The great event of a boy's life is the awakening of sex. He will bathe
many times a day, or get up at dawn and having stripped leap to and fro
over a stick laid upon two chairs and hardly know, and never admit, that
he had begun to take pleasure in his own nakedness, nor will he
understand the change until some dream discovers it. He may never
understand at all the greater change in his mind.
It all came upon me when I was close upon seventeen like the bursting of a
shell. Somnambulistic country-girls, when it is upon them, throw plates
about or pull them with long hairs in simulation of the polter-geist, or
become mediums for some genuine spirit-mischief, surrendering to their
desire of the marvellous. As I look backward, I seem to discover that my
passions, my loves and my despairs, instead of being my enemies, a
disturbance and an attack, became so beautiful that I must be constantly
alone to give them my whole attention. I notice that, for the first time
as I run through my memory, what I saw when alone is more vivid than what
I did or saw in company.
A herd had shown me a cave some hundred and fifty feet below the cliff
path and a couple of hundred above the sea, and told me how an evicted
tenant called Macrom, dead some fifteen years, had lived there many years,
and shown me a rusty nail in the rock which had served perhaps to hold up
some wooden protection from wind and weather. Here I stored a tin of cocoa
and some biscuits, and instead of going to my bed, would slip out on warm
nights and sleep in the cave on the excuse of catching moths. One had to
pass over a rocky ledge, safe enough for anyone with a fair head, yet
seeming, if looked at from above, narrow and sloping; and a remonstrance
from a stranger who had seen me climbing along it doubled my delight in
the adventure. When however, upon a bank holiday, I found lovers in my
cave, I was not content with it again till I heard of alarm among the
fishing boats, because the ghost of Macrom had been seen a little before
the dawn, stooping over his fire in the cave-mouth. I had been trying to
cook eggs, as I had read in some book, by burying them in the earth under
a fire of sticks.
At other times, I would sleep among the rhododendrons and rocks in the
wilder part of the grounds of Howth Castle. After a while my father said I
must stay in-doors half the night, meaning that I should get some sleep in
my bed; but I, knowing that I would be too sleepy and comfortable to get
up again, used to sit over the kitchen fire till half the night was gone.
Exaggerated accounts spread through the school, and sometimes when I did
not know a lesson some master would banter me. My interest in science
began to fade away, and presently I said to myself, "it has all been a
misunderstanding." I remembered how soon I tired of my specimens, and how
little I knew after all my years of collecting, and I came to believe that
I had gone through so much labour because of a text, heard for the first
time in St. John's Church in Sligo. I wanted to be certain of my own
wisdom by copying Solomon, who had knowledge of hyssop and of tree. I
still carried my green net but I began to play at being a sage, a magician
or a poet. I had many idols, and now as I climbed along the narrow ledge I
was Manfred on his glacier, and now I thought of Prince Athanase and his
solitary lamp, but I soon chose Alastor for my chief of men and longed to
share his melancholy, and maybe at last to disappear from everybody's
sight as he disappeared drifting in a boat along some slow-moving river
between great trees. When I thought of women they were modelled on those
in my favourite poets and loved in brief tragedy, or, like the girl in
"The Revolt of Islam," accompanied their lovers through all manner of wild
places, lawless women without homes and without children.