effort of a boy were his again, that he had never lost them, that they had never changed. Then a leaden heaviness began to steal along his limbs, he felt the weariness of effort for the first time, a thickening slowness in the muscles of his legs, a numb weight-like heaviness tingling at his finger-tips, and now he no longer looked so sharply and so smartly at the swinging crew below him, the nimbly running boys around him.
He began to pound ahead with dogged and deliberate effort, and his heart was pounding like a hammer at his ribs, his breath was labouring hoarsely in his throat and his tongue felt numb and thick and swollen in his mouth, and blind motes were swimming drunkenly before his eyes. He could hear his voice, unfamiliar and detached, weirdly unreal, as if someone else were speaking in him, as it panted hoarsely:
“Come on, Merton!… Come on, Merton!… Come on, Merton!”
And now the nimbler running footsteps all around him had passed, had gone ahead of him, had vanished. He could no longer see the crews nor know if they were there. He ran on blindly, desperately, hearing, seeing, saying nothing any longer, an anguished leaden creature, weighted down with a million leaden hours and weary efforts, pounding heavily, blindly, mindlessly along, beneath grey timeless skies of an immortal weariness, across the grey barren earth of some huge planetary vacancy—where there was neither shade nor stay nor shelter, where there would never be a resting-place, a room, nor any door which he could enter, and where he must pound blindly, wearily along, alone, through that huge vacancy for ever.
Then voices swarmed around him once again and he could feel strong hands on him. They seized him, stopped him, and familiar faces swarmed forward at him through those swimming motes of blind grey vacancy. He could hear again the hoarse ghost-unreality of his own voice panting: “Come on, Merton!” and see his friends again, now grinning, laughing, shouting, as they shook him. “Stop! The race is over! Merton won!”
LXXV
Their names were Octave Feuillet, Alfred Capus, and Maurice Donnay; their names were Hermant, Courteline, and René Bazin; their names were Jules Renard, Marcelle Tinayre, and André Theuriet; and Clarétie, and Frapié and Tristan Bernard; and de Régnier and Paul
