The Soul of a Child Part 15

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 n.o.bility 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sed. 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 gla.s.s. 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 n.o.body 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 gla.s.s 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 _vaktmastare_, 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 bra.s.s 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?"