I was too delicate to be sent to school at five years old, like other
boys. My doctor uncle said it was not to be thought of. Since, however,
I could not grow up altogether in ignorance, it was decided that I
should have a tutor of my own.
So a tutor was engaged who quickly won my unreserved affection and made
me very happy. The tutor came every morning and taught me all I had to
learn. He was a tutor whom one could ask about anything under the sun
and he would always know. First, there was the ABC. That was mastered
in a few lessons. I could read before I knew how to spell. Then came
writing and arithmetic and still more things. I was soon so far
advanced that the tutor could read _Frithiof's Saga_ aloud to me in
Swedish and be tolerably well understood; and, indeed, he could even
take a short German extract, and explain that I must say _ich_ and not
_ish_, as seemed so natural.
Mr. Voltelen was a poor student, and I quite understood from the
conversation of my elders what a pleasure and advantage it was to him
to get a cup of coffee extra and fine white bread and fresh butter with
it every day. On the stroke of half-past ten the maid brought it in on
a tray. Lessons were stopped, and the tutor ate and drank with a relish
that I had never seen anyone show over eating and drinking before. The
very way in which he took his sugar--more sugar than Father or Mother
took--and dissolved it in the coffee before he poured in the cream,
showed what a treat the cup of coffee was to him.
Mr. Voltelen had a delicate chest, and sometimes the grown-up people
said they were afraid he could not live. There was a report that a rich
benefactor, named Nobel, had offered to send him to Italy, that he
might recover in the warmer climate of the South. It was generous of
Mr. Nobel, and Mr. Voltelen was thinking of starting. Then he caught
another complaint. He had beautiful, brown, curly hair. One day he
stayed away; he had a bad head, he had contracted a disease in his hair
from a dirty comb at a bathing establishment. And when he came again I
hardly recognised him. He wore a little dark wig. He had lost every
hair on his head, even his eyebrows had disappeared. His face was of a
chalky pallor, and he coughed badly too.
Why did not God protect him from consumption? And how could God find it
in His heart to give him the hair disease when he was so ill already?
God was strange. He was Almighty, but He did not use His might to take
care of Mr. Voltelen, who was so good and so clever, and so poor that
he needed help more than anyone else. Mr. Nobel was kinder to Mr.
Voltelen than God was. God was strange, too, in other ways; He was
present everywhere, and yet Mother was cross and angry if you asked
whether He was in the new moderator lamp, which burnt in the
drawing-room with a much brighter light than the two wax candles used
to give. God knew everything, which was very uncomfortable, since it
was impossible to hide the least thing from Him. Strangest of all was
it when one reflected that, if one knew what God thought one was going
to say, one could say something else and His omniscience would be
foiled. But of course one did not know what He thought would come next.
The worst of all, though, was that He left Mr. Voltelen in the lurch so.