in the crook of the street, were the booths and stalls of the night market, lit by blazing naphtha, color heaped on color in a leaping, waving flare as of torches. On either side was a twisted and jagged line of houses--brown-brick, flat-fronted, eighteenth-century houses, and houses with painted fronts. Here a tall, red-brick modern Parade shot up the gables of its insolent facade.

There, oldest of all, a yellow house stooped forward on the posts that propped it. Somewhere up in the sky a tall chimney and a cupola. All beautiful under the night, all dark or dim, with sudden flashes and pallors and gleams, lamplit and moonlit; and all impressed upon Ransome's brain with an extraordinary vividness and importance, as if he had suddenly discovered something new about Wandsworth High Street.