The Soul of a Child Part 21

"No," Keith replied mechanically, but even as he spoke he became conscious of a desire to share his mother's enthusiasm rather than his father's indifference. If they would only promise not to shoot! ...

XVII

Three years he remained in the school of the Misses Ahlberg. Three times fall and winter and spring were followed by that painfully delicious period of almost unbroken daylight, when the very books seemed to lose some of their magic, when even the air of the old lane became fraught with some mystic urge, and when life within stone walls turned into an unbearable burden.

He rose by degrees from mere spelling to the study of a foreign language, German. He learned his Catechism by heart--or rather by rote, for the time-worn phrases dropped from his lips at demand very much as water runs down a mill sluice, without leaving any trace. In fact, little of what he learned appeared to touch his real life at all. Nor could he be made to take it very seriously, although, on the whole, he was counted a good pupil.

He used schoolbooks, of course, but he was rarely caught reading one of them. His mind seemed to master the offered knowledge by some mysterious process of absorption of which he himself was never aware. Study in the sense of close and painful application was quite foreign to him. Yet he seemed capable of mastering anything that aroused his interest--or that stirred his vanity, for he loved to s.h.i.+ne. Unfortunately most of his schoolmates were dull plodders who had not yet reached a stage where plodding counted, and so his triumphs came easy and there was nothing to spur him into serious effort.

At the end of the third year he had practically exhausted the possibilities of the little school in the South End, and it was understood that he would not return in the fall, when he would be nine years old. But nothing had been decided about what he was to do instead.

He had not been unhappy with the Misses Ahlberg and his leave-taking lacked none of the expected emotional colouring. Yet he left without a pang, without regrets. It was as if he had pa.s.sed through that school in his sleep, waking up only when he reached home and his books. He had made no friends and formed no ties at school, and outside of it he had never a.s.sociated with any of his schoolmates. Not one of them left a mark on his memory as Harald had done. In a place full of girls, his little heart never was betrayed into a single quickened beat of antic.i.p.ation. Nor did he make any new connections outside of the school during those years. One might almost say that he had ceased to realize the existence of things or persons except in so far as they administered to some immediate need within himself.

Summer came early that year, and with it came a marked change. His restlessness grew almost morbid, so that his mother found it nearly impossible to keep him indoors. He was every minute pleading for leave to play with Johan, and on several occasions when permission had been granted, he and Johan left the quiet lane to play with strange boys on the Quay. It drove his mother almost to despair, and she tried one thing after another to keep him at home.

She was doing some embroidery at that particular time and the work seemed to interest the boy a great deal. Sometimes, when he had given up all hope of getting out, he could stand for many minutes at a time watching the needle with its tail of brightly coloured yarn pa.s.s in and out through the wide meshes of the fabric. Finally his mother suggested that he try his hand at it, and he grabbed eagerly at that chance of diversion. For about three days he was as devoted to his needle as any girl. By that time he had filled a small square with a sort of design of his own, and when his father returned home in the evening of the third day, Keith displayed his achievement with considerable pride.

"Fine," remarked the father dryly. "Now we know what to do with him if Uncle Granstedt does not think good him enough for a carpenter. We'll apprentice him to a tailor. He'll make a good one, I am sure, as it takes nine tailors to make a man, he need not have as much courage as a woman even."

That disposed of the embroidery once for all, but it seemed also to bring matters to a head. As soon as the father was done with his meal, the mother made him accompany her into the parlour, and there they stayed an endless time. When they returned to the living-room, Keith could see that his mother had been crying, but she was smiling brightly at that moment, and her voice had a ring of triumph when she said:

"Papa has something to tell you, Keith."

"Yes," the father drawled. "Your mother, as usual, has persuaded me to do what I doubt is right. Because she has pleaded for you, I'll let you enter the public school in the fall. That will cost money, and I am not sure it is good for a poor man's son like you, but we'll see. It means that you will have to do some studying at last, for if you don't--well, then you'll have to learn a trade."

As always on such occasions, Keith took his cue from the mother, and her mien told him that he ought to be pleased. It was a new departure anyhow, and it implied evidently an advance that would administer to his rather undernourished sense of self-importance. For anything doing so he had a pa.s.sionate craving, and so he was ready to rejoice.

The new school was still far off, however, and in the meantime there was close at hand a problem that piqued him annoyingly. Had his father really meant to make a carpenter or a tailor of him if his mother had not interceded, or was the talk about it merely an expression of the father's peculiar unwillingness to admit any sort of tender feeling toward the son?

That was not the way Keith put it, in so far as he attempted any formulation at all, but it was in substance what his momentary speculations amounted to, and the solution of the problem lay quite beyond him. He never could make out just what his father meant or thought or felt in regard to himself.

XVIII

Then several developments followed each other in quick succession. First of all his father bought him a season ticket at the public baths in the North River and made him join a cla.s.s of small boys for instruction in the manly art of swimming. The world was opening up, Keith felt, and his father was lured to the verge of openly expressed satisfaction at finding that the boy's timidity did not extend to cold water.

No sooner, however, had he mastered the mechanics of the thing sufficiently to graduate from the board-walk onto a cork pillow in the water, than he had to quit because the whole family was "going into the country" for the summer. To Keith this meant a chance of playing with other children without having to ask permission every time and rarely getting it. To his mother it meant a distinct social advance, as no family staying in town all summer could be held really respectable.

The "country" was located on one of the numerous islands forming the outskirts of the city and could be reached by the father after he finished work by a fifteen-minute ride on one of the innumerable little steamboats running back and forth like so many busy shuttles across every sheet of water in the vicinity of Stockholm. Even then it was a suburb, but the houses were called villas, and there were plenty of trees between the buildings, and the roads meandering whimsically among miniature lawns and gardens had no pavements, and the lake came right up to the door.

There the father had rented a single room from some acquaintances who made their home on the island all the year round. The man was a German who had recently returned to Sweden after serving as a noncommissioned officer in the Franco-Prussian war--a stocky Bavarian with a tremendous black beard, a fondness for top-boots and long-stemmed pipes, and a startling tendency to shout every communication in the form of a command. He was a good-natured soul nevertheless, in spite of his appearance, his occasional bursts of temper, and his exaggerated regard for discipline, and he was full of stories about real fighting that differed puzzlingly from what Keith had read about such matters. Uncle Laube had a pet phrase that stuck in the boy's mind and exercised a corroding influence on some of his most cherished sentiments:

"A man must be able to fight, but it is black h.e.l.l when he has to."

There were three children in the family--a boy two or three years older than Keith, a girl of his own age and a baby sister. The boy was named Adolph and the elder girl Marie. All three of them, but especially the boy, were being brought up in strict Teutonic fas.h.i.+on, which made a sort of super-religion out of obedience. At the mere sound of his father's voice, Adolph trembled and stiffened up like a recruit under training.

Once the two boys and Marie strayed beyond bounds to a place where some timber rafts were tied up along the sh.o.r.e. Adolph led the way onto the rafts and the two others followed. It was great fun jumping from log to log where two rafts met, until Marie suddenly slipped into the water and began to sink like a stone. Quick as a flash Adolph dropped on his knees on a log that was partly under water, grabbed the girl by her hair and pulled her out. On their return home, Adolph was licked until he could not stand on his feet for leading the smaller children into mischief.

Then he got a crown for the pluck shown in saving his sister's life.

This even balancing of justice made a deep impression on Keith. He thought and thought of it, and his reason, which already was very active, appreciated the logic of such a dispensation, but his heart rebelled strangely and turned for a while to his own father as a paragon of mildness, while the black-bearded Uncle Laube became an object of repulsion bordering on hatred. Fortunately the disciplinarian was away most of the day and Keith was running wild around the island. This was not possible without some protests from his mother, who regarded all water outside of a tub with deep distrust. He nevertheless maintained an unusual degree of independence until one day, while playing in one of the rowboats lying outside a small pier near their house, he, too, fell in and was pulled out by Adolph.

The children were alone at the time. Keith had no consciousness of having been in danger, but he was in a funk because of his wet clothing.

Instead of going home at once, he ran to an open spot at the other end of the island and played in the sun to get dry. After a while his mother appeared, disturbed by his long absence. There was nothing to do but to respond to her call, although he did so most reluctantly, his clothing still being damp. His slow movements aroused her suspicion, and in another moment the awful truth was out.

"You might have drowned," his mother cried, too frightened to scold. "Or you might have caught cold and died of that. Perhaps ... you had better come home at once."

"No," protested Keith. "Adolph was there, and it hasn't been cold at all."

"But think, Keith," his mother remonstrated, her eyes dim with tears, "you wouldn't care to die and leave me?"

"I don't want to leave you," the boy said, "and I was not going to."

She took his head between her two hands and looked long into his eyes before she asked at last:

"Are you not scared of death?"

"I don't know," he stammered, wincing slightly under her stare. He could not grasp what she was driving at. Death carried no clear meaning to him. It had never touched his real inner life, and he never thought of it. No matter how frightened he became, it never occurred to him that he might cease to exist. Even his dreams had no colouring of that kind.

In spite of his mother's anxiety, he learned to swim that summer. He liked it and did it rather well for his age. But he never ventured very far out. Rebel as he might against the check on his movements, his mother's att.i.tude had left a lasting mark on him, and avoiding needless risks seemed a natural thing to him. As a result of this inhibition, all his outdoor playing lacked that complete abandon which is the soul of it. He been made an indoor child beyond retrieve.

XIX

Being so much in the open air and moving about as a child should, his nights during that summer pa.s.sed mostly without dreams of any kind, and also without other disturbances worth speaking of. He was too healthily tired for anything but sleep.

The winter nights, following days spent largely indoors with little company and less exercise, were quite different. Then the pa.s.sing from wakefulness to sleep took him through a dangerous twilight period, when games of the kind learned behind the big rock seemed not only natural, but the most enticing thing in the world. And the more he was thrown back on his own resources, the more tempting those games became. They represented, besides, something that was entirely his own, with which no one else could interfere. It was a secret that would have been the sweeter for being shared with some one else, he felt, but Johan's peculiar att.i.tude in this matter had filled him with a shyness not his own by nature.

Then, with the sleep, came also the dreams. At first they were, or seemed to be, mere plays of fancy--shadowy repet.i.tions of daylight experiences in clownish distortion. Then they began to change. An element of unrest, and finally of dread, began to fill them. This did not happen, however, until the same elements had found a place in his waking life, and particularly not until the hours of that twilight period had developed into a source of increasingly acute conflict.

Nothing palpable had happened. Nothing had been said openly to convince him that his secret was known and that it was evil. Yet the air about him seemed full of suspicion and suspense and menace. The mere way in which his mother looked at him at times filled his soul with sinister misgivings. And she was always talking about temptations and dangers that walk in the dark. Or else she dropped mysterious warnings about the duty of keeping one's soul and body clean and pure.

It was all very disturbing, and he should have liked to ask questions, but always some imperious force within himself kept him back. He felt that his sweet secret would never bear open discussion, but the more desperately he clung to it, the more his mind was poisoned with doubts out of which soon grew fears.

Thus began the new dream life.

He was as a rule the only living being in those dreams. Everything else consisted of lifeless things, and mostly of s.p.a.ces and dimensions rather than of objects. The dominant characteristic was an increase of size proportional to the increase of distance from himself. He found himself, for instance, in the midst of a vast s.p.a.ce laid out in squares. Where he stood at the centre, those squares were just large enough to hold him.

Then, as his glance pa.s.sed outward, the squares became larger and larger, until at last their dimensions became gigantic. Soon they began to move toward him, growing smaller as they approached, and yet filling his soul with a horror based entirely on the monstrous size of those squares that were still miles away. Or he walked down a corridor built of stones that, as it opened out in front of him, expanded indefinitely until it a.s.sumed proportions that filled him with a sickening sense of his own smallness. As he moved forward, the corridor automatically contracted, but always the horror of those immeasurable vastnesses still ahead of him continued dominant and inevitable. At other times sums of figures came moving toward him from every direction, and the farther away from him they were, the more enormous they grew, until his mind no longer could take them in, and his heart quaked at the thought that sooner or later one of them would reach him in its original awe-inspiring immensity.

He tried once to tell his mother about those dreams, but found it impossible to express what he wished to describe. Not long afterwards he was aroused in the middle of the night by his mother calling him by name. Her voice betrayed worry.

"What's the matter, Keith," she asked when at last he woke up sufficiently to answer her call. "Were you dreaming?"

"I don't know," replied the boy, and at that moment he didn't know.

"I thought first you were crying," explained the mother, "and then I heard that you were counting something."