From the Angle of Seventeen

by Eden Phillpotts

He rubbed me down after I had had a shower bath and gave me a locker for my things. He was a good man besides being so famous, and everybody thought a great deal of him at the L.A.C. His son was also an exceedingly clever trainer.

In course of time I was introduced to a few of the stars of the club, with whom, of course, Travers mixed on terms of perfect equality. They were all brilliant men, and their knowledge of athletics and times and great feats of the past filled me with interest and respect.

I enjoyed the evenings at the L.A.C. very much indeed, and I gradually improved till Perry decided that I had better enter for one of the evening handicaps.

“It will accustom you to the feel of it,” he said. “You’ll have to get over the strangeness before you do anything; and there’s your handicap to be thought on. As an unknown you won’t have your fair start at first; but after you’ve lost your heat for a month of Sundays, then you’ll be on your proper mark and may get on. You’re not a flyer and very like never will be—you ain’t got the physic; but you’ll do a bit, I dare say. And there’s hope for a mile, if you come on next year. No good for a quarter nor yet a half—too punishing. Your ’eart wouldn’t stand it.”

Thus this able and honest man encouraged me cautiously and I obeyed him, and in due time appeared to contest my heat in a hundred yards’ handicap.

It was exciting, but it didn’t last long. I took a preliminary spin and then, curiously enough, a thing happened that quite put me off for the moment. You must know the L.A.C. ground ran along one side of a railway cutting and on the other side, running, in fact, parallel with the athletic grounds, was a cemetery. And now, just as I was going to have a second preliminary spin, there came across the railway cutting the exceedingly mournful sound of a funeral bell tolling. Somehow I felt that while on one side of the line was a crowd of excited and eager men full of life and hope and joy, and others, like myself, also full of life and hope and joy, going to run in a competition and exert their wonderful energies to the utmost—while this was happening upon one side of the railway cutting, a scene of a very different nature was going on upon the other. And I got a sort of fancy they were burying a young man in his eighteenth year, like myself—a man who only a few days before was full of fight, and enjoying life and hoping no doubt some day to be somebody worth talking about. And now, instead of taking the world by storm and getting knighted even, or other honours, here was the unfortunate chap being tolled into the earth under the weeping eyes of a heartbroken mother and other relations. The reality of the thing was fearful, and it was rather sad in a way, too, because it did me no good to have my mind distracted in this manner just before I was called upon to battle against four other men, all considerably older than I was myself.

In fact they had to rouse me and call me to the starting-post, where the other competitors had already assembled. There was no man at scratch in my heat, but a great and powerful athlete called Muspratt, who received four yards from scratch, was the best runner of the five. I got eight yards, which was only four from Muspratt and not enough; and of the other three men in the race, one, who was startlingly fat to be a sprinter, had nine yards and one had ten.

At the sound of the pistol we all dashed off and I started fairly well. The sensation in a sprint of this kind is most interesting, because at first your position with respect to the other runners is unchanged. Though you are all flying along at a terrific pace, you appear to be all hardly moving at all. But then, after about half the distance had been run, I found, much to my astonishment, that I had caught the man who had one yard start from me, and both he and I were almost dead level with the front man. Now, of course, was the time for me to make my supreme effort; but just as I was about to do so, I became conscious of something white on my left and found, to my great interest, that Muspratt was only a yard behind me. In fact he was already making his effort, and when I made mine it proved useless against Muspratt, who was an old warhorse of the cinder path and a magnificent judge of pace. Twenty yards from the tape I honestly believe the whole five of us were in a dead line; but Muspratt really had us in the hollow of his hand, though we little knew it and all strained every nerve for victory. He slid past us, however, and broke the tape a yard ahead of myself and the fat man. And I was honestly more amazed by the splendid running of the fat man than anything else in the heat; because it showed what pluck and training and the genius of Nat Perry could do, even for such an unpromising sprinter.

Travers, who most kindly consented to come down that evening and encourage me, though he was not doing anything himself, figured it all out very correctly on paper afterwards. The heat was run in ten and three-fifths of a second by Muspratt with four yards start, and he beat me by a yard and a half. Therefore Travers considered that I had done what would have amounted to a shade worse than eleven seconds from scratch.

Muspratt, who ran in an eyeglass, by the way, which was interesting in itself, though spectacles were common enough with sprinters, got second in the final heat, which was won by a man with nine yards start, who had never before won as much as a salt-cellar, though he had been competing for two years unavailingly.