a week, and it sustained him in his orgies of physical energy at
the Poly. Gym.

Best of all, it sustained him in his daily and nightly encounters with
young Mercier.

He was all the more determined to stick it by the knowledge that young
Mercier was up there in the gallery looking at him. He could see him
leaning over the balustrade and smiling at him atrociously. 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 smiled atrociously. At Wandsworth, behind
the counter, or in the little zinc-roofed dispensing-room at the back,
among the horribly smelling materials of his craft, he smiled,
remembering him.

Mercier was a black-haired, thick-set youth with heavy features in a
heavy, pasty face, a face oddly decorated by immense and slightly
prominent blue eyes, a face where all day long the sensual dream brooded
heavily. His black eyebrows gave it a certain accent and distinction. It
was because of his dream that Leonard Mercier could afford to smile.

He was one of those who wanted to know what Ranny did it for. He
couldn't see what fun the young goat got out of his evenings. Not half,
no, nor a quarter of what he, Mercier, could get from one night 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 Ransome was a corker, though he
boasted to three entire strangers that that young fellow was a friend of
his, his curiosity was still unsatisfied. He still wanted to know what
the young goat did it for.

He wanted to know it now. And at his insistence young Ransome was
abashed. How could he explain to old Eno what he did it for or what it
felt like? He couldn't explain it to himself, he had no words for it,
for that ecstasy of living, that fusion of all faculties in one rhythm
and one 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 the feet on the highway? To Jujubes, who went in like a cushion
no matter where you prodded him, how describe the feel of a taut muscle,
the mounting swell of it, the resistance, and the small, almost
impalp