The Combined Maze

nner of his birth. It was in the early eighties, over a shabby chemist's shop in Wandsworth High Street, and it came of the union of Fulley

ndall Fulleymore Ransom

some illimitable prairie; he should have sailed with the vikings or fought with Cromwell's Ironside

he bore

be born, and it was hard to say which of them, Ranny or his mother, more nearly died of it. She must have been aware that there was a hi

in one disastrous marriage her whole stock of youth and gaiety and charm. It was

ealer's inexpensive and utterly insignificant clerk, one of a dozen confined in a long mahogany pen where they sat at long mahogany desks, upon high mahogany stools, making invoices of chairs and tables and

The thing that young Ransome most loathed and abhorred was Flabbiness, next to Flabbiness, Weediness. The years of his adolescence were one long struggle and battle against these two. He had them ever before him, and associated them, absurdly but inveterately, with a pharmaceutical

ite gleam of a shoulder or a thigh; whose vivid, virile odor has a tang of earth in it. He is the image and the type of these forlorn, foredoomed young athletes, these exponents of a city's desperate adolescence, these inarticulate enthusiasts of the earth. He bursts from his pen in the evening at seven or half past, he snatches somewhere a cup of cocoa and a sandwich, and at n

he last lap of his last mile, and limping through Wandsworth High Street home to the house of the weedy p

say you did it because it kept you fit, also (

t, immaculately high-collared, his thin serge suit molded by his sheer muscular development to the semblance of perfection, Ranny was a mark for loitering feet and wandering eyes. Ranny was brown-faced and brown-haired; he had brown eyes made clear with a strain of gray, rather narrow eyes, ever so slightly tilted, na

d at every turn his mysterious decen

e pen, who first put him in the right way, discer

ound the things to do he did do; the things, the frightful things he did about the house with bannisters and windows, of which she knew. As for the things he found to do with bicycles on Wan

ripped, and contemplating ruefully what he conceived to be the first horrible, mushy dawn of Flabbiness in his biceps muscle. All he wanted, Booty had then declared, was a turn or two at the Poly. Gym. Then Booty took Ransome round to his place in Putney Bridge Road, and they sat on Booty's bed with th

hat had in it both an adolescent

"'every reasonable facil'ty shall bee offered fer the formation of a st

e blowed,"

es careful preparation and stern'-stern, Ranny-'deetermination, it deemands the choice of good friends and the avoid'nce of those per

inted out to him, one by one, the privileg

six threw open to him every year the Poly. Gym., the Poly. Swimming Bath, and the Poly. Circulating Library. For ten-and-six

But it tickled him, the sheer fantastic opulence and extravagance of the thing. It tickled him so much that wh

ay, 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

om 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

ers 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