The Soul of a Child Part 33

He learned that physically and spiritually he had courted death, and what is worse than death. And suddenly the thought of that gentle-faced, sweet-tempered young man in the parlour leaped into his memory. But the image it brought him was not that of a human form stretched stiffly within the black boards of a coffin. What he saw and what froze him with horror was the hollow temples and sallow cheeks and drooping jaws and bent back and trembling limbs of the human wreck that was still counted a living man.

Worse than that image, however, and worse than any thought of punishment by powers not within his actual ken, was the book's d.a.m.ning imputation of shame incurred, of unworthiness proved, of inferiority so deep that no words could adequately picture it.

All that was most himself wanted to rise in wild rebellion against conclusions that found no support in anything he had actually experienced so far. He wanted to refuse belief. He sought for escapes as if the fulfilment of the doom p.r.o.nounced by the book had been a matter of minutes. But there was the book, and to back it suddenly appeared a line of experiences out of his own life.

Perhaps those who would not let him visit their homes had only too good cause for refusal. Perhaps, after all, it was not his father's position but something about himself that had caused the parents of Harald, of Loth, and now of Murray, to act in exactly the same way. Perhaps Dally had reasons for not letting him become _primus_ which, out of his soul's kindness, he never told even to Keith himself. Perhaps the reason he always felt isolated and out of touch with his schoolmates lay in their instinctive recognition of his nature....

In the end he replaced the book with a firm determination never to look at it again. But the poison was in his mind, and the book no longer mattered.

IX

The game learned behind the big rock must never be played again--that much was certain!

But all resolves proved vain. Fight as he may, the end was inevitably the same.

Previously he had been the player, and had thought no more of it. Now he was being played with, and this new form of the game kept him see-sawing incessantly between ecstasy and agony, between the relief of yielding and the remorse at having yielded.

His life was an unending conflict, and in the presence of that ever renewed struggle within, by forces that seemed alien to his own self, all else lost significance.

And there was not a thing or a person within reach that could offer an antidote to the self-contempt corroding his soul's integrity.

X

Going to school grew very hard for a while. He could barely look his schoolmates in the face for fear that they might read in his eyes what sort of a chap he was. At times, on his walks to or from school with Murray, a faintness would seize him at the mere thought that his friend somehow might have guessed the truth. And he sent timidly envious side-glances at one lucky enough to be raised above all temptation. For neither his recollections of the gang gathered about the big rock nor the more recent light shed on such things by Johan had the slightest influence on his conception of himself as the sole black sheep in a flock of perhaps soiled but nevertheless washable white ones.

After a while the poignancy of his emotions became blunted by familiarity, and mere weariness forced him to accept himself on a reduced level. A sort of new equilibrium was established within him, but it was primarily based on indifference. Nothing really mattered. Effort was useless. Things merely happened. No one could help what happened.

And in this fatalism, so utterly foreign to his ardent, supersensitive nature, he found a certain momentary sense of peace.

He went about his daily cla.s.sroom tasks as in a dream, doing mechanically what he was asked, and dropping his effort as soon as the demand for it ceased. Nothing happened during the lessons to indicate that the teachers noticed any change in him or were in any manner dissatisfied with him. Perhaps he was saved by an occasional flaring up of interest that drew from him flashes of that brightness of mind that had won Dally and given him the reputation of an exceptional pupil.

But as the spring term drew nearer its close, he found it more and more difficult to keep up a pretence at attention. More and more he sank into mere drifting, and he whose pride had been really to know, now trusted to luck like any dullard with a head unfit for studying. Worse still and more significant, he began to find excuses for staying home from school.

He who had never known what it was to be sick, now developed disturbing symptom after another--headaches and colds and digestive troubles in endless succession. Most of the time these symptoms yielded quickly at the mere sight of the castor oil which was his mother's favourite remedy and the taste of which Keith hated more than anything else in the world.

It was the one thing that stood inexorably between his growing indolence and the luxury of being ill.

With commencement almost in sight, all sorts of written examinations were demanded. These he disliked additionally because his handwriting never had developed in proportion to his mental capacity. No matter how he strove, the letters remained childishly awkward. No two of them seemed to point in the same direction. Not even his futile efforts at singing could fill him with a more humiliating sense of inferiority.

All his various resistances were brought into concerted action when at last the teacher in Swedish ordered him to prepare two brief original compositions on quite simple themes. In the days of Dally he would have revelled in such a task. Now it appalled him. His head was empty. The mere idea of trying to write about such things as the discovery of America and the beauties of nature seemed silly. There was any number of books, besides, that said anything you could ever hope to say on either subject.

The end of it was that he produced an indisposition real enough not only to convince his mother but to make himself willing to face the ordeal of castor oil. Thanks to the oil he was able to stay in bed the better part of two days. Those were the last two days before his Swedish compositions were to be delivered. He knew that if they were not delivered, he would get no mark in that subject, and this would prevent his graduation to a higher grade.

In that dilemma he conceived the brilliant idea of making his mother write the compositions for him, and he actually succeeded in persuading her to do so. He prompted her a little, but she did the main part of the work, and the handwriting was hers. Finally he got her to bring them up to school with the explanation that he was too sick to sit up and write, but that she had taken down what he dictated. He did not even look at what she wrote, and it never occurred to him to doubt her ability of doing it far better than he could. When it was all over, he experienced a tremendous sense of relief, and this was much enhanced by his mother's willingness to let the father remain in complete ignorance of what had happened.

Nothing was said to him when he showed up at school again. His first inkling of trouble came with the return of his copy book. It was full of marks and corrections in red ink. As he looked at these in a stunned fas.h.i.+on, he realized for the first time that his mother's spelling and punctuation would have been deemed unsatisfactory in a second grade pupil. At first he did not even consider the bearing of this discovery on his own fate. He could think of only one thing, namely that another blow had been dealt to his conception of his mother as a superior being.

He actually felt ashamed on her behalf. Then came the thought of what the teacher must have thought....

Commencement Day brought the answer. He got only C in Swedish, which meant that he had failed to pa.s.s. It gave him the choice between spending another year in the same grade or facing special examinations in the fall.

At first he was too dazed to think. Then his former indifference changed into blazing indignation and resentment. He felt himself a victim of unpardonable injustice. In that mood he returned home and reported to his father.

"You talk nonsense, my boy," said his father in a tone that was new to Keith. "From some things I have heard, I gather that your escape from the same kind of mark in every subject was little short of miraculous."

Keith stared open-eyed at his father, puzzled by his manner of speaking and stung to the quick by what he said.

"What are you going to do now," his father demanded after a while.

A long pause followed during which Keith's brain worked at lightning speed. It was as if he had never known until then what really had happened during the weeks preceding commencement.

"I'll pa.s.s the examinations in the fall," he said at last.

"Will you give me your word of honour to read hard during the summer,"

his father asked, and his voice set the boy's heart throbbing like an engine.

"I will," replied Keith. "But I could pa.s.s those examinations without looking at the book."

"The more shame for you, then, to let yourself be plucked," was his father's concluding remark, but even that was uttered without a suggestion of bitterness.

XI

The summer was spent on the mainland opposite the island where they used to live. He had practically no companions.h.i.+p except that of his mother.

It was very dull, but for the first time he seemed to need solitude. He had brought out all his schoolbooks, and he really did a good deal of studying, especially of Latin, which he knew was his weakest point.

At first he felt a slight grudge against the mother. She had disappointed him for one thing, and there was an inclination besides to hold her responsible for his misfortune. By degrees, however, he began to see his own part in its true light, and he wondered how he could have been such a blind fool. It was this understanding that brought him comparative peace and enabled him to work. He had been so hara.s.sed by the question of guilt in regard to actions which his own mind would never have cla.s.sed as wrong that the sense of facing punishment clearly deserved came as a genuine relief.

The monotony of the season was only broken by a visit to the summer home of Aunt Agda at Laurel Grove, where he stayed a whole week and made a lot of friends. She had served with the Wellanders as a nurse girl when Keith was only a baby. Then she was plain Agda, and Keith's mother often spoke of how crazy she had been about him. Then she disappeared, and when the Wellanders next heard of her, she was the wife of a well-to-do retired merchant, to whom she had borne three children while she was merely a servant and his first wife still lived. Keith had often overheard his parents speak of Agda's phenomenal rise with ironic smiles, but he didn't care for anything except her continued inclination to spoil him.

There was a lot of children at Laurel Grove, boys and girls, and most of them matched Keith in age. They took him in, and in that one week he had a glimpse of the kind of life he would have liked to live. There was in particular one boy, Arnold Kruse, for whom Keith formed a warm attachment. This feeling was additionally cemented by Arnold's choice of Keith as a confidant. Arnold was in love with the prettiest girl in the place, Gurlie Norlin, and so was every other boy within reach of Laurel Grove. But Arnold was the favourite, and he told Keith that he and Gurlie had agreed to wait for each other and to marry as soon as they were of age.

It was like a fairy tale to Keith--a wonderful tale like no one he had ever read. And the most wonderful thing about it was that it was real, and that he was permitted to play a sort of part in it. His thoughts went back to Oscar and what he had told Keith about the love between Oscar's father and mother. Here was love again, mystically beautiful, so that it brought a new light into the faces of those it touched. And Keith's heart grew lonely and wistful within him. But strangely enough, he never thought of connecting Arnold's love for Gurlie with what he had read in the book found in his father's book case. That was quite a different thing, he felt.

XII

The presiding genius of the examinations was Lector Booklund, teacher of Latin in Lower and Upper Sixth. He was short and stocky and gnarled by gout. Instead of speaking, he emitted a series of verbal explosives, and the boy whose answers didn't come quick enough became the object of withering scorn. Most of his life seemed concentrated in his eyes where twinkling merriment and blazing anger alternated with bewildering rapidity. He posed as a tyrant, but the boys who knew him well said that at heart he was as kind as he was just, and that his nervous impatience and bursts of rage were merely the results of severe physical sufferings.

The moment he caught sight of Keith among the boys up for examination, most of whom hailed from other schools, he became interested and began to draw him out. And Keith was able to respond with some of his old-time quickwittedness. His ambition had been stirred into a semblance of life through the shock of his failure, while the summer's rest and peace had brought back some of his natural vivacity. The inner conflict was still a source of trouble, but it did not seem quite so much a matter of life and death. He had not yet pa.s.sed the crisis, but he had reached a point where a little tactful nursing might put him on the right path again for good. What he needed above all was encouragement, and that was what he got for a while from the new cla.s.s princ.i.p.al.

He pa.s.sed the examinations with ease. Then the sense of being a favoured pupil once more made him throw himself into the studies with considerable zest. Little by little, however, his zest slacked off. More and more frequently he became the object of blame or ridicule instead of praise. By and by Lector Booklund found it hard to ask him a question or give him a direction without open display of irritation. It was evident that he felt disappointed in Keith, and he did not hesitate to show it.

Many causes combined to produce the slump in Keith's aspirations that in its turn produced the changed att.i.tude of the teacher. The latter's impatience had probably as much to do with it as anything else, while his splenetic manners and speech intimidated the boy's already overwrought sensitiveness. The subjects taught and the form of the teachings did their share, too. Grammar and rules and dry data seemed to play a greater part than ever. In Latin, for instance, they were reading Ovid's "_Metamorphoses_" and the colourful old legends might easily have been used to arouse the boy's interest, if attention had merely been concentrated on the stories told and the life revealed by them. But the teacher was first and last a grammarian, and he would wax frantically enthusiastic over some subtle syntactic distinction which left Keith peevishly indifferent. And Lector Booklund was positively jealous on behalf of his own subject, so that once he flung a bitingly sarcastic remark at the boy because his attention had flared up at the quoting of a phrase in English.

Keith's progress in English showed that he was still capable of both interest and effort. This language was quite new to him, and the cla.s.s had it only one hour a week. But the man who taught it had advanced ideas for his day, and instead of boring the boys with a lot of abstract rules relating to a wholly unknown tongue, he let them start right in on one of the English prose cla.s.sics. They were told to pick out the meaning of the princ.i.p.al words in advance, and the p.r.o.nunciation was explained as they took turns at reading aloud. All the time the teacher kept the princ.i.p.al part of their attention focused on the story gradually revealed. During that one hour a week Keith's mind never wandered. But it was the only rift in the scholastic fog that kept him in a state of constant boredom.