V.
I was too delicate to be sent to school at five years old, like other boys. My doctor uncle said it was not to be thought of. Since, however, I could not grow up altogether in ignorance, it was decided that I should have a tutor of my own.
So a tutor was engaged who quickly won my unreserved affection and made me very happy. The tutor came every morning and taught me all I had to learn. He was a tutor whom one could ask about anything under the sun and he would always know. First, there was the ABC. That was mastered in a few lessons. I could read before I knew how to spell. Then came writing and arithmetic and still more things. I was soon so far advanced that the tutor could read Frithiof's Saga aloud to me in Swedish and be tolerably well understood; and, indeed, he could even take a short German extract, and explain that I must say ich and not ish, as seemed so natural.
Mr. Voltelen was a poor student, and I quite understood from the conversation of my elders what a pleasure and advantage it was to him to get a cup of coffee extra and fine white bread and fresh butter with it every day. On the stroke of half-past ten the maid brought it in on a tray. Lessons were stopped, and the tutor ate and drank with a relish that I had never seen anyone show over eating and drinking before. The very way in which he took his sugar--more sugar than Father or Mother took--and dissolved it in the coffee before he poured in the cream, showed what a treat the cup of coffee was to him.
Mr. Voltelen had a delicate chest, and sometimes the grown-up people said they were afraid he could not live. There was a report that a rich benefactor, named Nobel, had offered to send him to Italy, that he might recover in the warmer climate of the South. It was generous of Mr. Nobel, and Mr. Voltelen was thinking of starting. Then he caught another complaint. He had beautiful, brown, curly hair. One day he stayed away; he had a bad head, he had contracted a disease in his hair from a dirty comb at a bathing establishment. And when he came again I hardly recognised him. He wore a little dark wig. He had lost every hair on his head, even his eyebrows had disappeared. His face was of a chalky pallor, and he coughed badly too.
Why did not God protect him from consumption? And how could God find it in His heart to give him the hair disease when he was so ill already? God was strange. He was Almighty, but He did not use His might to take care of Mr. Voltelen, who was so good and so clever, and so poor that he needed help more than anyone else. Mr. Nobel was kinder to Mr. Voltelen than God was. God was strange, too, in other ways; He was present everywhere, and yet Mother was cross and angry if you asked whether He was in the new moderator lamp, which burnt in the drawing-room with a much brighter light than the two wax candles used to give. God knew everything, which was very uncomfortable, since it was impossible to hide the least thing from Him. Strangest of all was it when one reflected that, if one knew what God thought one was going to say, one could say something else and His omniscience would be foiled. But of course one did not know what He thought would come next. The worst of all, though, was that He left Mr. Voltelen in the lurch so.