The Soul of a Child Part 28

"What are you doing," he said without much enthusiasm.

Johan beckoned mysteriously and would not say a word until he had got Keith into the shadow of the huge gateway leading to the paved yard in the rear of the house.

"Can't you come on," he cried impatiently at last "I don't want mumsey to see me."

When both were hidden from the kitchen window through which Fru Gustafsson used to keep a religiously preoccupied eye on the doings of her son, Johan pulled a cigarette from within his coat sleeve and a match from his pocket. Then he scratched the match on the seat of his pants and lit the cigarette with the air of a man who knows what is bliss. Keith watched him with feelings too confused for expression.

"What would your mamma say if she saw you," he asked at last, instinctively dropping his voice to a whisper.

"She'd tell popsey," Johan rejoined promptly, "and I'd get another licking. But it's worth it."

There was a long pause during which Keith watched his old playmate's unmistakable enjoyment with a mixture of consternation and admiration, of envy and resentment.

"I have got another," said Johan after a while. "Try it."

Keith shook his head. He was on the verge of saying that "mamma won't let me," but checked himself in time as he recalled the results of an earlier use of that too truthful explanation.

"Murray wouldn't smoke," he ventured after another pause.

"Him up there, you mean," inquired Johan with a gesture of his thumb toward the house across the lane, Of course, he wouldn't. He's a miss."

"He is not," Keith cried pa.s.sionately.

"And he's a stiff, too," Johan went on without any particular display of feeling. "And you're a fool, that's all."

There was a coolness between them.

"I think mamma is waiting for me," remarked Keith as he started to walk off.

"Of course she is waiting for her baby," Johan retorted with a leer.

Keith stopped and thought. Murray would fight for a thing like that, he said to himself. Or would he? Without having reached a decision Keith made for his own house, trying to look as if Johan didn't exist.

"He has no real use for you, and you'll find it out," was Johan's parting shot.

Keith was suddenly struck with the coa.r.s.eness of Johan's manners and speech. He was making comparisons in his mind, and as a result the image of Murray seemed more resplendent than ever.

XVIII

"Did you ever try to smoke," he asked Murray next morning.

"No," was the disdainful reply. "I know papa wouldn't like it, and it's nasty anyhow."

"How do you know," wondered Keith.

"Because I know," rejoined Murray. It was a way he had, and it always settled the matter. A cold, tired look would appear on his face if Keith tried to press a subject after such an answer, and before that look Keith quailed.

His state was hopeless. He accepted as law whatever his friend said or did. And although their friendship, such as it was, lasted only two years, Keith did not take up smoking until he was in camp as a conscript at the age of twenty.

In school it was the same. And the fact that Murray attended to his studies with scrupulous exactness was probably one of the factors that helped Keith through the grade without any loss of standing as a scholar.

Like Loth, Murray had mildly artistic leanings, and because he liked to draw and to sing, Keith, too, had to join in those studies, although both were elective, and although the singing cla.s.ses twice a week consumed one of the two precious lunch hours that otherwise could be used so profitably for play or study. Keith had neither apt.i.tude nor interest for draftsmanship, being curiously set toward the written word.

He would have liked to sing well, as he had noticed that boys having a good voice were always popular and received a lot of flattering attention. But his ear was so poor that for a while it looked as if he would not even be admitted to the singing practices. His persistence prevailed in the end, and when he and Murray stood side by side, using the same song-book while practicing some brave old student song, he felt as much happiness as ever fell to his share in those days.

They had common hours in gymnastics, too, but they were compulsory three times a week, and Murray took them as a duty rather than a pleasure.

Keith them on the whole, and unlike most of the other boys, he preferred the slow routine of the setting-up exercises to the more athletic features. While he never consciously realized the cause of that preference at the time, it would not have been difficult for a fairly intelligent observer to discover it.

Keith was still one of the smallest boys in the school utterly lacking any physical superiority, although he was in excellent health and never had experienced a single one of the ailments that commonly dodge the steps of childhood. He could not shine in jumping or leaping or climbing, but in the drill his painstaking attention placed him on a par with everybody else. It was his one chance of feeling himself the physical equal of his schoolmates, and it was the only field of common endeavour outside the lessons where he was not made to feel his own inferiority.

XIX

The insufficiency of one room as a living place for three persons had long been evident. Keith was in his twelfth year, and he still slept on the chaiselongue opposite his father's and mother's bed. He had ceased to pretend that the corner between the window and his mother's bureau could possibly be considered a satisfactory "play-room." Then a tenant who had lived with them quite a while left, and the parlour became unexpectedly vacant. Keith revelled in the free use of it, and his mother talked seriously of not renting it again, but the father insisted that they could not afford to keep it for themselves.

Then Keith's mother had a bright idea. She inserted an advertis.e.m.e.nt offering a home and "as good as parental care" to a boy from the country for the school season. An answer was received, negotiations progressed favourably, and soon Albert Mendelius, the son of a minister, was installed in the parlour with understanding that his use of it was exclusive only at night. In the daytime it was common ground for both boys, and Keith did his studying in there, but he continued to sleep on the chaiselongue.

The boys got on very well together, and yet no real friendship sprang up between them. Albert, who attended a different school, had his own a.s.sociates, and Keith could not take much of his mind off Murray. It made a great improvement in Keith's living conditions, however, and he hoped it would last.

When Albert went home to celebrate Christmas, Keith was asked to pay him a visit after the holidays. This invitation became still more attractive when Keith received a fine pair of skates for a Christmas present. He had never seen the country in winter, and the impression it made on him was a little startling. The sight of the dark pines against the white carpet of the snow filled him with a mystic longing so strong that it almost frightened him. When he and Albert put on their skates and stretched out at full speed across the lake that spread its floor of dark gla.s.s within a stone's throw of the vicarage, he had a sense of never having lived before. The s.p.a.ciousness of the house and the pleasant evenings spent cracking nuts and eating apples in front of the blazing fire-place were also revelations that filled his mind with many new thoughts. Why was his own home not like this?

The boys went back to Stockholm together, but before they started, Keith learned that Albert was going elsewhere to live. An aunt of his had offered to take him in for the rest of the season.

"And, of course," said Albert's mother apologetically, "when you can be with your own kin, it is better you know."

Keith wondered a little. On his return home, his mother said indignantly that she supposed their humble home had not been found good enough. A few weeks later the parlour was rented in the old way to a gentle-looking young man with very pink cheeks who coughed a good deal.

And Keith once more found himself restricted to the living-room for all the time spent at home.

XX

Keith had been home for lunch and was on the way back to the school. He was alone. Murray was in bed with some slight ailment.

It was in January, a cold but brilliant day. The streets were covered with deep snow. Everything that usually moved on wheels was now on runners. As runners make no noise and the sound of the hoofs was deadened by the snow, every horse carried a bell, and some of them had a whole little chime. The bright sunlight on the white snow and the tinkling of all those bells made a stimulating combination, and people hurried along with smiling faces, although they had to rub their noses and cheeks frequently to keep them from freezing.

Keith was never sensitive about his face, but his hands were buried deeply in his coat pockets. His schoolbooks were tied up in a leather thong and slung over his shoulder like a knapsack.

At the Sluice he stopped and looked long at the people skating merrily on the rinks down on the ice of the lake between the Corn Harbour and the railway bridge. A number of boys near his own age were among the rest having a good time. Many of the boys brought their skates to school and never went home for lunch, but just ate a couple of sandwiches in order to spend as much as possible of the noonday pause on the ice.

Keith had asked permission to do the same, but the refusal had been peremptory. The fact was that he was granted little or no chance to use his new skates. Once in a while he got leave, after begging long and hard, to run over to the rinks at the New Bridge Harbour, in the North End, for a brief while in the late afternoon. Most of the time even that scant leave was denied him. To his mother's general disinclination to let him out of sight was added her dread that he might fall into the water and get drowned. He promised by everything sacred that he would not leave the rink, which she ought to know was perfectly safe, but her morbid fears would not listen to reason. More and more he was beginning to give up asking even. The disappointment of a refusal was too bitter to be borne often.

As he stood leaning against the bridge railings, his eyes strayed farther and farther along the surface of the lake, which lay frozen as far out as he could see. There were rinks on the other side of the railway bridge, too, and here and there he noticed isolated black figures gliding along the unswept s.p.a.ces outside the rinks. Suddenly he caught sight of a large gathering of people very far out. They were moving slowly toward the sh.o.r.e, and evidently they were held together by some common purpose. He wondered what they could be doing out there, far beyond the last rink, but the distance was too great to give him any basis for speculation.

After a while he had to leave in order not to be late. He had almost reached the school when he was overtaken by a boy from the English section of his own grade, about whom he knew nothing but that his name was Bergman.

"Have you heard," cried Bergman when he was still several steps behind, although he and Keith had never exchanged a word before. Keith turned in surprise.