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:
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.