Part 33 (1/2)

He learned that physically and spiritually he had courted death, and what is worse than death. And suddenly the thought of that gentle-faced, sweet-tempered young man in the parlour leaped into his memory. But the image it brought him was not that of a human form stretched stiffly within the black boards of a coffin. What he saw and what froze him with horror was the hollow temples and sallow cheeks and drooping jaws and bent back and trembling limbs of the human wreck that was still counted a living man.

Worse than that image, however, and worse than any thought of punishment by powers not within his actual ken, was the book's d.a.m.ning imputation of shame incurred, of unworthiness proved, of inferiority so deep that no words could adequately picture it.

All that was most himself wanted to rise in wild rebellion against conclusions that found no support in anything he had actually experienced so far. He wanted to refuse belief. He sought for escapes as if the fulfilment of the doom p.r.o.nounced by the book had been a matter of minutes. But there was the book, and to back it suddenly appeared a line of experiences out of his own life.

Perhaps those who would not let him visit their homes had only too good cause for refusal. Perhaps, after all, it was not his father's position but something about himself that had caused the parents of Harald, of Loth, and now of Murray, to act in exactly the same way. Perhaps Dally had reasons for not letting him become _primus_ which, out of his soul's kindness, he never told even to Keith himself. Perhaps the reason he always felt isolated and out of touch with his schoolmates lay in their instinctive recognition of his nature....

In the end he replaced the book with a firm determination never to look at it again. But the poison was in his mind, and the book no longer mattered.

IX

The game learned behind the big rock must never be played again--that much was certain!

But all resolves proved vain. Fight as he may, the end was inevitably the same.

Previously he had been the player, and had thought no more of it. Now he was being played with, and this new form of the game kept him see-sawing incessantly between ecstasy and agony, between the relief of yielding and the remorse at having yielded.

His life was an unending conflict, and in the presence of that ever renewed struggle within, by forces that seemed alien to his own self, all else lost significance.

And there was not a thing or a person within reach that could offer an antidote to the self-contempt corroding his soul's integrity.

X

Going to school grew very hard for a while. He could barely look his schoolmates in the face for fear that they might read in his eyes what sort of a chap he was. At times, on his walks to or from school with Murray, a faintness would seize him at the mere thought that his friend somehow might have guessed the truth. And he sent timidly envious side-glances at one lucky enough to be raised above all temptation. For neither his recollections of the gang gathered about the big rock nor the more recent light shed on such things by Johan had the slightest influence on his conception of himself as the sole black sheep in a flock of perhaps soiled but nevertheless washable white ones.

After a while the poignancy of his emotions became blunted by familiarity, and mere weariness forced him to accept himself on a reduced level. A sort of new equilibrium was established within him, but it was primarily based on indifference. Nothing really mattered. Effort was useless. Things merely happened. No one could help what happened.

And in this fatalism, so utterly foreign to his ardent, supersensitive nature, he found a certain momentary sense of peace.

He went about his daily cla.s.sroom tasks as in a dream, doing mechanically what he was asked, and dropping his effort as soon as the demand for it ceased. Nothing happened during the lessons to indicate that the teachers noticed any change in him or were in any manner dissatisfied with him. Perhaps he was saved by an occasional flaring up of interest that drew from him flashes of that brightness of mind that had won Dally and given him the reputation of an exceptional pupil.

But as the spring term drew nearer its close, he found it more and more difficult to keep up a pretence at attention. More and more he sank into mere drifting, and he whose pride had been really to know, now trusted to luck like any dullard with a head unfit for studying. Worse still and more significant, he began to find excuses for staying home from school.

He who had never known what it was to be sick, now developed disturbing symptom after another--headaches and colds and digestive troubles in endless succession. Most of the time these symptoms yielded quickly at the mere sight of the castor oil which was his mother's favourite remedy and the taste of which Keith hated more than anything else in the world.

It was the one thing that stood inexorably between his growing indolence and the luxury of being ill.

With commencement almost in sight, all sorts of written examinations were demanded. These he disliked additionally because his handwriting never had developed in proportion to his mental capacity. No matter how he strove, the letters remained childishly awkward. No two of them seemed to point in the same direction. Not even his futile efforts at singing could fill him with a more humiliating sense of inferiority.

All his various resistances were brought into concerted action when at last the teacher in Swedish ordered him to prepare two brief original compositions on quite simple themes. In the days of Dally he would have revelled in such a task. Now it appalled him. His head was empty. The mere idea of trying to write about such things as the discovery of America and the beauties of nature seemed silly. There was any number of books, besides, that said anything you could ever hope to say on either subject.

The end of it was that he produced an indisposition real enough not only to convince his mother but to make himself willing to face the ordeal of castor oil. Thanks to the oil he was able to stay in bed the better part of two days. Those were the last two days before his Swedish compositions were to be delivered. He knew that if they were not delivered, he would get no mark in that subject, and this would prevent his graduation to a higher grade.

In that dilemma he conceived the brilliant idea of making his mother write the compositions for him, and he actually succeeded in persuading her to do so. He prompted her a little, but she did the main part of the work, and the handwriting was hers. Finally he got her to bring them up to school with the explanation that he was too sick to sit up and write, but that she had taken down what he dictated. He did not even look at what she wrote, and it never occurred to him to doubt her ability of doing it far better than he could. When it was all over, he experienced a tremendous sense of relief, and this was much enhanced by his mother's willingness to let the father remain in complete ignorance of what had happened.

Nothing was said to him when he showed up at school again. His first inkling of trouble came with the return of his copy book. It was full of marks and corrections in red ink. As he looked at these in a stunned fas.h.i.+on, he realized for the first time that his mother's spelling and punctuation would have been deemed unsatisfactory in a second grade pupil. At first he did not even consider the bearing of this discovery on his own fate. He could think of only one thing, namely that another blow had been dealt to his conception of his mother as a superior being.

He actually felt ashamed on her behalf. Then came the thought of what the teacher must have thought....