PART II

I

One day in the early autumn Keith's mother dressed him with unusual care

and kissed him several times before they left the house. Granny had to

be kissed, too, and even Lena came forward to shake hands and say

good-bye. It was a very solemn affair.

Hand in hand Keith and his mother walked clear across the old City, past

Great Church, until they came to a very broad lane at the foot of which

was a square with a statue in it. At the other end of the square lay a

very large, red building.

"That's the House of Knights where all the nobility hang up their

coats-of-arms," said the mother.

But Keith was too excited to ask any questions at that moment.

They entered a house much finer and neater than their own and stopped in

front of a door on the second floor. A hubbub of shrill voices could be

heard from within. Keith gripped his mother's hand more firmly.

Then the door was opened by a white-haired lady with spectacles and they

were admitted to a large room, containing a score of little boys and

girls. A dead silence fell on the room as they appeared, and every eye

turned toward Keith, who blushed furiously as was his wont whenever he

found himself observed.

After a brief talk with the teacher, Keith's mother to him:

"This is Aunt Westergren, whom you must obey as you obey me. And now be

a good boy and don't cry."

As the mother tarried by the door for a moment to exchange a last word

with the teacher, and perhaps also to cast one more lingering glance at

the boy, a little girl ran up to Keith, put her right fore-finger on top

of his head and cried out:

"Towhead!"

All the other children giggled. Keith blushed more deeply than ever, but

did not say a word or stir a limb. A moment later the teacher began to

cross-question him about his knowledge of letters and spelling, and he

found it much easier to answer her than to face the children. But, of

course, after a while he was quite at home among them without knowing

how it had happened.

That afternoon his mother came for him. The next morning he had to start

out alone under direct orders from the father, and alone he made his way

home again, his bosom swelling with a sense of wonderful independence.

Years passed before he learned that his mother had watched over him for

days before she was fully convinced of his ability to find the way

by himself.

The autumn passed. Winter and spring came and went. It was summer again.

The little school closed. Keith could read the head-lines at the tops of

the pages in the big Bible without help. But of the school where he had

learned it hardly a memory remained. It was as if the place had made no

impression whatsoever on his mind. And the children with whom he studied

and played nearly a whole year might as well have been dreams, forgotten

at the moment of waking--all but one of them.

Harald alone seemed a real, living thing, a part of Keith's own life,

but not a part of the school where the two met daily. He was a year

older than Keith, a little slow mentally, but rather unusually advanced

in other ways. His father was a merchant of some sort, with an office of

his own and half a dozen clerks at his command, and Harald had been

taught to regard himself as a young gentleman. They lived a few houses

from the school, in the same street, and their home was a revelation

to Keith.

Houses less fortunate than his own were familiar to him, but he had

never seen a better one until he was asked to visit Harald for the first

time, and the comparisons made on that occasion stuck deeply in

his mind.

They entered through a hallway where caps and coats were left behind,

and from there they went into a room where every piece of furniture was

of mahogany. Between the windows hung a mirror in a gilded frame that

was as tall as the room itself, so that Keith could see himself from

head to foot. The object that caught the boy's attention most of all,

however, was a chandelier suspended from the middle of the ceiling and

made up of hundreds of little rods of glass. As Harald slammed the door

on entering, some of the rods were set in motion and struck against each

other with a tiny twinkle that seemed to Keith the most beautiful sound

he had ever heard.

That room, Harald said, was used only to receive visitors, and he gave

Keith to understand that there were any number of other rooms on both

sides of it. One of these was Harald's own and used by nobody else. He

could even lock the door of it on the inside, if he wanted. There they

played with tin soldiers several inches high, and Harald had a little

cannon out of which they could shoot dry peas, so that it was possible

to fight a real battle by dividing the soldiers and taking turns of

using the cannon. Finally Harald's mother appeared with a bowl of fruit

and greeted the visitor with a certain searching kindness that made him

a little uneasy in the midst of all his enjoyment.

Keith returned home that day much later than unusual to find his mother

in a state of frantic worry. At first she declared that he must not go

anywhere without her knowing about it in advance, but after a while she

became quite interested and palpably elated by Keith's tale of all the

glories he had seen. She explained that the glass rods on the

chandeliers were prisms that showed the whole rainbow when you held them

in front of a light, and she asked him eagerly if he had been invited to

come again. But when the father heard of it that night, he said:

"I don't think Keith should go there at all. He can't ask such a boy

over here, and the next thing we know, Keith's own home will no longer

be good enough for him."

Keith could hardly believe his ears. He had never felt such resentment

against his father, and just before going to bed, while his father was

out of the room for a moment, he whispered to his mother:

"I think papa does not want me to have any fun!"

"You don't understand," she retorted. "He means well. Remember what

Granny says: Equals make the best playmates."

Three or four times Keith went home with Harald. Then the gates of

paradise were suddenly slammed in his face. One day, as they were

leaving school together, Harald remarked quite calmly:

"You can't come home with me any more."

"Why," gasped Keith, his throat choking.

"Because mamma says I must find some one else to play with," Harald

explained. Then he softened a little: "I can't help it, and I like you."

"But why," insisted Keith on the verge of tears.

"You look like a nice boy, mamma says, but your father is nothing but a

_vaktmästare_, and mine is a _grosshandlare_ (wholesale dealer)."

Keith walked home in a stupor and began to cry the moment he saw his

mother. Her lips tightened and her face grew white as she listened to

the story he sobbed forth.

"Now you can see that your father was right," she said at last. "Of

course, we are just as good as anybody else, but others don't think

so--because we are poor. But we have our pride, and you had better stay

and play with your own soldiers hereafter. Then I don't have to worry

about you either."

But Keith had very little pride. He continued to seek Harald's company

as before, and twice, as they about to part in front of the latter's

house, Keith asked if he couldn't come up and play for a little while.

"Don't you understand," Harald asked the second time, "that my mamma

does not think you good enough for me to play with?"

Keith had not thought of it in that way. He had learned that there were

people who looked down on his parents, just as they, in their turn,

looked down on the parents of Johan, but the idea that he himself might

be regarded equally inferior was entirely new to him. It was so strange

to him that it took him years to grasp it. And when it came into his

mind, he felt as if some one had raised a heavy stick to strike him, and

he cowered under the impending blow.

II

Christmas was approaching.

The days grew shorter and shorter, until at last a scant four hours of

daylight remained around noon. Even then a lamp was often needed

for reading.

The lead-coloured sky nearly touched the roofs. The drizzle that filled

the air most of the time seemed to enter men's minds, too, sapping their

vigour until life became a burden. Meeting on the streets, they would

cry in irritable tones:

"When will the snow come?"

It was always a tedious time for Keith. The incident with Harald made it

worse this year. Except for the daily attendance at school, he was

virtually a prisoner. Johan was to be seen only from the window, whence

Keith enviously watched him prowling about the lane, his hands buried in

the side-pockets of an old coat much too long--apparently inherited from

someone else--and his shoulders hunched as if fore-destined to support

loads of wood like those his father used to carry. If no one was in the

living-room, Keith might shout a greeting to his playmate below, but it

was not much fun, and Johan had a contemptuous way of asking why he did

not come out and play.

Yet the season was not without its compensations. Stores of every kind

were laid in to last through the winter. One might have thought that a

severance of communications with the outside world was feared. Keith

marvelled at the magnificence of it, and once in a while he asked why it

had to be done. The answers were unsatisfactory. The main reason was

that it had always been done, but he gathered also that, while it was

perfectly respectable to live from day to day during the summer, to do

so during the winter would be a distinct proof of social and economic

inferiority.

The fire wood came first--a mighty load of birch logs piled along the

house front in the lane. Two men were busy all day with saw and ax,

reducing those logs into pieces matching the fire-places in the kitchen

stove and the two glazed brick ovens in the living-room and the parlour.

Two more men piled the pieces into huge sacks and staggered with those

on their backs up the five flights of stairs to the top garret under the

peak of the house, which belonged to the Wellanders.

Keith would stand in the kitchen door watching them. First he heard the

slow clamp-clamp of ascending foot-steps. Then the man's heavy breathing

became audible, and Keith felt as if the load was resting on his own

shoulders. Finally the open top of the bag, with its bright stuffing of

newly cut birch wood, showed at the corner of the landing quite a long

time before the head beneath it came into sight. As the man crossed the

landing in front of Keith, bent almost double under his burden, a dew of

pungent perspiration would drop on the slate-coloured stones, leaving

behind a curious path of round spots. Not a word was said at that time,

but coming down the men would sometimes throw a crude jest to the

bright-eyed watcher or stop to refill their mouths with snuff out of a

little thin brass box with a mirror fitted to the inside of its cover.

The sight of the snuff filled Keith with a sense of loathing, although

his father used to put a pinch of it into his nostrils now and then, and

more than anything else it seemed to mark a distinction between himself

and those people from a world far beneath his own. Theirs was a racking

job, heavier than any other known to the boy, and one day he asked

his mother:

"Why do they care to carry all that wood for us?"

"Because we pay them, and because they are mighty glad to get the money.

Otherwise they couldn't live."

"And where does the wood come from?"

"The bank sends it as part of papa's pay."

Once more Keith was so impressed with the miraculous power of that

mysterious being which his father served and cursed and worshipped that

his mother's previous answer was lost for the time being. But it

recurred to his mind later and connected with his father's talk of

making him a carpenter. A strong prejudice against manual labour was

shaping itself in his mind.

After the wood came the victuals: a tub of butter reaching Keith to the

chin; bags of flour; barrels of potatoes and apples; hams and haunches

of dried mutton and smoked reindeer meat; and lastly packages of smaller

size and sundry contents that the mother promptly carried to the pantry

inside the parlour without letting Keith touch them.

This year--it was the winter following the Franco-Prussian war--the

preparations were rendered uncommonly impressive by the addition of a

cheese large as the moon at full. There was always plenty of cheese of

various kinds in the house: whole milk cheese carefully aged until its

flavour was like that of English Stilton or Italian Gorgonzola; skim

milk cheese stuffed with cloves and cardamom seeds; and dark brown goat

milk cheese of a cloying sweetness that Keith detested.

Cheese was more than a taste with Keith's father. It was a hobby, and

one of his few pastimes was to skirmish in strange little shops for some

particularly old and strong-smelling piece at a reasonable price. When

he brought home a bargain of that kind, he acted like a bibliophile

having just captured a rare first edition for a song, and the mother

tried hard to share his enthusiasm. But, she said once, she had to draw

the line at cheese that walked by itself. Half in jest and half in

earnest, the father maintained that the maggots were the very essence of

the cheese, and that to remove them was to lose the finest flavour. This

year the father had bought a whole fresh cheese in order to age it at

home and thus save money in two ways, the price being proportionate

to the age.

The same large-handed system prevailed in other things, though the

parents often spoke of their poverty, and though their resources

undoubtedly were very limited. Shirts, table-ware, bed-linen, china,

etc., must needs be acquired in round numbers. To have less than a dozen

of anything was to have nothing at all. The breaking of a cup was a

family disaster if it could not be replaced. Everything had to be in

sets, and to preserve these intact, the utmost care was preached and

exercised. It bred thrift and orderliness, but also an undue regard

for property.

Finally came the time for baking and other direct preparations for a

holiday season that in the good old days used to last from Christmas Eve

to January 13th known as the Twentieth Christmas Day, when everybody

"danced the Yule out." What interested Keith most in this part of the

proceedings was the making of gingersnaps according to a recipe

transmitted to his mother from bygone generations and cherished by her

as a precious family secret. A whole day was set aside for the purpose

and at the end of it they had a big, bulging earthen jar filled to the

brim. Keith used to boast to other children of those dainties that, in

addition to their taste, had the fascination of many different

shapes--hearts, crowns, lilies, clubs, diamonds, baskets, and so on.

They really deserved all the praise they got, and he had so little to

boast of on the whole. The jar stood on the floor in the pantry back of

the parlour, and once in a while Keith found his way to it without

maternal permission, although, as a rule, he was little given to

lawbreaking.

One morning three or four days before Christmas Lena was heard calling

from the kitchen:

"Keith, Keith, come and look!"

Eager as always when the slightest excitement was promised, the boy

started so suddenly that his little table was upset with its whole

population of tin soldiers and his mother was moved to remark that "it

was no use behaving as if the house were on fire."

"Look at the snow," said Lena, pointing to the window when Keith reached

the kitchen, relieved at not having had to pick up the spilled toys

before he could go.

Huge, wet, feathery flakes were dropping lazily from the sky. Little by

little they increased in numbers and fell more quickly. At last they

formed a moving veil through which the building at the other end of the

courtyard could barely be seen.

Later in the day Keith was permitted to look out through one of the

front windows. The whole world had changed and looked much brighter in

spite of the failing light. The Quay was covered by a carpet of white

that made the waters beyond look doubly dark and cold. The trees on the

opposite shore looked as if they had been painted from the topmost twig

to the root. Down in the lane, two of the workers in the distillery were

pelting each other with snowballs while a third one was shouting at the

top of his voice:

"We'll have a white Christmas this year, thank heaven."

That same evening Keith's long cherished dream of visiting the open-air

Christmas Fair at Great Square was to come true at last. Like other

affairs of its kind, it had been reduced by the modern shop to a mere

shadow of its former glorious self, and it was kept up only out of

regard for ancient tradition. Keith had been told that it was nothing

but a lot of open booths displaying cheap toys and cheaper candy. To

Keith toys were toys and candy candy, no matter what the price and

quality, and so he kept on begging leave to go, until the night in

question his parents, who were going out with friends, deemed it better

to let him see for himself. And so Lena was ordered to take charge of

the expedition.

Lena and Keith were dressed and ready to start when the mother came

into the kitchen to give the boy a farewell kiss as usual. He was in

high spirits, but fidgety with some unexpressed wish.

"What is it, Keith," asked the mother, recognizing the symptoms.

"I want some money," he whispered into her ear.

"Go and ask papa."

"No, you ask him."

That was what always happened, and in the end the mother voiced the

boy's plea to the father, who just then appeared in the door to the

living-room. He was in a good humour and promptly reached into his

pocket. Unfortunately Keith discovered at that crucial moment that one

of his shoe laces had become untied.

"Please, mamma, help me," he said, putting his foot on a chair to enable

her to reach it more easily.

"That settles it," exclaimed the father with a darkening face as he

handed Keith a few small copper coins. "That is all you will get now. A

boy of five who makes his mother tie his shoe strings ought not to have

anything at all."

Keith took the coins silently and went with Lena to the fair, but he saw

nothing worth seeing, and he never wanted to go again. Uneasily he

prowled among the booths trying as a matter of duty to find something so

cheap that his scant hoard would buy it. At last he succeeded in getting

a little box of tin soldiers of poorest quality for one-third less than

the price put on it It was one of the few times in his life when he

found himself able to haggle over the cost of a thing.

From the first he found fault with the new addition to his army, and one

day not long afterwards he charged the whole regiment with cowardice in

the face of the enemy. A drumhead court martial was held on the spot,

and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The culprits were found

guilty in a body and sentenced to immediate execution. Then Keith

possessed himself surreptitiously of the family hammer, and when his

mother came to investigate the noise he was making the whole offensive

regiment had been reduced to scraps. Never before or after did Keith as

a general go to such extremes on behalf of military morale.

But many, many years later, when he stopped for the first time at a

typical English hotel, he found himself horribly embarrassed by the

assistance forced on him by the obligatory valet.

III

In Sweden the principal celebration with its distribution of gifts takes

place late on Christmas Eve.

Long before that day Keith began to watch every package brought into the

house. Soon he noticed several that disappeared quickly without having

been opened. Nor did it take his shrewd little mind long to figure out

that they must have been stowed away on the upper shelf of the pantry

back of the parlour. This was an excellent hiding-place because the

shelf in question was fully six feet above the floor and on a level with

the lintel of the doorway, so that its contents seemed as much out of

reach as they were out sight from below.

One day, however, Keith succeeded in getting into the parlour when both

parents were out. The night before his father had come home with an

unusually large and queerly shaped package under his arm and had taken

it straight into the parlour. The boy's curiosity was at fever heat and

got the better of his customary inertia in the face of explicit

prohibitions. Having dragged a heavy wooden chair into the pantry, he

placed its tall back directly against the shelves. The crosspieces in

the back of the chair formed rungs on which he climbed up to the top

shelf. It was quite a feat for a very small boy, but the slight timidity

that characterized him as a rule was totally forgotten for the time.

There was the mystifying package together with many others. He could

even touch it with his hand. In spite of its size, it was very light. It

was wider at the bottom than at the top, and it sounded hollow when he

knocked at it. His little brain worked at high pressure, but not a guess

came out of it that was at all plausible. Finally Keith had to climb

down no wiser than he was before. His failure had one advantage. It

freed him from all of guilt. It served also to keep his expectations at

an unusually high pitch, so that when the morning of the great day

arrived at last, it seemed as if he were facing twelve long hours of

actual torture.

Every one was very busy preparing not only for the feast of the evening,

but for the two coming holidays. Christmas Day in Sweden being followed

by a Second Christmas Day, equal to the first one in leisure if not in

sanctity. No one had any time to spare for the boy, who found himself in

the way wherever he turned. In the end he was ordered pointblank out of

the kitchen, where his mother, Granny and the servant girl needed all

the space at their disposal. The door to the parlour was closed although

the lodger had left town for the holidays, and so nothing but the

living-room remained. There Keith whiled away the long hours in vain

speculation on the contents of the mysterious package.

He tried to recall what things he had wished for during the year. He

felt sure that nothing of the kind could be in the package. Any desire

openly expressed was disregarded by his father, Keith thought, if not

actually resented. The reason given was that a Christmas present should

be a complete surprise, and if the recipient had openly asked for it,

there could be no talk of surprising him. Of course, Keith could whisper

what he wanted into his mother's ear now and then but always with the

provision that she must convey the proper information to the father as

coming from herself.

Even this process of elimination failed, however, and so the day dragged

on interminably, with no help from without for a mind weary of waiting.

The customary dinner was passed up. Everybody snatched a bite off the

kitchen table without breaking away from the work. Three or four times

people arrived with packages from relatives or friends. Each visitor had

to be treated, even though he be a stranger of the humblest character.

Then dull monotony reigned once more, and Keith resumed his fidgeting

back and forth between the kitchen door and his own corner. The old toys

were simply unendurable....

It had long been dark when the father returned home at last, laden with

parcels and tired out by personal delivery of Christmas gifts to the

various members of the family. His face was slightly flushed and he

talked with unusual eagerness. An atmosphere of reckless good-will

surrounded him, and when he made a remark about there being no presents,

even Keith knew it to be facetious.

The last hour was the longest. The father and the mother had withdrawn

to the parlour and closed the door behind them. The girl was setting the

table and couldn't be disturbed. Granny was nervous and irritable

because she knew that she would be forced to join the rest at the table

that night. Keith felt like a disembodied soul let loose in infinite

space without goal or purpose.

Toward eight o'clock the parlour door opened and Keith was called in. A

tiny Christmas tree stood on a table in a corner, glistening with lights

and multicoloured paper festoons. It represented a great concession,

because neither one of the parents cared much for the trouble involved.

If there had been a number of children in the family, they said, then it

would have been another matter. The truth was that Keith didn't care

very much either. He clapped hands and shouted excitedly, of course, but

his glances went sideways to the big sofa, where stood a huge hamper

piled to twice its own height with parcels, all wrapped in snow-white

paper and sealed with red sealing wax. The air of the room was charged

with the rich smell of newly melted wax, and to Keith that smell was

always the essence of Christmas, its chief symbol and harbinger.

During those few minutes in the parlour a dozen tall candles had been

lighted in the living-room, transforming the place that a moment before

seemed so dreary. The dining table was opened to its full length and

placed across the middle of the room, at right angles to the

chaiselongue where Keith slept nights. Cut glass dishes and silver-ware

shone in the light reflected from the spotlessly white table cloth. In

the centre stood the Christmas layer cake, its body four inches thick

and its top glistening with red and yellow and green pieces of

candied fruit.

Then began the little comedy regularly enacted every Christmas.

"Isn't Granny coming," the father asked. Then he turned to Lena. "Tell

her we are ready."

"She says she doesn't want to come in," Lena reported after a hasty

visit to the kitchen.

"You go and ask her for me, Keith," was the father's next suggestion.

"Thank you, dear," Granny said when Keith came to her with his message.

"But you tell your father that I think the kitchen is a much better

place for a useless old hag like myself."

"Suppose you go," the father said to his wife on hearing Keith's

modified version of Granny's reply.

"She says she really won't come in," the mother explained a minute

later. "You had better go out and ask her yourself, Carl. It is the one

thing she cannot resist."

The father went with a broad grin on his face. Keith laughed loudly and

nervously, his eyes on the huge cake. But the mother said

apologetically to Lena:

"Mamma is so funny about coming in here, although she knows how much we

want her."

"Here she is now," said Lena.

And the father appeared with Granny on his arm, and Granny was all

dressed up in her best skirt of black silk thick as cloth, with a cap of

black lace on her head.

"Really, I can't see what you want with an old thing like me in here,"

she continued protesting as she was being led to her seat beside Keith.

The girl sat opposite Granny, and the mother beside the girl, facing

Keith. The father, on that one occasion, always occupied the

chaiselongue at the short end of the table, with the mother on his right

and Keith on his left. Beside him stood the hamper with its mountainous

pile of parcels.

Keith said grace with folded hands and bent head, and, of course, he had

to say it twice because the first time he swallowed half the words in

his eagerness to get through quickly. Then the meal began.

It opened with a light _smörgasbord_, hors d'oeuvres, literally rendered

sandwich-table: caviar, anchovy, sardines, shavings of smoked salmon,

slices of bologna, and so on. With it the father took a _snaps_ of

Swedish gin or _brännvin_, and after much pressing Granny consented to

take one, too. The main course consisted of _lutfisk_: dried and salted

codfish that had been soaked in water for twenty-four hours to take out

the salt and then boiled until it was tender as cranberry jelly. It was

served with boiled potatoes and a gravy made of cream and chopped

hard-boiled eggs. It was followed by _risgrynsgröt_: rice cooked in milk

and served with a cover of sugar and cinnamon. Wherever Swedes go, they

must have those two dishes on Christmas Eve. They have had them since

the days when Christmas was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice,

when dried codfish was the staple winter food, and when rice was the

rarest of imported delicacies.

Keith did not become interested until the rice appeared and the father

declared that no one could taste it until he or she had "rhymed over the

rice." Lena had to begin, and blushingly she read:

"To cook rice is a great feat, especially to get it sweet."

Whereupon everybody applauded, and the mother followed:

"Those who don't like rice are worse than little mice."

The father made them all laugh by saying:

"The rice is sweet and looks very neat, but now I want to eat."

The cutting of the cake, with its coating of sugar and its many layers

of custard ... the wine, port and sherry, poured from tall glass

decanters with silver labels hung about their necks to show which was

which ... the blushing native apples and the figs from distant sunlit

shores ... the almonds and raisins that tested best when eaten together

... the candy and the caramels ... the absence of restraint and reproof

... the freedom to indulge one's utmost appetite ... the smiles and the

pleasant words and the jokes sprung by the father ... and in the midst

of it all a pause laden with rose-coloured melancholy....

"Why can it not be Christmas every day," asked Keith suddenly.

"Because Christmas then would be like any other day," the father

replied, reaching for the first parcel which was always for Keith.

One by one they were handed out. Each one was elaborately addressed and

furnished with a rhymed or unrhymed tag that often hid a sting beneath

its clownish exterior. The father read the inscription aloud before he

handed each parcel to its recipient, who had to open it and let its

contents be admired by all before another gift was distributed.

The table became crowded. The floor was a litter of paper. Lena giggled.

Granny's cap was down on one ear. Keith could not sit still on

his chair.

"To Master Keith Wellander," the father read out. "A friendly warning,

to be remembered in the morning and all through the day. He who slops at

meals is a pig that squeals and hurts his parents alway."

Keith took the parcel with less than usual zest. It was rectangular and

very heavy. For a moment he hesitated to open it. There was something

about its inscription that puzzled and bothered him.

At last the wrapper came off, and he gazed uncomprehendingly at a large

piece of wood hollowed out like a canoe.

"A boat ..." he stammered.

"A trough," rejoined his father, a strange, almost embarrassed look

appearing on his face. "This is Christmas and I want you to be happy,

but you must learn to eat decently, and I thought this might serve you

as a lesson and a reminder."

Keith said nothing. He sat looking at that piece of wood as if it were a

dragon that had swallowed the whole Christmas in a single gulp. He

wanted to cry, but for the first time he seemed to feel a pride that

forbade him to do so....

"Master Keith Wellander," the father read out again with evident haste

and in a voice which he tried to make very jolly, "When beaten in the

open field, this will be my trusty shield."

It was _the_ package--and the trough was forgotten.

The boy trembled with excitement. His hands tore vainly at the paper

cover, which, in the end, had to be removed by the father.

On the table, fully revealed at last, stood a real fortress of

cardboard, with a drawbridge that could be raised, and a tower in the

centre, and at the top of it a flagstaff flying the Swedish colours.

It was his heart's most cherished desire, the thing that had seemed so

unattainable that he had deemed it useless to whisper it into his

mother's ear.

For a long while he did not move at all, but just looked and looked,

seemingly afraid to touch the new toy. Then a warm flood of joy shot

through him, and suddenly he was seized by an irresistible impulse to

kiss his father--which was a most unusual endearment between them. As he

put his hand on the table to get off the chair, it touched the trough,

and once more his mood changed. He seemed to stiffen, and all he could

do was to hold out his hand and whisper:

"Thank you very much, papa!"

IV

On Christmas Day morning everybody rose while it was still pitch dark

outside. After a hasty cup of coffee, the parents and Keith set off for

Great Church to attend _julotta_--yule matins--an early service held

only that one day of the year.

More snow had fallen, and now it was freezing, so that every step they

took produced a peculiar, almost metallic crunching. From every quarter

silent crowds in their holiday best streamed toward the old church. They

seemed very solemn, but Keith sensed the happy spirit underlying their

outward sedateness. It filled him with a wild desire to romp, and it was

merely the awe of his father's presence that kept him in check.

The church was packed, but they found good seats. Keith had eyes for one

thing only: the Star of Bethlehem that blazed above the screen of darkly

green spruces surrounding the altar. All the rest of it was lost on him.

Then the organ music burst forth, and for a moment he cowered as under a

blow. It was too much of a novelty, and the vibrations touched his

supersensitive nerves annoyingly. After a while he grew more accustomed

to it, but he did not like it, and he said so loudly enough to bring him

a stern glance from his father and smiles from some of the people in the

pew ahead. During the brief sermon he slept peacefully.

As soon as they were home again, the fortress was brought out and

preparations made for a great siege. In the midst of it he left his

corner to put a question to the mother, who was dozing over a book in

her easy chair.

"How could papa know that I wanted it," he asked, and she knew what he

was thinking of.

"Don't you remember," she answered smiling slyly, "how you came home one

day last summer and talked about something you had seen in a window on

West Long Street, and papa was listening."

"So long ago," mused Keith, "and I didn't know he heard it."

"Oh, yes, he heard, and he remembered. You don't understand papa. He

doesn't want you to ask for things because he finds it such a pleasure

to figure out what you want and give it to you unexpectedly."

Keith returned to his corner thinking hard, as was his wont at times.

The siege was postponed. He took out the trough and studied it

carefully. It would make a good boat. Then he put it down and sat for a

while looking at the little fortress--so like the one he could see when

he looked out of their front windows. His heart swelled, and with a rush

that nearly upset his little table, he made for his father in the

parlour, crawled up on his lap, put both arms about his neck, and kissed

him. And to his surprise he was not repelled. But a moment later his

father put him down on the floor and said in a voice that sounded a

little choked:

"Go back and play with your soldiers now."

Then came dinner, always the same on Christmas Day: _smörgasbord_;

roasted fresh ham with mashed potatoes and tiny cubes of Swedish

turnips fried in butter; rice and milk; cake and wine.

And the day ended as it had begun, happily and peacefully. Never had the

boy felt more warmly toward his father. But at dinner the next day,

which was also a holiday so that the father was at home, Keith happened

to spill something on the table cloth.

"Remember your Christmas present," said the father sharply. "You are old

enough to behave properly at table, and if you won't, we shall let you

eat in your own corner and eat out of the trough."

During the rest of that day Keith could not play with his fortress. Once

he took the trough to the window that happened to be open and

contemplated the possibility of dropping it into the lane. But his

courage failed him.

It stayed with him as part of his little stock of toys, and gradually it

came to be viewed with a certain amount of indifference. But on the rare

occasions when he was permitted to have a playmate at home, he always

managed to hide the trough under his mother's bureau. And even the mere

consciousness of its presence there would sometimes set his

cheeks burning.

V

It was summer again. The school was closed. Keith's pleas to be allowed

to play with Johan became impassioned. Consequently his parents were

pleased when Aunt Brita asked if Keith could spend a few weeks with

them in a little cottage they had hired on an island halfway between

Stockholm and the open sea.

To Keith this was a tremendous adventure--his first excursion from home,

and almost his first acquaintance with real country life. In fact, the

impressions of the journey itself were so many and so novel that his

mind couldn't retain anything at all. The same thing happened over and

over again during the earlier part of his life, so that out of that

epoch-making summer visit, for instance, only a single slight incident

took up a lasting abode in his memory.

The cottage stood in the middle of the island, which was so small that a

fifteen-minute walk took them down to the nearest shore. Thither they

went one afternoon not long after his arrival to bathe--his aunt, his

cousin Carl who was a year younger than himself, Keith, a couple of

other children of the same age, and Mina, an eighteen-year old girl

living with Keith's uncle and aunt in a position halfway between ward

and servant. Across the fields and along shaded wood paths they ran

joyously to a sheltered bay with a sandy beach from which the open fjord

could be seen in the distance. The children stripped helter-skelter and

went into the shallow water as nature had made them, but Mina, who was

to assist them, had for want of bathing suit put on a starched white

petticoat. The upper part of her body was bare, showing two beautifully

pointed breasts.

Keith looked and looked at those breasts until Mina noticed him and

actually began to blush. As if embarrassed, she picked up one of the

other children and began to swing it around in a circle. Her movement

turned Keith's attention to the petticoat, and suddenly he could think

of nothing else.

The children were naked. Why should Mina wear a piece of clothing that

even Keith could see was quite unfitted for such a use. There must be

something to hide. What could it be? At last he could contain himself no

longer, but blurted out:

"Why does Mina wear that silly skirt?"

"Because she is afraid of catching cold," replied his aunt from the

shore with a slight jeer in her voice and one of her shrewd smiles.

"Why shouldn't we catch cold, too," was his next question.

There was no direct answer, but he could hear his aunt mutter between

her teeth:

"Drat that boy!"

Then she burst into open laughter, while Mina rushed ashore and hastily

began to dress behind a close screen of undergrowth.

After that Mina did not go in bathing with the children.

Many years later Keith could still visualize the whole scene as if it

had happened only a few days ago, while all his efforts to recall the

cottage where they lived, or anything else seen that summer, were vain.

VI

In the autumn of that year Keith was sent to a "real" school, selected

after much inquiry by his parents as combining a reasonable degree of

efficiency and social standing with an equally reasonable cost of

tuition. It was private like the first one, kept by two middle-aged

spinster sisters, one of whom was tall, angular and firm, while the

other was short, fat and sentimental. It held about two scores of

pupils, most of whom were girls. These girls ranged in years to the

near-marriageable age, while none of the boys was more than eight years

old. Thus the atmosphere was distinctly feminine, which in the eyes of

Keith's mother marked an added advantage.

The only thing that excited Keith about the new school was that it took

him farther from home than he had ever been allowed to wander unattended

before, into a hitherto unexplored region of the city known as the South

End. It was a poor man's neighbourhood on the whole, but of that Keith

knew nothing at the time. The school occupied a few large and sunny

rooms in the rear part of a sprawling old stone structure built like a

palace around an enormous cobble-stoned courtyard, with a tall arched

gateway providing entrance from the street under the front part of the

house. For a while it was quite impressive and a little disturbing, but

like everything else it soon became familiar and commonplace.

To get there from his own part of town, Keith had to cross the Sluice--a

lock enabling vessels to pass safely from Lake Maelaren to the salt

waters of the Bay in spite of the frequently sharp difference of level.

At either end of the lock was a drawbridge in two sections raised from

the centre to let the larger vessels through. The place was full of

interesting sights, and Keith loved in particular to press right up

against the edge of the raised bridge as some steamer or small sailing

vessel glided leisurely in or out of the ever shifting waters of

the lock.

At first it never occurred to him that he might walk around by the other

bridge when the one right in his way happened to be open, and so he was

late at school several times in quick succession. The first time he was

warned. The second he was placed in a corner of the room with his face

to the wall and kept there for about one quarter of an hour. The third

time the elder Miss Ahlberg applied a ruler to the finger-tips of his

left hand, which she held in a firm grasp within one of her own.

The physical sensation gave the boy a terrible shock. No one had ever

really hurt him before. The spankings administered at home once in a

very great while were like thunderstorms, with a great deal of noise and

small harm done. This was something else, and more intimidating than the

pain was the manifest intention of the teacher to inflict it. Her face

was tense and her eyes flashed fire. Worst of all, however, was the

shame of it, for the punishment was applied in front of the

whole school.

When Keith retired to his own seat sobbing bitterly, he felt that he

could never look the other children in the face, and that they probably

would shun him as a pariah. The only thing would be to tell his mother

that he could not go back to school again. He was still shaking with

sobs, when he heard a boy on the chair behind him whisper into his ear:

"Oh, that's nothing. You just wait till she pulls your hair. She pulls

it right out by the roots. I'll show you a bare spot on my head during

the next pause."

And so he did when the lesson came to an end and they were permitted to

play for a few minutes. Other children joined them, and no one seemed to

think less of Keith for what had happened to him. It was a revelation to

him and opened vistas of considerable interest. But the memory of the

physical and mental shock received was more powerful, and after that he

took care to reach school in time regardless of what might be the

temptations along his path or the effort it might cost him to get there.

In fact, the incident became to some extent determining for his whole

career in school. He never voluntarily did anything that might expose

him to punishment, and rarely was he able to forget himself to the

extent of incurring reproof. He turned out a docile pupil, and on the

whole, docility did not come hard to him. In spite of the vitality with

which he overflowed, there was a certain timidity attaching to him.

VII

It would be wrong to conclude that the little school of the Misses

Ahlberg was characterized by any reign of terror. As a rule, the

atmosphere was peaceful and kindly, and the teaching was rather good.

Keith was eager to learn, and learning came easy to him. In those early

days, of course, there was no studying to be done at home, but even in

later years he never knew what it was to "plug." In fact, he could not

do it. Either his interest was aroused, and then he absorbed the matter

at hand in the way he breathed, without the least conscious effort; or

his interest remained unstirred, in which case no amount of mechanical

application would help. Learning by rote offered no escape in the latter

case, for his memory operated in the same way as the rest of his mind,

sucking up what fitted it as a blotter sucks the ink, and presenting a

surface of polished marble to any matter not germane according to its

own mysterious standards.

Soon he could read without any effort whatsoever--anything. Reckoning

came easy, too, but writing came hard. It seemed so much easier to take

in than to give out in any form. Grammar gave him no difficulty, because

it dealt with words, and words possessed a magic charm that always held

him. Gradually he began to dip into history and geography--wonderful

realms into which his imagination plunged headlong. He took almost as

eagerly to the old stories out of the Bible--stories of which he had

caught more than a glimpse at home--but the Catechism was like washing

in the morning: it had to be done because higher powers so decreed.

Yes, he learned a good deal for a little boy of his age, but he never

knew how it happened. The school was never quite real to him. His home

was real, and his play at home. So was his daily walk to and from school

with its innumerable opportunities for observation in the raw. There

were people in the streets, and shops along the road, and many different

kinds of vessels in the harbour. There was the guardhouse on the little

square halfway to school, kept by a small detachment of soldiers that

were relieved every noon and that never belonged to the same regiment

two days in succession. Watching them gave him many suggestions for

handling his own tin soldiers in a more business-like fashion.

But at school.... He was never absentminded or unattentive, for that

might have brought the quick clutch of the elder Miss Ahlberg's bony

hand into his own supersensitive crop of hair, and most of what was

going on had enough interest in itself to prevent his mind from straying

far afield. He knew the names of his fellow pupils. He played with those

of his own age, and he had likes and dislikes, as was natural. But

through it all he moved as through a mist, seeing only the thing

immediately at hand, and losing sight of everything the moment he had

passed it. The three years spent in that school seemed to telescope into

each other so that soon afterwards he found himself unable to tell if a

thing had happened during the first or last of those years. Nor did the

things he remembered have any connection with the school as a rule, and

out of all the boys and girls he met there not one remained distinct in

his memory as did the figure of Harald from the first school. When he

left the school to go home for the day, he was done with it, and nothing

followed him but what was stored in his head. And that, too, seemed

forgotten at the time, to be re-discovered later with a sense of

pleasant surprise.

And all that time things were happening to him at home and elsewhere

that, as far as importance went, stood in curious contrast to his

quickly forgotten experiences at school--things that burnt themselves

into his mind as a part of its permanent contents....

VIII

There was not a private bathroom to be found in Stockholm in those days.

One washed hands and face and neck whenever compelled to, and some

people, like Keith's father, splashed the upper part of their bodies

with water every morning regardless of weather and temperature. Once a

week every self-respecting person went to a public bath for a thorough

steaming and scrubbing.

Keith's mother did like the rest, and generally she took the boy along

as he was admitted without extra charge. Then mother and son would get

into a tremendous tub full of hot water--so large and so full that

Keith had to sit up in order to keep his head above water. He always

enjoyed it very much, and especially he enjoyed feeling his mother's

soft body close to his own.

On an occasion of this kind he had already finished his bath and was

sitting on a wooden bench beside the tub wrapped in a big sheet. The old

woman attendant stood ready with a similar sheet for his mother, who was

just stepping out of the tub facing the boy.

She was still young, and her skin, always beautiful, was aglow with the

heat of the bath and the friction of the scrubbing.

Keith stared open-eyed at her, unconscious of any particular interest,

and yet filled with a vague, slightly disturbing sense of pleasure.

Then his mother caught his glance. Their eyes met. A slight flush spread

over her face.

Grabbing the sheet from the old woman, she flung it about herself. As

she did so, he heard her say to the attendant:

"That young gentleman will have to bathe with his father hereafter, I

guess."

At first he was conscious of a rebuke, and the cause of it left him

quite at sea. He would probably have puzzled over it a great deal more

than he did, had not his mind become preoccupied with the idea that he

would be allowed to accompany his father to the men's part of the

establishment. It was an idea that filled him with a sort of

shrinking pride.

IX

Among the less intimate friends of his mother was a young widow with a

little girl about a year younger than Keith. For some reason unknown to

the boy, those two came to see his mother several times that Spring. It

was the first time in his life Keith met a girl on familiar terms.

Clara was slender and elfish, with a wealth of yellow tresses falling

down her back. She was tender and gay, too, and Keith liked to hear her

laugh. When they played, she was always ready to fall in with any whim

of Keith's.

One afternoon, when the days were growing longer, Clara's mother asked

permission to leave her with the Wellanders while she attended to some

business in the neighbourhood. Keith's mother was occupied in the

kitchen in some manner making her wish to have the door to the

living-room closed. Thus the two children were left to play by

themselves.

He never could remember how it began, and he could not tell what put the

idea in his head....

It was a new game, and she played it as readily as any other he might

have proposed. They had crawled so far into his own corner by the window

that they were almost hidden behind mamma's bureau.

At first they whispered to each other, eagerly as children do, but only

with the eagerness they might have shown if playing hide-and-seek. Then

he raised her little dress, and she didn't seem to mind. He also undid

his own dress, and they studied each other's bodies, noting the

differences.

The end of it was that they laid down together on the floor. He put his

mouth to hers and hugged her just as tightly as he could. When they had

been lying in way for a while, he whispered to her:

"Isn't it nice?"

And she dutifully whispered back: "It is!"

A few minutes later they were playing with his tin soldiers, and soon

after Clara's mother returned to take her away.

During their entire play both doors had remained closed. Keith was quite

sure of that. He had looked before he started the new game, although he

was not aware of trespassing on prohibited territory.

Afterwards he felt rather uneasy. There was a distinct sense of risk

attaching to that game, and he wondered whether Clara might tell her

mother. At the same time the thought of what he had done filled him with

inexplicable satisfaction, as if, in some way, he had put something over

on the grown-ups.

As for his own mother--she seemed to be watching him with unusual

concern during the next few days, and he could not escape a suspicion

that she knew. Closed doors did not seem to prevent grown-up people from

knowing what children did.

At the same time he wondered why he and Clara should not be playing as

they had done. There was really nothing to it. And the comparisons they

had made took no hold of his imagination. The differences revealed he

accepted as he accepted anything that had no direct bearing on his own

happiness.

As far as he could recall afterwards, he never saw Clara again. Nor did

he seem to miss her.

X

Summer again.

The incident with Clara was forgotten. Yet Keith had a sense of being

watched a little more closely than usual. He was rarely permitted to go

out alone after his return from school. And he was scolded if he ever

was late in coming home.

There was mystery in the air. The parents talked together a good deal in

a way that made Keith understand they were talking about him and did not

want to be overheard.

As soon as school closed the secret became revealed. He would be sent

into the real country for the summer to board with perfect strangers.

"Any children," was Keith's first question. Yes, a couple of sons in the

house, and probably one or two more boys from the city, boarders

like Keith.

It seemed the thing had been planning for a long time. The mother said

something about the necessity for Keith of going where everything was

clean and wholesome--the air, the food, the people. The boy knew that

she had been worrying about him for some reason he could not guess.

An advertisement in a newspaper had led his mother on the track of what

she wanted. She read it to him--"a religious family with children of

their own would take a few well-behaved boys of good family for the

summer months and give them a real home and as good as parental care."

It turned out to be the sexton of a country parish on the northern shore

of Lake Maelaren who had devised this means of eking out his probably

limited professional income. The ensuing correspondence had proved quite

satisfactory. The mother was evidently pleased. It was almost as good as

staying with the pastor himself, she said.

Keith knew what a pastor was. He had several times heard one preach from

a funny hanging box in Great Church, and he thought of him as a man who

was always dressed in black and who was even more serious than the

father. But it did not bother him, partly because he realized that,

after all, a sexton was not the same as a pastor, and partly because his

mind was full of something else. It was not the country, although his

previous experience of it, when he was staying with his aunt, had given

him a rather favourable impression. No, what occupied him to the

exclusion of everything else was the thought that he would be able to

play with other children all day long, and that there would be no one to

pull him away just as a game was becoming really interesting.

Exciting days of preparation followed. And finally the day of departure

dawned.

The greater part of the journey was to be made by boat to the little

town of Enköping, where Mr. Swensson, the sexton, would be waiting with

a team. The mother could not go along, and so Keith was placed in the

hands of some people going the same way, who promised to look after him

and see that he did not fall into wrong hands when the steamer landed.

Keith had to stand in the stern of the boat and wave his handkerchief as

long as his mother remained visible. Then he was free, at last, to

surrender himself to the novelty of his situation. And as always upon

such occasions, when new impressions came crowding in upon him, the

record became too blurred for clear remembrance. This was true not only

of the trip on the steamer, the arrival at Enköping with its little

old-fashioned red houses, the meeting with Mr. Swanson, the drive of

thirty miles or more inland, the arrival at the sexton's house not far

from a white spired church, and the introduction to a seemingly endless

number of new faces, but of the whole long summer. A couple of months

sufficed to wipe out of his memory everything but a few comparatively

trivial incidents and impressions.

Only one name escaped the general oblivion--that of the sexton himself.

Only one view left a lasting image behind--that of a tremendously large

boulder, a memento of the glacial period, that rose like a crude

monument right in the centre of a tilled field almost, but not quite out

of sight of the house. Only one face would come back in recognizable

shape when he tried to recall that rather momentous summer--that of a

boy a few years older than himself, who was the leader of all the games

played around the big rock in the open field.

XI

Quite a gang of boys gathered daily about the big rock, generally on the

farther side of it where they could not be seen from the house. Beyond

the rock in that direction was nothing but an open field, and then the

woods, rarely disturbed by a visitor. Thus they were really more safe

than indoors as no one could approach them without being detected while

still far away.

The two sons of the sexton were there, and a couple of boys from the

city besides Keith, and three or four sons of neighbouring farmers. They

ranged in ages from eight to eleven or twelve. Keith was the baby, but

this was never held up against him. He was commonly treated as an equal,

which raised his self-confidence tremendously, but it had also a

somewhat embarrassing effect when the others seemed to take for granted

that he knew as much as they concerning the matters that most occupied

their minds--to judge by their talk at least.

The oldest of the lot, and their undisputed leader, was a peasant boy of

remarkable ugliness, squint-eyed and snub-nosed, with tufts of yellow

hair always falling over his face and several teeth missing. His clothes

were in rags and he never wore shoes. He boasted of never washing unless

"the old one" stood over him with a stick, and his language was worse

than both his manners and his looks. An unbroken stream of profanity

and obscenity poured from his rarely silent mouth, and he heaped

withering scorn on any attempt at decent speech.

Keith had now and then picked up questionable words while playing in the

lane where he lived. Johan sported some of them in moments of furious

rebellion against his mother's "holiness," as he called it. Once or

twice Keith had repeated such words at home and suffered for it. Soon he

learned to know the type at first hearing, and he disliked this part of

the vocabulary even when he could use it without danger to himself. He

developed a greater daintiness in words than in anything else, but this

summer formed an exception. The force of suggestion brought to bear on

him was too overwhelming, and he strove boldly to vie with the rest in

foulness of tongue and thought. As soon as he was back in the city, this

habit dropped off him as the soap lather is washed off a bather when he

dives into the clear waters of a lake. But the game he had learned to

play back of the big rock could not be unlearned in the same way.

This game was in itself a revelation to Keith. He was not shocked or

startled, because he had no standards in the matter, but at first he

experienced a distinct revulsion. This wore off quickly, however, and

soon he accepted what he saw as a natural thing. The boy whose face

stuck in Keith's mind with such strange persistency set the pace, and

everybody seemed to hold him a hero on that account. Even the other city

boys surrendered after a brief resistance and tried humbly to emulate

the acknowledged leader.

Everything took place openly in the most brazen fashion, as if they had

been playing leap-frog or hide-and-seek. Every one boasted of his own

achievements and tried to outdo the rest in unashamed performance. Yet

it was not so much a question of companionship in indulgence as of

sportsmanlike competition. Pleasure had little to do with it. What they

did, and still more what they pretended to have done, was an assertion

and a proof of manliness, and so was the language they used among

themselves. If they hid from the older people, that was not because they

regarded themselves as engaged in any sinful pursuits, but because the

grown-ups to them appeared jealous of all childish pleasures, and

particularly jealous of the pleasures most treasured by themselves.

Outwardly Keith played the part of an interested but passive observer.

When taunted for his timidity, or as being a mere infant, he parried by

using a number of nasty words, some of which he did not know the meaning

of. When by himself, he soon found that he could play the game as well

as the rest, and it increased his sense of self-importance very much,

but of this he said nothing to any one. Something within his own nature

protested against the flaunting of such an act, though the act itself

carried no offence to his childish mind. The inner protest was not

strong enough to break into words or to make the companionship of the

other boys seem repulsive to him. Nor was it concerned with anything

Keith did by himself.

The summer went very fast. Keith was sorry when told that it was time

for him to go home. He would come back, of course, but his regrets were

only momentary. No sooner was he started than the idea of seeing his

mother, Granny, and his tin soldiers again, put everything else out

of his mind.

His mother was overjoyed to see him and revelled in his healthy looks.

She made him tell her at great length, over and over again, about

everything he had seen and done, about the place and the people, about

the food and the games he had played. Keith talked and talked, eagerly

and freely, but of the game played behind the big rock he never said

a word.

He was then not quite seven years old.

XII

That autumn and winter he was permitted to play a good deal with Johan,

and always in Johan's home. His mother had a bad spell of depression,

and while it made her fret and worry more than ever about Keith, as well

as about everything else, she was either too weak to resist his pleas,

or she felt his absence as a relief.

To his intense surprise, Keith found that Johan already knew all about

the new game, and that he was quite willing to play it. And for a couple

of years it became an important part of what they had in common. Chances

were not lacking, for Johan's mother was too wrapt up in her postils and

religious speculations to watch them closely, and there was always the

outhouse to which they could retire for privacy.

Their relationship was a peculiar one. Although the younger by a few

months and the smaller by several inches, Keith was the leader and the

aggressor. Johan remained passive--too passive, Keith often thought.

There was nothing of love in Keith's feelings toward Johan, nothing

emotional. The tenderness that was such a marked feature of his

character did not come into play at all. In fact, he rather looked down

on Johan, who frequently annoyed him by his dullness and his lack of

personal neatness. The truth of it was that he played with Johan merely

because he was the only other boy in sight, and in so far as that

particular game was concerned, Johan was simply an accessory to it in

same way as his tin soldiers and his toy fort.

In playing it, Keith had always a sense of seeking something else, but

he had not the slightest idea of what this something might be. It must

have some relation to girls, he felt vaguely, but beyond that vague

feeling he could not get. Clara remained forgotten.

Gradually Johan became more and more indifferent and reluctant as far as

that game was concerned. Dull as he was, he seemed to have some sort of

scruples that Keith couldn't understand. More and more Keith was thrown

back on himself. Once more a new set of interests began to take the

lion's share of his attention, although the game learned behind the big

rock would reassert its puzzling fascination from time to time.

XIII

His eagerness to read and his lack of reading matter had for some time

presented a growing problem. The books of his father--and there were

quite a number of them--were taboo for a double reason: first, because

they were not held safe for him to read, and, secondly, because his

father regarded them as his particularly private property that must not

be touched by any one else.

So he fell back on the old Bible and chance pickings. The stirring and

bloodcurdling stories in the Books of the Maccabees were his favourites.

He read them over and over, and he tried to dramatize that unbroken

record of battles with the help of his tin soldiers. But the reason he

could return to those stories so often was that he began studying them

while reading was still a partly mastered art, and half the time he was

more interested in the game of reading, so to speak, than in what

he read.

A year in the new school had made a great change. He read anything with

ease, and while he read rather slowly without ever skipping, his mind

took in what he read quickly and thoroughly so that going back over a

thing once perused became less and less attractive. He wanted new

material for his mind, and he wanted it in steadily increasing

quantities.

One day he made a great discovery. Books could be borrowed from other

people. One of his schoolmates came to school with a wonderful

illustrated copy of "Don Quixote" arranged for children. Keith went into

ecstasies over it. The mail-clad figure of the Knight of the Rueful

Countenance on the front cover was to him the beckoning guardian of a

world of wonders, the very existence of which he had never before

suspected. Tears came into his eyes at last as he stared hopelessly at

the object of his newly born desire. As a rule he blurted out any wish

he might have, but the thing was clearly too precious to ask as a gift

or acquire by bartering, and he had never heard of any other way of

getting it.

"Mercy," cried the other boy after having watched him for a while. "You

can take it home and read it, if you only promise to bring it back."

For a moment Keith was too overcome to speak. Then he became hysterical

with joy. The rest of the school day passed in a trance. He ran a good

part of the way home. Arrived there, he almost forgot to give his mother

and Granny the inevitable kiss of greeting. And he might even have

refused to be bothered by such a thing but for his fear of being put

under some discipline that might prevent him from plunging straightway

into the unexplored country of make-believe.

On seeing the book, his mother hesitated for a moment, but soon she was

delighted with the results it produced. Keith had no thought of asking

leave to see Johan that day. He was lost to the world around him. Not a

sound was heard from him. There was no nervous running about in futile

search for "something to do." The home was as quiet as if he had been

away, and yet there he was, safely ensconced in his own corner, where

his mother could watch him all the time.

Everybody was happy until the father returned home and heard of what had

happened. Having looked the book over for a moment, while the boy

watched him with a shrinking heart, he said at last:

"You must return it tomorrow, and I don't want you to borrow any more

books. You may spoil it in some way, and then you will have to pay for

it, and where are you to get the money?"

Keith tried hard not to cry, but the blow was too overwhelming. He was

driven out of his new paradise after a tantalizing glimpse at it. And he

could not understand why. So his tears must needs flow freely and his

throat contracted convulsively with half-choked sobs, and the final

result of it was that he was ordered to bed at once. That ended his last

chance of abstracting a few more thrills from the borrowed treasure.

Of course, the book was returned the next day. Keith had not yet arrived

at the point where the evasion of a parental decree seemed conceivable.

And to the sorrow of missing the promised enjoyment was added the

humiliation of confessing what had happened at home. To lie about it was

another thing that never occurred to him, and to act without explanation

was quite foreign to his nature.

A few sad days followed. Then his life resumed its customary tone, and

it was as if the lank, but to him far from ludicrous, shape of Don

Quixote had never crossed his horizon. And soon after Christmas recurred

once more.

Among the many packages falling to his share, there were two of a shape

that suggested the possibility of more tin soldiers. But when he held

them in his hand, they failed to yield to pressure as would a cardboard

box. Curiosity turned into genuine suspense. And when at last two books

lay in front of him as his own, with the implied permission that he

could read them to his heart's content whenever he chose, a pang of

something like real love for his father shot through his heart.

Those two little volumes became at once his most priceless possession

and the foundation of his first library. To others they might appear

quite commonplace books, without much value from any point of view. To

him they were passports to a realm of action and freedom and colour,

where he could roam at will in search of everything he missed in real

life. One was bound in white with the picture of an African lion hunt on

the front cover. The other one had a plain brown binding. Both had

coloured illustrations and contained stories of hunting and travelling

adventures in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. There were tales of

lion hunting with Arabs and tiger hunting in the jungles of India, of

whaling in the Arctic and hair-breadth escapes from giant snakes in

South America, of cruises in southern seas and caravaning across the

high plateaus of Central Asia.

One story in particular stuck in his mind, and more particularly one

little detail out of that story. It was one of comparative repose and

few sensational incidents relating the perfectly peaceful, but

nevertheless strange and interesting experiences of a European traveller

through some desert region back of the Caspian Sea. Arriving at a nomad

camp far away from all civilization, this traveller was met with

touching hospitality. During a formal visit to the chieftain of the

tribe, he was offered tea. With the tea was handed him a bowl containing

a single lump of sugar. In European fashion he picked up this and

dropped it into his cup. Not a word was said, but something told him

that he had committed some dreadful mistake. By and by, as he watched

the others, he understood. Sugar was so rare that to use it in ordinary

fashion was out of question, and so the solitary lump served was meant

to be licked in turn by each, and he, as the guest of honour, had been

given the first chance. To Keith's mind that story seemed as clearly

realized as if he had played a part in it himself. And what occupied him

more than anything else was the pitiful existence of those poor nomads

to whom even such a common thing as sugar was an almost unattainable

luxury. It was his first lesson in human sympathy, and it was typical of

his own existence and bent that it should have come out of a book.

XIV

From that day one of his main objects in life was to acquire books. He

had little pride as a rule, in spite of all his sensitiveness, and when

books were concerned he had none at all. Having discovered that a friend

of the family, who until then had been regarded with supreme

indifference, held some sort of clerical position in a publishing house,

his devotion to Uncle Lander suddenly became effusive and he begged so

shamelessly and so successfully that at last his father had to

intercede. Out of a half-hour sermon on things that must not be done,

Keith grasped only that, as usual, he could not do what he wanted. Money

was still a mystery to him, and he never suspected that Uncle Lander

would have to pay his employers for every book taken out of the stock.

The sole check to his passion sprang logically from the very fervor of

that passion: a book being such a precious object to himself, he could

not dream of taking it away from somebody else. As in a flash the true

spirit of his father's objection to borrowed books was revealed to him.

That objection became his own and stuck to him through life: if he liked

a borrowed book, the inescapable duty of returning it was too painful to

be faced, and if he didn't like it, there was no reason for borrowing

it. Books became sacred things to him, to be cherished and protected as

nothing else. The loss of one was a catastrophe.

Soon he had a small library of his own, kept on a shelf in the huge

wardrobe that stood in the vestibule leading to the parlour. Made up at

first of odds and ends bearing no real relation to his desire for

reading matter, it gradually acquired a certain homogeneity reflecting

the boy's state of mind. Books of travel and adventure continued to

prevail for a long while. Equally favoured were stories dealing with

Norse Mythology and the heroic legends of his race. The grim record of

the Niebelungs was familiar to him at the age of eight, and the first

heroes of his worship were young Siegfried of divine aspect and Dietrich

of Bern, who seemed to the boy the final embodiment of worldly wisdom.

To these should be added Garibaldi, of whose South American campaigns,

so touchingly shared by the faithful Anita, he read graphic accounts in

an odd volume of an illustrated weekly. The word liberty first came to

him from the lips of the picturesque Italian, while Anita and the women

of the old Germanic sagas struck him by their contrast to his mother.

In the main, all his reading made for escape and compensation. He read

to get away from his own surroundings, and he revelled in characters of

fiction and legend and history that possessed qualities lacking in

himself. By nature he was a queer mixture of rashness and timidity, but

through his mother's anxiety on his behalf the latter quality was

constantly being nursed at the expense of all tendency to action. And

so, in order to keep the balance, he revelled in the imaginary or real

deeds of men whose very life-breath was danger. The more the books gave

him of what he craved, the less he thought of looking for it in life.

Consequently his new passion seemed a godsend to his mother, who

encouraged him in every possible way. It brought a solution of many

difficulties and worries by keeping him at home and quiet. The only

resistance came, as usual, from the father, who repeatedly counselled

moderation and often made the boy drop his book and turn to something

else--which seemed to Keith the worst of all the tyrannies to which he

found himself exposed. But most of the time the father was powerless

because of his absence from home, and soon Keith learned that his

reading formed the only exception to his mother's general refusal to

permit any circumvention of his father's explicit command.

It also became plain to Keith that the mother favoured his love for the

books not only as a means of relief to herself. Evidently she held it

admirable in itself and a promise bearing in some mysterious manner on

his future. His mother's approval flattered him, but otherwise her

attitude was a riddle which he did not care to solve as long as it

brought him permission to explore at will this newly discovered world of

perfectly safe enjoyment. In the end, however, that strange reverence

shown by his mother combined with his own increasing ability to live the

cherished life of his dreams at second hand into an influence that more

or less warped his entire outlook on life. It robbed to some extent of

his sense of proportion.

XV

His father noticed his timidity and seemed to view it with a sense of

humiliation. Once, in the presence of company, he threatened to put him

into skirts "like any other girl." Keith had played too little with

other children to have acquired the usual male consciousness of

superiority, but his father's words cut him to the quick nevertheless,

because he knew them to be meant for an insult. He resolved then and

there to show his mettle in some striking way, and promptly be began to

dream of such ways, but chance being utterly lacking for even a normal

display of boyish daring, it merely served to plunge him more deeply

into the sham life of his books.

Yet he was not without courage, and it was not physical pain, or the

fear of it, that brought the tears so quickly into flowing. Once, when

returning home with an uncovered bowl full of molasses from the grocery,

he stumbled at the foot of the stairs and fell so his forehead struck

the edge of the lowest step and his scalp was cut open to the width of

nearly an inch. The blood blinded him so that he could barely make his

way upstairs. When he reached the kitchen at last, his mother was scared

almost out of her wits, and her fright was augmented by the manner in

which he sobbed as if his heart were breaking. When at last the flow of

blood was partly stenched and his crying still continued, his mother

tried to tell him that there was no cause to be scared.

"I am not scared," he sputtered to her surprise. "I didn't know I was

hurt, but ... but ... I spilled all the molasses."

That night his father gave him a shining new silver coin without telling

him why, and the boy couldn't guess it at the time, though later he

learned the reason from his mother.

A favourite method employed by the father to test and to develop his

courage was to send him alone after dark on some errand into the cellar

or up into the attic, and the boy went without protest, no matter how

much he might dread the task at heart. Even the servant girls felt

reluctant about visiting the cellar at night, and the occasional

discovery of a drunken man asleep in front of the cellar door made the

danger far from imaginary.

Going down to the cellar, Keith was permitted to bring a candle along,

but the danger of fire made this out of the question when the attic was

his goal. One night on his way up there, he discovered a white,

fluttering shape by the square opening in the outer wall. He stopped on

the spot, and his heart almost stopped, too--but only for a moment.

Driven by some necessity he could not explain to himself, he picked

himself together and pushed on, only to find that the intimidating

spectre consisted of some white clothing hung for drying on the iron rod

of the shutter and kept moving by a high wind. It was a lesson that went

right home and stuck.

During that one moment of hesitation, the idea of a ghost tried to take

form in his more or less paralysed consciousness. He had read of ghosts,

and overheard stories told by the servant girls in apparent good faith,

and that whitish, almost luminous thing in front of him, stirring

restlessly with a faint hissing sound, looked and acted the part of a

ghost to perfection. But the idea was rejected before it had taken clear

shape and without any reasoning, instinctively, automatically. His

father always became scornful at the mere mention of ghosts, and that

settled it.

When it was all over, and he was safe within the kitchen door once more,

he told no one what had happened. He thought that, in spite of his

initial scare, he had acted decidedly well, and he was eager for

approval, but he was kept from telling by an uneasy feeling that his

father would laugh at him if he did.

XVI

The boy's timidity took quite different forms. One day the whole family

was astir. His parents had in some way obtained tickets to that

evening's performance at the Royal Opera. As the custom of the place was

to permit the holders of two adjoining seats to bring in a child with

them, it was decided after much discussion that Keith might go along.

His mother tried to explain the nature and purpose of a theatrical

performance, but what she said made no impression on the boy, who was

more excited by the thought of accompanying his parents than by what he

might hear or see.

Their seats were in a box in the third tier. It was like being suspended

halfway between the top and the bottom of a gigantic well. The depth of

that well affected the boy unpleasantly, while the strong light and the

hum of talk confused him. He clung closely to his mother with averted

face. Suddenly the light went out, and he heard his mother whisper:

"Look now!"

Glancing up, he found that a new room full of people had appeared where

before was nothing but a flat wall.

"What became of the wall, mamma," he asked aloud. She hushed him with a

smile, and he heard some one in another box titter.

"Now keep very quiet and try to follow what happens on the stage," his

mother admonished in another whisper.

They were giving Auber's "Crown Diamonds." The rich dresses appealed

somewhat to him, but not strongly. The music made no impression on him

whatsoever. The general effect on his mind was one of bewilderment, that

soon lapsed into bored indifference. Then he discovered that most of the

men on the stage were armed, and that some of them acted as if they

might put their weapons into use at any moment. And he, the ardent

participant in all the bloody deeds of Siegfried and Dietrich and

Kriemhild, he, the passionate hunter of big game on five continents,

became so nervous that nothing but fear of his father kept him from

burying his head in his mother's lap in order not to see any more. When,

at last, a shot rang out on the stage, even that fear could no longer

restrain him, and there was nothing for his mother to do but to escort

him out of the box into the corridor. There, under the care of a

friendly doorkeeper who treated him to candy out of a paper bag, he

stayed in perfect contentment until his parents were ready to go home.

"Oh, we must go again, Carl," he heard his mother cry in a tone of high

exultation.

"All right, you go," said the father with a yawn, Keith and I don't

care--do we, Keith?"

"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 shine. 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 passed 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 associated 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

anticipation. 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 pass 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 passionate 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 class 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 hell 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 fashion, 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 shore. 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 attitude 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 passed 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 passing 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 attitude 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 repetitions 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 spaces 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 space laid out in squares. Where he

stood at the centre, those squares were just large enough to hold him.

Then, as his glance passed 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 assumed 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."

"He was probably repeating his multiplication table," muttered the

father. "I wish he would learn his lessons in the daytime, so that we

could sleep in peace at night."

The next morning Keith had forgotten all about it but his mother

reminded him of what had happened during the night in order to find out

whether he had any bad dreams. Keith shook his head. Then a thought

flashed through his mind.

"Do I often talk in my sleep," he asked.

"Hardly ever," said his mother. "But the other night you read the Lord's

Prayer from beginning to end, and I wish you would read it as nicely

when are saying your prayers before going to sleep."

"He is studying too much," Granny put in from the kitchen. "His nose is

always buried in a book. That's the whole trouble, I tell you."

"No, mamma, I don't think reading does him any harm," said Keith's

mother, and for some reason Keith felt relieved by the diversion.

XX

Even Keith could not escape a feeling about this time of having arrived

at some sort of station or landmark on his road through life.

He was frightfully self-centred. He seemed to be thinking about nothing

but himself. In reality, however, he was not reflecting at all on the

character and probable course of his life. It was all a matter of

feeling and what concerned him was merely the comforts or discomforts,

pleasures or pains, exhilarations or boredoms of the passing moment. The

future was a word that, at the most, implied things that might happen a

few days after tomorrow. The convinced visioning of events a year or

more distant was still utterly beyond him. And the past seemed to vanish

with the setting sun of the day just ended.

Yet he was dimly aware of facing a transition that, somehow, must make a

great change in his entire life. Something that he could not define was

drawing to an end, and something else, equally indefinable, was about to

begin. The "school for small children" which he had left, and the

"school for boys" into which he would soon enter, were the symbols used

by his mind to express the passing out of one phase of life into

another, but as such they suggested the actual change without revealing

it. And there were moments when Keith's vague efforts to look ahead were

accompanied by a sense of crushing dread, while at other times they

might fill him with a never before tasted fervor of existence.

He was near the completion of his ninth year. It seemed quite an age,

but this appearance was contradicted by troublesome facts. He was very

small for his age and hopelessly tied to the apron strings of his mother

in spite of all his father's efforts to pry him loose. The reason for

this failure was that his father lacked the time or the capacity for

winning the boy's whole-hearted attention and affection.

The one thing the father seemed to care for on his return home was to be

left alone with his own preoccupations, and these did not include the

boy. He could not unbend. He could not subordinate his own momentary

desire or disinclination to an interest essentially foreign to his own

self. In other words, he was just as self-centred as Keith, and just as

unreflecting on the whole. Both lived completely in the present, and

both wished to escape from it. The only difference between them was that

while Keith sought his escape in space, so to speak, by means of his

books, the father's only road of escape led him into a past of which the

boy formed no part.

Either through some fault of his own nature, or through the restrictive

policy of his parents, Keith at nine had formed no real attachments

outside of his immediate surroundings, and no life of his own that was

not enclosed by the walls of his childhood home. This state of affairs

tended always to throw him back on the mother as his most satisfactory

source of inspiration and the magnetic pole of his emotional compass.

And she on her part left no effort untried that could help to fasten his

affections more closely to her.

Unconsciously but increasingly she worked to cut the boy off from all

the rest of the world in order that she might have him the more

exclusively to herself. She expressed openly the wish that he might be a

girl, because girls in those days were so much less likely to escape the

parental protection.

The boy was pleased by her attempts at monopolization. There was

something flattering and softly reassuring about her passionate pleas

for the uppermost place in his heart. And yet he rebelled with

increasing violence against the closeness of her clutch on him. He

seemed to choke at times, and a blind hatred rose within him without

ever revealing itself as in any way related to his mother. One of the

dominant emotions of this and the following period of his life was one

of intense impatience that seemed to be directed toward no particular

object. Once in a great while he turned toward his father with an

expectation of relief, but this expectation was always foiled, and so he

was plunged back again and again into an inner life of his own that fed

almost exclusively on books and had little or nothing in common with the

reality to which the new school was supposed to form a gateway.