The Soul of a Child Part 32

"What did he want?" asked the father with unusual anxiety.

"Well, if you tried for a month, you couldn't guess it," the mother said, and as she spoke, a smile broke through her tears. "It is so sad and so funny that.... He wants me to send for his tailor to measure him for a new spring suit."

"Has he no idea ...?" The father checked himself with a glance at Keith.

"I know what you mean," said Keith calmly. Both parents looked at him in surprise, but neither comment nor rebuke ensued.

"No," the mother went on after a while, "he says that he knows he will be well and back at his office in two weeks. He actually laughed when I tried to say something about his being very ill. It brought on his cough again, and for a moment I thought he would die then and there. But when the attack was over, he asked me if I couldn't hear that the cough was much better. What do you think I ought to do?"

"Nothing," the father replied once more.

Keith was ready to start for school next morning when he heard Hilda utter a startled cry in the parlour.

"Fru Wellander! Fru Wellander!" she called.

Before the mother had a chance to move, the frightened face of the girl appeared in the parlour door, and she whispered as if afraid of waking some one out of sleep:

"He is dead."

Both women hurried into the parlour. Keith stood irresolute for a moment. Then he made for the kitchen door and ran downstairs at top speed. He was afraid of missing Murray.

All during that day a thought would bother his brain like a buzzing fly: how peculiar that a man could want to order a new suit of clothes a few hours before he died. There was something irrational about it that stumped him. For a moment he thought of speaking to Murray about it, but it was as if some one had put a hand firmly over his mouth every time he tried to do so.

The funeral took place in a couple of days. A distant relative had turned up, very apologetic and eager to explain that his dead cousin had failed to let any one know that he was sick even. This young man, the minister, and Keith's parents were the only mourners. A single carriage sufficed.

Keith never went into the parlour during those days. When everything was nearly ready, the mother asked him if he cared to go in and have a last look at poor Herr Stangenberg before the lid was put on the coffin.

Keith merely shook his head.

"You had better go," Granny called from the kitchen. "I never saw him better-looking while he was alive."

"I won't," Keith yelled back with an amount of irritation that seemed quite out of proportion to its cause. The mother gave him an uneasy glance but left the room without saying anything at the time.

As far as the boy was concerned, the incident was closed. He had never permitted it to take a real hold of his mind, and he resented anybody's attempt to bring it closer to him. Death had stopped within his own threshold, and he simply looked in the opposite direction. This att.i.tude sprang mainly from some inner resistance so stubborn that it would not even permit itself to be discussed. In addition, his mind was engrossed with other things, and the princ.i.p.al significance it attached to the pa.s.sing of a human life at such close quarters was the hope it held out that the parlour might remain vacant.

"Were you afraid to look," the mother asked Keith on her return with the father from the cemetery.

"No, I just didn't want to," the boy replied emphatically.

"Why," the mother asked, studying his face with the peculiar searching glance that sometimes provoked him and sometimes filled him with a desire to bury his head in her lap and weep.

"Why should I," Keith rejoined. "He was dead!"

VI

No sooner had the apologetic young man removed the effects of his departed relative than Keith wanted to take full possession of the parlour. His mother checked his eagerness with the explanation that they might still want to rent it. In the meantime he could use it freely, but he must remove all his playthings when he was through for the day.

"Why can't I sleep on the big sofa in there," he asked in a tone that he vainly tried to make ingratiating.

"Not yet," said his mother evasively. "You had better stay in here, I think."

Once more the sense of being watched took hold of him unpleasantly, filling him with a mixture of fear and resentment. And his wonder why they seemed to suspect him added to the mystery with which his mind was wrestling so hopelessly.

The constant access to the parlour was a great change for the better, however, and one of the first uses he made of it was to investigate his father's little library with a thoroughness that until then had been out of the question. It was a queer collection, embracing every form of literature from philosophy to fiction. This catholicity did not mirror the father's taste but resulted from his manner of acquiring the books.

Before obtaining the position he now held in the bank, he worked for a while in the office of one of the princ.i.p.al book printing establishments at Stockholm. There he formed acquaintances which later enabled him to get one unbound set of sheets of every book issued from that press.

These he sent to a binder who put them into simple paper covers for a few _ore_ per volume. They always arrived in a large package just before Christmas, and one of the thorns in Keith's flesh was the care with which his father kept all those new treasures hidden until the holiday season was past. Then the books that had not been handed on to friends or relations as Christmas presents were given a permanent place on the shelves of the book case. All of them, however, lacked printed covers and ill.u.s.trations.

The young man whom every one spoke of as "poor dear Herr Stangenberg"

had not been dead a week, when Keith one afternoon on his return from school found himself alone in the house with Granny. His mother had gone to call on some friends, and the father would not come home from the bank for several hours. Even the servant girl was away, which was a fact that not immaterially contributed to Keith's sense of security. Granny need not be taken into account.

A long cherished opportunity had arrived at last, and he made straight for the book case. It was locked, but he knew where to find the key. Its hiding-place had const.i.tuted one of those little domestic problems that add zest to an uneventful existence. There was also an injunction of long standing against any meddling with the case without permission, but that had been a dead letter for some time. When books were concerned, Keith's customary respect for authority ceased to be an obstacle to his desires.

He explored with no special object in mind. He wanted new reading matter, and his curiosity was piqued by a number of books with blank backs that gave no clue to their contents. Two huge, fat volumes on the bottom shelf had already attracted his attention, and they were the first he pulled out. Their t.i.tle brought instantaneous disappointment--"The Philosophy of the Unconscious," by Edouard von Hartmann. He prepared scornfully to put them back, when, through the big gap left by their withdrawal, he became aware that the s.p.a.ce back of the front row was packed with smaller books and pamphlets. This discovery surprised him for a moment, but what he saw in there looked rather uninteresting. Nevertheless he reached in and pulled out a small green pamphlet that happened to be nearest at hand. Idly he glanced at the legend printed on the front cover:

"Amor and Hymen. A guide for married and unmarried persons of both s.e.xes."

The words carried no special meaning to his mind, and in the same indifferent manner he turned a few pages until his eyes fell on a full-page ill.u.s.tration.

After that he read no other book for days.

VII

He read as he had never read before in his brief span of life--as, perhaps, he would never read again, no matter how wide a stretch of life that span might ultimately encompa.s.s.

He read of the anatomical differences between men and women. He read about the mechanism of love. He read about the mysteries of procreation.

All of it was startlingly new to him, and yet he read with a sense of always having known it. He read with absolute acceptance, without a possibility of doubt.

It seemed a genuine revelation that must render all future questioning futile. And yet he seemed to know no more when he had finished than he knew before he started. It remained outside of himself, a structure of air, a series of shadowgraphs, and the craving within him burned as pa.s.sionately as ever.

From now on he could grasp the points of the stories told by the boys at school, and he would know what Johan was hinting at in his boast about the secret doings of that attic. But of the reality of the thing he knew as little as before. In fact, the princ.i.p.al lesson brought home by his reading was that here he found himself in the presence of something that could not be learned out of books.

To begin with he did not go beyond the first part of the book. This he read over and over again. When at last he was sated with what that part had to give, a subtle chemical change had taken place in his mental make-up, one might say. It was not caused by any facts conveyed by the book. These seemed quite natural to him, and in themselves they would have had no more power over him than the information about flowers of various kinds imparted by the teacher of botany. It was the tone used that affected him in a manner reminding him of the Swedish Punch of which he had tested a few drops now and then. In every line there was a mixture of shamefaced apology and veiled desire that sent all the blood in his body rus.h.i.+ng toward his head until the walls of the room about him reeled. Every inch of him was on fire, and in that flame body and soul were consumed together.

The sum and substance of it was that he had become conscious of that mult.i.tudinous impulse we call s.e.x, and that from a vague, restless yearning this impulse suddenly had developed into an appet.i.te as imperative as any hunger for food.

VIII

Finally he went on to the remaining chapters of the book, always with that double sense of knowing it all before and of not quite grasping what he read.

Pages were consumed before he realized with a shock more intense than any one previously experienced, that the book was speaking of the game he learned to play back of the big rock.

Again it was not what the book told that seemed to matter, but the tone in which it spoke. And while before that tone had sent the blood to his head, it now drew every drop of it back to his heart until he s.h.i.+vered and shook with a misery so acute that another moment's endurance of it seemed unthinkable.

At that instant fear was born within him. Until then it had been no more real to him than were now the experiences described in the first part of the book. He had instinctively shrunk from things that he knew or believed to be painful, from the shock of a blow to the sting of a harsh word. He had suffered discomforting antic.i.p.ation of rebukes and restrictions. But he had never before stood face to face with that stark unreasoning terror which gathers its chief power from the intangible character of the danger it heralds.