Frank Harris - My Life and Loves, Book 1

«Do they let children like you go to America?» he cried. «What age are you?» I was furious with him for exposing my youth there in public before everyone. «How does it matter to you?» I asked disdainfully, «You are not responsible for me, thank God!» «I am though,» he said, «to a certain degree, at least. Are you really going to America on your own?» «I am,» I rejoined casually and rudely.

«What to do?» was his next query. «Anything I can get,» I replied. «Hm,» he muttered, «I must see to this.» Ten minutes later he returned again. «Come with me,» he said, and I followed him to his cabin-a comfortable stateroom with a good berth on the right of the door as you entered, and a good sofa opposite.

«Are you really alone?» he asked. I nodded, for I was a little afraid he might have the power to forbid me to go and I resolved to say as little as possible. «What age are you?» was his next question. «Sixteen.» I lied boldly. «Sixteen!» he repeated. «You don't look it but you speak as if you had been well educated.» I smiled; I had already measured the crass ignorance of the peasants in the steerage. «Have you any friends in America?» he asked. «What do you want to question me for?» I demanded. «I've paid for my passage and I'm doing no harm.» «I want to help you,» he said. «Will you stay here until we draw out and I get a little time?» «Certainly,» I said, «I'd rather be here than with those louts, and if I might read your books-» I had noticed that there were two little oak bookcases, one on each side of the washing stand, and smaller books and pictures scattered about. «Of course you may,» he rejoined, and threw open the door of the bookcase. There was a Macaulay staring at me. «I know his poetry,» I said, seeing that the book contained his essays and was written in prose. «I'd like to read this.» «Go ahead,» he said smiling, «in a couple of hours I'll be back.» When he returned he found me curled upon his sofa, lost in fairyland. I had just come to the end of the essay on Clive and was breathless. «You like it?» he asked. «I should just think I did,» I replied. «It's better even than his poetry,» and suddenly I closed the book and began to recite: With all his faults, and they were neither few nor small, only one cemetery was worthy to contain his remains. In the Great Abbey- The doctor took the book from me where I held it. «Are you reciting from Clive?» he asked.

«Yes, I said, «but the essay on Warren Hastings is just as good,» and I began again: He looked like a great man, and not like a bad one. A person small and emaciated, yet deriving dignity from a carriage which, while it indicated deference to the Court, indicated also habitual self-possession and self-respect. A high and intellectual forehead, a brow pensive but not gloomy, a mouth of inflexible decision, a face on which was written as legibly as under the great picture in the Council Chamber of Calcutta, Metis aequa in arduis: such was the aspect with which the great proconsul presented himself to his judges. «Have you learned all this by heart?» cried the doctor, laughing. «I don't have to learn stuff like that,» I replied. «One reading is enough.» He stared at me.

«I was surely right in bringing you down here,» he began. «I wanted to get you a berth in the intermediate, but there's no room: if you could put up with that sofa, I'd have the steward make up a bed for you on it.» «Oh, would you?» I cried. «How kind of you; and you'll let me read your books?» «Every one of 'em,» he replied, adding, «I only wish I could make as good use of them.» The upshot of it was that in an hour he had drawn some of my story from me and we were great friends. His name was Keogh. «Of course he's Irish,»

I said to myself as I went to sleep that night, «no one else would have been so kind.» The ordinary man will think I am bragging here about my memory. He's mistaken. Swinburne's memory especially for poetry was far, far better than mine, and I have always regretted the fact that a good memory often prevents one thinking for oneself. I shall come back to this belief of mine when I later explain how want of books gave me whatever originality I possess. A good memory and books at command are two of the greatest dangers of youth and form by themselves a terrible handicap, but like all gifts, a good memory is apt to make you friends among the unthinking, especially when you are very young. As a matter of fact, Doctor Keogh went about bragging of my memory and power of reciting until some of the cabin passengers became interested in the extraordinary schoolboy. The outcome was that I was asked to recite one evening in the first cabin, and afterwards a collection was taken up for me and a first-class passage paid and about twenty dollars over and above was given to me. Besides, an old gentleman offered to adopt me and play second father to me, but I had not got rid of one father to take on another, so I kept as far away from him as I decently could. I am again, however, running ahead of my story. The second evening of the voyage, the sea got up a little and there was a great deal of sickness. Doctor Keogh was called out of his cabin and while he was away, someone knocked at the door. I opened it and found a pretty girl. «Where's the doctor?» she asked. I told her he had been called to a cabin passenger. «Please tell him,» she said, «when he returns, that Jessie Kerr, the chief engineer's daughter, would like to see him.» «I'll go after him now if you wish, Miss Jessie,» I said. «I know where he is.» «It isn't important,» she rejoined, «but I feel giddy, and he told me he could cure it.» «Coming up on the deck is the best cure,» I declared. «The fresh air will soon blow the sick feeling away. You'll sleep like a top and tomorrow morning you'll be all right. Will you come?» She consented readily and in ten minutes admitted that the slight nausea had disappeared in the sharp breeze. As we walked up and down the dimly lighted deck I had now and then to support her, for the ship was rolling a little under a sou-wester. Jessie told me something about herself, how she was going to New York to spend some months with an elder married sister and how strict her father was. In return she had my whole story and could hardly believe I was only sixteen. Why, she was over sixteen and she could never have stood up and recited piece after piece as I did in the cabin; she thought it «wonderful.»

Before she went down, I told her she was the prettiest girl on board, and she kissed me and promised to come up the next evening and have another walk. «If you've nothing better to do,» she said at parting, «you might come forward to the little promenade deck of the second cabin and I'll get one of the men to arrange a seat in one of the boats for us.» «Of course,» I promised gladly, and spent the next afternoon with Jessie in the stern sheets of the great launch where we were out of sight of everyone, and out of hearing as well. There we were, tucked in with two rugs and cradled, so to speak, between sea and sky, while the keen air whistling past increased our sense of solitude. Jessie, though rather short, was a very pretty girl with large hazel eyes and fair complexion. I soon got my arm around her and kept kissing her till she told me she had never known a man so greedy of kisses as I was. It was delicious flattery to me to speak of me as a man, and in return I raved about her eyes and mouth and form; caressing her left breast, I told her I could divine the rest and knew she had a lovely body. But when I put my hand up her clothes, she stopped me when I got just above her knee and said: «We'd have to be engaged before I could let you do that. Do you really love me?»

Of course I swore I did, but when she said she'd have to tell her father that we were engaged to be married, cold shivers went down my back. «I can't marry for a long time yet,» I said. «I'll have to make a living first and I'm not very sure where I'll begin.» But she had heard that an old man wished to adopt me and everyone said that he was very rich and even her father admitted that I'd be «well-fixed.»