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THE COMBINED MAZE
BY MAY SINCLAIR
AUTHOR OF "THE DIVINE FIRE"
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
MCMXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1913, BY HARPER & BROTHERS
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHED FEBRUARY, 1913
[Illustration: SHE CLOSED HER EYES, AND HIS HOLD TIGHTENED]
THE COMBINED MAZE
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.
Circumstances 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 associated 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
assistant--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 Saturday afternoon,
stagger from the trampled field, hot-eyed under their wild hair, whose
garments are stained from the torn grass 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
snatches 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 impassioned worshiper of
the body and the earth.
And if the moon sees him sometimes haggard, panting, though indomitable,
though impassioned, 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 Saturday 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 Cockney 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 friendships; 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
Classes. 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 classes. 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 attitude as eminently anti-social--uppish, he called it.