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.