It was the night of the Grand Display of the spring of nineteen-two.
To the Gymnasium of the London Polytechnic you ascended (in
nineteen-two) as to a temple by a flight of steps, and found yourself in
a great oblong room of white walls, with white pillars supporting the
gallery that ran all round it. The railing of the gallery was of iron
tracery, painted green, with a brass balustrade. The great clean white
space, the long ropes for the trapezes which hung from the ceiling and
were looped up now to the stanchions, the coarse canvas of the
mattresses, the disciplined lines, the tramping feet, the commanding
voices of the instructors, gave a confused and dreamlike suggestion of
the lower deck of a man-of-war. To-night, under the west end of the
gallery, a small platform was raised for the Mayor of Marylebone and a
score of guests. The galleries themselves were packed with members of
the Polytechnic and their friends.
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 surreptitious, half-ironic applause. "Stick it,
Ransome; stick it, old boy!"
The reference was to his extraordinary attitude.
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
class. 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 balustrade 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 cushion
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 leadership 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 sturdy 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 space
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 sanctity 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 analogy 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 breasts 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 sex 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 grass and fallen
leaves, of ears pricking 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 passed from them; here and there hair was loosened, combs were
shed, and nobody 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 comradeship mingled
inextricably with that other sense of absurdity and tenderness.
Not love, not passion, 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 passion.