The Soul of a Child Part 30

"How," he demanded, and as he spoke an idea flashed through his mind that his mother might not be knowing what she said. Just how such a thing could happen was still a mystery to him, but what she said sounded so absurdly impossible.

At that moment her mood suddenly changed.

"There is one thing I have never told you. But for my being made so sick when you were born, you would have had a little brother, and you would not have been so lonesome, and perhaps everything would have been better. But he was born dead. And now I have no one but you, and I shall have no one else, and you are everything to me, and you must love me very much and never leave me."

Her arms were about him, and she was crying. And soon both felt better.

But Keith had heard things he could not forget. And there was food in them for a summer's thought.

PART IV

I

Form the very start the fifth grade was a disappointment. Once Keith, like all the rest of the smaller boys, had looked up to it with awe-stricken yearnings as to a peak that only a few fortunate few could hope to climb. It was then the top of the school. Its pupils were revered seniors--olympians tarrying momentarily among ordinary mortals before they took flight for the exalted regions where they really belonged. All this had been changed by the reorganization. The fifth grade now was merely a continuation of the fourth and a stepping stone to the sixth. And Keith's cla.s.s was the first one to miss the honours of which successive generations had dreamed as far back as the school had existed. It was a thing no one had considered when the great news was pa.s.sed around in the spring. Now it was brought home to those most nearly concerned with that poignancy of realization of which only youth is capable. It gave to the whole cla.s.s a peculiar atmosphere as if it had been marked in advance for defeat. The teachers seemed to feel it, too, and especially the old Rector, who, after so many years of supreme command, suddenly found himself reduced to a subordinate position.

Keith felt robbed like the rest. And like them, he felt that the instruction had become a mere humdrum routine enabling a certain number of boys to get the proper marks at the end of a certain number of months. What had lured him on as an adventure had turned into a tedious grind. And more and more he drifted back into a dream world of his own out of which he had been dragged by Dally's good-humoured jibes. And yet, what could he expect? Had not Dally even, his best friend in the whole school, cheated him of the honour he had rightfully earned--an honour that, once lost, could never be recovered?

The subjects, on the whole, were the same as in the previous grade. You simply went further into them--that was all. The teachers were the same, and the relationships once established between them and the boys remained the same, for good or bad. Every one knew what to expect, on both sides, and no one quite escaped from the resulting sense of staleness.

The old Rector went on cramming the cla.s.s with Latin grammar. He had a way of making some poor stumbler conjugate the same verb fifteen to twenty times in succession, so that the correct sequence might never again escape his memory. And as the red-faced sinner stammered out the tenses, the Rector would make a tube of his left hand into which he poked his right thumb. This gesture was always accompanied by the same mocking remark:

"That's the way to stuff sausages!"

His language grew more picturesque and unrestrained every day. He belonged distinctly to an older and less circ.u.mspect generation, and he was a good deal of an eccentric besides. His heart was of gold, and no one ever took the pedagogue's mission more seriously, but whatever he possessed of refinement went into his appreciation of the language that was his life's pa.s.sion. When he spoke Swedish, he called a spade a spade in a manner that gave Keith shock after shock. Always rather given to a certain aristocratic exclusiveness in his speech, Keith had through his a.s.sociation with Murray become something of a prude in this respect.

He could still descend to obscenities when his "manliness" had to be proved, but vulgarity repelled him irresistibly.

Until then he had never dreamt of questioning any authority. Even at this juncture he obeyed directions explicity and maintained on the whole his reputation as a good pupil. But a tendency to criticism was growing within him, and from the men who taught him it began gradually to pa.s.s to the subjects taught. There came a day when the truth could no longer be evaded: he was bored most of the time. And the result was that he grew more and more listless.

If asked, Keith could not have told what was wrong. In fact, it is not at all certain that he would have admitted that anything was wrong. No rebellious stirrings had yet found tangible form within him.

He had to learn long lists of foreign kings that had been dead for ages.

He was even expected to know when each king ascended his throne and left it. He had to learn mathematic formulas and grammatic rules. And on the heels of each rule hung at least a dozen exceptions. It was impossible to tell which were of greater importance, the rules or the exceptions.

He had also to learn the exact number of pistils and stamens possessed by every flower likely to be found in the vicinity of the Swedish capital. The same thing happened in every subject embraced by the curriculum. There was no end to it. Yet he did not rebel. Every one knew that there was no other way of teaching things, so what was the use of rebelling?

His memory was good, although tricky. In a case of aroused interest he could absorb an astonishing number of dates, or figures, or lines of poetry, at first glance or hearing. But he could also drop them as if he had never heard of them the moment his interest was gone. And they always seemed to drop out of sight when he left school and returned home. That word interest seemed to give the key to the situation. And all sorts of vague and queer and inexplicable things within himself determined whether he was to be interested or not. It was not a question of choice or will. He was or was not.

Facts as facts did not interest him at all. Even things as things did not necessarily, though they might. The cla.s.s made excursions into the fields and woods framing the capital, and under the guidance of their teacher of botany they observed and a.n.a.lysed all sorts of living flowers. Keith was delighted to get out and charmed with the flowers, but the facts about them pointed out by the teacher left him profoundly unmoved. They had exciting little experiments in chemistry, and Keith effervesced with the rest, but nothing of what he saw brought him more than a momentary diversion.

All those things left his own real life untouched. And yet he was not merely looking for fairy tales and adventures. His mind already was hungry for something else. He found it often in the books he read at home, many of which had been borrowed from the school library. Not facts--but how different sorts of facts hung together, so to speak. The school ought to tell him, and sometimes he had an uneasy feeling that the teachers were trying to tell him this very thing. But they failed somehow, and the farther he advanced, the more exasperating that failure became.

He was in his thirteenth year, and he was no longer certain that he cared to study. But reading was still his dominant pa.s.sion--reading and George Murray.

II

Relations with Murray had been resumed on the old basis. Day after day they walked to and from school together, and hardly ever was their friendship disturbed by a misunderstanding. In school, too, they spent a good deal of time in each other's company, and they continued to sit side by side. Being so much seen together, they gradually came to be known as "the twins," which pleased Keith tremendously. But once they had parted for the day at the corner of the Quay and the lane, there was no more communication between them. And no matter what Keith said or did, he could never persuade his friend to break that rule.

Then Murray's birthday came along, and he told Keith quite casually that his mother had promised to let him have a party and invite five of his schoolmates.

"Will you ask me," Keith blurted out, his eyes shining with eagerness.

"I don't know," said Murray guardedly.

"But I am your best friend in school," Keith protested.

"It depends on mamma," Murray explained, and his voice lacked a little of its customary complacency.

"Of course, I should like to have you," he added after a pause, but his words carried no conviction.

Keith was too hard hit to say a word.

A couple of days later, on their way home from school, Murray said unexpectedly that he and his mother had looked over the school catalogue the night before, and that his mother had picked the five boys whom he was to invite. And he started to name them. The first name was that of Brockert, a boy in their own cla.s.s.

"But I have never seen you speak to him," Keith interrupted him.

"He is a very fine boy and comes of excellent family," Murray retorted.

Then he enumerated the other four. Only one of them besides Brockert belonged to their own cla.s.s.

Little as Keith knew about most of the boys in school, he realized that all the prospective guests had three things in common: they were good scholars, poor, and yet of good families. One had a _von_ in front of his name. Brockert, too, had some sort of claim to n.o.bility, although it was said that his mother earned a living for herself and him by working as a seamstress and the boy was known to pay for his own tuition by tutoring backward sons of rich families in the lower grades.

Keith tried to look unconcerned. Fortunately they were near home, and soon he could get away by himself. It has to be admitted that he cried.

And in the end he told his mother, who tried to make him promise never to speak to Murray again.

"But we're side partners in the cla.s.s," said Keith, still sobbing.

There was a certain stiffness between him and Murray during the next few days, but they kept company to and from school as usual. Not until the morning after the party did it occur to Keith that his pride demanded some kind of demonstration.

That morning he meant to keep away from his friend. He stayed at home longer than usual on purpose. Finally he grew afraid of being late and tumbled pell-mell downstairs, intent on turning to his old route by way of East Long Street. But no sooner had he reached the lane than his legs seemed to be moving regardless of his will, and they took the familiar turn toward the Quay. At that moment he caught sight of Murray crossing the mouth of the lane without looking either right or left. Something like a shiver pa.s.sed through Keith's body, but his legs were still in command, and they began to run. A minute later he was walking beside Murray as he had done day after day for the better part of three terms.

At first they did not speak. Then Murray began to tell about the party of the night before as if it had been the most natural thing in the world to do so. He told what they had eaten and what they had played and what impression the boys had made on his mother. Keith listened without a word.

The worst fight he had ever fought with himself was raging within him, and while he heard every word that Murray uttered, they seemed to pa.s.s him by as if spoken to some other person. His heart was beating very hard, and he breathed uneasily. An unfamiliar, impersonal voice within himself was telling him that he must either give Murray a good licking then and there or run away. Nasty, ugly, hateful words seemed to crowd to his lips with an all but irresistible demand for utterance.

Yet he walked on as before, listening to Murray without a word of comment. At last, when they were near the school entrance, he stopped suddenly and said:

"Did you ever speak to your mother of me?"

"I did," replied Murray calmly. "And she said that while she had no objection to our keeping company, she did not think your father's position was such that we could ask you home."

A strange thing happened to Keith at that moment. It seemed to him that everything had been satisfactorily explained, and that there was no reason why he should be angry with Murray or offended at his friend's parents. He had simply been made to suffer for something that had nothing to do with his own person.

"Hey, twins," a cla.s.smate yelled at them just then.

"I suppose you couldn't help it," Keith said weakly to Murray.