I had sense enough to smile and keep my own counsel. Jones didn’t appear in school that night: indeed, for days after he was kept in sick-bay upstairs. The fags and lower school boys brought me all sorts of stories how the doctor had come and said “he feared erysipelas: the bruises were so large and Jones must stay in bed and in the dark!” and a host of other details.
One thing was quite clear; my position in the school was radically changed: Stackpole spoke to the Doctor and I got a seat by myself in his class-room and only went to the form-master for special lessons: Stackpole became more than ever my teacher and friend.
When Jones first appeared in the school, we met in the Sixth room while waiting for the Doctor to come in. I was talking with Herbert; Jones came in and nodded to me: I went over and held out my hand, “I’m glad you’re all right again!” He shook hands but said nothing. Herbert’s nod and smile showed me I had done right. “Bygones should be bygones”, he said in English fashion. I wrote the whole story to Vernon that night, thanking him, you may be sure, and Raleigh for the training and encouragement they had given me.
My whole outlook on life was permanently altered: I was cock-a-hoop and happy. One night I got thinking of E… and for the first time in months practiced Onanism. But next day I felt heavy and resolved that belief or no belief, self-restraint was a good thing for the health. All the next Christmas holidays spent in Rhyl, I tried to get intimate with some girl; but failed. As soon as I tried to touch even their breasts, they drew away. I liked girls fully formed and they all thought, I suppose, that I was too young and too small: if they had only known!
One more incident belongs in this thirteenth year, and is worthy perhaps of record. Freed of the bullying and senseless cruelty of the older boys who for the most part, still siding with Jones, left me severely alone, the restraints of school life began to irk me. “If I were free”, I said to myself, “I’d go after E… or some other girl and have a great time; as it is, I can do nothing, hope for nothing.” Life was stale, flat and unprofitable to me. Besides, I had read nearly all the books I thought worth reading in the school library, and time hung heavy on my hands: I began to long for liberty as a caged bird.
What was the quickest way out? I knew that my father as a Captain in the Navy could give me or get me a nomination so that I might become a Midshipman. Of course I’d have to be examined before I was fourteen; but I knew I could win a high place in any test.
The summer vacation after I was thirteen on the 14th of February I spent at home in Ireland as I have told, and from time to time, bothered my father to get me the nomination. He promised he would, and I took his promise seriously. All the autumn I studied carefully the subjects I was to be examined in and from time to time wrote to my father reminding him of his promise. But he seemed unwilling to touch on the matter in his letters which were mostly filled with Biblical exhortations, that sickened me with contempt for his brainless credulity. My unbelief made me feel immeasurably superior to him.
Christmas came and I wrote him a serious letter, insisting that he should keep his promise. For the first time in my life I flattered him, saying that I knew his word was sacred: but the time-limit was at hand and I was getting nervous lest some official delay might make me pass the prescribed limit of age. I got no reply: I wrote to Vernon who said he would do his best with the Governor. The days went on, the 14th of February came and went: I was fourteen. That way of escape into the wide world was closed to me by my father. I raged in hatred of him.
How was I to get free? Where should I go? What should I do? One day in an illustrated paper in ’68, I read of the discovery of the diamonds in the Cape, and then of the opening of the Diamond fields. That prospect tempted me and I read all I could about South Africa, but one day I found that the cheapest passage to the Cape cost fifteen pounds and I despaired. Shortly afterwards I read that a steerage passage to New York could be had for five pounds; that amount seemed to me possible to get; for there was a prize of ten pounds for books to be given to the second in the Mathematical scholarship exam that would take place in the summer: I thought I could win that, and I set myself to study Mathematics harder than ever.
The result was—but I shall tell the result in its proper place. Meanwhile I began reading about America and soon learned of the buffalo and Indians on the Great Plains and a myriad entrancing romantic pictures opened to my boyish imagining. I wanted to see the world and I had grown to dislike England; its snobbery, though I had caught the disease, was loathsome and worse still, its spirit of sordid self-interest. The rich boys were favored by all the Masters, even by Stackpole; I was disgusted with English life as I saw it. Yet there were good elements in it which I could not but see, which I shall try to indicate later.