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.
CHAPTER II
All that winter Ransome's nights and days were regulated in a perfect order—making statements of account for nine hours on five days of the week and four on Saturdays. Three evenings for the Poly. Gym. One for the Swimming Bath. One for sprinting. One (Saturday) for rest or relaxation after the violence of Rugger. One (Sunday) for the improvement of the mind. On Sundays he was very seldom good for anything else.
But in the spring of nineteen-two something stirred in him, something watched and waited; with a subtle agitation, a vague and delicate excitement, it exulted and aspired. The sensation, or whatever it was, had as yet no separate existence of its own. So perfect, in this spring of nineteen-two, was the harmony of Ransome's being that the pulse of the unborn thing was one with all his other pulses; it was one, indistinguishably, with the splendor of life, the madness of running, and the joy he took in his own remarkable performances on the horizontal bar. It had the effect of heightening, mysteriously and indescribably, the joy, the madness, and the splendor. And it was dominant, insistent. Like some great and unintelligible motif it ran ringing and sounding through the vast rhythmic tumult of physical energy.
Not for a moment did he connect it with the increasing interest that he took in the appearance of the Young Ladies of the Poly. Gym. He was not aware how aware he was of their coming, nor how his heart thumped and throbbed and his nerves trembled at the tramp, tramp of their feet along the floor.
For sometimes, it might be twice a year, the young men and the young women of the Gymnasium met and mingled in a Grand Display.