In course of time Mr. Travers informed me that I was elected an active member of the L.A.C. These magic letters stand for the London Athletic Club, easily the most famous athletic club in the world. I had been there as one of the public on several occasions, and already knew by sight such giants of the arena as Phillips and George and Cowie and other most notable men, all historically famous. In fact George soon joined the professional ranks, as we say, and the day was coming when he would run a mile faster than anybody in the world had ever run it.

The first time I went to Stamford Bridge it so happened that a most sad misfortune fell on my friend Dicky Travers.

He had entered for a two-mile walking race and trained very carefully for it—as well he might, because, such was his universal fame at this distance, that he was handicapped to give all the other competitors a lot of start. Some had actually as much as a minute start; but Dicky started from scratch. He told me in the morning of the day that he felt very well and expected to get pretty near fourteen minutes for the two miles. I lunched with him on the day, and, as it was an evening meeting at the L.A.C. and he would not be racing before six o’clock, he ate a steak and some bread and cheese; but he drank nothing but water; because experience had shown him that beer was no use before a great struggle of this sort.

In due time, after the first heats of a “sprint” and a half-mile race, the walking competition came on, and I was very glad to hear several spectators cheer Travers when he appeared on the cinder path. I also did the same. He wore black drawers and vest; but the rest of him was, of course, entirely bare, save for his feet, which were encased in walking shoes which he had made expressly to his directions. In each hand he carried an oblong cork, and his face had a cheerful and calm expression which little indicated the great ordeal before him.

Eight men had entered for the race, and the limit man went off at such a great pace that it seemed absurd to suppose Travers could ever get near him. Others started quickly after each other according to the handicap, and then a man called Forrester started. He was next to Travers and received only ten seconds start from him. But such was his speed that he had gone about forty yards before Dicky was told to go.

Every eye was fixed upon the scratch man as, with a magnificent and raking action, he set out on his gigantic task. Though not very tall, he had a remarkable stride, and his legs, which were slightly hairy and magnificently shaped, were remarkable, owing to a muscle that had developed on the front of the shin bones. This is the walking muscle, and only great walkers and racers have it developed in this extraordinary manner. Travers had a very long stride and a graceful motion. You didn’t realise that he was going so fearfully fast till you saw that, from the first, he began to gain upon the rest. Some of the others—all, of course, men of great distinction—appeared to be walking quite as fast as Dicky; but they were not. Umpires ran along on the grass inside the track to see the walking was fair; and the men who performed this onerous task had all been famous also in their day.

At last they exercised their umpiring powers and stopped one of the competitors. He had a most curious action, certainly, and several experts near me prophesied from the first that he would be pulled out. He didn’t seem to be actually running and he didn’t seem to be actually walking. It was a kind of shuffle of a very swift and speedy character; but whatever it exactly was, the umpires didn’t like it and told him that he was disqualified. He was a very tall man in a red costume, and he didn’t seem in the least surprised when they stopped him. In fact he was rather glad, I believe. A spectator next to me, smoking a cigar and talking very loud, said that the man had been really making the pace for another man.

Now the race had covered a mile and Travers was walking in the most magnificent manner it is possible to describe. An expression of great fierceness was in his eye and he was foaming slightly at the mouth, like a spirited steed. He and the man who had received ten seconds from him were too good for the rest of the field, and when they had covered a mile and a half, they passed the leader up to that distance and simply left him standing still. It was now clear there was going to be a historic race for the victory between Forrester and Travers, and the supporters of each great athlete shouted encouragement and yelled and left no stone unturned to excite their man to make a supreme effort and win. Travers and Forrester were walking one behind the other and it was, of course, a classical exhibition of fair “heel-and-toe” work, such as is probably never seen outside the famous precincts of the L.A.C. I shrieked for Travers and the man next me, with the cigar, howled for Forrester. Such was his excitement that the man with the cigar seized his hat and waved it to Forrester as he passed; and seeing him do this, I seized my hat, too, and waved it to Dicky.

Of course Travers, with the enormous cunning of the old stager, had kept just behind Forrester all the way—to let him set the pace; but now he knew that Forrester was slacking off a little—to save himself for a great finish—and so Travers felt that the time had come to make his bid for victory. It was just passing me that he did so, and I saw the flash of genius in his eye as he gathered himself for the supreme effort that was to dash the hopes of Forrester. Only one more round of the cinder track had to be made, so Dicky instantly got to Forrester’s shoulder and, after a few terrific moments, during which I and the man with the cigar and many others practically ceased to breathe, Travers wrested the lead from Forrester. It was a gigantic achievement and a cool and knowing sportsman near me with a stop watch in his hand declared that if Dicky wasn’t pulled up he would do fourteen and a quarter. “He’s getting among it,” said the cool hand, which was his way of meaning that Travers was promised to achieve a notable performance.

But Forrester was not yet done with. This magnificent walker, in no way discouraged by his doughty foeman, stuck gamely to his colossal task and Travers, try as he would, could not shake him off.

“He’s lifting! He’s lifting!” screamed the man with the cigar. “Pull him out—stop him!”

“He’s not—you’re a liar!” I shouted back, in a fever of rage, because the friend of Forrester, of course, meant that Travers was lifting. And if you “lift” in a walking race, you are running and not walking and all is over.

They had only two hundred yards to go and Travers was still in front, when an umpire, to my horror, approached Dicky. He had been watching Dicky’s legs with a microscopic scrutiny for some time and now he stopped the leader and told him that he was disqualified.

I shouted “Shame! Shame!” with all my might, and so did several other men; but the man with the cigar, who evidently understood only too well the subtleties of lifting among sprint walkers, screamed shrilly with exaggerated joy and behaved like a silly fool in every possible way.

Forrester, relieved of his formidable rival, took jolly good care not to lift himself. And as the next man in the race was nearly a hundred yards behind, he, of course, won comfortably.

Travers behaved like the magnificent sportsman he was, and I felt just as proud of knowing him as if he’d actually won; for he did not whine and swear and bully the umpires or anything like that. He just took his coat from the bench where he had thrown it before the race, inquired of the timekeeper what Forrester had done it in, and presently walked into the dressing-room with the others, quite indifferent to the hearty cheers that greeted him and the victor.

I went in while he dressed and he said the verdict, though hard, was just.

“I knew he was going to do me when he came up again after I passed him,” explained Travers. “He’s a North London chap in a lawyer’s office. I’ve never walked against him before. I ought to have pushed him much earlier and tried to outwalk him for the mile. He’s got fine pace. Look at the time—14.22—and he wasn’t walking after I came off. I meet him again at Catford Bridge next month. He seems a very good sort.”

Thus did this remarkable sportsman take his defeat. But he was, of course, cast down by it, for he had only been stopped twice before during the whole of his honourable and brilliant career on the cinder path.

As for my own experience, I went down after my election and Travers himself came to see how I shaped. At Merivale I had been a sprinter and had done well up to two hundred yards, and since I came to London I had seen Harry Hutchings—the greatest sprinter who ever lived and of course a professional champion. Therefore I decided to go in for that branch of the pedestrian’s art. I bought my costume, which was entirely black, like Dicky’s, and a pair of spiked running shoes and a black bag to carry them in. Then I went down one evening after office hours with my friend, and he introduced me to Nat Perry and his son, Charles Perry. Nat Perry was the hero of many a hard-won field, and immense and dogged courage sat upon his bronzed and clean-shaved countenance. Many hundreds of athletes had passed through his hands to victory or defeat, as the case might be, and he was a master in the art of judging an athlete’s powers. As the friend of Travers he welcomed me with great kindness, heard that I wanted to be a sprinter, but seemed doubtful whether I was the sort of build for that branch of running.

“You look more like a half-miler or miler with them legs,” he said, casting his eye over me critically but kindly. “And you’re on the thin side. You want to put on some flesh. But you’re young yet.”

I told Nat Perry that I hoped to put on some flesh and that I was prepared to follow his advice in everything. We came out on to the track presently, and I ran and Perry watched. But he kept very calm about it and I had a sort of feeling he wasn’t much interested. Presently he said:

“You don’t begin running till you’ve gone fifty yards. Start running from the jump off.”

He asked another man, who was training, to show me how to start; because his own athletic days were, of course, at an end, and he could not show me in person. But the other man most kindly came over and showed me how to get set and how to start like an arrow from a bow, which is half the art of sprinting.

After the trial was over Nat Perry said that it was impossible to prophesy anything until I had shaken down and found my feet on the cinders. “You may be a runner or you may not,” he told me. “I’ve seen bigger duffers than you shape into runners. You work hard for a month and get up your appetite and eat all you can pack away. Running or no running, the exercise in the open air’s what you want, and plenty of it.”

He rubbed me down after I had had a shower bath and gave me a locker for my things. He was a good man besides being so famous, and everybody thought a great deal of him at the L.A.C. His son was also an exceedingly clever trainer.

In course of time I was introduced to a few of the stars of the club, with whom, of course, Travers mixed on terms of perfect equality. They were all brilliant men, and their knowledge of athletics and times and great feats of the past filled me with interest and respect.

I enjoyed the evenings at the L.A.C. very much indeed, and I gradually improved till Perry decided that I had better enter for one of the evening handicaps.

“It will accustom you to the feel of it,” he said. “You’ll have to get over the strangeness before you do anything; and there’s your handicap to be thought on. As an unknown you won’t have your fair start at first; but after you’ve lost your heat for a month of Sundays, then you’ll be on your proper mark and may get on. You’re not a flyer and very like never will be—you ain’t got the physic; but you’ll do a bit, I dare say. And there’s hope for a mile, if you come on next year. No good for a quarter nor yet a half—too punishing. Your ’eart wouldn’t stand it.”

Thus this able and honest man encouraged me cautiously and I obeyed him, and in due time appeared to contest my heat in a hundred yards’ handicap.

It was exciting, but it didn’t last long. I took a preliminary spin and then, curiously enough, a thing happened that quite put me off for the moment. You must know the L.A.C. ground ran along one side of a railway cutting and on the other side, running, in fact, parallel with the athletic grounds, was a cemetery. And now, just as I was going to have a second preliminary spin, there came across the railway cutting the exceedingly mournful sound of a funeral bell tolling. Somehow I felt that while on one side of the line was a crowd of excited and eager men full of life and hope and joy, and others, like myself, also full of life and hope and joy, going to run in a competition and exert their wonderful energies to the utmost—while this was happening upon one side of the railway cutting, a scene of a very different nature was going on upon the other. And I got a sort of fancy they were burying a young man in his eighteenth year, like myself—a man who only a few days before was full of fight, and enjoying life and hoping no doubt some day to be somebody worth talking about. And now, instead of taking the world by storm and getting knighted even, or other honours, here was the unfortunate chap being tolled into the earth under the weeping eyes of a heartbroken mother and other relations. The reality of the thing was fearful, and it was rather sad in a way, too, because it did me no good to have my mind distracted in this manner just before I was called upon to battle against four other men, all considerably older than I was myself.

In fact they had to rouse me and call me to the starting-post, where the other competitors had already assembled. There was no man at scratch in my heat, but a great and powerful athlete called Muspratt, who received four yards from scratch, was the best runner of the five. I got eight yards, which was only four from Muspratt and not enough; and of the other three men in the race, one, who was startlingly fat to be a sprinter, had nine yards and one had ten.

At the sound of the pistol we all dashed off and I started fairly well. The sensation in a sprint of this kind is most interesting, because at first your position with respect to the other runners is unchanged. Though you are all flying along at a terrific pace, you appear to be all hardly moving at all. But then, after about half the distance had been run, I found, much to my astonishment, that I had caught the man who had one yard start from me, and both he and I were almost dead level with the front man. Now, of course, was the time for me to make my supreme effort; but just as I was about to do so, I became conscious of something white on my left and found, to my great interest, that Muspratt was only a yard behind me. In fact he was already making his effort, and when I made mine it proved useless against Muspratt, who was an old warhorse of the cinder path and a magnificent judge of pace. Twenty yards from the tape I honestly believe the whole five of us were in a dead line; but Muspratt really had us in the hollow of his hand, though we little knew it and all strained every nerve for victory. He slid past us, however, and broke the tape a yard ahead of myself and the fat man. And I was honestly more amazed by the splendid running of the fat man than anything else in the heat; because it showed what pluck and training and the genius of Nat Perry could do, even for such an unpromising sprinter.

Travers, who most kindly consented to come down that evening and encourage me, though he was not doing anything himself, figured it all out very correctly on paper afterwards. The heat was run in ten and three-fifths of a second by Muspratt with four yards start, and he beat me by a yard and a half. Therefore Travers considered that I had done what would have amounted to a shade worse than eleven seconds from scratch.

Muspratt, who ran in an eyeglass, by the way, which was interesting in itself, though spectacles were common enough with sprinters, got second in the final heat, which was won by a man with nine yards start, who had never before won as much as a salt-cellar, though he had been competing for two years unavailingly.

But though of great interest to me, I cannot say any more about my doings at the London Athletic Club, because other more important matters have to be told. What with running and cricket matches against other Fire and Life Insurance Offices, I now got plenty of exercise and felt exceedingly well and keen to proceed with the most important business of my life—which was, of course, to become a tragic actor and play in the greatest dramatic achievements of the human mind.