Chapter 4

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 classes 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 aptitude 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 advertisement 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 associates, 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 glass within a stone's throw of the vicarage, he had a sense of never having lived before. The spaciousness 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 spaces outside the rinks. Suddenly he caught sight of a large gathering of people very far out. They were moving slowly toward the shore, 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.

"Three boys were drowned skating during the lunch hours," continued Bergman breathlessly. "Two were in my class--Hill and Samson, you know. The third, Dahlin, was in your own class."

"Is Dahlin dead?" asked Keith blankly. The thing seemed impossible to him. He had been talking to Dahlin that very morning--a tall boy, slow, self-possessed, older than most of the other pupils, and advanced for his age in everything but studies.

"He is," said Bergman with emphasis. "And so are the other two. They are dragging for the bodies now."

So that was what I saw those people doing out there, Keith thought.

"Little Moses was with them," Bergman ran on. "The Jew, you know. We've always thought him a coward. And he nearly went down, too, trying to save them."

By that time they were separating at the door to Bergman's classroom. On entering his own class, Keith found it in a state of unexampled though subdued excitement. The boys were gathered in groups which constantly shifted membership. Every one spoke in a whisper. Reports and rumours of the most fantastic kind passed from group to group, giving rise to fierce discussions. Six boys had been drowned instead of three, some one asserted. In another minute they heard that no one had been lost. Most credence was given to a circumstantial report of the miraculous recovery of Dahlin after he had been fully fifteen minutes under water. His big sealskin cap, they said, had become stuck over his face as he went under, so that the water could not choke him.

Keith was among the most excited for a while, running eagerly from group to group and telling what he had heard from Bergman, who evidently had the very latest news. Soon, however, his mood changed, and he retired quickly to his own seat. There he sat by himself, his elbows on his knees and his face resting in his hands. A stupor had descended on his mind. The whole thing seemed so incredible. He could not grasp it. Those boys, who had been right among them only a few hours ago, would never appear again. There would be a funeral, and then they would never be heard of again. Tears broke into his eyes. He choked with a vague sense of pity. Samson, he knew, was the only son of a poor widow. Hill's mother was very sick, some one had said. And Dahlin....

Keith instinctively raised his head to look at the place which Dahlin had occupied that very morning. What did it mean ...?

At that moment the Rector entered, long overdue to give them an hour in Latin--an hour of which a goodly part already was gone. The boys dropped into their seats. A murmur of expectation passed through the class. Every eye was on the Rector's face which seemed to twitch in a peculiar fashion.

"The school has suffered a terrible loss," he said at last, his voice sounding very hoarse. "There is only one thing we can do--work! Will _primus_ please begin translating from the top of the twenty-second page, where we left off yesterday."

The boys stared at him, but no one dared to speak. They knew there was no escape, and they tried to fix their attention on the books. Keith saw before him a blurred page full of dancing letters. _Primus_ stumbled and blundered. He was followed by _secundus_ and _tertius_. Keith had recovered a little by that time, and he knew they were making mistakes that ordinarily would have called forth a storm of reproof from the Rector. Now he paid no attention, but merely repeated:

"Go on--go on!"

At last the lesson came to an end, and then they were dismissed for the day.

On his way home Keith's thoughts ran in a futile circle around the day's event. If they had never left the rink ... if they had been saved ... if the story about Dahlin could have been true....

Always his thoughts returned to the same point: the strangeness of the fact that those boys would never appear again. At no moment, however, did it occur to him that the same thing might have happened to himself--or might happen some time in the future. He was Keith Wellander, to whom such things never happened.

He was nearly home when he suddenly stopped in the middle of East Long Street and said to himself:

"Now I suppose I'll _never_ get leave to go skating again."

XXI

Among other new duties that accompanied Keith's entrance into the fourth grade was church-going. Until then he had known little about public worship beyond what he observed during two or three attendances of Yule Matins, that was almost like going to a party. The rule of the school was that all pupils in the higher grades who not going to church with their parents elsewhere must attend services with their respective classes every other Sunday at the Church of St. Mary Magdalene.

Judging by the number of boys who turned up, the percentage of church-goers among the parents must have been very small. Keith's father went to communion once a year. That was all. The mother went a little oftener, but as a rule something else turned up about the time she ought to start, and so she stayed home and read a chapter in some Lutheran postil instead. Keith thought little of that kind of books. He had tried them and found them dull beyond endurance.

"Do you really like reading that stuff," he said to his mother one Sunday.

"Keith!" she protested sternly. Then she continued more mildly: "It is not a question of like or dislike, my boy, but of saving your soul by humbling it before the Lord."

"Can you do that by reading," asked Keith innocently.

"N-no ... not exactly," his mother hesitated. But you can.... Oh, I know I ought to be in church instead of sitting here, but I am such a weak vessel, and I am sure that the Lord will understand and forgive me."

"Well, then you don't need to worry, mamma," said Keith consolingly, stirred as always by the appearance of an emotional note in her voice.

"We should always worry," she rejoined very gently, "because we are all sinners and we have a chance only by His mercy. But I don't believe in a hell, whatever they say, and I don't want you, Keith, to pay any attention to anything of that kind they may teach you."

"But why do they teach it then," asked Keith, his logic alert.

"Because ... it's a long story, and you will understand it some day. Now I want to finish my chapter, or I won't be able to do so before dinner is ready."

Keith would have liked to ask more, but what concerned him was the apparent contradiction in his mother's words rather than the subject of religion itself. His main impression of religion so far was that it was something very tedious to which grown-up people submitted for some mysterious reason never really revealed to children. And this impression was abundantly confirmed by his subsequent experiences in the prudishly ugly precincts of St. Mary Magdalene.

Seats were reserved in one of the side galleries for the pupils from Old Mary. Two teachers sat in one of the front pews, so that they could look down into the church. Aspiring youngsters who wanted to make sure of good marks were apt to look upon the same pews with special favour. The rest of the boys wanted to sit as far back as possible, where they could whisper, and show each other pictures, and eat candy without too much danger of being discovered. These pursuits brought no relief to Keith, partly because he possessed neither pictures nor candy, being always very shy of pocket money, and partly because either fear or some sort of pride made him draw back from engaging in any sort of mischief behind the teacher's back.

The hymn singing was not without a certain enjoyment. The slowness of the tempo made it possible for Keith to keep in tune by leaning very close to the boy sitting next to him. Even the reading of the gospels and other recurring features of the service could be borne. But when the sermon began, Keith fell into sheer agony. The other boys seemed capable of letting the words of the preacher drop off them as water drops off the oily feathers of a water-fowl. But one of Keith's characteristics was that he had to listen to anything said loudly enough in his presence. For him there was no escape. Through an endless hour, that sometimes would verge on the five quarters, he had to sit there and take in every word of a long-winded, moralistic discourse dealing in forbidding terms with things that left his brain as untouched as if they had been uttered in a strange tongue. He had a sense of warnings and threats that seemed to connect with what his mother had asked him not to heed. He was told to believe, but he could not make out what it was he should believe--unless it was the Small Catechism, and that had always left his mind a perfect blank although he knew it by heart from the first page to the last.

When at last the ordeal was over, he rushed away with a sense of relief that was marred by the thought of the same thing happening two weeks later. It was the only feature of his schooling that left behind an actual sense of grievance which the passing years could not mollify.

XXII

A little before commencement the whole school was stirred by important news. A reorganization of the entire school system was in progress, and one result of it was the merger of the old _gymnasium_ or high school on Knight's Island with Old Mary and the expansion of the latter to nine grades under the new name of St. Mary's Higher Latin School. A building across the street had already been acquired for the four new grades, and a new rector of higher rank was to take charge in the fall.

"It means that we'll stay right here until we go to the university," one of Keith's classmates explained in a tone implying that it must make quite a difference to their lives. Then he asked suddenly: "You'll go on to the university, Wellander, won't you--you with your brilliant mind?"

Keith looked at him in dumb astonishment. In spite of his two prizes, it was so strange to be called brilliant. And then the question of going to the university had been raised. Until then he had really never given a thought to it. And the question of cost leaped into his mind. He was beginning to learn at last that money was needed for a number of things you liked to do. Would it cost much, and could his father afford to pay that much, and, most important of all, would his father consent to pay it? Those were novel questions--and as he did so often when faced by something unpleasant or disturbing, so, now again, he pushed them aside, fled from them, refused to have anything to do with them. There were still five grades between him and that threateningly attractive possibility, the student's white cap.

"I don't know," he said at last, being a truthful fool in most matters, "I have not asked papa yet."

And there was a smile on the other boy's face which Keith disliked without guessing the significance of it.

Commencement brought him a prize again--a German dictionary just like the one Krass got when Keith carried off the highest prize in school after thinking himself ignominiously passed by. Of course, a prize was a prize, but--and he thought his father looked rather disappointed when he heard of it.

However, George Murray also received a book, and It was no better than Keith's, although Murray professed to see a great difference between a German Dictionary and a Latin Classic.

XXIII

Murray was going off with his family to their private summer residence in the archipelago outside of Stockholm and Keith gathered that it must be a very magnificent place. The Wellanders didn't go to the country at all. Keith's mother had a very bad period again, full of worry and depression. The summer dragged along joylessly, and Keith had to fall back on Johan's company in so far as he could obtain it. But Johan was getting very independent. He had plenty of other acquaintances, and what Keith saw of them made him deem it wiser not to mention them at all to his mother. He was gradually learning discretion of a kind.

He read a good deal, and he was beginning to make unauthorized visits to his father's bookcase in the parlour. There he had discovered certain volumes by one Jules Verne, and if he could only have plunged freely into these, the summer might have proved quite bearable. One day when he could not get at the books, and his mood was more than usually fretful, and his mother seemed at her lowest, she suddenly turned on him and said in a strangely bitter tone:

"All I have to go through now is your fault, Keith."

"Why," he asked dumbly, staring at her.

"Because when you came into the world you hurt me so much that I have never been well since."

"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.