Chapter IV: Part I: I (4)

"Oh, just playing," he replied without looking up, forgetful of everything but the pin that would not come out of the crack.

"Who is that with you?"

"That is Johan," Keith shouted back triumphantly, "and his papa is a _vaktmästare_, too."

"Come right up and let me speak to you," was the insistant rejoinder from above.

"Oh, please, mamma," the boy pleaded, his voice breaking a little, "can't I stay just a little longer?"

"You must come at once," his mother commanded.

"Is that your mumsey," Johan asked.

"It is my mamma," Keith retorted, his attention momentarily diverted by Johan's most peculiar way of referring to his parents.

"Then you had better go," advised the new friend sagely, "or she will tell your popsey, and then you know what happens to you."

"I think I can come down again, if you wait for me," cried Keith as he ran into the long dark passageway.

At that moment a cry of "Johan" rose from the lower part of the lane, and Keith had to come back once more to look.

"There's my mumsey now," said Johan philosophically, pointing to an open window on the ground floor of the corner house. With that he slouched off in a manner that Keith half envied and half resented.

XXIII

The sudden emergence of Johan had filled Keith's heart with a new hope. Here was a possible playmate at last. The fact that his father was a _vaktmästare_ like Keith's ought to settle all paternal opposition, the boy thought. But to his great surprise, he found this not to be the case.

A severe cross-examination followed his return home. In the midst of it, Keith made a grievous strategic mistake, lured on by his insatiable curiosity about strange words.

"Why does Johan call his mamma 'mumsey' and his papa 'popsey,'" he asked unexpectedly. "It sounds funny."

"Because he does not know any better," his mother rejoined with unmistakable disapproval. "It doesn't sound nice, and it isn't nice."

"But his papa and mamma don't care," Keith objected.

"That's the worst of it," said the mother. "It shows they are not very nice people, and I wish to talk to your father before you can play with Johan any more."

"I have heard of them," the grandmother piped up, making them both turn towards her, one hopefully and the other doubtfully.

The grandmother never left the kitchen. She walked from the sofa to the big foot-stool, from the foot-stool to the table by the window, and from the table back to the sofa. Sometimes she would not be seen talking to another person for days. And yet she had a miraculous way of surprising the rest of the family with pieces of gossip picked out of the air, one might think. There was apparently not a person in the neighbourhood of whom she had not heard, and about whom she could not give some more or less intimate piece of information. They were all perfect strangers to her, but she followed their lives with as much keenness for minute details as if they had been her nearest kin or dear friends.

"She was a cook in the house of the man whose office Gustafsson works in," the grandmother went on. "He used to do odd jobs for the family, cutting wood and such things, and in that way he met her in the kitchen, and one fine day they decided to get married. She is older than him, and I guess it was her last chance. But the family was crazy about her, and when they heard of it, they gave him the place of attendant in the office downstairs and the two rooms back of the office to live in. He was just a peasant boy, and she reads the Bible all day and goes to prayer-meeting at night."

"How do you know all that," wondered Keith's mother, having learned by this time that the old woman's gossip was generally well founded on truth.

"Oh," the grandmother said with a queer smile particular to such occasions, "a little bird sang it to me."

"I think they must be rather low people," Keith's mother concluded.

"Perhaps," the grandmother said, "but they have plenty of religion at least, and I don't think the boy can do much harm to Keith."

Keith ran up to the grandmother and kissed her impulsively.

That night there was a great family council. Keith's father was told about Johan and the Gustafssons.

"I think they are about as good as ourselves," was his verdict, given in a tone suggesting contempt for his own position rather than respect for that of Johan's father. "But Keith has his toys, and that ought to be enough for him."

"It _is_ rather lonely for him," the mother rejoined, "and he should get out a little, I suppose, but I hate to have him playing about the streets, and I fear Johan's manners are not very good."

"The best thing is to send him to school," said the father.

"What are you talking of, Carl," the mother cried. "The idea--when he is barely five!"

"He knows more about the letters than I did when I began school at seven," the father came back unperturbed.

"I don't think it would be very bad for him to play a little with Johan now and then," said the mother evasively, bending down to kiss Keith, who had snuggled up to her during the preceding talk. Then she put her hand through his waves of almost flaxen hair, bent his head slightly backward, looked straight into his eyes, and asked:

"You don't want to leave me, do you?"

"No," said Keith, hugging her passionately, "but I think I should like to go to school."

The idea carried no distinct image to his mind, and he felt a little timid toward all those unknown possibilities implied by the word school, but this slight feeling of hesitation was swamped by a longing so restless and so irresistible that it sent tears to his eyes, although he could not tell himself what it was he longed for.

XXIV

It was true that Keith knew a good deal for his age. In fact, he had mastered the whole alphabet and was making good progress in spelling under his mother's guidance. He was eager and quick to learn. Generally his interest was rather fitful, but along this one line it showed no wavering. It was as if the boy had known that the art of reading would offer him an escape of some sort.

He might have advanced still more rapidly if his mother had been more steady in her teaching. She was very proud of him, and she spoke of reading and studying as if there were nothing finer in the world.

"No better burden bears any man than much wisdom," she quoted one day from the old Eddas--probably without knowing the source. "I know, if any one does, what lack of money means, but I want you rather to have learning than wealth. Then, when the whole world is listening to you with bated breath, I shall walk across North Bridge resting on your arm, and I shall be repaid for all that my own life has not brought me. We shall walk arm in arm, you and I, at four o'clock, when the King goes for a walk, too, and all Stockholm is there to see.... Will you do that, Keith?"

"Of course," he cried, his eyes shining.

But sometimes she was helpless in the grip of one of her depressed moods, and then days might go by without a lesson. Far from being made happy by that respite, he would plead with her to be taught "one more little letter," and finally she would bring down the book from the hanging book shelf on the wall back of her easy chair. There stood the a-b-c book she had bought for him, and her favourite hymn-book, and the New Testament given to the father when he left school to begin earning his own living, and the miniature copy of Luther's catechism presented to him at the time of his confirmation. There, too, rested the big Bible which Keith's mother treasured as much as her wedding ring and the bureau that was her chief wedding present. It was a gift from her father when she was confirmed, and on its fly-leaf he had written:

"Belongs to Anna Margareta Carlsson."

It was this Bible rather than the a-b-c book that became the principal means of instruction. Keith loved it, and he could not have been much more than three years old when he first began to pore over its quaint old illustrations. The first of these showed an old man with a long beard and a trailing white garment floating over a sheet of water out of which rose two ragged pieces of rock. At one corner a pallid sun emerged out of the fleeing mists, while, at the opposite corner, a tiny moon crescent seemed about to disappear beneath the stilled waters.

"Who is that," asked Keith not once, but many times.

"That is God creating the world," explained his mother.

"But I don't see the world."

"It is just coming out," she said, pointing to the rocks.

"Who's God," was Keith's next question as a rule.

"He is the father of the whole universe," the mother said reverently.

"Papa's too," asked the boy once, and seeing his mother nod assent, he cried jubilantly:

"Then he must be my grandfather, whose portrait you haven't got!"

More frequently he stopped short as soon as he heard about the universal fatherhood. That was grown-up talk to him, and like much else, it carried no meaning to his mind. Nor did he waste much thought on it after having asked once if he could see God and been told that no man could do that and live. His mind was occupied with food and clothes and toys and people and things. What could never be seen was easily dismissed--much more easily than the spook that one of the servant girls insisted on having seen, thus making Keith's father so angry that he nearly discharged her on the spot. And from that first picture in the Bible the boy turned impatiently to another further on, where a small boy with a sword almost as big as himself was cutting the head off a man much taller than Keith's father. And at the top of each page appeared big black letters which he could recognize almost as easily as those in the a-b-c book, although they were differently shaped and much more pretty to look at.

To Keith this opening up of a new world was exclusively pleasant at first, and so it was to his mother, but other people seemed to be troubled by it at times. One day his free-spoken aunt was visiting with them, and, as usual, disagreeing with Keith's mother, who evidently felt one of her dark spells approaching. Wishing to express her disagreement at some particular point quite forcibly, but wishing also to keep the listening boy from enriching his vocabulary with a term of doubtful desirability, she took the precaution to spell out the too picturesque word:

"R-o-t!" Just then she caught a gleam of aroused interest in Keith's eyes, and to make assurance doubly sure, she hastened to add: "Says rod!"

"No," Keith objected promptly. "It says rot, and I want to know what it means."

"I knew that small pigs also have ears, but I didn't know they could spell," was her amused comment, uttered in a tone that touched something in Keith's inside most pleasantly. Then, however, she went on in a manner grown quite serious:

"You had better send him to school, Anna."

"Yes," replied the mother to Keith's intense surprise, "Carl and I have been talking it over and practically decided to do so. He certainly needs some better guidance than he gets from his poor, good-for-nothing mother."

"Good-for-nothing fiddlesticks!" sputtered the aunt. "You'll make me say something much worse than rot. Anna, if you keep talking like that when the boy hears it."

Keith had heard, but his mind was absorbed by the new idea.

"Well," said his mother, "I cannot take care of him properly. He is running down to that Gustafsson boy all time and most of the time I can't get him home again except by going for him."

"Johan's mother said yesterday that I hadn't been there half an hour when you called for me," Keith broke in. "And then she said that I had better not come back if you don't think Johan good enough for to play with."

"I don't say we are better than anybody else," said the mother, addressing herself to the aunt rather than to Keith. "But I don't know what he is doing when he is down there, and Johan seems such a clod that I can't see why Keith wants to play with him."

"Why can't Johan come up here," asked Keith.

"Because ...," said his mother, and got no further.

"Yes," the aunt declared in a tone of absolute finality, "you must send him to school."

No sooner had the aunt taken her leave than Keith assailed his mother with excited demands for further information. She took his head between her both hands and looked at him as if she would never see him again.

"Only five," she said at last, "and already he wants to get away. A few years more--a few short years--and you will be gone for good, I suppose."

"Oh, mamma," he protested, "you know that I shall never leave you!"

"No, never entirely," she cried, kissing him fervently. "Promise me you won't, Keith!"

He promised, and then he wanted to know what they did in school. But she began to talk about difficulties and dangers and temptations and all sorts of things he couldn't grasp. She spoke with intense feeling, and as always when she was deeply moved, his whole being was set vibrating in tune with her mood. His cheeks flushed, his throat choked, his eyes brimmed over with tears, and at last he began to wonder whether he had not better stay right where he was. Her eyes were dim with tears, too, and once more she took his head between her hands and looked an endless time before she said:

"Now you are beginning life in earnest, Keith!"