I licked out, neither seeing nor caring ... almost feeling my way along the rim of the track with my toes, as I ran—­as if I had racing eyes in them.  There was a continuous roar that rose and fell like the sea.  But I neither saw nor heeded.  I just ran and ran.

On the home-stretch a fellow came breast to breast with me.  It was Learoyd ... running low like a swallow skimming the ground.  But it didn’t worry me.  I was calm, just floating along, it seemed to me.

I saw Dunn throwing his camera into the air, in the forefront of the seething crowd.  He was crying for me to come on.  The camera fell in a smashed heap, unregarded.

Barely, with my chest flung out, I took the tape ... trailing off ...  I ran half a lap more, with my class leaping grotesquely and shouting, streaming across field after me—­before I had my senses back again, and realised that the race was over.

“Did I win?  Did I win?  Did I win?” I asked again and again.

“Yes, you won!”

I was being carried about on their shoulders.

“A little more, and we’d have to take you over to the hospital,” commented Smythe, as he looked at me, while I lay prone on my back, resting, under shelter of the tent.

“Who—­who used up all this witch-hazel?” he asked of the rubbers....

I hid my face in the grass, pretending to groan from the strain I had just undergone.  Instead, I was smothering a laugh at myself ... at the school ... at all things....

“God and witch-hazel,” I wanted to shout hysterically, “hurrah for God and witch-hazel.”

Then I rose shakily to my feet, and, flinging myself loose from those who offered to help me, I ran at a good clip, in my sneakers, dangling my running shoes affectionately—­to my solitary room ... with a bearing that boasted, “why, I could run all those three races over again, one right after the other, right now ... no, I’m not tired ... not the least bit tired!”

That night, in the crowded dining hall, the ovation for me was tremendous.

“I’ll smash life just like those races,” I boasted, in my heart.

But my triumph and eminence were not to last long.

To be looked up to at Mt.  Hebron you had to lead a distasteful, colourless life of hypocrisy and piety such as I have seldom seen anywhere before.  Under cover of their primitive Christianity I never found more pettiness.  First, you prayed and hymn-sung yourself into favour, and then indulged in sanctimonious intrigue to keep yourself where you had arrived.

I could not stand my half self-hypnotised hypocrisy any longer.  A spirit of mischief and horseplay awoke in me.  I perpetrated a hundred misdemeanours, most of them unpunishable elsewhere, but of serious import in schools and barracks, where discipline is to be maintained.  I stayed out of bounds late at night ...  I cut classes continually.  I visited Fairfield ... and a factory town further south, where I lounged about the streets all day, talking with people.