That night Ransome was more than ever the prey of thought, if you could
call it thought, that mad racing and careering of his brain which
followed his encounter with Miss Usher. The stupefaction which had been
her first effect had given way to a peculiar excitement and activity of
mind. When he said to himself that Miss Usher had behaved queerly, he
meant that she had acted with a fine defiance of convention. And she had
carried it off. She had compelled him to accept her with her mystery as
a thing long known. She had pushed the barriers aside, and in a moment
she had established intimacy.
For only intimacy could have excused her interference with his innermost
affairs. She had given him an amount of warning and advice that he would
not have tolerated from his own mother. And she had used some charm that
made it impossible for him to resent it. What could well be queerer than
that he should be told by a girl he did not know that his case was
hopeless, that he must give up running after Winny Dymond, that he was
only persecuting a girl who didn't care for him. Ransome had no doubt
that she had spoken out of some secret and mystic knowledge of her
friend.
He supposed that women understood each other.
And after all what had she done that was so extraordinary? She had only
put into words--sensible words--his own misgivings, his own profound
distrust of the event.
What _was_ extraordinary, if he could have analyzed it, was the calmness
that mingled with his disturbance. Calmness with regard to Winny and to
the issue taken out of his hands and decided for him; calmness, and yet
a pain, a distinct pain that he was not subtle enough to recognize as
remorse for a disloyalty. And, under it all, that nameless, inexplicable
excitement, as if for the first time in the affairs of sex, he had a
sense of mystery and of adventure.
He did not ask himself how it was that Winny had not stirred that sense
in him. He did not refer it definitely to Violet Usher. It had moved in
the air about her; but it remained when she was gone.
* * * * *
So far was he from referring it to Miss Usher that when it died down he
made no attempt to revive it by following the adventure. He was
restrained by some obscure instinct of self-preservation, also by the
absurd persistence with which in thought he returned again and again to
Winny Dymond. That recurrent tenderness for Winny, a girl who had no
sort of tenderness for him, was a thing he did not mean to encourage
more than he could help. Still, it kept him from running after any other
girl. He was not in love with Violet Usher, and so, gradually, her magic
lost its hold upon his memory.
* * * * *
Autumn came, and with it another Grand Display at the Polytechnic
Gymnasium, the grandest he had yet known. As if it had been some great
civic function, it was attended by the Mayor of Marylebone in his robes.
To be sure, the Mayor, who was "going on" that night, left some time
before the performance of Mr. J. R. F. Ransome on the Horizontal Bar.
But Ranny was not aware of the disappearance of the Mayor. He was not
perfectly aware of his own amazing evolutions on the horizontal bar. He
was not perfectly aware of anything but the face and eyes of Violet
Usher fixed on him from the side gallery above. The gallery was crowded
with other faces and with other eyes, all fixed on him; but he was not
aware of them. The gallery was for him a solitude pervaded by the
presence of Violet Usher.
She was seated in the front row directly opposite him; her arms were
laid along the balustrade, and she leaned out over them, bending her
dark brows toward him, immovable and intent. He did not know whether she
was alone there. To all appearance she was alone, for her face remained
fixed above her arms, and it was as if her eyes never once looked away
from him.
And under their gaze an exultation seized him and a fierce desire, not
only to exceed and to excel all other performers on the horizontal bar,
but to go beyond himself; beyond his ordinary punctual precision; beyond
the mere easy swing and temperate rhythm. Instead of the old
good-natured rivalry, it was as if he struggled and did battle in some
supreme and terrible fight. Each movement that he made fired his blood;
from the first flinging of his lithe body upward, and the sliding of its
taut muscles on the bar, to the frenzy of his revolving, triumphal,
glorious to behold. Each muscle and each nerve had its own peculiar
ecstasy.
And when he dropped from the high bar to the floor he stood tingling and
trembling and breathless from the queer violence with which his heart
threw itself about. So utterly had he gone beyond himself. And he knew
that his demonstration had not been quite so triumphal, so glorious as
he had thought it. There had been far too much hurry and excitement
about it. And Booty told him he was all right, but perhaps not quite up
to his usual form.
It was with the air of a conqueror that Ranny pushed his way through the
packed line of spectators in the gallery. It was with a crushed and
nervous air, as of some great artist, conscious of his aim and of his
failure, that he presented himself to Violet Usher, sliding slantwise
into the place she made for him.
It was as if she had known that he would come to her. They shook hands
awkwardly. And with the stirring of her body there came from her that
faint warm odor of violets.
"I didn't expect to see you here," he said, at last.
"Winny brought me; else I shouldn't have come."
She was very precise in making Winny responsible for her appearance. He
gathered that that was her idea of propriety.
"Well--anyhow--it's a bit of all right," he said. Then they sat silent
for a while.
And the girl's face turned to Ranny with a flying look; and it was as if
she had touched him with her eyes, lightly and shyly, and was gone. Then
her eyes began slowly to look him up and down, up and down, from his
bare neck and arms, white against the thin crimson binding of his
"zephyr," from his shoulders and from his chest where the lines and
bosses of the muscles showed under the light gauze, and from his crimson
belt, down the firm long slopes to his knees; and it was as if her eyes
brushed him, palpably, with soft feather strokes. They rested on his
face; and it was as if they held him between two ardent hands. And over
her own face as she looked at him there went a little wave of change.
Her rich color stirred and deepened; her lips parted for the quick
passage of her breath; and her blue eyes looked gray as if veiled in a
light vapor.
Ranny was seized with an overpowering, a terrible consciousness of
himself and of his evolutions on the horizontal bar.
"Well," he said, as if in apology, "you've seen me figuring queerly."
"Oh, it's all right for men," she said. "Besides, I've seen _you_
before."
"Why, you weren't here last time?"
"No. Not here."
"Where, then? Where on earth can you have seen me?"
She bent her brows at him in that way she had, under the brim of her
wide hat. "I saw you at Wandsworth--at the Sports--running in that race.
When you won the cup."
"Oh, Lord," said Ranny, expressing his innermost confusion.
"Well, I'm sure you ran beautifully."
"Oh, yes, I _ran_ all right."
"And you jumped!"
"Anybody can jump," said Ranny.
"Can they?"
"Oh, Lord, yes. You should see Fred Booty."
"I did see him. You won the cup off him."
She drew herself up, in that other way she had, as if challenged.
"And he'll win it off me next year. You bet. Look--here they are."
Some instinct, risen he knew not whence, compelled him to divert her
gaze.
From below in the great hall came the sound of the rhythmic padding and
tramping of feet. The Young Ladies of the Polytechnic were marching in.
Right and left they wheeled, and right and left ranged themselves in two
long lines under the galleries. Now they were marking time with the
stiff rise and fall of black stockings under the short tunics. Facing
them, at the head of her rank, was Winny Dymond, very upright and
earnest. And with each movement of her hips the crimson sash of
leadership swung in rhythm at her side.
Miss Usher turned to him. "Is Winny with them?"
"Rather. There she is. Right opposite. Jolly she looks, doesn't she?"
Miss Usher looked at Winny. The bent black brows bent lower, and a large
blue eye slued round into her profile, darting a sudden light at him.
"Don't ask _me_," she said, "I'm sure _I_ don't know." And she turned
her shoulder on him and sat thus averted, gazing at her own hands folded
in her lap.
Ransome leaned out over the balustrade and watched Winny. And for a
moment, as he watched her, he felt again the old sense of tenderness and
absurdity, mingled, this time, with that mysterious pain.
A barbell struck on the floor. A feminine voice gave the sharp word of
command, and the Young Ladies formed up for their performance on the
parallel bars.
Miss Usher still sat averted.
"Look," he said, at last, "it's Winny's turn."
She turned slowly, reluctantly almost, and looked.
Winny Dymond, shy, but grave and earnest, was going through her little
preliminary byplay at the bars. Then, with her startling suddenness, she
rushed at them, and swung herself, it seemed to Ransome, with an
increased abandonment, a wilder rhythm and motion; and when she raised
her body like an arch, far-stretching and wide-planted, it seemed to him
that it rose higher and stretched farther and wider than before, that
there was, in fact, something preposterous in her attitude. For as Miss
Usher looked at Winny she drew herself up and her red mouth stiffened.
Ranny's tension relaxed when Winny flung herself from side to side again
and over, and lighted on her feet in the little curtseying posture,
perfunctory and pathetic.
He clapped his hands. "'Jove! That's good!" He was smiling tenderly.
He turned to Miss Usher, eager and delighted. "Well--what'd you think of
it?"
The eyes he gazed into were remote and cold. Miss Usher did not answer
him. And he gathered from her silence that she disapproved profoundly of
the performance. He wondered why.
"Oh, come," he said. "She's the best we've got. There's not one of those
girls that can touch her on the bars. Look at them."
"I don't want to look at them. I didn't think it would be like that. I'm
not used to it. I've never been to a Gymnasium in my life before."
"You ought to come. You should join us, Miss Usher. Why don't you?"
"Thank you, Mr. Ransome, I'd rather not. I don't see myself!"
He didn't see her either. Some of his innocence had gone. She had taken
it away from him. He was beginning to understand how Winny's performance
had struck her. It was magnificent, but it was not a thing that could be
done by a nice woman, by a woman who respected herself and her own
womanhood and her own beauty; not a thing that could be done by Violet
Usher. He was not sure that in her view it was consistent with
propriety, with reticence, with a perfect purity. And he began to wonder
whether his own view of it had not been a little shameless.
He rushed, for sheer decency, into a stuttering defense.
"Well, but--well, but--but it's all right, don't you know?"
"It's all right for men. They're different. But--"
"Not right for women?"
"If you reelly want to know--no. I don't think it is. It isn't pretty,
for one thing."
"Oh, I say--how about Winny?"
"Winny's different. It doesn't seem to matter so much for her."
"Why not--for her?"
"Well--she's a queer creature anyhow."
"How d'you mean--queer?"
"Well--more like a boy, somehow, than a girl. She doesn't care. She'll
do anything. And she's plucky. If she's taken a thing into her head
she'll go through with it whatever you say."
"Yes, she's got pluck," he assented. "_And_ cheek."
"Mind you, she's as good as gold, with all her queerness. But it _is_
queer, Mr. Ransome, if you're a woman, not to care what you do, or what
you look like doing it. And she's so innocent, she doesn't reelly know.
She couldn't do it if she did. All the same, I wish she wouldn't."
She seemed to brood over it in beautiful distress.
"It's a pity that the boys encourage them. Boys don't mind, of course.
But _men_ don't like it."
And with every word of her strange, magical voice there went from him
some shred of innocence and illusion. It was, of course, his innocence,
his ignorance that had made him tolerant of a Grand Display, that had
filled him with admiration for the Young Ladies of the Polytechnic
Gymnasium, and that had attracted him to Winny Dymond. Everything he had
thought and felt about Winny was illusion. It was illusion, that sense
she gave him of tenderness and of absurdity. Gymnastics were all very
well in their way. But nice women, the women that men cared about, women
like Violet Usher, did not make of their bodies a spectacle in Grand
Displays. Little Winny, whatever she did, was all right, of course; but
now he came to think of it, he began to wish, like Violet Usher, that
she wouldn't do it. It was as a boy and her comrade that he had admired
her. It was as a man that he criticized her now, looking at her through
Violet Usher's eyes. And it was as a boy that he had cared, and as a man
that he had ceased to care.
In one night Ranny had suddenly grown up.
Of course, it might have been different if she had cared for _him_.
"What does it mean, the Combined Maze? What is it?"
Miss Usher was studying her programme.
The Combined Maze? That wasn't so easy to explain. But Ranny explained
it. It was, he said, a maze, because you ran it winding in and out like,
and combined, because men and women ran in it all mixed up together.
They made patterns accordin' as they ran, and the patterns were the plan
of the maze. You didn't see the plan. You didn't know it, unless you
were leader. You just followed.
"I see. Men and women together."
"Men and women together."
"Are you running in it?"
"Yes."
"Does Winny run in it?"
"Rather. We run together. You'll see how it's done."
Miss Usher thought she saw.
* * * * *
And they ran in it together, Ransome with Winny before him, turning from
him, parting from him, flying from him, and returning to him again.
Always with the same soft pad of her feet, the same swaying of her
sturdy, slender body, the same rising and falling on her shoulders of
her childish door-knocker plat.
Winny was a child; that was all that could be said of her; and he, he
was a man, grown up suddenly in a single night.
He ran, perfunctorily, through all the foolish turnings and windings of
the maze. He put his hands on Winny's waist to guide her when, in her
excitement, she went wrong. He linked his arm with hers when they ran
locked, shoulder to shoulder, in the Great Wheel; but it was as if he
held and caught, and was locked together with a child. Winny's charm was
gone; and with it gone the sense of tenderness and absurdity; gone the
magic and the madness of the running. For in Ranny's heart there was
another magic and another madness. And it was as if Life itself had
caught him and locked him with a woman in the whirling of its Great
Wheel.