Among the less intimate friends of his mother was a young widow with a little girl about a year younger than Keith. For some reason unknown to the boy, those two came to see his mother several times that Spring. It was the first time in his life Keith met a girl on familiar terms.

Clara was slender and elfish, with a wealth of yellow tresses falling down her back. She was tender and gay, too, and Keith liked to hear her laugh. When they played, she was always ready to fall in with any whim of Keith's.

One afternoon, when the days were growing longer, Clara's mother asked permission to leave her with the Wellanders while she attended to some business in the neighbourhood. Keith's mother was occupied in the kitchen in some manner making her wish to have the door to the living-room closed. Thus the two children were left to play by themselves.

He never could remember how it began, and he could not tell what put the idea in his head....

It was a new game, and she played it as readily as any other he might have proposed. They had crawled so far into his own corner by the window that they were almost hidden behind mamma's bureau.

At first they whispered to each other, eagerly as children do, but only with the eagerness they might have shown if playing hide-and-seek. Then he raised her little dress, and she didn't seem to mind. He also undid his own dress, and they studied each other's bodies, noting the differences.

The end of it was that they laid down together on the floor. He put his mouth to hers and hugged her just as tightly as he could. When they had been lying in way for a while, he whispered to her:

"Isn't it nice?"

And she dutifully whispered back: "It is!"

A few minutes later they were playing with his tin soldiers, and soon after Clara's mother returned to take her away.

During their entire play both doors had remained closed. Keith was quite sure of that. He had looked before he started the new game, although he was not aware of trespa.s.sing on prohibited territory.

Afterwards he felt rather uneasy. There was a distinct sense of risk attaching to that game, and he wondered whether Clara might tell her mother. At the same time the thought of what he had done filled him with inexplicable satisfaction, as if, in some way, he had put something over on the grown-ups.

As for his own mother--she seemed to be watching him with unusual concern during the next few days, and he could not escape a suspicion that she knew. Closed doors did not seem to prevent grown-up people from knowing what children did.

At the same time he wondered why he and Clara should not be playing as they had done. There was really nothing to it. And the comparisons they had made took no hold of his imagination. The differences revealed he accepted as he accepted anything that had no direct bearing on his own happiness.

As far as he could recall afterwards, he never saw Clara again. Nor did he seem to miss her.

X

Summer again.

The incident with Clara was forgotten. Yet Keith had a sense of being watched a little more closely than usual. He was rarely permitted to go out alone after his return from school. And he was scolded if he ever was late in coming home.

There was mystery in the air. The parents talked together a good deal in a way that made Keith understand they were talking about him and did not want to be overheard.

As soon as school closed the secret became revealed. He would be sent into the real country for the summer to board with perfect strangers.

"Any children," was Keith's first question. Yes, a couple of sons in the house, and probably one or two more boys from the city, boarders like Keith.

It seemed the thing had been planning for a long time. The mother said something about the necessity for Keith of going where everything was clean and wholesome--the air, the food, the people. The boy knew that she had been worrying about him for some reason he could not guess.

An advertis.e.m.e.nt in a newspaper had led his mother on the track of what she wanted. She read it to him--"a religious family with children of their own would take a few well-behaved boys of good family for the summer months and give them a real home and as good as parental care."

It turned out to be the s.e.xton of a country parish on the northern sh.o.r.e of Lake Maelaren who had devised this means of eking out his probably limited professional income. The ensuing correspondence had proved quite satisfactory. The mother was evidently pleased. It was almost as good as staying with the pastor himself, she said.

Keith knew what a pastor was. He had several times heard one preach from a funny hanging box in Great Church, and he thought of him as a man who was always dressed in black and who was even more serious than the father. But it did not bother him, partly because he realized that, after all, a s.e.xton was not the same as a pastor, and partly because his mind was full of something else. It was not the country, although his previous experience of it, when he was staying with his aunt, had given him a rather favourable impression. No, what occupied him to the exclusion of everything else was the thought that he would be able to play with other children all day long, and that there would be no one to pull him away just as a game was becoming really interesting.

Exciting days of preparation followed. And finally the day of departure dawned.

The greater part of the journey was to be made by boat to the little town of Enkoping, where Mr. Swensson, the s.e.xton, would be waiting with a team. The mother could not go along, and so Keith was placed in the hands of some people going the same way, who promised to look after him and see that he did not fall into wrong hands when the steamer landed.

Keith had to stand in the stern of the boat and wave his handkerchief as long as his mother remained visible. Then he was free, at last, to surrender himself to the novelty of his situation. And as always upon such occasions, when new impressions came crowding in upon him, the record became too blurred for clear remembrance. This was true not only of the trip on the steamer, the arrival at Enkoping with its little old-fashioned red houses, the meeting with Mr. Swanson, the drive of thirty miles or more inland, the arrival at the s.e.xton's house not far from a white spired church, and the introduction to a seemingly endless number of new faces, but of the whole long summer. A couple of months sufficed to wipe out of his memory everything but a few comparatively trivial incidents and impressions.

Only one name escaped the general oblivion--that of the s.e.xton himself.

Only one view left a lasting image behind--that of a tremendously large boulder, a memento of the glacial period, that rose like a crude monument right in the centre of a tilled field almost, but not quite out of sight of the house. Only one face would come back in recognizable shape when he tried to recall that rather momentous summer--that of a boy a few years older than himself, who was the leader of all the games played around the big rock in the open field.

XI

Quite a gang of boys gathered daily about the big rock, generally on the farther side of it where they could not be seen from the house. Beyond the rock in that direction was nothing but an open field, and then the woods, rarely disturbed by a visitor. Thus they were really more safe than indoors as no one could approach them without being detected while still far away.

The two sons of the s.e.xton were there, and a couple of boys from the city besides Keith, and three or four sons of neighbouring farmers. They ranged in ages from eight to eleven or twelve. Keith was the baby, but this was never held up against him. He was commonly treated as an equal, which raised his self-confidence tremendously, but it had also a somewhat embarra.s.sing effect when the others seemed to take for granted that he knew as much as they concerning the matters that most occupied their minds--to judge by their talk at least.

The oldest of the lot, and their undisputed leader, was a peasant boy of remarkable ugliness, squint-eyed and snub-nosed, with tufts of yellow hair always falling over his face and several teeth missing. His clothes were in rags and he never wore shoes. He boasted of never washing unless "the old one" stood over him with a stick, and his language was worse than both his manners and his looks. An unbroken stream of profanity and obscenity poured from his rarely silent mouth, and he heaped withering scorn on any attempt at decent speech.

Keith had now and then picked up questionable words while playing in the lane where he lived. Johan sported some of them in moments of furious rebellion against his mother's "holiness," as he called it. Once or twice Keith had repeated such words at home and suffered for it. Soon he learned to know the type at first hearing, and he disliked this part of the vocabulary even when he could use it without danger to himself. He developed a greater daintiness in words than in anything else, but this summer formed an exception. The force of suggestion brought to bear on him was too overwhelming, and he strove boldly to vie with the rest in foulness of tongue and thought. As soon as he was back in the city, this habit dropped off him as the soap lather is washed off a bather when he dives into the clear waters of a lake. But the game he had learned to play back of the big rock could not be unlearned in the same way.

This game was in itself a revelation to Keith. He was not shocked or startled, because he had no standards in the matter, but at first he experienced a distinct revulsion. This wore off quickly, however, and soon he accepted what he saw as a natural thing. The boy whose face stuck in Keith's mind with such strange persistency set the pace, and everybody seemed to hold him a hero on that account. Even the other city boys surrendered after a brief resistance and tried humbly to emulate the acknowledged leader.

Everything took place openly in the most brazen fashion, as if they had been playing leap-frog or hide-and-seek. Every one boasted of his own achievements and tried to outdo the rest in unashamed performance. Yet it was not so much a question of companionship in indulgence as of sportsmanlike compet.i.tion. Pleasure had little to do with it. What they did, and still more what they pretended to have done, was an a.s.sertion and a proof of manliness, and so was the language they used among themselves. If they hid from the older people, that was not because they regarded themselves as engaged in any sinful pursuits, but because the grown-ups to them appeared jealous of all childish pleasures, and particularly jealous of the pleasures most treasured by themselves.

Outwardly Keith played the part of an interested but pa.s.sive observer.

When taunted for his timidity, or as being a mere infant, he parried by using a number of nasty words, some of which he did not know the meaning of. When by himself, he soon found that he could play the game as well as the rest, and it increased his sense of self-importance very much, but of this he said nothing to any one. Something within his own nature protested against the flaunting of such an act, though the act itself carried no offence to his childish mind. The inner protest was not strong enough to break into words or to make the companionship of the other boys seem repulsive to him. Nor was it concerned with anything Keith did by himself.

The summer went very fast. Keith was sorry when told that it was time for him to go home. He would come back, of course, but his regrets were only momentary. No sooner was he started than the idea of seeing his mother, Granny, and his tin soldiers again, put everything else out of his mind.

His mother was overjoyed to see him and revelled in his healthy looks.

She made him tell her at great length, over and over again, about everything he had seen and done, about the place and the people, about the food and the games he had played. Keith talked and talked, eagerly and freely, but of the game played behind the big rock he never said a word.

He was then not quite seven years old.

XII

That autumn and winter he was permitted to play a good deal with Johan, and always in Johan's home. His mother had a bad spell of depression, and while it made her fret and worry more than ever about Keith, as well as about everything else, she was either too weak to resist his pleas, or she felt his absence as a relief.

To his intense surprise, Keith found that Johan already knew all about the new game, and that he was quite willing to play it. And for a couple of years it became an important part of what they had in common. Chances were not lacking, for Johan's mother was too wrapt up in her postils and religious speculations to watch them closely, and there was always the outhouse to which they could retire for privacy.

Their relationship was a peculiar one. Although the younger by a few months and the smaller by several inches, Keith was the leader and the aggressor. Johan remained pa.s.sive--too pa.s.sive, Keith often thought.

There was nothing of love in Keith's feelings toward Johan, nothing emotional. The tenderness that was such a marked feature of his character did not come into play at all. In fact, he rather looked down on Johan, who frequently annoyed him by his dullness and his lack of personal neatness. The truth of it was that he played with Johan merely because he was the only other boy in sight, and in so far as that particular game was concerned, Johan was simply an accessory to it in same way as his tin soldiers and his toy fort.

In playing it, Keith had always a sense of seeking something else, but he had not the slightest idea of what this something might be. It must have some relation to girls, he felt vaguely, but beyond that vague feeling he could not get. Clara remained forgotten.