The Fifty-Yard Dash

AFTER a certain letter came to me from New York the year I was twelve years old, I made up my mind to become the most powerful man in my neighborhood. The letter was from my friend Hector McDempsey. I had clipped a coupon from Argosy All-Story Magazine, signed it, placed it in an envelope, and mailed it to him. He had written back promptly, with an enthusiasm bordering on pure delight, saying I was undoubtedly a man of uncommon intelligence, potentially a giant, and — unlike the average run-of-the-mill people of the world, who were, in a manner of speaking, dream-walkers and daydreamers — a person who would some day be somebody.

His opinion of me was very much like my own. It was pleasant, however, to have the opinion so emphatically corroborated, particularly by a man in New York — and a man with the greatest chest expansion in the world. With the letter came several photographic reproductions of Mr. McDempsey wearing nothing but a little bit of leopard skin. He was a tremendous man and claimed that at one time he had been puny. He was loaded all over with muscle and appeared to be somebody who could lift a 1920 Ford roadster and tip it over. It was an honor to have him for a friend.

The only trouble was — I did n’t have the money. I forget how much the exact figure was at the beginning of our acquaintanceship, but I have n’t forgotten that it was an amount completely out of the question. While I was eager to be grateful to Mr. McDempsey for his enthusiasm, I did n’t seem to be able to find words with which to explain about not having the money, without immediately appearing to be a dream-walker and a daydreamer myself. So, while waiting from one day to another, looking everywhere for words that would not blight our friendship and degrade me to commonness, I talked the matter over with my uncle Gyko, who was studying Oriental philosophy at the time. He was amazed at my curious ambition, but quite pleased. He said the secret of greatness, according to Yoga, was the releasing within one’s self of those mysterious vital forces which are in all men.

‘These strength,’ he said in English which he liked to affect when speaking to me, ‘ease from God. I tell you, Wheeley, eat ease wonderful.’

I told him I could n’t begin to become the powerful man I had decided to become until I sent Mr. McDempsey some money.

‘Mohney!’ my uncle said with contempt. ‘I tell you, Wheeley, mohney is naw thing. You cannot bribe God.’

Although my uncle Gyko was n’t exactly a puny man, he was certainly not the man Hector McDempsey was. In a wrestling match I felt certain Mr. McDempsey would get a headlock or a half nelson or a toe hold on my uncle and either make him give up or squeeze him to death. And then again, on the other hand, I wondered. My uncle was nowhere near as big as Mr. McDempsey, but neither was Mr. McDempsey as dynamically furious as my uncle. It seemed to me that, at best, Mr. McDempsey, in a match with my uncle, would have a great deal of unfamiliar trouble — I mean with the mysterious vital forces that were always getting released in my uncle, so that very often a swift glance from him would make a big man quail and turn away, or, if he had been speaking, stop quickly.

Long before I had discovered words with which to explain to Mr. McDempsey about the money, another letter came from him. It was as cordial as the first, and as a matter of fact, if anything, a little more cordial. I was delighted and ran about, releasing mysterious vital forces, turning handsprings, scrambling up trees, turning somersaults, trying to tip over 1920 Ford roadsters, challenging all comers to wrestle, and in many other ways alarming my relatives and irritating the neighbors.

Not only was Mr. McDempsey not sore at me, he had reduced the cost of the course. Even so, the money necessary was still more than I could get hold of. I was selling papers every day, but that money was for bread and stuff like that. For a while I got up very early every morning and went around town looking for a small satchel full of money. During six days of this adventuring I found a nickel and two pennies. I found also a woman’s purse containing several foulsmelling cosmetic items, no money, and a slip of paper on which was written in an ignorant hand: ‘Steve Hertwig, 8764 Ventura Avenue.’

Three days after the arrival of Mr. McDempsey’s second letter, his third letter came. From this time on, our correspondence became one-sided. In fact, I did n’t write at all. Mr. McDempsey’s communications were overpowering and not at all easy to answer, without money. There was, in fact, almost nothing to say.

It was wintertime when the first letter came, and it was then that I made up my mind to become the most powerful man in my neighborhood and ultimately, for all I knew, one of the most powerful men in the world. I had ideas of my own as to how to go about getting that way, but I had also the warm friendship and high regard of Air. AIcDempsey in New York, and the mystical and furious guardianship of my uncle Gyko.

The letters from Air. AIcDempsey continued to arrive every two or three days all winter and on into springtime. I remember, the day apricots were ripe enough to steal, the arrival of a most charming letter from my friend in New York. It was a hymn to newness on earth, the arrival of springtime, the time of youth in the heart, of renewal, fresh strength, fresh determination, and many other things. It was truly a beautiful epistle, probably as line as any to the Romans or anybody else. It was full of the legend-quality, the world-feeling, and the dignity-of-strength-feeling so characteristic of Biblical days. The last paragraph of the lovely hymn brought up, apologetically, the coarse theme of money. The sum was six or seven times as little as it had been originally, and a new element had come into Air. AIcDempsey’s programme of changing me over from a nobody to a giant of tremendous strength, and extreme attractiveness to women. Mr. McDempsey had decided, he said, to teach me everything in one fell swoop, or one sweep fall, or something of that sort. At any rate, for three dollars, he said, he would send me all his precious secrets in one envelope and the rest would be up to me, and history.

I took the matter up with my uncle Gyko, who by this time had reached the stage of fasting, meditating, walking for hours, and vibrating. We had had discussions two or three times a week all winter and he had told me in his own unique broken-English way all the secrets he had been learning from Yoga.

‘I tell you, Wheeley,’ he said, ’I can do anything. Eat ease wonderful.’

I believed him, too, even though he had lost a lot of weight, could n’t sleep, and had a strange dynamic blaze in his eyes. He was very scornful of the world that year and was full of pity for the dumb beautiful animals that man was mistreating, killing, eating, domesticating, and teaching to do tricks.

‘I tell you, Wheeley,’he said, ‘eat ease creaminal to make the horses work. To keal the cows. To teach the dogs to jump, and the monkeys to smoke pipes.’

I told him about the letter from Mr. McDempsey.

‘ Mohney! ’he said. ‘ Always he wants mohney. I do not like heem.’

My uncle was getting all his dope free, from the theosophy-philosophy-astrology-and-miscellaneous shelf at the Public Library. He believed, however, that he was getting it straight from God. Before he took up Yoga he had been one of the boys around town and a good drinker of raki, but after the light began to come to him he gave up drinking. He said he was drinking liquor finer than raki or anything else.

‘What’s that?’ I asked him.

’Wheeley,’he said, ‘eat ease weasdom.'

Anyhow, he had little use for Mr. McDempsey and regarded the man as a charlatan.

‘He’s all right,’I told my uncle.

But my uncle became furious, releasing mysterious vital forces, and said, ‘I wheel break hease head, fooling all you leatle heads.'

‘He ain’t fooling,’I said. ‘He says he’ll give me all his secrets for three dollars.'

‘I tell you, Wheeley,’my uncle Gyko said, ‘he does not know any seacrcts. He case a liar.'

‘I don’t know,’I said. ‘I’d like to try that stuff out.'

‘Eat ease creaminal,’my uncle Gyko said, ‘but I Avheel geave you tree dollars.'

My uncle Gyko gave me the necessary three dollars and I sent them along to Mr. McDempsey. The envelope came from New York, full of Mr. McDempsey’s secrets. They were strangely simple. It was all stuff I had known anyhow but had been too lazy to pay any attention to. The idea Avas to get up early in the morning and for an hour or so to do various kinds of acrobatic exercises, which were illustrated. Also to drink plenty of water, get plenty of fresh air, eat good wholesome food, and keep it up until you were a giant.

I felt a little let doAvn and sent Mr. McDempsey a short polite note saying so. He ignored the note and I never heard from him again. In the meantime,

I had been following the rules and growing more powerful every day. When I say in the meantime, I mean for four days I followed the rules. On the fifth day I decided to sleep instead of getting up and filling the house with noise and getting my grandmother sore. She used to wake up in the darkness of early morning and shout that I was an impractical fool and would never be rich. She would go back to sleep for five minutes, wake up, and then shout that I would never buy and sell for a profit. She would sleep a little more, waken, and shout that there were once three sons of a king; one was wise like his father; the other was crazy about girls; and the third had less brains than a bird. Then she would get out of bed, and, shouting steadily, tell me the whole story while I did my exercises.

The story would usually warn me to be sensible and not go around waking her up before daybreak all the time. That would always be the moral, more or less, although the story itself would be about three sons of some king, or three brothers, each of them very wealthy and usually very greedy, or three daughters, or three proverbs, or three roads, or something else like that.

She was wasting her breath, though, because I was n’t enjoying the earlymorning acrobatics any more than she was. In fact, I was beginning to feel that it was a lot of nonsense, and that my uncle Gyko had been right about Mr. McDempsey in the first place.

So I gave up Mr. McDempsey’s programme and returned to my own, which was more or less as follows: to take it easy and grow to be the most powerful man in the neighborhood without any trouble or exercise. Which is what I did, too.

That spring Longfellow School announced that a track meet was to be held, one school to compete against another, but everybody to participate.

Here, I believed, was my chance. In my opinion I would be first in every event.

Somehow or other, however, continuous meditation on the theme of athletics had the effect of growing into a fury of anticipation that continued all day and all night, so that before the day of the track meet I had run the fifty-yard dash any number of hundreds of times, had jumped the running broad jump, the standing broad jump, and the high jump, and in each event had made my competitors look like weaklings. This tremendous inner activity, which was strictly Yoga, changed on the day of the track meet into fever.

The time came at last for me and three other athletes, one of them a Greek, to go to our marks, get set, and go, and I did, in a blind fury of speed which I knew had never before occurred in the history of athletics.

It seemed to me that never before had any living man moved so swiftly. Within myself I ran the fifty yards fifty times before I so much as opened my eyes to find out how far back I had left the other runners. I was very much amazed at what I saw. Three boys were four yards ahead of me and going away. It was incredible. It was unbelievable, but it was obviously the truth. There ought to be some mistake, but there was n’t. There they were, ahead of me, going away.

Well, it simply meant that I would have to overtake them, with my eyes open, and win the race. This I proceeded to do. They continued, incredibly, however, to go away, in spite of my intention. I became irritated and decided to put them in their places for the impertinence, and began releasing all the mysterious vital forces within myself that I had. Somehow or other, however, not even this seemed to bring me any closer to them and I felt that in some strange way I was being betrayed. If so, I decided, I would shame my betrayer by winning the race in spite of the betrayal, and once again I threw fresh life and fury into my running. There was n’t a great distance still to go, but I knew I would be able to do it. Then I knew I would n’t. The race was over. I was last.

Without the slightest hesitation I protested and challenged the runners to another race, same distance, back. They refused to consider the proposal, which proved, I knew, that they were afraid to race me. I told them they knew very well I could beat them.

It was very much the same in all the other events. When I got home I was in high fever and very angry. I was delirious all night and sick three days. My grandmother took very good care of me and probably was responsible for my not dying. When my uncle Gyko came to visit me he was no longer hollowcheeked. It seems he had finished his fast, which had been a long one — forty days or so; and nights too, I believe. He had stopped meditating, too, because he had practically exhausted the subject. He was again one of the boys around town, drinking, staying up all hours, and following the women.

‘I tell you, Wheeley,’ he said, ‘we are a great family. We can do anything.'

I told him about the track meet.

‘I won every event in my division,’ I said. ‘It was easy. There was nothing to it.’

I was n’t lying, either. It was the truth. Those other fellows were simply living in another world, that was all.