Part 20 (1/2)
Gradually Johan became more and more indifferent and reluctant as far as that game was concerned. Dull as he was, he seemed to have some sort of scruples that Keith couldn't understand. More and more Keith was thrown back on himself. Once more a new set of interests began to take the lion's share of his attention, although the game learned behind the big rock would rea.s.sert its puzzling fascination from time to time.
XIII
His eagerness to read and his lack of reading matter had for some time presented a growing problem. The books of his father--and there were quite a number of them--were taboo for a double reason: first, because they were not held safe for him to read, and, secondly, because his father regarded them as his particularly private property that must not be touched by any one else.
So he fell back on the old Bible and chance pickings. The stirring and bloodcurdling stories in the Books of the Maccabees were his favourites.
He read them over and over, and he tried to dramatize that unbroken record of battles with the help of his tin soldiers. But the reason he could return to those stories so often was that he began studying them while reading was still a partly mastered art, and half the time he was more interested in the game of reading, so to speak, than in what he read.
A year in the new school had made a great change. He read anything with ease, and while he read rather slowly without ever skipping, his mind took in what he read quickly and thoroughly so that going back over a thing once perused became less and less attractive. He wanted new material for his mind, and he wanted it in steadily increasing quant.i.ties.
One day he made a great discovery. Books could be borrowed from other people. One of his schoolmates came to school with a wonderful ill.u.s.trated copy of ”Don Quixote” arranged for children. Keith went into ecstasies over it. The mail-clad figure of the Knight of the Rueful Countenance on the front cover was to him the beckoning guardian of a world of wonders, the very existence of which he had never before suspected. Tears came into his eyes at last as he stared hopelessly at the object of his newly born desire. As a rule he blurted out any wish he might have, but the thing was clearly too precious to ask as a gift or acquire by bartering, and he had never heard of any other way of getting it.
”Mercy,” cried the other boy after having watched him for a while. ”You can take it home and read it, if you only promise to bring it back.”
For a moment Keith was too overcome to speak. Then he became hysterical with joy. The rest of the school day pa.s.sed in a trance. He ran a good part of the way home. Arrived there, he almost forgot to give his mother and Granny the inevitable kiss of greeting. And he might even have refused to be bothered by such a thing but for his fear of being put under some discipline that might prevent him from plunging straightway into the unexplored country of make-believe.
On seeing the book, his mother hesitated for a moment, but soon she was delighted with the results it produced. Keith had no thought of asking leave to see Johan that day. He was lost to the world around him. Not a sound was heard from him. There was no nervous running about in futile search for ”something to do.” The home was as quiet as if he had been away, and yet there he was, safely ensconced in his own corner, where his mother could watch him all the time.
Everybody was happy until the father returned home and heard of what had happened. Having looked the book over for a moment, while the boy watched him with a shrinking heart, he said at last:
”You must return it tomorrow, and I don't want you to borrow any more books. You may spoil it in some way, and then you will have to pay for it, and where are you to get the money?”
Keith tried hard not to cry, but the blow was too overwhelming. He was driven out of his new paradise after a tantalizing glimpse at it. And he could not understand why. So his tears must needs flow freely and his throat contracted convulsively with half-choked sobs, and the final result of it was that he was ordered to bed at once. That ended his last chance of abstracting a few more thrills from the borrowed treasure.
Of course, the book was returned the next day. Keith had not yet arrived at the point where the evasion of a parental decree seemed conceivable.
And to the sorrow of missing the promised enjoyment was added the humiliation of confessing what had happened at home. To lie about it was another thing that never occurred to him, and to act without explanation was quite foreign to his nature.
A few sad days followed. Then his life resumed its customary tone, and it was as if the lank, but to him far from ludicrous, shape of Don Quixote had never crossed his horizon. And soon after Christmas recurred once more.
Among the many packages falling to his share, there were two of a shape that suggested the possibility of more tin soldiers. But when he held them in his hand, they failed to yield to pressure as would a cardboard box. Curiosity turned into genuine suspense. And when at last two books lay in front of him as his own, with the implied permission that he could read them to his heart's content whenever he chose, a pang of something like real love for his father shot through his heart.
Those two little volumes became at once his most priceless possession and the foundation of his first library. To others they might appear quite commonplace books, without much value from any point of view. To him they were pa.s.sports to a realm of action and freedom and colour, where he could roam at will in search of everything he missed in real life. One was bound in white with the picture of an African lion hunt on the front cover. The other one had a plain brown binding. Both had coloured ill.u.s.trations and contained stories of hunting and travelling adventures in all sorts of out-of-the-way places. There were tales of lion hunting with Arabs and tiger hunting in the jungles of India, of whaling in the Arctic and hair-breadth escapes from giant snakes in South America, of cruises in southern seas and caravaning across the high plateaus of Central Asia.
One story in particular stuck in his mind, and more particularly one little detail out of that story. It was one of comparative repose and few sensational incidents relating the perfectly peaceful, but nevertheless strange and interesting experiences of a European traveller through some desert region back of the Caspian Sea. Arriving at a nomad camp far away from all civilization, this traveller was met with touching hospitality. During a formal visit to the chieftain of the tribe, he was offered tea. With the tea was handed him a bowl containing a single lump of sugar. In European fas.h.i.+on he picked up this and dropped it into his cup. Not a word was said, but something told him that he had committed some dreadful mistake. By and by, as he watched the others, he understood. Sugar was so rare that to use it in ordinary fas.h.i.+on was out of question, and so the solitary lump served was meant to be licked in turn by each, and he, as the guest of honour, had been given the first chance. To Keith's mind that story seemed as clearly realized as if he had played a part in it himself. And what occupied him more than anything else was the pitiful existence of those poor nomads to whom even such a common thing as sugar was an almost unattainable luxury. It was his first lesson in human sympathy, and it was typical of his own existence and bent that it should have come out of a book.
XIV
From that day one of his main objects in life was to acquire books. He had little pride as a rule, in spite of all his sensitiveness, and when books were concerned he had none at all. Having discovered that a friend of the family, who until then had been regarded with supreme indifference, held some sort of clerical position in a publis.h.i.+ng house, his devotion to Uncle Lander suddenly became effusive and he begged so shamelessly and so successfully that at last his father had to intercede. Out of a half-hour sermon on things that must not be done, Keith grasped only that, as usual, he could not do what he wanted. Money was still a mystery to him, and he never suspected that Uncle Lander would have to pay his employers for every book taken out of the stock.
The sole check to his pa.s.sion sprang logically from the very fervor of that pa.s.sion: a book being such a precious object to himself, he could not dream of taking it away from somebody else. As in a flash the true spirit of his father's objection to borrowed books was revealed to him.
That objection became his own and stuck to him through life: if he liked a borrowed book, the inescapable duty of returning it was too painful to be faced, and if he didn't like it, there was no reason for borrowing it. Books became sacred things to him, to be cherished and protected as nothing else. The loss of one was a catastrophe.
Soon he had a small library of his own, kept on a shelf in the huge wardrobe that stood in the vestibule leading to the parlour. Made up at first of odds and ends bearing no real relation to his desire for reading matter, it gradually acquired a certain h.o.m.ogeneity reflecting the boy's state of mind. Books of travel and adventure continued to prevail for a long while. Equally favoured were stories dealing with Norse Mythology and the heroic legends of his race. The grim record of the Niebelungs was familiar to him at the age of eight, and the first heroes of his wors.h.i.+p were young Siegfried of divine aspect and Dietrich of Bern, who seemed to the boy the final embodiment of worldly wisdom.
To these should be added Garibaldi, of whose South American campaigns, so touchingly shared by the faithful Anita, he read graphic accounts in an odd volume of an ill.u.s.trated weekly. The word liberty first came to him from the lips of the picturesque Italian, while Anita and the women of the old Germanic sagas struck him by their contrast to his mother.