The Combined Maze

e Grand Display of the

ed 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,

Grand Display announc

LLEL

lea

Tyser, Buist,

F. R

ous, half-ironic applause. "Stic

s to his extraor

nd 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

y 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 fee

ving just flown from the roof of the Gymnasium. Far belo

" "Half a mo!" "Stick it, Ranny; stick

ctually, from his awful emi

t immortalize

plifted at the corners. "Stick it!" was the motto of his individual recklessness and of the dogged, enduring conservatism of his class. It kept

m in his daily and nightly e

ciously. 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 s

mense and slightly prominent blue eyes, a face where all day long the sensual dream brooded heavily. His black eyebr

ight 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 Ranso

ne 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 t

you fit and because (he let old Eno have it) it kept you decent. Old Eno w

ikely to see there, you might as well be in a young ladies' boarding-school. And Ransome said that that was where Jujubes ought to b

reservation: Winny Dymond and the you

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

ted in his flabbiness. For he was a Boy of the Empire

d, showing the great muscles; a splendid figure in his white "zephyr" trimmed with crimson, with the crimson sash of leadership

em, 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

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 h

ttle inarticulate murmur he reserved for Winny. It w

onstration by F. Booty with the Indian clubs, where young Fred, slender and supple as a faun, played on his own mus

OMBIN

hey ran them-the parallel bars, the horses, the mattresses-in under the galleries; they uprooted the

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 visio

ce that the young men and the young girls run together with the racing of the stars, for the

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.

pun 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 dar

ret challenge and defiance of one sex to the other, with separation and estrangement, with a never-ending, baffling approach an

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

ed 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

erfect 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

rful was the Lon

ing 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

had to turn her with his two hands upon her waist. For it was the law of their running that, though i