Sec.4

That moment, while many hands helped me out of the water; while the building echoed with cheers and whistles; while White, too happy to speak, beamed upon the world; while fists hammered me on the back; while Cully, splendidly swimming, made the victory sure; I experienced such a happiness as would not be outweighed by years of subsequent misery.  Though my limbs were so stiff that it was pain to move them, they glowed with diffused happiness; though my heart was fluttering at an alarming pace, it beat also with the electric pulsations of joy:  though my breath was too disturbed for speech, yet my mind framed the words:  “I’ve done it, I’ve done it”; though my head ached with the blow it had received, it was also bursting with a delight too great to hold.  I had never done anything for the house before, and now I had won for its shelf the Swimming Cup.

They helped me to my cabin, and, as I sat there, I composed the tale of success that I would send to my mother.  Then I stood up to dress, and, in my excitement, put on my shirt before my vest.  There was a confusion of cheers within and without the building; and Upton, Fillet, and Jerry Brisket, the judges, were to be seen in animated debate, while many others stood round and listened.  Dazed, faint, and unconscious of the passage of momentous events, I took no notice of them, but drank deeply of victory.  It exhilarated me to reconstruct the whole story, beginning with my early stage-fright and ending with the triumphant climax, when I crashed into the end of the baths.

I was indulging the glorious retrospect when there broke upon my reverie a sullen youth who said: 

“Well, Ray, we haven’t won it after all.”

There was a hitch in my understanding, and I asked: 

“What d’you mean?”

“You were disqualified.”

“I!” It was almost a hair-whitening shock.  “I!  What?  Why?  What for?”

“They say you dived before Johnson touched the rope.  Nobody believes you did.”

So then; I had lost the cup for Bramhall.  The lie!  Too old to vent suffering in tears, I showed it in a panting chest, a trembling lip, and a dry, wide-eyed stare at my informant.  Backed by a disorder outside, he repeated:  “Nobody believes you did.”

All happiness died out of my ken.  Conscious only of aching limbs, a fluttering heart, uneven breath, and a bursting head, I cried: 

“I didn’t.  I didn’t.  Who said so?”

“Fillet—­Carpet Slippers.”

“The liar!  The liar!” I muttered; and, with a sudden attack of something like cramp down my left side, I fell into a sitting position, and thence into a huddled and fainting heap upon the floor.

CHAPTER X

WATERLOO CONTINUES:  THE CHARGE AT THE END OF THE DAY

Sec.1