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The Soul of a Child

by Edwin Björkman · English · Gutenberg #12283 · 462,746 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: The Soul of a Child

Author: Edwin Björkman


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #12283]
                Most recently updated: October 28, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SOUL OF A CHILD ***

THE SOUL OF A CHILD

BY

EDWIN BJÖRKMAN

1922




CONTENTS

PART I.
PART II.
PART III.
PART IV.



PART I


I

The oldest part of Stockholm is a little rocky island. Once it was the
whole city. Popularly it is still spoken of as "The City." At one end of
it stands the huge square-cut pile of the Royal Palace, looking with
solemn indifference toward the more modern quarters across the ever
hurried waters of the North River. Nearer the centre, and at the very
top of the island, lies an open place called Great Square, which used to
play a most important part in Swedish history, but which now serves no
better purpose than to house the open-air toy market that operates the
last week before Christmas.

Long narrow streets loop concentrically about Great Square. They are
lined with massive structures of stone and brick, four and five stories
high, that used to be the homes of court and government officials, of
army and navy officers, of burghers made prosperous by an extensive
domestic and foreign trade, while on the ground floors were located the
choicest shops of the country's capital. The shops are still there, but
they have grown dingy and cheap, and they administer only to the casual
needs of the humble middle-class people crowded into the old-fashioned,
gloomy apartments above.

From the square to the water-fronts radiate a number of still more
narrow and squalid lanes, harbouring a population which is held inferior
to that of the streets in social rank without yet being willing to have
itself classed with the manual toilers of the suburbs. Halfway down the
slope of such a lane, and almost within the shadow of the palace, stood
the house where Keith first arrived at some sort of consciousness of
himself and the surrounding world.

On the fourth floor his parents occupied a three-room flat. The parlour
and the living-room had two windows each, looking into the lane. The
kitchen in the rear opened a single window on the narrowest, barest,
darkest courtyard you ever saw, its one redeeming feature being a
glimpse of sky above the red-tiled roof of the building opposite.

In such surroundings Keith spent the better part of his first sixteen
years.

He was an only son, much loved, and one of his first conscious
realizations was a sharp sense of restraint, as if he had been tied to a
string by which he was pulled back as soon as anything promised to
become interesting.

At first he thought the world made up entirely of those three rooms,
where he, his parents, Granny--his maternal grandmother--and a more or
less transient servant girl had lived for ever. Visitors drifted in, of
course, but he seemed to think that they had come from nowhere and would
return to the same place. What instilled the first idea of a wider
outside world in his mind was leaning out through one of the windows,
with his mother's arm clutched tightly about his waist.

There was something symbolic in that clutch, for his mother was always
full of fear that dire things befall him. She was afraid of many other
things besides, and the need of being constantly worried was probably
his second clear realization.

But the clasp of his mother's arm was soft and tender for all that. Her
inclination to humour him in sundry respects not implying too much
freedom of movement contrasted favourably with the sterner restraint
exercised by his father. And so it was only natural that, to begin with,
he should cling no less closely to her than she to him.

Leaning out of the front windows was one of the favorite pursuits of his
earliest childhood, and during the summer it could be indulged to a
reasonable extent.

Across the lane, not more than twenty-five feet distant, was another
building, the upper parts of which he could see even when the windows
were closed. It was much darker of aspect than their own house, and he
knew that no people lived in it. He called it the distillery, just as he
heard his parents do, without knowing what the word meant. Staring as he
might into its dark windows, he could as a rule see nothing but the
grimy panes, because in the back of it there was no courtyard at
all--nothing but a solid wall without a single opening in it.

Now and then however, he would spy the flickering light of an open-wick
lamp move about on the floor level with their own. In the fitful,
smoke-enshrouded glow of that lamp he would catch fleeting glimpses of
clumsy figures and spooklike faces bending over huge round objects,
while at the same time, if the windows were open, he would hear much
mysterious tapping and knocking. It was all very puzzling and not quite
pleasant, so that on midwinter afternoons, when he was still awake after
dark, he would not care to look very long at the house opposite, and
the drawing of the shades came as an actual relief.

Letting his glance drop straight down from one of their windows, he saw,
at a dizzying depth, the cobbles of the lane, lined on either side by a
gutter made out of huge smooth stones. There was often water in the
gutter even on dry days, when the intense blueness of the sky-strip
overhead showed that the sun must be shining brightly. Sometimes the
water was thick and beautifully coloured, and then he yearned to get
down and put his hands into it. But to do so, he gathered from his
mother, would not only be dangerous and contrary to her will and wish,
but quite out of the question for some other reason that he could not
grasp. His mother's standing expression for it was:

"No _nice_ little boy would ever do that."

Keith's third realization in the way of self-consciousness was an uneasy
doubt of his own inherent nicety, for he soon discovered that whatever
was thus particularly forbidden seemed to himself particularly
desirable.

At times he saw children playing down there--perhaps in the very gutter
for which he was longing. To him they appeared entirely like himself,
but to his mother's eye they were evidently objectionable in the same
way as the gutter. There were not many of them, however, and it was a
long time before two or three of them began to return with sufficient
regularity to assume a distinct identity in his mind.

Older people came and went, but never many of them, and hardly ever more
than one or two at a time. Nor did he care very much. More attractive
was the sight of long, horse-drawn carts with narrow bodies resting on
two small wheels set about the centre. Generally they stopped in front
of the distillery to load or unload heavy casks or barrels of varying
size. The loading was more exciting by far, especially when the barrels
were large, for then the men had to use all their strength to roll them
up the gangway of two loose beams laid from the pavement to the cart,
and to time their efforts they shouted or chanted noisily--much to
Keith's joy and the disgust of his mother. On such occasions the air of
the lane was apt to take on a special pungency, and as he sniffed it, he
would have a sensation of mixed pleasure and revulsion. At other times
when the carts stopped in front of the warehouse below the distillery,
odours of an exclusively enjoyable character would tickle his
nostrils--odours that later he might encounter in their own kitchen and
identify with matters pleasing to the palate as well as to the nose.

There were in all only eight houses on both sides of the lane. Four of
these were the rear parts of the corner houses facing respectively on
the Quay, at the foot of the lane and on East Long Street, at its head.
Beyond the latter there was nothing but another wall full of windows,
just like the walls flanking the lane itself. The traffic on the street
was more lively and varied, but there was not much about it to catch and
hold his interest.

Almost invariably Keith turned his head in the other direction the
moment he had poked it out of the window and been pulled back by his
mother to a position of greater safety. There, at the foot of the lane,
only a stone's throw distant, opened the stony expanse of the quay
across which surged a veritable multitude of men and animals and
vehicles at all hours of the day. At the end of the Quay, silhouetted
against blue or grey or green water, appeared commonly the blunt nose or
the flag-draped stern of a big steamer, but hardly ever the middle part
of a hull with bridge or masts. And Keith could never recall whether the
complete shape of a full-sized vessel was finally revealed to him by
reality or by that reflection of it which, at an uncannily premature
age, he began to find in books.

The main feature of the view, however--a sort of narrow Japanese panel
where childish eyes perceived everything as on a flat surface--was that
it continued upwards: first, a lot of water, ripped and curled by busily
scurrying steam launches and tugs, streaked by plodding rowboats, and,
at rare times, adorned by a white-sailed yacht; then, still higher up, a
shore with many trees that drew the soul magnetically by their summer
verdure; and, finally, a brightly red, toylike fort, crowned by a small
embattled tower flying the blue and yellow Swedish flag at the top. Here
was another world, indeed, larger and brighter by far, and more richly
varied, than that of his home and the lane below and the dingy courtyard
in the back.

So he began to ask questions, and one of the first things he learned, to
his great astonishment, was that he had not always lived in the same
place--that he had been born, whatever that meant, in another and
unmistakably more desirable part of the city.

"But why did we come here," he asked, trying instinctively to keep his
voice from sounding regretful or petulant.

"Because the bank owns this house," his mother replied. "And because
papa acts as landlord for it, and we don't have to pay any rent here."

Out of this confusing answer he retained a single idea: the bank. It was
in the home air, so to speak. Evidently his father was closely connected
with it, and this was good for the whole family. For a little while the
boy imagined that his father was the bank. Later he began to think of it
as some sort of superlatively powerful being that, alone in the whole
world, ranked above his father even. Still later--much later--he began
to suspect a relationship between the bank and his father resembling
that between his father and himself. And he read out of his father's
words and miens a sense of dissatisfaction not unlike the one he felt
when he was forced to do what he did not want, or prevented from doing
what he wanted.

This was his fourth fundamental realization: of powers beyond those
directly represented within the home; powers of compelling importance
that might, or might not, be kindly; powers before which all and
everything within his own narrow world had to bow down in helpless
submission. In the end this one undoubtedly became the most significant
of all his early realizations. It tended gradually to lessen his awe of
parental authority so that, at a very early age, he developed the
courage to shape his own life and opinions regardless of his immediate
surroundings. At the same time, strange as it may seem, it inspired him
with a general respect for established authority from which he could
never quite free himself.



II

"Why don't I remember when we came here," Keith asked his mother one day
after she had let out the startling fact of his being born elsewhere.

"Because it happened before you began to remember things," she said a
little warily.

As frequently was the case, her reply puzzled him more than the fact it
was meant to explain, and so he asked no more questions that time.

On the whole, he lived completely in the present, and rather on the edge
nearest the future, so that a teacher later said of him that he was in
constant danger of "falling off forward." Highstrung and restless,
sitting still did not come naturally until he had learned to read books
all by himself, and he could hardly be called introspective. While prone
to futile regrets, largely under the influence of his mother's morbid
attitude, he gave little attention as a rule to what was past and gone.

Here was an exception, however--something concerning the past that
stirred his curiosity powerfully--and it became his first subject
for brooding.

He could remember all sorts of things, of course. And it seemed that he
had always remembered them. Yet his mother was able to tell him things
of which he knew nothing at all, although they had happened to himself.
There might be any number of such things. What were they? Could he
recall any of them by thinking hard enough?

When this problem laid hold of his mind he would retire to the corner
between the big bureau and the right-hand window in the living-room,
which, by formal conferment, was reserved for him as his own
"play-room." The space in that nook was large enough to hold a small
chair, a table to match, and a few toy boxes. There he would sit staring
blindly at his toys until his mother anxiously inquired what was the
matter with him.

The great question taking precedence of all the rest was: what was the
very first thing he could remember?

With puckered brows and peering pupils he would send his gaze back into
the misty past, and out of it emerged invariably the same image.

He saw himself seated on a small wooden horse fastened to a little
platform with wheels under it. The horse was black with white spots, and
possessed a nobly curved neck, a head with ears on top of it, and a pair
of fiercely red nostrils.

The next thing recurring to his mind was a sense of swift, exhilarating
movement. His father stood at one end of the living-room, his mother at
the other, and the horse with himself on it was being pushed rapidly
back and forth between them.

He could even hear his own joyous shouts as his father sent the horse
careering across the floor by an extra strong push. The general
impression left behind by the whole scene was one of happiness so acute
that nothing else in his life compared with it.

Was it a real memory? If so, when did it happen? And what had become of
the horse?

Finally the pressure from within became too strong and he blurted out
the whole story to his mother in order to make sure of what it meant.

"You never had a horse large enough to sit on," she declared
emphatically.

"You have been dreaming, child," Granny put in.

"What would the neighbours below have said," his mother continued. "And
the rag carpets on the floor would have caught the wheels, anyhow."

Removing the rag carpets except for purposes of cleaning was one of the
unforgivable sins, by the bye.

"And it isn't like your father either," Granny added after a while, not
without a suggestion of bitterness in her voice.

"Carl is always tired when he comes home," Keith's mother rejoined in a
tone that put an end to further discussion.

Granny's point made an impression on Keith's mind nevertheless. As far
as he could actually remember, his father had on no occasion showed such
a jolly spirit or done anything that could be used as basis for a belief
in that one questionable recollection.

At all times of the day Keith was enjoined to keep quiet--because his
mother was not well, or because of the neighbours, or just because "nice
children should not make a noise"--but it was only after his father's
return home that these injunctions must be taken quite seriously. The
father's appearance brought an instantaneous change in the atmosphere of
the place, the boy strove instinctly to be as little noticeable as
possible. If his mercurial temperament lured him into temporary
forgetfulness, a single stern word from the father sent him back into
silence and the refuge of his own corner--or into bed.

But the more he considered and conceded the unlikeliness of the scene
projected by some part of his mind with such persistency, the more
passionately he craved it to be a real memory of something that had
really happened to himself.

Perhaps it was merely a dream, as Granny had suggested. Perhaps it was
something he had wished....

Anyhow, he did wish that his father would let him come a little closer
to himself at times--not in the same way his mother did, but as he did
in the dream--or whatever it was....

Once more he fell into a deep study of when he had begun to remember so
hard that he could still remember it. Out of this he was awakened by his
mother's voice:

"What _is_ the matter, Keith?"

"I don't know what to play," he replied out of policy, as it might bring
him something either in the way of a diversion or a treat. There were
still some of mother's delectable ginger snaps left over from the
Christmas baking.

"Your soldiers are right in front of you," his mother said in a voice
holding out no hope.

So Keith returned to the tin soldiers that were his most cherished
toys--perhaps because they drew fewer protests from above than anything
else, as being least conductive to outbursts of youthful vivacity.
Judging by the earnest attention with which he manoeuvred them on his
own little table or, in moments of special dispensation, on the
collapsible dining table placed against the wall between the two
windows in the living-room, he ought to have ended as a general.



III

All through his life Keith retained a queer inclination to arrange
furniture very precisely at right angles to the wall as close to it as
possible. It was a direct outcome of his first and most deeply rooted
impressions, received in that parental living-room, where every inch of
space had been carefully calculated, and where the smallest nook was
filled by a chair, or a footstool, or some other minor object. In later
years he often wondered how a single room of modest proportions could
hold so much of furniture and of life.

It was bedroom and study, dining-room and nursery, workroom and parlour.
There the morning toilet was made, and there his first lessons were
learned. There the father did his reading, of which he was very fond,
and there the mother sewed, darned, embroidered, wrote letters, gave
household orders, told fairy tales, and received visitors. There the
simple daily meals were served for all but Granny, who clung obstinately
to the kitchen, and there friends were feasted and cards played at
nameday and birthday parties. And there three people slept every night.

Of course, excursions could be made, particularly to the kitchen where
Granny was always restlessly waiting for "one more kiss," and once in a
great while to the "best room" which mostly was occupied by some
stranger whose small weekly rent paid the servant's wages. But to the
living-room one always returned in the end, and during his first years
this narrow confinement did not strike Keith as a hardship.

The room seemed quite large to him at that time, with distances and
vistas and diversions sufficient for his childish fancy. It was a
pleasant room, with brightly striped rag carpets on the floor and two
pretty large windows framed by snow-white lace curtains. Crammed as it
was with objects needed for its many different uses, it was always kept
in a state of the most scrupulous order and instant disaster followed
any attempt as a disarrangement.

It was a whole world by itself, full of interesting things for a small
boy to puzzle over. It was also a world in evolution. Every so often a
piece of furniture would disappear and a better one take its place, to
be studied and admired and tried out again and again. Back of every
improvement lay a unifying ambition. Its key-word was mahogany. The
superior social respectability of this wood could not be disputed, and
it had a sort of natural dignity that harmonized with the father's solid
taste--though the mother might have preferred something lighter and
brighter. And a microcosm of mahogany might, after all, be worth living
for when loftier illusions had gone on the scrap heap.

Practically everything in the room had a history as well as a special
place. There was the main chest of drawers, for instance, known as
"mamma's bureau" and placed near one of the windows, where a good light
fell on the swinging mirror forming a separate piece on top of it. A
journeyman carpenter had made that chest to prove himself a master of
his trade under the old gild rules. Then he put it up at lottery to
raise money with which to open a shop of his own. Keith's father bought
a lot while still engaged, and won the prize which became the chief
wedding present of his bride--to be cherished above all other objects to
her dying day.

It was really a fine piece of work, of mahogany, with daintily carved
and twisted columns along the front corners, and so highly polished that
Keith could see his own face in the rich brown glimmer of its surfaces.
It had four drawers. The three lower ones were divided between the
parents and held all sorts of things, from shirts and socks to mother's
mahogany yard stick, which had a turned handle and a tapering blade that
made it pass excellent muster as a sword. The top drawer could only be
pulled out halfway, but then the front of it came down and it changed
into a writing desk, with an intriguing array of small drawers and
pigeonholes at the back of it, and a suspicion of alluring and
unattainable treasures in every separate receptacle. To ransack all of
these was Keith's most audacious dream, but when the dream came true at
last, it was fraught with no ecstasy of realization, for he was a
middle-aged man, and in the room behind him his mother lay dead....

The mirror was flanked by two small square mahogany boxes, one holding
medicines and the other tobacco. Little mats, some crocheted and some
wonderfully composed of differently coloured glass beads, were used to
protect the boxes as well as the top of the bureau from being
scratched, and on them stood several small groups and figures of
porcelain. One of these was Keith's special favourite and his first
introduction to that world where beauty takes precedence of goodness and
truth. It showed a lady and a gentleman in dresses of a colour and cut
wholly unlike anything seen by Keith on the real persons coming within
his ken. They were seated on a richly ornamented sofa before a tea
table, and there was something about the manner in which they looked at
each other that spoke more loudly than their bright costumes of things
lying beyond ordinary existence.

There was also a nice little girl with a doll viewing herself
complacently in a real mirror, and a lady in bloomers, apparently of
Oriental pattern, who rowed a boat hardly larger than herself, that was
raised almost on end by terrific waves. All three groups had this in
common, that when you removed the ornamental upper part, a previously
unsuspected inkstand was revealed. There was a period when Keith
seriously believed that all specimens of the keramic art were inkstands
in disguise.

Art not represented on the bureau alone, however. The walls contained a
number of steel engravings in gilt frames, quaint old coloured prints,
family photographs, and pink-coloured reliefs of various Swedish kings
made out of wax and mounted under convex glass panes on highly polished
black boards. But all of those objects were flat and distant and
colourless in comparison with the things on the bureau that could be
touched as well as seen. As for the group with the lady and the
gentlemen, it had only one rival in the boy's mind, and that was the
big clock in a wooden case that hung on the wall between the windows
over the dining table. The hide-and-seek of the restless pendulum with
its shining brass disc was a constant source of fascination in itself,
and so were the strange operations performed by the father in front of
the clock every Sunday morning, when diversions were particularly
welcome on account of the extra restrictions on play. But its main charm
rested in the strangely pleasing sounds it produced every so often,
preceded by a funny rattle that warned small folk and big of what was
going to happen. It was Keith's first acquaintance with music.

The parents' bed occupied the centre of the right-hand wall, between
mamma's bureau and another chest of drawers known as "Granny's bureau."
It was all wood and made in two parts that slid into each other,
reducing the daytime width of the bed by one-half. It stood parallel to
the wall, instead of at right angles, and the extension took place
sideways. At night it looked like an ordinary double bed. In the day it
almost disappeared beneath a rectangular pile of bed-clothing, covered
by a snow-white spread that was pulled and smoothed and tucked until it
hung straight as a wall.

Granny's bureau, old-fashioned and clumsy, but made of some native wood
that glimmered like gold, was largely devoted to linen ware for bed and
table. At the top it had two small drawers instead of a long, and one of
these constituted the first storage place set aside for Keith's special
use. His impression was that it had always been his, and once he asked
his mother if it really had been his before he was born.

"Of course it was," she said with a sly smile, "but we took the liberty
to use it for other purposes until you arrived"

At first glance this seemed quite reasonable to Keith, though nothing to
smile at so far as he could see. Later he became conscious of a vague
sense of annoyance. It would have been more pleasant if no one else had
ever used that drawer.

Across the room from Granny's bureau, in the corner just inside the door
to the kitchen, towered the characteristic Swedish oven--a round column
of white glazed bricks, with highly polished brass shutters in front of
the small cubical fire-place, where nothing but birchwood was burned. In
the narrow crack between the oven and the wall rested always a birch
rod, which was often referred to at critical moments. A new rod, with
brightly coloured feathers attached to the tip of every twig, appeared
regularly on Shrove Tuesday and tended slightly to spoil that otherwise
glorious day, when large cross buns stuffed with a mixture of crushed
almond and sugar were served in hot milk for dinner. Though the rod was
little more than a symbol of family discipline, Keith always disliked
its presence as a threat to his dignity if not to his hide.

A double washstand, looking like a document chest in the daytime, the
chaiselongue on which Keith slept at night, and the door to the best
room occupied all the rest of that wall except a corner by the window,
where stood his mother's high-backed easy chair, with the little
work-table beside it and a hassock in front of it. To that chair she
would retire whenever her household duties permitted, and thither Keith
would be drawn even more powerfully than to his own "play-room" at the
opposite corner--especially when his mother seemed in a happy mood.
There he would kneel on the hassock, with his head in her lap, and if he
could think of nothing else, he would say:

"Tell me about the time you were in London."



IV

While still in her early twenties, Keith's mother had spent two years
with an English family living in Sweden. She always described her
position as that of "lady companion" to the mistress of the house. As a
little boy, Keith did not know enough to ask any embarrassing questions.
Having learned more of life, he began to suspect that his mother's place
might have been little better than that of a servant, and the thought of
it made his soul shrink and wither.

When the family moved back to England, Keith's mother went along and
spent a whole year in London. It was her great adventure, the phase of
her past of which she spoke most eagerly and lovingly. She had formed a
passionate liking for the English language, of which she had picked up a
good deal, as well as for English character and English manners. She
never tired of telling about the great city of London, and Keith never
tired of listening.

"I was so homesick when I first got there," she would say, "that I cried
day and night. Then, one night, I heard a cat mewing on the roof outside
my window. It was the first Swedish sound I had heard since I came to
England, and after that I felt much better."

"Why didn't you stay," asked Keith.

"Because then there would have been no little Keith," she explained, her
face lighting up with the kind of grown-up smile that always provoked
and perplexed the boy.

"Are there no boys in England," he persisted.

"Yes, plenty of them, and fine ones at that. But I wanted no one but
you, and you were here, and so I had to come back to get you."

"Here," he repeated. "Where here?"

"In Sweden, of course," his mother rejoined, and then she started
hurriedly to describe the wonders of London shopping.

"But why did you go at all," he interrupted after listening a while to
what seemed less interesting to him than certain other points. "I might
have been lost while you were away."

"You might," she assented, "but I had to take the risk because I had to
get a name for you and I could never have found the one you have
in Sweden."

"Why not?"

"Because it is English. And it should be pronounced _Keeth_ instead of
_Kite_ as they say here. I found it in a book over there, and I fell in
love with it the moment I saw it, and I made up my mind that if I ever
had a boy, that would be his name."

"_If_ you had a boy," Keith took her up. "But you knew I was here?"

"Of course, I knew," said his mother in the tone that always warned him
that a change of occupation would be in order. "Run along and play in
your own corner now. I must get some work done."

At other times, when the talk didn't drift off into dangerous by-paths,
his mother would tell little anecdotes in English learned from her
former mistress, and generally end up by singing a little song about a
ball--probably one that had something to do with cricket. And Keith
would exultantly repeat the last line, which was the only one he
could remember:

"And then she _popped_, and then she died."

It was the word _popped_ that caught his fancy, partly because it was so
funny in itself, and partly because it had to be uttered with a sort of
explosion on a very high note. As far as his rendering of the rest was
concerned--well, it was early discovered and reluctantly admitted that,
like his father, he could not even sing "Old Man Noah," which is the
simplest melody imaginable to a musical mind in Sweden.

His failure in this respect gave his mother a slight pang every time it
was brought home to her, although she made fun of it and pretended she
didn't care. Music had been her young heart's dream. It was the only art
for which she showed a genuine regard. And two of her pet grievances
were that she didn't have a piano, and that, if she had one, she could
not play on it.

But his father used to say that the only instrument he cared to hear was
a drum.



V

His mother's chief grievance was her health. She was rarely quite well,
and they had a family physician who would appear from time to time
without being sent for. Yet her illness seemed, as a rule, not to
prevent her from being about and attending to her household duties.

Once, however, while Keith was still too small to receive clear
impressions, she had to keep in bed for a long time and during much of
that time she seemed to have forgotten him entirely. The father was more
taciturn and reserved than usual, and even the boy could see that he was
worried. Friends and relatives came and went with a quite uncommon
frequency, and all of them spoke to Keith in a strange manner that,
although not unpleasant, had a tendency to make him choke. A hundred
times a day he was told that he must keep quiet for his mother's sake,
and that it was no time for boisterous playing--if he really must play
at all. Most of the time he was in the kitchen, and on a few occasions
he was even permitted to stay all by himself in the parlour, where there
were all sorts of big books with any number of pictures on the fine oval
table standing in front of an old sofa so huge that to crawl up on its
seat was almost like going off into another room.

Finally he was taken to the home of Aunt Brita, his father's married
sister, in another part of the town and kept there, a bewildered
prisoner in a strange land, until one day his aunt told him that his
mother was well and wanted him to come home, but that he would have to
be a more than usually good boy for a long time yet, unless he wanted to
lose his mother forever.

When, at last, he was home again, his mother pulled him up to herself in
the bed, embraced him passionately and sobbed as if it had been a
farewell instead of a greeting. He wept, too, and clung to his mother as
if in fright, while she told him that he must always do just what she
told him and, above all, not scare her by going off so that she did not
know where he was.

The father stood beside the bed watching them. And as Keith happened to
look up once, he saw that his father's eyes were moist with tears. The
boy could hardly believe it, and a little later he wondered whether he
had been mistaken, for his father spoke just then in his sternest tone,
and all he said was:

"Yes, I hope you will behave a little better after this than you have
done before."

Many more weeks went before his mother was herself again. Even then a
difference remained. She was more given to worry than before and clung
to husband and child with a concern that frequently became oppressive.

Then, one fine day, she was all gay and smiling again, and bustled about
the home with new eagerness, and told Keith a lot of things about
England, and once actually danced across the floor while he was vainly
trying to keep step with her. And the father tried hard to look his
grouchiest when he returned home that night, but failed. And Keith was
allowed to stay up quite late, and when he was in bed at last, and
almost asleep, he thought he saw his father in the big easy chair by the
window, with the mother seated on his lap kissing him. And just as he
was dropping off, he heard, as if in a dream, his father's voice saying:

"Look out! I think the Crown Prince is still awake!"



VI

Some persons said that Keith looked like his father, others that he was
the very image of his mother.

"He has my light hair and Carl's brown eyes," said his mother often when
that topic was under discussion, and saying it seemed to make her happy.

"As a baby he was so pretty that people would stop us on the street to
ask whose child he was," Granny might put in, if she happened to be
within hearing. Then she would add with a glance at Keith: "But that is
all gone now."

Keith himself never gave much thought to his looks, but any comparison
with his mother struck him as quite foolish.

He liked to look at her, especially at her hair, which was very
plentiful and in colour like beaten copper with glints of gold in it.
Her skin was very fair and soft as the softest velvet. Her eyes were
blue, and in bright moments they had the softness of the sky of a
Swedish summer night. But when the clouds of depression closed in upon
her, they grew pale and light less and disturbingly furtive, so that
Keith's glance found it hard to meet them.

Her gaiety sparkled when she was herself, and she had a passionate love
of everything that was bright and pleasant. Once she had always been
that way and at times she would tell Keith what a wonderful time she had
as a girl, and how she used to be the centre and inspiration of every
social gathering in which she took part. She had a quick mind, too, and
a heart full of impulsive generosity. But from one extreme she would go
to another, so that, when the dark moments came, she would even regret
kindnesses conferred while the sun was still shining. In such moments
she would sometimes speak to the boy of her ailment as if he were in
some mysterious way responsible for it.

Yet she loved the boy to distraction and became filled with unreasoning
anxiety the moment he was out of sight. Her attitude toward her husband
was the same. He could never leave the home or return to it without
being kissed. The moment he was outside the kitchen door, she hastened
to the window and leaned out of it so that she might watch him until he
vanished about the corner at the head of the lane. And there she
generally lay waiting for him when he came home. If he was late, which
happened almost every day, she would be the victim of a thousand fears
as she made more and more frequent trips between the kitchen and the
living-room window. When he finally came, she acted as if she had not
seen him for months while he pretended to be more or less bored by her
attentions.

But there were moments, too, when her tenderness flared into startling
outbursts of bleak, cutting anger, giving way in the end to floods of
hysterical tears. A couple of such tempests formed part of Keith's
earliest reliable memories.



VII

As a rule Keith slept far too soundly to be aroused by anything. One
night, however, there was so much loud talking in the room that he woke
up completely. For a while he lay quite still, but with wide-open
eyes and ears.

The big lamp had been placed on the washstand back of the chaiselongue
on which he was lying, evidently in order to prevent its light from
falling on his face.

His mother was seated, fully dressed, on the edge of the bed across the
room. Her face was white as snow. Her eyes blazed with a sort of cold
fire. Her whole body seemed to tremble with a feeling so tense that he
could not find words for it.

The father was leaning far backwards on an ordinary chair, with his
outstretched right arm resting on the dining table. His face was flushed
and the thick fringe of black hair about the bald top of his head was
slightly disordered. He tried to smile, but the smile turned into a
grin. When he spoke, his voice was a little thick.

"I can't keep entirely away from my comrades." he said. "They think
already that I am too stuck up to associate with them. I haven't been
out for two weeks. I haven't had a drop more tonight than I can stand.
And it isn't twelve o'clock yet."

All of a sudden Keith saw the cold, angry light go out of his mother's
eyes. Her face twisted convulsively. She sank into a heap on the bed,
sobbing as if her heart would break then and there.

"Carl," she screamed between two sobs. "You'll kill me if you talk like
that to me!"

"Like that," he repeated in a stunned toneless voice. Then his face
flushed almost purple. A hard look came into his eyes, and he rose so
abruptly that the chair upset behind him. At the same time he brought
down his fist with such violence that the table nearly toppled over.

"I'll be damned if I stand this kind of thing one moment longer," he
shouted hoarsely.

But even as he spoke, his eyes fell on the boy. As if by magic, his
self-control returned.

"The boy is awake," he said in his usual tone of stern reserve.

There was a moment's silence. A few more sobs came from the mother. Then
she sat up, wiped her eyes, and spoke in a tone that was almost calm:

"Go to sleep again, Keith. Your father and I were merely talking about
some things that you don't understand yet."

When she saw that the boy was crying, she came over to him, kneeled down
beside him and put her arms about him. Soon her kisses and her soothing
words had their wonted effect, and he dropped off once more into the
deep, deathlike slumber of childhood.

The air remained tense in the household for several days, but nothing
further happened until one night when the father arrived a little later
than usual from his work, looking just as he did the night of the
quarrel. Again his speech was a little thick, and the mother's face
assumed an ominous look. She said nothing about what was nearest her
heart, however, she started instead to complain of some petty
disobedience on the part of Keith.

"If you spanked him a little more and humoured him la little less, he
would obey more readily," said the father.

His words carried no particular menace, and there seemed no reason why
the boy should be scared. But perhaps there was something else in the
atmosphere that affected his sensitive nerves and sent him unexpectedly
into a paroxysm of weeping.

"Stop it," cried his father dark with sudden anger. "Stop it, I tell
you."

"You leave the boy alone," cried the mother, her face as white as the
father's was red.

"We'll see whether he'll obey or not!"

As he spoke, the father sat down on the nearest chair, picked up the boy
and put him face down across his knees.

Keith's heart seemed to stop. He even ceased weeping. Then he heard his
mother cry out:

"If you touch the boy, I'll throw myself out of the window!"

"Oh, hell!" came back from the father. With that he half dropped and
half flung the boy to the floor, so that the latter rolled across the
room and landed under the chaiselongue.

There Keith lay, still as a mouse, until he was pulled out by his
mother. He didn't begin to cry again, and he was no longer scared or
upset. A few moments later he was undressing and going to bed as if
nothing had happened.

Another week had hardly passed, when Keith was waked up again at night,
but this time by a noise as if the house was falling. As he sat up in
bed, staring wildly about him, his nostrils became filled with a smell
that was quite new to him. It was like smoke, but more pungent.

The living-room was dark, but the door to the parlour stood open, and
light came through it. Not a sound could be heard for a few moments.

Then his mother came running into the room and flung herself on her
knees beside the chaiselongue.

"Oh, my boy, my boy, my boy!" she cried over and over again as she
pressed Keith to her breast, rocking him back and forth.

A few seconds later the father also came in carrying the lamp in one
hand. Having put it on the dining table, he dropped down on a chair as
if too exhausted to stand up.

His face showed a pallor quite strange to it and for the first and only
time in his life Keith thought that his father looked scared.

"Don't, Anna," the father said after a while, sitting up straight on the
chair. "It's all right now--"

Then a thought or a memory seemed to recur to him, and he said in a
voice that nearly broke:

"God, but it was a close call for both of us! And if it had happened to
you, I would have followed you on the spot!"

"Carl, Carl!" cried the mother, letting Keith go and throwing her arms
about her husband instead. "What would have become of Keith?"

It was the first time the boy was taken into his parents' confidence to
some extent. He was still too young to grasp all the implications, but
the main facts were plain enough even to him.

The parlour was rented as usual, but the man occupying it was not at
home. The parents had gone in there together on some errand. Seeing a
small pistol hanging on the wall above the big sofa, the father took it
down and began to play with it, never for a moment suspecting it of
being loaded.

First he pointed it at himself, then at Keith's mother. Each time he was
about to pull the trigger, and each time something seemed to hold him
back. Finally he turned the weapon toward the wall and pressed down with
his finger. As he did so, the shot rang out that waked the boy.

The next day Keith was permitted to examine the mark made by the bullet
in the wall. It was all very exciting. But the final result of that
incident was as unforeseen as the shot itself.

The whole affair evidently made a deep impression on Keith's father. He
ceased almost completely to go out by himself at night. In fact he
became so averse to leaving his home that it was hard to get him out
when the mother wanted him to go. And never again did Keith hear his
parents quarrel openly.

But now and then when his father came home from work, Keith would
notice that same slight thickness of speech which had forced itself on
his attention on two extraordinary occasions.

He was a man himself before he realized what that thickness signified in
his father's life.



VIII

"Oh, mamma, you mustn't!" cried Keith's mother one day when she came out
into the kitchen and found the boy munching a slice of white bread with
butter on it.

"He likes it so much," replied Granny easily.

"But you know what Carl has said," the mother rejoined rather
impatiently. "He'll find out sooner or later if you disregard it, and
then he'll be furious."

"So he will anyhow," muttered Granny.

"Mamma!" protested the mother. "It's for the boy's own good. He should
only eat hard bread except on Sundays and when we have company. It is
much better for his teeth. And it makes him stronger too. You want to be
big and strong, don't you Keith?"

"It's a wonder his father lets him have anything at all to eat," Granny
put in before Keith had a chance to answer.

"You must not talk like that, mamma," said the mother sharply. "Least of
all when the boy hears it." Then she turned to Keith again: "Don't you
believe what Granny says. Your father is merely thinking of what is
good for you. He loves you just as much as I do--or your grandmother.
But he thinks we are spoiling you. And he wants you to grow up and be a
real man. That's why he hates to see you cry."

There was a pause while Keith pondered the matter--not seriously
concerned on the whole, as long as the tidbit was not taken away
from him.

"Don't you love your father," his mother asked suddenly.

"Ye-es," Keith answered mechanically.

Then he began to ponder again. His feelings toward his father were far
too complicated for utterance. They seemed to have nothing whatsoever to
do with love, if that was what he felt for his mother. There was
undoubtedly a great deal of fear in his attitude toward the father, and
also resentment that at times would flare into something bordering on
hatred. But this attitude was combined with a lot of respect, not to say
admiration. At times it would also be tinged with a longing that he
could not explain or express. And if ever the father gave him the
slightest evidence of friendliness, he would be thrown into a rapture of
happiness that nothing done by his mother could equal.

He adored his mother, and clung to her, and relied on her and wheedled
her, but it was an open question whether, at heart, he felt any
particular respect for her--although he was quite proud of certain
things about her. And as for Granny, whom, in a way, he loved more than
anybody else, because she petted him and indulged his slightest whims,
there could simply be no talk about respecting her. Even Keith realized
that she was not in the respected class.

His father was, on the other hand. There could be no doubt about that.
If he had only been willing to unbend a little now and then....



IX

The kitchen had other attractions than Granny, though she ranked
foremost.

As Keith came out from the living-room, he had on his right the huge,
old-fashioned fire-place--a regular fortress of brick, with a modern
cook stove of iron set into one corner of it. It was entirely covered by
a smoke-hood of painted metal sheeting, with a flange on its outside
edge along which were placed a number of lids.

On his left was a set of shelves filled from top to bottom with pots and
pans and kettles of every possible size and shape, including a cauldron
so huge and heavy that it took two people to get it out with ease from
its place on the bottom shelf. An overwhelming majority of these
utensils were of copper and so highly polished that they shone like suns
setting through a fog bank. Some of them made good toys, but "things for
use and not for play" was an old maxim often quoted by both parents and
grudgingly repeated by Granny herself.

A big sofa, in which the grandmother slept at night stood along the
centre of the wall on the left. The corner beyond held a wall-fast
cupboard so large that it looked like a closet built into the room. It
serves both as pantry and buffet, and was full of things tempting to a
young palate.

In the opposite corner, beyond the window and right by the outside door,
stood an open water barrel holding about twenty gallons. There was no
running water above the ground floor. Every drop had to be carried three
flights of stairs from the courtyard. What was needed for drinking and
cooking was kept in a copper can, two feet high, with a lid on top and a
spout in front that made it look like a badly overgrown tea kettle.
Water for all other uses had to come out of the barrel. To keep both
vessels filled was a heavy task, and waste of water was regarded as
little short of a crime. The sacredness of the barrel and its contents
was a mystery to Keith until he grew old enough to do some of the
carrying. Then he began to understand.

Most of the water went to the stove, where operations of one kind or
another were carried on from morning till night, tempting the boy with
their mysteries or their promises. In the uppermost corner of the hood
was a square opening covered by an iron lid. When the lid was down and
you crawled right up into the fire-place, you could see the sky through
the chimney.

One day, when Keith had sneaked into the kitchen uninvited, he noticed
something unusual going on in the fire-place. All the paraphernalia had
been cleared away. The lid was open, and from the chimney issued strange
noises. Then soot began to fall in masses, and finally appeared a pair
of human feet, quite bare and all black.

It was very funny and very disconcerting. Keith watched with bulging
eyes and trembling heart, until at last a whole big man came out of the
chimney. As he crouched for a moment on the fire-place before getting
down on the floor, he turned on Keith a pair of eyes that seemed to be
all white and big as moons.

At that moment fear got the better of curiosity, and Keith made haste to
bury his face in Granny's lap.

"Yes, Keith had better look out," grinned the servant girl, "for the
chimney sweep takes all bad little boys."

"I'll take you, if you talk like that," the black figure in the
fire-place shot back at her.

The tone of his voice made Keith steal another glance at him. The white
eyes shone right at him in a rather friendly fashion, and further down a
huge red slit in the black face framed two rows of teeth no less white
than the eyes. Keith guessed that the dark visitor from the chimney was
smiling at him in a fashion that seemed to bode no harm.

In another minute the man was gone, and Keith hurried back to the
living-room to ask a question of his mother:

"Could he really take me?"

"Not unless we gave him leave," she replied. "But sometimes, when little
boys are very, _very_ bad, their parents turn them over to the sweep as
apprentices, because they are not good for anything else."

Keith thought long and hard.

"I ain't bad," he declared at last.

"Not exactly," his mother remarked diplomatically "But you could be a
great deal better. What were you doing in the kitchen just now? I have
told you not to run out there all the time. Lena does not like you to
get in her way, you know."

"But Granny is there," Keith protested.

"Yes, of course, and you must be nice to her, but...."

As his mother did not go on, Keith asked: "Why does Granny always stay
in the kitchen?"

"Because she wants to," his mother answered.

"But why does she want to?"

"It is her way--a sort of pride she has. And I have long ago given up
trying to persuade her."

Her tone indicated clearly that further discussion of the subject was
not desirable.



X

Keith was playing in his own corner that very evening, trying to keep as
quiet as possible while his father had an unusually late dinner. His
mother had gone out into the kitchen a few moments earlier. Thence she
returned suddenly with a half empty bottle in her hand and a look of
extreme annoyance on her face.

"Carl," she said, "look what I just found in a corner of the cupboard."

"Humph," the father grunted with a sideglance at the bottle. "Ours is
locked up, is it not?"

"Yes, but that is neither here nor there. She would rather die, she
says, than touch a drop of ours."

"Where does she get it?"

"I can't make it out. Somebody must bring it in, of course. I fear it
is Mrs. Karlgren, and I am simply going to tell her to keep away
hereafter. The idea of her coming here practically begging, and then
doing such a thing, after all I have done for her!"

"But you are not sure," the father objected earnestly, and Keith paid
special notice to his objection because he had already learned, or
divined, that his father could not bear the sight of the poor woman
in question.

"No, it is impossible to be sure," the mother admitted. Then she added
after a pause: "What puzzles me more than anything else is where she
gets the money."

Though no name was mentioned, Keith knew perfectly well that they were
speaking of Granny. And he recalled having laughed at her in the kitchen
earlier in the evening before the father came home. Her eyes had a funny
look and seemed a little inflamed. Her still thick braids were loosened
and about to come entirely undone. She was talking more than usual and
in a tone that suggested defiance.

As he recalled all this, Keith forgot to listen to his parents, who went
on discussing so intently that he was able to leave his corner and reach
the door to the kitchen unnoticed. An irresistible desire to see Granny
at once had seized him. Back of it lay a vaguely sensed mixture of
curiosity and sympathy.

Granny was in her favourite place beside the kitchen sofa, seated on a
footstool almost as large as an ordinary chair, but somewhat lower. That
stool was the one bone of contention between her and Keith, because he
was carrying it off as often as he could get at it. Turned upside down,
with Keith seated snugly between its four legs, it became a sleigh
drawn across icy plains by a team of swift reindeer, or a ship rocking
mightily on the high seas.

The kitchen was full of a peculiar sweetish smell, by which Keith knew
without looking that Granny was dressing the old wound on her left leg
that had developed "the rose" and would not heal. She was leaning far
over, busy with a bandage which she wound tightly about her leg, from
the ankle to the knee. The boy sniffed the familiar smell with a vague
sense of discomfort, which, however, did not prevent him from going up
to the grandmother and putting one arm about her neck.

"Old hurt is hard to mend," she muttered quoting one of the old saws
always on her lips. Then without raising her head, she added in the
peevish, truculent tone of a thwarted child: "You had better go back in
there before they come and get you. I am nothing but a servant, and as
such I know my place and keep it. I am less than a servant, for they
wouldn't dare do to Lena what they do to me."

"Oh, yes, they would," Lena put in from across the room. "And they would
have a right, too."

As if she had not heard at all, Granny sat up straight and looked hard
at the boy.

"Whatever you do, Keith," she said, and he noticed that her voice
sounded a little strange, "see that you make a lot of money when you
grow up. To be poor is to have no rights, and the worst thing of all is
to be dependent on others, no matter how near they are to you."

"I think Mrs. Carlsson is very ungrateful," said Lena. "There are
thousands of old people who would give anything to have a nice home and
nothing to worry over."

"Anybody can talk, but it takes a head to keep silent," said Granny
impersonally, quoting another old saw. Then her manner changed abruptly
and she turned to Keith effusively.

"Give me a kiss! You love your old Granny, don't you? You don't despise
her, do you, because she has nothing and is nothing? And can be sure she
loves you more than anybody else."

The boy's feelings were so mixed that he really could not feel anything
at all. His arm was still about the grandmother's neck, mechanically he
gave her the kiss she asked for, but it was with real relief he saw his
mother open the door to the living-room and responded to her demand that
he go to bed at once.



XI

Hardly any memory left behind by Keith's childhood was more acute than
the image of Granny seated in the centre of the kitchen, her stolid, yet
pleasant old face bent over some household task, and her whole figure
instinct with a passive protest against her enforced dependency or,
maybe against life's arbitrariness in general. One moment she seemed to
be brooding deeply, and the next she looked as if there was not a
thought in her head. For one reason or another, her anomalous position
and peculiar attitude occupied Keith's mind a great deal, and many of
the questions with which he plied his mother were concerned with Granny.
They were fairly discreet as a rule, but on the morning after the scene
just described, some impulse of which he had no clear understanding made
him perplex his mother with the abrupt question:

"Why does Granny drink?"

They were alone in the living-room at the time, she seated in her big
easy chair by the window and he, as usual, kneeling on the hassock
at her feet.

She looked up at him with as much surprise as if he had hit her
viciously. A deeper red flowed into her cheeks that kept their soft
pinkness even when she was thought at death's door and lost it only
under the pressure of extreme anger.

At the same time a look came into her eyes that gave Keith a momentary
scare. It was only a flash, however, and changed quickly into something
like the helplessness that used to characterize her glance in moments of
heavy depression. Her voice trembled a little as she spoke:

"Because Granny's life has been very hard, and not very happy."

"Tell me about it," urged the boy.

There was a long pause during which he watched his mother's face
closely. Gradually its expression changed into one of resignation, and
then into determination, as if she had made up her mind to be done once
for all with a task that could not be avoided indefinitely. It was a
long story she told, at first hesitatingly, then with an eagerness that
betrayed an awakening purpose. Everything she said stuck deeply in the
boy's mind, and whenever he thought of Granny's life afterwards, he had
the impression of having learned all about it at that one time, although
the likelihood is that many details were picked up by degrees and
dovetailed into the memory of that first narrative as integral parts
of it.

"Your grandmother was not born to be a servant," his mother began. "She
was a rich man's daughter, and there was not a thing her father didn't
want to do for her. Yet he left her in the hands of strangers who
cheated her of her rights and treated her as if she had been a
beggar...."

"Why did they do it," the boy asked, quite unable to grasp the idea of
such a thing.

"Because they could make a little more money that way, and because they
cared for nothing but money. Promise me, Keith, that whatever happens to
you, and whatever the temptation be, you will never put money above
everything else."

Keith shook his head earnestly, meaning it to be sign of assent. He was
a highly impressible child, and when his mother spoke to him like that,
he used literally to choke with a feeling that he could never, never do
anything but what she asked, but when another rush of feeling swept over
him, the old promises were also likely to be swept out of his mind.

"Those people did the worst thing any one can do to anybody else. They
twisted Granny's life so that it could never be set right again. And so
she became what you see her now...."

"You mean she just couldn't help herself," Keith put in.

"Yes, that's what I mean," she agreed. Then she stopped as if struck by
another thought, and said very slowly:

"Although, if she had been really strong...."

Once more she stopped and returned abruptly to her story:

"Your great-grandfather made and sold hats, and he earned a lot of
money, and they made him a City Councillor...."

"Where," Keith broke in again.

"In Skara," his mother explained, "which is a city that lies a long way
from here, and when you begin to learn geography, you will know where it
is.... Everybody liked your great-grandfather...."

"What was his name," Keith couldn't help asking.

"Lack," she said, "and now you mustn't interrupt me any more if you want
me to go on."

"Please," Keith pleaded. "I won't!"

"The reason they liked him," she resumed, "was that he was so
good-hearted that he couldn't say no to anybody or anything. He didn't
seem to care for money at all, and he used to say: 'What's money between
friends?' Everybody wanted to be friends with him in those days, and
everybody borrowed from him, until he didn't have enough left for his
business, and then they laughed at him. He tried in his turn to borrow,
but no one could spare a penny, and when things went entirely wrong with
him, one of those who had got most from him made a funny saying about
him: 'Now Lack lacks everything because everybody has what Lack lacks.'
So, you see, you mustn't think too little of money either, but learn to
be careful and keep what you have."

Keith nodded dutifully, but where the right road lay, he could not see.

"The worst thing was," the mother went on, "that your great-grandmother
died when Granny was only nine. There were brothers and sisters, too,
and she was the youngest. And it was then that her father got the idea
to send her to some farmer people he knew, quite some distance from
where he lived. He did it partly for the sake of Granny's health, and
partly because he was too worried about other things to look after her
properly himself. And he paid a lot of money for her board, and sent her
fine clothes, and arranged that she was to be taught by the pastor of
the parish, and he sent friends to ask about her, but he never came
himself. The people who were to take care of Granny kept the money and
the clothes, and put her to work as if she had been a servant, and
didn't let her get the least bit of schooling. And when her father's
friends came and asked about her, they told all sorts of tales about how
well she was doing, but she was so shy, they said, that she always ran
away when any visitor came to the place."

"Did she," asked Keith.

"Yes, she really did," the mother admitted. "She was ashamed of the way
she looked and was dressed, and yet she was quite pretty, and she had
the most wonderful hair that reached to her feet when she let it down."

"But, why didn't she tell somebody?" Keith insisted, his blood running
hot with wrath at the injustice to which Granny had been submitted.

"Oh, because ..." said his mother wearily, "because your grandmother
has always been peculiar in that way when she knew she was being
wronged. 'What is the use?' she says. And then word came that her father
had gone bankrupt and had died soon after. No one seemed to pay the
least attention to her. She stayed where she was, and she couldn't work
any harder than she had done all the time. But when she was to be
confirmed, and had to go to church every week with all the other
children of her own age, she was the poorest of them all, both in fact
and in appearance, she didn't have one person in the world to whom she
could turn. She has told me that she used to lie awake nights crying and
thinking of running away, but she couldn't make up her mind to
that either."

She stopped, and Keith waited in vain for the rest of the story.

"And then," he urged.

"Oh, then she came to Stockholm and married your grandfather--my papa,
you know. And now Lena is waiting for me to tell her what we are to have
for dinner."

Keith went back to his own corner for a while. Then he made a dash for
the kitchen, where he found Granny seated in her usual place peeling
potatoes. Having placed a smaller foot-stool beside the large one in
which she was seated, he got up on it so that he could put both arms
about her neck. Pressing his own soft cheek against hers, he
asked brokenly:

"Are you very unhappy, Granny?"

"No," she answered placidly, "not when you are willing to give me a
kiss."

"All right," he said without enthusiasm as he complied with her
request. At the same time he recalled suddenly that he had not played a
single game with his tin soldiers that whole morning.



XII

The boy had a logical mind. He knew that Granny's story had not been
finished, and he wanted all of it. At the first opportune moment he
asked his mother:

"Was Granny a little girl when she came to Stockholm?"

"No," said his mother unsuspectingly, "she was already a young woman."

"What did she do before?"

"I told you," the mother replied, now on her guard.

"You told me what she did as a little girl, but not afterwards. I want
to know."

"Oh, she worked, I suppose."

There was evidently nothing more to be had in that direction.

"And what did she do in Stockholm," Keith pushed on.

"She married your grandfather, as I told you, and then I was born."

"What was he?"

The mother remained silent for a good long while, and Keith repeated his
question, not yet having learned that unanswered questions generally
are unwelcome questions.

"He was a _vaktmästare_," she said finally, and Keith knew that, for
some reason, she found the word unpleasant.

The boy reflected a while before he observed:

"That's what papa is."

"Your father's position is quite different," his mother rejoined
sharply. "It's a shame that he and his comrades in the bank have no
other title--although some of them deserve nothing better."

"What should they be called?"

"I don't know exactly--collectors, I think, because they go around and
collect the money that is due to the bank."

"And what are real _vaktmästare_ doing?"

"The real ones work in government departments--not as officials, but
just as attendants--it's something you can't understand yet."

Keith nodded. He didn't understand, but the words stuck and the
understanding came later.

"And those that are not real," he persisted.

His mother laughed and patted him on the head.

"There is a lot of them," she said. "They look after coats and hats in
theatres and restaurants, and wait at dinners, and do all sorts
of things."

"Was that what grandfather was doing?"

A queer look came into his mother's eyes and sent a glow of
self-satisfaction through his whole being. The look was familiar to him
and meant that his mother was annoyed by the question but pleased with
his cleverness in thinking of it.

"No," she answered, "not exactly...."

"What did he do," asked Keith, and as he spoke he sent a look of
anticipation toward his own corner.

"He was an attendant in the big club where all the rich business-men go
to spend their evenings, and he died when I was a little girl ... have
you nothing else to ask about?"

"What was papa's father," Keith ventured after a pause.

"He worked in the royal palace." Again the mother's tone served as a
warning, but also as a goad to the boy's curiosity.

"What did he do there," he demanded eagerly.

The lines about his mother's mouth grew tighter and harder, and she
spoke as if the words hurt her--but she did not refuse to answer, and
she did not send him away:

"He was a lackey."

From the moment he began to speak, Keith had showed an unusual sense for
the value and peculiarities of words. They interested him for their own
sake, one might say. He treasured them, and he gave more thought to them
than to people. The word lackey he had heard before, and he had formed a
distinct opinion about it as not desirable.

"Then he was a servant," he blurted out.

"In a way," his mother admitted. "And we are all servants, for that
matter. But working in the king's palace is not like--working as Lena
does here, for instance."

The last part of her remark went by unheeded by Keith. His thoughts
leapt instead to his paternal grandmother--a strict and unapproachable
little lady who visited them at rare intervals dressed in a quaint old
shawl and a lace-trimmed cap. A great wonder, not unmixed with pleasure,
rose in his mind at the thought that her husband had been a sort of
servant after all. For some reason utterly beyond him, there was solace
as well as humiliation in the consciousness of a stigma, if such it be,
that attached equally to both his grandfathers, and not only to his
mother's parent. Then a new idea prompted a new question.

"Was Granny a servant when she came to Stockholm?"

"She was obliged to take service in order to live," his mother replied
very gently. "There is nothing about that to be ashamed of.... I have
known fine ladies who started in the kitchen. But, of course, one
doesn't like to talk of it to everybody."

Keith recognized the hint in her final words, but thought it needless.
He was already on his way back to his own corner, tired for the time of
asking questions, when he suddenly turned and said:

"We are just as good as anybody else, are we not?"

It was a phrase he had overheard sometime. Now it seemed to fit the
occasion, and it sounded good to him.

"There is the royal family," his mother rejoined enigmatically. "But one
of Granny's cousins was a lieutenant-colonel in the army."

"Where is he now," Keith demanded, agog with interest.

"He is dead, and--and we have never had anything to do with his family."



XIII

The inquisitiveness of Keith with regard to his ancestors and the past
life of his parents continued for quite a while. Other family
connections seemed unreal and did not interest him. Having no sister or
brother of his own, relationships of that kind were meaningless to him.
Parents, on the other hand, constituted a tangible personal experience,
and the presence of Granny taught that this experience was common to
grown-up people as well as children.

The curiosity he evinced was queerly impersonal, however, and might well
be called intellectual. The information he received had no power over
his own life. He could have been told anything, and he would have
accepted it calmly as something not affecting himself. The only thing
that influenced him was the manner of the person answering his
questions. To that manner he was almost morbidly sensitive, and from it
he concluded whether the various details related should please or
disturb him.

Instinctively he pressed his inquiries at points eliciting marked
resistance. And it was not what he actually learned, but the evasions
encountered, that produced the sensitiveness about his own backgrounds
which later often influenced his attitude harmfully at moments when he
most needed complete self-assurance. It was the reluctance with which
certain parts of the family history were told, and the total
withholding of others, that taught him to be ashamed of things for which
he could not be held personally responsible. The effect of this lesson
on his character was the more fatal because it remained unconscious so
long. Having become doubtful as to the worth of the roots of the tree,
it was only natural that he should also feel doubts about the fruit.

Concerning the real character of his forbears he learned next to
nothing. All that he heard related to external circumstances that were,
or were not, judged respectable and presentable. One fact in particular
was subject to the most rigid exclusion from all family conversations,
and yet it leaked down to Keith at a time when he was utterly incapable
of appreciating its significance. It piqued him mightily without
disturbing him.

One day they were visited by his father's married sister, who was
lacking in sentimentality and had a disturbing way of calling a spade a
spade. The inevitable testing of the boy's cleverness by making him tell
his own name led to a discussion of family names in general, Keith's
mother expressing a great admiration for that of Wellander.

"Oh, yes, it's good enough," remarked her sister-in-law, "but it is not
the right one, you know, and the old one was much finer."

"I know," said the mother, "but I don't know what the name used to be."

"Cederskjöld, and I think it was recognized as noble. I never knew the
inside of it, but it looks peculiar. Carl's and my father and his
brother and two sisters took common action to get the family name
changed to Wellander. I am sure my grandfather must have been up to
some rather striking deviltry, and for all I know he might have
been hanged."

"Hush," cried Keith's mother with a quick glance at the boy who was
taking in everything with wide-open eyes and ears.

Keith did not wait for anything more, but sneaked off by himself to
think. The change of the name seemed nothing at the time, but the
suggestion that his great-grandfather had been hanged was startling
enough to give food for many meditations. Fortunately, or unfortunately,
his aunt's manner had been too nonchalant to give him any clues. And
from the manner of his mother he gathered merely that the asking of
questions would be useless. So it came about that Keith for the first
time in his life regretted the premature death of his paternal
grandfather, from whom, otherwise, he might have elicited some more
satisfactory information.

Both grandfathers were dead long before Keith was born. He never saw a
portrait of either of them, or had an idea of how they looked. He could
not even recall having heard their Christian names. The personality of
his paternal grandfather always remained a total blank to him. Of the
other one he knew a little more. The fashionable club where his mother's
father served was notorious for its conviviality and reckless gambling,
and the men were like the masters to some extent. This one of his
grandfathers used to love wine, women, cards and everything else that
helped to modify life's general drabness. He must have been something of
a wit, too, in his own circles, having any number of boon companions.
Keith never heard what kind of a man he was at home. He made good money
while he lived and spent it as carelessly as he earned it. At forty-two
he died, leaving a penniless widow to look after a daughter still in her
early teens. Keith's paternal grandfather died in the same way, but his
widow, who was a hard-headed little woman of old peasant stock--the best
in Sweden--did better with four children than the other grandmother
with one.

There were gaps in the stories of his mother and Granny concerning which
he never got a direct reply from them, but by degrees he picked up many
missing details from other sources. What he learned in this way
indicated merely that they had been very poor at times, and poverty had
forced them to earn a living by work that was quite honest and decent,
but not "socially respectable." At one time, before her daughter was old
enough to assume a share of the burden, Granny had actually had to fall
back on the coarsest and humblest menial work--scrubbing and washing by
the day in strange houses. Yet she and her daughter appeared throughout
that ordeal to have remained on terms of pleasant intimacy with friends
of the class to which they regarded themselves as properly belonging.

Another problem never solved for Keith was what kind of schooling his
mother had had. Her own failure to tell suggested that it must have been
of the slightest. Yet Keith never thought of her as ignorant. She had a
bright, eager mind that, when not clouded, acted as a goad on his own.
It was she who taught him to read and filled him with an awe for books
and book-learning that was, perhaps, not entirely wholesome. She herself
read eagerly, though fitfully, her interest in all such matters varying
greatly with her mood and condition. Her day-dreaming was to a large
extent directed toward matters literary and artistic. Sometimes, when
she had read some novel with a markedly sentimental appeal, she talked
vaguely of old ambitions to write, but as a rule it was her ignorance of
music that she deplored. In the meantime her lace-making and her
embroidery proved an artistic sense not wholly confined to dreams. She
was always busy with some work of that kind, but her longings went far
beyond it, and it happened more than once that she let her work drop in
her lap while she looked at Keith with an expression he could not
understand.

"If only I had had your chance in life," she exclaimed on one occasion
of that kind.

"What do you mean," asked the boy, snuggling close to her.

"I mean that you will study and be able to do things," she answered,
bending down to kiss him.

At that very moment the father entered and heard what she said.

"Nonsense," he broke in. "The boy is going to learn a trade, and I think
we'll ask Uncle Granstedt to make a carpenter of him."

To Keith it was all meaningless, and his mother said nothing at the
time, but a slight stiffening of her face warned him that his father's
remark pointed in a direction not held desirable by her. And from that
sign the boy took his cue.



XIV

The outside door stood open and no one was in the kitchen but Granny.
The temptation to explore was irresistible.

"When the cat's away, the rats dance on the tray," the old grandmother
muttered as if to herself.

"I'll just have a peep," Keith explained, turning to her for a moment.
Then he made for the open door again.

The landing with its bare stone floor was familiar to him and quite
barren of interest. What drew him magnetically was the tall archway
leading to the mysterious upper regions known as the garret, where
strange old women lived in hermit cells, and whence disturbing noises
issued day and night. Even as he looked up there, he could hear a
spookish grating that seemed to symbolize the spirit of the place. He
shuddered a little, but not unpleasantly, for he knew what caused it.

In the brick wall ending the upward vista, he could see a square open
hole with an iron shutter held open at right angles by an iron rod. As
the wind shook the shutter, the rod scraped against the socket that held
its hooked end. That was all--but on dark winter afternoons the effect
was most disturbing.

"I'm not afraid," Keith announced, sensing his own bravery rather
keenly.

"Why should you be," asked Granny.

Then he noticed the tall iron door fastened to one side of the arch in
front of it. Now it was doubled up length-wise and folded back so as to
leave the passage free.

"What's that for," he asked, pointing to the door.

"In case of fire," said Granny. "If it should begin to burn up there,
they would close that door to keep the flames from the rest of
the house."

"Would it burn much," Keith wondered.

"Your father has five cords of good birch wood stored in the top attic,
so I think the whole city would see the blaze."

"And the people up there?"

"They would have to come before we closed the doors, but God have mercy
on us if it ever gets that far. Remember, boy, there is nothing worse
than fire so you must always be careful never play with matches."

"I know," said Keith, nodding sagely.

But he really did not know what fire meant until a few nights later. The
whole family was sound asleep, Keith on the chaiselongue, his father and
mother in the big bed on the other side of the room. While still half
asleep he could hear his mother crying his father's name in a strangely
agitated voice.

Then he woke fully and looked up. Every object in the room was clearly
visible, but the light coming through the windows was not daylight. It
was reddish and glaring, and the very reflection of it within the room
filled the boy with vague uneasiness.

The father jumped out of bed and ran to the window.

"It is fire," he said. "Something terrible. My Lord, half the town must
be burning. The whole sky is a mass of flames. And it's in the direction
of the bank."

Suddenly he turned back and began to dress in wordless haste.

"Must we get out," asked the mother.

"No, it is not very close yet, but you had better get up and dress--and
get everybody dressed."

By that time he was putting on his overcoat.

"Where are you going, Carl," demanded the mother, evidently more scared
by his going out than by the fire.

"To the bank," answered the father, grimly.

"You mustn't, Carl! I won't let you go out! Think if anything should
happen to you!"

"Nonsense," he said. "I am in no danger--but I must see what's happening
to the bank, and help if things have to be taken out."

"Carl, Carl...." was all the mother could get over her lips.

"Don't worry, Ann," he pleaded, bending over her for a minute, and his
voice took on a tenderness Keith seemed never to have heard before. "I
shall be careful, but I must go. If the fire should come this way, I'll
be back in time to help you all out."

She tried to cling to him, but he freed himself with gentle firmness. In
a minute more he was gone, and in the next second Keith's mother was at
the window looking out, though she had only her night-linen on and it
was late autumn. Unobserved and unrebuked, Keith joined her, and when he
looked up at the sky, his heart almost stopped beating.

A ghastly stillness reigned outside--except when it was merely
accentuated by the occasional sound of hurried steps along the street at
the top of the lane. Finally some one was heard passing through the
lane itself.

"Please," Keith's mother cried at the top of her voice. "What is it?"

"It's the German Church," a voice responded from below. "The whole spire
is flaming like a torch."

"Are we in danger down here?"

"Hard to tell. It depends on which way the spire falls. If it falls
outward, I fear the whole city will go."

Then he walked off.

By that time the servant girl had come in weeping as if she had just
heard her death-doom announced, and from the Granny was calling to them:

"You'll freeze to death, all of you, if you don't put on some clothes."

So they dressed, though difficulty, and then there was nothing to do but
to wait. The mother was at the window all the time, every few minutes
she said to the boy:

"Oh, I hope nothing happens to your father!"

At first it scared him more than did the light. But after a while it
began to have an opposite effect. He seemed to grow stiff and hard. The
excitement of the fire was still there, but it was overlaid and almost
neutralized by a vast impatience that seemed to take possession of his
whole being. He felt that if his mother made the same remark once more,
he should yell with rage and agony, and to save himself, he joined
Granny in the kitchen, where the girl had started a fire in order to
make some coffee.

The sky in that quarter was just as bright as in front, and no light was
needed in the room.

Suddenly he heard his mother cry out:

"Oh."

At the same time the brightness seemed to increase to something more
than daylight.

A quick change took place in the boy's heart. He ran into the
living-room and put his arm about his mother who was still lying in
the window.

"Don't worry, mamma," he whispered to her. "I'll take care of you."

There was something in his voice that brought the mother to herself. She
closed the window and took him in her arms and kissed him as she had
never kissed him before, he thought.

"It was the spire that fell just now," she said, "and if there is any
danger, your father will be here in a minute."

Almost as she spoke, the glare outside began to die down, though the sky
remained red and threatening until daybreak.

Then they had coffee, Keith being allowed an extra dose in his milk. And
soon afterwards the father returned to tell the story of the fire and
inform them that all danger was over as far as they were concerned.

For days afterwards the experiences of that night occupied Keith's mind.
The joy of excitement was probably uppermost in spite of all other
considerations, Beneath it was a vivid conception of the horrors of fire
that remained a live thing in his mind until he was well on in years,
sometimes waking him out of his sleep at night and setting his heart
palpitating wildly at the mere idea of danger. Lastly, however, there
was left from that momentous night a new attitude toward the mother that
implied a direct criticism--the first one that had ever broken into
clear consciousness. It did not make him love her less, but it changed
the character of his love in some subtle way. The father, on the other
hand, had gained by that night. There was something heroic about the
quiet way in which he walked off to take care of the bank, pushing all
other considerations aside until that duty had been filled.



XV

Gradually Keith learned to know the old house from top to bottom. The
garret and the cellar remained of excitement for a long time. The rest
of it offered little to hold the attention or feed the imagination.

It covered three sides of a rectangle, with the courtyard in the centre.
The wall of the adjoining house; formed the fourth side--a sheer cliff
of plastered brick that towered two whole stories higher, its dreary
expanse unbroken by a single window. Along the foot of it ran a long low
structure with innumerable doors opening on the courtyard. Thither men,
women and children had to descend regardless of weather or hour or
season, and every visitor could be watched from the windows opening
on the yard.

The rear part of the house constituted practically a building by
itself, with a stairway of its own, and the people living there seemed
to form a world apart, with which Keith never became very well
acquainted. But on the ground-floor of that part was the laundry, used
in turn by every household in the entire house and regarded by the boy
as a far-off, adventurous place until he had been allowed to visit it a
couple of times.

The building facing the lane and that running along the courtyard had a
stairway in common at the corner where they joined. Its stairs and
landings were of stone, uncarpeted, and lighted in the day by a window
on each floor and at night by a single gas jet on each landing. At the
foot of the lowermost flight of stairs was a long and dark passage that
turned at a right angle and finally reached the lane after what seemed a
long walk. Branching to the right, at the foot of the stairs, was
another passage from which the cellar was reached after you had used all
your strength to push open a huge iron door that squeaked uncannily on
its stiff hinges.

The flats on the second and third floors ran straight through from the
lane to the rear building, but on the fourth floor, where Keith lived,
another family occupied the rooms looking upon the courtyard. And there
lived Jonas, the only other child in the house during Keith's
earliest years.

Jonas' father was a compositor--a tall, lank, hollow-eyed man with a bad
cough. His mother was a woman of the people, angular and taciturn. Jonas
himself was pale and gawky and shy.

Those two families, living within a few feet of each other and meeting
daily on the common landing, had little more intercourse than if they
had been parted by miles of desert. The reserved and slightly eccentric
character of the neighbours had something to do with this separation,
but social distinctions counted for more. A compositor was, after all, a
mere workman, and Keith felt instinctively that his mother looked with
kindly contempt at the more primitive ways of the adjoining household.
Now and then he was permitted to go and play for a little while with
Jonas, who was a year older, but the other boy hardly ever entered
Keith's home. Nor was their playing much of a success. Jonas was
slow-witted and reserved, while alertness and frankness were among
Keith's most characteristic traits. But differences of temperament
accounted only in part for their failure to come together. Keith felt as
if a wall of some kind stood between them, and as if the eyes watching
from the other side of that wall were distinctly hostile at times. It
exasperated him as if it had implied terrible injustice, but it was only
in moments of extreme boredom he really cared. At such moments he would
also develop a passionate desire for a brother or sister. He might have
wished for a dog or a cat even, but the idea of such a disturbing
element in his parental home seemed too preposterous for serious
contemplation. In fact, so foreign was that idea to the home atmosphere,
that Keith went through the rest of his life envying other people's pets
without ever giving earnest thought to the acquisition of one
for himself.

Just as the parental attitude toward the nearest neighbours suggested a
kindly but unsentimental tolerance of inferiors, so it became
unmistakably tinged with a slightly jealous but unprotesting submission
to superiors whenever the lower floors were reached. A bachelor
official of some kind lived on the floor immediately below, with no one
but his housekeeper to share his spacious apartment. As deputy landlord,
Keith's father had to see this tenant like all the rest, but of social
intercourse there was none, while on the other hand, Keith's mother kept
up a gossiping acquaintance with the housekeeper. As far as Keith
himself was concerned, there was nothing more awe-inspiring than a
chance meeting on the stairs with the monocle, side-whiskers, precise
manners and doled-out civility of Mr. Bureau-Chief Broström. The
distance was so immense that even aspirations were precluded on the part
of the boy. He could imagine being king, but not a duly appointed
government official with a salary enabling him to occupy half a dozen
rooms practically by himself.

Of course, there were rumours afloat about a more intimate relationship
between the bureau chief and his fairly good-looking housekeeper, who
nominally had for her own that part of the flat which faced the
courtyard, and these rumours did not escape the boy's keen ears. While
their true inwardness was incomprehensible to him, they made him look
wonderingly at the housekeeper whenever he met her, and when he accepted
her gingersnaps and other tempting delicacies, he did so with a sense of
wickedness that limited his gratefulness.

A retired dry goods dealer and his good-hearted old wife lived on the
second floor. The Fernbloms were the aristocracy of the house in the
lane, having the best rooms, paying the highest rent and giving the
biggest parties, but even Keith guessed quite early that they were
simple souls, risen by thrift from very humble origins. They had a
single daughter, a girl of delicate health and looks with whom Keith
probably would have fallen in love hopelessly if she had stayed in the
house. But she married early, moved to some other city and was rarely
seen in her old home. Reports of her progress were received, of course,
and passed on in the hearing of Keith, but like so many other things not
touching his own life closely, it carried no real meaning to his mind.
The parties continued, and Keith's parents were often invited, partly
because the old couple was too simple-minded to think of social
distinctions, and partly because they both came from the same district
as Keith's Granny. Keith would be allowed to come along at times, and he
liked the idea of going and the good food, but otherwise he found it
dull business watching a lot of grown-up people seated solemnly about
square tables playing cards. Then, one day, the old lady died, and Keith
attended a part of the funeral, and from the window he saw the coffin
taken away in a hearse buried in flowers. It made him ask many questions
of his mother, but none of her answers brought death any closer to his
mind. After all, the old lady had been nothing to him, and if the
parties should cease as he heard was likely, the loss did not seem great
to him. The only thing that made a real difference to him was his
discovery that there would be no more of those ball-shaped gingersnaps
that the old lady used to bake herself and keep in an earthen jar almost
as tall as Keith.

The front part of the ground floor was used as an office of some kind in
those early days, but the middle part facing the long row of outhouses
was a human habitation. The rooms were so dark that a lamp had to be
used most of the day, and the principal entrance was direct from the
courtyard. An old workman and his wife lived there until the office in
front was changed into a coffee-house and those rooms toward the
courtyard became the kitchen. When it happened, some one told Keith's
mother a story which she in her turn conveyed to the boy.

History repeated itself, she said, and Keith already knew that history
was something that had happened before he was born. One hundred years
ago, when Gustavus III was king of Sweden and things were more exciting
than in these later days of outward and inward peace, there used also to
be a coffee-house on the ground floor, and a widely known one at that.
It occupied the floor above too, but this floor was in reality used as a
club, and the club was political and the men who frequented it were
conspiring against the government. This the police knew, and every so
often a lot of armed and uniformed men would surround the house and make
prisoners of those caught in the clubrooms on the second floor. But as a
rule no one was found there but a couple of sleepy and grouchy
attendants who cursed their luck at having to spend their lives in such
a dull place.

"But," Keith interrupted when the story got that far "you just told me
that the rooms had a lot of conspirators in them."

"So they had."

"And yet they were empty when the police came there? Do you really mean
that the people could make themselves invisible?"

"That's where the real story comes in," his mother explained. "You know
there is a long passageway between the front rooms of the Fernbloms and
their kitchen in the rear. It runs back of the stairs. The next time you
go through it, stamp your foot very hard, and you will hear that it
sounds hollow in one place. At that spot there used to be a trap door in
the floor. Now it is nailed down hard, but in the old days it could be
opened any time, and then you found a stairway below. It led into our
part of the cellar, where you still can find a couple of stone steps at
one end. Then the conspirators went down into the main cellar, and at
the back of it there was a tunnel leading under the rear part of the
house and the lane beyond to a house on the other side. That's the way
they escaped, and that's why the police never found anybody in
the club."

"What did the conspirators want," asked Keith after he had pondered the
matter for a while.

"I don't know exactly," his mother admitted, "but the king was killed by
one of them at last."

"I wish I had been there to defend the king," said Keith. Then a new
thought seized him suddenly: "I want to go down and see those steps."

"All right," his mother answered to his astonishment and joy. "Lena will
soon go down to get potatoes for dinner, and then you can go along, if
you only promise to come right up again."

Shortly afterwards the momentous expedition actually took place. Keith
had been as far as the outer cellar door before, but he had never cared
to go further. When you opened that door, you were met by an air so cold
and damp that it struck your face like a wet sheet, and the stairs fell
away into a black abyss that seemed bottomless.

The door was of iron, rounded at the top to fit the arch, and covered
with rust. It looked as if it had been in its place since the house was
built, and Keith had heard that the house could not be less than two
hundred years old. The key, which Keith had been permitted to carry
going down, was of iron too, and nearly twice as long as Keith's hand.
The lock was in keeping with the key, enormous in size and so stiff that
Lena had to use both hands to turn the key.

Having laid a firm hold of Lena's skirt, Keith followed her several
steps down until they reached a place in the opposite wall where a
single very tall step led up to another iron door, square-cut and
narrow, back of which lay the cellar used by the Wellanders. Lena
lighted a candle that burned with difficulty in the clammy air.

Inside nothing could be seen at first but a number of boxes and barrels
full of supplies, and back of them walls built out of enormous stone
blocks and dripping with moisture. As his eyes became accustomed to the
dim light, however, Keith perceived that the end toward the lane was
closed by a wall which even his inexperienced glance recognized as brick
and comparatively new. Squeezing between two large barrels of potatoes
he saw two stone steps at the foot of that wall and managed actually to
put his foot on one of them.

"I wish I knew what's back of that wall," he remarked at last.

"Oh, nothing," said Lena indifferently.

"There might be skeletons," he ventured after a pause.

"Jesus Christ, child," Lena almost screamed, looking as if she had
caught sight of a ghost. "Where in the world does he get such notions
from? Come out of here now. I think the master will have to go down for
potatoes himself hereafter."

"There was a skeleton in the story you told me the other night," Keith
protested with dignity, but not unaffected by the girl's
unmistakable fright.

"This is no place for stories of that kind," she declared pulling him
away from the barrels and almost forgetting to close the cellar door
behind her.

That evening Keith kept thinking of the story and the steps in the
cellar. He was sorry not to be able to walk up those stairs. And there
must be some old things left lying about on them. Then he imagined
himself a conspirator, hearing the police beating at the doors and
making his way through the stairway and the tunnel to some quiet,
unobserved doorway in another lane, much narrower and darker than their
own. It was exciting, the passage through the tunnel, which he could see
with his mind's eye--but the part of conspirator did not appeal to him.
He had seen policemen on the street several times. They were very tall
and carried sabres. Some time when he was conspiring they might be too
quick for him and get him before he could reach the secret stairway. It
would be much better, he decided finally, to be able to look them in the
face and say truthfully:

"I have done nothing at all!"



XVI

The regular meals of the day were four, not counting "afternoon coffee"
which was regarded as a special treat and always subject to
negotiations, though forthcoming as unfailingly as dinner or supper. It
was the natural and nominal counterpart of the "morning coffee," which
served to initiate the day's feeding. This first meal was consumed
separately, as each person was ready for work, and on the whole its name
was appropriate, although plenty of bread went with the coffee. Keith's
turn came generally a little after seven, when he sat down to a large
cup or bowl of half coffee and half milk into which had been broken a
good sized piece of hard Swedish rye-bread. A little sugar was allowed,
but no butter. This regimen began when Keith was less than three years
old, and he enjoyed it immensely, provided the bread had steeped long
enough to become soft, When, at last, he turned to rolls and butter
dipped into the coffee, it did not mean that his taste had changed, but
merely that his increasing sense of manhood found the earlier dish
too childish.

Breakfast was due about ll:30 and consisted generally of sundry
left-overs from the preceding day, bread and butter forming one of the
principal ingredients. Then came the main meal of the day, dinner,
between 3:30 and 4 in the afternoon. As a rule it had only two courses:
some meat dish or fish with potatoes, and a soup served last. Now and
then there was a vegetable. Desserts were reserved for special
occasions. To Keith each such meal was inseparably connected with the
parental admonition: "Eat plenty of bread with your meat, child." The
bread was of the hard kind already referred to--thin round cakes that
one broke to pieces and that gave the teeth plenty of work. Various
superstitions were invoked to promote the consumption of it. Thus the
failure to finish a piece already broken off was alleged to result in
the transfer of all one's strength to the actual consumer of the piece
left behind. Keith was a docile child in spite of his impulsiveness and
he did he was told and believed what he heard, but he often wondered why
the rules so strictly enforced himself did not apply to his parents.

"Afternoon coffee," generally accompanied by some form of sweet bread or
cake, "happened" about 5:30, and at 8 supper was served. The final meal
was commonly made up of sandwiches with porridge and milk, or perhaps,
when fate was remarkably propitious, thin pancakes with cranberry jam.
There might be an extra snack of food at a still later hour in case of
unexpected callers, but such visits were not frequent and Keith would be
asleep by that time anyhow.

It was different when parties were given to formally invited company.
Then Keith had to stay up--or pretend to do so--as long as the guests
remained, and he must have a share of whatever the house had to offer.
To such occasions he looked forward with feverish joy, not so much on
account of the good things dispensed as for the sake of feeling the
ordinary strict rules relaxed. Apart from Christmas, the principal
celebrations took place on his parents' birthdays and "namedays." Every
day in the Swedish calendar carries a name, and all those bearing it
have a right to expect felicitations and presents from their relations
and more intimate friends. In return they are expected to celebrate the
occasion with a party that gives an excuse for showing what the house
can do in the way of hospitality. The same thing applies to the birthday
anniversaries, only in a higher degree. Not to celebrate one's birthday
can only be a sign of poverty, miserliness or misanthropy, and to
overlook the birthday anniversary of a close relative is to risk an
immediate breach of connections.

Nothing was more familiar to Keith than his mother's open worries about
money and his father's occasional stern reference to the need of saving.
To the boy those complaints and warnings meant merely that the parents
were in a depressed and unfaourable mood, tending to draw the usual
constraint a little tighter about him. He was intensely sensitive to
atmosphere, and too often that of his home had the same effect on his
young soul as the low-hanging, leaden skies of a Swedish December day
before the first snow has fallen. It made him long for sunlight, and the
parties brought it to some extent. Then care and caution were forgotten,
although his father might grumble before and after. Then the daily
routine was broken, and Granny became cynically but actively interested,
bent above all on seeing that "the house would not be shamed."

When the great day came, the home, always scrupulously neat, shone with
cleanliness. Every one worked up to the last minute. Cupboards and
pantries were full of unfamiliar and enticing supplies. The dining
table, opened to its utmost length, groaned under the burden of
innumerable cold dishes of tempting appearance, while from the kitchen
came the odours of more substantial courses still in the making. A one
end of Granny's bureau stood a battery of multicoloured bottles. The
other end was jammed with desserts and goodies meant to be served while
the guests were waiting for supper or during the card game that
generally followed it. Better than anything else, however, was the
father's loud laugh and eager talk, so rarely heard in the course of
their regular daily existence. Even then he might be displeased by some
slight slip of the boy's, and a sharp rebuke might follow, but it seemed
forgotten as soon as uttered, and of other consequences there were none
to be feared. Therefore, Keith wished that there might be a party every
day, and while there was one going on he sometimes caught himself
wondering whether, after all, he did not like his father as much as his
mother, or more.

From his own experiences with food as well as from his parents' attitude
toward it, both on special and on ordinary occasions, Keith distilled a
sort of philosophy that it took him several decades to outlive. To him
eating became a good thing in itself, rather than a means to an end. His
parents were neither gluttons nor gourmets, but they liked good food,
and, what was of still greater importance, good eating represented the
principal source of enjoyment open to them. The same seemed true of
their friends, and when company arrived no topic was more in favour than
a comparison of past culinary enjoyments. Keith's father, for instance,
never grew tired of telling about the time when he was still the chief
clerk in a fashionable grocery and the owner gave him permission to
dispose freely of a keg of Holland oysters that threatened to "go bad"
before they could be sold. Four or five friends were drummed together.
The feast took place at night in the store itself. Bread, butter, salt,
pepper, liquor, beer and cards were the only things added to
the oysters.

"And when morning came, and I had to open the store, there was nothing
left but a keg full of empty shells," the father used to shout, laughing
at the same time so that it was hard to catch what he said. Then he
would smack his lips and add with earnest conviction: "I have never
tasted anything better unless it be the Russian caviar we used to import
for the Court."

Always it was a matter of quantity as well as quality. A feast was not a
feast without more than plenty. Eating was always in order. An offer of
a dish was as good as a command to partake. A refusal bordered on the
offensive. Pressing a reluctant guest was the highest form of
hospitality. Dietary precautions were apparently unheard of except in
the case of certain chronic ailments, and then they were accepted as one
of life's worst evils. To eat well was to be well, and the natural
conclusion was that the best cure in case of trouble was to eat. Lack of
appetite was a misfortune as well as a dangerous symptom, and to eat
when not hungry was not only a necessity but a virtue.

Yet Keith longed for other things and he learned early that even eating
has its drawbacks.



XVII

Except on Sundays, the father rarely ate with the rest of the family. He
left in the morning before Keith was up and never came home for
breakfast. His dinner often had to wait until five or six or even later,
so he seldom cared to eat again when the others had their supper.

One afternoon, however, he appeared just as Keith and his mother were to
sit for dinner. It put her in a flutter and she couldn't get an
additional cover laid quick enough.

"I heard that mother was coming," he remarked as he seated himself at
the table.

Instantly Keith's mother shot an apprehensive glance at the boy and
exclaimed:

"Please try to be a real nice boy now, so that your grandmother does not
get a bad impression of you." Then she added, turning to her husband:
"She never says anything, but she always looks as if I spoiled Keith
hopelessly."

"Well," the father rejoined thoughtfully, "she brought up four children
of her own without anybody else to help her, and there was not one among
us who dared to disregard her slightest word."

"How about Henrik," the mother suggested a little tartly.

"Yes, the one spared is the one spoiled," admitted the father with a
sigh. "He was the youngest, and while he was licked like all of us, her
hand never seemed quite as firm with him as with the rest. The worst
thing parents can do to children is to let them have their own will."

Keith was listening with one ear only. His thoughts were on Uncle
Henrik, who would put in an unheralded appearance now and then, always
when the father was away and always to the consternation of the whole
household. Although hustled out of the kitchen as soon as the unbidden
visitor arrived, Keith had had a good look at him several times and had
also overheard the parents discussing him. He was still comparatively
young. Yet he looked like animated waste matter. His face seemed to hang
on him. His mouth was loose and void of expression. His eyes were
bleared and ever on the move. He spoke mostly in a toneless drawl, that
sometimes turned into a shrill whine, but also at rare intervals could
change into a soft, heart-winning purr. His clothing was poorer and
coarser than that of any other person seen by Keith. Once or twice it
seemed to the boy like a repulsive uniform, and he heard his parents
speak with mingled disgust and relief of some house or institution that
was never fully named.

"No one has a better heart than Henrik," Keith heard his father say
once, "but he has no more spine than a cucumber, and he can't keep away
from drink."

Then the food was brought in, and Uncle Henrik was forgotten. As usual,
there was a meat course to begin with, and Keith ate what for him was a
big portion. Nor did he get into any trouble beyond having an extra
large piece of hard bread put beside his plate by the father and finding
the disposal of it rather difficult.

The meat was followed by a large bowl of soup, and the very sight of it
made Keith look unhappy--a fact that did not escape his father.

Keith cared little for soups, while both parents liked them, and he had
a particular dislike of soups made on a meat stock, like the one just
brought in. For some reason that Keith might have thought funny under
other circumstances, it was called Carpenter Soup, and it contained a
lot of rather coarse vegetables. Among these were green celery and
parsnips, both of which filled the boy with an almost morbid disgust.

While the mother was serving and Keith was waiting in dumb agony, it
flashed through his mind that Uncle Granstedt might be eating that kind
of soup. If so, the boy thought, he would rather let himself be killed
than made a carpenter.

As the turn came to his own plate, Keith tried to catch his mother's eye
with a signalled appeal to put in as little as possible, but she was
talking to her husband and not noticing the boy at all. And so, at last,
he found himself confronted with a plate filled to the brim.

The first few spoonfuls went down without much resistance, chiefly
because he confined himself to the fluid part of the soup. Then it
seemed of a sudden as if one more mouthful would choke him, and his
eating became a mere dallying with his spoon.

"Go on and finish your soup," the father urged sternly.

"I can't."

"Why?"

"I have eaten all I can."

"That does not matter," rejoined his father. "One must always finish
what is on one's plate."

"But I don't like it," Keith blurted out in a moment of
desperation--which was unfortunate.

"Children have no likings of their own," said the father, putting down
his spoon. "They must like what their parents give them. And you will
finish that soup--if I have to feed you myself to make you do it."

Two more spoonfuls went down by an heroic effort. Then Keith burst into
tears, and his father's face grew still darker as he asked scornfully:

"Are you a boy or a girl?"

Keith did not care at that moment. In fact, he thought that if girls had
a right to cry, he would rather be one.

His mother was trying to coax him with kind words, and he actually
raised the filled spoon to his lips once more, but the sensation within
him was such that he let it drop again with a splash. That was the
crowning offence, and the feeding process began at once. His father took
him by the neck with one hand and administered the spoon with the other.
It was done firmly and perhaps harshly, but in such a manner that the
boy was not hurt.

Keith cried and coughed and swallowed--and in the midst of that ordeal
he noticed the wonderful softness of his father's hands. But his heart
was full of bitter resentment, and he wished that he could grow up
on the spot.

What the end might have been is hard to tell, had not a slight
commotion been heard from the kitchen at that juncture.

"There is mother now," said the father, letting go his hold on Keith's
neck. "Wipe your eyes and try to act like a boy. Some day we'll put you
into skirts."

Keith did not care. He knew now that he would not have to eat the rest
of the soup. That was the one thing in the world that seemed to matter
to him. His tears ceased. But now his body was shaken by a convulsive
sob. On the whole his mood was one of hopeless resignation.



XVIII

"I am glad to see you, mother," said Keith's father, rising quickly as a
little old woman appeared in the kitchen doorway. His tone surprised the
boy. There was warmth in it, but still more of reverence bordering on
awe, and also something of pride. Thus might a queen be greeted, but
only by those nearest and dearest to her. What struck the boy most of
all, however, was the world of difference lying between that tone and
the one in which the father addressed his wife even in moments of
closest understanding. It gave Keith his first clear glimpse of the
distinction between love and respect, between sympathy and trust.

"So you are home, Carl," the grandmother remarked in her usual quiet,
matter-of-fact manner. Then she turned to her daughter-in-law, who had
also risen to her feet: "Is your head as bad as usual, Anna?"

"Thank you," answered Keith's mother, and the boy could sense that she
was not at her ease although she smiled pleasantly. "Those new powders I
got from Dr. Sköld helped a great deal."

"Hm," grunted the older woman as she walked across the room and sat down
on a chair not far from Keith. "I had no time or money to bother with
powders at your age, but times have changed."

She was taking in every detail of the room as she spoke, without looking
pointedly at anything in particular. Suddenly Keith, who followed her
every movement as if hypnotized, was startled by meeting the hard gaze
of her calm, pale-blue eyes. Those eyes illuminated her small, wrinkled
face so completely that the boy saw nothing else. Gone were her trimmed
wig, her black shawl, her wide skirt of a checkered grey. Gone were even
her thin, tight lips that used to close with the firm grip of a vice.
Nothing was left but the eyes that looked him through and through until
it was impossible for him to stand still any longer.

"What is the matter with Keith," she asked. "Sick, too?"

"No, thank heaven," the mother blurted out. "We have nothing to complain
of his health--"

"No," the father broke in with a suggestion of grim humour, "not about
his health, but--"

"Of course," the old lady said with a nod of comprehension. "I don't
wish to criticize anybody or anything, but I don't think Keith is very
obedient. He wants to pick and choose, I suppose, as if the food were
not good enough for him."

"Well, he can't," the father rejoined.

"Children should eat anything and be glad to get it at that. Mine never
thought of refusing what I gave them. If they ever had...."

She didn't finish the sentence, but it made Keith feel that he would
never have dared one word of protest about the soup if the grandmother
had been there a little earlier. Yet she spoke without marked feeling,
without hardness, almost kindly. It was plain as she went on, that she
believed intensely in what she said, and that it touched the very
foundations of existence as she saw it:

"Children owe everything to their parents, and the least they can do in
return is to accept thankfully what they get. That is what I did in my
childhood, and I never dreamt of anything else. I had no will but that
of my parents, and I knew that I could not and should not have any will
of my own."

Everybody but the grandmother was still standing. The mother's face bore
clear evidence of conflicting tendencies to accept and reject. Looking
at her, Keith felt, as he often did, that there was something within her
that gave his view of matters a fighting chance. The father, on the
other hand, seemed of a sudden to have become a child himself, listening
obediently and with absorbed approval. It looked almost as if he were
still afraid of that white-haired, fragile, tight-lipped little woman,
and the sight of him filled Keith with a vague uneasiness.

"Please sit down," said the grandmother at last. "I did not mean to
disturb you, and Keith looks as if he might fall in a heap any moment."

"Why don't you stand up straight, Keith," asked his mother. "You will
never grow up unless you do, and your grandmother will think worse of
you than she already does."

"I am not blaming the child," the old lady began in the same passive,
quietly assured tone. But before she got further, the father broke in:

"I think Keith had better go and play in his own corner--and please keep
quiet, for grandmother and I have important things to talk of."

Keith retired as directed, and at that moment growing up seemed to him a
more unreal and impossible thing than ever.

Not long afterwards the grandmother left, both parents escorting her to
the outside door. When they returned to the living-room, Keith heard his
mother say:

"I don't see why she should always find fault with Keith. He's not a bit
worse than Brita's Carl, whom she is helping to spoil just as fast
as she can."

"Well, that's her way," replied the father, paying no attention to the
latter part of the remark. "She was brought up that way herself, and
that's the way she brought up the four of us."

He was evidently in high good-humour and did what Keith had never seen
him do before when no company was present. He got out a cigar from one
of the little drawers in the upper part of mamma's bureau and sat down
at the still covered dining table to smoke it. This made Keith feel
almost as if they were having a party, and soon he sneaked out of his
corner and joined the parents at the table. First he stood hesitatingly
beside his mother, but little by little he edged over to the father
until he actually was leaning against the latter's knee without being
rebuffed. The father even put his hand on Keith's head, and the soup
episode became very distant and dim.

"She used to lick us mercilessly," the father said as if speaking
chiefly to himself, and as he spoke there was a reminiscent smile on his
face and not a trace of resentment in his voice. "But she was absolutely
just about it--so just that she used to lick all four of us whenever one
had earned it. That was to keep the rest from thinking themselves any
better, she said, and also because she felt sure that all of us had
deserved it, although she had not happened to find it out."

"I think it hard and unjust," Keith's mother protested. "And I don't
believe in beating children all the time."

"Those were hard days," the father mused on, "and everybody did it, and
children seemed to know their place better then. I don't think we
suffered very much from the beatings we got, they certainly did not make
us think less of mother. She had her hands full, too, and not much time
to think of nice distinctions. We were all small when father died, and
Henrik was just a baby. There was no one but her to look after us, and
how she did it, God only knows. But I have never heard her speak one
word of complaint, and she always managed. Sometimes there was little
enough, and we were mighty glad to get what there was, as she told you
herself, but she always had something for us. Then we had to go to work
just as soon as we could. I was thirteen when I began to add my share to
the common heap."

"Did you go to school," Keith ventured, having recently overheard some
talk of his parents that seemed to bear on his own immediate future.

"I did," the father replied, "but not long. I wanted to study, and my
teacher was so anxious that I should go on that he promised to get me
free admission to the higher school. But mother wouldn't listen. And I
suppose it was not to be."

"Did you like school," asked Keith, not having the slightest idea of
what a school might be like.

"Yes, I liked all about it but one thing. There was a big boy who
bullied all the rest, and no one cared to fight him. He went for me the
very first day of the term, and when I fought back, he gave me such a
licking that I could hardly walk into the schoolroom afterwards. The
next day he asked if I had had enough, and I told him I meant to go on
till he had enough. So we started right in again, and he licked me worse
than the day before. But I just couldn't give in. For three whole months
we fought every day, and each day I made it harder for him. And one day
I got the upper hand of him at last, and gave it to him until he began
to cry and begged for mercy. Then I let him go, but no sooner had I
turned my back on him, than he picked up a small sapling that was lying
around and struck me over the head with it. There was a piece of root
standing straight out, and it hit me right on top of my head so that the
blood squirted out and I fainted on the spot. Then he had to leave
school, and the last thing I heard of him was that the police had got
him for something still worse."

"Oh, Carl," the mother cried with a shudder, "you should have complained
to the teacher!"

"The teacher was watching us all the time, although I didn't know it.
He told me afterwards that he would have helped me any time I asked, but
that he would have thought less of me for asking."

Keith stared hard at his father and tried to imagine himself doing the
same thing, but his fancy did not seem to work well in that direction.
Later, when he was in bed, the father's story came back to him. Somehow
it made him feel very proud, but also uneasy. He felt that there nothing
more wonderful than to fight some one stronger than oneself and win, and
soon he was busy slaying giants and dragons and bears and other monsters
that he had heard Granny tell about. But he tried to think of himself as
fighting a real boy in the way as his father, his dreams seemed to peter
out ignominiously.

Then his mother came to in to tuck him in and make him say his prayers
and kiss him good-night. Suddenly he flung his arms about her neck in a
passion of craving for tenderness and protection. Putting his mouth
close to her ear, he whispered a question that had nothing to do with
the father's story or his fancies of a few moments ago.

"Why must I eat things I don't want?"



XIX

The next Sunday morning found Keith more than usually restless. Half a
dozen times in quick succession he appealed to the mother for
suggestions as to what to do. Finally she turned to the father, who was
preparing to go out:

"Can't you take him along, Carl? He has never seen the bank, and he
really should get out a little."

For a little while the father said nothing. Then he spoke directly to
Keith:

"Put on your coat and cap."

The boy who had been looking and listening with open mouth and a heart
that hardly dared to beat, became wildly excited.

"Now, Keith," the father admonished, "you can't go unless you behave."

"Where's my coat, mother," asked Keith eagerly and unheedingly.

"Don't you know that yourself," growled the father. "You are a big boy
already, and you should keep your own things in order."

"I have hung it up where he cannot reach it," the mother interceded.
"I'll get it for him."

The coat and the cap were on at last, but then began the struggle about
the muffler and the mittens. The mother had crocheted them herself for
Keith and insisted that they should be worn whenever he went outdoors
during autumn and winter. The muffler was long and white, with blue
rings two inches apart, and in shape more like a boa.

Keith wanted the mittens, because his hands got cold easily, but not the
muffler, which, he thought, made him look like a girl.

The father objected to everything of that kind, which he said, tended to
make the boy soft and susceptible to colds. He himself did not put on an
overcoat until the weather grew very severe, and he never buttoned it,
no matter how cold it grew. His throat was always bare, and he never
wore gloves of any kind. Nor did he ever put his hands in his pockets
while walking. He had a favourite trick of picking up a handful of snow,
which he rolled into a ball and carried in his hand until it became hard
as ice. His hands were milk-white, beautifully shaped and well cared
for. It was impossible to believe that for many years they had done the
hardest kind of work, often outdoors and generally in a poorly heated
drafty shop. He was proud of them, although he pretended not to care
when anybody spoke of them, and they filled Keith with admiration and
envy. He tried to follow the father's example, but with the result that
his hands grew red as boiled crawfish and began to ache under the nails
until he had to cry.

"You bring him up a woman," the father muttered, when Keith was ready at
last.

Then they left, having been kissed several times each by the mother, who
warned Keith not to let go of his father's hand under any circumstances
while they were on the streets.

Down in the passageway on the ground floor, Keith started to take off
the muffler.

"No," said the father. "Now you keep it on. Your mother has told you to
wear it, and you must not take it off behind her back."

"But you didn't want me to have it on," Keith protested in genuine
surprise.

"No, I didn't, because I want you to be hardened and grow up like a man.
But there is something I want still more, and that is for you to obey
your mother, first because children should always obey their parents,
and secondly because it makes your mother very unhappy if you don't do
as she tells you."

His tone changed slightly during the last part of his remark. Something
of an appeal came into it and went straight to Keith's heart, filling it
with a glow of righteous determination. It was always that way with him.
A word spoken kindly made him eager to comply, and that was particularly
the case if it came from some person not given to sentimentality.

In the lane they turned and saw the mother lying in the window to watch
them. As usual, kisses were thrown back and forth as they passed up the
lane, but Keith felt rather impatient about it, and it was with a marked
sense of relief he turned the corner into East Long Street. He was eager
to push ahead into unknown regions and did not care to look back.

Although he spoke little enough, the father proved a more genial
companion than Keith had dared to expect. In fact, he had been a little
oppressed at the thought of being entirely alone with the father, which
was quite a new experience to him. But now he found it a pleasure, and
their communion seemed more easy than when the mother was with them. He
walked sedately enough, clinging to one of his father's soft, white
hands, but every so often he ventured a skip and a jump without being
rebuked, and on the whole he felt the kind of happiness that used to
come on Christmas Eve, after the father had started to distribute
the presents.

Keith had frequently accompanied his mother as far as the little square
at the end of the street, and he pointed proudly to the grocery store
where he had helped to buy things.

"Yes," responded the father, and again his tone seemed strangely
unfamiliar to the boy. "I might have had such a store myself, if luck
had been with me."

The idea was more than Keith could digest at once. It was too
overwhelming, and once more he looked at his father with the feeling of
wonder and awe that sometimes took hold of him almost against his
will--a feeling that clashed hopelessly with the nervous shyness
commonly inspired by the father's stern manners.

"Why didn't you get it," the boy ventured at last.

"Because I was born under the Monkey Star," replied the father grimly.

The boy wondered what kind of star that was, but still more he wondered
at the father's mood which appeared to indicate a displeasure not
directed at the questioner. Before Keith could ask anything more, they
had started across one of the open market places that line the
fresh-water side of the old City.

The place was empty except for a few closed and abandoned booths. But at
the foot of it lay rows of one-masted sailing vessels loaded halfway up
their masts with piles of fire-wood. In the background, beyond a small
sheet of water crossed by a low iron bridge, rose abruptly the rocky
walls of the South End, with funny old houses perched precariously along
their edges. Keith stared so hard at all the new things that not a
single question had a chance to escape him before they entered another
street and stopped in front of a stone house that to him looked like
a castle.

It had a real portal instead of an ordinary doorway, and the inside was
still more impressive. Keith had been to church once or twice, and for a
moment he thought himself in one. But he saw no seats, and his father
did not look solemn at all. The walls were of stone curiously streaked
and coloured. The ceiling was so far up that Keith had to bend far
backwards to see it. It was full of ornaments and supported by two rows
of tall round stone pillars so thick that Keith could not get his arms
halfway around one of them. In the background rose a very broad and
seemingly endless stairway of white stone. While they climbed it step by
step, Keith wondered if the king in his palace had anything like it.

Arrived at the top at last, they turned into a sort of lobby--a rather
bare room with several plain desks by the windows and many hooks along
the inner wall. There the father took off both his coats and armed
himself with a huge feather duster and a rag.

"Remember, Keith," he said in his ordinary tone, "that you may look as
much as you please, but that you must not touch anything. If you do, you
can never come here again."

Having passed through several smaller rooms, they emerged finally into a
hall so bright and spacious that Keith stopped with a gasp and for a
moment thought himself in the open air again. It was as wide as the
building itself and three sides were full of large windows A counter of
mahogany that looked miles long ran from one end to the other. The place
behind it contained many desks so tall that Keith could not have reached
the tops of them with his raised hand. But from a distance he could see
that they were full of tempting things--paper and pens and pencils, red
bars of sealing wax, glue-pots and rulers and glistening shears.

Two men, also in their shirt-sleeves, were busy at the desks, dusting
them and arranging the things on top of them. And the father quickly
went to work in the same way.

It seemed interesting to Keith, who would have liked to try his hand at
it. But it also disconcerting for some reason he could not explain and
for a while he watched the father as if unwilling to believe his own
eyes. Somehow it did not tally with certain notions formed in Keith's
head on the night when the church was burning. At last he up to his
father and asked:

"Is this where you always work?"

"No," was the answer given with a peculiar grimness. "This is for the
officials."

"What are they?"

"Oh, tellers and cashiers and bookkeepers."

Keith noted the words for future inquiries. For the moment they meant
nothing to him.

"Why are you not here too," he persisted.

"Because I am only an attendant--a mere _vaktmästare_. That is a fact
you had better fix in your mind once for all, my boy."

"Is that your little boy, Wellander," one of the other men called out at
that moment. "Let us have a look at him."

Hand-shakings and head-pattings followed as Keith was presented to
"Uncle" This and "Uncle" That. He didn't object and he didn't care. They
looked nice enough, and their talk was friendly, but somehow he felt
that his parents did not care for them. Some of the glamour had left the
place. In spite of its magnificence, he did not like it, although he was
glad to have seen it.

Discovering a wastepaper basket full of envelopes with brightly coloured
marks on them, he regained his interest a little. He knew those marks
for stamps and they had pictures on them which attracted him very much.
So he made a bee-line for the basket and proceeded to pick out what he
liked best.

"Have you forgotten what I told you," he heard his father shout to him.

"They have been thrown away," he said going toward the father.

"That is neither here nor there," was the sharp answer he got. "You know
they are not yours, and so you must not touch them. Put them back
at once."

Keith did as he was told, wondering if he really had done anything wrong
or if his father merely objected for some reason of his own.

Then he walked around uninterested and forlorn until they were ready to
go home again. The stairway seemed shorter as they descended, but the
pillars were tall and thick as before. And on the way home his father
found a little shop open and bought him a few _öre's_ worth of
hard candy.

It was the only time Keith could ever remember his having done such a
thing.



XX

The lodger happened to be away when they got home, and the mother had
opened the door to the parlour in order to get a little more air and
light into the living-room. After dinner the father went into the
parlour to take a nap on the big sofa, while the mother settled down
comfortably in her easy chair, a piece of handiwork on her lap as usual.
Keith took up his customary position on the footstool to tell her what
he had seen and done during his morning excursion.

She was eager to hear everything and helped him along with questions,
and yet there ran through her very eagerness a subtle inner resistance
which the boy felt vaguely. It as if she never really cared for anything
concerning him in which she herself had not taken part.

The original glamour had returned to every aspect of his new experience,
and he tried excitedly to describe the wonders of the vestibule, the
stairway and the big hall. In the midst of it he paused suddenly and
fell to staring into vacancy.

"Was that all," she asked, puzzled by his silence.

"Lena dusts our rooms, doesn't she," was his rather startling
counter-question.

"Mostly," the mother replied with a searching glance at his puckered
brows. "Although I sometimes ..."

"You don't have to," the boy broke in.

"No" she admitted, "but then I am sure it is properly done."

"Is that why papa dusts the tables in the bank?"

A pause followed during which it was the mother's turn to stand the
boy's intense scrutiny.

"No," she said at last. "He does it because it is a part of his work,
and a shame it is that he has to. Scrub-women come in and do the rest of
the cleaning, but they are not trusted with the desks, and so the
attendants have to take turns doing that part of it. That's why your
father has to leave so very early in the morning."

Mother and son lapsed into silence once more. It was broken by another
question from the boy.

"Why couldn't I take some stamps that had been thrown away?"

"Had your father said anything about it before you took them?"

"He told me not to touch anything."

"Then you couldn't because he had told you to leave things alone. He is
so careful in all such matters. Sometimes he goes a little too far,
perhaps, but you can be sure that he means right. Other people want the
stamps, and there is a lot of gossip and envy about everything, and he
is too proud to be dragged into that sort of thing. It is always better,
Keith, to leave alone what you know is not your own. Honesty endures
beyond all else."

Keith made no direct response, but sprang one more irrelevant question:

"Why didn't papa get the grocery store?"

"How do you know," the mother demanded with a quick glance at him.

"Papa told me."

"Well," she drawled as if thinking. Then she settled back in the chair,
her mind made up. "Listen, and I will tell you a story. Once upon a time
there was a rich old man who owned a grocery store."

"That's where they sell prunes and raisins and sugar," the boy put in.

"And the store was so fine," she went on unheedingly, "that the old man
was permitted to sell all those things to the king's own kitchen. The
old man had many assistants, but at the head of them all was a young man
who knew just what to do, because he had worked in such stores ever
since he was a little boy. And he was so honest and able and polite that
the people liked him very much and came to the store for his sake, but
the old man liked him more anybody else."

"Was the old man nice," Keith asked.

"Yes, indeed, but he was also very peculiar, and the most peculiar thing
about him was that he hated all women and thought that a man who married
was lost for ever."

"Did he have any children?"

"No, men who want no wives get no children. That is a part of their
punishment. And so when the owner of the store got older and older, and
began to feel tired, he didn't know to whom he should leave the store.
You may be sure that he thought it over many times, because he was
exceedingly proud of the store and wanted it to go on. The result of his
thinking was that he decided to give it to the young man whom he trusted
and liked so much."

"How did the young man look," Keith broke in.

"Something like your father, I should say. But while all this was going
on, the young man had met a princess and fallen in love with her...."

"A real princess," asked the boy with wide-open eyes.

"All princesses are real in their own opinion. And she and the young man
had promised to marry each other, and this the old man learned at last.
Then he was very, very angry and told the young man that he was a fool.
And when the young man answered that there were many of his kind, and
that he had pledged his word, the old man told him that he would not get
the store unless he promised to have nothing more to do with the
princess. But the young man loved her and would not give her up, and so,
you see--he didn't get the store. Don't you think that was nobly
done, Keith?"

"Ye-es," the boy assented without particular enthusiasm, "but if he had
got the store, we should have been rich now?"

"We," repeated the mother in a funny tone. "Why, then there would have
been no _we_."

"Why not," he demanded.

"Or it might have been worse still," she whispered as if momentarily
forgetful of the boy's presence.

"There is your father now," she said a moment later, when a slight stir
was heard in the adjoining room. "Don't say anything more about the
store.... Do you know what your father wanted to be most of all?"

Keith looked up speculatively as his father appeared at the doorway to
the parlour--a man of medium height, who stooped because he was
nearsighted, and so looked shorter than he was, but also stronger
because of the great width of his shoulders.

"I can tell you," the father put in. "When I couldn't study, I wanted to
be a sailor, and I tried to take hire on a ship whose master knew me and
wished to help me. Then they found out that I was too nearsighted to
steer by the compass, and that was the end of it. Didn't I tell that I
was born under the Monkey Star?"

"Don't talk like that, Carl," the mother protested, rising to give him a
kiss. "You have done very well, and there is no man in the bank more
respected than you."

"Yes," he admitted with something like a grin. "They know I wouldn't
steal even if I had a chance, and they let me collect four million
crowns, as I did the other day, but I shall never get beyond where I am
today. So there you are--what's struck for a farthing will never be
a dollar."

Keith's head was still full of what he had heard when he went to bed
that night, and he didn't know whether to feel happy or unhappy about
it. His father had grown bigger and more interesting in some ways, and
yet the boy's chief impression was of a failure and a fall. It was this
impression that stuck most deeply in his mind.



XXI

Keith's home was not one of those hospitable places with the doors
always wide open, to which people are drawn almost against their will
and from which they come away with difficulty. Perhaps it was, above
all, the spirit of the father that settled this matter. To him, more
than to any Englishman, his home was his castle, and he liked to keep
the drawbridge raised against unwelcome company. And most company seemed
unwelcome, although at times, when the right persons appeared at the
right moment, he could be happy as a child and unbend in a manner that
made Keith gape with wonder. When her good mood prevailed, the mother,
too, was touchingly eager for the diversion provided by a chance visit,
but when the dark moments came, she shunned everybody, while at the same
time she watched any prolonged failure to call with morbid
suspiciousness, ascribing it promptly to a sense of superiority toward
herself and her family. Granny was glad enough to talk to anybody, but
she would never ask any one to call, and if no one came, she was apt to
dig out some particularly bitter proverb, like "money alone has
many friends."

Both parents could be hospitable enough when occasion so demanded, but
it was a formal thing with them, exercised only after due preparation.
In many ways, they were large-heartedly generous, but only in a serious
manner, when actual need required it. They might give freely beyond what
they could well afford, but the father could be out of humour for days
if some little thing regarded as particularly his own had been touched
or used by another member of the family.

As it was, people came and went a good deal, but they came formally or
because some specific errand brought them, and most of the errands,
Keith soon realized, were connected with a desire for help. The old
women living like nightbirds in the garret, would drop in frequently,
and almost invariably with some tale of woe that sooner or later drew
from the mother relief in one form or another. And one of Keith's
earliest tasks, half coveted and half feared, was to walk up to one of
the attics with a plate of soup or a saucer full of jam or some other
tidbit. Others would come from the outside, and they, too, were mostly
old women. They always wanted to pat Keith, and he objected passionately
to all of them. His especial aversion was a gaunt old woman with a big
hooked nose and a pair of startlingly large, sad-looking eyes. She
always smiled, and her smile was hopelessly out of keeping with the rest
of her face. The very sight of her made Keith forget all his manners.
Time and again his mother rebuked him and tried to bring him around by
telling the old woman's story--a story of wonderful self-sacrifice and
heroic struggle--but it made no difference to him. There was something
about the sight of poverty and unhappiness and failure that provoked him
beyond endurance, and sometimes he would turn to his mother with a
reckless cry of:

"Why do you let them come here at all?"

For the friends of the family, who came there on an equal footing, he
showed more respect, and for a few of them he felt a real liking. As a
rule, however, they inspired him with nothing but indifference, and his
one reason for greeting them with some approach at cordiality was that
they brought a change into the general monotony of the home, and that
their coming might lead to the distribution of some dainties out of the
ordinary. Some of his parents' friends were poor and growing poorer.
Others had the appearance of doing well and hoping for more. It made no
difference to Keith. They were all middle-aged, sedate and preoccupied
with their own little affairs. They tried to be nice to him, but they
did not interest him, and his main grievance against them--not clearly
understood by any means--was that they brought nothing into his life of
what he wanted.

Had he been asked what he wanted, he would have answered unhesitatingly:

"Some one to play with."



XXII

Having whined and nagged until his mother no longer could bear it, Keith
at last obtained the cherished permission to go and play in the lane.

"But look out for horses," warned his mother as he stood in the doorway
ready to run. "And don't run out of sight, and you must come when I
call, and--you had better keep away from other boys, or you may come
home quite naked this time."

"What do you mean," asked Keith, turning to see whether the mother was
joking or talking seriously.

"Don't you recall when those boys took your coat from you, and you came
up here crying?"

There could be no mistake about her meaning just what she said. Keith
stood still thinking very hard. Here was another memory that he could
not remember at all. There was not a trace of it left in his mind, and
yet it must have happened. It sounded exciting, too, and he wished to
know all about it.

"You had better close the door," his mother suggested.

"All right," said Keith, hastening to close the door from the outside
and make a dive for the stairway. There would be plenty of time to ask
about the loss of his coat later. He was halfway down the first flight
when he heard the kitchen door open behind him, and his heart leapt into
his throat.

"You must go down the stairs quietly," his mother called out from above,
whereupon Keith's heart resumed its normal position.

He descended the rest of that flight on tip-toe. The second one was
taken more rapidly, and down the last one he went two steps at a time,
the little iron plates under his heels hitting the stones with a ring
that echoed through the old house.

In the lane he found them loading a dray in front of the distillery, and
he started across to watch the men straining at the next barrel. He had
hardly taken a step in that direction, however, when a loud pop was
heard from the black cave forming the entrance to the distillery. It
was followed first by a single cry, and then by a hubbub of voices. A
second later a young man came running out and threw himself prone into
the gutter, where a trickle of water was to be seen.

Keith was too astonished to be frightened at once. He could not
understand what made the man act in this way. Then another man came out
in a rush and began to beat the legs of the man in the gutter with his
hands, and Keith suddenly noticed that little blue flames were dancing
up and down the grimy leathern trousers of the first man.

The memory of the night when the church burned leaped into his mind,
making him turn instinctively toward the passageway and his
mother's lap.

At that moment a third man appeared carrying a big tank full of water
which he poured over the man in the gutter. The latter got on his feet
and limped back into the distillery, supported by his two comrades.

Keith was left behind, trembling a little and gazing curiously at the
hanging head of the dray-horse which had not made the slightest movement
during the previous excitement.

"He'll have to go to bed," said a sleepy voice at his shoulder just
then.

Keith swung around as if touched by an electric shock. Before him he saw
another small boy, apparently of his own age, but a little taller, and
light-haired like himself.

"What's your name," asked Keith as soon as he caught his breath.

"Johan," answered the other stolidly, but not unfriendly.

"Have you got another name like me?"

"My name is Johan Peter Gustafsson," was the reply given in the tone of
a lesson painfully learned.

"Where do you live?"

"Right here."

"Not in our house," Keith protested.

"No, down there," Johan explained, pointing to the little side door
leading into the courtyard of one of the corner houses at the Quay.

"What's your father?" Keith continued his cross-examination.

"_Vaktmästare_" said Johan indifferently.

"So is mine," Keith cried eagerly. "Have you got a bank, too?"

Johan shook his head as if unable to grasp what Keith meant.

"My popsey works in the office down there," he said, "and we live beside
it, and at night I go with popsey when he carries all the mail to the
postoffice."

"Why do you call him popsey," inquired Keith, fascinated by the new word
and wondering if he would dare use it to his own father.

"Because that's what he is," Johan declared.

A few minutes later they were playing together as if they had known each
other for ever. They had just discovered an unusually large and tempting
pin in a crack at the bottom of the gutter, when Keith heard his mother
calling from the window above:

"What are you doing, Keith?"

"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!"



PART II



I

One day in the early autumn Keith's mother dressed him with unusual care
and kissed him several times before they left the house. Granny had to
be kissed, too, and even Lena came forward to shake hands and say
good-bye. It was a very solemn affair.

Hand in hand Keith and his mother walked clear across the old City, past
Great Church, until they came to a very broad lane at the foot of which
was a square with a statue in it. At the other end of the square lay a
very large, red building.

"That's the House of Knights where all the nobility hang up their
coats-of-arms," said the mother.

But Keith was too excited to ask any questions at that moment.

They entered a house much finer and neater than their own and stopped in
front of a door on the second floor. A hubbub of shrill voices could be
heard from within. Keith gripped his mother's hand more firmly.

Then the door was opened by a white-haired lady with spectacles and they
were admitted to a large room, containing a score of little boys and
girls. A dead silence fell on the room as they appeared, and every eye
turned toward Keith, who blushed furiously as was his wont whenever he
found himself observed.

After a brief talk with the teacher, Keith's mother to him:

"This is Aunt Westergren, whom you must obey as you obey me. And now be
a good boy and don't cry."

As the mother tarried by the door for a moment to exchange a last word
with the teacher, and perhaps also to cast one more lingering glance at
the boy, a little girl ran up to Keith, put her right fore-finger on top
of his head and cried out:

"Towhead!"

All the other children giggled. Keith blushed more deeply than ever, but
did not say a word or stir a limb. A moment later the teacher began to
cross-question him about his knowledge of letters and spelling, and he
found it much easier to answer her than to face the children. But, of
course, after a while he was quite at home among them without knowing
how it had happened.

That afternoon his mother came for him. The next morning he had to start
out alone under direct orders from the father, and alone he made his way
home again, his bosom swelling with a sense of wonderful independence.
Years passed before he learned that his mother had watched over him for
days before she was fully convinced of his ability to find the way
by himself.

The autumn passed. Winter and spring came and went. It was summer again.
The little school closed. Keith could read the head-lines at the tops of
the pages in the big Bible without help. But of the school where he had
learned it hardly a memory remained. It was as if the place had made no
impression whatsoever on his mind. And the children with whom he studied
and played nearly a whole year might as well have been dreams, forgotten
at the moment of waking--all but one of them.

Harald alone seemed a real, living thing, a part of Keith's own life,
but not a part of the school where the two met daily. He was a year
older than Keith, a little slow mentally, but rather unusually advanced
in other ways. His father was a merchant of some sort, with an office of
his own and half a dozen clerks at his command, and Harald had been
taught to regard himself as a young gentleman. They lived a few houses
from the school, in the same street, and their home was a revelation
to Keith.

Houses less fortunate than his own were familiar to him, but he had
never seen a better one until he was asked to visit Harald for the first
time, and the comparisons made on that occasion stuck deeply in
his mind.

They entered through a hallway where caps and coats were left behind,
and from there they went into a room where every piece of furniture was
of mahogany. Between the windows hung a mirror in a gilded frame that
was as tall as the room itself, so that Keith could see himself from
head to foot. The object that caught the boy's attention most of all,
however, was a chandelier suspended from the middle of the ceiling and
made up of hundreds of little rods of glass. As Harald slammed the door
on entering, some of the rods were set in motion and struck against each
other with a tiny twinkle that seemed to Keith the most beautiful sound
he had ever heard.

That room, Harald said, was used only to receive visitors, and he gave
Keith to understand that there were any number of other rooms on both
sides of it. One of these was Harald's own and used by nobody else. He
could even lock the door of it on the inside, if he wanted. There they
played with tin soldiers several inches high, and Harald had a little
cannon out of which they could shoot dry peas, so that it was possible
to fight a real battle by dividing the soldiers and taking turns of
using the cannon. Finally Harald's mother appeared with a bowl of fruit
and greeted the visitor with a certain searching kindness that made him
a little uneasy in the midst of all his enjoyment.

Keith returned home that day much later than unusual to find his mother
in a state of frantic worry. At first she declared that he must not go
anywhere without her knowing about it in advance, but after a while she
became quite interested and palpably elated by Keith's tale of all the
glories he had seen. She explained that the glass rods on the
chandeliers were prisms that showed the whole rainbow when you held them
in front of a light, and she asked him eagerly if he had been invited to
come again. But when the father heard of it that night, he said:

"I don't think Keith should go there at all. He can't ask such a boy
over here, and the next thing we know, Keith's own home will no longer
be good enough for him."

Keith could hardly believe his ears. He had never felt such resentment
against his father, and just before going to bed, while his father was
out of the room for a moment, he whispered to his mother:

"I think papa does not want me to have any fun!"

"You don't understand," she retorted. "He means well. Remember what
Granny says: Equals make the best playmates."

Three or four times Keith went home with Harald. Then the gates of
paradise were suddenly slammed in his face. One day, as they were
leaving school together, Harald remarked quite calmly:

"You can't come home with me any more."

"Why," gasped Keith, his throat choking.

"Because mamma says I must find some one else to play with," Harald
explained. Then he softened a little: "I can't help it, and I like you."

"But why," insisted Keith on the verge of tears.

"You look like a nice boy, mamma says, but your father is nothing but a
_vaktmästare_, and mine is a _grosshandlare_ (wholesale dealer)."

Keith walked home in a stupor and began to cry the moment he saw his
mother. Her lips tightened and her face grew white as she listened to
the story he sobbed forth.

"Now you can see that your father was right," she said at last. "Of
course, we are just as good as anybody else, but others don't think
so--because we are poor. But we have our pride, and you had better stay
and play with your own soldiers hereafter. Then I don't have to worry
about you either."

But Keith had very little pride. He continued to seek Harald's company
as before, and twice, as they about to part in front of the latter's
house, Keith asked if he couldn't come up and play for a little while.

"Don't you understand," Harald asked the second time, "that my mamma
does not think you good enough for me to play with?"

Keith had not thought of it in that way. He had learned that there were
people who looked down on his parents, just as they, in their turn,
looked down on the parents of Johan, but the idea that he himself might
be regarded equally inferior was entirely new to him. It was so strange
to him that it took him years to grasp it. And when it came into his
mind, he felt as if some one had raised a heavy stick to strike him, and
he cowered under the impending blow.



II

Christmas was approaching.

The days grew shorter and shorter, until at last a scant four hours of
daylight remained around noon. Even then a lamp was often needed
for reading.

The lead-coloured sky nearly touched the roofs. The drizzle that filled
the air most of the time seemed to enter men's minds, too, sapping their
vigour until life became a burden. Meeting on the streets, they would
cry in irritable tones:

"When will the snow come?"

It was always a tedious time for Keith. The incident with Harald made it
worse this year. Except for the daily attendance at school, he was
virtually a prisoner. Johan was to be seen only from the window, whence
Keith enviously watched him prowling about the lane, his hands buried in
the side-pockets of an old coat much too long--apparently inherited from
someone else--and his shoulders hunched as if fore-destined to support
loads of wood like those his father used to carry. If no one was in the
living-room, Keith might shout a greeting to his playmate below, but it
was not much fun, and Johan had a contemptuous way of asking why he did
not come out and play.

Yet the season was not without its compensations. Stores of every kind
were laid in to last through the winter. One might have thought that a
severance of communications with the outside world was feared. Keith
marvelled at the magnificence of it, and once in a while he asked why it
had to be done. The answers were unsatisfactory. The main reason was
that it had always been done, but he gathered also that, while it was
perfectly respectable to live from day to day during the summer, to do
so during the winter would be a distinct proof of social and economic
inferiority.

The fire wood came first--a mighty load of birch logs piled along the
house front in the lane. Two men were busy all day with saw and ax,
reducing those logs into pieces matching the fire-places in the kitchen
stove and the two glazed brick ovens in the living-room and the parlour.
Two more men piled the pieces into huge sacks and staggered with those
on their backs up the five flights of stairs to the top garret under the
peak of the house, which belonged to the Wellanders.

Keith would stand in the kitchen door watching them. First he heard the
slow clamp-clamp of ascending foot-steps. Then the man's heavy breathing
became audible, and Keith felt as if the load was resting on his own
shoulders. Finally the open top of the bag, with its bright stuffing of
newly cut birch wood, showed at the corner of the landing quite a long
time before the head beneath it came into sight. As the man crossed the
landing in front of Keith, bent almost double under his burden, a dew of
pungent perspiration would drop on the slate-coloured stones, leaving
behind a curious path of round spots. Not a word was said at that time,
but coming down the men would sometimes throw a crude jest to the
bright-eyed watcher or stop to refill their mouths with snuff out of a
little thin brass box with a mirror fitted to the inside of its cover.
The sight of the snuff filled Keith with a sense of loathing, although
his father used to put a pinch of it into his nostrils now and then, and
more than anything else it seemed to mark a distinction between himself
and those people from a world far beneath his own. Theirs was a racking
job, heavier than any other known to the boy, and one day he asked
his mother:

"Why do they care to carry all that wood for us?"

"Because we pay them, and because they are mighty glad to get the money.
Otherwise they couldn't live."

"And where does the wood come from?"

"The bank sends it as part of papa's pay."

Once more Keith was so impressed with the miraculous power of that
mysterious being which his father served and cursed and worshipped that
his mother's previous answer was lost for the time being. But it
recurred to his mind later and connected with his father's talk of
making him a carpenter. A strong prejudice against manual labour was
shaping itself in his mind.

After the wood came the victuals: a tub of butter reaching Keith to the
chin; bags of flour; barrels of potatoes and apples; hams and haunches
of dried mutton and smoked reindeer meat; and lastly packages of smaller
size and sundry contents that the mother promptly carried to the pantry
inside the parlour without letting Keith touch them.

This year--it was the winter following the Franco-Prussian war--the
preparations were rendered uncommonly impressive by the addition of a
cheese large as the moon at full. There was always plenty of cheese of
various kinds in the house: whole milk cheese carefully aged until its
flavour was like that of English Stilton or Italian Gorgonzola; skim
milk cheese stuffed with cloves and cardamom seeds; and dark brown goat
milk cheese of a cloying sweetness that Keith detested.

Cheese was more than a taste with Keith's father. It was a hobby, and
one of his few pastimes was to skirmish in strange little shops for some
particularly old and strong-smelling piece at a reasonable price. When
he brought home a bargain of that kind, he acted like a bibliophile
having just captured a rare first edition for a song, and the mother
tried hard to share his enthusiasm. But, she said once, she had to draw
the line at cheese that walked by itself. Half in jest and half in
earnest, the father maintained that the maggots were the very essence of
the cheese, and that to remove them was to lose the finest flavour. This
year the father had bought a whole fresh cheese in order to age it at
home and thus save money in two ways, the price being proportionate
to the age.

The same large-handed system prevailed in other things, though the
parents often spoke of their poverty, and though their resources
undoubtedly were very limited. Shirts, table-ware, bed-linen, china,
etc., must needs be acquired in round numbers. To have less than a dozen
of anything was to have nothing at all. The breaking of a cup was a
family disaster if it could not be replaced. Everything had to be in
sets, and to preserve these intact, the utmost care was preached and
exercised. It bred thrift and orderliness, but also an undue regard
for property.

Finally came the time for baking and other direct preparations for a
holiday season that in the good old days used to last from Christmas Eve
to January 13th known as the Twentieth Christmas Day, when everybody
"danced the Yule out." What interested Keith most in this part of the
proceedings was the making of gingersnaps according to a recipe
transmitted to his mother from bygone generations and cherished by her
as a precious family secret. A whole day was set aside for the purpose
and at the end of it they had a big, bulging earthen jar filled to the
brim. Keith used to boast to other children of those dainties that, in
addition to their taste, had the fascination of many different
shapes--hearts, crowns, lilies, clubs, diamonds, baskets, and so on.
They really deserved all the praise they got, and he had so little to
boast of on the whole. The jar stood on the floor in the pantry back of
the parlour, and once in a while Keith found his way to it without
maternal permission, although, as a rule, he was little given to
lawbreaking.

One morning three or four days before Christmas Lena was heard calling
from the kitchen:

"Keith, Keith, come and look!"

Eager as always when the slightest excitement was promised, the boy
started so suddenly that his little table was upset with its whole
population of tin soldiers and his mother was moved to remark that "it
was no use behaving as if the house were on fire."

"Look at the snow," said Lena, pointing to the window when Keith reached
the kitchen, relieved at not having had to pick up the spilled toys
before he could go.

Huge, wet, feathery flakes were dropping lazily from the sky. Little by
little they increased in numbers and fell more quickly. At last they
formed a moving veil through which the building at the other end of the
courtyard could barely be seen.

Later in the day Keith was permitted to look out through one of the
front windows. The whole world had changed and looked much brighter in
spite of the failing light. The Quay was covered by a carpet of white
that made the waters beyond look doubly dark and cold. The trees on the
opposite shore looked as if they had been painted from the topmost twig
to the root. Down in the lane, two of the workers in the distillery were
pelting each other with snowballs while a third one was shouting at the
top of his voice:

"We'll have a white Christmas this year, thank heaven."

That same evening Keith's long cherished dream of visiting the open-air
Christmas Fair at Great Square was to come true at last. Like other
affairs of its kind, it had been reduced by the modern shop to a mere
shadow of its former glorious self, and it was kept up only out of
regard for ancient tradition. Keith had been told that it was nothing
but a lot of open booths displaying cheap toys and cheaper candy. To
Keith toys were toys and candy candy, no matter what the price and
quality, and so he kept on begging leave to go, until the night in
question his parents, who were going out with friends, deemed it better
to let him see for himself. And so Lena was ordered to take charge of
the expedition.

Lena and Keith were dressed and ready to start when the mother came
into the kitchen to give the boy a farewell kiss as usual. He was in
high spirits, but fidgety with some unexpressed wish.

"What is it, Keith," asked the mother, recognizing the symptoms.

"I want some money," he whispered into her ear.

"Go and ask papa."

"No, you ask him."

That was what always happened, and in the end the mother voiced the
boy's plea to the father, who just then appeared in the door to the
living-room. He was in a good humour and promptly reached into his
pocket. Unfortunately Keith discovered at that crucial moment that one
of his shoe laces had become untied.

"Please, mamma, help me," he said, putting his foot on a chair to enable
her to reach it more easily.

"That settles it," exclaimed the father with a darkening face as he
handed Keith a few small copper coins. "That is all you will get now. A
boy of five who makes his mother tie his shoe strings ought not to have
anything at all."

Keith took the coins silently and went with Lena to the fair, but he saw
nothing worth seeing, and he never wanted to go again. Uneasily he
prowled among the booths trying as a matter of duty to find something so
cheap that his scant hoard would buy it. At last he succeeded in getting
a little box of tin soldiers of poorest quality for one-third less than
the price put on it It was one of the few times in his life when he
found himself able to haggle over the cost of a thing.

From the first he found fault with the new addition to his army, and one
day not long afterwards he charged the whole regiment with cowardice in
the face of the enemy. A drumhead court martial was held on the spot,
and the verdict was a foregone conclusion. The culprits were found
guilty in a body and sentenced to immediate execution. Then Keith
possessed himself surreptitiously of the family hammer, and when his
mother came to investigate the noise he was making the whole offensive
regiment had been reduced to scraps. Never before or after did Keith as
a general go to such extremes on behalf of military morale.

But many, many years later, when he stopped for the first time at a
typical English hotel, he found himself horribly embarrassed by the
assistance forced on him by the obligatory valet.



III

In Sweden the principal celebration with its distribution of gifts takes
place late on Christmas Eve.

Long before that day Keith began to watch every package brought into the
house. Soon he noticed several that disappeared quickly without having
been opened. Nor did it take his shrewd little mind long to figure out
that they must have been stowed away on the upper shelf of the pantry
back of the parlour. This was an excellent hiding-place because the
shelf in question was fully six feet above the floor and on a level with
the lintel of the doorway, so that its contents seemed as much out of
reach as they were out sight from below.

One day, however, Keith succeeded in getting into the parlour when both
parents were out. The night before his father had come home with an
unusually large and queerly shaped package under his arm and had taken
it straight into the parlour. The boy's curiosity was at fever heat and
got the better of his customary inertia in the face of explicit
prohibitions. Having dragged a heavy wooden chair into the pantry, he
placed its tall back directly against the shelves. The crosspieces in
the back of the chair formed rungs on which he climbed up to the top
shelf. It was quite a feat for a very small boy, but the slight timidity
that characterized him as a rule was totally forgotten for the time.

There was the mystifying package together with many others. He could
even touch it with his hand. In spite of its size, it was very light. It
was wider at the bottom than at the top, and it sounded hollow when he
knocked at it. His little brain worked at high pressure, but not a guess
came out of it that was at all plausible. Finally Keith had to climb
down no wiser than he was before. His failure had one advantage. It
freed him from all of guilt. It served also to keep his expectations at
an unusually high pitch, so that when the morning of the great day
arrived at last, it seemed as if he were facing twelve long hours of
actual torture.

Every one was very busy preparing not only for the feast of the evening,
but for the two coming holidays. Christmas Day in Sweden being followed
by a Second Christmas Day, equal to the first one in leisure if not in
sanctity. No one had any time to spare for the boy, who found himself in
the way wherever he turned. In the end he was ordered pointblank out of
the kitchen, where his mother, Granny and the servant girl needed all
the space at their disposal. The door to the parlour was closed although
the lodger had left town for the holidays, and so nothing but the
living-room remained. There Keith whiled away the long hours in vain
speculation on the contents of the mysterious package.

He tried to recall what things he had wished for during the year. He
felt sure that nothing of the kind could be in the package. Any desire
openly expressed was disregarded by his father, Keith thought, if not
actually resented. The reason given was that a Christmas present should
be a complete surprise, and if the recipient had openly asked for it,
there could be no talk of surprising him. Of course, Keith could whisper
what he wanted into his mother's ear now and then but always with the
provision that she must convey the proper information to the father as
coming from herself.

Even this process of elimination failed, however, and so the day dragged
on interminably, with no help from without for a mind weary of waiting.
The customary dinner was passed up. Everybody snatched a bite off the
kitchen table without breaking away from the work. Three or four times
people arrived with packages from relatives or friends. Each visitor had
to be treated, even though he be a stranger of the humblest character.
Then dull monotony reigned once more, and Keith resumed his fidgeting
back and forth between the kitchen door and his own corner. The old toys
were simply unendurable....

It had long been dark when the father returned home at last, laden with
parcels and tired out by personal delivery of Christmas gifts to the
various members of the family. His face was slightly flushed and he
talked with unusual eagerness. An atmosphere of reckless good-will
surrounded him, and when he made a remark about there being no presents,
even Keith knew it to be facetious.

The last hour was the longest. The father and the mother had withdrawn
to the parlour and closed the door behind them. The girl was setting the
table and couldn't be disturbed. Granny was nervous and irritable
because she knew that she would be forced to join the rest at the table
that night. Keith felt like a disembodied soul let loose in infinite
space without goal or purpose.

Toward eight o'clock the parlour door opened and Keith was called in. A
tiny Christmas tree stood on a table in a corner, glistening with lights
and multicoloured paper festoons. It represented a great concession,
because neither one of the parents cared much for the trouble involved.
If there had been a number of children in the family, they said, then it
would have been another matter. The truth was that Keith didn't care
very much either. He clapped hands and shouted excitedly, of course, but
his glances went sideways to the big sofa, where stood a huge hamper
piled to twice its own height with parcels, all wrapped in snow-white
paper and sealed with red sealing wax. The air of the room was charged
with the rich smell of newly melted wax, and to Keith that smell was
always the essence of Christmas, its chief symbol and harbinger.

During those few minutes in the parlour a dozen tall candles had been
lighted in the living-room, transforming the place that a moment before
seemed so dreary. The dining table was opened to its full length and
placed across the middle of the room, at right angles to the
chaiselongue where Keith slept nights. Cut glass dishes and silver-ware
shone in the light reflected from the spotlessly white table cloth. In
the centre stood the Christmas layer cake, its body four inches thick
and its top glistening with red and yellow and green pieces of
candied fruit.

Then began the little comedy regularly enacted every Christmas.

"Isn't Granny coming," the father asked. Then he turned to Lena. "Tell
her we are ready."

"She says she doesn't want to come in," Lena reported after a hasty
visit to the kitchen.

"You go and ask her for me, Keith," was the father's next suggestion.

"Thank you, dear," Granny said when Keith came to her with his message.
"But you tell your father that I think the kitchen is a much better
place for a useless old hag like myself."

"Suppose you go," the father said to his wife on hearing Keith's
modified version of Granny's reply.

"She says she really won't come in," the mother explained a minute
later. "You had better go out and ask her yourself, Carl. It is the one
thing she cannot resist."

The father went with a broad grin on his face. Keith laughed loudly and
nervously, his eyes on the huge cake. But the mother said
apologetically to Lena:

"Mamma is so funny about coming in here, although she knows how much we
want her."

"Here she is now," said Lena.

And the father appeared with Granny on his arm, and Granny was all
dressed up in her best skirt of black silk thick as cloth, with a cap of
black lace on her head.

"Really, I can't see what you want with an old thing like me in here,"
she continued protesting as she was being led to her seat beside Keith.
The girl sat opposite Granny, and the mother beside the girl, facing
Keith. The father, on that one occasion, always occupied the
chaiselongue at the short end of the table, with the mother on his right
and Keith on his left. Beside him stood the hamper with its mountainous
pile of parcels.

Keith said grace with folded hands and bent head, and, of course, he had
to say it twice because the first time he swallowed half the words in
his eagerness to get through quickly. Then the meal began.

It opened with a light _smörgasbord_, hors d'oeuvres, literally rendered
sandwich-table: caviar, anchovy, sardines, shavings of smoked salmon,
slices of bologna, and so on. With it the father took a _snaps_ of
Swedish gin or _brännvin_, and after much pressing Granny consented to
take one, too. The main course consisted of _lutfisk_: dried and salted
codfish that had been soaked in water for twenty-four hours to take out
the salt and then boiled until it was tender as cranberry jelly. It was
served with boiled potatoes and a gravy made of cream and chopped
hard-boiled eggs. It was followed by _risgrynsgröt_: rice cooked in milk
and served with a cover of sugar and cinnamon. Wherever Swedes go, they
must have those two dishes on Christmas Eve. They have had them since
the days when Christmas was a pagan celebration of the winter solstice,
when dried codfish was the staple winter food, and when rice was the
rarest of imported delicacies.

Keith did not become interested until the rice appeared and the father
declared that no one could taste it until he or she had "rhymed over the
rice." Lena had to begin, and blushingly she read:

"To cook rice is a great feat, especially to get it sweet."

Whereupon everybody applauded, and the mother followed:

"Those who don't like rice are worse than little mice."

The father made them all laugh by saying:

"The rice is sweet and looks very neat, but now I want to eat."

The cutting of the cake, with its coating of sugar and its many layers
of custard ... the wine, port and sherry, poured from tall glass
decanters with silver labels hung about their necks to show which was
which ... the blushing native apples and the figs from distant sunlit
shores ... the almonds and raisins that tested best when eaten together
... the candy and the caramels ... the absence of restraint and reproof
... the freedom to indulge one's utmost appetite ... the smiles and the
pleasant words and the jokes sprung by the father ... and in the midst
of it all a pause laden with rose-coloured melancholy....

"Why can it not be Christmas every day," asked Keith suddenly.

"Because Christmas then would be like any other day," the father
replied, reaching for the first parcel which was always for Keith.

One by one they were handed out. Each one was elaborately addressed and
furnished with a rhymed or unrhymed tag that often hid a sting beneath
its clownish exterior. The father read the inscription aloud before he
handed each parcel to its recipient, who had to open it and let its
contents be admired by all before another gift was distributed.

The table became crowded. The floor was a litter of paper. Lena giggled.
Granny's cap was down on one ear. Keith could not sit still on
his chair.

"To Master Keith Wellander," the father read out. "A friendly warning,
to be remembered in the morning and all through the day. He who slops at
meals is a pig that squeals and hurts his parents alway."

Keith took the parcel with less than usual zest. It was rectangular and
very heavy. For a moment he hesitated to open it. There was something
about its inscription that puzzled and bothered him.

At last the wrapper came off, and he gazed uncomprehendingly at a large
piece of wood hollowed out like a canoe.

"A boat ..." he stammered.

"A trough," rejoined his father, a strange, almost embarrassed look
appearing on his face. "This is Christmas and I want you to be happy,
but you must learn to eat decently, and I thought this might serve you
as a lesson and a reminder."

Keith said nothing. He sat looking at that piece of wood as if it were a
dragon that had swallowed the whole Christmas in a single gulp. He
wanted to cry, but for the first time he seemed to feel a pride that
forbade him to do so....

"Master Keith Wellander," the father read out again with evident haste
and in a voice which he tried to make very jolly, "When beaten in the
open field, this will be my trusty shield."

It was _the_ package--and the trough was forgotten.

The boy trembled with excitement. His hands tore vainly at the paper
cover, which, in the end, had to be removed by the father.

On the table, fully revealed at last, stood a real fortress of
cardboard, with a drawbridge that could be raised, and a tower in the
centre, and at the top of it a flagstaff flying the Swedish colours.

It was his heart's most cherished desire, the thing that had seemed so
unattainable that he had deemed it useless to whisper it into his
mother's ear.

For a long while he did not move at all, but just looked and looked,
seemingly afraid to touch the new toy. Then a warm flood of joy shot
through him, and suddenly he was seized by an irresistible impulse to
kiss his father--which was a most unusual endearment between them. As he
put his hand on the table to get off the chair, it touched the trough,
and once more his mood changed. He seemed to stiffen, and all he could
do was to hold out his hand and whisper:

"Thank you very much, papa!"



IV

On Christmas Day morning everybody rose while it was still pitch dark
outside. After a hasty cup of coffee, the parents and Keith set off for
Great Church to attend _julotta_--yule matins--an early service held
only that one day of the year.

More snow had fallen, and now it was freezing, so that every step they
took produced a peculiar, almost metallic crunching. From every quarter
silent crowds in their holiday best streamed toward the old church. They
seemed very solemn, but Keith sensed the happy spirit underlying their
outward sedateness. It filled him with a wild desire to romp, and it was
merely the awe of his father's presence that kept him in check.

The church was packed, but they found good seats. Keith had eyes for one
thing only: the Star of Bethlehem that blazed above the screen of darkly
green spruces surrounding the altar. All the rest of it was lost on him.

Then the organ music burst forth, and for a moment he cowered as under a
blow. It was too much of a novelty, and the vibrations touched his
supersensitive nerves annoyingly. After a while he grew more accustomed
to it, but he did not like it, and he said so loudly enough to bring him
a stern glance from his father and smiles from some of the people in the
pew ahead. During the brief sermon he slept peacefully.

As soon as they were home again, the fortress was brought out and
preparations made for a great siege. In the midst of it he left his
corner to put a question to the mother, who was dozing over a book in
her easy chair.

"How could papa know that I wanted it," he asked, and she knew what he
was thinking of.

"Don't you remember," she answered smiling slyly, "how you came home one
day last summer and talked about something you had seen in a window on
West Long Street, and papa was listening."

"So long ago," mused Keith, "and I didn't know he heard it."

"Oh, yes, he heard, and he remembered. You don't understand papa. He
doesn't want you to ask for things because he finds it such a pleasure
to figure out what you want and give it to you unexpectedly."

Keith returned to his corner thinking hard, as was his wont at times.
The siege was postponed. He took out the trough and studied it
carefully. It would make a good boat. Then he put it down and sat for a
while looking at the little fortress--so like the one he could see when
he looked out of their front windows. His heart swelled, and with a rush
that nearly upset his little table, he made for his father in the
parlour, crawled up on his lap, put both arms about his neck, and kissed
him. And to his surprise he was not repelled. But a moment later his
father put him down on the floor and said in a voice that sounded a
little choked:

"Go back and play with your soldiers now."

Then came dinner, always the same on Christmas Day: _smörgasbord_;
roasted fresh ham with mashed potatoes and tiny cubes of Swedish
turnips fried in butter; rice and milk; cake and wine.

And the day ended as it had begun, happily and peacefully. Never had the
boy felt more warmly toward his father. But at dinner the next day,
which was also a holiday so that the father was at home, Keith happened
to spill something on the table cloth.

"Remember your Christmas present," said the father sharply. "You are old
enough to behave properly at table, and if you won't, we shall let you
eat in your own corner and eat out of the trough."

During the rest of that day Keith could not play with his fortress. Once
he took the trough to the window that happened to be open and
contemplated the possibility of dropping it into the lane. But his
courage failed him.

It stayed with him as part of his little stock of toys, and gradually it
came to be viewed with a certain amount of indifference. But on the rare
occasions when he was permitted to have a playmate at home, he always
managed to hide the trough under his mother's bureau. And even the mere
consciousness of its presence there would sometimes set his
cheeks burning.



V

It was summer again. The school was closed. Keith's pleas to be allowed
to play with Johan became impassioned. Consequently his parents were
pleased when Aunt Brita asked if Keith could spend a few weeks with
them in a little cottage they had hired on an island halfway between
Stockholm and the open sea.

To Keith this was a tremendous adventure--his first excursion from home,
and almost his first acquaintance with real country life. In fact, the
impressions of the journey itself were so many and so novel that his
mind couldn't retain anything at all. The same thing happened over and
over again during the earlier part of his life, so that out of that
epoch-making summer visit, for instance, only a single slight incident
took up a lasting abode in his memory.

The cottage stood in the middle of the island, which was so small that a
fifteen-minute walk took them down to the nearest shore. Thither they
went one afternoon not long after his arrival to bathe--his aunt, his
cousin Carl who was a year younger than himself, Keith, a couple of
other children of the same age, and Mina, an eighteen-year old girl
living with Keith's uncle and aunt in a position halfway between ward
and servant. Across the fields and along shaded wood paths they ran
joyously to a sheltered bay with a sandy beach from which the open fjord
could be seen in the distance. The children stripped helter-skelter and
went into the shallow water as nature had made them, but Mina, who was
to assist them, had for want of bathing suit put on a starched white
petticoat. The upper part of her body was bare, showing two beautifully
pointed breasts.

Keith looked and looked at those breasts until Mina noticed him and
actually began to b

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