Frank Harris - My Life and Loves, Book 1

As soon as the school reassembled I was put in the upper fifth. All the boys were from two to three years older than I was, and they all made cutting remarks about me to each other and avoided speaking to «Pat.» All this strengthened my resolution to get to America as soon as I could. Meanwhile I worked as I had never worked, at Latin and Greek as well as mathematics, but chiefly at Greek, for there I was backward: by Easter I had mastered the grammar-irregular verbs and all-and was about the first in the class. My mind, too, through my religious doubts and gropings and through the reading of the thinkers had grown astonishingly: one morning I construed a piece of Latin that had puzzled the best in the class and the Doctor nodded at me approvingly. Then came the step I spoke of as decisive. The morning prayers were hardly over one bitter morning when the Doctor rose and gave out the terms of the scholarship exam at midsummer, the winner to get eighty pounds a year for three years at Cambridge, and the second ten pounds with which to buy books. «All boys,» he added,

«who wish to go in for this scholarship will now stand up and give their names.» I thought only Gordon would stand up, but when I saw Johnson get up and Fawcett and two or three others, I too got up. A sort of derisive growl went through the school; but Stackpole smiled at me and nodded his head as much as to say, «They'll see,» and I took heart of grace and gave my name very distinctly. Somehow I felt that the step was decisive. I liked Stackpole and this term he encouraged me to come to his rooms to talk whenever I felt inclined, and as I had made up my mind to use all the half-holidays for study, this association did me a lot of good and his help was invaluable.

One day when he had just come into his room, I shot a question at him and he stopped, came over to me and put his arm on my shoulder as he answered. I don't know how I knew; but by some instinct I felt a caress in the apparently innocent action. I didn't like to draw away or show him I objected; but I buried myself feverishly in the trigonometry and he soon moved away. When I thought of it afterwards I recalled the fact that his marked liking for me began after my fight with Jones. I had often been on the point of confessing to him my love-passages; but now I was glad I had kept them strenuously to myself, for day by day I noticed that his liking for me grew, or rather his compliments and flatteries increased. I hardly knew what to do: working with him and in his room was a godsend to me; yet at the same time I didn't like him much or admire him really.

In some ways he was curiously dense. He spoke of the school life as the happiest of all and the healthiest; a good moral tone here, he would say, no lying, cheating or scandal, much better than life outside. I used to find it difficult not to laugh in his face. Moral tone indeed! When the Doctor came down out of temper, it was usually accepted among the boys that he had had his wife in the night and was therefore a little below par physically. Though a really good mathematical scholar and a first rate teacher, patient and painstaking, with a gift of clear exposition, Stackpole seemed to me stupid and hidebound and soon I found that by laughing at his compliments, I could balk his desire to lavish on me his unwelcome caresses. Once he kissed me but my amused smile made him blush while he muttered shamefacedly, «You're a queer lad!» At the same time I knew quite well that if I encouraged him, he would take further liberties. One day he talked of Jones and Henry H… He had evidently heard something of what had taken place in our bedroom; but I pretended not to know what he meant and when he asked me whether none of the big boys had made up to me, I ignored big Fawcett's smutty excursions and said, «No,» adding that I was interested in girls and not in dirty boys. For some reason or other Stackpole seemed to me younger than I was and not twelve years older, and I had no real difficulty in keeping him within the bounds of propriety till the math exam. I was asked once whether I thought that «Shaddy,» as we called the housemaster, had ever had a woman. The idea of «Shaddy» as a virgin filled us with laughter; but when one spoke of him as a lover, it was funnier still. He was a man about forty, tall and fairly strong: he had a degree from some college in Manchester, but to us little snobs he was a bounder because he had not been to either Oxford or Cambridge. He was fairly capable, however. But for some reason or other he had a down on me and I grew to hate him and was always thinking of how I might hurt him. My new habit of forcing myself to watch and observe everything came to my aid. There were five or six polished oak steps up to the big bedroom where fourteen of us slept.

«Shaddy» used to give us half an hour to get into bed and then would come up, and standing just inside the door under the gaslight would ask us, «Have you all said your prayers?» We all answered: «Yes, Sir»; then would come his, «Goodnight, boys,» and our stereotyped reply,

«Goodnight, Sir.» He would then turn out the light and go downstairs to his room. The oak steps outside were worn in the middle and I had noticed that as one goes downstairs one treads on the very edge of each step. One day «Shaddy» had maddened me by giving me one hundred lines of Vergil to learn by heart for some trifling peccadillo. That night, having provided myself with a cake of brown Windsor soap, I ran upstairs before the other boys and rubbed the soap freely on the edge of the two top steps, and then went on to undress.

When «Shaddy» put out the light and stepped down to the second step, there was a slip and then a great thud as he half slid, half fell to the bottom. In a moment, for my bed was nearest the door, I had sprung up, opened the door and made incoherent exclamations of sympathy as I helped him to get up. «I've hurt my hip,» he said, putting his hand on it. He couldn't account for his fall.

Grinning to myself as I went back, I rubbed the soap off the top step with my handkerchief and got into bed again, where I chuckled over the success of my stratagem. He had only got what he richly deserved, I said to myself. At length the long term wore to its end; the exam was held and after consulting Stackpole I was very sure of the second prize. «I believe,» he said one day, «that you'd rather have the second prize than the first.» «Indeed I would,» I replied without thinking. «Why,» he asked, «why?» I only just restrained myself in time or I'd have given him the true reason. «You'll come nearer winning the scholarship,» he said at length, «than any of them guesses.» After the exams came the athletic games, much more interesting than the beastly lessons. I won two first prizes and Jones four, but I gained fifteen «seconds,» a record, I believe, for according to my age I was still in the lower school. I was fully aware of the secret of my success and, strange to say, it did not increase but rather diminished my conceit. I won, not through natural advantages but by will power and practice. I should have been much prouder had I succeeded through natural gifts. For instance, there was a boy named Reggie Miller, who at sixteen was five feet ten in height, while I was still under five feet: do what I would, he could jump higher than I could, though he only jumped up to his chin, while I could jump the bar above my head. I believed that Reggie could easily practice and then out-jump me still more. I had yet to learn in life that the resolved will to succeed was more than any natural advantage.

But this lesson only came to me later. From the beginning I was taking the highway to success in everything by strengthening my will even more than my body. Thus, every handicap in natural deficiency turns out to be an advantage in life to the brave soul, whereas every natural gift is surely a handicap. Demosthenes had a difficulty in his speech; practicing to overcome this made him the greatest of orators.