Frank Harris - My Life and Loves, Book 1

«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.