Chapter XI: Part IV: I (1)

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 class 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 passed 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 class 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 class 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 circumspect 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 passion. 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 association 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 pass 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 class made excursions into the fields and woods framing the capital, and under the guidance of their teacher of botany they observed and analysed 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 passion--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 class.

"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 class.

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 nobility, 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 class," 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 passed 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 pass 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 classmate yelled at them just then.

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

"I really should have liked to have you," Murray answered, and it made Keith feel as if he had been more than compensated for his previous sufferings.

After that their friendship continued outwardly as before, but there was a difference. A tendency to nag and find fault appeared on both sides, and on several occasions they broke into actual quarrels. These always ended in reconcilations, but the old serenity had gone from their companionship, and each new misunderstanding left Keith a little more unhappy.

III

As a result of the changed relationship between himself and the friend he idealized, Keith began once more to look up Johan. He did it rather furtively, as if he had known that he was engaged in something unworthy of himself. There was an additional reason for this return to an association long spurned, and it had something to do with his manner of going about it.

What his mother had told him during the summer was still fermenting in his mind, but no amount of brooding over it would produce any results. It was like trying to raise oneself by pulling at one's own bootstraps. He must turn to some one else for the information that alone could solve the mystery. Murray was out of the question. Keith had never exchanged a word with him about the subject that was taking more and more of his attention. He knew what Murray would say if such a matter were broached:

"I don't think my papa would like me to talk of it, and it's rather nasty anyhow."

No, Johan was the person to seek for knowledge of this kind. He was now smoking all the time when not under the eye of his mother. While Keith almost had stood still physically, Johan had forged ahead. There was no denying that he was coarse and dull and awkward, but there was a shrewd gleam in his somewhat bleary eyes, and from time to time he threw out dark hints about enjoyments and experiences that little boys clinging to their mother's skirts could never master.

It became a sort of game between them--a game that pleased Johan and drove Keith to exasperation. It was a game of hide-and-seek. And the most remarkable feature of it was that, although Keith was dying to know, he found it impossible to ask any direct questions. His pose was that he didn't care, and Johan's counter-pose was that he didn't know what Keith was driving at.

Little by little, however, Keith extracted various stories about those new friends of Johan's, who lived in one of the neighbouring lanes and who had a big vacant attic at their disposal. There quite a number of boys gathered daily, and Johan did his best to impress Keith with the desperate character of their doings. Girls came to that meeting-place, too. It was the principal thing, according to Johan--the fact that made those exploits so deliriously reprehensible. One day Johan was in an unusually communicative mood.

"Yesterday," he related with great gusto, "Nils got hold of Ellen and kissed her. And then they crawled into a big empty box when they thought we didn't see them. And there they stayed ever so long. But Gustaf crawled up behind the box and peeped. And he saw what they did, and then he told us."

"What did they do," asked Keith tensely, forgetting his usual reserve.

"Oh, you know," replied Johan teasingly.

"I don't," said Keith stoutly, realizing that it was a dreadful admission of inferiority. "And I want you to tell me."

For a moment Johan hesitated. Then he shot at Keith a single word--a verb--that Keith had heard in the lane and among the longshoremen on the Quay. He knew that it was bad--the worst one of its kind. He knew also in a vague sort of way that it touched the very heart of the mystery he was trying to solve. And yet it left him just as ignorant as before.

The bald use of that word by Johan stunned him for a moment. Then his hot thirst for light brushed all other considerations aside, and he said almost pleadingly: "Can't you tell me all about it?"

"Oh, everybody knows," said Johan, and his eyes began to wander shiftily as they always did when he found himself cornered.

"You don't know yourself," Keith taunted him, suddenly grown wise beyond his ordinary measure.

"Yes, I do," insisted Johan.

"Then tell--or I won't believe you."

"They did what your papa and mamma do nights," Johan shot back.

There was a long pause.

"They don't do anything," Keith said at last almost in a whisper, "except talk."

"You bet they do," asserted Johan, sure now of having triumphed.

And Keith went home without asking any more questions.

IV

A queer restlessness seized him and left him no peace. He swung abruptly from one extreme mood to another--from mad elation to paralyzing depression. He had a baffling sense of things happening within himself that were equally beyond control and explanation. He grew tired of sitting on those plain benches at school, with no support for the back, and still more tired of the Rector's incessant "sit up straight, boy." Sometimes when he read at home, he could not keep his eyes fixed on the book because his thoughts insisted on straying into all sorts of irrelevant fields. But no matter in what direction they started, circuitously they always found their way into the field of main preoccupation.

Although shocked at the time by what Johan had told him, it did not remain actively in his memory. On a few occasions he woke up during the night with an impression of having heard his mother call his father's name. When he raised his head from the pillow to listen, a breathless stillness prevailed in the room. Soon he went back to sleep, and afterwards he thought no more about it. Yet the very act of listening seemed to inflame his mind in some way.

The game learned back of the big rock had never become quite forgotten. Yet it had never meant very much to him, and during his association with Murray he had thought less and less of it. Now it took new hold of him, in a much more imperative way, as if it had got a new meaning and a new lure. And it seemed to have some elusive but highly significant connection with the mystery that always puzzled and fretted his curiosity.

Once more he pressed Johan for an explanation of that reference to Keith's parents.

"That's the way children are made," Johan finally announced with a mien of having transmitted the ultimate wisdom of the ages.

Keith merely stared at him. That answer did not interest him at all. Of course, he had long guessed that the arrival of children was a part of the mystery, but it was a part that had ceased to concern him. What he wished to know, must know, related to himself exclusively. But in this respect there was nothing more to be had out of Johan.

At school he began to join a group of boys who always gathered in a corner of the assembly hall during the pauses instead of mixing with the mob in the schoolyard. The centre of that group was Swensson, a handsome young chap of more advanced age than the others who had spent two years in most of the grades. He was always behind in his studies, but he seemed to know more of life than all the rest put together. A large part of the time he was telling stories--always about girls--or relating adventures--always with girls. Keith found the stories amusing, but as a rule he failed to grasp their point. And yet they added fuel to the flame that was burning more and more hotly within him.

His mother had been watching him intently for some time, and after a while she began to ask questions. These were guarded almost to unintelligibility, and yet Keith guessed that they referred to his own secret--the game learned back of the big rock. And so that game grew still more enticing. Even then, however, it did not seem to matter very much except in so far as it was the one thing that brought him a slight relief from the consuming restlessness of body and mind.

His mother's questions were followed by long talks, sometimes taking the form of warnings, but more often turning into passionate pleas. And gradually he gathered that the game he had been playing so innocently must be both sinful and dangerous. He tried as hard as he could to get to the root of his mother's hints, and he wanted to ask all sorts of questions. But in the end the meaning of her words seemed to dissolve into mist, and when he tried to question her directly, it was as if a solid wall had suddenly risen between them, so that neither one could hear what the other one said.

His father, too, began to ask questions, evidently urged on by the mother. He spoke sternly, but not unkindly, when he asked if Keith had been doing anything he ought not to do. And naturally enough Keith answered emphatically no.

In this way the mystery came closer and closer to him, and became more and more urgent. His mother's futile efforts at communicating what apparently rested heavily on her heart made him ill at ease, but he remained unconscious of any guilt or fear. A conflict of serious aspect and proportions was undoubtedly taking shape within him, but so far it was mainly concerned with the school and his friendship for Murray and a general sense of dissatisfaction with the life he was leading. It was above all a sense of things missed.

Then he happened one afternoon, when his mother was out, to be delving with more than customary audacity among the books in his father's book case, which become more accessible through the death of their gentle-looking tenant a short while before.

V

The cough of Herr Stangenberg had been growing worse and worse all through the winter. He had to take to the bed more and more frequently. There had been a terrible change in his appearance. Only the eyes and his temper remained the same. He was always cheerful and hopeful. So he remained when he had to stay in bed entirely and a doctor began to pay him daily visits. Keith's mother did everything in her power to be of help, and it seemed to put her own troubles and worries more in the background.

"Consumption" was a word the parents often used in discussing the case of poor Herr Stangenberg, and Keith gathered that it was something dreadful and merciless, from which escape was impossible. His attitude toward the whole matter was peculiar. He listened to what his parents talked, but always in a spirit of utter indifference, as if what they said could have no possible bearing on his own life.

One evening the servant girl--her name was Hilda at the time--brought word that Herr Stangenberg wanted very badly to see Fru Wellander for a few minutes.

"I think he knows at last that the end is near," Keith's mother said as she rose to go into the parlour. "What am I going to say if he asks me?"

"Nothing," replied the father quietly. "Leave that to the doctor."

On her return, the mother sank down in her chair and began to grope for a handkerchief. Keith saw that her eyes were lustrous with tears.

"What did he want?" asked the father with unusual anxiety.

"Well, if you tried for a month, you couldn't guess it," the mother said, and as she spoke, a smile broke through her tears. "It is so sad and so funny that.... He wants me to send for his tailor to measure him for a new spring suit."

"Has he no idea ...?" The father checked himself with a glance at Keith.

"I know what you mean," said Keith calmly. Both parents looked at him in surprise, but neither comment nor rebuke ensued.

"No," the mother went on after a while, "he says that he knows he will be well and back at his office in two weeks. He actually laughed when I tried to say something about his being very ill. It brought on his cough again, and for a moment I thought he would die then and there. But when the attack was over, he asked me if I couldn't hear that the cough was much better. What do you think I ought to do?"

"Nothing," the father replied once more.

Keith was ready to start for school next morning when he heard Hilda utter a startled cry in the parlour.

"Fru Wellander! Fru Wellander!" she called.

Before the mother had a chance to move, the frightened face of the girl appeared in the parlour door, and she whispered as if afraid of waking some one out of sleep:

"He is dead."

Both women hurried into the parlour. Keith stood irresolute for a moment. Then he made for the kitchen door and ran downstairs at top speed. He was afraid of missing Murray.

All during that day a thought would bother his brain like a buzzing fly: how peculiar that a man could want to order a new suit of clothes a few hours before he died. There was something irrational about it that stumped him. For a moment he thought of speaking to Murray about it, but it was as if some one had put a hand firmly over his mouth every time he tried to do so.

The funeral took place in a couple of days. A distant relative had turned up, very apologetic and eager to explain that his dead cousin had failed to let any one know that he was sick even. This young man, the minister, and Keith's parents were the only mourners. A single carriage sufficed.

Keith never went into the parlour during those days. When everything was nearly ready, the mother asked him if he cared to go in and have a last look at poor Herr Stangenberg before the lid was put on the coffin. Keith merely shook his head.

"You had better go," Granny called from the kitchen. "I never saw him better-looking while he was alive."

"I won't," Keith yelled back with an amount of irritation that seemed quite out of proportion to its cause. The mother gave him an uneasy glance but left the room without saying anything at the time.

As far as the boy was concerned, the incident was closed. He had never permitted it to take a real hold of his mind, and he resented anybody's attempt to bring it closer to him. Death had stopped within his own threshold, and he simply looked in the opposite direction. This attitude sprang mainly from some inner resistance so stubborn that it would not even permit itself to be discussed. In addition, his mind was engrossed with other things, and the principal significance it attached to the passing of a human life at such close quarters was the hope it held out that the parlour might remain vacant.

"Were you afraid to look," the mother asked Keith on her return with the father from the cemetery.

"No, I just didn't want to," the boy replied emphatically.

"Why," the mother asked, studying his face with the peculiar searching glance that sometimes provoked him and sometimes filled him with a desire to bury his head in her lap and weep.

"Why should I," Keith rejoined. "He was dead!"

VI

No sooner had the apologetic young man removed the effects of his departed relative than Keith wanted to take full possession of the parlour. His mother checked his eagerness with the explanation that they might still want to rent it. In the meantime he could use it freely, but he must remove all his playthings when he was through for the day.

"Why can't I sleep on the big sofa in there," he asked in a tone that he vainly tried to make ingratiating.

"Not yet," said his mother evasively. "You had better stay in here, I think."

Once more the sense of being watched took hold of him unpleasantly, filling him with a mixture of fear and resentment. And his wonder why they seemed to suspect him added to the mystery with which his mind was wrestling so hopelessly.

The constant access to the parlour was a great change for the better, however, and one of the first uses he made of it was to investigate his father's little library with a thoroughness that until then had been out of the question. It was a queer collection, embracing every form of literature from philosophy to fiction. This catholicity did not mirror the father's taste but resulted from his manner of acquiring the books. Before obtaining the position he now held in the bank, he worked for a while in the office of one of the principal book printing establishments at Stockholm. There he formed acquaintances which later enabled him to get one unbound set of sheets of every book issued from that press. These he sent to a binder who put them into simple paper covers for a few _öre_ per volume. They always arrived in a large package just before Christmas, and one of the thorns in Keith's flesh was the care with which his father kept all those new treasures hidden until the holiday season was past. Then the books that had not been handed on to friends or relations as Christmas presents were given a permanent place on the shelves of the book case. All of them, however, lacked printed covers and illustrations.

The young man whom every one spoke of as "poor dear Herr Stangenberg" had not been dead a week, when Keith one afternoon on his return from school found himself alone in the house with Granny. His mother had gone to call on some friends, and the father would not come home from the bank for several hours. Even the servant girl was away, which was a fact that not immaterially contributed to Keith's sense of security. Granny need not be taken into account.

A long cherished opportunity had arrived at last, and he made straight for the book case. It was locked, but he knew where to find the key. Its hiding-place had constituted one of those little domestic problems that add zest to an uneventful existence. There was also an injunction of long standing against any meddling with the case without permission, but that had been a dead letter for some time. When books were concerned, Keith's customary respect for authority ceased to be an obstacle to his desires.

He explored with no special object in mind. He wanted new reading matter, and his curiosity was piqued by a number of books with blank backs that gave no clue to their contents. Two huge, fat volumes on the bottom shelf had already attracted his attention, and they were the first he pulled out. Their title brought instantaneous disappointment--"The Philosophy of the Unconscious," by Edouard von Hartmann. He prepared scornfully to put them back, when, through the big gap left by their withdrawal, he became aware that the space back of the front row was packed with smaller books and pamphlets. This discovery surprised him for a moment, but what he saw in there looked rather uninteresting. Nevertheless he reached in and pulled out a small green pamphlet that happened to be nearest at hand. Idly he glanced at the legend printed on the front cover:

"Amor and Hymen. A guide for married and unmarried persons of both sexes."

The words carried no special meaning to his mind, and in the same indifferent manner he turned a few pages until his eyes fell on a full-page illustration.

After that he read no other book for days.

VII

He read as he had never read before in his brief span of life--as, perhaps, he would never read again, no matter how wide a stretch of life that span might ultimately encompass.

He read of the anatomical differences between men and women. He read about the mechanism of love. He read about the mysteries of procreation. All of it was startlingly new to him, and yet he read with a sense of always having known it. He read with absolute acceptance, without a possibility of doubt.

It seemed a genuine revelation that must render all future questioning futile. And yet he seemed to know no more when he had finished than he knew before he started. It remained outside of himself, a structure of air, a series of shadowgraphs, and the craving within him burned as passionately as ever.

From now on he could grasp the points of the stories told by the boys at school, and he would know what Johan was hinting at in his boast about the secret doings of that attic. But of the reality of the thing he knew as little as before. In fact, the principal lesson brought home by his reading was that here he found himself in the presence of something that could not be learned out of books.

To begin with he did not go beyond the first part of the book. This he read over and over again. When at last he was sated with what that part had to give, a subtle chemical change had taken place in his mental make-up, one might say. It was not caused by any facts conveyed by the book. These seemed quite natural to him, and in themselves they would have had no more power over him than the information about flowers of various kinds imparted by the teacher of botany. It was the tone used that affected him in a manner reminding him of the Swedish Punch of which he had tested a few drops now and then. In every line there was a mixture of shamefaced apology and veiled desire that sent all the blood in his body rushing toward his head until the walls of the room about him reeled. Every inch of him was on fire, and in that flame body and soul were consumed together.

The sum and substance of it was that he had become conscious of that multitudinous impulse we call sex, and that from a vague, restless yearning this impulse suddenly had developed into an appetite as imperative as any hunger for food.

VIII

Finally he went on to the remaining chapters of the book, always with that double sense of knowing it all before and of not quite grasping what he read.

Pages were consumed before he realized with a shock more intense than any one previously experienced, that the book was speaking of the game he learned to play back of the big rock.

Again it was not what the book told that seemed to matter, but the tone in which it spoke. And while before that tone had sent the blood to his head, it now drew every drop of it back to his heart until he shivered and shook with a misery so acute that another moment's endurance of it seemed unthinkable.

At that instant fear was born within him. Until then it had been no more real to him than were now the experiences described in the first part of the book. He had instinctively shrunk from things that he knew or believed to be painful, from the shock of a blow to the sting of a harsh word. He had suffered discomforting anticipation of rebukes and restrictions. But he had never before stood face to face with that stark unreasoning terror which gathers its chief power from the intangible character of the danger it heralds.

He learned that physically and spiritually he had courted death, and what is worse than death. And suddenly the thought of that gentle-faced, sweet-tempered young man in the parlour leaped into his memory. But the image it brought him was not that of a human form stretched stiffly within the black boards of a coffin. What he saw and what froze him with horror was the hollow temples and sallow cheeks and drooping jaws and bent back and trembling limbs of the human wreck that was still counted a living man.

Worse than that image, however, and worse than any thought of punishment by powers not within his actual ken, was the book's damning imputation of shame incurred, of unworthiness proved, of inferiority so deep that no words could adequately picture it.

All that was most himself wanted to rise in wild rebellion against conclusions that found no support in anything he had actually experienced so far. He wanted to refuse belief. He sought for escapes as if the fulfilment of the doom pronounced by the book had been a matter of minutes. But there was the book, and to back it suddenly appeared a line of experiences out of his own life.

Perhaps those who would not let him visit their homes had only too good cause for refusal. Perhaps, after all, it was not his father's position but something about himself that had caused the parents of Harald, of Loth, and now of Murray, to act in exactly the same way. Perhaps Dally had reasons for not letting him become _primus_ which, out of his soul's kindness, he never told even to Keith himself. Perhaps the reason he always felt isolated and out of touch with his schoolmates lay in their instinctive recognition of his nature....

In the end he replaced the book with a firm determination never to look at it again. But the poison was in his mind, and the book no longer mattered.

IX

The game learned behind the big rock must never be played again--that much was certain!

But all resolves proved vain. Fight as he may, the end was inevitably the same.

Previously he had been the player, and had thought no more of it. Now he was being played with, and this new form of the game kept him see-sawing incessantly between ecstasy and agony, between the relief of yielding and the remorse at having yielded.

His life was an unending conflict, and in the presence of that ever renewed struggle within, by forces that seemed alien to his own self, all else lost significance.

And there was not a thing or a person within reach that could offer an antidote to the self-contempt corroding his soul's integrity.

X

Going to school grew very hard for a while. He could barely look his schoolmates in the face for fear that they might read in his eyes what sort of a chap he was. At times, on his walks to or from school with Murray, a faintness would seize him at the mere thought that his friend somehow might have guessed the truth. And he sent timidly envious side-glances at one lucky enough to be raised above all temptation. For neither his recollections of the gang gathered about the big rock nor the more recent light shed on such things by Johan had the slightest influence on his conception of himself as the sole black sheep in a flock of perhaps soiled but nevertheless washable white ones.

After a while the poignancy of his emotions became blunted by familiarity, and mere weariness forced him to accept himself on a reduced level. A sort of new equilibrium was established within him, but it was primarily based on indifference. Nothing really mattered. Effort was useless. Things merely happened. No one could help what happened. And in this fatalism, so utterly foreign to his ardent, supersensitive nature, he found a certain momentary sense of peace.

He went about his daily classroom tasks as in a dream, doing mechanically what he was asked, and dropping his effort as soon as the demand for it ceased. Nothing happened during the lessons to indicate that the teachers noticed any change in him or were in any manner dissatisfied with him. Perhaps he was saved by an occasional flaring up of interest that drew from him flashes of that brightness of mind that had won Dally and given him the reputation of an exceptional pupil.

But as the spring term drew nearer its close, he found it more and more difficult to keep up a pretence at attention. More and more he sank into mere drifting, and he whose pride had been really to know, now trusted to luck like any dullard with a head unfit for studying. Worse still and more significant, he began to find excuses for staying home from school. He who had never known what it was to be sick, now developed disturbing symptom after another--headaches and colds and digestive troubles in endless succession. Most of the time these symptoms yielded quickly at the mere sight of the castor oil which was his mother's favourite remedy and the taste of which Keith hated more than anything else in the world. It was the one thing that stood inexorably between his growing indolence and the luxury of being ill.

With commencement almost in sight, all sorts of written examinations were demanded. These he disliked additionally because his handwriting never had developed in proportion to his mental capacity. No matter how he strove, the letters remained childishly awkward. No two of them seemed to point in the same direction. Not even his futile efforts at singing could fill him with a more humiliating sense of inferiority.

All his various resistances were brought into concerted action when at last the teacher in Swedish ordered him to prepare two brief original compositions on quite simple themes. In the days of Dally he would have revelled in such a task. Now it appalled him. His head was empty. The mere idea of trying to write about such things as the discovery of America and the beauties of nature seemed silly. There was any number of books, besides, that said anything you could ever hope to say on either subject.

The end of it was that he produced an indisposition real enough not only to convince his mother but to make himself willing to face the ordeal of castor oil. Thanks to the oil he was able to stay in bed the better part of two days. Those were the last two days before his Swedish compositions were to be delivered. He knew that if they were not delivered, he would get no mark in that subject, and this would prevent his graduation to a higher grade.

In that dilemma he conceived the brilliant idea of making his mother write the compositions for him, and he actually succeeded in persuading her to do so. He prompted her a little, but she did the main part of the work, and the handwriting was hers. Finally he got her to bring them up to school with the explanation that he was too sick to sit up and write, but that she had taken down what he dictated. He did not even look at what she wrote, and it never occurred to him to doubt her ability of doing it far better than he could. When it was all over, he experienced a tremendous sense of relief, and this was much enhanced by his mother's willingness to let the father remain in complete ignorance of what had happened.

Nothing was said to him when he showed up at school again. His first inkling of trouble came with the return of his copy book. It was full of marks and corrections in red ink. As he looked at these in a stunned fashion, he realized for the first time that his mother's spelling and punctuation would have been deemed unsatisfactory in a second grade pupil. At first he did not even consider the bearing of this discovery on his own fate. He could think of only one thing, namely that another blow had been dealt to his conception of his mother as a superior being. He actually felt ashamed on her behalf. Then came the thought of what the teacher must have thought....

Commencement Day brought the answer. He got only C in Swedish, which meant that he had failed to pass. It gave him the choice between spending another year in the same grade or facing special examinations in the fall.

At first he was too dazed to think. Then his former indifference changed into blazing indignation and resentment. He felt himself a victim of unpardonable injustice. In that mood he returned home and reported to his father.

"You talk nonsense, my boy," said his father in a tone that was new to Keith. "From some things I have heard, I gather that your escape from the same kind of mark in every subject was little short of miraculous."

Keith stared open-eyed at his father, puzzled by his manner of speaking and stung to the quick by what he said.

"What are you going to do now," his father demanded after a while.

A long pause followed during which Keith's brain worked at lightning speed. It was as if he had never known until then what really had happened during the weeks preceding commencement.

"I'll pass the examinations in the fall," he said at last.

"Will you give me your word of honour to read hard during the summer," his father asked, and his voice set the boy's heart throbbing like an engine.

"I will," replied Keith. "But I could pass those examinations without looking at the book."

"The more shame for you, then, to let yourself be plucked," was his father's concluding remark, but even that was uttered without a suggestion of bitterness.

XI

The summer was spent on the mainland opposite the island where they used to live. He had practically no companionship except that of his mother. It was very dull, but for the first time he seemed to need solitude. He had brought out all his schoolbooks, and he really did a good deal of studying, especially of Latin, which he knew was his weakest point.

At first he felt a slight grudge against the mother. She had disappointed him for one thing, and there was an inclination besides to hold her responsible for his misfortune. By degrees, however, he began to see his own part in its true light, and he wondered how he could have been such a blind fool. It was this understanding that brought him comparative peace and enabled him to work. He had been so harassed by the question of guilt in regard to actions which his own mind would never have classed as wrong that the sense of facing punishment clearly deserved came as a genuine relief.

The monotony of the season was only broken by a visit to the summer home of Aunt Agda at Laurel Grove, where he stayed a whole week and made a lot of friends. She had served with the Wellanders as a nurse girl when Keith was only a baby. Then she was plain Agda, and Keith's mother often spoke of how crazy she had been about him. Then she disappeared, and when the Wellanders next heard of her, she was the wife of a well-to-do retired merchant, to whom she had borne three children while she was merely a servant and his first wife still lived. Keith had often overheard his parents speak of Agda's phenomenal rise with ironic smiles, but he didn't care for anything except her continued inclination to spoil him.

There was a lot of children at Laurel Grove, boys and girls, and most of them matched Keith in age. They took him in, and in that one week he had a glimpse of the kind of life he would have liked to live. There was in particular one boy, Arnold Kruse, for whom Keith formed a warm attachment. This feeling was additionally cemented by Arnold's choice of Keith as a confidant. Arnold was in love with the prettiest girl in the place, Gurlie Norlin, and so was every other boy within reach of Laurel Grove. But Arnold was the favourite, and he told Keith that he and Gurlie had agreed to wait for each other and to marry as soon as they were of age.

It was like a fairy tale to Keith--a wonderful tale like no one he had ever read. And the most wonderful thing about it was that it was real, and that he was permitted to play a sort of part in it. His thoughts went back to Oscar and what he had told Keith about the love between Oscar's father and mother. Here was love again, mystically beautiful, so that it brought a new light into the faces of those it touched. And Keith's heart grew lonely and wistful within him. But strangely enough, he never thought of connecting Arnold's love for Gurlie with what he had read in the book found in his father's book case. That was quite a different thing, he felt.

XII

The presiding genius of the examinations was Lector Booklund, teacher of Latin in Lower and Upper Sixth. He was short and stocky and gnarled by gout. Instead of speaking, he emitted a series of verbal explosives, and the boy whose answers didn't come quick enough became the object of withering scorn. Most of his life seemed concentrated in his eyes where twinkling merriment and blazing anger alternated with bewildering rapidity. He posed as a tyrant, but the boys who knew him well said that at heart he was as kind as he was just, and that his nervous impatience and bursts of rage were merely the results of severe physical sufferings.

The moment he caught sight of Keith among the boys up for examination, most of whom hailed from other schools, he became interested and began to draw him out. And Keith was able to respond with some of his old-time quickwittedness. His ambition had been stirred into a semblance of life through the shock of his failure, while the summer's rest and peace had brought back some of his natural vivacity. The inner conflict was still a source of trouble, but it did not seem quite so much a matter of life and death. He had not yet passed the crisis, but he had reached a point where a little tactful nursing might put him on the right path again for good. What he needed above all was encouragement, and that was what he got for a while from the new class principal.

He passed the examinations with ease. Then the sense of being a favoured pupil once more made him throw himself into the studies with considerable zest. Little by little, however, his zest slacked off. More and more frequently he became the object of blame or ridicule instead of praise. By and by Lector Booklund found it hard to ask him a question or give him a direction without open display of irritation. It was evident that he felt disappointed in Keith, and he did not hesitate to show it.

Many causes combined to produce the slump in Keith's aspirations that in its turn produced the changed attitude of the teacher. The latter's impatience had probably as much to do with it as anything else, while his splenetic manners and speech intimidated the boy's already overwrought sensitiveness. The subjects taught and the form of the teachings did their share, too. Grammar and rules and dry data seemed to play a greater part than ever. In Latin, for instance, they were reading Ovid's "_Metamorphoses_" and the colourful old legends might easily have been used to arouse the boy's interest, if attention had merely been concentrated on the stories told and the life revealed by them. But the teacher was first and last a grammarian, and he would wax frantically enthusiastic over some subtle syntactic distinction which left Keith peevishly indifferent. And Lector Booklund was positively jealous on behalf of his own subject, so that once he flung a bitingly sarcastic remark at the boy because his attention had flared up at the quoting of a phrase in English.