My Life and Loves, Book 1

by Frank Harris

  «How awful!» cried Gertie. «Let's get over the fence,» I replied,

  «and go close!» The next moment I had thrown myself on the wooden paling and half-vaulted, half-clambered over it. But Gertie's skirts prevented her from imitating me. As she stood in dismay, a great thought came to me. «Step on the low rail, Gertie,» I cried, «and then on the upper one, and I'll lift you over. Quick!» At once she did as she was told, and while she stood with a foot on each rail hesitating, and her hand on my head to steady herself, I put my right hand and arm between her legs, and pulling her at the same moment towards me with my left hand, I lifted her over safely, but my arm was in her crotch, and when I withdrew it, my right hand stopped on her sex and began to touch it. It was larger than E…'s and had more hairs and was just as soft, but she did not give me time to let it excite me so intensely. «Don't!» she exclaimed angrily. «Take your hand away!» And slowly, reluctantly I obeyed, trying to excite her first. As she still scowled, «Come quick!» I cried, and taking her hand, drew her over to the blazing wreck. In a little while we learned what had happened: a goods train loaded with barrels of oil had been at the top of the siding: it began to glide down of its own weight and ran into the Irish Express on its way from London to Holyhead. When the two met, the oil barrels were hurled over the engine of the express train, caught fire on the way and poured in flame over the first three carriages, reducing them and their unfortunate inmates to cinders in a very short time. There were a few persons burned and singed in the fourth and fifth carriages, but not many. Open-eyed, we watched the gang of workmen lift out charred things like burnt logs, rather than men and women, and lay them reverently in rows alongside the rails: about forty bodies, if I remember rightly, were taken out of that holocaust. Suddenly Gertie realized that it was late and quickly hand in hand we made our way home: «They will be angry with me,» said Gertie, «for being so late; it's after midnight.» «When you tell them what you've seen,» I replied, «they won't wonder why we waited!» As we parted I said,

  «Gertie, dear, I want to thank you-» «What for?» she said shortly.

  «You know,» I said cunningly. «It was so kind of you-» She made a face at me and ran up the steps into her house. Slowly I returned to my lodgings, only to find myself the hero of the house when I told the story in the morning. That experience in common made Gertie and myself great friends. She used to kiss and say I was sweet: once she even let me see her breasts when I told her a girl (I did not say who it was) had shown hers to me once: her breasts were nearly as large as my sister's and very pretty. Gertie even let me touch her legs right up to the knee; but as soon as I tried to go further, she would pull down her dress with a frown. Still I was always going higher, making progress; persistence brings one closer to any goal; but alas, it was near the end of Christmas holidays and though I returned to Rhyl at Easter, I never saw Gertie again. When I was just over thirteen I tried mainly out of pity to get up a revolt of the fags, and at first had a partial success, but some of the little fellows talked and as a ringleader I got a trouncing. The monitors threw me down on my face on a long desk; one sixth-form boy sat on my head and another on my feet, and a third, it was Jones, laid on with an ash plant. I bore it without a groan but I can never describe the storm of rage and hate that boiled in me. Do English fathers really believe that such work is a part of education? It made me murderous. When they let me up, I looked at Jones and if looks could kill, he'd have had short shrift.

  He tried to hit me but I dodged the blow and went out to plot revenge.

  Jones was the head of the cricket first eleven in which I too was given a place just for my bowling. Vernon of the sixth was the chief bowler, but I was second, the only boy in the lower school who was in the eleven at all. Soon afterwards a team from some other school came over to play us: the rival captains met before the tent, all on their best behavior; for some reason, Vernon not being ready or something, I was given the new ball. A couple of the masters stood near. Jones lost the toss and said to the rival captain very politely, «If you're ready, Sir, we'll go out.» The other captain bowed smiling. My chance had come: «I'm not going to play with you, you brute!» I cried and dashed the ball in Jones' face. He was very quick and throwing his head aside, escaped the full force of the blow; still the seam of the new ball grazed his cheekbone and broke the skin: everyone stood amazed: only people who know the strength of English conventions can realize the sensation. Jones himself did not know what to do but took out his handkerchief to mop the blood, the skin being just broken. As for me, I walked away by myself. I had broken the supreme law of our schoolboy honor: never to give away our dissensions to a master, still less to boys and masters from another school; I had sinned in public, too, and before everyone; I'd be universally condemned. The truth is, I was desperate, dreadfully unhappy, for since the breakdown of the fags' revolt the lower boys had drawn away from me and the older boys never spoke to me if they could help it; and then it was always as «Pat.» I felt myself an outcast and was utterly lonely and miserable, as only despised outcasts can be. I was sure, too, I should be expelled and knew my father would judge me harshly; he was always on the side of the authorities and masters.

  However, the future was not to be as gloomy as my imagination pictured it. The mathematical master was a young Cambridge man of perhaps six and twenty, Stackpole by name: I had asked him one day about a problem in algebra and he had been kind to me. On returning to the school this fatal afternoon about six, I happened to meet him on the edge of the playing field and by a little sympathy he soon drew out my whole story. «I want to be expelled. I hate the beastly school,» was my cry. All the charm of the Irish schools was fermenting in me: I missed the kindliness of boy to boy and of the masters to the boys; above all the imaginative fancies of fairies and «the little people» which had been taught us by our nurses, and though only half believed in, yet enriched and glorified life-all this was lost to me. My head in especial was full of stories of banshees and fairy queens and heroes, half due to memory, half to my own shaping, which made me a desirable companion to Irish boys and only got me derision from the English. «I wish I had known that you were being fagged,»

  Stackpole said when he had heard all. «I can easily remedy that,» and he went with me to the schoolroom and then and there erased my name from the fags' list and wrote in my name in the first mathematical division. «There,» he said with a smile, «you are now in the upper school where you belong. I think,» he added, «I had better go and tell the Doctor what I've done. Don't be downhearted, Harris,» he added; «it'll all come right.» Next day the sixth did nothing except cut out my name from the list of the first eleven: I was told that Jones was going to thrash me, but I startled my informant by saying: «I'll put a knife into him if he lays a hand on me: you can tell him so.» In fact, however, I was half sent to Coventry, and what hurt me most was that it was the boys of the lower school who were the coldest to me, the very boys for whom I had been fighting.

  That gave me a bitter foretaste of what was to happen to me again and again all through my life. The partial boycotting of me didn't affect me much; I went for long walks in the beautiful park of Sir. W.

  W… near the school. I have said many harsh things here of English school life, but for me it had two great redeeming features: the one was the library, which was open to every boy, and the other the physical training of the playing fields, the various athletic exercises and the gymnasium. The library to me for some months meant Walter Scott. How right George Eliot was to speak of him as «making the joy of many a young life.» Certain scenes of his made ineffaceable impressions on me, though unfortunately not always his best work. The wrestling match between the Puritan, Balfour of Burleigh, and the soldier was one of my beloved passages. Another favorite page was approved, too, by my maturer judgment, the brave suicide of the little atheist apothecary in the Fair Maid of Perth. But Scott's finest work, such as the character painting of old Scotch servants, left me cold.

  Dickens I never could
stomach, either as a boy or in later life. His Tale of Two Cities and Nicholas Nickleby seemed to me then about the best, and I've never had any desire since to revise my judgment after reading David Copperfield in my student days and finding men painted by a name or phrase or gesture, women by their modesty, and souls by some silly catch-word; «the mere talent of the caricaturist,» I said to myself, «at his best another Hogarth.» Naturally, the romances and tales of adventure were all swallowed whole; but few affected me vitally: The Chase of the White Horse by Mayne Reid, lives with me still because of the love scenes with the Spanish heroine, and Marryat's Peter Simple, which I read a hundred times and could read again tomorrow; for there is better character painting in Chucks, the boatswain, than in all Dickens, in my poor opinion. I remember being astounded ten years later when Carlyle spoke of Marryat with contempt.

  I knew he was unfair, just as I am probably unfair to Dickens: after all, even Hogarth has one or two good pictures to his credit, and no one survives even three generations without some merit. In my two years I read every book in the library, and half a dozen are still beloved by me. I profited, too, from all games and exercises. I was no good at cricket; I was short-sighted and caught some nasty knocks through an unsuspected astigmatism; but I had an extraordinary knack of bowling, which, as I have stated, put me in the first eleven.

  I liked football and was good at it. I took the keenest delight in every form of exercise: I could jump and run better than almost any boy of my age, and in wrestling and a little later in boxing, was among the best in the school. In the gymnasium, too, I practiced assiduously; I was so eager to excel that the teacher was continually advising me to go slow. At fourteen I could pull myself up with my right hand till my chin was above the bar. In all games the English have a high ideal of fairness and courtesy. No one ever took an unfair advantage of another and courtesy was a law. If another school sent a team to play us at cricket or football, the victors always cheered the vanquished when the game was over, and it was a rule for the captain to thank the captain of the visitors for his kindness in coming and for the good game he had given us. This custom obtained, too, in the Royal Schools in Ireland that were founded for the English garrison, but I couldn't help noting that these courtesies were not practiced in ordinary Irish schools. It was for years the only thing in which I had to admit the superiority of John Bull.

  The ideal of a gentleman is not a very high one. Emerson says somewhere that the evolution of the gentleman is the chief spiritual product of the last two or three centuries; but the concept, it seems to me, dwarfs the ideal. A «gentleman» to me is a thing of some parts but no magnitude: one should be a gentleman and much more: a thinker, guide or artist. English custom in the games taught me the value and need of courtesy, and athletics practiced assiduously did much to steel and strengthen my control of all my bodily desires: they gave my mind and reason the mastery of me. At the same time they taught me the laws of health and the necessity of obeying them. I found out that by drinking little at meals I could reduce my weight very quickly and was thereby enabled to jump higher than ever; but when I went on reducing I learned that there was a limit beyond which, if I persisted, I began to lose strength: athletics taught me what the French call the juste milieu, the middle path of moderation. When I was about fourteen I discovered that to think of love before going to sleep was to dream of it during the night. And this experience taught me something else; if I repeated any lesson just before going to sleep, I knew it perfectly next morning; the mind, it seems, works even during unconsciousness. Often since, I have solved problems during sleep in mathematics and in chess that have puzzled me during the day.

  Chapter III. School Days in England

  In my thirteenth year the most important experience took place of my schoolboy life. Walking out one day with a West Indian boy of sixteen or so, I admitted that I was going to be «confirmed» in the Church of England. I was intensely religious at this time and took the whole rite with appalling seriousness. «Believe and thou shalt be saved» rang in my ears day and night, but I had no happy conviction. Believe what? «Believe in Me, Jesus.» Of course I believe; then I should be happy, and I was not happy. «Believe not» and eternal damnation and eternal torture follow. My soul revolted at the iniquity of the awful condemnation. What became of the myriads who had not heard of Jesus? It was all a horrible puzzle to me; but the radiant figure and sweet teaching of Jesus just enabled me to believe and resolve to live as he had lived, unselfishly-purely. I never liked that word «purely» and used to relegate it to the darkest background of my thought. But I would try to be good-I'd try at least!

  «Do you believe all the fairy stories in the Bible?» my companion asked. «Of course I do,» I replied. «It's the Word of God, isn't it?» «Who is God?» asked the West Indian. «He made the world,» I added, «all this wonder,» and with a gesture I included earth and sky. «Who made God?» asked my companion. I turned away stricken: in a flash I saw I had been building on a word taught me: «who made God?» I walked away alone, up the long meadow by the little brook, my thoughts in a whirl: story after story that I had accepted were now to me «fairy stories.» Jonah hadn't lived three days in a whale's belly. A man couldn't get down a whale's throat. The Gospel of Matthew began with Jesus' pedigree, showing that he had been born of the seed of David through Joseph, his father, and in the very next chapter you are told that Joseph wasn't his father; but the Holy Ghost. In an hour the whole fabric of my spiritual beliefs lay in ruins about me: I believed none of it, not a jot, nor a tittle: I felt as though I had been stripped naked to the cold. Suddenly a joy came to me: if Christianity was all lies and fairy tales like Mohammedanism, then the prohibitions of it were ridiculous and I could kiss and have any girl who would yield to me. At once I was partially reconciled to my spiritual nakedness: there was compensation. The loss of my belief was for a long time very painful to me. One day I told Stackpole of my infidelity, and he recommended me to read Butler's Analogy and keep an open mind. Butler finished what the West Indian had begun and in my thirst for some certainty I took up a course of deeper reading. In Stackpole's rooms one day I came across a book of Huxley's Essays; in an hour I had swallowed them and proclaimed myself an «agnostic»; that's what I was; I knew nothing surely, but was willing to learn. I aged ten years mentally in the next six months: I was always foraging for books to convince me and at length got hold of Hume's argument against miracles. That put an end to all my doubts, satisfied me finally. Twelve years later, when studying philosophy in Goettingen, I saw that Hume's reasoning was not conclusive, but for the time I was cured. At midsummer I refused to be confirmed. For weeks before, I had been reading the Bible for the most incredible stories in it and the smut, which I retailed at night to the delight of the boys in the big bedroom.

  This year as usual I spent the midsummer holidays in Ireland. My father had made his house with my sister Nita where Vernon happened to be sent by his bank. This summer was passed in Ballybay, in County Monaghan, I think. I remember little or nothing about the village save that there was a noble series of reed-fringed lakes near the place which gave good duck and snipe shooting to Vernon in the autumn.

  These holidays were memorable to me for several incidents. A conversation began one day at dinner between my sister and my eldest brother about making up to girls and winning them. I noticed with astonishment that my brother Vernon was very deferential to my sister's opinion on the matter, so I immediately got hold of Nita after the lunch and asked her to explain to me what she meant by «flattery.» «You said all girls like flattery. What did you mean?» «I mean,» she said, «they all like to be told they are pretty, that they have good eyes or good teeth or good hair, as the case may be, or that they are tall and nicely made. They all like their good points noticed and praised.» «Is that all?» I asked.

  «Oh no!» she said, «they all like their dress noticed too and especially their hat; if it suits their face, if it's very pretty and so forth. All girls think that if you notice their
clothes you really like them, for most men don't.» «Number two,» I said to myself.

  «Is there anything else?» «Of course,» she said, «you must say that the girl you are with is the prettiest girl in the room or in town-in fact, is quite unlike any other girl, superior to all the rest, the only girl in the world for you. All women like to be the only girl in the world for as many men as possible.» «Number three,» I said to myself: «Don't they like to be kissed?» I asked.