The Soul of a Child Part 29

"Three boys were drowned skating during the lunch hours," continued Bergman breathlessly. "Two were in my cla.s.s--Hill and Samson, you know.

The third, Dahlin, was in your own cla.s.s."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At that moment the Rector entered, long overdue to give them an hour in Latin--an hour of which a goodly part already was gone. The boys dropped into their seats. A murmur of expectation pa.s.sed through the cla.s.s.

Every eye was on the Rector's face which seemed to twitch in a peculiar fas.h.i.+on.

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

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

"Go on--go on!"

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

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

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

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

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

XXI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXII

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XXIII

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

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

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

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

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